You can't eat the plants that are eaten by the animals. Not all pastures can be converted to fields, and converting the rest will actually reduce biodiversity and cause more sustainability issues.
Here are charts that compare land use of different foods normalized per calorie / grams of protein:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-use-kcal-poore
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-use-protein-poore
If you want to know more, type "land use" into the search box of https://ourworldindata.org and pick an article of your choice.
I live in a community with ranches and farms. The ranchland looks like nature. Other than cows here and there, it's wildland. Coyotes, mountain lions, hawks, and all sorts of wildlife abound.
The farms are manicured flat with row crops, irrigation, fertilizers, pesticides, etc. Farming is vastly more destructive to the natural environment.
"Land use" measured in abstract square feet is not a useful concept.
You might be surprised but 40% of all (cereal) crops are produced to feed animals. That would almost completely go away except a bit to compensate for the loss of meat.
See https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cereal-distribution-to-us...
The other thing we could do of course is to avoid feeding animals with crops like soy and corn, and instead let them browse freely and eat the wild grasses and shrubs that they would eat normally, if humans didn't feed them more "efficient" feeds.
Obviously that would mean a significantly reduced number of farmed animals, but that's a feature, not a bug. Perhaps we can all agree on this: the true plague is industrial meat production.
What percentage of meat or dairy comes from pasture animals? You can't fulfill a country like the US's meat and dairy demand with pasture raised animals. So realistically we are talking about factory farmed animals. If we are talking about factory farmed animals then it goes back to the needing these nature destructing farms you are talking about just to feed animals that then feed humans, this is not an efficient system.
Meat and dairy are separate considerations. Even in industrial farming, meat animals and dairy animals are raised separately and often belong to different breeds. They are certainly treated differently.
So for example, where I'm staying, about 80% of the dairy products are made with the milk of sheep and goats in small farms where the animals range freely, in the summer, and eat stored wild grassses as hay in the winter. On the other hand, most of the meat consumed is chicken and pork and of those animals, at least the chicken are kept in large battery operations. I don't know about pig farming. Also, where I stay there are very few cows, most of them raised for dairy, and the country has one of the smallest, if not the smallest number of cattle in Europe. It's in South Europe, but I don't want to say exactly where.
Anyway when you ask questions like the one above, please consider that the conditions you know from the Americas are not the same in all of the rest of the world, and that most of the rest of the world simply does not eat as much meat, of all kids, as Americans (and by "Americans" I mean people in the US, Argentina and Brazil).
> You can't fulfill a country like the US's meat and dairy demand with pasture raised animals.
"Demand", maybe not. But "need"? It seems to me that this can be done perfectly well simply because the amount currently consumed is extravagant. People in the US eat way too much meat, per capita, compared to almost everyone else in the world, including most industrialised nations. My selection below:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/meat-supply-per-person?ta...
Nobody needs to eat that much meat. If there is "demand" for it, that is the matter that should be addressed. Why do people want to eat so much meat? There is something incredibly wrong in the data above, when you look at how the US, Argentina, Spain and Brazil eat, compared to the other industrialised countries in the chart.
Not everywhere. In the US there is an incredible amount of overlap. For example, Male cows born in the dairy industry end up in the meat industry. But more specifically I don't see how they are separate in the context of this conversation? Aren't we just talking about the inefficiency of raising animals as a food source?
>Anyway when you ask questions like the one above, please consider that the conditions you know from the Americas are not the same in all of the rest of the world, and that most of the rest of the world simply does not eat as much meat, of all kids, as Americans (and by "Americans" I mean people in the US, Argentina and Brazil).
I thought I was, I honestly wanted to know what the percentage of meat and dairy comes from pasture animals in the world. I guess I should of been more clear about that.
>"Demand", maybe not. But "need"? It seems to me that this can be done perfectly well simply because the amount currently consumed is extravagant. People in the US eat way too much meat, per capita, compared to almost everyone else in the world, including most industrialised nations. My selection below:
I 100% agree.
>Nobody needs to eat that much meat.
Again I very much agree.
Well, I confess I don't know the actual numbers. But most places on Earth don't have the intensive farming found in the Americas.
> Aren't we just talking about the inefficiency of raising animals as a food source?
Quite the contrary. In a sibling comment I discuss how ruminants are the most efficient way to turn inedible plant matter to food that humans can eat.
The wikipedia page on "ruminant" has some interesting information about the process of rumination. In short, ruminants have four stomachs. In the first two, plant matter is fermented by bacteria, then regurgitated so that it can be re-chewed to hydrate it with saliva, that promotes bacterial development and controls the pH of these stomachs. The third stomach is a kind of filter that absorbs some nutrients and allows only food of certain size to pass to the final, fourth stomach. The fourth stomach is the true stomach that is similar to the one we have in our beliies. So to eat the plants that ruminants are specialised to eat, we'd need to have it first chewed and pre-digested by ruminants. In yet another comment I noted how sheep and cows that range freely eat wild grasses, and goats eat shrub.
As I say in that other comment, factory farmed cows are fed soy and corn, that humans can also eat, rather than wild grasses that humans can't eat. But that is factory farming. It is actually harmful for ruminants to feed them that kind of food and so it's a practice that should absolutely be eliminated, along with the rest of factory farming.
Far as I can tell, nobody has been able to breed goats in factory farms. And sheep are normally not factory farmed. I don't know what it is that makes cows good for that sort of thing, but you can be assured that where farming is primarily of sheep and goats, whatever automation of processes there exists is nowhere near the scale of factory farms with giant, thousand-animal feedlots as in the Americas.
