The Myth of Regenerative Cattle Grazing - The New Republic

The Myth of Regenerative Cattle Grazing | The New Republic 9/26/21, 08:55
The Myth of Regenerative

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The Myth of Regenerative

Ranching
The purveyors of “grass-fed” beef want you to believe that it solves meat’s
environmental problem. But this is merely a branding exercise, not a climate solution.
ILLUSTRATION BY SALLY DENG
Jan Dutkiewicz, Gabriel N. Rosenberg / September 23, 2021
When foodies sink their teeth into a slab of cheese from one of the historic dairy
farms in Point Reyes, California, their minds probably run to grass-fed cows
ranging free on the lush green oceanside hills of Marin County. Over 5,000 dairy
cows and beef cattle roam the Point Reyes National Seashore National Park in full
view of visiting tourists. Unlike the many dairy and meat companies that slap
happy animals on their labels while sourcing their product from hellish factory
farms, the dairy and beef farms at Point Reyes represent an agrarian ideal of
ecologically and ethically sustainable animal agriculture.
“Pasture-raised” and “extensive” or “regenerative” grazing have been watchwords

in the American foodie community since at least the 2000s, when celebrated food
writer Michael Pollan presented sustainable, nonindustrial practices as a way out
of the ethical morass of the American food system in his award-winning bestseller
The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Everyone from progressive agrarians to libertarian
ranchers to multinational food companies, and even conservation NGOs such as
the Audubon Society, has thrown their weight behind the idea of replacing mass-
produced meat, from chickens to ungulates, with a holistically raised alternative.
While some environmentalists reject beef altogether for its contribution to climate
change, pollution, and deforestation, proponents of free-ranging beef have rallied
under the motto, “It’s not the cow; it’s the how.” They argue that, done properly,
pasture-raised cattle can replace the ecological functions of wild ruminants like
elk and bison, produce food on “marginal” land that would otherwise be wasted,
and eliminate beef’s carbon hoofprint (since well-grazed land can sequester
atmospheric carbon dioxide). This would mean consumers could stick it to Big Ag,
fight climate change, and help imperiled animals and ecosystems without actually
changing their diets too much; they’d just need to eat a bit less meat and pay a bit
more for the grass-fed option.
Whether these promises hold up under scrutiny is a subject of fierce debate. And
in recent years, a series of lawsuits have argued the opposite thesis: that even
“regenerative” cattle imperil the very ecosystems proponents claim they will
“regenerate.”
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This past June, the Harvard Animal Law and Policy Clinic, on behalf of the Animal
Legal Defense Fund and a number of individual plaintiffs, filed suit against the
Department of the Interior and the National Park Service, which manages Point
Reyes National Park, alleging that cattle ranching is endangering the iconic tule
elk.* It’s not the first such lawsuit that has been filed over the past decade against
the NPS to stop alleged environmental damage from Point Reyes cows.
The goals of commodity production run directly

counter to those of a functional ecosystem.
The National Park Service leases parkland to a number of “historic” cattle and
dairy farms, which it has done since the park’s creation in 1962. The elk, native to
the region but driven to near-extinction by hunting and human activities such as
ranching, are protected by a 1976 federal conservation law and were reintroduced
to the park in 1978. But to keep the elk from competing with cattle for forage and
water, the NPS erected fences that confine the elk to select corners of the park with
limited water and forage. This confinement has proved fatal during droughts.
Drought in 2013–2014 led to 254 elk deaths. A current drought has already killed
over 150 elk, a third of the once 445-strong herd that inhabits Tomales Point, all
just a stone’s throw away from thriving commodity cows. Ranchers have even
pushed for the right to cull elk outright to keep their populations in check, in part
because they have also killed off the natural predators that would do so in a
healthy ecosystem. The Harvard suit alleges that “the Tule elk are continuing to
die horrific and preventable deaths” in clear violation of federal law.
Prior to the twentieth century, the tule elk were an important part of the Pacific
coastal ecosystem and a major component of the diet of the Coast Miwok tribe, the
native peoples who lived there. In fact, the NPS concedes that the region’s
characteristic hilly grasslands were “the byproduct of burning, weeding, pruning
and harvesting for at least two millennia by Coast Miwok and their antecedents.”
These grasslands made a juicy target for white settlers arriving in the middle of the
nineteenth century. They brought cattle with them, plundered the Coast Miwok
lands, hunted large predators and elk to near-extinction, and then grazed their
cattle on the hills instead. The intertwined processes of colonial and ecological
displacement have continued into the twenty-first century: In 2015, the NPS
balked at a proposed “Indigenous Archaeological District” that would have
protected Coast Miwok heritage sites from damage from ranching. Even as it did
so, it quickly approved a “Historic Dairy Ranching District,” over and against
Miwok protests. Today, many Coast Miwok are opposed to the rancher-backed
plan to fence and further cull the elk. “The Park Service proposal to shoot
indigenous tule elk and promote ranching that harms wildlife, water and habitat is
a travesty and contrary to the traditions of our ancestors,” Jason Deschler, dance
captain and headman with the Coast Miwok Tribal Council of Marin, wrote this
summer in a statement opposing the cull.
The cows at Point Reyes don’t just compete with the elk. They also defecate about
130 million pounds of nitrogen-rich manure a year, which leaches into the soil and
streams and ponds of the area. An NPS-funded study suggested that removal of
the cows would benefit numerous native species, including butterflies, seabirds,
frogs, and salmon. And yet the same study recommended the expansion of
ranching. As a damning investigative report into the issue in the Marin County
Pacific Sun suggests, the ranchers and dairy farmers have urged pliant politicians,
including Senator Dianne Feinstein, to “pressur[e] the Park Service to prioritize
the preservation of private ranching profits over environmental concerns.”
Point Reyes is a microcosm of a much broader anti-wildlife bent in American

