By Seth Millstein for Sentient Climate.
Broadcast version by Isobel Charle for Washington News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration
Beef production has steadily been rising over the last half-century. Unfortunately, so has the environmental destruction that it causes. Cattle ranching requires the wholesale eradication of natural habitats, and this eradication causes immeasurable damage to an essential component of Earth's overall ecosystem: food webs.
"Cattle are not native to the U.S. and did not evolve with our ecosystems here," Jennifer Molidor, senior food campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity told Sentient in an email. "They are not a viable replacement for any native species in the U.S., including bison. Removing a native species from the food web to prioritize cattle grazing impacts the entire food web and ecosystem balance.
But how exactly does cattle ranching affect food webs, and why does this matter? Let's have a look.
What Is a Food Web?
Most people are familiar with the concept of a food chain: The big fish eats the medium-sized fish, who in turn eats the small fish, and so on.
Food chains do exist, and are helpful as a general framework for understanding the natural world. In truth, however, most ecosystems are much more complex than this. Species have to contend with multiple predators, and predators eat many different types of prey. Because of this, many ecosystems look more like a web than a chain, with complex and multi-faceted connections between the various species in it.
"Most ecosystems aren't as simple as, 'If you catch this, there'll be more of the thing it eats, and then less of the thing that that eats,'" Trevor Branch, a professor at University of Washington's School of Aquatic & Fishery Sciences, tells Sentient. "Most systems are more like, 'There are 100 species in the system. If you catch one of them, this thing goes up and that thing goes down. And because of that, there's less competition over here. And so this thing goes up, and then that eats more of the thing here,' and you've got this big mess."
Here's another way to think about it: Any given ecosystem has a number of interlocking food chains that criss-cross with one another, and this overall connection of food chains is called a food web.
In order for an ecosystem to remain stable and functional, the food webs within it have to maintain a degree of equilibrium, with all of the species in it balancing one another out over the long run. This is true of both individual ecosystems, like the Amazon rainforest, and the Earth's overall ecosystem.
"Food webs illustrate the complex interdependence of organisms for survival," Molidor says. "We are part of the food web, and we need other species for a healthy planet."
But when food webs are disrupted, so is this complex interdependence. This can have disastrous and widespread impacts, from species extinction to unsafe drinking water and tainted food. Unfortunately, cattle ranching is incredibly disruptive to food webs in a number of ways, and results in all of these consequences and more.
Why Does Cattle Ranching Impact Food Webs?
Beef farming exacts an enormous toll on the environment, and food webs are just one area in which we see these consequences play out. But why is cattle ranching such an environmentally intensive process in the first place?
Deforestation
Deforestation is one big reason cattle ranching is so harmful to food webs. In order to make way for beef farms, cattle ranchers regularly destroy huge swaths of forested land, most notably in the Amazon rainforest, but elsewhere as well. The destruction doesn't stop at the farms itself, either, as a significant amount of land is also deforested just to grow food for this cattle.
"Cattle production is a leading driver of global deforestation and habitat loss, both in clearing for cattle pasture and grazing lands and in clearing for feedstock production," Molidor says.
Needless to say, destroying millions upon millions of trees has a number of enormously disruptive impacts on the surrounding environment, which we'll discuss in a bit. In this sense, cattle ranches begin affecting ecosystems before they're even built.
Pollution
Once they're up and running, beef farms pollute the land, air and water as a matter of their daily operations. Cows emit methane, a harmful greenhouse gas, as part of their natural digestive process - and so does their manure, which is often stored on-site in huge pools known as manure lagoons.
These methane emissions are bad enough on their own, but cattle manure poses a second problem as well: it pollutes the water and damages marine ecosystems. This happens not only because manure lagoons often spring leaks, but also because many farms use manure as untreated fertilizer for soil, which can cause it to seep into groundwater or be washed into nearby bodies of water in the rain.
Soil Degradation
Finally, cattle farming takes a toll on the land itself. A common problem on beef farms is overgrazing, which is when the cows eat plant cover faster than it can regrow. Over time, this erodes and degrades the soil beneath, making it more susceptible to runoff and other undesirable consequences.
These are the primary ways in which cattle farms affect the food webs around them. But what exactly do these effects look like?
How Cattle Farming Damages Food Webs
Cattle farms hurt food webs in a multitude of ways, both big and small. Here are a few illustrations of what this damage actually looks like.
Fewer Pollinators
When a bee sucks nectar out of a flower, some of the flower's genetic material, or pollen, gets stuck in the bee's fur. When the bee moves on to another flower, they take this pollen with them, and that pollen fertilizes the second flower. Simply by searching for food and eating it, this bee is facilitating the reproduction of plants.
This process is called pollination, and bees aren't the only ones who do it: Birds, bats, beetles, butterflies, moths, and flies are also pollinators. Even lizards and mice have been known to pollinate, though in totality, insects do the majority of pollination.
