8 ms·

Hm, this seems to be missing the point that plant monocrops destroy the soil and are not nearly as efficient a source of food for the human body as fresh animal

• wumpus 5y ago
  I thought the main problem with cows was feed lots feeding 10 calories of grain to make 1 calorie of meat, not methane.
  • GhettoComputers 5y ago
    Lets not forget the transportation of fresh meat is not negligible, the cooling and the fuel costs will add greatly to carbon emissions. Preserved foods and not relying on luxuries such as refrigeration would go a long way to sustainability and heath.
    • wumpus 5y ago
      Do you have a source that shows that it's not negligible? The carbon and water cost of 10 calories of grain is pretty large.
      • GhettoComputers 5y ago
        https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis... The EPA site shows transportation and electricity as the main contributions to carbon. The grains are not the issue, the subsidies in the US are so strong that they are not a real factor. There is so much excess food produced they export it to other countries for instance. https://modernfarmer.com/2019/01/congress-finally-passed-a-new-farm-bill-and-it-continues-to-pay-homage-to-the-cult-of-corn-and-soy/ https://modernfarmer.com/2019/01/congress-finally-passed-a-n... https://abcnews.go.com/US/dairy-farmers-dumping-milk-amid-covid-19-pandemics/story?id=70268302 https://abcnews.go.com/US/dairy-farmers-dumping-milk-amid-co... https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/15/business/milk-dumping-coronavirus/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/15/business/milk-dumping-cor... Fresh food is often wasted, and the dumping of milk is to prevent the prices from going too low. This was happening before corona as well, this paper is a pretty good summary from a marxist perspective on overproduction. https://www.e-ir.info/2016/07/07/agricultural-overproduction-and-the-deteriorating-environment/ https://www.e-ir.info/2016/07/07/agricultural-overproduction...
        • wumpus 5y ago
          Again, you apparently are willing to confuse the transportation cost of beef with the transport cost of everything. Nice reference to Marxism.
        • lasc4r 5y ago
          Transportation and cooling of meat in particular is nothing compared to the land area of North America and South America combined that we devote to growing crops to feed livestock. https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture
          • GhettoComputers 5y ago
            Is it negligible that transportation of fresh meat, its cooling or freezing are not at all factors in carbon production? I would like to see how its calculated.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  • Doji 5y ago
    Cow feed is generally not human edible: https://www.milkmeansmore.org/what-do-cows-eat/ https://www.milkmeansmore.org/what-do-cows-eat/
    • wumpus 5y ago
      Most places that grow feed corn could also grow human-edible corn. Remember that I'm talking about feedlots for beef.
    • mdorazio 5y ago
      This implies that the land used to grow cow feed couldn't be used to instead grow human-consumable crops or left fallow as a carbon sink. I'm not aware of any studies showing that.
      • Doji 5y ago
        You make a strong argument. I think this is a case where we'll find the global optimum somewhere in the middle. Deforesting the amazon to grow corn for cows is something I'm sure we can all agree is bad. Should we use livestock to eat cover crops and waste products like corn husks and cobs? This way we reuse waste and produce high quality protein to supplement our diets. Should we graze cattle on natural grasslands like the great plains? Especially in rotation with human foods, like the cover crops mentioned before?
        • wumpus 5y ago
          I'm pretty sure that feedlot studies say that the usual situation in the US is that 1/2 of beef calories come from a 10:1 ratio of human edible calories. So sure, go for 100%-grass-and-not-human-edible-food-fed beef, but that's not the current system.
      • WithinReason 5y ago
        If you check out the link, most of the cow feed is a by-product of other industrial processes and would go to waste otherwise.
• yboris 5y ago
  "plant monocrops" -- like all the soy that is planted to grow so it can be fed to the cows?
  • GhettoComputers 5y ago
    The monocrops are terrible for many reasons but the issue is subsidies. We have HFCS because of an artificial surplus of corn production.
• tasty_freeze 5y ago
  That article seems highly motivated to marginalize the effects of livestock. Quoting a section: While methane is 28-times more heat-trapping than carbon dioxide, methane’s lifespan is just a decade, while CO2 — known as a long-life pollutant — remains in the atmosphere for 1000 years. After ten years, methane is broken down in a process called hydroxyl oxidation into CO2, entering a carbon cycle which sees the gas absorbed by plants, converted into cellulose, and eaten by livestock. In the first paragraph, it says methane isn't so bad because it lasts only 10 years, unlike CO2 which lasts 1000 years. In the very next paragraph it says the methane is broken down into CO2 which is then absorbed by plants and recycled. Wait, you just said it lasts 1000 years. The next two paragraphs say that livestock accounts for 33% of the total methane released and blithely states that it all gets broken down and reused. If no additional animals are introduced, then net release equals net absorption. That is not very insightful -- eventually an equilibrium will be reached. This glosses over the real data that CO2 levels are rising, it is having measurable consequences, and is pushing control loops to new, worse states. Citing one article written for the "Farm Business" trade publication isn't as conclusive as you seem to state.
