10 ms·

The important caveat, and misleading headline, here is what comes further down in the article: "Global pasture has peaked. Global cropland has not." We still u

by shafyy 4y ago

The important caveat, and misleading headline, here is what comes further down in the article: "Global pasture has peaked. Global cropland has not." We still use an increasing amount of cropland to feed the animals that we're moving closer and closer together in industrial farming (that's why pasture land is decreasing). I think many still underestimate the effect on climate change of livestock agriculture. Furthermore, livestock agriculture is one of the leading causes of the collapse of biodiversity - a crisis that will have much more dire consequences than climate change, in my opninion. Also a crisis that almost nobody is aware of presently.

oifjsidjf 4y ago
A few "small" problems with your statement: 1) Growing monocrop plants on a large scale is much more destructive to the environment as it completely destroys the ecosystem. You destroy all other plants and small animals that would regenerate the soil. Instead you just steal from the soil over and over again without regenerating it. Cows shitting provide fertilizer. But this obviously doesn't happen on monocrop land. 2) Most of the places where cows graze grass can NOT support human eatable plant food growing. Only grass can grow there, not eg corn or some grains. So that land can either do nothing or you can unleash cows onto that land to convert that grass into human food (cows).
- te_chris 4y ago
  That land is not doing nothing if it’s been rewilded. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-damaging-farm-products-organic-pasture-fed-beef-lamb https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-dam...
- bjoli 4y ago
  These are the arguments that are always made. The thing is we still devote too much cropland to animals because we have a demand that couldn't possibly be met by grazing animals. Take wild moose as an example. My home country has an artificially high moose pupilation due to current forresting practices. Yet the annual yield is only something like 3% of the Swedish meat consumption. Removing crops as a part of animal feed would mean something like reducing our meat consumption by 90%. Edit: and there are ways of maintaining a healthy soil without animals. I have done it in a very small scale for my plantations (just 40m2) and there are examples of people doing it on a much larger scale. I have yet to find data about yields though, but they seem competitive.
  - mrmlz 4y ago
    Eh. Most cattle in Sweden is fed with grass or grass-equivalents. I.e. stuff that humans don't want/can't eat. Now the idiotic argument that is often heard is "well, if we didn't grow grass we could grow something humans want, like.. soybeans". And the answer is no, we couldn't because the land isn't suitable for growing those high-value crops. If it was the case the farmers would be all over it. https://jordbruksverket.se/om-jordbruksverket/jordbruksverkets-officiella-statistik/jordbruksverkets-statistikrapporter/statistik/2021-02-03-jordbruksmarkens-anvandning-2020.-slutlig-statistik#h-Jordbruksmarkensfordelning20002020 https://jordbruksverket.se/om-jordbruksverket/jordbruksverke... Horrible link, but it shows that close to 45%(?) is used for "vall/grönfoder" and "betesmark" i.e. grass, grass-equivalents and gracing pastures.
    - wavesquid 4y ago
      > An economist walks by a twenty dollar bill on the sidewalk but decides not to pick it up, because if it were really there someone would have picked it up already I think many farmers do what has worked for the last X decades; often copying what their forebears do with small adjustments.
      - upsidesinclude 4y ago
        You are not a farmer and have a typical ignorant view of what it takes in knowledge and management to farm. You can't copy/paste in farming to get ahead, or be really likeable but have no actual output or contribution.
      - bryanrasmussen 4y ago
        that's a joke based on a particular economic theory, by humor the flaws in the theory are indicated, I'm pretty sure every economist walking by 20 bucks on the sidewalk will pick it up. I don't think farmers have any particular theory that land growing grass cannot grow anything else or their parents would already have done that. So the analogy is really stretched thin.
