alt Hacker News> going vegetarian reduce one's environmental impact
Mmm, yes and no.
It depends where your meat comes from. If you buy meat the way it's produced in the US where you have great big sheds full of cattle in the desert with everything trucked in, then yes.
If you want permaculture, you absolutely must have livestock.
If you want arable farming of any sort, you absolutely must have livestock.
The whole thing breaks down very quickly if you don't have grass and clovers growing in fields, and ruminants eating them, breaking down the tough cellulose, and then shitting it out and trampling it in.
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The amount of cattle required to maintain pasture is way fewer than we have right now. From a CO2 perspective factory farmed cattle tends to look a little better than "free-range" mostly due to reduced land use changes (but it is obviously worse from a cruelty perspective). Finally, we can still have farm animals without eating them!!
You might be right, but I was taking that as a given since the article made that claim. I think the general point (of taking smaller actions in lieu of more effective but costly ones) matters more so than the individual "vanity activity".
Won’t that work better without killing & eating them young?
The amount of livestock that we actually would need in that case is probably around 5% of what we actually have (in the US). So it’s still valid if half of all people became vegetarian, and the remaining amount cut their meat consumption to “special occasions only”.
Keep in mind that a lot of our current agriculture is growing feed for livestock as well, so we could cut back on plant farming by a huge amount as well, if we greatly reduced livestock.