About a third of the greenhouse gases cooking our planet come from our food, agriculture and livestock production. To curb the impact, we need to drastically reduce the amount of land we use to make food, while at the same time making more food for a growing population. How are we going to do that?

“The organic, grass-fed beef that people love so much, because there's this sense that the cows are treated better and that maybe it's better for the planet, it's more sustainable, well, it's certainly worse for the climate,” said journalist Michael Grunwald. Grunwald is the author of the new book, “We Are Eating The Earth” and after five years of diving deep into food and agriculture, he says there are a few reasons why regenerative, grass-fed practices cause issues for the climate, “first of all, it takes [grass-fed animals] longer to get to slaughter weight, so the animals are alive longer to burp and fart methane. But the main reason is because it's less efficient. It requires more acres to make the same amount of meat.” 

Right now, Grunwald explained, two out of every five acres on the planet are used for agriculture. The more land we use up to make food, the more carbon dioxide gets unleashed into the atmosphere, while also destroying the ecosystems that can absorb it. According to Grunwald, the best thing an individual can do to curb this impact is to give up eating beef altogether. 

The second best thing? Turn to a controversial part of the agriculture industry: Factory farms. Grunwald explains that factory operations are just more efficient, “so, you know, these efficiencies, these productivities, it sounds like they're kind of dirty words, right? Like these are like rapacious corporations dredging dollars out of the dirt, but the more efficient they can be, you know, the lighter agriculture's touch is going to be on the environment.”

It can be a hard solution to stomach, so in this episode, the “How We Survive” team explores both sides of the argument. We go fishing with an eccentric rancher in Northern California who practices regenerative agriculture and then we head to Colorado to get a rare peek into the factory farm industry.