Questions about animal agriculture...

by Jennifer Greene, DOVE curriculum lead author
Word count 4000; allow 20 minutes

The topic of animal agriculture* can engender strong feelings in us—from those of us for whom raising animals is a family business and a time-honored tradition, to those of us who savor certain animal-sourced ingredients or dishes, to those of us who regard veganism as a moral baseline and animal liberation as a justice issue. 

*For this post, let's define animal agriculture as the practice of rearing and/or harvesting animals for food.

This page is an attempt to present some of the most compelling and most commonly-asked questions, along with salient answers, arguments, and evidence. If you notice an important question, argument or fact which is missing, thank you for letting me know. This is a work in progress, and your feedback is appreciated.

Here is an overview of the questions addressed:
  What about Allan Savory's cattle solution for the climate?
  What about pasture-based, local farming—isn't that the epitome of sustainability?
  Is animal manure necessary for organic farming?
  Should I buy meat that's certified as humanely-raised?
  Is it better to eat poultry instead of beef?
  What about meat that's kosher/halal?
  What if I get my eggs/dairy products from a family farm?
  Do we owe it to animals to continue farming them? What about entire breeds?
  Should I eat fish? What about other sea creatures, like clams?
  Which is better for the environment, shrimp-farming or shrimp-fishing?

What about Allan Savory's cattle solution?

When I first heard Allan Savory's carbon claim for the grazing methods he calls Holistic Management, I was curious. "Should we take this claim seriously?" I wondered.

Here is Savory's summary of his claim (this is from the conclusion of his 2013 TED talk):

...we can take enough carbon out of the atmosphere and safely store it in the grassland soils for thousands of years, and if we just do that on about half the world's grasslands that I've shown you, we can take us back to pre-industrial levels...

Allan Savory (photo credit)

I tried to determine if his claim is based on strong evidence, or if it is overstated, as some critics have charged. Here are some questions I compiled during my investigation:

1. Can you point us to a peer-reviewed study which backs up your claim?
(This question was inspired by George Monbiot's 2014 interview of Savory.)

2. If the system you're proposing—involving large numbers of grazers—can pull 100 ppm of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in 50 years, how did the atmosphere retain its load of 180 to 300 ppm of carbon dioxide for hundreds of thousands of years? Why didn't grazers keep pulling down carbon dioxide until they created a Snowball Earth? (Question originally posed by Teratornis.)

3. Adam Merberg, a mathematics graduate student at UC Berkeley, has studied your claim and written that it's "perfectly reasonable to ask for evidence on a smaller scale before we [employ your methods on a large scale], particularly as existing evidence indicates that this would make the problems worse." How do you respond?

See the rest of the questions for Allan Savory.

Understanding the appeal of grass-fed "solutions"

Savory is surely right about some things—the health of soil matters, and grassland restoration is beneficial for various reasons, including a certain amount of carbon sequestration. It may be true that the absence of megafauna can exacerbate, not reverse, desertification. But Savory asserts that the only (and he does stress only) way we can solve our climate problem is to use livestock, in increased numbers.

At RealClimate.org, I found a succinct critique of Savory's TED talk. Here is an excerpt, with emphasis added, from the conclusion of "Cows, Carbon and the Anthropocene" by Jason West and David Briske:

Mr. Savory argues that we adopt his grazing method as a simple solution to resolve a key Anthropocene contributor – the ongoing perturbation of Earth’s carbon cycle. The appeal of this claim to casual observers is enhanced in that it does not require humans to face any tradeoffs. The implication is that we can continue to use fossil fuels and emit carbon into the atmosphere because application of holistic management on the Earth’s grasslands provides a ‘silver bullet’ that will sustainably solve the climate change problem and provide abundant livestock products as well. We would be thrilled if a simple solution such as this existed. However, it clearly does not, and it is counter-productive to believe that it does.

As West and Briske observe, Savory's plan does not require humans to face any tradeoffs. The appeal is understandable; we'd all love a free lunch, and we also like hearing good news about our questionable habits. Savory may seem like a savior to those of us who want to eat animal-sourced cheeseburgers with a clear conscience.

