Allan Savory – EXTRACTS – Keeping Cattle: cause or cure for climate crisis? from Feasta on Vimeo.

Some thoughts and observations on it….

Improving our pastures could be a very fast, energy intensive, and expensive proposition, or we could take the gradual, improvement of management approach. Being fundamentally frugal when having to deal with a decent-sized acreage, we’ve gone the gradual approach. In our tenure here, we’ve seen a large increase in the presence of “good” forage grasses, along with vetch and subclover (soil building legumes), with a decline in the weedy annuals that dominated the pastures when we got here.

Marks & Spencer (a high-end UK retailer) spent £200million to take 100,000 cars off the road…in order to reach that level of effect, a 12acre grass fire burning for 15mins will offset all of those cars and money (1.5 acre fire puts out more pollutants than 4000 cars per second). Our seasonally dry climate evolved to burn every few years, and I’d like to include fire in our management at some point, but notwithstanding the conflagration danger, the pollution that it will spew, along with the volatilization of so much of our soil nutrients, makes me think that it’ll be something that we’ll have to pass on.

For the folks who really want to geek out on Holistic Management from the mouth of the prophet, click here for the hour long lecture. It’s a bit dry at the start, but totally worth the time.

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The grass-fed beef the students tasted in the surveys came from Portland-based SP Provisions, which processes a brand of beef called Cascade Natural Beef. It’s made from Angus steers in Oregon and Washington that are raised on grass, but for the last four months of their lives are fed grain and corn to fatten them up, said Jim Register, the general manager of the company.

This results in an animal that is more expensive to raise, since there’s the longer time to get to a harvestable weight, which is a result of grassfed production, and then switched to grain, which negates any of the health and taste benefits (scroll down) that result from a grassfed and grass finished animal. It essentially takes the weaknesses of both production types, and calls it grassfed. No wonder it didn’t work out.

While farm to school programs are an excellent way to help farmers and get healthy, local food into our kids, studies such as this one distort the costs and benefits of the program…hopefully they’ll get a more robust study underway to really measure the costs and appeal of grassfed meat.

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