By Caroline Tracey for Civil Eats.
Broadcast version by Deborah Van Fleet for Missouri News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration
Jack Southworth’s ranch sits at 4,600 feet in elevation outside Seneca, Oregon, near the Strawberry and Blue mountain ranges. Like many ranchers, his cattle graze private, deeded land in the winter and leased National Forest land in the summer, including a high mountain plateau filled with bluebunch wheatgrass and Idaho fescue and surrounded by Ponderosa Pine forest. Since the valley is “good at collecting cold air,” as Southworth put it, it has a short growing season, and if cattle stay too long in any given place, they will eat the grass down to bare ground, creating conditions for soil erosion.
Last year, in an effort to improve his pasture and make his land more resilient to these challenges, Southworth, a founding member of the cooperative Country Natural Beef (CNB), enrolled in the pilot program of the company’s new initiative, called Grazewell. In partnership with Sustainable Northwest and Northway Ranch Services, Grazewell aims to provide ranchers with monitoring and education that help them adopt regenerative ranching practices. In February, the project received $500,000 from a charitable trust.
Then, in September, Grazewell and several research partners received a $10 million grant through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Climate Smart Commodities program to build what a press release called “the West’s largest climate-smart ranching program.” In the coming years, CNB plans to enroll all of its member ranches—which span 6.5 million acres across the Western U.S.—in the program.
Regenerative grazing has increasingly become a buzzword as the market for local, sustainable foods has expanded and product labels such as Regenerative Organic have entered the market. But debates about ranching and climate are some of the food and agriculture world’s most contentious, among scientists and the general public alike. Beef is well-known for its sizable carbon footprint, and around 40 percent of the world’s methane emissions come from livestock.
But some ranchers and scientists see grazing as a way to make grasslands into effective carbon sinks. And the rise of carbon markets—including on conservation lands, or agricultural landscapes with conservation value—has focused recent attention, including from the USDA, on rangelands as sites for regenerative land management centered on climate goals.
For scientists, activists, and consumers, the ongoing conversation about regenerative ranching has largely focused how to quantify grazing lands ability to draw carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it in the soil. And CNB, which sells its meat at Whole Foods and other retailer across the West, is already marketing its Grazewell products as “climate-smart beef backed by science.”
For many ranchers, however, the value in adopting regenerative practices is about learning to work with ecosystems.
‘Our Roots and History Have Always Been Around an Environmental Idea’
Conventional beef production separates a cow’s life cycle into three stages. First, calves are born on a cow-calf ranch. Then, when they are a few months old, those calves, now called “yearlings” or “stockers,” are separated from their mothers and either moved to a separate set of pastures or sold to another ranch. Finally, when they are around a year old, they are sent to a feedlot, where they are slaughtered at 18-20 months old. On “grass-fed” or “grass-finished” beef operations, cattle spend all their days on grass and get slaughtered slightly later, at 20-24 months—but these operations produce just 4 percent of U.S. beef.
While CNB follows a conventional production cycle, with cows ending their lives in feedlots, the company is unique in the beef business because of its cooperative structure. The company is member-owned, and its 100 members have an equal vote regardless of “whether they have 80 or 800 cattle,” said Southworth. The model stands out as unique in an industry dominated by a small handful of large meatpacking companies including Cargill and JBS, and it is designed to give its member ranchers a better price for their beef, as well as participation in a “values-based” company.
That member-owned structure also means that CNB does not have the economies of scale of larger meat-packing companies. That means that the company has always focused on “leading with the attributes,” says rancher and communications manager Dan Probert.
Land management practices, along with animal welfare standards, are at the center of this approach. CNB’s 13 founding members met in 1986 at a training for holistic management, a form of managed grazing founded by Zambian game officer Allan Savory.
