Cultivated land, regardless of how it's cultivated, is generally way worse for habitat conservation than pasture land because you are by definition destroying the native flora to plant food crops.
Here in the Canadian prairies, the ranches are by far the best conservators of native ecosystems because cows can graze on the same plants that bison did for the last millenia.
My province of Saskatchewan is one of the biggest producers of pulse crops in the world (chickpeas, lentils, etc..) but has also some of the worst habitat destruction worldwide (less than 3% of native grasslands remaining) precisely because so much land was plowed under to produce those crops.
Here in the Canadian prairies, the ranches are by far the best conservators of native ecosystems because cows can graze on the same plants that bison did for the last millenia.
My province of Saskatchewan is one of the biggest producers of pulse crops in the world (chickpeas, lentils, etc..) but has also some of the worst habitat destruction worldwide (less than 3% of native grasslands remaining) precisely because so much land was plowed under to produce those crops.