I had a dream a few years ago like this to some degree. Really affected me, write about it and one of my art pieces so far reflects this imagery. Reading this essay before today’s zoom. Crazily, I’m in red with bank account and don’t even have $5 cash on or available to me at this odd juncture as I’m looking for freelance and remote work, mainly pitching writing and applying for various jobs. If you hear of anything, let me know, thanks! Cu soon. Hope to purchase and support as able. 🙏🏻🌷🦄
The way people will bend over backwards to pretend that beef is an absolute human necessity, when in reality they just don’t know how to cook anything else, or they don’t want to spend a couple extra minutes finding other ways to get the same nutrients is insane. They’d rather let the world burn than give up steak and burgers. It’s pathetic, and deeply irrational.
It’s so strange. And it’s only a recent phenomenon. People didn’t used to eat this much beef, but the industry is heavily subsidized and then became popularized by fast food chains as a daily indulgence. Now it’s become normal to eat it everyday which is just not true. I say end the subsidies and let beef be really expensive. Because it’s costing all of us!
It delights me to read stuff like this and to see that there are people really thinking about what an alternative, hopeful future looks like. I appreciate you sharing this, and look forward to reading more of your articles!
I stopped eating mammals (beef, pork, etc) a year and a half ago. It's not hard. My blood work is exceptional and I have energy to be a dad and do taekwondo. The arguments against reduced meat consumption are only based on personal bias and resistance to change. I also began planting natives rather than foreign ornamentals, and leaving wild edges on my land. The birds and bees love it even if the American lawn care industrial complex does not. Douglas Tallamy and Robin Wll Kimmerer were my inspiration for those changes to do my little part in promoting biodiversity and ecological flourishing. Stop listening to American greed, consumerism, materialism messaging and start thinking about harmony and mutuality with the earth.
I hope to get there someday! I've tried to go vegetarian several times without good results. I tend toward anemia and hormonal imbalance, both of which happen really quickly after I eradicate meat. I'm also allergic to beans which makes it difficult. I'm hoping that starting with the most land-intensive meat will help me stay more balanced while making space for more biodiversity. And that advancements in plant-based proteins will help with the rest! Plant-based is our future, but it may take a while, and incremental changes, to get us there as a society!
So no beef, no lamb, no chicken. What are we supposed to eat? I'm not a vegetarian.
We have canine an incisor teeth for a reason. We eat meat for protien and energy.
Grass doesn't provide energy, wheat doesn't provide energy, plants don't provide enough energy.
You'd think that with the governments falling for this nonsense and trying to kill us, people would be smarter.
And before you talk about synthetic meat. It's not the same. You can't get the same amount of protien and energy from fake meat.
Rewilding the world is just not feasible. There are already people starving and you want to add to that number.
Or would you be satisfied if we just decimated (Killed 1/10th) the population of the world?
The world was not given to us by the creator to sit unused and look pretty. It was given to us to be lived in, cultivated, and shaped responsibly.
Believe me, the run of the mill farmer doesn't want to use pesticides or plant GMO crops. He wants to use heirloom seeds and feed the world.
There was a time when farms in Kansas, Texas, and the center of the country fed the rest of the world, but successive stupidity from government has turned that farmland into cornland.
There was a time when we imported things such as cane sugar and rice, letting each country sell its excess. Now governments interfere with that, which leads to all the problems you cited.
You can't fix it by killing off the food supply. We have herds of cattle because hunting is banned in certain places and people are too lazy to hunt that pig or that deer or that buffallo and kill it.
Why don't you start out by calling for the dissolution of mega-cities and mandate that people return to the rural areas and fend for themselves?
When we were mostly rural, you didn't need the mass farms that plant GMO seeds. Every person took care of their own needs and still managed to care for the land.
a minority considering that there are 8 billion people in the world.
I'm sorry, but as much as I love vegetables, I need the power packed into beef to do my job.
I would never think of telling you that you had to stop eating what you like in order to save the world. Vegetables are water intensive. I should know, I've planted, cultivated, and harvested them. You use more pesticides and herbicides in food farming than you do in ranching.
Raising food crops requires anywhere from 60-150 gallons of water a week in order to grow them. Farming takes up a bigger footprint and uses more chemicals than ranching.
Your body's energy requirements do not correlate with any particular food source. Blue whales are the largest animals in existence and eat plankton.
Cattle are vegetarian. Their food is also supplemented. So they indirectly consume all the water you mention, plus their own needs. It means beef is one of the most water-intensive food products. It takes 15,000 litres to produce 1kg of beef. This contrasts with 300-500 litres/kg for vegetables.
Even on a per-calorie basis, beef uses 10–50x more land, requires 20–40x more water and emits 20–100x more greenhouse gases than vegetables.
