3. Efficient meat - Problem or solution?

So let me start with a premise which is that number one consumers in many parts of the world like to eat meat is something they enjoy having under diet. Jason Lusk, Agriculture Economist at Purdue University, has conducted many studies that have found it's really hard to get people to change their diets by providing them more information. Talking to them about the environmental consequences or even animal welfare consequences doesn't seem to have a big impact on people's consumption decisions. So just making people feel bad doesn't seem to do much. And tax in meat products are also really politically unpopular. We seem to be at a bit of a conundrum that we know there are some environmental concerns associated with meat eating. How are we going to produce enough calories and protein to meet a growing world population? How can we do that in a responsible way? So I think about innovation and intensification as a way to get around these conundrums. We know people like to eat meat. How can we give them what they want while reducing the impacts that that consumption has on the environment in one way to do that is try to increase efficiency. Welcome to the Efficient Meat 2.0 episode of the Meat the Four Futures Podcast, presented by Table. I'm Matthew Kessler, your guide for the series. Where we explore four competing visions for the future of meat and livestock. Alternative meat, less meat, no meat, and efficient meat. Can we get more pounds from each cow or chicken? Can we use less feed to produce a pound of meat? Can we use less water, less land to produce an egg or a gallon of dairy? There are many ways to think about efficiency. In this episode, we focus on efficient animal production, so increasing yields and output for the least amount of input. I'm somebody who believes that productivity growth is a cornerstone of sustainability. We can produce what we like to eat in a way that has fewer impacts on natural resources in the environment. That's a more sustainable future for us. Today we farm in meat meat at a scale never seen before in human history. We raise 80 billion animals a year for food. I had a really low cost to the consumer. Here we look at how technology, research, and innovation have paved the way for a more efficient animal agriculture. We are part of the problem today, but we can see that with the right steps, we can actually be part of the solution also. Is this the only way to feed a growing global population? Or is it creating more problems than it's solving? In this episode, we look at how animal farming systems have dramatically scaled up in size in the last half century and become much more productive. Through a combination of improved diets, genetics and breeding, housing, and veterinary care. Some see efficiency improvements in animal agriculture as essential for feeding a growing population and we should strive for continued productivity gains. Others emphasize that the drive to increase yields and keep meat affordable has come at the expense of the environment, public health, and animal welfare. This group says we should eat less meat, switch to plant-forward diets, or create competitive meat alternatives. We'll hear these views in more depth later in the series. And we hope you listen to all the episodes so you can hear the whole story. First, a thought experiment. Part 1, a world without efficiency gains. If you go back to say like the 1970s and calculate the amount of beef produced per cow, imagine that hadn't changed over time. How many more cows would we need today? We wanted to enjoy the amount of beef consumption we actually enjoyed in 2020, but we wanted to do that using 1970s technology. And the answer is in the United States, we need 11 million more feedlot cattle. If we had not innovated and we wanted to enjoy the amount of beef consumption that we enjoyed today. Speaking of 1970s technology, when was the last time you listened to a cassette tape or put a movie in the VCR? Technological advances continued to change the world and our food system. Not only in beef production, but also with chickens. DJ D'Conning, animal geneticist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, makes a similar comparison with the poultry industry and shows how they have increased the efficiency of turning animal feed into animal flesh. If we were in the 60s of the last century, if I wanted 1000 kilograms of broiler meat, I would need to get about 3000 kilograms of grains to feed to the chickens. And that would cost me 1.7 hectares to grow that amount of grain. No need to get out the no pads and calculators. We'll help you with the math. Now if we look in the modern day, I only need 1700 kilograms of grain, so almost half of that. And also to grow that amount, I only need like 0.37, 0.4 hectares to grow. So 60 years ago, you needed almost twice as much feed and four times as much land to produce the same amount of chicken meat as today. So that's because of the increased efficiency in crop production. Growing feed for these animals has become much more productive. This is the recombination of harvesting higher yields and breeding bigger birds. So putting those two together means that I can get those 1000 kilograms broiler meat, 4.5, 5 times more efficient than I could in the 60s. And why does this matter? Do we need billions more chicken today if we hadn't improved the amount of yield, the amount of meat that's being produced per chicken? Those are billions of chickens that would have required feed, that would have required housing, that would have required land, that would have required water. And we got to save all those resources