Comment by philliphaydon
7 years ago
Can you cite that because my understanding is it takes less space to have live stock as you don’t need to do crop rotation. Organic is the worst as the yields are low you need to plant more to attempt to come close to the same yields as a GM crop.
Livestock always takes more land than an equivalent calorie-load of crops. It has to; you're feeding the crops to the animals instead of eating the crops yourself, so there's a lot of energy lost on building cows.
The actual farm footprint may be smaller, but the feed for those animals was still grown somewhere.
(Of course there are resources besides land. In desert environments, livestock still takes more land, but it takes several orders of magnitude less water, since ruminants can digest dry scrub while humans need well-watered grains. But in places that get plenty of rain, livestock is always less efficient.)
Tell me about my home country, which certainly has enough rain. Here's a photo: https://nasjonalparken.no/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/081-hes...
Sheep, goats and reindeer will spend the summer there and taste great. It's not done on that particular mountain at present due to... explanations vary, and generally contain some or all of the words "market price", "herders" and "bears".
I suppose you could say that keeping sheep there is less efficient than transporting grain from somewhere else. But that isn't the sense of "efficient" you had in mind, is it?
I don't know about Norway, but in general you might be underestimating how much that landscape looks like that because grazing animals range on it.
See e.g. this thread about Iceland & my top comment there, but perhaps the amount of ecological destruction doesn't carry over to Norway: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15515292
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Fair enough, there are other considerations besides just water that make land less practical for growing food crops. It still takes more land--square kilometers--to produce X calories of livestock than X calories of plants. It's just that sometimes there are more important factors than square kilometers. Water, soil quality, markets, terrain inclination.
A lot of land can’t be used for farming crops. But you can shove animals on much wider variety of land scapes. Meaning you don’t need to deforest on the same scale. Coupled with not needing to do crop rotation. Etc etc. Results in less land required.