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> farms growing crops have been just as destructive as those raising animals This comparison does not make sense. What this reporter and the public, in general

by vfc1 7y ago

> farms growing crops have been just as destructive as those raising animals This comparison does not make sense. What this reporter and the public, in general, fail to realize still in 2019, is that most of the farms producing crops are doing so to produce cattle feed. The majority of agricultural fields are planted to feed livestock, not humans. Only a relatively small amount of crops goes directly to humans. This is why eating plants directly is much less wasteful and more resource-efficient. If more people eat plant-based, much less land will be needed for crops, that's the point.

Aunche 7y ago
It's a lot less efficient to grow almonds than livestock-grade soybeans, so perhaps almond milk is worse for the environment than cow's milk? The article doesn't really go into that sort of analysis though, and it's difficult to imagine that the average vegan has a bigger ecological impact.
- vfc1 7y ago
  Soy crops are a good example, the majority of them are to feed livestock but they are a great crop to feed humans instead, and without all the waste involved in having to feed a cow first and then eat parts of it. You can make plant milk with soy too, its a very versatile crop. With it, you can feed the same amount of people with a fraction of the land, water, and pollution.
  - jakemoshenko 7y ago
    You didn't address, and I don't know: what is the relative environmental impact of growing human-grade soy vs. livestock-grade soy? Is there even necessarily a distinction?
    - vfc1 7y ago
      As far as I know it's all just beans, they are all eatable by humans. The difference between resource consumption of different types of soy crops, if any, is not comparable to the difference between eating the soy directly or feeding it first to an animal, the second is a much more wasteful and environmentally impactful as you can imagine.
    - zpallin 7y ago
      You won't need to grow livestock-grade soy if you don't have livestock to feed. But we will always have humans to feed (because we're humans).
    - wtmt 7y ago
      AFAIK there is no human-grade soy vs. livestock-grade soy. But the soy grown for livestock can usually be fed in the ratio of <soy for one animal>:<soy for many humans> (this ratio varies based on which animal and farming practice you consider).
  - bryanlarsen 7y ago
    Barley crops are a good counter-example. There are three main purposes: malting, milling & animal feed. A good chunk of the feed barley on the market is barley grown for malting or milling but wasn't good enough for those purposes and is fed to chickens. The alternative to feeding it to chickens is to throw it away. That's hardly environmentally friendly. Some barley is purposefully grown for feed rather than aiming for the higher price that malting or milling will get. Yields on such variants can be as much as 3 times that of a nice malting or milling variant. Given that a chicken can convert 1.5 grams of barley protein into 1 gram of meat protein, you can see how it be more environmentally efficient to "eat" barley by running it through a chicken first.
    - vfc1 7y ago
      Well then lets no plant Barley to feed humans, let's use something else. The thing is a good portion of the surface of the Earth is covered with agricultural fields, most of them aimed at feeding cattle, not humans. It's a bit insane if we think about it. I doubt that conversion from barley to chicken is so efficient. There is more nutrition in barley than the protein, there are carbs as well and fiber and micro nutrients that would be good for humans, besides only the protein. A better comparison would be in calories, considering the waste of slaughtering the chicken and all the parts with don't eat, plus all the waste produced by the chicken and the water used.
      - NickBusey 7y ago
        Not plant Barley? Hate to tell you, but when they said 'malting' that means 'malted barley' as in the primary ingredient in beer. We are not going to stop planting that any time soon.
      - bryanlarsen 7y ago
        Feed barley also yields almost 2X that milling wheat does on dryland Canadian prairie, so switching species rather than variants doesn't change the argument. And if you want to use calories instead of grams of protein, be my guest. It'll just help my argument. Chickens eat unhulled barley; the hull is almost half the weight of the kernel. Humans eat hulled barley and still a good chunk of its calories are indigestible fiber. That may help your digestive system but you're not extracting any energy from it.
- cpk5 7y ago
  Sure, that's true from a purely ecological perspective, but your argument does not capture the general inhumane practices that go on within the diary industry (e.g., caging, keeping cows perpetually pregnant, separating mother / calve at birth, etc.). All of these combined create a life of significant distress for all the animals involved and should be captured as an "environmental cost" in your equation above.
- ainiriand 7y ago
  You are making the mistake of assuming that just by growing livestock-grade soybeans you magically have milk. You still have to make this animal drink about 3 gallons per 100pounds, per day. https://beef.unl.edu/water-requirements-for-beef-cattle https://beef.unl.edu/water-requirements-for-beef-cattle
  - vfc1 7y ago
    You're right the water consumption of livestock raising is very important too, besides the huge amount of excrement produced.
- vfc1 7y ago
