Podcast Transcript
Hope
Welcome to the Hope for the Animals Podcast, sponsored by United Poultry Concerns. I’m your host, Hope Bohanec, and you can find all our past shows at our website, Hope For The Animals Podcast.org.
It’s April, and that means Earth Day, Earth Month, so we’re going to be dedicating a couple of episodes this month to the environmental impact of animal agriculture in honor of Earth Day. I’ll be having a very knowledgeable speaker later in the month who is going to debunk regenerative animal agriculture, Dr. Tushar Mehta. For this one, I’m going to be flying solo today, no guest speaker. This particular subject, “greenwashing our food,” I happen to know a lot about. I’ve given numerous talks about it and I wrote a book about “humane washing” called The Ultimate Betrayal.There’s a large section in that book on the environmental impact and greenwashing our food and the labels like “organic” and “free-range” that we’re going to be talking about today.
I do want to briefly give a bit of a disclaimer about the word, “livestock.” I don’t like using this word, it reduces animals to commodities. I really don’t like the term livestock, but it is the word that is used in the science around this issue so I probably will use it here. I’ll try to limit it. We should really strive to eliminate this word as much as we can. However, it is used in the science, so I’ll do my best to not use it, but I might.
I want to start with a little bit of background about my connection to the environmental aspect of the vegan issue. It’s something that’s very dear to my heart. I started the work, many, many years ago as an environmentalist. I worked for Greenpeace. Greenpeace was my very first job, right out of high school. The environment definitely was very important to me, and I was drawn to the plight of the redwoods, the sequoias, the beautiful huge ancient trees in Northern California that were being cut. This was back in the 90s, where they were being cut on a massive scale, and that drew me to the area. I packed up my car— I had never been to California my life— and drove across the country and worked with Earth First. I did some radical direct action activism for the trees, doing tree-sits and lockdowns and all kinds of very crazy courageous stuff.
This whole time, the farmed animals were really calling me. I was vegan at the time and a lot of the Earth Firsters were vegan as well, but the farmed animals, they were really calling me. There were so few people speaking for them. I mean, still, there are so few people speaking for them, but even more so back then in the early 90s. I felt their plight, I felt them as really the most exploited animals on the earth that needed our help, or at least, needed my help the most. My activism shifted to the plight of farmed animals and vegan issues, but the environmental connection came with me. It was so part of the story, which just shows how everything is so connected. This is another aspect of the vegan story that I think is incredibly, incredibly important, and that is how much animal agriculture is impacting our planet and decimating our planet.
I want to start with a big picture of animal agriculture’s impact on the environment because it impacts so much. I think it’s important for us to get a baseline of how impactful it is on this massive scale before we get into the labels that I want to talk about, like “organic,” “free-range,” “sustainable,” “local,” and all these labels that are coming out that are supposedly a “better” way of farming. The impact is huge. We’re talking about climate disruption, massive energy consumption, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, loss of habitat, loss of species, excessive water use, water pollution, air pollution, soil degradation, land use, wasting of food and grain and resources. It’s all-encompassing, and I’m not going to get into all of that, but just to touch on a few things and then we’ll get more into the greenwashing issue.
First I want to talk about fossil fuel consumption because this is really huge. This has to do with the climate change, climate disruption, and massive energy consumption and use. It takes eight times as much fossil fuel to produce animal products, as it takes to produce plant foods. There’s massive amounts of energy that’s wasted in the processing of meat and dairy and eggs, their indoor environments, conveyor belts, milking machines, lighting, heating, the mechanized slaughter process, lots more machinery and production than plant foods, than comparing to plant farming. With the transportation, there are also so many more steps, numerous more steps involved with animal production, like the grain that’s brought to the animals, and the animals brought to auction, animals to slaughter, carcass to processing, product to market. There’s so many more steps in transportation compared again to plant farming, where it’s the farm to the processing plant to market and that’s it.
