One solution would be to eat less meat. Americans, per capita, are eating 200 pounds of meat each year - compare that to the 1950s when we ate only 140 pounds of meat per capita.
Raising meat is very inefficient - it takes seven pounds of corn to produce one pound of beef. The livestock industry consumes more than half of corn grown in the US, so cutting back on livestock herds would have a major effect on corn supply.
A simple thing for all of us to do, if we are concerned about the food crisis, is to cut back on our meat consumption. There is enough corn to go around, we just aren’t using it wisely.
I have to dispute you, at least to a degree. I am, among other things, a rancher, and have been all my life. I agree that many ranchers feed corn to cattle, though I think that is changing. I do not feed grain to cattle. Not ever. My cattle are 100% grass-fed. Granted, people like the “marbling” that the feed lots put in the meat with corn. There are other ways, perhaps less satisfactory, to do it. I have, myself, butchered totally grass-fed steers and, while you have to put a little oil in the pan to fry hamburgers or a steak to keep it from sticking, I like it just fine. For roasts, marbling serves no useful purpose and is actually a big negative in my mind. Unmarbled beef is indisputably healthier.
Now, I am aware, though I have not tried it yet, that I can “marble” the beef by no-tilling beets into a pasture or even by overseeding wheat on “warm season” pastures like Bermuda. (I have done the latter for “backgrounding” but not for full feedout, so I can’t speak from experience on that.)
But the big thing about beef is the utter uselessness of a great deal of land for anything but grass. Grass is totally indigestible to humans, because the sugars and proteins are locked up in cellulose. But, if one feeds that otherwise useless grass to cattle, (or sheep) which can digest the cellulose because of their unique double stomachs, they convert it to high quality, highly digestible protein; to-wit, meat. When cattle (or sheep) are raised on lands that will produce nothing but grass, they are a big net plus to the human food supply.
It is no accident that Indo-Europeans have a high tolerance for meat protein and milk sugar (lactose). Our remote ancestors came from the Eurasian steppes, where absolutely nothing but grass will grow.
Even the feedlots have begun to change, at least to a degree. They no longer want fat steers. They want steers that are a bit older, a bit bigger, and grass fed. Obviously, they are doing that in order to use less corn. They now prefer to just add the marbling to a nearly finished animal.
If you don’t want to burden the corn supply, buy grass-fed beef. It’s a little more expensive, for now, but it’s as easy as that.
