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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.

The livestock industry is poised to expand on the world’s growing appetite for beef. But a small number of producers are making a bid to produce steaks and burgers without adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere—or, rather, to effectively cancel out the industry’s greenhouse gas pollution with “regenerative grazing” practices. 

Some of these producers are aiming to go one step further by earning carbon credits for those practices, which they can sell to polluters seeking to offset their own emissions.

KazBeef is one of them, at the vanguard of an emerging trend. 

Critics say it’s impossible to raise livestock without greenhouse gas emissions and that significantly expanding the world’s livestock herds is tantamount to laying more oil pipelines or building more coal-fired power plants—a path to climate catastrophe. Regenerative grazing, they say, may have benefits for the soil, like improving water retention and microbial activity, but it does little to address methane emissions, which come mostly from cow burps. Measuring soil carbon in pasture is especially tricky, and many calculations fail to measure how much carbon would have remained in the soil without the cows grazing on it. 

This, among other challenges, makes it difficult to verify a legitimate and saleable grazing-based credit.

“In order to attribute the greenhouse gas removal to the cows, you need to control for the presence of cows, versus no cows,” said Matthew Hayek, a professor of environmental studies at New York University who studies livestock impacts on the climate. “This is apart from the methane concerns.” 

Initially a joint venture between Price’s company, Global Beef Consultants, and the Kazakh government, KazBeef has since evolved into a division of Singapore-based Kusto Group, a conglomerate of disparate businesses run by the Kazakh billionaire Yerkin Tatishev. Tatishev’s interests range from oil production to construction supplies to agriculture, with a business footprint that reaches from Israel to Vietnam to Canada. He has also wagered big on fast food: Kusto Group recently announced plans to open 55 Wendy’s restaurants across Kazakhstan and neighboring Uzbekistan within five years. Tatishev has made KazBeef’s agricultural ambitions clear: The company will turn the seemingly endless grasslands of this huge Central Asian nation into a beef-producing powerhouse.

At the 2023 United Nations conference on climate change, held in glittering, oil-rich Dubai, KazBeef announced it would begin producing “climate smart” beef. The company’s timing was strategic: The conference organizers had put agriculture prominently on the formal agenda, explicitly acknowledging that emissions from livestock agriculture need to be slashed in order to curb global warming. Though the number is debated, emissions from livestock account for as much as 37 percent of the world’s methane emissions.

KazBeef, the company said, would work with another Price enterprise, EcoBalance Global, and a Kazakh-based company called rTek to launch a cattle-raising system that will “show the world that the livestock and farming industry can be part of the net-zero solution.” The idea, the companies announced, is to graze cattle on Kazakh grasslands, moving the herds strategically so that grasses recover in such a way that the soil is better able to store carbon. This stored carbon will be tracked using blockchain technology, providing a verified carbon credit that, in principle, cancels out some of the company’s livestock emissions. 

As the world’s most carbon-intensive industries—including energy generation, transportation and agriculture—continue to release record amounts of greenhouse gas emissions, pushing global climate goals further from reach, some climate experts suggest that removing carbon from the atmosphere is the only way to reach net-negative emissions. Carbon markets, whether voluntary or mandatory, as in the European Union, play a role by putting a value on that removal. 

These markets represent a relatively small piece of the climate solutions puzzle, and most of them, so far, are voluntary. But the financial prospects are alluringly huge: The value of the voluntary carbon market reached $2 billion in 2021, and experts project it could reach $40 billion by 2030. 

For farmers, these markets have become especially appealing. They’re in possession of one of the most potent tools for storing greenhouse gas emissions: the soil under their feet, which is the biggest reservoir of carbon after the world’s oceans. In the past few years, “carbon farming” has become a tantalizing idea, not only because of the potential to store significant amounts of carbon—though the amount is debated and depends on environmental conditions—but because it’s a potential money maker. Even the American farm lobby, which played a pivotal role in derailing a mandatory carbon trading program in the United States and had long denied the scientific consensus of climate change, has embraced the idea. 

