you will see they are already farming everywhere they can farm…
it wouldn’t be “efficient” to ignore 88% of your productive land… and even if you do ignore it, the sun still shines on it, the grass still grows on it… something is going to eat that grass, even if it’s just bacteria… so the ecology is going to keep marching forward no matter what, that is why its a biocycle
how do you not understand that the more meat we consume, the more the crops that need to be grown? the vast majority of farmed animal meat is grown with far more crops than it would ever take to just feed people the plants. its incredibly simple arithmetic.
Most crop biomass is not edible by humans, so that 70% of biomass we can’t eat is fed to animals. That doesn’t mean the crops are grown exclusively for animals, it’s just an industrial efficiency
It seems like you were not able to look at the map, 88% of the food producing land of Australia is only suitable for grazing animals, to make meat
I guess there are no consequences to flooding a land with non-native cows or sheep or whatever and letting them eat everything in sight. Or even just artificially increasing the native population of your choice to do the same.
Care to show your work on that one? If we assume a carnivore diet would need about 1 kg of meat per day, beef herds need over 300 m2 of land per kg of food produced and Australia has a population of around 28 million, you’d need 8.4 million km2 of land to raise that beef and Australia, a continent famous for having a low population density and according to wikipedia less than 7.7 million km2, doesn’t have enough land to feed its own population.
Where are you getting the idea that ruminants raised for meat are more efficient than crops? And we’re not even getting into the climate change implications of everyone switching to an all/mostly meat diet.
You have been downvoting my comments, which tells me your not a good faith participant, but probably acting emotionally in defense of a philosophy. That’s fine, but if that is your bias anything I say will either be ignored, or you will immediately pivot to another what-about-ism. I’ve been clear about my bias (human health first), so even if you are correct about the efficiency of plants, it won’t change my position… it just so happens you are incorrect, if you would like to look at data I invite you to read https://www.aleph2020.org/
clanker-response-to-your-argument
Your argument fails on both arithmetic and methodology.
First, your maths is wrong.
28 million × 1 kg/day × 365 × 300 m²/kg = 3.066 million km², not 8.4 million.
Even using your graph’s exact 326.21 m²/kg, it’s 3.334 million km².
At 500 g/day of animal food, including edible fat and organs, that becomes 1.667 million km², roughly 22% of Australia.
And you’re applying a global beef-herd average as though it measures Australian grazing capacity or represents all animal foods. It does neither.[1]
Second, your own research exposes the flaw in your land-use argument.
Its modeled removal of beef-herd beef and mutton frees 1.92 billion hectares globally, of which 1.85 billion (96%) are pasture. Arable land decreases by only 70 million hectares (~6%).[2][3]
Pasture isn’t cropland. Roughly two-thirds of global grazing grassland cannot be converted to cropland.[3:1][4] Ruminants produce human food from vegetation growing on land unsuitable for cultivation.
Third, ruminants can outperform crops when land suitability is considered.
A direct comparison found that dairy cattle on marginal peat soils produced 1 kg of human-digestible protein where crops could produce only 0.67 kg on the same land.[5]
Globally, 86% of livestock feed is human-inedible, and only ~5% of ruminant feed consists of potentially food-competing grains and soybean meal.[4:1][6]
Australian beef systems achieved quality-adjusted human-edible protein output/input ratios of 1.96 (grain-finished) and 1,597 (grass-fed), the latter reflecting negligible human-edible feed inputs.[7]
That’s converting resources humans cannot directly consume into high-quality nutrition.
Fourth, count the whole animal.
An Australian lamb study found edible co-products contributed 24% of edible weight, 37% of fat and 42% of iron.[8]
Ignoring edible fat and organs understates nutritional output. Kilograms of meat alone don’t capture total food value.
Finally, biogenic methane isn’t fossil CO₂.
Cattle recycle atmospheric carbon captured through photosynthesis. Methane has an atmospheric lifetime of approximately a decade.