    - Scarblac 4y ago
- WanderPanda 4y ago
  How exaclty are farmers "stealing" from the soil, when the same patch of land has been used for monocultures a hundred years or more? To me it seems to be a pretty stable cycle at this point, where the soil is not the limiting factor (cf increasing yields over the same period)
  - Gordonjcp 4y ago
    It's not been used as a monoculture. Grassland is incredibly complex. Maintaining farmland is incredibly complex.
  - imtringued 4y ago
    What I have seen is corn farmers turn perfectly healthy soil into hard bricks (I mean pure clay) within 25 years.
  - zelos 4y ago
    It's not a closed system, is it? farmers are pumping in huge amounts of nutrients in the form of fertiliser, mostly made using fossil fuels.
    - samatman 4y ago
      Fertilizer is made using energy, this is a critical distinction. The only consumables in the Haber process are air, heat, and pressure. Ammonia production can be designed to run when energy is cheap, free, or negative in price, this is unlike other energy-intensive industrial feedstocks such as aluminium smelting. It isn't currently economically efficient to run factories this way, but (again, unlike smelting bauxite) it is physically plausible to start-and-stop Haber process plants on a scale of hours. Nitrogen fertilizers cause their own cascade of second-order effects when they leach into the water supply, but this can be solved with well-understood chemistry which renders the nitrate largely insoluble in water but available to soil microorganisms, who are happy to share it with crop roots. My point is that fossil fuels aren't a feedstock for the most important fertilizer, so the use of fossil fuels in their manufacture is instrumental rather than inherent.
  - badpun 4y ago
- imtringued 4y ago
  >2) Most of the places where cows graze grass can NOT support human eatable plant food growing. Only grass can grow there, not eg corn or some grains. This is completely wrong. You can grow regular crops there but usually the land is sloped, the terrain itself is inaccessible or inconvenient for machinery. There are plenty of Asian countries that do terraced rice farming but this requires massive amounts of manual labor compared to a nice, level and flat piece of land on which tractors and combines can drive on.
  - mrmlz 4y ago
    No it is not completely wrong. It is very dependent on geography. The discussion regarding beef/cattle/meat always takes some "global-scale-scope" which is useless since the topology, soil, water etc. is something that almost exclusively determines what is suitable to grow. You could not, how much you wanted convert the gracing pastures in Sweden to any high-yield farm.
    - roflyear 4y ago
      My looking at pictures and videos of such fields in Sweden you seem very wrong. Many videos show cows side by side crops and the land looks no different.
      - mrmlz 4y ago
        Maybe it is about soil composition, something you don't see in a picture? But sure, keep on looking at a picture of grass and decide that the land is suitable for other crops.
        roflyear 4y ago
        Well, when the fields are right next to each other, I dunno. Anyway, I'd rather go on pictures and videos over some random commenter online.
        mrmlz 4y ago
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  > Most of the places where cows graze grass can NOT support human eatable plant food growing. This is pure propaganda. Do people know that when they repeat it? Or does it just soak into the collective unconsious and become 'common sense' even though it doesn't make any sense? Who told you these were the only two options? Why would you believe them? What other alternative uses for the land have you explored?
  - mrmlz 4y ago
    What other use for the land have YOU explored? If you could grow something more valuable than grass on a piece of land you can be quite sure that most farmers would.
    - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
