Reintroducing bison on tallgrass prairie doubles plant diversity: research
I've been thinking a bit about this lately.<p>I've read estimates of ~30 million Bison before European settlement, ~35 million pronghorn, and ~3 trillion oysters in beds on the east coast, in addition to all of the other natural abundance. It's amazing to think of what nature provides - supplemented with chicken and pork, it seems those wild populations would be relatively close sustaining modern levels of meat-eating on their own.<p>Edited to add some math. TL:DR is that bison alone couldn't get to US beef consumption. Wikipedia says 60 million Bison, so let's use that.<p>Say you can take a managed 10% of Bison a year on average and sustain a population. Median weight seems to be about 1,600 lbs for males and 1,000 lbs for females, average of 1,300 (assuming harvest is even, but management for population might mean taking more males). Carcass weight to meat seems to be about 57% in cows, so that's:<p>60 million individuals * 10% harvest * 1,300 lbs each * 57% of standing weight in meat = 2.2 billion pounds, or 13.4 pounds per person. Average beef intake per person in the US is around 60 lbs, so this has a decent distance to go - assuming annual harvest of 20% would only get you about half-way there, and there's still Canada to account for (since a lot of bison range is there). I doubt elk, pronghorn, and deer could bridge that gap as the individuals (sans elk) are much smaller.