That background laid the groundwork for CNB’s current turn to regenerative practices. In holistic management, ranchers subdivide large pastures for higher-intensity, short-duration grazing. The management practices both increase pastures’ rest times and concentrate livestock foot traffic in a way that is meant to simulate the trampling of wild ungulates. Holistic grazing also emphasizes using pastures at the right time of year relative to grass growth, leaving plant biomass behind rather than grazing down to short stubble, and “adaptivity” to the land’s needs. Beyond land management, holistic management also trains ranchers in decision-making frameworks and long-term goal setting for their businesses and families.
In recent years, as farmers and ranchers have begun to use the term “regenerative,” CNB has been focusing more on principles such as keeping soil covered, fostering the soil’s living organisms, and increasing diversity of plants, especially native perennials. Minimizing bare ground is a key goal because of the link between deep-rooted perennials and holding more water and organic carbon in the soil.
Many credit North Dakota farmer Gabe Brown with popularizing the term regenerative and CNB started orienting its land health standards around the term after Brown spoke at the cooperative’s annual member meeting. But where row crop farmers like Brown often see economic benefit from cutting down on fertilizers, pesticides, and other inputs, ranchers must find ways to make more labor-intensive regenerative management pencil out—and the Grazewell initiative aims to support that effort for these Western ranchers.
Untangling Holistic and Regenerative Management
While holistic and regenerative practices are similar, regenerative tends to focus more on scientific indicators. Though many ranchers attest to remarkable outcomes from holistic practices, rangeland scientists have expressed skepticism regarding its claims to improve ecosystem health.
“The scientific community and the mainstream environmental community are skeptical [of holistic management’s ecological impact] because it’s really hard to measure,” said Hannah Gosnell, a social scientist at Oregon State University who studies ranchers’ adoption of holistic and regenerative practices.
Regenerative management’s focus on indicators, then, helps bridge ranchers’ commitment to holistic thinking and practices with the scientific community’s focus on hard data. In the Grazewell program, for instance, the key land health indicators are the percentage of bare ground, water infiltration, soil organic matter, soil organic carbon, and plant biodiversity.
But holistic management also plays a role in achieving those indicators. Gosnell emphasizes that the ecological systems thinking taught by practitioners of holistic management are key to successfully implementing regenerative agriculture. Her research argues that the key to regenerative agriculture is the shift to what she calls “integrative and systems thinking.” To be successful at regenerative agriculture, she said, “you need to understand the ecosystem processes and work with them as opposed to trying to control them.”
As Southworth put it: “Let’s use holistic management for goal setting in quality of life, landscape, production, and let’s not argue about whether holistic management itself is scientifically valid. Instead, let’s use uniform, scientifically-supported monitoring and figure out if our rangelands are getting more diversified with healthier soils.”
But Gosnell underscores that this shift is no small thing. “It’s hard. You have to learn a whole new way of thinking about your land and your animals and how they all work together.”
That’s where Grazewell comes in. CNB’s program is designed to meet ranchers where they are in the process of adopting this ecologically minded systems thinking and help them use scientific indicators to improve the rangelands they manage. “For some, it’s starting with plant identification and understanding foundational soil health principles, for others, it’s deeper,” said Marissa Taylor of Northway Ranch Services.
The Grazewell Initiative started in late 2020, when CNB approached Northway Ranch Services to research what existing regenerative ranch programs existed, and whether CNB’s work would fit into any of them. Some, such as Cargill’s RegenConnect, were focused on crop agriculture, while others, such as Audubon’s Conservation Ranching Initiative, were only open to grass-finished beef.
CNB wanted to create a program that would help manage their grazing lands within their conventional production cycle. Some of these regenerative agriculture programs are connected to the carbon credit marketplace; Grazewell has not partnered with a carbon broker, though they do plan to support ranchers who want to pursue carbon credits, said Dallas Hall Defrees of Sustainable Northwest.
As they began developing the program, they had to decide on what definition of “regenerative” they wanted to use. Whereas holistic management principles are laid out in Savory’s 1988 Holistic Management: A New Framework for Decision-Making, the term “regenerative” is applied expansively, pinning down a precise definition can be challenging. “Depending on who you ask what ‘regenerative’ means, you’d get 100 answers,” said Defrees.
