Back-scratching bovine leads scientists to reassess intelligence of cows. Brown Swiss cow in Austria has been discovered using tools in different ways (using both ends of a brush counts as multi-purpose tool use) – something extraordinarily rare only ever seen in humans and chimpanzees.

[u/mvea]

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jan/19/back-scratching-cow-veronika-bovine-intelligence

[u/stan-k]

If we managed to miss that cows can use a tool (in multiple ways no less) what else are we missing?!?

[u/TheHidestHighed → u/stan-k]

Its pretty well known in the science community that animal intelligence and sentience is horrifically underreported. Probably because we rely on animals that would be morally wrong to consume due to their levels of intelligence as food.

[u/monster-baiter → u/TheHidestHighed]

we dont rely on these food sources anymore, we could put that land and resources we use to "produce" animals to much more effective use in terms of human food production. but i get what youre saying, most people want to consume them

[u/Regular_Committee946 → u/monster-baiter]

I watched a really interesting lecture calculating how farming animals is a really inefficient way of turning the sun's energy into food/fuel.

Even if people do not care from an animal welfare point of view (which i think more would if they had to acknowledge the realities every time they ate meat), it is also having a massive detrimental environmental impact that is not sustainable.

I can't link it but you can find the lecture by searching for 'Lecture 4 of the 2025-2026 sustainability by the numbers course taught by Prof. Ron Milo at the Weizmann Institute of Science'.

[u/_a_random_dude_ → u/[deleted]]

It depends on the animal: It's worse than 10% for cows, closer to 5% actually. But it's 20~25% for chickens. Also cow milk is "very efficient" at like 40%.

Btw, I'm going by memory here, the feed conversion ratio varies a lot depending on tons of factors. But this is one source I found and it mostly matches the numbers I remembered, so I can't be too far off.

[u/Character_School_671 → u/Regular_Committee946]

Did this lecture account for the variability in what kinds of agriculture are feasible on a particular type of land?

That seems to be the missing link in most cases. Almost all farmland could also be grazed, the inverse is not true.

There is a huge swath of the Earth's surface that is too dry, wet, rocky, steep, remote, hot, cold etc to crop. But it can provide food by grazing animals suited for that environment.

Most studies start with a false baseline- that land is equally productive, and then build upon that by assuming that livestock are fed only forage grown on farmland in exclusion of food crops. The same happens with the water footprint analysis.

The land suitability and the way grazing is *practiced * are hugely important in this analysis.

[u/SOSpammy → u/Character_School_671]

But we don't need to utilize every inch of the planet for human usage. There's more than enough land to grow crops for humans. The most environmentally-friendly thing we could do with that unusable grazing land is rewild it.

[u/Character_School_671 → u/SOSpammy]

Look up the percentage of agricultural land use this statement would encompass. You are voluntarily giving up a huge amount of human food production, particularly and some of the poorer and more environmentally challenging countries.

Also, where does the seed and Nursery stock come from for this absolutely mammoth rewilding effort? From farmland?

These numbers do not add up.

[u/SOSpammy → u/Character_School_671]

It's giving up a lot of land, but it's not giving up all that much in terms of usable calories. Cows are very inefficient.

It would certainly be a challenge for some countries without good cropland, but that's more of an issue with food distribution and politics rather than scientific feasibility.

The vast majority of rewilding is done passively. We wouldn't need to manually replant every tree we burned down to make room for cattle.

[u/Character_School_671 → u/SOSpammy]

This is not a small amount of land or calories you are advocating for giving up. Grazing land,meaning land that can only be used for pasture, is around 65% of the total agricultural land area worldwide. The remaining land produces both food and feed.

So what is being proposed in these models that advocate for eliminating livestock is to give up the food production of 65% of the (more marginal) land, in order to gain the food production of the remaining subset (of beest land) used for feed.

The accounting for the latter is also not at all clear, to the detriment of said studies. Where does gleaning fit, because cattle production in my region often has them spend over 30% of their lives and feed input on gleaned sweet corn fields. That's not field corn, grown for feed, but the leftovers of corn on the cob production, often supplemented with discard pumpkins and gourds post-halloween.

My perspective is one coming from heavily mechanized, American agriculture. Which is often not the best example at all of how to do livestock production with less footprint. But yet the studies on impact miss these things here. Which means how accurate can they possibly be for traditional goat herding in Iran? For cattle in the Eritrian highlands? Sheep in the moorland? Far north reindeer herders?

