Part one is the case proper

I affirm a Living wage as defined by websters dictionary: a

wage sufficient to provide the necessities and comforts
essential to an acceptable standard of living
Websters online dictionary

A Decent Standard of living for Animals Defined

Robyn

Mallon, The Deplorable Standard of Living Faced by Farmed Animals in Americas Meat Industry and How to

Improve Conditions by Eliminating the Corporate Farm ( 2005), Available at:

http://digitalcommons.law.msu.edu/king/66

There is currently no legislation that covers farm animals from birth until slaughter.
This oversight allows for factory farms to subject the animals to whatever standard of living they wish. Naturally,
CAFOs choose the cheapest standard of living . This is why the animals at feedlots are packed
together as tightly as possible to the point where they cannot move. This maximizes output and minimizes costs

there should clearly be a

Federal Humane Standards of Living Act to cover how the animal is raised. Animals
should be given the chance to do the things they naturally do such as pigs rooting in the
mud and chickens scratching the ground. All animals should be allowed the chance to go
outdoors and have the ability to move around freely, exercise, and socialize in a
meaningful way. As part of the return to sustainable agriculture, battery cages and
gestation crates should be banned. Battery cages are so small that when the chickens grow, their feet
without regard to worker or animal safety. Since there is a Humane Slaughter Act,

are forced to grow around the wire because they get stuck to the bottom of the cage.173 These cruel cages serve
to immobilize the chicken trapped in it even more.

Furthermore, Cows are employees

http://farmprogress.com/blogs-a-cows-job-description-1945, Curt Arens On Gerrish Archives Email Author A
Cow's Job Description Husker Home Place If my cows are employees, do I have to negotiate benefits? Published on:
January 4,

2011

I enjoyed listening to acclaimed grazing consultant, researcher and author, Jim Gerrish, when he stopped in ONeill
recently, courtesy of University of Nebraska Extension and the Nebraska Grazing Lands Coalition. One of the most
interesting points made by Gerrish was that our cows should be viewed as employees . So, we should
think of a job description for them and understand in detail what we want our cows to do on our farm. Gerrish came

a list of duties for the cows, like rustle their own grub, produce a live calf
every year, thrive where they live, and stay productive in the herd for 10 years or
more. His point was well made. Gerrish, who lives in Idaho, speaks about reaching the goal of year around grazing
up with

for his herds, so hes looking at consistent winter grazing of forages without a lot of supplementation or even baled

Were the boss, he says. Our responsibilities as producers include marketing and
providing the best possible environment for the cows to excel at their jobs.
hay.

Prefer treating cows as employees for two reasons

1. Jim Gerrish is an expert in the field of cows, he surely knows more than some
high school debater arguing why we shouldnt extend a good standard of
living to our bovine friends
2. Not including animals in a living wage allows for the continuation of factory
farms, this is unnecessary and cruel for several reasons. Peta writes:

Peta, http://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-food/factory-farming/cows/
In the U.S., more than 42 million cows suffer and die for the meat and dairy
industries every year. When they are still very young, many cows are burned
with hot irons (branded), their horns are gouged out or cut or burned off, and
male cattle have their testicles ripped out of their scrotums (castrated)all
without painkillers. Once they have grown large enough, they are sent to
massive, filthy feedlots that are exposed to the elements, where they are to
be fattened for slaughter. Cows on dairy farms are repeatedly impregnated
and then traumatically separated from their newborn calves until finally their
bodies wear out and they are sent to be killed. Like all animals, cows form
strong maternal bonds with their calves, and on dairy farms and cattle
ranches, mother cows can be heard frantically crying out for their calves for
several days after they have been separated.
Cows Used for Food,

And The anthropocentric mindset allows for the oppression of all life
Heydt 10 (Samantha Heydt is a photographer and journalist who writes about
her social advocacy, American Abattoirs, 10/20/2010,
http://samheydt.wordpress.com/2010/12/20/224/, Bennett Gilliam)
The conceit of anthropocentrism is rooted in the inability to recognize the role nonhumans play in shaping history . Humanity does not exist, only humans, who bear
within themselves the mark of the inhuman (Agamben, 1999: 77). This hybridization
obscures fixed notions of civil rights. The modern anthropological machine
differentiates citizen from body, man from human. The justification for cruelty is
constructed on the dismissal of the victim being primitive, barbarian, savage and
akin to animals. Yet, the fate of human beings is not far off from the fate of animals.
In terms of human- animal relations, it is the former that hoard sovereign jouissance for
themselves, by virtue of assumed authority and ownership. But when it comes to humanhuman relations, the question of who wears the pantsin its most nuanced and
metaphysical sensebecomes harder to identify with any certainty (Pettman 140).
Heideggers theory of enframing buttresses the notion that humans relationship with
nature influences how we relate to one another (Zimmerman 23). The power apparatus that
allows for human domination over animals emerges from the same violent pathology that
subjugates humans to suffering. Isaac Bashevis Singer argues that everything the Nazis
did to Jews we are today practicing on animals (Patterson 221). The very same

