Eat more meat*

Conservation organizations are beginning to allow that some animal agriculture can be benign if not beneficial for the environment. Still, many continue to advise the public to avoid eating much meat, citing the common concerns surrounding industrial meat production--inefficient land use to graze animals or grow their feed, methane production from ruminants, destruction of rainforests for grazing land, inhumane practices in the industry, and so on. 

The idea is that if one is to offer a directive to wide swaths of the human population, an overly nuanced one runs the risk of over-complicating things for the inconsiderate public. Better to have them eat less of it than to think that meat is OK. 

I contend this is deeply misguided and may produce the opposite results of what is intended. Worse, it misses an opportunity to create ecological change at a meaningful scale. 

Don't get me wrong, I am sympathetic to the cause. I want nothing more than to discourage people from eating meat borne of bad practices. But I don't think encouraging people to eat less meat actually achieves net ecological health. 

What's taken for granted is that it's somehow appropriate or useful for a large organization to offer simple dietary guidelines to people living in vastly different and unique agroecosystems. The problems with this are manifold.

For one, it's absurd to tell people in (for example) the mid-Atlantic region of the United States, with its mild winters, abundant summers, and year-round precipitation that they should eat less meat because of what the beef industry does with itself. Industrial agricultural economy involves millions of acres and often international trade agreements and more often than not are irrelevant to the question of any given person's dinner plate. Systems that can easily support multispecies grazing, leader-follow systems, silvopasture, etc. can produce meat in almost completely closed loop systems that bear no resemblance to chicken, pork, and beef raised within the commodities sector. By responding solely to the offenses of industrial agriculture rather than the rancher down the road we usher in the very agrodystopia we seek to avoid. 

Secondly, telling the public to consume less of anything frames that item as a guilty pleasure, and thereby exempts it from the standards to which we hold our staple foods.

For example, I consider beer an indulgence--always an afterthought, more akin in my mind to a treat or dessert. So I don't give it as much consideration as I give the foodstuffs I rely on to form the bulk my nutrition. While I insist on organic eggs raised in complex agroecosystems, I rarely buy organic beer. (If I honestly reckoned with how often I "wound up" drinking beer every week, perhaps I would make better choices).

Animal agriculture is land and resource intensive, in the sense that it's impactful. A single 1,000 lb cow will consume 2 - 3% of his or her body weight per day (in dry matter, so many more lbs of wet grass than this). That adds up to a lot of land. They drink on average 10 to 20 gallons of water a day, depending on bodyweight and weather.

Where people often get this wrong is that what goes in must come out; the forage eaten and water consumed is not necessarily wasted. The inputs into an animal's digestive track can become the source of renewal for the very land it came from, or not, depending on management. So even a few ounces a week of animal flesh has tremendous capacity to improve upon its resources or to degrade them depending on the animals' relationship with those resources, and thusly, on our relationship with that animal. How much land it takes to raise an animal, then, is not a meaningful metric until management is considered. Eat less meat ignores management.

Hence, eat less meat comes at tremendous opportunity cost, and I believe it's time we held this suggestion accountable for this. Because suggesting to the omnivorous public that they should eat less of something means fewer farms working with animals to improve ecosystems. I say this as someone whose sole compensation for grazing animals in an ecologically restorative context is beef sales. 

Despite its good intentions, eat less meat means greater dependence on synthetic or imported fertility for their vegetables, less carbon stored in their soil, less effective cycling of water, less efficient use of sunlight to create calories. It means broad acres of pasture land is valued not for the habitat it offers to wildlife above and below ground, but as real estate for development. It means people eager to work with plants and animals are without the economic opportunity to do so. It means abundance unrealized. It means bellies unfed. 

Because ultimately, there is no "too much" when meat comes from a dynamic and responsible production system. If we want people to consume meat raised within its environs, the carrying capacity issue will by definition sort itself out. But this all the more requires that we sanction eating meat for ecological reasons, rather than shaming it, sending our meat-eating habits into the shady corners where our higher-minded selves don't visit. 

The thing about regenerative agriculture is that somebody has to do it. And for us to do it, somebody has to pay for it. And for it to be paid for, it must be valued. Not as a guilty pleasure, but as a dietary and ecological staple.