because we improved the efficiency of our production process. We got more from each animal. It isn't only chickens that have seen these improvements, but also cows. This is largely due to finishing cattle on feed lots. So cows finish their lives in confined areas and are fed high energy diets to gain weight faster before slaughter. So while cattle are commonly raised on pastures, many are fattened in these feed lots. Again, Jason Lusk explains what this means. If we save tens of millions of cows, that's tens of millions of cows that would have been emitting methane, we would have had manure that we would have had to deal with and think about how to judiciously dispose of. And so all those things are savings that came about because of innovation and science in entrepreneurship. In high-income countries, we're eating twice as much meat as we ate 50 years ago. And this has been made possible by these efficiency gains, which is a good opportunity to talk about the Jevons Paradox. Jevons Paradox asks if you improve the efficiency of your production, how will that affect consumption? Typically, the price will go down. And if something is cheaper, in the case of food at least, we tend to eat more of it. Let's take the chicken example. Say we are raising individual chickens four or five times more efficient than we did 60 years ago. At a global scale, we're also eating tens of billions more chickens than in the past. And that's expected to increase in the future. So the paradox is there's less greenhouse gas emissions per bird, but the industry as a whole is increasing their emissions. I want to stress here that how much we consume and how much meat we eat is really uneven across the world. As incomes and populations rise, especially across Africa and Asia, we expect that people will eat more meat and most notably chicken. If current trends in poultry consumption continue, estimates suggest that India alone could experience an eightfold increase in eating chicken. So we're using older, less productive technology. We would need multiple planets to feed this growing population. So assuming that the world continues to eat the same amount or more meat in the future, these efficiencies are absolutely crucial. Part 2. The Logic of Efficiency This system didn't happen by accident. It's been a combination of scientific breakthrough and public policy funded by governments. So while advancements in breeding, nutrition and infrastructure had made these farms and factories more productive, the system was also incentivized. In the 1970s, the United States Secretary of Agriculture Earl Buts famously told farmers "Get big or get out." As economists, we tend to believe in economies of scale, which tends to mean that as the size of a firm or industry grows larger, you can reduce the cost of production. That's Jason Rusk again. Here he tells the story of the increased productivity of livestock in the United States, though the scenario might be familiar in other countries. So one way to think about that that's maybe easiest for people to imagine is in crop production. So imagine you have a small farm, one acre, and you're planting something like corn. And you think about the cost of doing that. Okay, now you want to get a little bit bigger, so you go from one acre to say 100 acres. You can get a bit more efficient if you had a tractor and you can plant it in a hand, you can plant with a big tractor that's pulling a plow behind it, putting the seeds in the ground. But that tractor is expensive, like today, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy a tractor. So to make that big capital investment make sense, you need to be able to spread that cost over lots of acres. And so that provides an incentive to grow bigger. And so if you can go from 100 acres to more something like 500 to 1000 acres, once you have that tractor on that larger piece of land, the cost of planting and the cost of harvesting per bushel of corn that gets produced falls. And that same phenomenon can play itself out in animal agriculture, whether we're talking about chickens or cows or pigs, we see a similar phenomenon that that if we can have more production that enables us to buy capital that we wouldn't be able to afford otherwise. And maybe the farmers then able to pay for full time veterinarians to take better care of the health and welfare of the animals. A healthier herd or a flock of animals makes for a better return on investment. So as a result, we generally see patterns in which the cost of animal production falls as size gets larger. That's particularly true in the slaughtering phase or the packing phase of the process. There's a lot of good research on this that as the size of those plants grow, the cost of processing those animals falls. So as a result, the most efficient way, the lowest cost of production way, and again, efficiencies often very much associated with improvements in sustainability. So scale really helps with the efficiency, but you can't just increase the size of the plant since it's only one part of the value chain. So if you want to build a larger plant, though, you need a lot of animals around it, because you want to be able to run that plant at something close to full capacity. So if they're large facilities, they're refrigerated facilities because they're turning animals into meat. Once they're in the form of meat, we need to keep on cold for food safety reasons. And that refrigerated space is expensive. So as a result, you want to achieve those low cost. You want to run as many animals through that plant as you can. So what that means is once somebody makes an investment to build a large processing facility, there's