Pretty much all of the food for our cattle is imported, I.e soy from Brasil etc. Capitalism combined with a lack of environmental taxes results in some crazy wasteful situations like this. It also results in the related cattle food etc industries subsidizing political parties and thus manipulating our government to let it keep on going and duck any responsibilities, like we have to the EU, that would risk stopping it.
When I biked from Amsterdam to Antwerp in ~2014, it was difficult to not run into a village every few km.
I guess there's no cheap enough real estate left to grow the massive amounts of soy, cow corn, and hay to feed the animals.
Since it's such a huge source of climate change GHGs, pandemics, antibiotic resistance, and air, water, and soil pollution, perhaps globally we need to scale back dairy and meat agriculture.