CNB, Northway Ranch Services, and Sustainable Northwest decided to define regenerative as “any practice, process or management technique that increases the function of the systems on which it relies,” said Marissa Taylor of Northway.
That definition also allows them to measure progress without being prescriptive, said Defrees. Currently, the Grazewell program doesn’t ask ranchers to change their management practices, because ranchers’ level of familiarity with holistic and regenerative ranching varies, and because their ranches’ terrain varies wildly.
“There are 100 different ranches across 11 Western states—they have completely different ecosystems and rainfall, so things that work on one ranch wouldn’t work on another,” said Defrees. “We’re not setting hard goals like 25 percent bare ground. We just want measurable improvement.”
During 2021 and early 2022, 20 of CNB’s 100 ranches enrolled in the Grazewell program. Taylor and her business partner, James Rodgers—both ranchers themselves—traveled to the ranches to collect baseline data with the ranchers. CNB and Northway aim to collect baseline data from the remaining ranches in the next three years. After that, each rancher will participate in 3-5 years of education and grazing plan support. At the end of the five years, Northway will return to the ranches and take new measurements, to see what has changed.
The Value of Regenerative Thinking
When Northway visited Southworth’s ranch for baseline monitoring, he took them to a site where only 26 percent of the ground was covered in grass.
“You think, these guys are showing up and you want to show them you’re a good range manager,” he said, “but I also wanted to take them to places that didn’t look good at all.” He wanted to draw on their expertise to figure out how he could change his management practices and restore the groundcover.
Conversations during the visit helped Southward devise a strategy to increase organic matter in the soil and help his pasture grow back in a healthy, robust way. Since the area needed an influx of nutrients, he realized that when he fed hay to his cows during the winter, he could do it there—and between the excess hay serving as mulch and the cows’ urine and manure, more nutrients and organic matter would cycle into the soil.
Southworth’s experience illustrates one of the key values that ranchers see in adopting regenerative practices. While soil carbon sequestration may be the most important component of regenerative ranching for scientists, funders, and consumers, it isn’t necessarily ranchers’ primary goal. But neither is it beef. Rather, it’s about taking an ecosystem on its own terms, and working with it to improve its functionality.
“People go from thinking about beef being the focus of their operation to grass being the focus,” said Gosnell. “Beef and carbon sequestration are byproducts of being a really good grass manager.”
Caroline Tracey wrote this article for Civil Eats.
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By Grey Moran for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Zamone Perez for Virginia News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration
Last August, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food & Safety Inspection Service, the federal team responsible for ensuring the safe and accurate labeling of the commercial meat supply, issued letters to several dozen meat producers to inform them of antibiotics detected in beef. This isn’t an unusual finding — antibiotics are widely used on industrial animal farms — yet the meat sampled was on track to be sold as “antibiotic-free,” “raised without antibiotics” or a similar label promising that the animals were never administered antibiotics.
These letters, recently obtained by the advocacy group Farm Forward through a Freedom of Information Act request, reveal that the world’s largest meat producers — JBS, Cargill, and Tyson — raised cattle that tested positive for antibiotics prohibited under USDA-approved labels advertising the beef as free of antibiotics.
“This strongly suggests that the US antibiotic-free beef supply is deeply contaminated and deeply deceptive to American consumers,” Andrew deCoriolis, the executive director of Farm Forward tells Sentient.
The USDA’s Food & Safety Inspection Service found that 20 percent of the samples under this label tested positive for antibiotics, raising questions about how widespread mislabeling is in the U.S. commercial beef supply. These findings were announced last August, but the names of the companies which tested positive for antibiotics were not made publicly available until recently, as part of a new report released by Farm Forward questioning the validity of this popular label.
“It does seem to violate the nature of the label,” says Keeve Nachman, the associate director of the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. Nachman is not concerned about immediate health impacts — consuming antibiotic residue does not cause an immediate illness, but contributes to the rise of antibiotic resistant bacteria — though he is concerned about the broader lack of transparency around antibiotic use on farms and how that contributes to longer-term antibiotic resistance in humans and animals.
