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How America Uses Its Land

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Re: How America Uses Its Land

#211

Post by sorrymate »

jpadkins wrote: post #187
vfc1 wrote: post #134

Looking at that map, Between livestock pasture, feed and feed export it accounts for around 45% of the US. Food that we eat is only a small fraction. Isn’t this a huge waste of resources, and completely unsustainable? If we ate the produce directly instead of feeding it to cows and eating them, how many people could we feed? What about the gigantic consumption of water this implies? The link between this to global wa…

> What about the gigantic consumption of water this implies? The water isn't destroyed. It goes right back into the ecosystem. The planet surface is 70% water. We aren't running out of water. > how many people could we feed? The US could probably feed the entire world with meat, with unlimited energy / $$. People going hungry is not a food production problem, it's an economic and logistic problem. If we use plant bas…

Sure, 70% of the earths surface is water. 97.5% being salt water and 2.5% being fresh water. You can't use sea water to irrigate agriculture. You can't drink sea water from the faucet. Additional money/ cost and work would be need to make the water drinkable. Please consider that many states like California, Nevada, Arizona, Texas, water is a valuable resource. And yes, we are running out of cheap drinkable water. That's why most of the west coast gets most of their water all the way from Colorado.

Re: How America Uses Its Land

#212

Post by njarboe »

ceejayoz wrote: post #52
mrep wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but they continually die in a cycle such that the overall CO2 levels never really get stored long term as it is all temporarily stored in the trees.

Yes, but putting a forest where there wasn't a forest increases the amount of stored CO2. It just doesn't keep increasing once the forest is mature.

Many species of trees in most forests can live for over a thousand years. So reaching "mature" could take that long. I imagine the stored carbon level keeps rising till then. The amount of carbon sequestered in a forest full of 4 meter diameter fir trees 75 meters tall is huge. In a mature giant sequoia forest one even has huge dead trees not rotting away for millennia.

Re: How America Uses Its Land

#213

Post by bunderbunder »

Hupriene wrote: post #186
bunderbunder wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowadays, an alternative, and possibly greater, source of economic value might be as a carbon sink. I'm curious if some of this pasture land might be more heavily forested if it weren't being grazed. Out where my folks live in Colorado, for example, it's striking to see how anything that's anywhere close to flat enough for cattle to walk on is scrubland, but the sides of the mountains are well-forested. I'm no ecolog…

That might be true, but to establish that state we'd have to kill off the native grazers. People tend to forget that before we had vast herds of domestic cattle in the western plains we had vast herds of bison, antelope, etc.

The vast herds of bison is an interesting example.

I read in some book on pre-Columbian history or other that the prairie that existed in North America when Europeans first showed up was a product of human activity. It seems that folks living in the Great Plains started burning down forests to create more grazing land for bison, in order to have larger bison herds for hunting.

re: antelope, I thought they were browsers and not grazers.

Re: How America Uses Its Land

#214

Post by cco »

adbge wrote: post #210
justinwp wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Pasture is basically the Bureau of Land Management’s default use for the vast swaths of federal land. It’s like “here is this land, you’re allowed to graze on it with a permit.” That doesn’t produce that many cows... And yet it is an incredibly destructive use of land for so few cows. BLM land is often shrubby desert and is not able to cope with the impacts of the cows and remain a healthy ecosystem.

I have the opposite impression, that the grazing of cows on this land is beneficial as it mimics the role the buffalo formerly played.

If and only if it's done correctly. Both the above statement and yours are true, it really depends a lot on how it's done.

In most cases it's not done well.

Re: How America Uses Its Land

#215

Post by ceejayoz »

njarboe wrote: post #212
ceejayoz wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but putting a forest where there wasn't a forest increases the amount of stored CO2. It just doesn't keep increasing once the forest is mature.

Many species of trees in most forests can live for over a thousand years. So reaching "mature" could take that long. I imagine the stored carbon level keeps rising till then. The amount of carbon sequestered in a forest full of 4 meter diameter fir trees 75 meters tall is huge. In a mature giant sequoia forest one even has huge dead trees not rotting away for millennia.

If you're looking to sequester carbon, you'll probably want something fast growing - pine, bamboo.

Bonus points if (as with pine and bamboo) it can be used for construction, which'll potentially lock it up even longer.

Re: How America Uses Its Land

#216

Post by baybal2 »

ianleeclark wrote: post #202
baybal2 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I advise Americans to auction empty federal land holdings. having so much of land in state's property is wrong, and very uncapitalist.

Sell your kidneys, too. /s

What useful things does the US federal government do with all that land?

Re: How America Uses Its Land

#217

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

bscphil wrote: post #56
hirundo wrote: post #30

> More than one-third of U.S. land is used for pasture ... There’s a single, major occupant on all this land: cows. Not here. I live on cow range land, but the cattle are outnumbered by elk. The elk hunting industry here is larger than the cattle industry. Every third local seems to be a hunting guide, and many of those are cow growers too. This seems to me to be a very positive thing that should be encouraged. Inste…

Having people travel to hunt the meat they eat doesn't scale, though, at all. It's quite simply not possible to use it as a way to improve land use and reduce climate change. Suggestions like yours can be good, but they don't recognize the scale of the changes that are needed. It's the equivalent of trying to get people to buy hybrids to stop climate change - even if everyone could do it, it wouldn't make a dent in t…

only available to those who are by any reasonable standard quite wealthy

What reasonable standard? A shotgun or small game rifle is I agree with your other points, but I have to take issue with this one. I've let people we know, who live in the suburbs, hunt on our land and while I'm not a hunter, they certainly derive a great deal of pleasure from it.

Re: How America Uses Its Land

#218

Post by xapata »

cco wrote: post #214
adbge wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the opposite impression, that the grazing of cows on this land is beneficial as it mimics the role the buffalo formerly played.

If and only if it's done correctly. Both the above statement and yours are true, it really depends a lot on how it's done. In most cases it's not done well.

To be more specific, the cows should take a bite and move on. This keeps the grass short, but doesn't kill it. With short grass, predators can see prey easier, so birds can eat and deposit droppings to add more nitrogen to the soil.

Re: How America Uses Its Land

#220

Post by insensible »

xapata wrote: post #218
cco wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If and only if it's done correctly. Both the above statement and yours are true, it really depends a lot on how it's done. In most cases it's not done well.

To be more specific, the cows should take a bite and move on. This keeps the grass short, but doesn't kill it. With short grass, predators can see prey easier, so birds can eat and deposit droppings to add more nitrogen to the soil.

We can simulate buffalo mob grazing with "managed intensive grazing": many cows in a small area for about a day, then they move. In addition to what you said, it manures the land quite evenly. The grass can stay in its fastest-growing "adolescent" stage. Builds topsoil quickly and sequesters unbelievable amounts of carbon. (This is not how most beef is raised.)
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