5 ms·

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

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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- 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.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
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

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.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

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