going to be an economic incentive to locate a lot of animals around that processing facility so that they can keep that plant full. And what we've seen over time is this emergence of these economic forces leading to a situation and we tend to see more of a concentration of animals around what are plants are located. Another economic term to bring in here is environmental comparative advantage, which means that different regions have favorable economic and climatic conditions to raise animals around the world. To raise animals and grow crops. Because they're more suited for these ecosystems, they require fewer inputs. For example, coffee is grown in subtropical climates and not in greenhouses in temperate regions or the Arctic. Jason Lesk makes this argument for livestock. It's also the case that animals often tend to either be located where the feed is grown, so around the corn belt, in the United States or in areas where the environment is particularly suited to that animal production. So the United States that would be often be in the West where it's a little drier, where cattle, at least in the feed lot stage of the process. You know, you don't want them in an environment where it's really wet and muddy because that can cause a lot of problems for them. And let's be frank too, there's also some advantage to putting a lot of animals where there's not a lot of people. And so you avoid some externalities by locating in places where there aren't many people. You don't have some of those problems as well. There are some social and ecological downsides that come with the concentration of livestock. The COVID-19 pandemic has put a spotlight on some appalling working conditions in meat packing plants. For example, keeping plants running at full capacity, even when there were severe health risks to the workers. And on the environmental side, one specific challenge that comes with keeping so many animals in a small area is dealing with the large volumes of manure. While some manure can be stored in lagoon or large pools and uses fertilizers, in other places where the concentration of animals is so high, the nutrients from these manure pools can leak into waterways and the air and could cause harms to the health of humans and the environment. Another risk is if there's a disease outbreak or a disruption of major trading ports near a region that intensively produces meat. This can have big impacts on global food trade. We saw this in 2022 with Russia's ongoing war on Ukraine and the blockage of both wheat and fertilizer exports. We've now heard about these theories of economies of scale and environmental comparative advantage. What does it look like on the ground? Just to give an example in the United States, if you draw about 100 mile radius around the molyan Iowa, you'll have 60 to 70% of all US hog production within that area. For cattle, again, if you draw probably 100 mile radius around Wichita, Kansas, you'll have 60 to 70% of total processing capacity in that particular area. Chicken production is more concentrated around Arkansas and other parts of the Southeast United States, but there are these geographic locations that emerge as centers where economies of scale emerge in comparative advantages exist. Once that happens, then it makes sense to let those locations do what they do well and ship us the meat we want and then send them the things that they want. That's just a classic economic story of comparative advantage and trade. But what about food miles? Is it better economically and environmentally to ship food products across the world? Sometimes I think it seems a little bit odd and maybe bad for the environment to say, well, why are we shipping pork, let's say, from Iowa all the way to China? All those food miles have a lot of negative consequences for the environment. Well, the truth is the mileage part of the production process is a relatively small part of the overall carbon picture. Estimates vary, but transportation may account for as little as 3% to somewhere around 15, 15% of all the emissions from the farm to your plate. The range is wide because so much depends on the type of transportation. Remember, we were sailing the ocean blue well before we had fossil fuels, so you can use the ocean currents and those things to help efficiently move products across the ocean. So on the water, that's a very efficient form of transportation. Often it's the case that most of the environmental impacts are happening where the production occurs. And so one lesson from that is we want to grow products where they can be most efficiently grown and then then transport them to where the consumption is. We've talked about efficient production, but what about efficient consumption? Are we just eating specific cuts of the animal and wasting the rest? Or are we eating the whole animal? So the average consumer, of course, does not eat nose to tail. The average consumer eats very specific parts of animals for which increasingly animals are bred. Yondukevich, policy fellow at Harvard Law, points out that we aren't necessarily wasting the animal by not eating all of it. There's a fantastic book by the anthropologist Alex Blanchett called Porcopolis, which is an ethnography of pork factory farming in the Midwestern United States, which shows that animal bodies at the biological level are actually changed and optimized to produce specific cuts of meat. So for instance pigs are optimized to produce more bacon to have more belly. So where one's bacon was in soil now bacon is absolutely everywhere. Americans are bacon obsessed. Actually pigs at the physical level are changed to produce more bacon. You can go back