This is an interesting article, but offers little concrete data. That grazing cows compete with other animals seems pretty obvious, okay, but to me the questions are: Is grass fed beef better or worse than traditional beef for the climate? Is it better or worse than chicken? Better or worse than soy? Is using "marginal" lands and competing with local wildlife better or worse (for the climate? for the ecosystem as a whole?) than getting the same calories by other means, e.g. more intensive agriculture on non-marginal lands?

I know nothing but in the UK we have a chap with a YouTube channel called Harry's Farm and he regularly makes the claim that grass fed beef is at least carbon neutral and may be even better than that. He claims to have dug into some research on co2 sequestering in grass. I have no idea if true or not, I watch him mostly for his other channel, Harry's Garage, (he's a motoring journalist, with a great car collection)

I'm a little bit skeptical of this claim, because cows turn the "sequestered" carbon (partly) into methane, which is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

A cow eating grass isn't eating sequestered carbon. It's part of the carbon cycle. It is a living organism eating a living plant. If a ruminant doesn't graze a grassland, it needs to burn...which releases carbon. If neither one of those things happen, the grassland will die and decompose.

Grasslands and ruminants co-evolved.

Sequestered carbon would be underground. If there were no fossil fuels dug out of the ground and burned, there are no amount of cows that could cause a problem with warming.

ALL ruminant animals produce methane. Deer, moose, elk, antelope all do. It is part of fermentation.

A cow eating grass is more carbon neutral than other things people try to pass off like biodiesel.

True, although research is ongoing into minimising this[1] and a product based on the above research is being prepared for the market.

[1]: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Gabriel N. Rosenberg is Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies and History.

Jan Dutkiewicz is a lawyer.

Both of the authors are (surprise) vegans. Neither have any background in ecology or agriculture.

They just hate people eating meat.

This myth is pedalled strongly in the recent documentary Kiss the Ground (on Netflix) with Woody Harrelson. It seems that this is Big Ag’s latest attempt to explain why meat eating can be good. It is the only documentary you’ll see about climate change that makes you feel “this is probably going to be OK” which I don’t think is the right sentiment.

Note: Article is specific to the USA and other countries with large grasslands and native grazing animals.

In New Zealand, all our beef is grass fed, in fact, we've never made the distinction between grass fed and not.

Our colonial ancestors spent a lot of time burning tussocklands and clearing native bush, so we have a lot of pasture. (Just under 40% of our land is used for agriculture).

We luckily got the idea that maybe we should think about preserving what wilderness was left in the 1890s, and it went from there, our most recent national park was created in 2002 (national parks are the most protected areas, no dogs, until recently no smallbore hunting, then there's forest parks, conservation areas etc. with lesser protections but still not being farmed), and some formerly grazed marginal land have been returned to the conservation estate (e.g., Korowai Torlesse Tussocklands Park).

But most of our soils aren't suitable for growing crops, so growing corn in the <2% of our land that's arable, to feed cows, when we have so much land that can grow grass, and that's about it, has never made economic sense.

(Although the usage of supplementary feeding by dairy farmers is another kettle of fish...)

Oh, and our endemic grazers (some species of moa) were hunted to extinction by the 15th century.

TL;DR - our grass fed beef and lamb might be far more ethical, please encourage your Congress to actually engage in free trade and drop protectionist subsidies and tariffs - nah just kidding, I know that's never going to happen.