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"A significant proportion of the Earth's land surface is currently dedicated to either growing animals or growing animal feed." It's important to note that alm

"A significant proportion of the Earth's land surface is currently dedicated to either growing animals or growing animal feed." It's important to note that almost all of the land that cattle are raised on is unsuitable for any other purpose. They aren't grazing cattle in Manhattan, it's in places like rural Australia or Texas where there is no infrastructure, no arable land, and no human population that is competing with the cattle population for resources.

boston_clone 5y ago
That's only a portion of it, though. That area could be used for something other than agriculture, and a significant portion of arable land is used for growing crops that go exclusively toward animals that are later slaughtered, e.g. soybeans. Moving away from meat is the right way forward - ethically, ecologically, and economically.
- Broken_Hippo 5y ago
  Realistically, though, it isn't used for other things. Lack of infrastructure is a decent barrier for many things. Not that I disagree with the last bit - I'm mostly vegetarian save for an occasional fish dish.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    If not used by cattle ranching it would be used as a natural preserve - there are huge chunks of the country that aren't fit even for ranching and in those chunks of the country you'll see... nothing. Except a biome that's doing its thing without human intervention. If this land is good for nothing but cattle rearing and we stop cattle rearing then we can return big chunks of it to nature.
    - novok 5y ago
      You can do cattle ranching in a regenerative way that would be better than doing nothing and making a place a national park. [0] Are there problems with current chicken, pig and some ruminant ranching? Yes. Does it have to be done this way? No. Are there major environmental issues also with monoculture plant farming that nobody seems to bring up? Yes. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI&t=1s Getting rid of ruminant cattle farming will just make the world worse off as food demand gets redirected to a smaller amount of arable land and missing cattle would accelerate climate change and desertification. Humanity does not have a lack of land to live on, there is plenty to go around. City land is expensive because everyone wants to be on small space.
      - laurencerowe 5y ago
        > Getting rid of ruminant cattle farming will just make the world worse off as food demand gets redirected to a smaller amount of arable land and missing cattle would accelerate climate change and desertification. Humanity does not have a lack of land to live on, there is plenty to go around. City land is expensive because everyone wants to be on small space. Wouldn't getting rid of ruminant cattle farming reduce the amount of arable land required since so much of it is used to grow animal feed? "If all the grain currently fed to livestock in the United States were consumed directly by people, the number of people who could be fed would be nearly 800 million," https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-million-people-grain-livestock-eat https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-m...
        bscphil 5y ago
        > Wouldn't getting rid of ruminant cattle farming reduce the amount of arable land required since so much of it is used to grow animal feed? I think this is exactly the point missed by the people in this thread saying that a lot of cattle are raised on otherwise useless land. The presumption is that if you got rid of cattle farming you'd have to replace the lost calories for humans by growing other food on that land or cutting down more forests. But this presumption is false. Even if every bit of land used for raising cattle turned out to be worthless for doing anything else, you'd still have an overall environmental win by getting rid of cattle. Convert not the land used to raise cattle directly but the land used to grow the food they eat to producing vegetables and grains for us.
        pigeonhole123 5y ago
        I don’t understand your last sentence. Get rid of cows and then give people what? I also think vegetables are very energy inefficient compared to for example potatoes. Not sure how we can defend growing anything with such a minuscule calorie count given the impact of pesticides and herbicides on the environment.
        maccard 5y ago
- philwelch 5y ago
  A lot of the land used in the US for raising cattle was previously the habitat of wild bison, who were themselves the primary food source of the indigenous people who lived on that land. Cattle ranching in the American Great Plains is just a domesticated and industrialized version of what the Great Plains have been doing all along.
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  - jjtheblunt 5y ago
    But are you overlooking different scales?
    - philwelch 5y ago
      Maybe. Maybe not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28622417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28622417 > I always like to point out that before the Europeans decimated the American bison, there were more head of bison roaming the west than there are head of cattle today. Just turning our monocrop soy and corn farms in the midwest back to prairie (by actually doing nothing to the land - just leave it alone), we could have regenerative ranching and cows and more food for less energy input than we do today. I don’t know for sure if that’s true, but it sure as hell wouldn’t surprise me.
      - mikeyouse 5y ago
