Al-ibn Kermit said:
I don't know how much it cheaper corn would be without the subsidies but it seems that you can grow a lot more pounds of corn per acre than you can grass. Plus cows gain weight more slowly on a grass diet. Grass fed does have less fat and more omega-3 so I can understand the health benefit but from an economic perspective, it just seems too inefficient.
Assuming most of the animals we eat are fed a grain-based diet, then there's an energy loss obviously so vegetarian foods would seem more efficient. There might be some examples where it's not like that though.
It is pretty complicated to figure out exactly what would happen without agricultural subsidies, but at the very least corn syrup would cease to be economically viable to put into every single consumer food product on the planet.
Whether all meat farming would suddenly go corn free, I doubt it, but farmers would probably at the very least reduce the percentage of corn in the diet and replace it with healthier grains like oats, barley, etc.
As for the vegetarian claims about efficiency of farming, they never take into account that cattle feed contains mostly stuff humans would never eat, either due to quality or that it's just not tasty enough or hard to prepare. Oats are basically one of the most efficient grain crops imaginable, but people don't eat a lot of oats because they are a pain in the ass to prepare. Cattle(and horses) on the other hand, love oats.
Then there is barley which we mainly only use for beer, despite it being on the most healthy grains around.
This is before even mentioning all the types of grasses used to rotate corn and wheat and soybean fields, alfalfa, ryegrass, clover, etc. We basically have to grow this stuff to cycle the fields to prepare for the next crop, but humans can't eat that shit, so you have to have at least some amount of livestock in order to achieve maximum efficiency.
We probably do farm too much livestock in america, leading to human edible food being used to feed cattle, but in order to be truly efficient you have to have something to eat the byproducts and scraps from the human food crops.
You can't just take the amount of food energy used to feed livestock and say that it could have been used to feed people directly instead, because people don't eat fucking alfalfa.
