Carbon is not the problem

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Author: George King

I recently had the privilege of flying Walter Jehne from the southern temperate zone of New South Wales, through the deserts of Central Australia to the subtropics of the Northern Territory.  About 20 hours of return flight time looking at and talking about Australia’s environments.  Walter is a soil microbiologist and probably the most intelligent and knowledgeable person I have ever met.  He is immensely patriotic to Australia and has the clearest understanding of environments.

Here is the layman’s version of some of what I learnt.  Carbon is not the problem, it is certainly a major symptom of the problem though.  Even if we cut our carbon emissions to zero right now it will take hundreds of years for the carbon levels to fall to pre-industrial revolution levels.  And no developed country is going to cut their standard of living so drastically.

The root problem is that on a local level we have adversely affected the hydrological cycles of the environment.  The world population and distribution is at such a saturation now that human local land management is catastrophically effecting the global environment.  The good news is that we have the ability to reverse any damage we have done to the hydrological processes, it is simple, it is affordable and we will produce more food in the process.

For the past 420 million years soils have been the foundation for the evolution of life on land, it stands to reason that the soils will hold the solution to turn around our current practice from damaging soils globally to growing them again as nature has been doing for millennia.  Almost without exception every nation’s greatest export by volume and value is eroding soil.

Our soils are formed and are governed by the microbial processes which regulate much of the Earth’s critical carbon, water, nutrient, heat dynamics, cooling and climate cycles and more importantly their interconnected balance.  The natural hydrological processes govern 95% of the heat dynamics and balance of the blue planet.  We have been damaging these hydrological processes for more than 10,000 years but particularly in the past 300 years.

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Beyond Carbon Metrics

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Authors: Camila Moreno, Lili Fuhr, and Daniel Speich

Over the last 10 years, “climate change” has become almost synonymous with “carbon emissions.” The reduction of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, measured in tons of “carbon equivalents” (CO2e) has emerged as the paramount objective in the quest to preserve the planet. But such a simplistic approach cannot possibly resolve the highly complex and interconnected ecological crises that we currently face.

Global environmental policy’s single-minded focus on “carbon metrics” reflects a broader obsession with measurement and accounting. The world runs on abstractions—calories, miles, pounds, and now tons of CO2e—that are seemingly objective and reliable, especially when embedded in “expert” (often economic) language. As a result, we tend to overlook the effects of each abstraction’s history, and the dynamics of power and politics that continue to shape it.

One key example of a powerful and somewhat illusory global abstraction is the gross domestic product (GDP), which was adopted as the main measure of a country’s economic development and performance after World War II, when world powers were building international financial institutions that were supposed to reflect relative economic power. Today, however, GDP has become a source of widespread frustration, as it fails to reflect the realities of people’s lives. Like a car’s high beams, abstractions can be very illuminating; but they can also render invisible what lies outside their light.

Nonetheless, GDP remains by far the dominant measure of economic prosperity, reflecting the obsession with universality that accompanied the spread of capitalism worldwide. Complex, nuanced, and qualitative imaginings that reflect local specificities are simply not as appealing as linear, overarching, and quantitative explanations.

KEEP READING ON POLICY INNOVATIONS

Creating sustainability? Join the Re-Generation!

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Author: Daniel Christian Wahl

Faced with multiple converging crises humanity is challenged to redesign the human presence on Earth within the lifetime of present generations, writes Daniel Christian Wahl, and so transform our impact from degeneration to regeneration. We are capable of creating diverse creative cultures elegantly adapted to the uniqueness of place.

After the post-war Baby Boomers came Generation X, followed by Generation Y – the millennials – and Generation Z – the iGeneration. So what’s next?

Creating a viable future for humanity on an overpopulated planet in crisis requires all of us to collaborate, across generations, ideologies and nations. We all will need to join the re-generation!

How do we keep the lights on, avoid revolution and turmoil, keep children in school and people in work, yet still manage to fundamentally transform the human presence on planet Earth before ‘business as usual’ leads to run-away climate change, a drastically impoverished biosphere, and the early demise of our species?

