The Importance of Ruminants to Food Security*

Or how humans get nutrients from grass and weeds.

*Revised and reposted for new subscribers.

I have been distressed with the misguided attempt to remove ruminants from the human diet because of the methane they produce. Here are some thoughts for your consideration:

1.  The emissions from ruminants are natural. Very much as natural as burning trees as “renewable biomass”, ruminants have been ruminating for eons. After all cows and sheep are renewable. They have not caused global warming.  I have suspicions that the vegan influence on the global warming activists might possibly be the impetus behind this drive to eliminate our ruminating friends.

2. Ruminants are VERY important to human food security. The rangelands that cattle, sheep, and goats graze are unsuitable to crop production. So if you remove ruminants from the human diet, you will have to replace all that nutrition with some other form. Our seas are already suffering from over fishing.  More arable acres are not being created in the corn belt. I think this point alone is iron clad. The human race cannot replace ruminants with other nutritional sources. Think about it - ruminants convert grass, weeds and tree leaves to food.  Keep in mind that pigs and chickens compete with humans for food since their diet consists mainly of corn and soybeans. And you don’t see many people eating grass and elm leaves. When my kids were small we had a goat named Bucket. (That’s what happens when you let the children name the goat!). Bucket loved eating leaves from the elm trees more than any other food. Chickens and pigs don’t do that. Millions of acres of marginal land are used for grazing cattle, sheep, and goats. It is a valuable use of land that otherwise would not be utilized.  The great thing about range land is that it is also the habitat of an enormous variety of wildlife species. Even if you could convert it to farmland, you would be destroying the habitat of wildlife and negatively impacting biodiversity.

The U.S. consumption of beef amounted to 27.3 billion pounds in 2019, not counting pork, lamb, and chicken. How many millions of acres of beans and other vegetables must be grown to replace that protein in our diet?  Where would one grow those millions of additional acres of beans and veggies?

3.  Ruminants are not new to the environment. There were an estimated 30 to 75 million buffalo on the Great Plains of North America before the buffalo hunters hunted them to near extinction.  That compares with the 11.9 million head of cattle on feed in the US today. That’s lots of buffalo farts that evidently didn’t cause global warming because the buffalo were gone before the rise in temperatures that activists talk about.  When the buffalo hunters butchered the buffalo herds, they destroyed the ability of the native Americans to survive by taking away their primary source of food, clothing and shelter. Food, clothing and shelter that came from the vast grasslands that covered the Great Plains.

4.  The hides of ruminants are the source for producing leather. Leather is a renewable resource used in handbags and other items. Think of all the things you have ever had that were made of leather. How cool will it be for crude oil based plastics, vinyls and other synthetics to replace every leather product you have ever used?

Some people want to compare the carbon footprints of things in order to decide which is the “moral” choice. So let’s do that regarding leather and oil based synthetic alternatives (just for the fun of it). If burning trees as “renewable biomass” is carbon neutral, then surely leather is a carbon neutral renewable resource. Therefore, leather should be the “moral” choice.

Ruminants were designed to be an integral part of a diverse food chain. If we manage our rangelands and wildlife properly, ruminants can be a valuable source of human protein far into the future.