over a hundred years to the stockyards in Chicago and the US and see early traces of the modern intensive farms we have today. That model is predicated on maximizing the use of animal tissue. So as the line went, even the early meat packers used everything from the pig except the squeal. So even if the average consumer isn't eating knows the tail, virtually the entirety of the animal is used for different uses, right? If it's not for eating, where might you find other parts of the pig? So for instance if you look at a hog slaughterhouse, you've got the normal cuts of meat that will come from the pig for the standard Western diet, but you've also got things like ears and traitors and even bums that are exported for specific markets for specific foods. You've got things like heart valves that are used for biomedical purposes. You've got the hair of hogs which goes to things like hogs hair brushes and other applications. I mean this goes on and on right to the use of plasma and the food. the use of fat. So this is part of the highly efficient system of production, consumption, and trade within and outside the food industry. And you know, as Alex Blanchett writes, there are traces of the industrial pig and almost everything we use, right, from bullet casings to concrete, to the very paper that as he writes his book is printed on. So you've actually got a system that uses the entirety of the animal that does actually consume the animal, knows the tail in an extremely efficient way. It's just that that's not how the average consumer engages with that animal. Part 3. From backyard bird to super chicken. Cecille Steele was a housewife living in Delaware in the United States in the early 1900s. One day in 1923, she ordered 50 chicks for her flock of laying heads. There was a mistake in the shipment, which some say marked the beginning of the industrial poultry sector. Cecille Steele ordered 50 chicks, but instead she received 500. She decided to adapt really quickly and raise these animals in the best way she could. Four and a half months later, she sold 387 birds to market. The next year she ordered 1,000 birds, and three years from the day of the accidental delivery, Cecille and her husband were raising 10,000 birds. These chicks were sold to her by Del Marva. If you fast forward nearly 100 years to 2021, the Del Marva Chicken Association recorded $4.2 billion in profit from wholesale chicken sales. You look 100 years ago, then it has really developed from a small scale system with mixed farming to very specialized systems. DJ Dakoning again of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. So if you look at the farm now, you're talking thousands, if not tens of thousands, of birds perform. So there's really scaled up dramatically. People have been eating some chicken meat for the last 2,000 years, and in the last few hundred years, many families who have access to land would keep a small flock nearby in a field, a yard, or even inside their home. But now these farms or warehouses have become highly specialized. From my horizon, which is the breeding, is the the concentration of the breeding activities. If we look at all the laying hands in the world and all the broilers for the broilers, there's maybe only really two big companies worldwide that provide all the broilers to the industry. And likewise, for laying hands, you could say it's maybe two or three. Brailers are chickens produced for meat, and laying hands are chickens that produce eggs. They both share a common ancestor, but have been transformed into very different creatures. So two companies in the world now have the genetic lines that become the commercial broilers. There's really no equivalent for that level of consolidation in any other agricultural production sector. This means it's both ultra-efficient in terms of production and distribution, but it also could be a risk of you "excuse the pun" put all your eggs in a single basket. These breeding companies select chickens for their desirable traits for humans, which could be physical or even personality traits. They aren't editing the genes or splicing DNA. But through these breeding programs, they've increased the size of the birds by four times in the last hundred years, and have bred them to gain weight faster, so they could turn animal feed into flesh at a more efficient rate. Farmers can't breed these birds themselves because they are crosses, so they're dependent on breeding companies for a new stock. That's another impact of the specialization of this industry. When we start to genetically improve animals to become more efficient, it doesn't just happen by themselves. We cannot have a modern layer or a modern broiler in a barnyard system where we give them some scraps, so we need all these improvements, need to be accompanied by health and nutrition and management. So modern broilers and laying hens need special housing systems and specific feeding routines. Raising poultry scale has become a lot more technical than your backyard chickens, and not only more technical, but the conditions that these birds are living in can be pretty horrific. These efficiency gains where some of the chickens have been bred to reach their slaughter weight in as little as six weeks are sometimes packed together in their cages so tightly that they can barely move. DJ to Cohning's research focuses on the bone strength of these birds, particularly laying hens. Strong bones are important for their health and their productivity, and they can be strengthened by both genetics and by having access to exercise and moving around. The other thing that we observe in our data related to different housing systems