What counts as arable? Can you grow literally nothing on it, or is it just unusable for mass industrial mono-cropping at a scale that competes?
IIRC even if ruminant grazing is the most efficient way to produce food on this land, it’s still be a severe environmental net negative as opposed to other non-food uses, namely rewilding. Of course this is true for cash crops as well, and I don’t know how the payoff compares, but a lot of animal agriculture defenders like to use this argument to imply that grazers can just be slotted in on the margins with no downside.
Based on the map in the article, a substantial portion of land still goes to farmed livestock feed. Eliminate all of that first and then we can actually see how much of this beef is purely ranched.
Meat eaters do love to champion the most ethical and environmental corners of their supply chain, and I appreciate that, but everyone I know that buys a half cow for their deep freezer from a sustainable local farmer refuses to draw the hard line in the fast food drive-thru. “Conscious” meat exists to justify all meat consumption rather than replace it in the supply chain, from my experience growing up on a small hobby farm trying to produce it.
What you’re describing in your last paragraph is virtue signaling, e.g publicly expressing some moral position to gain approval without actually following through on that moral position. That’s not something to appreciate.
It is extremely commonplace in meat eater circles to virtue signal about ethical meat and then completely ignore that for the vast majority of consumption. This is a huge difference between vegans and meat eaters.
Vegans aren’t virtue signaling, we actually have an understanding of what we believe to be a moral truth; it’s wrong to kill and harm things for your own pleasure, whether that be taste pleasure, sexual pleasure, whatever, and we extend that as far as we’re able to. We actively avoid food that purposefully necessitates killing and suffering.
Meat eaters advocate for some local maximum, like “I can’t give up meat because it’s too tasty, but I can at least avoid factory farming”, and then they’ll go to McDonalds 3 times a week once they’re outside of a discussion with a vegan.
I’m much less frustrated with people who both advocate for and commit to some moral position. If someone abstains from all sources of fast food and factory farming meat and only goes out and handpicks cows to slaughter that they’ve known from birth, that’s better. It’s still wrong to kill something without it’s consent, but at the very least if they’re not virtue signaling they’re at least not trying to deceive others.
If someone abstains from all sources of fast food and factory farming meat and only goes out and handpicks cows to slaughter that they’ve known from birth, that’s better.
There’s zero chance there’s a measurable amount of carnists who actually commit to that. There’s also no way you could produce the amount of meat carnists want to eat without factory farming.
Eventually I think lab meat will be cheaper than factory meat. When that happens there will be. Until then fast food will always be made with the cheapest ingredients possible. Until then I’ll be vegan.
I looked through the article and didn’t see any map, so I’m not sure exactly what you’re talking about. My assumption is that this is referring to the Great Plains. The Great Plains is a mix of Prairie, Steppe, and Grassland. All three are arable in the sense that they can grow grass and small vegetation, but would need lots of irrigation and most of this area isn’t close to a water source. You could always drill wells, but that has other problems. The land is good for grazing because the land is only really good at growing small spindly grasses that themselves are mostly dry.
As for eliminating the livestock grazing I would like to point out some figures from the article.
About 2 million cattle, or around just 6 percent of the US herd, graze on public lands. By one estimate, the land provides 1.6 percent of forage eaten by US cattle.
So by this article there are 2 million cattle ranched on this land, or approximately 33 million in the entire US. Prior to 1870, before their mass slaughter, there was an estimated 60 million Bison in the US and Canada. I don’t know much about the differences in Bison and Cows, but they seem like they would serve a pretty similar function in the ecosystem. You could make an argument that they need to be rotated and cycled over the lands better, but removing them would probably be pretty bad as well.
As to rewilding the area, it is rewilded, the article is about public lands which the government isn’t allowing to be used. The wild state of these lands is that it is dry with a sea of grass.
EDIT: I also took a look at several of the sources used, at least in the beginning of the article. The writer is using an appeal to authority logical fallacy to make their argument look more valid, but the sources they are pulling are really not related or are heavily biased as well.