Wittingly or not, taxpayers have, too. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has funneled at least $3 billion toward building markets for agricultural practices deemed “climate friendly” and $165 million to encourage participation in voluntary carbon markets based on those practices, an agency spokesperson said. The agency has directed at least $80 million to develop carbon markets based on livestock and grazing specifically. 

But carbon markets and offsets face some major challenges, whether they involve agriculture or not. As more companies have bought into these markets to offset their emissions, studies have challenged the validity of those offsets or credits—based on reforestation or renewable energy projects or any other carbon removal effort. 

Yet companies and countries, eager to burnish their net-zero credentials or meet their commitments to reduce climate-warming emissions under the Paris climate agreement, have poured into the market. Along with this developing market, a slate of registries, standard-setting organizations and verification programs have popped up, creating a confusing, unwieldy patchwork of rules. 

“It’s the wild west and we have no firm oversight over what’s going on,” said Jason Rowntree, a professor of animal science at Michigan State University and a top expert of livestock and carbon storage. 

Research, published in Nature Communications this month, found that only 16 percent of carbon credits resulted in actual emissions reductions.

Grazing-based carbon credits raise yet more hurdles and questions: Can a livestock producer, who trades in a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, legitimately cancel out those emissions from their own supply chain—a process known as “insetting”? Or can they generate a saleable credit that promises a reduction in emissions—an “offset” purchased by other companies—from creatures that belch millions of tons of methane?

The idea of grazing-based credits is so new that many carbon accounting experts interviewed for this story had yet to hear of them, and many who had heard of them were skeptical. Some were blunt.

“I would say it’s outside the bounds of probability,” said Peter Smith, a climate scientist at the University of Aberdeen who has written about the limitations of carbon sequestration from grazing livestock. “It’s being used as a smokescreen by the livestock industry. It’s greenwashing.”

Global appetites for beef have more than doubled since 1960, and overall meat consumption is projected to keep rising by 50 percent within 25 years. Along with that increase will come more planet-warming emissions. Researchers have determined that, without major changes, emissions from food production, largely from meat, will rise 60 percent by 2050, making global climate goals impossible even if the world were to stop burning fossil fuels today.

More cows could blow through the atmosphere’s limits—“climate friendly” or not. 

But the team behind KazBeef doesn’t see the future that way.

Deeply Rooted

The iced-over mud track leading to KazBeef’s grazing operation outside the village of Mamay, about 165 miles north of Astana, passes a handful of small houses that look bleached from winter and baked from summer, victims of temperatures that swing from 40 below Celsius to 40 above. 

There is nothing else around for miles, except a handful of metal-clad buildings that constitute KazBeef’s local headquarters. Inside one of the larger buildings, Yespol Aisabayev, KazBeef’s manager here, has arranged for breakfast—a table-wide spread of nuts, fruit, beef topped with raw onions, fried dough and the ever-present Kazakh tea, which he pours into ceramic bowls. 

Aisabayev is wearing jeans and a down vest bearing the KazBeef logo. His hair is neatly cut and an eye-wrinkling smile often breaks across his face. He points to certificates, hanging on the wall behind him, from the American Hereford and Angus associations, which have each certified KazBeef as a member. 

When the first cows arrived in Kazakhstan from North Dakota, they were sent here, to the outskirts of this village, surrounded by plentiful grasslands that stretch in all directions. This was the beginning of KazBeef’s bid to build a cattle empire in what was once the hinterlands of the USSR. The company controls nearly 250,000 acres in this area alone and employs 80 people, many from the village, where work prospects are otherwise dismal to nonexistent.

KazBeef hired Aisabayev to oversee the operation. His family lives nearly 600 miles away— “close by,” he joked. Like the other men whom KazBeef has placed in its outposts across the northern part of this country, he endures the isolation because he’s a believer, and like most of his fellow Kazakhs he wants to reclaim his country from a complicated, repressed past.

During the Soviet era, Kazakhstan’s nomadic culture came under a collective agricultural system that never really fit the landscape and severely damaged as much as one-quarter of its grasslands. Under this system, which started in the 1920s, Kazakhstan lost half of its households, 80 percent of its livestock and its nomadic ways of life. Many people here consider the seven decades of Soviet rule a kind of agricultural genocide.