A cheeseburger you can eat with a clear conscience? 
(Impossible Foods is one of several new companies
developing plant-sourced meats and cheeses.)

Some of the interest in Savory's message could also stem from a concern for animals. As awareness grows of the hideous warehousing of animals which has become routine in animal agriculture, concerned consumers are seeking alternatives. "Grass-fed/finished" production is perceived by many to be the opposite of "factory-farmed" production, and therefore virtuous. How justified is this reputation?

Sustainability claims for pasture-based systems

One farm frequently held up as an alternative to factory farming, thanks to exposure from the film Food, Inc. and the bestseller Omnivore's Dilemma, is Joel Salatin's farm in Virginia's beautiful Shenandoah Valley. There's no question that Salatin's pastures are greener, literally, than Craig Watt's factory-farm sheds (see video in the next section). But consumers are wise to scrutinize sustainability claims. For instance, Salatin himself acknowledges that his farm relies on substantial grain input from external sources.

Joel Salatin's "chicken tractor" (photo credit)

Other well-known producers who argue for the sustainability of the meat they sell are Nicolette and Bill Niman. They operate a grass-fed beef business in California. In her latest book, Defending Beef: The Case for Sustainable Meat Production, Nicolette says that ranchers can actually be good environmental stewards. Here is an article published in The Wall Street Journal which is based on the book.

To support her sustainability claim, Nicolette turns to Allan Savory, arguing that if all livestock were allowed to graze the way Savory suggests, it would be possible to completely offset emissions. Nutrition is another benefit the Nimans cite in defending their business. Writes Bill, "I vividly remember lying awake the night after we'd slaughtered our first pig. I agonized over whether I'd done the right thing. But in the weeks that followed, as we, our friends, and family ate the pork from that pig, I realized that the pig had died for an important purpose—to provide us with delicious, wholesome, and highly nutritious food." The appeal of these beliefs—that meat is environmentally beneficial and/or nutritionally necessary—is understandable. By accepting these beliefs, we can feel better about the violence of slaughter. Like Bill, most people feel some ethical conflict about the killing of animals, and feel better when there is a way to justify it. I will return to the justification theme at the end of this post.

One inconvenient reality about pasture-based animal systems is that they are not scalable—because we just don't have enough land. By its nature, pasture-based animal agriculture uses far more land than do systems of intensive confinement, and unless there is a drastic reduction either in our human population or in our per capita consumption of livestock products, converting all the world's livestock to pasture-based systems will mean the "development" of remaining wilderness (which, lest we forget, is needed habitat for the free-living animals on this planet). To further illustrate the conundrum, consider: how could all city-dwellers have rooftop hens (the urban version of backyard chickens) to produce their eggs? I confess that it worries me to see sustainability proponents promoting food-styles which cannot be encouraged for everyone.

To be sure, many small-scale farmers and homesteaders don't regard the unscalability of their way of life as something to be concerned about—rather, they identify consumerist lifestyles and/or overpopulation as the problem, and locavorism as part of the solution. It's certainly true that there are

Projected population pressure,
if nothing changes
(image credit)

benefits to sourcing food locally, though significant reduction in emissions is not necessarily one of them (since transportation has been found to contribute just 11% on average to food carbon costs). It's also true that global population pressure is a critical factor in the environmental impact equation. Often overlooked, though, when population pressure is discussed, is the point that livestock as well as humans contribute to it. In other words, "population pressure" should bring to mind not just 7.2 billion human beings, but also the many billions of non-human beings whose reproduction is determined by us.

One might wonder, what about the herds of bison? What's the difference, if millions of bison used to roam the plains of North America, and now there are cattle instead? Indeed, once there were over 40 million bison, according to the National Wildlife Federation. Today, there are far more cattle, according to the USDA: the combined U.S. and Canadian cattle inventory was 108 million, as of July 2014.

In recent years, the magnitude of the world's livestock population has been gaining more attention. But still, to the hard-working holistic farmer or her eco-minded customers, the marginal environmental impact of a few cows is absolutely imperceptible, which is why trusted governance of our shared environment is a must.

