How is it wasting land to feed cattle on it? It’s often not doing anything else.

Any land reclaimed from livestock feeding could be returned to nature, be it rainforests in Brazil or woodlands in Europe. Livestock uses a massive amount of agricultural land in comparison to plant production meant for direct human consumption.

It's just a very very simple math based on the amount of crops it takes to grow animals for meat -- and soy is much more efficient than grass in that sense, so your suggestion would make things decidedly worse for environment.

I don't know what you know about European agriculture, but woodlands in Europe aren't 'nature' in any primitive sense.

If the grass pasture is already there in cycle, it's not being used for anything else. Might as well put cattle on it.

> but woodlands in Europe aren't 'nature' in any primitive sense.

Europe is varied, not sure where you live but the forests in Northern/North-Central Europe that I'm familiar with absolutely do support wildlife. I think it shouldn't be controversial that returning agricultural land to nature, whatever "nature" means in different areas, is good for environment.

Anyway, this is wildly beside the point, which is that pasture feeding cattle can't satisfy the current demand for meat, not even close. Converting soy fields to grazing fields would be an ecological disaster without a serious decrease in worldwide meat consumption, as the yields would be far lower.

> Converting soy fields to grazing fields

But why would you do that? Don't cut down forests for soy, and don't cut it down for pasture either. Use existing green grass fields to feed cattle. This can be done in between crop rotations.

> without a serious decrease in worldwide meat consumption

Maybe that's the point?

Eat less (if you want to eat at all) and eat grass-fed. Do cattle even choose to eat soy when they have green grass available?

> Maybe that's the point? Eat less (if you want to eat at all) and eat grass-fed. Do cattle even choose to eat soy when they have green grass available?

Eating less meat was the point from the start as the main/only way to decrease soy footprint, so if you're not suggesting to replace soy feed with grass then this whole discussion was in the end more or less pointless.

Livestock has been raised in Europe for Millenia with no soy anywhere near them. Grass grazed cattle & chickens are completely sustainable and beneficial to the environment they're on. Sourced locally they're a fuckton healthier and less polluting than shipping soy and avocados across the planet.

Monocrops are terrible for the planet & wildlife, and are only even viable due to heavy use of pesticides & NPK fertliser.

Organic farming requires large amounts of animal manure to work, guess where it comes from?

Please go read about regenerative agriculture - that's the way forward.

>If the grass pasture is already there in cycle, it's not being used for anything else. Might as well put cattle on it.

This is true, technically speaking. Practically, you couldn't produce even a fraction of the amount of meat that the market wants using this way. If all meat was grass fed meat, it would be a luxury good. I don't think that would be too bad to be honest, it would lead to much less meat consumption overall.

Basically, "just eat grass fed meat" = "everyone must eat a lot less meat, unless they're rich I guess"

Cattle is also disastrous for the water supply. Unfortunately, mass production of meat is just very expensive for the health of the planet.

Not all land is a good pasture. In many parts of the world, good pasture are also efficient carbon sinks. In my part of the world those carbon sinks are rare (only about 10% of pastures are carbon sinks), and the few that are good are even better as farmland.

That overlap is not 100%. Some good pasture is bad farmland, but the claim that good pasture is good farmland is a good rule of thumb