Is climate-friendly beef even a possibility?

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Jordan Heath-Rawlings Listen, there are all sorts of ways to claim that what you’re doing is actually helping to save the planet. For instance, just last week we explained carbon capture tax credits and how they seem pretty good unless they’re used to help burn more fossil fuels. Right now there is an awful lot of money to be made by making your consumption of anything seem ethical, even green. And if there is one thing that many of us eat that we all know for certain is bad for the planet, it’s beef, like we know it is really bad naturally, then if a company can find a way to tell you, well this beef, our beef isn’t actually that bad. In fact it’s climate friendly. So grill up some steaks and forget the guilt. If they can really do that, then it’s one thing though to say that something is climate friendly, to slap a label on it, to advertise it that way. And another thing entirely for scientific evidence to agree. So climate friendly beef really, are we there yet? Will we ever get there? I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Kenny Torrella is a staff writer with Vox who reports on animal welfare. Hey Kenny.

Kenny Torrella: Hi Jordan. Thanks so much for having me on.

Jordan: You’re welcome. It’s always a pleasure to talk about the latest advancements in the beef industry. Are these advancements?

Kenny Torrella: Well, I’d argue that no, that it’s a healthy dose of greenwashing coming from one of the country’s largest meat producers.

Jordan: Okay, so what exactly is, I will say, so-called climate friendly Beef. Who’s making it as you mentioned?

Kenny Torrella: Yeah, so it’s Tyson Foods, which is one of the largest meat companies, not only in the United States but in the world. And they’ve recently started selling in very limited quantities, what they’re calling climate friendly beef and it’s beef that they say has a 10% smaller carbon footprint than other beef. And I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what exactly makes this beef climate friendly, what are they doing to achieve this 10% reduction and what is it even at 10% reduction from what is the baseline that they’re measuring? But I didn’t get any answers either from Tyson or consultants that they worked with on the program or even the United States government. The United States Department of Agriculture told me I’d need to file a FOIA request to get details. And so I think transparency and answers are really important here because climate-wise, beef is the worst food for the planet.

Jordan: That was going to be my next question is just for context, how huge is the beef industry? How bad is it when we say a 10% reduction? It doesn’t sound like much, but at this scale it might be huge.

Kenny Torrella: Yeah, it could be and it would certainly lead to a large emissions reduction if Tyson and other meat companies could reduce their carbon footprint of beef by 10%. And that’s because the beef industry is massive. Globally, we raise about one and a half billion cows for beef and dairy, and cows globally account for 10% of all greenhouse gas emissions. So not just from the food system, but if you look at all greenhouse gas emissions in the world, around 10% just come from cows.

Jordan: Why don’t we explain that before we get deeper into whether or not this is possible, how much of it is fact or fiction? How exactly does the cattle industry pollute the planet? So massively?

Kenny Torrella: Yeah. So there are three main ways. And so the first is that cows eat a lot of grass and also a lot of corn and soy. And when they eat these foods, it ferments in their stomach and they burp it out as methane, which is a highly potent greenhouse gas. It’s much more potent than carbon dioxide. That’s the first way. The second is that cows poop a lot and their manure has a lot of nitrous oxide, which is even more potent than methane. Also, there’s a lot of fertilizer, a lot of synthetic fertilizer used to grow the corn and soy that we feed to cows. And that fertilizer also contains a lot of nitrous oxide. And lastly, the third main way that cows pollute the planet is through all the land that we dedicate to cattle grazing and to growing corn and soy. And so for example, in the Amazon rainforest, you’ve probably heard a lot about their deforestation problem. Most of it is land that is cut to graze cattle or to grow corn and soy. And so when all that land is deforested, it emits a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And on the flip side, there’s a problem that climate scientists call the carbon opportunity cost. And so it’s this issue where if we just left that land as forest, it could draw down a lot of carbon. And so we’re clearing that land, it releases emissions, and we’re also foregoing this opportunity to use that land to suck up carbon.

Jordan: You mentioned that we’re clearing these lands now. Is the cattle industry, the beef industry still growing? I would wonder if after everything we’ve heard about how bad it can be for the planet if it would at least be stabilizing or shrinking.

Kenny Torrella: Yeah. Well, it depends where you look. In the United States, the beef industry has actually been slowly declining since the 1970s because that’s when you started to hear a lot more concern over the high fat content of beef and red meat. And a lot of people started switching to chicken and fish. But globally, beef consumption is certainly on the rise, especially in lower income countries where right now meat consumption is very low and they’re trying to adopt more western styles of food consumption, which usually means a lot more meat and dairy.

Jordan: Do we know if given everything you’ve described, if it is possible to reduce the emissions of the actual process of creating beef?