  To answer your question, it takes a lot more soy beans to feed a cow, that then will digest them and use only part of them, produce waste, consume water. The cow will be slaughtered and only part of the body will be consumed (gut, head, for example, make for a huge part and are not usually eaten), some of the eatable parts will be wasted in the food chain. If you count for everything, the amount of land and resources used to produce a gallon of cow's milk is always going to be much higher than anything done with a crop directly, because you cut out the middleman, the animal. For the specific case of almonds, why not use soy milk instead for a better comparison. I'm sure you will agree that you can produce a lot more soy milk by using the soy directly then by feeding to a cow, impregnate it, shooting the calf on birth if its male, etc. the whole process. Not to mention the copious amount of cow excrement produced and the impact on global warming due to methane emissions of the cows intestines.
- thrownblown 7y ago
  cows dont eat soy, too much fat, it makes them sick
roel_v 7y ago
You can grow (maize and grass for) cattle in places where you can't grow crops.
- vfc1 7y ago
  Yes like in the Amazon where the forest is taken down for soy crops and for grazing mostly. A lot of the grazing land we have was created through human burning and deforestation in the first place. And yet, in reality, the vast majority of meat comes from factory farms fed with corn and soy. Even technically called free-range meat gets fattened up in the last portion of their lives in factory farms to get the slaughter weight so they also get fed corn and soy just less.
cmrdporcupine 7y ago
Farms grow crops that you can't eat, to feed to animals that you can. Name the protein and fat sources that will replace meat. Tofu? We already grow soy for animal feed as a cash crop and it's pesticide and fertilizer intensive, and if people eat it directly instead of as an animal feed additive its production will grow at the expense of forests and soil health. Nuts? I'm all for perennial woody agriculture, but the calorie/acre ratio is not great, and they are labour intensive for picking, netting, processing. I say this as a person who has an orchard of my own with hazelnuts and chestnuts in it. The reality is that should meat be gone, we'd have to replace it with other foods, grown on a mass scale on agricultural lands. Animals can graze on products (grass, hay, soy, dent corn) that are marginal or useless for human consumption, and turn it into high protein, high fat calorie rich food. There are populations that eat primarily vegetarian, but mostly they are also heavy on the dairy. But the moment you bring dairy into the equation you're also bringing in non-productive male calves -- in other words, veal. Similar story for eggs. What we need to be doing -- along with reducing meat consumption some -- is coming up with more ecological ways to raise meats, and diversifying our meat products. Raising insects as feed stock for chickens, for example. Increasing perennial woody agriculture instead of cash crops, with small scale grazing of meat and dairy animals inbetween rows. Cutting animals out entirely actually leads to a nutrient deficiency. The classic pre-green revolution family farm forms a kind of nutritive circle with manure, grazing, and rooting being an important part of soil health and maintenance. That didn't scale out in the last 100 years, but it's a model we need to look at. EDIT: wow, the downvotes. Go vegans go!
- Someone 7y ago
  ”We already grow soy for animal feed as a cash crop and it's pesticide and fertilizer intensive, and if people eat it directly instead of as an animal feed additive its production will grow” Only if farmers keep feeding soy to cows that nobody will buy anymore.
- jetpackjoe 7y ago
  As long as you are eating a variety of plants and getting enough calories it is practically impossible to be protein deficient.
jakewins 7y ago
Some plants have exceptional environmental properties; things like soy, oats (0.1g CO2e/kcal!!) and potatoes. Others are worse than eating meat; if you get your calories from fresh tomatoes (12.22g CO2e/kcal, heated greenhouse) you have an order-of-magnitude higher impact than if you get it from chicken (~1.58g CO2e/kcal, depending on part). The food system is not easily grouped into "climate-conscious" and "bad"; a vegan diet is better than a western one in every study I've seen, but we could do much, much better. I highly recommend this study as a starting point, though you need to convert the unit they use, kg CO2e / kg, to the unit we eat in, kcal: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652616303584 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965261... And, shameless self-promotion: I maintain a food blog that attempts to build an evidence-based low carbon collection of recipes at https://www.carboncook.com https://www.carboncook.com
- nicoburns 7y ago
  Nobody really eats tomatoes for the calories though. People (with meat-based or plant-based diets) use tomatoes for flavour and other nutrients.
  - jakewins 7y ago
    Tomato pastas like pomodoro and putanesca were my go-to lunches before I learned about this, and tomato soups remain super popular, so I disagree that they are simply a condiment. Still, perhaps they are a bad general example. Perhaps a better one would be rice (~2g CO2e/kcal). There the problem is the massive methane emissions produced from the cultivation approach. Point being: There are huge differences between different foods, and they are non-obvious.
    - vfc1 7y ago
      It's precisely because feeding humans is so environmentally impactful that we should not be feeding mostly animals, only to eat them. The CO2 impact of rice and grains in general can't be compared the impact of animal products, here is a graph - https://i0.wp.com/shrinkthatfootprint.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/foodkCal1.gif?resize=540%2C405 https://i0.wp.com/shrinkthatfootprint.com/wp-content/uploads...
odiroot 7y ago
Let us stop consuming ruminants meat first then. Beef and lamb are not even that good but require so much resources.

by vfc1 7y ago

Aunche 7y ago

It's a lot less efficient to grow almonds than livestock-grade soybeans, so perhaps almond milk is worse for the environment than cow's milk? The article doesn't really go into that sort of analysis though, and it's difficult to imagine that the average vegan has a bigger ecological impact.

vfc1 7y ago
Soy crops are a good example, the majority of them are to feed livestock but they are a great crop to feed humans instead, and without all the waste involved in having to feed a cow first and then eat parts of it. You can make plant milk with soy too, its a very versatile crop. With it, you can feed the same amount of people with a fraction of the land, water, and pollution.
- jakemoshenko 7y ago
  You didn't address, and I don't know: what is the relative environmental impact of growing human-grade soy vs. livestock-grade soy? Is there even necessarily a distinction?
  - vfc1 7y ago
    As far as I know it's all just beans, they are all eatable by humans. The difference between resource consumption of different types of soy crops, if any, is not comparable to the difference between eating the soy directly or feeding it first to an animal, the second is a much more wasteful and environmentally impactful as you can imagine.
  - zpallin 7y ago
    You won't need to grow livestock-grade soy if you don't have livestock to feed. But we will always have humans to feed (because we're humans).
  - wtmt 7y ago
    AFAIK there is no human-grade soy vs. livestock-grade soy. But the soy grown for livestock can usually be fed in the ratio of <soy for one animal>:<soy for many humans> (this ratio varies based on which animal and farming practice you consider).
- bryanlarsen 7y ago
  Barley crops are a good counter-example. There are three main purposes: malting, milling & animal feed. A good chunk of the feed barley on the market is barley grown for malting or milling but wasn't good enough for those purposes and is fed to chickens. The alternative to feeding it to chickens is to throw it away. That's hardly environmentally friendly. Some barley is purposefully grown for feed rather than aiming for the higher price that malting or milling will get. Yields on such variants can be as much as 3 times that of a nice malting or milling variant. Given that a chicken can convert 1.5 grams of barley protein into 1 gram of meat protein, you can see how it be more environmentally efficient to "eat" barley by running it through a chicken first.
  - vfc1 7y ago
    Well then lets no plant Barley to feed humans, let's use something else. The thing is a good portion of the surface of the Earth is covered with agricultural fields, most of them aimed at feeding cattle, not humans. It's a bit insane if we think about it. I doubt that conversion from barley to chicken is so efficient. There is more nutrition in barley than the protein, there are carbs as well and fiber and micro nutrients that would be good for humans, besides only the protein. A better comparison would be in calories, considering the waste of slaughtering the chicken and all the parts with don't eat, plus all the waste produced by the chicken and the water used.
    - NickBusey 7y ago
      Not plant Barley? Hate to tell you, but when they said 'malting' that means 'malted barley' as in the primary ingredient in beer. We are not going to stop planting that any time soon.
    - bryanlarsen 7y ago
      Feed barley also yields almost 2X that milling wheat does on dryland Canadian prairie, so switching species rather than variants doesn't change the argument. And if you want to use calories instead of grams of protein, be my guest. It'll just help my argument. Chickens eat unhulled barley; the hull is almost half the weight of the kernel. Humans eat hulled barley and still a good chunk of its calories are indigestible fiber. That may help your digestive system but you're not extracting any energy from it.
cpk5 7y ago
Sure, that's true from a purely ecological perspective, but your argument does not capture the general inhumane practices that go on within the diary industry (e.g., caging, keeping cows perpetually pregnant, separating mother / calve at birth, etc.). All of these combined create a life of significant distress for all the animals involved and should be captured as an "environmental cost" in your equation above.
ainiriand 7y ago
You are making the mistake of assuming that just by growing livestock-grade soybeans you magically have milk. You still have to make this animal drink about 3 gallons per 100pounds, per day. https://beef.unl.edu/water-requirements-for-beef-cattle https://beef.unl.edu/water-requirements-for-beef-cattle
- vfc1 7y ago
  You're right the water consumption of livestock raising is very important too, besides the huge amount of excrement produced.
vfc1 7y ago
To answer your question, it takes a lot more soy beans to feed a cow, that then will digest them and use only part of them, produce waste, consume water. The cow will be slaughtered and only part of the body will be consumed (gut, head, for example, make for a huge part and are not usually eaten), some of the eatable parts will be wasted in the food chain. If you count for everything, the amount of land and resources used to produce a gallon of cow's milk is always going to be much higher than anything done with a crop directly, because you cut out the middleman, the animal. For the specific case of almonds, why not use soy milk instead for a better comparison. I'm sure you will agree that you can produce a lot more soy milk by using the soy directly then by feeding to a cow, impregnate it, shooting the calf on birth if its male, etc. the whole process. Not to mention the copious amount of cow excrement produced and the impact on global warming due to methane emissions of the cows intestines.
thrownblown 7y ago
cows dont eat soy, too much fat, it makes them sick

roel_v 7y ago

You can grow (maize and grass for) cattle in places where you can't grow crops.

vfc1 7y ago
Yes like in the Amazon where the forest is taken down for soy crops and for grazing mostly. A lot of the grazing land we have was created through human burning and deforestation in the first place. And yet, in reality, the vast majority of meat comes from factory farms fed with corn and soy. Even technically called free-range meat gets fattened up in the last portion of their lives in factory farms to get the slaughter weight so they also get fed corn and soy just less.

cmrdporcupine 7y ago

Farms grow crops that you can't eat, to feed to animals that you can. Name the protein and fat sources that will replace meat. Tofu? We already grow soy for animal feed as a cash crop and it's pesticide and fertilizer intensive, and if people eat it directly instead of as an animal feed additive its production will grow at the expense of forests and soil health. Nuts? I'm all for perennial woody agriculture, but the calorie/acre ratio is not great, and they are labour intensive for picking, netting, processing. I say this as a person who has an orchard of my own with hazelnuts and chestnuts in it. The reality is that should meat be gone, we'd have to replace it with other foods, grown on a mass scale on agricultural lands. Animals can graze on products (grass, hay, soy, dent corn) that are marginal or useless for human consumption, and turn it into high protein, high fat calorie rich food. There are populations that eat primarily vegetarian, but mostly they are also heavy on the dairy. But the moment you bring dairy into the equation you're also bringing in non-productive male calves -- in other words, veal. Similar story for eggs. What we need to be doing -- along with reducing meat consumption some -- is coming up with more ecological ways to raise meats, and diversifying our meat products. Raising insects as feed stock for chickens, for example. Increasing perennial woody agriculture instead of cash crops, with small scale grazing of meat and dairy animals inbetween rows. Cutting animals out entirely actually leads to a nutrient deficiency. The classic pre-green revolution family farm forms a kind of nutritive circle with manure, grazing, and rooting being an important part of soil health and maintenance. That didn't scale out in the last 100 years, but it's a model we need to look at. EDIT: wow, the downvotes. Go vegans go!

Someone 7y ago
”We already grow soy for animal feed as a cash crop and it's pesticide and fertilizer intensive, and if people eat it directly instead of as an animal feed additive its production will grow” Only if farmers keep feeding soy to cows that nobody will buy anymore.
jetpackjoe 7y ago
As long as you are eating a variety of plants and getting enough calories it is practically impossible to be protein deficient.

jakewins 7y ago

Some plants have exceptional environmental properties; things like soy, oats (0.1g CO2e/kcal!!) and potatoes. Others are worse than eating meat; if you get your calories from fresh tomatoes (12.22g CO2e/kcal, heated greenhouse) you have an order-of-magnitude higher impact than if you get it from chicken (~1.58g CO2e/kcal, depending on part). The food system is not easily grouped into "climate-conscious" and "bad"; a vegan diet is better than a western one in every study I've seen, but we could do much, much better. I highly recommend this study as a starting point, though you need to convert the unit they use, kg CO2e / kg, to the unit we eat in, kcal: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652616303584 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965261... And, shameless self-promotion: I maintain a food blog that attempts to build an evidence-based low carbon collection of recipes at https://www.carboncook.com https://www.carboncook.com

nicoburns 7y ago
Nobody really eats tomatoes for the calories though. People (with meat-based or plant-based diets) use tomatoes for flavour and other nutrients.
- jakewins 7y ago
  Tomato pastas like pomodoro and putanesca were my go-to lunches before I learned about this, and tomato soups remain super popular, so I disagree that they are simply a condiment. Still, perhaps they are a bad general example. Perhaps a better one would be rice (~2g CO2e/kcal). There the problem is the massive methane emissions produced from the cultivation approach. Point being: There are huge differences between different foods, and they are non-obvious.
  - vfc1 7y ago
    It's precisely because feeding humans is so environmentally impactful that we should not be feeding mostly animals, only to eat them. The CO2 impact of rice and grains in general can't be compared the impact of animal products, here is a graph - https://i0.wp.com/shrinkthatfootprint.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/foodkCal1.gif?resize=540%2C405 https://i0.wp.com/shrinkthatfootprint.com/wp-content/uploads...

odiroot 7y ago

Let us stop consuming ruminants meat first then. Beef and lamb are not even that good but require so much resources.