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It’s not just cow farts. Raising and killing a whole cow is an inefficient way to extract calories from plants. Even chicken would be more efficient.
by jdavis703 6y ago
It’s not just cow farts. Raising and killing a whole cow is an inefficient way to extract calories from plants. Even chicken would be more efficient.
- DamnYuppie 6y agoMy understanding is that cooked meat has much higher caloric value than vegetables. To be honest if it wasn't so good for us we wouldn't have evolved to consume it!
- wyre 6y agoCows need to eat thousands of pounds of plants before they are at a size to get slaughtered and prepared as food. Humans evolved to eat meat as a way to survive through winter. Early diets relied heavily on gathered foods.
- smegger001 6y agohow much of that was human edible callories? free grazing cattle will eat plant humans won't/can't. there is alot of land thats used for grazing that is not suitable for planting crops for a variety of reasons.
- dashundchen 6y agoThe vast majority of cattle are not grazing - instead they are fed farmed grain and soy in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFO if you want to search it) where the density of animals is far greater than grazing would ever support. Essentially most of that soy and corn in the American midwest and the clearcut Amazon are being raised to fatten cattle, not feed people - and it takes a lot of energy to do that.
- astura 6y agoExcept we aren't doing that, the demand for (cheap) beef far, far exceeds the supply of beef that could be made with just grazing land.
- wooger 6y agoKey then to heavily tax beef imports from any country with no agricultural standards, or which are destroying rainforests.
- megablast 6y agoAre you finding it hard to consume enough calories??
- Spivak 6y agoAnimals bread for slaughter are essentially tools for converting plants we can’t eat into something we can. They’re used when you reach the limit of your usable farmland but still have grasslands. Yes meat is more caloric than “vegetables” on a per-lb basis but meat gets beat out by oils, nuts and seeds which is why trail mix and unleavened nut breads “lembas bread” exist.
- tspike 6y ago> tools for converting plants we can’t eat into something we can Yep, but the devil is in the details. How exactly is that conversion happening and what are the side effects? It takes great care to ensure the outcome is a net positive.
- animatedb 6y agoTo be honest if it wasn't so good, we wouldn't have evolved to consume so much of it.
- ip26 6y agoMeat has high calories per pound. But a cow must eat 10,000 calories of plants to produce 1,000 calories of beef. Chickens need as few as 2,000 calories of plant to produce 1,000 calories of chicken. If they are eating roughage humans can't eat, it's useful. But if we are farming corn to feed cows, we could have been farming something humans (or chickens) can eat instead with less land, fertilizer, etc.
- missedthecue 6y agoOk, but the plants a cow is eating are inedible to humans, and they mostly graze on infertile land. Most food they are fed in the finishing stage is farm byproduct that would otherwise get thrown out. Only 7% of a cow's lifetime food intake will be crops that compete with human food demand. What a cow is really doing is turning inedible sources of food into nutritious human food.
- ip26 6y agoField corn is hardly a byproduct. It's inedible to humans, yes, but a different crop could be grown instead.
- 8ytecoder 6y agoThis entire thread is hijacked by talking about "cow farts". Meat, the way it's farmed today, is far more intensive than what meets the eye. There's the land required to raise the crops that feed the animals, there's transportation of this feed and the raw material to grow the feed, there's the deforestation caused by the land requirement, and on and on. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding-meat-and-dairy-is-single-biggest-way-to-reduce-your-impact-on-earth https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding...
- mcdevilkiller 6y agoThat's because they shouldn't be fed grains.
- 6y ago
- brailsafe 6y agoI agree, but I don't know if it necessarily needs to be very good for us to evolve to eating it. We could have either already been adapted to eating it, or it just needs to be the most viable food source among few. If the only thing around to eat is treebark, there's going to be something that eats it, but not us, so we eat that thing.
- wooger 6y agoWe can't eat grass. In my country cattle eat grass.
- 0xcafecafe 6y agoMost of the grains we eat are grass so we can technically eat grass.
- anoncake 6y agoAlso, tomatoes are technically fruits.