Reintroducing bison on tallgrass prairie doubles plant diversity: research
agriculture.com
agriculture.com
I've read estimates of ~30 million Bison before European settlement, ~35 million pronghorn, and ~3 trillion oysters in beds on the east coast, in addition to all of the other natural abundance. It's amazing to think of what nature provides - supplemented with chicken and pork, it seems those wild populations would be relatively close sustaining modern levels of meat-eating on their own.
Edited to add some math. TL:DR is that bison alone couldn't get to US beef consumption. Wikipedia says 60 million Bison, so let's use that.
Say you can take a managed 10% of Bison a year on average and sustain a population. Median weight seems to be about 1,600 lbs for males and 1,000 lbs for females, average of 1,300 (assuming harvest is even, but management for population might mean taking more males). Carcass weight to meat seems to be about 57% in cows, so that's:
60 million individuals * 10% harvest * 1,300 lbs each * 57% of standing weight in meat = 2.2 billion pounds, or 13.4 pounds per person. Average beef intake per person in the US is around 60 lbs, so this has a decent distance to go - assuming annual harvest of 20% would only get you about half-way there, and there's still Canada to account for (since a lot of bison range is there). I doubt elk, pronghorn, and deer could bridge that gap as the individuals (sans elk) are much smaller.
The assumption for which there is increasing evidence is that as the existing human populations that were the top predator of bison collapsed, there was no other large natural predatory species to take their place after humans had also pressured the natural predatory species like bears and wolves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panthera
includes leopards and jaguars, usually seems they call them panthers if they're melanistic (dark hairdos).
by genetics, mountain lions are the biggest in the group that includes domestic cats.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felinae
they purr and play and can domesticate so people do have them as pets, but of course are 70kg sized so a ton of money to feed and ton of space needed to play/exercise.
Especially given that a herd of bison would be more than capable of taking on a bear, like wolves, it would have to isolate an individual to escape unscathed.
Also: humans is my other guess - we have a well earned reputation for extirpating predators that compete with us.
Pronghorn tend to follow bison, only feeding after the bison have eaten the tall grass. This greatly reduces predation on pronghorn from ambush predators hiding in the grass; if they can see the predator with sufficient time, they are nearly impossible to run down.
And, there was an American cheetah? Welp, down a wikihole I go. Cheers!
Pronghorn are interesting animals and an evolutionary isolate. If science is to be believed, their closest living relative is the giraffe. North America used to have a wide range of very impressive predators that all disappeared around the last ice age. There was a strong selection pressure on the herbivores that were the food of these predators. While many of those predators are extinct now — American cheetah, dire wolf, saber-tooth tiger, et al — this has been a very recent change of circumstances in evolutionary terms.
To put it another way, bison and pronghorn had apex survival skills in an environment where many capable predators were hunting them at the same time. It is easy to forget that now because the set of top predators in North America has been dramatically reduced over the last several thousand years but these species didn’t evolve in the current environment.
It is never, ever "toward" anything. It is often "away".
Evolution is simply one static sorting event following another, on and on, with no gradual element towards something long-term. You only need variation in a population (same as in when a rock field includes various sizes of rocks but are otherwise similar), and the ability to inherit the properties of the parent.
Imagine a batch of bacteria, similar but slightly different from each other. One sorting event could be that someone applies some disinfection agent to the batch. Some bacteria die, some survive, and if that's because the survivors were slightly different then when they divide (as bacteria do) you suddenly have a lot more bacteria which handles the disinfection agent better than many of the previous generation. If someone re-adds the same disinfectant then again some die, some survive - presumably the ones which are better at it. Sometimes, but not always, that could be because of random mutations and "just" that one, existing in a subset, will fare better. And, if this continues, you end up with a batch of bacteria which doesn't really react much to that particular disinfectant at all.
But - the next day some other disinfectant may be applied. Now things change. Maybe completely different properties will fare better.
