I live in upper midwest in what should be native forested area and large tracts of forest have been clearcut just for cattle. My neighbor last year cut dozens of acres of heavy forest to raise more cattle. I don't think people fully understand what has been done in many areas to destroy the native environment just to raise cattle.. let alone the corn raised that many cattle ranchers in midwest at least feed their cattle.

Land use questions are far more of a concern in developing countries than in the US. The area of forested land in the US is actually increasing, not decreasing.

But in general the point is that meat production does not have to be displacing other food production. Cows are actually a way to convert otherwise worthless land into food. And the grass they're eating is not going to typically store carbon otherwise.

> Cows are actually a way to convert otherwise worthless land into food. And the grass they're eating is not going to typically store carbon otherwise.

I think this is provably false. As mentioned above, a lot of land used for cattle used to be forest; the global beef market is one of the main drivers for deforestation in the Brazilian rainforest.

There are second order effects, too. Cattle that's factory farmed in the developed world is raised on corn, wheat, soy, and other calorie dense foods. Those crops are grown with a large quantity of fertilizer, and for every calorie of corn, wheat, etc. grown, about one calorie of petroleum is used.

I don't think there's any doubt that beef, in particular, is only economical because of the negative externalities involved. Accounting for those externalities would probably go a long way toward making lab grown meat (more) competitive.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_feeding#Corn-fed

Not sure if you're intentionally trying to misunderstand to make some weird point. All I said is that there exists land that is not forest, and is not otherwise suitable for agriculture, but that can be converted by cows into food. This is not only not provably false, it's actually true.

The fact that a lot of cattle production does not do this is not proof that this is not possible.

You do understand that cows aren’t free energy generators from thin air ?

And as the big bag of calories they are, they need to be raised with huge calories intake, which is not exactly commercial TV ad grass.

So you need to raise food for your cows alongside your cows anyway.

You are just transforming energy from a medium to another and thermodynamics says that it’s totally inefficient.

Uhm......sure, but there absolutely are cows that are raised with very little maintenance on land that is otherwise useless. Here in UK farmers often raise cows on moorlands, which are mostly just a pile of rocks with a bit if soil on top to support minimal vegetation, that land isn't and can't be used for other types of farming - yet farmers happily leave cows on it in the spring and collect them for slaughter in autumn. They feed on what grows there and there's little need to supplement them. Then they are usually slaughtered locally too. I can't believe that this kind of beef farming is even 10% as bad for environment as the big factory farming elsewhere.

Sure it happens, but like others said, this is so low intensity (small scale), that it's basically an edge case.

We can/could raise mountain goats too.

If all meat were raised only this way the lab grown would be probably cheaper.

Have you got any numbers on what percentage of UK beef is reared like that?

It's probably reasonably high, anecdotally every time I got out walking in the hills in most parts of the UK there are large numbers of sheep and cattle grazing on basically unusable wilderness, often which is part of a national park so can't be built on much anyway. They seem to be pretty self sufficient eating grass unless there is a heavy snowfall, which is quite rare in England, farmers would then supplement with feed crops like turnips etc.

Thermodynamics says nothing about which plants can grow on which land. A lot of land in the world can only sustain grass. Letting animals graze on that land is as close to free as you can get

Is it possible on the same scale?

The real problem is that forest is not being economically valued for its carbon sequestration capability.

Solving that would require complex carbon cap & trade regulations to be enforced.

Forests have basically no continuous carbon sequestration capability. Most of the carbon they'll ever sequester is already there.

You'd get more by turning it into a tree farm, converting trees to charcoal and burying that.

I don't think you're right here. Forests form soil

https://www.wri.org/insights/forests-absorb-twice-much-carbo...

"But in general the point is that meat production does not have to be displacing other food production. Cows are actually a way to convert otherwise worthless land into food. And the grass they're eating is not going to typically store carbon otherwise"

Arguably that's a value judgement not everyone shares. For example, if you placed value on the carbon storage capacity and biodiversity contribution of the Forrest then replacing it with cows may not be an increase in efficiency of useful use of the land.

Arguably broad acre farming is currently getting a free ride on a number of external costs, if the math of that were to change meat grown on a small footprint would be much more competitive.