        Yeah there's almost no way that's true. Maxmimum bison population in North America was never more than 50 million. US alone has 90M head of cattle, Canada and Mexico have ~10 million each. Also Bison grew at natural rates and lived for 20+ years... Beef cattle are slaughtered around 2/3 years - so you're turning over ~2,000lbs of mass per head every few years. Just an unfathomably massive industry.
        philwelch 5y ago
        So that's about twice the population for about 1/10th the lifespan, so about a 20x increase in scale. Which seems...not entirely unreasonable compared to near-complete wilderness supporting a hunter-gatherer population?
- quickthrowman 5y ago
  > That's only a portion of it, though. That area could be used for something other than agriculture, Like what? What do you propose as a better use of the high plains? (Let’s define this as land west of 100 degree W to Rocky Mountains) There are no natural resources, no large cities, lack of infrastructure, etc. Other than wind farms, what can you do with grasslands that receive less than 10” of rain a year that sits on top of a rapidly depleting aquifer?
  - fragmede 5y ago
    WeWork co-working spaces. There's a slight infrastructure situation, which you mentioned, but nothing a ton of money won't fix. What're you doing the next couple months? I have some money I'd like to invest. I hope you good with construction!
    - beerandt 5y ago
      Compared to the scale of bioreactor construction proposed in the article, this is actually a attractive investment.
  - tuatoru 5y ago
    Most of the farming on the high plains depends on fossil aquifers which are being depleted, or snowmelt-fed rivers. The snow is increasingly falling as rain and/or melting in a big rush in early spring, leaving the rivers dry for more and more of the year. Farming on the high plains mostly isn't sustainable. Certainly not the way it's done now. Not in the context of climate change.
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- King-Aaron 5y ago
  Yes, here in Australia we have other uses for north-western land that's primarily used for raising cattle. We dig it up for ore.
  - missedthecue 5y ago
    A mine is much more profitable than a cattle farm. If the land has provable minerals beneath it, it will not be used for farming cattle.
    - King-Aaron 5y ago
      Interestingly, several of the sites I work with do both. Pretty surprising when you're heading back to camp in the LV and suddenly a cow steps onto the road
jonas21 5y ago
Yeah, maybe land wasn't the best thing to call out as it's not particularly scarce in the US. Water, on the other hand... California uses more water to grow animal feed (Alfalfa + irrigated pasture) than it does for all residential and commercial uses combined.
- nightcracker 5y ago
  Here in the Netherlands it's the exact opposite. We have infinite water, just not a lot of space.
  - moffkalast 5y ago
    Manatee farms when?
- User23 5y ago
  Water isn’t particularly scarce in the US either. Just because a handful of states are managing their resources sub-optimally doesn’t mean the whole country has a shortage.
- RGamma 5y ago
  And then in Germany... Fly over with Google Earth or similar. It's basically all farms and cities now. Several of the forests left are mere tree plantations. Perhaps one day the yearly reminder that our forests are dying will stop because there's none left.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    European forest area has actually increased as modern farming made land use more efficient so we could reduce farm area. The forests were cut down centuries ago. All farming in Europe has to be sustainable since there is no farmland left to expand into. https://ourworldindata.org/exports/forest-area-as-share-of-land-area-8dd751532752fe5d4aa24a09d0e2c5b7_v12_850x600.svg https://ourworldindata.org/exports/forest-area-as-share-of-l...
    - 5y ago
nicoburns 5y ago
> It's important to note that almost all of the land that cattle are raised on is unsuitable for any other purpose I'm not so sure about that. Brazil is the second largest producer of beef, and there have been huge outcries because large swathes of the Amazon are being cut down to facilitate beef production (as well as crops such as soya - which I should note is mostly used as animal feed - and palm oil). Apparently the soil does soon become unsuitable for even raising cattle, so it does become land unsuitable for other purposes. But it certainly didn't start out that way.
- beerandt 5y ago
  No- large swathes of land are being cleared because it's one of the few resources available to locals to climb out of poverty. If they weren't cutting it down for beef, they'd be cutting it down for something else, like the palm oil mentioned.
  - roflc0ptic 5y ago
    Really moving the goalposts there
  - enkid 5y ago
    If it wasn't as economical to do it because you couldn't sell the meat produced that way, less of it would be cut down because they couldn't make money that way. In other words, it's their only resource, but it's only valuable to destroy if there is something they can sell, i.e., meat. (Or palm oil)
    - beerandt 5y ago
      No- this isn't US economics where there's a cost below which land use doesn't make sense for them. These people were cutting and burning these forests just for timber and firewood, and have been for decades. Even in places where it's banned to do so, and they risk jail. A smaller profit margin isn't going to prevent them from utilizing the one resource at their disposal.
    - Spooky23 5y ago
ghayes 5y ago
I'm a little confused; why is rural Texas less able to support human life than Manhattan? Other than the infrastructure that was built by humans, I assume the primary advantage of Manhattan is protection from human invasion and easily accessible water?