      https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-opportunity-costs-food https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-opportunity-costs-food > The climate impact of diets are usually compared in terms of greenhouse gases that are emitted today. But this misses a hidden cost: the carbon opportunity costs of agricultural land. If we were not using this land to grow food, it would be possible that forests and wild grasslands grow on these lands. They would not only harbour wildlife, but also store much more carbon. Meat and dairy products need more land than alternatives, and therefore have a higher opportunity cost.
      - mrmlz 4y ago
        I'm not really arguing for shoveling rainforests to raise sheep on or something.. But if we enjoy the idea of living (and not starving) food produced locally has to adapt to the local lands.. Which in many places allows for a lot of grass -> cattle etc. So it needing more land is a kinda worthless metric tbh.
        ZeroGravitas 4y ago
        As mentioned in another commemt, the UK meat industry identified imported animal feed from places that were cutting down rainforests as about a quarter of their GHG impact. So you kind of are suggesting that, while pretending to be some old lady with a pet sheep roaming the hills rather than a global industry producing 400 million tonnes of meat per annum.
- roflyear 4y ago
  Point two is stupid because that land isn't needed if we stop eating cows. Cows eat massive amounts of grain.
  - macinjosh 4y ago
    Cows eat grass and have evolved to eat grass. They do not need to eat grain.
    - ethbr0 4y ago
      The obvious answer here is to transplant rumen into humans, thus cutting out the middle-cow.
    - roflyear 4y ago
      They don't need to, but in the world we live in, they eat a fucking lot of grain, bro! The diet will say it is "50% grass" but it is not. That 50% is the stems etc.. from corn and whatever.
- irthomasthomas 4y ago
  3) Grazing animals are good for carbon capture, as they need grass to graze, and grass is one of the best carbon sinks.
  - smallerfish 4y ago
    > 3) Grazing animals are good for carbon capture, as they need grass to graze, and grass is one of the best carbon sinks. a) Citation? Most studies I can find on a quick googling show minimal effects. b) Whereas clearing forest to create pasture for animals to graze is...not good for carbon capture. Quote from WWF: "Alone, the deforestation caused by cattle ranching is responsible for the release of 340 million tons of carbon to the atmosphere every year, equivalent to 3.4% of current global emissions." https://wwf.panda.org/discover/knowledge_hub/where_we_work/amazon/amazon_threats/unsustainable_cattle_ranching/ https://wwf.panda.org/discover/knowledge_hub/where_we_work/a...
  - jogjayr 4y ago
    That's not true at all. "Ranching’s capital account is always in debt, because wild ecosystems store more carbon than the fields and pastures that have taken their place." https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-damaging-farm-products-organic-pasture-fed-beef-lamb https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-dam...
- jogjayr 4y ago
  > Only grass can grow there Forests can also grow there. They are far more valuable for bio-diversity and as carbon sinks.
- neuralRiot 4y ago
  Look up for the usage of global soy/ corn productionand then tell me “cows eats grass humans cannot eat”. The Brazilian rainfores is being burned to plant soy to feed european cows. This system is very inefficien but, who cares! Profits.
paganel 4y ago
> I think many still underestimate the effect on climate change of livestock agriculture. We might as well do, but what's the alternative? The less-off people, the plebs, eating less meat? How would that be fair?
- yonaguska 4y ago
  That's the WEF playbook. Also, depopulation. Eat the bugs.
- jamil7 4y ago
  If you're making an argument for the less fortunate surely the effects of climate change will hit them hardest?
  - paganel 4y ago
    I hear that paternalistic argument all the time, and almost always coming from the Western countries, but surely food is closer to one's direct needs compared to a climatic thing that might or might not happen according to our models (which models are changing all the time). In other words you don't need much modelling to see that more expensive food will hurt the world's poor here and now, the climate change thing is in the indistinct future (and it might happen the way we prevision it, or it may not).
