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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 t

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
    It could be rewilded, instead of being used by humans directly. Biodiversity badly needs that.
  - bjoli 4y ago
    About 15% is slåtter and grazeland. Slåtter might include some grazing, but the vast majority of things growing there won't be eaten. I think it is pretty safe to say that the vast majority of the grass feed land is suitable for human crops since "vall" is most often used in rotational crop systems. We CAN grow such crops in Sweden, at least in the southern parts. I lived next to a quinoa field with comparatively high yields. And we have been growing white beans for years. Pre pandemic there were trials with soybeans on Öland and in Skåne with promising results.
  - jogjayr 4y ago
- dangerface 4y ago
  > 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. Gardening isn't farming. All crop farms of any scale use artificial fertilisers that wash off the land an poison our rivers and wetlands its not sustainable. Cutting out artificial fertilisers and gmo crops would cut our crop production by 60%. We need to go back to our old style of farming before the world wars where we rotated between crops and animals and used the animals dung as fertiliser.
  - saalweachter 4y ago
    > We need to go back to our old style of farming before the world wars where we rotated between crops and animals and used the animals dung as fertiliser. You mean, the old style of farming where our agricultural output was sustained by unimaginable tons of ancient manures looted from South America? We are already using ~all available animal dung as fertilizer; it provides something like 10% of our global fertilizer needs. We can't produce more animal dung than we are now; we already raise an absurd quantity of livestock, and we especially can't do it while also doing the other thing people suggest on this topic, cutting our meat production by 90%.
- DoctorOetker 4y ago
  > Removing crops as a part of animal feed would mean something like reducing our meat consumption by 90%. You correctly reference that raising vegetable protein is about 10x more efficient than raising animal protein. Assuming * it is ~ 20x more efficient to raise single cell protein than it is to raise vegetable protein * it is too impractical or inefficient to feed single-cell protein to plants Then it would follow that it would be 2x more efficient to raise single-cell-protein-fed animal protein than it is to raise vegetable protein. This can happen in closed facilities to capture any methane gas. We observe it is very hard to convince people to switch from carnivore habits to vegetarian habits. Presumably it will be similarily difficult to convince carnivore population to voluntarily switch to eating single cell protein. It will obviously still be 10x more efficient to eat the single cell protein directly than to eat single-cell-protein fed animal protein, which would in turn be about 2x as efficient as eating vegetable protein. I don't think meat eating humans care much if the animal ate plant protein or single cell protein. It's not like meat products specify what the livestock ate throughout its short life. Even if you have (perfectly valid!) ethical questions about raising creatures as fast as possible only to kill them and harvest their meat; faced with a fellow vegetarian human who cannot be convinced to eat single cell protein, would you convince them to eat SCP-fed animal protein? (better for the environment); or would you convince them to eat vegetable protein? (better for compassion with the livestock creatures) Assume for a minute you were vegetarian up to this day yourself: you welcome the lower footprint of single-cell proteins, and don't mind eating it most of the time, ... but sometimes you want to treat yourself, just a small treat, would you have the discipline to eat SCP-fed animal protein, or would you insist on eating less efficiently produced vegetable protein? Le morale: if one is abhorred by the concept of raising creatures for the sole purpouse of eating them, one should stick to the point and not defer to efficiency arguments. Every cover reason backfires... eventually.
  - bjoli 4y ago
    It is not just the protein that is a limiting factor in meat production. Especially not for grazing animals. And 20x less seems like a very high estimate compared to the current protein king, the soybean. What I am saying is: a.sustainable protein will make the largest impact in chicken, but very little impact for the kind of feed and land use we are discussing. Vall and slåtter (I have no idea about the English terms) are almost exclusively used as feed for grazing animals. And even with chickens I must ask: Is SCP competitive with insects? I have been betting on insects becoming the next big thing in animal feed for some time. 20x less land use per gram of protein compared to soy is no problem for something like the black soldier fly larvae. They are well above 50x.
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.

