Sheepish

I wonder what role wool plays in the environment. Since wool comes from sheep, and sheep are supposedly bad for the environment, it’s not looking good for wool. Ever since that UN report came out, I’ve been under a discouraged cloud. Yes, it’s just one report, but because of it I not only feel guilty as a livestock farmer, but also as a carnivore.

Then my online news service sends me the breaking news: “UN Admits Error in Report on Global Warming.” What? It turns out that an American scientist from the University of California at Davis found an error. He said that meat and milk production generate less greenhouse gas than most environmentalists claim and that the UN emissions figures were calculated differently than the transportation figures, resulting in an “apples-and-oranges analogy that truly confused the issue.”

One of the authors of the UN report agreed. “I must say honestly that he has a point—we factored in everything for meat emissions, and we didn’t do the same thing with transport.”

It turns out that the vast majority of global greenhouse gas emissions attributed to livestock production result from deforestation and converting rain forests to grow crops or use as pasture. In the United States, only 2.8 percent of emissions come from animal agriculture, and this number has remained constant since 1990. So when it comes to greenhouse gases, we can stop pointing fingers at livestock. Sheep aren’t the culprit. Hey! I’m not destroying the planet.

Yes, there are still many problems with livestock production. We eat more meat than we should, basically because we’re not paying all the costs associated with it. Intensive livestock production creates more manure than the local environment can absorb. It consumes ridiculous amounts of water, something that a pasturebased system doesn’t do. There are animal welfare issues.

But the animals themselves aren’t the problem—it’s how they’re raised. Raising livestock on pasture can actually help the environment. Nicolette Niman wrote in the New York Times that “many smaller traditional farms and ranches in the United States have scant connection to carbon dioxide emissions because they keep their animals outdoors on pasture and make little use of machinery.” And here’s that carbon sink idea again: “Pasture and grassland areas used for livestock reduce global warming by acting as carbon sinks. Converting cropland to pasture, which reduces erosion, effectively sequesters significant amounts of carbon.”

But how do you manage plants used as a carbon sink? Why not keep thousands of acres of land in grass to soak up carbon dioxide, then keep the grass under control using sheep? The meat and wool will be a by-product of reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

An example of what sheep mean to the landscape can be found in England’s Lake District, a verdant area with lakes and breathtakingly steep green hills grazed by sheep. Experts predict profits on the sheep and cattle farms are likely to drop by up to 40 percent in the next five years. What will happen if the sheep farms disappear from northern England? Scrub and trees will replace the grass, so the land will no longer be accessible to walkers. The birds that thrive on the moors will vanish. The peatland moors also work as a carbon sink, acting as the single largest carbon reserve in the United Kingdom, storing more carbon than the woods of Britain and France combined. Without grazing sheep, shrubby vegetation will appear, dry out the peat, and release more CO₂ into the atmosphere.

After my recycling debacle, which I must confess I have repeated twice more, at least now I can take sheep off my planetharming activities. This is a relief. If it weren’t for my chronic insomnia, I’d totally be able to sleep now.

Sheep have been a good idea for 10,000 years, and they remain so because sheep (and goats) are the planet’s self-propelled lawn mowers. Whether you believe God designed the sheep or that the sheep evolved over the millennia, it’s still a darned smart design. The sheep is one of the most efficient machines for converting sun and water and nutrients into protein and energy, which we use in the form of meat, milk, leather, and wool. Sheep are ruminants, which means they have four chambers to their stomachs. (In case you’re burning to know, other ruminants include cattle, goats, giraffes, bison, yaks, water buffalo, deer, camels, alpacas, llamas, wildebeest, antelope, pronghorns, and something called a nilgai.)

When a sheep chews a mouthful of grass and swallows it, that grass heads for the chamber called the rumen. After it’s hung out there for a while and softened a bit, the sheep burps it back up and chews it a second time. That’s what she’s doing when she’s chewing her cud. Then she swallows it again and it moves through the other three chambers where special bacteria break it down even farther. Why all the need for digestion? Many green, growing things contain lots of cellulose, which isn’t digestible by humans and other monogastrics. But a ruminant’s four-stage process can handle it.

Sheep are used in the United States to control invasive exotic weeds, reduce the fire risks around urban areas, and control weeds on farms without using chemicals. They eat weeds in Christmas tree farms, vineyards, national parks, along power lines, irrigation canals, and roadsides, and in forest plantations. They can be herded into roadless areas. They leave no chemical residue, just manure that breaks down and fertilizes the soil. They improve biodiversity, for if a noxious non-native weed is set back, then the native plants have the chance to recover.

Cattle won’t eat leafy spurge, which crowds out all other plants and forms a monoculture. Sheep, on the other hand, love leafy spurge. When Montana and North Dakota used sheep to control leafy spurge, it cost as little as 60 cents per acre, compared to $35 per acre to spray herbicides from a helicopter.

Sheep happily munch on the kudzu taking over the southeastern United States. I love that the quiet, unassuming, nearly forgotten sheep can be Super Weeder, able to conquer kudzu in a single bite, or nearly so.

Alfalfa growers in California’s Imperial County use 200,000 to 300,000 lambs every winter for weed control, creating the largest concentration of sheep in the nation for those months. The lambs provide both weed and insect control, cutting down on pesticide use and improving water quality.

Many urban areas are surrounded by wild brushland, a fire waiting for a spark. Sheep and goats to the rescue. California uses them to graze down highly flammable shrubs, basically creating firebreaks. In Carson City, Nevada, sheep removed 75 percent of the “fuels” around the city, and 90 percent of the citizens surveyed preferred the sheep over applying herbicides or mowing the fuel breaks. As the Carson City program proclaimed, “Only Ewes Can Prevent Wildfire.”

One summer we had rain, and more rain, and more rain. Our lawn went crazy. I tried to mow, but the blade clogged so often that the mower came to a sad end and flipped over on its back, wheels pointing straight up, its headlights now little Xs.

Super Sheep to the rescue. Melissa put up a temporary electric fence, then opened the big red gate and called the sheep. They leaped into the yard and scampered about, almost too excited to eat. There was even some actual sproinging. Apparently, the grass actually is greener on the other side.

The sheep mowed the grass down to golf course lushness, then Melissa took them out and moved them into the Bowl Pasture. The only sign the sheep did the work instead of the fuel-guzzling lawn mower were the small piles of Milk Dud–sized manure.