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Something like 70% of farming is growing crops to feed animals which we then eat. Meat is an incredibly inefficient way to turn sunlight and water into calories

Something like 70% of farming is growing crops to feed animals which we then eat. Meat is an incredibly inefficient way to turn sunlight and water into calories. If we all switched away from meat and ate mostly plants instead we’d have more than enough without needing such intensive farming methods. More seriously than that though, current methods are actively destructive to the soil - the longer we farm so intensively the less viable farmland we will have. Does that sound sustainable?

sleepygardener 6y ago
If this is all true, I wonder why a kg of pepper/cucumber (or any other vegetable for that matter) costs very close to a kg of chicken/pork etc. Shouldn't the additional complexity/resource intensiveness of meat production be reflected in the consumer price?
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  It should but as you deducted yourself, that is not the case. I suspect they force the profit margins of vegetables way up somehow. I'm sure they've done a lot of research and experiments and concluded that: * People are willing to pay x for a pepper * People do not consume significantly more peppers if the price is lowered * People are willing to pay y for a kg of chicken * People buy significantly less chicken if the price goes up much higher TL;DR it's about price vs volume vs profit margins, and I'm sure they continuously hover around an optimum for these products.
- refusenick 6y ago
  subsidies
- rwmj 6y ago
  Meat farmers don't buy cucumbers from the shops to feed to their animals. You'd need to compare farm gate prices of the kinds of low-grade grains used in animal feed. In any case what you say isn't even true: At my local supermarket cucumbers are £1.80/kg, while chicken starts at £1.95/kg for super-cheap chicken thighs with bone-in, up to nearly £20/kg ("Sainsbury's Norfolk Black Corn Fed Free Range Chicken Fillets" in case you want to know), the average being around £5/kg. There are no pork products at all below £4/kg.
  - sleepygardener 6y ago
    YMMV of course, doesn't mean that what I say is not true, neither I'm saying it's the same for all countries. In my supermarket (central EU) a kg of pepper is 3-4 Eur/kg, chicken breasts without bone are cca 4,50 Eur/kg, whole chicken is 2 - 3 Eur/kg. Not mentioning pepper is supposedly 94% water. I'm definitely going to be fed more times buying 1 kg chicken instead of vegetables.
    - erpellan 6y ago
      Fresh vegetables are great but yes, mostly water. Beans, rice, lentils, grains (in dry form) cost less per kg than chicken, don't need refrigeration and will make many more meals.
    - freeflight 6y ago
      > without bone are cca 4,50 Eur/kg As somebody who's also from the central EU, it feels like you are low-balling that price there. You would have to look really hard to find chicken breast as such a low kg price because the average is more like 5 €/kg usually higher [0]. Personally I wouldn't even buy such cheap poultry because with a price like that you can be very certain these animals must be farmed in rather "optimized" conditions. Just like with eggs or milk, these are items I'm willing to spend a bit of extra money to support better and more humane practices. Trying to do the same with meat is very expensive, did it recently ordering turkey breast, ended up paying 8€ for 400g, thus I reserve it for special occasions. In that context, your comparison between peppers and chicken breasts is also not that good. Peppers are a very bad vegetable source of proteins, to replace chicken breast one would eat something protein-rich, like beans and those happen to be dirt cheap pretty much everywhere, particularly when buying them in bulk and dried. [0] https://www.supermarktcheck.de/sb-haehnchenbrustfilet-frisch/produkte/ https://www.supermarktcheck.de/sb-haehnchenbrustfilet-frisch...
      - sleepygardener 6y ago
        Seems like central EU is a very vague term. I meant Slovakia, you probably meant Germany. I don't really low-ball the price, I checked one of the supermarkets current weekly offer, 1kg Chicken breasts (standard quality, respected manufacturer) this week 4,29 E. [0]. You might argue that this is a special offer, but we have similar offer all the time in one of the different supermarkets around. Your point with beans etc. is valid though. Just the fresh vegetables are very expensive here and feels almost like a luxury item. [0] https://imgur.com/a/sGOCC5V https://imgur.com/a/sGOCC5V
- bitcurious 6y ago
  You’ve asked a local question globally. In my home country, meat is much more expensive than cucumbers. In the US, grain production (and actually farming in general) is highly subsidized, such that you can’t infer much about the cost of growing food from the prices you pay for it. I don’t know where you are, but the answer is probably local to you.
- GuB-42 6y ago