ranching, regenerative and otherwise. To protect their cows from predators and
disease, or simply to ensure that they have access to food and water, ranchers
across the country have supported wolf hunts, vulture and wild horse culls, and
the deployment of cyanide bombs. It is difficult to count the number of wild
animals killed in the service of ranching interests by government bodies like the
Agriculture Department’s secretive Wildlife Services, the Bureau of Land
Management, and various state-level farm bureaus, but about a million animals
per year is the federal government’s own estimate.
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Unlike wild animals such as elk, ranched cattle are commodities in a global
market. And the goals of commodity production run directly counter to those of a
functional ecosystem. In the wild, ungulates like bison or elk range across vast
swathes of land, serving all sorts of ecosystem functions just by living: rooting,
trampling, defecating, dying and decomposing, serving as food for predators and
carrion birds and insects, nourishing other animals and the soil in death as their
hooves did in life. Commodity production, be it conventional or regenerative,
removes animals like cows from this web of life, using fencing and predator
extermination to protect grazers from harm so that they can be profitably sold. In
place of that natural web, ranching also requires an economic and material
infrastructure to breed, manage, slaughter, process, and transport cattle as they
are transformed into beef or milked. Even with the best of ecological intentions,
ranchers who want their business to survive must build and maintain that
infrastructure according to commercial principles.
The idea of converting “marginal” or unused land is

basically a promise to produce something from nothing.
All too often, that simply means that the costs are
hidden.
The capitalist assumptions pervading these enterprises are clearest when
regenerative proponents promise to be able to extract food from so-called
“marginal” lands. Conventionally defined, “marginal land” is land that has little
current agricultural or industrial value, often because of poor soil, water resources,
or climate conditions. What ranchers mean is that grazing cattle can extract value,
in the form of commoditized beef, from dry, rocky, difficult to access lands. Of
course, such lands are only “marginal” from an instrumental, Lockean view that
all land must be worked to create value. But from a biodiversity and ecosystem
health perspective, so-called marginal lands can be thriving, biodiverse habitats
for myriad flora and fauna, which can be disrupted by the introduction of grazers.
Historically, even land that is home to human beings has been deemed “marginal”
if its value cannot be commoditized. As historian Joshua Specht shows, ranchers

have historically been the spear tip of settler colonialism in the American West.
They often used the pretext of “waste” and “emptiness” to violently uproot
Indigenous lifeways and ecosystems and replace them with “productive”
commercial ranching. The Coast Miwok Tribal Council of Marin linked that
history of dispossession to the plan to cull the elk in a letter to Secretary of the
Interior Deb Haaland, describing it as “a travesty … that perpetuates a long legacy
of harm inflicted on Native People by the National Park Service.”
The idea of converting “marginal” or unused land is basically a promise to produce

