Local View: Ode to the Cow: Cattle as Climate Champions

Author: Eric Enberg | Published: January 8, 2018

In science, it pays to have an open mind to new ideas and concepts. I recently ran across some research from the Land Stewardship Project (myth buster #47: “Cattle are a Climate Change Catastrophe”) and the bestseller book, “Drawdown,” which challenged a lot about the way I view the lowly cow and its role in climate change.

We’ve all been told that raising and eating cattle is the worst thing we can do for the climate, and it probably is true considering that we have separated the cows from the land, mono-cultivating corn and soybeans, which erodes the topsoil, and ship the feed to the cows in large confined animal feedlot operations, or CAFOs. There, cows spend their last miserable months standing and sleeping in their own waste. Small mountains of manure pile up, as there is no other place to put it. Farmers who grow the corn and soybeans don’t even have the machinery with which to handle the manure anymore; they only use energy-intensive synthetic fertilizers. And, of course, you are happy to know your tax dollars go a long way toward supporting all of this in the name of feeding the world.

Only in America could we have designed a set of government incentives that simultaneously mine the only soil we have and pollute the water with synthetic fertilizer on one end and manure on the other — all of it mixed with a strong whiff of small-farm bankruptcy, animal misery, and climate change.

Why climate change? The black in healthy topsoil is atmospheric carbon that has been incorporated into the soil over many thousands of years. Understanding how it got there is key to reversing climate change. It turns out that healthy soil needs animals on the land to eat the plants. When a cow or any other herbivore, like the millions of bison that once roamed North America, tears off part of a plant, a portion of the root system dies for lack of support from the leaves. The roots are largely made of cellulose, which is one glucose molecule attached to another in long chains. Each glucose molecule has six carbon atoms, and this carbon is consumed by the soil organisms. Once it enters the bodies of these organisms, the carbon is locked into the soil.

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