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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 Euro

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?
  - mekkkkkk 5y ago
    You're saying ~1 billion freely roaming bison in the US seems like a manageable and reasonable solution?
    - philwelch 5y ago
      No; I’m saying it seems reasonable to get 20x the bovine field from the same land through active ranching and agriculture than it would naturally support.
Notanothertoo 5y ago
Who doesn't love a good bison burger? Let's do this.