“The Soviet Union was opposed to nomadic farming ideologically,” said Susanne Wengle, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame who studies Soviet and post-Soviet agriculture. 

Now Kazahks want to start over on their own terms, and, at least for beef production, those terms are American. 

“This whole place was built on the American system,” Aisabayev says, of the operation he oversees.

After KazBeef’s forerunners contacted the Prices, they set up the cow-calf operation in Mamay. A cow-calf operation is the first step in the beef production system, where cows give birth to calves, which are then grazed for four or five months before being shipped off to the feedlot to be fattened. 

The whole process of setting up the new KazBeef operation—from cow-calf to slaughterhouse— took about six years, Price said. The Kazakh government hired not only Price’s team, but advisors from the Arkansas-based meat processing giant Tyson and the USDA. One advisor, from a Canadian company called Feedlot Health Management Services, lived on the Mamay ranch for two years.

After some experimentation, the team found that the hardiest animals are cross-breeds between Angus or Herefords, which have been bred over generations to fatten quickly, and the breeds native to the steppe, which don’t produce as much lucrative meat, but can endure the tough conditions. The timing is critical. The calves need to be born in the winter so they’re old enough to graze on the spring and summer grass before the winter sets in again—even if that means losing babies to the winter cold.

“It’s better they’re ready for the grass in May,” Aisabayev says. “The weakest will die in the winter anyway. They’re making their children strong. That’s the way we make our natural selection. The strongest will live.”

After grazing for the summer, the animals are sent to a feedlot where they live the rest of their lives before slaughter. KazBeef’s biggest of these is about 140 miles north of Astana near the village of Malik Gabdullin.

KazBeef hired Makhsat Kuralbekovich, a friendly one-time restaurant owner, taxi co-op overseer and government crisis manager, for the job of running it. 

The corrals, packed with cattle, sit against a sloping hillside covered with pine trees. “We were looking for a place protected from the wind,” Kuralbekovich says, his close-shorn head topped with a New York Yankees cap. “We have insane winds here. It can reach 30 meters a second, so it’s very difficult, these weather conditions, if we add wind to negative 35.”

The cold freezes the muddy feedlots so quickly sometimes that the animals’ hooves get stuck. Their legs snap. This sometimes kills them before the cold can.

After a tour of the feedlot and its automated feeding systems, which draw from massive mountains of grain covered with tarps held down by tires, Kuralbekovich sits at a table, heaping with Mongolian camel milk chocolates and blonde biscuits. An oil painting of a heifer and her calf hangs on the wall between windows that are dressed with gold, pom pom-trimmed curtains.

The sun has not yet set, but Kuralbekovich brings out a bottle of Irish whiskey. He insists that everyone have some.

Livestock, he explains, are a Kazakh person’s wealth, embedded in their psyche. “Richness is animals,” he says. “In case of the apocalypse, paper won’t mean anything.”

Like many KazBeef managers, Kuralbekovich’s family lives hundreds of miles away, in a city with better schools and more life. But the isolation suits him, he says. He misses the animals when he’s gone. “When I go back to Almaty, I only last five days,” he says, of the country’s biggest city. “I have work I love.”

So, like his KazBeef colleagues, he leaves his family behind and returns here, to this country’s new beef frontier.

Taking Credit

A few years ago, Bill Price, the North Dakota rancher and investor, struck up a conversation with Jim Arthaud, an oil and gas developer who owns a 22,000-acre cattle ranch that straddles the border of Montana and North Dakota. 

Price, with his ranching background, and Arthaud, with his ties to energy development, got to talking about the growing market for carbon credits and how together they might develop a program to generate these credits from the grasslands of the Dakotas.

Three years later, a seafood company hoping to underwrite the carbon neutrality of the 2023 Pac-12 men’s basketball tournament championship bought credits generated by Arthaud’s cattle—a first-of-its-kind transaction and the beginning of an improbable path that led from North Dakota to Kazakhstan. 

