Realistically, though, it isn't used for other things. Lack of infrastructure is a decent barrier for many things.
Not that I disagree with the last bit - I'm mostly vegetarian save for an occasional fish dish.
Not that I disagree with the last bit - I'm mostly vegetarian save for an occasional fish dish.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI&t=1s
Getting rid of ruminant cattle farming will just make the world worse off as food demand gets redirected to a smaller amount of arable land and missing cattle would accelerate climate change and desertification. Humanity does not have a lack of land to live on, there is plenty to go around. City land is expensive because everyone wants to be on small space.
Wouldn't getting rid of ruminant cattle farming reduce the amount of arable land required since so much of it is used to grow animal feed?
"If all the grain currently fed to livestock in the United States were consumed directly by people, the number of people who could be fed would be nearly 800 million,"
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-m...
I think this is exactly the point missed by the people in this thread saying that a lot of cattle are raised on otherwise useless land. The presumption is that if you got rid of cattle farming you'd have to replace the lost calories for humans by growing other food on that land or cutting down more forests.
But this presumption is false. Even if every bit of land used for raising cattle turned out to be worthless for doing anything else, you'd still have an overall environmental win by getting rid of cattle. Convert not the land used to raise cattle directly but the land used to grow the food they eat to producing vegetables and grains for us.
I also think vegetables are very energy inefficient compared to for example potatoes. Not sure how we can defend growing anything with such a minuscule calorie count given the impact of pesticides and herbicides on the environment.
Cattle are herbivores, so we're feeding _them_ plant matter for them to convert to meat for us to eat. We're also growing massive amounts of soy and corn just to feed those cattle already, when we could be growing substantially less than that to feed ourselves.
> Not sure how we can defend growing anything with such a minuscule calorie count given the impact of pesticides and herbicides on the environment.
Not sure how we can defend the current status quo when we're growing many times the amount of crops to feed the animals using those pesticides and herbicides, _and_ pumping said cattle full of antibiotics, but yet here we are.
I'm aware that you linked the Allan Savory TED talk, but that's been heavily controversial and many of the studies on it find limited effects beyond any other reasonable strategy.