Cows to the Rescue !

I hear a lot these days about how cows ruin the world. Cow flatulence produces lots of methane and seems to damage our atmosphere thus warms the planet. So why on earth are we raising cattle if this is true? Do we care more about tasty milk than the future of our planet? Absolutely not! I encourage you to step back and look at more just the cow’s gas. Let’s look at the whole picture of what cows can do for our world.

I trained as a farmer under Abe Collins in Vermont, who calls himself a carbon farmer. He taught me that cows are by far the best tool for sequestering carbon. By intensively rotating cattle on pasture we are able to build massive amounts of top soil and therefore sequester carbon from the air. If our climate is warming due to carbon emissions, we need to not only create less emissions, but figure out how to remove more of it from the air. At the moment the only view seems to be how to produce less of the stuff at whatever cost, but what if we turn tons and tons of carbon emissions into soil? Soil is the stuff of life, and grazing cattle help us build tons of it each year.

Our farm produces raw milk and that is great for the folks consuming it, but milk production is only one part of our goal at Sweet Land Farm. We graze with the goal of demonstrating that you can make a living at grazing cows while healing the world at the same time. You can make food and do the land good at the same time. These two things are not at odds like the news narratives generally attest. We farm with intensive grazing systems in the hope of encouraging others  that properly managed cattle are the best tool for healing the land, air, water, and good for the people who consume those cows.

Government regulations on emissions and carbon credit ideas are fraught with corruption and are impotent solutions to climate issues. Climate regulation definitely makes folks feel good, but does so while padding the pockets of large corporations and regulators, but it isn’t fixing the carbon emission problem. On the other hand, cattle, used as tools for carbon sequestration, produce their own funding by producing excellent food and are all you need to negate carbon emissions if only more farmers will continue to adopt these methods. We need more cows, not less. The current ideal of lessening livestock production is backwards and scary. The believe that ridding the world of cow flatulence stems from myopic viewpoints that miss the greater whole of cow’s purpose in the .

Truely good things are good on all levels. Raw milk is a vital nutritious food and the animals producing it are vital to the health of the land. You can have both great food and a livable planet.