When Price and Arthaud started their conversation, agriculture-based carbon credits were mostly based on croplands: A corn or soy farmer, for example, might take certain steps to improve the quality of their soils, like refraining from tillage, making that soil better able to hold carbon. That stored carbon, in turn, generates a credit or offset that can be bought through an exchange or marketplace, by a company seeking to lower its own carbon footprint.

Price and Arthaud wondered how to enlist the vast rangelands of the Dakotas in a similar type of arrangement—but with grazing animals. Eventually, the conversation turned into EcoBalance Global and its grazing-based system.

EcoBalance soon developed a rotational grazing method it calls “twice-over grazing” where the animals are grazed in one area, moved to another, and then within a certain timeframe moved back to the first area. 

“When they go across it the first time, they clip the top of the grass and then you move them,” explained Tellan Steffan, a North Dakota rancher and now the CEO of EcoBalance. “Then we give that grass a recovery period before those animals come back and graze that grass again. What that does is it keeps the grass in a vegetative state for a longer period of time.” That, Steffan explained, keeps more leafy matter on the grass, allowing it to pull carbon dioxide out of the air. “Microbes come up and they exchange that carbon dioxide for nitrogen and sugars, and they take the carbon dioxide down to the soil with them and that’s where the permanent storage happens.”

Beginning in 2022, workers at Arthaud’s Open A Angus Ranch placed GPS tags on calves, digitally tracking them as they moved across the ranch and over the course of their lives. EcoBalance ultimately tracked 904 cattle at the ranch. During that year, soil scientists took samples at different depths, determining a carbon baseline. In the following years, they took more samples and sent them to a lab for analysis. “We do the same process in the same way,” Steffan explained, “and that gives us the true amount of carbon that we have sequestered.”

In March 2023, a Houston-based carbon registry called BCarbon verified that this twice-over grazing process resulted in legitimately stored soil carbon and issued the first carbon credits generated on Arthaud’s ranch. BCarbon then sold those credits, including to a company called Pacific Seafood, which paid to offset the carbon emissions of the Pac-12 Conference basketball championship that year. (Pacific Seafood bought credits from multiple carbon storage projects, not just from EcoBalance.)

In January, BCarbon issued another 4,364 credits and in March, another 6,817 based on the grazing operations at Arthaud’s ranch, with the ranch keeping 80 percent of the sale proceeds. 

Steffan says this is just the beginning—that the twice-over grazing system can revolutionize how cattle are raised and how carbon is stored. He noted additional benefits: healthier animals, better water infiltration, more biodiversity, more forage production. Grasslands all over the world could benefit from this approach while providing protein at the same time.

In December 2023, at the COP in Dubai, EcoBalance unveiled its next venture—this one with KazBeef and Almaty-based rTek, a company that specializes in remote sensing and geographic data mapping. 

The partnership, the companies said, would launch the “first-ever pilot ranch outside the United States that will deliver the world’s first climate smart beef, using carbon insets, backed by 3rd party validation and blockchain technology.”

To Inset or Offset

rTek’s offices are tucked off Dostyk Avenue, a boulevard lined with stolid government buildings that runs through Almaty, Kazakhstan’s mountain-fringed metropolis. Abstract paintings sit against the walls, yet to be hung.

Stuart Bowlin is one of rTek’s co-founders. Originally from Seattle and wearing hobnailed boots and a fleece jacket, he looks like he could be a barista back home. But he’s lived in Kazakhstan for a dozen years—so long now that he’s started to drop the “the’s” from his speech. The only interruption in Bowlin’s Kazakh tenure was a two-year break when he returned to Washington after a potash business he helped launch went belly up. Back in Washington he got his commercial pilot’s license, which turned out to be useful. Now he flies drones over Kazakh rangelands to help determine where cattle should graze for optimal carbon storage.

Bowlin has become an expert in the soils of his adopted home. He knows how a history of overgrazing has damaged them and how overuse of water drained the Aral Sea. (A Soviet nuclear test site in northern Kazakhstan destroyed millions of acres of arable land, which didn’t help.) He believes that better grazing can restore the health of the country’s grasslands. 