You're picturing a world where the only land that exists is forested land and you have to choose to either leave it a forest or cut it and use it for agriculture or grazing. But a lot of land is not forested, and not suitable for agriculture. But it is suitable for grazing. This is the otherwise worthless land that can be converted by cows into food.

As I said, land use issues where you replace forest with cows is a problem (though not in the US, it is a problem in the developing world).

It's not about replacing forest with cows. It's about replacing forest with cow-feed.

1% of US cows are grass-finished, the rest eat grain.

These grain-eating cows may be located in a place that has grass, couldn't be forest, and couldn't be agricultural land. And yet they eat grain nonetheless, from another place, that could be agricultural land, forest or otherwise nature that creates biodiversity.

The grain comes from somewhere. That creates land use issues. Not because of replacing forest with cows, but because 99% of cows sold in US stores are eating grain which must come from somewhere that is obviously not only useable for growing just grass.

Yes, in theory it's possible to have cows eat grass only, that's quite obvious. But if you were to limit beef in US stores to only those type of situations, you'd have to reduce the supply by 99% today and radically shift the way beef is produced worldwide.

And even that 1% / 99% isn't the entire story. That only tells you what is grass-finished vs cows that eat grain. An even smaller portion of that 1% are cows that are eating grass from a place that could solely grow grass and could not be used for other purposes such as forest.

Grass-finished. Think about what that means. Most (all besides veal?) eat grass. They finish them (fatten them before slaughter) with grain. That 99% isn't 100% grain. It consists of lots of grass.

> Cows are actually a way to convert otherwise worthless land into food

As someone who lived in a subsistence farm, that's absolutely not true, not on a large scale.

That is true in some places where the soil is not suitable for agriculture and the cows only eat grass, but that would be a minority of cows that exist today.

If that was even remotely true, there would be no cows raised by eating grain.

According to the Guardian almost all cows in the UK are raised on grass, I'd guess this is true for most of Europe

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/apr/17/the-eco-...

> Cows are actually a way to convert otherwise worthless land into food

This is completely false. Animal farming is entirely based on crop farming for fodder.

Farming crop for animal fodder, for human consumption and for biofuel are in direct competition with each other.

It's the same in the rural and semi-rural Northeast (I mean Vermont and upstate NY specifically), most of the cattle are raised for dairy.

Though a farmer in the area (an old neighbor actually) recently converted a good portion of his maize fields into a solar energy facility. I'm not sure exactly what his motivations were, but farmers are for the most part not stupid people, especially when it comes to maximizing the productivity of their land.

> It's important to note that almost all of the land that cattle are raised on is unsuitable for any other purpose

I'm not so sure about that. Brazil is the second largest producer of beef, and there have been huge outcries because large swathes of the Amazon are being cut down to facilitate beef production (as well as crops such as soya - which I should note is mostly used as animal feed - and palm oil).

Apparently the soil does soon become unsuitable for even raising cattle, so it does become land unsuitable for other purposes. But it certainly didn't start out that way.

Most of Brazillian beef came from natural grassland area, "Serrado"

Also Pantanal (a kind of swampland of sorts) create some awesome natural pastures, although raising cattle there is harder because of the floods.

Amazon Rainforest destruction has much to do with stupidity (the land there is sand actually, destroying the forest to plant ANYTHING there, even soybeans, is stupid idea), logging, illegal land grabbing, and issues related to certain US companies (Cargill in particular is a big offender).

Also there a lot of conflict is going on there, including political, that made the destruction faster, including destruction being sped up in name of conservation, for example worldwide media was all happy when a particular logger got arrested, only for the destruction to speed up after his arrest, because the people that kept calling the police on him were actually trying to use the police to push him out so they could squat the land, and indeed they did so, as soon he was kicked out, illegal loggers and miners moved in, and fortified, now THOSE people can't be kicked out because they are heavily armed and the police fears the political fallout of that. Meanwhile the area they squatted had logging sped-up a lot, and trees that previously were being preserved as seed stock got cut down, ruining the management work being done there.

According to this paper 70-80% of Brazil's deforestation begins as pasture creation:

http://www7.nau.edu/mpcer/direnet/publications/publications_...

It can both be true that deforestation isn't important to Brazils meat industry but that people mostly burn down forests to create meat. Just means that we could stop the deforestation without much consequences, which is a good thing.

