This month’s newsletter was curated and edited by: Dr. J.W. Holloway and C.J. Ferdinand and their Team

Analysis

Red meat is the most sought-after food on the planet. It is the most nutritious, tasty food on the globe that is considered by many as the king of foods occupying, in many cuisines, the center of the plate.

Red meat is produced by ruminants. Ruminant animals occupy a singular position in the animal kingdom as being the only species capable of converting the most abundant carbohydrate produced by the plant kingdom, lignocellulose, in the most sought-after food in the world. If it weren’t for ruminants, one of the most abundant sources of energy in the world would be of little use to humans.

If it weren’t for ruminants, one of the most abundant sources of prolific renewable energy for conversion to food for humankind in the world would be of little use to humans. Ruminants are able to perform this almost magical trick because they have evolved internal- fermentation vats called rumens. Ruminants cultivate anaerobic microbes in their rumens that unlock the energy bound in lignocellulose to produce the highest quality foods in the world rich in high-quality protein, vitamins, and minerals easily utilized by gastronomically lower forms of life such as humans.

This “magic” occurs because these cultivated microbes have evolved novel pathways to break the lignocellulose bonds. These bonds cannot be broken in the presence of oxygen and require a sink for a toxic byproduct that is necessarily produced, hydrogen. This sink is methane that is eliminated from the animal largely by belching.

Unfortunately, this methane has been identified as a measurable contributor to global climate change. Beef, the most commonly consumed ruminant meat, is resource-intensive to produce, requiring twenty times more land and emitting twenty times more greenhouse gas per gram of edible protein than common plant proteins, such as beans, peas, and lentils.

Production of this greenhouse gas has been a discussion item in our recent history in that it is attributable for blame as a partial cause component of the increasingly severe weather phenomena that we are experiencing. If ruminants are a contributing factor, the component will only get worse as global demand for red meats increases in the future. Global demand will increase because the world population is expected to increase to (10) ten billion people by 2050, (2.3) two point three billion more people than in 2019. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has projected that food production must increase by (70%) seventy percent to fulfill the nutritional requirements of this increase in global demand.

The demand for red meat will increase dramatically not only as a result of the increasing number of mouths that must eat but also as a result of the expectation of increases of their economic status in the developing world. Within a very short timeline the expectations of the standards of living rise above poverty levels, people will spend their increasing resources for a better-quality diet. In much of the world, people would eat more red meat if they could afford it. This convergence of time and resources defines the rise in the demand for red meat will escalate in the coming decades.

Not to worry, the world has enough lignocellulose to support the expectation of an increase in the ruminant population requisite to produce this increase in demand. But, since global climate change is considered to be a serious discussion item and since ruminants are considered to contribute to the components of global climate change, technologies must develop for commercial implementation to curb this contribution.

An environmentally sustainable food supply can only be achieved through the adoption of the integration of systems that make the most efficient use of available resources and concurrently reduce the environmental impact (Capper et al., 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, and Hyland et al, 2017). The role of efficiency in improving the (U.S.) United States beef system sustainability has been called into question by certain groups and agencies promoting a social or political agenda in opposition to animal agriculture (Nierenberg, 2005; and Koneswaran and Nierenberg, 2008). Capper et al. (2009), however, did conclude improvements in the resource use per unit of food output considerably reduced the environmental impact of a unit of milk production by (U.S.) United States dairies from 1944 to 2007.

Capper et al. (2011) reported that consumers often have the perception that modern beef production has an environmental impact far greater than that of historical systems. Consumer perception is that improvements in efficiency are an achievement at the expense of an increase in greenhouse gas emissions. They concluded that beef production in 2007 required considerably fewer resources than the equivalent system in 1977, with 69.9% of the animals, 81.4% of the feedstuffs, 87.9% of the water, and only 67.0% of the land required to produce 1 billion kg of beef. Waste outputs were similarly reduced, with the 2007 beef production systems producing 81.9% of the manure, 82.3% of the methane, and 88.0% of the nitrogen oxide per billion kg of beef compared with equivalent systems in 1977. The carbon footprint per billion kilograms of beef produced in 2007 was reduced by 16.3% compared with equivalent systems in 1977 (Capper et al., 2011).

Hristov et al. (2013a, b) reviewed the literature as to methods to reduce methane and nitric oxide emissions from cattle. They reported the work of Sauvant and Giger-Reverd in (2009) who showed that as DM intake and the concentrate portion of the diet increase, enteric CH4/DM intake declines. Hristov et al. (2013a, b) and Hyland et al. (2017) concluded that alterations in the production system that result in improved utilization of the animal’s diet and improved system efficiency, especially through improved fertility will reduce enteric CH4 and N2O emissions. 

