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Comment by megaman22 | Hacker News Reader

You're comparing alfalfa and oranges. You're not going to grow wheat on pastureland that can support sheep or cattle. Much less other vegetables.

You're also making the assumption that agricultural land is a resource that needs conservation, when there is a massive surplus of it. We've allowed huge tracts to revert to forest on the east coast.

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Allowing more to revert to forest would help moderate CO2 levels. Assuming, that is, we didn't do what we're doing with U.S southeastern forests: converting vast areas into wood pellets, so they can be fed into power plants in Europe.

65% of the grain grown in the US is fed to animals:

https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel...

Start feeding that directly to people instead and you can use the rest of that land a lot more efficiently. And that's not even addressing all the other nasty externalities of breeding that many animals.

More efficiently for what?

Just because there is a surplus of agricultural does mean we should use it.

The one that we use is already causing massive environmental problems.

Grasing is not an inocous activity, there are the methane emissions that are very impactful.

I'm sure I'm misunderstanding you but... How is conservation of agricultural land not important?

I mean, isn't not being good stewards of the land what gave us the dust bowl?

Conservation isn't the best word there. Maybe optimization is better. It's not scarce, we don't need to agonize over calorie outputs per acre. And if you're going to do that, you don't want to be intensively farming most of this cattle country - there's one of the reasons for the dust bowl.

Ah okay, that makes more sense. Thanks.

From a resource perspective there is no surplus, due to opportunity costs in land conversion. Mid-term prospects for meeting global food demand boil down to increasing production yields. (Sure, distant technology will probably change this a bit).

http://www.futuredirections.org.au/publication/the-future-pr...

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