To repeat, we don't have enough land to convert all intensive confinement systems to pasture-based ones. But even if we did, would we have the carbon budget?

graphic by Sam Carana
(click to enlarge)

It is a question that weighs on me. Readers may wish to review DOVE's section on the diet-climate connection, which explains that climate change is an issue of global and intergenerational justice. Bill McKibben has observed that "winning too slowly is the same as losing." If we achieve a rapid reduction in methane, could that delay the onset of positive feedback loops (aka "runaway climate change")? Or should we advocate Savory's solution, and hope he's right?

(It's worth noting that animal agriculture is not the only food-sector contributor of methane. Rice cultivation is another significant contributor. One way rice farmers can reduce methane emissions is mid-season drainage of rice paddies, which also saves farmers money on irrigation and pumping costs. Shifting to "upland" as opposed to wetland rice varieties can help reduce emissions, too.)

In 2010, the International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management (under the auspices of United Nations Environment Programme) issued a press release entitled, "Energy and Agriculture Top Resource Panel's Priority List for Sustainable 21st Century." The IPSRM warned, "[S]ome efficiency gains are possible in terms of reducing the impacts of agriculture. [But] a 50 per cent growth in population by 2050 will overwhelm or offset these gains. Therefore, a substantial reduction of impacts would only be possible with a substantial worldwide diet change, away from animal products." The message about moving away from animal products for the sake of a livable world may not be as popular as Savory's, but it seems to have more scientific support.

Don't farmers need manure from livestock, though, if they're not using synthetic fertilizers? Actually, building and maintaining soil fertility using plants is a practical alternative to using animal by-products. "Stock-free organic" means using green manures, composting, mulching, crop rotation, low/no-till techniques, perennial polycultures, and other sources of fertility such as leaf mold, plant meal, and mycorrhizal fungi. While it may be a new concept for most people today, the value of "green manuring" was recognized as far back as the Chou dynasty (1134-247 B.C.), and farmers today are rediscovering these methods. Sixteen farms in the U.S. and Canada are currently listed at the Veganic Agriculture Network site. This article describes the experience of Iain Tolhurst, an English farmer who explains why he found stock-free organic farming to be more efficient and sustainable than the alternatives. His farm, Tolhurst Organics, produces food for 400 local families, and was the first farm in England to be registered as stock-free; the farm has had no grazing animals or animal inputs since 2004.

What about "humane" animal agriculture? 

Consumers should be skeptical of feel-good "humane" marketing. Watch this 5-min video in which Craig Watts, a farmer of certified "humanely-raised" chickens, dares to speak out and tell the truth. "The consumer's being hoodwinked," declares Watts.

If there is one trend which should trouble humane consumers, it is the tendency to switch from eating cows' "red meat" to eating chickens. When people do this, the result is an increase in the number of deaths, and possibly an increase in the amount of suffering in the world, because of two factors. The first is simply relative size—it takes literally hundreds of birds to yield the same amount of flesh one gets from a cow. Ginny Messina, RD, explains:

Assuming that one steer provides around 450 pounds of meat, a person eating a pound of beef per week would be responsible for the death of one steer every 8½ years or so. Replace that pound of beef a week with a pound of chicken (assuming that the average chicken yields 2 pounds of meat) and the number of animals killed would be about 220 chickens over the same time period. In fact, even if the health-conscious, meat-shunning consumer chose to reduce her meat intake by 75 percent—eating just 4 ounces of meat per week and getting all of it as chicken flesh—she would still be responsible for the death of more than 50 birds over that 8½ year period.

And not only do more animals die when people replace red meat with chicken in their diet, but chickens and other birds live and die under conditions that are horrible even by the usual horrible standards of modern farming.  — from Bad News for Red Meat is Bad News for Chickens

The second factor, as Messina mentions, is the prevalence and severity of their suffering. The sad truth is that even if these birds could be rescued from their intensive confinement, they cannot be rescued from their own bodies. Today's hybridized birds (Cornish Xs) possess traits optimized for cheaper meat—namely, accelerated growth rates and overgrown bodies. Their young soft bones can't support their own weight. Skeletal disorders and lameness are common.