You are correct. Most of the deforestation issue could be fixed with better law enforcement, mind you not just "harsher" enforcement, part of the problem is some previous governments went overboard with it, bothering people that weren't doing anything illegal. Sadly the current government fixed it by doing the opposite (enforcing too little).

Excellent comment.

Except it's not true - all sources say that the primary reason for deforestation in brazil is cattle grazing. Wikipedia [0] has numerous sources that say the exact opposite of what OP has said.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_of_the_Amazon_ra...

No- large swathes of land are being cleared because it's one of the few resources available to locals to climb out of poverty.

If they weren't cutting it down for beef, they'd be cutting it down for something else, like the palm oil mentioned.

Really moving the goalposts there

If it wasn't as economical to do it because you couldn't sell the meat produced that way, less of it would be cut down because they couldn't make money that way. In other words, it's their only resource, but it's only valuable to destroy if there is something they can sell, i.e., meat. (Or palm oil)

No- this isn't US economics where there's a cost below which land use doesn't make sense for them.

These people were cutting and burning these forests just for timber and firewood, and have been for decades.

Even in places where it's banned to do so, and they risk jail.

A smaller profit margin isn't going to prevent them from utilizing the one resource at their disposal.

That’s kind of a wacky argument. It’s like saying that they wouldn’t need money if only these people wouldn’t eat.

The fake meat story is a fraud - if you care about pollution, like every other industry yu can regulate how they handle waste products and other operational practices.

Fake meat is just a consolidation play, which happens to be the factor that made meat production a horror show in the first place. Instead of cutting down rain forests for pasture, we’ll cut them down for more protein sources to manufacture fake meat. Ditto with palm oil, which will drive some apes to extinction because there is a marketing problem with selling lard and a health problem associated with selling hydrogenated oils.

Always come with citations.

> It's important to note that almost all of the land that cattle are raised on is unsuitable for any other purpose.

This is blatantly false. It might have been true 70 years ago, but not since the rise of CAFOs or a large international beef market.

* ~70% of US beef comes from a CAFO (where the primary feedstock is corn) [0].

* In the US alone the amount of corn diverted to livestock feed (predominantly beef) could feed 800 million humans [1].

* Brazil produces ~15% of the world's beef (2013) and much of this land (65 Mha) was reclaimed from the Amazon [2].

[0] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iUpRFOPmAE5IO4hO4PyS...

[1] https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-m...

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026483771...

Corn is heavily subsidized. Is it a surprise that this ends up as animal feed?

> It's important to note that almost all of the land that cattle are raised on is unsuitable for any other purpose

The land used to grow the food used to feed most cattle most definitely could be used for other purposes or just left alone.

The vast majority of cattle aren't grass-fed on the high plains just before slaughter. Sustainably produced beef like this simply can't scale and is too expensive for mass consumption.

Most cattle are fed in feedlots using grains produced en masse for that purpose.

That is why beef production has such a huge carbon footprint - because of the massive crop fertilizer inputs needed to feed massive quantities of cattle.

I recently watched a documentary that really called to question this common wisdom. https://youtu.be/SdrhpThqlCo For context, I was vegan from 2006-11, and the environmental reasons were my primary motivation. Now it seems obvious that the numbers couldn't have been what I thought. Put into context that "carbon footprint" was a slogan invented by the fossil fuel industry, and its clear who is served by shifting the blame to cows.

> Put into context that "carbon footprint" was a slogan invented by the fossil fuel industry, and its clear who is served by shifting the blame to cows.

We should absolutely be scrutinizing the fossil fuel industry. There's also no reason to _shift_ blame; both can be blamed at the same time. Ulterior motives behind the origin of carbon footprints does not negate the impact of our diets - particularly animal agriculture.

Willpower is finite, political will is finite, social capital is finite. We really can't afford to squander those things on low-impact high-pain measures. Farm bills and government subsidies to fossil fuel make your diet not even noise. Its not detectable at any scale. The only way to change diets at scale is price and availability.

Electric cars are sold to wealthy people so they can maintain their lifestyle with a fresh narrative of being the solution. Meanwhile, a few meters of road being built releases massive amounts of crap to the air.

