Posted on June 18, 2008 by Gerald Pugliese
Chris Weber, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, has studied the global-warming impacts of the American diet. He found that red meat - such as beef, pork, and lamb - produces 150 percent more greenhouse gases than chicken or fish, not to mention veggies.
It's the Hummer of foods.
Weber's study is merely the latest in a cascade of beefs about beef. There's the fat and cholesterol. And, since most beef is fattened with copious amounts of corn - enough to feed eight times the people the beef itself will feed - it raises ethical questions related to world hunger.
Here's another eco-biggie: methane, emitted from both ends of these ruminants. Incredibly, the EPA rates their belchings as the third-largest methane source behind landfills and natural gas systems.
A greenhouse gas, methane has 20 times the global warming effect of carbon dioxide.
"They are less price sensitive, and also have more fully integrated LOHAS products into their lifestyle and are less likely to go back," said Gwynne Rogers, business director at NMI, Harleysville, Pa.
About 20% of Americans make up this segment of buyers. These highly desirable consumers tend to spend 10% more in warehouse clubs as well as buy more cereal, jelly, pasta, produce, soup and ready-to-serve prepared food than "non-green" consumers.
Products labeled organic represented $4.4 billion in sales for the 52 weeks ended April 19 (excluding Wal-Mart), per The Nielsen Company. Mintel, Chicago, forecasts sales will grow to $6.8 billion by 2012.
Small brands are seeing big growth. Ian's Natural Food's grows 45% annually, per the company. Nature's Path Foods, meanwhile, grew 30% in the first half of this year and will launch 15 new products by year's end.
Organic farms are not allowed to use chemical pesticides or artificial fertilizers on their crops, nor to give their cows antibiotics. As a result, chemical costs were virtually wiped out on the farms studied, saving almost $1,900 per cow, while veterinary costs were cut in half.
At the same time, once the transition period was over, the price that farmers received for their milk went up.
For the farms' last conventional year, Fisher's study cited a price of 59 cents a litre. In the first organic year, the price was 74 cents, a jump of more than 25 per cent.
In the end, Fisher says, the farms were making $217 less per cow once the switch to organic was complete. That's a small enough drop to make switch to organic a viable option, he says.
Ann Slater, a market farmer near St. Marys and president of the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario, says soils continue to improve even after the transition is complete, and farmers get better at running their farms.
Within a few years, she says, they are doing as well or better than they were as conventional farm operators.
