Farming smaller cattle breeds

Dexter cattle were considered an endangered livestock breed, but environmental concerns in addition to rising energy and food costs are making mini moos like Dexter cattle popular again. From the Times Online:

For between £200 and £2,000, people can buy a cow that stands no taller than a large German shepherd dog, gives 16 pints of milk a day that can be drunk unpasteurised, keeps the grass “mown” and will be a family pet for years before ending up in the freezer.

The Dexter, a mountain breed from Ireland, is perfect for cattle-keeping on a small scale, but other breeds are being artificially created to compete with it, including the Mini-Hereford and the Lowline Angus, which has been developed by the Australian government to stand no more than 39in high but produce 70% of the steak of a cow twice its size.

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“As long as you’ve got plenty of grass they will be fine. You don’t really have to feed them.”

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In America, small cow breeds such as the mini-Hereford are catching on among professional farmers keen to save money as the cost of feed skyrockets. These Herefords consume about a third less feed than normal cows and produce proportionately more beef for the amount of grain they eat.

Kangaroo ranching

Hoof stock such as cattle, goats, and sheep damage the land as they graze, and are susceptible to drought and disease. Furthermore, cattle produce a lot of methane, which is a greenhouse gas. However, it has been proposed that Australians should be ranching native species of kangaroo for meat in order to fight climate change. Kangaroo has been described as tasting “a little bit like deer“ or “a nice cut of beef.” From ABC Online, Australia:

In fact, 11 per cent of Australia’s total greenhouse gases come from cattle and sheep.

Kangaroos are animals that don’t burp methane because they have different micro-organisms to help them digest food. If we were to replace some of the cattle and sheep in Australia with kangaroos we could reduce the number of animals producing methane and at the same time promote natural habitats instead of hoof-damaged pastures.

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Current prices for kangaroo products are lower than they are for cattle, sheep and wool. However, the cost of producing a kilogram of kangaroo meat from a free-ranging animal that needs minimal management would be lower than those for cattle or sheep. For example, there are no costs for fences or yards, internal or external parasite control, shearing, crutching, purchasing new genetic material (e.g., stud rams and bulls), branding, dehorning or castrating.

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Livestock grazing damage to native ecosystems has contributed to the extinction of at least 20 species of mammals and continues to threaten around one quarter of the plant species listed as endangered. Fewer livestock and more kangaroos could include a reduction in hard-hoofed livestock damage to river environments, improved soil conservation, fewer weeds, increased capacity of vegetation to respond after drought, and improved water quality. These changes can improve native environments leading to an increase in habitat quality for other species such as emus, wombats, lizards and bilbies.

Raising giant rabbits

The North Koreans and Chinese are interested in breeding German gray giant rabbits as a source of protein for their people. From ABC News:

Could a plan to feed starving people with giant rabbits really work?

Szmolinsky estimates that it costs about $1,000 a year to feed the 60 bunnies he keeps in his yard. When you think that each full-grown rabbit has 15 pounds of meat on its bones, though, the payback is handsome.

Fifteen pounds is the equivalent of 60 hamburgers, but it’s not all good eating. The 15 pounds include the liver, heart, stomach, and even the meat on the rabbits’ gigantic heads.

As the old saying goes, they breed like rabbits. While one cow has one calf every year, one female rabbit can give birth to 16 bunnies in a year, and a male rabbit can impregnate two female rabbits every day.

Even if Szmolinsky doesn’t ship any more rabbits to North Korea, if North Koreans breed the animals correctly, the 12 they already have could multiply to more than 1 million in just eight years.

UPDATE 1 ( JAN. 10): A beef producer claims that his grass-fed production model is able to match the productivity of confinement systems. From the Winnipeg Free Press (emphasis added):

Churchill is the founder and co-owner of the Minnesota-based Thousand Hills Cattle Co., which contracts with about 50 family farms and ranches in the northern United States to produce 100 per cent grass-fed cattle. Those cattle are processed through a small-scale plant in Minneapolis and made into branded meat products for distribution through restaurants and retail outlets.

His production chain delivers a high-quality product to consumers who are willing to pay up to double commodity beef prices. It also pays farmers prices that are an average premium of 15 per cent.

He’s passionate about the relative merits of grass-finished beef from an economic, social as well as environmental viewpoint. It’s beef with a story and in his view, a lighter carbon footprint.

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Once you factor in the bovine’s methane-spewing ruminant digestive system, the costs of producing and transporting feed, manure management, transportation, processing and distributing the refrigerated or frozen product — beef is seen as the major culprit.

Grass-fed systems may be more natural and socially appealing, but many researchers say they don’t hold up to scrutiny, primarily due to their lower productivity. While confinement systems have resulted in higher greenhouse gas emissions per animal, the system overall produces significantly more meat with fewer animals.

By comparison, traditional grazing takes more time to finish an animal and it creates relatively more methane gas because forages are harder to digest.

This is where Churchill believes he holds the trump card. What if the forage-finished systems were as productive as the feedlots?

“The confinement industry’s common response to criticism right now is to say ‘we have to feed the world’ and that doesn’t work if there are viable (alternative) models out there,” he said.

Churchill said the grass-fed production model that feeds his supply chain is able to match the productivity of confinement systems because it uses highly productive land that would otherwise be sown to crops like corn and soybeans. The high-quality forages produced are harvested through rotational grazing. Typically, cattle are grazed on marginal lands not suitable for annual crop production.

Churchill says his approach increases the productive capacity of the land while reducing its carbon footprint. “By taking it out of corn and soybean rotations and growing very high-quality forages with it, I am actually producing more beef per acre than if I had harvested the corn and the soybeans and brought them to a feedlot.”

Churchill also points out the economics of intensive livestock production systems are predicated on cheap energy and mountains of cheap feed grain — neither of which are likely to exist in the future. If he is correct, the political will to continue propping these systems up will evaporate as equally productive alternatives develop.

Still others say there is no debate; we should all just stop eating meat and obtain our protein from pulse crops like peas, beans and lentils. Nutritionally speaking, the latest research says we’d all be healthier with less meat and more legumes in our diets.

However, much of our farmland is highly erodible and can’t support annual crops over the long term — especially pulse crops that leave little by way of crop residue behind. Ruminants such as cattle are uniquely equipped to convert the sun’s energy into consumable protein, while at the same time playing a valuable role in nutrient-recycling and soil-building.

In all likelihood, meat will continue to be on the menu, but there might be less of it and it will probably cost more.

Video: Grass-fed vs. corn-fed beef: Feeding cattle fast food: Some farmers are feeding their cattle a mixture of M&Ms or chocolate and potato chips in addition to the corn-based feed. I imagine the chocolate and potato chips aren’t satisfactory to market or suitable for human consumption.

Information on the images used in this blog post:

Photo source for attribution for the Dexter cattle image is here, and the photo source for attribution is here for the grass-fed cattle image. The authors or licensors of these images do not endorse my work or me, and their images are protected under an attribution license. The giant rabbit image was found here, and the Kangaroo meat in the supermarket image was found here

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