It would be great for sequestering carbon dioxide (in the form of trees), which is really what most of it probably should be used for. Instead we're depleting the topsoil, using up all our non-renewable water, and poisoning the oceans. All for basically no reason.
Most of that land out West is too dry for many trees. There are some really interesting experiments for improving scrub plant growth using wavy rollers (water collects at bottom of rippled soil), but the fuel to plow that much land would probably do more harm than good.
Yes! I think a lot of people miss the water part. The land will not grow a lot of the plants we eat or large trees without irrigation. However cows and other animals can eat the scrub that grows there naturally so it makes some sense to raise cattle in these areas. It'd be interesting to see that pasture range broken out a bit more (feed lots, open grazing land, etc.). That said, I'm all for lowering our overall meat consumption. The amount of land for cattle and land for food for cattle is huge.
A grazing beef cow will drink about 7-10 gallons during the day. If it is hot, they will drink 25. Wheat yields around 1LB for 130 -150 gallons over the growing season. An avocado (1lb) requires about 90 Gallons over the growing season.
There are a lot of things to factor into this, crop yields aren't static and there are a lot of other things that can change the yields. Cows have legs, so you don't have to 'irrigate' them, they just have to be pastured within a couple thousand feet of water, and you can set up temporary solar pump + water trough if you have water within a couple miles.
Beef Cattle will give you 5-600 lbs of meat at about 1200 Calories per pound, with an average grazing time of 12 months. works out to 150cal/gallon.
Avocado has about 700+ cal per pound so about 8cal/gallon. (I'm not as sure on this, it could be lower as a 'medium' avocado is about 1/3 of a pound, but I've never grown avocados so I don't know the exact here.)
Calories in a whole grain wheat is about 1500/lb, so 1500/150 is about 10cal/gallon.
So it's kinda relative, but the only way you're going to harvest edible nutrients from scrub land is buy herding or hunting grazing animals that process the stuff with 4 stomachs.
There's a larger question of the value that grazing provides and if we need that as a food source. Before modern farming and shipping, if you lived in a semi-arid scrubland style climate, you were very much dependent on some type of animal to turn that stuff into a digestible food source for you.
Most grazing land was not cleared by people. It's just land that people graze their cattle on. Most of it is plains, and was never heavily forested. Also, when grass is eaten it absorbs much more carbon dioxide, so the grazing of the cattle is beneficial. Are you suggesting a better use of the land is for humans to plant a bunch of trees on it?
Unfortunately the methanogens in a cow’s gut mean that they’re an environmental disaster. I’ve read about seaweed being used to curb their, um, “output” yet unless thst comes into widespread use the state of affairs is grim. Grazing isn’t beneficial, it’s just a way to turn sequestered carbon into methane-belching cattle. Either we need to rapidly enact means to reduce those emissions with dietary additives, or we need to reduce the number of cattle.
Here’s a look at carbon sequestration in ecosystems in the Western US:
Because the bison were between 3x to 4x less numerous than cattle, lived far longer lives than the average 2.5 years to slaughter of a cow (not counting veal calves which are killed far sooner and never graze). It’s not just the number of cows or bison alive at any moment, but when you consider a 10 year period and count total individuals it’s even more stark due to rapid turnover of cattle. Buffalo were part of an ecosystem, so you had a loop of carbon in soil, carbon in plants, carbon in buffallo, and then a lot of that carbon returning to the soil as bison or wolf corpses.
Modern cattle spend some time grazing in the Great Plains, but start their lives on farms, and finish their lives on feed lots. Then they’re slaughtered, and more CO2 is emitted transporting them all around the country and indeed, world. Then of course, the bison existed in a world before heavy industry, a world of millions rather than billions of people, a world before automobiles, airplanes, coal fired plants, oil exploration, strip mining, rainforest clearing, ocean acidification and overfishing, etc... etc...
> Because the bison were between 3x to 4x less numerous than cattle
No, they weren't. You need to count only the cattle that are on the land under discussion.
> lived far longer lives than the average 2.5 years to slaughter of a cow
Irrelevant. One bovine is the same as another as far as the impact on the prairie is concerned. That's sort of how an ecosystem works, dude.
I'm skeptical that they lived "far longer lives", by the way. If they were anything like the wild grazing/browsing animals with which I am familiar (moose, caribou, musk ox) a WHOLE LOT of them died in their first year, either through being taken by predators or simply not surviving a harsh winter.
I strongly suspect you're using a lifespan figure for modern bison herds that are protected by human beings.
Because there were much fewer bison than there now are cows, and because the atmosphere wasn't already being pumped full of CO2, methane etc. by humans.
That is incorrect. The plains bison herds expanded to match the carrying capacity of the grazing.
Now, there are a lot of other cattle that aren't being grazed on the historical prairie. You might have a point with those, but it's not relevant to the point under discussion.
Because for most of their history, they weren’t accompanied by the massive carbon and methane emissions of their human counterparts’ industrialization? Seems self-evident.
I don't understand why - better being "more natural," right? Those plains have been feeding grazing animals for millennia, what should we do differently?
They were feeding grazing animals, but without all the massive externalities associated with industrial agriculture, from antibiotic resistance to its impact on climate change.
If you’re also of an ethical mindset similar to someone like Peter Singer, the “cultivation” of animals for slaughter is not something one should favor.
There are cows now within an industrialized agricultural context that we know to be a significant contribution to climate change. Would bison in this context produce the same outcome? It’s hard to say, but the two circumstances of their existence on this land is largely incomparable.
That's kind of a bizarre statement, since (as others have noted) the land was historically used by grazing bison, a creature so closely related to domestic cattle that they can even interbreed with them with a substantial amount of success.
The same is true of similar grasslands elsewhere in the world. Lots of grazing animals, which support a smaller population of predators (including humans).
Sure, that's why huge aquifers are shrinking and causing subsidence.
Today about 27% of the irrigated land in the entire United States lies over the aquifer, which yields about 30% of the ground water used for irrigation in the United States.[5] The aquifer is at risk for over-extraction and pollution. Since 1950, agricultural irrigation has reduced the saturated volume of the aquifer by an estimated 9%. Once depleted, the aquifer will take over 6,000 years to replenish naturally through rainfall.[6]
The whole forest doesn't die at once, the dead trees' biomass doesn't all break down at once, and said biomass largely gets incorporated into new seedlings that spring up in the now-open space.
Yeah, but they continually die in a cycle such that the overall CO2 levels never really get stored long term as it is all temporarily stored in the trees.
Many species of trees in most forests can live for over a thousand years. So reaching "mature" could take that long. I imagine the stored carbon level keeps rising till then. The amount of carbon sequestered in a forest full of 4 meter diameter fir trees 75 meters tall is huge. In a mature giant sequoia forest one even has huge dead trees not rotting away for millennia.