    - Scarblac 4y ago
      Massive flooding and droughts are here now, climate change isn't a future thing anymore. It will become worse every year, but the disasters are already here.
    - jogjayr 4y ago
      > more expensive food Poor people already eat less meat. On the other hand, climate change will make basic foods more expensive. I'm from India. I've seen the miseries caused when the price of rice or onions goes up. It becomes a major political issue. But if chicken becomes more expensive, no one blinks, because people don't eat that much of it anyway. Maybe some people in the cities grumble because prices at restaurants went up, but that's about it. Your argument is like saying "Taxing Ferraris more will make life harder for poor people because it increases average transportation prices".
bennettdams 4y ago
If you look at the land usage for animal products and compare it to their calorie & protein supply, the story gets even worse. In short: Of all agricultural land, ~77% is used for meat/dairy production. This 77% are responsible for only 18% of the calories and 37% of proteins, the rest comes from the plants in our diet. The numbers may vary a bit, but the scale stays the same. It's ridiculous. https://u4d2z7k9.rocketcdn.me/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Global-land-use-graphic-1024x647.jpg https://u4d2z7k9.rocketcdn.me/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Glo... https://earth.org/data_visualization/adopting-a-plant-based-diet-would-reduce-agricultural-land-use-by-3-4/ https://earth.org/data_visualization/adopting-a-plant-based-... https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets#more-plant-based-diets-tend-to-need-less-cropland https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets#more-plant-based-d...
- viridian 4y ago
  Not all pastoral land is able to yield crops though. There's a reason that Wyoming is home so many ranches, while San Joaquin valley is overwhelmingly money crops like grapes, almonds, and pistachios. Some fertility problems (hardening, soil compaction) can be fixed in places like the Steppe and the northern American plains, but retention, drainage, and composition are inherent to the environment, and crop yield is one of those things that's damn near exponential to its inputs. Honestly I'm glad that the terrain is at least useful for some purpose, out in the Appalachian mountains the % of land that can either support crops or livestock is incredibly small.
  - jogjayr 4y ago
    You can let pastoral land that's unfit for growing crops return to the wild. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-damaging-farm-products-organic-pasture-fed-beef-lamb https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-dam...
- zamalek 4y ago
  Adding to your comment, our wheat preference is also sub-optimal (but not to such a large degree). There are alternative crops with much higher cal/ha.
smeagull 4y ago
It's a big shame too, some of the pasture land is desertifying because of the lack of livestock.
- theodric 4y ago
  So much for the auto-rewilding outcome suggested by so many of the farming/JavaScript experts in the comments here
BurningFrog 4y ago
> Furthermore, livestock agriculture is one of the leading causes of the collapse of biodiversity - a crisis that will have much more dire consequences than climate change, in my opinion. Also a crisis that almost nobody is aware of presently. I see no clear reason why fewer species existing in agricultural production areas will lead to any particular disasters, but I'm happy to be enlightened.
- pjc50 4y ago
  Many of those species are pollinator species. Others have different ecological roles. The classic example is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign : in that case, exterminating species in agricultural areas was intentional, but the results were not.
  - BurningFrog 4y ago
    I think of a wheat field a bit like a factory floor. There is little biodiversity inside the factory. Few species thrive there. But that doesn't mean life outside of the factory is doomed.