mindset that made the Holocaust possible that we can do anything we want to
those we decide are different or inferior is what allows us to commit atrocities
against animals every single day. The fact is, all animals feel pain, fear and loneliness.
Were asking people to recognize that what Jews and others went through in the Holocaust is
what animals go through every day in factory farms (Prescott 2003). In the United States
today, were all aware (to various degrees) of the brutality that takes place to satisfy our
hunger for cheap meat- yet few call for reform. During WWII the good Germans lived in
denial of the Holocaust even as outside the crematoriums ash fell from the sky. The cruel
experimentation conducted by Dr. Josef Mengele on Jewish prisoners was also met with silent
indifference. Stripped down to bare life, the victims of these tests were met with the same
disregard as the 50-100 million animals experimented on annually today. It is significant to
mention that Mengeles father founded the slaughterhouse machinery company, Karl
Mengele & Sons, which may have planted the seed of cruelty exercised first on animals.
Also during WWII, lampshades were made from human skin and sold as highly coveted

commodities in Germany. Similarly today, fur coat and alligator skin are fetishized objects of
seduction stripped of the stigma of sporting another species skin. In tracing the trajectory of
exploitation, it is clear that the atrocities inflicted on humans have been rehearsed on
animals. We are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which
rivals anything the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise
without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the
world for the purpose of killing them (Coetzee 21). Descartes notion Cognito, ergo
sum (I think, therefore I am) aligns animals with machines- facilitating cruelty sans the sting
of remorse. This perverse perception is applicable to a spectrum of suffering. The

oppression of human over human has deep roots in the oppression of human over
animal (Best 23). As long as ethical responsibility fails to embrace all living
creatures, these moral limitations are as much a threat to humanity as they are to
animals.

Thus, I advocate for a living wage specified to Dairy Cows. I

defend a living wage that allows for cows to live out their lives
in natural conditions and because the resolution calls for a
decent standard of living the cows must be alive, meaning I
also advocate for slaughter free milk.
ENVIRONMENT ANIMALS, FOOD AND AG, TOP STORIES SLAUGHTER-FREE MILK IS GREAT FOR COWS. BY
JOSH

HARKINSON

| MON JUL. 21,

2014

The typical female is milked for five yearsa

quarter of her natural lifetimethen sent to the abattoir to become pet food or lowgrade hamburger meat. Elsie the Cow, Borden Dairy Company's famous cartoon logo, is smiling only because she
The typical male calf born to a dairy cow becomes veal.

doesn't realize that she's about to get euthanized with a cattle gun. Yet if you're an ethical vegetarian who still can't bear to give up

you now have another option: slaughter-free dairy, which comes from farms
where cows never get killed. Since 2011, the UK-based Ahimsa Dairy has offered slaughter free-milk and cheese to
customers in London. In February, Pennsylvania's Gita Nagari Creamery, which has supplied nokill milk to the local Hare Krishna community for many years, began offering it to
the public through subscription and mail order for a whopping $10 a gallon. The price includes a $2.50
milk,

cow retirement fee and $1.50 for "boy calf care." Less than half of its 60-head herd gets milked; the rest of the animals pull plows or
spend their golden years lackadaisically chomping grass. "For

us, the cows or oxen or bulls are seen as

extended family members," says Pari Jata, the co-president of Gita Nagari Creamery.
"It's very important for us to protect them in their retirement. We take care of them
just as one would take care of elderly parents in their old age. " The slaughter-free milk
movement takes its cues from India, where many vegetarian Hindus drink milk but consider cows sacred animals that should never
be consumed for meat. Yet increasing numbers of Gita Nagari and Ahimsa customers are Westerners who eschew meat for ethical
reasons. Both dairies have considered selling their milk in stores; Ahimsa is in talks with a major retailer.

