Is raising meat more harmful to the environment than raising vegetables?

I grew up on a farm and we had some scrub land and sloughs that we never touched. They were kind of sanctuaries for wild life. Coyotes, deer, antelope, badgers, gophers ducks geese snipes are only a partial list of birds and animals that lived near the small ponds. Trees grew all around them and the wild life found shelter food and water there. We would turn our cattle into that area and the year after year there was harmony as we would harvest the cows every year producing hundreds of pounds of beef every year with zero impact on the environment. Not far from the sloughs we would grow grain. Early in the spring we would turn all the soil killing all the native grasses of course that required using a huge diesel tractor to do it. Then we would go over the land planting seed. As we planted we would add chemical fertilizer and some very powerful mercury based poison to kill the worms that would eat our crop. It was not unusual to run over a ducks nest or see baby hares running in fear of the noisy machinery. Late in the spring we would spray the land with dangerous chemicals to control the weeds. Some time later we would spray with another deadly chemical to control the grass hoppers or other blight. Finally in the fall we would fire up the massive combine and burn hundreds of gallons of diesel as we took off the wheat which we hoped was of adequate quality to feed to humans. It often wasn't due to lack of rain or early frost or early snow. What did we do with substandard grain? Fed it to the cows. Now which one of these food sources had the greater impact on the environment? Hers is a hint. It wasn't the cows.