Is America's Love Of Meat Harming The Planet?

The Wrangler feedlot, lost among the High Plains of the Texas escarpment, was just beginning to dawn. All 20,000 tons of meat stirred. The people who serve this city of horns and hooves have been around for a long time. Steam rises from the chimneys of the feed shop, trucks roll in the aisles between the rows, filling 14 km of concrete troughs with steam-treated corn flakes. In overcrowded corrals, where no end can be seen, big horned heads stick out through the fences and dive into the feeders. For most of the 43,000 cattle kept here, this is just another day, during which they gain almost a kilogram of net weight in high-quality "marble" beef. But closer to the northern part of the complex, the last journey awaits several hundred animals. By lunchtime, they are already carcasses, cut in half and hung on hooks.

Meat is murder. Meat, especially beef, is nicotine and Hummer in one package. For the sake of the animals, for the sake of our own health, for the sake of the health of the planet, we should consume less of it. The meat is delicious. Meat is nutritious. It's not for nothing that global demand is growing like yeast, and we need to find a way to produce more of it.

In short, meat—beef in particular—became the subject of fierce controversy. Critics of industrial beef production say it warms our climate, devastates land that could feed more people, pollutes and wastes precious water. Not to mention that millions of cows are doomed to premature death and a miserable life in captivity. However, most of us have no idea where the beef on our table actually comes from. Let's use the example of the large-scale Wrangler feed complex near the town of Tulia (Texas) to try to figure out whether Americans can eat so much beef?

Wrangler and eight other feedlots in north Texas and Kansas are owned by Cactus Feeders. Every year, Cactus sends millions of cattle to slaughter. "If you can eat 150 g of lean beef," says the company's executive director, "one cow will make about 1,800 servings."

Cactus Feeders, now employee-owned, is headquartered in Amarillo. Its co-founder was a breeder from Nebraska, Paul Engler. It is said that in 1960, Engler came there to buy cattle for a feedlot in Nebraska and realized that the area was excellent for fattening. There is a lot of livestock here, and in addition to this, there is also a warm and dry climate, where animals grow faster (they lose energy due to cold and mud), and plenty of grain.

Over the next few decades, this corner of the state of Texas turned into the world capital of beef cattle breeding. In 195 Engler founded Cactus Feeders and turned it into the world's largest feedlot (now the second largest). Engler saw the task of his company as making beef affordable for everyone. "My father didn't know anyone who didn't like beef," says current company director Mike Engler. "But he knew people who couldn't afford it."

However, the business faced difficulties from the very beginning. In 1976, per capita beef consumption in the United States reached 41.5 kg per year, but since then it has declined by more than 40%. After all, the average American began to consume 24.5 kg of beef per year - almost the same as a century ago. Instead, people began to eat chicken twice as much as in 1976, and almost 6 times more than 100 years ago. It is cheaper and considered more useful for the cardiovascular system. Currently, more than 8 billion broiler chickens are slaughtered in the US every year (compared to 33 million heads of cattle).

Friendly and modest 63-year-old Mike Engler is nothing like a meat tycoon. When his father started Cactus, Mike was working on his biochemistry thesis at Johns Hopkins University. He then conducted research at Harvard at the University of Texas. After 24 years, in 1993, he returned to Amarillo. It was a difficult year for meat livestock. Four children died and hundreds of people became ill after eating hamburgers from the Jack in the Box restaurant chain, which were contaminated with a particularly dangerous strain of E. coli.

Then the rabies panic began: no one had yet contracted the human form of the brain-destroying disease from American beef, but Americans learned that animal protein that could carry rabies was often used in cattle feed until management the US Food and Drug Administration did not ban it in 1997. The media began to coherently form a picture of fattening complexes: they are cruel, disgusting, a real artificial hell, well, just London of the 14th century. Michael Pollan in his book "The Omnivore's Dilemma" wrote that they are "overcrowded, dirty and smelly, with open sewers, mud underfoot and stifling air with dust hanging on it." Only the intensive use of antibiotics prevents the spread of terrible diseases.

Defor Rhys grew up on a small farm north of Houston. His family was completely self-sufficient in food, and also sold some. "We kept cows, chickens, goats," he says. Now it seems to him that he was constantly picking peas - there were several hectares of them. He does not miss that life at all.

It's not about how to feed the world, he says. And not in how to raise the standard of living, starting at least with those half a thousand people who work at the Cactus company. This is all done using technology to increase productivity and reduce waste.

Forty-six people work full-time at the Wrangler feedlot, manager Walt Harrison says. Only 7 people are needed to work at the automatic mill, which prepares fodder for 43,000 cattle three times a day, which is 680 tons. Next to the monitors that track the movement of feed in the machine (from solid whole grains at the entrance to steam-processed flakes at the exit) hangs the poster "Crudo Cactus: efficient conversion of feed energy into maximum meat production with minimum costs." In order to meet this slogan, it is necessary to satisfy 43 thousand cow stomachs with the help of technologies.