  • Doji 5y ago
    There is a certain amount of carbon in the atmosphere, and a certain amount of carbon in the ground. When you burn oil, you take carbon from the ground and introduce it into the atmosphere. This increases the total amount of carbon resident in the atmosphere. When you grow plants, you take carbon out of the atmosphere. When you eat it, you release it back into the atmosphere. The total amount of carbon resident in the atmosphere does not change. Grass grows more vigorously when regularly pruned, for example by a grazing animal. Farms also make a point of planting thing which grow quickly and efficiently. Thus it's reasonable to expect that farming could increase the rate of carbon turnover in the atmosphere, which would create the appearance of increased carbon emissions without a corresponding increase in the amount of carbon resident in the atmosphere. In practice, farms regularly use synthetic fertilizers. They might cut down trees to clear fields for animals. They use heavy, oil burning equipment. These, and many other practices, actually increase atmospheric carbon, and for that reason should be discouraged. But the cow itself only causes a short lived, fixed increase in atmospheric methane and an increased rate of carbon turnover.
• _the_inflator 5y ago
  I disagree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p...
• adrianN 5y ago
  Well, some meat production is obviously a sustainable part of agriculture. There will always be some areas where the soil is too poor for anything but grazing and you'll always have some waste that you can feed to chicken, pigs, and ruminants. But these sustainable levels of animal husbandry are so far removed from the industrialized meat production that we're currently doing that they might as well be zero. Recall that just a generation or two ago meat was something you ate once a week if you lived in a fairly developed country. Today Americans eat more than a 100kg of meat per year.
  • allturtles 5y ago
    > Recall that just a generation or two ago meat was something you ate once a week if you lived in a fairly developed country. What do you mean by a fairly developed country? McDonald's was selling hamburgers for 15 cents in 1955 (roughly the same as the price of a loaf of bread at the grocery store). Catholics eating fish on Friday (instead of meat) I believe goes back many generations. See also this article about historical meat consumption in the U.S.[0]: "“These sources do give us some confidence in suggesting an average annual consumption of 150–200 pounds of meat per person in the nineteenth century.” [0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/how-americans-used-to-eat/371895/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/how-ameri...
    • adrianN 5y ago
      Huh, interesting. I was extrapolating from my parents and grandparents who definitely didn't eat meat every day and certainly not half a pound of meat each day. They didn't live in the US though. My grandparents still had to raise all the meat for the family themselves.
      • bserge 5y ago
        Wouldn't be a bad idea tbh. Raise the tax on meat from industrial deathcamps but not from homegrown. Yes, I realize it's still death and pollution but the scale of modern farms is simply mindboggling. Grow and slaughter your own pigs and hens and then decide if you still want to do it for the meat (or the money from selling the meat).
• rapnie 5y ago
  Yesterday in the investigative journalism program Zembla on Dutch TV they addressed how the entire agri sector was beholden in a vicious cycle of greed. Where in the supply chain from Monsanto to supermarkets huge profit margins were raked in. Large part of the blame is at the supermarkets. While farmers are left no choice but to apply extractive methods (furtilizers, pesticides) to farm their lands to keep their heads afloat. Even with their huge farms and professional production methods they are effectively exploited. In this story the supermarkets say "We'll give consumers the choice", but for them that means choosing eco products that have ~40% higher price and they don't do that (~5% of sales is eco-friendly), so this doesn't work. Once again it is politicians who need to take some tough measures, but they find powerful lobbies in their path plus they do not dare to take impopular measures that make products more expensive, for fear of losing votes. So for 50 years things got worse and worse. One solution mentioned was what social enterprise True Price [0] is trying to establish: explicitly pricing the detrimental externalities that until now are shoved as costs to future generations. A pack of regular coffee with externalities priced in would go from, say, $5 to become $10, while a pack of eco-friendly coffee would go to $6.50. The surplus to the price should be reserved in a fund with which farmers can make the transition to sustainable agriculture. [0] https://trueprice.org/ https://trueprice.org/
• tarsinge 5y ago
  The vast majority of agricultural land today are for feeding animals (between 70% and 80% depending of the studies). The end product meat is maybe more efficient, but compared to what was needed for its production it is not. It’s not humans that eat that much monocultured corn and soy.
  • p_l 5y ago
    "Agricultural land" != "arable land'. It varies a lot by country, pretty sure there's a lot more overlap between pasture land and arable land in Europe, but for example in USA not so much. Considerable amount of animal food also involves byproducts of food production for humans, or plants used in cycling the fields (that's made worse with preference to just put ton of artificial fertilizer)
• asplake 5y ago
  Efficient? That rather depends on the scope of the system you’re measuring.
• johnydays 5y ago
  Most plant monocrops are for feedstock. You can do regenerative agriculture with only plants. Feeding animals plant calories is terribly inneficient (~10-15% depending on the estimate)
• Glench 5y ago
  Your efficiency argument is ridiculously based on a Medium article. Here's a quote from the Economist article citing two recent scientific studies: "It takes 33 plant calories to produce one calorie of beef."