Deforestation is another huge issue that is absolutely affected by animal agriculture. Of course, trees are so important right now, they absorb carbon. They are a natural carbon sink, and that’s what we need to absorb the greenhouse gases that are going into the atmosphere. It’s critical to have trees and shrubs and green spaces. This is where we’re absorbing carbon from the atmosphere and offsetting the detrimental effects of the greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere. Large scale dietary change to a plant based diet could actually reverse deforestation. Here in the US, we have over 400 million acres of pasture and rangeland, that if we would stop farming animals, all that land could be reforested, rewilded. There are hundreds of millions of additional acres that is going to grow the feed that feeds all the animals, and that could also be rewilded.
Water. Water is such a huge issue when it comes to animal agriculture. With the amount of water it takes to produce a month’s worth of food for someone who eats meat, dairy, and eggs, you can use the same amount of water and grow food for a vegan for a year. So much more water is used in animal agriculture. There’s the water that the animals drink directly, then there’s the added waste of water that’s used to grow the grain that’s fed to the animals. The factories use so much water, the equipment of the facility all have to be washed down, the dairy milking parlors have to be washed. The slaughtering process, and all the slaughter gunk has to be washed, so there’s massive waste of water again compared to plant farming, which uses very little water in comparison.
Now I do want to be clear that beef is not the only culprit. We often hear this, when we’re talking about the environmental impacts, we only hear about the cows or dairy or beef, and it’s often thought or even said that, “Oh, just switch to chickens, switch from red meat to white meat, and it’s so much better.” This is not the case. This is like comparing rotten apples and oranges. There’s so much impact, heavy impact, with all animal agriculture when you compare it to plant farming. We hear it all the time, we blame the cows, but there are environmental impacts of all animal products, not just the cows, and chicken farming is absolutely impactful too. There are numerous reasons, many that I’ve already talked about like water waste.
Something that is unique to chicken farming is the poultry litter, the bedding. When you are housing tens of thousands of birds for chicken flesh for the breeding flocks, and now the cage-free birds are in these floor systems, which is basically a huge windowless warehouse with thousands of birds packed in on the floor. They put out this litter, it’s bedding like wood shavings and other things. Over time— they don’t clean the buildings out very often— it builds up with high concentrations of feces, chemicals, bacteria, parasites, pathogens, heavy metals, viruses, and the dead bodies of the animals that have died and they are left there. All of this gets piled up and dumped somewhere on the property on the farm, and all of that, these harmful chemicals and other nutrients, go into the water, and that creates eutrophication. When you’ve got high levels of nitrogen and other nutrients in the water, it causes algae growth, algae blooms, that depletes the oxygen in the water and kills aquatic life. It’s called eutrophication. These huge areas of water can be called “dead zones” where nothing can live, no aquatic life can live. These dead zones are very common and very connected to chicken farming and the chicken farming industry. That’s just one aspect of the detrimental impact of chicken farming. Farming chickens for their flesh or their eggs, it’s no better, and just switching from one animal species to another is not the answer.
That gives us a baseline of where we are with the environmental impact of animal agriculture. So what do we do about it? What can be done about it? Well, because of all that I’ve been talking about, the meat, dairy, and egg industry are on the defensive. They are telling us what we can do about it. They’re saying, buy “alternative” animal products. Buy “local,” buy “organic,” look for the sustainable labels, “small scale,” buy from small scale farms. That’s what I want to talk about today. This is what I want to dig into.
There are some labels that are just straight greenwashing. There is no difference, no change in the environmental impact of the product from conventional to whatever they’re saying it is. No change at all. Then there are some situations that might be slightly better, but as I will explain, they are still problematic in numerous ways, and sometimes they’ll be worse in some other ways than what the label says. These labels are woefully unregulated, there’s no onsite inspection, there’s very little oversight. It’s just the farmer’s word, basically. The farmer fills out a form, sends it in, and they’re awarded the label from the USDA or the FDA, or they can use labels randomly and don’t even have to have any oversight. You won’t know the difference, the farmer can tell you whatever they want on their websites, in their marketing, but you don’t know what’s really going on.
