The redneck strike again.

[The Grand Nudger]

They CAN, but don't. You know as well as I do how the US cattle industry works.

Yes, they do, how many times do I have to repeat this? Feed corn is not corn fit for human consumption. All corn isn't created equal, so to speak. I'll explain some of the differences, in the specifics.

Feed corn is largely grown without irrigation. It's planted with the stalks pretty much supporting each other and with no discernable rows. Very dense stuff. It requires a lesser amount of nutrients and can be treated with more herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides, more often..though it doesn't have to be to provide a decent ROI (because livestock don;t seem to care how pretty their food is). Lesser compared to table corn, that is. Table corn which requires more water, about a palms breadth between stalks, and a foot and a half between rows. Table corn which cannot be treated with the same spectrum of chemicals and must be managed much more carefully with regards to those chemicals. Table corn also has to meet marketability requirements, people just don't buy ugly food, it is what it is. Granted, most of the unmarketable stuff gets processed (but we see what sort of trouble that's been getting us into and yes, this less-than-marketable excess does get fed to livestock when the human consumption market is flooded - the alternative being to simply throw it away).

(table corn, feedcorn, canning corn, processing corn...all of these things are different commodities)

I agree and have said so. If cattle were truly free-grazed, on land that was unsuitable for human-edible plant crops, then nobody could make an efficiency claim. There could still be other issues-- methane production and potentially disease issues, but I don't think anyone could argue that cattle kill as many voles and birds as industrial vegetable farming practices do.

The corn and the feedlots are even more efficient than grazing (that's why we do it that way). I wouldn't do it, but meh, you know.

There's another option-- reverse the industrial efficiencies and focus on other values-- sustainability, lower impact on ecosystems, etc. Doing this requires smaller (or no) machinery, basically a technological step back. If we have billions of people sitting around doing essentially nothing, why not scrap the 100-meter-wide threshers or whatever (I hope I'm exaggerating but not sure), and get people actually working fields by hand? Hand-picking grain would save all those voles and birds I was talking about, and give people a respect for their food they haven't had in a long time.

Plenty of options, but I don't know if I'd advocate for the luddite option. You wouldn't tell a doctor to take a step beck, right? I am a smaller machinery guy myself, smaller and better, more advanced - more efficient. Hand harvest is unlikely to save much wildlife, but there's something to be said for putting hungry people to work in a garden. Ultimately though, it won't work. Human labor is the highest cost of production, even though most fieldworkers get paid dick as is, and an army of them (larger than the current army) would only serve to make food even more expensive and less efficient. There are some pretty novel production systems for row crops that could tilt the scales a little bit, like vertical integration (essentially get more out of the human machine per step taken) but it's hard to compete with the machines.

Well, either we self-limit, or we continue to grow until there are no real viable solutions. Right now, changes in food production could improve our quality of life and minimize the environmental effects of so many people. But if we get more efficient, and end up supporting 20 billion people, we'll hit a point where only efficiency matters, and quality of life is no longer an option to consider.

That's one of those bridges we'd have to cross when we got there, and wouldn't it be fantastic to have such a problem? 20 billion people, all of them adequately fed, wondering not so much how to stop them from starving, but how to increase their quality of life.