Rather than rushing for solutions we’d better make sure we’re asking the appropriate questions. Albert Einstein supposedly said:

“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask. For once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”

It is time to step back from our cultural predisposition to want solutions and answers as quickly as possible. Do symptomatic quick fix solutions – rather than systemic transformation – actually serve the necessary culture change? Or are they merely premature responses to mistaken problem statements created within an outdated way of thinking, based on a cultural narrative that no longer serves humanity?

The right questions can reshape our perception of the world

By daring to ask deeper questions we begin to see the world differently. As we engage in conversation about such questions, we collectively begin to contribute to the emergence of a new culture. Questions – and the dialogues they spark – are culturally creative. We need to make sure we ask the right questions if we hope to bring forth the thriving, resilient, regenerative cultures and communities most of us long to live in.

KEEP READING ON THE ECOLOGIST

In the Pastures of Colombia, Cows, Crops and Timber Coexist

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Author: Lisa Palmer

Over the last two decades, cattle rancher Carlos Hernando Molina has replaced 220 acres of open pastureland with trees, shrubs, and bushy vegetation. But he hasn’t eliminated the cows. Today, his land in southwestern Colombia more closely resembles a perennial nursery at a garden center than a grazing area. Native, high-value timber like mahogany and samanea grow close together along the perimeter of the pasture. The trees are strung with electric wire and act as live fences. In the middle of the pen grow leucaena trees, a protein-packed forage tree, and beneath the leucaena are three types of tropical grasses and groundcover such as peanuts.

The plants provide his 90 head of cattle with vertical layers of grazing, leading to twice the milk and meat production per acre while reducing the amount of land needed to raise them. His operation is part of a trend globally to sustainably coax more food from each acre — without chemicals and fertilizers — while reducing greenhouse gas emissions, increasing biodiversity, and enhancing the land’s ability to withstand the effects of climate change.

Livestock and their food needs take up 30 percent of land globally, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. In Colombia, where cattle occupy 80 percent of agricultural area, pastures have contributed to soil degradation and deforestation and, in dry areas, have hastened desertification, according to Julián Chará, a researcher at the Center for Research in Sustainable Systems of Agriculture, CIPAV, in Cali, Colombia. But a new paradigm is emerging. Land conservation is happening alongside livestock production.

In Colombia, Molina’s brand of so-called “sustainable intensification” is the favored agroforestry practice for livestock production. Agroforestry cultivates trees with food crops or livestock, while farmers make use of the trees’ ecological benefits. Plantains grow above shade-loving coffee. Valuable hardwoods like oak grow in alleys next to corn and wheat.

“People don’t think of ranching when they think of agroforestry,” says David Cleary, strategy director for agriculture at The Nature Conservancy. “But what is happening in Colombia is a reminder that you have to have a broader definition of agroforestry and make it work with any number of agricultural systems. In Colombia, silvopastoral systems are favored because they can work for both smallholder farms as well as large, private-sector-style ranching.”

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Move Over, Organic And Natural Foods. We Live In A Grassfed Era Now.

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Author: Geoff Williams

Grass-fed is the new organic.

That is, just as the organic food industry took off, so, too have grass-fed-raised foods. It’s apparently at least a $2.5 billion industry, and growing, according to, well, the grassfed industry. Right now, as I write this, The 2016 Grassfed Exchange Conference is being held in Perry, Georgia — this is its eighth annual conference — and of course, there is an American Grassfed Association. In other words, there is some sort of grass-fed movement, and if you’re like me, you’ve noticed more and more restaurants touting its grass-fed beef, or groceries pushing its grass-fed dairy products. You can buy grass-fed eggs (which generally means that the chickens laying the eggs are free roaming and can eat grass if they want, but, sure, given chickens generally don’t eat grass), and, of course, there’s grass-fed milk, yogurt, butter… You can even buy grass-fed macaroni and cheese.