Chicken farmers are the main witnesses to the suffering. Before Craig Watts, Carole Morison was another chicken farmer who dared to pull back the curtain on her business. She invited Food, Inc.'s filmmaker to document her farm, and in the book Animal Factory, she described her chickens as being "on the verge of structural collapse." According to Morison, "After about five weeks, they are just too darn big to walk or even get up. So they just sit there."

Independent researchers have begun surveying the extent of the problem. In one Swedish study of four different farms, no birds could be found who were capable of sustained walking. A much larger UK study of 176 flocks at five major broiler producers (accounting for over 50% of UK broiler production) found a "high prevalence of poor locomotion."

Is lameness a sign that a bird is suffering? It seems likely. Even if birds experience pain differently than we do, behavioral evidence confirms that they feel pain and seek to avoid it.

Unfortunately, U.S. poultry consumption per capita is on the rise. Worldwide, the trend is the same. Will poultry producers decide to stop raising the fast-growing hybrid and return to "heritage" breeds? Or is there another reason to hope for a future with less chicken suffering, rather than more?

There might be. In this 2012 video, New York Times food columnist Mark Bittman takes viewers on a tour of a different kind of "chicken" factory. The factory's plant-protein product uses a recipe originally developed by University of Missouri researchers. They found a way to create a texture that is similar to cooked chicken. Bittman himself was fooled in multiple blind taste tests.

Going mainstream: Tropical Smoothie Café is a national chain where
customers can request these Beyond Meat strips instead of chicken meat
in their wrap, sandwich or salad.  At no extra cost.  (photo credit)

Today, Beyond Meat chicken-free strips are available in stores across North America. The product is probably most successful in applications which call for chunks of meat, like chicken salad, or strips tucked inside other food, as in wraps and burritos.

Beyond Meat's founder and CEO, Ethan Brown, is someone who became troubled by the reality of what happens to animals who are used for food. So he got into the food business. His company's website explains that making meat from plants is a way to conserve resources, protect our environment, and benefit human health, in addition to helping animals. Beyond Meat's vision is to reduce global consumption of animal meat by 25% by 2020.

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What about kosher or halal-certified products?* Kosher slaughter methods can be viewed here and here. Halal slaughter methods can be viewed here and here. Viewer discretion is advised. People often find it disturbing to witness scenes of killing. If the killing is disturbing to witness, should we consider the potential long-term psychological harm for those who are employed to do it? This executive from the meat industry says that slaughtering is essentially dehumanizing work.

*Bea Elliott is a blogger who likes to advocate for the animals by pointing out, when Jewish or Muslim friends bring up the topic of kosher or halal meat, "No one will betray their faith if they choose to be kind."

In our society, people want to believe they are buying happy meat, happy eggs, happy dairy products.  Businesses know this, and take advantage of it. We can appreciate why this is happening, even as we raise awareness about misleading claims.

As humane consumers, we might ask: is there a system of animal agriculture we can support with a clear conscience?  Is there a way to procure meat, dairy, or eggs without causing harm to animals?

It turns out that "non-industrial" production of farmed animals, just like industrial production, typically involves forced impregnation, family separation, and slaughter. It's obvious why meat cannot be procured without slaughter. But dairy products and eggs aren't flesh, so why do these "vegetarian" products also involve slaughter?

Answer: it's the inescapable economics you face when using female animals' reproductive systems to produce food. Dairy producers, "laying" chick hatcheries, and egg producers cull (that is, kill or sell to be killed) the unproductive animals—which means all the male chicks and male calves, as well as the mother hens and cows once they are considered "spent"—or else their operations would become unprofitable.

Calves' heads (photo credit)

As one Vermont animal science instructor quips, "If you want goat cheese, you better want goat sausage." We don't hear the National Dairy Council making comparable declarations about veal, but it's equally true: veal production is an inevitable consequence of dairy cheese/yogurt/ice cream consumption.