by shafyy 4y ago

oifjsidjf 4y ago

A few "small" problems with your statement: 1) Growing monocrop plants on a large scale is much more destructive to the environment as it completely destroys the ecosystem. You destroy all other plants and small animals that would regenerate the soil. Instead you just steal from the soil over and over again without regenerating it. Cows shitting provide fertilizer. But this obviously doesn't happen on monocrop land. 2) Most of the places where cows graze grass can NOT support human eatable plant food growing. Only grass can grow there, not eg corn or some grains. So that land can either do nothing or you can unleash cows onto that land to convert that grass into human food (cows).

te_chris 4y ago
That land is not doing nothing if it’s been rewilded. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-damaging-farm-products-organic-pasture-fed-beef-lamb https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-dam...
bjoli 4y ago
These are the arguments that are always made. The thing is we still devote too much cropland to animals because we have a demand that couldn't possibly be met by grazing animals. Take wild moose as an example. My home country has an artificially high moose pupilation due to current forresting practices. Yet the annual yield is only something like 3% of the Swedish meat consumption. Removing crops as a part of animal feed would mean something like reducing our meat consumption by 90%. Edit: and there are ways of maintaining a healthy soil without animals. I have done it in a very small scale for my plantations (just 40m2) and there are examples of people doing it on a much larger scale. I have yet to find data about yields though, but they seem competitive.
- mrmlz 4y ago
  Eh. Most cattle in Sweden is fed with grass or grass-equivalents. I.e. stuff that humans don't want/can't eat. Now the idiotic argument that is often heard is "well, if we didn't grow grass we could grow something humans want, like.. soybeans". And the answer is no, we couldn't because the land isn't suitable for growing those high-value crops. If it was the case the farmers would be all over it. https://jordbruksverket.se/om-jordbruksverket/jordbruksverkets-officiella-statistik/jordbruksverkets-statistikrapporter/statistik/2021-02-03-jordbruksmarkens-anvandning-2020.-slutlig-statistik#h-Jordbruksmarkensfordelning20002020 https://jordbruksverket.se/om-jordbruksverket/jordbruksverke... Horrible link, but it shows that close to 45%(?) is used for "vall/grönfoder" and "betesmark" i.e. grass, grass-equivalents and gracing pastures.
  - wavesquid 4y ago
    > An economist walks by a twenty dollar bill on the sidewalk but decides not to pick it up, because if it were really there someone would have picked it up already I think many farmers do what has worked for the last X decades; often copying what their forebears do with small adjustments.
    - upsidesinclude 4y ago
      You are not a farmer and have a typical ignorant view of what it takes in knowledge and management to farm. You can't copy/paste in farming to get ahead, or be really likeable but have no actual output or contribution.
    - bryanrasmussen 4y ago
      that's a joke based on a particular economic theory, by humor the flaws in the theory are indicated, I'm pretty sure every economist walking by 20 bucks on the sidewalk will pick it up. I don't think farmers have any particular theory that land growing grass cannot grow anything else or their parents would already have done that. So the analogy is really stretched thin.
  - Scarblac 4y ago
WanderPanda 4y ago
How exaclty are farmers "stealing" from the soil, when the same patch of land has been used for monocultures a hundred years or more? To me it seems to be a pretty stable cycle at this point, where the soil is not the limiting factor (cf increasing yields over the same period)
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  It's not been used as a monoculture. Grassland is incredibly complex. Maintaining farmland is incredibly complex.
- imtringued 4y ago
  What I have seen is corn farmers turn perfectly healthy soil into hard bricks (I mean pure clay) within 25 years.
- zelos 4y ago
  It's not a closed system, is it? farmers are pumping in huge amounts of nutrients in the form of fertiliser, mostly made using fossil fuels.
  - samatman 4y ago
    Fertilizer is made using energy, this is a critical distinction. The only consumables in the Haber process are air, heat, and pressure. Ammonia production can be designed to run when energy is cheap, free, or negative in price, this is unlike other energy-intensive industrial feedstocks such as aluminium smelting. It isn't currently economically efficient to run factories this way, but (again, unlike smelting bauxite) it is physically plausible to start-and-stop Haber process plants on a scale of hours. Nitrogen fertilizers cause their own cascade of second-order effects when they leach into the water supply, but this can be solved with well-understood chemistry which renders the nitrate largely insoluble in water but available to soil microorganisms, who are happy to share it with crop roots. My point is that fossil fuels aren't a feedstock for the most important fertilizer, so the use of fossil fuels in their manufacture is instrumental rather than inherent.
- badpun 4y ago
imtringued 4y ago
