Intensifying cattle farming with more fertilizer and irrigation actually significantly drops their methane emissions.
March 24, 2026
Original Paper
Can different levels of intensified tropical pasture-based beef cattle production systems lower the levels of methane emissions?
SSRN · 6459470
The Takeaway
While 'industrial' farming is often blamed for high emissions, this study of tropical beef systems found that intensification (using up to 600kg of Nitrogen per hectare) makes production so much more efficient that it dramatically reduces the methane footprint per unit of land and product. The productivity gains from higher-tech farming far outweigh the environmental costs of the inputs.
From the abstract
Pasture-based beef cattle systems are essential to global livestock production, but they are often linked to high enteric methane (CH4) emissions. This study evaluated how different levels of pasture intensification affected enteric CH4 emissions intensity in tropical beef cattle pasture-based production systems. This two-year study evaluated the impact of intensification on CH4 emission intensity across five tropical beef cattle pasture-based production systems: degraded pasture (DP0), silvopas