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- missedthecue 5y ago
  If a cattle farm isn't built in Manhattan, a thousand other people will be lining up to turn it into office, residential, or retail space. If a cattle farm isn't built in Erath County Texas, that land is going to sit there doing nothing. It has no other productive use case. The point of this is that pointing out how much land beef production uses isn't as insightful as it may at first seem, because that land isn't being taken from another economic activity.
  - geoduck14 5y ago
    There are, in fact, dairy farms in New York state. Also, the DFW area is the 4th largest region in the country - proving that you CAN put people and cows on the same land
  - tuatoru 5y ago
    > Erath County Texas That looks like prime wind turbine power generation country.
    - missedthecue 5y ago
      True, but a wind turbine can sit on a cattle pasture without causing issues, so that's immaterial to the arguments here considered.
cameronh90 5y ago
I was pointing it out purely as a reference to the utterly enormous scale of the industry.
mc32 5y ago
Some of that land historically was inhabited by relatives of current herbivores (bisons) so some of the land is feeding herbivores as it did historically. Now, there are places where forest was cut down for grazing. Thats true. We also have experience where leaving the land alone a few decades reverts it back to forest (this is seen in forests in the eastern US which were once grazing lands for domesticated herbivores and now are back to being mature forests.
danans 5y ago
> It's important to note that almost all of the land that cattle are raised on is unsuitable for any other purpose The land used to grow the food used to feed most cattle most definitely could be used for other purposes or just left alone. The vast majority of cattle aren't grass-fed on the high plains just before slaughter. Sustainably produced beef like this simply can't scale and is too expensive for mass consumption. Most cattle are fed in feedlots using grains produced en masse for that purpose. That is why beef production has such a huge carbon footprint - because of the massive crop fertilizer inputs needed to feed massive quantities of cattle.
- scoopdewoop 5y ago
  I recently watched a documentary that really called to question this common wisdom. https://youtu.be/SdrhpThqlCo https://youtu.be/SdrhpThqlCo For context, I was vegan from 2006-11, and the environmental reasons were my primary motivation. Now it seems obvious that the numbers couldn't have been what I thought. Put into context that "carbon footprint" was a slogan invented by the fossil fuel industry, and its clear who is served by shifting the blame to cows.
  - Falling3 5y ago
    > Put into context that "carbon footprint" was a slogan invented by the fossil fuel industry, and its clear who is served by shifting the blame to cows. We should absolutely be scrutinizing the fossil fuel industry. There's also no reason to _shift_ blame; both can be blamed at the same time. Ulterior motives behind the origin of carbon footprints does not negate the impact of our diets - particularly animal agriculture.
    - scoopdewoop 5y ago
      Willpower is finite, political will is finite, social capital is finite. We really can't afford to squander those things on low-impact high-pain measures. Farm bills and government subsidies to fossil fuel make your diet not even noise. Its not detectable at any scale. The only way to change diets at scale is price and availability. Electric cars are sold to wealthy people so they can maintain their lifestyle with a fresh narrative of being the solution. Meanwhile, a few meters of road being built releases massive amounts of crap to the air. Lab-grown meat is the same. Bioreactors taking resources from states away to pump out goo for people to eat states away is not sustainable and will never be sustainable. We need to return to the land, but governments work hard to ensure every last human is a citizen, and produces wealth for someone else. People who resisted were met with violence and their land seized. The system is going to collapse, I really don't have hope. But the least you could do is spare people the party line of blame and shame. /doomer-rant
Ma8ee 5y ago
That just isn’t true. Most arable land is used to grow animal feed. And maybe the Brazilian rainforests can’t be used for much which has economical value, only things like producing oxygen and being one of the richest and biodiverse ecosystems on earth, but I still think it would be better to try to preserve them instead of converting them to land for grazing.
malwarebytess 5y ago
This is a good point until you recognize that you need vast resources beyond "unsuitable land" to raise cattle, let alone raise cattle at scale. Water, food (big one), medicine, manpower, infrastructure, transportation, and all of the subsidiary requirements therein all come into play. When you properly recognize this your reduction disarms nothing.
destitude 5y ago
I live in upper midwest in what should be native forested area and large tracts of forest have been clearcut just for cattle. My neighbor last year cut dozens of acres of heavy forest to raise more cattle. I don't think people fully understand what has been done in many areas to destroy the native environment just to raise cattle.. let alone the corn raised that many cattle ranchers in midwest at least feed their cattle.
- readams 5y ago
