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Animals are extremely efficient at converting inedible food to edible nutrition. For example, goats eat almost any plant, including many natives. Unless you th

Animals are extremely efficient at converting inedible food to edible nutrition. For example, goats eat almost any plant, including many natives. Unless you think humans are going to be able to eat chaparral. The fact is that modern edible agriculture is heavily dependent on fossil fuel and mined fertilizers. Until we solve that problem, it's better to stop growing too many plants, let native vegetation regrow and set loose the troops of goats and chickens. People have this idea that plants and vegetables are clean..they're not

Jeff_Brown 5y ago
If you want meat at the scale we eat it at now, let alone the one we'll eat it at when China and India have twice their current incomes, free range isn't going to cut it.
- iammisc 5y ago
  I don't disagree. I understand arguments for less meat. What I don't understand is abolition...that's just silly and a huge environmental catastrophe.
  - analog31 5y ago
    How is it a catastrophe? Why does the environment need domesticated livestock? Why does the food chain need us to be a predator?
    - iammisc 5y ago
      To be able to produce the calories currently made by meat using relatively meh land, we'd have to heavily increase our fertilizer use and deforestation to be able to grow enough human edible plants (grains or legumes really, since tubers are difficult to transport).
      - analog31 5y ago
        It's been my impression that eliminating meat consumption would produce less need for farmland and fertilizer, not more.
eloff 5y ago
This is a laudable goal, but it can't scale to the level we require today, nevermind when we have 10 billion people later in the century.
- iammisc 5y ago
  Um okay... Wel then we better get ethically okay with crowded pigs fed our food scraps. Humans eat like 5% of the actual plant matter we harvest. The rest is composted which just releases more greenhouse gases. If you feed it to a pig, then you at least get that car on released after feeding a human. The 'plant based' push is once again feelings without science.
- mbrodersen 5y ago
  Don’t ever bet against the advancement of technology. People were saying the same about electric cars for example.
  - eloff 5y ago
    How do you advance technology with free range livestock? There is no technology, that's the point of it.
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
Most steaks come from cows than never tasted grass.
- gruez 5y ago
  Source? I know CAFOs are a thing, but AFAIK they're typically only used in the latter half/third of a cow's life.
- djrogers 5y ago
  That’s not how cattle are raised. Yes, most cattle are finished on grain packed in a small area, but they’re born and raised mostly to maturity grazing on grass or (eating hay where climate dictates).
  - JoeAltmaier 5y ago
    That doesn't seem to be the norm any more. Feedlots outnumber grain-fed operation.
  - iammisc 5y ago
    I swear half the people responding have never driven past a cattle ranch.
- rendang 5y ago
  Citation for this??
dividedbyzero 5y ago
> Animals are extremely efficient at converting inedible food to edible nutrition. And survive in a very complex and hostile environment, adapt to changing conditions, procreate, and build all the structure and tissues and organs that requires. That's a lot of energy that bioreactor-grown steak doesn't have to expend. At scale, and with some genetic optimization thrown in, can we do better? I don't know for sure, but I don't think it's an impossibility, given that most of the current meat supply is already grown in factories.
- iammisc 5y ago
  Organs are edible. You should try it sometimes. They are not waste products. No wonder Americans find these things wasteful. In my experience, even something as simple as chicken. People do not actually eat the whole thing. Half of it is thrown away, just like everything else. It's very strange to me, because growing up, we'd eat everything. But I married into an American family, and I'm often picking stuff off the bones they throw out. We were raised to eat everything, even the marrow. > That's a lot of energy that bioreactor-grown steak doesn't have to expend Sure, but the bioreactor is (1) heavily affected by supply chain issues, (2) dependent on an external source of energy, (3) requires complex chemical inputs that have to be synthesized themselves oftentimes. No one takes into account the whole thing. Also, monoculture is always going to be less resilient than an actual population of cattle, or pigs, or chickens. But, I guess this is a problem that affects the whole industry.
theptip 5y ago
