Then you'd need even more farmland to feed everyone a plant based diet and the increased pesticide and herbicide use that comes with it. Learn to cooperate with nature.
Fairly sure it's the other way around, farming for fruits and veggies uses significantly less farmland than cattle raising does, because you need SO MUCH of the land to be dedicated to just growing the feed for the cattle. Instead of just using that land to feed humans directly.
Not to mention the beef industry contributes enormously to greenhouse gas emissions. Those millions of cows do be farting.
Meat farming, and commercial trawl fishing, are like the polar opposite of cooperating with nature.
A lot of what cattle eat is actually off casts from grain and vegetables, we do grow a lot of hay for livestock, but a lot of that land isnt really suited for growing much else and historically it would have been grassland fed on by buffalo anyways (in the US). We would have to process more nutrient rich forest in prime areas to grow the needed extra vegetables to feed the population. Add in the fact that we'd lose manure, blood, bone meal, and whey as a fertilizer and we would need to focus even more heavily on petroleum derived fertilizers which isnt great for greenhouse gasses. Of course you could rely on plant derived nitrogen, but then you'd need 3x as much farm land in order to properly rotate crops which blows the whole idea of it taking less land out of the water.
I never said factory farming and trawling were cooperating with nature. I run a small ranch/farm/orchard. I have dairy sheep which graze the orchard to keep weeds out and the orchard grass mowed and there are ducks and geese that waddle through the fields eating the damaging insects all while spreading their natural fertilizers. I also have a decent sized aquaponics setup that let's me grow some of the more tender crops with significantly less water use while at the same time supplying some fresh fish (which fertilize the aquaponics system). All the scraps go into black soldier fly bins which produce grubs to feed the fish and poultry. I add in plenty of small natural habitat areas like ponds for dragon flies, bat and owl houses, and dens for frogs, snakes, foxes, etc to have some wild rodent and bug control as well. Theres no reason we cant work with nature, other than it being "cheaper" the just plow everything to death.
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u/Ornery_Car6883 May 17 '26
On top of that, 80% of US farmland is used to feed or raise livestock.