In evaluating the place of red meat in the global environmental arena, it is important to note that red meat makes a substantial contribution to food security providing protein, energy, and essential micronutrients to human populations. As noted above, rumination allows ruminants to digest fibrous feeds that cannot be directly consumed by humans and thus, make a net positive contribution to food balances. This contribution is of particular importance in marginal areas, especially in the third world where Agro-ecological conditions and weak infrastructures offer little alternative to food production. It is in these areas also that their value is apparent in that they have the ability to convert, crop residues and by-products into high-quality edible products, and they contribute to soil fertility through their impact on nutrients and organic matter cycles (Gerber et al., 2015).

Coincidentally, a full evaluation of their place in the environment requires an evaluation of their environmental sustainability issues. These issues, chiefly, relate to the low efficiency of ruminants in converting natural resources into edible products. Water use, land use, biomass appropriation, and greenhouse gas emissions, for example, are typically higher per unit of edible product in beef systems than in any other livestock systems, even when corrected for product nutritional quality (Gerber et al., 2015).

Gerber et al. (2015) reviewed the literature concerning environmental challenges in beef production at the global level. Beef production is faced with a range of additional sustainability challenges, such as changing consumer perceptions, resilience to climate change, animal health, and inequities in access to land and water resources. Within the livestock sector, beef receives the most attention for its environmental impact. This results from the apparent aggregated contribution that beef production makes to global environmental issues such as climate change and land use (Gerber et al., 2015).

Globally, beef supply chains are estimated to emit about 2.9 gigatonnes of CO2-eq, about 40% of all livestock emissions (Gerber et al., 2013). The greenhouse gas emissions per unit of product (emission intensity) is the highest when beef is produced on newly deforested land (Cederberg et al., 2011). Cattle are the primary ruminant species making use of about one-quarter of all emerged lands (Bouwman et al., 2005).

The world has over 1.3 billion cattle about one for every five people on the planet (FAOSTAT, 2015). While cattle are kept and raised for the wide range of products and functions, they deliver, the vast majority is eventually culled and served as meat (Gerber et al., 2015). The debate over the environmental position of beef production is often characterized by a lack of recognition of this tremendous diversity in production systems and delivery systems, in the goods and services they deliver, and the environmental interactions and options for improvement that exist (Smith, 2015; and Herrero et al., 2013).

But, much public relations work must be done to offset the bad rap that beef (as well as other red meat) production has received in terms of its ecological damage. Steinfeld et al. (2006) of FAO published a comprehensive global lifecycle assessment of livestock agriculture’s environmental impact called “Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options” (LLS) concluding that global livestock agriculture contributes 18% of total anthropogenic greenhouse gasses and that livestock contribute more to climate change than the global transportation sector (Steinfeld et al., 2006).

These conclusions have been widely quoted in the popular press and often used incorrectly in the articles that make such comparisons as contrasting driving a different vehicle to not eat meat or comparing the greenhouse gas emissions from producing a pound of carrots to producing a pound of beef (Bittman, 2008; Rosenthal, 2008; and Place and Mitloehner, 2012). These types of comparisons, though inappropriate, lead to misguided public policy decisions such as “Meatless Mondays,” which was adopted in San Francisco (Chang, 2009). A major inappropriate premise in LLS was that land used for cattle was converted from a carbon “sink” (a net sequesters of CO2 from the air into the soil, e.g., the Amazon rainforest) into a carbon source. It is inappropriate to blame beef cattle emissions for this difference since the comparison involves a confounding situation in that when the rainforest is clear cut to graze cattle, the loss of the trees greatly reduces the CO2sequestered regardless of the CH4 emissions from enteric fermentation by cattle (Place and Mitloehner, 2012). Deforestation alone represents 34% of the total CO2 attributed to livestock production in LLS (Steinfeld et al., 2006).

Apart from these considerations, revolutionary advancements have been made during the last decade in understanding rumen fermentation and disruptive technologies have been introduced to markedly increase efficiency of fermentation (Elam et al., 2009; Hilton et al., 2009; Rathmann et al, 2012; Van Donkersgoed et al., 2011; and Martineau et al., 2012). It is a happy coincidence that technologies that improve rumen fermentation efficiency also improve both the economics and the environmental friendliness of red meat production.