I don't think your main points here are true. > Animals are extremely efficient at converting inedible food to edible nutrition. Animals are pretty inefficient at converting plants to calories, e.g. see https://learn.uvm.edu/foodsystemsblog/2014/07/10/meat-vs-veg-an-energy-perspective/ https://learn.uvm.edu/foodsystemsblog/2014/07/10/meat-vs-veg... Most of the energy spent getting grains to the table is in transport/processing. If you just compare the production, grains are way more efficient than animals. Even though I'm sure goats are better than cows, they aren't as efficient as plants at producing calories, and in all cases you still have to process and transport them. However if you've got some data showing otherwise I'm open to being convinced here. > Until we solve that problem, it's better to stop growing too many plants I think this is making perfect the enemy of the good. Plants use less water, produce substantially less GHG emissions, and so are still a net major win on environmental terms vs. the status quo.
- iammisc 5y ago
  > Animals are pretty inefficient at converting plants to calories, e.g. see ... That is not what that graph shows. That graph purports to count all energy 'inputs' into the system, including human labor. This is not about 'how many calories did the cow / pig eat, versus what it produced'. Here's an example. Consider wheat grass. Both a cow and a human can eat this grass. However, the human can eat the seed, the cow / pig / goat can eat the entire plant. If you burn the entire wheat plant, and count the calories released you will get some number. Let's call it Y. If you count the calories in the seed that we eat, it'll necessarily be less, let's say X. Ideally, if we're going to produce Y calories in the grain, humans ought to be able to consume as close to Y calories as possible in order to get the total benefit. Since humans can only eat X, and X < Y. Then it makes sense to feed Y-X calories to a low maintenance animal (so not beef), and then eat the animal. This will yield some number N < (Y-X) that humans can consume. This also provides a complete protein, fats, and other nutrients not found in grain (B12, which is not found in plants period, for example, thus preventing yet another synthesis process). X + N < Y, but it is much closer to the actual amount of energy in the grain plant than just X. And then we'd need to count the energy expenditure getting the B12 and Vitamin D produced and distributed as well. And then the supply chain risk costs. All these things have costs that never get considered.
tfehring 5y ago
It's true that most of the food consumed by livestock isn't edible by humans - [0] says 86% - but livestock are so inefficient at converting food to edible nutrition that they still generally consume more than 1 human-edible Calorie per Calorie of meat produced. For cattle, Diet for a Small Planet [1] cites 16 Calories per edible Calorie of meat and 8 grams of protein per edible gram of protein produced, other sources seem to be in the same ballpark - both higher than the ~7:1 ratio that's implied by that 86% figure. The ratios for chickens are better, but they also generally get a much lower share of their feed from human-inedible sources. Also, even that 86% isn't "free" - it's not all pasturing, and it takes a lot of effort, energy, and equipment to get hay, inedible by-products of human-edible crops, etc. from the field to animals' mouths. [0] https://www.cgiar.org/news-events/news/fao-sets-the-record-straight-86-of-livestock-feed-is-inedible-by-humans/ https://www.cgiar.org/news-events/news/fao-sets-the-record-s... [1] https://www.amazon.com/Diet-Small-Planet-20th-Anniversary/dp/0345321200/ https://www.amazon.com/Diet-Small-Planet-20th-Anniversary/dp...
- iammisc 5y ago
  > cites 16 Calories per edible Calorie of meat and 8 grams of protein per edible gram of protein produced. Two things. Firstly, those are 16 Calories that would otherwise quite literally go to waste. They would be metabolized by bacteria, used to grow a bacterial mat in a compost bin, and then be released into the air in the form of CO2. Secondly, I'm not sure what 8g of protein per edible gram of protein produced means. Ruminants like cows convert carbs and other compounds into protein by hosting gut bacteria. Without a cow or chicken or something in between, these amino acids would have to come from somewhere else. Same with B12.
  - rapind 5y ago
    Don’t we grow food specifically for livestock though? That must consume a lot of resources (oil, water, etc). I think the argument is the cut out the middle man (beef / chicken) due to inefficiencies. I personally suspect the real ratio is less than what’s being cited just because I’m a cynic, but there seems to be some logic to it no?
wcoenen 5y ago
> animals are extremely efficient at converting inedible food to edible nutrition. I disagree. Average caloric and protein efficiency is 7%–8%. For beef specifically, it is only 3%. I don't know how efficiently a cultured meat factory could convert grass into beef, but I bet it could do a better. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/105002 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/1...
- iammisc 5y ago
  This article is not about converting land from meat to not-meat. It's about converting from beef to chicken. No one doubts that chicken is more efficient than beef. I have not argued that beef is the best animal.
mythrwy 5y ago
Having eaten goat a few times I'd say a goat is still pretty near inedible so there is no realized gain. Tastes may vary though.
- iammisc 5y ago
  You don't like goat? Most cultures / people love it.