Lab-grown meat is the same. Bioreactors taking resources from states away to pump out goo for people to eat states away is not sustainable and will never be sustainable.

We need to return to the land, but governments work hard to ensure every last human is a citizen, and produces wealth for someone else. People who resisted were met with violence and their land seized. The system is going to collapse, I really don't have hope. But the least you could do is spare people the party line of blame and shame. /doomer-rant

Analysis claiming that beef production at large is not the major source of CO2 emissions among livestock is ignoring the supply chain CO2 of beef production - ignoring the CO2 emissions of the food produced to feed the cows.

This is pretty well documented:

http://www.fao.org/gleam/results/en/

Also, whether one is a vegan or not is irrelevant to the question. These are systemic issues based on, as you yourself say, the lack of price put on CO2 emissions to account for their externalities.

However, the lack of political will to do so up to this point doesn't mean we can or should end industrial society and return to the land. There are less dramatic solution paths, but they will need time to acculturate.

Today's latest from Kurzgesagt is also relevant: https://youtu.be/yiw6_JakZFc

That's only a portion of it, though. That area could be used for something other than agriculture, and a significant portion of arable land is used for growing crops that go exclusively toward animals that are later slaughtered, e.g. soybeans.

Moving away from meat is the right way forward - ethically, ecologically, and economically.

A lot of the land used in the US for raising cattle was previously the habitat of wild bison, who were themselves the primary food source of the indigenous people who lived on that land. Cattle ranching in the American Great Plains is just a domesticated and industrialized version of what the Great Plains have been doing all along.

But are you overlooking different scales?

Maybe. Maybe not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28622417

> I always like to point out that before the Europeans decimated the American bison, there were more head of bison roaming the west than there are head of cattle today. Just turning our monocrop soy and corn farms in the midwest back to prairie (by actually doing nothing to the land - just leave it alone), we could have regenerative ranching and cows and more food for less energy input than we do today.

I don’t know for sure if that’s true, but it sure as hell wouldn’t surprise me.

Yeah there's almost no way that's true. Maxmimum bison population in North America was never more than 50 million. US alone has 90M head of cattle, Canada and Mexico have ~10 million each.

Also Bison grew at natural rates and lived for 20+ years... Beef cattle are slaughtered around 2/3 years - so you're turning over ~2,000lbs of mass per head every few years. Just an unfathomably massive industry.

So that's about twice the population for about 1/10th the lifespan, so about a 20x increase in scale. Which seems...not entirely unreasonable compared to near-complete wilderness supporting a hunter-gatherer population?

You're saying ~1 billion freely roaming bison in the US seems like a manageable and reasonable solution?

No; I’m saying it seems reasonable to get 20x the bovine field from the same land through active ranching and agriculture than it would naturally support.

Who doesn't love a good bison burger? Let's do this.

Realistically, though, it isn't used for other things. Lack of infrastructure is a decent barrier for many things.

Not that I disagree with the last bit - I'm mostly vegetarian save for an occasional fish dish.

If not used by cattle ranching it would be used as a natural preserve - there are huge chunks of the country that aren't fit even for ranching and in those chunks of the country you'll see... nothing. Except a biome that's doing its thing without human intervention. If this land is good for nothing but cattle rearing and we stop cattle rearing then we can return big chunks of it to nature.

You can do cattle ranching in a regenerative way that would be better than doing nothing and making a place a national park. [0] Are there problems with current chicken, pig and some ruminant ranching? Yes. Does it have to be done this way? No. Are there major environmental issues also with monoculture plant farming that nobody seems to bring up? Yes.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI&t=1s

Getting rid of ruminant cattle farming will just make the world worse off as food demand gets redirected to a smaller amount of arable land and missing cattle would accelerate climate change and desertification. Humanity does not have a lack of land to live on, there is plenty to go around. City land is expensive because everyone wants to be on small space.

> Getting rid of ruminant cattle farming will just make the world worse off as food demand gets redirected to a smaller amount of arable land and missing cattle would accelerate climate change and desertification. Humanity does not have a lack of land to live on, there is plenty to go around. City land is expensive because everyone wants to be on small space.

Wouldn't getting rid of ruminant cattle farming reduce the amount of arable land required since so much of it is used to grow animal feed?