Stable methane emissions sustain approximately stable methane-driven warming, unlike continuing fossil CO₂ emissions, whose warming effects accumulate. GWP* accounts for this fundamental difference.[9][10]
Your 8.4-million-km² calculation is wrong. Your broader argument confuses global land-use averages with Australian carrying capacity, pasture with cropland, raw food weight with nutritional efficiency, and biogenic methane with fossil carbon.
Your conclusion doesn’t follow from your evidence.
I think it boils down to not trusting you to argue in good faith to begin with. You are, after all, the same person that sent me a UN article about how some plants can contain toxins in response to me asking why herbs and spices are bad for you and ultimately wanted me to read a self help book instead of actually explaining why you think herbs and spices are bad for you. And now you’re just having chatGPT write your responses.
Edit: and my math was wrong, I forgot a square kilometer was 1 million square meters instead of 1,000.
Even using your graph’s exact 326.21 m²/kg, it’s 3.334 million km²
So it would take up a little under half of Australia’s total land mass, in a famously empty country.
At 500 g/day of animal food, including edible fat and organs, that becomes 1.667 million km², roughly 22% of Australia
I don’t know why you think this part is okay when you’re arguing “carnivore isn’t a priveledge” as if anyone anywhere could do it, but fine. The average person only needs to eat 500g of food per day. This still wouldn’t work for anyone in a country about 4.5 times as densely populated as Australia, which according to wikipedia is… 219 of them out of 244.
30% is still quite a lot (much more than just eating a plant!), and the land still has uses beyond just farmland.
https://www.agriculture.gov.au/sites/default/files/images/abares-snapshot-2026-2-land.png
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dib.2022.108852
you will see they are already farming everywhere they can farm…
it wouldn’t be “efficient” to ignore 88% of your productive land… and even if you do ignore it, the sun still shines on it, the grass still grows on it… something is going to eat that grass, even if it’s just bacteria… so the ecology is going to keep marching forward no matter what, that is why its a biocycle
You could use the same argument to throw a datacenter there, but just because nature is undistributed doesn’t mean we need to disturb it.
Efficiency also includes space efficiency, as we have destroyed more habitats in the past hundred years than some extinction events.
how do you not understand that the more meat we consume, the more the crops that need to be grown? the vast majority of farmed animal meat is grown with far more crops than it would ever take to just feed people the plants. its incredibly simple arithmetic.
Unfortunately, simple and true are often at odds
Most crop biomass is not edible by humans, so that 70% of biomass we can’t eat is fed to animals. That doesn’t mean the crops are grown exclusively for animals, it’s just an industrial efficiency
It seems like you were not able to look at the map, 88% of the food producing land of Australia is only suitable for grazing animals, to make meat
I guess there are no consequences to flooding a land with non-native cows or sheep or whatever and letting them eat everything in sight. Or even just artificially increasing the native population of your choice to do the same.
If you start with the premiss that humans need to live and be healthy - and work backwards from there, you end up with ruminants and land conservation
Care to show your work on that one? If we assume a carnivore diet would need about 1 kg of meat per day, beef herds need over 300 m2 of land per kg of food produced and Australia has a population of around 28 million, you’d need 8.4 million km2 of land to raise that beef and Australia, a continent famous for having a low population density and according to wikipedia less than 7.7 million km2, doesn’t have enough land to feed its own population.
Where are you getting the idea that ruminants raised for meat are more efficient than crops? And we’re not even getting into the climate change implications of everyone switching to an all/mostly meat diet.
poore-nemecek 2018 is not good science. do you have a source that supports this claim without combining disparately methodized LCA studies?
You have been downvoting my comments, which tells me your not a good faith participant, but probably acting emotionally in defense of a philosophy. That’s fine, but if that is your bias anything I say will either be ignored, or you will immediately pivot to another what-about-ism. I’ve been clear about my bias (human health first), so even if you are correct about the efficiency of plants, it won’t change my position… it just so happens you are incorrect, if you would like to look at data I invite you to read https://www.aleph2020.org/
clanker-response-to-your-argument
Your argument fails on both arithmetic and methodology.
