The best thing for the environment is not cutting down forests to replace them with grasslands. I just got back from Maui where this was standard practice for hundreds of years, and in fact one of the neighboring islands(Kaho'olawe) no longer catches rain because the ruminant grass-fed beef cattle that were ranched on that island ate all of the vegetation year after year resulting in massive erosion of the topsoil. What you would call "wildlife living on a pasture" is actually the invasion of endemic ecology with one that is alien to the area, and this has a significant impact on the endemic species.

So no, grass-fed beef is not particularly good for the environment.

That's in environments where forests exist. I would agree with you there. In the U.S. the Great Plains were not forests in any recent millenia. I'm comparing corn and soy fields to grasslands.

Consider though that most "grass-fed" beef is grown in places like Brazil or Argentina where the native forest is cut down to make space for it. Or as an alternative consider how many cows are grown in feedlots and would instead need grassland to roam on and you can see how everyone indulging in red meat at their current level but with grass-fed beef could result in another environmental disaster.

A better way to think about this is to consider how many acres of land and how much fuel input is required to grow 2000 calories of food with an appropriate mix of macronutrients. I don't have a complete picture of what this would look like for a traditional American diet with the huge amount of meat we consume here, so I can't make an argument from that.

I do know that if we focus on acres of land and fuel inputs needed to grow protein from various sources, that plant-based proteins are much more space and fuel efficient than taking those same proteins and growing cows or chickens from them. Arguments for not eating soybeans, for example, center around how much land is being cleared to grow soybeans. But those same arguments ignore how much of those soybeans are being fed to cattle.

The best solutions in my mind are to significantly reduce our intake from meat sources regardless of how those sources were raised. Eating meat at the level we are used to is not a tenable situation.

Very few soybeans are used for cattle. The meal from soybeans is used on chickens and pigs. Cattle cannot stomach very much soy at all. They are more likely to be fed some grain, but their diet is 90+% hay and grass even on feed lot cattle. Soy meal is the leftover part of the soy bean. About 20% of a soy bean is used to produce soy oil, which is the primary source of human nutrition in soy. That's what's used to make soy milk, soy protein, etc. The meal component of the bean is not useful for all these other byproducts that soy acts as an ingredient of. So it would be a waste of perfectly good food not to feed that to chickens and pigs.

Land use management in Brazil sounds like an incredibly nuanced topic that I know next to nothing about. I'm much more familiar with American agriculture. And we make most of our own food here, including our own beef.

Source: https://ncsoy.org/media-resources/uses-of-soybeans/

How much keto/carno red meat is raised in such an idyllic settings?

Most red meat is factory-raised and fed tons of those artificially fertilized/pest-controlled grains, belching massive amounts of methane before getting trucked around the country - toxic for the environment.

Environmentally friendly meat does exist, by some definitions, but those locally-raised antibiotic-free grass-fed pasture-raised free-range sustainable meats are expensive.

just buy an ethically raised cow/bison etc and freeze it. i've been living off the same 1/2 cow since probably 2014 or so.

This says that American beef production will be upwards of 27 billion pounds this year:

https://beef2live.com/story-beef-production-year-0-107550

If American beef production went to 100% grass-fed beef, no feedlots, how much beef could be produced domestically? Do you have any sources handy?

Where I live, grass-fed beef is significantly more expensive than generic beef that presumably encountered a feedlot at some point in its lifecycle. If that is generally true, urging the public to consume grass-fed beef is also effectively urging the public to consume less beef. A universal switch to grass-fed beef would increase beef prices without increasing consumer buying power.

But it's possible that a pound of grass-fed beef is really no more costly to produce than average beef and it's just the niche status/labeling that commands higher prices. I haven't found an analysis addressing this question.

I asked a grass fed cattle rancher that question and he just said thats a hard question, but also grain fed will always be cheaper because they use a breed that can about grow twice as fast/large. I doubt those steers could get the same calorie intake from grass feeding. Which is a separate question from “if we used all land available for cattle grazing how much grass fed beef would we max out at”? I suspect not near the level of demand for beef unless we also took back huge areas of crops and forest.

Should we ignore the massive scale deforestation?

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/02/revealed...

> Ruminant grass-fed meat is the best thing for the environment.

It's really not.