Meat industry needs to return to pasture-fed cattle

Farming should return to its roots
Graham Harvey, BBC News 39 Jan 08;

The meat industry needs to return to its roots of pasture-fed cattle, says Graham Harvey. In this week's Green Room, he argues that traditional farming methods can deliver more sustainable and healthier food as people become more aware of what ends up on their plates.

The best beef I ever tasted came from a small farm just three miles from where I live in Somerset, England.

I'd heard from a foodie friend that the farmer sometimes took a beast back to sell in freezer packs direct from the farm.

When I called to collect my meat I was struck by how old-fashioned the farm looked. For a start, the pastures were full of clovers and wild flowers, a rare sight in an age of chemically-fertilised monocultures of most beef farms.

The pastures were grazed; not by one of the big, continental breeds so popular with modern farmers, but by traditional Red Ruby Devon cattle, once the universal breed on Exmoor.

This was the way beef had been produced for thousands of years in the UK. This supplier had stuck with this way of farming even though his neighbours, one-by-one, switched to the big cattle and the intensive methods so favoured by the supermarkets and giant abattoirs.

No doubt they had a quiet chuckle at this quaint style of farming as they looked over the hedge. But they don't laugh any more.

As scientists continually uncover more health benefits from this natural, pasture-fed beef, there's a growing queue of customers waiting to buy it.

Research has shown that, in contrast to most supermarket meat, this beef contains more anti-oxidants including vitamin E, more iron and other minerals, more omega-3 fatty acids and more of the powerful anti-cancer compound known as conjugated linoleic acid.

As a result, it doesn't simply supply high-quality protein and other nutrients; It can actually help protect the body against heart disease, cancer and a host of other diseases.

The "commodity beef" that fills the supermarket chill cabinets fails to provide these health benefits. Yet this is the kind of beef western governments continue to support through their agricultural policies.

Where's the beef?

On any rational grounds, pasture-fed beef ought to be the norm in countries like Britain that have the climate to grow good grass.

As well as producing healthy meat, pasture-based production systems require no chemical fertilisers, especially when they contain nitrogen-fixing clovers.

The great beef-raising countries of the world - South America, central and eastern Europe, and on the Great Plains of the US - all based their production on semi-natural grasslands.

It is a system of food production that is sustainable, efficient in resource use and good for the environment.

Semi-natural grassland absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and builds up soil carbon reserves.

Higher levels of organic matter boost the uptake of valuable trace elements by plant roots, so the whole system made up a virtuous circle from which healthy food and a healthy planet were the chief products.

It has been destroyed by political measures to promote worldwide grain production. For more than 30 years, governments in the US and the EU have poured subsidies into the production of wheat and other grains.

They have maintained a permanent global grain surplus that has made the production of healthy, grass-fed beef uneconomic.

Traditional beef producers are unable to compete with the inferior meat produced by animals confined in sheds and feedlots and fed on the subsidised grain. This is an unnatural food for ruminants.

The meat it produces is the kind that's more likely to lead to heart attacks and cancer. European and American taxpayers have unwittingly degraded a staple food.

Chief beneficiaries of the change have been the agri-business corporations who supply chemical fertilisers, pharmaceuticals and a host of other inputs needed to keep the current system going.

Pasture-based production with its healthy animals and fertile soils required none of these things.

The natural grassland of the US prairie states supported 50 million bison. Without inputs they would have supported a similar number of cattle. Today those same states are mainly under corn and soya crops, which require huge inputs of chemical fertiliser, pesticide, irrigation and government subsidy to keep on producing.

Most of the crops are fed to livestock from which the food products are far less healthy than the original grass-fed version.

This damaging form of food production is backed by intensive lobbying from agri-business companies and large farmers.

In Britain, the influential National Farmers' Union - whose president is a commodity cereal grower - pledges support for family farms.

Yet the union has for decades fought to keep the grain subsidies that destroyed pasture-based livestock production, the mainstay of the family farm.

With western industrial countries suffering an epidemic of degenerative diseases, there's an urgent need to return to the healthier foods from animals raised on pasture.

At the same time, it's important to reduce the environmental impact of nitrate fertilisers which are major contributors of greenhouse gases. Switching livestock production from grain to pasture-based would help achieve both objectives.

Ironically, US and EU backing for biofuels may lead to a global renewal of pasture farming.

Government aid for bioethanol and biodiesel production from temperate crops - essentially a new form of subsidy for arable farming - has led to a doubling in grain prices.

For the first time in decades there are no surpluses of cheap grain for intensive animal production. The traditional production of meat and dairy foods from grassland begins to look viable again.

Western consumers can speed to switch to healthier foods by giving pasture-fed foods a higher priority. In doing so they'll protect not only their own health, but the long-term health of the planet.

Graham Harvey is author of We Want Real Food, published by Robinson

The Green Room is a series of opinion articles on environmental topics running weekly on the BBC News website