Back to Grass: The Market Potential for US Grassfed Beef

Authors: Donny Benz, Renee Cheung, Rosalie Kissel, Paul McMahon and Erik Norel | Published: April 2017 

Grassfed beef in the U.S. is a fast-growing consumer phenomenon that is starting to attract the attention of more cattle producers and food companies, but there is a lack of coherent information on how the market works. While the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) produces a vast body of data on the conventional beef sector, its data collection and reporting efforts on grassfed beef are spotty. Pockets of information are held by different private sector organizations, but they have rarely been brought together.

This report addresses that gap by providing a comprehensive overview of the U.S. grassfed beef sector, with a focus on market and economic dynamics. It brings together available data on the current state of the sector, identifies barriers to growth and highlights actions that will help propel further expansion. It analyzes consumer demand, supply chains and both domestic and imported grassfed beef production models, all the while comparing grassfed beef with conventional beef to highlight their differences.

The report tries to answer some fundamental questions about the future of the sector. How do we define “grassfed beef”? Does it matter how restrictive this definition is? Is grassfed beef destined to remain a niche, expensive product for the affluent consumer? Or can grassfed beef scale to the point where it displaces a significant portion of the conventional, grain-fed beef system in the U.S.?

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Hope Below Our Feet: Soil as a Climate Solution

Authors: Anne-Marie Codur, Seth Itzkan, William Moomaw, Karl Thidemann, and Jonathan Harris | Published: April 2017 

Can the world meet the ambitious goals necessary to avoid catastrophic climate change? A major reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is clearly needed, but there is increasing scientific consensus that even if achieved, this will not be enough. In addition to a drastic reduction in carbon emissions, carbon must be removed from the atmosphere. An important solution is beneath our feet – the massive capacity of the earth’s soils to remove and store carbon from the atmosphere.

Soils hold about three times more carbon than the atmosphere, and an increase in soil carbon content worldwide could close the “emissions gap” between carbon dioxide reductions pledged at the Paris Agreement of 2015 and those deemed necessary to limit warming to 2 o C or less by 2100. To meet this challenge, several international efforts to build soil carbon have been launched, with similar measures underway in the United States.

Proposed policies include reforestation and innovative farming, ranching, and land management approaches that will enhance degraded soil and restore its carbon stock. The French-initiated effort, 4 per 1000: Soils for Food Security and Climate, introduced to coincide with the Paris Agreement, calls for an annual increase of 0.4% in annual global soil carbon storage which, if achieved, would amount to nearly one third of total anthropogenic emissions. This brief also addresses other international soil carbon enhancement initiatives and legislation considered or enacted in US states.

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Want Good Soil? Feed the Microbes

Author: Kathy Voth  | Published on: March 20, 2017

In June of 2014, Grist reporter Nathanael Johnson reported on a battle between two men in New South Wales Australia. Clive Kirkby and John Kirkegaard were having it out over the proper handling of crop residues after harvest. Kirkby was trying to get farmers to stop torching wheat stubble. Rather than letting fire release all that carbon into the atmosphere, he told them that they could increase soil organic matter and build healthier, carbon-rich soils by leaving the stubble in the field.  John Kirkegaard, an agronomist, told Kirkby he was wrong. The practice of burning and cultivating was what was growing the best crops.

As most folks will tell you nowadays, cultivating, or plowing, disrupts soil microbes and releases even more carbon into the air. That’s why no-till is becoming increasingly popular. But the practice that Kirkby was promoting didn’t seem to be making a difference either. After six years of leaving stubble in the field, Kirkegaard’s data showed that soil organic matter and the carbon it holds wasn’t increasing, and in some cases, it was even decreasing.

Farmers have been encouraged to leave stubble in the field for the same reason that management-intensive grazing proponents leave plenty of forage behind in pasture: It’s food for the soil. Put more precisely, it’s fuel for a complex, not entirely understood food web of fungi, insects, and microbes eating the residue and each other and transforming plant remains into stable, carbon-rich soil.

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Protect Small Farms to Meet Growing Global Food Needs

Author: Chris Arsenault | April 5, 2017 

As the world moves towards large-scale plantation agriculture, it’s crucial poor countries protect small farmers to meet the food needs of a growing global population, said a study from Australian researchers published on Wednesday.

More than half of the world’s food is produced by small and medium farmers, particularly in Africa and Asia, said researchers at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia.