First, your maths is wrong.
28 million × 1 kg/day × 365 × 300 m²/kg = 3.066 million km², not 8.4 million.
Even using your graph’s exact 326.21 m²/kg, it’s 3.334 million km².
At 500 g/day of animal food, including edible fat and organs, that becomes 1.667 million km², roughly 22% of Australia.
And you’re applying a global beef-herd average as though it measures Australian grazing capacity or represents all animal foods. It does neither.[1]
Second, your own research exposes the flaw in your land-use argument.
Its modeled removal of beef-herd beef and mutton frees 1.92 billion hectares globally, of which 1.85 billion (96%) are pasture. Arable land decreases by only 70 million hectares (~6%).[2][3]
Pasture isn’t cropland. Roughly two-thirds of global grazing grassland cannot be converted to cropland.[3:1][4] Ruminants produce human food from vegetation growing on land unsuitable for cultivation.
Third, ruminants can outperform crops when land suitability is considered.
A direct comparison found that dairy cattle on marginal peat soils produced 1 kg of human-digestible protein where crops could produce only 0.67 kg on the same land.[5]
Globally, 86% of livestock feed is human-inedible, and only ~5% of ruminant feed consists of potentially food-competing grains and soybean meal.[4:1][6]
Australian beef systems achieved quality-adjusted human-edible protein output/input ratios of 1.96 (grain-finished) and 1,597 (grass-fed), the latter reflecting negligible human-edible feed inputs.[7]
That’s converting resources humans cannot directly consume into high-quality nutrition.
Fourth, count the whole animal.
An Australian lamb study found edible co-products contributed 24% of edible weight, 37% of fat and 42% of iron.[8]
Ignoring edible fat and organs understates nutritional output. Kilograms of meat alone don’t capture total food value.
Finally, biogenic methane isn’t fossil CO₂.
Cattle recycle atmospheric carbon captured through photosynthesis. Methane has an atmospheric lifetime of approximately a decade.
Stable methane emissions sustain approximately stable methane-driven warming, unlike continuing fossil CO₂ emissions, whose warming effects accumulate. GWP* accounts for this fundamental difference.[9][10]
Your 8.4-million-km² calculation is wrong. Your broader argument confuses global land-use averages with Australian carrying capacity, pasture with cropland, raw food weight with nutritional efficiency, and biogenic methane with fossil carbon.
Your conclusion doesn’t follow from your evidence.
Poore & Nemecek data — Our World in Data ↩︎
Poore & Nemecek (2018) — Corrected Supplementary Materials, p. 63 ↩︎
ALEPH2020 — Land Use and Biodiversity ↩︎ ↩︎
Mottet et al. (2017) ↩︎ ↩︎
Van Zanten et al. (2016) — Land Use Efficiency ↩︎
ALEPH2020 — Feed-Food Competition ↩︎
Thomas et al. (2021) ↩︎
Wingett & Alders (2023) ↩︎
ALEPH2020 — Greenhouse Gas Emissions ↩︎
Lynch et al. (2020) — GWP* ↩︎
I think it boils down to not trusting you to argue in good faith to begin with. You are, after all, the same person that sent me a UN article about how some plants can contain toxins in response to me asking why herbs and spices are bad for you and ultimately wanted me to read a self help book instead of actually explaining why you think herbs and spices are bad for you. And now you’re just having chatGPT write your responses.
Edit: and my math was wrong, I forgot a square kilometer was 1 million square meters instead of 1,000.
So it would take up a little under half of Australia’s total land mass, in a famously empty country.
I don’t know why you think this part is okay when you’re arguing “carnivore isn’t a priveledge” as if anyone anywhere could do it, but fine. The average person only needs to eat 500g of food per day. This still wouldn’t work for anyone in a country about 4.5 times as densely populated as Australia, which according to wikipedia is… 219 of them out of 244.