Grass Fed - The Fantasy You Want to Believe

All images taken in Point Reyes National Seashore by Skyler Thomas

Cattle and birds gather around a feeding trough on degraded soil in Point Reyes

I read two very different articles this week regarding grass fed beef; The first thoroughly debunked the glorification of “grass fed” as some sort of earth-friendly meat option .  The other article discussed removing the cattle operations in Point Reyes.  If you someone  who currently enjoys eating meat and don’t want to give it up you’ll likely reject any data in article one regardless of merit, so let’s just skip to article two.

A location meant to serve as the poster child of “grass fed”, Point Reyes National Seashore instead provides a focal point for everything wrong with animal agriculture, even when it is "small, local, and organic".  The damage, which is both scientifically and visually undeniable, has led to increasing public scrutiny as to why ranchers, paid millions for their land, continue to receive new leases within this national seashore.  A few reader comments below the article expressed concern for where these grass fed operations would move to if they didn’t operate in the seashore. To me, this indicates that those with this concern are picturing the grass fed operations in Point Reyes as something they are not.

McClure Ranch, Point Reyes National Seashore

Look closely at the ground these cattle are "grazing" on

McClure Ranch, Point Reyes National Seashore

Erase the fantasy of cattle getting fat on grass and wildflowers.  The bulk of the year the pastoral zone looks like brown, hammered shit, sometimes even resembling a demilitarized zone. The remaining portion of the year it improves to green, hammered shit.  That last, and shortest portion of the year is the one from which the fantasy must be derived.  Non-native, annual grasses are reseeded, plastered with manure, and grown briefly before the cattle hammer it back down to nothing.  Sure, the cattle may roam the land, but much of that time they are walking on bare soil, manure, and a few species of noxious weeds that even the cattle don’t want.  In these months the cattle are mostly fed at concentrated feeding areas with supplemental feed.  This is the reality of ranching.  This is the effect ranching has on native vegetation.  This is the effect ranching has on habitat. This is why the cattle are often found outside their legal grazing boundaries, destroying what little native vegetation remains and polluting the water channels.

As good as it gets - The "lush" part of the year in Point Reyes

There are several lessons here:

1. The aforementioned surviving vegetation exists because it is in non ranching zones, which provides a visual education on how wildlife feed in comparison to how livestock feed.  Too often the promoters of regenerative ranching try to make it sound as if livestock are an equal replacement for the native grazers that are missing (largely thanks to ranching, mind you).  They are very, very different.  The cattle are as foreign to this land as the Europeans who brought them here were.
2. If this degraded land is the result of cattle grazing in a location touted as being “a model for small, sustainable ranching” then it should serve as a wake up call for any operations of similar or larger size anywhere else.
3. If this is the reality of “grass fed” in a model location then it only goes downhill from here.  Yes, there’s the other end of the spectrum in which cattle are crammed on top of each other and their own excrement, constantly bloated from their unnatural diets and pumped with antibiotics just to keep them alive in their nightmare living conditions.  Is grass fed better than that? Yes. But if the status of better is only achieved thanks to the existence of something terrible, that’s different than being good.

McClure Ranch is so abused the soil has turned to sand

Additional considerations:
What did it take to turn a perennial grassland into dirt as seen under the hooves of the cattle in these photos?  Fertile soil and native vegetation reduced to sand!! The answer is generations of ranching and mismanagement.  One might be tempted to blame the degradation on the high numbers of cattle in enclosed areas, which would be partially true, but keep in mind that these ranches are supposedly small operations.  By that argument animal units at other operations only increase from here.  Furthermore, the Tule elk are held in a reserve that is known to reach its carry capacity regularly, yet this area of the seashore looks like the garden of eden in comparison to ranch lands. If you want to blame the condition of the pastures on enclosure then how do you explain the far superior habitat of the elk reserve?  One would expect animals that reached the carry capacity of their habitat to decimate the land and eat everything in sight in their struggle to survive.  The elk reserve once again provided proof that native ungulates are vastly different than introduced livestock.

The elk reserve - How does this habitat provide for so many species without being destroyed?

Cattle at Kehoe Ranch enjoying the green grass...

L Ranch in the "green season"

The reserve- How is it that animals who have reached carry capacity haven't destroyed their habitat in the struggle for survival?

As good as it gets - cattle quickly trample the replanted, nonnative grass during the "green season" of Point Reyes

Ranch land or desert? It still blows my mind that this is allowed in a National Seashore

Wake up call - Only a small portion of the green seen on this hammered land is grass, the rest is noxious weeds. All of it is nonnative and a direct consequence of ranching

A beef bull rests in a ranching wasteland in Point Reyes

Waiting in their own feces - Even in Point Reyes cattle are confined to cramped areas where they are forced to lay or stand in their own excrement

18 wheelers are a normal sight in Point Reyes, brining in supplemental feed

You should be crying, not clapping. Point Reyes National Seashore

What does it take to turn land into this?