something from nothing. All too often, that simply means that the costs are
hidden. Increasingly, environmental research suggests that while introducing
grazers to marginal lands can be economically generative for those who own the
grazers, it is degenerative of previously existing ecosystems. A recent meta-
analysis in the journal Ecology Letters, for example, found that excluding
commercial agricultural grazers increases the abundance of plant and faunal
biodiversity in most ecosystems. That’s because most livestock are managed at
densities that dramatically exceed those of wild fauna. In fact, the Center for
Biological Diversity recently won a lawsuit that will force the Forest Service and
the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to protect sensitive ecosystems within New
Mexico’s Gila National Forest and Arizona’s Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest
from free-ranging cows.
Over the past two decades, proponents of “regenerative” grazing have increasingly
justified cattle agriculture by claiming their methods reduce ruminants’
contribution to climate change: Currently, the world’s cows, by belching out
methane, contribute about 6 percent percent of all greenhouse gases. (Many note
that cows “only” contribute 3 percent of U.S. emissions, but this is only because of
America’s massive total emissions.) Regenerative ranching proponents claim,
however, that by turning over and fertilizing the soil where they graze, free-
ranging ruminants create healthy soil that can act as a carbon sink.
One of the biggest drivers of this claim has been the work of the rancher Allan
Savory, made famous through a viral TED talk in 2013. But Savory’s claims have
little peer-reviewed support and seem to fail under scrutiny. “The Savory Method
Can Not Green Deserts or Reverse Climate Change,” five researchers argued in a
lengthy rebuttal published in the journal Rangelands that same year. In 2017, an
exhaustive, 127-page study led by scholars at Oxford found that grass-fed livestock
“does not offer a significant solution to climate change as only under very specific
conditions can they help sequester carbon. This sequestering of carbon is even
then small, time-limited, reversible and substantially outweighed by the
greenhouse gas emissions these grazing animals generate.”
Studies suggest that while some forms of well-managed grazing can increase the
health and productivity of soil, there is little proof that this has much impact on
soil’s ability to capture carbon. To the extent that soil can act as a carbon sink, a
widely-cited article in Frontiers in Climate argues that it can do so through
practices like cover crop rotation, tillage, and novel soil amendments that don’t
use animals at all. But cows or no cows, the idea that soil can act as a meaningful
carbon sink at the scale at which global climate change currently operates is itself
not entirely convincing. Removing soil from any agricultural use and allowing it to
rewild, however, can create meaningful carbon sinks while protecting and
restoring biodiversity; wild elk populations might plausibly do more to capture
carbon than the most holistically raised cattle.
Cows that graze throughout their lives actually

potentially emit more than feedlot-finished ones.
When it comes to cows, there is actually a sort of perverse climate and ethical
math at play. Most of America’s 93 million cattle spend at least some of their life
grazing on pasture, although many beef cattle are also fattened for slaughter in
feedlots where they are fed soy- and grain-based meals. But since processed meal
is easier to digest and beef cattle, on average, spend only a few of their 18-month
lives at feedlots, only about 11 percent of their greenhouse gas emissions happen
there. The remaining 89 percent happen when they digest rough forage and
grasses on pasture. In other words, cows that graze throughout their lives actually
potentially emit more than feedlot-finished ones.
Small numbers of grazers may be consistent with healthy ecosystems and have
minimal greenhouse gas impact, but only if their populations stay within
ecologically defined limits. The situation in Point Reyes, where ranchers have
pushed the NPS to be able to use more land for grazing and prevent elk from
competing with cows for food and water, illustrates exactly why that’s unlikely.
The problem of scale bedevils regenerative beef from every angle. Holistic grazing
cannot hope to compete on price with Big Meat, which operates with high volumes
and low margins: A pound of ground beef from a Marin County ranch can run well
over $10, compared to $3.99 for mass-produced beef at Kroger. Regenerative
ranching proponents often answer that consumers will opt to eat “less but better
meat,” but it’s far from clear what’s going to drive that transition at the societal
level. (Also worth noting: In the absence of a public agency that could define and
regulate ecologically informed grazing practices, “better” meat is a little nebulous.
The “regenerative” label has been affixed to so many different techniques that
what exactly it means is often hard to pin down.)
As a result, “regenerative” beef currently represents not so much a scalable climate

solution as a way for those who can afford to do so to purchase indulgences for
their continued meat consumption. The owners of grass-fed beef ventures may
market their premium-priced products as a way out of the hellscape of Western
capitalistic agriculture. But absent much broader societal changes, regenerative
agriculture’s anti-industrial rhetoric is more of a class marker than a call to
revolution.
If regenerative agriculture were to challenge the