is that in the housing systems where the birds can move more, they do develop stronger bones, that is the fact, that is really, and that's a good point. Unfortunately, that also gives them more opportunities to hurt themselves. So they're more accident prone in those systems. Poultry housing systems vary. With laying hens, you could have intensive battery cages stacked on top of each other, to larger cages where there's more room to perch, nest, and scratch, to free-ware in systems where there's access to the outdoors during the daytime. Brailleers, on the other hand, are not kept in cages, and across Europe and a few other countries, keeping laying hens in cages has either been banned or is in the process of being phased out. Each of these systems have different costs to humans and to the chickens themselves. Detail accounting suggests that the housing systems of the future will in some ways be shaped by consumer demand, and he reflects on how far the poultry industry has come, and some challenges it will continue to face. With Brailleers, we no longer want faster growth. We actually see that, okay, slightly slower growth, which costs more feet as a golf conflict there, but we realize actually with a little bit slower growth, we get birds that are more in pace with their development and have a better health and welfare. So that's where we have to say, okay, we can't go all the way for efficiency. We don't want any more efficiency there because that's when it's growing too fast for its own good, so to say. How far should we go with efficiency? Can productivity can continue indefinitely? Or as DJ DeConey mentioned, there's a conflict between animal welfare and becoming ultra-efficient. Would you prefer a system that keeps costs down as much as possible and cuts green-esque estimations? Or one that might cost a little more and give more consideration to the welfare of these farmed animals? We're going to visit a pig farm in Sweden that's betting on that next. But if feeding the population as efficiently as possible and using little agricultural land is your primary concern, then you might end up with a 26-story pig skyscraper like the one that opened in China in 2022, where each floor is specialized for breeding, feeding, and growing the pigs at different life stages. You heard that right, a 26-story pig skyscraper. So no access to natural sunlight or wind or fresh pasture in the field, but they do have some space to maneuver and exercise and their health and production is highly supervised. There's even a control center on the bottom floor to monitor temperature, ventilation, and food and water intake. If you'd like to learn more about this system, we'll link to an article that is pictures of the facility in our show notes. We didn't visit China for this podcast, but we did head to a Swedish pig farm that has grown in size and scale over the last few generations. Ilva Krakow's Farmborg, Science Journalist, and Meet the Four Futures Producer, takes us there. Part 4. A Pig Farm in Sweden. Hello, my name is Anders Grinachon, and I produce a sustainable pig here. That was a pig going against the electric fence. So, it learned a lesson. Touching an electric fence hurts. But apart from that necessary limitation of freedom, these 3,500 peaks at Halleform in southern Sweden are probably just about as free as can be, while still being part of a large-scale efficient meat production system. This farm has been in Anders Gunnachon's family for generations. If you're great, great grandfather, could see this, what do you think you would have thought? Oh, this is big. It's the first thought. After that it's, wow. Is it possible to have so many peaks outside? Maybe one thought. As we speak, the sun is rising as well as the temperature. The further the day will go, the more peaks will go out. The 3,500 peaks that live here for 16 weeks until ready for slaughter can choose between running free in a large open area or staying inside with about 1.2 square meters of space each. They live on a farm with a cutting edge mindset when it comes to sustainability, climate impact, and animal welfare. But this is not a typical large-scale meat producing farm. We are part of the problem today, but we can see that with the right steps we can actually be part of the solution also. The large apple gvest is the CEO of HK Scone Sweden, one of the large meat producing companies in the Nordic region of Europe. We need to take actions to change a lot of things, to be more sustainable. We meet on this exceptional production site for HK Scone to demonstrate that sustainable large-scale meat production could possibly be the future of meat. Now we are on a pork farm, but if we look at beef for example, which is painted up as the big problem here, we see actually if we have the energy to take the right steps there, we can actually reduce carbon dioxide and also meat if we produce it right to actually cope with the Paris agreement, which is quite exciting. It was much more found to work if you are a part of a solution than just a part of the problem. Large apple gvest considers meat a nutritious, delicious food that can be produced while considering animal welfare as well as climate and environmental impact. I mean standing here, looking at the Anders fields here, I think we see the great parts. We have entrepreneurs and farmers like Anders who have really focused and tried to approach the problems and really trying to find the solution. There are solutions there and we can really find them. The bad thing with meat production today is when it's so focused and specialized to only grow animal as quick as possible without any holistic thinking, which