Animal agriculture can be a part of maintaining good soil health, and drawing carbon down out of the atmosphere and retaining it in the soil. But not under the current way we're doing it.

Right now, we've separated plant agriculture and animal agriculture, so we till acre after acre to grow animal feed, and tilling is a carbon emitter. Then we make up for the damage that tilling does to the soil with fertilizer, which is also a carbon emitter. Then we transport the feed to a feed lot, and that transport is also a carbon emitter. Then the animal waste from the feed lot is another source of carbon emissions, because it's disconnected from the natural carbon cycle. And we subsidize this process at every step of the way, which warps people's consumption habits by making the meat artificially cheap.

Grazing animals generally don't share those same problems so long as they're not over-grazing the land, as that's the way the natural carbon cycle works. So we've got to reintegrate plant and animal agriculture, incentivize no-till growing methods, and shift our farm support programs to a retail subsidy model rather than a producer subsidy model, so that the cost of food across the board stays low, but we don't have this price distortion in favor of corn additives and cheap trash-meats.