Dietary change and the animal agriculture industry

The food sector contributes a lot to the planet overheating, and animal agriculture is particularly problematic. As someone who urges people to eat less meat (and dairy) with the goal of sustainability, I want to applaud when I learn about scientific advances and farming practices that can shrink the livestock industry’s environmental footprint, complementing meat reduction efforts.

Unfortunately, the applause only goes one way: The industry has a disincentive to support meat reduction as a powerful tool to fight global climate change. If people eat less meat, animal agriculture makes less money.

That was at the top of my mind when I attended an event during New York’s Climate Week, in September, titled “Can Animal Agriculture Be A Sustainable Solution?” One the one hand, I was encouraged by the remarks of one of the panelists, Martha Baker, Global Director for Carbon Markets at the animal nutrition company Alltech. She described simultaneously giving dairy cows “nature-based additives” that reduce their methane emissions by 9.5 percent, and using nutrition to increase the milk they produce such that fewer cows can meet the demand for dairy. Fewer cows making less gas is good news for the planet.

But on the other hand, there were no speakers at the event without a vested interest in animal agriculture. Other panelists included a cattle farmer, a National Pork Board representative, and an executive from a trade industry group called The Meat Institute. None of them acknowledged that farming animals is not as sustainable as farming crops, and that’s not going to change anytime soon.

One of the panelist’s remarks illustrated our societal ambivalence about the future. Debbie Lyons-Blythe, owner of Blythe Family Farms in Kansas, described how cattle farmers maintain the native tall grass prairie that is a repository for carbon in the soil: “The roots to the grass in the prairie reach down … into the soil, so every bit of carbon that is taken up through photosynthesis goes deep into the soil. But we don’t plant it, till it, [or] release carbon at any way. So our goal is to make sure that it stays in grass.”

“Some of the things that cows help us do to maintain the prairie is to make sure that we have biodiversity,” Lyons-Blythe said. Cattle farmers “manage for water, we manage the land use change. We don’t want it to be taken out of prairie and made into a housing development or a supermarket or even crop ground.”

That sounds great, but if our society truly valued the benefits of preserving this environmentally beneficial prairie land in Kansas, we could put resources toward protecting it without tending 900 cows that are contributing to global overheating. No matter how admirable the efforts of Lyons-Blythe and her family to protect the land—and I sincerely respect that—they are doing it because that’s how they subsist: They work to give people a highly desired product (beef) that is undermining everyone’s future. That distorted societal value system isn’t the fault of Lyons-Blythe. As I see it, we don’t collectively worry enough about climate to invest in other ways for people to earn a living, and other ways to maintain native prairies, and other ways for people to eat.

Meat Me In The Middle is a project about meat reduction, but I hope that it’s more than that. I hope it prompts people to think about acting broadly in ways that benefit other living creatures and the environments in which we thrive.