If you're pumping water to grow grass in the desert just for the beef, there are better uses for the water.
However, cows have the unique ability to turn grass into protein, so if all an area can grow is grass, cows are a great way to get calories out of it. Properly allowed to graze freely, cows can be a net improvement on a particular ecology as a carbon sink (manure is an improvement to the soil), but shipping the harvested grass to feedlots is indeed an ecological disaster.
You get more protein per X acres eating corn than feeding that same corn to cows and eating the cows.
If you prefer meat then chicken is worse than eating corn but still much better than cows. We eat beef because it’s delicious and that’s it’s only advantage at scale.
Only about %25 of agricultural land is arable and viable for growing crops, the other %75 can only be grazed by ruminants like cattle. Just on that fact alone, ruminant animals are never going away from the food supply until you could synthesize everything in a lab from some basic raw materials, and have that food actually be healthy to humans. That is long, long long away. Without cows, the prices of vegetables will go up a lot and put even more pressure on the remaining %25 of land.
There is something to be said about growing animal feed on arable land to feed to animals directly although that could be used to make food that humans can digest directly instead. But you still need bio-available protein, and plants do really badly on that. If you actual compare meat to plant matter on what is actually digested and absorbed by humans to get the equivalent nutrition, you'll find that plants actually do not perform that well beyond carbs and some micro-nutrients on an efficiency basis. You still need fat, protein and the other micro-nutrients.
Animals also convert indigestible agricultural waste products from plant growing into something humans can use, meat.
First most cattle in the US get the majority of calories over their lifetime from crops not directly grazing land.
The actual percentage breakdown is for land completely dependent on irrigation and land preparation. It’s not cost effective to use huge tracts of land for crops because we have such excess farmland, but maximum production would involve zero animals whatsoever.
Further, actual productivity on marginal or untended land is by definition very low. Cattle grazing on scrub that gets minimal rainfall is very expensive both in terms of effort and the energy expended by cattle to extract what little food is available while generally leading to desertification.
In terms of converting waste products, such organic material has a wide range of uses including feeding livestock. You could for example burn it for energy so calling it a waste product is very misleading.
The whole point of GP's post is that you can't grow corn everywhere. There is some soil that only supports grass, and the most efficient way to extract nutritional value from this land is through grazing animals.
Irrigation lets you grow corn or other crops just about anywhere. The availability of irrigation is largely a solvable problem. In the US for example the east coast, Alaska etc gets plenty of fresh water which just ends up in the ocean.
Irrigation lets you grow corn or other crops just about anywhere.
No, it does not.
In this context, 'grow' means 'in a usable fashion'.
Rocky, hilly soil isn't tillable, is impossible to harvest en mass, and results in poor outcomes. It's almost like you've never farmed, and are making statements based upon theory, instead of real world usage cases.
Whatever agenda you have, please stop trying to claim that all soil is good for corn.
Even beyond that, there are places corn cannot grow. Period. Ever. For example, in many parts of Canada, the season is too short for corn to mature!
Hay and other such things grow there, and such land is good for cattle too.
Not all crops involve tilling soil, some orchards are in extremely rocky hilly areas. It’s one of the reasons olive trees are so associated with Italy.
Anyway, preparing an area for cultivation is a one time cost. People actually grow crops in areas you consider impossible because someone already put the effort possibly thousands of years ago even if it’s not currently economically viable.
Terraces also work in hilly areas, though building them is expensive. Removing stones from fields is the origin of field stone houses and quite a few stone fences at property lines. The degree of effort required can be huge but at the extreme end people plant orchards in areas that are covered in boulders.
For places where none of that effort is worth it, lumber is still a viable crop as long as it gets enough rain.
You're changing the context of the argument, from "growing stuff people eat" to "growing stuff for grazing, because it makes no sense to grow crops there".
Yes, you can grow crops anywhere, on the moon, in shipping containers, in your basement, and yes on terraces and if you spare no expense to change the land.
But all of that is silly and absurd, and not part of the context of this discussion. Some of it just is notpossible in any sane fashion.
Some of the land you think is just "move a few rocks and it's fine, like people used to do" is not even remotely accurate or true. We're talking about hilly, rocky land, with 1" of topsoil (Canadian Shield), with poor soil. This land is what you throw a goat or cattle at. It's not something you import billions of dollars of topsoil per 100 acres, to make usable.
I was responding to how to maximize use of land. Grazing is low investment for low returns, but rarely the only option.
I am explicitly not saying significant investment is economically viable, we have a vast surplus of farmland.
That said, historically people would improve land because they had a labor surplus and few options for long term investments. We are living in a world where thousands of years of such decisions has made some real changes to various landscapes. Much of Asia is covered in terraces because they preferred really flat areas for rice fields and had a huge labor surplus. That’s a legacy I think worth remembering rather than the focus on who was in charge over the course of history.