The twice-over system, he explained, solves a problem of size. When animals have to move long distances for water and forage, they trample a lot of land. The trampled land becomes more prone to invasive grasses, dehydration and erosion. 

The strategy now, though, is to split up tracts of land into 20 paddocks, each cordoned off with moveable electric fencing and equipped with a watering point, run off a solar panel. The animals are moved from paddock to paddock after Bowlin determines, via remote sensing, if the grasses have rested for enough time. “The point is to reduce grazing pressure overall,” he explains. “That keeps the grass at an optimal length to increase root growth and productivity of the grass.”

Then comes a critical step. “We’ll measure the carbon directly in the soil before and after, every year at a minimum to start with,” Bowlin says. “And as we get a handle on the rates of soil sequestration—there are many soil types in Kazakhstan—we’ll do this many times in many places.”

rTek will then send the results of all the tests to BCarbon in Houston, which will verify the results. But, unlike the Open A offset credits, the ones generated by KazBeef will be “inset” credits—another emerging, voluntary approach companies are using to reduce their carbon impacts.

Offsets work when one company or government entity buys a credit from another company that engages in a carbon-storing project, like reforestation or a solar facility. The trade happens outside the purchasing company or government entity’s supply chain. 

With insetting, a company that wants to reduce its carbon footprint engages in a carbon-reduction project within its own supply chain. (Supply chain emissions account for about 75 percent of the average company’s emissions. In food-related industries, the percentage is closer to 90 percent.) There is no “trade” between companies or entities. Rather, a company that invests in reducing carbon in its own supply chain, in turn markets that reduction to climate-conscious customers who might be compelled to buy their product over another. 

In the case of KazBeef or Open A, the reductions happen, in theory, in the soils of grazing lands. But companies of all types increasingly have been pursuing them.

“There’s been a lot of interest in insetting as opposed to offsetting,” said Georgine Yorgey, an agricultural researcher and associate director at the Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources at Washington State University. “Things in the U.S. are moving toward insetting, especially in the food and beverage sector. The reasons for that, broadly, is that consumers care about the footprint of their food choices—an important set of consumers.”

Wealthy steak lovers in Middle Eastern petrostates, for example. 

Earlier this year, an influential Dubai-based British chef named Robert Rathbone sampled the carbon-neutral inset beef produced by EcoBalance and decided he loved it. In April, more than 3,300 pounds of “carbon-neutral” inset beef from Open A Angus Ranch were flown to Dubai and served in Rathbone’s restaurants. KazBeef has also supplied Rathbone’s restaurants and plans to fly one load of beef from Astana to Dubai every week.

The beef will be sold to consumers as “climate smart” even though it was flown thousands of miles. The carbon emissions from the flights will not be factored into the math. 

A Need for Speed and a Lack of Answers

As the market for offsets has grown, so has the scrutiny. Multiple academic and media investigations have found problems of double counting—where both companies involved in a trade count the carbon reduction in their tallies—or of “additionality,” where one company pays for a carbon project that would have happened without the trade.

In May of this year, the Biden White House, along with the treasury, agriculture and energy departments, issued a joint statement saying carbon markets have huge potential for “accelerating emissions reductions,” but acknowledged that credits need to be measured and verified in systematic and accurate ways. (One analysis found there are at least a dozen different protocols for measuring, reporting and verifying soil carbon from agricultural practices on cropland alone.) 

“Unlike what happens with commodities that can be sampled or measured on delivery, such as soybeans or nickel, a credit buyer cannot consistently and easily ascertain quality through examination of physically delivered emissions reductions or removals,” the report said. 

Earlier this year, Stanford University published a report which noted that, despite $20 billion being directed toward “climate smart” agriculture under the Biden administration’s signature climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, there are major data gaps that prevent accurate measurement and verification of carbon reductions from agricultural practices. 

“We’re trying to push this so fast,” Rowntree, of Michigan State, said. “But scientifically we don’t have all the answers.”