If you have a lot of different-sized rocks rolling down a mountain, and passing an area with holes - the smaller ones will fall down the holes, the larger ones pass - then you have the whole physical "law" of evolution, almost. You only need to add reproduction and inheritance to have biological evolution as we know it. And it's something that you just can't avoid. Which is why we have to fight antibiotic resistance all the time, and new Covid variants fare better than older ones - it's just sorting. Nothing gradual as such.
And, contrary to what anti-evolutionists claim, that to get a "new" functioning species, subspecies or variant, you need "an impossible number of just-so-happens-to-be-functional mutations" - no, it's not so. Dogs, for example, compared to the wolf ancestor of dogs, only have something like two major mutations: One for large size dogs (think Irish wolfhound) and one of very small dogs (think Chihuahua). The rest, e.g. the ability to digest lots of starch, which is present in many dogs, is simply that the genes for starch digestion came from wolves but were sorted for in dogs during domestication (i.e. it was easier for proto-dogs if they could actually survive on human foodstuff/leftovers/etc). So it became much more dominant than in wolves, which can't really for the most part get much out of starch unlike many (but not all) dogs.
Flight developed independently four times in dinosaurs alone, besides the pterosaurs. All the flying dinos relied on ancestral feathers.
I’m not here for that.
Now we know that the cheetah, dire wolf, saber-tooth cat, short-faced bear (bigger than grizzly), mastodon, mammoth, giant sloth, horses, camels, and other big animals were wiped out by a bolide strike, probably a broken-up comet. It set the whole hemisphere on fire, and left a layer of elevated-platinum dust under soot. No Clovis points are found above the charcoal layer.
So, not just "around the last ice age", but precisely 12,800 years ago. Somehow moose, bison, elk, and the smaller bears survived. And pronghorn, with nothing left that could catch them.
Are you talking about this?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesi...
This does not seem to be a theory generally accepted by the scientific mainstream. There are competing theories for the Younger Drias extinctions that apparently have stronger evidence.
Among working geologists, there is no discussion about whether it happened, and only about how. A recent survey article is Sweatman,
The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis: Review of the impact evidence
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00128...
The remaining controversy is how much the strike contributed to the Younger Dryas development and other coincident events, including extinctions.
Opponents have been disgracefully sloppy and disingenuous. Sweatman is very generous.
These scientific controversies are really fun to follow. In mathematics there's not as much drama! We barely have a handful of crackpot proofs of Riemann hypothesis per decade. (Except in theoretical computer science, thanks to the inestimable input of quantum computing people).
A valid proof of Riemann that fails to elucidate primes would face deep apathy, and would probably never be reviewed properly, rejected over spurious nitpicks. There might even be one.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00128...
Start doubling 10 vs 100, and see where you get after a few rounds.
While your statement is true in the sense that we wouldn't see them if they had all previously starved, it's not true that they don't reproduce too fast _because_ they would starve if they did. Evolution doesn't have lookahead, it can't predict consequences and avoid them.
The comet strike is a better bet.
Sounds like first expedition might have introduced new disease.
https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Colu...
It's been a while since I read it but IIRC, the theory is that some of the pigs the Spanish brought with them got loose and went wild, but brought the flu with them. As wild boar spread so did the disease.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/30...
I also don’t think it’s conclusive that it was disease or disease alone, it’s the rather blind assumption today that it must have been disease and somehow that makes Europeans culpable for something they also didn’t understand, but there are any number of things that could have happened in 100 years that led to such changes. It seems more plausible to assume that semi-nomadic hunter gatherer societies that were extremely conflict prone would have likely moved, been overrun by hostile tribes and/or been decimated in wars with other tribes, faced hunger, followed livestock, or simply just moved.
In spite of the semi-religious nature of what I’ll call native-worship, (and don’t get me wrong, I find them fascinating for different reasons) fact of the matter is that the indigenous people were very underdeveloped relative to the European state, and as such were confronted with all the similar trappings of hunter-gatherer societies that didn’t even have the wheel, let alone a writing system or even bronze weapons. They were in effect Stone Age people, dealing with Stone Age systems and parameters.
