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.
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.