These concerns apply to offsets as well as insets.

“The same things still matter,” Yorgey said. “Additionality still matters, double counting still matters, where you draw the boundaries still matters. Making sure [the credits] are above and beyond business-as-usual matters, too.”

That’s especially true with grazing-based credits. 

Paige Stanley is a research scientist with Colorado State University who studies carbon sequestration in rangelands. She’s noticed an uptick in interest in grazing-based credits—and with it, some emerging questions.

“The voluntary carbon market space is moving into grazing, rather than just croplands. But there are different challenges that the space needs to contend with,” Stanley said. “There’s so much inherent variability in the landscape. It’s a little bit like finding a needle in a haystack.”

Stanley published a paper last year based on research she did into California rangelands, which documented problems with the accuracy and reliability of soil carbon measurements from grazed areas. The differences in soil types across rangelands presents a big challenge, but Stanley also found that sample sizes were generally too small to reliably measure changes in the soil carbon and that statistical methods were uneven. 

“We’re trying to push this so fast, but scientifically we don’t have all the answers.”

Jason Rowntree, Michigan State University professor of animal science

Some researchers and experts who reviewed EcoBalance’s methodology pointed out that KazBeef aims to store carbon for a 10-year period—not nearly long enough.

“They say it is a 10-year contract of non-disturbance. But if the carbon can be released through disturbance after 10 years, we’ve lost all the value,” said Ben Lilliston, the director of rural strategies and climate change at the Minnesota-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. “A principle of high integrity credits is that they are permanent.”

Even Bowlin acknowledges the limitations. “Twice-over grazing is a short-term solution. We don’t know how many decades it will contribute to soil health, but we know it helps now,” he said. “It’s more permanent than some credits out there, but it’s less permanent than carbon capture and storage, where you’re literally taking the carbon and putting it in a brick or something.”

Even if it were permanent, though, EcoBalance’s grazing-based approach doesn’t account for methane emitted from cows—only for carbon in the soil.

Jim Blackburn, who runs the BCarbon registry and verifies the credits for EcoBalance, acknowledges as much. (BCarbon had only issued credits for Open A Angus at the time of publication, not KazBeef.)

“We believe that if you can prove that you’re adding carbon to the ground or the trees, then you can sell those credits,” Blackburn said. “We are basically measuring the soil. Our certification is limited to that … We do not consider the methane emissions in the issuance.”

Given that cattle are responsible for so much of the world’s methane emissions, that’s a major oversight.

“There’s very little science here, and the omissions are glaring,” explained Hayek, of New York University. “Nothing about methane emissions or any other [greenhouse gas] fluxes besides soil carbon. Nothing about whether their study site would be taking up carbon anyway if the cows weren’t there. These are fundamental conditions that need to be met to show any additional benefit that carbon credits would need to make.”

In the emerging world of carbon markets, there are a handful of verification companies and registries considered to be certifiers of “high integrity,” credible carbon credits, according to the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market. These are ACR, Climate Action Reserve, Gold Standard and Verra, which earlier this year were deemed eligible by the council to label certain credits as adhering to its “Core Carbon Principles” methodology—its most robust standard. These credits, so far, have come only from projects involving natural gas pipelines, landfills and discarded equipment that generates ozone and refrigerants.

The council has not yet approved any agricultural methods in this high-level category, and only one of these major certifiers—Verra—has a protocol related to grazing. 

New research published last year found that it would be basically impossible for the livestock industry to cancel out its emissions through improved grazing methods on grasslands. “Solely relying on carbon sequestration in grasslands to offset [the] warming effect of emissions for current ruminant systems is not feasible,” the authors concluded, noting that carbon in the soil would have to increase by somewhere between 25 percent and 2,000 percent. 

“Estimating a change in cropland is really difficult. Assessment in a grassland is almost impossible,” said Smith, of Aberdeen, a co-author of the research. “Even if you’re not claiming carbon credits, the justification for expanding livestock production is incredibly counter-productive for climate change. And then when you throw in the claim that they’re trying to improve climate benefits, that just seems entirely implausible.”

