To have Dennis T. Avery speak to your group, please contact Anne Avery at 540-337-6354 or anneavery@hughes.net.

“Around the world, 35–50 percent of the wheat-growing areas are under drought risk. The number of drought-affected wheat growing areas is likely to increase with the effects of climate change” John Brumby, of Victoria, Australia told his audience. “These initial results are very promising, and suggest that these genetically modified wheat lines may be part of the solution to help farmers maintain and improve their crop yields in a changing global environment.”

Australia is the world’s driest continent and Victoria’s wheat crop was significantly reduced by drought in 2006/2007. U.S. wheat stocks were cut to an 11-year low this winter by drought that spread last year from Texas through bone-dry Missouri and nearly to the Canadian border.

Researchers are also working on heat-tolerant wheat varieties, examining wild relatives of the wheat plant for DNA that would help wheat to tolerate higher temperatures for longer periods without sacrificing yield. Biotechnology would permit such DNA to be inserted into wheat varieties that already have high yields and good baking characteristics.

Due largely to opposition from environmental activists, no biotech wheats are currently being grown in the world. Monsanto shelved its herbicide-tolerant wheat, which could have allowed higher yields due to better weed control. Syngenta has slowed its work on disease-resistant biotech wheat.

However, British authorities are now saying that the world’s current food shortage underscores the huge increase in world food and feed production needed to feed a more populous, affluent world in the coming three decades. They say Europe should encourage research and production of biotech crops to supply the extra food from higher yields, rather than from clearing more forest to grow low-yield crops. Genetically modified crops are already being grown on hundreds of millions of acres worldwide, with no ill effects. The U.S., Latin America, China, and India are all leading biotech producers.

Drought is likely to be a particular problem over the next century or two. During both the Medieval Warming (950–1300 AD) and Roman Warming (200 BC–600 AD) the tropical rain belts moved hundreds of miles north. The Sahara Desert became wetter, and the southern tier of U.S. States became drier. Southern California had two century-long droughts during the Medieval Warming.

Not only is more wheat going to be needed, but research administrators note that many of the world’s rural poor depend on growing their own wheat in order to eat each year. Many of these disadvantaged farmers live in regions where drought is frequent. Many more live in areas too dry for current wheat crops, so they depend on still-lower grain yields from such crops as millet and sorghum. Drought and heat-tolerant wheat might offer a nutritional upgrade for such farmers and their families.

Isn’t it time we welcome the best agricultural research and technology, developed by thousands of dedicated scientists over the last century, to preserve our wildlands and provide a sustainable food supply for humanity?

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC and is the Director for the Center for Global Food Issues. (www.cgfi.org) He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 2442 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

 “Today, one ecological problem outweighs all others: global warming,” says Wired’s May 19 issue. “Restoring the Everglades, protecting the Headwaters redwoods, or saving the Illinois mud turtle won’t matter if climate change plunges the planet into chaos. . . . Winning the war on global warming requires slaughtering some of environmentalism’s sacred cows. We can afford to ignore neither the carbon-free electricity supplied by nuclear energy nor the transformational potential of genetic engineering. . . .” 

 Here, then, are some Wired’s new eco-heresies:

Air conditioning is good: “As a symbol of American profligacy, the air conditioner may rank second only to the automobile. . . . But this stereotype gets it wrong. When it’s 0 degrees outside, you’ve got to raise the indoor thermometer to 70 degrees. In 110-degree weather, you need to change the temperature by only 40 degrees to achieve the same comfort level. . . . In the Northeast, a typical house heated by fuel oil emits 13,000 pounds of CO₂ annually. Cooling a similar dwelling in Phoenix produced only 900 pounds of CO₂ a year.”   

