Of the total area that is used by humans (Agriculture, Urban and Built-up Land),
- urban and built-up land is 1m km²,
- agriculture is 48m km²,
so agriculture is 48 of 49 millions km² used, that’s 98%. The remaining 2% are all streets and housing and other infrastructure together.
Okay, but can we stop using suitable farmland to grow corn cattle feed?
The US could feed its own population multiple times over if we used something like 30% of our current agricultural farmland subject to growing animal feed instead for growing things like corn, soybean, and wheat, as well as vegetables and fruit.
We’d still need to import some stuff, but we could cover the vast majority of Americans’ nutrition doing this WHILE at the same time re-wilding the country and helping restore biodiversity.
Hope to see this shift in my lifetime
I’m wholly in support of this plan.
Yep for sure. The food grown to feed livestock (6M2 km) seems like it’s just feeding humans with extra steps. If you cut that out and feed humans directly. You’d still have livestock on grazing pad (32M2 km), just not the whole feedlot situation.
At that point we don’t need to farm animals.
Best thing to do at that point would be to outlaw breeding of new farm animals, send the remaining ones to sanctuaries, and let them live the rest of their lives out on their own terms. Might need to sterilize as well.
All of this would aim to restore natural populations of cows, pigs, chickens, goats, sheep, etc. in the world to native levels. And if those animals aren’t native, then imo there is no reason to help sustain them. Release to the wild at some point and let nature take it’s course. Of course, this also means restoring natural predators to ecosystems like wolves, which would help keep populations in check.
Those species that are native, however, but are declining and on the brink of extinction: those we should focus on for conservation and regeneration.
It’s a tough balance, but it can be done ethically
Or go a step further and stop doing animal farming.
Yeah, and those extra steps require more land and more water and more transportation and more harvesting and more processing etc etc. Every extra step makes the whole system less efficient. We’re essentially sacrificing farmland.
We’re not sacrificing it, exactly the opposite; without the demand for plant products generated by animal ag, we wouldn’t be able to exploit all that farmland. You know, for money.
During peacetime, all the corn fields kept operational with subsidy that just create corn which is fed to livestock seem like a waste.
But if China (or anybody else) pulls a fucky-wucky and makes it difficult to get food imported from outside the US, we slaughter the livestock and then have enough corn to feed the whole nation (and a lot of our allies). Without missing a beat.
You really still see yourself as belonging to the nation that protects the world, don’t you? Despite everything.
Yeah. Trump told you not to rely on Russian gas and did you listen? No, you didnt and now you buy Russian gas (through India), thus funding Russia, while telling us to shoulder the majority of the burden of funding Ukraine. Just for one example.
Y’all are threatening to kill your “allies” while trying to overthrow their democracies. You have no allies, and you sure as shit wouldn’t try to help them in a food shortage.
Allies? Lol.
Most of the corn cattle are eating is the stalk and husks. The stuff we’re going to grow regardless and would otherwise throw away.
Near slaughter when they get fattened up on feed lots (called finishing) it’s mostly cracked corn grain, it’s more towards the beggining of life that they’re fed roughage with only a small amount of supporting grain.