Meat Crisis- Look Out For CAFOs!

Meat consumption has become to characterise our everyday diet and as more countries become wealthier, the hunger for meat is only expected to rise. In the past decades we have seen a move from small-scale ranches to multinational companies, sometimes called CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations). Livestock production is one of the biggest contributors to the world's greenhouse emissions with estimates of as much as 18% (FAO, 2006) of all global greenhouse gas emissions. Here I will make an attempt to explain the dirty secrets behind livestock production and suggest a few solutions to the problem in the heart of food production. Small scale solutions for this problem may hit very close to home but others may need a critical rethinking of the livestock industry. Keep reading and in the end I promise you a unexpected TED video, which may solve the world's problems all together (wait and see for yourself)!

Traditionally, and still in some parts of the world today, livestock have been integrated into diverse farms where they play an important part in the sustainable farm system (providing manure as fertiliser, grazing and muscle for farm work). Today however, these small sustainable farms have been replaced by multinational animal 'factories' (yes, they have lost all resemblance to farms), diverting us dangerously away from sustainable relationship between livestock humans and the planet. If we look at behind the scenes of livestock production, we see that this process damages the planet practically every step of the way. Let me explain you why.

Firstly, livestock takes up as much as 70% of agricultural land in the world and nearly all meat production occurs in CAFOs all over the world (Steinfeld et al, 2006) EPA defines CAFOs as facilities that confine animals for at least 45 days a year and do not raise their own feed. Globally, industrial livestock production is growing 6 times as fast as pasture-based (traditional) animal production. CAFOs bear a dramatic climate cost with them: fossil fuel energy dependency for heating, cooling, lighting, ventilating and dealing with waste. And these factories are not small scale organisations, far from it. One of the world's biggest meat packers Tyson Foods slaughters and packs 42.5 million chickens, around 170 000 cattle and 347 000 pigs per week(!).

Growth of population and meat supply

Source: UNEP, 2012

Another problem with today's industrial livestock production: feed. In CAFOs, livestock is taken off pasture and traditional feeds and put on diets of corn and soybean. Traditionally, animals would feed themselves on landscape types that are otherwise unusable for human consumption. In this process, animals would usually use up the energy stored in plants to fertilise the soil, creating a closed cycle where animals and nature co-exist (Garnett, 2009). Conventional livestock farming takes animals off pasture leading to a conflict of land and livestock production. In fact, in the United States, 80% of soy and two thirds of corn production goes to feeding animals and 36%  (Cassidy et al. 2013) of all calories produced on cropland will never end up on our table. People are only indirectly and insufficiently fed. This poses a huge inefficiency on industrial livestock production. The amount of calories consumed by livestock, only a fraction of that is returned to us humans as edible meat (Janzen, 2011). To my surprise I found out that CAFO cattle consumes as much as 16 pounds of grain and soy in order to deliver one pound of of beef back to us. Not a very efficient food system is it? To consider the irrigation and machinery required for growing feed for livestock, not to mention the land that is used inefficiently and experiencing deforestation, livestock production is a fossil-fuel intensive and harmful phenomenon for the planet.

The way CAFOs deal with waste is everything but sustainable. Traditionally, animal manure was not 'waste', it was a fertiliser for the farm cycle. Animal manure is often stored in manure holding tanks (they just don't know what else to do with it), where the microorganisms break down the organic matter without oxygen and get turned into methane, carbon dioxide and other gases. Neither of those gases are soluble in water and enter the atmosphere, warming our planet. In addition, manure runoff is an enormous problem for surrounding waterways, where it infiltrates through the soil and gets into freshwater storage (Reimer, 2006). Not to mention the soaring methane levels from livestock digestive systems since the emergence of CAFOs. Methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas in terms of trapping heat than carbon dioxide and it is estimated that globally, emissions from enteric fermentation make up a total of 27% of total methane (C2ES, 2009). But what does that mean in carbon dioxide terms? Let me present you with a (not-so)fun fact: a year's worth of methane emissions from an ordinary 200-cow dairy herd has the same carbon dioxide equivalence as you would attain by driving a Toyota Prius from New York to San Francisco and back 45 times (Thrope, 2009)!

But what about the future then? How can we feed the growing population and can we do it in a more sustainable way? Changes do not have to be dramatic to be effective. For example, switching from grain-fed beef to pork or chicken, there would be additional meat calories to feed another 357 million people while reducing diet related greenhouse gases by 40%. This is by simply eating less beef. Some more dramatic measures give us even more (maybe overly) optimistic results. If we direct all the calories currently consumed by the livestock and biofuels, there would be enough calories to feed an additional 4 billion people (Cassidy, 2013 for Ensia)! This however means a radical change in people's diets. But even small changes will go a long way. 

As promised, I end with a bit of a crazy TED talk by Marcel Dicke who 'wants us to reconsider our relationship with insects, promoting bugs as a tasty - and ecologically sound - alternative to meat in an increasingly hungry world'. Are you willing to switch from beef to grasshoppers? Never know until you try it!

Here is a little evidence that parts of the world already consider insects as a tasty treat. This photo is taken this summer in Vietnam, where streets and markets were full of different crispy 'delicacy'. Who knows, maybe that's where we are headed?

Market in KonTum, Vietnam, summer 2013.

Til next time,
Laura