I’m not sure you understood my piece—I said if we stopped eating beef and lamb only. Humans could still eat chicken, pork, etc. Cows are the land-intensive meat, and we could get all our protein/nutrient needs from other (more land-efficient) animals.
Pound for pound, Beef is the most nurtient dense food we have, not to mention, the most protien rich. I can do without lamb and pigs.
Have you ever been around a pig farm? Cattle can graze out on the prairie and drink 30 gallons of water a day. (That's less than a big trashcan.) You can take cowhide and make clothes, and cow shit is the best fertilizer in the world, not to mention that every part of the cow is edible, from the muscle to the organs and the fat can be used to make tallow. The cow is the ultimate recycler. Pigs don't recycle, nor do lambs. One cow can provide food for a family of four, for almost a year.
The only animal more enviro friendly than a cow is a goat. They'll eat anything.
I’m not saying there aren’t a lot of great qualities about cattle farming, and in small farms you can get a lot of the benefits you just mentioned. That’s also why raising cattle for dairy (rather than for beef) is much less land intensive: You can milk a cow for nearly a decade! And there’s no reason why we couldn’t continue to do so!
But the industrial raising of cows for beef requires turning large tracks of land into prairie they can graze on which eliminates every other possible use for that land (including by other plants and animals and humans). Beef cows are raised for 1-2 years before slaughter on a constant rotation, and grazing isn’t enough to get them fat enough so most of our grain crops go toward feeding them even more. 50% of all habitable land on Earth is used for agriculture, nearly 80% of that is used for livestock, and 60% of that is for beef farming. That means roughly 25–30% of all habitable land on Earth is used for beef farming! And then we can talk about the methane they release! There’s no reason why so much of the Earth’s land needs to go toward raising cattle, we simply don’t need to eat this much cow meat. Even if you are an avid meat eater, that the cow takes up so much space is why we don’t have a wider diversity of animal meats to choose from. We’ve eliminated so many other options for the sake of cow farming!
The Modern Feedyard (at least the one I worked on,) was one square mile.
It had 72 pens which housed 50-70 cattle. They were fed a mixture of corn/wheat/barley with feed supplments. They were shaded, and had an advanced watering system.
The waste was piled in hills that farmers could buy and use to fertilize their fields.
There was another square mile of grazing for special order herds.
Most commercial butchers have a smaller footprint.
It's a great point about tunnel vision on the Panda at the expense of the unplushiable. I tend to look at conservation efforts through the lens of possibility, with the knowledge that some possibilities are more desirable than others.
Life builds on a platform of energy and material to create a magnificent world above and we can support it by protecting ecosystems at all scales. For the wild it's about discovering those critical cycles that can't easily adapt or restart. For humans, it is our social ecosystems that seem to need the most effort.
You wrote, “Sixty-two percent of the Earth’s mammals are those we raise for our consumption, only 4% are wild animals (the rest are humans). “
This is incorrect and not what Ritchie claims. Her percentages are of biomass, not of number of animals. The breakdown for number of animals is different.
Fantastic read. Bringing nuance, clarity, and actual optimism to these conversations.
I find myself often debunking the 6th great extinction claim (citing Ritchie's book) but too often that message is heard as "so we shouldn't care about biodiversity loss?"
Of course we should! But we should be accurate, and not hyperbolic.
Fascinating article, I’ll be diving in deeper soon for a second pass for sure. I’m curious on one small point to learn why you departed out beef cattle land from dairy cattle land? I’m not deeply knowledge about the difference between the two but recently became separately curious and now see your distinction here and wonder if you did so for any particular reason? Is there a scientific or statistical difference or perhaps it’s a personal moral valuation between the two or perhaps simply just differentiating the giant lump in a way ripple can easily understand? Thanks for your work, stimulating in many ways!
Thank you! From what I understand, a beef cow is typically raised for around 12–24 months before slaughter, producing only one-time meat output. A dairy cow, however, produces thousands of gallons of milk over several years (often 5–7). Beef production thus requires more animals and therefore more pasture/feed etc!
Yes, I’m aligned with all this. Very well written Elle.🌸
I had a dream a few years ago like this to some degree. Really affected me, write about it and one of my art pieces so far reflects this imagery. Reading this essay before today’s zoom. Crazily, I’m in red with bank account and don’t even have $5 cash on or available to me at this odd juncture as I’m looking for freelance and remote work, mainly pitching writing and applying for various jobs. If you hear of anything, let me know, thanks! Cu soon. Hope to purchase and support as able. 🙏🏻🌷🦄
The way people will bend over backwards to pretend that beef is an absolute human necessity, when in reality they just don’t know how to cook anything else, or they don’t want to spend a couple extra minutes finding other ways to get the same nutrients is insane. They’d rather let the world burn than give up steak and burgers. It’s pathetic, and deeply irrational.