The rumen is the largest of the 4 chambers of the cow's stomach, a "wonder of nature," as Defort says. This is a huge beige bubble with a capacity of up to 150 liters, filled with liquid. In the animal's stomach, it fills most of the abdominal cavity on the left. It is a giant barrel where food is digested by enzymes produced by a complex ecosystem of microbes, releasing volatile fatty acids from which the cow gets energy. At the Wrangler complex, the caterpillar is also a powerful engine, which is serviced at short intervals by a highly qualified team of mechanics.

The goal is to pump as much energy as possible through the rumen so that the animal gains weight as quickly as possible, but at the same time does not get sick. Ruminants can digest grass, which is mostly roughage. But corn kernels, consisting mainly of starch, contain much more energy. At the Wrangler complex, only 8% of the ration at the final stage of fattening is roughage — ground sorghum and corn green mass. The rest are corn flakes (for easier absorption of starch) and by-products of ethanol production.

In addition, the feed is treated with two antibiotics. Monensin destroys those bacteria in the rumen that are responsible for fermenting fibers, but are less suitable for digesting grain. This allows other bacteria to multiply. Tylosin helps prevent liver abscesses, which are more common in animals consuming high-energy forages.

A diet with a high content of grain also increases the risk of acidosis: acids accumulate in the rumen and enter the blood, which makes the animal sick, and sometimes even lame. Each animal has an individual degree of susceptibility.

"That's the problem in our industry," says Kendall Carr, a feed specialist at Cactus Feeders. - All animals are young. We do not produce iron."

GPS-guided feed trucks deliver precisely measured doses of feed to each pen, and every morning feed manager Armando Vargas adjusts the ration to the nearest 100 grams per head to ensure the animals are fed but not overfed and feed is not wasted. Cowboys go around all the pens, looking for animals with a sunken left side (which means that the scar is not complete) or those that do not hold their heads (a sign of illness). About 6.5 percent of feedlot animals get sick sooner or later, says Cactus Veterinarian Carter King. As a rule, for respiratory infections. About 1% die before reaching slaughter weight (usually 550-650 kg).

Without pharmacology, the animal feed industry would not be able to work. Every animal that enters Wrangler is injected with 2 steroid hormones to build muscle: estradiol (a type of estrogen) and the synthetic hormone trenbolone acetate. DeFore says these drugs save feed by about $100 per head — a significant amount, given the industry's traditionally low profit margins. Finally, in the last 3 weeks of life, cattle at the Wrangler complex receive beta agonists. The most effective of them, zilpaterol, allows you to gain another 14 kg of meat without fat.

In 2013, the US produced almost as much beef as in 1976: about 12 million tons. At the same time, 10 million fewer cattle were slaughtered, and the herd was smaller by almost 40 million. The average cow now produces 23% more meat than in 1976. For Cactus Feeders, this is a technological success story, and meat producers will need to extend this success as global demand grows.

Competent and dedicated people work at the Wrangler feed complex. They try to be kind to livestock. The pens are full, but not crammed to the brim: each animal has 15-20 square meters, and since the cows always gather in a pile, there is plenty of room.

Do such feedlots harm the environment? This is too multifaceted a question to have an easy answer. Now that human resistance to antibiotics is a growing concern, the Food and Drug Administration has introduced optional restrictions on the use of antimicrobials in animal feed. However, these restrictions will not greatly affect the work of the Wrangler complex, since local antibiotics are either not used for human treatment (monensin), or are prescribed in veterinary medicine for the prevention of diseases (tylosin). Hormones and beta-agonists used in the complex are not considered (at least by the Food and Drug Administration) to be harmful to human health. But it is not yet known

The issue that worries Defort the most is water. Farmers on the Texas Ridge who supply corn and other crops to feedlots are depleting the Ogallala aquifer: at this rate, it could be depleted by the end of this century. But Texas feedlots have long gone beyond just local grain supplies. Much of the corn now comes from the "corn belt"—the Midwest. The biggest puzzle of all is a global one: how do we meet the demand for meat while still preserving biodiversity and fighting climate change? It is now a common argument that people in developed countries should eat less meat in general, and chicken instead of beef, and if they do eat beef, then only from pasture-raised cattle. But I doubt the solution is that simple.

To begin with, it ignores the protection of animals. After spending a week at the Wrangler complex, I then visited a modern poultry farm in Maryland. The farm was clean and the owners seemed like people with the best intentions. But the floor of the dimly lit 150-meter-long poultry house (one of 6 on this farm) was densely covered by 39,000 white chickens of a special meat breed that reach maturity in just 7 weeks. If you eat meat, but want to reduce the suffering of animals, then it is better to eat beef.