we can see in certain parts in the world. Unsustainable meat production is often associated with large-scale production, but large apple gvest considers that misconception. Large-scale means that you can use resources where efficient, you can use less energy, you can use less input on more units produced and that is really good for the climate to do that. You make it too easy if you say that large-scale is not good and local, small-scale is good. I think it's actually sometimes very often the opposite in a way. If you look at large-scale production, I think you have a choice there. You can do it in a really climate-friendly way or not. We have so many good examples of large-scale production, which is really a low impact when it comes to carbon dioxide and methane. It's very much about using less resources than the input that you use. Alter-a-matter of it produced here on the garden. While some of Scott's meat producers import feed that has traveled across the globe to feed their animals, 99% of what the pigs eat here is produced on Andersen-Nachon's farm. What you're thinking is at the very core of everything produced here. When I, for example, grow peas, I give it to the pigs and the pigs give me meat and it gives me manure. From the manure I can get my own electricity, my heat and I also get fertilizer to next year. Do you believe in a world where this type of meat production is the norm and not the exception? It's actually up to the consumer to decide that. It's a little bit more expensive, but the pig have a better life. We have a much lower impact of the environment on this way to produce meat. We get some eye contact with the group of about ten, pink and gray pigs, raising round in the morning chill in one of the fenced pastures. Before stopping a few meters away, sniffing in the air. To sum, the fact that you need a slaughter and animal to get meat is the reason they don't eat meat. Anders sees things differently. As meat to him is a natural part of yesterday's, today's and the future's food. The reason why this pig are living is for giving us very good meat. So I give them the most or the best opportunity in life that I can give and they give me a very good meat. That was Swedish pig farmer Anders Gunnersson and Lars Apelkfest, CEO of HK Skån Sweden, one of the big meat producing companies in Northern Europe. Part 5 What's the Beef? Pigs and chickens are the prototypes for the Efficient Farm Animal. Since they can turn animal feed into meat much more efficiently than ruminants like cow's sheep and goats. But they also eat a little more than half of global soybean production, which plays a big role in cutting down rainforests across South America. Out of all the debates about the future of food, beef production probably gets the most attention. But many ruminant advocates also see the need for efficiency gains in their industry. We all have our conscious and unconscious biases and I think those of us who work with livestock often feel that we're under pressure all the time. Everyone hates us, the whole world doesn't want to be beef, you know, etc. Can you introduce yourself? Absolutely. So my name is Jude Kapper. I am a livestock sustainability consultant. Jude Kapper is also a professor of beef and sheep production at Harper Adams University in the United Kingdom. And I try to tell people, let's just put it into context. If we think about it as a normal curve, there are the people who are very against animal farming. There are the people who are very pro animal farming. There's a huge bit in the middle where everyone's just going about their normal life and choosing the foods they eat and not really thinking about it. Jude recognizes that the tensions run high on both sides. So I think those of us in the beef industry do sometimes sort of get a bit too sensitive as it were because we feel like the world's against us. So our, if I can speak for the beef industry, which I've got to call it, my perception and many of us in the industry I think is that everyone blames cattle, cattle of the villains, cattle are emitting greenhouse gases every single day. If we just gave up milk and meat, you know, the perception is that we wouldn't have any global warming. We can still drive huge cars every day, you know, to all be fine and cattle farmers are at art of blame is the simple message that we perceive gets out there. And of course, with all of these things, it's so complicated and we all want a nice easy message and a nice easy headline, just do this, don't do that. But the reality is, you know, it's such a complex nuance argument. The future of cattle farming is complicated. Let's start with some basic positives of beef production, which like other meat is a high quality protein with a full set of easily digestible amino acids. It makes use of much of the land that it's difficult to grow crops on for direct human consumption. And from a global sustainability point of view, I think it's really important to understand that there are billions of smallholder farmers that utterly rely on a grazing livestock for their future and their children's future and that we in their more developed countries can't ignore their needs as well. June will happily talk to you about the benefits of pasture-based livestock. And she'll also tell you what she sees as the advantages of feedlot finish cattle, too. Because we know from a scientific point of view that if we improve efficiency in any system, whether it's housed, outdoor, graze, pasture, whatever it might be, that will cut the carbon footprint that will improve the efficiency of resource use. And we know that to finish cattle inside, for example, or in a