Jeff_Brown 5y ago

If you want meat at the scale we eat it at now, let alone the one we'll eat it at when China and India have twice their current incomes, free range isn't going to cut it.

iammisc 5y ago
I don't disagree. I understand arguments for less meat. What I don't understand is abolition...that's just silly and a huge environmental catastrophe.
- analog31 5y ago
  How is it a catastrophe? Why does the environment need domesticated livestock? Why does the food chain need us to be a predator?
  - iammisc 5y ago
    To be able to produce the calories currently made by meat using relatively meh land, we'd have to heavily increase our fertilizer use and deforestation to be able to grow enough human edible plants (grains or legumes really, since tubers are difficult to transport).
    - analog31 5y ago
      It's been my impression that eliminating meat consumption would produce less need for farmland and fertilizer, not more.

eloff 5y ago

This is a laudable goal, but it can't scale to the level we require today, nevermind when we have 10 billion people later in the century.

iammisc 5y ago
Um okay... Wel then we better get ethically okay with crowded pigs fed our food scraps. Humans eat like 5% of the actual plant matter we harvest. The rest is composted which just releases more greenhouse gases. If you feed it to a pig, then you at least get that car on released after feeding a human. The 'plant based' push is once again feelings without science.
mbrodersen 5y ago
Don’t ever bet against the advancement of technology. People were saying the same about electric cars for example.
- eloff 5y ago
  How do you advance technology with free range livestock? There is no technology, that's the point of it.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

Most steaks come from cows than never tasted grass.

gruez 5y ago
Source? I know CAFOs are a thing, but AFAIK they're typically only used in the latter half/third of a cow's life.
djrogers 5y ago
That’s not how cattle are raised. Yes, most cattle are finished on grain packed in a small area, but they’re born and raised mostly to maturity grazing on grass or (eating hay where climate dictates).
- JoeAltmaier 5y ago
  That doesn't seem to be the norm any more. Feedlots outnumber grain-fed operation.
- iammisc 5y ago
  I swear half the people responding have never driven past a cattle ranch.
rendang 5y ago
Citation for this??

dividedbyzero 5y ago

> Animals are extremely efficient at converting inedible food to edible nutrition. And survive in a very complex and hostile environment, adapt to changing conditions, procreate, and build all the structure and tissues and organs that requires. That's a lot of energy that bioreactor-grown steak doesn't have to expend. At scale, and with some genetic optimization thrown in, can we do better? I don't know for sure, but I don't think it's an impossibility, given that most of the current meat supply is already grown in factories.

iammisc 5y ago
Organs are edible. You should try it sometimes. They are not waste products. No wonder Americans find these things wasteful. In my experience, even something as simple as chicken. People do not actually eat the whole thing. Half of it is thrown away, just like everything else. It's very strange to me, because growing up, we'd eat everything. But I married into an American family, and I'm often picking stuff off the bones they throw out. We were raised to eat everything, even the marrow. > That's a lot of energy that bioreactor-grown steak doesn't have to expend Sure, but the bioreactor is (1) heavily affected by supply chain issues, (2) dependent on an external source of energy, (3) requires complex chemical inputs that have to be synthesized themselves oftentimes. No one takes into account the whole thing. Also, monoculture is always going to be less resilient than an actual population of cattle, or pigs, or chickens. But, I guess this is a problem that affects the whole industry.

theptip 5y ago

I don't think your main points here are true. > Animals are extremely efficient at converting inedible food to edible nutrition. Animals are pretty inefficient at converting plants to calories, e.g. see https://learn.uvm.edu/foodsystemsblog/2014/07/10/meat-vs-veg-an-energy-perspective/ https://learn.uvm.edu/foodsystemsblog/2014/07/10/meat-vs-veg... Most of the energy spent getting grains to the table is in transport/processing. If you just compare the production, grains are way more efficient than animals. Even though I'm sure goats are better than cows, they aren't as efficient as plants at producing calories, and in all cases you still have to process and transport them. However if you've got some data showing otherwise I'm open to being convinced here. > Until we solve that problem, it's better to stop growing too many plants I think this is making perfect the enemy of the good. Plants use less water, produce substantially less GHG emissions, and so are still a net major win on environmental terms vs. the status quo.

