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Pasture soil is very often of such low quality (relative to farm soil - nutrients, grade, drainage) that removing cattle from those soils would not open them up

Pasture soil is very often of such low quality (relative to farm soil - nutrients, grade, drainage) that removing cattle from those soils would not open them up to farming.

bigyellow 5y ago
- Broken_Hippo 5y ago
  Perhaps you've misread? Otherwise, you are adding context that definitely wasn't there in the comment. Specifically, they were pointing out that pasture lands weren't necessarily farmland being misused as pasture land. No one said anything about erosion.
mburee 5y ago
But how much of the cows actually graze on open fields? Or much of their food doesn't come from plants like soy which is pretty edible for humans too...
- Symmetry 5y ago
  Most cows grow up on pasture land before being moved to feed lots for bulking up before slaughter. My sense is that the US could sustain about half of its current beef production just with pasture grazing.
- Swizec 5y ago
  I think this depends on the area. Back home in Slovenia, you see cows grazing all summer up in the alps where no sane person would ever farm. I wouldn’t even call it “agricultural land”. Cows roam free on the mountains among hikers and tourists. Here in California, any rolling grassy hill you see has cows on it year round. Cows everywhere. Doesn’t look like anyone’s interested in building housing on that land and you rarely see any crop fields in those areas. Whether that’s because letting cows graze is cheaper or the land is unsuitable for crops, I don’t know. But there are also feedlots where cows are “finished” before slaughter. How much grain and soy they eat there to be fattened up … probably a lot. I’ve heard of feedlots that stretch horizon to horizon in the midwest
  - CapitalistCartr 5y ago
    In the United States, in most states, agricultural usage, such as grazing cattle, is the basis for an agricultural exemption on property tax. Here in Florida, it's about 90%.
enkid 5y ago
Much of the land being used is crop land to make animal feed, certainly not most but a considerable amount is. This is also assuming that the only goal is getting more farmland, when it would also be useful for things like conservation efforts.
- snicker7 5y ago
  The same land is used to make human food. We get the grains, they get the hay.
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
Still, the way energy is circulating in the food chain, you need a lot more land and water for raising X calories of cattle than for the same calories of plants. Not to mention transportation, anti-biotics, cold chain management, packaging, transmissible diseases, waste management, etc. are all a much higher concern for animal based food. In fact, even pesticides are worse on cattle, because any non food product tends to concentrate in the animal after a life of consuming it. Meat is a luxury, like plane transportation.
- snicker7 5y ago
  Cattle mostly eat what humans can’t digest — grasses, not grains. That energy would go to “waste” otherwise. And the water consumption stats often include rain water (“green water”).
  - BiteCode_dev 5y ago
    Cattle do eat grains as a supplement to grazing, a drought ration, or in lot feeding. And since lands with grass is limited by space, and seasonality, we also do grow a lot of food for them. E.G: UK stats for 2015/16 of soy imports (3.1 million tonnes) break down: - 1.1 million tonnes for livestock - 1.42 million tones for human food - 0.58 for non-foo products That 35% of the imported soy, just for the livestock food.
- nosianu 5y ago
  I don't know why you base your statement on the assumption that the industrial highly concentrated and unhealthy (for the animals definitely) style is the basis such a discussion should be based on. You lower your bar for your side of arguments substantially by pretending the line is there. You even do it without the shadow of a hint that the base you use is entirely artificial and unnatural. No, animals should indeed not be raised like that. But I find such arguments dishonest at best. I have yet to find a discussion where any significant (or really any, but let's assume difficult people exist everywhere) number of meat eating people argue that the current state of how animals are raised in industrial-style facilities using what you mention is how it should be. If they let cows roam free - like what indeed happens in plenty of places in the world - then they use free energy stored in grass. Which is the much better food for them anyway. It's almost like a lot of people completely forgot that North America once had tens of millions of big grass feeding animals roam what now is the US (https://medium.com/@davbunnell/once-there-were-50-to-100-million-buffalo-they-were-the-most-numerous-large-mammals-to-ever-exist-e01a5bca9ed8 https://medium.com/@davbunnell/once-there-were-50-to-100-mil...). I'm not saying that could happen again at that scale, but it is always (and I'm not exaggerating by using that word) missing from the argument of the "anti meat" side, whose arguments read as if having a lot of grazing animals is something unnatural and can only occur because we raise them artificially and that getting rid of them is necessary to help the climate. If that simplistic argument were true Buffalo Bill did something for the environment by killing the huge herds - which I don't is not what people mean.
RC_ITR 5y ago
>If everyone were vegan, only a quarter of current farmland would be needed. Yeah. We would just let it return to nature and become a (small) carbon sink instead of a methane source.