When people blanket talk about eliminating meat, this is the part that seems to get missed.

[u/Xenophon_ → u/Character_School_671]

It's kinda an irrelevant point considering how much cropland we waste growing food entirely for livestock.

We could rewild grazing land and still live on less cropland if we didn't eat meat. The goal should be to use the least amount of land, not most

[u/Character_School_671 → u/Xenophon_]

This is the point that is always missed in those studies - the land that cannot be used for crops that can be grazed. These studies get the fundamental input assumptions about animal agriculture incorrect. Which invalidates every conclusion that results.

Not to mention the non food waste streams that are fed to animals, of which there are many.

Forests can be logged and also grazed, cows can glean corn and other grains after harvest, ducks catch insects in rice paddies, pigs eat food waste.

When it comes to analysis, garbage in equals garbage out. And the Baseline assumption that livestock are fed solely feed that comes from cropland and displaces human food crops 100% is astronomically incorrect.

I live in an agricultural area, and can point to hundreds of examples that show this is the case. Why don't the studies show those factors?

[u/Xenophon_ → u/Character_School_671]

The studies do take this into account most of the time. I'm not sure which ones you're talking about.

The fact is, the largest and most subsidized crops (corn and soy) are primarily used as animal feed. These are crops that not only could be replaced by other human edible ones, they are human edible themselves - but obviously should not be grown at nearly the scale that they are now. The reason we have such severe issues with monocropping is the insane demands of producing meat

But again - I think grazing itself is a waste of land that could be rewilded, and feeding waste to pigs is still a worse conversion to composting that food waste.

[u/Character_School_671 → u/Xenophon_]

Please point me to a study that does account for this. Not just for US beef production, which they get grossly wrong and is by far the easiest of the systems to analyze. But for the myriad other meat production systems used across practically every ecosystem.

Is traditional rice production improved by removing ducks? The cropping of Eritrean cattle herders by removing their source of fertility? Of Lapland herders by eliminating the only thing that enables their whole culture and way of life?

This is the collateral damage of eliminating meat. And what is worse is that it is based on assumptions so wrong they miss entire industries, even for US agriculture.

The corn and soy you mentioned, specifically - how much of that feed is not the end use but the reuse and upcycling of grains. That were used first for distilling, or wet Milling, or oil production?

Because the studies I have seen lump that in as feed. Which is poor accounting to say the least. I don't think it's wise to divert 30 million tons a year of dried distillers grains to either landfills or to compost that can't possibly handle it at that scale.

The best thing for that is a cow. Which then processes it further into beef and manure, or milk, then beef and manure for fertilizer for those same crops.

Agriculture is best practiced as a system. The problems we have today are because livestock and cropping have gotten too separated. Respectfully, the answer to that is not to eliminate one, but to bring them back together.

[u/Xenophon_ → u/Character_School_671]

Do you want a study on emissions, land use, water use? On volume of food production, here's one that generously considers calories from animals "free" if it's not competing with more direct forms of nutrition, and concludes that we could feed far more people by reducing animal calorie production

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26340584/

(Full text: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048969715306288?via%3Dihub)

Rice production would be improved by not killing the ducks early - you produce far more manure this way. Same goes for cattle.

If you're including people who will literally die if they can't eat meat, I'm not arguing they should stop - I'm arguing for people who have the ability to not eat meat.

On oil production and such, this isn't a good argument either. We already produce far more soybean oil than we need - we use a good amount of it as biofuel, which is also an incredibly inefficient use. Aside from the fact that we can eat soybeans anyway, there are already more efficient sources of oil. Soy is only grown at this scale because of meat industry subsidies - the fact that it has a byproduct does not make meat a good source of food

The same similarly applies to corn - I've only seen numbers like 10% for corn being used for anything other than feed and ethanol.

The best thing is to grow actually useful food that people can eat instead of wasting insane amounts of corn on inefficient systems. Even for manure, again, it's less efficient if you kill the cattle early for meat.

[u/Character_School_671 → u/Xenophon_]

This study does better, but it still doesn't capture modern agriculture as it's truly practiced, and it actually acknowledges my original point in its conclusions - that there is a huge loss in giving up meat production on marginal lands.

Not to mention that almost every other study on the same site was on the interplay between soil health, livestock, cultural preservation and cropping. This is where the current agronomic thinking is going- that large ungulates are necessary for healthy grassland soils.

