Every time I hear the word “sustainable,” I chuckle. Raising cattle is one of the most sustainable ventures there is. We have family ranches that have been around for five and six generations. We are sustainable.
I’ve been hearing a little noise about NCBA involvement with the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef (USRSB) because they are partnering with the likes of World Wildlife Fund, which has been combating beef production in other countries. Some folks are considering it almost treasonous to the cattle business. Frankly, I have no problem with NCBA being at the table. We just don’t want the U.S. cattle business on the table to be dissected.
The USRSB has motivated the beef industry to develop justifiable information on why we need cattle on the range. The NCBA has funded research, with checkoff dollars, that illustrates the unrealized benefits of cattle and their contribution to what we now call “ecosystem services.”
Remember those words—they will become important.
Ecosystem services covers four general areas: provisioning (producing food, water, fiber, and fuel wood); supporting (sustaining the biodiversity of plant species, and the fertility and renewal of ecosystem); regulating (managing pest and invasive species, water and air quality, weather extremes, and items that would regenerate and decompose); and of course, culture (supporting local heritage, educational recreations, and aesthetic qualities of the ecosystem).
Most of that we currently do but have never quantified its value in terms of dollars.
Several land-grant universities collaborated to evaluate common datasets from USDA’s Farm Services Agency, National Ag Statistics Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife, Livestock Marketing Information Center and Headwater Economics. These folks looked at the data and found 620,000 beef operations that managed 337 million acres, but they excluded grazing land under federal permits. These ranches supported 20.4 million head of beef cows. They estimated the value of this farm and ranch real estate was $523.4 billion and employed 1.9 million workers and family labor.
These folks tried to quantify how much hunting, fishing and wildlife-watching days were worth at $38.11 per acre. Then just the value of pasture and rangeland was worth $57.67 per acre and the cows on those pastures and rangeland were worth $726.01. These folks even calculated that ecosystem services add 86 cents to a pound of beef.
Got that? Each cow generates $726.01 in economic value to society. Believe me, the is one story every rancher needs to be up on and tell everyone they can.
Not much of this research concerned cattle operations in the Western states because most of them run on some form of public land. If public lands ranching was penciled in, the benefits to society would be much higher because livestock people are the only ones to develop much of these arid Western lands.
Cattle production is a provisioning service. Cattle spend most of their life consuming forage on land that is generally not farmable. Cows convert worthless forage into valuable beef. In other words, an unhealthy ecosystem produces no value or benefit.
These services are essentially provided free to the community that each farm or ranch with livestock provides—simple things like a pleasing view, the ability to hunt and fish and bird watch. We provide a nature experience for many communities. These are all unrealized benefits to the community, which they pay nothing for, and cattle producers also receive nothing.
Take the cows, sheep or goats off the land and the ecosystem will grow wild and produce fuel for catastrophic wildfires. Without cows, bringing bison back would be the only way to manage these range and pasture lands, and who wants to do that?
Demonstrating our continued sustainability is something this industry must do. It’s a buzz word we can’t avoid, even if the definitions sound ambiguous. They were meant to be ambiguous to provide flexibility. When it comes to beef production, one-size production protocols don’t work; there is too much environmental variability and cultural diversity.
When this USRSB started, the industry was afraid powerful environmental groups were going to give us a set of hard, fast rules we would have to live by to be considered sustainable. But now someone has made the effort to quantify and value these social benefits of running livestock. The next step is to quantify these values into the U.S. Tax Code. An environmental tax credit would be good and really give agriculture incentive to do more with less. — PETE CROW
