Meat: A Benign Extravagance

As a follow up to the previous essay I wrote on livestock I have some new statistics of note to mention that come from the book Meat: A Benign Extravagance by Simon Fairlie, which I have finally been able to get a copy of.   I feel like the title of the book is misleading because it doesn't seem to be endorsing meat or a meat diet at all.  I think maybe the title was chosen to provoke.  In the end Fairlie seems to say that we will have to dramatically reduce the animal products in our diet to make it more sustainable, but it does advocate keeping livestock as a part of a sustainable food system.

Of major note in the book are the estimates of land use required for production of different food products. There is a lot of information Simon Fairlie gives to support that a straight comparison of meat to vegetables or grain is not as simple as propaganda would lead us to believe. Taking into account that livestock can be grazed directly on pasture (that may not be suitable for grain or vegetable crops) instead of being fed grain or hay, the impact of meat production on human land use for food production in an ideal production system could be far less than the 10:1 ratio often given by vegetarians and vegans as the reason not to eat meat. Grain-fed beef is the least efficient meat in terms of land use, fitting the 10:1 ratio commonly stated as the ratio of land required for amount of food value offered for all meat. Taking into account the ability of pigs to live entirely off food waste and by-products (and the fact that they do in many parts of the world), the potential ratio for pork production is comparable or even lower than that for most vegetable and grain crops. Food waste cannot, in the same way, be fed directly to grain or vegetable crops to produce more food. Statistics are given in the book that estimate that were it legal in the UK to feed food waste to hogs, the waste would be able to supply pork amounting to one sixth of the country's entire meat consumption. Another interesting point is that meat is a more nutritious form of food, so the straight ratio of weight or volume of food cannot be compared directly, a fact most anti-meat advocates ignore. In other words, one must eat more grain and legumes to supply as much nutrients as offered by a comparable amount of meat (of course this varies depending on the meat and type of grain or legume).

Heritage Gloucestershire Old Spot pigs foraging in an apple orchard

 

Another enlightening statistic is the amount of land required for production of vegetable oils, which is about the same as that required for beef in terms of m2 per kilo produced. The amount of land required for butter production is half what is required for vegetable oil and lard is possibly even lower, since pork takes a third of the land to produce that beef does.

In analysis and comparison of different food systems the vegan organic permaculture system is the most efficient in terms of land use and sustainability, using nearly half the land of the livestock permaculture system. They both end up using an equal amount of arable land, but the livestock system uses additional marginal land that would not be suitable for crops.  And whereas the vegan system uses a tractor and biofuel, the livestock system uses draft animals for farm power.  These systems are more efficient than either organic vegan or an organic system with livestock (which is the least efficient), which are not integrated systems set up to recycle all waste and maximize sustainability. Though less efficient than other systems, the organic livestock system is still more sustainable than the chemical vegan or livestock systems. Conventional agriculture is able to feed about twice as many people on a comparable amount of land, but given that it isn't sustainable in the long term, it should not be considered a viable option. Fairlie refers to the Global Opponents of Organic Farming (GOOFs), who advocate the conventional route over the organic, claiming organic agriculture won't be able to feed the ever-growing human population because it uses too much land.

An easy counter to this argument is that maybe we should start looking at population instead of embracing fossil fuels to temporarily feed our hungry billions. This is, after all, how we got into the situation we are in. It would not have been possible to have a human population this high without tapping into fossil fuel.   In this way, much of humanity is essentially made of oil and coal. When we begin to run out of fossil fuel, something happening as we speak, we will be hard pressed to feed all those billions, especially if so many of them are using more than their fair share of resources.
 

One of the more interesting factors Fairlie points to has to do with the Maring tribe in New Guinea, who use pig husbandry to distance their community from the carrying capacity of their land. This example illustrates the buffer that animal production can provide in preventing famine that a vegan system would not have. If you have animals around, when you have a bad grain year, you will not starve, because the animals can eat things like grass or crop waste, that you can't eat. Instead of eating grain that year, you might instead eat meat, dairy products, or drink blood. As well, if you are putting effort into growing and storing food for animals, when you have a bad season, you can divert the harvest you do get directly to feeding yourself instead of your livestock. It's easy in our urban world of abundant grocery shelves to forget that some people are living a lot closer to the earth, and are much more susceptible to its whim.
 

