Tuesday, December 11, 2018

Hunting Cattle

After reading through most of Cows Save the Planet and other Improbable ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth by Judith D. Schwartz, my main takeaway is that which the author probably intended by her choice of book title: stop eating beef unless it was grazed rotationally. Through numerous visits to ranchers who take the effort to move their herds to graze intensively one area at a time, Schwartz makes a convincing case that there is no better way to enrich large tracts of soil. If it were possible to increase the cattle population by herding in this fashion, the world would be a better place.

Can they save the planet? Maybe they can get us most of the way there if we also follow through with the 18 other solutions that precede managed grazing on Drawdown's list of 100 things that need to be done. They point out there that managed grazing, "does not address the methane emissions generated by ruminants (cattle, sheep, goats, etc.), which ferment cellulose in their digestive systems and break it down with methane-emitting microbes." If you look down the list to #72, however, you can find something that does address that particular biological shortcoming - biochar. There is movement afoot for biochar to be allowed in animal feed in the U.S. Chickens are likely to be given the nod first, but cows should be included not long thereafter. Canada may be leading the U.S. in permitting these changes. Europe is ahead of both.

In cattle, methane is mainly generated in the rumen, i.e. the first bovine stomach. It comes out mostly from the front end. By altering the enzyme and microbe environment in the rumen, a small percentage of biochar in a ruminant's feed can alleviate some of that gas while solving a host of other animal health imbalances. Hey, if cows are going to save the planet, we should do something for them, right?

Either way, managed grazing still pencils out in the black when you do the carbon accounting. With this in mind, I checked out the list of suppliers to my local farmstand, Chesapeake's Bounty, and noticed that at least three (Grand View Farm, Monnett Farm, and P. A. Bowen Farmstead) are holistic grazers. If I don't find what I want at the Bounty, Monnett sells at the California, MD farmers' market April through November.

With the prices for this beef running about double what the grocery stores charge, I am strongly considering buying a side of beef the way Dad used to do. That way you save about 3 to 4 dollars a pound, but you need three big coolers to bring it home and lots of freezer space. The cuts are vacuum packed and last for a year or more. Even as an 8-year-old, I had the sense that buying this much meat at one time was pretty macho. So what if it's the closest I'll ever get to hauling home a kill from the hunt? I imagine the feeling will be pretty much the same.

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