THERE ARE A lot of ways to describe a hunk of beef. Take a stroll through the meat department of a grocery store in the United States and you’ll be presented with a smorgasbord of meaty descriptors detailing the upbringing of your dinner: Angus, antibiotic-free, hormone-free, grass-fed, vegetarian-fed, and so on. But soon you might see another, more perplexing, description on the label: low-carbon.
In November, the US Department of Agriculture approved a program that will open a path for beef producers to market their meat as low-carbon. Producers who can prove that their cattle are raised in a way that emits 10 percent less greenhouse gases than an industry baseline can qualify for the certification scheme, which is run by a private company called Low Carbon Beef.
This is the first time that the USDA has approved this kind of certification for beef, and it will make it easier for manufacturers to eventually suggest that their products are more environmentally friendly than those of their competitors. “If you go to the meat aisle, you can’t really tell whether this pound of hamburger generated more emissions than another pound of hamburger,” says Colin Beal, a former rancher and the founder of Low Carbon Beef. Beal says some small producers have already been certified by his company, although applications to label beef as low-carbon must go through a separate USDA approval process. A USDA official said the agency had not yet received any such applications.
To read the rest of the story, please go to: Wired
