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Cattle aren't being raised on fertile Iowa topsoil. Cattle are raised where the land has essentially no other purpose. You can see this in cash rent prices for
by missedthecue 5y ago
Cattle aren't being raised on fertile Iowa topsoil. Cattle are raised where the land has essentially no other purpose.
You can see this in cash rent prices for farmland. Leasing it out for crops makes around $150 an acre, but for cattle it will only bring in $35 an acre.
The statistics about how a huge proportion of agricultural land is going to raise beef is misleading for this reason. It's not one or the other.
- dashundchen 5y agoA lot of crops are grown to feed cattle. Most livestock in the US are fed on consolidated feed lots using feed like corn and soy. Grass grazing couldn't support the amount of meat raised, so it's a chain of fossil fuel fertilizer -> feed crops -> livestock
- missedthecue 5y ago93 percent of cattle's lifetime diet intake is food that is essentially inedible to humans, for instance agricultural byproduct/waste such as the cornstalks, husks, and depleted cobs and therefore their diet is not in direct competition with the human food supply. They don't feed cattle valuable cornmeal and soybeans. Unlike humans, cattle can efficiently digest fiber and convert previously human-inedible feeds into nutritious, human-edible foods. http://pods.dasnr.okstate.edu/docushare/dsweb/Get/Document-10165/ANSI-3296.pdf http://pods.dasnr.okstate.edu/docushare/dsweb/Get/Document-1...