As with organic foods, grass-fed foods are also apparently the healthier way to go, and also like the word organic, not to mention, natural, there’s a lot of confusion over exactly what grassfed means.

So if you’re new to the grass-fed phenomenon, let’s walk through this…

First, the spelling. Is it grassfed, grass-fed or grass fed? You’ll see a variety of spellings everywhere, but I’m going to take a cue from the Associated Press’s articles and will go with the hyphenated version.

If you’re eating grass-fed beef or drinking grass-fed milk, what does that mean? The cow you’re dining on, or drinking from, had a diet of grass. After all, we may not like the stuff, but cows sure do, and if you’re going to think about where your hamburger or glass of milk was before it wound up in your meal, you’d probably prefer to picture a cow on a sloping grassy field chewing happily under a bright blue shy, rather than being in a small pen in some factory farm, being fed some formula to fatten them up.

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Stéphane Le Foll: The Obelix of Agriculture?

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On April 28, my colleague from Regeneration International (RI), Precious Phiri, and I found ourselves for the first time in our lives in Meknes, Morocco, trying to navigate in a world of broken French, lots of Arabic and jet lag that I couldn’t seem to shrug off.

We had come to Meknes to be part of the 4 per 1000 presentation organized by the governments of France and Morocco during the SIAM (Salon International de l’Agriculture du Maroc), hoping to find answers to the many questions we had around the next steps for the 4 per 1000 French initiative: Soils for Food Security and the Climate.

RI and the Organic Consumers Association (OCA)  have been actively involved in the promotion of the French initiative that seeks to build up the soils’ organic matter at a rate of four parts per 1000 every year as a way to make the soil what it once was: a carbon reservoir. The initiative’s proposed solution sounded fabulous and the fact that the government of France was supporting it was unprecedented. But we still had many questions on how the initiative was going to be implemented, its governance, financing and administration.

We expected that the meeting, called “What governance and roadmap for the 4 per 1000”? was going to become our Oracle of Delphos. High expectations indeed. In the end, we may not have found all the answers we wanted, but the meeting cleared up any doubts we had. Even better, and unexpected, we left the meeting highly inspired and ready for action.

A ministerial meeting, a pseudo-diplomatic debate that inspires and moves to action? At first it sounded like science fiction. But I soon learned if one of the speakers at such a meeting is French Minister of Agriculture Stéphane Le Foll, anything is possible. Listening to him present, he reminded me of super human strength-possessing Obelix, the sidekick to the cartoon hero Asterix.

A country’s initiative pushed by a minister’s charisma

It’s not a stretch to say that Le Foll’s charisma and personality have been the driving forces behind this initiative. Le Foll shocked the world when he said that agriculture could provide a solution to climate change. He again took everyone by surprise when he explained, in a very simple statement, that the key was in something as simple and straightforward as the good old scientific process, taught in every elementary school science class, of photosynthesis.

Le Foll’s charisma was on full display at the meeting in Meknes. After a long conference with Ministers of Agriculture and representatives of about 30 countries, Le Foll wrapped up the meeting with a powerful message, a call to action that leaves no room for a timid response:

“If we ask ourselves where oil and carbon originally came from, the answer is from the soil. We pulled them out of there during the industrial revolution and via consumption. So by putting carbon back in the soil, we are closing a cycle. Every time we think of fighting climate change, we must always remember the fundamental role of agriculture in reversing climate change. After all, you cannot separate carbon storage from food security.”

Le Foll was intentionally forceful at calling out major countries that were present at the meeting but are not yet signed on to the 4 per 1000 initiative, in particular Brazil and India. (India’s Minister of Agriculture was the only official present who advocated for organic agriculture, and one of the few speakers at the meeting who didn’t into the trap of advocating for the use of more fertilizers to increase yields for a growing population).