Pasture soil is very often of such low quality (relative to farm soil - nutrients, grade, drainage) that removing cattle from those soils would not open them up to farming.

bigyellow 5y ago

Broken_Hippo 5y ago
Perhaps you've misread? Otherwise, you are adding context that definitely wasn't there in the comment. Specifically, they were pointing out that pasture lands weren't necessarily farmland being misused as pasture land. No one said anything about erosion.

mburee 5y ago

But how much of the cows actually graze on open fields? Or much of their food doesn't come from plants like soy which is pretty edible for humans too...

Symmetry 5y ago
Most cows grow up on pasture land before being moved to feed lots for bulking up before slaughter. My sense is that the US could sustain about half of its current beef production just with pasture grazing.
Swizec 5y ago
I think this depends on the area. Back home in Slovenia, you see cows grazing all summer up in the alps where no sane person would ever farm. I wouldn’t even call it “agricultural land”. Cows roam free on the mountains among hikers and tourists. Here in California, any rolling grassy hill you see has cows on it year round. Cows everywhere. Doesn’t look like anyone’s interested in building housing on that land and you rarely see any crop fields in those areas. Whether that’s because letting cows graze is cheaper or the land is unsuitable for crops, I don’t know. But there are also feedlots where cows are “finished” before slaughter. How much grain and soy they eat there to be fattened up … probably a lot. I’ve heard of feedlots that stretch horizon to horizon in the midwest
- CapitalistCartr 5y ago
  In the United States, in most states, agricultural usage, such as grazing cattle, is the basis for an agricultural exemption on property tax. Here in Florida, it's about 90%.

enkid 5y ago

Much of the land being used is crop land to make animal feed, certainly not most but a considerable amount is. This is also assuming that the only goal is getting more farmland, when it would also be useful for things like conservation efforts.

snicker7 5y ago
The same land is used to make human food. We get the grains, they get the hay.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

Still, the way energy is circulating in the food chain, you need a lot more land and water for raising X calories of cattle than for the same calories of plants. Not to mention transportation, anti-biotics, cold chain management, packaging, transmissible diseases, waste management, etc. are all a much higher concern for animal based food. In fact, even pesticides are worse on cattle, because any non food product tends to concentrate in the animal after a life of consuming it. Meat is a luxury, like plane transportation.

snicker7 5y ago
Cattle mostly eat what humans can’t digest — grasses, not grains. That energy would go to “waste” otherwise. And the water consumption stats often include rain water (“green water”).
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  Cattle do eat grains as a supplement to grazing, a drought ration, or in lot feeding. And since lands with grass is limited by space, and seasonality, we also do grow a lot of food for them. E.G: UK stats for 2015/16 of soy imports (3.1 million tonnes) break down: - 1.1 million tonnes for livestock - 1.42 million tones for human food - 0.58 for non-foo products That 35% of the imported soy, just for the livestock food.
nosianu 5y ago
I don't know why you base your statement on the assumption that the industrial highly concentrated and unhealthy (for the animals definitely) style is the basis such a discussion should be based on. You lower your bar for your side of arguments substantially by pretending the line is there. You even do it without the shadow of a hint that the base you use is entirely artificial and unnatural. No, animals should indeed not be raised like that. But I find such arguments dishonest at best. I have yet to find a discussion where any significant (or really any, but let's assume difficult people exist everywhere) number of meat eating people argue that the current state of how animals are raised in industrial-style facilities using what you mention is how it should be. If they let cows roam free - like what indeed happens in plenty of places in the world - then they use free energy stored in grass. Which is the much better food for them anyway. It's almost like a lot of people completely forgot that North America once had tens of millions of big grass feeding animals roam what now is the US (https://medium.com/@davbunnell/once-there-were-50-to-100-million-buffalo-they-were-the-most-numerous-large-mammals-to-ever-exist-e01a5bca9ed8 https://medium.com/@davbunnell/once-there-were-50-to-100-mil...). I'm not saying that could happen again at that scale, but it is always (and I'm not exaggerating by using that word) missing from the argument of the "anti meat" side, whose arguments read as if having a lot of grazing animals is something unnatural and can only occur because we raise them artificially and that getting rid of them is necessary to help the climate. If that simplistic argument were true Buffalo Bill did something for the environment by killing the huge herds - which I don't is not what people mean.

RC_ITR 5y ago

>If everyone were vegan, only a quarter of current farmland would be needed. Yeah. We would just let it return to nature and become a (small) carbon sink instead of a methane source.