But would Americans help feed the world if they themselves ate less beef? Even after 1971, when the book "Diet for a Small Planet" (Diet for a Small Planet) was published, the argument became popular that feeding grain to cattle is a waste, because cattle consume four times more of it per kilogram of weight than poultry. In the US, the share of feed grain for all animals has fallen from 81% at the time to 42% today, even as yields have increased dramatically and more and more grain is being processed into ethanol. Currently, 36% of available grain is used for ethanol, while only about 10% is used for cattle feed. However, it can be assumed that if Americans consumed less meat, more grain would become available to hungry populations in poor countries.

There is no evidence that this is possible in the modern world. Using an economic model of the global food system, scientists at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington have predicted what would happen if the entire developed world halved its consumption of all types of meat. "The impact on food security in developing countries would be minimal," says IFPRI's Mark Rosegrant. Maize and sorghum prices would come down, which would help Africa a little, but the world's staple food grains are wheat and rice. If Americans decide to eat less beef, Iowa corn producers still won't be exporting wheat and rice to Africa and Asia.

The thesis that restricting beef consumption in the US can have a significant impact on global warming is also dubious. Last year's study by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) found that beef production is responsible for 6% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. But if the world were to give up beef entirely, emissions would drop by less than 6%, with more than a third of them coming from fertilizers and fuel used to grow and transport feed grain. Producer farmers would continue to sow and reap—after all, they need to feed a hungry world.

If all livestock in America were to disappear altogether, we could safely count on a reduction in emissions of about 2%: that's how much the animals emit in the form of methane belches and droppings that emit methane and nitrous oxide. Humans have already reduced emissions in this way once, in a very unfortunate way. According to Professor Alexander Hristov from the University of Pennsylvania, the 50 million herds of bison that grazed the expanses of North America before the arrival of settlers there emitted more methane than all cattle today.

Feedlots, although they use pharmaceuticals, save land and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Beef production, according to the FAO, emits more than double the emissions in North America on a per kg basis because more cattle are pasture-raised and farmers clear rainforests for pastures and fields to grow feed. In the conditions of the aggravation of the problem of ensuring the global demand for meat, "stall keeping is definitely better than grazing," says Jason Clay, a food expert at the World Wildlife Fund. "We have to follow the path of intensification and produce more with less costs."

Even supporters of pasture-raised livestock admit that it cannot meet US meat needs, let alone the ever-increasing global demand. "It's not going to work," says Mac Graves, former CEO of Panorama Meats, a supplier to Whole Foods Market organic supermarket chain in the western United States. — Demand will continue to grow. Livestock will have to be raised as efficiently as possible, and pasture keeping is inferior to stable keeping in this regard."

However, economic efficiency is not the only criterion, according to Graves. In the world, pastures occupy large areas unsuitable for agriculture. With proper grazing management, it can enrich the soil and make the land more fertile — that is, what bison once did for the prairie. In New Mexico and Colorado, some beef producers practice "managed grazing" grazing of cattle. Instead of letting the cattle out on a vast pasture all year round, these farmers keep them in a compact area fenced with so-called electric herders and move the fence every few days to give the grass time to recover.

The ideologist of this movement is a scientist from Zimbabwe, Allan Savory, who claims that managed grazing can remove a huge amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The claim is controversial, but those farmers who practice it unanimously swear that managed grazing has transformed their pastures. This kind of meat production is not as economically efficient as in feedlots, but according to some indicators it is more environmentally friendly. They do not add pharmaceuticals when feeding. They don't get nutrients in the form of corn from the fertilizer-saturated soil of Iowa, they don't transport it in long train trains for a thousand and a half kilometers, and they don't turn them into a pile of manure in Texas. Instead, their livestock creates and preserves the landscape.

Carter King, a veterinarian at the Wrangler complex, when asked how he feels about sending the animals he cares for to slaughter, says, “You know, every time I pass a cattle truck on the highway, I say thank you — thank you , cows that feed our country."

At the Caviness Beef Packers meat processing plant in Hereford (Texas), 1,800 head of cattle are slaughtered every day. First, the animals are stunned with a blow to the forehead from a special gun, then they are hung by their hind legs, and the butcher kills them by cutting the carotid artery and the jugular vein. Perhaps the thought of the immorality of eating animals is appealing, and perhaps as a species we will one day stop doing it—but it's hard to reconcile that with our evolutionary history as hunter-gatherers. By the way, animals at the Kevyness plant and other similar slaughterhouses die faster and experience less horror and pain than the prey of many hunters on the hunt. 

There's no question that most Americans, and most people on Earth, could do with cutting back on beef a little. But science has not reliably proven how much it will help us or the planet.