Midwest is still cow and calf country

What else are you going to do with all that grass?

A ruminant is the only thing that can really do it. Out here in the great flyover where the Midwest and Great Plains mingle and the grass grows whether we want it to or not, cows make sense.

But the cow gets a bad rap. Not too long ago, I was talking with someone from Kansas City about environmental matters. He told me that cattle were a bane to society. He said we’d ought to eat more vegetables. Cows sucked down more than their fair share of water, he reckoned, and the places they grazed would be better off as plots dedicated to local food production of the non-hoofed kind. Plus, to his way of thinking, cows’ reluctance to curb their flatulence is a prime contributor to global warming.

And to think that Kansas City is still called a cow town.

Bring on the vegetables. Grow as many as you want on the productive land you can buy or rent all across the Midwest. Really though, it’s time to lighten up on the cow. She’s doing a good job.

For all the talk about growing vegetables and grain for human consumption and depopulating the nation’s cow herd, I don’t hear many solutions about what to do with the land that’s currently under hoof. The vast range of rocky hills in the south part of Today’s Farmer country are grazed for good reason. With such thin soil, the only way to grow profitable crops there is to have ample irrigation. But good old perennial grass grows on those hills. And, a cow will wander those hills, chewing her cud to turn something our mono-gastric stomachs find useless into milk and meat.

Farther north in Today’s Farmer country, there are patches of grass between fields of crops. There are waterways, and there are hills too steep to put in crops. These places are grazed for a good reason, too. We know that planting the clay knob on the home place is pointless because it won’t grow corn (or vegetables). But it grows grass. We know the steep run on the Back 40 will wash into the creek if we try to put crops on it. But grass keeps the soil in place. Same for the waterways.

{gallery}Sum10/cowcalf:200:260:1:2{/gallery}The anti-cow crowd’s keenness to attribute water scarcity to cattle comes from water use in western feedlots—and corn grown under irrigation to supply them. That’s got little to do with the cow that lives outside your window. She’s loafing in a state that gets about 35 inches of precipitation per year. She probably drinks from at least one pond or lake—impoundments that capture excess runoff and mete it out the rest of the year. I’ll meet my KC man halfway on this one. Let’s just keep more cattle at home to finish here where feedstuffs and water are plentiful.

When it comes to cow flatulence, what we’re really talking about is methane. Remember that the man-made global warming scare was turned by a decade of no global warming. Now it’s called anthropogenic climate change, or something like that, and the whole enterprise of scaring the hell out of us with graphs and computer models has come unraveled in the past year as scientists’ misdeeds and corruption surfaced.

For the sake of argument, we’ll allow that methane gas contributes to global warming. Then consider a study from temperate grasslands in China and Mongolia that shows grazing grasslands reduces nitrous oxide emissions.

In fact, Dr. Butterbach-Bahl, the German scientist who published the study, explained that temperate grasslands in the United States, Canada, Russia and China account for up to a third of total nitrous oxide emissions each year. Nitrous oxide is in the big three of so-called climate changing gases. Butterbach-Bahl figures that ungrazed grass and the snow it holds insulate nitrous-oxide-emitting microbes from the cold. The same microbes suffer winter kill if left more exposed to a hard freeze. So, graze the same ground before winter, and you reduce climate-changing microbe flatulence.

What I told my KC man was that cows are a great utilitarian creature for the Midwest. Beef is an end and a means.