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I'll wager the meat industry is but one of the many agricultural industries to do such a thing.
That's the problem with the separation between consumers and farmers - you never truly know what's going on behind the scenes.
The meat industry is a pretty big outlier compared to human crop production. It turns out that the best-case production of meat, dairy, etc. comes out worse compared to even the worst-case production of any plants for human consumption on pretty much every environmental metric (emissions, land usage, etc.)
Plant-based foods have a significantly smaller footprint on the environment than animal-based foods. Even the least sustainable vegetables and cereals cause less environmental harm than the lowest impact meat and dairy products [9].
The math of trophic levels (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level) means that you're never going to do better. The only really good options for improving the math is stuff like eating smaller animals (like bugs) or lab grown meat, and as the math shows, they're still going to be worse than a heavily processed plant alternative.