Plus, a good portion of the country’s good farmland is diverted to growing feed for those animals.
Think of it like: how many acres have been changed from a natural ecosystem to an artificial one for meat eating.
It's not like we invented grazing animals in a lab. The Great Plains were teeming with millions of buffalo before, and we have cattle on them now.
Sure that's different but it's reasonable to note that a lot of this land looks and basically is pretty much the same as it was before modern ranching.
But mostly we kill off the predators. The livestock spreads all over and grazes continuously. The result is topsoil destruction and erosion. There are large areas where overgrazing is a serious problem.
Allan Savory has been the leading advocate for "holistic grazing" that keeps the herds packed. It's been controversial, because he advocates doing more grazing. The evidence of that helping is mixed at best. However, just leaving overgrazed land alone is another matter, and experiments have been very successful.
Leaving the land untouched is even more 'ecologically privileged' than using it to make expensive food.
>Plus, a good portion of the country’s good farmland is diverted to growing feed for those animals.
Growing feed (hay/grass) is much easier than growing things like almonds. If a farmer could grow something humans would pay for directly rather than hay, they would.
Plus, all the grain storage facilities are still mostly full from last year and we're looking towards another bumper crop from all the rainfall this year.
By contrast, EU farm subsidies in a smaller economy are three times that size. If the US farm subsidies are colossal, I'm not sure what you'd call 3x colossal.
https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/reversing-desertification-with-l...
I wonder what the economics would be of doing without the feed and feedlots? There would be somewhat less cattle I presume.