Oregon’s bovine businesses are booming.

Cattle, dairy and hay for livestock feed have topped Oregon’s list of highest grossing agricultural commodities for six years running, taking three of the top four slots each year. For two out of the past three years, live cattle for beef was Oregon’s No. 1 commodity in agriculture, the state’s second-largest industry.

This translates to a whopping 1.3 million cattle spread across the state among farms, ranches, feedlots and dairies, large and small.

In Western Oregon, where the pasture is lush, it takes 2 acres to feed a single cow. East of the Cascades, where there isn’t much to nibble on, it takes vastly greater space, often on public lands and in direct competition with other wildlife that depend on scarce desert resources to survive.

Oregon is currently faced with uncertainty about its groundwater reserves and is falling far short of meeting its greenhouse gas reduction goals. At the same time, climate change is forcing the state into an era of more frequent droughts and a changing landscape. Is it wise to continue to pour limited resources into nourishing more than a million cattle?

Street Roots examined public records; visited beef and dairy producers; and spoke with industry leaders, environmental lawyers and activists, state and federal regulators, biologists and other experts, all in an effort to answer this question and take a peek behind what one ecologist calls “the bovine curtain.”

While health impacts of consumption and animal welfare issues are equally important and controversial aspects of the beef and dairy industries, in this issue we aim to explore what the industries look like in our state, and how they might be affecting Oregon’s economic and ecologic future.

An Angus at Verdant Hills Farm near McMinnville. Photo by Arkady Brown

Oregon cattle, but Midwest beef

The first thing to understand about Oregon’s beef industry is that it’s quite small in comparison to its live cattle and calf industry.

“I like to tell people that the part of the beef industry that they imagine, the wide open spaces, the cows roaming free – those elements are what we have in Oregon. The other part that turns livestock into beef is typically done in other regions of our country,” said Theresa Yoshioka, a trade manager at Oregon’s Department of Agriculture.

The Oregon Cattlemen’s Association estimates there are between 10,000 and 12,000 cattle ranchers operating throughout Oregon’s 36 counties.

“Many ranchers on the west side of the state are raising just a handful of animals to feed their family and friends,” said Jerome Rosa, the association’s director. “They typically have other sources of income or are retired.

“Now, on the east side of the state, it’s a completely different scenario,” Rosa said. “These are the folks that make their full-time living raising beef, and many of them do it in a large way.”

These cows typically graze on pasture or on public lands with their mothers until they are about 500 pounds. Then they’re sold to a feedlot where they are fattened up on grain, or in some cases grass-finished.

“The mother cows spend their lifetime in Oregon,” Yoshioka said. “It’s what we call the weeners or yearlings, the offspring, that are sold to other regions.”

While Oregon has 130 feedlots, many are quite small in comparison to the giant operations in the Midwest, where many Oregon cattle are sent for fattening up and slaughter.

For regional natural meat brands, however, the cattle are raised and slaughtered in the Pacific Northwest, but it’s a smaller share of the market.

Cattle ranchers are paid what an animal is worth when it’s sold to a feedlot or slaughterhouse, not for the value of the end product, such as steak or hamburger, that’s sold to consumers.

Today, 80 percent of the slaughter and meatpacking portion of the industry is controlled by just four multibillion-dollar corporations.

With few slaughterhouses and meatpackers located in Oregon, it hurts ranchers’ bottom line.

“Their product has to go farther to get processed, and that adds cost. And not only that, but the farther those cattle have to go to get slaughtered – if they were 15 minutes away or 15 hours away – makes a big difference on the amount of shrink that occurs in those animals, and the cost to get it there,” Rosa said.

Another challenge to the industry is its labor shortage. Fewer young people want to stay in the country to work on the ranch, and immigration issues are compounding the problem as the industry has largely relied on Hispanic laborers to fill positions.

This is partly because as the minimum wage has increased, said Rosa, ranchers would rather pay a skilled laborer than a high-school kid that might be goofing off half the time.

“The labor situation is getting more and more serious and more and more difficult for us all the time,” said Rosa.

Beef cattle account for about 85 percent of Oregon’s bovine population; the rest are in dairies.

Oregon houses one of the largest dairies in the nation near Boardman, called Threemile Canyon Farms. And another mega-dairy is moving in about 25 miles away. Together these facilities will house up to 100,000 dairy cows and calves.

Cows are milked on a carousel at Threemile Canyon Farms. Photo courtesy of Threemile Canyon Farms

There are 227 cow dairies in Oregon, and about 20 percent are organic. Organic dairies typically graze cows on pesticide-free pasture during the dry months and bring them into a barn structure during the wet months.