  Land use questions are far more of a concern in developing countries than in the US. The area of forested land in the US is actually increasing, not decreasing. But in general the point is that meat production does not have to be displacing other food production. Cows are actually a way to convert otherwise worthless land into food. And the grass they're eating is not going to typically store carbon otherwise.
  - teachrdan 5y ago
    > Cows are actually a way to convert otherwise worthless land into food. And the grass they're eating is not going to typically store carbon otherwise. I think this is provably false. As mentioned above, a lot of land used for cattle used to be forest; the global beef market is one of the main drivers for deforestation in the Brazilian rainforest. There are second order effects, too. Cattle that's factory farmed in the developed world is raised on corn, wheat, soy, and other calorie dense foods. Those crops are grown with a large quantity of fertilizer, and for every calorie of corn, wheat, etc. grown, about one calorie of petroleum is used. I don't think there's any doubt that beef, in particular, is only economical because of the negative externalities involved. Accounting for those externalities would probably go a long way toward making lab grown meat (more) competitive. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/02/revealed-amazon-deforestation-driven-global-greed-meat-brazil https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/02/revealed... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_feeding#Corn-fed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_feeding#Corn-fed
    - readams 5y ago
ramblenode 5y ago
> It's important to note that almost all of the land that cattle are raised on is unsuitable for any other purpose. This is blatantly false. It might have been true 70 years ago, but not since the rise of CAFOs or a large international beef market. * ~70% of US beef comes from a CAFO (where the primary feedstock is corn) [0]. * In the US alone the amount of corn diverted to livestock feed (predominantly beef) could feed 800 million humans [1]. * Brazil produces ~15% of the world's beef (2013) and much of this land (65 Mha) was reclaimed from the Amazon [2]. [0] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iUpRFOPmAE5IO4hO4PyS4MP_kHzkuM_-soqAyVNQcJc/edit#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iUpRFOPmAE5IO4hO4PyS... [1] https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-million-people-grain-livestock-eat https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-m... [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264837719309809 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026483771...
- pigeonhole123 5y ago
  Corn is heavily subsidized. Is it a surprise that this ends up as animal feed?
tablespoon 5y ago
> It's important to note that almost all of the land that cattle are raised on is unsuitable for any other purpose. They aren't grazing cattle in Manhattan, it's in places like rural Australia or Texas where there is no infrastructure, no arable land, and no human population that is competing with the cattle population for resources. Traditionally yes, but my understanding is nowadays, at least in America, a lot of cattle are fed grain in industrial feedlots.
anyonecancode 5y ago
I'm not convinced that cattle ranching is always or necessarily the best use for much of that land, but I think the second point made was the more impactful one -- "growing animal feed." Much of _that_ land is either land that would be better suited for other purposes, or is land that we're intensely farming at high costs to the environment.
bjoli 5y ago
Not in sweden. 70% of arable land is used for feed production. These are numbers from Svenskt Kött, a lobby organisation for meat producers, in swedish: https://svensktkott.se/om-kott/miljo-och-klimat/hur-mycket-mark-och-resurser-anvands-for-djuruppfodning/ https://svensktkott.se/om-kott/miljo-och-klimat/hur-mycket-m...
eaenki 5y ago
How isn’t this downvoted into oblivion? It’s the falsest shit ever
fnord123 5y ago
The Amazon rainforest is being slashed and burned to make way for land for raising beef. Rainforest is a good alternative use of the land.
xorfish 5y ago
I hear this statement all the time, it is never sourced. If Jews can grow tomatoes in the desert, then what land could possibly not used for agriculture? Besides, the majority of the land use that is used for growing animals or growing animal feed is in the lather category. So as it is a statement that is always asserted without evidence, it can also be dismissed without evidence.
maccard 5y ago
> They aren't grazing cattle in Manhattan, it's in places like rural Australia or Texas where there is no infrastructure, no arable land, and no human population that is competing with the cattle population for resources Nasa [0] claims that the single biggest reason for deforestation is conversion to cropland and pasture, and Vice [1] says that 80% of the deforestation is for cattle in Brazil. Meanwhile, in the US almost 70% of all crops grown are used as animal feed [2] (e.g. all that midwestern corn and soy) - and the efficiency of that is staggeringly low; Only about 3% of the calories used for beef feed translate into our human food, > They aren't grazing cattle in Manhattan, They're not because it's a concrete jungle, and land is expensive in the immediate areas. [0] https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Deforestation/deforestation_update3.php https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Deforestation/def... [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/bjwzk4/feeling-sad-about-the-amazon-fires-stop-eating-meat https://www.vice.com/en/article/bjwzk4/feeling-sad-about-the... [2] https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel-animal-feed https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel...

