2-part interview: Is eating meat - Is farming - ethical? What happens when we give livestock more choice in a grazing system?
Trade-offs? Context? Nuances? Taking another look at climate & environment & animal production systems, & the amazing benefits (to us!) when animals have choice in a grazing system
This 2-part interview is available as two YouTube videos (part 1, part 2), or as a single podcast.
An increasing proportion of people – particularly younger generations - are electing to be vegetarian. When asked, they reason that animal agriculture is bad for the planet, driving climate change and pollution, and that eating animals is unethical.
At the same time a global cohort of researchers, past and present are shedding light on how livestock (domestic herbivores such as goats, sheep, cattle and deer) – how learn, evolve and co-evolve, in not just paddocks or fields or landscapes – but in foodscapes. The incessant curiosity and a willingness to look across disciplines and pay respect to complexity, is deepening global knowledge on the intelligence of animals – including the animals we farm for meat, around their eating (grazing) choices, and how we can improve our paddocks and fields - our foodscapes, to co-evolve with animals in a mutually beneficial way.
Their work asks to look at layers of benefit, to humans and livestock that are sometimes oversimplified or ignored. Here’s another thought, if we don’t farm animals, they won’t have a chance to live. To explore, to consume. To experience life.
A recent 2-part interview with Professor Pablo Gregorini asks us to reconsider these claims. Professor Gregorini heads Lincoln University’s Centre of Excellence in Designing Future Productive Landscapes and Pastoral Livestock Production Lab. Gregorini researches integrated farm systems and the way domestic herbivores – goats, deer, sheep and cattle (beef and dairy) complement and benefit, not only farm systems – but human, social systems.
Part 1 Is eating meat - Is farming - ethical?
In the first part of this interview (which YouTube need to strangely overlay with an explanation about their perspective on climate change) we discuss why society might look more critically at media and academic rhetoric that positions animal agriculture as harmful and destructive and rethink imagery that asserts a separateness of animal agriculture from human society, - and rather, consider how deeply animal agriculture is embedded in the human story.
These issues were discussed in Leroy et al [2022] Animal board invited review: Animal source foods in healthy, sustainable, and ethical diets – which also highlighted that perhaps the marginal differences between vegetarian/vegan and omnivore diets and carbon emissions might be scrutinised for a reductionistic use of metrics, and silence on the harms that potentially arise from a shift away from grassfed meat:
The potential detrimental outcomes and side-effects of a mitigation policy based on abandoning grass-fed livestock are commonly ignored.
Gregorini asks that we take a nuanced view and consider the layered, complex, intergenerational benefits of livestock production to human society and the environment. That we question claims that livestock farming is not a valid component of both food landscapes and environmental landscapes.
Human benefits not only arise from consuming the high quality, dense nutrients contained in meat protein from livestock grazed on healthy pastures. Livestock can graze land unsuitable for crops destined for ‘vegetarian’ diets; upcycle crop waste; and promote soil health in a way that plant-based crops often do not. Conventional monocrop agriculture, such as soy, canola, lupins and wheat requires heavy tilling, and multiple spray treatments, and unlike livestock grazing is inhospitable to local animals, insects and plants.
Gregorini and his colleagues are part of a larger group of global scientists and doctors that are highlighting how grassfed livestock is part and parcel of a healthy productive landscape, socially, historically, culturally and environmentally. This growing group asks us to be excited about how creative we can be in designing integrative agricultural systems. They don’t deny that conventional feedlot agriculture is harmful, and they can provide evidence that conventional monocrop pasture systems are downright boring for domestic herbivores, who like human, don’t want to eat the same generic food, day in and day out. The challenge is to make farm systems work for farmers, their livestock, and society.
Part 2: Animal plant choice influences human cellular health - Metabolomic profiling & phytonutrients
In the second part of this interview we focus on how mainstream messaging on human nutrition can fail to emphasise, and hence downplay, the important role of secondary compounds (phytonutrients). We also look at a stunning new, first of it’s kind, multi-disciplinary cross-over (mixed-methods) study, and look at complexity and chaos.
It’s a big challenge – farming productively, maintaining stock and soil health over time, and reducing stocking rates to prevent nutrient runoff, and farming ethically. Gregorini believes we can.
In a recent multi-disciplinary study, led by farmer and scientist Anita Fleming, Gregorini, Fleming and colleagues demonstrated how scientists can use up-to-the-minute technology, including using untargeted metabolomics to identify the benefits to humans from livestock dietary changes - and provide insight into how the benefits might translate to both farm income, and human health.
