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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

There are places in the world where cattle production is the most efficient (and really only) efficient use of resources.

Very large herds of cattle on extremely large areas of semi-arid grasslands mimic the buffalo that humans eradicated. They take few to no resources that aren't already there, and they actually support the ecosystem.

In some places cattle suck down resources that could go to other more useful places (grain, water, etc.) but in others they're the only way to gain anything from the land, and they protect it from desertification.

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It's not just about use of land resources though, it's about greenhouse gases (methane) generated by cattle. Beef is just about the worst thing you can eat with regards to climate change.

How would this differ from an equivalent buffalo?

From an ecological perspective, replacing cattle with buffalo wouldn't be much of a win. There are too many meat-eating people on the planet to make either animal the primary source.

Is there a problem with having a 'revolving' population of 60M? That is, we are eating out of the population, and it is replacing itself (with our help)?

Assume we could feed all the meat-eaters on a revolving 60M cattle--would we then have solved the problem? Or are we supposed to maintain a smaller-than-original population?

60M is possibly double the population there ever was, and that was a time when far, far more land was devoted to them. The only way to have that many now would be an extremely concentrated population (with its methane output) plus all the other outputs of humanity.

There is no single answer about what we're "supposed to" do, but it is clear that cattle are driving the increase of methane production and that methane is a far, far more potent greenhouse gas than C02. A plant-based replacement wins hands-down in any ecological analysis.

There are an order of magnitude more cattle than there have been equivalent buffalos?

Hmm, I was going to say "No way!" but looking around it seems like 60M buffalo back in the day [1] and at times 100M cows [2], certainly not "order of magnitude" but more cows that buffalo.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_bison#Range_and_popul...

[2] http://www.cattlenetwork.com/advice-and-tips/cowcalf-produce...

Worldwide there are around 1 billion cows [1]

[1] http://beef2live.com/story-world-cattle-inventory-ranking-co...

100M is an order of magnitude more than 60M, by definition. "order of magnitude" doesn't mean "ten times as much", it means "you have to use another column to describe it"... and so 1x10^8 is an order of magnitude more than 6x10^7...

You're just wrong.

Here are three sources that say an order of magnitude means ten times as much:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/order-of-magnitude

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/order+of+magnitude

Each of those links say that it can be used both ways. I was wrong that it wasn't used the OP's way, but not wrong in my own definition of it.

an order of magnitude conventionally means an approximate power of 10; the implicit accuracy of the approximation is such that n orders of magnitude means a multiple between 10^(n-0.5) and 10^(n+0.5).

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