4 ms·
A bit of an aside from the topic of the original article. I'm beginning to think ruminants are often shown in a poor light by common statistics. And not due to
by alexitorg 5y ago
A bit of an aside from the topic of the original article.
I'm beginning to think ruminants are often shown in a poor light by common statistics. And not due to deceit, just reliance of simplistic statistics that do not tell the whole story.
Take the graph showing a cow requires 31.7kgs of food to produce 1kg of meat. But this can be (but sometimes not) all grass which is indigestible to all the other animals here.
Pigs and Chickens are at 10.2kg feed/kg meat and 4.2kg feed/kg meat, but this is generally all food which is digestible by humans. Fish are at 2.3kg feed/kg meat, but the fish humans eat almost all naturally eat animals for feed.
Another graph in this shows that maybe 60% of land in the US is used for grazing. This doesn't mean that this land could be used for growing crops. Often ruminants are grazing on marginal land that isn't good for growing other foods.
Similarly methane from ruminants digestion is considered the same as methane from a gas wells for most climate change modelling. But it seems to me that over the 20 year lifetime of methane in the atmosphere, a fixed heard of ruminants would have a fixed amount of methane in the atmosphere. While methane from fossil fuels is more carbon put back into the carbon cycle just seems objectively much more damaging.
Also a smaller portion of their feed ruminants consume would naturally turn into methane if it hadn't been eaten by farmed ruminants.
I've cut back on the amount of red meat that I am eating, but I still think that a more holistic look at ruminants would probably have them looking better than some simple statistics make them look.
My bias is that I grew up on a farm. I am fond of cows and sheep and I would be sad if they went away. I want them treated well, but don't mind them being slaughtered for food.
- France_is_bacon 5y agoIf what you're saying is true, then I agree. If cows ONLY eat from non-productive land, then sure. If they don't get corn or wheat or soybeans or whatever.
- missedthecue 5y agoTo your point, the studies I've seen report that 93% of a cows lifetimes diet is food that is not in competition with the human food supply, such as grass and agricultural waste. A cow is essentially a machine that turns inedible food into nutritious edible food.
- teslabox 5y agoThe dairy cow is the most efficient means of turning grass on a rocky hillside into human-usable protein [0]. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20061802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20061802
- reacharavindh 5y agoThere seems to be a hidden fallacy here. If cows were free range eating _only_ from non productive grass, then sure, they helped turn them into useful proteins in an efficient way. However, we(humans) as we always do, took things too far, and have been turning lots of wild land to make grass as food for these cows that eventually turn them into proteins. That only leads to more and more grass production and burping cows :-(
- jka 5y agoCan you link to the book, out of interest?
- teslabox 5y agoAs best I can figure that one's in a box of books. If I ever get a chance to unpack them all, it's one of the books I'm looking for. I'll favorite your comment here, and try to get back to you. :) This is not the reference, but something I just found on google books about the efficiency of dairy cows: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Farming_the_Business_Magazine/q_hEAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=dairy+cow+rocky+hillside+grass+efficient&pg=PA200&printsec=frontcover https://www.google.com/books/edition/Farming_the_Business_Ma... (responding to request for the reference for the dairy cow as an efficient converter of grass on rocky hillsides).
- jka 5y agoNo worries, thank you :)
- BizarroLand 5y agoThe follow up argument is how much fresh water it takes to both hydrate the cow and to grow the feed. According to this article it takes 1847 gallons of water to make 1 lb of beef and 122 to make one gallon of milk, compared to 39 for 1 lb of vegetables: https://www.denverwater.org/tap/whats-the-beef-with-water https://www.denverwater.org/tap/whats-the-beef-with-water Admittedly, that water doesn't disappear and stays in the water cycle, but every lb of beef that is reduced from the diet saves enough water to supply a household of 4 for almost a week (assuming 80 gallons per person/day) With the droughts due to climate change interfering with the water cycle and changing the actual local climates of farming areas, without change happening it may become a requirement to drastically reduce the amount of beef that we consume in order to have enough water to survive. Either that or we will need to start catching rain as it falls on the ocean and shipping it in to make up for the overuse.