And that doesn’t even go into the fact that genetic testing has shown that the mass extinction event of the Americas due to what were Asian pathogens that Europeans almost didn’t survive either, was inevitable because any contact prior to the technology of the last few decades would have resulted in the same outcome.
https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/nasa-satellite-reveals-...
And then you go on to suggest massive global scale engineering projects?
What kind of objections do you have against agriculture? Especially objections that couldn't be solved with less effort than what you are suggesting here?
It would also be a giant carbon sink, much better than any tree planting scheme could hope to be. The world's topsoil currently contains about 2500 GT of carbon, compared to 800 GT in the atmosphere [1].
Compared to plant agriculture, which requires a huge amount of natural gas for nitrogen fertilizer production, and just fertilizer production itself a pretty sizable contributor to both CO2 and non-CO2 GHG emissions. Not to mention pesticides, oil for farm equipment, etc.
1: https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/soil-carbo...
You can use electric vehicles..
But if you are assuming plenty of cheap nuclear power, you can just synthesize all the hydrocarbons you'd normally need oil for straight out of thin air. Including all the hydrocarbons for conventional agriculture.
And tons of disadvantages.
> and much of the terrain they can graze on does not make good farm land for other food production
So ... maybe let's rewild the land with forests and shrubs?
> will happily eat all sort of vegetation that doesn't need humans to water fertilize or plant
You'd have us thinking that eating meat helps save water.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use
We globally dedicate 75% of agri land to the animal agriculture, btw it's larger area than all forests together.
https://waterfootprint.org/en/water-footprint/product-water-...
"Per ton of product, animal products generally have a larger water footprint than crop products. The same is true when we look at the water footprint per calorie. The average water footprint per calorie for beef is twenty times larger than for cereals and starchy roots. When we look at the water requirements for protein, it has been found that the water footprint per gram of protein for milk, eggs and chicken meat is about 1.5 times larger than for pulses. For beef, the water footprint per gram of protein is 6 times larger than for pulses."
https://www.cowspiracy.com/facts
"Agriculture is responsible for 80-90% of US water consumption.
5% of water consumed in the US is by private homes. 55% of water consumed in the US is for animal agriculture.
Animal Agriculture is responsible for 20%-33% of all fresh water consumption in the world today."
>And tons of disadvantages.
I never said their weren't; everything has it tradeoffs.
>> and much of the terrain they can graze on does not make good farm land for other food production
>So ... maybe let's rewild the land with forests and shrubs?
much of that is scrub land and plains there naturally there are large heard of wild large herbavores that doesn't mesh well with current subdivision of lands into plots separated by fences and barbwire. better to alow grazzing by domestic herd animals that are close matches to their wild cousins ecologically but deal better with modern existence than have yet another a empty gap in the natural ecology.
>> will happily eat all sort of vegetation that doesn't need humans to water fertilize or plant
>You'd have us thinking that eating meat helps save water.
I said no such thing, waht i meant is that free range cattle don't require as much water use as grain fed beacuse you aren't watering feilds to grow food to feed them. as they are living off of the planst that grow their naturally.
I agree that we use to much meat, and that is a bad use of calories and land to grow corn to feed cow to get less calories back.
My point is their is plenty of land that is naturally good grazing for herd of cattle but otherwise unusable for farming that can be still be used to produce useful food.
Too cute a theory to be completely true, but I don't think it's completely untrue either.
This is a great group already doing this with bison, and he’s got a great book as well
Parent bison: "And then occasionally, son, a flying death machine comes and murders one of us."
In the hypothetical scenario, the predator would be an automaton, killing for our pleasure.
Also '(rat) brain in a dish flies plane (simulator)' from about 2004...
Masses of people living in walled cities, while the wild outsides are forbidden for the commoner, with variations like only the elites are allowed to go/hunt there, or more recently that autonomous robot gardener/harvester/hunter/killer thing.
