“Then, after years of bull bashing, the previously silent pro-cow camp got fed up. Books like Cows Save the Planet by Judith Schwartz, Defending Beef: The Case for Sustainable Meat Production by Nicolette Hahn Niman of Niman Ranch, and Allan Savory’s The Grazing Revolution hit the shelves, painting a very different picture.”

Josh Tickell Author

Go to a cocktail party somewhere on the West Coast, mention the link between those . . . mmm, finger-licking-good beef sliders and “climate change” and you can be sure you’ll see sparks fly. The collateral damage done by beef consumption has been vehemently debated for the better part of two and a half decades and has recently reached a fever pitch. To understand why and how we got into our on-again, off-again, love/hate relationship with beef, we have to go back in time.

In the 1980s Bay Area–based Rainforest Action Network got Burger King to end its $35 million “rainforest beef” contract in Central America. Sting and Phil Collins soon joined in, banging the anti-beef drum. For many environmentalists, burgers became synonymous with deforestation. Lost in the frenzy, however, was an account of the subtle and complex relationships leading up to cattle roaming where trees had once grown. That cycle of rainforest destruction often begins with poverty, continues with logging, moves to cattle, transforms the land to soybean production and ends with desertification.

In 1997, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) launched its “McCruelty” campaign. They organized four hundred protests targeting McDonald’s restaurants in twenty-three countries where they also used advertisements depicting gory scenes from slaughterhouses. Soon thereafter, PETA targeted Burger King and Wendy’s with similar campaigns. All three restaurants kept selling burgers, but they did agree to create basic animal welfare standards.

The early 2000s saw outbreaks of mad cow disease. Then, as if things weren’t bad enough for the beef biz, Morgan Spurlock’s muckraking documentary Super Size Me hit theaters. The film, which was nominated for an Oscar, essentially shows that fast food makes you fat.

Around that time Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang at the World Watch Institute had coauthored a report entitled Livestock and Climate Change—What If the Key Actors in Climate Change Are . . . Cows, Pigs, and Chickens? As if that question wasn’t confrontational enough, right up front the authors say, “Our analysis shows that livestock and their by-products actually account for at least 32,564 million tons of CO2e per year, or 51 percent of annual worldwide GHG emissions.” CO2e means CO2 “equivalent,” GHG emissions means greenhouse gas emissions.

The report, however, is based on sweeping and inaccurate assumptions. It incorrectly asserts, “Practically the only way more livestock and feed can be produced is by destroying natural forest.” But in North America in the last fifty years, much more field corn has been produced each year on a shrinking base of farmland precisely to feed more livestock. Now I am not advocating we produce more corn to feed more animals, but clearly rain forest is not being chopped down in the Midwest to grow more corn.

The report weighs the greenhouse effects of cooking, packaging, and transporting meat more heavily than those from other types of food. It also counts the CO2 from the respiration of animals (breathing out), even though the CO2 originated in the atmosphere and was cycled into plants, which became food for livestock (and even though we had far more ruminants on Earth before industrialized agriculture). The report polarized environmentalists into two camps: people who believe livestock contribute 51 percent of the greenhouse gases and those who do not.

Adding fuel to the fire, a 2014 documentary called Cowspiracy was released online. Taking a page from the Worldwatch Institute report, the film claims “the meat and dairy industry produces more greenhouse gases than the exhaust of all cars, trucks, trains, boats, and planes combined.” The film blames meat production to the exclusion of all other contributors for global water overuse, rainforest destruction, emissions, environmental degradation, and climate change.

Then, after years of bull bashing, the previously silent pro-cow camp got fed up. Books like Cows Save the Planet by Judith Schwartz, Defending Beef: The Case for Sustainable Meat Production by Nicolette Hahn Niman of Niman Ranch, and Allan Savory’s The Grazing Revolution hit the shelves, painting a very different picture.

