Regenerative grazing is overhyped as a climate solution. We should do it anyway.

But, sadly, regenerative grazing doesn’t always live up to the hype. The climate benefits are often smaller than claimed and only work under limited circumstances. Moreover, the more outlandish claims about regenerative grazing can act as greenwashing for the beef industry. Left unchallenged, this could distract us from pursuing more effective solutions and delay the changes we need to make in the livestock industry.

Regenerative grazing has a place in the climate-friendly agriculture toolbox. But we must be conscious of its limitations and use it as effectively as possible.

Why Regenerative Grazing Doesn’t Always Deliver as Promised

The best approach to addressing climate change – no matter the sector – is to cut greenhouse gas emissions from the source. Whether the emissions come from burning coal, driving SUVs, heating homes, clearing forests, or raising herds of cattle, the strategy is the same – we should cut emissions quickly and deeply.

But regenerative grazing doesn’t work by cutting emissions. Instead, it tries to “balance out” its emissions by putting carbon in the soil. The idea goes like this: Well-managed grazing systems create healthy grasslands that sequester soil carbon – enough to overtake the emissions of cattle grazing. That creates carbon-negative landscapes, thus making it a huge climate solution.

Building soil carbon is fantastic, and I’m all for it. And we should do it wherever we can. It can, under some circumstances, be helpful to address climate change. And it certainly has other benefits. However, there are some fundamental reasons why we should be cautious about relying on soil carbon sequestration as a primary climate solution.

• Soils have limits. While regenerative grazing may help build soil carbon, there are limits to how much it can store. We don’t know precisely how much carbon can be stored by regenerative grazing, but credible estimates range from 40–120 billion tonnes of CO₂ as the upper limit. Put in perspective, that isn’t all that much. It’s only equivalent to ~1–3 years of the world’s CO₂ emissions.

  More importantly, this doesn’t consider the increased methane emissions, land use, and other emissions grazing can cause (see below). So, whatever carbon grazing lands absorb could be overridden by the additional greenhouse gases they emit. We must look carefully at both sides of the greenhouse gas balance sheet.

• Soil carbon accumulation slows down. Many advocates focus on the first few years of soil carbon accumulation. But you can’t extrapolate these early results because soil carbon slows substantially over time as soils reach a balance between carbon inputs from plants and losses from decomposition and respiration. This usually takes a couple of decades. At that point, soils essentially stop accumulating carbon.

• Methane emissions can’t be ignored. Some folks in the livestock business suggest that methane emissions from cattle don’t matter because they come from a “closed loop of carbon” – where grasses absorb carbon dioxide, cattle eat the grass, and then the cattle belch methane, which are all built with the same carbon atoms. 

  But this notion is wrong and confuses atoms and molecules. Carbon dioxide absorbed by grass is a vastly different molecule than methane released by cattle. A methane molecule warms the atmosphere about 80 times more than a carbon dioxide molecule, even if it has the same carbon atom inside. It’s like saying sugar, alcohol, and caffeine are all the “same thing” since they all have carbon atoms inside, too. But they’re very different, as we all know.

• Cattle are a significant source of methane, and soils can’t offset them forever. Many in the regenerative grazing community believe that building soil carbon can effectively “offset” the greenhouse gas emissions from cattle. While studies have found soil sequestration may temporarily offset grazing’s methane and other greenhouse gas emissions, the effect isn’t permanent. As soil sequestration declines, regenerative grazing lands can become net sources of greenhouse gases.

  Moreover, grass-fed cattle emit more methane (per pound of meat and milk) than livestock raised in feedlots, worsening the problem in the long run.

• Today’s livestock emit more methane than wild animals ever did. Some suggest that today’s cattle, dairy cows, and other ruminants don’t emit any more methane than wild animals did in the past. While wild ruminants emitted methane, the world likely has more livestock – at around 1.5 billion cattle, 1.2 billion sheep, and 1 billion goats – than wild ruminant populations of the past. More importantly, today’s livestock emit more methane per animal than wild animals. Modern livestock are bred, fed, and raised to maximize production in the shortest possible time – which also drives increased methane emissions.
   
• Regenerative grazing takes more land – and carbon. Regenerative grass-fed beef production can take more land – around 2–3 times more land in some cases – than conventional grass-to-grain-fed methods. That means the footprint of animal agriculture could increase substantially, putting pressure on natural lands, increasing emissions, and incurring an extra carbon “opportunity cost.”
   
• Healthy grasslands don’t require cattle. Some advocates claim cattle grazing is necessary to maintain healthy grasslands. Yes, periodic disturbances – like light grazing – can help stimulate grass growth and soil development. But this can also be achieved through mowing, periodic burning, and other restoration methods – without cattle and their emissions.
   
• Soil carbon isn’t permanent. Finally, even if grazing systems sequester carbon, how long can soils hold on to it? What if future ranchers change their practices? What if climatic conditions change? This soil carbon could be released back into the atmosphere, erasing any benefits of regenerative grazing.

In the end, regenerative grazing does many good things, including building up some (but limited) amounts of soil carbon, at least for a while. However, it must be balanced against the continued – and possibly increased – methane emissions from cattle and the increased emissions from more extensive land use. An honest assessment of regenerative grazing must consider the full emissions balance sheet and ratchet down the hype.

