Monbiot renders me speechless (Part I of 2)

Back in 2002, self proclaimed meat eater, environmentalist and journalist George Monbiot wrote a nice little piece about why veganism was more than just a response to animal suffering or, as he put it, "a health fad". Eating meat was an unconscionable burden on the planet and the poor. In support of this conclusion, he repeated an oft cited figure of 100,000 litres of water per kilo of beef and mentioned that livestock consume about half the world's grain. He also mentioned the horrific conditions that characterise modern factory farms. But now it's 2010 and Monbiot has read a book by one Simon Fairlie which has convinced him that there are environmentally sound methods of producing meat. Monbiot begins his piece as follows: "The ethical case against eating animal produce once seemed clear. But a new book is an abattoir for dodgy arguments". But, as he proceeds, Monbiot doesn't discuss a single ethical argument about why, despite having plenty of healthy tasty alternatives, we should kill perfectly healthy animals who are going about their lives with the joy of a lamb or calf ... or the affection and grace of an elephant or whale for that matter. The ethical component of his 2002 article has vanished. No matter, let's look at what he does say about acceptable ways of producing meat.

How much "green" meat is possible?

The jewel in the crown of Monbiot's green production methods seems to be to grow animals on waste and then we can eat them with warm inner thoughts about how efficient we have been. He cites a claim by Fairlie that there is enough waste to feed pigs to produce about 1/6th of the UK's current meat consumption and notes that the waste must be rendered properly. Monbiot doesn't put a number on possible UK beef production but has plenty of harsh words for the US beef feedlot industry and clearly thinks that cattle raised on forage and straw are suitable to be trucked to a captive bolt pistol near you. I haven't read Fairlie's book, but the little information provided doesn't engender confidence. Perhaps we can do a book swap, I'll send them "CSIRO Perfidy" and one of them can send me Fairlie's book. 

Of course, you can produce some pig meat this way, the critical issue for people with only environmental rather than ethical concerns is how much. If you care specifically about climate change, then greenhouse gas efficiency is also important. If you don't care about climate change, then either you haven't been paying attention for a couple of decades or you don't mind a rising frequency of horrors like the Pakistan and Chinese floods or the Russian heat wave crop failures and fires.

Now ... the use of the word "rendered" indicates that one part of Monbiot's waste stream is meat based.  About 49, 44 and 37 percent of the liveweight of cattle, pigs and chickens processed in slaughterhouses isn't fit for human consumption. Any reduction in livestock consumption shrinks this part of the waste stream. Are Fairlie's waste calculations done after the presumed phase out of most (ie., factory farm) meat production? And what is "rendering"? Just high temperature cooking until all the things that make people sick are dead. How much energy does this take? Energy is power multiplied by time. Consider the power difference between a small cool 35 watt LCD computer monitor, a large warm plasma TV which might use 500 watts during operation and a draft horse plouging a paddock generating about 750 watts. What about the humble electric kettle? The latter will typically use 45 times more power than the monitor and more than twice that of the draft horse ... about 1600 Watts. Now scale up a kettle to a huge rendering boiler capable of heating to around 120-145 degrees centigrade for an hour. Pasta cooks in 10 minutes. Monbiot wants to cook the pig's feed for an hour before he cooks the pig ... which turns the pig into a largish energy hog!

The other issue is getting rendered material to the pig farms. Monbiot doesn't mention the pig production conditions so we don't know if the pigs are free ranging or still in sheds. If the former, then the distribution problem is non-trivial. Distribute 100,000 pigs in groups of 10 across a large region and you have 10,000 drop off points for your waste trucks, put them in 100 large sheds and transport emissions plummet. So, pickup your waste, take it to a rendering plant, unload it, treat it, reload it and truck it out to the pigs. You could do rendering at the slaughterhouse, but you don't want the clean stuff contaminated by the dirty stuff. It's all getting very expensive and the heat for rendering is a serious problem.

An even bigger issue is whether there might be better uses for the waste. Low value high volume waste seeks the best price and it can't be choosy. Slaughterhouses and the rendering industry used to supply large volumes of fat to the cookie pushers ... checkout the little individually wrapped cookies at every supermarket checkout ... many can supply more than an entire days allowance of saturated fat in one sitting. It used to come from the renderers. Enter biofuels. They can pay more than the cookie makers so they are getting most of Australias slaughterhouse fat. So where do the cookie makers get it now? Enter palm oil with about half of its fat being saturated. What's the extinction of Orangutan's compared with the profit you can make by clogging children's arteries? 

Where I live, plenty of waste of many kinds now goes into compost streams, the result is plenty of good compost for growing fruit and veggies. If you do it right, the compost can generate its own heat, not enough for rendering, but plenty hot enough to make it safe for use on plants.  Animal food  is the ultimate source of virtually all food poisoning and it's waste complicates matters enormously. There are really good reasons why food hygiene courses teach people to use different chopping boards for meat and everything else. Did you know that toilets typically have less fecal contamination than kitchen sinks. Why? Because people defrost their chickens in their sink and not their toilet.

When is waste really waste?

But Monbiot's biggest problem emerges when he lists some of the other waste he is talking about ... Ooops ... crop residues. This is the really dangerously wrong bit in the argument. In most places on the planet, crop residues aren't really waste at all. They are valuable protectors of soil, preventing erosion and returning carbon and nutrients to the soil when they break down. Here's a succinct quote from one of the world's top soil scientists in a letter to Science last year (you will need a subscription to read this, but here's the quote):

The agrarian stagnation and perpetual food deficit in sub-Saharan Africa is attributed to severe soil degradation, caused by extractive farming practices that involve continuous removal of crop residues for use as traditional biofuels and cattle feed. This has created a negative nutrient budget.

What does this mean? It's a little technical but the guts of it is simple, African farmers keep removing crop residues to burn and to feed cattle and this is buggering their soil and leading to food shortages. Australian farmers are frequently just as stupid ... letting sheep graze stubble is a time honoured brain dead Aussie tradition. But Aussie farmers don't notice too much because they can compensate with expensive artificial fertilisers. Australian grain farmers typically spend more on fertiliser than fuel.

Ok, so plenty of waste sources aren't really waste and the rest pose greenhouse emission and logistic problems and may well have better uses. So much for pigs. What about chicken and cattle meat?

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(To be continued ... Next week we look at other meats and the implications for a global reforestation imperative from climate change.  In particular we look at how Monbiot was sucked in by Fairlie's claims about cattle and Amazon deforestation.)