https://grist.org/food-and-agriculture/heres-how-much-cropland-could-be-freed-up-if-americans-ate-half-as-much-meat/
A national flexitarian diet would reduce the amount of U.S. farmland by roughly the size of South Dakota.
We already have way more farmland than we need. That's how we can produce cheap beef in the first place. The government pays farmers to grow corn and turn it into ethanol because we grow so much corn that it would tank the market to sell it all.
We should be turning cropland back into prairies and forests. Put some carbon back into the soil and create ecosystems to support biodiversity again.
A well-intentioned thought. There is indeed a lot of corn. Dedicated fields are valuable, and practical. We just need to find better use for them. 🙂
It's far easier said than done, but I would love to see fields of industrial hemp! It would clean the soil, water, and sky. Hemp has so many uses. We can wear it, our clothing would be stronger & last longer...I'm telling you, it would be worth a try.
I'm picturing a field of potatoes, beans and hemp laid out in optimized patterns and never 100% harvested. Throw in patches of natives and flowers and some shading solar panels you'd be really cookin... If feasable to totally no till and if it worked, after season, bring in some cows to clear the dead beans and after a few days, chickens to feast upon the poo-munchin invertabrates. Do soil maintenance if necessary... Add fruit trees for the lullz. Harvesting would have to be really clever... I bet after a decade or so, upkeep costs woild optimize.
Oh hush; it's my naive fantasy and I can do what I want.
We can likely get even more by shifting from gas cars to EVs; notice how much corn is converted into motor fuel:
Transition to irrigated only production combined with moving to EV and we'd need 75% less land for corn. While still eating the same amount of meat.
Banning open range and converting to annual crop rotational grazing would decrease land usage for grazing by 70-80%.
Moving all vegetable production to protected culture would decrease land area needed by 50% or more.
Around 70-80% of environments we destroy for farming/ranching is completely unnecessary. We have the technology and ability to grow what we need an less than 25% of the land area we currently dedicate for agriculture.
Here's a fun question. Do you just stop abruptly and release a few million cows to roam and do whatever a wild cow does, or do you have a huge feast
Slaughter the majority of exaliating stock over the course of a year and sell the rest as pets.
Not actually serious, but all of the major meat producing animals are slaughtered before their first birthday so phasing it out would take care of the population without needing to release millions of stock.
The real question is whether the species should be reintroduced to nature or not. It isn't like there are wild cattle outside of Africa and maybe Asia other than buffalo anymore*. We would need to take the time to reintroduce feral livestock so they could adapt.
*that I can recall off the top of my head.
Cattle don't have any of the survival instincts left, and they have been bred to be docile and overproducers of milk and meat. They would die of starvetion or dehydration with swollen udders and any number of horrific diseases.
That's not to say they are better off in factory farms, but if the question is should we reintroduce them to the wild, I would say no.
There are many breeds of cattle. Some which are on their own for most of the year. I am sure with some carefully selection (and maybe a few generations of crossbreeding) there could be viable breeds for reintroduction to most biomes which historically had wild cows
Hawaii has wild cattle that you can hunt. Not native, but still quite wild, and very dangerous.
We already have that huge feast.
There are about 1.5 billion cows on the globe, but cows would go extinct if we stopped breeding them for just 6 months.