Part two is the framework: The Role of the ballot is to vote for
whichever debater best deconstructs the Non-Human, Human
Binary, which is best done through Ecopedagogy. Darder
explains:
Antonia

Darder on Richard Kahn, Critical Pedagogy, Ecoliteracy, & Planetary Crisis: The Ecopedagogy
2010, Richard Kahn, Ph.D. Core Faculty in Education, Antioch University Los Angeles

Movement,

Kahn unambiguously demands that the survival of the planet (and

ourselves!) underscore our political and pedagogical decisions, despite the fact that
seldom have questions of ecological concern been made central to the everyday
lives of teachers and students or to the larger context of movement work, save for the
True to this dictum,

liberal agenda of the Sierra Club or the wellmeaning discourse on population control for poor and racialized women,

Perhaps, it is this missing link in the curriculum of

that is most responsible for the historically
uncritical and listless response to the global suffering of human beings subjected to
imperial regimes of genocide, slavery, and colonialism. In truth, a deeper analysis exposes sharply
a legacy that persists today in the shrouded values and attitudes of educators from
the dominant class and culture who expect that all oppressed populations and living
species should acquiesce to the dominion and hegemonic rule of the wealthy elite.
It is precisely such a worldview of domination that perpetuates the extinction of
whole species, as it does the cultural and linguistic destruction of peoples and
nations outside of a first-world classification. As a consequence, our biodiversity is slipping
espoused by people of all ideological stripes.
both public schools and political movements

away, despite scientific findings that clearly warn of the loss of hardiness and vitality to human life, as a direct
consequence of the homogenization of our differences .

It is equally ironic to note here how

repression of the body itself is manifested within the capitalist fervor to commodify
or colonize all forms of vital existence. Schools, unfortunately, are one of the most complicit
institutions in the exercise of such ecological repression, generally carried out through the immobilization of the

In response,
Kahn eloquently argues for a critical ecopedagogy and ecoliteracy that supports teachers in
engaging substantively students integral natures, in an effort to forge an
emancipatory learning environment where all can thrive amid everyday concerns . As
such, he makes clear that, although important, it is not enough to rely solely on abstract
cognitive processes, where only the analysis of words and texts are privileged in the
construction of knowledge. Such an educational process of estrangement functions
to alienate and isolate students from the natural world around them, from
themselves, and one another. This, unwittingly, serves to reinforce an
anthropocentric reading of the world, which denies and disregards the wisdom and knowledge outside
Western formulations. In contrast, an ecopedagogy that sustains life and creativity is
firmly grounded in a material and social understanding of our interconnected
organic existence, as a starting place for classroom practice and political strategies
for reinventing the world. Also significant to Kahns notion of ecopedagogy is an engagement with the
body and the subordination of our emotional nature, our sexual energies, and spiritual capacities.

emancipatory insights and cultural knowledge of indigenous populations, given that the majority of the social and
political problems facing us today are fundamentally rooted in mainstream social relations and material conditions
that fuel authoritarianism, fragmentation, alienation, violence, and greed. Such anti-ecological dynamics are
predicated on an ahistorical and uncritical view of life that enables the powerful to abdicate their collective
responsibility to democratic ideals, while superimposing a technocratic and instrumental rationality that
commodifies and objectifies all existence. Such a practice of education serves to warp or marginalize diverse
indigenous knowledge and practices, by privileging repetitive and unimaginative curricula and fetishized methods.
Anchored upon such a perspective of schooling, classroom curriculum socializes students into full-blown identities
as entitled consuming masters and exploiters of the earth, rather than collective caretakers of the planet. In
contrast, Kahn explores the inherent possibilities at work within indigenous knowledge and traditions, in ways that
enhance our capacity to not only critique conditions of ecological crisis, but to consider ways in non-Western
societies and peoples have enacted ecologically sustaining practices within the everyday lives of their communities.
He turns the false dominion of the West on its head, offering alternative ways of being that hold possibilities for the
reconstruction of institutional culture, the transformation of how we view technology and science, and thus the

As critical educators and revolutionary activists across

communities of difference, we are encouraged to turn to the wisdom of our own
historical survival, in serious and sustained ways, in order to work toward the
reformulation of public policy.

abandonment of colonizing values and practices that for centuries have denigrated
our cultural ways and attempted to disable our life-sustaining capacities. Moreover,
to contend effectively with issues of racism, sexism, homophobia, disablism, and
other forms of inequalities, a life-affirming ecological praxis is paramount. That is, one
that encompasses a refusal to adhere to political, economic, and philosophical disconnections, which falsely
separate humankind from those ecological dynamics that shape local, global, regional, rural, and urban landscapes.
Instead, static views of humanity and the planet, which inadvertently serve the commodifying interests of capital a

