this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2025
367 points (98.4% liked)
Data Is Beautiful
7292 readers
192 users here now
A place to share and discuss data visualizations. #dataviz
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Most pasture/grazing land simply isn't suitable for crop farming, which is why we use it for pasture. Be it because of water retention or lacking topsoil or whatever, it's often the case that the only feasible way to produce food from an area is livestock farming.
The "livestock feed" section of the graph looks more than twice as big as "Food we eat", and at least some of the pasture land (much larger than both) has got to be viable, even if it mostly isn't.
Sure, and there's a very important discussion to be had about the influence livestock has on the environment. But that's a separate topic from the usefulness of pasture land for alternate purposes.