"If all the grain currently fed to livestock in the United States were consumed directly by people, the number of people who could be fed would be nearly 800 million,"

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-m...

> Wouldn't getting rid of ruminant cattle farming reduce the amount of arable land required since so much of it is used to grow animal feed?

I think this is exactly the point missed by the people in this thread saying that a lot of cattle are raised on otherwise useless land. The presumption is that if you got rid of cattle farming you'd have to replace the lost calories for humans by growing other food on that land or cutting down more forests.

But this presumption is false. Even if every bit of land used for raising cattle turned out to be worthless for doing anything else, you'd still have an overall environmental win by getting rid of cattle. Convert not the land used to raise cattle directly but the land used to grow the food they eat to producing vegetables and grains for us.

I don’t understand your last sentence. Get rid of cows and then give people what?

I also think vegetables are very energy inefficient compared to for example potatoes. Not sure how we can defend growing anything with such a minuscule calorie count given the impact of pesticides and herbicides on the environment.

> I also think vegetables are very energy inefficient compared to for example potatoes. Not sure how we can defend growing anything with such a minuscule calorie count given the impact of pesticides and herbicides on the environment.

Cattle are herbivores, so we're feeding _them_ plant matter for them to convert to meat for us to eat. We're also growing massive amounts of soy and corn just to feed those cattle already, when we could be growing substantially less than that to feed ourselves.

> Not sure how we can defend growing anything with such a minuscule calorie count given the impact of pesticides and herbicides on the environment.

Not sure how we can defend the current status quo when we're growing many times the amount of crops to feed the animals using those pesticides and herbicides, _and_ pumping said cattle full of antibiotics, but yet here we are.

Livestock overgrazing is one of the leading causes of desertification. Can you explain how removing them and simultaneously making the food chain more efficient could worsen the situation?

I'm aware that you linked the Allan Savory TED talk, but that's been heavily controversial and many of the studies on it find limited effects beyond any other reasonable strategy.

The area on which is cattle ranching is better than nothing is a very small portion of the world. People loves to bring this argument, but it is order of magnitude lower than area destroyed by cattle ranching (farms for feeding beefs lead to deforestation, badly managed water leads to desertification).

Yes, here in Australia we have other uses for north-western land that's primarily used for raising cattle. We dig it up for ore.

A mine is much more profitable than a cattle farm. If the land has provable minerals beneath it, it will not be used for farming cattle.

Interestingly, several of the sites I work with do both. Pretty surprising when you're heading back to camp in the LV and suddenly a cow steps onto the road

> That's only a portion of it, though. That area could be used for something other than agriculture,

Like what? What do you propose as a better use of the high plains? (Let’s define this as land west of 100 degree W to Rocky Mountains) There are no natural resources, no large cities, lack of infrastructure, etc. Other than wind farms, what can you do with grasslands that receive less than 10” of rain a year that sits on top of a rapidly depleting aquifer?

Most of the farming on the high plains depends on fossil aquifers which are being depleted, or snowmelt-fed rivers. The snow is increasingly falling as rain and/or melting in a big rush in early spring, leaving the rivers dry for more and more of the year.

Farming on the high plains mostly isn't sustainable. Certainly not the way it's done now. Not in the context of climate change.

WeWork co-working spaces. There's a slight infrastructure situation, which you mentioned, but nothing a ton of money won't fix. What're you doing the next couple months? I have some money I'd like to invest. I hope you good with construction!

Compared to the scale of bioreactor construction proposed in the article, this is actually a attractive investment.

Yeah, maybe land wasn't the best thing to call out as it's not particularly scarce in the US. Water, on the other hand...

California uses more water to grow animal feed (Alfalfa + irrigated pasture) than it does for all residential and commercial uses combined.

Here in the Netherlands it's the exact opposite. We have infinite water, just not a lot of space.

Manatee farms when?

And then in Germany... Fly over with Google Earth or similar.

It's basically all farms and cities now. Several of the forests left are mere tree plantations.

Perhaps one day the yearly reminder that our forests are dying will stop because there's none left.

European forest area has actually increased as modern farming made land use more efficient so we could reduce farm area. The forests were cut down centuries ago. All farming in Europe has to be sustainable since there is no farmland left to expand into.

https://ourworldindata.org/exports/forest-area-as-share-of-l...