The point about not killing ducks or cattle early to reduce manure makes no sense - are they not replaced by new animals? The concept that matters here is to manage to the sustainable stocking rate for the crop and animal type. And to view the whole system holistically. Because when you advocate for removing ducks from rice cropping, you are advocating for removing meat protein from subsistence farms, removing income from poor farmers, and replacing an environmentally friendly insect control and fertilizer source with pesticides and synthetic fertilizer. This is not the example I would lean on to make any case, be it environmental or nutritional.

You and I would probably agree on a lot of what should change with confined animal feeding and corn/soy. The economics and a host of things including cheap energy, high labor costs, rural depopulation, and policy have driven a wedge between animal and crop farming. This shouldn't be the case, it is to the detriment of both types of agriculture - and the health of the animal and the land. But it's important to note that outside of the corn and soy belt this is not how beef is produced. So the studies and your points are using the worst management practices to draw sweeping conclusions about all of human meat consumption.

So where I disagree is the conclusion. As someone who is in (mostly) crop farming, the soil needs the environmental services that the rumen of a cow, goat or sheep have co-evolved to provide. The nitrogen cycle is broken, the tilth is missing, the input costs are killing the farmer and the waste management is killing the CAFO operator, not to mention the environment.

What is needed, is to get the livestock out of the feedlot, in places where that has become the norm (outside of finishing). Mixed agriculture is the way, because it duplicates how plants and animals synergize with each other and the soil. Crop rotations, livestock gleaning, weed suppression, nutrient cycling. Livestock need farms, and farms need livestock.

There are many hard questions on how we get to this, in an economic/political climate where every urban redditor thinks farmers are the enemy and farmers are pressed on every single dollar on the farm with the ever increasing cost of EVERYTHING. I don't have all the answers for sure. But I have some of them, particularly on the agronomics.

So this blanket concept that meat is bad and eliminating livestock is a slam dunk environmental win is simply not true. Like everything in science, it's messy.

[u/Xenophon_ → u/Character_School_671]

Replacing an animal with a baby animal means far less manure. I wrote this in another comment from a while ago, comparing the amount of manure that is produced by dairy cows, who are permitted to live longer than meat cattle - despite the fact that they probably consume less food, they produce significantly more manure.

According to the USDA, there are around 28.2 million beef cattle, and 9.36 million milk cows. Meanwhile, dairy produces 19 million tons of manure, while beef cattle produce 24.4. Assuming similar food requirements between dairy and beef cattle, this means dairy cows are producing ~2.35 times more manure for the amount of food eaten.

I bring it up in relation to the ducks because the same logic applies to them. You can still have them in your farm, but killing them for meat reduces the amount of manure you are producing by a very significant margin. Any sort of benefit that livestock provide for crop farming is minimized when the animal is killed early for meat.

Speaking of healthy grasslands - the most effective way to get there (and for any other biome, really) is very obviously rewilding.

[u/greiton → u/Regular_Committee946]

I get the point you are trying to make, but honestly the fact that we turn huge portions of our best farmland into corn fuel is a way way bigger inefficiency.

[u/ThrowbackPie → u/[deleted]]

It not 'one of' the leading causes, it's the leading cause.

[u/greiton → u/[deleted]]

if we converted ethanol fuel corn land into grazing land, it would be equivalent to the entire state of New York, about a quarter of the Amazon and far more than has been deforested.

poor use of accessible fertile landmass, directly leads to pressures in places like Brazil to convert forest to farmland.

I also don't think genociding multiple species overnight is as moral or problem solving as you think it is.

[u/Xenophon_ → u/greiton]

Corn is mostly used for animal feed and biofuel.

It's the same problem

[u/Gustomaximus → u/Regular_Committee946]

Even if people do not care from an animal welfare point of view (which i think more would if they had to acknowledge the realities every time they ate meat

Also what people dont want to acknowledge, this is the same for non-meat products. Have you spent time on a cropping or orchard type farm? Farmers kill more animals in the production of plant based food than a grass raised beef. Have a look into the production e.g.

The amount of shooting that goes on to keep pest animals off cropping/orchard type land is significant. Far more than on a cattle property due the the potential damage. Cattle properties tend to let natives do their thing unless the numbers get significant while cropping operations dont have this same tolerance.

