mapawatt » Food

Grassfed Beef: Better for the planet

Chris — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 03:22:24 +0000

I’m a fan of sustainable food. If the Mapawatt Blog was a University, my undergrad would be in Sustainable Living, my Masters in Energy (conservation, efficienty, renewable, etc.) and my Minor would be in sustainable food/farming. While Mapawatt’s focus is reducing fossil-fuel energy in residential settings, I occasionally sprinkle in a few topics that relate to general sustainable living because I believe in a “systems” (looking at the big picture) approach to sustainable living. In March of ’09 I wrote about Polyface Farms, who takes a complete systems approach to their farming practices.

I’m passionate about sustainable food for several reasons:

It’s better for humans (less pestecides, less hormones, less nasty stuff)
It’s better for the environment (less pesticides, less monoculture, less agricultural run-off, etc.)
It makes me happier to know I’m eating something in the way nature intended me to eat it

At its simplest, sustainable food/farming can be divided into two main topics: plants and animals.

Now, there are many vegetarians who wish sustainable food only meant eating plants, but I’m not one of them. Humans evolved to eat meat, and I enjoy eating meat. While my wife and I are trying to eat less of it for health reasons, we still enjoy a nice steak or pork chop every now and then. But I don’t like eating meat from factory farms. It bothers me to know that we’re willing to sacrifice quality, animal welfare, and our health for the sake of cheaper ground beef. There’s another option to eating meet that are fattened up on Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO) : Grass-Fed Beef.

Last week’s issue of Time Magazine had an excellent article on Grass-Fed Beef titled, “How Cows (Grass-Fed Only) Could Save the Planet“. Global Warming alarmists cry about the amount of methane cattle produce, but the Time article had a great description of why we may not need to worry about grass-fed cattle’s methane’s production:

It works like this: grass is a perennial. Rotate cattle and other ruminants across pastures full of it, and the animals’ grazing will cut the blades — which spurs new growth — while their trampling helps work manure and other decaying organic matter into the soil, turning it into rich humus. The plant’s roots also help maintain soil health by retaining water and microbes. And healthy soil keeps carbon dioxide underground and out of the atmosphere.

In case you didn’t know, cows can’t survive by just eating grain alone because they are ruminants. But those that produce unnatural cattle on factory farms don’t care about that. The Time article goes on to say,

…grass feeding obviates the antibiotics that feedlots are forced to administer in order to prevent the acidosis that occurs when cows are fed grain.

Aside from the fact that nature (which usually gets things right) intended cows to eat grass (there’s a hint), Grass-Fed Beef is lower in saturated fat and higher in Omega-3s, so it’s healthier than fatty, hormone-and-antibiotic-filled CAFO beef.

Sustainable decisions need to be made by taking into account all factors involved in the entire system. Sure, some GW alarmists think that eating meat will end the world (what about all those fossil-fuel fertilized monoculture soy farms that make tofu?), and factory farmers want to feed us the cheapest/unhealthiest product they can for the sake of an easier buck, but I occasionally like eating meat the way nature intended for us to, not how capitalism has trained us to. Grass-fed beef makes so much sustainable sense, it’s certainly worth a few more cents at the store.

***Update – 02/01/10 – I just found the site onlygrassfed.com. They offer grass-fed beef sales in the Atlanta area, but if you don’t live in Atlanta they have a ton of good information on the benefits of grass fed beef. They are also an example of a good business idea on how you could start a local sustainable agriculture sales business!

Sustainability update from the West coast

Chris — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:16:29 +0000

I’m traveling this week out in SF/Napa valley area and I just wanted to throw in a few observations:

We stayed the first night at the Hotel Griffon which I covered on Triple Pundit when I wrote a quick blog on their use of the Perfect Flush device from Brondell. I was happy to test out the Perfect Flush device and it did work well. I found that the “number 1″ size flush usually worked for all needs; which makes me wonder if there isn’t too much water being used for number 1?
While I was happy Hotel Griffon was conserving water. I was disappointing that the thermostat installed in the rooms was from 1973 (my rough estimate). The only settings were “warm” and “cool”. This makes it very inconvenient to pinpoint a comfortable temperature and wastes energy in the process. Please upgrade to a programmable thermostat!
The first winery we went to was Benziger which has many wines that fall under Biodynamically processed (biodynamic wine). This was really the first time I had heard of this and I’m very interested to learn more. Basically, it’s a step above organic and it treats the farm as a living organism, not just individual parts that make up a whole.
The food is amazing. Most of this is due to the fact that there is so much good wine, that the restaurants have to be up to par to balance it out. Another reason the food is so good is that so much of it is sourced locally. Local food does not just help the local economy, save transportation costs, and make everyone a better steward of the local environment…it also tastes much better!

That’s it for now. Just a few observations from the road.

Sustainable Gorilla

Chris — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 23:37:43 +0000

I usually don’t do this, but I am re-posting one of the first blogs I put up on Mapawatt way back in February. It has been a hectic week (not much time for writing) and I think the post on how sustainable practices can help Gorillas in the African jungle has some really great lessons in it. Not to mention the fact that it has been viewed by less than 10 people! Don’t just scan the post and forget about it. Read it and think about how you can attack problems from a sustainable point of view.

