Most cattle feed isn't digestible by humans, so it doesn't matter. Replacing grass with more human-edible crops would probably introduce new problems of similar scale.
You might ask, can we just process the grass into something humans can eat? Well, that's what cattle are for.
Being pedantic. If we eat the stuff they feed to the cows I eat we would die. Grass is not human digestible.
My point being the problem is not meat which is a natural part of our diet (and is traditionally raised on land not well suited to crops) but the crazy frankenmeat many are reduced to eating due to overpopulation.
Can you sustainably feed all of humanity by feeding cattle from all the world's grasses? I don't understand your position. What's the better alternative to a more plant-focused diet?
The problem as I understand it is that while cattle are often raised in such places - grazing on open grass plains which could not support other crops - they are usually transferred to feedlots later in their life, where a significant portion of the nutrients used to support them come from corn, soy, etc, which do come from croplands.
So in our current system it does appear that cattle, even if they occupy some grassland space which could not be more efficiently used, do inevitably use resources which could be more efficiently used to feed humans directly.
However, there are many areas of the world where you can't grow human-edible food on the land currently being used to grow grass for feeding livestock. Of course this is not true everywhere, but a lot of area, e.g. in the UK, could only be used for grazing cows or sheep, if not left for nature.
Running grass through a cow is a remarkably efficient way of converting sunlight-capturing grass into calories we can actually digest. At least in the US, much of the scrubland can't support crops without intensive irrigation and fertilizer, but they can support cattle.
If you take away the fundamental question of eating meat, it's the way cattle are raised today that's the problem.
Did you read that article? Do you understand the context it's coming from? This article is a call to grass-feed cows, not stop having cows.
Humans can process grains just fine. Humans can't process grass, cows can. Cows have four stomachs. Do you? It's way more efficient (perhaps counter-intuitively) for livestock to eat the grass, then turn it into meat, then be killed and have us eat the meat, than it is for us to eat the grass directly. When you eat a salad, and you poop, you'll find a lot of the salad in your poop. That's because you don't have four stomachs. If you had four stomachs, you'd be better at eating grass.
You're right, although farmed animals eating grass has its own complexities such as deforestation, low yield per hectare, methane emissions & "non-arable land" actually being a vague/relative category where hardy food crops like alfalfa can often be grown. But overall if the world moved to exclusively grass-fed meat it would be a massive improvement.
> Cows are much better at extracting nutrients from, say, grass than humans are.
That's because we human cannot digest grass due to the lack of the proper mictobiote, but most cows in the modern world aren't fed with grass anymore but instead with soy, corn or other kind of high-nutrients food (for which we human are totally equiped to eat).
The vast majority of cow's feed is grain & soy, both of which humans can eat directly. Current levels of meat consumption both in value and cost wouldn't even be remotely sustainable if everyone only ate pasture raised, grass fed cows.
Not to mention that existing biotopes are being destroyed in order to create more pasture; it's very much a self-made problem.
What's your point? Humans can't eat grass, but cows can eat grass and then human's can eat cows. Think of a pasture as a "lab" and a cow as "lab-grown meat" if it makes you feel better.
93 percent of cattle's lifetime diet intake is food that is essentially inedible to humans, for instance agricultural byproduct/waste such as the cornstalks, husks, and depleted cobs and therefore their diet is not in direct competition with the human food supply. They don't feed cattle valuable cornmeal and soybeans. Unlike humans, cattle can efficiently digest fiber and convert previously human-inedible feeds into nutritious, human-edible foods.
You're still treating cows and people as equivalent: thanks to the microorganisms in their guts, cows break down fiber, which is entirely indigestible for humans.
Unless you know the glycemic load of both digested corn and digested grass for cows you can't compare them with the figures for humans. And more importantly, drawing nutritional wisdom from such a comparison is foolish at best.
Humans can't digest grass. While we do feed cows corn for at least a portion of their life, it doesn't need to be as prolific as it is.
But we also feed them things like beet pulp pellets and molasses - both of which are by products of sugar production. Unless we are going to stop eating sugar what else would you do with this waste?
The vast majority of ruminants are fed corn and soy. If they were all to eat grass we'd be able to produce much less meat than we currently do, and also use much more land
I was mainly thinking about soybeans, not humans eating grass. 75% of soy bean production goes to animal feed, and more than 50% of US, and 40% of worldwide, grain production goes to animals instead of directly to humans, where it's inefficiently converted to energy humans consume. All this because people like the taste of meat and because of tradition.
Other resources, such as fossil fuels and water, are used at a much higher rate when raising animals than when producing crops. Grain-fed beef production uses 100 000 liters of water per kilogram of food produced, broiler chicken 3500 liters per kilogram, and soybeans 2000 liters per kilogram. Water is a precious resource in many places of the world.
This is the way the world works today, but you don't argue for animal products over vegetables, you argue for grass-feed animals instead of crop-fed. You should vote with your wallet and only buy grass-fed meat, both when you cook at home, when you buy an animal-based snack, or when you go to a restaurant. I think that many meals would have to be vegetarian, because a purely grass-fed meat, dairy, and egg diet would be hard to uphold.
You might ask, can we just process the grass into something humans can eat? Well, that's what cattle are for.
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