Can Regenerative Grazing Be Helpful for Climate Change?

In a word, yes, but only under limited conditions. To evaluate how regenerative grazing can play a beneficial, albeit limited, role in reducing beef industry emissions, we must first consider how our current production systems work.

Typically, American beef cattle spend most of their life on grazing lands and are then rapidly fattened (or “finished”) for a few months in crowded, messy feedlots before being slaughtered. Roughly 70–80 million beef cattle are alive in the United States at any given time, with about 60–65 million on grazing lands and 10–15 million in feedlots. Another ~20 million cows live in dairy operations.

Each year, 30–35 million cattle are slaughtered in the United States for meat consumption, mainly from feedlots and by culling dairy herds. In feedlots, cattle are kept in cramped spaces, fed grains (primarily corn, sorghum, and wheat) and forage (mainly alfalfa and corn silage), and pumped full of antibiotics and growth hormones. While a torment for animals, this helps bring cattle to their slaughter weight quickly, with the marbled texture of beef that American consumers are accustomed to. Meanwhile, very serious concerns about animal welfare, local air and water pollution, and risks of zoonotic disease in feedlots are growing.

How might regenerative grazing help address emissions from this system?

If regenerative grazing practices are used within these conventional beef production systems – where cattle are grazed with regenerative methods and are then finished in feedlots – they could offer some clear climate benefits. Replacing current grazing methods – particularly on degraded lands – with better, regenerative grazing techniques could help improve grassland health and sequester some limited carbon in the soil without emitting more methane or using more land. It’s not a climate “silver bullet,” but it would be helpful.

But if regenerative grazing is used to replace feedlot operations, it starts to lose some of the climate benefits it might have had. While so-called “grass-fed” – more correctly, grass-finished – beef may improve animal welfare and local air and water quality, replacing horrific feedlot operations, it, unfortunately, comes at a climate cost. Grass-fed beef is unlikely to provide many climate benefits due to its higher methane emissions, increased land footprint, and carbon opportunity cost. 

Sadly, the hype around regenerative, grass-fed beef being a major climate solution doesn’t pan out as much as I would hope. Plus, even if it were better for climate change, the United States doesn’t have enough grassland to maintain current beef production levels with grass-fed methods.

In short, regenerative grazing can be a helpful, albeit limited, climate solution within our beef production systems – but only under certain circumstances.

Where Regenerative Grazing Does Have a Big Impact

While regenerative grazing’s climate benefits are modest and often overhyped, it is helpful to consider its other benefits.

Regenerative practices can reduce soil erosion in grazing systems, a serious concern in much of the world. Moreover, boosting soil carbon levels on grazing land can improve its water-holding capacity, helping it withstand dry spells and floods better. Increased carbon levels also help soils retain nutrients and reduce water pollution. It’s also possible that regenerative grazing is more friendly to biodiversity than traditional grazing methods.

However, it’s important to note that these environmental benefits are only relative to our current (often bad) grazing practices. Compared to today’s poorly grazed systems, regenerative grazing can offer some real benefits. But it might be even better to “re-wild” these landscapes, where possible, without large-scale grazing.

Ultimately, I favor using regenerative grazing practices – where we still graze livestock – for these environmental benefits. If we can improve grazing practices and see some environmental benefits, let’s do it. But that should not get in the way of reducing the massive levels of livestock grazing we have in the first place.

Striking the Right Balance

As a “silver bullet” climate solution, regenerative grazing tends to overhype and underdeliver. We can and should still pursue regenerative grazing, reaping what benefits it can provide, but we cannot let it distract us from more impactful climate and environmental solutions.

We must call out the widespread misinformation about regenerative grazing. Some of it is unintentional, especially in this era of influencers, social media, “alternative facts,” and the Dunning-Kruger Effect. But there is also a lot of deliberate hype and industrial greenwashing, aiming to distract us from reforming the livestock industry in more fundamental ways. It’s time to call this out and focus attention on more effective solutions.

From a climate and environmental perspective, taking an “all of the above” approach to livestock production would be most helpful. First, we should reduce red meat and dairy production where possible – by curbing food loss and waste (which can be a staggering 30-40% of all food produced) and shifting to more sustainable diets. That immediately cuts emissions and makes everything else we need to do far easier. Second, we should deploy regenerative grazing practices where they would be most helpful – particularly on degraded lands in grass-to-feed systems. Third, assuming they remain a part of our food system for the foreseeable future, we should update feedlot practices to reduce emissions, including working with feed additives, better livestock management, more effective manure management, and improved cattle breeding. Taken together, these approaches could significantly curb emissions from the livestock industry.

It’s time to move past the hype, keep what’s good about regenerative grazing, and see it for what it has always truly been: one helpful, complementary piece in the larger system of solutions we need to address climate change in the food system.

Jonathan Foley, PhD, (@GlobalEcoGuy) is a climate scientist and the Executive Director of Project Drawdown, the world’s leading resource for climate solutions. These views are his own.

This work was published under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. You are welcome to republish it following the license terms.