On the afternoon of December 25th, Pam and I, like people all over the world, sat down to Christmas dinner. The main course was a leg of lamb – a lamb that we had raised, then took to be slaughtered, butchered, vacuum packed, and frozen. I roasted the meat in a terra cotta dish called a cazuela, in our wood fired oven, with vegetables and white wine. It was delicious.

Shortly before I began writing this blog post, I glanced out my window to check on this year’s crop of ram lambs. They had eaten a midday meal of hay, but now were out of their barn, grazing on nearly spent winter pasture. They aren’t getting much nutrition from that pasture, but they are enjoying their natural urge to graze. Ultimately, the fate of all of those ram lambs will be the same as that of our Christmas lamb. But until the moment they enter the food system, their lives will be as happy as a sheep’s life can be. That is the commitment we make to our livestock. That is why we raise livestock. Because, with few exceptions, we cannot be sure that other farmers who raise meat – those sending 20,000 hogs to the Smithfield Foods packing plant every few months, or those managing 10,000 head of cattle in a Kansas feedlot – have made the same commitment to the animals in their care. I suspect they haven’t. While everything eventually dies, it’s the way we live that matters. We know that our sheep are happy in their lives. That’s what counts. And while they are enjoying their time on that dormant pasture, full of sleeping grasses and sedges and weeds, our lambs are contributing to the cycle of life upon which we rely in our regenerative farming operation. Their dung will be covered by the snow this winter, and as the snow melts in the spring, months after the lambs are gone, the dung will soak deep into the soil and become food for bacteria and fungi that will do things for the soil’s fertility and for the plants growing in it that synthetic fertilizers could not match in a million years. The happy life we give our lambs is re-paid with phytochemically rich pastures that feed those that will follow them, and provide flavorful, healthy food for us and our customers.

But why do we need to kill animals in the first place? Why do we need cows, sheep, pigs, and chickens? We can get all the nutrition and flavor we need from legumes, and from plant-based meat alternatives, which look and, increasingly, taste like real meat…Right?

The short answer is “No”. We cannot get all the nourishment we need from plants. That’s because we are omnivores. Our omnivorousness defines our health and even helps define the health of the ecosystems to which we belong. And that brings me to the long answer:

The long answer starts with my friend Dr. Fred Provenza. Fred is emeritus professor of behavioral ecology at Utah State University. He is one of the smartest people I know. He has spent nearly half a century studying the relationships between plants, herbivores, omnivores and carnivores, particularly as they relate to nutrition. About a year ago, the editors of the research journal Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems asked me to guest edit a special issue dealing with any aspect of agro-ecology that I chose to consider. I agreed, so long as Fred and one of his former students, Dr. Juan Jose Villalba, would co-edit the issue with me. We put together what we think is a quite informative volume on livestock production and the functioning of agricultural ecosystems. We invited a limited number of leading researchers to contribute papers. In the end, an internationally recognized cadre of scientists and scholars submitted articles for peer review. The issue has now been viewed more than 28,000 times (and parts are still in production). You can find all of the papers (they’re free) at, https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/11351/livestock-production-and-the-functioning-of-agricultural-ecosystems#articles.

Fred, along with Duke University researcher, Stephen VanVliet, and USDA scientist, Scott Kronberga co-authored the most-widely viewed paper in the issue. It compares the nutritional attributes of meat and plants (including plant-based meat substitutes) as food for humans. One of their principal conclusions is that as omnivores, we need to consume both meat and plants in order to be healthy. Plants provide certain nutrients that meat does not. Meat is a better source of other nutrients absent or scarce in plants. In general, animal proteins are more fully utilized by humans than plant proteins because meat contains more animal-appropriate amino acid compositions. Most importantly, in an omnivorous diet, the nutrients and micro-nutrients (vitamins and minerals) in plants and meat enhance each other’s functioning. This synergy makes and keeps us healthy.

Omnivores (and carnivores) keep the planet healthy as well, so long as they are part of an ecologically functional system. That system occurs in nature and on regenerative farms and ranches. In the paper that I contributed to the Frontiers issue, I conducted a thorough review and comparison of regenerative and conventional animal agriculture. My findings overwhelmingly support the conclusion that regenerative animal agriculture not only has a smaller environmental footprint than conventional agriculture, but it actually enhances environmental health. Regenerative livestock production produces richer, more diverse, fertility-stimulating microbial communities in the soil than does conventional animal agriculture. Regenerative agriculture creates 35% fewer greenhouse gas emissions, and photosynthetically removes some 200 percent more carbon from the atmosphere (per animal raised), than conventional animal agriculture. Regenerative animal agriculture uses half of the blue water required in conventional agriculture. For years, Texas A&M Professor Richard Teague has been doing the same sort of research as I have. We have never worked together or even met. Yet his findings in the rangelands of Texas and mine on farms in New York’s Hudson Valley are consistent. These are generalizable results.

Plant-based meat alternatives are not realistic replacements for meat because they don’t provide the nutritional benefits of meat. Nor, if intended as meat replacements, do they provide the synergistic value of a combined meat-plant diet . Nutritionists, ecologists, farmers and ranchers are increasingly concerned about the surge in the popularity of these “faux-meats”. They are marketed aggressively by large corporations, ostensibly to wean us off meat, which some experts consider unhealthy and environmentally damaging (though rarely distinguishing between meats from regeneratively and conventionally raised livestock). Their efforts have been profitable. Meat substitutes now represent a $20 billion industry. But when we look closely, we find that faux-meats are not all that they’re cracked up to be. In fact, they may be more damaging to Earth’s ecosystems than real meat produced regeneratively. Most of the plants used in meat substitutes are grown in monocultures on factory farms that are infamous for their enormous irrigation-water withdrawals and excessive use of fossil fuels, pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. Plant-based meat substitutes are highly processed products, lacking any of the nutritional attributes of meat or many of the nutritional qualities of whole plant foods. We are attracted to them because as omnivores we crave meat, and faux-meats look (right down to the fake blood), smell and taste like meat. They offer what seems to be a “guilt-free” alternative to the real thing. Multinational corporations market faux meat as healthy and environmentally benign. In fact, neither is true, especially when compared with meat produced from animals grown on regenerative farms and ranches. They are products of clever marketing and creative biochemistry, not wise nutritional science or ecological wisdom.

Nature defines us as omnivores. If we accept the responsibilities associated with omnivorousness, and if we respect the animals, plants and soil upon which we depend for sustenance, we and our planet will be healthy. We should feel no more remorse about consuming a lamb on Christmas than we should about eating the potatoes sitting next to the lamb on our plates.

“Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything.” – Genesis 9:3