There's one more problem with eat less meat, and it's this: it uses the same over-simplified logic to try to improve our planet that has wrought so much damage to begin with. The modus operandi of agriculture since its inception has been to codify, commodify, command and control. Agriculture has been a tool for warfare, and the justification and fruit of it t'boot. To rely on reductive rules-of-thumb to try to restore a vitality and health to agroecosystems worldwide, we simply cannot use the same thinking that created the problem to begin with. 

So what do we tell people instead? Short of a heady articulation of the role of the human eater in the global food web, or a romanticized appeal to the role of stewards in a bioregional biology, how can we compel people to turn their attention away from dubious meat and direct their attention instead to the animal agriculture that improves their land and watersheds nearby, without turning meat into something considered an occasional treat or guilty pleasure?

I don't know. What do you think? Leave a comment.

Scale Matters

As someone involved in producing beef, I get a lot of questions prompted by Cowspiracy. Full and immediate disclosure: I've not yet prioritized seeing the flick, which is what I tell anyone who asks me about it. But, I'm familiar with some of it's content from the info it has put on the web, and from what questions it's raising in my circles.

Were I to watch it, perhaps I could devote a whole post to the film, but others already have done this better than I ever could. After all, discussion that it has prompted is long overdue. And anyway, I don't have much interest in going to bat for the beef industry--even grassfed beef--because it's such a complex matter, and one producer's practices can have widely different environmental implications than the next.

In fact, that's what I want to explore instead: how when we talk about where food comes from, and where its production lies on the spectrum of destructive to regenerative, the initial answer will always be "it depends."

That answer may seem fuzzy, but it serves to invite further inquiry that ultimately generates a more precise answer. Contrast it to "all beef is bad," or "vegetarian diets are better for the planet," because that's where the imprecision begins. As I see it, the trouble is not that we're asking the wrong questions about diets but rather, we're asking the right questions at the wrong scale.

Consider that for an individual wondering if he should buy a pound of beef to cook for dinner that night, the tendency for the global beef industry to destroy rain forests to plant monocultures of soy or pasture to feed beef cattle matters little, unless he has no knowledge of the origins of his beef and may risk, for example, buying US-raised beef fed Brazil-grown corn. (To my knowledge, most feedlot-finished US-raised beef cattle eat US-grown commodity crops, but I digress).

Because what "it depends" on are questions of how the animal from which that flesh was derived lived in its environment. What it ate, and where that feed came from--how that feed, whether grass or hay or grain, interacted with its environment. The degree to which the animal was able to live as its species evolved or was domesticated to live. Were his stresses natural or unnatural? Where did his water come from, and where did his manure go? Could he play?

These questions can only be answered through a knowledge of one's bioregion--and a knowledge of one's ranch. Cliche as it may seem, this is one reason why "buy local" matters: the more distance between ourselves and a product's place of origin, the more proxies we rely on for knowledge, and the more the specificities of how land and animals were treated can get lost in the fray.

(That's why certifications like Fair Trade and Organic for crops like coffee and cacao are so important, and so perilous. When we choose to trust those certifications we are handing over a bit of our ecological agency in exchange for tasty if not addictive foodstuffs. I write this while sipping coffee. I've got a long ways to go, too.)

At its heart, buying local isn't about doddling around at farmer's markets asking growers how they cook their collards. It's about expressing your interdependency on your land and community instead of on governments and corporations, and it's about your birthright as a human animal seeking to procure sustenance from its environment. It's an act of moral and political sovereignty, and one that we give up every time we rely on sweeping generalizations masquerading as helpful data instead of looking more deeply into our surrounding landscape.

"It depends" can be a paralyzing answer for many. Depends on what? I contend we are in an epidemic of ecological illiteracy at the local level--the level that matters most. Many people have little knowledge of their bioregions--by which I mean a baseline understanding of native weather patterns, vegetation, wildlife, their soils, their watershed, the crops produced with the lowest inputs, and the implication of those crops on the surrounding vegetation/wildlife/watershed.

But humans don't like asking questions we can't easily answer swiftly and cleanly, so we frame our questions--typically, by asking them very generally--'til we find an answer. Returning to my example, a quick Google search exploring whether or not one should eat beef will generate a lot of infographics and statistics surrounding how much beef Americans eat, how much water is used to produce one pound of ground beef, the emissions associated with raising cattle, and so on.

This data creates the illusion of specificity, but it's typically considered from taking the average from a data set at the industrial, national, or global scale.