Kenny Torrella: Yeah, it’s certainly possible. There are a number of different approaches that farmers and ranchers can take to reduce the carbon footprint of beef. And I’ll actually say here that globally, the United States, the carbon footprint of a pound of beef is much lower than in most countries because in the US we’ve put a lot of money into agricultural research and adjusting the supply chain of beef to make it more carbon friendly. And so that means doing things like finding certain breeds of cattle who have a lower carbon footprint because maybe they turn food into meat more efficiently. It means using different practices to manage the manure from cows. And so it has a lower carbon footprint. And so we’re in this strange tension with meat in which in the United States, we raise and produce meat much more efficiently than a lot of other countries. But at the same time, even though we’ve taken those efforts and made those strides, you could still argue that beef is essentially the coal of the food sector. It’s by far the worst food for the planet, even though we figured out how to make it much more efficient. And so that’s why a lot of climate scientists are skeptical and kind of raise their eyebrows when they see Tyson calling their beef. so-called climate friendly beef, maybe it’s better than conventional beef if they can prove it, but it certainly doesn’t make it climate friendly. It’s kind of like if you were to take a Hummer and make it 10% more efficient and say, this is a climate friendly car. It’s maybe better than the old Hummer, but it’s quite a stretch to call it climate friendly.

Jordan: What exactly is being done to make this beef different from the rest of the beef that Tyson produces or that America produces?

Kenny Torrella: So the problem is that we don’t really know. I contacted Tyson, they declined to do an interview for this story. I also contacted Deloitte, which is a major consulting firm that is working with Tyson on this project. They too declined to an interview request for this story as did two environmental groups, the Environmental Defense Fund and the Nature Conservancy that advised Tyson on this project. They didn’t want to talk to me either, nor did a third party verification company that is working on this project also didn’t want to talk to me the USDA. When I asked the USDA, how are you verifying that this beef is 10% better for the climate than conventional beef? They said that if I wanted answers, I would have to submit a freedom of Information Act request. I think it speaks volumes that Tyson is going out there and saying, Hey, we have this climate friendly beef, and yet when journalists such as myself and journalists from other news outlets ask to show the math, they just say, sorry, we’re not going to do that. So if you go to Tyson’s website, the company is called Brazen Beef. There’s a few different practices that they say they are employing with their farmers and ranchers to get this 10% reduction. And I can kind of briefly walk through those. So if you look at the first step of the supply chain, it’s growing corn and soy to feed these cattle in the feedlot during the final few months of their lives. They spend the first major part of their lives actually out on pasture, but at the end they’re just eating corn and soy on a big feedlot. And so Tyson says that the farmers growing that corn and soy are doing things like planting cover crops, which can reduce soil erosion or employing no-till farming, which means you’re basically just not turning over the soil between harvests. And these are practice that climate scientists say have some environmental benefits. They’re good for the soil, they’re good for land management, but they don’t really do much or maybe anything depending on the farm to actually reduce emissions. So maybe good for the environment, but not really cutting the carbon footprint of the beef. So that’s one. The second is reducing fertilizer over application. So a lot of farmers just put way too much fertilizer onto their corn and soy crops. And so using technologies to reduce that fertilizer over application, again, climate scientists have told me this is a good thing to do. It’s important, but without details, it’s really hard to trust the claim that it’s contributing to this big reduction. And then I’ll mention just one or two other things. One is that Tyson says that it is doing this practice called pasture rotation in which you move cattle around more frequently to different parts of the field, which gives the grass more time to regrow, which again can provide a number of environmental benefits, but probably can’t meaningfully reduce emissions. And so you have this whole slate of practices that Tyson is talking about, but when they’re talking about it in these vague terms without details, consumers should be skeptical.

Jordan: You mentioned that you spoke with some climate scientists about this. You ran those processes by them. What did they think about the overall changes, I guess that Tyson is claiming they’ve made?

Kenny Torrella: Yeah, so there’s a lot of environmental scientists and environmental nonprofits that are voicing a lot of criticism and skepticism around Tyson’s claims. And one I spoke to his name’s Matthew Hayek, he’s an environmental professor at New York University, and he said, well, a lot of these practices that Tyson says it’s doing are admirable and important to pursue and can provide some environmental benefits. He said that at the same time, most of them really won’t reduce emissions significantly. They might reduce them marginally. And that claiming a 10% reduction is really misleading for consumers.

Jordan: I can understand why Tyson, who maybe or clearly is marketing this and hoping it drives revenue, would be reluctant to get into specifics here. Why wouldn’t the USDA talk about it? Wouldn’t it theoretically fall to them to ascertain if this claim is true and why wouldn’t they share that with journalists?

