Cows are a strange issue. I understand the burping thing, but they are often talked about as using a lot of water and land, and that I don't understand, at least in the Canadian context. Cows may use, but they don't use up, water. What goes in one end comes out the other. They also don't generally use otherwise useful land. If you can farm a given piece of land you generally do. Farming makes more per acre than ranching, but if you have land that's too dry or not fertile enough to farm you put cows on it and you let them graze. So in fact ranching makes use of land that would otherwise be nonproductive.