(What's a veal-boycotting, cheese-loving consumer to do? You could see if you like Chao Slices, the newest plant-sourced cheese on the market. I agree with this reviewer, who praises Chao's texture as well as flavor, saying it achieves the creamy richness of its dairy counterpart.)

Goat being held (photo credit)

Some defenders of animal agriculture assert that these inevitable harms are balanced out if the animal had an otherwise good life. Try this thought experiment: imagine that instead of seeing the goat above, you are seeing a healthy young cat, dog, guinea pig or horse about to be slaughtered. These animals are considered edible in some cultures, even if not in ours. (In this thought experiment, let's still be ourselves and not, say, Inuits living in the Arctic or Burmese refugees hiding in the forest. As this writer points out, there is a big difference between a harsh survival situation with no other choices, and the everyday situations which are all most of us will ever face. So to be clear, in this scenario at hand, our survival is not at stake.)

Suppose the person about to kill the cat (or dog, horse, or guinea pig) assures you: "Don't worry, she's been able to run around every day. She eats high-quality chow. Look—she's happy, not miserable. That makes it okay for us to kill her, so we can eat her legs. They're going to taste delicious. So will the rest of her; nothing will be wasted." Do you buy the happy meat argument when applied like this, to a cat (or dog, horse, or guinea pig)?

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What about the argument that they wouldn't exist if we didn't breed them to eat them, so it's actually wrong not to bring them into existence? By this logic, if you're a woman who really does believe that non-existent individuals have interest in coming into existence, then you'd have to think you've committed a wrong by not fertilizing as many of your eggs as you can, in order to bring every possible child of yours into existence. And if you're a man, you'd have to believe that you ought to father as many children as possible. I don't believe this, and in all likelihood neither do you.  So if we don't believe that non-existent human beings have interest in coming into existence, why should we believe that non-existent other-than-human beings have interest in coming into existence?

"Even if one believed existence to represent a gift to the being who exists, it would remain true that bringing a living being into existence would not entitle us to inflict harm on that being, regardless of why we brought him into the world," argues Cornell law professor Sherry Colb. "Seeking the extinction of animals whose rights we claim to defend might appear to be paradoxical. This appearance, however, confuses living individuals... [who] deserve protection, with the DNA of those individuals, which may no longer find exemplars many generations from now."

In terms of species- and DNA-preservation, it's understandable that we might feel sentimental attachment to the domesticated species portrayed in the books and songs of our childhood. But are we overlooking the fact that these breeds have been subjected to artificial selection for traits which are not advantageous to the animals themselves? As previously discussed, the same traits which yield cheaper meat/milk/eggs—such as accelerated growth rates and enlarged body parts—are traits that cause pain and interfere with natural behaviors like walking, flying, and mating. In other words, these breeds don't represent Nature's exquisite design. They represent human manipulation, at the creatures' expense.

And then there is domestication's impact on the lives of undomesticated animals to consider. "In place of billions of farmed animals, many other wild animals of different varieties (including the wild relatives of domesticated breeds) could flourish," Colb writes.

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What about eating aquatic animals, like fish? In his 2010 bestseller Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer writes, "[N]o fish gets a good death. Not a single one. You never have to wonder if the fish on your plate had to suffer. It did."

How does Foer know this? Recent research has found considerable new evidence that fish feel pain. What's more, they track relationships, cooperate, use tools, and exhibit long-term memories and stable cultural traditions. Fish are now seen as intelligent animals by the scientists who study their behavior and cognition.

What about clams? While we know that mammals and birds and fish are sentient (= endowed with awareness), I honestly don't know if clams and other bivalves are. (It's been suggested that bivalves could be a less harmful source of food in those rare cases, such as carnitine transporter deficiency, when animal flesh is actually medically necessary for survival.) What about insects—are they sentient?  It's understandable to wonder where exactly to draw our lines. This quote from philosopher Tom Regan seems like wise counsel: Wherever you draw your line, draw it in pencil.  

