The ethics of eating red meat have been grilled recently by critics who question its consequences for environmental health and animal welfare, but if you want to minimise animal suffering and promote more sustainable agriculture, adopting a vegetarian diet might be the worst possible thing you could do.
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Published figures from CSIRO and other sources in relation to Australia suggest that producing wheat and other grains to service a vegetarian/vegan diet results in at least 25 times more sentient animals being killed per kilogram of useable protein, more environmental damage and a great deal more animal cruelty.
Full Paper - https://doi.org/10.7882/AZ.2011.051
TLDR: Meat results in 25x less death per kg of protein vs plant based protein sources.
And the bigger the animal you eat, the fewer deaths, and if it’s regenerative it’s better still, to that end I found this site https://regenerative.org.au/directory/directory-products-list/ which gives me a few farms within a hundred kilometres that will sell me a box of meat up to 15kg, and others I can point a butcher at and ask them to order me a whole cow