>2) Most of the places where cows graze grass can NOT support human eatable plant food growing. Only grass can grow there, not eg corn or some grains. This is completely wrong. You can grow regular crops there but usually the land is sloped, the terrain itself is inaccessible or inconvenient for machinery. There are plenty of Asian countries that do terraced rice farming but this requires massive amounts of manual labor compared to a nice, level and flat piece of land on which tractors and combines can drive on.
- mrmlz 4y ago
  No it is not completely wrong. It is very dependent on geography. The discussion regarding beef/cattle/meat always takes some "global-scale-scope" which is useless since the topology, soil, water etc. is something that almost exclusively determines what is suitable to grow. You could not, how much you wanted convert the gracing pastures in Sweden to any high-yield farm.
  - roflyear 4y ago
    My looking at pictures and videos of such fields in Sweden you seem very wrong. Many videos show cows side by side crops and the land looks no different.
    - mrmlz 4y ago
      Maybe it is about soil composition, something you don't see in a picture? But sure, keep on looking at a picture of grass and decide that the land is suitable for other crops.
      - roflyear 4y ago
        Well, when the fields are right next to each other, I dunno. Anyway, I'd rather go on pictures and videos over some random commenter online.
        mrmlz 4y ago
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
> Most of the places where cows graze grass can NOT support human eatable plant food growing. This is pure propaganda. Do people know that when they repeat it? Or does it just soak into the collective unconsious and become 'common sense' even though it doesn't make any sense? Who told you these were the only two options? Why would you believe them? What other alternative uses for the land have you explored?
- mrmlz 4y ago
  What other use for the land have YOU explored? If you could grow something more valuable than grass on a piece of land you can be quite sure that most farmers would.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-opportunity-costs-food https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-opportunity-costs-food > The climate impact of diets are usually compared in terms of greenhouse gases that are emitted today. But this misses a hidden cost: the carbon opportunity costs of agricultural land. If we were not using this land to grow food, it would be possible that forests and wild grasslands grow on these lands. They would not only harbour wildlife, but also store much more carbon. Meat and dairy products need more land than alternatives, and therefore have a higher opportunity cost.
    - mrmlz 4y ago
      I'm not really arguing for shoveling rainforests to raise sheep on or something.. But if we enjoy the idea of living (and not starving) food produced locally has to adapt to the local lands.. Which in many places allows for a lot of grass -> cattle etc. So it needing more land is a kinda worthless metric tbh.
      - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
        As mentioned in another commemt, the UK meat industry identified imported animal feed from places that were cutting down rainforests as about a quarter of their GHG impact. So you kind of are suggesting that, while pretending to be some old lady with a pet sheep roaming the hills rather than a global industry producing 400 million tonnes of meat per annum.
roflyear 4y ago
Point two is stupid because that land isn't needed if we stop eating cows. Cows eat massive amounts of grain.
- macinjosh 4y ago
  Cows eat grass and have evolved to eat grass. They do not need to eat grain.
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    The obvious answer here is to transplant rumen into humans, thus cutting out the middle-cow.
  - roflyear 4y ago
    They don't need to, but in the world we live in, they eat a fucking lot of grain, bro! The diet will say it is "50% grass" but it is not. That 50% is the stems etc.. from corn and whatever.
irthomasthomas 4y ago
3) Grazing animals are good for carbon capture, as they need grass to graze, and grass is one of the best carbon sinks.
- smallerfish 4y ago
  > 3) Grazing animals are good for carbon capture, as they need grass to graze, and grass is one of the best carbon sinks. a) Citation? Most studies I can find on a quick googling show minimal effects. b) Whereas clearing forest to create pasture for animals to graze is...not good for carbon capture. Quote from WWF: "Alone, the deforestation caused by cattle ranching is responsible for the release of 340 million tons of carbon to the atmosphere every year, equivalent to 3.4% of current global emissions." https://wwf.panda.org/discover/knowledge_hub/where_we_work/amazon/amazon_threats/unsustainable_cattle_ranching/ https://wwf.panda.org/discover/knowledge_hub/where_we_work/a...
- jogjayr 4y ago
  That's not true at all. "Ranching’s capital account is always in debt, because wild ecosystems store more carbon than the fields and pastures that have taken their place." https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-damaging-farm-products-organic-pasture-fed-beef-lamb https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-dam...
jogjayr 4y ago
> Only grass can grow there Forests can also grow there. They are far more valuable for bio-diversity and as carbon sinks.
neuralRiot 4y ago
Look up for the usage of global soy/ corn productionand then tell me “cows eats grass humans cannot eat”. The Brazilian rainfores is being burned to plant soy to feed european cows. This system is very inefficien but, who cares! Profits.