That livestock provide a buffer is an interesting concept and is another reason to keep livestock around, but there are some flaws in the concept. One is in that food security in the world currently is not a matter of availability, but of distribution. In a drought year when the grain harvest is low, grain will not automatically be directed toward feeding humans instead of livestock. It's likely that more poor will starve while meat and dairy will become a bit more expensive because grain is in short supply. The concept makes sense, but it also ignores the fact that in order to have a sustainable world we cannot always be stretching the carrying capacity of the earth to its limits just to serve the needs of humanity. Humans have to reduce their numbers to reduce their impact on the earth. This is the quickest (and should be the easiest way) to do it, but because people are, at heart, just animals who can't control their reproduction rates, it will probably never happen, and humans will push the world to the brink of catastrophe. The theory that population growth rates decrease as standard of living increases does nothing to solve the problems that population causes. A higher standard of living only increases resource consumption so that fewer people are simply having more impact on the planet. In the end the impact is the same or, in that case of Americans, much worse than having several dozen more Third World mouths to feed.
 

The section on fishing has a very useful chart comparing commercial fishing and local fishing in terms of sustainability, fossil fuel use, and impact on fisheries. It shows essentially how going back to the old systems that kept fishing local would ensure that wild populations are sustainably harvested.

In one section, Fairlie compares farm power options for a sustainable agricultural system. Biofuels used in tractors are compared to animal power. There is a quote from GOOFs arguing that it would be impossible to use horsepower to feed the US population because of the incredible amount of land it would take to feed the horses. The statistic translates the amount of machine horsepower currently used in farming in the US into equivalent horses and the acreage it would require to feed them. The estimate is that it would take twice the amount of arable land we have just to feed the horses. But Fairlie makes a good point in arguing against the GOOF's numbers by stating that this stat mostly illustrates the inefficiency of tractor power because, he says, the number of horses used in the translation, 250 million, though they might require a lot of land to feed, would be enough to produce enough food to feed the entire world's population, not just the American. Of course, Fairlie neglects to mention whether that is enough to feed the world a vegetarian diet, a vegan diet, or it's current diet. So is it the inefficiency of tractors or the inefficiency of the American diet that is the culprit. Either way, it is interesting to consider that horsepower alone would be enough to feed the world if it had just twice the arable land found in the US plus the 2.5 billion hectares needed to produce the food for humans.

Orchard mowers

 

But again, the argument of GOOFs that we won't be able to feed the world using organic farming because of its lower yields and higher land demand (because of the need for land to be fallow and the need to practice sustainable farming that doesn't run land into the ground) assumes we will be able to rely on fossil fuel indefinitely. Arguing against organics and for the use of fossil fuel because it will better be able to feed the world's booming human population is at the outset a flawed argument. It just means that humans will be making the severity of the eventual population crash even greater by continuing to grow population as we head towards a decline in fossil fuel and the exhaustion of all arable land. Converting to organic and permacultural systems would mean creating a truly sustainable agriculture that ensures our arable land will be fertile forever, and would also mean a decline in food supply that would have to be matched by a decline in population. This would not be a bad thing at all. It would mean we'd have to address the lack of sustainability of our population and of our diet as a species.

The “population delusion” is a recurring theme in this book. Fairlie is one of the camp who finds it necessary to counter all the claims of vegans and opponents of organic farming by largely ignoring the greater problem of population. He does mention it a couple times, but most of his arguments are falling into the assumption that we need to feed an ever-growing population, and that we need to use up every bit of arable and non-arable land to do it. The comparisons of the land impact of various diets gives only a paltry amount of land to “nature” or wild creatures. I would rather see a massive reduction of the human population than see humans demanding the majority of the world for their own selfish and affluent lives.

The section that compares the potential of animal power to the potential of biofuels seems weak at best. The best comparison he can give is of bioethanol made from wheat as compared to draft horse power. It seems odd that he does not mention biodiesel at all (though he does mention fuel from rape oil) and seems to group it with ethanol as not efficient to produce, when my research found it to be at least twice as efficient as ethanol production.  I found straight veggie oil (as opposed to biodiesel) from canola to be at least ten times as efficient as ethanol, yet he doesn't mention this option either. He does go on to talk about the potential of oxen as a lower cost, more easily accessed and trainable option than horses. Oxen are also not nearly as picky about what they eat, being able to survive on straw and pasture that a horse would turn its nose up at. He references Cuba in its recent “special period”, where the country put efforts into developing new farm technology that would increase the efficiency of oxen. But unfortunately there seems to be a cultural aversion to exploring livestock like oxen because we modern humans see that option as a part of our past and improved machine technology as the future.

