Is that sarcasm? Pretty much the entire midwest was forest before colonization. Now take a look at Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri...they're basically one big farm criscrossed by roads, highways, sprinkled with small spinneys of trees, and dotted with cities. Just load up Google Earth, satellite mode, turn off all labels, and zoom out. It's astonishing.
This just isn't true. The Eastern half the US was heavily deforested by colonization, but that's really not true in the midwest. It was prarie.
There are actually a lot of researchers who believe that the Native peoples were keeping the forests back via controlled burns, since grassland is better for hunting and agriculture, and the forests have regrown substantially _since_ most of the indigenous people died via disease.
Indiana is the beginning of the Eastern forests. Prairie starts in Illinois and extends over most of the Midwest and runs North/South along the Rockies well into Canada and down to Texas, New Mexico.. nice map: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tallgrass_prairie#/media/Fil...
Like, I'm not saying wikipedia is an infallible source of truth, but I'm not exactly arguing for ancient aliens here:
> In the Eastern Deciduous Forest, frequent fires kept open areas which supported herds of bison. A substantial portion of this forest was extensively burned by agricultural Native Americans. Annual burning created many large oaks and white pines with little understory.[10]
Corn, people... American cows prominently eat corn.
It is extremely fertilizer and pesticide intensive, and entirely engineered. As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the fertilizers are also fossil fuel based.
Yeah, this is a bit what I was getting at. But all I know about cattle comes from my family's cattle background in Eastern Montana and the high valleys of the SouthWest corner of the state. In both those regions, many cows are raised in naturally occurring pastures, eating native grasses, save oats which are sown as a cover crop.
However, my impression this is very unique and produces much less pounds of beef per acre than most places. The cattle breeds there are leaner and half wild. I'm hesitant to speak more definitively because I don't know specific statistics on how ranches in other regions differ. My impression is that the difference are substantial.
True, but these only account for 1% of energy demand[1]. Fertilizer is all about the nitrogen, not the carbon. The carbon for the corn is taken from the atmosphere.
At this point, nearly all agricultural land was converted a century ago. The trend now is more towards decreasing total agricultural acreage if anything?
No one in America has slash and burned a forest to feed cattle for a very long time.
