🌱 Grazing for the Planet: Livestock Management Can Shape Climate Outcomes

A recent study in Nature Climate Change reveals that cattle grazing can either harm or help our climate—depending on how it's managed.

🐮Cattle grazing has a particularly bad rap within the climate change conversation, due to the land clearing, soil degradation, carbon storage loss and emissions that are typically associated with cows themselves.

📊However, when grazing is carefully managed—by adjusting intensity and timing of grazing rotations, matching fodder availability to herd demand, among other practices, it can sequester large amounts of soil carbon by increasing allocation of plant biomass to root growth.

📰This global study indicates that grazing has reduced global soil carbon stocks by 46 billion tons over the past 60 years; but that regenerative grazing practice over 21 million km² or 65% of the worlds grazing lands has the potential to restore 63 billion tons of carbon, indicating the potential of good grazing practice as a climate mitigation strategy.

Read the full study here.