Retroactively you say? Perhaps my attestations of your being specious have some weight after all, considering I have never once been in support of feedlots?
To that end, I challenge you to go back and find where I have said different. You can easily see any dates and times on edits, and see they have not been recently modded for retroactive effect.
Go on. Find one.
What *I* can find, however, is where you have denied that grasslands get destroyed to make the extra production. REPEATELY.
Here, I will cite them for you.
Whatever this is:
To satisfy their argument, that land has to be repurposed; EG, that grass has to be exterminated and planted to rice, potatoes and such.
But fails to acknowledge that you cannot grow potatoes on marginal land, but you CAN grow grass on it (and thus cattle.)
-- nobody is arguing. It's misplaced outrage at nothing.
Edit:
Should people eat less meat? Absolutely.
Should all the land used for cattle farming be used for soybeans? FUCK NO-- I think I just illustrated why that would be a terrible idea.
Here it is concisely; the "fallacy" you're talking about is a misunderstanding about the land use argument. Saying that the "grow food for people instead" argument (such that it is) is false because marginal land can't be used for intensive agriculture is a strawman on your part, because again, the environmentalist argument is about the non-marginal land use, not about converting ranches to farms.
As for this:
Please, please tell me how this increase in crop demand is due to people eating less meat, and not exactly the opposite.
that was never the statement made. The argument I tendered, is more like this.
The "land use" studies, do not properly delineate between marginal and non-marginal properties. (this is likely because "Marginalness" has to do with economics, and it changes yearly, based on economic pressures.) As such, they incorrectly conflate marginal grazelands with highly productive grain fields, and then present models that spit out data based on this conflation. I point out this conflation.
You insist that this conflation does not exist. Insist that the argument is exclusively about arable land, despite being shown otherwise multiple ways. You present a Vox article as proof.
I Go through your Vox article's sources, and read the abstracts. Sure enough, no mention of marginal status is cited in any of them (at least as concerns the "Can increase yeild 70%" claim, which the rest of the paper is predicated on). Just general land use, and water+fertilizer use is treated as uniformly fungible. (which it is NOT-- that is the very reason why marginal is a thing. It costs more of those things to crop on land as it becomes more and more marginal.)
You get angry and storm off.
Then you come back, and try the highroad, with asserting that corn utilization figures are diverging sharply between feed use and food use.
I do not question this at all. I point out that there is no REDUCTION in trend for food use, and no INCREASE in trend for import, to account for the increase trend in feed use.
Point to Science article, which corroborates my attestation: Previously marginal land, was repurposed as crop land, at increased costs, to meet the extra demand.
I reiterate that grass pasturage protects diversity, and that the only way to satisfy the argument about land use, is to destroy the grass:
1) Right now, as it currently stands, there is a multiple billion dollar industry keeping corn and soybeans off prairie habitats. That industry is cattle.
1a) Cattle serve an important and difficult/costly to replace role in the maintenance of those habitats. The habitats NEED the cattle.
2) If you shutdown cattle (completely), that industry dries up. There is suddenly economic value in destroying the prairies.
2a) To wit, Science points out how this happened in the corn belt during the 2013 year. (and based on the data you generously provided, it appears that trend has continued apace.)
2b) I pointed this out long prior, and it was ignored. I suggested banning feedlots, and insisting on 100% graze feeding, fully acknowledging that this will cause demand for cattle to skyrocket, greatly increasing the economic value of cattle on the prairies, making the opportunity costs to replace them with corn or soy greatly prohibitive. I point out that abolition of feedlots would make feed-use of corn dry up, by destroying demand for the product.
Your counter-argument, is that cattle feedlot use drives up corn demand. I acknowledge this, and reiterate that feedlots should be banned, for a wide number of reasons. You ignore this, and pretend that I am a feedlot champion or something. (Nevermind that point 2b was made HOURS before your counter-argument, which really does not counter anything I argued. )
You then get mad again, and insist that I am retroactively changing my position.
This is untrue.
Rather than try to pretend I am in some ideological niche that I do not actually occupy, or insist that my arguments are just pointless shrieking, perhaps it would be more profitable to ask for clarifications on things you find dubious, or that you think do not follow, rather than simply assume you are right, and then get shut down repeatedly.