9 ms·

Cattle can feed on land that is not suitable for growing crops

• LinXitoW 3y ago
  Which is an efficiency not required by us at the moment, and a mode of production that couldn't cover even a percent of the entire current or future meat production. Our problem isn't tetris with land. We have way, way, way more land to produce food crops than we need to feed everyone, we don't need to optimize for the few places where we can raise a few cattle exclusively. We can feed the same amount of people using far less water, land, and power using a vegan-ish diet.
  • bliteben 3y ago
    If tomorrow everyone switches to your proposed vegan diet, where does all the saved power, water and land go towards? growing cattle keeps the land from turning into concrete. If you actually want to conserve land you want to use as much already deforested as possible for growing crops and then never deforest new land. Slowly you should work onto getting conservation NGOs to integrate it into government protected land. Seems to me like a fools errand to optimize land use. The optimal use in the Americas for example was likely already there 14,000 years ago before humans arrived in Americas. We obviously can't go back, but we can improve land, but optimal ....
    • digging 3y ago
      Are you seriously arguing that cattle ranching is what's keeping our lands healthy right now? I'm pretty sure just leaving them fallow would be infinitely better for the health of the soil and ecosystems within a few years.
• stevenwoo 3y ago
  Most of the land cleared recently in Amazon is used to grow plants to feed to cattle. The knock on effects are kinda incredible, most recent Planet Earth series showed a bit.
• digging 3y ago
  Ok, then let's move all cattle production to lands that's not suitable for growing crops. I'd be extremely happy with that solution as it will eliminate almost all cattle ranching.