————–

The March issue of National Geographic Adventure magazine has a fascinating article about the mountain gorillas of Virunga National Park in the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo.

virunga national park mountain gorilla.

The majority of the article is spent discussing the head ranger, Emmanuel de Merode, and his efforts to work with rebel forces to protect the gorilla. While Emmanuel’s efforts to work with the rebels are admirable and heroic (while making for an exciting story), the most revealing part comes in the last three paragraphs. You see, it is not the rebels that are the true danger to the gorillas; it is the deforestation surrounding the gorilla’s habitat that threatens them.

There are two million people who surround Virunga park, and they cut down the old-growth trees to make charcoal for cooking fuel. So while de Merode’s exciting efforts revolve around meeting with gun wielding rebel leaders, it is his work in creating an alternative energy program to switch inhabitants from charcoal to briquettes made from grass and leaves that will make the biggest difference.

Emmanuel’s efforts remind me of one of my favorite Amory Lovin’s quotes: “People don’t want raw kilowatt-hours or lumps of coal or barrels of sticky black goo. They want hot showers, cold beer, comfort, mobility, illumination. It’s like when you go to the hardware store looking for a drill. What you really want is not a drill but a hole. And why do you want the hole?” Asking such questions, Lovins says, is the first step in good design.

The Congolese didn’t want to destroy the gorilla’s habitat and lead them down the path to extinction. They just wanted to cook their food and charcoal was the fuel that they knew. It was de Merode who realized they just needed to be shown a new way to make a hole.

Polyface Farms – Sustainable Model

Chris — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 01:25:46 +0000

One of my favorite parts in Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, was the section on Polyface Farms located in Virginia. What was so fascinating about Polyface is their focus on a sustainable system. Their values really lay out what makes them so impressive.

polyface sustainable farm

They realize that their business is not just producing chickens, beef, pork, or rabbits the cheapest way possible (which is also the unhealthiest way). Their business is producing a product that doesn’t sacrifice food safety, their surrounding environment, or the animal’s happiness. They are also able to increase their profits by being extremely efficient and charging a bit more for a much better product.

Polyface’s proprieter, Joel Salatin, looked at all facets of farm life and rearranged them so they didnt operate as independent operations, but rather a system of intertwined cycles. For example:

Cattle are able to forage for clean grass each day with a moveable fence (this is different than the cattle most of us eat living in muddy, dirty, cramped feedlots)
Chickens that follow the cattle around to the fresh grass sprouts and the bugs out of their poop
Pigs that come behind the cows and root around in the cow’s bedding (wood chips/sawdust mixed with the cow manure) which helps aerate the bedding and aid in compost development
The blood from the slaughtered chickens is added to aforementioned compost to make it more nutritious for the garden and pastures

So the next time you’re at the store and trying to decide on which cut of meet to get, think about how the meat was raised, and how it’s former life is going to impact your health and the taste of the meat. As Polyface farms proves, Sustainability is not just about helping the environment, it’s about making a living by doing what’s right, because doing what’s right makes life much happier to live.

While you probably don’t have a farm in your backyard, think about your home as a system, and how that system is part of a larger environment. Think of ways you can eliminate waste (recycle, compost, rain water capture) and make smarter decisions (control your thermostat, turn off lights, insulate), that won’t just save you money, but will also make your home and local environment a happier place to live.

Grass-Fed Beef

Chris — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 01:53:01 +0000

While the purpose of Mapawatt is to focus on things you can do to directly lower your energy and water consumption, I just can’t help writing a blog about the other big player in our life: Food!

While searching for my wife and my Valentine’s Day meal at Whole Foods, I stumbled upon a beautiful grass-fed boneless ribeye from a local farm, White Oak Pastures. After reading Pollan’s book Omnivore’s Dilemma, I’ve been much more sensitive in my eating decisions.

In his book, Pollan has a whole section on “corn-fed” beef. Before his book, I thought “corn-fed” just meant it was special. What I didn’t know, is that without massive doses of anti-biotics, cows can’t survive eating corn. Their stomachs can’t effectively process it. They have evolved to eat grass, yet farmers realized they could get a bigger cow to market faster if they shoved corn down their throats. Here is what the author John Robbins has to say about grass-fed beef:

“Switching a cow from grass to grain is so disturbing to the animal’s digestive system that it can kill the animal if not done gradually and if the animal is not continually fed antibiotics. These animals are designed to forage, but we make them eat grain, primarily corn, in order to make them as fat as possible as fast as possible.”

Worst of all, farmers don’t feed them this corn in a beautiful country meadow, they do it in a feedlot. This is a gated piece of dirt where the cows are crammed with little room to move around, let alone stay clean.

If the above isn’t enough to convince you, grass-fed beef is healthier for you, being higher in Omega 3’s, beta carotene, vitamin E, and CLA (conjugated linoleic acid)

Finally, many people – including myself – think grass-fed beef just tastes better! While yes, it may cost a few more dollars, think about how great a decision it is for your health, the animal’s health, and in supporting your local community. To me, supporting local, sustainable farming methods is a no-brainer and something you can immediately start doing to make an impact in your life and surrounding environment!