feedlot on a high-end G-high protein diet will have lower carbon footprint can have some benefits depending on your market and what that market's used to in terms of the taste or the texture of beef as well. So raising animals on grass and finishing them on feed lots, fadden the animals faster than if they are kept out on pastures. Put bluntly, the faster they get to slaughter weight, the less days alive, the fewer the greenhouse gas emissions. And faddening these animals quicker also helps create this fat marbled beef that many eaters enjoy. We publish a work in the Journal of Animal Science a few years back now looking at the environmental impact of the US beef industry in 1977 to compare to 2007. And in that 30 year period, there were changes. You know, things became slightly more intensive, more productive, but not. It wasn't like every animal in 1977 was out on pasture and every animal in 2007 was in a feed lot. You know, things just got better over time, so better management, better health, better genetics and a better understanding of how to feed cattle in a healthy way, ultimately. And based on that research, for example, we saw a 16, so 1/6 percent decrease in the carbon footprint per kilo of beef over those 30 years and concomitant decreases in water use, land use, fuel use, etc. So, you know, overall positives. And I haven't seen equivalent work with the UK, although I have seen it for various other regions, including Canada. And we've seen the same trends across all of the middle or higher income countries in terms of beef production. Jude Capran knows that beef has a high carbon footprint and says the industry is working to cut it back. Beef does have a higher carbon footprint than almost any other food. And there's no way to get around that. And if we try to deny that, you know, then we're just being disingenuous frankly. So, while we are doing everything we can to cut it and we're improving feeds and we're looking at technologies that can cut antoconethane and we're using byproduct fees and better genetics and breeding for more efficient cattle and, you know, so on and so on and so on. The fact remains that the carbon footprint is still high compared to let's say peas or tofu or even chicken, for example. Some of these technologies include giving cattle different types of feed, like seaweed, to reduce the emissions associated with their methane verbs. Seaweed has been a part of some room in its diets for centuries. In recent studies, adding seaweed to their diet has shown to reduce methane emissions ranging from 50 to 98%. But we still don't know what impact it will have on beef and dairy yield, as there have been no long-term studies yet to prove or disprove its efficacy. Jude Capran thinks a lot about livestock farmers and wants them to continue for generations to come. But she's concerned. Because ultimately, without that social acceptability, you know, we may not have a market in five years, ten years, fifteen years, twenty years. So what does Jude suggest to improve the public image and reputation of livestock farmers? Ultimately, we have to share our values. The most productive conversation that we can have is to say as a farmer, as a vet, as an animal health industry professional, whoever it is, this is what I care about, this is why I do what I do, this is why I think it's important that we all have dietary choices, protect the environment, look after the rural community, etc. So we have to share our values. And I think in the beef industry, we have a real positive story to talk about. That was Jude Capran, sustainable livestock consultant and professor at Harper-Adams University, believing that they're sharing the story of farmers and continuing to pour research into improving the efficiency of these animals. We can better mitigate the climate impacts of beef. Part 6. Wizards and Profits If you've been listening to this episode and just can't find any agreement with what the guests have been saying, you might just be a profit. There are very different ideologies, philosophies about the world and I think two competing views of the world that maybe are best articulated in Charles Mann's book, Wizard and Profit. So not that kind of profit and not that kind of wizard. Jason Lusk again from Purdue University is talking about a book by Charles Mann, The Wizard and the Profit, who writes about two brilliant 20th century scientists, who hold diametrically opposing views about the environment and how humans should live in the future. According to Charles Mann, the profit looks to the future and forces disaster. There are only so many resources to go around and more and more mouths to feed. The risks seem huge. One hand of view of the world where we've got natural planetary limits that we can't surpass and as a result, I think proponents of that view really, in their view, the solution is to reduce consumption, try to reduce population growth because we're going to run up against these planetary limits. Planetary boundaries is a pretty well accepted concept and you'll hear more about it in the last meat episode. Although not everyone agrees with the framing that the economy should stop growing, so everyone in the present and the future has the ability to prosper. The other view in which frankly I probably subscribe to myself is the Wizard view. Yes, there may be limits at any point in time, but if we can continue to be innovative, we can find ways to get more with resources. And maybe even resources we are even thinking about now. And so growth can continue on out into the future that we don't have to reduce our consumption here in the United States, say to help improve consumption across