1. Speciesism leads to debaticide and loss of knowledge

production

Rossini 06

(Manuela Rossini, Executive Director of the Institute of Advanced

Study in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, PhD in English lit, MA in critical
and cultural theory, To the Dogs: Companion speciesism and the new feminist
materialism, http://intertheory.org/rossini, September 2006)
What is equally sobering, however, is the fact that the most radical metaposthumanists (and the
humanities more broadly) do not quite manage to make an epistemological break with liberal
humanism, insofar as their writing is also marked by an unquestioned speciesism;
i.e., in the definition of ethicist Peter Singer who popularised the term three decades ago in his book Animal
Liberation, a

prejudice or attitude of bias in favour of the interests of members of

ones own species and against those of members of other species .[17] Both postcolonial,
feminist and queer theories and discussion of subjectivity, identity, and difference as well as the claims on the right
to freedom by new social movements have recourse to an Enlightenment concept of the subject whose conditio
sine qua non is the absolute control of that subject over the life of nonhuman others/objects. The rhetorical strategy
of radically separating non-white, non-male and non-heterosexual human beings from animals in order to have the
subject status of these members of the human species recognised was and is successful and also legitimate given
that the racist, sexist and homophobic discourse of animality or an animalistic nature has hitherto served to

but the speciesist logic of the

dominance of human animals over nonhuman animals has remained in place. If we
fight racism and (hetero)sexism because we declare discrimination on the basis of
specific and identifiable characteristics such as black, woman or lesbian to
be wrong and unjust, then we should also vehemently oppose the exploitation,
imprisoning, killing and eating of nonhuman animals on the basis of their species
identity. Moreover, if our research and teaching as cultural critics endeavours to do
justice to the diversity of human experience and life styles and feel responsible
towards marginalised others, should we then not seriously think about Cary Wolfes
question how must our work itself change when the other to which it tries to do
justice is no longer human?[18] Wolfe is not making a claim for animal rights here at least not primarily.
This is also why his book puns on rites/rights: Animal Rites is the intervention of the antispeciesist cultural critic who scrutinizes the rituals that human beings form around
the figures of animals, including the literary and cinematic enactments of
cannibalism, monstrosity and normativity. Wolfe subsumes all of these stagings
under the heading the discourse of species, with discourse understood in the
sense of Michel Foucault as not only a rhetoric but above all as the condition for the production
and ordering of meaning and knowledge in institutions like medicine, the law, the
church, the family or universities. In addition, Wolfe wants to sharpen our awareness that a
speciesist metaphysics has also a deadly impact on human animals, especially
because speciesism is grounded in the juridical state apparatus : the full transcendence of
exclude most individuals of those groups of people from many privileges

the human requires the sacrifice of the animal and the animalistic, which in turn makes possible a symbolic
economy in which we engage in what Derrida [calls] a non-criminal putting to death of other humans as well by
marking them as animal.

Theory stuf

On Topicality
Overview of theory: it doesnt matter

1. Fairness and education rely on certain epistemological assumptions.

Since the K is appealing to a different epistemology, that means it
functions on a higher level.
2. Fairness and education still assume that the role of the judge is to
adjudicate the round, but my role of the ballot explains that the judge
should actually be an educator. Thus, the K precedes theory since the
aff need to defend his or her implicit role of the ballot before he or she
can access their voters.
3. Theory only matters within the round, but the K also has impacts out of
the round. Since were people before were debaters, this means the K
comes first.

4. Fairness
a. The K outweighs on magnitude because if you drop the aff you drop the
way bigger violation of fairness that is faced by the 42 million cows in just
the United States
b. The role of the ballot controls the internal link to fairness, so you have to
prefer stopping the oppression faced by these cows to an argument about
a debate round
c. Timeskew: because of the 6-4-3 to 7-6 timeskew the neg is reactive and
leaves the door open for thousands of PICs.
5. Education
a. I outweigh on breadth of research because it makes the neg learn of a
wide possibility of ethical frameworks, which helps them become a better
moral actor
b. I outweigh on depth of research because it makes the neg go in depth into
research about the suffering of cows, which furthers their out of round
education
c. Even if the neg didnt prep out Cows, both the neg and the judge learn of
the horrors faced by our bovine friends which furthers education and is
the starting point behind real change, which outweighs any claims to
fairness
D: voters

a. Education will always outweigh any claims to fairness because The goal of
debate is education. Robert Rowland explains, The Primacy of Standards for Paradigm
Evaluation: A Rejoinder. Journal of the American Forensic Association. 1982.