Conventional dairy practices vary, with some confining cattle year-round, feeding them a mixture of grain and grass.

Tammy Dennee, the legislative director at Oregon Dairy Farmers Association told the Oregon Board of Agriculture at a meeting in May that in recent years, Oregon has lost about six dairies annually.

Many dairy operators blame this decline on large dairies moving in, saying that it’s hard to compete when dairy giants flood the market with milk, resulting in lower margins that only they can afford to ride out.

But despite the shrinking number of smaller and mid-sized dairies, in 2016 the state saw record-setting production levels with 2.6 billion pounds of dairy products produced, according to USDA data.

That’s nearly a billion pounds more than just 16 years earlier.

Paris, a cow at Double J Jerseys, an organic dairy in Oregon. Photo by Arkady Brown

Oregon’s largest source of methane

While individual cattle ranchers and dairy farmers may have different business philosophies as it relates to organic versus conventional, one fact is undeniable: They raise an animal that consumes massive amounts of resources while producing large volumes of powerful greenhouse gases.

Oregon’s 1.3 million cattle produce more methane than any other source in the state, including all municipal and industrial landfills combined, according to data obtained from Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality, or DEQ.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the warming effect of methane is 86 times as potent as carbon dioxide over a 20-year period, and 34 times as strong over a 100-year period.

DEQ’s modeling assumes methane is just 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide. This is based on an earlier version of the IPCC report, published in 2007, for a 100-year period. In the short term, however, methane has a much greater carbon dioxide equivalent than DEQ methods reflect.

Cows also produce nitrous oxide in their manure, a gas with warming potential 265 times greater than carbon dioxide.

According to DEQ modeling, Oregon’s cattle produce nearly 3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in these two gases per year. That equates to about 5 percent of the state’s total greenhouse gas emissions.

But that’s just what comes out of the cow. It doesn’t account for emissions related to transporting, processing, growing their feed or the carbon sequestration potential lost when cows eat all the vegetation, including young trees, along stream banks.

In Portland, residents are encouraged to utilize the curbside composting program to help lower methane emissions at city landfills. So what are policymakers on the state level doing to rein in the state’s largest source of methane gas?

The answer is not much.

While dairies and feedlots are known to emit harmful pollutants in addition to greenhouse gases, such as ammonia, hydrogen sulfide and particulates, they are exempted from air quality monitoring.

A bill aimed at removing this exemption from dairies died this legislative session despite widespread concerns that the

30,000-cow dairy coming in 25 miles away from Threemile Canyon Farms would compound air quality issues in the Boardman area.

Bills seeking to implement a carbon-trading program this session, which also failed, altogether excluded agricultural industries from their proposed carbon-counting systems.

“Because agriculture feeds people, usually it’s a more incentive-based program,” said Jana Gastellum, program director of climate at Oregon Environmental Council, one of the bill’s primary backers.

Oregon is falling far short of meeting its goal of reducing emissions to 14 million metric tons by 2050, and there is no comprehensive plan to address emissions from the agricultural sector.

“It would be really great for Oregon to have a broader strategy for how we are going to hit those overall pollution caps,” Gastellum said.

While cattle’s contribution of 5 percent of total state emissions may not seem significant, if the industry continues unchecked and Oregon eventually meets it emissions goal, cattle will account for 21 percent of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions. Even more if the industry continues to grow and more large dairies move in.

Additionally, as carbon dioxide emissions go down, so will the aerosols emitted when we burn fossil fuels, which actually have a cooling effect by reflecting the sun’s energy back into space. Therefore, it’s critical that more powerful greenhouse gases, such as methane and nitrous oxide, be addressed.

California implemented a carbon cap-and-trade program four years ago, and dairies there are required to lower their methane emissions 40 percent by 2030.

The Oregon Global Warming Commission issued a warning to the state Legislature in its February report:

“While individual agencies have taken up both emissions reduction and adaptation issues episodically, the State has no overall climate change adaptation/preparation strategy, action plan or investment criteria.”

The report also indicated agriculture has been responsible for 8 percent to 9 percent of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions since 2002, with livestock being the primary source.

But that percentage is an estimate.

“We have a very rough read on what’s coming out of agriculture,” said Angus Duncan, the commission’s chair. But, he added, “the issue of methane generally, and of agricultural methane, we think is a significant one.”

Photo by Arkady Brown

Methane digesters won’t solve the problem

Cows poop. A lot.

