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Comment by Zababa | Hacker News Reader

> it's usually much more efficient to eat plants directly instead of feeding them to animals.

This is true for plants that can be eaten by humans. Animals eating grass on non-arable land on the other hand doesn't suffer from that inefficiency.

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We tend to grow a lot of crops for animals, up to 3/4 of U.S. cropland in 2011 [0]. According to The Independent[1], in the UK it's 2/5 of arable land for growing animal feed. The FAO claims that 40% of all crops are used to feed animals[2]. It's not like livestock are only raised on non-arable land; we spend plenty of effort growing human-edible plant food for animals to eat and inefficiently convert to animal protein. Talking about animals surviving on only non-arable land seems like a motte and bailey that ignores what we're actually doing.

[0] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1720760115#body-ref-r2 - original data is actually from a Nature article found at https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10452

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/wwf-norfol...

[2] https://www.fao.org/3/ar591e/ar591e.pdf

You're right, although farmed animals eating grass has its own complexities such as deforestation, low yield per hectare, methane emissions & "non-arable land" actually being a vague/relative category where hardy food crops like alfalfa can often be grown. But overall if the world moved to exclusively grass-fed meat it would be a massive improvement.

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