iammisc 5y ago
> Animals are pretty inefficient at converting plants to calories, e.g. see ... That is not what that graph shows. That graph purports to count all energy 'inputs' into the system, including human labor. This is not about 'how many calories did the cow / pig eat, versus what it produced'. Here's an example. Consider wheat grass. Both a cow and a human can eat this grass. However, the human can eat the seed, the cow / pig / goat can eat the entire plant. If you burn the entire wheat plant, and count the calories released you will get some number. Let's call it Y. If you count the calories in the seed that we eat, it'll necessarily be less, let's say X. Ideally, if we're going to produce Y calories in the grain, humans ought to be able to consume as close to Y calories as possible in order to get the total benefit. Since humans can only eat X, and X < Y. Then it makes sense to feed Y-X calories to a low maintenance animal (so not beef), and then eat the animal. This will yield some number N < (Y-X) that humans can consume. This also provides a complete protein, fats, and other nutrients not found in grain (B12, which is not found in plants period, for example, thus preventing yet another synthesis process). X + N < Y, but it is much closer to the actual amount of energy in the grain plant than just X. And then we'd need to count the energy expenditure getting the B12 and Vitamin D produced and distributed as well. And then the supply chain risk costs. All these things have costs that never get considered.

tfehring 5y ago

It's true that most of the food consumed by livestock isn't edible by humans - [0] says 86% - but livestock are so inefficient at converting food to edible nutrition that they still generally consume more than 1 human-edible Calorie per Calorie of meat produced. For cattle, Diet for a Small Planet [1] cites 16 Calories per edible Calorie of meat and 8 grams of protein per edible gram of protein produced, other sources seem to be in the same ballpark - both higher than the ~7:1 ratio that's implied by that 86% figure. The ratios for chickens are better, but they also generally get a much lower share of their feed from human-inedible sources. Also, even that 86% isn't "free" - it's not all pasturing, and it takes a lot of effort, energy, and equipment to get hay, inedible by-products of human-edible crops, etc. from the field to animals' mouths. [0] https://www.cgiar.org/news-events/news/fao-sets-the-record-straight-86-of-livestock-feed-is-inedible-by-humans/ https://www.cgiar.org/news-events/news/fao-sets-the-record-s... [1] https://www.amazon.com/Diet-Small-Planet-20th-Anniversary/dp/0345321200/ https://www.amazon.com/Diet-Small-Planet-20th-Anniversary/dp...

iammisc 5y ago
> cites 16 Calories per edible Calorie of meat and 8 grams of protein per edible gram of protein produced. Two things. Firstly, those are 16 Calories that would otherwise quite literally go to waste. They would be metabolized by bacteria, used to grow a bacterial mat in a compost bin, and then be released into the air in the form of CO2. Secondly, I'm not sure what 8g of protein per edible gram of protein produced means. Ruminants like cows convert carbs and other compounds into protein by hosting gut bacteria. Without a cow or chicken or something in between, these amino acids would have to come from somewhere else. Same with B12.
- rapind 5y ago
  Don’t we grow food specifically for livestock though? That must consume a lot of resources (oil, water, etc). I think the argument is the cut out the middle man (beef / chicken) due to inefficiencies. I personally suspect the real ratio is less than what’s being cited just because I’m a cynic, but there seems to be some logic to it no?

wcoenen 5y ago

> animals are extremely efficient at converting inedible food to edible nutrition. I disagree. Average caloric and protein efficiency is 7%–8%. For beef specifically, it is only 3%. I don't know how efficiently a cultured meat factory could convert grass into beef, but I bet it could do a better. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/105002 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/1...

iammisc 5y ago
This article is not about converting land from meat to not-meat. It's about converting from beef to chicken. No one doubts that chicken is more efficient than beef. I have not argued that beef is the best animal.

mythrwy 5y ago

Having eaten goat a few times I'd say a goat is still pretty near inedible so there is no realized gain. Tastes may vary though.

iammisc 5y ago
You don't like goat? Most cultures / people love it.