Beef and more than two veg

Food Security To grow beef requires many more resources and emits 11-fold more greenhouse gases than raising poultry. It is easy to say eat less meat to mitigate environmental degradation and climate change, but how to do this? Eshel calculated how adopting nitrogen-sparing agriculture (NSA) in the United States could feed the country nutritiously, enhance carbon sequestration, and reduce nitrogen leakage into water supplies. The proposal is to shift to small, mixed agricultural enterprises in which the nitrogen budget is kept closed (nitrogen and carbon resources are biogeochemically tightly linked in agriculture). The core of a 1.43–hectare unit NSA farm is an intensive cattle facility from which manure production supports a variety of rain-fed and rotated crops of plant-based foods for humans, as well as livestock fodder. Less than half of today's current cropland in the United States is suitable for NSA. Nevertheless, this area has the potential to feed 330 million Americans and still have some left over for export. Arid rangelands could thus be spared or left to low-intensity grazing. PLoS Biol. 10.1371/journal.pbio.3001264 (2021).