Especially if the European first contact with their diseases kill off almost all the native population of humans, allowing "nature" to recover from all the human foibles for sometimes 500 years before we were there and recording information (again).
The amount of bison (and yes, pronghorns) killed for the railroads was ridiculous.
No, people did not "consume" all of them. Most were left to rot, and pushed off rail lines if needed. This is not some kind of retroactive conspiracy theory. We killed them willy-nilly. Because we're human.
It was policy to shoot bison from trains and leave them to rot, to depopulate the plains. It worked.
For example https://sfrecpark.org/facilities/facility/details/Bison-Padd...
Brucellosis causes abortion in pregnant cattle.
Really makes you understand the whole “amber waves of grain” thing.
> Allan Savory works to promote holistic management in the grasslands of the world.
The note says "Statements in this talk have been challenged by scientists working in this field", but all I could find is that "any gains from greening after grazing are more than offset by methane emitted by the grazing animals". It seems that the method is well known, and that the criticism is on the carbon capture capacities, not the greening power. It may not reverse climate change all by itself, but all the benefits of de-multiplying the biomass, bringing back water, feeding local populations, might work (as illustrated by his works during decades).
Other names I came across are Richard Perkins and Joel Salatin. I found an article that says that 15 million hectares on the five continents are successfully doing holistic management, but it was not sourced.
I'd welcome books or documentaries suggestions on the topic.
I could imaging you would enjoy reading <teaming with microbes> about the life of soils. Paul Hawken does a great job explaining a broader scene with <Drawdown> and <Regeneration> George Monbiot writes a fascinating book <Regenesis> but comes to my understanding to the wrong conclusion.
Planetary Boundaries is my go to reference and the documentary on netflix is always recommended.
I have worked at Richard Perkins farm in 2015.
I don't like to participate in ad hominem attacks, but in this case ... that man is a livestock farmer directly responsible for the killings of tens of thousands of african elephants. The effect that had on the ecosystems is enormous.
If we were to take the land away from animal farming and return it to the nature, while protecting forests and all animals, including predators, positive effects would surely outweigh mr. Savory's pseudo-scientific endeavours, maybe protecting him from another blunder of his life.
And Mr. Savory could start growing vegetables, it would help more.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Savory
"... while I was Director 30,529 [elephants] were killed, mostly on culls, and the countrywide population grew from an estimated 44,109 to 52,583 animals.” However, this culling program did not reverse the degradation of the land as expected, and Savory has called his decision to advocate for the culling of large numbers of elephants "the saddest and greatest blunder of my life."
I know. And anecdote is a word I'm not sure is apropriate for describing that incident.
> his research into ruminant animal grazing was a giant mea culpa for how he handled those elephants
I know, don't care, not good enough.
> the subject article of this comment section is research affirming the benefit of Savory's techniques
It's true that he tries to manage overgrazing and removal of old growth of grasses, but you can't imho compare natural grazing of bison herds in their natural habitat with a farmer subdividing his fenced plot into several sections and moving his herd from sector A to sector N in a controlled manner.
If you're doing animal agriculture, you're not really helping the nature, doesn't matter how, you're still unnecessary exploiting it. Here, I've said it.
It was a horrific mistake but its not like he went out and did it by himself. He had multiple other researchers and the government backing and implementing the plan.
There has to be room in society for people to learn and repair the damage from their mistakes.
> you can't imho compare natural grazing of bison herds in their natural habitat with a farmer subdividing his fenced plot into several sections and moving his herd from sector A to sector N in a controlled manner.
I don't think its a silver bullet to save the meat industry but I don't think the technique should be disregarded outright. For example, AFAIK California doesn't have any native ruminant species so it doesn't make sense to raise cattle here. However, in other parts of the country there is much land which historically was grazed and is now developed for other purposes. Those are precisely the places we could be producing ruminant meet ethically.
However ... I'll try to explain my position. But it's a complex problem, i don't have enough time to formulate it properly ... anyhow, here goes the gist.
