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Comment by Dudhbbh3343 | Hacker News Reader

I doubt the typical HN reader is familiar with the acronym CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation), at least I wasn't.

Your link seems specific to grassland. How is it relevant to other types of land?

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You have the internet and you used it. I'm not your encyclopedia or ChatGPT Wikipedia summarizer. There is no excuse for defending ignorance or the promotion of anti-intellectualism here.

Without healthy prairies, huge tracts of land decay into deserts and that fucking sucks. It's tragic and avoidable, but planting trees is a largely impractical, overly-simplistic strategy promoted by people who don't understand ecology.

Even on grassland I wonder if that’s ideal. Look at the prairie for example - the native tall grasses have massive roots and they don’t need cows chewing on them but they do need to burn every now and then. Most of the biomass and carbon is under ground in these systems

They don’t need cows, but praries evolved with bison. There’s positive effects on carbon sequestration from short, intense grazing, much like a roaming herd of bison would have done. It’s not just removal of grass, it’s also nutrient cycling, enzymes in their spit stimulating additional growth nodes, hooves causing disturbance and pressing seeds into soil, all kinds of neat stuff. That’s NOT the same as cattle on public lands. It’s also not the same as fire, even though fire is awesome.

For reference, I’m a prescribed fire practitioner and manage a chunk of grassland with primitive sheep.

I’m all for bringing more bison back

Bison are rad. Here's where to see them: https://www.fws.gov/refuge/wichita-mountains

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