Organics are not the answer: Wired notes that organic farms yield less food per acre. Actually, the organic yields are only about half as high as conventional because the world has an urgent shortage of manure. So all-organic farming would give up half the current world food output, threatening hunger for billions and extinction for species whose wild forests get cleared to plant more low-yield crops. Additionally, organic steers are on pasture much longer, burping up twice as much methane per pound as a feedlot steer, according to the UN’s FAO—and needing three times as much of the world’s scarce land.  

Farm the forests like fields:  Old-growth forests have a problem. “A tree absorbs roughly 1,500 pounds of CO₂ in its first 55 years. After that, its’ growth slows and it takes in less carbon. Left untouched, it ultimately rots or burns and all that CO₂ gets released. . . . The most climate-friendly policy is to continually cut down trees and plant new ones. Lots of them.” Use the wood to build durables such as furniture and houses, says the magazine.

Accept biotechnology: New nitrogen-efficient genetically engineered crops need only half as much nitrogen fertilizer—which Wired says could save a whopping 50 million tons worth of CO₂ emissions per year, with almost no leftover fertilizer to leach into streams. An organic dairy cow, with no boost from biotech growth hormone, gives 8 percent less milk. That means more cows, eating more feed, and emitting more methane, to produce organic milk that contains identical growth hormones.

Embrace nuclear power: “Nukes are the most climate-friendly industrial-scale form of energy.” A recent British government white paper says that from uranium mining to decommissioning, a nuclear power plant emits only 2 to 6 percent of the carbon per kilowatt-hour as natural gas. “Embracing the atom is key to winning the war on warming. . . . One of the Kyoto Protocol’s worst features is a sop to greens that denies carbon credits to power-starved developing countries that build nukes—thereby ensuring they’ll continue to depend on filthy coal.”

We commend Wired for indeed focusing on environmental first principles.  Now, if some additional warming actually occurs after our ten-years-and-counting vacation from higher temperatures . . .

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC and is the Director for the Center for Global Food Issues. (www.cgfi.org) He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 2442 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

The blue collar world sees no warming, but they surely see economic ruin staring them in the face.  Finally, the workers of the world are crying, “Enough of this man-made warming hype without warming!”

• Fishing fleets have gone on strike across Europe against ultra-high diesel prices, while  the Greens demand that fuel become even more scarce and expensive
• Truckers are staging fuel-protest slowdowns in major European cities.   
• Protesting French farmers have blockaded fuel stations.
• More than 70 percent of Britons now say they will not pay any extra taxes to “save the planet.”

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Meanwhile, the Vatican, widely flung governments, and dozens of universities have scheduled conferences on the global food shortage.

Guess whose advice we took on shifting much of our cropland from food to biofuels?  The advice of the same Greens who told us not to burn coal or oil. We shifted too much of our scarce cropland into corn ethanol and palm oil biodiesel. We forgot that the world’s food and feed demand was in the process of doubling due to 1) the last surge in human population growth; 2) rising Third World incomes and expectations; and 3) millions more beloved cats and dogs as households have fewer children and more affluence

Assuming society is not yet ready to starve the poor or euthanize their pets, we must feed them. That means at least twice as much global food and feed per year by 2040. Nor do we want to clear the forests or drain the wetlands to grow more crops. That means there is no “spare” cropland for corn ethanol

Unless the planet starts warming again, quickly and significantly, the Green momentum for a low-carbon society will come to a screeching stop. There are many indications that we are in a long, moderate warming cycle, which  began 150 years ago with the end of the Little Ice Age, and may continue for several more hundred years. There is no indication that this modest warming will be bad for humans, or for the wildlife. The thermometers show a net global temperature increase of just 0.2 degree C since 1940 —and even that tiny increase has been inflated by the urban heat island effect.

The big temperature increases are all in those unverified computer models so beloved by the Green movement. The mothers of the world’s kids and the workers who grow and catch its food now demand to see the thermometers climb more than .2 degrees before they renounce their food and jobs. Without energy, the workers can’t work, the farmers can’t farm, and the children can’t eat.

