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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

Every time this comes up I have to remind people that not all land that farms meat can be made arable.

There is a lot of arable land in England itself that can be used, (and, currently used for meat production); however this is not true for many parts of wales and most of Scotland. (which combined make up a about 100,000 sqkm vs Englands 130,000 sqkm)

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Cows and sheep happily graze on moors and other rocky areas that could not be suddenly used to grow any kind of plants for food.

Harry Metcalfe has a good video[0] about it - he keeps cows on the fields that are just too steep and too rocky to grow anything else - but it doesn't bother animals. Same applies to sheep. I imagine animals like chickens will have different considerations, because farm buildings do take land that can be used for something else.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feSBsLSRkWs

True, though in some cases (The Burren in Ireland for instance) it was sheep that stripped the land of vegetation, then topsoil, and left it rocky, in the first place. Whittled Away, by Padraic Fogarty, is a good read on this.

That doesn't mean you could grow good on it though if there was no sheep

That's over grazing. That's lazy, over zealous and/or careless herders who fucked up. You rotate your herds on different land so they don't strip the vegetation. Allowing it to regrow quickly. You're managing the land just as much as your flock. This has been known for thousands of years by people who actually farm and not armchair farm.

While I generally agree with you, there is the tragedy of the commons effect. :-)

Yea, but that's not a "farming" or "meat" problem. That's a human problem. A well known one for a long time at that. If everyone owns it, no one takes care of it. Someone has to be responsible and thus, manage it. There are people who will always abuse a system because they simply don't care. The same as people litter. Pretending to be surprised and blaming anything else is fruitless. "Well, it's the bag's fault for existing, that's why there's trash." or "It's the consumption of meat's fault that the land was stripped bare". No, an asshole did it. An asshole is responsible. Hold particular humans responsible for their personal actions. Don't blame someone or something else.

In Norway, sheep herds are typically sent off into the mountains during summer and left to fend largely for themselves, so not even fenced in land. I'd expect that is the same many other places too.

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