I guess this also counts steppe lands in Mongolia where shepards pass through with their herds once a year. The numbers likely look different if you look at industrialized countries where animals live in stables.
If everyone ate as much meat, dairy, etc. as many industrialized countries do, there would be no land left. If everyone ate like Americans, we would need 137% of the world’s habitable land which includes forests, urban areas, arable and non-arable land, etc. Cutting down every forest wouldn’t even be enough
I think the numbers might surprise you. This is where the original graphic came from and contains much more information on the topic. More developed countries especially tend to use far more land for agriculture due to their larger animal agriculture industries (by both percentage of our total agricultural land use and absolute size of our animal agriculture industry compared to less developed countries). Even the land that is used to grow crops is mostly there so that we have something to feed the literal billions of animals we kill per year in the US alone. Even with more efficient land use and farming techniques the sheer scale of our animal agriculture industry vastly outweighs whatever inefficiency is involved in things like what you are describing. And as the chart near the bottom shows, despite our increases in efficiency with the abhorrent practices of factory farming, producing 100 grams of protein in the form of beef for example is far far far more inefficient still. And that’s not even taking into account things like how much water it takes to produce that protein, the effect on the ecosystem, the ethical implications, the effect on the climate, etc.
For anyone curious what things look like for some of those other environmental issues:
Transitioning to plant-based diets (PBDs) has the potential to reduce diet-related land use by 76%, diet-related greenhouse gas emissions by 49%, eutrophication by 49%, and green and blue water use by 21% and 14%, respectively, whilst garnering substantial health co-benefits
[…]
Plant-based foods have a significantly smaller footprint on the environment than animal-based foods. Even the least sustainable vegetables and cereals cause less environmental harm than the lowest impact meat and dairy products [9].
To produce 1 kg of protein from kidney beans required approximately eighteen times less land, ten times less water, nine times less fuel, twelve times less fertilizer and ten times less pesticide in comparison to producing 1 kg of protein from beef
I guess this also counts steppe lands in Mongolia where shepards pass through with their herds once a year. The numbers likely look different if you look at industrialized countries where animals live in stables.
If everyone ate as much meat, dairy, etc. as many industrialized countries do, there would be no land left. If everyone ate like Americans, we would need 137% of the world’s habitable land which includes forests, urban areas, arable and non-arable land, etc. Cutting down every forest wouldn’t even be enough
Source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-global-habitable-land-needed-for-agriculture-if-everyone-had-the-diet-of
I think the numbers might surprise you. This is where the original graphic came from and contains much more information on the topic. More developed countries especially tend to use far more land for agriculture due to their larger animal agriculture industries (by both percentage of our total agricultural land use and absolute size of our animal agriculture industry compared to less developed countries). Even the land that is used to grow crops is mostly there so that we have something to feed the literal billions of animals we kill per year in the US alone. Even with more efficient land use and farming techniques the sheer scale of our animal agriculture industry vastly outweighs whatever inefficiency is involved in things like what you are describing. And as the chart near the bottom shows, despite our increases in efficiency with the abhorrent practices of factory farming, producing 100 grams of protein in the form of beef for example is far far far more inefficient still. And that’s not even taking into account things like how much water it takes to produce that protein, the effect on the ecosystem, the ethical implications, the effect on the climate, etc.
Yep it takes plenty of feed:
For anyone curious what things look like for some of those other environmental issues:
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/8/1614/htm
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25374332/