The first link is made in relation to the size of the land being used and is just a document about the raw statistics on the land.
The second link is associated with a comment that the land is leased at “bargin bin prices” and is an opinion piece about how the land is leased too cheaply in that person’s opinion (it really has no other supporting information).
The third link is associated with a comment that the cattle eat or destroy plants consumed by native species. The link leads to an academic article which is a literature review of livestock impacts around the world and the conclusion doesn’t really support what the writer of this article is saying. It looks like they googled something that looked like it would support their opinion and then slapped it in there.
, but they seem like they would serve a pretty similar function in the ecosystem
They do not graze the same and these differences hurt ecosystems
Cows and bison differ in all behaviors — including how they stand, move and graze. Cattle spend almost double the time grazing — 45-49 percent — in comparison to bison — who spend just over a quarter of their time doing so (26-28 percent). And while land needs some amount of disturbance to enable soil turnover, it turns out that the kind of soil disturbance provided by cows trampling over the soil is not the best for preserving biodiversity. And these critical differences in grazing behavior have downstream effects on the ecosystems they inhabit.
[…]
The types of plants bison and cattle prefer to graze on are also remarkably different. Unlike cattle, who prefer to graze steadily on flowering herbs like clover, milkweed and sunflower, free-roaming bison cover a much larger area, grazing on different varieties of grass, such as perennial grasses, but leaving certain areas of the prairie untouched.
Livestock farmers often claim that their grazing systems “mimic nature”. If so, the mimicry is a crude caricature. A review of evidence from over 100 studies found that when livestock are removed from the land, the abundance and diversity of almost all groups of wild animals increases
I started this off as one post, but Lemmy didn’t like it so I’m breaking it into two:
PART 1
I want to preface that while I’m not a vegetarian and am ok with eating meat, I’m not fundamentally opposed to the ideas and arguments. My discussion here is to highlight poor journalism and point out very obvious bias. In essence, I’m on you’re side for environmentalism but these articles are terrible.
First off, both articles you linked suffer the same problem as the Vox article. All three are biased and agenda led opinion pieces which the authors filled with journal articles which either have problems of their own or sound like they support their argument, but don’t if you read their sources.
The first article you linked is from a Website called Sentient Media and their about section clearly states their bias, which isn’t inherently bad here. At the beginning they describe regenerative grazing and refute it while linking to various articles about the subject and why it’s stupid. Looking into the sources here it quickly becomes apparent that what they are talking about is the snake oil equivalent of environmental agriculture (essentially Regenerative Grazing is the claim that you can reverse climate change and desertification with a specific style of livestock grazing).
Next this article goes into a discussion attacking biodiversity claims, but doesn’t really seem to understand how biodiversity works.
But one regenerative grazing notion continues to linger — the idea that cattle ranching is a fundamental part of biodiversity, that grasslands across the world and especially in the U.S. need livestock in order to thrive. The presence of livestock and other domesticated animals trampling across grasslands, the argument goes, enhances biodiversity rather than destroys it.
When it comes to biodiversity there are primary, secondary, and tertiary species. When an environment is upset the primary species are the first to rebound but are generally more fragile in the long term while secondary and tertiary are slower, but hardier. For example, if a forest burns down pine trees are a primary succession species which quickly rebounds in just a few years, but oak trees are a secondary or tertiary species which take longer to grow and with enough time will outlast the pines and eventually crowd them out. By this logic the disturbance of an environment increases biodiversity, because it literally makes the environment more diverse. What is lost is that biodiversity is different between ecosystems, for example, the pine forests on the east coast of the US were historically a high biodiversity location because of frequent hurricanes and fires. The fires in these areas were actually essential for the long leaf pine, because the seeds do not sprout until they are heated by a fire. In this sense, these forests are meant to be regularly destroyed by fires and hurricanes to keep their ecosystem the way it is. In recent times humans have fought to prevent these wildfires which has hurt the long leaf pine forests.