The typical full-grown beef cow produces about 75 pounds of manure a day, and a dairy cow produces 120 pounds.

Because many cattle ranchers and smaller to mid-sized dairy farmers in Oregon graze their cows for at least a portion of their lives, much of that manure is deposited on pastures or saved during the winter for fertilizer later in the year.

But at confined cattle feeding operations, the poop piles up. In these cases, methane digesters can be used to combust the waste, turning it into biogas for electricity.

These anaerobic digesters are often touted as being the solution to the methane problem, but they leave a lot to be desired.

“We destroy about 60,000 tons of carbon (equivalent) a year through our methane digesters,” said Marty Myers, who manages Threemile Canyon Farms.

Threemile houses 70,000 milk cows, replacement cows and calves. The waste of 25,000 of those animals goes through the digester, which is roughly 3 million pounds of poop per day.

Threemile is owned by North Dakotan Ronald Offutt, whose net worth is $500 million. He is also the primary supplier of french fries to McDonald’s and owns farms in the South, in the Midwest and on both coasts. Myers said the state gives Threemile Canyon Farms a tax credit of $3.50 (dropped down from $5) for each wet ton of manure run through the digester. But even with the tax credit, Myers said, it’s a barely breakeven financial endeavor.

Ivan Maluski, director at Friends of Family Farmers, thinks the bulk of that tax credit should be going to smaller operations rather than Threemile.

“For operations of the scale of Threemile, frankly, it should be a cost of doing business,” he said. “They don’t need General Fund dollars when we’re having a budget crisis in Oregon, for a tax credit for a manure digester.”

Myers, whom Gov. Kate Brown drew criticism for appointing to the Oregon Board of Agriculture, said Threemile isn’t saving any money by having a digester.

“Theoretically, it’s a cost-saving asset, but it doesn’t really work that way,” Myers said. “It looks good on paper, but the reality is it’s a very intense operation that has all kinds of burps and upsets that go along with it. It hasn’t provided us a return.”

He said his digester generates 30 percent of the electricity the dairy needs to operate.

NW Natural’s Smart Energy program purchases offsets from five of Oregon’s eight digesters – with participating ratepayers funding the projects.

While in some instances, four or five dairies in close proximity will share a digester, the vast majority of the state’s dairies do not combust their manure at all, nor do any of the state’s beef feedlots.

“Part of the reason why there are not more methane digesters on feedlots and on dairies in Oregon, and in the U.S., compared to Europe, is we have a low cost on our power rates,” said Jerome Rosa, executive director of Oregon Cattlemen’s Association. “If our power rate was double, there would be more demand to go in and put in digesters, because then it would be economically feasible.”

But even if they were more heavily utilized, methane digesters solve only a small part of the methane problem.

“For a digester to really function, you need a constant supply of manure. My grass needs the constant supply of manure,” said Jon Bansen, an organic milk producer near Monmouth. “I would have to put diapers on my cows when they go to pasture. I know it sounds all green to have a digester, but it’s really not so green because your cows have to be on concrete all day long in order to have it.”

But the main reason digesters won’t solve the livestock methane problem is because 85 percent of the methane a cow emits comes out of its mouth, not its rear end, according to DEQ’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program data.

“The cows, they chew their cud and they have more than one stomach so they have a process in their system that creates some belching, but not a lot of flatulence – it’s mostly burping,” Myers said, “and there’s no way to capture that.”

Nearly a decade ago, the Oregon Legislature passed a bill that created a task force to look at dairy emissions. It was composed of industry and farm representatives, public health professionals, policymakers and Oregon State University faculty. The task force “strongly” recommended the creation of an “Oregon Dairy Air Emissions Program,” but no program was ever initiated.

Elisabeth Holmes, an environmental law attorney in Eugene, said Oregon needs to protect itself from attracting additional confined animal feeding operations.

She often represents clients suing these facilities in states that have been inundated with them.

“We have a couple that are coming in,” she said. “In other parts of the United States, they tend to move around a lot because what happens is they come in and they pollute the water, they destroy the land, and then they close up shop and move somewhere else.”

Cattle at Double J Jerseys, an organic dairy in Oregon. Photo by Arkady Brown

What does it take to feed a cow?

March marked the first time Oregon was completely drought-free in six years. But scientists predict droughts like the state saw in 2015 will become more frequent with climate change.

That year, the state was so dry Gov. Kate Brown declared a state of emergency in two-thirds of Oregon’s counties while many cities such as Lake Oswego, Bend and Keizer imposed water-use limits on their residents.

