Peak beef could already be here

By David Fickling

If you want to turn climate policy into a bitter culture war, there are few more effective weapons than a Big Mac.

On one side, environmentalists will point out that the cattle we raise cause about as much greenhouse pollution as all the world’s cars, trucks, ships and planes. On the other, irritated meat-lovers will call you a killjoy, and warn you don’t win friends with salad. There’s one place where the opposing groups agree, however: As incomes rise and allow people to buy more of it, beef-eating is such an irresistible habit that only implausibly radical behavioral changes can stop things spiraling still further out of control.

They’re both wrong about that, though. As we’ve argued in the past, the world is rapidly closing in on peak beef. It’s possible that the carbon hoofprint of the global cattle herd is already in decline.

That’s certainly the assessment suggested by the US Department of Agriculture’s data. More than 90 per cent of the world’s additional demand for meat over the past 15 years has been met by less carbon-intensive products. Consumption of chicken increased by 35 per cent, or 27 million metric tons, between 2010 and the agency’s forecast for 2025 demand, while pork is up by 12 million tons, or 12 per cent. Beef, whose heavy methane load is due to burped gases from ruminant stomachs that poultry and pigs lack, increased by a mere 3.6 million tons, or 6.3 per cent.

Such numbers are particularly striking when you consider that the world’s population increased by about 15 per cent between 2010 and 2023, and the global economy is about 43 per cent larger, adjusted for inflation. Our appetite for burgers, steak and mince hasn’t increased at anything like the same rate. This suggests the constraint on beef production is not our guts and wallets, but more fundamental constraints of resource availability.

The same factor that worries environmentalists about beef — its voracious ability to consume land, water, feed crops and the planet’s carbon budget — puts limits on the ability for supplies to grow. Diners might not need to self-consciously reject red meat at all, when the availability of cheaper fish, chicken, pork and vegetarian options is enough to cause an imperceptible shift away from it.

By the USDA’s numbers, those factors may already by causing a decline in the worldwide herd. From a peak of more than a billion head of cattle in the mid-2000s, stocks at the start of next year will fall to 923 million head, a record low in their data.

That may seem inconsistent with a world in which beef demand is still growing, but in fact it’s not. In crowded developed countries, animals spend much of their lives in intensive feedlots, where they’re given a grain-based ration to get them to slaughter weight in 18 months or less. This is much more productive than having grass-fed cattle living semi-wild on rangelands. In Brazil, animals can live for three years or more before their trip to the abattoir.

As major producing regions such as Brazil, the US and China intensify their beef production processes and focus on the breeds that grow fastest, we are eking more beef out of a smaller herd. This intensification means pasturelands already cover less area than at any time since the 1970s. In terms of animal welfare, this isn’t great news — but from the perspective of the climate, it’s almost certainly an improvement.

There’s one major reason to doubt this optimistic story: Counting the number of bovids spread across vast rangelands is an imprecise business, so it’s possible the USDA’s numbers are wrong.

The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization has a much higher, and still-growing, estimate for the cattle herd — 1.55 billion head, as opposed to the USDA’s 923 million.

That appears to largely relate to differences in areas such as Africa and west and central Asia less connected to global trade routes, where the market-oriented USDA’s data-gathering may be weaker than that of the FAO. Both bodies are in agreement that the cattle herd has more or less stopped growing in most of the world, but the FAO’s numbers for Africa alone are enough to offset all the positive news elsewhere.

Swathes of sub-Saharan Africa have a ranching, pastoralist culture, like the Americas and Oceania, quite distinct from the crop-growing cultures of Asia and Europe. It would hardly be surprising if rising incomes there saw locals develop the insatiable appetite for beef we associate with Argentines and Americans.

Even there, though, it’s worth considering that not every cow is bred primarily for slaughter. The carbon footprint of dairy products is pretty much in line with that of poultry, pork and eggs, and drastically lower than what we see with beef and lamb.

We produce about eight times more milk than beef for half the carbon emissions, so if dairies are taking market share from slaughterhouses then emissions may be falling even faster (on the USDA’s numbers) or at least growing more slowly (per the FAO).

That’s welcome news. Climate doomers and denialists might prefer the grim narrative that we have no way of reining in our emissions, but, in agriculture as in industry, there’s evidence of progress all around us. If even the allure of a burger or steak frites can be resisted, the sky’s the limit.