In thinking about how DR organizes its current food system, there is an interesting illustration given in the book. Fairlie used to live in a community that was producing some of it's own food. Livestock were incorporated into the food system in ways that seemed practical. Most of the members were vegetarians, so they did have cows for dairy products and grazed them on land unsuitable for crops. They also used pigs to deal with waste products so they didn't have to compost the waste, which attracted rats to the farm. Pigs ate kitchen scraps, crop residue, apple pomace, waste vegetables, and whey. But the people in the community didn't ever want to eat the pork, because they wanted to practice a “more sustainable diet”, and so they imported vegetarian foods like beans, tahini, nuts, grains, and vegetable oils, and luxury foods like coffee and chocolate. This all sounds familiar. We don't have pigs and we have a serious rat problem here. Every day I compost many pounds of vegetable waste from food processing, from pulling up vegetable beds, from the fridge, from winemaking, from beer brewing, even from weeding the garden, that could all be fed to pigs, especially if it were dowsed with a little whey from my cheesemaking. If I were making tofu or soymilk more often or on a larger scale, the okara could easily be fed to pigs and it would save having to wait for the compost pile to turn it into usable waste because it would all be mostly composted in the process of going through the pig's digestion. It would also be less edible to rats having done so.

Fairlie then goes on to illustrate how maintaining a vegan diet in northern climates requires the importation of fats from tropical regions because of limited local options for vegan fat. Whereas fats from animals can easily be obtained locally from sources like pigs, and dairy cows. I have looked into growing and pressing our own canola oil here, which would be an option for a local fat for vegans. I currently have a bed of canola going in my garden to test the potential for overwintering it. If it works, we could have a local farmer grow it on a larger scale and we could invest in a press to extract the oil for biofuel and further processing for food grade. The same press could be used to extract linseed oil from flax seed, which is expensive and which we use in great quantity here for waterproofing earthen plaster and protecting wood. Flax grows like a weed in most places in my experience and I've grown it successfully here. The real inspiration in this book is that it gets you thinking about every possible way we could change our food system to make it more sustainable. When you think of what we are taking from the land and what we are putting into it, the plan for action becomes clearer. Having the statistics and science to back up the methods allows us to create a more efficient plan and one that is adapted to geography as well.

One bit of information that still eludes me is the question of whether animals are better than plants at restoring and maintaining fertility on cropland. There seem to be conflicting opinions and statistics, and some cultural theories that have been passed down through farmers and may or may not have a basis in fact. Do you trust the farmer who has watched the results and has personal experience, or do you trust the researcher who may be doing everything in a lab or just assembling other people's statistics and data while sitting at a computer? But this seems like something so simple and integral to farming, it's amazing that it's difficult to find research confirming or disputing it. Fairlie seems to say that before Europe came in contact with nitrogen fixing crops like alfalfa, they were depleting their fields or just maintaining fertility using a mixed system that included grazing livestock. Europeans left half to a third of their land fallow for a year and during this time would fold livestock there, which meant they would graze the animals on non-arable pasture during the day and move them to their fallow fields at night so they could fertilize them with the nutrients gathered during the day. In this way, nutrients were transported from one field to another. After the introduction of nitrogen-fixing crops to their rotations in place of fallow, they were able to greatly increase yields by fixing more nitrogen from the atmosphere and by being able to feed animals at the same time. This led to higher yields of both grain and animal products, and of course to population increases. Fairlie downplays the role of manure in adding fertility. He explains that when virgin land is initially broken for cultivation, there is a bank of stored nitrogen, but eventually yields decrease to meet the natural level of nitrogen replenished every season by various microorganisms and other processes that make nitrogen available.

Fairlie has a great, though sometimes hard to follow, section picking apart FAO figures on the contribution of livestock to climate change, and specifically the 18% figure I mention in my previous entry on the sustainability of livestock. He also criticizes an FAO chart showing the breakdown of all global contributors to climate change and what they contribute—CO2, methane, nitrous oxide, and HFCs. People often fixate on methane because it is a more potent GHG than carbon dioxide, yet Fairlie points out that targeting it has less of an impact on climate over time because it is so short lived. He uses an analogy of using blowtorches or hot water bottles to heat a room, with methane being many very brief blasts of a blow torch and CO2 being hot water bottles that stick around for a while. He says that focusing on methane from livestock would be a temporary fix, but that carbon reduction would have a more lasting effect. He also points out that CO2 emissions from fossil fuel have doubled since 1970, while methane emissions have risen just 40%. In using its 18% number, the UN recommends more intensive livestock production over more pastured livestock because they claim it is more productive, so essentially, we'll get more bang for our carbon buck. Yet they ignore the massive fossil fuel inputs, and thus the higher CO2 emissions, required for intensive livestock production. Under the livestock section in their chart, CO2 emissions from factory farms are not grouped under livestock, but under transportation, and other industrial sources of carbon, where factory farms are obscured as the culprits. He feels that singling out livestock as the problem ignores the fact that many of the world's livestock are raised by the poor, who because they do not own farmland, graze their animals on common wasteland, and do not require fossil fuel intensive infrastructure to produce their animal products in the way that those in rich countries do.

