Grazing animals on land not suited for agriculture increases the food supply; how can that be considered wrong?
There are areas in the world where grazing of livestock is possible but agriculture is not. If conditions are such that people living in these areas cannot trade for crops and must raise livestock to survive, few would question the practice. However, such areas are very small in comparison to the fertile and semi-arid regions currently utilized for intensive grazing, and they do not appreciably contribute to the world food supply. (Some would argue that it is morally preferable not to live in such areas.) The real issue is the intensive grazing in the fertile and semi-arid regions. The use of such areas for livestock raising reduces the world food supply. Keith Acker writes as follows in his “A Vegetarian Sourcebook”: Land, energy, and water resources for livestock agriculture range anywhere from 10 to 1000 times greater than those necessary to produce an equivalent amount of plant foods. And livestock agriculture does not merely use these resources, it depletes them. This is a matter
