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Rethinking how the US grows beef
As of now, cattle eat not only local pasture, but also grains, hay, and grass that is grown elsewhere and stored. A recent analysis by an international team of researchers looked into what would change if the US switched to sustainable ranching, in which cattle eat only from local grasslands and agricultural byproducts.
It turns out that the current amount of pastureland in the US could only support 45 percent of our current beef production and consumption. This admittedly narrow definition of sustainability relies on feeding cows more agricultural byproducts, which, as of now, account for only about 10 percent of their diet; the scientists note that, "despite the recent doubling of distillers' grain utilization," these byproducts are still plentiful.
If we were to cut the pastureland that ranchers currently use in half, that would diminish beef availability to... 43 percent of current values, rather than 45. So freeing up about 135 hectares—almost a quarter of our national surface area, and twice the size of France—would decrease beef availability by only two percentage points.
Most of this is not especially productive grassland, and it could be rewilded or conserved. But some of it is high-quality cropland that could be used to grow other food sources, like pork, poultry, grains, legumes, vegetables, and even dairy. All of these utilize less water and fertilizer than beef while emitting fewer greenhouse gases. In addition, they provide us with more calories, fiber, micronutrients, and even protein than the beef they'd supplant. The only thing we'd be missing is vitamin B12, for which the authors of this analysis offer a quick fix: take a pill.
A model for 'sustainable' US beef production (open, DOI: 10.1038/s41559-017-0390-5) (DX)
(Score: 3, Informative) by Reziac on Saturday December 30 2017, @02:40AM
"there are no environmental impacts to herds of cattle vs herds of anything else."
If anything, to simulate the most natural condition of these grasslands, the number of cattle needs to be roughly doubled, or maybe tripled: There are somewhere around 80 million head of range cattle in the U.S. today. They replaced, on the same grasslands, an estimated 120 million head of bison. One bison eats about as much as two domestic bovines (and domestic cattle are about 5% more efficient). Do the math.
Grasslands evolved to be grazed; if they aren't, they soon deteriorate into weeds and eventually erode down to badlands or desert. This happens far faster than today's cattle could be replaced with tomorrow's grazers. This is not croppable land regardless, primarily due to insufficient water. (Crops are much more profitable than livestock, so everyone already crops as much land as possible.)
Doubling our production of beef cattle would also double the availability of natural fertilizer; right now, tho nearly all stockyard manure is processed into commercial fertilizer, it only covers about half what we actually need for crops. The rest comes from an ugly process involving natural gas. Without this fertilizer, our crop production would drop to about 1/5th of current levels.
I've never heard the pro-vegewhack contingent explain how, absent meat, they plan to fertilize (let alone water) food crops, which would need to be considerably increased to feed the same number of people. Perhaps they plan instead to get rid of the people? If so, they should lead by example!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.