Farming cattle for humans to eat is less efficient than farming crops because of energy transfer - AQA - A-Level Biology - Question 4 - 2022 - Paper 1

Farming cattle is less efficient than farming crops due to the principles of energy transfer through trophic levels in an ecosystem. In general, energy is lost at each trophic level, primarily through metabolic processes as heat. When energy is transferred from crops (producers) to cattle (primary consumers), only about 10% of the energy is available to the cattle, as illustrated by the 10% rule in ecology. Therefore, the amount of biomass that can be produced from feeding cattle results in significantly less caloric energy available to humans compared to directly consuming crops. This inefficiency illustrates why it takes much more agricultural input to produce meat than it does to produce crops directly for human consumption.