It depends a lot on the particular climate and soil. In a lot of places, the best you can do with the land is grazing. The soil is good enough only for raising

It depends a lot on the particular climate and soil. In a lot of places, the best you can do with the land is grazing. The soil is good enough only for raising pasture, and as we don't diggest cellulose, cattle serve as some kind of reactor to transform unedible cellulose into food. In other places, like mountainous ranges, it would be pretty hard to get some sustenance directly from the ground, but again, goats are useful factories that turn otherwise unedible brush into food. Most of the problem occurs because government subsidies make economical to raise cattle in places that should have no business doing so because there is plenty of better-suited environment in the third-world to free-range cattle. Feeding grains to cattle in a high-wage first world country under confinement is way more expensive than buying meat for third-world countries in Africa or Latin American, and it only happens because of the lobbying power of farmers and agro-corporations.