Rearing animals on pastures in less crowded conditions is more humane, has a lower ecological footprint, and creates meat that is safer to consume; however, this method cannot produce the volume of animals that CAFOs can produce.
The picture is certainly prettier on a grass-fed farm: Cattle meander leisurely across the meadows, eating grass as they go. They don’t reach market weight as quickly as their CAFO-reared counterparts, but neither do they stand in their own feces. Because they are less crowded and are eating the food they were adapted, over eons, to eat, sickness is less of a problem and antibiotics less of an urgency.
In the United States in recent years, a niche market has developed for such “grass-fed” beef, which is produced from animals that are raised on pasture lands rather than in CAFOs. Grass-fed animals don’t gain weight nearly as rapidly as feedlot animals do; they eat less-concentrated food (grass, not grain) and spend more time moving around, so they don’t get quite as fat. But proponents say that the meat and milk they produce are healthier—with less saturated fat and more omega-3 fatty acids (a “healthy fat”) than CAFO-generated beef and milk. And the animals themselves live better lives: Rather than being confined in a tight space, they are free to roam the grasslands and eat the food that they have evolved to digest. In fact, unlike CAFO livestock, grass-fed animals represent a net gain for the human food supply when raised on land that is unsuitable for human crops; they eat grasses that we can’t eat and turn it into beef and dairy products that we can eat (see LaunchPad Chapter 27).
Research shows that raising cattle on pasture would address many of the ecological problems associated with feedlots: Well-managed pastures would reduce erosion and minimize the use of crop inputs like fuel, fertilizer, and pesticides because fewer cows would require less corn. “When we eat from the industrial food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases,” writes journalist, author, and sustainable-food advocate Michael Pollan in an article in the New York Times in 2008. Smaller, grass-fed operations would replace all that oil with sunlight. Farmers would once again rely on crop diversity and photosynthesis.
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One example of how such a system would look can be found on Joel Salatin’s polyculture animal farm in Swoope, Virginia. Polyculture farms rear different species of animals (or a mix of animals and plant crops) together—typically in some sort of rotation. Such operations have been touted as more efficient means of using land resources (see Chapter 17). Salatin’s pastures support several different species of animals, rotated through in a way that maximizes food for each. For example, chickens, released into a pasture after the cows leave, feast on insects congregating on manure. These “free ranging” animals eat a more natural diet and require fewer, if any, synthetic inputs of fertilizer or pesticides. (Consumers need to be careful when they see the term “free range” on food products. The USDA only acknowledges free-range poultry, and the only requirement is that animals have “access to the outside.” This can be nothing more than a small space outside a chicken house that the birds rarely use; the animals may not be roaming freely on pasture as they do on Salatin’s farm.) According to Salatin, his 57-hectare (140-acre)farm manages to be highly productive even though it uses very little fossil fuel. In 1 year, his relatively small farm produced 30,000 dozen eggs, 10,000–12,000 chickens, 100 beef animals, 250 hogs, 800 turkeys, and 600 rabbits.
But for any of these other options to prevail over the CAFO model, several things must change.