mainstream food system, it would run into some hard
physical limits.
If regenerative agriculture were to challenge the mainstream food system, it would
run into some hard physical limits. Converting the beef industry, at current levels
of demand, entirely to a grass- and crop-forage feeding system would require
increasing the total size of American beef herds by 23 million cows, or 30 percent,
according to a recent article in the respected science journal Environmental
Research Letters. And that increase, were it even possible, would have
monumental consequences for both greenhouse gas outputs and land use. But
there simply isn’t enough land in the U.S. for that many grazers. At best, beef
production would have to decrease by 39 percent and potentially as much as 73
percent. Framed that way, grass-fed grazing, especially if scaled, doesn’t seem
likely to regenerate many ecosystems—indeed, it would likely require
deforestation, as is the case in Brazil, where the clear-cutting of the Amazon is
driven both by soy plantations for feedlot and factory farm animal feed and by the
need for grazing space for grass-fed cattle. And as the Environmental Research
Letters article argued, even temporary overgrazing can lead to long-term and
perhaps irreversible ecological degradation.
This list of mismatches between theory and empirics prompts an important

question: Who does benefit from more demand for holistic-grazed beef? Ranchers
and dairy farmers, of course. Regenerative ranching begins with the assumption
that cattle must be commercially ranched and then backfills an ecological
narrative to sustain that assumption, much as the NPS assumes there must be
ranches in Point Reyes and then reshapes the park’s history and landscape to fit
that need.
Actually making animal agriculture less ecologically disruptive would mean

taking animals’ ecological value as a bedrock principle against and over their value
as commodities. That means treating commodity production, not land, as
“marginal”: Commodities could be extracted only if doing so didn’t disturb the

ecological, social, and cultural value of the landscape. In other words, in most such
systems, animals would more than likely play a minor support role for primarily
plant agriculture. And that, in turn, would almost certainly mean far fewer grazers
entering the commercial food system, and at a much higher price point. Point
Reyes, for example, might feature free-ranging elk managed by an Indigenous best
practice–driven conservation agency, not dairy cattle grazed by private ranches.
This kind of truly eco-friendly meat production would produce even less meat
than the current grab bag of practices loosely labeled “regenerative.”
As the elk of Point Reyes might attest, grass-fed beef and dairy are not ecologically
benign. Nor are they a solution to climate change. Nor yet, in offering a more
expensive alternative to industrial agriculture to those who can afford it, do they
offer a clear path for reducing meat consumption society-wide. If anything,
regenerative ranching lends itself either to niche locavore indulgence or large-
scale corporate greenwashing, but it offers little promise for sustainable food
system transformation.
Achieving more sustainable agriculture means we need to produce and eat less
meat. To get there, we’ll need individuals to change their habits, but we’ll also
need policy aimed specifically at reducing meat consumption through taxation,
nudges toward animal-free diets, or, potentially, support for the proliferation of
plant- or cell-based meat analogs. Ranchers tend to deny this, not because it is
ecologically unfounded but because they are financially invested in ranching
rather than regeneration.
*One of the authors of this piece is a fellow at the Harvard Animal Law and Policy
Program. He is not and has never been personally involved in the Point Reyes
lawsuit.
Jan Dutkiewicz @jan_dutkiewicz
Jan Dutkiewicz is a postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University in Montreal and a visiting fellow
in the Animal Law and Policy Program at Harvard University.
Gabriel N. Rosenberg @gnrosenberg
Gabriel N. Rosenberg teaches at Duke University and is the Duke Endowment Fellow of the
National Humanities Center.
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The Myth of Regenerative Cattle Grazing | The New Republic 9/26/21, 08:55

The Myth of Regenerative

The Myth of Regenerative

ILLUSTRATION BY SALLY DENG

Jan Dutkiewicz, Gabriel N. Rosenberg / September 23, 2021

“Pasture-raised” and “extensive” or “regenerative” grazing have been watchwords

Summer Sale: 50% o! fearless reporting.

The goals of commodity production run directly

summer in a statement opposing the cull.

Point Reyes is a microcosm of a much broader anti-wildlife bent in American

Summer Sale: 50% o! fearless reporting.

The idea of converting “marginal” or unused land is

if its value cannot be commoditized. As historian Joshua Specht shows, ranchers

The idea of converting “marginal” or unused land is basically a promise to produce

Cows that graze throughout their lives actually

As a result, “regenerative” beef currently represents not so much a scalable climate

If regenerative agriculture were to challenge the

This list of mismatches between theory and empirics prompts an important

Actually making animal agriculture less ecologically disruptive would mean

“marginal”: Commodities could be extracted only if doing so didn’t disturb the

Jan Dutkiewicz @jan_dutkiewicz

Gabriel N. Rosenberg @gnrosenberg

Want more climate change ideas and updates?

An Inconvenient Lesson From the Pandemic: We Have to Stop Eating Meat

Troy Vettese, Nicholas Carter

How to Live in a Burning World Without Losing Your Mind

Latest From Apocalypse Soon

Follow the Money Into Joe Manchin’s Pockets

The Chilling Popularity of Anti-Vax Deathbed Videos

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