As to adding topsoil that’s closer to 10 million per 100 acres. Dirt’s very cheap in bulk though transportation long distances isn’t. Nowhere near viable when farmland is cheap and the Canadian Shield is that cold. But orders of magnitude better than you where suggesting.
Unless you do crazy things, there is more land suitable for grazing only, than not.
And doing crazy things makes zero sense in the context of this conversation, which was about how cattle are all some land is good for.
Your argument seems to boil down to "well, we could literally move mountains of dirt, or perform massive terraforming projects on useless soil!," well of course, and so what.
It doesn't make you correct, because this sort of discussion is senseless in the context we were discussing.
Take the soil example, yes it would be billions per 100 acres, because on that scale (the Canadian shield) you'd either have to desoil massive amounts of usable farmless, or start grinding rock and creating new topsoil from that... so current market prices are meaningless!
And if you were going to do that, why not just proclaim that the sahara is perfect farmland too, but of course you'd have to dig irrigation ditches, setup trillion dollar desalination plants, but hey I'm sure you'd chime in too, when someone says desert sand isn't good cropland too?!?!?
Nobody is grazing cattle in the Sahara. They did graze it next to their which is one of the reasons it’s expanded so far. That said, farmers are actually reclaiming land at the borders from the desert which isn’t possible with herding, in other words much of this land is only viable for farming.
Your 50% benchmark in terms of land is really not a function of each individual acre of land on it’s own.
The southwest as a whole needs vastly more irrigation than is available, but which specific bit of land becomes farmland and which but is used to graze cattle is very arbitrary. The parts that do grow crops generally have more to do with water rights and which bits are federal land than the actual land it’s self.
Conversely a lot of US farmland is more sustainable for grazing, but the giant aquifer is a temporary solution.
Take the soil example, yes it would be billions per 100 acres, because on that scale (the Canadian shield) you'd either have to desoil massive amounts of usable farmless, or start grinding rock and creating new topsoil from that... so current market prices are meaningless!
Individual large river delta’s contain hundreds of cubic miles of soil. It’s not a limitless supply, but there is plenty of soil though not topsoil to cover 3 million square miles of the Canadian Shield.
No, ruminants use bacteria we don't have to get protein out of plants. Humans can not extract that protein, so we use animals to do it then eat them.
Theres about 30 grams protein in 1000 calories of corn. There's about 90 grams in 1000 calories beef. This is because cows are very good at extracting protein.
Also, I can just let cows graze on Texas praire. I can't necessarily do that with corn.
It’s not that they are more efficient at extracting protein it’s they preferentially use carbohydrates for energy. Human vegetarians can have that same ratio of protein to calories in their flesh as cows or non vegetarian humans. Though the actual ratios do depend on body composition for both cattle and humans.
Yes it is. Cows can eat only grass and still get enough protein. Vegetarians can not do that and still get enough protein. They have to eat other plants as well. Those plants do not grow everywhere.
Humans can extract enough protein in terms of grams from grasses like wheat as long as their daily activity level is high enough to burn sufficient carbohydrates. We have more complex dietary needs, but daily protein requirements aren’t actually that high.
ruminants are able to digest cellulose, it's basically what they have extra stomachs for, so they can have different chemistries that are livable for the cellulose digesting bacteria
It’s a meaningless distinction. Ruminants aren’t eating the full plant either, the roots stay in place.
And of course it’s a moot discussion. Directly eating the seeds is vastly more efficient than cattle eating both especially when their primarily eating seeds in the US.
We also prefer beef because that much corn consumption would be incredibly unhealthy.
People like to shit on animal farms and say that more calories could be grown with less resources with plants. That's true, but the calorie count isn't the only factor to consider. Humans need a diverse diet.
It’s not like corn is the only viable crop on this land, humans can also be vegetarians.
That said, with wealth comes the desire to increase meat consumption in just about every culture. We have plenty of food and land to waste a large percentage of them on cattle, the only issue is the externalities of doing so.
I'm not an expert, but my sense of the carbon sink is that the more soil there is the better, and grazing cows eating grass and leaving manure behind is building soil and encouraging plant growth.
The carbon released by the cows "emissions" is part of a carbon cycle, first captured by the grass and then released by bacteria in the cow's gut. The more grass, the more cows, the more carbon is hanging out somewhere other than the atmosphere.
Or you can grow beans, hemp, etc. Some animal protein is good. But in many places the level of animal protein creation and consumption does not harm than good.
I know you mentioned cows, but do some research on factory farmed pigs. They're legal toxic waste sights. We need to rethink our (Western) approach to diet.
However, cows have the unique ability to turn grass into protein, so if all an area can grow is grass, cows are a great way to get calories out of it. Properly allowed to graze freely, cows can be a net improvement on a particular ecology as a carbon sink (manure is an improvement to the soil), but shipping the harvested grass to feedlots is indeed an ecological disaster.