> and the hydrocarbons it takes to transport them/their food etc. Obviously, if you graze sheep / cattle / goats on marginal land, or even relatively arable la

> and the hydrocarbons it takes to transport them/their food etc. Obviously, if you graze sheep / cattle / goats on marginal land, or even relatively arable land (jumping ahead to your op-cost comments) you don't have to transport food to them. Transporting grain to feed grass-eating animals is not uniquely a north-American strategy, but is much less common in other parts of the world. > Considering eating beef is much more energy intensive then eating the equivalent vegetarian diet, there's simply no way cattle farm is energy negative just from bacteria taking carbon from the manure Eating beef, or raising beef? Again, if you focus on large tracts of relatively non-arable land to run cattle, the numbers are quite different than if you look only at land that can support nutrient- or calorific- dense crops. I'd suggest Simon Fairlie's excellent 2010 book 'Meat - a Benign Extravagance' for some deeper examination of the logistics / numbers here.