Beans is the answer for protine alternative. Baked Beans.

Bugsy - why have you dragged feedlots into it? No beef in Aus has ever been produced by anything that could be considered factory methods.. correct answer is 0 per cent factory as noted before. chicken and pork, however, are different, as noted.

As for the Amazon my guess, from a brief glance at the figures (you or the author could always have looked it up) is something like 10 per cent, but that sounds high. However, for various reasons, it is as high as its ever likely to go..

I wonder what those

Animals are in feedlots

All over the place?

A very large number of our feed lots are "opportunity feed lots". A number of my friends have them.

They are rarely used, but they stay registered as a drought mitigation system.

When it starts to get dry, & the pasture is getting low, rather than flog their properties, they will open up the feed lot, & put a number of their near finished cattle into them. This quickly reduces the grazing pressure, & by finishing the stock on grain, they get a higher price when they sell.

The higher price is not profitable in the Australian market or they would feed lot all their stock. However it helps look after the property, & is much better than drought feeding or agistment of stock, to survive a drought.

The arithmetic is really pretty simple; the conversion rate for cattle is generally taken as about 8 or 9 to one; that is 8 kilos of vegetable matter to produce 1 kilo of meat. Indians have been saying for decades 'why feed all that grain to beef and then eat the beef? Why not just eat the grain?'
The answer of course is pretty straight forward; cattle can digest grass, people can't, but people can digest cattle. In effect, cattle have become our extended -or 'outsourced'- intestines.
However when, as in the USA for instance, we start feeding cattle high protein grains like corn, wheat, rye and barley -which humans are perfectly capable of digesting themselves- you have to concede the Indians have a point.
For every kilo we feed cattle, we could provide 8 kilo's of food for humans. Arguably an ignorable issue at the moment, but as our population continues to rise, these statistics will continue to factor more heavily.
Currently, only rich countries can afford this sort of 8 to 1 luxury and guess what?
The richest countries ain't lookin' that rich anymore.

Does Monika practise what she preaches? If so, she should get her friends to do likewise.