A Different Approach

Jamila Jaxaliyeva is a former professional golfer—Kazakhstan’s first—now a graduate student, studying forestry at Yale University, and an aspiring Kazakh cattle rancher.

Though she was raised in Germany, she was born in Almaty and her family has lived in western Kazakhstan for generations. That’s where she hopes to resurrect her family’s cattle business and raise cows, though not the way KazBeef does.

“Trying to copy the American system in Kazakhstan is just so stupid,” she says, in a customarily direct manner. “We’re nomadic. We don’t have fences in Kazakhstan.”

And that’s only the first problem, she says. 

Nomads relied on horses to move across the harsh landscape of the steppe, not just because they provided better transportation than other animals, but because they could survive. Horses know how to dig through the snow to find grass in the winter. Cows, especially the Angus and Hereford breeds brought to the country by KazBeef, don’t. Without human-fed grain, they would die. “These are stupid cattle,” Jaxaliyeva says.

In the U.S. and other major beef producing countries corn is a mainstay of a cow-fattening diet, and heavily subsidized. Roughly 40 percent of U.S.-grown corn, the most heavily subsidized crop in the country, goes to livestock. 

But Kazakhstan’s agricultural system doesn’t support corn in the same way. The country grew about 1.2 million metric tons last year, compared to 390 million in the U.S. and 290 million in China, the next biggest producer. 

“We should use grass. You make the cows do what they’re born to do, which is graze,” Jaxaliyeva says. “Grass to beef—just one step.” Not grass, to grain, to beef.

Kazakhs eat a lot of meat, both from horses and cows. But the native steppe breeds don’t produce as much meat in this grass-to-beef system as the imported ones do when they’re fed grain. That means they’re not as lucrative. 

The leaner meat of the steppe breeds is just fine with most Kazakhs, Jaxaliyeva says. “In Kazakhstan, because we boil meat, we don’t need marbling. We don’t care about steaks.”

But the world’s premier consumers have learned to want fatty, marbled meat—the kind produced by the Angus and Hereford cows that have been bred over decades to get bigger and fatter, fast.

“Marbling is fake,” Jaxaliyeva says, expressing a strong preference for lean, native beef. “It’s just marketing.”

Jaxaliyeva thinks native breeds that can survive the conditions in Kazakhstan better suit the country’s appetites and environment. She plans to use those breeds in her operation.

“You need cattle that are more adapted, and that’s huge for climate change,” she says. “Your Angus is not going to survive the extremes.”

Nor is it going to create the kind of economic conditions that will help more Kazakhs. Replicating the American system will lead to more consolidation in the industry, as it has in the rest of the world, shutting out more Kazakh farmers, Jaxaliyeva fears.

“My vision is to give them the opportunity to raise their own animals. Provide them with the right tools and the right breed that graze wherever they want to,” Jaxaliyeva says. “Then everyone has a job. We would revive old traditions and communities. These bleak conditions at a feedlot—that’s not life. We need to do it our way, not the American way.”

Reviving a Depressed Land

Murat Yuldashev is a managing partner at Kusto Group, KazBeef’s parent company, where he is in charge of overseeing the company’s carbon credits programs. During the late Soviet era, Yuldashev was a nuclear scientist, but the collapse of the Soviet Union changed his trajectory. 

Sitting in a traditional Kazakh restaurant on Dostyk Avenue he wears his career switch expertly.

“When the Soviet Union crashed it was not so easy to cover my expenses for my family, so I changed. I became a financial guy,” he says. 

And for KazBeef carbon credits have become a financial matter. 

Driving around his hometown of Shchuchinsk, in the far north of the country, Shayakhmetov points out the modest building where his parents still live. A complex of ski jumps rises at the edge of town, where the first Kazakh champion trained—perhaps the town’s only claim to fame. Women shove prams across wedges of dirty snow. Nothing new has been built here since the early 1980s, except a hospital. Vape shops line the streets.

“It is very depressed here,” Shayakhmetov says, dragging again on his e-cigarette.

