this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2023
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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/