Beef Production Report Flawed

Editor:
I was startled to read the Hudson Institute report announced in your March 22 article “Study: Conventional Beef Production Better for Environment Than Grass-Fed.” My fears began to subside quickly, however, once I saw that the study’s lead author was Alex Avery, a notorious denigrator of organic and natural agriculture. He is pretty much a clone of his father Dennis, who just happens to be the co-author of this “study.”
As a firm believer in and practitioner of grass-based livestock production, I find the report farcical in its manipulation of “science.”
The Hudson Institute is regarded as a right-wing think tank financially supported by, among others, Eli Lilly, Monsanto, DuPont, Dow-Elanco, Sandoz, Ciba-Geigy, ConAgra, Cargill, and Proctor & Gamble. The usual suspects. Dennis Avery is a past president of the Hudson Institute. Alex Avery is the director of its in-house “Center For Global Food,” a noble sounding appellation with a history of pronouncements in defense of corporate agriculture and critical of environmentalism.
I read the report in its entirety. The first thing I noticed was that the grass-based system to which they compared the feedlot system in their land use hypothesis was 100 head of cattle on 660 acres (my emphasis). This system is obviously not using Management Intensive Grazing. If it were, it could easily support that number of animals, including providing for stored forages, on a maximum of 200 to 225 acres of quality pasture.
In this study the grain-fed “farm” uses 365 acres for feeding and the production of hay and corn as well as, curiously, pasture.
So the Averys’ hypothesis is based on a self-serving model obviously chosen to prop up their “findings.” In reality, a well-managed grass-fed herd of 100 head would use significantly less land than their feedlot model — 40 percent less!
The other big issue they address is greenhouse gas emissions.
With regard to CO2 emissions in all their livestock production models, they basically blow their own bias out of the water by citing the Kyoto protocol’s assertion that “carbon dioxide emitted due to livestock respiration is not considered to be a net source of CO2 emissions.” Nevertheless, they go on delineating the various quantities of CO2 emissions of their models, ostensibly to again prop up their hypothesis. Their chosen mathematics results in a “finding” that an organic grass-fed protocol emits 30 percent more CO2 than a “modern” grain-fed model.
They conveniently ignore the enormous carbon sequestration inherent in the grass-based system, which I suspect would more than offset this 30 percent. They also ignore the copious use of fossil fuels required to support the infrastructure of the feed lot system — equipment manufacture, transport, and fueling; trucking and distribution of feedstuffs; production of feedstuffs (corn and other grains). This grain-fed support structure is bound to produce CO2 emissions far in excess of that grass-based 30 percent.
To their credit, the Averys do address the production of nitrogen fertilizer for animal feed and report it as the source of 40 million tons of CO2 emissions per year. They even state “Because no synthetic nitrogen fertilizers were applied to organic pastures, there are zero CO2 emissions from fertilizer in the grass-fed system.” It is not clear whether this 40 million tons of emissions was included in the equation earlier in the paper that resulted in the 30 percent greater CO2 emissions in the grass-based model. I suspect it was not and if I’m right that would further negate, along with the inclusion of the required grain-fed support structure, the purported 30 percent greater emissions in the grass-based system.
On they go to discuss methane production. Consider the arrogance of this statement: “Higher quality feeds produce less methane than lower quality feeds. Thus, a diet higher in grain will result in less methane emissions.” Who determined a diet higher in grain is of a higher quality than a grass diet?
The conclusions drawn in this report are at best seriously flawed and at worst a blatant manipulation of facts and figures to support a synthetic animal production model.
— Fred Griffen
Cincinnatus, N.Y.