In response to Sam Johnson's 5-4-99, 7:54 am posting:

Sam and everyone,

In my post yesterday concerning modern livestock and ancient game, I was
comparing wild herds and pastures to modern herds and pastures, absolutely
NOT including grain fed herds.  I want to stress this point emphatically,
and apologize as I was definitely unclear about it out of pure absent
mindedness.  So with this in mind I was thinking mainly in terms of quantity
of animals and acerage of grasslands grazed.  In these terms, I cannot see
how modern husbandry of domestic herds could NOT be more efficient,
especially in terms of acerage, than hunting of wild herds.

Also in my thoughts was the beauty of ranches like Lassater Ranch that allow
cattle and prarie wildlife to coexist as much as possible.  The cattle eat
nothing but natural grass.  Cattle are most efficient at turning their
natural food, otherwise unusable (to us) grass, into protein and fat.  I
think that much of the inefficiency enters into the picture with the
introduction of feedloting.  The cost here rises in terms of land lost to
corn/soy feilds, energy spent from fossil-feuls/coal/electricity required to
grow the crops and transport them to feedlots and others that I can't call
to mind now.  And all of this added cost exists in order to produce an
artificially fattened, supposedly more palatable meat that is, as you
mentioned, and is pretty much common knowledge on this list, evolutionarily
unprecedented in terms of lipid profile.

I strongly disagree with the point made that yeilds would drop significantly
from a switch to grass feeding.  When compared to total cost in terms stated
above, I feel that yeilds would improve.  Feedloting is a wasteful luxury
expense IMO, sort of a cosmetic luxury.... makes the cattle pretty and fat,
drives meat prices up, but doesn't improve numbers of cattle so much.

The vast plains in N. America  were once rich grasslands covered with
astonishing numbers of bison.  These rich lands, their deep soil and
abundant game, were largly replaced with infertile, thin soiled grain farms.
Much of this grain goes to artificially fatten cattle.  The point that I was
half conciously aiming at yesterday, and admittedly failed to elucidate, is
that we would be better of if we could somehow return the world's ancient
grassland regions to there origeonal function.  This is idealistic and
perhaps impossible, as most of the soil has probably been blown or washed
away thanks to the plow, but in some areas it is working (Lassater Ranch is
one).  My comment about going back in time was belted out in attemts to
crystalize this idea.  Just imagine what things would be like, in N.
America, for example, if we never wastefully wiped out the Buffalo (wich in
large part was meant to wipe out the plains indians), but rather learned to
manage it as a food source.  I strongly believe that the plains would have
been far more productive under those circumstances than they are now with
the grain-farming/feedlot cycle.  And how much more poductive would they be
with efficient, easily managed domestic livestock?

What this all boils down to is that although we've lost much of the world's
grasslands and game, we do have domesticated livestock, and their employment
as a foodsource through grazing on what grasslands we have left (or are able
to convert back from grain farms!!!) can be a viable, and much more natural,
alternative to grain farming.  As for the issue of feeding the world, I feel
that grasslands are more productive of food when fulfilling their natural
function as grazing lands than they are as dusty, depleted, chemically
saturated grain farms.  This is provided that these lands are somehow
allowed to return to their natural, rich state.  Whether or not this is
possible environmentally or in terms of the worlds agro-political landscape
is left to be seen.

B.Lischer