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Comment by spenczar5 | Hacker News Reader

How does that calculation work? Prairies were inhabited by huge herds of large grazers: bison. Thats how they stayed as prairies.

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?

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Part of the issue is also that there is simply far less grassland now. The prairies and other grasslands used to be huge, and supported 2/3rds of the number of bovines. Now they're a tiny fraction of the size and supporting 50% more.

Pastureland makes up 27% of the US; crop land is 18% [1]. What do you mean by "tiny fraction?" Is pastureland different than grassland?

[1] USDA National Resource Conservation Service "Range and Pastureland" https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/national/la...

That is more than I had understood remained, and also a surprisingly high number. Possibly there is an issue of definitions.

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 agree that there seems to be some wobbliness in definitions here.

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 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...

What you are missing is that Bison lived off whatever plants naturally grew in the land, and that their numbers declined and increased with the available food supply. The loss of natural habitat and biodiversity alone should be a cause for concern.

My impression was (again! uninformed!) that pasture-raised cattle basically are living off whatever plants naturally grow on the land. Is that not the case?

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?

That was, indeed, how cattle used to be raised back in the day, with maybe some grain added to their diet to make up for seasonality of plants (after all, cow eating is a year-round business).

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/...

Not where I am, it's mostly just pasture raised cows, there time in a feedlot is very short.

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