Land usage is a totally useless metric for the impact of beef production, because we can (and do) raise cattle on land that's basically useless for anything else.
Also, killing billions of sentient beings simply because the taste is a bit off, but let's all just ignore that.
First off, there used to be over 60 million buffalo in North America, producing similar amounts of methane. We have only 50% more cows today.
Second, whatever cows don't eat is probably going to be metabolized by fungi, which also produce methane (although it's not well-quantified how much).
Third, the half-life of atmospheric methane is only on the order of 9 years (it's a fairly unstable molecule in an oxidizing environment), so its long-term effect is much smaller than CO2's, even though it's a more potent greenhouse gas.
> simply because the taste
It's about nutrition and health. "Taste" is a strawman.
First, the whole bison vs. cow argument is bunk for a variety of reasons. The diet that roaming bison ate is very different that the beef and dairy cattle eat today. Also, they didn't typically shit in large pools given that they were not animals that we're penned in to the same geographical location and roamed, often over many, many miles throughout the year.
Second, you're looking solely at North America. Cattle "production" is truly worldwide at this point, with beef and dairy cattle farms in many far off places where the animals are not native, and the true reporting of their numbers is grossly under-reported.
And, the whole goddamn thing about fungi is just.. I don't even know where to start with that. The amount of food created to feed cattle is staggering, and without that need in the first place, then the fungi wouldn't need to metabolize and emit methane, even though all of this is just some kind of insane babble. The methane comes from huge pools of manure that can, and more likely is not, properly and sustainably dealt with. There are blighted areas in the US alone where large cattle companies have simply abandoned the areas due to health concerns.
Here's the thing about methane though, when you generate an enormous amount of it, year over year, the cumulative effects of it cooling the planet (you know, melting glaciers, raising sea temperatures) does not really give a damn about the half-life of atmospheric methane. Once those effects set in, they're self-perpetuating and continuing to feed into the same root causes only makes it more difficult to resolve.
Finally, if you think that beef filled with GMO corn is some kind of magical health / nutrition goal post, well, there's nothing I could possibly say to counteract the sheer inanity of that position.
I think Beyond Beef is fine. I don't eat it for "health" reasons, and anyone who eats mass produced ground beef for "health" reasons is just straight up lying to themselves. All of these are comfort foods that we can all sustainbly live without. The decision is whether the slight taste difference is worth the absolutely terrible cost to the environment, and the devastating cost associated with the mass slaughter of sentient animals.
Cattle are mostly fed off grazable plants in agricultural dead zones and byproducts of human ag production. The marginal ecological impact of feeding cows on top of humans is not that significant.
You seem to be operating under this idea that concentration of resources like manure is worse than having the same amount over a larger area. Can you explain your thought process there?
Vegetable activists often attempt to divert blame to meat production by saying things like "70% of the amazon soy is used to feed cattle", which is true, but only by mass. Cattle are fed the byproducts of soy production like soy meal that humans refuse to eat. By dollar value, almost all of the soy produced goes to human consumption.
This is provably false, see [1]. The page is in Dutch, but surely there are English sources just a quick Google search away too.
1. https://nieuwscheckers.nl/nieuwscheckers/soja-voor-veevoer-i...
OTOH, growing soy and other plant protein sources used for fake meat requires high-quality land and is extremely taxing on the soil.
As an interesting reference, take a look at how farmers in Brazil use deforested Amazon land to graze cattle only after depleting the soil to grow soy for a few years, at which point it is inhospitable to plant agriculture.