Le Foll explained the structure that will be put in place for the governance of the 4 per 1000 initiative. He said that the initiative has to be dynamic and easy to implement, but at the same time it must be backed up by a very detailed, meticulous body of research. In other words, there has to be a balance between action and research that allows for the initiative to be fluid, without losing its consistency.

To accomplish this, the initiative will establish three bodies: 1) a consultation body; 2) a scientific body (14 scientists from different parts of the world have been chosen, with a very clear gender balance); and 3) consortium that will serve as executive body (to avoid conflicts of interest the members of said consortium will belong to the non-profit world). RI recommended one of our steering committee members, André Leu, who is also president of IFOAM Organics International, to serve on the consortium—a move that was met with a favorable response from the directors of the French initiative.

These bodies will be set up during 2016. The goal is to have them up and running before the COP22 climate meeting in Marrakesh, in November. The 4 per 1000 initiative will be part of the final formal document for implementation of the Paris agreement.

Le Foll had it right when he said that putting carbon into soil is closing a cycle, that it is going back to the original order of things. That statement contains in a nutshell the basic idea behind regenerative agriculture, a simple concept, that just like 4 per 1000 has nothing but positive multiplying effects.

With Le Foll’s drive and everyone’s participation, we hope the 4 per 1000 initiative is finally adopted, endorsed and fully funded starting November. We may need thousands of Obelix to make this task possible, but we do know now that we have Asterix on our side.

Ercilia Sahores is Latin America Political Director for Regeneration International.

An African COP

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Last week I attended, on behalf of Regeneration International,  a meeting to map out the next steps for France’s 4 per 1000 climate initiative.  The meeting, called “What Governance and Roadmap for the 4 per 1000?” took place during the Salon International de l’Agriculture du Maroc (SIAM), in Meknes, Morocco.

A host of ministerial delegates attended, from Morocco, India, Brazil, Palestine, Senegal and many more African countries, as did representatives of the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) and financial bodies like the Green Fund, African Development Bank and the Islamic development bank.

The meeting confirmed that the French and other governments are unwavering in their support of the 4 per 1000 initiative, launched at the 2015 COP21 Paris Climate Summit, and incorporated into the final agreement. It also set the tone for the COP22, to be held in Marrakech in November, 2016.

The meeting also confirmed that Morocco and Africa are ready to host the COP22, which was recently dubbed as a COP of Action and a COP of Africa by the charismatic leader Stéphane Le Foll, French Minister of Agriculture.

Africa has an integral role to play in the 4 per 1000 initiative. Partly because so little funding has been channeled to agriculture in Africa, and partly because 60 percent of the world’s arable land is in Africa. The upcoming COP will ensure that actions to tackle climate change and improve food security are brought to the table and implemented in Africa.

With this in mind, the President of the COP22, and Minister of Agriculture of the Kingdom of Morocco, Hon. Aziz Akhannouch, led the conversation around a new approach—the Triple A (AAA) or Adaptation de I’ agriculture Africaine (Adaptation of African Agriculture). This conversation became the most prominent in the convention as it will be the focus of the COP22.

Triple A will secure funding to support African agricultural initiatives that are meant to back up the 4 per1000 initiative globally. Minister Aziz explained that 70 percent of Africa’s population is rural and depends on agriculture as a source of livelihoods. At the same time, Africa’s greenhouse gas (GHG) footprint is less than that of most western countries, yet Africa stands to be the most affected by climate change.

Today’s food insecurity problem in Africa will need to be addressed by closing the productivity gap. Agricultural yield is dropping and it is projected that by 2050, the African population will increase by 15-20 percent—making it absolutely critical that we address Africa’s food security crisis.

In his last moving words, Minister Le Foll said “you cannot separate carbon storage from food security” and well-directed agricultural practices will achieve these two ambitions.

The role of agriculture in reversing climate change cannot be underplayed, yet this most hopeful of all climate solutions remains under-acknowledged and under-funded. The 4 per1000 and Triple A initiatives are both crucial for the movement. They are meant to encourage solutions that work for Africa. They will be implemented in both English and French speaking African countries

$100 billion is channeled every year to fund developing world productivity needs. Africa receives less than 50 percent of international funding overall. For climate change initiatives, Africa gets less than 5 percent of available funding. This year the Triple A seeks to lobby for $30 billion to be used as a pool fund for Agriculture.

