OUR ENTIRE FOOD SYSTEM TODAY operates within the general framework of our industrial economy. But our world has changed. Fuel prices are unstable. Water resources are dwindling. And there are no more “sinks” where we can thoughtlessly bury industrial wastes. We must quickly adapt toward systems of energy exchange rather than energy consumption. Grass-pastured farming allows us to do just that.
Many citizens today are questioning whether animals can be sustainably included in our food and farming production. Sustainability is, of course, by definition a futuristic concept. The root word sustain is simply defined in Webster’s dictionary as “to maintain,” “to keep in existence,” to “keep going.” Sustainability is therefore a journey, an ongoing process, not a prescription or a set of instructions. So when we ask the question, How do we sustain animal agriculture? we are asking how we can manage animal agriculture so that it can be maintained indefinitely, and we are asking what changes need to be made along the way to accomplish that goal.
Sustaining animal agriculture then requires that we begin imagining the challenges and changes that our future will bring. In his extensive study of history, Jared Diamond pointed out that those civilizations that correctly assessed their current situations, anticipated the changes coming at them, and got a head start in preparing for those changes were the ones that thrived—they were sustainable. Civilizations that failed in that quest were the ones that collapsed. They were not sustainable.1 What is true for civilizations is likely also true for business enterprises.
Today, thoughtful citizens increasingly question whether animals belong in our food system at all. They see studies reporting that animals are responsible for a major part of the methane in our environment, one of the most pungent greenhouse gases contributing to climate change. They see reports that point out that a single pound of boneless beef has approximately 2,000 gallons of water embedded in it when the total water use required to raise the corn to feed the animal and process the meat is calculated. They read nutritional guidelines that consistently point out that we eat too much meat. So they wonder whether it might not be more sustainable to eliminate animals from our agriculture and food system altogether.
But from an ecological perspective, such reductionist thinking could produce serious unintended consequences that might create opposite results from those we intended. The problems we need to address may not be the result of animals as such, but of the food and farming system into which we have integrated those animals.
It is important to recognize that our entire food system today operates within the general framework of our industrial economy, which is based on two basic assumptions: (1) that natural resources and other inputs to fuel economic activities are unlimited, and (2) that nature provides unlimited “sinks” to absorb the wastes emanating from those economic activities. Our modern industrial food system, including our industrial animal agriculture, is simply part of that unrealistic economy.
Aldo Leopold recognized both the attractiveness and the vulnerability of industrial agriculture as early as 1945:
It was inevitable and no doubt desirable that the tremendous momentum of industrialization should have spread to farm life. It is clear to me, however, that it has overshot the mark, in the sense that it is generating new insecurities, economic and ecological, in place of those it was meant to abolish. In its extreme form, it is humanly desolate and economically unstable. These extremes will some day die of their own too-much, not because they are bad for wildlife, but because they are bad for the farmers.2
As we enter the twenty-first century, the insecurities Leopold perceived are beginning to manifest themselves, and there are urgent reasons to reevaluate the way we produce crops and animals in our food system. Among the many changes we are likely to see in the next fifty years, three will be especially challenging to our current industrial agriculture system—the depletion of our stored energy and water resources, and our changing climate.
The reason these changes will be especially challenging to our current food and agriculture system, including our industrial animal agriculture enterprises, is that our industrial economy of the past century was based on the availability of cheap energy, abundant fresh water, and a relatively stable climate.
The end of cheap energy may well be the first limited resource to force change in our industrial animal enterprises. Our modern industrial agriculture production system is almost entirely dependent on fossil fuels. The nitrogen used for fertilizer to produce the animal feed is derived from natural gas. Phosphorus and potash are mined, processed, and transported to farms with petroleum energy. Pesticides are manufactured from petroleum resources. Farm equipment is manufactured and operated with petroleum energy. Feed is produced and trucked to concentrated animal operations with fossil fuels. The manure is collected and hauled to distant locations with fossil fuels.