The debate process

is designed to fulfill an educational function. Any goal other than
education would be better served by some argumentative activity
other than competitive debate. For example, if the goal were to identify the
best policy for dealing with a given problem, then some sort of hearing
process, in which all views could be heard, would seem to be required.
A new paradigm, which served a non-educational purpose would
demand not merely different evaluative criteria, but a different activity altogether.1
I believe that academic debate is, by its very nature, an educational activity.

Consequently, debate must always strive to be most educational before

anything else.
B. Education is a logical perquisite to impacts of fairness because schools need
to fund debate, which they do because it is educational which happens before
the round occurs. Participation is a logical pre-requisite to competition, which
is the only reason fairness matters to begin with.
C. Education is more important in the long term because it is the only thing that
can affect us later in life. Further, if we set a precedent where education
matters less in all rounds, we create a cyclical harm that is more detrimental
to debate than one person being unfair. The more educational our discussion
of the resolution is, the more topic knowledge we are aware of because the
content of the debate rounds is based on the topic. Topic specific education is
important because they have to do with current issues in the world.
Understanding these issues makes us more aware domestic and global
citizens
D. Certain arguments might be considered unfair but they should still be
discussed in debate rounds because they are educational and are relevant in
the real world. We shouldnt arbitrarily exclude arguments just because they
are deemed unfair.
E. Valuing education as a principle permits greater discovery. We need to
subordinate all other concerns because we never know what new discoveries
with regards to arguments we can make. There might be a new reason
education or fairness themselves are important. Thus I control the internal
link into the very process of justification.

1 Robert C. Rowland. The Primacy of Standards for Paradigm Evaluation: A

Rejoinder. Journal of the American Forensic Association. 1982.

F. Fairness is only important as an internal link to education. Strait and Wallace 2

:
the terminal impact to all questions of competitive
equity is ultimately participation in itself, which is good because debate
is fun and, obviously, educational. Therefore, if it is the case that the single most
valuable benefit one can gain from participating in debate is that it
improves decision-making skills, then the educational benefit of
rejecting an illogical fiat scheme would outweigh competitive equity
concerns that are not absolute. Therefore, unless the negative can show that agent
First. we must note that

counterplans are absolutely critical to preserve participation in debate (for example. if the
affirmative would will almost every debate without agent counterplans), claims that they are
"not that bad" do not get to the level needed to prove that they are necessary. It is the
negatives burden to justify their use of alternate actor fiat, not the affirmatives burden to
dejustify all agent counterplans.

G. Education is more important in the long term because it is the only thing that
can affect us later in life. Topic specific education is important because they
have to do with current issues in the world. Understanding these issues
makes us more aware domestic and global citizens.

2 L. Paul Strait (George Mason University) and Brett Wallace (George Washington
University). The Scope of Negative Fiat and the Logic of Decision Making. WFU
Debaters Research Guide. 2007.
[http://groups.wfu.edu/debate/MiscSites/DRGArticles/2007/The%20Scope%20of
%20Negative%20Fiat%20and%20the%20Logic%20of%20Decision%20Making.pdf

On Disads
Economy and Food shortages
Ocean

Robbins, The Food Revolution Network, December 9, 2012, The Truth about Grassfed Beef

A lot of people today, horrified by how animals are treated in factory farms and feedlots, and wanting to lower their
ecological footprint, are looking for healthier alternatives. As a result, there is a decided trend toward pasture-raised
animals. One former vegetarian, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford, says he now eats meat, but only
grassfed and organic and sustainable as possible, reverentially and deeply gratefully, and in small amounts.

Sales of grassfed and organic beef are rising rapidly. Ten years ago, there were only
about 50 grassfed cattle operations left in the U.S. Now there are thousands. How much
difference does it make? Is grassfed really better? If so, in what ways, and how much? If you read on, youll see why
Ive concluded that grassfed is indeed better. But then, almost anything would be. Putting beef cattle in feedlots
and feeding them grain may actually be one of the dumbest ideas in the history of western civilization. Cattle (like
sheep, deer and other grazing animals) are endowed with the ability to convert grasses, which we humans cannot
digest, into flesh that we are able to digest. They can do this because unlike humans, who possess only one
stomach, they are ruminants, which is to say that they possess a rumen, a 45 or so gallon fermentation tank in
which resident bacteria convert cellulose into protein and fats .