Another example here would be an old growth oak forest which hasn’t seen flame or axe for 2000 years. Introducing biodiversity here would utterly destroy the historic ecosystem.
The article later goes on to talk about this topic themselves and how some ecosystems need disturbances for maintaining their biodiversity, but they get a bit… ¿Strange? with it:
The right balance of biodiversity helps an ecosystem regulate itself — keeping itself in balance even when exposed to natural disturbances like windstorms and fires, or droughts and insect infestations. Functioning biodiverse ecosystems can even thrive in the face of some natural disturbances, like periodic fires. Many plant species depend on these fires for reproduction and growth.
Biodiversity isn’t magical, it’s a variable slider dependent on whatever desired ecosystem outcome is. If the desired outcome is an 1900 version of the Great Plains then reduced livestock is a great way to do that. If the desired outcome is a 1600 version of the Great Plains it definitely isn’t. Just like reintroducing wolves to Yellow Stone, it’s all about what the desired outcome is.
The article also brings up a study further refuting the regenerative grazing which discusses the grazing and livestock from the point of climate change, not from keeping the ecosystem healthy. This article, “Livestock Use on Public Lands in the Western USA Exacerbates Climate Change: Implications for Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation,” makes no statement about maintaining the ecosystem with the bison in mind and is singularly focused on emissions. So the argument which uses this article is at odds with the one they used earlier for biodiversity. One could argue that if the purpose is the eliminate emissions then you also wouldn’t want 60 million free ranging bison in this area either.
Later the article talks about the difference between Bison and Cows as you quoted. The article they link is actually really good, but it’s hard to find a full version of it (paywalls). I read what I could of the conclusion (part of it was clipped off). The take away from what I could read and what others said about this article is that Bison are definitely different and arguably better, but the downsides of cattle grazing are more to do with how cattle grazing is done, not the grazing itself. If cattle were forced to move around the pasture more, forced to be away from water sources and trees (which they seem to prefer unlike bison), and if you forced them to move along more, then as the original article says:
If increased biological diversity facilitated by vegetation heterogeneity is an objective (Fuhlendorf et al. 2006) and domestic livestock are used as the dominant grazer, then the cumulative result of grazing alterations across many pasture units may reduce the impact of increased grazing periods and localized use areas by livestock, thus increasing biological diversity at a landscape scale (Fuhlendorf and Engle 2001).
So are bison better for the environment? As it stands, often, yes – but that’s less an indictment of ranching cattle than an indictment of the way the cattle industry works.
I started this off as one post, but Lemmy didn’t like it so I’m breaking it into two:
PART 2
Next Article
Let’s start off by observing how this writer subtly plugs their new book…
One of the first articles this writer uses is for this statement:
A review of evidence from over 100 studies found that when livestock are removed from the land, the abundance and diversity of almost all groups of wild animals increases
Looking at the article they reference the conclusion states: (I had to do a lot of manual typing and editing as the source I found did not easily allow copy paste, so please forgive any typos)
Livestock exclusion can benefit the abundance and diversity of multiple trophic levels. However, abandoning grazing in certain environments may not result in an increase to biodiversity and in some instances can cause further loss. For instance, we observed grazing having a positive effect on plant diversity and four studies within our meta-analysis where animal diversity increased with livestock grazing, contradicting the general trend. In all four studies, livestock grazing maintained grassland structure by suppressing woody encroachment, which supports specific animal species. Although the conversion of grasslands to shrublands has been attributed to overgrazing, continued grazing in these systems might be required to minimize shrub cover. In other ecosystems, such as forests, livestock production is some-times described as causing habitat loss because the generated rangelands do not provide the same ecosystem services or functions as the previous native habitat. If there are persistent effects of grazing, restoration to previous conditions can be impractical and instead these rangelands represent novel ecosystems with a different set of species composition and functions… When examined at the species-level the effects of grazing can be