The following summer, Oregonian reporters Kelly House and Mark Graves revealed in an exposé titled “Draining Oregon” that the state was allowing farmers to deplete underground water reservoirs by pumping water to grow cash crops in the desert.

And a lot of that water was being pumped to grow Oregon’s third-highest-valued agricultural commodity, alfalfa and other hay, to feed livestock.

Ecologist George Wuerthner, a longtime thorn in the side of the cattle industry, said this is an issue across the West. He pointed south to California.

“The irony there is during this last drought, people were asked to take short showers and put bricks in their toilets; meanwhile out there in the California desert in Imperial Valley and places like that, they’re growing alfalfa, which is a very water-thirsty plant.”

Oregon was doing the same thing during its last severe drought, with more than a million acres growing hay to feed livestock – and state agencies had no idea how much groundwater there was to spare.

A bill to fund groundwater studies died this legislative session with strong opposition from the Oregon Farm Bureau, farmers and ranchers who thought it would be burdensome. It would have required that water pumpers install a device that measures how much water they use and imposed a steep fine for exceeding water rights.

Both National Geographic and Water Footprint Network calculated that it takes about 1,800 gallons of water to make just one pound of ground beef when considering the water it takes to irrigate the animal’s feed, what it drinks and what’s used in meat processing.

This pair of photos from Oregon’s Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge shows riparian conditions in the same spot before the removal of cattle in 1984-91 (left) compared to after the removal of cattle in 2013-14 (after). Photos from “Restoration of riparian areas following the removal of cattle in the Northwestern Great Basin” in Environmental Management

Public lands for private enterprise

The federal government owns about half of Oregon, and much of that public land is broken up into grazing allotments where, ecologists and biologists say, cows are acting as an invasive species.

They trample the earth and devour vegetation, posing a danger to already threatened species in sensitive areas, and they act as a significant contributor to the rising temperatures and dropping levels of the state’s waters.

There are 1,657 grazing allotments on U.S. Bureau of Land Management land in Oregon, occupying roughly a quarter of the state’s landmass. Up to about 930,000 livestock are permitted to graze these areas, although that number represents the limit, not necessarily the number that are actually grazing, said Robert Hopper, BLM rangeland manager.

He said that while rangeland managers periodically check to make sure the cows aren’t overgrazing or trampling sensitive areas on these allotments, the frequency of visits varies significantly, with smaller allotments going unchecked.

Right now there are about 30 rangeland managers in Oregon, Hopper said. Offices that had seven managers when he started with BLM three decades ago now have three or four.

“There are a lot of vacancies,” he said, adding that budget cuts have been a factor in staffing.

The U.S. Forest Service also grants grazing permits, although fewer, for up to 91,300 head of cattle on 625 allotments in national forests across Oregon.

To understand how damaging cows can be in these areas, you have to understand the importance of riparian zones.

“Riparian zones are defined as those areas that are associated with streams and lakes and other wet areas,” said Boone Kaufman, a professor and senior researcher at Oregon State University’s Department of Fisheries and Wildlife.

While these areas only make up 1 to 2 percent of the landscape, he said, “82 percent of the wildlife in the state of Oregon depend upon riparian zones for all or part of their life.

“These small areas function as incredibly important water filters for cleaning water and giving us fresh water. They store water and slowly release it late in the year, and they have important aesthetic values for tourism,” he said. “They are far greater in value than almost any other area of land in the state.”

The problem is, cows love hanging out in them. There’s water, shade and fresh vegetation for them to munch on.

“More stream miles or riparian zones are affected by livestock grazing than any other land use,” Kauffman said.

He conducted a study to determine how the compaction of soil by cattle was impacting stream flows on the Middle Fork John Day River. He found that in areas where cows had compacted the earth, the soil’s ability to absorb and store water was diminished. This meant that when it rained in the spring, rather than that water replenishing groundwater stores that would slowly release into the stream later in the year, it was running off into the stream.

But areas where cattle had been removed for the previous nine years showed great resilience.

“We were getting 60,000 extra liters of water just in the top 10 centimeters,” Kauffman said. “So we’re thinking, for the entire John Day River we were sampling, it’s something like the equivalent of 200 households of water use.”

But compaction is just one of many problems cows create in riparian areas.

As they eat down the vegetation, they cause the stream banks to erode. Over time, this can transform a clear, deep and narrow meandering stream into a wide and shallow murky stream that warms quickly in the sun.