Anyway I think "efficiency" is a red herring. The farming industry is very efficient at producing cheap meat by the thousand-ton. But human bodies are not tuned to a world were food is produced "efficiently". We are predisposed to eat as much as we can as soon as we can, to make up for the difficulty of finding enough nutrients to sustain us "in the wild". Presented with the extravagant amounts of cheap meat produced by industrial farming, we are inevitably drawn to excesses of consumption. These excesses are used by the very industry that caused them in the first place as justification to produce even more meat, throwing even more fuel to the fire, destroying even more of the environment and treating even more hundreds of thousands of animals like garbage. Inevitably, there is a backlash and people swear off meat, when what we should all be swearing at and off is the meat industry, that would happily farm us if it was profitable.
I hear you and agree with everything you say in the rest of your post. I think we are just coming from two different assumptions. My assumption is that with the population the world the and with the increasing middle class we are seeing an increase in meat and dairy consumption, to a level that cannot be met and hasn't been met, with pasture and grazing animals. Basically I agree with everything you have been saying about the efficiency of ruminants but as a viable way to feed the worlds population, my assumption is that it wont work and isn't working. If you look at places like the EU, Pig meat is their largest meat sector and factory farms account for 85% off all pig meat available on the market. (page 4: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2020/6520...)
The EU is not a singular case, the trend of farms moving towards intensive factory farms is happening everywhere. In my limited research, I couldn't find statistics on how much pasturing china does but I still thought this was interesting: "Today, China produces and consumes half of the world’s pork, produces nearly 20 percent of the world’s poultry, 10 percent of the world’s beef and is the fourth largest milk producer of the world." (https://www.iatp.org/documents/need-feed-chinas-demand-indus...)
Anyway I agree Factory Farming is a terrible "solution", and thinking about food production in the "most efficient" terms is not a approach to the problem either. I just don't think pasturing ruminant animals is a great solution either, I live in a rural farming community and I don't see it actually working. I'll just go eat my lintels and peas until I see a solution that makes any sense to me.
So I think it's a matter of controlling over-supply and reducing the excess of demand. One way I think could work to do this in a way that aligns with middle-class values is to promote a return to traditional, local cuisines and diets. For example, I come from a Mediterrannean country where the majority of the traditional diet is, well, typically mediterrannean, 80% vegetables, pulses and legumes, with tons of olive oil and tomato sauce on everything, and with meat eaten sparingly and most of the time replaced with dairy. Almost all traditional dishes are either vegan, or vegetarian because they include eggs or dairy. We do eat a lot of fish, which is also rapidly becoming impossible to produce sustainably, so that's another discussion to have. Of the meat we eat, most of it is chicken or pork, with sheep or goat eaten a few times a year, as a traditional treat during religious feasts.
In the place I live, sheep and goat farming is free range almost exclusively. I'm afraid pork production is another scandal of animal abuse, not different than factory farms for cows. The same goes for chicken, treating animals like industrial goods must absolutely be made illegal and damn the markets. On the plus side, pork and chicken are much more sustainable from an environmental point of view- and both kinds of animals are absolutely fantastic recyclers of matter that humans can't even consume. Incidentally, the traditional thing to do with whey left over from cheesemaking is to feed it to pigs. When my cheese fails, I feed it to the chickens :)
To my mind a large part of the problem is that most people choose to live in cities, away from food production. This has two effects. On the one hand, the people in the cities have no idea where their food comes from, they're insulated from the reality of animal abuse in factory farms and they even lose the ability to recognise good produce (both meat and plants) from bad. On the other hand, because the location of people is massively centralised, the production and distribution of food also becomes massively centralised.
In simpler words, it's impossible for everyone who lives in the city to have their little garden with their veg and a few chickens or a goat. Instead, the farms are all outside the city and the food is all in the supermarket shelves. If everyone could raise their own animals, grow their own vegetables, we would obviously be in a very different world, with far less animal abuse (certainly far less systematic animal abuse) and far less over-consumption: it takes a lot of work to care for an animal, it makes more economic sense to keep an animal for its milk so one can have dairy year round, rather than slaughter it and eat meat once, and it's also much harder to mistreat or even slaughter an animal for food when one has raised the animal from a baby (one will always find excuses to not do it today).
So a simple solution would be to keep the food where it is produced: in the countryside, away from the city. But then the city folks would literally starve and it wouldn't be about meat or veg anymore, it's just impossible to grow food in the city. So it's not really a practical solution at all.
That depends on the land. Cattle and rainforests don't go together well
In the USA (excluding Alaska), something like 1/4 of all land area is directly used for animal grazing land, and something like 2/3 agriculture production goes to producing animal feed. These take huge amounts of water, fuel, and other resources. Beef production in particular is one of the leading causes of global climate change via CO2 emissions.
I love steaks and hamburgers as much as the next person, but we shouldn’t pretend it has a low environmental cost.
That's a quick dodge, but still, a dodge of the OP's point: you can't eat all the plants that animals eat. For example, I eat primarily sheep and goat and their dairy products. The goats eat shrubs and the sheep browse inedible grasses. In fact, funny story, but I know a girl (not me) who tried to eat the grass the sheep were eating and her mouth filled with sores. I mean duh.
Anyway ruminants have four stomachs just so they can digest plant matter that is impossible for omnivores to digest. Industrially farmed animals are fed soy and corn, that can be digested by humans, but those are not those animals' natural feed. Left to their own devices, outside of factory farming, browsing freely, farm animals would exclusively eat plants that are inedible to humans and so they would convert plant matter to food way, way more efficiently than any human stomach ever could.
Four stomachs and rumination is the most efficient plant-to-meat production mechanism known to anyone.