This hasn’t been true since decades now. 96% of cattle is raised on grain instead of grazing. Merely 4% in the US are allowed to be called „grass fed“ and that doesn’t even mean they are grazing year round.
That article does say that only 4% is "grass-fed", but I don't think that implies 96% of beef cattle never graze, merely that they don't graze enough to meet the "grass-fed" labeling requirements.
I grew up on a small farm and from there and the other beef producers I know the practice is as parent describes. Cattle are raised on pasture then eventually auctioned off to feedlots that fatten them them up with grain a couple months before slaughter.
My understanding is that USDA grass-fed labelling is dubious at best since late 2016. You need to look at trusted 3rd party labels, looking for grass fed, grain finished, or grass finished to get a sense of what was actually fed. Most cows will eat grass at some point in their lives (especially as calfs, from what I've read).
One trouble too is that grass fed NEVER strictly means pastured, and in fact, it rarely does. It can even mean they've been fed grass-based feed, which isn't whole grass but a processed feed containing grass. This is a feed that might be implemented in a feed lot, for example.
That's the next issue. When consumers think of grass fed, they imagine open fields, space, etc. No, this is not how it works; grass is still used in feed lots, and the vast majority of beef in North America comes from feed lots (recent figures indicate 95% or more). Depending on the country and farm, animals may spend the beginning of their lives with pastures, but many don't. They may then spend anywhere from a couple months to over half a year in a feed lot for finishing. These conditions are absolutely brutal, and not worth supporting in my opinion. The externalities of feed lots are absolutely absurd.
> It's still a tremendous amount of grain.
Up to 10lb per day, apparently. Imagine, in a week you could have roughly ten pounds each of 7 nutritious grains and legumes saved for a human being to eat. Lentils, peas, millet, wheat, oats, etc. That would go really far for a human being, and actually provide a lot of nutrition as whole foods. Somehow we've meandered so far from that kind of diet, but science backs it up in spades: we should be eating those things instead of using that land for feeding soy and corn to cattle.
So fix the laws so that economics aligns with ecology, no?
The solution is to stop wasting strategic reserves of water and fertilizer to make non-arable land into arable land. Grow grass on this land instead and turn it into pasture. (Okay, so meat will be 15% more expensive.)
Making use of non-arable land in a sustainable way is why humans invented livestock in the first place.
Humans aren't herbivores, and growing crops suitable for human consumption requires enormous amounts of resources and engineering. (Essentially, terraforming on a planetary scale.) The planet's ecology can't sustain a herbivore human race.
Do you understand the sheer amount of effort mankind must spend on soil engineering, irrigation, fertilizers and genetic engineering just to make grains that can feed people?
If we were forced to eat only natural plants (not plants genetically engineered though thousands of years of unnatural selection) then 99.9 percent of mankind would starve.
Meanwhile cows eat natural grass on natural pastures.
We need livestock if we want to live in balance with nature without irreversibly changing the structure of the Earth's biosphere.
I need to see the papers you're reading about this. I've never seen anything scientific suggesting this is true, and if anything, it's the complete opposite: we need to eat plants instead, because it would actually reduce burdens on arable land while reducing overall GHG emissions.
In North America the average farm is using massive amounts of inputs from other farms. Whether it's grass or grains, these inputs from from conventional farms using fertilizers and irrigation that we could be putting into human-friendly crops. That's an insane waste of energy and resources.
Sure there are farms using fewer inputs from arable land, and that's great. Perhaps those are the only ones which should raise livestock. The rest should stop, because the inefficiency comes with externalities our countries and the world literally cannot sustain.
I think you're misinformed. As parent request, you need citations to support your honestly pretty wild claims.
Land used for growing livestock feed would in a very large part be just as suitable for human food production, and we wouldn't even use that much of it. Ruminants are not any kind of necessary part of food security, on the contrary -- without livestock large parts of current farm land could be released back to nature.
Nobody is suggesting to eat "natural plants" as neolithic gatherers might have done.
Before Europeans colonized North America there were 30+ million bison roaming the plains. Today, we have have 30 million beef cattle. People make it out to be like the scale is unnatural but Mother Nature is quite capable of scale herself.
The key thing here is that those bison were eating grasses and leafy greens from the wild, not from extensive grass and grain farming operations (all of which largely exclude other plant, animal, and insect life). 30 million bison roaming and grazing makes sense, but sustaining them largely off of conventional farm outputs isn't the same thing.