paganel 4y ago

> I think many still underestimate the effect on climate change of livestock agriculture. We might as well do, but what's the alternative? The less-off people, the plebs, eating less meat? How would that be fair?

yonaguska 4y ago
That's the WEF playbook. Also, depopulation. Eat the bugs.
jamil7 4y ago
If you're making an argument for the less fortunate surely the effects of climate change will hit them hardest?
- paganel 4y ago
  I hear that paternalistic argument all the time, and almost always coming from the Western countries, but surely food is closer to one's direct needs compared to a climatic thing that might or might not happen according to our models (which models are changing all the time). In other words you don't need much modelling to see that more expensive food will hurt the world's poor here and now, the climate change thing is in the indistinct future (and it might happen the way we prevision it, or it may not).
  - Scarblac 4y ago
    Massive flooding and droughts are here now, climate change isn't a future thing anymore. It will become worse every year, but the disasters are already here.
  - jogjayr 4y ago
    > more expensive food Poor people already eat less meat. On the other hand, climate change will make basic foods more expensive. I'm from India. I've seen the miseries caused when the price of rice or onions goes up. It becomes a major political issue. But if chicken becomes more expensive, no one blinks, because people don't eat that much of it anyway. Maybe some people in the cities grumble because prices at restaurants went up, but that's about it. Your argument is like saying "Taxing Ferraris more will make life harder for poor people because it increases average transportation prices".

bennettdams 4y ago

If you look at the land usage for animal products and compare it to their calorie & protein supply, the story gets even worse. In short: Of all agricultural land, ~77% is used for meat/dairy production. This 77% are responsible for only 18% of the calories and 37% of proteins, the rest comes from the plants in our diet. The numbers may vary a bit, but the scale stays the same. It's ridiculous. https://u4d2z7k9.rocketcdn.me/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Global-land-use-graphic-1024x647.jpg https://u4d2z7k9.rocketcdn.me/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Glo... https://earth.org/data_visualization/adopting-a-plant-based-diet-would-reduce-agricultural-land-use-by-3-4/ https://earth.org/data_visualization/adopting-a-plant-based-... https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets#more-plant-based-diets-tend-to-need-less-cropland https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets#more-plant-based-d...

viridian 4y ago
Not all pastoral land is able to yield crops though. There's a reason that Wyoming is home so many ranches, while San Joaquin valley is overwhelmingly money crops like grapes, almonds, and pistachios. Some fertility problems (hardening, soil compaction) can be fixed in places like the Steppe and the northern American plains, but retention, drainage, and composition are inherent to the environment, and crop yield is one of those things that's damn near exponential to its inputs. Honestly I'm glad that the terrain is at least useful for some purpose, out in the Appalachian mountains the % of land that can either support crops or livestock is incredibly small.
- jogjayr 4y ago
  You can let pastoral land that's unfit for growing crops return to the wild. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-damaging-farm-products-organic-pasture-fed-beef-lamb https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-dam...
zamalek 4y ago
Adding to your comment, our wheat preference is also sub-optimal (but not to such a large degree). There are alternative crops with much higher cal/ha.

smeagull 4y ago

It's a big shame too, some of the pasture land is desertifying because of the lack of livestock.

theodric 4y ago
So much for the auto-rewilding outcome suggested by so many of the farming/JavaScript experts in the comments here

BurningFrog 4y ago

> Furthermore, livestock agriculture is one of the leading causes of the collapse of biodiversity - a crisis that will have much more dire consequences than climate change, in my opinion. Also a crisis that almost nobody is aware of presently. I see no clear reason why fewer species existing in agricultural production areas will lead to any particular disasters, but I'm happy to be enlightened.

pjc50 4y ago
Many of those species are pollinator species. Others have different ecological roles. The classic example is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign : in that case, exterminating species in agricultural areas was intentional, but the results were not.
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  I think of a wheat field a bit like a factory floor. There is little biodiversity inside the factory. Few species thrive there. But that doesn't mean life outside of the factory is doomed.