It’s so strange. And it’s only a recent phenomenon. People didn’t used to eat this much beef, but the industry is heavily subsidized and then became popularized by fast food chains as a daily indulgence. Now it’s become normal to eat it everyday which is just not true. I say end the subsidies and let beef be really expensive. Because it’s costing all of us!
Lab grown meat is also an interesting development and can free up a lot of land. But labs need energy.
Thanks for the excellent article.
Definitely an interesting option! I’ll be curious to see how that space develops.
It delights me to read stuff like this and to see that there are people really thinking about what an alternative, hopeful future looks like. I appreciate you sharing this, and look forward to reading more of your articles!
Thanks Graeme! I appreciate you taking the time to comment 😊
I stopped eating mammals (beef, pork, etc) a year and a half ago. It's not hard. My blood work is exceptional and I have energy to be a dad and do taekwondo. The arguments against reduced meat consumption are only based on personal bias and resistance to change. I also began planting natives rather than foreign ornamentals, and leaving wild edges on my land. The birds and bees love it even if the American lawn care industrial complex does not. Douglas Tallamy and Robin Wll Kimmerer were my inspiration for those changes to do my little part in promoting biodiversity and ecological flourishing. Stop listening to American greed, consumerism, materialism messaging and start thinking about harmony and mutuality with the earth.
I hope to get there someday! I've tried to go vegetarian several times without good results. I tend toward anemia and hormonal imbalance, both of which happen really quickly after I eradicate meat. I'm also allergic to beans which makes it difficult. I'm hoping that starting with the most land-intensive meat will help me stay more balanced while making space for more biodiversity. And that advancements in plant-based proteins will help with the rest! Plant-based is our future, but it may take a while, and incremental changes, to get us there as a society!
And thanks for your thoughtful, researched writing in this Terraform series!
Thanks Jonathan!
So no beef, no lamb, no chicken. What are we supposed to eat? I'm not a vegetarian.
We have canine an incisor teeth for a reason. We eat meat for protien and energy.
Grass doesn't provide energy, wheat doesn't provide energy, plants don't provide enough energy.
You'd think that with the governments falling for this nonsense and trying to kill us, people would be smarter.
And before you talk about synthetic meat. It's not the same. You can't get the same amount of protien and energy from fake meat.
Rewilding the world is just not feasible. There are already people starving and you want to add to that number.
Or would you be satisfied if we just decimated (Killed 1/10th) the population of the world?
The world was not given to us by the creator to sit unused and look pretty. It was given to us to be lived in, cultivated, and shaped responsibly.
Believe me, the run of the mill farmer doesn't want to use pesticides or plant GMO crops. He wants to use heirloom seeds and feed the world.
There was a time when farms in Kansas, Texas, and the center of the country fed the rest of the world, but successive stupidity from government has turned that farmland into cornland.
There was a time when we imported things such as cane sugar and rice, letting each country sell its excess. Now governments interfere with that, which leads to all the problems you cited.
You can't fix it by killing off the food supply. We have herds of cattle because hunting is banned in certain places and people are too lazy to hunt that pig or that deer or that buffallo and kill it.
Why don't you start out by calling for the dissolution of mega-cities and mandate that people return to the rural areas and fend for themselves?
When we were mostly rural, you didn't need the mass farms that plant GMO seeds. Every person took care of their own needs and still managed to care for the land.
Vegetarianism is an entirely feasible nutritional option for humans. It's estimated there are 1.5 billion vegetarians globally (22% of the human population). There are 20 million alone in the United States. More than one-third of India's population is vegetarian. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254412281_An_Estimate_of_the_Number_of_Vegetarians_in_the_World
a minority considering that there are 8 billion people in the world.
I'm sorry, but as much as I love vegetables, I need the power packed into beef to do my job.
I would never think of telling you that you had to stop eating what you like in order to save the world. Vegetables are water intensive. I should know, I've planted, cultivated, and harvested them. You use more pesticides and herbicides in food farming than you do in ranching.
Raising food crops requires anywhere from 60-150 gallons of water a week in order to grow them. Farming takes up a bigger footprint and uses more chemicals than ranching.
Your body's energy requirements do not correlate with any particular food source. Blue whales are the largest animals in existence and eat plankton.
Cattle are vegetarian. Their food is also supplemented. So they indirectly consume all the water you mention, plus their own needs. It means beef is one of the most water-intensive food products. It takes 15,000 litres to produce 1kg of beef. This contrasts with 300-500 litres/kg for vegetables.
Even on a per-calorie basis, beef uses 10–50x more land, requires 20–40x more water and emits 20–100x more greenhouse gases than vegetables.