The next action phase for helping Africa combat climate change and food insecurity will include strategies to tackle critical issues like water. The need for new alliances with skilled countries like Brazil, China and India will be sought to help African countries with technological support in areas like irrigation practices to enhance productivity.

The world is currently looking at Morocco to lead and guide the COP22 process. The ministers at the convention pledged their support to back up stages of Triple A and 4 per 1000 collaboration. As Le Foll rightly pointed out: “Triple A’s integration with 4 per 1000 is important to fight climate change.”

It will take Africans to do what works in Africa and to bring their much needed contribution to both agriculture and reversal of climate change globally.

And so, we look forward, with hope, to Marrakech and the COP22.

Precious Phiri is founding director of EarthWisdom Consulting Co. and a member of the Regeneration International steering committee.

A sprinkle of compost helps rangeland lock up carbon

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Author: Carolyn Lochhead

A compost experiment that began seven years ago on a Marin County ranch has uncovered a disarmingly simple and benign way to remove carbon dioxide from the air, holding the potential to turn the vast rangeland of California and the world into a weapon against climate change.

The concept grew out of a unique Bay Area alignment of a biotech fortune, a world-class research institution and progressive-minded Marin ranchers. It has captured the attention of the White House, the Brown administration, the city of San Francisco, officials in Brazil and China, and even House Republicans, who may not believe in climate change but like the idea that “carbon farming” could mean profits for ranchers.

Experiments on grazing lands in Marin County and the Sierra foothills of Yuba County by UC Berkeley bio-geochemist Whendee Silver showed that a one-time dusting of compost substantially boosted the soil’s carbon storage. The effect has persisted over six years, and Silver believes the carbon will remain stored for at least several decades.

The experiments were instigated by John Wick and his wife, Peggy, heiress to the Amgen biotech fortune, on a 540-acre ranch they bought in Nicasio. What began as a search for an artist’s studio turned into a seven-year, $8 million journey through rangeland ecology that has produced results John Wick calls “the most exciting thing I can think of on the planet right now.”

Spreading scraps

The research showed that if compost from green waste — everything from household food scraps to dairy manure — were applied over just 5 percent of the state’s grazing lands, the soil could capture a year’s worth of greenhouse gas emissions from California’s farm and forestry industries.

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Antidepressant Microbes In Soil: How Dirt Makes You Happy

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Author: Bonnie L. Grant

Prozac may not be the only way to get rid of your serious blues. Soil microbes have been found to have similar effects on the brain and are without side effects and chemical dependency potential. Learn how to harness the natural antidepressant in soil and make yourself happier and healthier. Read on to see how dirt makes you happy.

Natural remedies have been around for untold centuries. These natural remedies included cures for almost any physical ailment as well as mental and emotional afflictions. Ancient healers may not have known why something worked but simply that it did. Modern scientists have unraveled the why of many medicinal plants and practices but only recently are they finding remedies that were previously unknown and yet, still a part of the natural life cycle. Soil microbes and human health now have a positive link which has been studied and found to be verifiable.

Soil Microbes and Human Health

Did you know that there’s a natural antidepressant in soil? It’s true. Mycobacterium vaccae is the substance under study and has indeed been found to mirror the effect on neurons that drugs like Prozac provide. The bacterium is found in soil and may stimulate serotonin production, which makes you relaxed and happier. Studies were conducted on cancer patients and they reported a better quality of life and less stress.

Lack of serotonin has been linked to depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder and bipolar problems. The bacterium appears to be a natural antidepressant in soil and has no adverse health effects. These antidepressant microbes in soil may be as easy to use as just playing in the dirt.

