Cowspiracy was nothing but vegan propaganda. There are many ways that beef cattle can and are being raised that improve and regenerate land including reducing GHG emissions by sequestering carbon and oxidizing methane.

Again, you’re oversimplifying Daniel. Let’s start with soybeans, 90% of soybeans are pressed for soybean oil. Soybean oil isn’t fed to livestock. Neither are biofuels, alcohol, ethanol, sugar, styrofoam, soy lecithin, high fructose corn syrup, biodegrablde plastics, etc. In our biobased economy, different parts of the plants go to different uses so there are a number of co- and by- products with pretty much every crops, and livestock eat a lot of the items that can’t be used for other uses. The feed industry started as a by-product industry. Cattle now are fed almond husk and palm fruit as well. They get a lot of the waste that humans can’t eat.

Though I’m all for growing less soy and dent corn, as well as palm oil trees, but’s that’s because I get my cooking fats from lard pigs and use eggs for emulsifiers. I don’t need the vegetable fats or other additives.

Regardless, pretty much all tilled Ag is devastating for soil ecosystems. Plows tear apart the mycorrhizal fungi. Most organic Ag is tilled, heavily irrigated, and done leaving ground exposed. There are better no- till ways to grow organic produce but these methods aren’t widely practiced. And, no, hydroponics don’t provide eco friendly solution because their nutrient solutions are agrochemicals derived from industrial processes…Just take a look at where the phosphorus comes from…plenty of sentient animals died to mine that phosphorus.

So you’re just providing cliches rather than real arguments…especially since livestock can be grazed in intact natural ecosystems like grasslands, and silvo pasture…and this is where the vast majority of the globe’s ruminants are being raised.

There is a major problem with your efficiency argument Daniel, and that’s very little of the earth’s land mass is arable (on average per continent only 12%) whereas a lot more of the earth’s land mass is grazable (on average around 35%) . So if you live in regions of the world where the earth is grazable but not arable, the only way you get food off the land is via grazing, not crop production. Ruminants turn inedible grasses into proteins humans can consume.

But even arable land has to be re-supplied with nutrients, and be protected from erosion. The best way to do this, especially in more brittle environments, is with integrated livestock. Ruminants build soil a lot faster than conservation systems without ruminants because they increase soil ecosystem biodiversity plus provide minerals without the needs for inputs, especially phosphorus. Tilled Ag systems destroy soil ecosystems, and when left exposed lead to a lot of soil erosion. At the current rate, farms are losing topsoil, there won’t be any soil left if 50 or sixty years. Integrated livestock also can be used to grazed down cover crops and crop residues….and again, crop residues are portions of crops that aren’t digestible by humans. So again the efficiency argument again fails, if you have depleted soils that are input dependent for any yields.

Meat is demonized so often because any good that you can legitimately find in animal agriculture is vastly outweighed by the negative impacts.

Just because you can make something less bad doesn’t make it right. Why fight so hard to preserve an intrinsically wasteful and unnecessary industry? Even animals that convert the highest percentage of feed into animal flesh don’t come close to 100% efficiency. Every nutrient in animal flesh is derived from plants. Eating only plants uses less land than animal agriculture ever will, and there are sustainable methods of farming that don’t require animal inputs. We would also be ingesting all of the plant’s nutrients instead of wasting most of them by feeding them to and then eating livestock.