Until and unless the Greens and the UN can offer some evidence beyond the guesses of computer models that consistently over-estimate the warming that is occurring, we’ll accept the unsung voice of the thermometers

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC and is the Director for the Center for Global Food Issues. (www.cgfi.org) He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 2442 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

CHURCHVILLE, VA—We are truly conflicted about energy. Everyone agrees gasoline prices are far too high, but:

• Congress claims the oil industry is manipulating gas prices, while not allowing drilling.
• President Bush’s corn ethanol mandate has nearly doubled the world’s food prices, while producing a tiny amount of low-grade auto fuel.
• The Senate is meanwhile debating the Lieberman-Warner bill, which would deliberately tax gasoline and every other fossil fuel more and more heavily until we stop using them. That’s to “save us” from global warming.

The most foolish “solution” of all—the new law that lets us sue Arabs (we have zero jurisdiction) to force them to produce more oil while we sit on billions of gallons of oil and thousands of American jobs, refusing to drill in our own backyard.

The most logical answer to high gasoline prices has to be coal. We have centuries’ worth of coal, and we have clean-burning systems such as fluidized bed combustion. But we’ve been retiring the old coal-fired power plants, and burning scarcer oil and natural gas in our power plants. That has driven up both gas and gasoline prices. Hybrid cars conserve a little oil, but shifting the power plants to “clean coal” would conserve a lot of it.

Instead, the Eco-Department of Kansas has just forbidden the construction of two new coal-fired power plants because they would emit greenhouse gases. Governor Sibelius has backed up the environmental regulators. Texas has been forced to drop plans for several new coal-fired plants as well.   

Kansas and Texas are naïve. In Europe, they’re openly burning more coal already.  German coal burning was up 3.5 percent last year, never mind Kyoto. Britain is building a whole generation of new coal-fired plants to keep the lights on with a minimum of Middle East oil and Russian natural gas.

California wins the Hypocrisy Medal as it brags about its small carbon footprint while letting Arizona and New Mexico burn California’s coal just over the border, and paying the transmission costs back to California.

In the longer run, when we come to our senses, nuclear power will be a big player; but it will take a long time to get new nuclear plants on line. Nor is it clear what they will cost, even if we can rein in the Green lawsuits that seem to have paralyzed both the courts and congress.

Don’t blame Big Oil. Countries own their oil—and the U.S. won’t let U.S. workers produce it in this country.  Don’t blame the Arabs for the Greenpeace plan to scuttle “clean coal,” along with every other viable energy source.  Don’t even blame Congress, which foolishly tries to represent our own ambivalence about cars, energy, and “conservation.” Is leaving coal in the ground part of conservation? And what are we conserving it for if we refuse to use it as energy?

The crowning irony is that NASA now says the Pacific Ocean has entered a 25–30 year cooling phase. The last time this happened was from 1940–1975, when we had moderate, erratic global cooling. The climate science shows a 79 percent correlation between our temperatures and sunspots but no correlation with CO_2. This means CO₂ cannot be the dominant factor in our climate. So the high gas prices, the reliance on foreign oil, the loss of American jobs in the oil and coal and potential jobs in the nuclear fields are all for naught

Dennis T. Avery directs the Center for Global Food Issues for the Hudson Institute of Washington, D.C. He was formerly the senior agricultural analyst in the U.S. State Department. He is the co- author of the 2006 best-seller Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Yeas. His 1995 book Saving the Planet With Pesticides and Plastic: The Environmental Triumph of High-Yield Farming continues to be popular as a readable overview of realistic agriculture for the future and for today. 

Center for Global Food Issues: P.O. Box 202, Churchville, VA, U.S.A. 24421

Telephone: 540-337-6354: e-mail: cgfi@hughes.net web: www.cgfi.org fax: 540-337-8593

Recently, with America being dragged toward Kyoto-style energy limits by cadres of alarmists, Robinson mailed a new copy of the petition to his original signers, asking them to recruit additional qualified scientists.  Now his list includes nearly 32,000 American man-made warming skeptics with science qualifications.  More than 9,000 hold scientific PhDs. Almost 32,000 thousand skeptics happens to be twelve times as many scientists as the 2,500 scientific reviewers claimed by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to form a scientific consensus.