boston_clone 5y ago

That's only a portion of it, though. That area could be used for something other than agriculture, and a significant portion of arable land is used for growing crops that go exclusively toward animals that are later slaughtered, e.g. soybeans. Moving away from meat is the right way forward - ethically, ecologically, and economically.

Broken_Hippo 5y ago
Realistically, though, it isn't used for other things. Lack of infrastructure is a decent barrier for many things. Not that I disagree with the last bit - I'm mostly vegetarian save for an occasional fish dish.
- munk-a 5y ago
  If not used by cattle ranching it would be used as a natural preserve - there are huge chunks of the country that aren't fit even for ranching and in those chunks of the country you'll see... nothing. Except a biome that's doing its thing without human intervention. If this land is good for nothing but cattle rearing and we stop cattle rearing then we can return big chunks of it to nature.
  - novok 5y ago
    You can do cattle ranching in a regenerative way that would be better than doing nothing and making a place a national park. [0] Are there problems with current chicken, pig and some ruminant ranching? Yes. Does it have to be done this way? No. Are there major environmental issues also with monoculture plant farming that nobody seems to bring up? Yes. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI&t=1s Getting rid of ruminant cattle farming will just make the world worse off as food demand gets redirected to a smaller amount of arable land and missing cattle would accelerate climate change and desertification. Humanity does not have a lack of land to live on, there is plenty to go around. City land is expensive because everyone wants to be on small space.
    - laurencerowe 5y ago
      > Getting rid of ruminant cattle farming will just make the world worse off as food demand gets redirected to a smaller amount of arable land and missing cattle would accelerate climate change and desertification. Humanity does not have a lack of land to live on, there is plenty to go around. City land is expensive because everyone wants to be on small space. Wouldn't getting rid of ruminant cattle farming reduce the amount of arable land required since so much of it is used to grow animal feed? "If all the grain currently fed to livestock in the United States were consumed directly by people, the number of people who could be fed would be nearly 800 million," https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-million-people-grain-livestock-eat https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-m...
      - bscphil 5y ago
        > Wouldn't getting rid of ruminant cattle farming reduce the amount of arable land required since so much of it is used to grow animal feed? I think this is exactly the point missed by the people in this thread saying that a lot of cattle are raised on otherwise useless land. The presumption is that if you got rid of cattle farming you'd have to replace the lost calories for humans by growing other food on that land or cutting down more forests. But this presumption is false. Even if every bit of land used for raising cattle turned out to be worthless for doing anything else, you'd still have an overall environmental win by getting rid of cattle. Convert not the land used to raise cattle directly but the land used to grow the food they eat to producing vegetables and grains for us.
        pigeonhole123 5y ago
        I don’t understand your last sentence. Get rid of cows and then give people what? I also think vegetables are very energy inefficient compared to for example potatoes. Not sure how we can defend growing anything with such a minuscule calorie count given the impact of pesticides and herbicides on the environment.
        maccard 5y ago
philwelch 5y ago
A lot of the land used in the US for raising cattle was previously the habitat of wild bison, who were themselves the primary food source of the indigenous people who lived on that land. Cattle ranching in the American Great Plains is just a domesticated and industrialized version of what the Great Plains have been doing all along.
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- jjtheblunt 5y ago
  But are you overlooking different scales?
  - philwelch 5y ago
    Maybe. Maybe not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28622417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28622417 > I always like to point out that before the Europeans decimated the American bison, there were more head of bison roaming the west than there are head of cattle today. Just turning our monocrop soy and corn farms in the midwest back to prairie (by actually doing nothing to the land - just leave it alone), we could have regenerative ranching and cows and more food for less energy input than we do today. I don’t know for sure if that’s true, but it sure as hell wouldn’t surprise me.
    - mikeyouse 5y ago
      Yeah there's almost no way that's true. Maxmimum bison population in North America was never more than 50 million. US alone has 90M head of cattle, Canada and Mexico have ~10 million each. Also Bison grew at natural rates and lived for 20+ years... Beef cattle are slaughtered around 2/3 years - so you're turning over ~2,000lbs of mass per head every few years. Just an unfathomably massive industry.
      - philwelch 5y ago
        So that's about twice the population for about 1/10th the lifespan, so about a 20x increase in scale. Which seems...not entirely unreasonable compared to near-complete wilderness supporting a hunter-gatherer population?
quickthrowman 5y ago
> That's only a portion of it, though. That area could be used for something other than agriculture, Like what? What do you propose as a better use of the high plains? (Let’s define this as land west of 100 degree W to Rocky Mountains) There are no natural resources, no large cities, lack of infrastructure, etc. Other than wind farms, what can you do with grasslands that receive less than 10” of rain a year that sits on top of a rapidly depleting aquifer?
- fragmede 5y ago
  WeWork co-working spaces. There's a slight infrastructure situation, which you mentioned, but nothing a ton of money won't fix. What're you doing the next couple months? I have some money I'd like to invest. I hope you good with construction!
  - beerandt 5y ago
    Compared to the scale of bioreactor construction proposed in the article, this is actually a attractive investment.
- tuatoru 5y ago
  Most of the farming on the high plains depends on fossil aquifers which are being depleted, or snowmelt-fed rivers. The snow is increasingly falling as rain and/or melting in a big rush in early spring, leaving the rivers dry for more and more of the year. Farming on the high plains mostly isn't sustainable. Certainly not the way it's done now. Not in the context of climate change.
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King-Aaron 5y ago
Yes, here in Australia we have other uses for north-western land that's primarily used for raising cattle. We dig it up for ore.
- missedthecue 5y ago
  A mine is much more profitable than a cattle farm. If the land has provable minerals beneath it, it will not be used for farming cattle.
  - King-Aaron 5y ago
    Interestingly, several of the sites I work with do both. Pretty surprising when you're heading back to camp in the LV and suddenly a cow steps onto the road

