The cattle percentage is very misleading.
A large percentage of that land is scrub land owned by the BLM. They let ranchers run cattle on it because the ecological impact is similar to the bison that used to live on the land. Any other use would destroy the land. But it only supports a couple of cows per square mile. So in many ways it’s more like park land than ranch land. Using for anything other than grazing would be an ecological disaster.
The beef you buy in the store probably got most of its calories from corn rather than from grass. The chunk of land marked as “livestock feed” supports a lot more cattle than the chunk marked as “cow pasture / range”. The ratio of “livestock feed” to “food we eat” is the argument against meat eating, not the “cow pasture / range” land.
