If cattle gain 50 kg per hectare per year, and are slaughtered after eight years, and half the weight is non-meat (skin, bones, etc.), then each cow produces 200 kg, or 1,600 hamburgers.
It takes one hectare of cleared tropical moist forest, turned to pasture, to feed that one cow and to produce the 1,600 hamburgers. Because the land is fertile for grazing for only a few years, this is a one-shot deal, and an expensive one. After ten years—a generous estimate of the life of the soil—the return on the land from the hamburgers it produces will have been $3 US per hectare per year.
The cumulative effect of this hamburger consumption is equivalent to millions of years of evolution, and to thousands of species.
Conversion of all of Amazonia—4 million square kilometres— to cattle pasture would produce one month of hamburger for the world's population and no more—since the soil would be depleted and the forest irreversibly lost.
Adapted from J. O. Browder: The Social Costs of Rain Forest Destruction: The Hamburger Debate. InterClencia, Caracas, 1988
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