Worse, it only speaks to what it can measure. Industrial agriculture is an economy of scale, meaning every input input and output is tracked and measured with a degree of precision that would leave many of us dizzy. So even though the FAO has recently been heralding the far-and-away value of smallholder farmers for productivity, diversity, and sustainability, the data we most often see about a given crop comes from land grant universities (funded by large scale ag - that's the deal) dealing in a scale beyond what most of us are required participate in.

In other words, the Demeter-certified biodynamic smallholder farmer down the road who is raising a hundred species with zero outside inputs while growing soil and increasing biodiversity doesn't often get measured, and won't make it into the citations in a Huffington Post article being circulated on your news feed.

Considering an entire nation or planet would only really be useful if you were trying to serve dinner to a whole nation or planet that night--forsooth, a role many technocrats have taken on as their own. But when you're asking because you want to feed yourself or your community, the scale of inquiry is profoundly different, and the process of finding answers and the answers themselves must both change. Beyond "it depends" is a series of considerations, yes, but all of them are available to your investigation. Sometimes we have to get off Google and get into our surrounding environment.

To be clear, I'm not impugning the utility of data as a whole. Far from it. Rather, I am acknowledging that it's our jobs as grown adults to distinguish between what data is purported to be relevant to a given decision, and what actually IS relevant. Most of us are not in the business of crafting law and shaping policy. And while ideally we'd all have some dealing in these matters, the scale of inquiry most relevant on a daily basis concerns how we feed ourselves from our surrounding landscape. With that as a lens, we can engage policy much more effectively than from a descending level of specificity.

Making this distinction requires a familiarity with our bioregions so we can apprehend what is important to consider (coho salmon spawning? diverse habitat for groundnesting birds?), and so we can make decisions that enhance rather than degrade our environment.

This really matters quite a bit, because how we eat shapes our environment like almost nothing else. Agriculture is arguably the single greatest force that defines not only our planet but our social structures. It can be a tool of unimaginable destruction and oppression, and incomparable restoration and sovereignty. And whether we are producers or strict consumers, we are all practicing agriculture. (Unless you're a purist neo-primitivist hunter-gatherer, in which case more power to you, but you'd better be wearing buckskin and not cotton).

This is all easy for me to say, because it's easy for me to see. My vocation as a manager of a herd of 100% grassfed cattle in a conservation context lends the privilege of thinking about this all the time--it's my bread and butter (or my beef and marrow, if you will). Fortunately, we have a growing list of customers who choose to practice their ecological agency by buying our beef, and I enjoy the opportunity to serve as a bit of a liaison. They asked the question at the right scale, run into "it depends," and pursued it further.

When they begin to raise questions about water use, they learn that we water off of native water only--creeks half the year, and that our grazing practices store water in the soil to recharge the aquifers we draw from the rest of the time. When they mention the acreage required to produce beef vs. vegetables, I remind them that we're grazing hilly grasslands, one of the planet's most threatened landscapes with a value of it's own and that don't lend themselves to tillage agriculture anyhow.

When they wonder about where our feed comes from, I can say, look around. It comes from here, and no where else. We manage our forage and our stocking rate accordingly. When they ask about methane, I can show them research exploring the relationship between global atmospheric methane and the rise and fall in numbers of ruminants over the years and discuss the difference between gas cycling and gas production. And as for good ol' CO2, our grazing practices store carbon in the soil, and I can explain how.

When we dismiss an agricultural venture wholesale through unwillingness to forge our ecological agency, we undermine the livelihoods of those doing it differently and we compromise the specific land and animals that would benefit. "It depends" shouldn't paralyze us--it should invite us to reclaim our birthright as knowledgeable and active agents of change for the betterment of our home bioregions. If we want to address our big global problems, we have to start with what we can know and love and touch and eat. I can't imagine anything more encouraging than that.   

Thanks, Jane Jacobs

While reading James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State, I encountered the ideas of Jane Jacobs. A few moments of investigation reveal that it’s the anniversary of her death back in 2006. So unprepared and unworthy though I feel, I’ve cobbled together these thoughts as a little ode to her.

For context, I’m feeling pretty post-city these days. I realize such a wholly dismissive attitude betrays unsubstantial thinking—I can’t really defend this point of view; for now, it’s pure sensibility. But the basis of my distaste for urban life is how easily our natural reality is shoved aside make room for constructs, whether brick and mortar or social. 

