The Briefing:
- World Without Cows reaches New York on Sept. 18, the fourth and final gala in a run that opened in Dublin; the commercial tour of North America starts in October, with South American dates to follow.
- Its central claim leans on FAO math: livestock systems release roughly 6.2 billion tonnes of CO₂ equivalent a year, about 12% of human-caused emissions — nowhere near the 51% figure that still circulates online.
- Animal nutrition firm Alltech produced the film, and an environmental foundation lists it among narratives that soften the sector's climate footprint. Meanwhile Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay all closed 2025 with record beef export earnings.
There is a question Latin America's cattle industry rarely asks out loud, and a documentary just carried it into movie theaters: if every cow vanished tomorrow, what would actually get fixed, and what would break? World Without Cows answers: far less would be fixed than the slogan promises, and that the steepest bill would land on a region where cattle are not merely livestock but payroll, protein and, in some countries, a fifth of all export earnings.
The film wraps a four-city gala run in New York on Sept. 18, after Dublin, London and Los Angeles. This is not a world debut — the documentary has circulated at festivals and industry screenings since 2024. What is new is the move into commercial cinemas, which begins in October across North America with screenings planned for South America, Europe, Africa and Asia.
Five years and 22 countries to take apart a slogan
Journalists Michelle Michael and Brandon Whitworth spent half a decade shooting in 22 countries across five continents, covering more than 40 locations and interviewing farmers, scientists and environmental specialists. The finished cut runs 85 minutes, traveling from the American farm belt to Kenya, India and Brazil, with an Irish leg that gave the tour its reason to open in Dublin. It has been localized into more than 25 languages, Spanish among them.
Michael sums up the takeaway without grandeur: none of the planet's biggest problems has a single, tidy fix. Whitworth was blunter about what the project was for. "The film wasn't made to be an echo chamber," the co-director said while presenting it.
The number the film puts on the table
The documentary's scientific spine is an argument about scale. An FAO assessment released around COP28 put livestock emissions at 6.2 billion tonnes of CO₂ equivalent per year, roughly 12% of everything human activity emits. Beef and dairy cattle account for 3.8 billion tonnes of that — 62% of the livestock share.
The figure is enormous, and still four times smaller than the 51% claim that has circulated since a 2009 calculation published in World Watch magazine by Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang, whose method emissions-accounting specialists later disputed. For executive producer Mark Lyons, the trouble is framing rather than arithmetic: "Cows have become a symbol in the climate conversation," he said as the trailer launched.
Who paid for the film
This belongs up front, because it changes how the movie should be watched. The production came from Alltech, the U.S. animal nutrition company Lyons runs as chief executive, with annual revenue of around $2.6 billion. The directors say they kept full editorial control.
On the other side, a Changing Markets Foundation report titled Dangerous Distractions, reviewed by Euronews, places the documentary among content that plays down the sector's environmental damage and pushes the idea that livestock can be part of the climate solution. That same report notes the film screened inside official United Nations zones during COP30 in Belém. Latin American audiences deserve to walk in knowing both facts.
What is at stake from the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego
This is where the debate stops being abstract. Brazil finished 2025 with 3.5 million tonnes exported and $18 billion in revenue, a 40% jump in earnings from a commercial herd of 195.5 million head, according to ABIEC's Beef Report 2026. The chain moved 1.159 trillion reais, close to 9% of Brazilian GDP.
Argentina broke its own mark too: the beef-and-hide complex earned $4.727 billion and made up 5.4% of the country's total exports, Diario Río Negro reported using Rosario Board of Trade data. The record came while shipping fewer tonnes than in 2024, carried by prices 28% to 43% higher.
Uruguay repeated the pattern on a smaller scale but with heavier relative weight: beef brought in $2.71 billion, up 29.4% year over year, while all meat categories together hit an all-time high of $3.25 billion, per the National Meat Institute.
A million jobs the global debate never counts
The social weight runs heavier than the commercial one. In Colombia, cattle and buffalo farming generated 1,099,273 direct jobs across 736,972 holdings surveyed by Fedegán during the first 2025 vaccination cycle. Of those, 216,670 are run by women and supply 297,903 positions. A third of all sector employment comes from operations with fewer than ten animals.
Mexico shows the same anatomy. Its herd of 28.4 million head is spread across roughly 800,000 producers, and 61.8% of production units keep between one and ten cattle. These are not vast estates; they are household economies holding up entire towns.
The nutrition argument almost nobody contests
The film presses a point the FAO documented in 2023: meat, eggs and milk pack iron, zinc, calcium and vitamin B12 into forms that are hard to replace on a tight budget. The agency counted 372 million preschool-age children short of at least one of three key micronutrients — iron, vitamin A or zinc — plus 1.2 billion women of childbearing age in the same position.
The way out the region is testing
Latin America's alternative is not fewer cows but more output on land already cleared. Brazil set a target of restoring 40 million hectares of degraded pasture within a decade, a plan the government says would nearly double food production without touching native vegetation.
Regional trials have already produced numbers. In Corrientes, Argentina, beef output climbed 74% while emissions intensity fell 21%; in Costa Rica, some 1,800 operations grew their herds 25% without adding paddocks. Andrés González, the FAO's animal health and biodiversity manager, summed up those pilots when he presented them in 2022: low-emission cattle farming, he said, is "totally possible," as reported by Latam Green.
The documentary does not settle the argument, and does not claim to. It hands the argument back — with figures, and with its own funding in plain view — to the people who live off it.