Here’s an example: There is a grass-fed dairy producer called Maple Hill, and I went to their website to check them out. They have 35 farms in upstate New York, this is a grass-fed dairy. Do you think that there is grass, year-round in upstate New York? No way. There’s just no way. I don’t know if Maple Hill does this but I have heard that dairy producers and grass-fed beef producers that are in more northern and colder states will bring their animals indoors through the winter or they would freeze, and then they feed them cut grass that they have to buy and it gets trucked up from the southern states. There’s a lot of deception and stretching of the truth with these labels.
Considering the size of the farm, it’s not enough to make any difference. Smaller farms don’t alter the number of resources that it requires to raise, transport, and slaughter billions of animals. Right now, 55% of our fresh water in the US is given to animals raised for food. That wouldn’t change just because all the cows are now on small farms. Having billions of farmed animals alive, no matter how they’re raised, no matter the size of the farm, it wastes tons of resources, water, and grain, and causes pollution. That won’t change just because they’re on smaller farms now. Larger farms also can be more efficient, they can utilize technology that actually makes their processing less resource-intensive. Larger operations are able to produce more product with less input of energy, and they can be more efficient when it comes to transportation. This is all on a case-by-case basis, but it’s important to realize that the size of the farm is not necessarily a determining factor as to it being more ecological.
Let’s get into the labels now, I want to talk about some specific labels. The first one I’m going to talk about is “local.” We are seeing this word everywhere now that it has become a marketing buzzword. There’s no consensus as to what it really means or what it constitutes for a product to be local, that seems to be up to the manufacturer that’s using the term. This has been looked into scientifically and it’s interesting to note that in a food’s carbon footprint, or how much impact a food product has on climate disruption, transportation is only about 11% of the equation, as far as importance. The production phase is 83%. That’s where the impact is, and animal products are heavy on production. The transportation, how local the food is, that’s only 11% of the equation, it’s pretty minimal compared to the production phase.
In lifecycle assessments, when you calculate the impact of a food from seed to plate for plant foods, or inception to plate for animal products, the calculations that they’re finding, again and again, is that animal products have a much higher impact on the environment, regardless of whether they were local or sustainable or some other label. Again and again, we’re finding that just being an animal product makes it more impactful. Because of that production phase, there’s so much more energy and resources that have to go into creating it. Buying locally doesn’t necessarily mean you’re buying more ecologically or more humanely, it doesn’t have anything to do with that. The energy, water, and fossil fuel that’s needed to produce a product, that is where the impact is. They’re far more impactful factors than how far the food traveled. Fossil fuel is wasted in the slaughtering process and the refrigeration. All this energy used for the production of local animal products, it’s enormous compared to the much lower carbon footprint of growing plants.
I’ll give an example. Let’s say you’re at the grocery store buying tomatoes, and you notice that these tomatoes came from Mexico, and you think “Oh my gosh, that is a lot of food miles, they had to travel really far, probably a heavy impact on the planet. Maybe I’ll skip the tomatoes.” You go for an organic, local dairy product like yogurt, and you think, “Oh, see this is going to have a much lower impact because it’s local and organic.” No, that is not the case at all. It took so much more fossil fuel and water and all the things we’ve been talking about, to produce that dairy product, as compared to the tomato. That tomato is going to have less of an impact than an animal product. We see that again and again in these lifecycle assessments and all the science.
Here’s something interesting with the local issue. In Oakland, California, the city council created the Oakland Food System Assessment, which calculated how much usable land would be needed to feed 30% of Oakland residents with locally grown food. Just 30%. They found that they would need 9,000 acres to feed 30% of the community using vegetable farming, plant farming. But if animal foods were to be included, it would require 10,000 additional acres, totaling 19,000 acres, to feed the same number of people. It’s so amazing to me that the locavore movement, and people that are very into local eating, is so animal product heavy, it makes no sense. Land is precious. We don’t have enough of it to feed people locally, and have it include animal products. I’ll wrap up the local section by citing this study that was in the Journal of Environmental Science and Technology. It found that switching just two meals a week from meat and dairy, to a vegetable-based diet, achieved more greenhouse gas reductions than buying all locally sourced food. Just switching two meals a week to vegan had more impact, a better impact, than buying all locally sourced food. That’s how much impact animal agriculture has compared to this transportation issue.
