Because on timescales up to a decade the mineral component of soil is approximately fixed, this rather vague idea addresses organic components of soil and thus biogeochemical cycling. Most proposed routes to achieving such putative less resource-intensive beef envision small to medium mixed-use farms, in which cattle are a cornerstone element on account of promoting local recycling of nutrients and thus “soil building”. When contested, it is most often on the grounds that while the above findings fairly characterize hyperintensive industrial agriculture, more sustainable agricultural models that currently contribute very little to total production can deliver far less resource-intensive beef. While widely held, this view is not universal.

Consuming less beef can thus potentially mitigate climate change and environmental degradation. Correspondingly, beef production dominates total US resource use for food production. Compared with poultry, beef requires 7, 70, 22, and 10 times as much high-quality cropland, total land, irrigation water, and fertilizer, respectively, while emitting 11 times the greenhouse gases per gram of protein. As defined here, NSA is thus potentially a viable, scalable environmentally superior alternative to the current US food system, but only when combined with the commitment to substantially enhance our reliance on plant food.īeef is the most resource intensive of all commonly used foods. The model also permits 70%–80% of today’s beef consumption, raises today’s protein delivery by 5%–40%, and averts approximately 60% of today’s fertilizer use and approximately 10% of today’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Assuming the model is deployed throughout the high-quality, precipitation-rich US cropland (delimiting approximately 100 million ha, less than half of today’s agricultural land use) and neglecting potential macroeconomic obstacles to wide deployment, I find that NSA could produce a diverse, high-quality nationwide diet distinctly better than today’s mean US diet. Focusing on the most common eutrophication-causing element, N, I devise a specific model of mixed-use NSA comprising numerous small farms producing human plant-based food and forage, the latter feeding a core intensive beef operation that forgoes synthetic fertilizer and relies only on locally produced manure and N fixers. Here, I thus ask whether nitrogen-sparing agriculture (NSA) can offer a viable alternative to the current US food system. Yet the dietary potential of such models is currently poorly known.

Livestock, especially cattle, are central to these models, which advocates describe as the context most likely to overcome beef’s environmental liabilities. Disproportionate synthetic fertilizer use during beef production propels a vigorous one-way factory-to-ocean nutrient flux, which alternative agriculture models strive to rectify by enhancing in-farm biogeochemical cycling. Beef is the most resource intensive of all commonly used food items.

Ahrens hobby farm