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
  It could be rewilded, instead of being used by humans directly. Biodiversity badly needs that.
- bjoli 4y ago
  About 15% is slåtter and grazeland. Slåtter might include some grazing, but the vast majority of things growing there won't be eaten. I think it is pretty safe to say that the vast majority of the grass feed land is suitable for human crops since "vall" is most often used in rotational crop systems. We CAN grow such crops in Sweden, at least in the southern parts. I lived next to a quinoa field with comparatively high yields. And we have been growing white beans for years. Pre pandemic there were trials with soybeans on Öland and in Skåne with promising results.
- jogjayr 4y ago
dangerface 4y ago
> 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. Gardening isn't farming. All crop farms of any scale use artificial fertilisers that wash off the land an poison our rivers and wetlands its not sustainable. Cutting out artificial fertilisers and gmo crops would cut our crop production by 60%. We need to go back to our old style of farming before the world wars where we rotated between crops and animals and used the animals dung as fertiliser.
- saalweachter 4y ago
  > We need to go back to our old style of farming before the world wars where we rotated between crops and animals and used the animals dung as fertiliser. You mean, the old style of farming where our agricultural output was sustained by unimaginable tons of ancient manures looted from South America? We are already using ~all available animal dung as fertilizer; it provides something like 10% of our global fertilizer needs. We can't produce more animal dung than we are now; we already raise an absurd quantity of livestock, and we especially can't do it while also doing the other thing people suggest on this topic, cutting our meat production by 90%.
DoctorOetker 4y ago
> Removing crops as a part of animal feed would mean something like reducing our meat consumption by 90%. You correctly reference that raising vegetable protein is about 10x more efficient than raising animal protein. Assuming * it is ~ 20x more efficient to raise single cell protein than it is to raise vegetable protein * it is too impractical or inefficient to feed single-cell protein to plants Then it would follow that it would be 2x more efficient to raise single-cell-protein-fed animal protein than it is to raise vegetable protein. This can happen in closed facilities to capture any methane gas. We observe it is very hard to convince people to switch from carnivore habits to vegetarian habits. Presumably it will be similarily difficult to convince carnivore population to voluntarily switch to eating single cell protein. It will obviously still be 10x more efficient to eat the single cell protein directly than to eat single-cell-protein fed animal protein, which would in turn be about 2x as efficient as eating vegetable protein. I don't think meat eating humans care much if the animal ate plant protein or single cell protein. It's not like meat products specify what the livestock ate throughout its short life. Even if you have (perfectly valid!) ethical questions about raising creatures as fast as possible only to kill them and harvest their meat; faced with a fellow vegetarian human who cannot be convinced to eat single cell protein, would you convince them to eat SCP-fed animal protein? (better for the environment); or would you convince them to eat vegetable protein? (better for compassion with the livestock creatures) Assume for a minute you were vegetarian up to this day yourself: you welcome the lower footprint of single-cell proteins, and don't mind eating it most of the time, ... but sometimes you want to treat yourself, just a small treat, would you have the discipline to eat SCP-fed animal protein, or would you insist on eating less efficiently produced vegetable protein? Le morale: if one is abhorred by the concept of raising creatures for the sole purpouse of eating them, one should stick to the point and not defer to efficiency arguments. Every cover reason backfires... eventually.
- bjoli 4y ago
  It is not just the protein that is a limiting factor in meat production. Especially not for grazing animals. And 20x less seems like a very high estimate compared to the current protein king, the soybean. What I am saying is: a.sustainable protein will make the largest impact in chicken, but very little impact for the kind of feed and land use we are discussing. Vall and slåtter (I have no idea about the English terms) are almost exclusively used as feed for grazing animals. And even with chickens I must ask: Is SCP competitive with insects? I have been betting on insects becoming the next big thing in animal feed for some time. 20x less land use per gram of protein compared to soy is no problem for something like the black soldier fly larvae. They are well above 50x.

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.