The thing is – the way humans learn to eat, and livestock learn to eat – follows remarkably similar patterns. Domestic herbivores – goats, deer, sheep and beef (livestock) seek out phytochemically rich landscapes. flavour-feedback associations, availability of phytochemically rich foods, and learning in utero and early in life to eat nourishing combinations of foods.
While humans and dietary nutrition advisers focus on a narrow range of macronutrients (carbohydrates, protein and fats) and micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) – Gregorini and colleagues have been looking further afield – at secondary compounds, phytochemicals.
Secondary compounds and phytochemicals are downplayed in society, but they are terrifically important, as a recent review by Ashwani Kumar and colleagues outlined:
‘Some of the significant phytochemicals are carotenoids, polyphenols, isoprenoids, phytosterols, saponins, dietary fibers, and certain polysaccharides. These phytochemicals possess strong antioxidant activities and exhibit antimicrobial, antidiarrheal, anthelmintic, antiallergic, antispasmodic, and antiviral activities. They also help to regulate gene transcription, enhance gap junction communication, improve immunity, and provide protection against lung and prostate cancers.’
And in recent groundbreaking research, in a study led by Anita Fleming, these New Zealand researchers found that when a paddock is prepared with different, functionally diverse rows forage the animals eat more and eat differently.
The paper Connecting plant, animal, and human health using untargeted metabolomics is currently available as a preprint.
Three forage mixtures of either perennial ryegrass x white clover (PRG), a complex multispecies mixture (n = 22 species) grasses, legumes, and forbs (CMS), and adjacent monocultures (AMS) of perennial ryegrass, chicory, plantain, lucerne and red clover, which were sown longitudinally across the paddock and all available to cattle throughout the four-month finishing period.
A double-blind randomized cross-over clinical trial was then performed with 23 individuals that consumed a single meal of the meat. Metabolomic analyses were performed using a combination of GCMS/MS, lipidomics and LC-qToF-on plasma samples collected from all participants before meat consumption, 3-, and 5-h post prandial, in addition to meat and pasture samples. Metabolomic profiles of plant, meat and plasma were altered by the three forage mixtures.
The beef cattle put on more weight (increased productivity) which potentially means that farmers could lower stocking rates. In addition, the authors reported several parameters where meat quality improved in the adjacent monoculture system:
Enrichment ratios suggest that pathways associated with linoleic fatty acid metabolism and eicosapentaenoic acid were upregulated in cattle grazing AMS compared with PRG or CMS, indicating increased presence of polyunsaturated fatty acids in the AMS swards. Eicosapentaenoic acid is an omega-3 fatty acid usually found in fatty fish such as salmon but also in pasture-raised land animals and has several health benefits including antidepressant activities and prevention of coronary heart disease thrombosis – blood clots, and arterial plaque formation (Russell & Bürgin-Maunder, 2012).
The AMS also increased the relative abundance of pantothenic acid (PA; vitamin B5) in beef. Vitamin B5 is an essential nutrient involved in the synthesis of coenzyme A – needed for FA synthesis and degradation.
Gamma tocopherol (vitamin E) was elevated in the AMS sward, and this increased the circulating concentrations of gamma-tocopherol in people following the consumption of AMS beef. Gamma tocopherol is the second most common form of vitamin E, a lipophilic molecule (second to α-tocopherol) but as 1 of 8 isomers, it is the most effective anti-inflammatory, due to its ability to inhibit cyclooxygenase and 5-lipoxygenase activity, and antioxidant through capture of lipophilic electrophiles (Jiang et al., 2001).
This multi-disciplinary trial, exploring different grazing systems, and the way the dietary change in the finishing phase altered not only the meat, but the blood markers of human trial subjects, is the first of its kind.
In the second part of our interview we also turn to the paper Complexity, Crash and Collapse of Chaos: Clues for Designing Sustainable Systems, with Focus on Grassland-Based Systems which dives into overlapping, multi-layered system dynamics. The paper provides, and even normalises, a language of uncertainty inherent in farming, and how technical mechanistic approaches are often unreasonable, when the interoperability and interdependency of farm systems are considered.
It might explain why farmers deviate, when given instructions by their local agronomist or industry representative.