While large-scale plantation agriculture is expanding, small farms with less than 20 hectares of land should be protected because they produce more diverse and nutritious food, the study said.

“It is vital that we protect and support small farms and more diverse agriculture so as to ensure sustainable and nutritional food production,” Mario Herrero, the study’s lead author, said in a statement.

“Large farms, in contrast are less diverse.”

Big farms larger than 50 hectares dominate food production in the western hemisphere, Australia and New Zealand, producing more than three quarters of the cereals, livestock and fruit in those regions, the study said.

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Gender and Climate Change – Gender, Climate Change and Food Security

Published: April 17, 2017 

The interlinked challenges of climate change and food security are most evident in the agriculture sector, which (combined with land-use change) produces about a quarter of global greenhouse emissions. At the same time, climatic stresses on agriculture and food systems present formidable food security and livelihood challenges to millions.

The climate challenge in agriculture requires integrated approaches that increase productivity, enhance adaptive capacity and cut back net emissions. The agency of rural female farmers is essential for enhancing agricultural productivity and realizing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including ensuring food security (SDG 2) and addressing the perils of climate change (SDG 13). Despite significant strides in addressing gender inequalities over the years, rural women are still among the most marginalized groups in society and are particularly vulnerable to current and future climate change and food insecurity. Given these close relationships, the response to climate change vis-à-vis the agricultural sector should therefore take into account gender dynamics and be gender-responsive.

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Cover Crops May Be Used to Mitigate and Adapt to Climate Change

Published: April 17, 2017 

Climate-change mitigation and adaptation may be additional, important ecosystem services provided by cover crops, said Jason Kaye, professor of soil biogeochemistry in the College of Agricultural Sciences. He suggested that the climate-change mitigation potential of cover crops is significant, comparable to other practices, such as no-till.

“Many people have been promoting no-till as a climate-mitigation tool, so finding that cover crops are comparable to no-till means there is another valuable tool in the toolbox for agricultural climate mitigation,” he said.

In a recent issue of Agronomy for Sustainable Development — the official journal of the French National Institute for Agricultural Research, Europe’s top agricultural research institute and the world’s number two center for the agricultural sciences — Kaye contends that cover cropping can be an adaptive management tool to maintain yields and minimize nitrogen losses as the climate warms.

Collaborating with Miguel Quemada in the Department of Agriculture Production at the Technical University of Madrid in Spain, Kaye reviewed cover-cropping initiatives in Pennsylvania and central Spain. He said that lessons learned from cover cropping in those contrasting regions show that the strategy has merit in a warming world.

The researchers concluded that cover-crop effects on greenhouse-gas fluxes typically mitigate warming by 100-150 grams of carbon per square meter per year, which is comparable to, and perhaps higher than, mitigation from transitioning to no-till. The key ways that cover crops mitigate climate change from greenhouse-gas fluxes are by increasing soil carbon sequestration and reducing fertilizer use after legume cover crops.

“Perhaps most significant, the surface albedo change — the proportion of energy from sunlight reflecting off of farm fields due to cover cropping — calculated for the first time in our review using case-study sites in central Spain and Pennsylvania, may mitigate 12 to 46 grams of carbon per square meter per year over a 100-year time horizon,” Kaye wrote.

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Make Our Soil Great Again

Author: David R. Montgomery | Published: April 14, 2017 

Most of us don’t think much about soil, let alone its health. But as Earth Day approaches, it’s time to recommend some skin care for Mother Nature. Restoring soil fertility is one of humanity’s best options for making progress on three daunting challenges: Feeding everyone, weathering climate change and conserving biodiversity.

Widespread mechanization and adoption of chemical fertilizers and pesticides revolutionized agriculture. But it took a hidden toll on the soil. Farmers around the world have already degraded and abandoned one-third of the world’s cropland. In the United States, our soils have already lost about half of the organic matter content that helped make them fertile.

What is at stake if we don’t reverse this trend? Impoverished trouble spots like Syria, Libya and Iraq are among the societies living with a legacy of degraded soil. And if the world keeps losing productive farmland, it will only make it harder to feed a growing global population.

But it is possible to restore soil fertility, as I learned traveling the world to meet farmers who had adopted regenerative practices on large commercial and small subsistence farms while researching my new book, Growing A Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life. From Pennsylvania to the Dakotas and from Africa to Latin America, I saw compelling evidence of how a new way of farming can restore health to the soil, and do so remarkably fast.