I’m not sure you understood my piece—I said if we stopped eating beef and lamb only. Humans could still eat chicken, pork, etc. Cows are the land-intensive meat, and we could get all our protein/nutrient needs from other (more land-efficient) animals.
Pound for pound, Beef is the most nurtient dense food we have, not to mention, the most protien rich. I can do without lamb and pigs.
Have you ever been around a pig farm? Cattle can graze out on the prairie and drink 30 gallons of water a day. (That's less than a big trashcan.) You can take cowhide and make clothes, and cow shit is the best fertilizer in the world, not to mention that every part of the cow is edible, from the muscle to the organs and the fat can be used to make tallow. The cow is the ultimate recycler. Pigs don't recycle, nor do lambs. One cow can provide food for a family of four, for almost a year.
The only animal more enviro friendly than a cow is a goat. They'll eat anything.
I’m not saying there aren’t a lot of great qualities about cattle farming, and in small farms you can get a lot of the benefits you just mentioned. That’s also why raising cattle for dairy (rather than for beef) is much less land intensive: You can milk a cow for nearly a decade! And there’s no reason why we couldn’t continue to do so!
But the industrial raising of cows for beef requires turning large tracks of land into prairie they can graze on which eliminates every other possible use for that land (including by other plants and animals and humans). Beef cows are raised for 1-2 years before slaughter on a constant rotation, and grazing isn’t enough to get them fat enough so most of our grain crops go toward feeding them even more. 50% of all habitable land on Earth is used for agriculture, nearly 80% of that is used for livestock, and 60% of that is for beef farming. That means roughly 25–30% of all habitable land on Earth is used for beef farming! And then we can talk about the methane they release! There’s no reason why so much of the Earth’s land needs to go toward raising cattle, we simply don’t need to eat this much cow meat. Even if you are an avid meat eater, that the cow takes up so much space is why we don’t have a wider diversity of animal meats to choose from. We’ve eliminated so many other options for the sake of cow farming!
The Modern Feedyard (at least the one I worked on,) was one square mile.
It had 72 pens which housed 50-70 cattle. They were fed a mixture of corn/wheat/barley with feed supplments. They were shaded, and had an advanced watering system.
The waste was piled in hills that farmers could buy and use to fertilize their fields.
There was another square mile of grazing for special order herds.
Most commercial butchers have a smaller footprint.
And why should 30% of our habitable land be used that way? And why should 66% of mammals (in biomass) be cows?
You keep saying how great cows are, and that’s fine, but that doesn’t mean we need this many of them. Cows have completely take over the world.
Humanity takes up far more room than Cattle. Why don't we just decimate the population?
Cattle serve an ecological purpose, mankind does not.
It's a great point about tunnel vision on the Panda at the expense of the unplushiable. I tend to look at conservation efforts through the lens of possibility, with the knowledge that some possibilities are more desirable than others.
Life builds on a platform of energy and material to create a magnificent world above and we can support it by protecting ecosystems at all scales. For the wild it's about discovering those critical cycles that can't easily adapt or restart. For humans, it is our social ecosystems that seem to need the most effort.
You wrote, “Sixty-two percent of the Earth’s mammals are those we raise for our consumption, only 4% are wild animals (the rest are humans). “
This is incorrect and not what Ritchie claims. Her percentages are of biomass, not of number of animals. The breakdown for number of animals is different.
Yes that's correct, those numbers are in biomass. Added a qualifier so that's more clear!
Thank you! This is an important conversation and the numbers are complicated but important to understand.
So true!
Fantastic read. Bringing nuance, clarity, and actual optimism to these conversations.
I find myself often debunking the 6th great extinction claim (citing Ritchie's book) but too often that message is heard as "so we shouldn't care about biodiversity loss?"
Of course we should! But we should be accurate, and not hyperbolic.
More essays like this please!
Much love from New England -Andy
Exactly!!! And thanks Andy!
Fascinating article, I’ll be diving in deeper soon for a second pass for sure. I’m curious on one small point to learn why you departed out beef cattle land from dairy cattle land? I’m not deeply knowledge about the difference between the two but recently became separately curious and now see your distinction here and wonder if you did so for any particular reason? Is there a scientific or statistical difference or perhaps it’s a personal moral valuation between the two or perhaps simply just differentiating the giant lump in a way ripple can easily understand? Thanks for your work, stimulating in many ways!
Thank you! From what I understand, a beef cow is typically raised for around 12–24 months before slaughter, producing only one-time meat output. A dairy cow, however, produces thousands of gallons of milk over several years (often 5–7). Beef production thus requires more animals and therefore more pasture/feed etc!
Ah! Makes sense, thank you for the extra insight!
This is rare as it's both beautifully written and urgently actionable.
Thank you, Joe!