Free range cattle are only really a thing in land that isn't good for plant farming, usually because it's too arid. Cattle open up massive amounts of otherwise-unfarmable land to agriculture.

The number of cattle in the US has been steady for decades now (suggesting something of a drop in intake). For purely grass-fed cattle, they're carbon-neutral at this point, because the life of methane in the atmosphere is about 9 years, as opposed to CO2, which is 100 years.

Corn-feeding is really the only carbon footprint problem associated with beef.