Like the anti-cow activists, these writers also eschew all forms of factory farming of animals. But instead of ending the consumption of meat altogether, they propose an ecosystemic approach to ranching and farming in which cows are central to sequestering carbon dioxide, restoring grasslands, reversing desertification, and stabilizing water supplies. These authors and the researchers they draw from assert that bovines are one of the keys to regenerative agriculture.

A CARBON COWGIRL I hold on for dear life as the truck slams in and out of ruts. We are climbing up a steep mountain trail. I try not to think about the vehicle toppling backward nose over end. But driving upward at a near-vertical angle seems second nature to thirty-four-year-old Doniga Markegard as she chats about the battle she and her husband Erik are fighting against conservationists who want to take away their leased lands.

We reach the top of the hill and the truck levels off. Doniga hops out, grabs a machete, and starts poking around in the grass. I, on the other hand, need a moment before I can move from the vehicle.

I find Doniga a few yards from the truck examining one of the many tufts of grass. “These grasses evolved with grazers, so they coevolved together to be mutually beneficial to each other. See all this green here in this bunchgrass?” She gingerly pulls apart the strands of golden grass to show the green strands. We are miles from the nearest water source but they are green, alive, and growing.

She continues: “And what happens if that never gets grazed? Eventually it dies off and becomes a desert. So the action of the grazing animal is what’s keeping these native coastal terrace prairies alive.”

Doniga continues her explanation: “The cattle will come along and they’ll eat the tops off right about to there. So that’ll go in the cows’ stomachs and then when the grasses get bitten off, these roots strengthen. And what is that root made out of ? Carbon.”

There it is—that invisible thing I am chasing: soil-based carbon sequestration. I still can’t see it. But what I can see in this windswept California plateau, far from civilization, is substantial biological growth and not just in one tuft of grass. I look up and realize we are crouching in a veritable forest of bunchgrass, something my brain had heretofore passed off as a field of weeds.

According to Doniga, “The old accounts of California talk about beautiful green bunchgrass prairies that stood up to your waist. And the root systems of those would tap down into nutrients deep down in the soils, into water that is held deep down under the surface of the ground.”

Left untouched, the dry hills of California’s central coast quickly cover themselves in coyote brush, an invasive scraggly, bushy green plant that takes over grasslands replacing animal-edible grasses with something akin to an endless inedible hedge. The problem with the “let nature go back to nature” idea is that the “native” coyote brush wasn’t present in vast quantities inside the bunchgrass prairies of yesteryear. To jump-start the ecological memory of the land and begin to balance the species, you need to add back in as much of the original nature as possible, including the animals.

Doniga tells me that the managed prairie we are in isn’t just grazing land for cattle. It’s also home to ground-nesting birds, deer, sparrows, foxes, and other wildlife. As we poke around the grass, I watch a hawk floating overhead, searching for lunch. The squawking bird of prey certainly adds a nice touch.

She emphasizes that their cattle aren’t just left to gorge themselves. The Markegards are trying to mimic natural grazing patterns by keeping their otherwise lazy bovines constantly on the move so the grass is never munched down too close to the ground. I learn that the field we are in had been left for around ninety days and is almost ready for another “mowing.” Rather than a silver bullet solution to a set of system-wide ecological problems, she sees the cattle as one tool to help revitalize land systems. Without management, or with “overgrazing,” Doniga is quick to point out, cattle can be highly destructive to an ecosystem and can easily reduce it to bare dirt.

Doniga shows me how the bunchgrasses on her prairie cover the earth with a kind of thatch. “You see that, the soil is very hard to get to,” she says as she tries to pry apart the thick cover layer of rooty grasses to get into the soil. This theme is drummed by almost everyone in the soil movement: in a healthy soil-based agriculture system, nature covers itself. There’s no bare soil.

She summarizes the whole idea behind her rangeland management: “We’re taking carbon from the atmosphere via photosynthesis into the plant, and then through the plant into the root system, and it turns into humus and builds the topsoil.”