  Where I live, per kg, chicken is about 5 times more expensive than cucumber. But in some countries, fresh fruits and vegetables are considered a luxury item. It is especially apparent in Japan, where you are only able to buy top quality vegetables with a flawless appearance and a matching price. Everything else goes to the food processing industry.
JetSetWilly 6y ago
Around here land of good quality is used to grow crops for human consumption, and land of marginal or poor quality can't grow many crops so is used as grazing land. Is it "70% of farming" by area of land? That doesn't sound so bad because most farmed land isn't all that great. Can we really say that 70% of the yield of high quality farming land is going to feed animals?
- Mvandenbergh 6y ago
  In some parts of the world, marginal quality land is used for monocropping of animal feedstock using intensive exogenous inputs (fertiliser and pesticide). Raising animals for meat on meadowland, depending on the level of intervention used on that land, can actually be good for biodiversity although if those animal are excreting larvicides everywhere they go, it's not so good. In the English context, the richest habitat with the best biodiversity is a complex mix between meadows, hedgerows, and woodland. The exact historical balance, especially between meadows and woods is hotly contested and an open research topic.
dalore 6y ago
Most of those crops are inedible to humans or the waste products from human crops that are non saleable. Meat is inefficient for calories, but very efficient for nutrients. Food is more than cheap calories.
- geddy 6y ago
  What? How can meat possibly be more efficient for nutrients? Where do you think the animals get the nutrients in the first place? Everything originates from plants.
  - bad_user 6y ago
    That's a really dumb argument. Where do you think the energy and the nutrients from plants come from? It comes from the sun and the soil. So if plants are a middleman, we might as well eat dirt and stay in the sun all day.
    - geddy 6y ago
      We are biologically herbivores, and we are built to process plants (jaw moves side to side and we have long intestinal tracts, the exact opposite case applies to carnivores). We don't "eat dirt" because we are built to eat plants. Your argument on that is a silly one. You're running anywhere from 5-12x the amount of plant calories (depending on the animal) through animals (that need to be fed water in addition to plants), to produce fractions of calories on the other end. It's highly inefficient and that by itself is a terrific argument for stopping the consumption of animal products. Not to mention all of the potent affects on climate change, and the water usage associated with producing meat. We're paving the rainforests to plant more crops to feed back to animals, despite having millions starving to death. Go search for `animal agriculture inefficient` and read the metric ton of studies if you don't believe me. I can't fathom how you could think that spending 12,000,000 calories of plants to get 1,000,000 calories of beef is worth it "for the nutrients". I'm curious as to what nutrients you think are so critical here, because literally every vital nutrient can be obtained from plants, and in the cases of Vitamin D and B12, they are both supplemented into animal feed as it is, and can easily be taken in pill form.
kraussvonespy 6y ago
In my area of the US, a good percentage of the majority crop (corn) goes to produce alcohol to burn as fuel. So we pour poisons and fertilizer on the land and burn huge amounts of petroleum to produce a seriously inefficient crop to supplement an energy source that doesn't need supplementing. Just to give farmers something to do and to keep the CEOs of the chemical companies in yachts and private jets. This kind of reminds me of the Soviet whaling program that almost wiped out entire species of whales for no reason other than the 5 year plan said that they needed to continue whaling.
- godtoldmetodoit 6y ago
  Ethanol is such a disaster. Is there any legitimate reason for ethanol production to be a thing outside of subsidizing mega farmers? Can we just cut them checks instead?
  - kraussvonespy 6y ago
    If you peel back all of the propaganda, no, there's no legitimate reason to produce ethanol. It's just a way to continue to feed money into the farming-industrial complex (farmers, chemical companies, implement companies, seed companies, ethanol manufacturers, etc.) Even if the crop that was grown to make ethanol was less stupid (sugar beets for example), it still wouldn't make much sense.
- kraussvonespy 6y ago
  For the record, I just found a reference that states that ~40% of corn grown in the US gets turned into ethanol. 40%. We consume somewhere between a half a gallon and a full gallon of petroleum (between fuel for the machines, production of chemicals, etc.) for every gallon of ethanol we get out of the process. There is no justification for this other than make-work for farmers, chemical companies and the whole ethanol-industrial complex.

sleepygardener 6y ago

If this is all true, I wonder why a kg of pepper/cucumber (or any other vegetable for that matter) costs very close to a kg of chicken/pork etc. Shouldn't the additional complexity/resource intensiveness of meat production be reflected in the consumer price?