significantly magnified relative to community measures. For instance, at risk species may be especially sensitive to livestock relative to other species if grazing reduces the abundance of plant species that they are dependent. The impacts of livestock grazing on conservation are thus dependent on target organism (plants, primary consumers, predators) and goals set by land managers (improving diversity or productivity). The production of livestock has increased significantly in spatial extent since the 1960s and is projected to continue to expand in developing countries, potentially threatening indigenous animal diversity on a global scale. Future increases in climate variability is also expected to threaten food security and increase conversion of land into rangelands. To meet this demand, livestock grazers will continue to be placed on land shared by indigenous animal species, thereby potentially threatening the global biodiversity of herbivores and pollinators. These impacts are expected to be most pronounced in mild climates, such as temperate ecosystems, and are likely to persist after grazers are removed. Identifying the aspects of grazing that most impact animal biodiversity could be used to further develop more effective management practices. For example, some forms of rotational grazing are effective in environments with low abiotic stress and when precipitation less variable. Techniques for mitigation will not erase all the effects of livestock grazing and these negative cascading effects may be an inevitable consequence that society will need to balance with the socioeconomic benefits.
This article while supporting the argument that livestock grazing is not as good as whatever native environment was there before the grazing, for the most part, it’s hardly the glaring result that the writer claims it is and the writers of the academic article even point out that it’s not universally the case. This portion of the article also discusses how a certain amount of grazing can cause an ecosystem to shift from it’s historic setting and create a novel new setting, implying that if grazing ceased the preexisting ecosystem wouldn’t return and instead you would simply destroy what is currently working.
I’m not going to get into the rest of this article as I started to cringe at the discussion of cyanide land mines.
Conclusion:
When it comes to environmental journalism too often the people fail to use the articles they reference accurately and instead use the appeal to authority logical fallacy to make their biased, opinion based, points appear more valid. Often times a nugget of their argument is accurate, but as with much of journalism the goal is views, ratings, and book sales rather than a fair and accurate representation of science.
My responses to that are:
What counts as arable? Can you grow literally nothing on it, or is it just unusable for mass industrial mono-cropping at a scale that competes?
IIRC even if ruminant grazing is the most efficient way to produce food on this land, it’s still be a severe environmental net negative as opposed to other non-food uses, namely rewilding. Of course this is true for cash crops as well, and I don’t know how the payoff compares, but a lot of animal agriculture defenders like to use this argument to imply that grazers can just be slotted in on the margins with no downside.
Based on the map in the article, a substantial portion of land still goes to farmed livestock feed. Eliminate all of that first and then we can actually see how much of this beef is purely ranched.
Meat eaters do love to champion the most ethical and environmental corners of their supply chain, and I appreciate that, but everyone I know that buys a half cow for their deep freezer from a sustainable local farmer refuses to draw the hard line in the fast food drive-thru. “Conscious” meat exists to justify all meat consumption rather than replace it in the supply chain, from my experience growing up on a small hobby farm trying to produce it.
What you’re describing in your last paragraph is virtue signaling, e.g publicly expressing some moral position to gain approval without actually following through on that moral position. That’s not something to appreciate.
It is extremely commonplace in meat eater circles to virtue signal about ethical meat and then completely ignore that for the vast majority of consumption. This is a huge difference between vegans and meat eaters.
Vegans aren’t virtue signaling, we actually have an understanding of what we believe to be a moral truth; it’s wrong to kill and harm things for your own pleasure, whether that be taste pleasure, sexual pleasure, whatever, and we extend that as far as we’re able to. We actively avoid food that purposefully necessitates killing and suffering.
Meat eaters advocate for some local maximum, like “I can’t give up meat because it’s too tasty, but I can at least avoid factory farming”, and then they’ll go to McDonalds 3 times a week once they’re outside of a discussion with a vegan.