It’s just hard to situate one’s self close to nature when one lives in a city. Drawing associations between one’s actions and one’s impact requires a cognitive stretch that exhausts the resources of even the more conscientious among us when buildings and HOAs get in the way. So the feedback loops that can be potentially quite short and obvious when one lives unsupervised in the countryside become sprawling and obscured in urban places. Outside of cities, ignoring our impact on nature requires cognitive dissonance. Within them, it’s just the path of least resistance.

But if I ever again live in a city I hope it’s one with a little of Jane Jacobs’ blood flowing through its proverbial veins. In an era still shaped by High Modernist thought, which prescribed upon cities a gridwork of legibility and planned utility, Jacobs advocated for a design ethic that caused people to collide in a bustle of informal activity and exchange. Concepts we take for granted today, like the value of urban density, social capital, and mixed-use—ideas at the heart of New Urbanism—owe Jacobs a debt of gratitude for being their champion.

Jacobs’ vision for city life is one of involvement and connectivity, a metaphorically mycelial dynamic wherein the otherwise fracturing effects of roadways and city blocks are overcome with sensible design--where the planning institutions facilitate humanity over legibility, and natural activity over controlled predictability.

This is why, in a foray of admitted geekery, I gave a shoutout to Jane Jacobs in a recent panel discussion at Raleigh City Farm. The beauty of that farm is that it’s situated at the nexus of otherwise distinct parts of the city. What used to be an unproductive empty lot is now a lively, multidimensional hub of economic and ecological activity. Perennial permaculture plantings flow in and out of highly productive annual row crops. Youngsters with a savvy hydroponics enterprise rub shoulders with old folks born and bred in Raleigh. When citizens buying a bike or a bottle of wine at the nearby shops (which arguably would never have found a footing had the Farm not moved in first), they encounter land, which as Henry George reminds us is the basis of all economy… and all life. And because the farm exists at a common corridor, they also meet neighbors of vastly different socioeconomic backgrounds whom they may otherwise never encounter.

When co-founder Josh Whiton and I sought the council of a stalwart of the organic farming milieu some years back, before a single spade was dug into the urban soil, we were asked if we couldn’t find a better place outside the city to grow food. Our advisor missed the point, yet we couldn’t exactly articulate why the value of visibility, of access, of farming at the edge made more sense than growing somewhere with a more reliable lease and more fertile soil.

But now we don’t have to—the farm speaks for itself. And I think we have Jane Jacobs to thank for the intuition that more interaction, more activity, is better. The farm is robust, yet interstitial, and serves to direct citizens’ attention to the rural land beyond city boundaries that provide the bulk of what we eat. Raleigh City Farm thus produces more than what it can grow on its 1.3 acres by serving as the lynchpin of an urban-rural connection that extends many miles beyond the heart of Raleigh.

What Jacobs contributed to the disciplines of architecture, urban planning, and city politics can hardly be overstated. Yet beyond her specific ideas, it’s the nature of Jacobs’ contribution that most stirs me. Jacobs didn’t “belong” to any one of the disciplines she reformed. She had no formal training in architecture or city planning. Her college education was postponed, her vocations were iterative, and the observations that formed the basis of her fresh perspective were garnered through gazing out the window of her home and office with eyes unclouded by cumulative lenses of sanctioned thought.

Critics questioned her authority (though she claimed none), and deemed her a wrecking ball, threatening the towering contributions of centuries of urban theory. But Jacobs made no apologies. She had the self-assuredness to acknowledge that she was witness to something others missed, and did not demure when others pulled rank. It was her very lack of enculturation of contemporary thought that allowed her to see what others could not.

I wonder about Jane Jacobs. What went into her making that enabled her to be so bold—to support her thoughts with confidence, promoting her ideas without necessarily promoting her self?

Jacobs also resounds in my mind as a resolution of the tension between the individual and the community. To Jacobs, this was not a zero-sum equation: her cultivation of her own observations contributed directly to the integrity of her community. She managed a complementary arrangement when so many of us feebly sacrifice our obligation to neighbors at the altar of our own self-promotion and success. Similarly, her ideas were borne of a specific place, yet relevant to cities well beyond. 

Jacob's ideas have made cities more habitable for us all. But maybe more importantly, she models a posture relative to institutional authority that leverages the individual mind to the benefit of the community. Thanks, Jane.

For more on Jane Jacobs, check out this NYT bio and of course, her Wikipedia entry.

Jane Jacobs, photographed by Christopher Wahl.