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Combatting the impact of soil without doing anything about our impossible to scale diet is bound to fail isn't it? A huge chunk of our net impact on global war

Combatting the impact of soil without doing anything about our impossible to scale diet is bound to fail isn't it? A huge chunk of our net impact on global warming and deforestation is a direct result of our food system, namely animal agriculture. There is disagreement about just how inefficient turning an acre of corn into slabs of cow, but it should be clear that it is some fraction of the efficiency of just eating that corn as food itself.

PaulHoule 6y ago
The statement that "animal agriculture = bad" is a half-truth. It's true that if you feed corn to pigs most of the energy gets thermalized. It's also true that animals can eat grass in places where the soil would dry up and blow away if you tried to grow corn.
- scaredginger 6y ago
  This is true, but a large proportion of the animals we rear are fed on grains since there is not nearly enough grassland to feed enough animals for everyone to eat a typical western diet. Edit: the very first link I found puts the figure at 97% of cattle in the US coming from feedlots. https://www.thoughtco.com/feedlot-organic-and-grass-fed-beef-127669 https://www.thoughtco.com/feedlot-organic-and-grass-fed-beef...
  - cgh 6y ago
    Cattle only enter feedlots during the final weeks of their lives. For nearly the entirety of their lives, cattle are indeed grazed.
    - alex_young 6y ago
      Citation needed
- jamil7 6y ago
  "Can" is the operative word here. This argument gets brought up time and time again to support animal agriculture and makes a few generalisations. The first is that all pasture land is unfit for growing crops, the second is that all cattle farming is entirely grass fed, finally all this is localized only to cattle yet is presented as a kind of argument for all animal agriculture.
randomdata 6y ago
Corn (not to be confused with sweet corn, which is a different crop) has pretty limited use for human consumption, though. The foods that humans enjoy eating on a regular basis, including sweet corn, are far less efficient to grow and are not necessarily always more efficient than eating animals. There is indeed a good reason why animal food costs considerably less than human food, and why humans don't resort to eating that cheaper animal food to save money.
- bjo590 6y ago
  > The foods that humans enjoy eating on a regular basis, including sweet corn, are far less efficient to grow and are not necessarily always more efficient than eating animals. To me this is a bold claim. My understanding is eating plants is significantly more efficient per calorie than eating animals on a wide range of scales -- amount of water used, amount of green house gases produced, amount of land consumed. Can you please provide one common example in which a plant humans like to consume is less efficient than a domesticated animal humans like to consume?
  - randomdata 6y ago
    > Can you please provide one common example in which a plant humans like to consume is less efficient than a domesticated animal humans like to consume? It would be worthwhile to define efficiency here, as it can mean a lot of different things, but I'll go with the most readily available numbers that fit within the confines of your comment. Which means calories to the amount of land consumed. Pork provides 3.5 million calories per acre. Broccoli, only two million calories per acre. For comparison, corn (again, not sweet corn) provides 15 million calories per acre. If you actually ate a corn diet, it would be very efficient, but there is a good reason why you probably don't sustain yourself on a corn diet (those who live on Doritos and sugary drinks excepted). It is not exactly great human food. Now, that is not the greatest comparison as if you stopped eating pork, you probably wouldn't replace those calories with broccoli, but it does ultimately satisfy your question and illustrates that it is not simply a matter of all plant life always being more efficient. As you can see, corn is really efficient (and not just when it comes to land use), which provides a nice margin for the overall efficiency of animal production.

PaulHoule 6y ago

The statement that "animal agriculture = bad" is a half-truth. It's true that if you feed corn to pigs most of the energy gets thermalized. It's also true that animals can eat grass in places where the soil would dry up and blow away if you tried to grow corn.

scaredginger 6y ago
This is true, but a large proportion of the animals we rear are fed on grains since there is not nearly enough grassland to feed enough animals for everyone to eat a typical western diet. Edit: the very first link I found puts the figure at 97% of cattle in the US coming from feedlots. https://www.thoughtco.com/feedlot-organic-and-grass-fed-beef-127669 https://www.thoughtco.com/feedlot-organic-and-grass-fed-beef...
- cgh 6y ago
  Cattle only enter feedlots during the final weeks of their lives. For nearly the entirety of their lives, cattle are indeed grazed.
  - alex_young 6y ago
    Citation needed
jamil7 6y ago
"Can" is the operative word here. This argument gets brought up time and time again to support animal agriculture and makes a few generalisations. The first is that all pasture land is unfit for growing crops, the second is that all cattle farming is entirely grass fed, finally all this is localized only to cattle yet is presented as a kind of argument for all animal agriculture.

randomdata 6y ago

Corn (not to be confused with sweet corn, which is a different crop) has pretty limited use for human consumption, though. The foods that humans enjoy eating on a regular basis, including sweet corn, are far less efficient to grow and are not necessarily always more efficient than eating animals. There is indeed a good reason why animal food costs considerably less than human food, and why humans don't resort to eating that cheaper animal food to save money.

bjo590 6y ago
> The foods that humans enjoy eating on a regular basis, including sweet corn, are far less efficient to grow and are not necessarily always more efficient than eating animals. To me this is a bold claim. My understanding is eating plants is significantly more efficient per calorie than eating animals on a wide range of scales -- amount of water used, amount of green house gases produced, amount of land consumed. Can you please provide one common example in which a plant humans like to consume is less efficient than a domesticated animal humans like to consume?
- randomdata 6y ago
  > Can you please provide one common example in which a plant humans like to consume is less efficient than a domesticated animal humans like to consume? It would be worthwhile to define efficiency here, as it can mean a lot of different things, but I'll go with the most readily available numbers that fit within the confines of your comment. Which means calories to the amount of land consumed. Pork provides 3.5 million calories per acre. Broccoli, only two million calories per acre. For comparison, corn (again, not sweet corn) provides 15 million calories per acre. If you actually ate a corn diet, it would be very efficient, but there is a good reason why you probably don't sustain yourself on a corn diet (those who live on Doritos and sugary drinks excepted). It is not exactly great human food. Now, that is not the greatest comparison as if you stopped eating pork, you probably wouldn't replace those calories with broccoli, but it does ultimately satisfy your question and illustrates that it is not simply a matter of all plant life always being more efficient. As you can see, corn is really efficient (and not just when it comes to land use), which provides a nice margin for the overall efficiency of animal production.