Comment by oblio
14 hours ago
We could probably reduced cultivated land by 50% if we would stop wanting to eat mid-sized or large animals (cows and pigs).
14 hours ago
We could probably reduced cultivated land by 50% if we would stop wanting to eat mid-sized or large animals (cows and pigs).
It's not that simple. Large herbivores are necessary for many environments and useful agriculturally even if we didn't eat them. Desertification caused by removing trees and grazing without replenishing, nutrients lost because sunlight and wind are scraping the bare soil, monoculture deserts and insecticides killing off pollinators and destroying ecologies... It's the factory farming and profit-motivated short-termist resource extraction that's a problem, not the cows and pigs. We can transition to sustainable methods without decreasing food variety.
some ruminants are good because they can turn inedible biomass into calories. However the scale at which we farm them is orders of magnitude beyond those levels.
I'm fairly sure there weren't 1.5 billion cows in the world before humans.
There were many other large mammals, but we've destroyed a lot of biodiversity already.
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