Issue 6: Cheatgrass Case Study
A good example of how food companies are missing the mark on sustainability.
This past weekend I posted about the serious problem of invasive grass in the American West, specifically cheatgrass. So far 21,000 people have seen the information - which hopefully leads to positive action.
The virality validated the particular note which I keep attempting to hit: in many cases, we are losing the forest through the trees on sustainability action.
For those of you who didn’t see it, here is the original post:
This is the biggest nature heist no one seems to be talking about.
Today in the U.S. there are 100 million acres of an invasive grass destroying our rangelands.
That is as much land as Montana and it's spreading at a rate of millions of acres a year.
Cheatgrass is an invasive annual grass that goes to seed early and produces a lot of them, allowing it to rapidly outcompete the native, perennial species.
Its roots are shallow and the grass itself is poor in nutritional value, whereas native plant roots are deep, moving nutrients and carbon that support soil health. Native plants are high nutrient value, having evolved alongside ruminants to be optimized for the ecosystem.
Cheatgrass is also a finer fuel and dries up before the natives, meaning it burns hotter and faster. 80% of the grassland fires in Idaho in the past 10 years have been invasive dominated.
Because the seeds germinate faster after the burn, it takes over that much faster. The cycle gets worse. Now lets talk about the carbon.
The first major study on this topic showed that native grasslands which are dominated by cheatgrass lose 1 to 3.5 tons of soil carbon per year - over 20 years. https://lnkd.in/gdWFdT4y
You heard me right. 100 million acres * 1-3.5 tons/yr * 20 years = 2-7 billion tons of CO2e
This doesn’t account for all the carbon released in the fires.
Or all the taxpayer dollars spent fighting them.
Or the lives destroyed by them.
This doesn’t account for the loss of rangeland productivity and the ability to feed our nation.
This doesn’t account for the loss of water storage. 1 ton of soil carbon has ~20,000 gallons of water holding capacity. On the low end, cheatgrass could dry out our Western soils by 200 trillion gallons in the next 20 years.
And almost no one is doing anything about it.
Comment below if you want to learn more.
The corporate companies we work with look at their supply chain in terms of cost, efficiency and emissions. To them, fighting the narrative of “cows are bad for the environment” means decarbonizing as quickly as possible. In livestock systems, enteric methane (~45%), feed production (~30%) and manure (~15%) represent the lions share of the carbon footprint. Contrary to popular belief, processing and transport are <5% of the total emissions of a burger.
Some of them are interested in removing antibiotics. But the buck stops there.
What gets missed in the whack-a-mole treatment of systems are the solutions directly addressing the root cause. If healthy grasslands are the root of a healthy system, then invest in good grazing, invest in invasive management, and invest in feed and genetic solutions that support natural growth performance (and real efficiency).
The systems that nature designed are more efficient and productive in the long-term, and there are actually stepping stones being designed by farmers & ranchers, for farmers & ranchers to help each other do it.
What seems to be missing is a link between the land and animal based solutions that are really working and the story that represents at the corporate level.
There has to be an data infrastructure that plugs into the supply chain to service a brand, not just a carbon commitment. Whether it is managing cheatgrass, improving animal health, naturally reducing inputs or rebuilding pollinator habitats, there are tangible, high ROI solutions that are regenerating the earth today. We just need a better story to get them to more farmers and ranchers.
This is Nutrax.