Maynard Beery, 65, began raising his cattle on pasture after grain became too expensive to use as feed. He now lauds the health and environmental benefits of grass-fed beef and expects his farm to be certified organic in fall 2009. Photograph by Sarah Coefield

He walks comfortably among his mismatched cattle. With his fur-lined trapper hat, worn jeans and graying horseshoe mustache, he blends in with his multi-hued herd.

The cattle have a mixed heritage. He points out one with a bit of Jersey in her, another with some Holstein. A bull has some shorthorn. Smaller cattle do better nutritionally on pasture, he says, so he’s been favoring the Holstein/Jersey cross, with shorthorn thrown in for good measure. A cow with a black coat that lightens to russet on her hindquarters lumbers over. Her name is Two Socks, so named for her white rear hooves, and she’s his favorite.

"She’s got great legs,” he says. "Just look at them. She has real style.”

Beery’s small herd is part of a quiet, but growing movement to return cattle to pasture. On American farms, cattle typically spend their first year on pasture before being shipped to feedlots where they are fed grain for rapid weight gain prior to slaughter. While this industrial livestock production has provided inexpensive food for decades, its reliance on large-scale grain-crop production can lead to serious environmental consequences.

Formerly a grain farmer, Beery began converting his fields to pasture nearly 10 years ago after the price of grain made feeding 300 cows impossible.

"We bled long and hard,” Beery says. "Cattle feeding is a tough business.”

His herd of 30 cattle, 60 if you count the calves, now grows plump on 100 acres of pasture. The mixture of forages, ranging from sorghum-sudangrass to oats, turnips and cereal rye, ensures the cattle will have food growing for most of the year. Beery stores his harvest to feed his cattle in the winter.

Watching his herd wander over the gently rolling landscape, Beery doesn’t seem likely to switch back to feeding them grain.

"They do all the work themselves,” he says. "Grass is about sun and water … we’re harvesting the sun.”

While Beery’s farm is picturesque, it is certainly not the norm.

Agriculture looks dramatically different from 70 years ago. Since the 1930s and ’40s, the rise of heavy machinery and manufactured pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers have allowed farms to expand into the behemoths that now blanket Midwestern states, says Phil Howard, an assistant professor in Michigan State University’s Department of Community, Agriculture, Recreation and Resource Studies.

The average American farm has 418 acres, but more than 62 percent of all harvested cropland is on farms with 1,000 acres or more, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2007 agriculture census. Nearly 40 percent is on farms with at least 2,000 acres.

Those endless waves of grain are not for direct human consumption, however — they’re for the cows.

More than 50 percent of corn grown in the U.S. is destined for feeding livestock, according to the USDA. Another 20 percent is exported as feed for livestock overseas.

As the agricultural revolution expanded, and cropland morphed into seas of corn and soybeans, livestock pastures retracted. Between 1945 and 2002, total U.S. grazing area declined by 268 million acres, but the total number of cattle increased by nearly 40 percent to more than 96 million head, according to the USDA. Most cattle no longer harvest their own food, growing fatter quicker on grains supplied by man. In 2007, cattle were fattened for slaughter on more than 31,000 feedlots nationwide.

Producing the grain to supply all those feedlots requires a lot of input, says Jo Robinson, an investigative journalist who spent the past 11 years examining grain- and pasture-based livestock production. Robinson is the author of Pasture Perfect, which examines the health and environmental benefits of grass-based farming. Grain-based livestock production relies on machinery and transportation, which uses a lot of fuel, she says.

"You have to harvest it, which is more machinery. You have to ship it to places where they dry it and turn it into feed, which involves yet more industry. Then they have to ship it to feedlots and then it’s mechanically delivered to the cows,” she says.

In addition to fossil fuels, corn production requires tremendous amounts of nitrogen fertilizer. Corn needs a lot of nitrogen to build stalks and produce ears, says Wesley Everman, an assistant professor in MSU’s Crop and Soil Sciences Department. Farmers apply up to 200 pounds of nitrogen per acre of corn, he says. With more than 86 million acres in production, that comes to a lot of fertilizer. A USDA survey of 19 states representing 93 percent of U.S. cropland found farmers applied 10.1 billion pounds of nitrogen on corn in 2005.

Liberal application of nitrogen can have serious environmental consequences, says Marc Ribaudo, a USDA agricultural economist. Nitrogen is readily soluble in water, so any fertilizer the corn doesn’t take into its system may seep into groundwater or be washed away into rivers and streams. Once in the water, nitrogen fuels plant growth. When that influx of plants and algae dies off, bacteria in the water work overtime to decompose the plants, using up oxygen in the process.

When the oxygen runs out, so does aquatic life, Ribaudo says. The Gulf of Mexico’s dead zone, 8,000 square-miles without enough oxygen to support fish or other aquatic life, has been linked to run-off from farms thousands of miles upstream.

Grain crop production can also lead to a loss of topsoil and biodiversity, and to the depletion of groundwater resources, he says.

Farmers like Beery, who raise cows on pasture, avoid the environmental impacts associated with grain, Robinson says.

"All the work is done by the animal,” she says. "The sun provides the energy to grow the grass and the carbon dioxide gets sucked into the grass to grow it. They harvest their own food, they spread their own manure — it’s an amazingly simple system that requires very little fossil fuel.”

Farmers are starting to take note. In 2001, when Robinson launched EatWild.com, a website dedicated to grass-fed meat production, she only had 50 grass-based operations registered on her site. That number is now closer to 1,200, with new farms joining nearly every day.

Not all pastures are created equal. Raising cattle on poor land or in colder regions like northern New England where there are only four months of frost-free grazing per year is not efficient, Robinson says. As with grain farming, irresponsible management can harm the environment.

Harold Mooney, a professor of biological sciences at Stanford University, chairs a program that has examined the consequences of industrial animal production since 2003. There are places where pasture is appropriate, where the land can support the number of cows grazing in an area, Mooney says. However, if there are too many animals in one place, you can "clobber” the landscape, he says.

Industrial agriculture has a large environmental footprint, but it is also a source of inexpensive meat and milk that is used to feed the world’s population, says Mooney, whose group is publishing a book about the societal and environmental costs and benefits of industrial animal production later this year.

"It’s a huge balancing act,” he says. "It involves the social system as well as the environmental system.”

While pasture-based farming lags far behind industrial methods, and because grass-fed beef often has to be marketed directly to the consumer, it may be some time before Beery turns a profit.

"You have to establish a clientele,” Beery says. "Once you find the consumers, you have to court them, hang on to them, and convince them it’s worthwhile buying.”

That can be tricky. Beery says he fielded several inquiries from potential consumers in March, but didn’t sell any beef.

"The cattle business is not for the faint of heart,” he says. He’s not ready to give up his day job as a soil scientist at his consulting company, Maynard Beery Soil Scientist. Sitting at his kitchen table, surrounded by 8-inch stacks of well-worn papers, articles and books about grass farming, Beery says he doesn’t expect the status quo to change from inexpensive, grain-fed beef until more of his fellow farmers feel the pinch from rising grain prices.

"You can suggest changes, but it looks like most [farmers] have to get so totally broke they’ve just got no other option than to put a fence around [the farm] and turn it into a pasture,” he says.

Sarah Coefield is a first-year graduate student in MSU’s environmental journalism program and a fifth-year graduate student studying zoology. This is her second appearance in EJ. Contact her at coefield@msu.edu.