If you look at the problem of animal agriculture from the point, where you're able to acknowledge that meat and dairy is simply not needed (it produces just fraction of world's nutritional needs, while needing 75% of agricultural land [0]), when it's not needed nutritionally [6], when you account in the amount of suffering it causes, when you see the amount of deforestation and biodiversity loss it causes, when you discount your taste buds experiences (and we need meat & dairy in this day and age for nothing else [6]), only then you'll start to see how unnecessary and destructive it all is.
You know ... for the planet to function, we need forests. And not few trees here and there, we need big rain forests on every continent, continuous, large bodies of both new and old growth, several layers of vegetation, full of diversity (= food), biodiversity and only then the forest starts to fulfill its other functions, especially working as a biotic pump and producing rain and self-protect against climate changes, wind and excessive evaporation, draughts, etc. [7] [8]
Those small patches of trees we have and we call forests are not functional in this regard. And can't be, because we have animal agriculture which stole much of their land, and is still stealing immensive parts of land from them.
Sahara and arabian peninsula are deserts probably because of overgrazing [4]. Amazon is dying mainly because of animal agriculture [2]. Deforestation of the last 300 years is a product of animal agriculture [1]. So is a biodiversity loss (did you notice we're in anthropocene now? [5]).
So ... I can't accept animal agriculture as a way out of this mess. I know that everybody's blaming fossil fuels and nothing else, but that's because everybody eats meat and dairy and nobody wants to acknowledge it's him causing it, it's THEM causing it, not me.
In my view we need to stop using both fossil fuels and meat & dairy industry [3], just fossil fuels won't cut it. Those are the largest destroyers of the environment we have. Doing it better is not a way out. It's just normalizing it, putting a pretty mask on something very destructive, while losing time for the real solutions. We've done a plenty of that.
Nothing against you, all in good will. Be well.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
[1] https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/weve-lost-35-pe...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/04/magazine/amazon-tipping-p...
[3] https://climatehealers.org/the-science/animal-agriculture-po...
[4] https://www.academia.edu/es/38627904/Blame_it_on_the_goats_D...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene
[6] https://talkveganto.me/en/facts/suitable-for-all/
[7] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cutting-down-rain...
[8] https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/59/4/341/346941
Grazing operations can of course differ, but regenerative agriculture and HM are tools which can be used for the betterment of carbon-, nutrient and the water cycle. All tools can be used wrong and therefore cause harm.
I agree that industrial agriculture has gotten out of the planetary boundaries and according to this study actually the contributing factor transgressing 5 boundaries. [1]
There is no ecosystems without animals and we will have to steward the rewilding of things, over time restoring ecosystem. I am aware of the size needed, I am working with this professionally, the natural hydrology needs vast areas to function properly.
We are trying to set the right boundaries in the Anthropocene, agriculture is a vital part of this, I guess my argument is that agriculture can be the segway for stewarding the naturebased inititatives on the vast areas. Regenerative agriculture as an output orientated and holistic approach can function as the middle way granting us a planetary healthy diet [2] (mainly plantbased) and leave room for healthy ecosystem. So much work to do, it's important to recognize the conversion loss as you are stating in animal based nutrients. We can spare a lot of land changing our diets, but we need animals in the landscape to disturb the biological succession of ecosystem. Grass is a great perennial crop.
I will put no arguments forward maintaining the exaggerated industrial agricultural complex, besides we need a fair exit plan for all the involved people. We are only practicing for the much larger exit plan for petrol states.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320356605_Agricultu... [2] https://eatforum.org/eat-lancet-commission/the-planetary-hea...
Horses range much farther from water than cattle can, so do not compete with them for fodder. They did once compete with bison.
Longsighted capitalism recognizes that there is greater returns by growing beef slowly, recognizing that we (ranchers, shepherds, ruminant farmers) are primarily grass farmers, rotating cattle to simulate migration patterns, allowing native grasses to grow back, and giving up some (10% to 15%) of our pastures to trees to return the American south and midwest to the state it desires to be at (savannah).