Compounding the temperature increase, cows also eat or otherwise destroy plants and young trees providing the shade that keeps the waterway cool.

All of these effects are detrimental to Oregon’s many threatened and endangered salmon and other fish species, said Laurie Rule, senior staff attorney at Advocates for the West.

Before becoming an attorney, Rule worked as a wildlife biologist for the U.S. Forest Service and for private consultants who surveyed state land in Oregon and Washington.

She said she realized no matter what research was being done, land managers were going to do what they wanted despite the science.

“I thought that maybe a better way to create impact was to go to law school and try to incorporate science and law together,” she said.

In January, her firm won one of three lawsuits it brought against the U.S. Forest Service for allowing grazing near sensitive habitats that the cows kept trampling in the Fremont-Winema National Forest in Southern Oregon.

Each of the three lawsuits dealt with the degradation of a different species’ habitat. While they lost their cases for the bull trout and short-nosed sucker, they won their case for the Oregon spotted frog, a recently listed threatened species.

She said winning these cases is tough because judges are very cognizant of the fact their judgment will affect the rancher’s livelihood. Oftentimes her law firm will win a grazing allotment case on its legal merits, but rather than stopping the grazing, the judge will tell the land management agency to do a better analysis of the impacts.

“There’s a lot of BLM land out there. It’s a huge part of the state, and there’s not a lot of people really looking at what’s going on out there and paying attention to grazing impacts,” she said.

“When you win and don’t see any changes on the ground – that’s frustrating,” she said, when asked why so few environmental groups target grazing. “I think there is some fatigue, some frustration, some feeling like you are just beating your head against a wall by trying and trying to make change, and not much change happens.”

Rule said wildlife that live on the west side of the state have it easy.

“The species that live out in Southeast Oregon? Man, they have it rough! They have these small niches that are highly dependent on water and riparian areas – that have good vegetation. When those areas that they are highly reliant on are damaged by livestock? They don’t have a chance.”

While taxpayers fund fence building on public lands to protect some riparian areas from cows, many areas are unprotected or protected by fencing that fails to keep cows out.

“The majority of riparian areas are still totally accessible,” Rule said.

But the fencing also poses problems.

“Fences fragment habitat and harm many species of native wildlife, including sage grouse, which collide with it, and pronghorn (antelope), which may not be able to cross it,” said Paul Ruprecht, a staff attorney for Western Watersheds Project.

Western Watersheds Project launched a legal challenge in January against the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife for expanding grazing allotments into a wildlife refuge in Southern Oregon and Northern California’s Klamath Basin, which houses the last sage grouse breeding area in the region.

Cattle are known to destroy sage grouse habitat by eating the sparse bunches of forbs and grasses where the birds hide their eggs and brood from predators.

In wildlife refuges, a land management agency must show its plans will improve the habitat, not degrade it.

“The Fish and Wildlife Service claims that grazing will be used to prevent fires and target invasive plants like cheatgrass,” Ruprecht said. “But that justification is not scientifically sound because livestock are in fact the major cause of cheatgrass that causes more frequent fires in sagebrush habitat. Grazing is a cause of the degraded sage grouse habitat – not the solution to it.”

Bill Marlett is a hydrologist and former director of the Oregon Natural Desert Association, which in the past was the primary initiator of lawsuits aimed at protecting sensitive areas on public lands in Eastern Oregon from grazing. He said that while there are many ranchers who are doing good work, such as protecting wolves and keeping their cows where they are supposed to be, there is still a pervasive mentality among others that the land is theirs to do with as they please.

“The holding out with (Malheur occupier Ammon) Bundy, that was classic,” he said. “A lot of this is cultural, because cows were out there before the laws and regulations existed.”

But, he added, “if there were no cows on public lands today, and someone came up with a bright idea and said, let’s consider putting livestock on public lands. Just think about that and do an environmental impact statement, and make a decision. I predict if that happened, we would probably not have public-lands grazing today.”

Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge is shown after cattle grazing was halted. PHOTO FROM “RESTORATION OF RIPARIAN AREAS FOLLOWING THE REMOVAL OF CATTLE IN THE NORTHWESTERN GREAT BASIN”

Waters of the state

While dairies and feedlots aren’t regulated by air quality programs, the Oregon Department of Agriculture does permit and monitor manure management for water quality.

But most cattle ranching operations don’t require a permit because they don’t meet the definition of confinement, said Wym Mathews, who oversees the program.

For cattlemen Rich and Michael Butler, protecting their watershed on private property was a top priority, but they said it was voluntary.