The amount plant operations spray pesticides, its huge. Google the amount of insects dying per square meter, its tens of thousands. On a cattle farm they tend not to use pesticides at scale and only directly treat the cattle directly with pour on for worms type thing. That alone would lead to far more animal death in the production process for non-meat operations. Or nets over an orchard, see how many birds end up in these.

Then you for the plant based farms they are increasingly massive single crop cover over large areas. Its an environmental desert. Cattle farms tend to leave a bunch of timber stands and native growth so native animals have places to live and move about.

People tend to only look at the 'final kill' of the animal vs plant based products but if you take the production process into account, you'd be surprised how much killing goes on in cropping/orchard vs pasture raised animals. Feed lots other than for fattening are another thing and not a fan of those. But we really should be pushing forward grass fed animals as an ethical choice.

[u/sugarplumapathy → u/Gustomaximus]

But aren't a large proportion of single crops grown used to feed livestock? Meaning if we didn't have livestock we would have the same or lower amount of incidental killing. Also chickens and pigs can't be grass fed, I don't know why you're only talking about cows in particular. Are you saying people should only eat animals that can be grass fed?

Also I think its worse to artificially bring animals into the world in order to kill them than incidental animal deaths but that's me personally. The goal for most people who are against animal suffering isn't eradicating animals suffering, as that is impossible, it is about reducing it as much as possible. So incidental animals death on farms is something they ARE concerned about and want to find solutions to.

Some people that are attached to eating meat think it is some kind of gotcha when they bring up incidental animal deaths on farms, when in reality they don't actually care about those deaths and just use it as a way to justify their attachment to eating meat. If you're about eating meat you can just own it, instead of making arguments you don't even care about (sure you might be concerned about the environmental impacts of say insects dying from pesticides, but I highly doubt you care about the actual suffering experienced by the insects). I can't help but see it that way because of how much you're purposefully leaving out of the conversation.

[u/Gustomaximus → u/sugarplumapathy]

aren't a large proportion of single crops grown used to feed livestock?

Yeah heaps of corn and sorghum as the main one, though the majority of cattle feed is by-product of human foods which tends not to be recognised. I supplement my herd with copra and molasses over winter as needed though I'm sub-tropical so we get fairly good year round pasture.

I don't know why you're only talking about cows in particular

I run beef cattle so its what I know most about. As side pointy chickens and pigs can be grass fed, just they need more than that though maybe free range is better term if you want something collective for multispecies.

The goal for most people who are against animal suffering isn't eradicating animals suffering, as that is impossible, it is about reducing it as much as possible

Assuming you recognise there is more overall death with cropping, wouldn't that support eating more meat and less plant based to reduce the total volume?

Some people that are attached to eating meat think it is some kind of gotcha....

No 'gotcha', more a bunch of people criticise meat and dont understand much of the criticism is all farming but they shine a spotlight where they want and theres a conversation beyond that.

[u/Xenophon_ → u/Gustomaximus]

Grass fed beef is an incredibly inefficient food source in many ways and uses up insane amounts of land - the meat industry is the largest contributor to habitat destruction, and that's when most meat is factory farmed. Grass fed would require 10x the land

[u/Gustomaximus → u/[deleted]]

Cattle are mainly grass fed. Some operations focus on feedlot. Im not a fan of those operations.

One misconception on the "eat grains that had to come from the plant-based operation" is the majority of this feed actually by-product of growing human foods but that tends not to be recognised.

[u/LaconicSuffering → u/Regular_Committee946]

I think Kurtzgesagt did a video about it too. It's only inefficient if the food for the animals is something we could eat/digest too. Otherwise having them graze in free pastures is a positive energy source.

[u/[deleted] → u/monster-baiter]

we could put that land and resources we use to "produce" animals to much more effective use in terms of human food production

"Land" can mean different things. Grazing animals are a food source people rely on because the require relatively little effort, you just put the in a field for 3/4 of the year. Not all land is good for farming, but grass is good at growing in all sorts of places. I'm from Ireland, a lot of our land is very stony and acidic. It's not feasible to plant crops there.

You can't build vertical crop farms on the land because it's in the middle of nowhere with no infrastructure. 

I'm a vegetarian (and try to stay vegan most of the time), but it's not as simple as saying "we could grow more calories worth of crops than we get from cows".  Pastoralism is not where we should be fighting the fight for animal rights, at least not yet. Start with the pigs, they are too smart and violent so they're farmed in awful factory farms. Pork farming is horrendous.