What’s the Beef with the Cattle Industry?
One of the most eye-opening revelations in Frances Moore Lappé’s provocative 1971 book, "Diet for a Small Planet" was the information she provided on the environmentally disastrous impact of the beef industry. One of the biggest effects is on the groundwater supplies that provide the water we use for drinking, cooking and bathing. In the United States alone, the various underground water tables are dropping from six inches to six feet per year. And even as our water supplies are dwindling, almost half of the water used in the U.S. each year is used to irrigate land to grow food – with vast quantities of that going to produce the grain that’s fed to farm animals.
The rate of return – the amount of food we get for the amount of water we use – on animal protein is pretty poor. As an example, it takes about 23 gallons of water to produce a pound of tomatoes. Compare that to the estimated 2,000 gallons of water used to produce a pound of beef. In her book, Lappé called cattle a "protein factory in reverse," meaning they consume more protein than they provide! For every pound of beef that a steer provides, it eats seven pounds of grain and soy protein – so doesn’t it make more environmental sense to just eat the grains?
As global warming due to air pollution becomes an ever more dire development, scientists are looking not only to the pollutants caused by cars and factories, but to that caused by factory farming as well. Cattle produce methane gas (and if you’ve ever driven past a stockyard, you know how dense that gas can be!) and methane makes up 9 percent of the gasses contributing to the greenhouse effect – approximately 70 to 80 tons of methane per year. They also produce waste high in nitrous oxide, another factor in global warming. In fact, animal waste is the largest source of environmental emissions of nitrous oxide, making up 95 percent. Cattle farming in rainforest areas contributes to global warming, too, as more and more rainforest is leveled to create pastures for grazing. And the runoff from cattle farms – containing nitrogen, phosphorous, waste-borne pathogens and detergents – often flows directly into the waterways, destroying fish habitats and leaching into the groundwater that provides our drinking water supplies.
Then there’s the massive use of fossil fuels required to get beef to market. Today’s massive, high-tech factory farms burn fuel to run the machinery that provides heating, lighting and cooling, in addition to the gasoline that fuels the trucks that deliver the feed, transport the cattle and deliver the meat to market. The Worldwatch Institute estimates that it takes about 48 gallons of gasoline per American, per year, to provide the red meat and poultry that we eat.
