There isn't enough grass to 'let the cows eat' while sustaining affordability for lower income people. That's why they switched to corn, much better density of calories.
There was a time when people didn't eat meat with every meal...many people believe it's actually healthier. If people can't afford to eat grass-fed meat with every meal, the simple answer is to not eat meat with every meal...poor people can eat vegetables too and will probably be healthier for it.
Yeah. There was also a time when 8-year-olds did a full day's work in the mines and malnourishment was the norm.
You should think about the complexity involved in eating a healthy vegetarian diet before you start being dismissive of it. Meat is easier in some significant ways.
Lets not blow the difficulty of being a vegetarian out of proportion. Eating a healthy vegan diet is still difficult. Eating a healthy vegetarian diet is not. There are plenty of cook books describing varied and balanced vegetarian meals. There are plenty of restaurants that serve good vegetarian meals and many supermarkets (at least in Western Europe) also provide the necessary ingredients.
(I have been a vegetarian for 16 years now, almost half of my life.)
Humans are fairly unique in our dietary flexibility; most other animals are evolutionarily adapted to a narrow range of foods. Corn provides caloric energy, but little more; a cow needs to eat grass, and move around, in order to be healthy.
I think there is more use of other antibiotics to treat sickness in feedlots though.
(as an aside, this pdf has an amazing and disturbing illustration of severe bloat on the third page: https://www.animalsciencepublications.org/publications/jas/p... Warning: it shows material ejecting from a medical opening in a rumen.)
Why on earth should my tax dollars go to a steak party?
The average voter probably has also not had /good/ experiences with salads that are actually tasty for reasons other than bacon. (Can we PLEASE stop adding bacon to /everything/ (at least as a default?); some of us just don't like the smokey taste.)
There is an argument that says the Central Valley of California farmers basically funded Reagan's White House run in 1980. Carter was going after payments for all that water...
I'm pretty sure there's no shortage of grass. If we turn some of those corn fields into grazing fields, there would be even more grass.
The reason they use corn is because it fattens up the cow much faster and to a far greater degree.
So yeah, switching to grass will increase the price of beef on a per pound basis. Label the meat. Let people choose. Stick a "fed with corn" or "fed with grass" sticker on it. I'll happily pay twice as much knowing the animal didn't eat crap.
We already do this with eggs. Lots of labeling. There's no reason we can't extend this to poultry and beef.
Then you should check your confidence level, because you're wrong. Most of the available USA grazing territory is already cow-burnt, and that's before you get things like the extreme droughts of recent years causing mass cattle slaughter and die-offs. And mind you all but a rounding error of these cattle are finished on grain feedlots.
Pasture is probably higher quality in the UK though, owing to the wet climate, which would compensate for there being less pasture.