I agree, and we have vast amounts of land that are not very arable, but are perfectly good grazing lands. Uninformed people think that meat production is an inefficient diversion of vegetable foods like corn that could be used to feed people directly, but it does not have to be that way.
Range beef needs hay all winter......... tons of it. All livestock feed (not just corn) is produced using fuel intensive methods.
Just a note here...."people" dont convert corn as a food very efficently either. Very hard to digest.......passes right through. We dont do well on on wheat either.
Even if we went to all range beef the market would suffer. We would see an over stock of slaughter ready beef in the Fall that would drive prices down. Then if we want to carry over stock over the winter...those who survive would need supplemental feed to make it over the winter..... that would drive prices through the roof in the spring. A real hard winter or drought would be catastrophic.
I dont see many of todays kids willing to live in a line shack, haul salt and drive cattle to market now days either. It takes diesel to move these beefs every inch in todays market place. Tending cattle on a big grass spread requires hours a-horseback or on an ATV or pickup truck. One of those skill sets is about dead..... the alternative takes gas.
As we found out in the 1880's...you can grow skinny cattle in Texas year round... or fat ones in Montana if they make the winter. For the forseeable future ...the grain conversion -feed lot method is with us. Keep in mind to that the current methods of producing meat is the direct resuslt of industrial development....... we had to figure a way to feed hungry urbanites
As much as we want to jaw about it food production is fuel intensive. Oil prices that are manipulated by the traders and OPEC will eventually starve all of us if we dont figure out some alternatives.
Commercial hogs and poultry aint cheap to raise either. All grain, all the time.
Jeff
Hill