Last week Robinson held a press meeting at the National Press Club in DC, followed by a luncheon on Capital Hill, to which members of Congress and their aides were invited. Not surprisingly, attendance was low.

Robinson’s petition states a truth:  “There is no convincing evidence that human release of CO₂, methane or other greenhouse gases is causing or will cause, in the foreseeable future, catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.” 

What do these approx 32,000 scientists believe has caused the earth’s warming since 1850 if it isn’t CO₂?  He points to the sun. Robinson notes that over the past 150 years the sunspot index has predicted the Earth’s temperature changes—with 79 percent accuracy—about ten years before they happen.  The sunspots actually predicted the 2007 global temperature decline; the index turned down in 2000.  The computer models didn’t foresee it. 

The correlation between Earth’s temperatures and CO₂ is only at the “accidental” level—22 percent and declining sharply over the past decade as the temperatures have refused to increase with the CO₂ levels. Robinson says the lack of correlation between CO2 levels and past Earth temperatures proves that CO₂ is not dominating our climate.

The Oregon chemist warns that “no other major scientific problem has ever been tackled the way the UN has approached global warming.”  The UN hosted a big meeting of scientists, he says, and then a small group of “authors” summarized the discussions into a global action plan.  But the UN has never produced any evidence that humans are warming our climate.  The UN panel says CO₂ became the culprit “by the process of elimination” but such a process is neither scientific nor admissible in a court of law.       

The forecasts of desperate temperature increases all come from computer climate models, notes Robinson.  But the computer models keep forecasting more warming than we get.  In fact, 70 percent of the earth’s recent warming occurred before 1940, while virtually all of humanity’s greenhouse gas emission has occurred since that date.  The Earth’s net warming since 1940 is a tiny 0.2 degree C.

 “If CO₂ isn’t causing our tiny warming, then banning all our energy will simply make people poor and helpless, says Robinson, “The cold spells and heat waves nature will always throw at us, will then  indeed, threaten human lives on the planet.” 

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC and is the Director for the Center for Global Food Issues. (www.cgfi.org) He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

During the last Ice Age Svalbard was frozen under mile-thick ice for 90,000 years. Even the polar bears were driven south, and the island probably had no surviving plants at all. But when the Ice Age ended about 12,000 years ago, global temperatures swiftly rose more than 15 degrees C—and 40 percent of Svalbard became ice-free. Almost immediately, says a research team, such Arctic plants as mountain avens and white arctic bell heather colonized the newly available territory

Inger Greve Alsos, who studies the biology of Svalbard, recently reported on a new DNA analysis of its tough and persistent plant life (“Frequent Long-distance Plant Colonization in the Changing Arctic,” Science, Vol. 316, 2007.)  Her report says Svalbard has been colonized by plants repeatedly as it warmed and froze during Ice Ages and warm interglacials. The plants presumably also thrived during the eight global warmings that Svalbard and the earth have experienced since the last Ice Age—as they are in ours.  

“For all except one species, multiple seeds were necessary to bring the observed genetic diversity to Svalbard,” says biologist Alsos. She estimates that re-establishing the mountain aven on Svalbard would have required thousands of seeds. Dr. Alsos’ work suggests, however, that whenever Svalbard has been warm enough for the plants, the seeds have arrived

Apparently, the mountain aven came from Russia, hundreds of miles across the Arctic sea, blown by the prevailing southeastern winds across the ice. Dr. Alsos says Svalbard has also been repeatedly colonized by plants from Greenland, Iceland, and even Canada—but not from Scandinavia, which is nearer and along bird migration routes.  Scandinavian seeds would have had to travel upwind. That didn’t happen

“Recurrent glacial cycles have probably selected for a highly mobile arctic flora,” said the Svalbard research team in their Science report. “In addition, some dispersal vectors may be particularly efficient in the Arctic as a result of the open landscape.” 

