The Environmental Impact of Beef Consumption
The Meaninglessness of the ‘Global Mean’
When statistics for the environmental impact of beef consumption are presented, they tend to be based on the ‘global mean’.
This ‘global mean’ is meaningless in the UK. Two of the biggest variables in its calculation are deforestation and intensively growing crops as feed for livestock. But it’s absurd to think that these things are serious problems for beef consumption in the UK.
Deforestation
Consider deforestation for grazing land. Domestically, in the UK, this doesn’t happen. When we cut down woodland nowadays it’s invariably to build houses.
What about international imports? Brazil is the famous offender here. Is this a problem for beef consumption in the UK?
Of all the worst-offending ‘deforesting’ nations from which the UK imports beef, the largest contributor is actually Canada, with Brazil coming in a close second. Even so, Canadian beef accounts for a tiny percentage of UK imports: $9.5 million out of $1.4 billion (0.7%). Brazilian beef is similar (0.6%). And imports account for only 35% of all beef consumed in the UK, with the vast majority (70%) of this coming from Ireland.
(To further complicate matters, much of that ‘imported’ beef will be British beef returning to the UK, having been exported to the EU as carcasses and imported as processed cuts.)
The chances are that if you buy and eat beef in the UK, and you are even slightly discerning, you will never have bought any beef that’s come from freshly deforested land.
And obviously this small chance is easily avoided by buying something with ‘Britain’ or ‘Ireland’ on the label, as is overwhelmingly the case in most British supermarkets.
Intensive Feed Crops
Consider intensively growing crops as feed for livestock. Domestically, in the UK, this is a big problem for pork and poultry, but not very common for cows.
Here in the UK, cows eat grass: they graze out for most of the year and then get silage (cut grass) and hay (cut and dried grass) in the winter. The farm I work on hasn’t bought cattle feed for decades!
Most of this is down to simple market forces. In the UK, crops are considerably more profitable than cows, if the land allows it, and crops that can feed humans are more profitable than crops that can’t. Consequently, anyone who can grow crops that are fit for human consumption, does. Anyone who tries but falls short ends up with livestock feed, which is essentially a waste product but still has a use for non-human consumption. And anyone who can’t grow anything else grows grass.
To state the obvious: we can’t eat grass, but cows can.
It naturally follows that we only keep cows where grass grows best or where you can’t grow anything but grass. Under these conditions, feeding cows grass is much cheaper than feeding them crops, provided you have a lot of grass (which we do but other parts of the world don’t). To further state the obvious: cows like to eat grass and they do very well on it. As a result, nearly all UK beef is predominantly (79%) grass fed.
Of the 21% of feed that isn’t grass, a good proportion of this is waste products from the food industry. Of the small proportion of livestock feed that are actual crops, an even smaller proportion would have been grown for that purpose, with the overwhelming majority being poorer quality grains that have been designated unfit for human consumption.
In terms of international imports, most (70%) of our imported beef comes from Ireland, and most (80%) of Ireland’s agricultural land is grass. Like us, they will only house the cows in the worst winter months, with the vast majority of the cows’ feed still coming from grass (in the form of hay and silage, which is just grass cut and stored).
The notion of intensively growing crops (which is bad for the environment) to feed to cattle (which is bad for the environment), with the combination of these practices compounding the environmental impact of the resulting product, is meaningless for beef consumption in the UK. It just doesn’t work like that here.
Think Locally
I speak from the UK, in the context of the UK: it will be different in other parts of the world.
This is one of the lessons of the climate crisis that everyone should learn as soon as possible: what is right and best to do will depend on your particular context; and since contexts differ, there will be different answers about what is right and best to do, for you. And it follows from this that there will not be one universal ‘right’ answer but a range of different ‘better’ answers.
Given the range of variation and variables involved in the production and consumption of meat around the world, the notion of a ‘global mean’ means nothing. It’s about as meaningful as trying to calculate your tax return on the basis of the ‘global mean’ income: which is to say that it doesn’t tell you anything whatsoever about what you ought to do.
If you want to ask the question about the environmental impact of the food on your plate, in this context the answer is obvious: know where your food comes from and understand how it is produced. Then try to buy local and ethical.
The food miles for the 100% grass-fed beef on my plate only just breaks into double-figures: the farm is 5 miles from the abattoir, which is 5 miles from the butcher, which is 2 miles from me. Seeing how the farm operates and given what I understand about soil sequestration, I have absolutely no doubt that, in terms of the environmental cost, this portion of beef fares far better than the portion of rice next to it.
People say ‘think globally, act locally’, which is to say that I should do what I can to influence big global things by doing small local things. But to say that I can stop the Brazilians felling trees by not eating the beef that comes from down the road, here, would be absurd. The two are in no way connected.
By the logic of ‘think globally, act locally’, wouldn’t it be truer to suggest the opposite? The best way I can discourage the Canadians or Brazilians from doing what they do is by pressuring my government or retailers not to buy from there, not to flood our markets with cheap sub-standard imports, instead supporting local farmers who are pursuing the environmentally-best practices, indirectly encouraging all beef production to rise to the standards of the UK: predominantly grass-fed, extensive, local, increasingly organic, strictly regulated with the internationally-highest welfare standards and supported by a range of sustainable farming incentives that protect and provide for the environment.