the world. It's not a zero-sum game. This is a more politically popular view that eco-modernists believe in. It's an environmentalist philosophy that suggests if we can convert our energy sources to renewable energies, if we can electrify and decarbonize the grid that powers us, then we can continue to consume the way we do since we're no longer dependent on fossil fuels. And we can do this globally in a just way. And I think, you know, different people are going to approach those problems in ways that you're bringing your life of experience and your own ideologies to bear, you know, as I said, I tend to find myself more on the Wizard view of things. And so as a result, I think one thing I realized, it's at least helpful knowing that there are people that really view the world in a different way than I do because sometimes feels like we're talking past each other, but at least I can understand sometimes why somebody may be more opposed to my more technologically, you told me a few of the world, let's say, is that they're bringing a more constrained view of more planetary limit view to the world. So are you a Wizard or a Prophet? Do you find it inevitable that the demand for meat will continue to grow? And the only way to reduce its negative impacts on the environment is to produce it as sustainably as possible? Or do you think we should cut out meat some or entirely from our diets? We put out a call for listeners to share their thoughts on the podcast and you came through. One of our listeners bumped on a phrase we used in our first episode, the quote "growing global demand for meat." She called into challenging assumption that there's no way around the rising demand for meat. My name is Eleanor Boyle, I'm a food policy researcher in Vancouver, Canada. My point is that we need to deeply question what is often called the growing global demand for meat as if that were inevitable. I think the phrase implies that global citizens are clamoring for more and more meat and that producers are simply responding. And it's true that in our market economies demand can drive supply, but supply can also drive demand. In mature industrial economies, one common phenomenon is overproduction or oversupply. And meat, multinationals now turn out so much beef, chicken, and pork that they are motivated to amplify natural demand. Encouraging consumers to believe that they need more and more. I'm not suggesting that demand is entirely constructed. Human beings have long wanted to eat meat, but today's tendency to eat meat virtually ever meal in some regions is unprecedented. Many thanks to Eleanor Boyle for her comment. And before wrapping up, I wanted to share some personal reflections after making this episode. First, the premise of an efficiency future is pretty compelling and pretty pragmatic. Let's produce food in a way that keeps greenhouse gas emissions low and costs low, so not just the rich, but everyone will be able to afford meat for their family. So that's the premise of efficiency, but is efficiency everything? Earlier we talked about the Jevons paradox, which shows how increased efficiency of production also increases demand, meaning that at the end of the day, we aren't necessarily using less resources to produce meat, but more. Another important issue that comes up when striving for greater efficiency is the increased risk to public health. Due to the crowded and confined conditions in which livestock are raised, these environments can become breeding grounds for bacteria and viruses. This increases the chances that diseases can spread from animal to animal and even jump from animal to human. This is one concern that's been raised around the 26th story pig skyscraper, which leads to my last open question. What does increased efficiency mean for the living conditions and welfare of farmed animals? So I just pose some questions, but at the same time, I do find myself wondering whether these trade-offs surrounding animal welfare, public health, and the environment are truly inevitable. Or are there technologies, policy proposals, or other solutions out there that can address these concerns? Maybe you have some experience yourself about efficient solutions that you'd like to share, or some other questions or dilemmas that you're grappling with. We'd love to hear from you. You can share your ideas, questions, and comments to this series by recording your voice in a quiet room and sending it to [email protected]. Next week we speak with people who don't want to replace people's love of beef with beans and chicken with chickpeas, but with other meat-like alternatives. To hear that we could grow meat from cells made me feel like, "Oh my gosh, this is such an obvious next step for humanity and a real win-win-win when you think about not just reducing environmental impact, but also animals need not suffer anymore for food." Once you've had a bite of the future, how can you deny its inevitability? Thanks to you all for listening, you can rate and review us on Spotify, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen. A big thanks to all the guests in this episode. You can find links to their work, their research, and their farms on our website, tabledebates.org/meat. What the four features is funded by Formis and Sweden, initiated by the future food platform and produced by Table, a collaboration between the University of Oxford, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, and VACCAN in the University. This episode was edited and mixed by Matthew Kessler and Ilva Kalkos-Varnborg and a huge team of support, music by Blue Doc sessions and epidemic sound. Kalki next week in the Alternative Meet Future.