Has "peak meat" been reached? Why one nation is attempting to reduce its livestock population

 January 16, 2023 11:00GMT

Dutch farms are feeling the squeeze from EU rules and need to make sweeping changes to the farm system – could a huge producer like the US follow suit?

                                  Thousands of dairy farmers in the Netherlands, including Ingrid de Sain, claim that they occasionally lay awake at night. Her farm of 100 cows in north Holland has been unlawful ever since a court decision in 2019 revealed that the Dutch were violating European environmental rules.

She hopes for a future in which she can support herself and resume farming lawfully, just like the other 2,500+ farmers whose environmental clearance was abruptly revoked.

Scientists predict that questions about how to strike a balance between the needs of the environment and how we farm and grow will soon affect all intensively farmed areas, starting with the Netherlands. Have we reached "peak meat," similar to "peak oil," where there is so much local pollution from livestock that there is no other viable option but to reduce it? The US, the top beef-producing nation in the world, will soon have to respond to these queries.

With "pain in our hearts," the Dutch government launched the first phase of a €24.3 billion ($26.3 billion) plan in November to buy out up to 3,000 farms and significant industrial polluters in close proximity to designated nature areas. After a year of demonstrations, tough talks, and a study in October that suggested buying out the top 500 or 600 polluters within a year, only the broad strokes of the plan have been revealed.

The reason is that the country is required by EU legislation to conserve regions of distinctive, natural environment known as Natura 2000 ecosystems, which are being harmed by the emissions of ammonia, nitrogen oxides, and nitrous oxide. According to forecasts from the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, this entails cutting local nitrogen compound emissions from 12% to 70%, as well as reducing the 118 million farm animals in the Netherlands by 30% by 2030.

Tjeerd de Groot, a member of the Dutch house of representatives and the coalition party D66's agriculture spokesman, favours halving the population of pigs and chickens as well as fewer cows that are raised on pasture rather than imported grain and soy for feed. He said that there was a problem with agriculture "wherever you turn," emphasising the damage that the ensuing pollution had done to biodiversity and water quality. "Yes, we have been a major exporter, but the environment is now costing us dearly."

Environmentalists contend that in order to support various agricultural practises with a good revenue, the Netherlands must reform every component of its food system chain. Natasja Oerlemans, leader of the food team at the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Netherlands, observed that "all the indicators are red." "The Netherlands' meat and dairy production systems can no longer be maintained at current level. That has long been evident.

Scientists who think the world has to take action to decrease livestock rather than depending on voluntary pollution reduction or technology alternatives that may be untested at scale say that all eyes are on the Netherlands.

Dr. Helen Harwatt, a senior research fellow at Chatham House and a climate policy scholar at Harvard University, stated that the main difference between this metric and earlier ones is a decrease in the quantity of animals. She was the leader of a group of experts that demanded action in 2019 to prevent cattle decreases. "Rather than limiting the quantity of agricultural production, we frequently only see technical solutions to reducing nitrogen at the point of production or minimising leakage to the environment. All eyes will be on the Netherlands to see what it can learn from this change.

Harwatt contends that reductions should be a part of a more comprehensive green approach since livestock, which is raised for both meat and dairy, has significant negative environmental effects. According to her, current global goals include protecting more land for biodiversity, halting deforestation, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and increasing livestock production. There are presently more cattle and more than three times as many people on the earth than there are wild animals. As diets all across the world shift to embrace more animal products, livestock output is expected to keep rising. The environment or biodiversity shouldn't suffer because something has to give.

Pete Smith, professor of soils and global change at Aberdeen University in Scotland, predicts that the US and Denmark may soon experience similar problems. He remarked, "Last year, we showed that animal husbandry accounts for 57% of greenhouse gas emissions from the food chain. "It has an outsized impact on the climate. The problem is that we have more animals than the climate can sustain because of how intensively we farm. Given that the Netherlands has the largest issue, I am not surprised that it is leading.

The US is the second-largest producer of pork in the world, and it is the world's top producer of beef, poultry meat, and cow's milk. Nothing comes close to beef when it comes to the amount of nutrients that are polluted per kilogramme of food produced, according to Harwatt. "Feed crops provide about two-thirds of all crop calories generated in the US. However, livestock production makes up less than 1% of US GDP, and on the area now utilised for growing feed crops for farmed animals, at least twice as much food could be produced for people.