These faulty labeling practices result in a “mischaracterization of the magnitude of antibiotics being used in agriculture,” Nachman says. It’s been estimated that 70 percent of medically-important antibiotics sold in the U.S. — those used to treat human infections — are used to produce meat, dairy and other animal-sourced products. The difference between what’s presented on labels and actual use means the public may not understand the urgency. “It is going to mean that we don’t have the full appreciation of the pressure our agricultural industry puts on the ability of those drugs to resolve human infections,” says Nachman.
The World Health Organization calls antimicrobial resistance “one of the top global public health and development threats,” responsible for millions of deaths every year. The problem is only going to get worse, according to public health experts. The misuse and overuse of antibiotics — both in humans and farm animals (who often receive the same antibiotics) — leads bacteria to develop more resistant genes that then fail to respond to the medically necessary use of these drugs.
The USDA’s Food & Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) sent a total of 27 letters to offending meat companies, advising them to “conduct a root cause analysis to determine how antibiotics were introduced into the animal and to take appropriate measures to ensure future products are not misbranded.” FSIS sampled between one and four cattle carcasses per processing facility, which were randomly selected as part of a 2023 initiative. In the letters, FSIS stated that it would “not take immediate enforcement action in response to individual test results.”
“USDA is continuing to review policies and actions taken by the previous administration,” a FSIS spokesperson told Sentient in an e-mail, in response to questions about whether they intend to take any follow-up enforcement or policy actions. “FSIS remains committed to ensuring the safety of the nation’s food supply and protecting public health.”
deCoriolis points to the USDA’s lax oversight of this voluntary certification program, which requires that companies submit documentation to receive the USDA’s approval for use of this label. The USDA relies on self-reported information to validate these and many other claims, including humanely-raised and free range claims.
Meat brands are required only to submit written statements attesting to their process for ensuring antibiotics are not part of their meat supply chains. As deCoriolis sees it, the certification process is vulnerable to exploitation — companies can charge a higher price for meat sold as antibiotic-free but there is not enough oversight to ensure compliance.
“Despite the USDA knowing that this label claim is, in many cases false, they continue to approve the label without requiring testing to verify the claim,” continued deCoriolis. ”From our perspective, this is the USDA deliberately maintaining labeling policies that allow meat companies to mislead the public. And the effect of that is the USDA is giving meat companies a consumer liability shield to protect them from consumer protection laws.”
The Federal Meat Inspection Act (FMIA) and Poultry Products Inspection Act (PPIA) set the federal legal frameworks for meat and poultry product labeling, which refers to the language on the back or front of meat packaging in grocery stores. Previously, courts have held that if the manufacturer’s labels are approved by the USDA, they can be legally used for advertising — effectively giving the USDA the final say on what winds up on meat labels.
Following these test results, the USDA updated its guidelines to “strongly encourages the use of third-party certification to substantiate animal-raising or environment-related claims,” but the agency fell short of actually requiring third-party verification. The updated guidelines were announced in August under President Biden’s administration, and there has not been any further action in this vein under USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins.
Sentient reached out to every meat producer that received a letter to see if they had followed the USDA’s recommendations in conducting a root causes analysis to determine how antibiotics entered their food supply, or any other additional measures.
According to FSIS’s letter, inspectors identified monensin — an antibiotic that is banned in the European Union as a growth promoter in farm animals — in animal carcasses sampled at Swift Beef Company in Greeley, Colorado, a subsidiary of JBS USA, one of the largest meat companies in the world. JBS USA claims beef sold under its Aspen Ridge brand come from cattle that “have never received growth promotants of any kind.”
In an e-mail to Sentient, Nikki Richardson, JBS USA’s Head of Corporate Communications, wrote that “the product impacted in this instance was identified at the facility and never made it into the food supply.” She also wrote that JBS USA conducted an audit following this incident. No evidence of either statement was provided. Sentient asked if the company would be willing to provide Sentient with “the results of the audit, for the sake of consumer transparency,” but Richardson did not reply.
