"The thing is, when we're born into a culture most of us don't ever question it... Especially if we're making money from it."

Should cattle farmers switch to more animal-friendly agriculture? That's the question posed by an American author visiting southern Queensland this week.

Dr Will Tuttle is a well-known vegan author from the USA. He will address a gathering in Toowoomba later this week; a city with strong links to the farming sector.

He told ABC Local Radio that during his studies he "realised our culture's routine mistreatment of animals for food and other products is a huge factor in all the problems we have."

"There's a lot of cruelty involved. Where I live in the United States, it wasn't that long ago we had slavery in the south. People said the same thing, 'we treat slaves well, they have a good life, and it's much better than if they were back in Africa running around.' But we look back on that and can see now from a perspective of history that was a dark time with a lot of violence and devastation. And I think hopefully in the future we'll look back on this time and realise there's a lot of devastation also. We're growing huge amounts of grain and feeding them to animals. People are going starving... and it actually desensitises us," he said.

"People say 'well, what could these farmers do, are there jobs for them?' I think there are. People have to eat. If people are not producing cattle... they could get into something different. My great uncle was a horseshoe maker, and when cars came along he had to find something else to do. That's how things are."

A farmer's perspective

Terry O'Leary is a fifth generation farmer on Queensland's Darling Downs. He says he's proud of his chosen field of work.

"To link the forced entrapment and harsh conditions of people to breeding animals for food is pretty outlandish to me," he said.

"I'm not opposed to anyone's personal choices, but when people stand up and tell me what we should be doing, and what we do is wrong, when quite obviously it isn't, I do take a bit of personal offence to that."

O'Leary grows watermelons on his family property.

"We feed the vegans, and we also have Angus cattle, so we feed the steak enjoyers as well."

He says the idea of simply swapping cattle paddocks to grain crops isn't feasible, as a lot of land used for cattle production couldn't grow crops.

O'Leary encourages people with questions about farming practices to seek answers.

"Go out there and have a look what happens first hand," he said.

He writes a blog called Melons Cause Insomnia where he explains how melon and cattle farming works on his property.

"I had a couple of my cousin's children out here, they're a vegetarian family. They got into the cattle yards and helped us inoculate and brand and mark the cattle. They admitted it wasn't anywhere near as bad as what they thought it was going to be."

Beyond the cattle yard

Dr Will Tuttle recommends "not buying any produce from any conventional agriculture that uses chemical fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides and fungicides. I think we have to completely get away from all that... And that's how we could employ a lot of people. We could have agriculture that was more small-scale and organic. We can feed everyone. It'll just take more people gardening and farming, doing it in a harmonious way."

"If everyone switched to a plant-based diet we could allow huge amounts of land to go back to forests and be habitat again, we could allow oceans to come back, and allow rivers to run free again. We could feed everyone on a fraction of the land."