As long as fossil fuels were cheap, they made all these inputs available at very low cost. But independent scholars agree that we have now either reached peak oil production or will shortly do so.3
Of course, alternatives to fossil fuel energy are available—biofuels and wind, solar, and geothermal energy—so one could theoretically contemplate replacing oil and natural gas with alternative sources of energy to keep industrial animal agriculture viable. But the reality that we must face is that our industrial economy was created on a platform of stored, concentrated energy that produced a very favorable energy profit ratio—the amount of energy yield divided by the amount of energy expended to make it available. All alternative energy, on the other hand, is based on current, dispersed energy, which has a much lower energy profit ratio. Consequently, economies that are dependent on cheap energy are not likely to fare well in the future. And that is why the depletion of our fossil fuel resources will require not only that we transition to alternative fuels to produce our food, but also that we transition to a new energy system. Creative new designs for animal production are likely to be part of such new energy systems.
The real energy transition that we must contemplate is converting from an energy input system to an energy exchange system. It is this energy transition that is likely to lead us to consider significant systems changes in the way we produce our crops and livestock. Future systems are less likely to be specialized monocultures and more likely to be based on biological diversity, organized so that each organism exchanges energy with other organisms, forming a web of synchronous relationships, instead of relying on energy-intensive inputs.
A second natural resource that has been essential to industrial agriculture is a relatively stable climate. We often mistakenly attribute the yield-producing success of the past century entirely to the development of new production technologies. In point of fact, those robust yields were at least as much due to unusually favorable climate conditions as they were to technology.
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Panel on Climate Variations reported in 1975 that “our present [stable] climate is in fact highly abnormal,” and that “the earth’s climates have always been changing, and the magnitude of . . . the changes can be catastrophic.” The report concluded that “the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.” It then went on to suggest that climate change might be further exacerbated by “our own activities.”4 In other words, according to NAS, it is this combination of “normal” climate variation plus the changes that will occur from our own industrial economies (greenhouse gas emissions) that could have a significant impact on our future agricultural productivity.5
A third natural resource that may challenge our current soil management system is water. Lester Brown points out that while we each need only 4 liters of water to meet our daily liquid requirement, our current industrial agriculture system consumes 2,000 liters per day to produce each of our daily food requirements. A significant amount of that water is consumed by production agriculture. Agriculture consumes over 70 percent of our global freshwater resources for irrigation.6
Water tables in the Ogallala Aquifer supply water for one of every five irrigated acres in the United States, but this fossil water bank is now half depleted and is being overdrawn at the rate of 3.1 trillion gallons per year according to some reports.7 And it now appears that as we attempt to meet our energy needs with alternative fuels, we are putting additional stress on our water resources. According to a 2007 Des Moines Register article, the production of biofuels is putting significant additional pressure on our water resources, and climate change is likely to further stress that resource.8 In 2007, Kansas filed a lawsuit against Nebraska over its use of water from the Republican River, which is used for irrigation and other purposes in both states. Kansas complained that from 2005 to 2006, Nebraska had diverted more than its share of water for irrigation and cost the state of Kansas millions of dollars in losses. In 2009, the arbitrator for the dispute found that Nebraska had indeed surpassed its water allocation and that the state’s plans for future compliance with water use remained insufficient. As drought and overuse of water increase, so are the disputes over remaining water resources.9 Previously, Kansas had sued Colorado over Arkansas River water diverted in Colorado, in part, for agriculture irrigation and use by the city of Denver. Reduced snow-packs in mountainous regions due to climate change will decrease spring runoff, a primary source of irrigation water in many parts of the world, adding stress to our water shortages.
These early indications of stress demonstrate that our new energy, water, and climate changes will intersect and impact each other in many unanticipated ways, making industrial production systems increasingly vulnerable.
It is this new reality that should lead us to reassess the place of animals in our food system. In nature, a healthy, self-renewing ecosystem always has animals integrated into a biological synergy that enables the biotic community to thrive. Despite the fact that we could reduce our energy consumption by eating crop proteins directly in the form of vegetables and cereal grains instead of feeding the grains to animals, there are also significant landscapes that are not suitable for crop production but that are ideal for grazing animals. On our farm in North Dakota, for example, 1,000 of the 3,500 acres we farm are still in native prairie because they are land that is simply not suitable for crop production. That native prairie supports over 150 beef animals that produce protein on grass, and the grass produces considerable ecological capital in the form of habitat for wildlife, sequestering carbon, and numerous other ecological services.
