Most of the ranch land in my area isn't really suitable for other kinds of agriculture so I don't know if that measure means much. It certainly isn't irrigated and I think the cows give back the water they use.
In terms of some like of positivist, ecosystem sense? I don't know, ask an ecologist what used to be on the land. I can promise you it wasn't cows.
It was probably buffalo.
The prairies used to be one of the greatest carbon sinks in the world, storing as much or more carbon per acre than most forests. They were also a source of incredible diversity.
Cattle ranching operations transforms that carbon sink into methane gas to warm our atmosphere. And while the water is returned, the energy spend transporting and cleaning it isn't.
There were about 60 million bison on the American prairie before 1800. There are about 90 million cattle in the US across all states - with large numbers outside the bison’s range, in states like New York and Tennessee and California. So - roughly in the same ballpark.
Pasture-raised cattle don’t seem so different to me - but I am not very informed on this topic, maybe I am missing something?
Of course it is wrong for factory farmed cattle raised in a shed, and for grain fed to cattle right before slaughter to change their meat, but I thought the bulk of their diet was basically unmanaged wild grasses?
Nowadays, most cattle lives confined in a pen, being fed grass and grains depending on the stage of growth. There’s still some very small farmers using the traditional methodology, but the vast majority of the meat you can buy in a supermarket - even fancy ones like Wholefoods - are the product of mass production.
The USDA’s website has a pretty good rundown of the process: https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/animal-products/cattle-beef/...
[1] USDA National Resource Conservation Service "Range and Pastureland" https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/national/la...
This site, for instance, calculates that 40% of the US used to be grassland, and it's now under 5%. [1]
Possibly there is a difference been "old growth" unmanaged grassland, and "pastureland" that is mostly seeded with purchased grass and clover seed.
Certainly the old prairies do not exist in any meaningful sense. If you ever read Little House on the Prairie you might recall that they traveled for weeks across grassland that was uninterrupted and looked simply like a flat sea of grass for as far as the eye could see.
In any case, even if those numbers are correct it seems like the number of cows is 50% higher and the amount of grassland is about 25% lower (from 40% to 30%).
1. https://www.nathab.com/blog/grasslands-a-lot-more-than-just-...
I think your citation must have an error. It says:
> In the United States, only 5 percent of the original grasslands remain; or about 358 million acres.
If I understand this right, it's claiming that there were once 20 * 358M = 7,160M acres of grassland. But the total size of the United States - everything, not just grass - is about 2,400M acres, so that can't be right.
Maybe they mean 5% of an original 358M? But no; the "358 million acres" in that blog post is a link to a conservation group report; the report is definitely saying that there are 358 million acres of grassland in the US today.
Definitely agreed that the old prairies are pretty different, especially in the wet crop-heavy areas like Iowa. But as I understand it, the dryer west, like the Dakotas and Nebraska and Colorado, are not as changed. But anyway, I'm really interested in the original topic - do we still have good carbon sinks? I would think all that pastureland would be pretty good at sucking up carbon and storing it in soil, but I don't know.
I'm unsure, but my understanding is that carbon sequestration of the old-growth "permaculture" of the prairies and other grasslands comes from their extremely deep roots. [1]
I'm not sure what the pastures of a typical large cattle farm look like, and whether their roots travel anywhere near as deep. However, as we're already establishing, I'm not an expert.
1. https://www.fws.gov/news/blog/index.cfm/2011/6/27/iowa-the-p...