I would be remiss not to raise the sustainability question here as well, because the ecological disaster known as the seafood industry provides a perfect example of the tragedy of the commons. Does anyone know what would be a truly sustainable level of fish consumption, per capita? I don't. Wanting to do all I can to prevent the depletion of the oceans is another reason I eat zero fish now. As for shrimp, this article (by the Natural Resources Defense Council) is one of many which compare shrimp-fishing vs. shrimp-farming to determine which is less destructive. Conclusion: they're both pretty awful.

If you love fish, you could try Gardein's fishless filet (on the left).
Meanwhile, the fellow on the right is an animal who feels pain, 
demonstrates intelligence, and exhibits long-term memory.

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If we don't need to eat food from animals**, we may have difficulty justifying the harm done to them. Case in point: pig farmer Bob Comis. Even though he treated his pasture-raised pigs royally while they were alive, the business of killing them did not sit well with him.

In his blogpost "The Grapple of Ethics," Comis asked, "How can you justify taking a life for gustatory pleasure?"

To himself and to his readership, Comis declared: "...what I am doing, what we are doing, is wrong."

Eventually, this pig farmer heeded his conscience. After ten years of producing meat, Comis is now a former pig farmer. He decided to start growing vegetables instead.

Profile picture at Bob Comis' Google+ account

**If we do need to, it's a different story, of course. Situations that may reduce one's options include economic or geographic constraints, or some unusual medical circumstances. But for nearly everyone who will ever read these words, consuming flesh, dairy, or eggs is a choice rather than a necessity.

(Readers may wish to review the conclusion of health and nutrition authorities that a B12-fortified, whole-food plant-sourced diet is able to supply everything your body needs, and also that such a diet is likely to confer health benefits.)

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Thank you for reading!

What are your thoughts? Reader input and feedback are appreciated. Any evidence or perspectives regarding animal agriculture you think should be added to this page, please let me know—just click here to send an email.

Additional questions for Allan Savory

4. Since 1977, Green Belt Movement communities in Kenya have planted over 51 million trees. In Tanzania, the Kwimba Reforestation Project, which ran from 1990 to 1999, planted 6.4 million trees, and survival rates varied from about 75 percent in drought years to 90 percent in good years. I'm wondering about the regions you highlighted in your TED talk as being most affected by desertification—the Amazon basin, numerous countries in Africa, and temperate regions in Asia. Weren't many of those areas once forest, before they were turned into pastures for cattle? Why not propose widespread reforestation of the same areas? (Question 4 inspired by this post by Richard Oppenlander.)

5. In your April 2013 white paper, "Restoring the Climate Through Capture and Storage of Soil Carbon Through Holistic Planned Grazing," I searched but found no specific mention of methane.  When you predict that your plan will take us back to pre-industrial levels of greenhouse gases, are you taking livestock's methane contribution into account?

6. One of the areas you use as an example is the Greater Horn of Africa, which encompasses eight countries and six million square miles. You have said, "95% of the land in the GHA can only feed people from animals." Livestock already occupy 44% of the total land surface of the GHA. These countries are using their sparse natural resources to support millions of cattle, sheep, and goats, while their human populations suffer from lack of food. If much of the region is actually drought-ridden now, why not propose types of food production that involve the least water usage? (Question 6 inspired by this post by Richard Oppenlander.)

7. The Charter Grazing Trials were undertaken in Zimbabwe, with your involvement, to test the claim that “we could double the stocking rate on any land under conventional management, improve the land and make more profit” with your methods. Referring to the Charter Grazing Trials, you have said, “The only trial ever conducted proved what I have always advocated and continue to advocate when livestock are run on any land.” How you can be so sure that your methods will work on any land, when you say they've been tested only on those plots of land in Zimbabwe back in the 1960s? (Credit to Adam Merberg for inspiring this question.)


Finally, a note about "Cows, Carbon and the Anthropocene" by Jason West and David Briske: in their conclusion, the authors advise emphasis on "adaptation, rather than mitigation"—which could seem to contradict their call for "solutions in all sectors of society." They have clarified that the adaptation comment was not meant as a general prescription. It was in reference to grasslands in particular.