Furthermore, animals are essential to building healthy soils, and, as it turns out, how we manage our soils under the new energy, water, and climate regimes in which we find ourselves can make major contributions to the sustainability of our future farming systems. We know, from both research and on-farm experience, that when soils are managed in accordance with closed regenerative loops that build soil organic matter, the soil’s capacity to absorb and retain moisture is significantly enhanced, reducing the need for irrigation. We also know from on-farm experience (as well as from nature’s own elasticity) that diverse systems are more resilient than monocultures in the face of adverse climate conditions. And we know from on-farm experience that energy inputs can be dramatically reduced when input/output systems are replaced by recycling systems. Managing soil health based on recycling systems will require more mixed crop/livestock systems.
Joe Lewis and his colleagues, who worked for many years with the USDA Agricultural Research Services in Tifton, Georgia, for example, clearly articulated the failure of the industrial “single tactic” “therapeutic intervention” strategy when applied to pest management. They point out that while it may “seem that an optimal corrective action for an undesired entity is to apply a direct external counter force against it,” in fact, “such interventionist actions never produce sustainable desired effects. Rather, the attempted solution becomes the problem.” The alternative, they propose, is “an understanding and shoring up of the full composite of inherent plant defenses, plant mixtures, soil, natural enemies, and other components of the system. These natural ‘built in’ regulators are linked in a web of feedback loops and are renewable and sustainable.”10
Approaching pest management, weed control, or animal diseases from such an ecological perspective always involves a web of relationships that require more biologically diverse systems. “For example, problems with soil erosion have resulted in major thrusts in use of winter cover crops and conservation tillage. Preliminary studies indicate that cover crops also serve as bridge/refugia to stabilize natural enemy/pest balances and relay these balances into the crop season.”11 In short, such natural systems management can revitalize soil health, reduce weed and other pest pressures, get farmers off the pesticide treadmill and begin the transition from an energy-intensive industrial farming operation to a self-regulating, self-renewing one. Having animals in a diversified crop/animal system always enhances the possibilities for establishing such self-regulating systems.
Other benefits, such as greater water conservation, follow from the improved soil health, which results from closed recycling systems. As research conducted by John Reganold and his colleagues at Washington State University has demonstrated, soil managed by such recycling methods develops richer topsoil, more than twice the organic matter, more biological activity, and far greater moisture absorption and holding capacity.12
Such soil management serves as an example of how we can begin to move to an energy system that operates on the basis of energy exchange instead of energy input. But more innovation is needed. Nature is a very efficient energy manager. All of nature’s energy comes from sunlight that is processed into carbon through photosynthesis and becomes available to various organisms that exchange energy through a web of relationships. Bison on the prairie obtain their energy from the grass, which gets its energy from the soil and from the sun. Bison deposit their excrement back onto the grass, which provides energy for insects and other organisms that, in turn, convert it to energy that enriches the soil to produce more grass. It is these energy exchange systems that we must explore and adapt to our postindustrial farming systems. But very little research is currently devoted to exploring such energy exchanges on a farm scale.
Fortunately, a few farmers have already developed such energy exchange systems and appear to be quite successful in managing their operations with very little fossil fuel input.13 Converting our farms to this new energy model will require a major transformation. Our highly specialized monocultures, which are energy-intensive, will need to be converted to complex, highly diversified operations that function on energy exchange. The practicality and multiple benefits of such integrated crop/livestock systems have been established through research,14 but further research will be needed to explore how to adapt this new model of farming to various thermo climes and ecosystems.
Of course it is always difficult to change systems that have developed infrastructures to support them. But we can begin the transition by moving in the right direction. Intensive confined animal feeding operations can take steps to begin transitioning to a more sustainable future with waste-composting systems and other innovations.
Farmers in many parts of the world are adopting deep-bedded hoop barn technologies for raising their animals in confinement. Hoop barns are much less expensive to construct and have demonstrated production efficiencies that are comparable to nonbedded confinement systems and have proved to be a more welfare-friendly environment for animals.15 The deep-bedded system allows animals to exercise more of their natural functions; absorbs the urine and manure of the animals, which is then composted and used to build soil quality on nearby land; and also provides warmth for the animals during the winter months. Such hoop structures are now being used in hog, beef, dairy, and some poultry operations and have demonstrated reduced environmental impact and risk.16
Tweaking our monoculture confinement operations with such methods may be possible and arguably may be necessary in the short term, but as our energy, water, and climate resources undergo dramatic changes, we will need to transition to much more biologically diverse systems, organized into biological synergies that exchange energy, improve soil quality, and conserve water and other resources. Long-term sustainability will require a transformation from an industrial economy to an ecological economy.