I’m much less frustrated with people who both advocate for and commit to some moral position. If someone abstains from all sources of fast food and factory farming meat and only goes out and handpicks cows to slaughter that they’ve known from birth, that’s better. It’s still wrong to kill something without it’s consent, but at the very least if they’re not virtue signaling they’re at least not trying to deceive others.
There’s zero chance there’s a measurable amount of carnists who actually commit to that. There’s also no way you could produce the amount of meat carnists want to eat without factory farming.
Check out the treatbrains in this thread that apparently feel brave and smart by announcing that they want unfettered infinite access to meat treats.
I wish there was a conscious meat fast food option.
Eventually I think lab meat will be cheaper than factory meat. When that happens there will be. Until then fast food will always be made with the cheapest ingredients possible. Until then I’ll be vegan.
I looked through the article and didn’t see any map, so I’m not sure exactly what you’re talking about. My assumption is that this is referring to the Great Plains. The Great Plains is a mix of Prairie, Steppe, and Grassland. All three are arable in the sense that they can grow grass and small vegetation, but would need lots of irrigation and most of this area isn’t close to a water source. You could always drill wells, but that has other problems. The land is good for grazing because the land is only really good at growing small spindly grasses that themselves are mostly dry.
As for eliminating the livestock grazing I would like to point out some figures from the article.
So by this article there are 2 million cattle ranched on this land, or approximately 33 million in the entire US. Prior to 1870, before their mass slaughter, there was an estimated 60 million Bison in the US and Canada. I don’t know much about the differences in Bison and Cows, but they seem like they would serve a pretty similar function in the ecosystem. You could make an argument that they need to be rotated and cycled over the lands better, but removing them would probably be pretty bad as well.
As to rewilding the area, it is rewilded, the article is about public lands which the government isn’t allowing to be used. The wild state of these lands is that it is dry with a sea of grass.
EDIT: I also took a look at several of the sources used, at least in the beginning of the article. The writer is using an appeal to authority logical fallacy to make their argument look more valid, but the sources they are pulling are really not related or are heavily biased as well.
The first link is made in relation to the size of the land being used and is just a document about the raw statistics on the land.
The second link is associated with a comment that the land is leased at “bargin bin prices” and is an opinion piece about how the land is leased too cheaply in that person’s opinion (it really has no other supporting information).
The third link is associated with a comment that the cattle eat or destroy plants consumed by native species. The link leads to an academic article which is a literature review of livestock impacts around the world and the conclusion doesn’t really support what the writer of this article is saying. It looks like they googled something that looked like it would support their opinion and then slapped it in there.
They do not graze the same and these differences hurt ecosystems
https://sentientmedia.org/cattle-ranching-terrible-for-biodiversity/
Which leads to:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-damaging-farm-products-organic-pasture-fed-beef-lamb
I started this off as one post, but Lemmy didn’t like it so I’m breaking it into two:
PART 1
I want to preface that while I’m not a vegetarian and am ok with eating meat, I’m not fundamentally opposed to the ideas and arguments. My discussion here is to highlight poor journalism and point out very obvious bias. In essence, I’m on you’re side for environmentalism but these articles are terrible.
First off, both articles you linked suffer the same problem as the Vox article. All three are biased and agenda led opinion pieces which the authors filled with journal articles which either have problems of their own or sound like they support their argument, but don’t if you read their sources.
The first article you linked is from a Website called Sentient Media and their about section clearly states their bias, which isn’t inherently bad here. At the beginning they describe regenerative grazing and refute it while linking to various articles about the subject and why it’s stupid. Looking into the sources here it quickly becomes apparent that what they are talking about is the snake oil equivalent of environmental agriculture (essentially Regenerative Grazing is the claim that you can reverse climate change and desertification with a specific style of livestock grazing).
Next this article goes into a discussion attacking biodiversity claims, but doesn’t really seem to understand how biodiversity works.
