If US beef comes from factory farms, why are wide open pastures everywhere?

Aerial image of beef cattle in Tascosa Feedyard, Bushland, Texas. Image courtesy Mishka Henner: mishkahenner.com

Here in the United States, people are getting fed up with their food system. Every week there's a new documentary trailer or bleak article about the horrid conditions in which the animals who become our dinners are raised. You've probably seen the footage of cattle crowded into feedlot pens and walking over piles of their own manure, or aerial photos like the one above of geometrically stark fences containing thousands of animals next to radioactive-looking runoff pits. Then again, you might also have taken a scenic road trip anywhere in the country and seen a very different landscape: cattle roaming around lush rolling green hills in New England or through scrubby open ranges in western mountain valleys. These dueling images of modern day cattle ranching leave many with a perplexing conundrum: what is the source of my own meat? Everyone wants to know where their food comes from these days, but when it comes to beef, they're as confused as ever.

So was the animal that provided your steak free-ranged or factory farmed? The short answer to this dilemma likely is: both. Beef cattle in the US spend most of their 18 month-long lives in wide open fields. In the first few months of their lives, calves raised for beef drink their mothers’ milk. Then, they eat grass, hay, and a few minerals and crop residues like wheat straws to keep them growing steadily. When their skeletons have grown to their full size, the cattle are placed on feedlots to gain as much fat and muscle weight as possible right before slaughter. This process is often called "finishing". It’s these feedlot finishing operations that are seen as polluting, over-industrialized, and all-around abhorrent.

The cattle in these feedlots—the ones your prime rib came from—also have a whole family of additional cattle required to breed them. They have mothers: cows who need to birth and feed them as little calves, before they are eventually shipped off to feedlots.

Cows don't reproduce quickly like bees or rabbits; they have nine-month long pregnancies—just like humans.

Because cows are slow to reproduce, we keep even more of them around than there are feedlot cattle. Also on pasture are bulls (needed to mate with the cows), heifers (young female cattle, being raised to replace the cows that will later be too old to reproduce), and yearlings or stocker cattle (between the age of calves and feedlot cattle; think of them as preteens in cattle years). All these cattle, breeding and raising their young for the next generation of feedlot cattle, are called “cow-calf herds” and they outnumber the cattle on feedlots by 5 to 1—it’s these cattle that you can see grazing on pastures from coast to coast.

So where's the beef?

We can map where all the beef cattle are in the US, highlighting where you’re most likely to see them (or smell them) on the side of the highway. The USDA reports how many cattle are in every US county. With a bit of analysis, we can determine how many of them are feedlot cattle and how many are part of cow-calf herds on pastures.

We can see from this bird's eye view that cow-calf herds are spread all over the country. They're grazing on the rolling green hills of Vermont, in lush fields where dense forests would otherwise grow. They’re even in the deserts of the southwest, roaming for miles to get enough calories where the grass and shrubs are sparse, tough, and low-quality.

Anywhere there are grasses for cattle to eat, and land is cheap enough, cow-calf herds are likely to be found.

Many of the people I've talked to about my work find it hard to believe that these roaming cow-calf herds on pasture let out more methane, a potent global warming gas, than their feedlot counterparts. Grass isn't edible to humans; it's only edible to cattle who have bacteria in their stomach to break it down using fermentation, producing methane as a byproduct. That fermentation isn't as necessary for feeds with more readily digestible nutrients like corn and soy. Feedlot diets, although they can cause other digestion and immune system problems, therefore tend to reduce methane emissions. That said, feedlots are still large point sources of methane and other emissions because there are so many cattle in one concentrated place.

Compared to cattle in cow-calf herds roaming on pasture, cattle on feedlots are less spread out. Most of the biggest feedlot operations span the upper Midwest to the Texas panhandle, where some of the largest in the country have over 100,000 cattle.

The placement of feedlots throughout the American heartland provides easy access to corn, soy, and other grain feed, consumed daily in huge quantities: more than 25 pounds per animal per day, that’s more than 300 million pounds of grain per day in total! This explains why feedlots are so far removed from cow-calf herds: feedlots have to replace tons of grain feed every day, a lot more frequently than they have to their cattle upon marching them to the slaughterhouse.

Not covered in this article are the 19 million dairy cattle in this country, which are actually a totally different herd from beef cattle in the US. Dairy cows become lower-quality hamburger meat after milk productivity slows down and their male dairy calves become veal. Some countries in Europe eliminate this inefficiency by raising male dairy calves into adulthood for beef, although the taste is quite different from what Americans are used to enjoying.

Among the United States beef cattle population, the larger number of cow-calf cattle relative to cattle in feedlots explains why so many can still be seen roaming on open pastures. Feedlot cattle spend a relatively short period of their lives there, and they need large, slowly reproducing pasture-raised cow-calf herds to breed their replacements after slaughter. So to answer the dilemma posed earlier...

All of your beef is at least mostly grass-fed, but very little of it is entirely grass-fed.

In my next article, I'll discuss what it would take to change the feedlot system, whether that's even possible for the millions of cattle we raise for beef, and whether we might need to take seriously some alternative ways of getting our protein.

This article was reproduced from an earlier version on LinkedIn.