You have been downvoting my comments, which tells me your not a good faith participant, but probably acting emotionally in defense of a philosophy. That's fine, but if that is your bias anything I say will either be ignored, or you will immediately pivot to another what-about-ism. I've been clear about my bias (human health first), so even if you are correct about the efficiency of plants, it won't change my position... it just so happens you are incorrect, if you would like to look at data I invite you to read https://www.aleph2020.org/
clanker-response-to-your-argument
Your argument fails on both arithmetic and methodology.
First, your maths is wrong.
28 million × 1 kg/day × 365 × 300 m²/kg = 3.066 million km², not 8.4 million.
Even using your graph's exact 326.21 m²/kg, it's 3.334 million km².
At 500 g/day of animal food, including edible fat and organs, that becomes 1.667 million km², roughly 22% of Australia.
And you're applying a global beef-herd average as though it measures Australian grazing capacity or represents all animal foods. It does neither.[^1]
Second, your own research exposes the flaw in your land-use argument.
Its modeled removal of beef-herd beef and mutton frees 1.92 billion hectares globally, of which 1.85 billion (96%) are pasture. Arable land decreases by only 70 million hectares (~6%).[^2][^3]
Pasture isn't cropland. Roughly two-thirds of global grazing grassland cannot be converted to cropland.[^3][^4] Ruminants produce human food from vegetation growing on land unsuitable for cultivation.
Third, ruminants can outperform crops when land suitability is considered.
A direct comparison found that dairy cattle on marginal peat soils produced 1 kg of human-digestible protein where crops could produce only 0.67 kg on the same land.[^5]
Globally, 86% of livestock feed is human-inedible, and only ~5% of ruminant feed consists of potentially food-competing grains and soybean meal.[^4][^6]
Australian beef systems achieved quality-adjusted human-edible protein output/input ratios of 1.96 (grain-finished) and 1,597 (grass-fed), the latter reflecting negligible human-edible feed inputs.[^7]
That's converting resources humans cannot directly consume into high-quality nutrition.
Fourth, count the whole animal.
An Australian lamb study found edible co-products contributed 24% of edible weight, 37% of fat and 42% of iron.[^8]
Ignoring edible fat and organs understates nutritional output. Kilograms of meat alone don't capture total food value.
Finally, biogenic methane isn't fossil CO₂.
Cattle recycle atmospheric carbon captured through photosynthesis. Methane has an atmospheric lifetime of approximately a decade.
Stable methane emissions sustain approximately stable methane-driven warming, unlike continuing fossil CO₂ emissions, whose warming effects accumulate. GWP* accounts for this fundamental difference.[^9][^10]
Your 8.4-million-km² calculation is wrong. Your broader argument confuses global land-use averages with Australian carrying capacity, pasture with cropland, raw food weight with nutritional efficiency, and biogenic methane with fossil carbon.
Your conclusion doesn't follow from your evidence.
[^1]: Poore & Nemecek data — Our World in Data [^2]: Poore & Nemecek (2018) — Corrected Supplementary Materials, p. 63 [^3]: ALEPH2020 — Land Use and Biodiversity [^4]: Mottet et al. (2017) [^5]: Van Zanten et al. (2016) — Land Use Efficiency [^6]: ALEPH2020 — Feed-Food Competition [^7]: Thomas et al. (2021) [^8]: Wingett & Alders (2023) [^9]: ALEPH2020 — Greenhouse Gas Emissions [^10]: Lynch et al. (2020) — GWP*