(edit, I can't speak for ranching on the big western ranches, just how it's done from the east coast to about Tulsa)
I am a small time dairy farmer and homesteader (I also write software for a fintech 9-5). We practice regenerative agriculture and permaculture methods, and have pretty great results.
(Of course to get there, you also need eg long term security of property rights and stable regulation etc.)
I disagree. If no consumer wants to buy your more expensive, "longsighted" beef, then it doesn't matter what the rate of interest is.
If the consumer always rejects slightly more expensive, but more sustainably produced, goods then the only solution is to change this behavior.
Edit
I think anyone can pull it off with enough capital, patience, some help, and determination. Costs can be low. I have over $100 acres, that was about $2000/acre and that includes the house that was on the land. It's about $250 for every 1000 feet of electric fencing I run. A beef cow costs $500 my dairy cows are significantly more ($2000-4000) but they produce $8/gallon and give 6-8 gallons a day, so they pay themselves off quickly.
Hardest part is learning because you are gonna fail and failure involves lives. One of my cows gave birth during this cold snap over Christmas. Her teats are frostbitten and will probably all fall off, and all because I am too inexperienced and got her due date wrong by a month.
A point I try to make is that responsible cattle production on land left in a wild state is a good thing and not at all something people should be morally or environmentally opposed to. There must be a way to do it to optimize for caring for the land.
Then again, bison are also delicious.
Bison are far more unruly though, so you need serious fencing to keep them contained, so it's less practical. I think they are lower maintenance than cattle, but bison just doesn't have the market.
> Several differences between bison and cattle behavior potentially explain why bison increased species richness more than cattle. While the existence of DNA fragments from forbs and woody plants has been identified within bison dung (58), nongrass species comprise a minor portion of bison diet in comparison to grasses, as evidenced by direct identification of forage con- sumed (59), carbon isotope values of bison hair (59), and microhistology of bison dung (60). In contrast, the higher dominant grass cover in the cattle treatment suggests that these domesticated grazers likely consume more nongrass species than bison. This is consistent with studies of cattle diets in tall- grass prairie and elsewhere which found forbs comprise 10 to 34% of cattle diet (61, 62). In addition to differences in bison and cattle foraging behavior, bison also create physical distur- bances (e.g., wallows) and grazing lawns (34) that increase hab- itat heterogeneity (20) and thus species richness across scales (63), whereas cattle do not form soil disturbances similar to bison wallows.
Not sure how well-evidenced this is, but something I've heard from relevant researchers is that bison hooves are more scoop-link vs. cattle hooves. Bison more thoroughly till topsoil and activate microbial/fungal processes that promote floral diversity (among other things).
We might actually need something like this.
edit: Then again, bisons are fucking scary. There is a great story i read a while back about the huge starting advantage Europe had vs Africa and America when it came to easy to domesticate animals. Good luck trying to survive riding a Zebra or hunting a Buffalo.
On a sidenote, there is an Island in Africa created by a river which trapped a bunch of Lions and Buffalo. Lions had to evolve to incredible dimensions to hunt successful. Search for Okavango Delta
What'd be bigger sink, better alternative for the health of the planet ... a desert or aforested desert?
Edit: https://www.ibtimes.com/deserts-are-key-carbon-dioxide-sinks...
"It is worth noting that, although the sink in this experiment is significant, it is … about a hundredfold less than typical sinks in young forested ecosystems not exposed to elevated carbon dioxide," Christopher Field, director of the department of global ecology at Stanford University’s Carnegie Institution for Science, told NBC News. “The bottom line is that deserts will not save us from climate change."
Alternatively a diet that's 10% meat is optimal for health and also sustainable - win win
My first reaction was, "I know bison, but this is the first time I hear about these other frameworks."
Makes sense, this entire continent was carpeted in bison until only two hundred years ago.