Similarly, FSIS detected monensin in an animal carcass at a Cargill facility in Fort Morgan, Colorado and tulathromycin (used to treat bovine respiratory illnesses) at a separate Cargill facility in Wyalusing, Pennsylvania. Chuck Miller, the global external communications lead for Cargill, replied that the company has not violated any regulatory requirements.
“Cargill complies with USDA and FSIS regulatory requirements to ensure safe and compliant products enter the market,” stated Miller, in an email to Sentient. “I would also like to reinforce that there has been no evidence that meat with antibiotic residue levels in excess of regulatory standards entered the food supply.”
Tyson did not respond to a request for comment. However, Tyson has scaled back on its previous pledge to raise beef without antibiotics, following previous public scrutiny of these labeling claims.
There are shortcomings to FSIS’s testing program. The tests performed didn’t distinguish between selective antibiotic use to treat an illness and constant low-dose exposure to antibiotics administered directly into the animals’ feed. While both are prohibited under the labeling program, the excessive, chronic use of antibiotics poses a much more serious risk to public health, contributing to the development of antibiotic resistance.
“If a cow is selectively treated for penicillin two years ago and gets harvested, that’s one thing. But if it’s been constantly exposed to a drug, over and over again, leading up to 30 to 60 days prior to the time it was harvested, that’s going to be a whole other level of residue,” says Marshall Bartlett, the co-founder of Home Place Pastures, a cattle and pig farm and processing house in Como, Mississippi. FSIS’s letters don’t indicate the level of residue.
FSIS found that one of Bartlett’s cattle tested positive for penicillin, which is commonly used on small farms to selectively treat illnesses. He performed the root cause analysis as recommended, tracing it back to a nearby producer who sells him cattle, who forgot to tag that animal to indicate that it could no longer be sold under the labeling program. “The producer was very apologetic and understood,” says Bartlett.
Out of all of the meat producers, Bartlett is the only one who said he performed this analysis and was willing to share the results. He hopes that the USDA expands and refines its testing for antibiotics use. “As far as we’re concerned, we’re really committed to transparency and figuring this out, trying to be an advocate for local farmers in our supply chain,” he says.
Grey Moran wrote this article for Sentient.
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By Dawn Attride for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Mark Richardson for Arkansas News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration
It's no secret that industrial animal agriculture is draining our planet's resources and is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions - responsible for somewhere between 12 and nearly 20 percent of climate pollution. On a personal level, reducing meat consumption and adapting to a plant-forward diet are one of the most effective forms of climate action. When it comes to more systemic solutions however, lawmakers and development banks have favored interventions that tend to be tech-based, or human manufactured. These solutions, like dairy digesters that convert manure into biogas, or synthetic feed additives that reduce methane emissions from livestock, also tend to be hotly contested by a certain swath of environmentalists.
While such technologies promise to curb emissions, the reality is not so simple - and they also may do little to combat agriculture's stress on water, soils and biodiversity. These strategies often don't address issues like soil health or the deforestation of land - at least not directly.
A new report makes the case that the best way forward may lie in investing in nature-based solutions, rather than technological ones. The findings were published by The Farm Animal Investment Risk and Return Initiative (FAIRR), an investor network covering risks and opportunities in the global food system.
Investing in Nature Take Time, but Benefits Ecosystems
A nature-based solution uses natural techniques and ecosystems to address environmental challenges, such as planting trees or restoring wetlands to capture carbon.
The new FAIRR report is the "first of its kind" in developing a framework to attract investment for long-term climate solutions in a way that considers the whole planet holistically, Sajeev Mohankumar, senior technical specialist of climate and biodiversity at FAIRR, tells Sentient.
"Industrial farming produces more calories and produces more product per unit area because they are so efficient and their only goal is to maximize profit. But what we wanted to emphasize in this report is that that is not the only system of agriculture -- it also has to deliver for the animals in terms of welfare, human health and planetary health. That's where nature-based solutions come into play," he says.
