WHETHER making a spaghetti Bolognese or getting ready to grill some steaks, Americans buying beef might find themselves wondering if they should spend a few dollars more per pound for the grass-fed option.
The image of cows grazing in a pasture is certainly picturesque. And, at first glance, it may seem like a more humane and planet-friendly alternative to factory-farmed beef.
But the environmental effects of food are often complex. So, we asked the experts: Is grass-fed beef better for the climate?
A whole lot of gas
Roughly a quarter of all global greenhouse gases come from food production, and beef accounts for the single biggest share. It generates eight times the emissions of pork, per kilogram of food, and 100 times the emissions of protein-rich vegetables like peas.
A big reason is that cows, regardless of what they’re raised for, produce methane. In fact, they have it coming out of both ends day and night. And, while methane disappears faster than carbon dioxide, it’s about 80 times as potent as a greenhouse gas during its first 20 years in the atmosphere.
It’s true that grass-fed beef raises fewer animal welfare and pollution concerns than industrial feedlots, which cram thousands of cows into small spaces where they tend to kick up a lot of air pollution. Their manure and feed are also a big source nitrogen runoff that can create dead zones in aquatic ecosystems.
But Peter Smith, a professor at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland who focuses on climate change and agriculture, said people often conflate climate with other environmental and animal welfare issues. “All these things get rolled in together,” he said.
The big thing in climate terms is how long the cows are around belching and tooting methane.
In the United States, most cows begin life on a pasture. At six months, those headed for industrial production move to feedlots to be “finished” on high-calorie grain. By about 18 months, they reach market weight and are slaughtered.
Grass-fed cows, by contrast, can take up to three years to reach market weight. And all that extra time means more methane. “There’s a whole bunch of reasons you might prefer grass-fed beef,” Smith said. But in terms of climate-warming emissions, “it actually comes out no better — in fact, a little worse.”
How the numbers add up
Over the past few decades, and as recently as 2024, industry-funded studies have suggested that grazing cattle can offset their methane emissions by stimulating grass regrowth and recycling nutrients through manure.Some research found that this helps to mitigate climate change by locking away planet-warming carbon in the soil.
Last year, Ron Milo, an environmental scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, an Israeli research centre, and Gidon Eshel, a professor at Bard College in upstate New York who studies the environmental impact of agriculture, put these claims to the test by calculating the footprint of beef operations in the US.
Their analysis was complex, but it boiled down to one question: Grazing can store carbon in the soil, but does that outweigh the methane that cows produce?
“We wanted to see exactly how the numbers add up,” Eshel said. “The bottom line answer is that they mostly don’t.”
Their study found that even the most efficient grass-fed beef operations create at least 10% more emissions than US industrial beef per kilogram of protein. After taking soil sequestration into account, most grass-fed options ended up no better than industrial ones.
These results didn’t surprise Smith, who was not affiliated with the study. Soil has a carbon saturation limit, he said, and the benefits vanish after about a decade. Offsetting methane emissions from cattle is “simply unfeasible” for most of the planet, he said.
Grass-fed beef also uses more land than industrial beef. “Land is not free,” said Paul Behrens, a food system scientist at the University of Oxford. “The question is, what else could we be using it for?”
Taken together, meat and dairy production use 80% of agricultural land, much of which is better suited to other crops for human consumption, Behrens said, or could store more carbon if left to grow wild.
What you can do
While the experts all agreed that eating any kind of beef comes with climate baggage, making a difference doesn’t have to mean giving up beef entirely.
“The bulk of food-related emissions comes from a relatively small number of people eating quite a lot of meat,” said Tara Garnett, director of Table, a group that studies food systems.
A 2023 study found that just 12% of the population accounts for half the beef eaten in America on any given day.
“The biggest benefit to the climate,” Garnett said, is not going to come from trying to increase the number of vegans. “It’s going to come from the majority of people cutting back on their meat consumption.”
“If you’re going to eat meat, think about what matters most to you,” she said. But whether you focus on animal welfare, air pollution or greenhouse gas emissions, she said, “there isn’t an answer that sounds like, ‘Eat as much meat as you like.’” – ©2026 The New York Times Company