Given the satellite pictures I'm looking at, that graph cannot really comfort me, but thanks for trying.

Water isn’t particularly scarce in the US either. Just because a handful of states are managing their resources sub-optimally doesn’t mean the whole country has a shortage.

> They aren't grazing cattle in Manhattan, it's in places like rural Australia or Texas where there is no infrastructure, no arable land, and no human population that is competing with the cattle population for resources

Nasa [0] claims that the single biggest reason for deforestation is conversion to cropland and pasture, and Vice [1] says that 80% of the deforestation is for cattle in Brazil. Meanwhile, in the US almost 70% of all crops grown are used as animal feed [2] (e.g. all that midwestern corn and soy) - and the efficiency of that is staggeringly low; Only about 3% of the calories used for beef feed translate into our human food,

> They aren't grazing cattle in Manhattan,

They're not because it's a concrete jungle, and land is expensive in the immediate areas.

[0] https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Deforestation/def...

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/bjwzk4/feeling-sad-about-the...

[2] https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel...

That just isn’t true. Most arable land is used to grow animal feed. And maybe the Brazilian rainforests can’t be used for much which has economical value, only things like producing oxygen and being one of the richest and biodiverse ecosystems on earth, but I still think it would be better to try to preserve them instead of converting them to land for grazing.

This is a good point until you recognize that you need vast resources beyond "unsuitable land" to raise cattle, let alone raise cattle at scale. Water, food (big one), medicine, manpower, infrastructure, transportation, and all of the subsidiary requirements therein all come into play.

When you properly recognize this your reduction disarms nothing.

Not in sweden. 70% of arable land is used for feed production. These are numbers from Svenskt Kött, a lobby organisation for meat producers, in swedish:

https://svensktkott.se/om-kott/miljo-och-klimat/hur-mycket-m...

> It's important to note that almost all of the land that cattle are raised on is unsuitable for any other purpose. They aren't grazing cattle in Manhattan, it's in places like rural Australia or Texas where there is no infrastructure, no arable land, and no human population that is competing with the cattle population for resources.

Traditionally yes, but my understanding is nowadays, at least in America, a lot of cattle are fed grain in industrial feedlots.

Some of that land historically was inhabited by relatives of current herbivores (bisons) so some of the land is feeding herbivores as it did historically.

Now, there are places where forest was cut down for grazing. Thats true. We also have experience where leaving the land alone a few decades reverts it back to forest (this is seen in forests in the eastern US which were once grazing lands for domesticated herbivores and now are back to being mature forests.

I'm not convinced that cattle ranching is always or necessarily the best use for much of that land, but I think the second point made was the more impactful one -- "growing animal feed." Much of _that_ land is either land that would be better suited for other purposes, or is land that we're intensely farming at high costs to the environment.

I hear this statement all the time, it is never sourced.

If Jews can grow tomatoes in the desert, then what land could possibly not used for agriculture?

Besides, the majority of the land use that is used for growing animals or growing animal feed is in the lather category.

So as it is a statement that is always asserted without evidence, it can also be dismissed without evidence.

I'm a little confused; why is rural Texas less able to support human life than Manhattan? Other than the infrastructure that was built by humans, I assume the primary advantage of Manhattan is protection from human invasion and easily accessible water?

If a cattle farm isn't built in Manhattan, a thousand other people will be lining up to turn it into office, residential, or retail space.

If a cattle farm isn't built in Erath County Texas, that land is going to sit there doing nothing. It has no other productive use case.

The point of this is that pointing out how much land beef production uses isn't as insightful as it may at first seem, because that land isn't being taken from another economic activity.

There are, in fact, dairy farms in New York state.

Also, the DFW area is the 4th largest region in the country - proving that you CAN put people and cows on the same land

> Erath County Texas

That looks like prime wind turbine power generation country.

True, but a wind turbine can sit on a cattle pasture without causing issues, so that's immaterial to the arguments here considered.

I was pointing it out purely as a reference to the utterly enormous scale of the industry.

The Amazon rainforest is being slashed and burned to make way for land for raising beef. Rainforest is a good alternative use of the land.

How isn’t this downvoted into oblivion? It’s the falsest shit ever