Let’s move on to another label, “free-range,” or “pasture-raised.” Some people assume that these labels mean that the product is more environmental. Let’s have a look at that. Whenever there’s a transition to a truly free-range system, unfortunately, so many times it’s not the case and the industry and the farm is lying to you. If there is a true transition to a free-range system, the same amount of animals, or more often, a smaller number of animals, will now use several more acres of land. If you think about a cage-free floor system with thousands of hens crowded into this windowless warehouse, that’s going to occupy maybe a single acre of land, or half an acre of land. Now imagine how much land would be needed if that farmer wanted to offer every one of those hens the room that she needs and deserves to roam around, express natural behaviors, and actually be free-range. Not even triple the space would be enough, you would need several more acres of land to accommodate all those birds. Free-ranging and organic farms that are using more outdoor space, they require more land for the same amount of animals or for fewer animals. As the demand for these alternative products continues to grow, so will the need to clear more land, and that means destroying trees, forests, wetlands, prairies, and other wild areas to accommodate these local free-range farms.
Here’s an interesting example of why local free-ranging of animals can’t work, can’t feed everyone. We can’t feed the billions of people on the planet with this method of animal farming. There’s a beef and pork producer in Petaluma, California, and they claim on their website that they give their animals ten acres per cow and 50 acres per ten pigs. So now we are at 60 acres of land for eleven animals. There are 60,000 People in Petaluma. How on earth could they feed all the people of Petaluma their meat? It can’t be done. There is simply not enough space to accommodate this local diet and have it include meat, it’s not sustainable. It’s been estimated that we would need closer to five planet Earths to be able to do this free-ranging and local animal agriculture. The tiny amount of free-ranging that we do now can’t be scaled up to feed billions of people. Free-ranging animals and local animal production, can never be more than a specialty market for a few elite buyers.
Let’s talk about “organic.” Organic is one of the only labels that we’ll talk about that actually does have some stringent regulation, on-site inspection, soil analysis and all of that. However, the only difference is that the feed and grain fed to the animals are organic, and the animals are drug-free, that’s what organic means. There’s some regulation on animals having access to the outside, it depends on the species of animals, but all the other environmental destructions that I have mentioned up to this point still apply to organic animal agriculture. The impact on energy consumption, water waste, water pollution, all those things still apply to organic animal agriculture.
There’s this really interesting chart based on a comparison of organic and vegan diets. Let’s say that someone wants to eat more eco, they want to change their diet, and lower their carbon footprint at the grocery store. They decide to go organic. They’re going to eat only organic meat and organic dairy, organic eggs. Well, okay you make a bit of difference, you’ve dropped your impact by 8%. That’s something, but let’s say the same person says, I really want to reduce my impact. I want to eat more eco, I’m going to go vegan. Now we’re not even talking about organic. It’s just conventional vegan, changing to vegan and cutting out animal products. Well, then you drop your impact by 87%. Okay, now we’re talking. Now we’re making some impact, right? If you want to go all organic vegan, you drop your impact that your diet has by 94%. That’s amazing. Again, it shows that the animal products, that’s where the impact is. Organic, okay that can help a little. Local, it doesn’t really mean much. But getting the animal products out of your diet, that’s where you can have some really serious impact, and really be helping the environment.