The chapter critical of a future vegan world makes some good points but seems to have the most flaws and is based less on facts than on opinion. Some points he makes about how some humans have come to praise wild animals so much that they have made the animals tame to human intrusion make sense. The lack of hunting of the deer and the decline of predators has led to overpopulation in suburbs and there are other examples. But since humans have taken over so much of the planet, if this respect or fascination had not developed, many more animals would likely have become extinct by now because of human encroachment on or destruction of habitat. Then again it is a shame that humans don't make some use of the wild meat they could potentially use to supplement their diets. The suburbanite who watches tame deer flooding their neighborhood then goes to the store to buy a cut of cheap meat raised in former rainforest would do better, for the planet and for the sake of feeling a connection to their food source, to eat the deer grazing on their garden.

Deer jerky made from local venison and dried with renewable energy

 

Fairlie also speaks out against the creation of refugees from the establishment of national parks where humans are excluded. I see this as a result of the desire to preserve some remnant of nature in an overpopulated world. Granted if it's being done by environmental groups representing the world's ecologically concerned affluent, then it is really just another form of imperialism. At the same time, do we just let the lion go extinct? We in rich countries force the world's poor to destroy natural areas by not allowing them access to fossil fuels, the greater part of which we probably stole from their land in the first place. As well, if those Africans that threaten the populations of lions had access to basic necessities and were educated about and had access to birth control, perhaps their populations wouldn't be growing at such an alarming rate and perhaps they wouldn't need to encroach on wild lands or poach endangered animals for subsistence.

There are some more points made about the human role in the ecology of some natural systems as the supreme predator that to me make a lot of sense. To eliminate humans from certain natural systems where they've played a role in nature for thousands of years may put the systems out of balance. Determining for certain where this line is seems tenuous though. For centuries humans in Britain coppiced areas of land for firewood, and when this practice stopped with the increase in fossil fuel use for heating and cooking, many species of animals that thrived in the coppiced habitat declined. Now people there are advocating the creation of coppiced habitat to preserve the declining species. But who's to say that the widespread initial coppicing of native forests didn't cause a decline in native species when it happened thousands of years ago, and that the coppiced land is unnatural and should be restored to forest?

This chapter ends with an alarming and revealing primer on the extremes of vegan ethics today. Though extreme, many of the crazy ideas are advocated by activists like Pete Singer, who are very influential. I didn't know that some vegans were so supportive of bioengineering. The information about animal rights activists denying the inherent “cruelty” of the world's predators, and advocating bioengineering a cat that will not kill other animals, is absolutely shocking. He notes that while many people advocating a more sustainable society are pushing for slow food, many vegans are moving in the opposite direction, advocating technology to produce synthetic, bioengineered, “cruelty-free” meat products in a factory. This embracing of technology that separates us from the natural world even more, is leading us further and further from reality in the same way that our vision of fossil fuel as unlimited has led us down the wrong path. I would guess that most vegans are more sensible than these extreme cases might seem to indicate. Obviously, the vegans we have here at DR have a more sensible holistic view of the world because they are trying to live an all around sustainable lifestyle and not just protect animal rights.

The second to last chapter focuses on a comparison of forests and grasslands. In this chapter, the benefits of doubling Britain's forest areas (something that has been proposed by the current administration), is weighed against the decline it could potentially cause in sheep grazing land and the impact of both on climate change, whether for good or bad.

I think the book finishes on a strong chord providing many ideas and a blueprint for creating more sustainable food systems. The main idea he advocates is a decentralization of population and economy that would move people out of cities and closer to their food sources. Getting all food locally would reduce the amount of resources currently needed to transport food back and forth across the country and the world. This would also allow people to make use of local waste products to feed livestock and to recycle local manure in their fields. Having all agriculture operate on a smaller scale would solve many of the problems caused by industrial scale food production and would make this sharing/exchanging of resources more feasible. Most of the ideas he suggests are a return to the way things worked before the industrial fossil fuel era. These systems seemed to work well in the past, so why wouldn't they be able to thrive in a world of declining fossil fuel supply.  I plan to use the ideas and the plan in coming up with a plan for doing agriculture better and more sustainably here at DR.