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World Without Cows: Film's Broad View on Cattle and Environment
New Documentary Has Chicago Premiere This Friday
Not long ago, those raising cattle often found themselves on the defensive against claims that beef and dairy cows were major contributors to global climate change and other damage to the environment.
In more recent years, though, regenerative agriculture — in which rotational grazing of livestock plays an important part in building or restoring soil health — has had a role in changing the conversation, as has a rising consumer demand for beef from cattle raised sustainably on pasture.
World Without Cows is a new documentary that examines both sides of the issue: the degree to which cattle have negative impacts on the environment, and the degree to which these animals benefit people and the planet.
The film has its Chicago premiere on Friday (October 9), 7 p.m., at the AMC River East 21 complex, 322 E. Illinois St. in downtown's Streeterville neighborhood. The showing will be followed by live Q&A with directors Michelle Michael and Brandon Whitworth with Executive Producer Mark Lyons.
World Without Cows also will be shown at that theater through October 15.
Here are the details in the filmmakers' press release:
Cows are a focal point in the climate debate. With 1.5 billion of them on the planet (roughly one for every five people), and agriculture responsible for nearly half of global methane emissions, cattle have become a major focus of the climate conversation.
For award-winning journalists Michelle Michael and Brandon Whitworth, their experience in the field suggested there was more to the story. So they set out to find it, spending five years and visiting 22 countries in search of an answer.
The film’s journey takes them to India, where cows are both sacred and essential; where 70 to 80 percent of the population doesn’t eat beef, yet milk remains an important part of the country’s diet, and millions of cows roam the streets as strays, no longer producing milk but remaining culturally protected.
It takes them to Kenya, where cattle aren’t simply livestock but a rite of passage and a lifeline, where Maasai herders are part of a pastoralist tradition that supplies
meat and dairy to nearly a billion people on the planet, and where a warming, drying climate is putting that entire way of life in peril.
It takes them through Ireland’s lush, grass-fed pasture-based dairy country; Brazil’s ranchlands, where agriculture and rainforest conservation intersect; and the industrial feedlots of the American heartland. Each one has a different answer to the same question: How do you feed a growing world while protecting the land that sustains
it?
Along the way, World Without Cows turns its attention to one of the central questions surrounding cattle: their impact on the climate. But the numbers run up against a practical problem: Roughly two-thirds of the world’s agricultural land is too rocky, dry, or otherwise marginal to grow crops at all. It’s only good for grazing.
Cattle, it turns out, are one of the only ways to turn land nobody can farm, and food nobody can eat, into the nourishment we need.
In its final act, the film considers an unexpected possibility: Cows, managed well, could be part of healing the land rather than harming it. Regenerative ranchers and soil scientists explore how rotational grazing, under the right conditions, may help rebuild degraded soil, increase biodiversity and pull carbon back into the ground.
World Without Cows gives us food for thought on complexity at a moment when most
conversations about food and climate leave little room for it. And it asks a bigger question than the one it started with: not whether cows are good or bad, but what we owe the land, and each other, in a world that has to feed 9.5 billion people that’s running out of fertile farmland.
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