Modern humans have become arrogant about our impact on the earth. We think we have to save Nature’s seeds—from the same climate changes that have persisted throughout time. The Ice Ages come every 100,000 years, whether we burn fossil fuels or not. The ice cores, seabed sediments, fossil pollen, and cave stalagmites all testify to a moderate, natural 1,500-year climate cycle that is tied to the sun and has persisted through the past million years. The Russians tell us there’s even a short Arctic climate cycle of about 70 years, and that the Arctic was warmer in the 1920s than it is today. Today, many decision makers are doing their best to ignore this evidence and foster illusions about the destructive power of our modern world.

The plants and polar bears have evolved to deal with climate changes. It was the Viking colonists on southern Greenland 1,000 years ago who couldn’t adapt when the Little Ice Age arrived bringing sea ice to their shores.

Whenever the sun warms the oceans, Svalbard will have ice-free land, and the Arctic plants will cycle back. The question remains whether humans will continue to persist—or whether we will frighten ourselves into extinction over a planetary warming that has totaled 0.2 degrees since 1940—right on the 1,500-year cycle’s schedule 

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DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC and is the Director for the Center for Global Food Issues. (www.cgfi.org) He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 2442 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

Not any time soon—if we suspend the biofuels mandates quickly. Unfortunately, if we keep burning corn, wheat, and palm oil in our vehicles, there’s no limit to the hunger, malnutrition, wildlife extinction and political disruption we can cause.

The problem is simple: Food demand is inelastic. People need about the same number of calories whether they’re expensive or cheap. But the demand for biofuels is almost without limit. An acre of corn produces only 50 gallons worth of gasoline per acre, while humans worldwide burn more than a trillion gallons of gasoline per year.

Biofuels could absorb the whole world’s crop production without bringing down gasoline prices—because we’re banning coal and refusing to drill for oil. If we want to keep on eating, we’ll have to scrap the false “fuel security” of the biofuels.

Even giving up biofuels won’t stave off the world’s hunger for long, because we’ll need more than twice as much food and feed per year by 2050. The number of humans is likely to peak at about 8 billion, up from today’s 6.4 billion, and at least 7 billion of them are likely to be affluent enough to eat meat and ice cream. They’ll have fewer children—but more pets, few of them vegetarian.

If the world plans to have forests, wildlands, and wildlife species in the 22^nd century, then we’ll need to triple the crop yields on the land we already farm—just for food and feed. Except for a chunk of western Brazil, there isn’t much high-quality cropland left in the world for cropland expansion, and none of it “extra” for biofuels.

But the same people who don’t want us to burn coal are telling us not to raise high-yield crops either. Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund tell us not to use nitrogen fertilizer taken from the air. They demand organic-only nitrogen from cattle manure or green manure crops—but such low-yield systems produce only half as much food per acre.

We’re locked into the same “don’t use it” debate on food as on energy. Is the Greens’ information on high yield crops any better than their “advice” on global warming—which tells us to stop burning fossil fuels though the world has cooled over the last ten years? 

The funding for farm science has declined sharply since Dr. Norman Borlaug led the Green Revolution and saved a billion people from starving. America’s land-grant universities are now researching how to farm organically, though such “research” has never produced a yield breakthrough. The high-yield studies are being done mainly by agribusiness—and by Bill Gates who has vowed to rekindle a Green Revolution for Africa whether the Greens like it or not.

Now, a big new report from the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) has been cited as evidence that industrialized food production is screwing up the planet. This report was supposed to be the “big tent” laying out the consensus path for future agricultural research. The land-grant agriculture schools, Greenpeace, agribusiness, FAO, all were included. But, by the time the report was issued, only Greenpeace seemed to be at the drafting table.

