Will We Still Eat Beef in 50 Years?
When drought became a perennial visitor to the Beatty Canyon Ranch in Colorado in the late 1990s, Steve Wooten remembers telling his family, “We got to do something different.”
Between 1997 and 2003, the Wootens, who have been raising cattle in this arid landscape since 1929, had to sell off cows — a last resort for any rancher. Steve Wooten figures they lost half a million dollars.
“I never want to do that again,” he tells Mongabay. “We felt like one of the things we have to do is create the resilience in the ranch so that we’re not wiped out by drought.”
Around that time, the family “got more serious” about dealing with drought, and it’s helped the ranch keep going. They made plans to allow the recovery of grasses so that they spring back to life when the rains come, Wooten says. And they’ve gone all in on a strategy they’d previously experimented with, one that aims to mimic the role that wild grazers played on the grasslands of North America for millions of years. Proponents say a focus on holistic grazing helps the land recover, provides habitat for other species, and pulls carbon from the atmosphere. To Wooten, the proof is in the resurgent grasses that feed the cattle year after year.
“I wouldn’t venture to say that we’re always in balance, because we are an extractor of that natural resource,” he adds. “But if your cattle are in balance, and you’re matching their forage needs … you’re going to be pretty good at being resilient or regenerative.”
This “regenerative” aspect has been seized on by conservation organizations, the same groups that work to identify, track and tackle the environmental threats to life on Earth.