The latest billionaire space circle jerk.

[The Grand Nudger]

??  I'm at a loss to understand your point here.  Overall, you seem to be saying increasing livestock is good for the environment and people have to eat meat.  Is that what you mean to say?

I was hazarding a guess as to one of the many reasons that the fb might arrive at a low estimate, there...but, yeah. Ill hop over to that below.  

Something like that, though, yes.  Like I mentioned in the beginning, it's complicated.  As we currently do it, mostly, it's not good for the environment, though it's effects can be and obviously have been overstated.  I don't advocate for the expansion of the conventional model.  As we can do it, and as we must do it, in the absence of petrochem ag - yes.  

It's a bit of a conundrum. We're going to need (alot) more natural fertility - but the main way we produce natural fertility today is itself tied up in the mining and pumping of food as an extraction industry. The War on Dirt. Oddly enough, that's the basis of the argument that feedlots, of all things, have a place in our sustainable future.


@Ranjr
Feedlot vacancies while numbers of pastured animals increase can suggest that more producers are trying to tap into the premium market.   That market is dominated by consumers looking to make an ecological and ethical choice, and that's what the industry provides them (or, at least..attempts to).  It's true that grass fed cattle will produce more methane than grain fed over the course of their lives - and partly because they live longer - but in practice, the cattle raised to tap into this market come from operations which explicitly market their carbon choices.  Their carbon sequestration methods could offset anywhere from 20-60% of that 5% of emissions down to livestock - and alot of them cut their emissions from transport in delivery or market range as well.  

Essentially, the market for sustainable meat is growing..and conventional operations are more and more concerned themselves.  What used to be a steadily plowed monoculture of grain with a feedlot may now be a local no till strip grazing operation that follows cattle with laying hens, and the hens with pigs.  Or maybe they're still doing the same thing...but pay far more attention to their inputs.  That's how pastured cattle can drive a reduction in emissions which might end up getting used as a benchmark.  

Its more likely that the fb was using an unrepresentatively low (or at least argued to be) benchmark and that rippled out into their estimates, than some bias influencing their findings.  This is certainly not the case with propagandists and shills who repeated a number retracted with explanation by it's own author, long after that retraction.

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Grain diet produces less methane than grass.  Not sure how pastures are helping there.  Holstein steers will still go to feedlots.

Have you ever heard the desert island food puzzle ?  You are shipwrecked on a deserted island and all you have are two crates of corn flakes and a crate full of live chickens.  What do you do, eat some of the cornflakes and feed some to the birds until they are gone, then eat the chickens, or eat the birds first, then the cornflakes.  Answer: birds first.  You lose calories if they eat the corn flakes, then you eat them.

You breed the birds.  They'll eat anything, even each other. Yall gonna kill your egg machine over some corn flakes? Who even likes corn flakes?

They started out as jungle birds....we're pretty sure...though you'd be hard pressed to find them in any jungles now.