Cthulhu_ 6y ago
It should but as you deducted yourself, that is not the case. I suspect they force the profit margins of vegetables way up somehow. I'm sure they've done a lot of research and experiments and concluded that: * People are willing to pay x for a pepper * People do not consume significantly more peppers if the price is lowered * People are willing to pay y for a kg of chicken * People buy significantly less chicken if the price goes up much higher TL;DR it's about price vs volume vs profit margins, and I'm sure they continuously hover around an optimum for these products.
refusenick 6y ago
subsidies
rwmj 6y ago
Meat farmers don't buy cucumbers from the shops to feed to their animals. You'd need to compare farm gate prices of the kinds of low-grade grains used in animal feed. In any case what you say isn't even true: At my local supermarket cucumbers are £1.80/kg, while chicken starts at £1.95/kg for super-cheap chicken thighs with bone-in, up to nearly £20/kg ("Sainsbury's Norfolk Black Corn Fed Free Range Chicken Fillets" in case you want to know), the average being around £5/kg. There are no pork products at all below £4/kg.
- sleepygardener 6y ago
  YMMV of course, doesn't mean that what I say is not true, neither I'm saying it's the same for all countries. In my supermarket (central EU) a kg of pepper is 3-4 Eur/kg, chicken breasts without bone are cca 4,50 Eur/kg, whole chicken is 2 - 3 Eur/kg. Not mentioning pepper is supposedly 94% water. I'm definitely going to be fed more times buying 1 kg chicken instead of vegetables.
  - erpellan 6y ago
    Fresh vegetables are great but yes, mostly water. Beans, rice, lentils, grains (in dry form) cost less per kg than chicken, don't need refrigeration and will make many more meals.
  - freeflight 6y ago
    > without bone are cca 4,50 Eur/kg As somebody who's also from the central EU, it feels like you are low-balling that price there. You would have to look really hard to find chicken breast as such a low kg price because the average is more like 5 €/kg usually higher [0]. Personally I wouldn't even buy such cheap poultry because with a price like that you can be very certain these animals must be farmed in rather "optimized" conditions. Just like with eggs or milk, these are items I'm willing to spend a bit of extra money to support better and more humane practices. Trying to do the same with meat is very expensive, did it recently ordering turkey breast, ended up paying 8€ for 400g, thus I reserve it for special occasions. In that context, your comparison between peppers and chicken breasts is also not that good. Peppers are a very bad vegetable source of proteins, to replace chicken breast one would eat something protein-rich, like beans and those happen to be dirt cheap pretty much everywhere, particularly when buying them in bulk and dried. [0] https://www.supermarktcheck.de/sb-haehnchenbrustfilet-frisch/produkte/ https://www.supermarktcheck.de/sb-haehnchenbrustfilet-frisch...
    - sleepygardener 6y ago
      Seems like central EU is a very vague term. I meant Slovakia, you probably meant Germany. I don't really low-ball the price, I checked one of the supermarkets current weekly offer, 1kg Chicken breasts (standard quality, respected manufacturer) this week 4,29 E. [0]. You might argue that this is a special offer, but we have similar offer all the time in one of the different supermarkets around. Your point with beans etc. is valid though. Just the fresh vegetables are very expensive here and feels almost like a luxury item. [0] https://imgur.com/a/sGOCC5V https://imgur.com/a/sGOCC5V
bitcurious 6y ago
You’ve asked a local question globally. In my home country, meat is much more expensive than cucumbers. In the US, grain production (and actually farming in general) is highly subsidized, such that you can’t infer much about the cost of growing food from the prices you pay for it. I don’t know where you are, but the answer is probably local to you.
GuB-42 6y ago
Where I live, per kg, chicken is about 5 times more expensive than cucumber. But in some countries, fresh fruits and vegetables are considered a luxury item. It is especially apparent in Japan, where you are only able to buy top quality vegetables with a flawless appearance and a matching price. Everything else goes to the food processing industry.