The married couple is raising 25 head of organic, grass-fed Angus cattle on their property in Muddy Valley. While they pasture feed their herd in the summer, they keep them in a covered barn area with a small outdoor lot during the winter where the waste collects. They store it in a pile on concrete nearby.

They noticed that when it rained, contaminated water full of nitrates was running off of their manure pile and into nearby Muddy Creek. It was easy to see because the grass where the water had flowed was much greener and extended all the way to the creek. When asked if the Department of Agriculture had noticed the problem, Rich Butler said, “Nobody comes out and looks. We called them actually to ask for suggestions.”

They won a grant through their local water conservation district that helped pay for a roof on their manure storage area that solved the problem.

But, Michael Butler added, “It’s completely optional.”

Nitrate levels exceed the safety standard in many of Oregon’s watersheds. In some areas, livestock manure is the main source, and in other areas it’s crop fertilizers, mainly synthetics made from petroleum byproducts.

One study of the Southern Willamette Valley, for example, found 20 percent of well water exceeded the EPA’s benchmark for safe nitrate levels. Another study of the Umatilla Basin found that nitrate contamination is increasing in 33 percent of the wells tested and that five public water systems required nitrate treatment.

Elisabeth Holmes, an attorney with Blue River Law in Eugene, pointed out that the EPA’s benchmark for nitrates, which is 10 milligrams per liter, was set in the early 1990s. “That level was based on studies from the 1950s,” she said. “There are a lot of studies that have come out that talk about various effects of nitrates – thyroid problems, blood circulation problems, diabetes, reproductive problems, birth defects, central nervous system defects and cancer. … Some of these studies show levels as low as 4 or 5 milligrams per liter are associated with certain health problems.”

The state’s Watershed Protection Program requires the Department of Agriculture to work with local communities on watershed management plans, said Don Butcher, a DEQ water quality manager.

He said that while there are many ecological dangers to cows stomping around in streams, “the plans vary from basin to basin – some have prohibitions on that sort of thing, and some of them just say: Try not to do that, or plan not to do that, or preferably don’t do that.”

Butcher said when he drives around the state, he often sees damage from cows that he finds troublesome.

“I’ll see areas where cows have completely eroded the stream banks and clearly are in the stream and there’s no fencing, and all the riparian vegetation is gone. But it’s kind of scattered,” he said. “There’s places where we have bacteria problems in streams because of accumulations of manure that gets hurled across fields, and they flood-irrigate next to the John Day River.”

Cattle at Double J Jerseys, an organic dairy in Oregon. Photo by Arkady Brown

But don’t rural communities rely on cattle?

An irony ecologist George Wuerthner likes to point out is that many of the very same ranchers who decry the federal government’s regulations protecting public lands are more than willing to take taxpayer-funded subsidies to keep them in business.

Wuerthner, who sits on the board of the Western Watersheds Project, also wrote a book titled “Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction of the American West.”

One subsidy is the low rate ranchers pay to let their cows loose and unsupervised on public lands. Ranchers pay $1.87 per month per animal. It’s a fee that’s gone up only 64 cents since 1966.

They also get a giant break on property taxes in many states, including Oregon.

The Hammond family in Harney County, who was used as rationale by the Bundys for holding the Malheur Wildlife Refuge hostage last year, collected $325,644 in livestock subsidies between 1995 and 2014, according to an online database of farm subsidies that Environmental Working Group manages.

Theirs was just a small portion of the $11.5 million in federal subsidies paid out to livestock owners in Harney County alone during that time.

In all, farmers and ranchers in Oregon have received $2.1 billion in subsidies between 1995 and 2014, with $62.4 million in the form of livestock subsidies.

Critics say using taxpayer dollars and offering huge tax breaks to keep ranchers’ businesses viable and the price of beef low masks the true cost of what should be a luxury product that’s not sustainable at current levels.

That many rural communities are dependent on the cattle industry is not an indication of the industry’s economic strength, but of the economic weaknesses of those communities, Wuerthner said.

“The irony was during the Malheur takeover, people were all up in arms about how ‘We hate the government,’” he said. “If government jobs were to disappear from Burns, there would not be a Burns left because the contribution from things like ranching is so small in the employment.”

According to Oregon’s Employment Department, in 2016, the government was the largest employer in Eastern Oregon, employing more than 17,000 people, while raising cattle accounted for just 1,600 jobs across the entire state.

When you combine all the jobs in beef and dairy, including slaughter and processing, it accounts for just 6,700 jobs across Oregon – more than three times that number of people work in real estate, and twice as many work in retail department stores, according to Oregon Employment Department data.

