This reporting comes from episode 3 of the latest season of Marketplace’s “How We Survive,” which takes a closer look at how the climate crisis is also a food and agriculture crisis.

How humanity feeds itself has a huge impact on greenhouse gas emissions. Two out of every five acres of habitable land on the planet are used for agriculture. And one major food product that takes up an awful lot of land? Beef.

But there’s a split between several options to produce more climate-friendly beef products. One is regenerative agriculture; picture cattle grazing across acres of pasture, crops with no pesticides, and more carbon stored in the ground. Then, there’s factory farming, which may have a bad rep, but produces more food on less land with less effect on the climate.

So, Marketplace’s Amy Scott visited two farms to understand these potential solutions.

The regenerative farming experience

In Tomales, California, about an hour and a half north of San Francisco, I’m at Stemple Creek Ranch.

Loren Poncia is the owner of Stemple Creek Ranch and a fourth-generation rancher. And he’s wearing flip-flops. “Yeah, I'm the hippie rancher,” he said.

Stemple Creek is a regenerative ranch that sells grass-raised beef and lamb, and pasture-raised pork and chicken.

I’m visiting today to see what those practices look like firsthand. Poncia takes me to a special part of the ranch, which is bucolic.

Trees and tall grass surround a big pond. It’s completely still. But it wasn’t always like this.

Part of adopting regenerative practices included revitalizing this area. “None of these trees were here 10 years ago,” Poncia said. “I planted them all. So they're all sequestering this carbon.”

Poncia said his ranch has always prioritized conservation and protecting wildlife. Then, about 15 years ago, he teamed up with a local group trying to promote climate-smart agriculture.

At first, he said it was just a way to get free compost.

“And then what it really did was open my mind about soil health and connectivity amongst living plants. Carbon is just another piece of that link,” he said. “I'd be naive to say what we're doing is actually going to have a huge, significant impact just on my ranch, but if everybody around the world did this, it would have a huge, significant impact.”

As a climate solution though, there’s a debate brewing.

“Well, this is where I start getting in trouble,” said journalist Michael Grunwald. He wrote the book “We Are Eating the Earth,” all about the ways that our agricultural systems are hurting the planet.

“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 certainly worse for the climate,” he said.

It’s worse, Grunwald noted, because it takes longer for the animals to get to slaughter weight, which means they have longer to emit methane into the atmosphere, while regenerative grazing requires more land that might otherwise be left alone as forest or wetlands storing carbon.

One study of a ranch in Georgia found its regenerative grazing system required two-and-a-half times more land than conventional practices to produce the same amount of meat.

In his book, Grunwald turns to a surprising solution: factory farms.  

“Look, you know, they treat people badly. They treat animals badly. Yeah, they use too many antibiotics. They're lobbying against environmental regulation and climate action,” he said. “But one thing about them is that they do make a lot of food, and we are going to need more food with less land.”

So, I decided to visit a factory operation to find out: Could it really be better for the climate?

Life on a factory farm

About an hour’s drive northeast of Denver, I roll up to Magnum Feedyard in Wiggins, Colorado, where I’m greeted by an “I heart beef” sign.

Steve Gabel runs Magnum Feedyard. He’s owned the place since 1993 and his priority here is efficiency: producing as much beef per input as possible.

“There's 35,000 cattle here today that have to eat two times every day,” he said. Basically, he’s fattening them up for slaughter.

“We challenge the livestock from a performance perspective,” Gabel said. “If they're going to gain two pounds a day, when genetically, hey, they have the ability to gain four pounds a day, you can understand what that does to economics. So our goal is to maximize performance.”

To see how Gabel’s operation maximizes performance, I climb into his truck for a tour.

Gabel likes to describe the feedyard as a hotel. He said the pens are the cattle’s bedrooms and the mill facility where they process the cattle’s food, “this would be the kitchen area — so extremely important to us. We're feeding about $90,000 worth of feed every day.”

Today, they’re processing yellow corn to make corn flakes, and they’ll mix that with alfalfa hay and a protein supplement, plus vitamins and probiotics that get added in microdoses.  

Gabel drives us to the pens to see the cattle. I’m looking at hundreds if not thousands of black steers, munching at the concrete feed bunk or standing out in the dirt.  

It’s notably pretty quiet out here.

“There's 35,000 cattle here,” Gabel said. “You hear anybody that sounds like they're being abused?”

The cattle have about 250 square feet of pen space per animal compared to one to 10 acres at Stemple Creek, the regenerative ranch.

There are other downsides to factory farms, acknowledged climate journalist Michael Grunwald — from animal welfare to air and water pollution.

“But the fact is, if you care about the climate, you need to care about making beef more efficiently, because that's where the emissions are,” he said.

An even better option? Eating less beef, which, Grunwald said, pound for pound, generates 50 times more greenhouse gas emissions than coal.