Pollination's importance to life on Earth can't be overstated. Around 75 percent of all crops that humans eat rely on pollinators to reproduce; when accounting for differences in crop production, this means that one-third of all food we eat depends on pollinators, according to Our World In Data.
But cattle farms threaten pollinators. Both deforestation and overgrazing by cattle reduces the fertility of soil, which makes it more difficult for plants to grow and thrive in it, including the plants that pollinators depend on for food. More broadly, deforestation destroys massive ecosystems in one fell swoop, and pollinators are often a part of these ecosystems.
Pollinators, Molidor says, "are threatened by the very food systems we need them for."
"If we want clean air and water, we need more than just humans and the domesticated species they eat," Molidor says. "We are part of a planet that needs all kinds of other organisms to be healthy, and have healthy landscapes, air and water."
It's worth noting that we're not the only ones who need pollination. So do the various mammalian species, such as elk and coyotes, who rely on pollinated plants for food and shelter. Elk and coyotes are themselves preyed on by other animals - wolves and bears to name just a few examples, and are part of the complex food web.
In other words, overgrazing by cattle on beef farms is an indirect threat not just to bees, but also to coyotes, wolves and humans' food supply. It's a classic illustration of food webs, and how all of Earth's creatures rely on them.
Harmful Algal Blooms
As mentioned earlier, the manure from cattle farms often finds its way into nearby lakes, rivers, streams and other waterways. In addition to methane, cattle manure also contains nitrogen, ammonia, phosphates, and other toxins that hurt marine ecosystems and aquatic food webs in several ways.
Harmful algal blooms are perhaps the most stark example of this. Algae plays an important ecological role, as it's the primary food source for many creatures and serves as the base of aquatic food webs. But when a body of water contains excessive nitrogen and phosphorus, as it does when it's polluted by cattle manure, algae can grow out of control into what scientists call harmful algal blooms.
Algae might not sound too threatening, but harmful algal blooms cause an astonishingly far-reaching amount of damage to countless different creatures, from coral to dolphins to humans. They poison fish, and because of the complex and interlocking nature of food webs, this poison often trickles up to larger creatures that eat fish, like sea lions and birds. These blooms often cause mass die-offs; for instance, in 2019, a toxic algal bloom killed millions of salmon in Norway, also resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in economic losses.
Humans aren't safe from the damage caused by harmful algal blooms - and not just because of the noxious stench, which one researcher likened to the "smell of decay and death." Drinking water and seafood are often contaminated by harmful algal blooms, with paralytic shellfish poisoning being an especially common consequence of this.
Although this usually doesn't kill the person in question, it sometimes does, and in 2018, a coalition of European researchers dubbed harmful algal blooms a "threat to global water security."
Biodiversity Loss
Many of the above phenomena, such as deforestation and harmful algal blooms, are forms of habitat destruction. Habitat destruction leads to biodiversity loss, which can have a catastrophic effect on food webs and beyond.
Biodiversity essentially refers to the number of different species in any given ecosystem. A high, or at least a healthy, level of biodiversity is essential for the survival of any ecosystem, be it a lake, a forest or a planet. It's not necessarily the end of the world if one species is driven out of an ecosystem, but lose enough of them and the effects can be devastating.
For instance, as Molidor points out, the cattle industry has engaged in widespread killing of black-tailed prairie dogs, due to the belief that they compete with cows for food. As it turns out, this belief may be incorrect, but regardless, prairie dogs have been wiped out from 95 percent of their historic range, in large part due to these extermination efforts.
This is a problem not only for prairie dogs, but for the critically endangered black-footed ferret, which relies on prairie dogs for food. It's estimated that there were once as many as five million black-footed ferrets around the world; now, there are only around 300 left in the wild.
The deforestation carried out for cattle farms is even more alarming in this regard. At least 10 mammalian species, 20 avian species and eight amphibian species have gone completely extinct due to deforestation in the Amazon. It's been estimated that 137 species of plant, insect and animal go extinct every single day due to deforestation.
Humans aren't necessarily safe from this, either. Over the last 500 years or so, entire genera have been going extinct 35 times faster than the historical norm, according to a 2023 research paper, and that rate is rapidly accelerating. Likening it to a "mutilation of the tree of life," the authors of this paper wrote that the loss of biodiversity is not only a "serious threat to the stability of civilization," but is "destroying the conditions that make human life possible."
The Bottom Line
Beef production disrupts and damages food webs in complicated ways. But the big-picture takeaway is not complicated: Cattle ranching, and the practices that make it possible, is destroying ecosystems.
"It's important to understand that nature is a series of relationships and connections," Molidor says. "If we want clean air and water, we need more than just humans and the domesticated species they eat. We are part of a planet that needs all kinds of other organisms to be healthy, and have healthy landscapes, air and water."
Seth Millstein wrote this article for Sentient.
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