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).
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).