Ranchers feed families from the great American landscape. We raise cows who convert low value grass to high quality protein. For a long time now, ranching has been not only an honest living, but a mythical one; the lone cowboy on a horse earning a living against the weather, the outlaws, and the money boys.

But now we ranchers learn that we bear big responsibility for greenhouse gas warming the Earth. Our cows belch and fart the earth-heating greenhouse gas, methane (CH4), as a result of their ruminant digestive tracts ( known as enteric fermentation to the scientists).

Fortunately, the nerds have a hack to help us with our cows’ indelicacy ((Nerds Over Cattle). Instead of the cows eating plants and then people eating the beef, they tell us we should cut out the “cow middle,” and just eat the plants. And lucky us, these plant patties are bio-engineered to be “sorta” like hamburgers so we can chew and swallow them. Well, except when the plant patty contains pieces of plastic (Impossible Foods’s Fake Meat Gets Real Voluntary Recall).

Biotech companies Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are the biggest advertisers for meat-substitute, plant patties and have been first to deliver their products to the public. Their pitch to consumers? Eat our plant patties and save the world!

And they mean the whole wide world because it is only on that scale that methane from cow digestion as a percentage of greenhouse gas loads looks meaningful. There are a variety of significant sources of animal greenhouse gases besides American beef cattle on pasture, including dairy cows everywhere and Brazilian cows on deforested Amazon River jungle, among others.

In spite of knowing full well that American cattle on pasture are not a major source of methane in the world, Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods have zeroed in on American consumers to save the world from cows wherever located and however managed, as if all cattle and cattlemen are fungible.

The Impossible Foods Mission Statement declares, in part: “. . .using animals to make meat is a prehistoric and destructive technology. Animal agriculture occupies almost half the land on earth, consumes a quarter of our freshwater and destroys our ecosystems…we’re making meat using plants. . . [so we can] save the best planet in the known universe.”

The Beyond Meat Mission Statement is even grander, “By shifting from animal, to plant-based meat, we are creating one savory solution that solves four growing issues attributed to livestock production: human health, climate change, constraints on natural resources and animal welfare.”

Aside from marketing that is as extravagant as that of an Old West patent medicine show, there are three problems with these plant products.

· First, these plant concoctions don’t taste better than beef.

· Second, neither company provides any measurement of their own carbon footprint. How does a consumer know that eating one of their plant patties is actually better for the climate?

· Third, and most importantly, these plant patties are very expensive. Beyond Meat’s plant burger is $15.20/lb. on Amazon (as of March 20, 2019) and Impossible Foods’ burger (which is not yet available in groceries) is even more than that, extrapolating from two Boston area restaurants’ menu prices. By comparison Whole Foods hamburger is $4.99/lb. and tofu is $2.27/lb. Plant patties are not cheap protein for most Americans and certainly not for the masses in the rest of the world where most of that enteric fermentation occurs.

Since the plant patty companies can’t sell their bio-engineered product’s taste or luxury price, they are selling the farts. And it turns out that is about as stinky as you would expect.