A disservice to environmentally appropriate livestock producers.

• Author: Muller, Mark
• Position: From Readers - Letter to the Editor

Your July/August article on meat consumption ["Meat: Now, It's Not Personal!"] does an excellent job of identifying the environmental issues with the current industrial meat production and processing industry. Reducing our consumption of industrially produced meat will certainly improve health and the environment. However, because you paint all meat production in one broad stroke, your article does a disservice to the thousands of farmers using environmentally appropriate methods of livestock production in the United States, as well as the millions of people in less-developed countries who use livestock to improve the efficiency of food production.

Most natural systems require continual interactions between plants and animals for nutrient cycling, seed distribution, and a host of other services each provides the other. Here in the Midwest, the prairie grasslands and the buffalo had this symbiotic relationship. Our current dominant agricultural system--which uses commercial fertilizer instead of manure, annuals like corn and soybeans rather than grass, and confined livestock rather than free-ranging animals--is a far cry from a natural system. Some innovative, sustainable farmers are mimicking nature's processes and planting a mix of grasses for cows, pigs, and even buffalo. These practices return nutrient flows and soil erosion back to the levels before tillage, providing tremendous benefits to soil and water quality.

Your article states that "the easiest way to reduce the amount of excrement flowing down the Mississippi and killing the Gulf of Mexico is to eat less meat, thereby reducing the size of the herds upstream in Iowa or Missouri." I strongly disagree. First, the largest contributor of nitrogen to the Gulf dead zone is not animal manure (15 percent of total) but fertilizer (50 percent of total). Second, the grain-oilseed-livestock complex has gone global and diversified. Not eating a hamburger may simply redirect Midwest corn from a feedlot to an ethanol plant, or that beef may instead be exported to one of the burgeoning Asian markets.

A better way to protect the environment is to purchase sustainable meat raised by local farmers. (Local farmers and retailers of sustainably grown meat can be found at www.eatwellguide.org.) Sustainable agriculture offers farmers a viable alternative to the industrial food system, while also providing consumers food choices to promote more natural landscapes. Many in the environmental community seem...