ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2025
US grass-fed beef is as carbon intensive as industrial beef and ≈10-fold more intensive than common protein-dense alternatives.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Reply to Apanovich and Weeks: Exceptions exist, as recognized in the paper, but are too rare to challenge the original findings.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Why excluding regenerative grazing skews beef's carbon profile.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The high resource intensity of industrial beef in high-income economies has prompted growing interest in alternative, potentially lower environmental impact beef production pathways. Of those, grass feeding is promoted by some as one such alternative, but rigorous quantification of this claim is required. Motivated to bridge this knowledge gap, we integrate empirical evidence with a model based on authoritative equations governing beef cattle performance to quantify the greenhouse gas emissions of producing grass-fed beef. Because geographical specificity and dependence on agricultural intensity are key, we model widely varied herds, from extensive operations on semiarid, marginal rangelands to partially industrial, intensive ones in lusher, more accommodating settings. We find that emissions per kg protein of even the most efficient grass-fed beef are 10 to 25% higher than those of industrial US beef and 3- to over 40-fold higher than a wide range of plant and animal alternatives. Soil sequestration enhancement by rangeland grazing reduces these emissions from 280-390 to 180-290 kg CO
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