Grass-Fed Cows Create Soil and Reverse Climate Change
We often hear about the methane emissions from cows’ burping and farting, but we rarely hear about the contributions that grazing cows can make to reversing climate change. If raised correctly, cows can pull more than 10 times the climate change-causing gases out of the atmosphere that they add to it. Cows can be not only carbon-neutral, but carbon-negative.
Current farming practices involve factory farming of most of our meat, but this is a very different scenario than how cows and other ruminant (grazing) animals acted in the wild. For millennia, ruminant animals covered the grasslands of North and South America. Because of predators, they would stay in tight, bunched groups, and constantly were on the move for new sources of tall grass to eat. Their hooves would press the chewed grass into the soil, planting the seeds, and their waste would fertilize the plants. They would naturally move on when the majority of the tall grass was eaten, leaving short grass behind. They would not stay long enough to kill the grass but only to leave stubble, similar to when we mow our lawn. If we never mow the lawn, the grass becomes too tall and dries out from an excess of plant matter blocking sunlight and using up the water in the soil. If we mow our lawn too short, the grass can die as well. Both situations result in desertification, which is a fancy word for the removal of topsoil.
Soil is made out of carbon, because it is largely decomposed plant and animal matter. When this soil is sent up into the atmosphere, it become atmospheric carbon and contributes to climate change through an increase in global temperatures caused by the carbon trapping heat in the atmosphere. Both removing grazing animals from grasslands, and over-grazing the grasslands, causes desertification. But, mimicking nature with managed grazing actually does the opposite, and causes the grass to pour carbon into the ground - creating new topsoil and reversing climate change.
Grass has a symbiotic relationship with the fungus that lives underground. This means that they trade with each other. Fungus provides the grass with micronutrients, and in exchange grass provides the fungus with sugar, a 6-carbon molecule. Basically, the grass is purchasing nutrients from the underground fungus, and the currency is carbon. The grass obtains this carbon from the atmosphere, using sunlight as the energy source to drive photosynthesis (the creation of sugar). When the grass is eaten down by the cows but not killed, it causes the grass to pour carbon into the ground in order to “purchase” additional nutrients from the fungus to re-grow.
Allan Savory, the scientist who discovered much of this process and how to recreate it with farming practices, claims that grazing animals can create as much as a foot of topsoil a year, underground. The topsoil is created down into the earth, the level part of the ground does not change. Dead sandy areas underground become “humus”, or pure carbon, living topsoil. A teaspoon of healthy topsoil contains billions of organisms, mostly bacteria and fungus, as well as worms and grubs and much more.
Current farming practices, especially of grain and bean crops like the corn and soybeans that covers the U.S., cause desertification, the removal of topsoil, sending the soil carbon into the air. Some scientists believe that the removal of topsoil has contributed more to atmospheric carbon, and climate change, than all fossil fuels use COMBINED. But all we hear about is fossil fuels, no one is talking about soil. When the ground is tilled, broken up, during modern agriculture, it breaks up and kills the underground fungus and ruins the symbiotic relationship between the plants and the fungus underground. The plants are no longer able to “purchase” nutrients from the fungus, which is now dead from being tilled, and the farmer is forced to use artificial nutrients (fertilizers) to feed the plants. Also, the actual tilling of the ground sends more soil carbon up into the air. Then the modern farmer also kills pests and weeds with pesticides and herbicides, further killing the bacteria and fungus underground, creating dead soil that no longer is able to absorb water or support life without artificial nutrients.
When Europeans arrived at the Americas in 1492, there was an average of 10 feet of topsoil covering the continents, created by millennia of ruminant animals grazing the grasslands. Now we are down to an average of 6 inches. Scientists state that we have less than 60 harvests left before all the soil is gone and plants will no longer grow. We need to stand up to the monolithic farming conglomerates that have taken over the small farms that used to cover our land, and are mass-producing corn and soybeans in order to feed not only factory-farmed animals, but humans as well. Humans are not meant to eat grains and beans, and neither are ruminant animals.
Allan Savory states that if we cover the earth’s existing grasslands in grazing animals, we could create enough topsoil (by pulling carbon out of the atmosphere) to completely reverse climate change. Cows can save the planet.
Learn more:
Allan Savory's TED Talk (One of the Top 100 TED talks of all time)
