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.