Grass Agriculture By John Neil Conkle

What Well Cover What Makes Grass-Fed Special? How is it different from Grain-Fed? Economic Considerations Should we eat meat?

What Makes Grass Different? Lets take a detour…

Why Should We Care? Grass captures solar energy very efficiently Humans cant digest it Grassland sequesters carbon Smart Ranching Highly Efficient Use of Land

Rotational Grazing

…Go on?

Grass Fed – the stats Twice as expensive Cows are smaller than grain-fed cows Take longer to grow Not available in most supermarkets

Why Buy Them Then? Preferences Health Benefits Moral/Ethical Concerns

Economic Implications And Why Itll Be Niche for a While

Grass is a Niche Market – Highly efficient process, but complicated – Processing costs – CONSUMER PREFERENCES

Is Demand For Grass-Fed Beef Growing?

Google Insights

What About Corn?

Why Are Prices Rising?

Super Official Data-set

Actual Data

Should We Eat Meat? Ethical Considerations, Land Usage, Sustainability, Methane Emissions

Ethical Considerations Do we have a right to kill animals?

The Reaper is Coming

Animal Deaths Steven L. Davis, May 25 th, 2002 – 1.8 billion animal deaths estimated if 100% of US farmland was dedicated to grain – 1.4 billion animal deaths if half of land was pasture (with large herbivores), half grain Citation on my blog if youre curious

The Ugly Truth If we can eat it, it used to be alive.

We Could Put Hilly Land to Use

Environmental Considerations

Predicting Catastrophe A 1972 MIT study predicted the exhaustion of ALL copper, lead, mercury, natural gas, oil, silver, tin, tungsten and zinc by – Did that happen? In 1972, they estimated global reserves of 455 billion barrels untapped. Since then we have harvested 1 trillion barrels. Obviously they made some faulty predictions

Economic Growth has its Upsides

Why Am I Telling You This? As Economic Pressures Rise, We Develop New Tech … And We routinely underestimate How Fast Your choice: Richer people, less babies, and more tech, or global enforced depression So Relax.

Data from NASA

All decomposition created equal

What We Covered What Makes Grass-Fed Special? – More efficient and healthier How is it different from Grain-Fed? – Less inputs, more humane Economic Considerations – Demand driven, possibly a growing market Should we eat meat? – Theres more important things to worry about

Further Reading: Good Calories, Bad Calories - Gary Taubes The Omnivores Dilemma Michael Pollan The Paleo Solution by Robb Wolf Anything by Robb Wolf, really. The Limits of The Limits to Growth Reason.org Full citation list online at

Questions?