KEEP READING ON GARDENING KNOW HOW

Factory Farm Meat: Why Vegetarians, Ranchers and Conscious Omnivores Need to Unite

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For the first time since the advent of industrial agriculture, the federal government is considering advising Americans to eat “less red and processed meat.”

That advice is the outcome of studies conducted by an independent panel of “experts” which was asked by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for recommended changes to the U.S. Dietary Guidelines.

The February 19 “eat less red and processed meat” pronouncement by the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) was reported widely in mainstream media. It set off a heated debate about whether or not consumers should eat meat, a debate that included the standard name-calling by factory farm front groups, including the Farm Bureau, denouncing consumers and environmentalists (and their alleged pawns on the DGAC) for being “anti-meat” and “anti-farmer.”

Unfortunately in its recommendations, the DGAC didn’t really come out and tell us the whole truth, which would go something like this: “Americans should eat less, or rather no red and processed meat from filthy, inhumane factory farms or feedlots, where the animals are cruelly crammed together and routinely fed a diet of herbicide-drenched, genetically engineered grains, supplemented by a witch’s brew of antibiotics, artificial hormones, steroids, blood, manure and slaughterhouse waste, contributing to a deadly public health epidemic of obesity, heart disease, cancer, antibiotic resistance, hormone disruption and food allergies.”

If the DGAC had really told us the truth about America’s red meat horror show (95 percent of our red meat comes from these Confined Animal Feeding Operations or CAFOs), we’d be having a conversation about how we can get rid of factory farms, instead of a rather abstract debate on the ethics of eating meat.

With a real debate we could conceivably start to change the self-destructive purchasing and eating habits (the average American carnivore consumes nine ounces or more of toxic CAFO meat and animal products daily) of most Americans. Instead we are having a slightly more high-volume replay of the same old debate, whereby vegetarians and vegans, constituting approximately 5 percent of the population, tell the other 95 percent, who are omnivores, to stop eating meat. Nothing much ever comes of that particular debate, which leaves thousands of hard-working, conscientious ranchers, and millions of health-, environment- and humane-minded omnivores, out of the conversation.

I say thousands of “hard-working, conscientious,” ranchers are being left out of the conversation because I know lots of them.

North American cattle ranchers, for the most part, have no love for Cargill, Tyson, Monsanto, JBS, Smithfield, Elanco (animal drugs) or McDonald’s. Most of these ranchers practice traditional animal husbandry, conscientiously taking care of their animals from birth. They graze their cattle free-range on grass, as nature intended, before they’re forced to sell these heretofore-healthy animals at rock-bottom prices to the monopolistic meat cartel.

Before these hapless creatures are dragged away to hell, to be fattened up on GMO grains and drugged up in America’s CAFOs, their meat is high in beneficial Omega 3 and conjugated linoleic acids (LA), and low in “bad” fats.

Unfortunately by the time their abused and contaminated carcasses arrive, all neatly packaged, at your local supermarket, restaurant or school cafeteria, the meat is low in Omega 3 and good “fats,” and routinely tainted by harmful bacteria, not to mention pesticide, steroid and antibiotic residues. What was once a healthy food has now become a literal poison that clogs up your veins, makes you fat, and heightens your risk of heart attack or cancer.

I mention millions of “health-, environment-, and humane-minded” consumers being left out of the “meat versus no meat” conversation because, as director of the two million-strong, Organic Consumers Association, I talk and exchange emails with conscious consumers every day.

No organic consumer, vegetarian or omnivore I’ve ever encountered consciously supports the cruelty of intensive confinement for farm animals. Nor do they support feeding herbivores genetically engineered, herbicide-drenched grains, mixed with slaughterhouse waste. No one supports dosing factory farmed animals with antibiotics and hormones that then end up in your kid’s hamburger at school (unless it’s organic or 100-percent grass-fed.)

