The Natural Diet of Cattle Is Grass!

Following on to my research on grass-based chicken husbandry, I've been doing some reading on the concept of grass-fed livestock in general and how important it is to go back in time with heritage breeds. If one is truly serious about grass forage, doesn't it make genetic and ecological sense to use livestock breeds that were originally optimized for grass instead of grain? Why try to use a breed optimized for a grain-based feed lot operation? Luckily there are organizations like the Livestock Conservancy doing their best to recover and conserve our heritage gene stock across multiple livestock types.

As for grass forage ecology, an opinion piece by Joann Grohman in the October 2014 issue of Acres USA magazine (available here too) brings all of this together in the context of the terrestrial carbon cycle. The central thesis of this piece is that from the mile-high view, there really is "no shortage of land" for agriculture. The current agribusiness model is to blame for cattle getting a bad rap particularly with CO2 emissions. For grass to develop into efficient carbon capturing turf, grazing herbivores are essential and their grazing habits are driven by predation. Anyone who has started a new lawn and knows about the proper way to cut grass has this figured out already.

Some select quotes from the article:

1) "The natural diet of cattle is grass."

2) "Cattle are not competing with humans for grass, their real food. The fact that corn and soy are being fed to animals reflects the artificial circumstances in which the animals are begin kept."

3) "Food production in an integrated small farm system is capable of being far more productive per acre than an agribusiness model because all of the different parts support each other, plus the small farm system greatly benefits from close management by the owner (see my note below)."

4) "Manure in the open air is not a source of methane."

5) "Grass, the world's most widespread crop, truly is amazing. To properly encourage grass, herbivores must graze in a dense pattern. Grass achives its maximum turf-building response only under the grazing presence of bunched animals, and then the animals must move on, leaving the grass to regrow. In the wild this is absolutely dependent on the presence of predators, otherwise the animals will stray apart in a random fashion and the turf-building effect is lost."

6) "This property of grass is entirely dependent on the presence of herbivores. Without the nibbling, trampling and fertilization of herbivores, grass fails to function as this massive carbon sink. Grass without grazers dies above ground and loses its carbon back into the air."

Note: my concern about #3 is the manual labor-cost factor. I can believe that a totally integrated organic farming operation with sufficient land can be self sustaining and maybe even more efficient than a factory farm operation. But at what cost? Will the masses be able to afford the product?

Some farmers are able to make this work such as Poly Face Farm down in the Valley of Virginia. I am particularly impressed with their cattle/poultry rotation strategy, the role of native forage, and the incorporation of swine in woody borders and forest land. I've got to get down there this spring for a look around.