FAIRR evaluated 22 on-farm interventions (12 nature-based, 10 tech-based) often cited to address agriculture's climate and nature risks. They found that nature-based solutions such as hedgerows (rows of shrubs that act as a carbon sink and reduce soil erosion) and silvopasture (integrating trees into grazing pastures) had a greater positive impact collectively on emissions reductions, biodiversity, freshwater use and the flow of nutrients across ecosystems. "Nature-based interventions can deliver 37 percent of the mitigation required to meet 2030 climate targets, along with significant nature co-benefits," the report states.
Nature-based solutions are touted as offering more holistic rewards, but can take time to show impact, which can be difficult to sell to investors. "I think there is a lack of knowledge in terms of connecting some of the financial returns to environmental outcomes," Mohankumar says. "This involves changing the behavior of farmers and tying them into a long-term contract...it takes a long time to yield benefits."
For example, technology like synthetic animal feed additives reduce methane emissions from livestock by roughly 10-30 percent, but offer few co-benefits for nature. Hedgerows, by comparison, reduce emissions but also have positive environmental benefits, such as reducing soil erosion and curbing nutrient runoff into water. On the other hand, hedgerows need to be planted in large quantities, and require a long timescale of up to 10 years to sequester significant amounts of carbon.
A Ticking Climate Clock Requires Thoughtful Solutions
Nature-based solutions have another added benefit: they tend to boost climate resilience, often in a more cost-effective way, according to a recent review of over 100 peer-reviewed articles. Sixty-five percent of studies found that nature-based solutions were better at reducing disaster risk, and 71 percent of studies found that they were more cost-effective than tech-based ones.
Currently, the majority of on-farm intervention investment flows toward technological advances, which, FAIRR says is "concerning." This is because tech-based climate interventions "are more likely to be aligned with intensive livestock production practices, and lead only to incremental emissions reductions relative to the long-term systemic changes from implementing nature-based interventions." In other words, these solutions cut down on emissions a little, without addressing the problems caused by industrial food systems, like poor animal welfare or water pollution.
Not every climate researcher sees a clear preference for technology or nature-based solutions. Sentient asked Richard Waite, director for Agriculture Initiatives, Food, Land and Water Program at the World Resources Institute (WRI), to take a look at FAIRR's research, with which he was not involved. Waite was a co-author of a 2019 report from WRI that recommended a suite of solutions to meet the challenge of feeding even more people on the planet - 9.7 billion by 2050 - without draining natural resources and driving up global temperatures to an unhealthy degree.
"This report looks at many interventions that are commonly cited when talking about reducing agriculture's impacts on climate and nature. It recommends more investment in nature-based solutions, while also noting that such interventions may lower food production," Waite tells Sentient.
"In our world of increasing food demand linked to agricultural expansion and deforestation," says Waite, "we must be very careful to assess any tradeoffs related to shifting to agricultural systems or practices that produce less food and require more land."
When it comes to food systems, tradeoffs can have significant consequences. For instance, shifting a factory farm to a regenerative beef operation could mean more space for farm animals to roam. That sounds like a better scenario for farm animals. But research has also shown that regenerative cattle ranches use twice as much land to produce the same amount of food. If Americans and other Global North populations were to continue to eat meat at even close to the same levels they do now, there is simply not enough farmland to shift all industrial farms to regenerative operations. And trying to make that shift would undoubtedly result in more emissions and more deforestation.
For Waite and WRI, a mix of solutions is key. "Our own research suggests that both tech-based and nature-based solutions will be essential to feeding 10 billion people by 2050, while protecting nature and the climate."
The Bottom Line
Fierce debates over climate solutions seem to be going strong, yet global temperatures - and food system emissions - continue to be heading in the wrong direction. If countries are serious about meeting their climate goals, they will likely need to consider comprehensive solutions that account for impacts to both climate and nature.
Dawn Attride wrote this article for Sentient.
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