It's not even beef. It's industrial beef catering.
Around my place, cows are still in the meadows, then for a few winter months they are in the stable but they are fed mostly with grass cut in the same meadows earlier, plus a bit of straw, leftover of other cultures. The pressure on the local environment is basically nil, and it has no effect on remote locations either.
But if you drive just a few dozen miles away, all catering is industrial (even at small scale): cows live their whole life under a shed, over a concrete slab, behind galvanised steel bars, and are fed silage and soja sprayed from a tractor. They do not ever go in the meadows.
It was not like that 25 years ago, it changed quickly. It is unneeded (production was already excessive with the (not so) old way) and it is unsustainable: it costs lots of investments, it costs lots of food buying, it destroys landscapes which are either turned into farm land or abandoned to the forest, this farm land uses more water and pollutes more, the farmer does not any more produce a wide range of crops and animals, it is specialised in a single (or 2 at most) production and has to stick to it and is thus highly sensitive and fragile with respect to market price variations. In fact he's not a farmer any more, he's just a small industrialist, a meat manufacturer. A very small one who doesn't even have any power to control anything. He's perpetually on the verge of bankruptcy and sometimes commits suicide. So really none, nothing, nowhere benefits of this system (except a few go-between that didn't exist before or existed but increased their margins).
You make a valid point that there are varying degrees of offense. There's this thing called the "feed conversion ratio"[0] that measures how much input it takes to get the desired output. But for all meats, even fish, the ratio is above 1 (it takes more food than is produced). I would be curious to see where insects fall on the spectrum; I've heard they're very efficient protein producers for the physical space they take up, but I'm having trouble locating any specific data to back that up.
That's true, however, the bigger issue with beef is the methods used to raise cattle in tropical countries. Farming cattle involves clear-cutting large swaths of forest to create fields that have 2-3 years of use for cattle before the soil is completely degraded. Then new land must be cleared. Cattle methane is another huge problem. Neither of those issues are factored in to the "feed conversion ratio".
Yea. The reason I called out fish is that they have the advantage of more-or-less not needing to support their own body weight to move around, unlike land-based animals, and therefore they have the closest ratio to 1.
Downvoters tell me why you disagree?