In this collaboration with Hans Schiere, the challenge of farming life – the navigation of open-ended complexity agricultural systems is tackled from a philosophical academic perspective. All too often academic papers technically approach one element of farming, and fail to speak (write out) the multiplicity of uncertainties farming families must juggle. Good and poor financial years, weather and rainfall, insect, fungal and mite infestations that might result from weather changes and stocking pressure, the physical age of the farmer, and the financial stress of managing mortgage and infrastructure costs (fencing, machinery etc) are often not contextualised because of the extraordinary complexity of farming life. (Which is why farming is considered a craft).
Academic or published analyses are often linear, containing the same weakness as standard economics, as they write our uncertainty and depend on varying degrees of lock-in based on technical, or mechanistic approaches that contradict the experiences of farmers and growers on the ground.
Schiere and Gregorini draw on the latin ceteris imparibus to buttress their discussion – all things won’t remain equal. Explaining that a mechanistic, reductionistic approach is:
‘ usually accompanied by disciplinary focus and by focus on aspects of matter rather than mind, assuming that ‘things may be complicated but solvable’ and assuming ceteris paribus (all other conditions remain equal). Holistic and complex system approaches consider parts, but they pay attention to the interactions between the parts and to several ‘disciplinary’ aspects rather than a few, stressing complexity (non-solvability), emergence, self-organization, different perceptions, and unexpected behaviors (i.e., ceteris imparibus).’
Farming families recognise that farming is a craft, a skill involving the management of complex open-ended systems, day in, day out. While technology can support and improve farming from to record keeping, technology can’t anticipate patterns (from weather to soil to breeding to insect infestation) and apply insight to juggle and judge in a way an on-the-ground farmer can. This is why tech is a crutch, but not the legs.
Because it can be difficult to give a voice to the temporal, spatial, environmental and economic judgements that farmers juggle daily. In Crash and Collapse of Chaos, Gregorini and Schiere have had a go at doing just that.
PSGR believe more interdisciplinary work like this desperately needs to be funded. Basic science and on-the ground funding and research for agriculture that can look at interdisciplinary factors and contextualise risks and benefits across different systems is important. This research can work with farmers, and address the challenges and concerns that preoccupy both farmers and society. It’s also why funding for science translation (known as extension services) to farmers, and feedback loops back into the research world is also critical. Agricultures contribution to GDP and export is substantial, but this sort of interdisciplinary research often falls outside policy and so is poorly funded. Science extension services to farmers is not funded, with the exception of minor greenhouse gas funding.
References:
Fleming A, Provenza F, Leroy F, van Vliet S, Hamlin M, Elliot C, Garrett K, Marshall CJ, Gregorini P (2024) Connecting plant, animal, and human health using untargeted metabolomics. Preprint. Research Square. Doi:10.21203/rs.3.rs-3813988/v1
Kumar A, P N, Kumar M, Jose A, Tomer V, Oz E, Proestos C, Zeng M, Elobeid T, K S, Oz F. Major Phytochemicals: Recent Advances in Health Benefits and Extraction Method. Molecules.16;28(2):887. doi: 10.3390/molecules28020887. PMID: 36677944; PMCID: PMC9862941
Leroy F et al. Animal board invited review: Animal source foods in healthy, sustainable, and ethical diets – An argument against drastic limitation of livestock in the food system 2022. Animal, 16:100457 DOI: 10.1016/j.animal.2022.100457
Provenza FD, Meuret M, Gregorini P. (2015) Our landscapes, our livestock, ourselves: Restoring broken linkages among plants, herbivores, and humans with diets that nourish and satiate. Appetite 95, 500e519, doi:10.1016/j.appet.2015.08.004
Schiere, J.B.; Gregorini, P. (2023) Complexity, Crash and Collapse of Chaos: Clues for Designing Sustainable Systems, with Focus on Grassland-Based Systems. Sustainability 15, 4356. https://doi.org/10.3390/su15054356
Note:
For further reading on the adequacy of plant-based diets please consider the review Impact of consuming an environmentally protective diet on micronutrients –
Most results suggested that intakes of zinc, calcium, iodine, and vitamins B12, A, and D would decrease, and total iron and folate would increase in a dietary transition to reduce environmental impacts.
The authors referred to Mayer et al [2022]:
A review of 44 meat substitutes in Sweden found that all products were poor sources of iron due to high phytate or low iron concentrations; mycoprotein products, which are low in phytate, were the best sources of zinc.
