Pasture soil is very often of such low quality (relative to farm soil - nutrients, grade, drainage) that removing cattle from those soils would not open them up to farming.
Back home in Slovenia, you see cows grazing all summer up in the alps where no sane person would ever farm. I wouldn’t even call it “agricultural land”. Cows roam free on the mountains among hikers and tourists.
Here in California, any rolling grassy hill you see has cows on it year round. Cows everywhere. Doesn’t look like anyone’s interested in building housing on that land and you rarely see any crop fields in those areas. Whether that’s because letting cows graze is cheaper or the land is unsuitable for crops, I don’t know.
But there are also feedlots where cows are “finished” before slaughter. How much grain and soy they eat there to be fattened up … probably a lot. I’ve heard of feedlots that stretch horizon to horizon in the midwest
Not to mention transportation, anti-biotics, cold chain management, packaging, transmissible diseases, waste management, etc. are all a much higher concern for animal based food. In fact, even pesticides are worse on cattle, because any non food product tends to concentrate in the animal after a life of consuming it.
Meat is a luxury, like plane transportation.
You even do it without the shadow of a hint that the base you use is entirely artificial and unnatural. No, animals should indeed not be raised like that. But I find such arguments dishonest at best.
I have yet to find a discussion where any significant (or really any, but let's assume difficult people exist everywhere) number of meat eating people argue that the current state of how animals are raised in industrial-style facilities using what you mention is how it should be.
If they let cows roam free - like what indeed happens in plenty of places in the world - then they use free energy stored in grass. Which is the much better food for them anyway.
It's almost like a lot of people completely forgot that North America once had tens of millions of big grass feeding animals roam what now is the US (https://medium.com/@davbunnell/once-there-were-50-to-100-mil...). I'm not saying that could happen again at that scale, but it is always (and I'm not exaggerating by using that word) missing from the argument of the "anti meat" side, whose arguments read as if having a lot of grazing animals is something unnatural and can only occur because we raise them artificially and that getting rid of them is necessary to help the climate. If that simplistic argument were true Buffalo Bill did something for the environment by killing the huge herds - which I don't is not what people mean.
In fact, we are cutting forest to meet demands for lands to grow cattle because it's still not enough.
If suddenly all meat would come from free range animal, the debate would be different, and I would use different arguments.
But I would actually be very pleased if we already just did that.
It's more realistic than expecting everyone to decide my diet is for them too, and it would already do a lot of good.
I myself could no longer eat even a modest size steak, even top quality. I eat mostly plants, and some meat. So cutting back on meat substantially is certainly something I can get behind. But the extreme messages I have to read make it hard.
> and it would already do a lot of good.
I think your kind of arguments don't do any good for anyone. It's just polarization but not based on any facts, but based on the tone. If you did base it on facts and reason it would be so much better. Maybe the 24/7 news sites prefer such texts, it sure creates a lot of "engagement" and clicks, but that hardly translates to the assumption that the outcome of such practices will be anything good.
Argue against the truly insane industrial "meat production" practices and we may actually get somewhere. Crates a lot less clicks and discussion because it's not nearly (or atz all) controversial though.
That's not true. "We" are not cutting down forests. It's the Americans who do. It's Americans, both South and North Americans, who consume almost double the amount of beef as in any other place in the world:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-meat-type?coun...
(Annual beef consumption per capita: Argentina - 42kg, US - 37kg, Brazil - 37kg. Next largest amount: Portugal - 18kg).
In truth, the most common meat produced and consumed the world over is chicken and pork:
https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production#meat-production-b...
(million tonnes of meat by livestock type, 2018: poultry - 127.31, pigmeat - 120.88, beef and buffalo - 71.61)
It's the Americans who cut down forest and rainforest to plant soy and corn to feed (or at least "finish") their cows. The rest of the world can do fine without the extravagant, inhumane and destructive factory farming of cows. We already do.
We need more than calories from food. As is well known, some micronutrients that we need cannot be obtained from plants alone and so a plant-based diet must be supplemented either with fish, eggs, meat or dairy, or with artificial supplements.
Which means a) meat, or at least animal food products, is not a luxury, rather it's a necessity and b) for everyone on the entire Earth to go vegan we must make sure that everyone on Earth can take at the very least B12 supplements, and probably supplements for other nutrients also.
I have not seen any study of the costs of supplementing everyone at a planetary level with B12 and whatever other micronutrients are missing from a vegan diet.
On the other hand, most meat eaters I know have heavy deficient in many key nutrients because the average western diet is terrible, meat or not.
All in all, I think we have to put it in the context of trying to be vegetarian in a society that is optimized for meat eaters. It we go more plant base, I think there are plenty of solutions that will suddenly become more common, such as yeast, algae, etc.
Currently, it's logistically less convenient, and often way less tasty than just eat cheese or eggs for me. But that's because we made it that way:
- it's available everywhere
- the economy is based on it
- we are used to the taste, and our flora has adapted to it
It doesn't mean it can't go fine if we organize for it.
"Key nutrients"? And "heavy" deficiencies? Are you sure? This is the first time I hear this. Can you explain? Which key nutrients are those? What kind of diets "most meat eaters" you know have that causes deficiency in those key nutrients?
Thank you in advance for the reply and sorry for sounding incrdulous, but really that's the first time I hear that.
So which are the key nutrients that you say most meat eaters you know are heavily deficient in because of their diet?
What I don't understand is that you said that "most meat eaters I know have heavy deficient in many key nutrients". If that's true then most of the meat eaters you know should be severely sick, disabled, in hospitals, etc. Is that the case, or were you maybe exaggerating? I'm trying to understand what you're trying to say.
And since lands with grass is limited by space, and seasonality, we also do grow a lot of food for them.
E.G: UK stats for 2015/16 of soy imports (3.1 million tonnes) break down:
- 1.1 million tonnes for livestock
- 1.42 million tones for human food
- 0.58 for non-foo products
Yeah. We would just let it return to nature and become a (small) carbon sink instead of a methane source.