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Well, good point, I typed my comment up fairly quickly. It is a lot of land occupied by a very recource hungry industry and less efficient industry e.g. you ne

by wuschel 10y ago

Well, good point, I typed my comment up fairly quickly. It is a lot of land occupied by a very recource hungry industry and less efficient industry e.g. you need 100x more water to make animal protein when compared to plant protein. We use 25% of our freshwater consumption for animal protein production - not even mentioning other recourses. With a growing number of people on the planet, efficiency is key.

mrob 10y ago
If that water is from rain then it's a renewable resource, and if it's not used it will just flow to the sea and be wasted. There are places like Wales, with a wet climate and hilly terrain that are poorly suited to arable cultivation but ideal for livestock. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_Wales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_Wales However, freeing up more land for plants means we could grow the same amount of food using less intensive cultivation techniques, eg. rotating in nitrogen-fixing crops instead of relying on energy-intensive Haber process fertilizers.
- lkbm 10y ago
  > If that water is from rain then it's a renewable resource, and if it's not used it will just flow to the sea and be wasted. This is simply not true. A large amount of rainwater goes to (or would go to) replenishing aquifers, which we use to provide our drinking and irrigation water. Unharvested rainwater is not wasted--it replenishes our natural freshwater storage. Additionally, not all water used is captured rainwater. Some comes from those aquifers being replenished by rainwater, and some comes from fossil aquifers, which DON'T get replenished on a human timescale and are truly non-renewable. If all our livestock were grown in places like Wales, maybe the idea of "use it or lose it" holds true, but we've got a lot of cattle sitting atop the Ogallala Aquifer in the US, and you can find similar situations many places where we raise livestock.

by wuschel 10y ago

mrob 10y ago

If that water is from rain then it's a renewable resource, and if it's not used it will just flow to the sea and be wasted. There are places like Wales, with a wet climate and hilly terrain that are poorly suited to arable cultivation but ideal for livestock. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_Wales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_Wales However, freeing up more land for plants means we could grow the same amount of food using less intensive cultivation techniques, eg. rotating in nitrogen-fixing crops instead of relying on energy-intensive Haber process fertilizers.

lkbm 10y ago
> If that water is from rain then it's a renewable resource, and if it's not used it will just flow to the sea and be wasted. This is simply not true. A large amount of rainwater goes to (or would go to) replenishing aquifers, which we use to provide our drinking and irrigation water. Unharvested rainwater is not wasted--it replenishes our natural freshwater storage. Additionally, not all water used is captured rainwater. Some comes from those aquifers being replenished by rainwater, and some comes from fossil aquifers, which DON'T get replenished on a human timescale and are truly non-renewable. If all our livestock were grown in places like Wales, maybe the idea of "use it or lose it" holds true, but we've got a lot of cattle sitting atop the Ogallala Aquifer in the US, and you can find similar situations many places where we raise livestock.