Is not industrial agriculture generally (and more generally, greed) the actual problem?
I do not think that intensive crop growing is better than pastoral farming of animals for meat. The former is catastrophic to the local environment the latter is all around me and causes very few problems.
I don't have the numbers at my fingertips, but growing animals for meat generally requires growing lots and lots of feed stock. Many multiples more than what it would require to feed humans directly.
So because we want meat, more and more industrial agriculture has to happen to grow that meat. So yeah, I think having an industrial meat industry has more environmental impact, than just having industrial farming in the absence of the industrial meat industry.
It kind of goes both ways, today's factory farmed meat is grown with lots of grains and corn which is grown using artificial fertilizer, that is a lot of waste. But a bit more traditionally and on smaller scales you donn't feed cows much of any grains, that is for people to eat, they eat the alfalfa which is grown in rotation to put nutrients/fertilizer into the soil for free and without any pollution.
So eating meat is both very polluting, but once was and still could be a net positive for agricultural sustainability and reducing fossil fuel pollution.
