Did You Know These Environmental Benefits??
- Grazing cows help to maintain the landscape: With the help of the rancher, the cattle actually can help maintain and enhance the prairie grass and farm landscape. If the cattle is normally rotated, they can help grass grow faster just by eating it.
- Grass fed cattle promotes a more sustainable agriculture: Grass fed cattle’s natural fertilizer helps sustain a better agriculture. The great thing is that their manure is pure and doesn’t contain any chemicals and/or hormones.
- Pasture raising cattle result in healthier animals: restoration of natural grasslands for cattle to graze on helps other animals have a healthier life.
What About These Facts?
- The issue of efficiency. Cattle can convert grasses (which humans cannot digest) into food that humans can eat (meat). When cows are fed corn and grain they are eating food that humans can eat, which is not very efficient.
- Confined animal feeding operations produces a lot of pollution.
- Organic beef ranching promotes cleaner water: Huge amounts of manure in one place that have not been disposed properly leak into the ground soil and contaminate the water supply. Manure is naturally nutrient rich. If it gets into lakes or rivers, it will cause huge amounts of algae to grow which can kill fish. To fix this problem, switching to organic grass-fed beef will help as to giving enough land for the cattle to graze on, then the soil will absorb their manure as a nutrient instead of a waste and so they don’t use growth hormones to accelerate their growth which in this case if it does leak to the river or lake, it won’t harm the water supply. Although all cattle produce greenhouse gasses, the UCS has determined that a well-maintained pasture and careful management of the grazing animals can draw greenhouse gasses out of the air and store them in the soil where they fuel plant growth. The overall impact is positive. Feedlots have no living plants – just bare dirt and manure; instead of absorbing greenhouse gasses, they emit them.
