https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/defending-beef/
Nicolette Hahn Niman is an environmental lawyer and long-time vegetarian who married a rancher.
A review of her book from Mother Jones
"A longtime critic of industrial agriculture and a lawyer by training, Niman mounts a lawyerly case for pasture-based beef production. She does so from an interested position. She's the wife of Bill Niman, one of the nation's most celebrated grass-based ranchers. But critics who want to dismiss Niman's advocacy on economic-interest grounds have to grapple with the mountains of evidence she brings to bear. The main ecological question that haunts grass-fed beef involves climate change. Cows emit methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon, when they burp, which is often. But by grazing, they also promote healthy, flourishing grasslands, which suck carbon from the atmosphere and store it in soil. In doing so, they convert a wild vegetation that people can't digest into a highly nourishing foodstuff. So on balance, do cows contribute to or mitigate climate change? The conventional view holds that the burps win. Niman casts more than reasonable doubt on that verdict. Citing loads of research, she argues that enteric emissions (methane from burps) are likely overstated and can be curtailed by breeding and techniques like abundant salt licks, and more than offset by the carbon-gulping capacity of intensive grazing (where farmers run dense herds through a pasture for a short time, and then give the land plenty of time to recover). She also shows that healthy pastures also provide plenty of other benefits, including habitat for pollinating insects and birds, which are declining rapidly as industrial grain farming—mostly for grain to feed confined animals—expands.”--Tom Philpott, Mother Jones, Best Food Books of 2014
There are significant portions of the earth that cannot produce food directly for human consumption, but which can be used for cattle grazing. Such farms are not pollutants, the way concentrated factory farms are. Virtually all of the calculations for sustainability (e.g. Frances Moore Lappé) ignore both of these realities.
My father's ranch matches the description above - It is separated into a number of smaller pastures which cattle graze to the ground (unlike when they are given the entire pasture and pick and choose). Once a smaller pasture is fully grazed, the cattle are moved to another portion of the pasture, etc. This practice is similar to the burns native people in Australia and other places use to give plants and grasses a fresh start, which encourages robust rejuvination. The cattle are fed as well as they are when they graze the entire pasture, and are happy grazing on hilly, sometimes craggy pasture, with a creek running through it and ample shade trees - all of which make it competely unuseful to grow vegetable matter for consumption by humans. The pasture is more vibrant due to the managed grazing, and (as noted above) this also contributes to a desireable habitat for not ony pollenating insects and birds, but any number of other critters whose happy homes are all too often sacrificed as farmers raze more and more
tree claims and
shelterbelts in the race to make ends meet growning vegetation for humans.
Our shelterbelt used to be one of 4 between our house and the highway. Every other shelterbelt between our house and the highway has been razed to create more cropland.
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