Raising the Steaks: Report Recommendations
A February 2011 Union of Concerned Scientists report, Raising the Steaks: Global Warming and Pasture-Raised Beef Production in the United States, looks at ways pasture-based beef producers could lower their climate emissions and take greater advantage of pastures’ capacity to remove heat-trapping carbon from the atmosphere and store it in soil.
The federal government has an important role to play in helping farmers to improve pasture practices. Research funding is needed at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to improve the nutritional quality (forage feed efficiency), productivity, hardiness, efficient nitrogen use, and other growth characteristics of pasture and harvested forage crops. In addition to research, funding is needed for USDA farmer incentive programs that can encourage farmers to adopt best management practices on their pastures. The federal farm bill, due to be reauthorized in 2012, offers an opportunity for Congress and the administration to invest in these programs. The reduction in climate impact and other types of pollution will return this investment many times over, because the impacts of climate change and pollution have social and economic costs.
Adoption of the following recommendations would improve our understanding of the potential for best practices to curb the heat-trapping emissions and boost the carbon sequestration of pasture beef, and spur the use of those practices:
1. USDA should expand its research on global warming emissions from pasture beef production, and further develop management practices to curb those emissions. Critical needs include:
- Breeding and development of other practices to promote more nutritious pasture crops.
- Investigating the most effective combinations of climate-friendly practices.
- Improving the ability of high-quality legumes to become established and to persist in mixed pastures.
- Improving the efficiency with which pasture crops use nitrogen.
- Boosting forage yields and extending the period of high-quality pasture growth.
- Collecting information on practices now used to manage the quality of pastures and the amount of carbon in various soils.
- Optimizing intensive rotational grazing systems and investigating their impact on methane and nitrous oxide emissions and long-term carbon sequestration.
- Pursuing whole-farm studies of suites of climate-friendly practices to identify synergies, optimize carbon budgets, and evaluate any tradeoffs.
- Developing demonstration projects and educational materials to alert cow-calf operators and pasture beef producers to the advantages of better pasture management.
2. The USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service should expand its efforts to encourage best management practices that reduce methane and nitrous oxide emissions and boost carbon sequestration. This work should include:
- Using the Conservation Stewardship Program to provide incentive payments for:
- Practices that may reduce methane and nitrous oxide emissions, including increasing the share of legumes and improved forage crops in forage mixtures, using moderate cattle stocking densities, using appropriate amounts of synthetic fertilizer, avoiding grazing cattle on low-quality mature pasture—such as by substituting high-quality stored forages—and encouraging more even distribution of manure on pastures.
- Practices that increase carbon sequestration, such as supplying the precise amount of nutrients that crops need from legume species, manure, or synthetic fertilizer, and preventing overgrazing.
- Providing technical assistance to beef producers to help and encourage them to implement such practices.
- Providing transitional support through the Environmental Quality Incentives Program to beef producers who switch from confinement to pasture-based finishing systems that use best management practices.
3. State and federally funded university extension services should advise and train beef producers on climate-friendly practices, including use of the highest-quality forage, and strategies to prevent overgrazing.