JetSetWilly 6y ago

Around here land of good quality is used to grow crops for human consumption, and land of marginal or poor quality can't grow many crops so is used as grazing land. Is it "70% of farming" by area of land? That doesn't sound so bad because most farmed land isn't all that great. Can we really say that 70% of the yield of high quality farming land is going to feed animals?

Mvandenbergh 6y ago
In some parts of the world, marginal quality land is used for monocropping of animal feedstock using intensive exogenous inputs (fertiliser and pesticide). Raising animals for meat on meadowland, depending on the level of intervention used on that land, can actually be good for biodiversity although if those animal are excreting larvicides everywhere they go, it's not so good. In the English context, the richest habitat with the best biodiversity is a complex mix between meadows, hedgerows, and woodland. The exact historical balance, especially between meadows and woods is hotly contested and an open research topic.

dalore 6y ago

Most of those crops are inedible to humans or the waste products from human crops that are non saleable. Meat is inefficient for calories, but very efficient for nutrients. Food is more than cheap calories.

geddy 6y ago
What? How can meat possibly be more efficient for nutrients? Where do you think the animals get the nutrients in the first place? Everything originates from plants.
- bad_user 6y ago
  That's a really dumb argument. Where do you think the energy and the nutrients from plants come from? It comes from the sun and the soil. So if plants are a middleman, we might as well eat dirt and stay in the sun all day.
  - geddy 6y ago
    We are biologically herbivores, and we are built to process plants (jaw moves side to side and we have long intestinal tracts, the exact opposite case applies to carnivores). We don't "eat dirt" because we are built to eat plants. Your argument on that is a silly one. You're running anywhere from 5-12x the amount of plant calories (depending on the animal) through animals (that need to be fed water in addition to plants), to produce fractions of calories on the other end. It's highly inefficient and that by itself is a terrific argument for stopping the consumption of animal products. Not to mention all of the potent affects on climate change, and the water usage associated with producing meat. We're paving the rainforests to plant more crops to feed back to animals, despite having millions starving to death. Go search for `animal agriculture inefficient` and read the metric ton of studies if you don't believe me. I can't fathom how you could think that spending 12,000,000 calories of plants to get 1,000,000 calories of beef is worth it "for the nutrients". I'm curious as to what nutrients you think are so critical here, because literally every vital nutrient can be obtained from plants, and in the cases of Vitamin D and B12, they are both supplemented into animal feed as it is, and can easily be taken in pill form.

kraussvonespy 6y ago

In my area of the US, a good percentage of the majority crop (corn) goes to produce alcohol to burn as fuel. So we pour poisons and fertilizer on the land and burn huge amounts of petroleum to produce a seriously inefficient crop to supplement an energy source that doesn't need supplementing. Just to give farmers something to do and to keep the CEOs of the chemical companies in yachts and private jets. This kind of reminds me of the Soviet whaling program that almost wiped out entire species of whales for no reason other than the 5 year plan said that they needed to continue whaling.

godtoldmetodoit 6y ago
Ethanol is such a disaster. Is there any legitimate reason for ethanol production to be a thing outside of subsidizing mega farmers? Can we just cut them checks instead?
- kraussvonespy 6y ago
  If you peel back all of the propaganda, no, there's no legitimate reason to produce ethanol. It's just a way to continue to feed money into the farming-industrial complex (farmers, chemical companies, implement companies, seed companies, ethanol manufacturers, etc.) Even if the crop that was grown to make ethanol was less stupid (sugar beets for example), it still wouldn't make much sense.
kraussvonespy 6y ago
For the record, I just found a reference that states that ~40% of corn grown in the US gets turned into ethanol. 40%. We consume somewhere between a half a gallon and a full gallon of petroleum (between fuel for the machines, production of chemicals, etc.) for every gallon of ethanol we get out of the process. There is no justification for this other than make-work for farmers, chemical companies and the whole ethanol-industrial complex.