jonas21 5y ago

Yeah, maybe land wasn't the best thing to call out as it's not particularly scarce in the US. Water, on the other hand... California uses more water to grow animal feed (Alfalfa + irrigated pasture) than it does for all residential and commercial uses combined.

nightcracker 5y ago
Here in the Netherlands it's the exact opposite. We have infinite water, just not a lot of space.
- moffkalast 5y ago
  Manatee farms when?
User23 5y ago
Water isn’t particularly scarce in the US either. Just because a handful of states are managing their resources sub-optimally doesn’t mean the whole country has a shortage.
RGamma 5y ago
And then in Germany... Fly over with Google Earth or similar. It's basically all farms and cities now. Several of the forests left are mere tree plantations. Perhaps one day the yearly reminder that our forests are dying will stop because there's none left.
- Jensson 5y ago
  European forest area has actually increased as modern farming made land use more efficient so we could reduce farm area. The forests were cut down centuries ago. All farming in Europe has to be sustainable since there is no farmland left to expand into. https://ourworldindata.org/exports/forest-area-as-share-of-land-area-8dd751532752fe5d4aa24a09d0e2c5b7_v12_850x600.svg https://ourworldindata.org/exports/forest-area-as-share-of-l...
  - 5y ago

nicoburns 5y ago

> It's important to note that almost all of the land that cattle are raised on is unsuitable for any other purpose I'm not so sure about that. Brazil is the second largest producer of beef, and there have been huge outcries because large swathes of the Amazon are being cut down to facilitate beef production (as well as crops such as soya - which I should note is mostly used as animal feed - and palm oil). Apparently the soil does soon become unsuitable for even raising cattle, so it does become land unsuitable for other purposes. But it certainly didn't start out that way.

beerandt 5y ago
No- large swathes of land are being cleared because it's one of the few resources available to locals to climb out of poverty. If they weren't cutting it down for beef, they'd be cutting it down for something else, like the palm oil mentioned.
- roflc0ptic 5y ago
  Really moving the goalposts there
- enkid 5y ago
  If it wasn't as economical to do it because you couldn't sell the meat produced that way, less of it would be cut down because they couldn't make money that way. In other words, it's their only resource, but it's only valuable to destroy if there is something they can sell, i.e., meat. (Or palm oil)
  - beerandt 5y ago
    No- this isn't US economics where there's a cost below which land use doesn't make sense for them. These people were cutting and burning these forests just for timber and firewood, and have been for decades. Even in places where it's banned to do so, and they risk jail. A smaller profit margin isn't going to prevent them from utilizing the one resource at their disposal.
  - Spooky23 5y ago

ghayes 5y ago

I'm a little confused; why is rural Texas less able to support human life than Manhattan? Other than the infrastructure that was built by humans, I assume the primary advantage of Manhattan is protection from human invasion and easily accessible water?