Kenny Torrella: Yeah, so the USDA has a really odd and complicated relationship with the meat industry and the food industry more broadly. And so like many agencies, they are charged with regulating certain agencies. That’s part of their mission. But at the same time, they’re also charged with promoting American agriculture, which creates this really serious conflict and tension that comes up over and over again when you look at the history and the present day issues within the USDA. And critics say that they spend a lot more of their time and resources on the promotion side rather than the regulation side. And so I’ve done a lot of research into animal welfare claims that meat and dairy and egg producers make on their labels. If you walk through the meat aisle, you’ll see a lot of terms like humanely raised or farm fresh or a sustainable, and with few exceptions, the meat industry kind of gets to operate on an honor system with the USDA, there’s not an army of USDA inspectors going out onto farms making sure that these claims are verified. It’s largely an honor system, which leads to what a lot of critics call humane washing rather than greenwashing.

Jordan: Do we know how this new claim of climate friendly beef is going over or will go over with the consumer? I mean, obviously that’s the end goal here, right?

Kenny Torrella: Yeah. So environmental groups really worry that it will mislead consumers and make them believe that the beef that they’re getting that says climate friendly is friendly for the planet, or at the very least, a lot better than conventional beef and polls show time and time again. We’ve done polls at Vox and other news outlets and academics have run polls trying to gauge consumers understanding of the climate impact of food. And polls show that people have very little understanding. And I think it’s a complex problem because the media doesn’t really talk about the climate impacts of food too much environmental groups. And so we have a consumer base that sadly is really ripe for being greenwashed because they’re going into the supermarket armed with little knowledge of what could make a food climate friendly or not, and they kind of have to trust what’s on the label. And so myself and other journalists and environmental advocates are really worried about what this whole new world of climate friendly meat labels could mean for the sustainability in the food system.

Jordan: What bigger options are out there to either help reform the beef industry or to move people away from it?

Kenny Torrella: Yeah, this is a tough question and a tough problem because the main thing to reduce emissions in the food system, the most effective way is really just to eat fewer cows and other animals, especially in rich countries like Canada and the United States where our meat consumption is drastically higher than the global average.

Jordan: But that’s become almost like a culture war issue now, proposing you have to eat less hamburgers or you might have to give up a stake or two that sets people off in opposite directions now and it gets pretty ugly.

Kenny Torrella: You’re absolutely right. And so that’s why I think of it as one of these wicked problems that is really hard to fix because we know it needs to change, but often when it’s suggested, people’s guard comes up. And so I think often what part of the problem is is that it’s usually framed as an all or nothing. Either you’re going to be an all-out carnivore or you’re going to be a vegan. And I think it’s important for listeners and just the average person to understand that the levels of dairy consumption we’re eating in the West are ahistorical. Our ancestors, even just a few generations ago, ate drastically less meat and dairy and we’ve become accustomed to an abundant supply of cheap food. And part of that is the fast food system, the supermarket system, and the globalized nature of our food supply. And so I don’t have any easy answers on how to change this. I think part of this solution is trying to embrace this next generation of plant-based meat and dairy products, although consumers got excited about them for a few years and interest seems to be waning. And so I don’t have any clear positive answers. I think part of the problem is that the knowledge level of the climate impact of our food system is maybe where coal and energy production was in the 1990s. Most people just have no idea. So I think we’re starting at a level where journalists, academics, and environmentalists need to begin educating the public just on the basics of this issue. And then maybe with that knowledge and that understanding down the road, we could start to have more constructive and positive conversations about rethinking our relationship. To me,

Jordan: Good thing we have so much time to play with and it’s not an emergency.

Kenny Torrella: Oh, yeah. Yeah, you’re absolutely right there. One

Jordan: Last question, and thank you for this. Did you FOIA, the USDA, are we going to find out eventually what they did

Kenny Torrella: Here? All I’ll say right now is that I’m working on it and I really want to get to the bottom of this, so I’m invested in figuring it out.

Jordan: Alright, well, we’ll talk to you soon hopefully, Kenny, thank you again for this.

Kenny Torrella: Yeah, thank you so much, Jordan. I really appreciate your time.

Jordan: Kenny Torrella writing for Vox. That was The Big Story for more, including the episode I mentioned about carbon capture tax credits off the top, head to The Big Story podcast.ca. We love exploring claims of things that will definitely save the planet because, well, as you just heard, most of the time, not so much. If you have a suggestion for an episode or even just a comment, a question or a concern, you can find us on Twitter at The Big Story fpn. You can always write to us, the email address is hello at The Big Story podcast.ca, and you can even call 6 9 3 5 5 9 3 5 and leave us a voicemail. The big stories in every single podcast player. It’s all over the podcast landscape, really. You don’t have to go far. You can search it in any app and you can also ask your smart speaker to play The Big Story podcast. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.