These farmers adopted practices that cultivate beneficial soil life. They stopped plowing and minimized ground disturbance. They planted cover crops, especially legumes, as well as commercial crops. And they didn’t just plant the same thing over and over again. Instead they planted a greater diversity of crops in more complex rotations. Combining these techniques cultivates a diversity of beneficial microbial and soil life that enhances nutrient cycling, increases soil organic matter, and improves soil structure and thereby reduces erosive runoff.

Farmers who implemented all three techniques began regenerating fertile soil and after several years ended up with more money in their pocket. Crop yields and soil organic matter increased while their fuel, fertilizer, and pesticide use fell. Their fields consistently had more pollinators — butterflies and bees — than neighboring conventional farms. Using less insecticide and retaining native plants around their fields translated into more predatory species that managed insect pests.

Innovative ranchers likewise showed me methods that left their soil better off. Cows on their farms grazed the way buffalo once did, concentrating in a small area for a short period followed by a long recovery time. This pattern stimulates plants to push sugary substances out of their roots. And this feeds soil life that in return provides the plants with things like growth-promoting hormones and mineral nutrients. Letting cows graze also builds soil organic matter by dispersing manure across the land, rather than concentrating it in feedlot sewage lagoons.

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3 Big Myths About Modern Agriculture

Author: David R. Montgomery  | Published on: April 5, 2017

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.The Conversation

One of the biggest modern myths about agriculture is that organic farming is inherently sustainable. It can be, but it isn’t necessarily. After all, soil erosion from chemical-free tilled fields undermined the Roman Empire and other ancient societies around the world. Other agricultural myths hinder recognizing the potential to restore degraded soils to feed the world using fewer agrochemicals.

When I embarked on a six-month trip to visit farms around the world to research my forthcoming book, “Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life,” the innovative farmers I met showed me that regenerative farming practices can restore the world’s agricultural soils. In both the developed and developing worlds, these farmers rapidly rebuilt the fertility of their degraded soil, which then allowed them to maintain high yields using far less fertilizer and fewer pesticides.

Their experiences, and the results that I saw on their farms in North and South Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Ghana and Costa Rica, offer compelling evidence that the key to sustaining highly productive agriculture lies in rebuilding healthy, fertile soil. This journey also led me to question three pillars of conventional wisdom about today’s industrialized agrochemical agriculture: that it feeds the world, is a more efficient way to produce food and will be necessary to feed the future.

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Farmers Can Profit Economically and Politically by Addressing Climate Change

Author: Matthew Russell | Date Published: April 4, 2017 

President Trump, congressional Republicans and most American farmers share common positions on climate change: They question the science showing human activity is altering the global climate and are skeptical of using public policy to reduce greenhouse gas pollution.

But farmers are in a unique position to tackle climate change. We have the political power, economic incentive and policy tools to do so. What we don’t yet have is the political will.

As a fifth-generation Iowa farmer and the resilient agriculture coordinator at the Drake University Agricultural Law Center, I deal with both the challenges and opportunities of climate change. I also see a need for the agriculture community to make tough choices about its policy priorities in the face of dramatic political shifts in Washington.

Pundits, agriculture groups and President Trump have identified farmers as a key demographic in the Republican victory. How we leverage this influence remains to be seen. Trade and immigration policy and the president’s fiscal 2018 budget proposal are already creating disagreements between farmers and the Trump administration. We will need to be strategic in using our political power to shape agriculture policy.

My research and farming experience convince me that even in today’s unpromising political conditions, agriculture can play an important role in addressing climate change. American farmers can become global leaders in producing what the world needs as much as abundant food: a stable climate.

Farmers wrestle with climate change

Prior to 2009, thousands of farmers across the United States participated in two large-scale projects designed to maintain or increase carbon storage on farmlands: the National Farmers Union Carbon Credit Program and the Iowa Farm Bureau AgraGate program. These programs paid farmers for limiting the number of acres they tilled and for maintaining or establishing grasslands. Payments came through the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), a voluntary market in which businesses could buy and sell carbon credits.

But after Barack Obama became president in 2009, farmers overwhelmingly joined the opposition to climate change action. As agriculture journalist Chris Clayton documents in his 2015 book “The Elephant in the Cornfield,” farmers viewed Obama’s climate strategy – especially the push for cap-and-trade legislation in 2009-2010 – as regulatory overreach by a Democratic Congress and president.