And guess who’s in charge of this new “pattern for farming’s future”? Robert Watson, a British-born chemist who served as chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change from 1997–2002.

What are the chances that the Greens’ farm science is any more honest than the IPCC’s global warming “science”?

Dennis T. Avery directs the Center for Global Food Issues for the Hudson Institute of Washington, D.C. He is the co- author, with Dr. S. Fred Singer, of the 2006 best-seller Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years. His book Saving the Planet With Pesticides and Plastic: The Environmental Triumph of High-Yield Farming continues to be popular as a readable overview of realistic agriculture for the future and for today.

e-mail: cgfi@hughes.net or write him at P.O. Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421

CHURCHVILLE VA—Now it’s not just the sunspots that predict a 23-year global cooling. The new Jason oceanographic satellite shows that 2007 was a “cool” La Nina year—but Jason also says something more important is at work: The much larger and more persistent Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) has turned into its cool phase, telling us to expect moderately lower global temperatures until 2030 or so.

For the past century at least, global temperatures have tended to mirror the 20-to 30-year  warmings and coolings of the north-central Pacific Ocean. We don’t know just why, but the pattern of the last century is clear: the earth warmed from about 1915 to1940, while the PDO was also warming (1925 to 46). The earth cooled from 1940 to 1975, while the PDO was cooling (1946 to 1977). The strong global warming from 1976 to 1998 was accompanied by a strong and almost-constant warming of the north-central Pacific. Ancient tree rings in Baja California and Mexico show there have been 11 such PDO shifts since 1650, averaging 23 years on length.

Researchers discovered the PDO only recently—in 1996—while searching for the reason  salmon numbers had declined sharply in the Columbia River after 1977. The salmon catch record for the past 100 years gave the answer—shifting Pacific Ocean currents. The PDO favors the salmon from the Columbia for about 25 years at a time, and then the salmon from the Gulf of Alaska, but the two fisheries never thrive at the same time. Something in the PDO favors the early development of the salmon smolts from one region or the other. Other fish, such as halibut, sardines, and anchovies follow similar shifts in line with the PDO.  

The PDO seems to be driven by the huge Aleutian Low in the Arctic—but we don’t know what controls the Aleutian Low. Nonetheless, 22.5-year “double sunspot cycles” have been identified in South African rainfall, Indian monsoons, Australian droughts, and rains in the United States’ far southwest as well. These cycles argue that the sun, not CO₂, controls the earth’s temperatures.

Dr. Henrik Svensmark’s recent experiments at the Danish Space Research Institute seem to show that the earth’s temperatures are importantly affected by the low, wet clouds that deflect more or less solar heat back into space. The number of such clouds is affected, in turn, by more or fewer cosmic rays hitting the earth. The number of earthbound cosmic rays depends on the extent of the giant magnetic wind thrown out by the sun.

All of this defies the “consensus” that human-emitted carbon dioxide has been responsible for our global warming. But the evidence for man-made warming has never been as strong as its Green advocates maintained. The earth’s warming from 1915 to 1940 was just about as strong as the “scary” 1975 to 1998 warming in both scope and duration—and occurred too early to be blamed on human-emitted CO₂. The cooling from 1940 to 1975 defied the Greenhouse Theory, occurring during the first big surge of man-made greenhouse emissions. Most recently, the climate has stubbornly refused to warm since 1998, even though human CO₂ emissions have continued to rise strongly.

The Jason satellite is an updated and more-accurate version of the Poseidon satellite that has been monitoring the oceans since 1992, picking up ocean wind speeds, wave heights, and sea level changes. Jason is run by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a French team.

How many years of declining world temperature would it take now—in the wake of the ten-year non-warming since 1998—to break up Al Gore’s “climate change consensus”?

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC and is the Director for the Center for Global Food Issues. (www.cgfi.org) He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 2442 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

New Beef Eco-Report: Pound-for-pound, beef produced with grains and growth hormones produces 40% less greenhouse gas emissions and saves two-thirds more land for nature compared to organic grass-fed beef.