Let’s move on to another label, “grass-fed.” This is, of course, very popular now. Grass-fed beef, also grass-fed dairy, I’ve seen grass-fed lamb, there are all kinds of animal products coming out that are supposedly grass-fed. What we’re learning about grass-fed beef is really fascinating because, why do people buy this label? Why do people look for this label? They think it’s more environmental, right? Well, we’re learning that grass-fed beef can actually produce 50 to 60% more greenhouse gas emissions than their grain eating cousins, and there’s more water wasted as well because they’re moving around more and they’re drinking more water. So, it’s amazing to me that it can be even worse, it’s not just that it’s neutral, it’s worse. Grass-fed beef can take 18 to 24 months longer for the animals to get up to slaughter weight. That greatly extends the amount of time that they’re alive, that they’re burping greenhouse gases, and drinking the clean water, and creating pollution. There was a professor of Dairy Sciences at Washington State University that conducted this comprehensive comparison of conventional feedlot cattle and grass-fed cows, and she found that to produce a set quantity of beef, the conventional feedlot product required less land, less water, fewer fossil fuels, and it produced the least greenhouse gases. There are numerous other studies by researchers at Oxford University and Harvard University showing that grass-fed beef actually produces higher emissions than conventional beef production. The prospect of changing over conventionally farmed beef in the CAFOs, in the concentrated animal feeding operations, to pasture-raised beef in the US, would require up to 270% more land, meaning even more deforestation and degradation of land.
This is where the regenerative agriculture folks will start shouting, “Hang on. You can’t just throw the cows out into the pasture and expect them to all be okay.” They mostly agree that livestock grazing is what is degrading the planet. What they say is that there are methods that must be adhered to, to make it sustainable. Let’s look into that. There are numerous names to what they’re proposing, it’s sometimes called “regenerative grazing,” “intensive rotational grazing,” “short duration grazing,” “holistic management,” there are all kinds of names for it. Basically what it is, is taking a very large area of land, and a very small amount of animals and rotating them around the land so they’re fenced off in a small space, and they will graze that one area. Then, after a certain amount of time, be moved to another patch of land, a smaller patch of land, and graze that area so that the area that they just grazed will regenerate. That’s the idea. However, after four decades of trials and studies, this issue has been studied extensively for a long time, this is really nothing new. It’s really not the silver bullet solution that so many think it is.
First of all, you have to have a very small amount of animals on vastly more acres of land than we’ve done in the past. Scaling up is going to be impossible, doing this on a large scale that would feed billions of people. There’s also no peer-reviewed science that shows that this management approach is better in any way than conventional grazing. There were 50 trials in Africa that concluded, and I’ll quote here, “short duration grazing systems differ a little in their effect upon range conditions.” It’s been rigorously evaluated by numerous investigations, all over the world and in the US, not just Africa, multiple locations, a wide range of precipitation zones, over periods of decades. The vast majority of scientific evidence does not support the claims that they have of enhanced ecological benefits. It doesn’t increase soil carbon sequestering, it doesn’t increase plant or animal production. Unfortunately, it just isn’t the solution that everyone wants it to be. It also requires extensive fencing, which disrupts wildlife migration and wildlife movement patterns. This free range of animals, grass-fed rotational grazing, it’s something that people really want to be true, they really want to have their beef burger. But it just doesn’t hold water scientifically. We’re going to dig a little deeper into this with my guest coming up later in the month, Dr. Tushar. He’s going to have a lot more to say about this particular issue which is such a huge one in the environmental community.
Another huge problem with wanting to get animals out of the buildings and onto pastures with free-ranging and grass-feeding is that this will increase conflict with wildlife. That’s already a huge issue. I’ll give an example. In the Point Reyes National Seashore— this is an area that is about two hours west of me on the coast, Northern California, about an hour north of San Francisco— there is an endangered elk that live in this area called the Tule Elk. Their numbers are really declining. There are only about 500 elk left in this national park. However, there is a ton of dairy and beef farming that has been growing and growing. Right now the dairy and beef cows outnumber the elk 10 to one. The ranchers are increasingly becoming hostile to the elk, and they don’t want the elk eating their cows’ grass and drinking their cows’ water. These for-profit, privately owned beef and dairy businesses are now threatening the wildlife in a public national park, and they’re threatening this endangered species of elk. The cows dump millions of pounds of feces and urine into the land and the soil and the water. The bay and the Pacific Ocean are really being polluted in that area because of the dairy and beef farming. This issue has gotten the attention of the local environmental community as well as the animal rights community who were working together on this issue and trying to get the dairy farms out of this national park, so the Tule Elk can thrive there once again. But it’s just so amazing to me that what is being proposed by the environmental community and as an environmental product, is grass-fed and free-range dairy and eggs and all that. It uses so much more land in such destructive ways.