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missedthecue 5y ago
If a cattle farm isn't built in Manhattan, a thousand other people will be lining up to turn it into office, residential, or retail space. If a cattle farm isn't built in Erath County Texas, that land is going to sit there doing nothing. It has no other productive use case. The point of this is that pointing out how much land beef production uses isn't as insightful as it may at first seem, because that land isn't being taken from another economic activity.
- geoduck14 5y ago
  There are, in fact, dairy farms in New York state. Also, the DFW area is the 4th largest region in the country - proving that you CAN put people and cows on the same land
- tuatoru 5y ago
  > Erath County Texas That looks like prime wind turbine power generation country.
  - missedthecue 5y ago
    True, but a wind turbine can sit on a cattle pasture without causing issues, so that's immaterial to the arguments here considered.

cameronh90 5y ago

I was pointing it out purely as a reference to the utterly enormous scale of the industry.

mc32 5y ago

Some of that land historically was inhabited by relatives of current herbivores (bisons) so some of the land is feeding herbivores as it did historically. Now, there are places where forest was cut down for grazing. Thats true. We also have experience where leaving the land alone a few decades reverts it back to forest (this is seen in forests in the eastern US which were once grazing lands for domesticated herbivores and now are back to being mature forests.

danans 5y ago

> It's important to note that almost all of the land that cattle are raised on is unsuitable for any other purpose The land used to grow the food used to feed most cattle most definitely could be used for other purposes or just left alone. The vast majority of cattle aren't grass-fed on the high plains just before slaughter. Sustainably produced beef like this simply can't scale and is too expensive for mass consumption. Most cattle are fed in feedlots using grains produced en masse for that purpose. That is why beef production has such a huge carbon footprint - because of the massive crop fertilizer inputs needed to feed massive quantities of cattle.

scoopdewoop 5y ago
I recently watched a documentary that really called to question this common wisdom. https://youtu.be/SdrhpThqlCo https://youtu.be/SdrhpThqlCo For context, I was vegan from 2006-11, and the environmental reasons were my primary motivation. Now it seems obvious that the numbers couldn't have been what I thought. Put into context that "carbon footprint" was a slogan invented by the fossil fuel industry, and its clear who is served by shifting the blame to cows.
- Falling3 5y ago
  > Put into context that "carbon footprint" was a slogan invented by the fossil fuel industry, and its clear who is served by shifting the blame to cows. We should absolutely be scrutinizing the fossil fuel industry. There's also no reason to _shift_ blame; both can be blamed at the same time. Ulterior motives behind the origin of carbon footprints does not negate the impact of our diets - particularly animal agriculture.
  - scoopdewoop 5y ago
    Willpower is finite, political will is finite, social capital is finite. We really can't afford to squander those things on low-impact high-pain measures. Farm bills and government subsidies to fossil fuel make your diet not even noise. Its not detectable at any scale. The only way to change diets at scale is price and availability. Electric cars are sold to wealthy people so they can maintain their lifestyle with a fresh narrative of being the solution. Meanwhile, a few meters of road being built releases massive amounts of crap to the air. Lab-grown meat is the same. Bioreactors taking resources from states away to pump out goo for people to eat states away is not sustainable and will never be sustainable. We need to return to the land, but governments work hard to ensure every last human is a citizen, and produces wealth for someone else. People who resisted were met with violence and their land seized. The system is going to collapse, I really don't have hope. But the least you could do is spare people the party line of blame and shame. /doomer-rant

Ma8ee 5y ago

That just isn’t true. Most arable land is used to grow animal feed. And maybe the Brazilian rainforests can’t be used for much which has economical value, only things like producing oxygen and being one of the richest and biodiverse ecosystems on earth, but I still think it would be better to try to preserve them instead of converting them to land for grazing.

malwarebytess 5y ago

This is a good point until you recognize that you need vast resources beyond "unsuitable land" to raise cattle, let alone raise cattle at scale. Water, food (big one), medicine, manpower, infrastructure, transportation, and all of the subsidiary requirements therein all come into play. When you properly recognize this your reduction disarms nothing.

destitude 5y ago

I live in upper midwest in what should be native forested area and large tracts of forest have been clearcut just for cattle. My neighbor last year cut dozens of acres of heavy forest to raise more cattle. I don't think people fully understand what has been done in many areas to destroy the native environment just to raise cattle.. let alone the corn raised that many cattle ranchers in midwest at least feed their cattle.