While the overall population of the state might not be reliant on ranching, however, some small communities are, said Rule, the Advocates for the West attorney.

“You have the ranchers themselves, then you have the people who own the stores where they buy their feed and their equipment, the grocery stores,” she said. “A lot of these local economies are still relatively dependent on ranching.”

But Wuerthner thinks a complete economic overhaul would be more beneficial to rural communities than sustaining the cattle industry.

“They think because their economies are not in good shape to begin with, they can’t afford to have less ranchers. But probably in many cases, it would actually get better,” he said. “Because without the cattle there, so many things would improve – the wildlife and the fisheries and so forth. That would be attractive to people who would be interested in moving to some of these rural communities, and who would bring jobs with them and other ways of living.”

Power of the belt buckle

Cows and factory farms were the topic of several panels at the Public Interest Environmental Law Conference in March.

The conference, held at the University of Oregon’s School of Law in Eugene each year, attracts environmental lawyers and activists from around the country.

Suing land managers has been one of the only tools environmentalists have at their disposal when it comes to reining in livestock grazing. But even when attorneys think they have a good case, it can be tough to get a win.

“Grazing is so ingrained – the Marlboro man, the Western mantra,” Rule said. “It’s a way of life, and we’re trying to take away this historic way of life from these ranchers who have been grazing these lands for 100 or 200 years. So grazing litigation is really hard.”

Many attorneys and environmental watchdogs say they are mystified by how susceptible lawmakers are to the nostalgia that surrounds the idea of the iconic Western cowboy.

For one, getting legislation passed in Salem to regulate the agricultural sector is never an easy battle – and the legislative session ending this month was no exception. Environmental groups watched bill after hard-fought bill die in committee amid strong opposition from the farm lobby.

“When you go to the Capitol and see lots of cowboy hats and belt buckles, you can bet it’s going to be a bad day for wildlife, water and public lands,” said Rob Klavin, Oregon Wild’s Northeast Oregon Field Coordinator.

Klavin has spent years fighting to protect wolves, a species once eradicated from Oregon, largely by the cattle industry.

A USDA agency, Wildlife Services, routinely kills predators that threaten livestock on the taxpayer’s dime. The government also reimburses ranchers for livestock killed by wolves.

While there are laws in place meant to protect public lands from overgrazing and to keep cows out of sensitive habitats, during interviews for this story, Street Roots was told repeatedly that regulators are too close to the people they regulate to be truly effective.

“Most of the people that work in that ranger district live in that community,” Rule said. “It’s hard to say, ‘I’m going to screw you by cutting your permit by 50 cows because I’m supposed to be protecting those species – sorry about that Fred, but I’ll see you at the basketball game tomorrow night.’”

We spoke with a former BLM employee who agreed to speak with us on condition of anonymity, as this person still does contract work with the agency.

“Jordan” is familiar with BLM rangeland management practices across the Northwest.

“A lot of those (BLM) range people,” Jordan said, “sometimes they’re from the city and sometimes they’re from rural areas – but they have an almost religious zealous to try to promote cattle grazing.

“Some of the range conservationists have spoken up, and they just get in trouble for reporting abuse because the ranchers are the wealthy property owners, and they apply pressure to the managers through indirect means,” Jordan said. “I know a wildlife biologist that was in the field and happened upon some cows in the wrong place and reported it. He ends up getting two weeks’ suspension without pay because the manager didn’t think he was prioritizing his work the way he was supposed to or something like that. It’s absurd. When you see that happen, you send a message: Don’t bring this up.”

At Verdant Hills Farm near McMinnville, chickens follow the cows, eating fly larvae. Photo by Arkady Brown

There’s got to be a better way

Street Roots visited two farms where the cows appeared healthy and happy, the land was cared for, and riparian areas were effectively fenced off.

At Verdant Hills Farm near McMinnville, Rich and Michael Butler go above and beyond organic.

On hot days, they position a water mister out in the pasture by their herd to keep the cattle cool and hire a licensed slaughterer to come out to their farm so they don’t have to subject their cows to travel, which can induce a lot of stress.

Both the Butlers and Jon Bansen, owner of Double J Jerseys, an organic dairy, practice intensive rotational grazing, which builds up the complexity of the soil and plant diversity while sequestering carbon dioxide.

On the downside, while their herds’ quality of life is better than grain-fed cows kept in confinement, their cows are emitting more methane because they’re grass fed. Research has shown grain-fed beef produces anywhere from 38 percent to 70 percent less methane than grass fed, depending on the study.