No one in their right mind, or at least no one who has ever experienced a factory farm first-hand or even read a book or watched a video about what’s going on, supports CAFOs. That’s why corporate agribusiness is working overtime to pass state “Ag Gag” laws making it a crime to take photos of CAFOs. That’s why the beef cartel and Big Food spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year to keep you in the dark about CAFOs, about whether or not your food contains genetically engineered ingredients, and about the country-of-origin of your food.

If CAFO meat and animal products had to be labeled (a proposition I support wholeheartedly), the entire factory farm industry would collapse. If CAFO meat had to be labeled, not only in grocery stores but also in restaurants,

McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s and the rest would immediately be on the phone, contacting ranchers directly to buy their grass-fed, healthy, free- range beef.

Before we go any further, let’s identify the real culprits in this CAFO horror show.

Four multi-billion dollar transnational companies—Tyson JBS, Cargill and Smithfield—produce about 85 percent of the factory farm meat in the U.S., making it difficult for ranchers to sell their livestock to anyone but the Big Four. And of course these same Big Four companies, along with their front groups such as the North American Meat Institute, are lobbying the government to ditch the 2015 dietary guidelines to “eat less red and processed meat” recommendation because they understand what that recommendation will do to their bottom lines.

But what the Big Four fear even more is the thought of consumers waking up to the horrors of factory farms, and the filthy, contaminated meat that comes out of these animal prisons.

Fortunately, demand for healthier, sustainably raised grass-fed beef is growing rapidly. Here in Minneapolis-St. Paul where I spend a good part of the year, there are now over 100 restaurants that offer grass-fed beef on their menus. Local co-ops and natural food grocery stores are barely able to keep up with the increasing consumer demand.

But unfortunately 95 percent of beef today still comes from factory farms and feedlots. Meanwhile most of the 100-percent grass-fed meat sold at restaurants such as Chipotle or Carl’s Jr. (a popular chain on the West Coast) is imported from Australia, New Zealand, Uruguay and Argentina, rather than produced here in the US. Why? It’s not because consumers don’t want healthier, more humanely raised 100-percent grass fed beef. It’s because Cargill and Big Food have monopolized the market by brainwashing the public into believing that cheap CAFO meat is OK, while controlling nearly all of the meat processing plants in the country.

The time has come to shift the American diet away from unhealthy, inhumane, GMO factory farmed food. But as Kendra Kimbirauskas of the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project (SRAP) pointed out at her TEDx talk in New York City recently, we, conscious consumers and farmers, “need to get on common ground” and stop “in-fighting over whether to eat ethical meat, go meat-free, or advocate for bigger cages…” As Kimbirauskas emphasizes, we need to enlist environmentalists in our anti-CAFO campaigning as well.

“As long as animals are in factory farms, they are polluting our environment”… And, Kimbirauskas added, “Those most impacted by the problem (farmers and rural people adjacent to CAFOs) need to be most visible in the fight to change It.”

Meat (along with eggs and dairy products) from factory farms is literally killing people with diet-related diseases. Factory farms are a disaster, not only for the animals, but also for the communities where manure and chemical fertilizers and pesticides pollute the air, the soil, streams, lakes, rivers and drinking water.

Factory farms and the GMO farms that supply them with animal feed are a disaster for the climate as well, releasing vast amounts of greenhouse gases, including CO2, methane and nitrous oxide into the atmosphere. The grasslands that support grass-fed beef, on the other hand, if grazed properly, sequester CO2 from the air and put it in the soil, while drastically reducing or eliminating altogether methane and nitrous oxide emissions.

It’s time to stop fighting among ourselves about whether or not to eat meat. Americans need to boycott all factory farmed meat and animal products. Period.

Beyond boycotting CAFO products, if consumers care about their health and the health of the planet, we need to reduce our consumption of sustainable grass-fed animal products to approximately three or four ounces a day (not nine ounces a day, the current average).

We are what we eat. We must get rid of factory farms and put the Earth’s billions of confined farm animals back outside on the land, grazing and foraging, where they belong.

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Ronnie Cummins is international director of the Organic Consumers Association and its Mexico-based affiliate, Via Organica.