I looked through the article and didn’t see any map, so I’m not sure exactly what you’re talking about. My assumption is that this is referring to the Great Plains. The Great Plains is a mix of Prairie, Steppe, and Grassland. All three are arable in the sense that they can grow grass and small vegetation, but would need lots of irrigation and most of this area isn’t close to a water source. You could always drill wells, but that has other problems. The land is good for grazing because the land is only really good at growing small spindly grasses that themselves are mostly dry.
As for eliminating the livestock grazing I would like to point out some figures from the article.
About 2 million cattle, or around just 6 percent of the US herd, graze on public lands. By one estimate, the land provides 1.6 percent of forage eaten by US cattle.
So by this article there are 2 million cattle ranched on this land, or approximately 33 million in the entire US. Prior to 1870, before their mass slaughter, there was an estimated 60 million Bison in the US and Canada. I don’t know much about the differences in Bison and Cows, but they seem like they would serve a pretty similar function in the ecosystem. You could make an argument that they need to be rotated and cycled over the lands better, but removing them would probably be pretty bad as well.
As to rewilding the area, it is rewilded, the article is about public lands which the government isn’t allowing to be used. The wild state of these lands is that it is dry with a sea of grass.
EDIT: I also took a look at several of the sources used, at least in the beginning of the article. The writer is using an appeal to authority logical fallacy to make their argument look more valid, but the sources they are pulling are really not related or are heavily biased as well.
The first link is made in relation to the size of the land being used and is just a document about the raw statistics on the land.
The second link is associated with a comment that the land is leased at “bargin bin prices” and is an opinion piece about how the land is leased too cheaply in that person’s opinion (it really has no other supporting information).
The third link is associated with a comment that the cattle eat or destroy plants consumed by native species. The link leads to an academic article which is a literature review of livestock impacts around the world and the conclusion doesn’t really support what the writer of this article is saying. It looks like they googled something that looked like it would support their opinion and then slapped it in there.
, but they seem like they would serve a pretty similar function in the ecosystem
They do not graze the same and these differences hurt ecosystems
Cows and bison differ in all behaviors — including how they stand, move and graze. Cattle spend almost double the time grazing — 45-49 percent — in comparison to bison — who spend just over a quarter of their time doing so (26-28 percent). And while land needs some amount of disturbance to enable soil turnover, it turns out that the kind of soil disturbance provided by cows trampling over the soil is not the best for preserving biodiversity. And these critical differences in grazing behavior have downstream effects on the ecosystems they inhabit.
[…]
The types of plants bison and cattle prefer to graze on are also remarkably different. Unlike cattle, who prefer to graze steadily on flowering herbs like clover, milkweed and sunflower, free-roaming bison cover a much larger area, grazing on different varieties of grass, such as perennial grasses, but leaving certain areas of the prairie untouched.
Livestock farmers often claim that their grazing systems “mimic nature”. If so, the mimicry is a crude caricature. A review of evidence from over 100 studies found that when livestock are removed from the land, the abundance and diversity of almost all groups of wild animals increases
I looked through the article and didn’t see any map, so I’m not sure exactly what you’re talking about. My assumption is that this is referring to the Great Plains. The Great Plains is a mix of Prairie, Steppe, and Grassland. All three are arable in the sense that they can grow grass and small vegetation, but would need lots of irrigation and most of this area isn’t close to a water source. You could always drill wells, but that has other problems. The land is good for grazing because the land is only really good at growing small spindly grasses that themselves are mostly dry.
As for eliminating the livestock grazing I would like to point out some figures from the article.
So by this article there are 2 million cattle ranched on this land, or approximately 33 million in the entire US. Prior to 1870, before their mass slaughter, there was an estimated 60 million Bison in the US and Canada. I don’t know much about the differences in Bison and Cows, but they seem like they would serve a pretty similar function in the ecosystem. You could make an argument that they need to be rotated and cycled over the lands better, but removing them would probably be pretty bad as well.
As to rewilding the area, it is rewilded, the article is about public lands which the government isn’t allowing to be used. The wild state of these lands is that it is dry with a sea of grass.
EDIT: I also took a look at several of the sources used, at least in the beginning of the article. The writer is using an appeal to authority logical fallacy to make their argument look more valid, but the sources they are pulling are really not related or are heavily biased as well.
The first link is made in relation to the size of the land being used and is just a document about the raw statistics on the land.
The second link is associated with a comment that the land is leased at “bargin bin prices” and is an opinion piece about how the land is leased too cheaply in that person’s opinion (it really has no other supporting information).
The third link is associated with a comment that the cattle eat or destroy plants consumed by native species. The link leads to an academic article which is a literature review of livestock impacts around the world and the conclusion doesn’t really support what the writer of this article is saying. It looks like they googled something that looked like it would support their opinion and then slapped it in there.
They do not graze the same and these differences hurt ecosystems
https://sentientmedia.org/cattle-ranching-terrible-for-biodiversity/
Which leads to:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-damaging-farm-products-organic-pasture-fed-beef-lamb