Foods / Tuesday, 09-Sep-2025

Viewpoint: Why two sacred cows of organic farming, grass-fed beef and biofuels, are hurting the planet

Viewpoint: Why two sacred cows of organic farming, grass-fed beef and biofuels, are hurting the planet

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Credit: ThoughtCo
Credit: ThoughtCo

Anne Kim: [M]ost of us aren’t farmers, we’re eaters. Can you drill down a little bit about the specific practices that are having the devastating impacts you’re talking about?  

Michael Grunwald: [W]e need to make more food with less land. That means that more efficient farming ….

Better beef is generally not the kind of local grass-fed, know, organic, twee beef that you can get at the farmers market. [T]hat’s usually worse for the planet and the climate because it uses more land ….

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You see what happened in Sri Lanka where they banned agrochemicals, they banned fertilizers, they banned pesticides, they went all organic. And within a few months, their farm yields crashed. 

Anne Kim: I want to ask about one more sacred cow or rather in this case, sacred corn. And that is biofuels. 

Michael Grunwald: [W]hen you took into account the land use, the indirect land use change that these biofuels were going to induce … biofuels were twice as bad as gasoline for the climate.  

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here

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