For example, after the Environmental Protection Agency briefly mentioned livestock in a 2008 report on regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, farmers and agriculture trade groups erupted in outrage at the prospect of a “cow tax” on methane releases from both ends of the animal. When Congress failed to enact the cap-and-trade bill in 2010, the CCX went out of business.

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No-till at Woven Roots Farm: An Interview With Co-owner Jen Salinetti

Author: Julie Rawson| Published: April 2017 

Jen Salinetti farms with her husband Pete in Tyringham, MA in the Berkshires. They have been farming for 16 years together, the four years spent on their almost 5-acre farm. In recent years they have not been using tillage to grow their vegetables. Jen feels that by not disturbing the soil they have a considerable positive impact on carbon sequestration on their land. They have experienced a significant increase in quality and yields which has enabled them to create a viable business on a small amount of land.

“Pete and I started experimenting with no-till 13 years ago, and we are now going into year 11. Our initial experimenting began when we were looking to increase greenhouse production. We started looking into ways to do prep without the tiller. We saw some really great results after the first season. And then we expanded it out to our market garden. Through the process, we were able to set up permanent beds and maximize our earnings and outputs through proper spacing of plants. It was right around when our son Diego was born. We wanted to commit to farming, to be available for family life and to be home.”

They read of French bio-intensive methods in books. Pete took off with that and Jen has supported him on some level. In the early 2000s they took an intensive with Eliot Coleman at a NOFA Summer Conference. Jen remembers being in that workshop and Pete looking at her and giving her an “I told you so” look. Jen thought this system was nice for a backyard gardener, but was unsure of the scalability for market growing for profit.

Some authors whose works were important in their conversion to no-till and soil buiding were Lee Reich, author of The Weed Free Gardener, and Grace Gershuny’s The Soul of Soil. Jerry Brunetti’s book Farm as Ecosystemwas also valuable. Now they feel that they are living proof that no till can be accomplished on scale. Jen remembered Eliot’s class giving her a whir of emotions. “There is someone who is doing this, has success, hard numbers, and success further north than us. It came at a critical time. We were having our second child. We were committing to being home and to being a family unit and to being in a position to provide high quality food to our community,” said Jen.

Every year they make some adjustments to their system. They push their season extension, have more constant soil coverage and provide more mulching. They find it fun to have this foundation and be able to build off of it, grow their business and teach others about their findings.

Jen states: “I would actually encourage somebody to not do it all at once. I think for two reasons – it could be incredibly overwhelming and a huge risk. I can say with complete confidence that we have better yield and quality, but it would have been too much of a risk all at once. Transitioning over a couple of years helped us to be able to see that one field over there was doing better than the other – carrots, for example were not growing as well over there as here. The longer transition helped to solidify it in front of our eyes and in our mouths. Within the first year we were able to bear witness to the overall positive changes we were making. By the end of year two, it was a significant shift for us.”

Though it was hard for Jen to embrace no-till farming at first, she did have some amazing mentors – she interned with Deb Habib and Ricky Baruc of Seeds of Solidarity Farm. She was their first intern. She saw that they were a number of years ahead of them and having success with what they were doing. After she left college and apprenticed on a farm that was not operating in that way, she was able to see on so many different levels that no-till made sense. Nonetheless, it was harder for her to take any really big steps. Pete is always willing to push the envelope further than she is through new applications and trials. “We had a few books on hand and some good inspiration. The Soul of Soil was a huge one for us. It gave us a clear perspective of our soil as a living environment. Having a better understanding of soil building was the foundation of that book. It helped us to see how comprehensive the system could be. I could see that we were not growing plants anymore. More so, we are here to support an ecosystem.”

Jen suggests that folks start by defining the bed spaces within their garden with permanent walking spaces and beds. Commit to having the bed spaces as weed free as possible. Their beds are very systematic – 30” wide with 12” pathways and beds 50’ long. With that system, they can set up their quick hoops easily and always use the same materials. It also makes it easier to calculate yields when there is uniformity.

Organic matter is a really important component. Having a good source of compost and being generous with it is essential for them. When they first started, they just put the compost in the planting hole. Now they do the whole bed. It is a hard thing to swallow at first, but the layering of compost mimics what the earth naturally does on its own. Observing what surrounds them and putting it into practice in the field continues to help their production thrive.

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