readams 5y ago
Land use questions are far more of a concern in developing countries than in the US. The area of forested land in the US is actually increasing, not decreasing. But in general the point is that meat production does not have to be displacing other food production. Cows are actually a way to convert otherwise worthless land into food. And the grass they're eating is not going to typically store carbon otherwise.
- teachrdan 5y ago
  > Cows are actually a way to convert otherwise worthless land into food. And the grass they're eating is not going to typically store carbon otherwise. I think this is provably false. As mentioned above, a lot of land used for cattle used to be forest; the global beef market is one of the main drivers for deforestation in the Brazilian rainforest. There are second order effects, too. Cattle that's factory farmed in the developed world is raised on corn, wheat, soy, and other calorie dense foods. Those crops are grown with a large quantity of fertilizer, and for every calorie of corn, wheat, etc. grown, about one calorie of petroleum is used. I don't think there's any doubt that beef, in particular, is only economical because of the negative externalities involved. Accounting for those externalities would probably go a long way toward making lab grown meat (more) competitive. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/02/revealed-amazon-deforestation-driven-global-greed-meat-brazil https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/02/revealed... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_feeding#Corn-fed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_feeding#Corn-fed
  - readams 5y ago

ramblenode 5y ago

> It's important to note that almost all of the land that cattle are raised on is unsuitable for any other purpose. This is blatantly false. It might have been true 70 years ago, but not since the rise of CAFOs or a large international beef market. * ~70% of US beef comes from a CAFO (where the primary feedstock is corn) [0]. * In the US alone the amount of corn diverted to livestock feed (predominantly beef) could feed 800 million humans [1]. * Brazil produces ~15% of the world's beef (2013) and much of this land (65 Mha) was reclaimed from the Amazon [2]. [0] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iUpRFOPmAE5IO4hO4PyS4MP_kHzkuM_-soqAyVNQcJc/edit#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iUpRFOPmAE5IO4hO4PyS... [1] https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-million-people-grain-livestock-eat https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-m... [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264837719309809 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026483771...

pigeonhole123 5y ago
Corn is heavily subsidized. Is it a surprise that this ends up as animal feed?

tablespoon 5y ago

> It's important to note that almost all of the land that cattle are raised on is unsuitable for any other purpose. They aren't grazing cattle in Manhattan, it's in places like rural Australia or Texas where there is no infrastructure, no arable land, and no human population that is competing with the cattle population for resources. Traditionally yes, but my understanding is nowadays, at least in America, a lot of cattle are fed grain in industrial feedlots.

anyonecancode 5y ago

I'm not convinced that cattle ranching is always or necessarily the best use for much of that land, but I think the second point made was the more impactful one -- "growing animal feed." Much of _that_ land is either land that would be better suited for other purposes, or is land that we're intensely farming at high costs to the environment.

bjoli 5y ago

Not in sweden. 70% of arable land is used for feed production. These are numbers from Svenskt Kött, a lobby organisation for meat producers, in swedish: https://svensktkott.se/om-kott/miljo-och-klimat/hur-mycket-mark-och-resurser-anvands-for-djuruppfodning/ https://svensktkott.se/om-kott/miljo-och-klimat/hur-mycket-m...

eaenki 5y ago

How isn’t this downvoted into oblivion? It’s the falsest shit ever

fnord123 5y ago

The Amazon rainforest is being slashed and burned to make way for land for raising beef. Rainforest is a good alternative use of the land.

xorfish 5y ago

I hear this statement all the time, it is never sourced. If Jews can grow tomatoes in the desert, then what land could possibly not used for agriculture? Besides, the majority of the land use that is used for growing animals or growing animal feed is in the lather category. So as it is a statement that is always asserted without evidence, it can also be dismissed without evidence.

maccard 5y ago

> They aren't grazing cattle in Manhattan, it's in places like rural Australia or Texas where there is no infrastructure, no arable land, and no human population that is competing with the cattle population for resources Nasa [0] claims that the single biggest reason for deforestation is conversion to cropland and pasture, and Vice [1] says that 80% of the deforestation is for cattle in Brazil. Meanwhile, in the US almost 70% of all crops grown are used as animal feed [2] (e.g. all that midwestern corn and soy) - and the efficiency of that is staggeringly low; Only about 3% of the calories used for beef feed translate into our human food, > They aren't grazing cattle in Manhattan, They're not because it's a concrete jungle, and land is expensive in the immediate areas. [0] https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Deforestation/deforestation_update3.php https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Deforestation/def... [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/bjwzk4/feeling-sad-about-the-amazon-fires-stop-eating-meat https://www.vice.com/en/article/bjwzk4/feeling-sad-about-the... [2] https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel-animal-feed https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel...