7 ms·

Technology changes that game. Grains are the core of the human diet, and have been since the dawn of civilization. But they are only edible because of civiliza

by beat 7y ago

Technology changes that game. Grains are the core of the human diet, and have been since the dawn of civilization. But they are only edible because of civilization - the grinding, fermentation, and cooking breaking them down into something our bodies can use. In the US and other wealthy countries, we might feed grain to livestock, but it's also often parts of grain that we can't really eat (hulls, etc). And in poorer countries, livestock are often open-grazed on grasses that are inedible for us. And non-grazers like hogs often eat garbage, food waste that we don't consume. When farming, the questions are even more complex. The livestock generates manure that fertilizes the fields, so much of that "lost" energy is recovered.

philg_jr 7y ago
> When farming, the questions are even more complex. The livestock generates manure that fertilizes the fields, so much of that "lost" energy is recovered. Which is why grassfed > cornfed in pretty much every situation except for the extra fat/flavor you might get from cornfed beef. Having cows that consume grass is a win-win. The grass absorbs sunlight instead of reflecting it back into the atmosphere like a feedlot does, the grass is digested better, and manure fertilizes the grass. And when the cows are moved to different pastures and chickens are brought in, they help to agitate the manure into the soil to help that fertilizing process along. I wish the grassfed beef industry was embraced more instead of people attempting to swear off beef completely.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Net of methane production from the cattle may affect that. I don't know if it does or doesn't, but you might want to incorporate that into your model. (NB: I'm not a vegitarian myself. I'm quite familiar with arguments. And have some familiarity with feedlots.)
  - beat 7y ago
    If we didn't have cattle, would we have buffalo? Large wild herbivores in general? (Hmm, results of a quick google... there were 30-60m buffalo in the 19th century, and there are 94m cows in the US today. Given relative size, methane output has probably been more or less static over that period.)
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      That's a good question and I don't know. The net terrestrial vertebrate biomass has shifted markedly over the past century (and undoubtedly over the previous 50,000 years of the Human Diaspora). What the pre-Columbian American bison population was I have no idea. Total pre-industrial wildlife biomass ~10,000 BCE, by estimates, was ~1/7 that of the present, and smaller than humans in total: http://peakoilbarrel.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Terrestrial-Vertebrate-Biomass.jpg http://peakoilbarrel.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Terrestr...
    - pnutjam 7y ago
      Some people think buffalo herds exploded when native Americans died off. The herds may not have been that big pre-columbus.
- beat 7y ago
  Trends in agriculture are driven heavily by cost. This is where the vegan fundamentalists go wrong, arguing that meat is "more expensive". But in the days before modern agriculture, people raised animals and had meat - it was economically beneficial to do so, even for people living at the edge of famine. Cornfed beef is a result of economics, too - it's cheaper to buy corn than use pasture, and/or it produces meat that can sell for higher prices. We don't just see corfed beef for fancy prime steaks. It's used in cheap fast food hamburgers as well. Fast food and junk food are the cheapest food. They've applied industrial logic to every link in the food chain. If meat was as expensive as vegans argue, we wouldn't see it as the basis of so much fast food.
  - chrisco255 7y ago
    Cows are fed very, very little corn. Corn is not cheaper than grass! Grass is free and widely available in the great American plains. More than 90% of a cow's diet over its lifetime is grass and hay. Less than 10% is grain or non-human edible leftovers from corn stalks, such as corn silage: https://www.progressiveforage.com/forage-types/silage/what-is-corn-silage-worth https://www.progressiveforage.com/forage-types/silage/what-i... https://beef.unl.edu/cattleproduction/forageconsumed-day https://beef.unl.edu/cattleproduction/forageconsumed-day
dredmorbius 7y ago
Cultivation, selective breeding, and hybridisation of grains does not change the trophic level calculus. The bulk of livestock feed is corn (which has seen tremendous yield improvements since the 1960s through "green revolution" techniques), and for protein content, soyabeans, which have rather pointedly not. Additional silage provides some but AFAIU considerably less general nutritive content. And you will absolutely find vast acreages of corn and soyabean in the flyover states destined entirely for livestock feed. Not table crops with the leftovers going to livestock. Fully 100% livestock-dedicated. Integrated farming operations in which cows run loose amongst the corn and wheat fertilising the fields are ... effectively nonexistant. Theoretical possibilities are not on-the-ground, in-the-dirt, realities.
- beat 7y ago
  And that's a totally legitimate point - but does it support your contention? You seem to be arguing that it is too expensive to raise meat. But food is driven largely by economics. Replacing the integrated farm with the sort of separation of duties you're talking about here is succeeding because it's cheaper. If you're talking about thermal efficiency.. what you're saying is true but irrelevant. Whether my food is the optimum use of sunlight is not a real concern.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    "Economics" unfortunately excludes numerous costs and risks associated with both provisioning and consumption of resources, including not only economic impacts, but fully-costed ecological inputs. Most especially in the accounting and market price mechanisms for utilisation of nonrenewable (or, read equivalently: nonsustainably-utilised) resources. The alternatives to sustainable, integrated, ecological agricultural methods are "cheaper" because the market doesn't price in the 5-million-years-to-one rate at which we're extracting fossil fuels from the Earth over that at which they'd been put there,[1] of the strip-mining of topsoil at rates 100x - 1000x greater than those at which it had formed, of the natural-gas-fed fixing of atmospheric nitrogen (again at a roughly 5 million:1 ratio of inputs), of the mining of phosphorus, another critical fertiliser (potash is, for the moment, relatively abundant), of the impacts of eutrophication of rivers, wetlands, and oceans near ag-land outflows, of the systemic risks posed by monoculture cultivation, of the systemic ecological impacts of pesticide use, of the destruction of virgin ecosystems and biological diversity, and more.[2] The "economic" costs are actually financialised costs, which include a long, peculiar, historically-contingent, largely malformed and false worldview model origin, which persists for numerous reasons, largely boiling down to being a highly convenient fiction for contemporary beneficiaries of this particular theology. Though the difficulty in moving to a more accurate, realistic, and one might hope sustainable model is severe. The convenience of the modern lie is profound. Upshot: "cheaper" is based on invalid models heaped on invalid models. There's a vast unbooked debt accumulating. ________________________________ Notes: 1. Jeffrey S. Dukes, "Burning Buried Sunshine" (2003) https://dge.carnegiescience.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_ClimChange1.pdf https://dge.carnegiescience.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_ClimChange1.... 2. Lev Tolstoy has an early and fascinating discussion of cost accounting and factors of production in What Shall We Do Then (https://archive.org/details/whatshallwedothe00tolsrich/page/101 https://archive.org/details/whatshallwedothe00tolsrich/page/...), finding the standard three-factor model of the time, land, labour, and capital, insufficient. The economic theory seems to derive directly from cost accounting, dating principally to Alexander Hamilton Church (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Hamilton_Church https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Hamilton_Church). The problem of defining economic theory to guide accounts based on what accounts tallied to inform economists seems ... problematic. The legal and economic theory of extractive resources has a long, problematic, and almost entirely unscientific history, specifically the Rule of Capture and its logic, and the principle theory of pricing, which though largely dismissed doesn't seem to have found a replacement: Hotelling's Rule.

by beat 7y ago

philg_jr 7y ago

> When farming, the questions are even more complex. The livestock generates manure that fertilizes the fields, so much of that "lost" energy is recovered. Which is why grassfed > cornfed in pretty much every situation except for the extra fat/flavor you might get from cornfed beef. Having cows that consume grass is a win-win. The grass absorbs sunlight instead of reflecting it back into the atmosphere like a feedlot does, the grass is digested better, and manure fertilizes the grass. And when the cows are moved to different pastures and chickens are brought in, they help to agitate the manure into the soil to help that fertilizing process along. I wish the grassfed beef industry was embraced more instead of people attempting to swear off beef completely.

dredmorbius 7y ago
Net of methane production from the cattle may affect that. I don't know if it does or doesn't, but you might want to incorporate that into your model. (NB: I'm not a vegitarian myself. I'm quite familiar with arguments. And have some familiarity with feedlots.)
- beat 7y ago
  If we didn't have cattle, would we have buffalo? Large wild herbivores in general? (Hmm, results of a quick google... there were 30-60m buffalo in the 19th century, and there are 94m cows in the US today. Given relative size, methane output has probably been more or less static over that period.)
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    That's a good question and I don't know. The net terrestrial vertebrate biomass has shifted markedly over the past century (and undoubtedly over the previous 50,000 years of the Human Diaspora). What the pre-Columbian American bison population was I have no idea. Total pre-industrial wildlife biomass ~10,000 BCE, by estimates, was ~1/7 that of the present, and smaller than humans in total: http://peakoilbarrel.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Terrestrial-Vertebrate-Biomass.jpg http://peakoilbarrel.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Terrestr...
  - pnutjam 7y ago
    Some people think buffalo herds exploded when native Americans died off. The herds may not have been that big pre-columbus.
beat 7y ago
Trends in agriculture are driven heavily by cost. This is where the vegan fundamentalists go wrong, arguing that meat is "more expensive". But in the days before modern agriculture, people raised animals and had meat - it was economically beneficial to do so, even for people living at the edge of famine. Cornfed beef is a result of economics, too - it's cheaper to buy corn than use pasture, and/or it produces meat that can sell for higher prices. We don't just see corfed beef for fancy prime steaks. It's used in cheap fast food hamburgers as well. Fast food and junk food are the cheapest food. They've applied industrial logic to every link in the food chain. If meat was as expensive as vegans argue, we wouldn't see it as the basis of so much fast food.
- chrisco255 7y ago
  Cows are fed very, very little corn. Corn is not cheaper than grass! Grass is free and widely available in the great American plains. More than 90% of a cow's diet over its lifetime is grass and hay. Less than 10% is grain or non-human edible leftovers from corn stalks, such as corn silage: https://www.progressiveforage.com/forage-types/silage/what-is-corn-silage-worth https://www.progressiveforage.com/forage-types/silage/what-i... https://beef.unl.edu/cattleproduction/forageconsumed-day https://beef.unl.edu/cattleproduction/forageconsumed-day

dredmorbius 7y ago

Cultivation, selective breeding, and hybridisation of grains does not change the trophic level calculus. The bulk of livestock feed is corn (which has seen tremendous yield improvements since the 1960s through "green revolution" techniques), and for protein content, soyabeans, which have rather pointedly not. Additional silage provides some but AFAIU considerably less general nutritive content. And you will absolutely find vast acreages of corn and soyabean in the flyover states destined entirely for livestock feed. Not table crops with the leftovers going to livestock. Fully 100% livestock-dedicated. Integrated farming operations in which cows run loose amongst the corn and wheat fertilising the fields are ... effectively nonexistant. Theoretical possibilities are not on-the-ground, in-the-dirt, realities.

beat 7y ago
And that's a totally legitimate point - but does it support your contention? You seem to be arguing that it is too expensive to raise meat. But food is driven largely by economics. Replacing the integrated farm with the sort of separation of duties you're talking about here is succeeding because it's cheaper. If you're talking about thermal efficiency.. what you're saying is true but irrelevant. Whether my food is the optimum use of sunlight is not a real concern.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  "Economics" unfortunately excludes numerous costs and risks associated with both provisioning and consumption of resources, including not only economic impacts, but fully-costed ecological inputs. Most especially in the accounting and market price mechanisms for utilisation of nonrenewable (or, read equivalently: nonsustainably-utilised) resources. The alternatives to sustainable, integrated, ecological agricultural methods are "cheaper" because the market doesn't price in the 5-million-years-to-one rate at which we're extracting fossil fuels from the Earth over that at which they'd been put there,[1] of the strip-mining of topsoil at rates 100x - 1000x greater than those at which it had formed, of the natural-gas-fed fixing of atmospheric nitrogen (again at a roughly 5 million:1 ratio of inputs), of the mining of phosphorus, another critical fertiliser (potash is, for the moment, relatively abundant), of the impacts of eutrophication of rivers, wetlands, and oceans near ag-land outflows, of the systemic risks posed by monoculture cultivation, of the systemic ecological impacts of pesticide use, of the destruction of virgin ecosystems and biological diversity, and more.[2] The "economic" costs are actually financialised costs, which include a long, peculiar, historically-contingent, largely malformed and false worldview model origin, which persists for numerous reasons, largely boiling down to being a highly convenient fiction for contemporary beneficiaries of this particular theology. Though the difficulty in moving to a more accurate, realistic, and one might hope sustainable model is severe. The convenience of the modern lie is profound. Upshot: "cheaper" is based on invalid models heaped on invalid models. There's a vast unbooked debt accumulating. ________________________________ Notes: 1. Jeffrey S. Dukes, "Burning Buried Sunshine" (2003) https://dge.carnegiescience.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_ClimChange1.pdf https://dge.carnegiescience.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_ClimChange1.... 2. Lev Tolstoy has an early and fascinating discussion of cost accounting and factors of production in What Shall We Do Then (https://archive.org/details/whatshallwedothe00tolsrich/page/101 https://archive.org/details/whatshallwedothe00tolsrich/page/...), finding the standard three-factor model of the time, land, labour, and capital, insufficient. The economic theory seems to derive directly from cost accounting, dating principally to Alexander Hamilton Church (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Hamilton_Church https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Hamilton_Church). The problem of defining economic theory to guide accounts based on what accounts tallied to inform economists seems ... problematic. The legal and economic theory of extractive resources has a long, problematic, and almost entirely unscientific history, specifically the Rule of Capture and its logic, and the principle theory of pricing, which though largely dismissed doesn't seem to have found a replacement: Hotelling's Rule.