On the other hand, grain production requires plowing, which releases carbon stores into the atmosphere, as well as transport, which requires the burning of fossil fuels. Both the Butlers and Bansen use a no-till method to plant seed, which minimizes soil disruption, keeping the carbon in the earth.

Whereas conventional practice is to spray a cow with pesticides to kill flies, at the Butler’s cattle ranch, chickens follow the cows, eating fly larvae. At Bansen’s dairy, swallows eat the insects, and the cows walk through a fly vacuum on their way to being milked twice a day.

“The first thing a cow does when you spray her with pesticides is she licks herself,” Bansen said. “Now you have that in the system – another reason for organic.”

He started his career as a conventional dairy operator – just like his father, grandfather and great-grandfather before him.

“We were on a faster rotation, fed them a lot more grain. We pushed a lot more production out of our cows,” he said. “That was the old days where conventional agriculture was push push push, produce maximum amounts at really small margins – and that model is a little broken.”

But that was until 20 years ago, when George Siemen, the founder of Organic Valley showed up on his doorstop and asked Bansen if he wanted to join the organic cooperative. He became one of Oregon’s early adopters of the organic milk movement after that.

In the years since, Bansen said, he’s watched his soil become healthier and his pastures lusher, sequestering more carbon.

He’s also watched how bigger dairies’ moving in has coincided with smaller dairies’ going out of business. But being in an organic cooperative, he said, he doesn’t face the same market pressures.

“There were two other dairy farms on our road,” he said as we walked the perimeter of his pasture, “this one and another one that have all closed shop in the last five years.”

Troy Downing, a dairy specialist at Oregon State University, pointed out that U.S. milk production is so efficient, with cows bred for production and advances in livestock technologies, that the impact has been greatly reduced.

“Fifty years ago, we had twice the number of dairy cows in the U.S.,” Downing said, “and we produced half the milk. So what we’ve done by improving that efficiency is we’re feeding more people on less impact – and using grain has been a big part of that.”

He said most U.S. dairies feed cows a mix of grain and forage, which also cuts down significantly on methane emissions.

But the Butlers and Bansen both noted that grain-fed cows produce products containing harmful Omega 6 fats, rather than the beneficial Omega 3 fats found in grass-fed animal products. They said grass, not grain, is what a cow is supposed to eat.

“I consider giving them grain cruel. It’s like giving someone who is lactose intolerant milk,” Rich Butler said.

“The disconnect for modern agriculture has been to bring the animals in off the pasture, put them on concrete, bring the food to them, feed them high diet of grains and you get much more production,” Bansen said. “But the cow doesn’t live nearly as long. It’s definitely a shortened lifecycle because you are pushing that cow really hard.”

While beef consumption in the U.S. is trending down, consumption of U.S. beef in other parts of the world is increasing. In June, U.S. beef was sold in China again for the first time in 14 years, reopening a gigantic market for export.

“The appetite for American beef has grown tremendously in Asia in recent years, with Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong rapidly becoming three of the world’s top five importers of American-produced beef,” according to a recent press release from the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. “NCBA said it will continue to fight for greater and fairer access to foreign markets for American producers.”

On the small scale, raising beef and dairy cows doesn’t necessarily have an enormous impact, but what happens when your state is home to 1.3 million cattle?

“We have far too many animals out there, and there’s too much area being grazed at this moment right now to truly sustain Oregon’s biological diversity, particularly in the face of climate change,” said Boone Kauffman, senior researcher for the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife at Oregon State University.

What happens when your country is home to 93.6 million cattle, like the U.S. was at the start of the year?

To some cattle industry adversaries, such as Wuerthner, there is no such thing as sustainable beef or dairy, no matter where the animals graze.

The sheer amount of resources needed to raise cattle and produce dairy heavily outweighs the sustenance the animal provides, but federal subsidies and low-cost public-lands grazing continue to mask the true cost of beef.

“People are looking for this happy coincidence where they can say, ‘It’s OK to eat grass-fed beef,’” Wuerthner said. “There are reasons why grass-fed beef is better than factory-produced stuff, but there are also reasons why factory-produced beef is better than grass-fed. In other words, neither is good.”

Even as a dairy farmer, Bansen said people should eat mostly plants.

“Truthfully, some Americans probably consume too many animal products,” he said. “I say, consume less and consume really high quality.”

Email staff reporter Emily Green at emily@streetroots.org. Follow her on Twitter @GreenWrites.