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This chart also shows how terribly inefficient animal farming is.
Most pasture land isn't suitable as farmland - there's examples of overlap of course, but you really can't draw that conclusion from the chart, it leaves out far too much information.
Okay, but can we stop using suitable farmland to grow corn cattle feed?
I'm wholly in support of this plan.
Yep for sure. The food grown to feed livestock (6M2 km) seems like it’s just feeding humans with extra steps. If you cut that out and feed humans directly. You’d still have livestock on grazing pad (32M2 km), just not the whole feedlot situation.
Yeah, and those extra steps require more land and more water and more transportation and more harvesting and more processing etc etc. Every extra step makes the whole system less efficient. We're essentially sacrificing farmland.
Or go a step further and stop doing animal farming.
At that point we don't need to farm animals.
Best thing to do at that point would be to outlaw breeding of new farm animals, send the remaining ones to sanctuaries, and let them live the rest of their lives out on their own terms. Might need to sterilize as well.
All of this would aim to restore natural populations of cows, pigs, chickens, goats, sheep, etc. in the world to native levels. And if those animals aren't native, then imo there is no reason to help sustain them. Release to the wild at some point and let nature take it's course. Of course, this also means restoring natural predators to ecosystems like wolves, which would help keep populations in check.
Those species that are native, however, but are declining and on the brink of extinction: those we should focus on for conservation and regeneration.
It's a tough balance, but it can be done ethically
The US could feed its own population multiple times over if we used something like 30% of our current agricultural farmland subject to growing animal feed instead for growing things like corn, soybean, and wheat, as well as vegetables and fruit.
We'd still need to import some stuff, but we could cover the vast majority of Americans' nutrition doing this WHILE at the same time re-wilding the country and helping restore biodiversity.
Hope to see this shift in my lifetime
Most of the corn cattle are eating is the stalk and husks. The stuff we're going to grow regardless and would otherwise throw away.
Near slaughter when they get fattened up on feed lots (called finishing) it's mostly cracked corn grain, it's more towards the beggining of life that they're fed roughage with only a small amount of supporting grain.
During peacetime, all the corn fields kept operational with subsidy that just create corn which is fed to livestock seem like a waste.
But if China (or anybody else) pulls a fucky-wucky and makes it difficult to get food imported from outside the US, we slaughter the livestock and then have enough corn to feed the whole nation (and a lot of our allies). Without missing a beat.
Allies? Lol.
Y'all are threatening to kill your "allies" while trying to overthrow their democracies. You have no allies, and you sure as shit wouldn't try to help them in a food shortage.
You really still see yourself as belonging to the nation that protects the world, don't you? Despite everything.
Yeah. Trump told you not to rely on Russian gas and did you listen? No, you didnt and now you buy Russian gas (through India), thus funding Russia, while telling us to shoulder the majority of the burden of funding Ukraine. Just for one example.
It's not only pastures. Growing animal feed is vastly less efficient than growing food for humans directly. We could stop farming animals, use some of that land for growing human food, rewild the excess, and rewild the pastures.
This is true. But at the same time, the tradeoff I think more about isn't pasture versus crop land, but pasture and crop land versus wild land. Personally, I really enjoy eating meat, and have no problem with its production in general. But I also think that we should reserve far more land for nature.
Imo, a good way to strike the balance is via pigouvian taxes. First, of course, a carbon tax. Animal agriculture creates a lot of carbon, so higher prices would drive consumers to lower-carbon alternatives. Then a land value tax - the trick would be deciding how much the intrinsic beauty of nature and access to it by the public is worth - but once we figure out a decent number, the scheme should work quite well. If you want to farm/ranch, you aren't allowed to use up everyone else's nature for free. Either generate enough money to pay the public back for using their nature, or bounce. And of course, better rules and oversight for animal welfare - I wanna eat meat, not meat produced with unnecessary suffering.
This combination of approaches would reduce meat consumption and land use in a fair and ethical way, while still not being overbearing or playing favorites by doing things like banning x or y. Unfortunately, this is very much a pipe dream - at least in the US right now, as we have, umm... more pressing issues.
No, it doesn't.
The entire mid- and western US is largely unable to grow crops - "this land was made for the buffalo, and hates the plow".
See Bowl, Dust.
To make it grow crops, we've been pumping out a massive aquifer since the early 20th century. Subsidence caused by this is a major concern, in addition to the aquifer not refilling as fast as we use it.
In the western portions of CO, basically all of Wyoming, NM, Arizona (arid places), crops simply can't grow at any significant level - but that land can grow crops for grazing animals, especially cows. Sheep and goats destroy such grazing land, which explains the conflict between cattlemen and sheepherders in the 19th century.
Really the entire breadbasket is naturally suited to cows, not crops, as it supported millions of bison.
You should probably read more before pontificating.
Yes, but you omitted all the croplands we use for feeding non-human animals.
https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture
Also, if our goal is to find the truth in all of this, why be mean?
They didn't really omit that as an oversight, it's just not relevant to their thesis - agricultural land used for animal feed is not super relevant to the disparity in land utilization, as 80% of all agricultural land usage is pasture/grazing. Only 7% of agricultural land is used for growing animal feed.
Agreed about being a little mean though, although I do sympathize with being frustrated about this as AG land use is a very often misunderstood statistic.
poore and nemecek did some sloppy work in that 2018 paper, and it's conclusions should not be believed
You raise some valid points, but I don’t see why it’s necessary to be so rude about it.
How is that rude
Stop farming animals, rewild the pastures, grow human food where animal feed was once grown.
Animal food use should be pulled back a lot. But let's also concentrate on how much of agriculture area is used for non-food.
I'd hazard a guess that is the point of the graphics considering the special markings highlighting the fact.
This chart is designed to push that agenda but the raw numbers disagree.
They are using some favorable math that excludes all the waste goes into human food products and including all of the waste in animal feed.
Humans throw away a vast majority of our calories, not just at the individual level but across the entire supply chain. It makes the numbers really easy to play with.
Anyone who focuses on beef is manipulating the data. Pork, poultry and dairy are far more efficient so it's left out. The price of each these things directly reflects this because it turns out global capitalism is actually really good at determine comparative values.