Is Regenerative Meat Better for the Environment?
The Claims
Regenerative meat claims to remove CO2 from the air by storing it as organic carbon in the soil in a process called “carbon sequestration.” Proponents argue that this process sequesters more carbon than it produces, resulting in a carbon-NEGATIVE effect.
The language used is always very flowery and holistic. One “regenerative meat” producer describes their production as using “agriculture systems [that] honor the systems within Mother Nature. We care for the soil, respect diversity in plants and animals on the land, and focus on natural outcomes versus synthetic inputs. That means no tilling, no synthetic chemicals, no hormones or antibiotics, and beautiful, wide-open spaces.”
That all sounds very nice, and they do include a few specifics such as no tilling and no chemicals, hormones, or antibiotics. But none of that has anything to do with carbon sequestration. There’s no hard scientific data supporting their claims. It’s all just ornamental language designed to paint a quaint image in our minds: happy cows grazing “beautiful, wide-open” pastures.
The image they’re trying to project.
Essentially, they’re appealing to a nostalgic image of agriculture. Man living in harmony with the earth and all of its creatures.
But what does the science actually say?
The Science
A recent report from the Food Climate Research Network at the University of Oxford found that the claims of regenerative meat are completely “unfounded.”
They found that “while grazing of grass-fed animals can boost the sequestration of carbon in some locally specific circumstances, that effect is time-limited, reversible, and at the global level, substantially outweighed by the greenhouse gas emissions they generate.”
Because cows don’t just emit CO2. They also emit methane, which is a greenhouse gas 28 times more potent at warming the atmosphere than CO2. In fact, cows are the #1 source of agricultural emissions worldwide.
Lead author Dr Tara Garnett of the Oxford study explains the key takeaways from this report: "This report concludes that grass-fed livestock are not a climate solution. Grazing livestock are net contributors to the climate problem, as are all livestock. Rising animal production and consumption, whatever the farming system and animal type, is causing damaging greenhouse gas release…Ultimately, if high consuming individuals and countries want to do something positive for the climate, maintaining their current consumption levels but simply switching to grass-fed beef is not a solution. Eating less meat, of all types, is."
Ironically, factory farmed meat is actually less harmful to the environment than grass fed meat. According to researchers from Harvard and Boston Universities, “due to grain feed's higher nutrient density relative to grass, it requires significantly less land and generates less methane per unit of meat produced.”
Furthermore, raising animals in pastures is simply not scalable.
In the US, for instance, 99% of farmed animals are currently factory farmed.
By species, that breaks down to:
70.4% of cows
98.2% of egg laying hens
98.3% of pigs
99.8% of turkeys
99.9% of broiler chickens
This is where 98.3% of pigs in the US begin their life.
If the US wanted to raise every animal used for meat in a pasture, we’d have to reduce our meat consumption by 77%.
There simply isn’t enough land.
Animal agriculture is the leading cause of greenhouse gas emissions, land use, deforestation, water use, and species extinction.
Conservative estimates place animal agriculture’s contribution to global GHG emissions at 18%. But according to Dr. Bruce Monger, senior lecturer and researcher in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Cornell University, when feed crops and deforestation are accounted for, animal agriculture’s GHG emissions reach 51% of the global total.
According to the FAO, animal agriculture utilizes 59% of the earth’s total ice-free land. Within agricultural land, animal agriculture uses 77% of the world’s farmlands, but only produces 18% of the world’s calories and only 37% of the world’s protein.
In fact, we currently grow enough plants to feed 10 billion people. But we waste nearly 40% of those crops by feeding them to animals exploited in animal agriculture.
The FAO states, “Agricultural expansion continues to be the main driver of deforestation and forest degradation and the associated loss of forest biodiversity. Large-scale commercial agriculture (primarily cattle ranching and cultivation of soya bean and oil palm) accounted for 40 percent of tropical deforestation between 2000 and 2010.”
Animal agriculture is responsible for 80% of Amazon Rainforest destruction.
The vast majority of global soy production (77%) is fed to animals exploited in animal agriculture. Only 7% is directly consumed by humans. The remainder is used as biofuel.
Animal agriculture also accounts for one third of global freshwater use.
And according to a recent report from the UN, 1 million species are now threatened with imminent extinction, “mainly due to the disproportionate impact of animal agriculture on biodiversity, land use and the environment.”
By contrast, a global shift to a plant based diet would reduce agricultural land use by 76%, and agricultural GHG, acidifying, and eutrophying emissions by 73%. It would reduce global water usage by 54% and wildlife destruction by 66%.
To summarize, the FAO states, “The livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.”
The science is conclusive: Animal agriculture, in all of its forms, is the leading cause of the climate crisis. And a plant based vegan diet is the most sustainable diet.
The Marketing
But this is bad PR for animal agriculture. They’re scared.
And their counter-strategy is regenerative meat.
The idea of regenerative agriculture is fairly new. There’s not a ton of research on it. So it’s easy to make vague claims like, “We care for the soil, respect diversity in plants and animals on the land, and focus on natural outcomes versus synthetic inputs.”
It sounds so picturesque. So…regenerative!
Notice how this advertisement from a regenerative meat farm focuses exclusively on CO2. Conveniently for them, there’s no mention of methane, a GHG that cows emit which is 28 times more potent at warming the atmosphere than CO2.
To the average econsumer, regenerative meat sounds like they get to keep eating their meat, guilt-free, while actively saving the planet. It’s like the perfect product.
But it’s marketing. It’s not based in reality.
The science conclusively states that, “global dietary patterns need to move towards more plant-heavy diets.”
But animal agriculture is trying to distract from the science which says to consume LESS meat, and they’re instead trying to SELL you DIFFERENT meat.
They’re trying to distract from the science and confuse the consumer in order to sell a product.
It’s all just about selling a product and making money.
Regenerative meat is not good for the environment. It’s actually worse for the environment than the current factory farming model.
It’s a last-ditch PR campaign by the meat industry to combat the conclusive and growing body of scientific evidence condemning animal agriculture as the leading cause of the climate crisis.
Regenerative meat is a scam.
The overwhelming preponderance of scientific evidence concurs that the best thing we can do for our personal health, the health of the planet, and of course - the animals, is to adopt a vegan lifestyle.
Sources:
Force of Nature Regenerative Meat Company