Let’s start this week in the US: ‘Your grass-fed burger isn’t better for the planet,’ runs a headline in The Washington Post. The article is on the back of a new study, published in the journal PNAS, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which looked at the claims made by some that grass feeding cattle, often extensively, has a potentially lower carbon footprint than the ‘close them up, feed them up and cull them quick’ production approach in feedlots (or sheds here in the UK).
The team used newly-available US data comparing pasture where cows were grazing to grass that had been left undisturbed and factored the carbon storage in the soil (carbon sequestration) into the overall carbon footprint of grass-fed beef, then compared this to the emissions from grain-fed systems. The emissions per kilogram of protein of even the most efficient grass-fed beef operations were 10–25% higher than those of grain-fed beef.
“Accounting for soil sequestration lowers the emissions, and makes grass-fed beef more similar to industrial beef, but it does not under any circumstances make this beef desirable in terms of carbon balance,” lead author Gidon Eshel from Bard College, New York, told the Post. “That argument does not hold.”
Eshel and his team also found that non-beef alternatives, including plants, had by far lower carbon footprints.
However, with regenerative agriculture in fashion – and beef at the forefront of this farming revolution – this study could make for uncomfortable reading. I asked Eshel if the findings might be used to support intensification of beef rather than less and ‘better’ beef (a concept that must factor in more than just carbon).
“Not only are there such concerns, I’d be surprised if this paper is not used as a fulcrum for promoting exactly this kind of wrong response to the new knowledge we devised,” he explained. “As we have shown last week, the beef industry has stopped, and likely will stop, at little in their promotion of their product.”
He went on: “It is indeed also very important to look beyond [carbon] dynamics and [carbon] balance. Those obviously constitute only one dimension of this problem, and other ones deserve a seat at the table. In some cases, their seat should be even more prominent than carbon’s.”
The same goes for chickens too. Intensification of the poultry meat supply chain may well boast of carbon savings (some data would be great, please) but has brought all kinds of other problems for the birds, the farmers and the local environment. And there has been very little headway made in changing that, according to a new report produced by CIWF, Compassion in World Farming, this week.
The Chicken Track report provides an update on progress towards the 2026 Better Chicken Commitment (BCC) – a set of science-based criteria designed to improve bird welfare and due to be met by the end of this year. So more space, adoption of slower-growing breeds and access to natural light, for example. Signatories must also publicly disclose and update their progress annually against all BCC criteria – 29 of the 93 tracked don’t even do that.
Only two – Greggs and Premier Foods – demonstrated strong year-on-year progress and deserve recognition, said CIWF. However, the NGO seemed reticent to really criticise companies that appear to have deprioritised this. Restaurant chains and caterers in particular seem to be struggling, as we detail in our other stories this week:
· CIWF results should have foodservice businesses in a flap over chicken (see here)
· Academics call for tough regulations on food industry as voluntary initiatives fail (see here)
· Seafood and farmed fish set to ‘dethrone’ poultry as protein growth ‘leader’ (see here)
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