The discipline of economics usually operates somewhere outside my personal space. Any sense of a relationship to economic shifts gets lost between the complex equations and unimaginably large numbers that get thrown around when measuring things on a national scale.

Within the dismal science, though, a small sliver resonates with me on an absolutely personal level: The notion that every aspect of our lives has a measurable economic value. The valuations are nearly always arguable; consider the value of a stay-at-home parent's contributions, set by Salary.com at about $113,000 a year. Is the calculation valid if the work of an amateur cook/gardener/childcare provider (i.e., the parent) is given the same value as professionals who are trained and specialize in each of these areas?

I know I started to make decisions differently when I began to weigh the economic value of my options; hiring a home cleaning service is a no-brainer when I calculate cost of spending my time doing that work. I do consider it work, not leisure time, and if I'm not getting paid I'd rather invest my energies in family, friends, hobbies and the like. Similarly, although I could change the tire on my car, the time it would take to do that, not to mention my personal lack of expertise, makes that AAA membership cheap by comparison. And so on.

New research from the University of Wyoming is beginning to paint a picture of sustainability in the conventional beef supply chain that takes into account its economic contributions at each stage of the process. This approach strikes me as far more welcome than counting only the costs; with the latter, your only option for improvement is reducing expenses, and that effort has a built-in, hard limit.

In this research, David “Tex” Taylor, extension specialist and professor in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Wyoming (UW), and three researchers at the university calculated an economic value to the "ecosystem services" of cattle production, beyond the market value of the animal itself.

As described in a recent issue of Beef magazine, the UW study accounts for forage production (pasture rental rate estimates from the National Agricultural Statistics Service), general ecosystems services (annual grassland rental payments from the Farm Service Agency Conservation Reserve Program) and wildlife recreation values (estimates from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service). They determined, preliminarily at least, that a cow's economic contributions are $57.67 per acre, or $726 economic value per head.

Taylor and his research colleagues discussed their early finding at the recent checkoff-funded Ag Media Workshop.

“You can’t go to the store and pick up a six-pack of biodiversity,” Taylor said, as reported in Beef. “Measuring the economic value of ecosystem services is difficult, because many of the services are not traded in the formal market. Often there is no observed price, so you have to rely on non-market valuation methods.”

Cattle producers aren't going to be paid those amounts, of course, any more than a stay-at-home parent is going to see an actual $113,000 for their toils. But it reframes the meat industry's efforts to demonstrate value to the economy. It is an opportunity to point out a positive contribution to the environment, rather than focusing solely on the reduction of the negative.

The theory of the cost of everything

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