In the south of the country and in the west, near the Caspian Sea, Kazakhstan’s oil fields produce massive amounts of oil, making the country the world’s 12th largest producer. Oil is its biggest financial engine. Around Shchuchinsk, though, there’s nothing but barley and grasslands. That’s where Shayakhmetov, KazBeef’s evangelistic messenger, believes his country’s new promise lies.

About an hour outside of town, KazBeef’s slaughter facilities are ringed by a fence and guarded. In an upstairs office, Azamat Orumbayev, the facility’s chief, sits behind a desk, wearing jeans and a KazBeef jacket. A clock in the shape of a steak hangs on the wall; a steak calendar sits on the desk. Snow-blinding sun slices into the room through the windows.

Shayakhmetov translates Orumbayev’s Russian to English. 

For him, the carbon credits are secondary. “We’re just providing the land,” he says.

Believe In It

Below Orumbayev’s office, KazBeef’s operations flow with mechanized, antiseptic precision—the antithesis of the makeshift backyard slaughtering that dominates most of the country. 

The temperature in the processing rooms remains a constant 2 degrees Celsius. Each person, dressed in a white lab-like coat and helmet, has their own knife that is switched out every 30 minutes. Every two hours, all the knives are disinfected—a process that takes 10 or 15 minutes, providing workers a window for their coffee breaks. Random shapes of gristle and fat fill plastic crates around the room. 

“We can trace which cut of beef is cut with which knife,” Shayakhmetov says.

The facility has a computerized grader—the only one in Kazakhstan—to rate the percentage of marbled fat that international buyers have come to expect. At the end of the day, the facility has processed 10 tons of highly marbled meat, all of which gets boxed up and stored in a shockingly cold and massive walk-in cooler, ready for consumers in far-away places.

On the slaughtering side of the KazBeef operation, everyone wears maroon lab coats rather than white ones. Workers enter through a door that leads onto a platform where they pause as a machine applies disinfectant to their rubber boots. The air is warm and fleshy, smelling of wet fur and animal.

Above, 2,000-pound carcasses hang on hooks, moving slowly along a conveyor, appearing in reverse stages of recognition, from meat to animal: A headless carcass stripped of its hide and organs. A carcass still with its head and organs, but no hide or limbs. An animal with its hide and organs, but horns sawed off, its tongue flopping out of its head. An animal, hanging upside down by one chained leg—electrically stunned just seconds before—still breathing, thrashing against gravity. 

At the beginning of this procession from creature to food is an animal, taken minutes ago from an outdoor corral, confused by the transition from sunlight to darkness, from herd to isolation. Its hooves are slipping on the wet concrete and its eyes are rolling in their sockets, straining to see over the walls of the chute where he now waits. The dim, sweaty room is aware of his presence — of a life about to end. Then, moments later, with an electric jolt, a collapse, a swift heave into the air and a swipe of electric teeth across the neck, it does. 

Blood drains onto the floor as the conveyor moves the animal’s massive body along. Within the day, dozens of hands will process the animal’s flesh into a package that will bear an audacious claim, for which consumers eventually will pay a premium. It will say the animal was good for the future.

In KazBeef’s facility 35 animals are slaughtered this way every day, a fraction of the number processed in giant American facilities. (Islam still dominates the culture of eating in Kazakhstan and under halal rules, the animal’s throat must be cut while it is still alive, slowing down the process.) But as KazBeef breeds more cows, and more cows graze the country’s grassland, and more consumers get to know the product, that number will rise. At least that’s the hope.

KazBeef’s managers and workers are proud of their work—proud to display it to a reporter. No American or multinational livestock company would ever allow a journalist in to see its operations, from start to finish, the way KazBeef has.

“Everyone who works in this company believes in it,” Shayakhmetov says. “It’s not about KazBeef. It’s about Kazakh protein.”

Shayakhmetov becomes lyrically emphatic after a whisky. “We have all this beautiful land. All this space,” he says. “We see this country as a beef-producing country that will feed the world. We believe in it. I believe in it.”

“We can be known for more than oil,” he adds, with hope and without irony. “We will do it somehow.”

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