When it comes to biodiversity there are primary, secondary, and tertiary species. When an environment is upset the primary species are the first to rebound but are generally more fragile in the long term while secondary and tertiary are slower, but hardier. For example, if a forest burns down pine trees are a primary succession species which quickly rebounds in just a few years, but oak trees are a secondary or tertiary species which take longer to grow and with enough time will outlast the pines and eventually crowd them out. By this logic the disturbance of an environment increases biodiversity, because it literally makes the environment more diverse. What is lost is that biodiversity is different between ecosystems, for example, the pine forests on the east coast of the US were historically a high biodiversity location because of frequent hurricanes and fires. The fires in these areas were actually essential for the long leaf pine, because the seeds do not sprout until they are heated by a fire. In this sense, these forests are meant to be regularly destroyed by fires and hurricanes to keep their ecosystem the way it is. In recent times humans have fought to prevent these wildfires which has hurt the long leaf pine forests.
Another example here would be an old growth oak forest which hasn’t seen flame or axe for 2000 years. Introducing biodiversity here would utterly destroy the historic ecosystem.
The article later goes on to talk about this topic themselves and how some ecosystems need disturbances for maintaining their biodiversity, but they get a bit… ¿Strange? with it:
Biodiversity isn’t magical, it’s a variable slider dependent on whatever desired ecosystem outcome is. If the desired outcome is an 1900 version of the Great Plains then reduced livestock is a great way to do that. If the desired outcome is a 1600 version of the Great Plains it definitely isn’t. Just like reintroducing wolves to Yellow Stone, it’s all about what the desired outcome is.
The article also brings up a study further refuting the regenerative grazing which discusses the grazing and livestock from the point of climate change, not from keeping the ecosystem healthy. This article, “Livestock Use on Public Lands in the Western USA Exacerbates Climate Change: Implications for Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation,” makes no statement about maintaining the ecosystem with the bison in mind and is singularly focused on emissions. So the argument which uses this article is at odds with the one they used earlier for biodiversity. One could argue that if the purpose is the eliminate emissions then you also wouldn’t want 60 million free ranging bison in this area either.
Later the article talks about the difference between Bison and Cows as you quoted. The article they link is actually really good, but it’s hard to find a full version of it (paywalls). I read what I could of the conclusion (part of it was clipped off). The take away from what I could read and what others said about this article is that Bison are definitely different and arguably better, but the downsides of cattle grazing are more to do with how cattle grazing is done, not the grazing itself. If cattle were forced to move around the pasture more, forced to be away from water sources and trees (which they seem to prefer unlike bison), and if you forced them to move along more, then as the original article says:
This journalist opinion piece (https://modernfarmer.com/2016/09/bison-vs-cattle-environment/) seems to reference the article (but their links are dead so I couldn’t confirm), but I liked their point:
I started this off as one post, but Lemmy didn’t like it so I’m breaking it into two:
PART 2
Next Article
Let’s start off by observing how this writer subtly plugs their new book…
One of the first articles this writer uses is for this statement:
Looking at the article they reference the conclusion states: (I had to do a lot of manual typing and editing as the source I found did not easily allow copy paste, so please forgive any typos)
This article while supporting the argument that livestock grazing is not as good as whatever native environment was there before the grazing, for the most part, it’s hardly the glaring result that the writer claims it is and the writers of the academic article even point out that it’s not universally the case. This portion of the article also discusses how a certain amount of grazing can cause an ecosystem to shift from it’s historic setting and create a novel new setting, implying that if grazing ceased the preexisting ecosystem wouldn’t return and instead you would simply destroy what is currently working.
I’m not going to get into the rest of this article as I started to cringe at the discussion of cyanide land mines.
Conclusion: When it comes to environmental journalism too often the people fail to use the articles they reference accurately and instead use the appeal to authority logical fallacy to make their biased, opinion based, points appear more valid. Often times a nugget of their argument is accurate, but as with much of journalism the goal is views, ratings, and book sales rather than a fair and accurate representation of science.