To reach these startling conclusions, analysts at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Food Issues used beef production models from Iowa State University’s Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture and greenhouse gas emissions estimates from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN IPCC).

More than 95% of beef produced in the United States is raised on grain-based diets in feedlots, using supplemental growth hormones, both natural and synthetic. The report details the extensive human and environmental safety requirements for the use of supplemental hormones on feedlots, as well as the growing body of environmental monitoring studies showing no significant negative impacts from their use. Instead, the data show major environmental benefits of this production system: Saving 2/3rds more land for nature and producing 40% fewer greenhouse gas emissions per pound of beef produced.

The use of supplemental hormones in beef production has been deemed safe for humans by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Health Canada, the World Health Organization, the Codex Alimentarius Committee of the World Trade Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and a conference of expert toxicologists established by the European Agriculture Commission.

The first-of-its-kind analysis compared the land costs and greenhouse gas emissions of organic grass-based beef with conventional grain-finished beef. The findings are particularly relevant in light of a UN Food and Agriculture Organization report published last summer estimating that beef and dairy production are responsible for 18% of all human greenhouse gas emissions.

“Environmentally conscious consumers who have been told that grass-raised beef is more environmentally sensitive and sustainable should rethink their beef purchases in light of our findings,” says lead author Alex Avery, director of research at the Center.

Executive Summary

Growth promoting hormones are a key component of North American beef production. Their use over the past 50+ years (since 1956) has proven beneficial not only to beef producers, but to consumers and the environment, who benefit from lower costs and more efficient use of scarce natural resources. In short, they allow us to achieve the old Yankee maxim of producing more from less.

Every food safety authority that has examined their use and the resulting beef products have found them to be both safe and wholesome, helping to produce an overall leaner beef supply with minimal residues of no practical health consequence. This assessment is shared not only by the Food and Drug Administration of the United States and Health Canada, but also by the Codex Alimentarius Committee of the World Trade Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and even a conference established by the European Agriculture Commission.

There are six hormones approved for use in beef production in more than 30 countries. Three of these are natural, three synthetic. The three natural hormones (testosterone, estradiol, and progesterone) have been deemed completely safe for use in beef production, are a natural part of all mammalian physiology, and are released into the environment at levels well within natural ranges. Their use is uncontroversial.

The three synthetic growth enhancing hormones are melengestrol acetate (MGA), trenbolone acetate (TBA), and zeranol. These are more stable analogs of the three natural hormones. All three of these synthetic hormones enter the environment predominantly in the same way as the natural: via cattle waste. All three have undergone extensive eco-safety assessments, including worst-case estimates of their levels in cattle waste, runoff from cattle feedlots, and runoff from land on which the waste has been applied. In addition, there is a growing body of science regarding their fate in real-world environments.

But beyond this reassuring history, there are enormous environmental benefits to be gained from use of these products. Increased feed use efficiency, reduced land requirements, and reduced greenhouse gas emissions per pound of beef produced have all been conclusively demonstrated.

Comparing conventional beef production to an alternative grass-based beef production system using an economic/production model created by scientists at Iowa State University shows that growth promoting hormones and ionophores decrease the land required to produce a pound of beef by two thirds, with fully one fifth of this gain resulting from growth enhancing pharmaceuticals. Whereas grass-based organic beef requires more than 5 acre-days to produce a pound of beef, less than 1.7 acre days are needed in a grain-fed feedlot system using growth promotants.

Grain feeding combined with growth promotants also results in a nearly 40 percent reduction in greenhouse gases (GHGs) per pound of beef compared to grass feeding (excluding nitrous oxides), with growth promotants accounting for fully 25 percent of the emissions reductions.

In short, growth promoting implants safely and responsibly allow humanity to produce more beef from less feed, using less land, and creating less waste.