Akmola Region, Kazakhstan—The highway running north toward the Russian border is long and straight, a black line streaking across a snowy flatness. A clutch of pine trees, a row of utility poles, a small flock of crows taking flight. These are the few dark features in a landscape with no horizon, only varying definitions of white.
In the coming months this vast steppe will explode into life with green grass and wild tulips. For now, at the end of a long winter, it is a disorienting place.Few people live out here. Villages are just clusters of disheveled cinder-block houses that look drawn onto the white in graphite. Horses, with their bones nearly poking through shaggy winter coats, plod across the snow, unfenced. Historically Kazakhs were nomads who relied on horses for transportation, labor, milk and meat. Now the animals mainly provide the latter. Most villages have a butcher, someone who knows how to use a knife in the yard behind their house.
Kazakhstan is the world’s largest landlocked country, the ninth largest overall—and young, having only emerged from the USSR as an independent nation 33 years ago. The street signs are still mostly in Russian and a Soviet spell hovers over everything. So it’s startling when something distinctively American comes into view: Thousands of black cattle, penned into a neat grid of metal corrals, with tags on their ears—an American-style feedlot.
Twenty-five years ago the new Kazakh government decided to kick-start the country’s moribund cattle industry, spending an initial $50 million to replicate the speed and efficiency of the quick-fattening American production system. One of its first moves was getting in touch with an amiable fourth-generation North Dakota cattle rancher and investor named Bill Price to ask for his help. The climate in the northern Great Plains, the Kazakh officials figured, was similar to Kazakhstan’s. If cattle could endure North Dakota’s winters, they could survive on the Kazakh steppe.
“They came to us and said: ‘Would you give us a tour of your feed yard and beef operation?” Price recalled recently. “We said: First of all, we don’t even know where your country is.” But soon after, Price’s brother and business partner, Daniel, flew to Kazakhstan to scope out partnership possibilities, returning home with this report: “It’s just like North Dakota. It gets cold. People are friendly.”
In October of 2010, the Prices loaded the first herd of Angus and Hereford cows into crates and onto a 747 at Hector International Airport in Fargo for a 22-hour flight to Astana, the Kazakh capital. Eleven more flights followed over the next several months, each carrying about 170 cows.
Now, 15 years later the progeny of those airlifted cows number in the thousands. They jostle for grain at metal troughs in icy mud up to their knees, most of them outlasting the deep freeze of Kazakh winter, and they graze the sprawling grasslands under the unabating heat of summer. After 20 months of life, give or take, they are shipped to Kazakhstan’s first state-of-the-art abattoir, slaughtered, expertly portioned and shrink-wrapped in plastic.
They are the property of a company called KazBeef and its hopes for achieving “net zero” emissions.
The world’s livestock, mostly cows, are one of the biggest global sources of methane, an especially potent greenhouse gas. Research, including from the United Nations, has argued that slowing the world’s consumption of livestock-based foods, largely beef and dairy, is critical for meeting global greenhouse gas targets. Instead, as the planet’s population hurtles toward 10 billion, demand is expected to rise—and greenhouse gas emissions along with it. More of this article (Inside Climate News) - link - more like this (farming) - link - more like this (Kazakhstan) - link
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