In todays feedlots, however, cows fed

corn and other grains are eating food that humans can eat, and they are quite
inefficiently converting it into meat. Since it takes anywhere from 7 to 16 pounds of
grain to make a pound of feedlot beef, we actually get far less food out than we put
in. Its a protein factory in reverse. And we do this on a massive scale, while nearly a billion people on our planet
do not have enough to eat. Feedlot Reality How has a system that is so wasteful come to be? Feedlots and
other CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) are not the inevitable product of
agricultural progress, nor are they the result of market forces. They are instead the
result of public policies that massively favor large-scale feedlots to the detriment of
family farms. From 1997 to 2005, for example, taxpayer-subsidized grain prices
saved feedlots and other CAFOs about $35 billion. This subsidy is so large that it
reduced the price CAFOs pay for animal feed to a tiny fraction of what it would
otherwise have been. Cattle operations that raise animals exclusively on pasture
land, however, derive no benefit from the subsidy. Federal policies also give CAFOs
billions of dollars to address their pollution problems, which arise because they
confine so many animals, often tens of thousands, in a small area . Small farmers raising
cattle on pasture do not have this problem in the first place. If feedlots and other CAFOs were
required to pay the price of handling the animal waste in an environmentally health
manner, if they were made to pay to prevent or to clean up the pollution they create, they wouldnt be
dominating the U.S. meat industry the way they are today. But instead we have had
farm policies that require the taxpayers to foot the bill . Such policies have made feedlots and
other CAFOs feasible, but only by fleecing the public. Traditionally, all beef was grassfed beef, but
weve turned that completely upside down.
1. This means that Grassfed beef actually increases food supply because the
calories lost in the process of making beef could be reused with humans
2. The economic gains from cutting subsidies to the factory farms could easily
be reapplied to the rising costs of beef, the aff solves better than the neg
ever could
3. In order to get to the impact of mass starvation that means that all the food
would disappear entirely and that people ouldnt be willing to eat the grain

that wasnt used in the beef process, this turns the disad in that mass
starvation has a greater probability in the neg world

Pastured cows enrich soil, improve the environment, and make

better meat
Wednesday, February 17, 2010 by: Ethan Huff http://www.naturalnews.com/028182_grassfed_cows_environment.html##ixzz3NMDbWVPF
(NaturalNews) Cattle, particularly cows, have been the target of many environmental groups that believe raising
animals for food is contributing to climate change and causing environmental harm. While true about the vast

pastured animals that are rotated

among fields actually help to improve environmental conditions. Eliot Coleman,
author of The New Organic Grower, and Barbara Damrosch, gardening columnist at
the Washington Post, are two of the most notable organic vegetable gardeners in
the country. According to a recent TIME article, they are currently outfitting their farm in coastal
Maine with a new barn that will hold a half dozen cows and some sheep . The couple plans to use the
grazing animals to improve the soil conditions on their farm and help the
environment. Cattleman Ridge Shinn of Hardwick, Massachusetts, also explained in
the piece that rotating cattle among various grass fields ends up contributing back
to the environment more than it takes. Conventional cattle raising is like mining,
Shinn explained. It's unsustainable, because you're just taking without putting
anything back. But when you rotate cattle on grass, you change the equation. You
put back more than you take. Because grass is a perennial plant, it will continue to
grow indefinitely, being spurred to new growth each time cows eat it. Grass roots retain
majority of American livestock that are raised using feedlots,

water and microbes which helps to keep the soil healthy. As cows graze, they also work manure into the soil along
with other decaying organic matter, enriching it with nutrients and carbon. Allan Savory, a former wildlife
conservationist in Zimbabwe, explained in an interview that rotational grazing actually reverses the effects of land
degradation. Soil that was once dead has now become thriving grassland thanks to the efforts of ranchers who
rotated their large herds.

Conventional beef raising, on the other hand, confines cows to

densely-packed feedlots where they are bulked up on corn and soybeans for the
final segment of their lives. Millions of acres of land that once grew grass have been
converted into fields that grow corn and soy specifically for animal feed. Much of
these crops are likely genetically modified. It takes a heavy amount of fossil fuels to
grow animal feed crops, fertilize them, apply pesticides and herbicides to them, and
transport them to feedlots. Since rotational grass feeding is a natural cycle that
feeds animals and replenishes the ground with little to no additional effort, pastured
animals actually provide a net benefit to the environment as a whole. Pastured animal
meat is also far healthier than grain-fed meat because it is leaner and is rich in omega-3 fatty acids which are
highly beneficial to maintaining good health.