According to the US Department of Agriculture, the US will produce 12,820,000 metric tonnes of beef and veal this year, a little decrease of 6% owing to the drought but an increase in pig and poultry output.

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, agricultural runoff is the primary cause of "water quality impacts to rivers and streams, the third leading source of lakes, and the second largest source of impairments to wetlands." Animal farming has been linked to 17,900 air-based pollution-related deaths in the US each year. The Mississippi River is one illustration.

Despite having a new special envoy on biodiversity and water resources and having signed accords like the G7 2030 Nature Compact, which pledges to stop biodiversity loss, the US is not a signatory to the Convention on Biological Diversity, which might be a barrier to implementing a Dutch-style strategy.

Instead of relying on climate mitigation techniques like seaweed additions or manure digesters, Dr. Matthew Hayek, assistant professor of environmental studies at New York University, suggests determining a point of "peak livestock" and striving for decrease. When compared to just producing and consuming less, he added, "They don't solve part of the problem and their technological efficiency hasn't been proved at levels of scale."

"In the United States, midwestern states in particular, nitrogen concentrations and 'impaired waterways' are still far higher than are legally permitted. States can, however, carve out exclusions, and this is what has been done in Iowa and many other states with a lot of maize and beef production. Simply put, there aren't the legal safeguards or societal pressure to deal with them, especially given the extent of the agriculture sectors' social and regulatory domination.

We also have some nitrogen pollution that is "acceptable." We manage to somehow transform a lot of the 'point source' pollution from industrial animal husbandry into non-point source pollution, which is not tightly controlled, by dispersing it over fields, he said.

In order to enhance water quality in the Chesapeake Bay and raise public awareness, Hayek thinks "soft" measures, like vegan meals as a default in New York City hospitals, might be paired with municipal legislation, like the 2010 "total maximum daily load" restriction. In many cases, he claimed, we choose to consume meat simply because we are unaware that there is an alternative. In our regulatory frameworks, we also don't properly combine the micro and the macro scales. We're focusing on a single farm or field, but we're not questioning whether the nitrogen load in the watershed is greater than what it can take.

It would appear simpler to address "macro" policy in a country of 17.8 million people in the compact, densely populated Netherlands.

However, political activity in this country is rife with strife, divergent interests, rage, and mistrust.

Farmers complain of years of uncertainty, claim that pollution sources including industry, aircraft, and road traffic are seldom addressed, and claim that their business has reduced pollution more than any other. No other industry has innovated as much to decrease nitrogen as the rural community, according to Kees Hanse, a farmer and wind farm owner from Zierikzee who is running in the Zeeland elections for the burgeoning BBB Farmer-Citizen Movement. "We don't want to become much bigger, but we'll keep innovating and working to give people access to healthy food sources. It is not the goal of nitrogen reductions to acquire farmers. Industry, air traffic, shipping, and automobile movements should all contribute.

A former agricultural minister secretly withdrew the suggestion that Dutch people reduce their meat consumption from a 2019 climate awareness campaign because it was so divisive.

Some people think the new ideas' nitrogen pricing scheme will be beneficial.

According to MP de Groot, "farmers haven't done anything illegal; they have just done what the economics mandates." Food is too inexpensive since pollution is not taxed. In the Netherlands, the cost of the damage has been estimated at €7 billion annually. That should be [monetized], and the economy will then transform.

Environmentalists like Oerlemans call for closer examination of other players in the food chain, such as feed manufacturers and banks, as well as assistance for farmers looking to switch to more lucrative, lower-intensity farming and related services like nature preservation, flood plain management, and carbon sequestration.

However, assurance cannot come fast enough for dairy producers like de Sain, one of those the government wants to legalise by forcing "peak polluters" to quit. She responded, "Farmers always obeyed the regulations.

 "Why would I milk 100 cows if I could get by with 50?"

Under the terms of a Creative Commons licence, this article has been taken from The Guardian. Go here to read the original article.