Where is the increased pastureland needed to produce grass-fed beef and dairy going to come from?
How best to use the nation’s agricultural and range land has long been a complicated question, and it is likely to be even more so in the future. For the time being, the land use implications of grass-fed beef and dairying are not pressing questions because the number of grass-fed beef operations is small in relation to the available land. But as the demand for grass-fed beef and dairy increase, there will be growing interest in acquiring or converting land to pasture. In general, well-managed grass-fed beef and dairy operations are good ways to use agricultural and range land in the United States and UCS believes that grass-based livestock operations deserve a prominent role in the mix of future U.S. agricultural land uses. It is way too early to predict where exactly the new pasture land will come from. We note, however, that the United States currently devotes 70 to 80 million acres of land to the production of corn, much of which is fed to animals. A move to pasture-raised cattle w