I think it’s really interesting to note that when it comes to this new “regenerative grazing” and “free-ranging” of animals, suddenly, farmers are “environmental experts,” just like farmers and ranchers have been seen for decades as “animal experts” when all they are expert in is making money on exploiting animals for their flesh, milk, and eggs. They’re certainly not experts in animal care and animal welfare. The same is happening with small-scale farmers that are transitioning to regenerative animal agriculture, they’re now seen as environmental experts, and we shouldn’t treat them as such. No other polluting industry would do this. We would never listen to or trust someone from the oil industry about how to comply with fossil fuels less. No, we wouldn’t trust them. We would trust scientists. But farmers have this nostalgia and kind of salt-of-the-earth reputation. They’re somehow exempt from our distrust of a polluting industry. They use pseudoscience and people’s sympathies to continue to commit atrocities to the animals, to the planet, and they’re charging consumers more for it. I think it’s important to remember that ultimately we’re not anti-farmer. We’re not against farming. We just want to see people farming plants, not sentient beings. We all eat, even vegans. We eat a lot of food. We eat a lot of plant food, so we are pro plant farmer.
I’m going to wrap up soon here and I want to give you one last study. This is kind of going back to the big picture. This study came from the Alliance of World Scientists, and they have 15,000 scientists involved from 184 countries. In 2017, they were asked to evaluate what would be the most impactful way that humans can change their individual impact on the environment and on climate change in particular. They came to the conclusion that we should encourage people to avoid all animal products, as the most impactful personal action someone can take to curb climate change, to lower their carbon footprint. They didn’t say, “Eat free-range beef,” they didn’t even say, “Reduce animal products,” they said, “Avoid all animal products.” It’s so clear when you look at the science.
I’ll also say here at the end– because I will give this presentation, and when it gets to the question and answer period I will often still be asked, “What is the most ecological egg to buy?” or “What’s the best dairy?” or “Which of these labels should I trust?”— what I say to that is, “Don’t waste your money.” Don’t waste your money on these sustainable labels, it’s really a marketing scam. If you really want to reduce your impact, reduce your consumption of animal products. Don’t just switch from one kind of egg to another, one label of an animal product to another, reduce the number of eggs that you buy, reduce the number of animal products that you buy, and eventually eliminate them altogether. That’s where you’re going to have the most impact.
I do want to recommend a couple of films if you want to follow up with a film and get some more information about the environmental impact. These aren’t specific really to greenwashing, unfortunately, it’s more of the bigger picture, but there are two really good films: one is called Countdown to Year Zero, and the other is End Game 2050. I’ll put links in the show notes to those two films. I’d also encourage you to go to United Poultry Concerns’ website. We have a lot of great information there on the environmental impact of animal agriculture, the impact of chicken farming, farming chickens for their flesh and their eggs, and the really horrific impact on the planet. That’s UPC-online.org. I’d also like to recommend my book, The Ultimate Betrayal. I do have an entire section on the environmental impact, and I go into more information about these labels, so please read my book, if you would like to. I’ll end with a quote from my book and that is, “It is not our methods of animal agricultural practices that need to change, it is our unwillingness to let go of animal products and animal farming.”
Thank you for listening to the Hope for the Animals Podcast. I hope this episode was informative and that you learned something. Please help us to get this information out there, far and wide, and tell a friend, create a post, spread the love. Help protect and preserve the planet and all life on Mother Earth, and live vegan.
