why crop-growing can provide more food for human consumption than cattle-raising?

Question

a piece of agricultural land can be used for growing crops, or for growing grass to raise cattle for meat

Answer 1

I think you ask a smart question.

if you eat vegetable, you eat off the land. Lets say that it takes 4 lb (2kg) of vegetables to feed you every day. that means 60 kg is a month.
if you raise a cow, that takes - what? 1 year before it is killed to feed you? and it takes - lets random guess - 2 kg of grass to eat every day? that means that before killing the cow (that would feed 30 ppl) you will have fed it 2kgX30daysX12 months. this means 720 kg of grass. that is a lot of grass, and about 24 times more that to feed you with vegetables.

Now of course this calculation is VERY approximate. You can do web searches to find more exact numbers, such as how much eat a cow every day, and how many people it can feed, and so on.

Answer 2

Cattle are not efficient mechanisms for storing food-energy - crops from arable land. The food-value is wasted growing a cow, when it could be used growing a human instead. 10 times as many people can be fed when the land is used to raise food for human consumption, compared to the food-value that can be obtained by using it to raise cattle-food.

Answer 3

The cow has to eat. It eat the crops that could go directly to feeding people. Allot of what it eats is used up just keeping the cow alive. By the time you eat the cow, the food it ate to keep it alive for years could have fed a whole lot more people than the single cow did. Get it? Cows and red meat in general are extravagant foods and not so good for you.

Answer 4

There is heaps of pastoral land and agricultural land to provide enough food for more than twice the worlds current population easily, its more a matter of management then crop yields...

Answer 5

Because the meat cost more to buy. Not everyone
can afford it.