But almost nobody is eating pasture-raised meat, though the industrial meat complex loves that you think that or are pointing it out as if that's how beef is made.

The US farming methods (grainfed, feed lots, etc) are very different from what we do in New Zealand.

In New Zealand every farmer I've ever met (and I've met many) let their cattle feed on fresh pasture almost entirely. We are blessed with lots of land per person, and lots of rainfall, perfect for growing grass. In the dry part of summer or the cold part of winter when fresh pasture isn't growing fast enough, they supplement with hay and silage (both produced from fresh pasture that is typically harvested at the beginning of summer).

But I know that outside of my own experience, other things are occasionally fed such as waste products from food processing, brewing, etc. And I know that when you sell animals you can legally tick "grass fed" as long as the animal has had access to pasture, regardless of what percentage of their diet actually came from that pasture. So it is possible that some cattle from NZ have eaten mainly non-grass foods, but in practice I've never actually seen that happen.

As for seaweed, we have a lot of coastline so we could utilize this strategy more effectively than the US could.

If you travel through Austria you will find herds of cattle on every pasture cutting the grass instead of machines. From what I've heard cattle farming in the US is different.

Yeah, but farming in general is different in Austria, just look at the rates of e.g. cage eggs in the US, where 95% are caged. Plus even in Austria you have to watch out, a lot of the cheaper meat is from large German farms with similar conditions.

I asked a small town butcher in Scotland if his beef was grass-fed and got seriously laughed at. Then he sold me some damn good steaks.

Because it was, or because it wasn't?

I mean, I'd guess it was, but equally it could be "why do you care, it tastes good", so ...?

It’s was A) “that’s what cows eat”

> 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).

That just means the inefficiency is in the feed used and the farming practices, not in the animal.

Not really: having an animal in between makes you waste a lot of energy (because the animal only spend a fraction of this energy to build muscles, and the rest is just burned away to sustain its metabolism).

You can take the problem the other way around: the limiting factor is land, and if you have 1 square kilometers of (somewhat fertile) land, you will feed many more humans if you grow potatoes, wheat or rice on the land than if you feed a cow on this land (whether you fees the cow directly with grass or grow corn or soy on it to feed your cows).