My initial reaction to this article was surprise and retisence as it proposed the opposite what my common sense and engineering mind tells me: given the total arable land aavaialbe, the expected world population and the yield of energy/protein per unit area, it would be more energy/protein efficient to grow appropriate food for people and not feed for animals to be eaten. (see my related story on https://medium.com/@peter.wurmsdobler/thoughts-on-the-economic-prospects-of-dairy-farmers-in-a-vegan-world-2d4e804d47c9). My thinking was and isstrongly influenced by the numbers in “There is no Planet B” by Mike Berners Lee, ttps://theresnoplanetb.net/, which presents a compelling case for the transition to a plant based diet.
Being intrigued by the article's proposition, however, I followed up on Allan Savory and watched an interesting documentary, Kiss The Ground, https://kissthegroundmovie.com/. The key message for me is that not all types of land are the same and I must not confuse them. On one hand, it does make sense to produce energy/protein crops on prime arable land to feed the world directly through mostly plant-based diet rather than through cattle and chicken feed as meat. For this type of land using modern, no-till farming offers the additional benefit of sequestering large amounts of carbon into the soil.
On the other hand, and more importantly, an even larger portion of land is not suitable for growing crops; this may include mountainous areas, and in particular areas of intermittent humidity (in many cases facing desertification). There, using more cattle in a well manageed manner seems to achieve various targets: cover the land with vegetation to sequester CO2; produce meat in a sustainable way; and lift the affected countries out of poverty. Perhaps those countries would become main meat producers and contribute at some point themselves to feeding the world, but using land which does not compete with other crops.
Bottom line: use no-till farming where possible on arable land to produce baseline amount plant-based foodstuff; use cattle or other animals in a managed where appropriate; both energy/protein streams are not mutually exclusive but complementary, and both help mitigate climate change.
Desiree, your provocative article has achieved at least one goal: to consider things in a more balanced way.
