Nutrient provision capacity of alternative livestock farming systems per area of arable farmland required.

ABSTRACT: Although climate impacts of ruminant agriculture are a major concern worldwide, using policy instruments to force grazing farms out of the livestock industry may diminish opportunities to produce nutritious food without exacerbating the food-feed competition for fertile and accessible land resources. Here, we present a new set of quantitative evidence to demonstrate that, per unit of overall nutrient value supplied by a given commodity, the demand for land suitable for human-edible crop production is considerably smaller under ruminant systems than monogastric systems, and consistently so at both farm and regional scales. We also demonstrate that imposition of a naïvely designed "red meat tax" has the potential to invite socioeconomic losses far greater than its environmental benefits, due

SUBMITTER: Lee MRF 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8298395 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature