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If everyone were vegan, only a quarter of current farmland would be needed
- purephase 5y agoPutting on some popcorn to watch this thread. HN loves discussions around veganism.
- chana_masala 5y agoYeah, surprised it's not flagged. I am vegan but arguing about it online just isn't worth it, so I'll grab some (vegan) popcorn with you.
- karmakurtisaani 5y agoThe comments are already frustrating. I could boil the whole being vegan argument down to "less cattle in the world would be a quick and easy CO2 reduction win", and receive mind bogglingly silly arguments in return totally missing the point. Better not go there.
- teakettle42 5y ago> less cattle in the world would be a quick and easy CO2 reduction win Do you often find that taking away things that the majority of people like — and have firmly entrenched in their lifestyle — is “quick and easy”?
- karmakurtisaani 5y agoQuick and easy in the sense that the overall impact to society would be minimal. Contrast that to giving up fossile fuels in large scale for example. Or any other change that would have similar impact. The whole point of making the argument for veganism is to make people understand that they can, and indeed should, make this change. Even if in small steps.
- Zababa 5y ago> so I'll grab some (vegan) popcorn with you Now I'm curious about what non-vegan popcorn is supposed to be.
- karmakurtisaani 5y agoPopcorn that has butter comes to mind.
- scrumbledober 5y agoor cheesy popcorn, or caramel popcorn depending on how the caramel is made, or popcorn topped with ground beef
- Zababa 5y agoI only knew about popcorn with salt and popcorn with sugar. Is popcorn topped with ground beef really a thing?
- brimble 5y agoButtered.
- ratsmack 5y agoI don't understand the thought process here on HN when people start punching the flagged button the second a controversial subject comes up. I would think the large portion of scientific minded people here would be thrilled to toss around different ideas, but it seems egos and hurt feeling take over and the thread is ultimately killed. So unfortunate.
- the_only_law 5y ago> I don't understand the thought process here on HN when people start punching the flagged button the second a controversial subject comes up. I would think the large portion of scientific minded people here would be thrilled to toss around different ideas Take a look at comments on more controversial threads, I think you overestimate the userbase.
- purephase 5y ago[flagged]
- andrewclunn 5y agoFew things are worth the destruction of our natural environment. Ice cream, leather, and surf and turf most definitely are though.
- klyrs 5y agoI was going to point out that coconut ice cream can be superior to its milky counterpart... but coconut farming itself is problematic. If we replaced all the world's ice cream with coconut ice cream, there would be no coconuts left. And it takes 4-10 years for new coconuts to mature. Our addiction to luxury may be the root problem.
- PretzelPirate 5y agoI don’t know any vegan that still eats coconut ice cream…because it tastes like coconut. There are a huge variety of non-dairy ice cream made with oats, cashews, soy, peas, etc…
- klyrs 5y agoTrue, one must like coconut to arrive at my opinion that it's superior to cream. And it's only good for certain flavors: yes salted caramel, no not mint chocolate chip.
- RFV_ 5y ago
- jacobmarble 5y agoPasture soil is very often of such low quality (relative to farm soil - nutrients, grade, drainage) that removing cattle from those soils would not open them up to farming.
- bigyellow 5y ago
- Broken_Hippo 5y agoPerhaps you've misread? Otherwise, you are adding context that definitely wasn't there in the comment. Specifically, they were pointing out that pasture lands weren't necessarily farmland being misused as pasture land. No one said anything about erosion.
- mburee 5y agoBut how much of the cows actually graze on open fields? Or much of their food doesn't come from plants like soy which is pretty edible for humans too...
- Symmetry 5y agoMost cows grow up on pasture land before being moved to feed lots for bulking up before slaughter. My sense is that the US could sustain about half of its current beef production just with pasture grazing.
- Swizec 5y agoI think this depends on the area. Back home in Slovenia, you see cows grazing all summer up in the alps where no sane person would ever farm. I wouldn’t even call it “agricultural land”. Cows roam free on the mountains among hikers and tourists. Here in California, any rolling grassy hill you see has cows on it year round. Cows everywhere. Doesn’t look like anyone’s interested in building housing on that land and you rarely see any crop fields in those areas. Whether that’s because letting cows graze is cheaper or the land is unsuitable for crops, I don’t know. But there are also feedlots where cows are “finished” before slaughter. How much grain and soy they eat there to be fattened up … probably a lot. I’ve heard of feedlots that stretch horizon to horizon in the midwest
- wbsss4412 5y agoIt should be noted, as displayed in the graphic, that the difference is primarily due to a reduction in pasture lands, not crop land, and those two are not fungible. Still a laudable achievement.
- arbitrage 5y agoVegan diets can only exist at a global scale by externalizing the negative costs related to shipping, storage, and manufacturing. The Vegan diet didn't/can't appear in a vacuum, and it only became widespread as an option for everyone once global shipping emerged. Veganism has its place, but it's not the holier-than-thou panacea its adherents make it out to be.
- VaxWithSex 5y agomeat-containing diets can only exist at a global scale by externalizing the negative costs related to shipping, storage, and manufacturing. The meat-containnig diet didn't/can't appear in a vacuum, and it only became widespread as an option for everyone once global shipping emerged. meat has its place, but it's not the holier-than-thou panacea its adherents make it out to be.
- globular-toast 5y agoNot true, I'm afraid. People have been eating meat for a long time. They just didn't eat as much as people eat now. Nowhere near what the average American eats. It was also produced in a different way. For example, in Britain it was traditional for families to keep a pig and feed it leftovers from the kitchen (swill). Essentially free food. But that's been illegal for a long time now.
- nkingsy 5y agoExcept your version is wrong. People were eating milk and meat long before shipping. Meat-dominant diets, sure
- bigyellow 5y agoIn capitalism, all costs of production are externalized. What you said is not relevant to the the importance and possibility of veganism.
- orthecreedence 5y ago[flagged]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- chrisfrantz 5y agoResident vegan here. Would love if everyone gave it a shot, it substantially improved my cholesterol and aligns with my ethics. This site is a fun one (not affiliated) if you have one of the more common questions: https://yourveganfallacyis.com/en https://yourveganfallacyis.com/en
- SuoDuanDao 5y agoI did give it a shot when I was living with vegan roommates... turns out my health declines noticeably when I try. I do hope vegans and people like myself can find common cause around shifting away from factory farming of all types rather than trying to solve the problem by shifting diets alone.
- datameta 5y agoNot all vegan diets are alike. What yours like, out of curiousity?
- SuoDuanDao 5y agoI don't remember the particulars any more, I know I was eating more peanut and nutritional yeast than before but I couldn't give you a detailed breakdown of my diet at the time.
- corobo 5y agoI hate to admit it but this is the exact reason I stopped being vegan too. I'd just start feeling weirdly faint like I was about to pass out randomly. You know when you're in an elevator and there's a slight gravity shift when it stops at a floor? It was like that every now and then Fully loaded up on the multivitamins and as far as I knew I was getting in everything I needed to get in food wise. I do realise that it's on me to make sure that I'm actually eating the right food to not die, it's not something for other vegans to have to fix for me, but I just couldn't figure it out quickly enough myself and had no resources to reference I'm down to about ~10% meat but I'm just going to accept that I'm sitting in the moral wrong on this until the nutritional alternatives ramp up in options and down in price e: I really should note that I'm allergic to most types of beans, which took out a fair chunk of the vegan diet on its own. I couldn't see anything that only beans provided when I tried to fix it though. Gave it a good 6 months overall but not for me (yet?)
- jtr110 5y agoMy understanding is that land used for livestock is often not suitable for crops, water is mostly rainwater, and animals are fed the grain deemed not suitable for human consumption? I think things like nut processing use much more resources overall than milk from a cow
- soldehierro 5y agoNot at all. While animals can be pastured, most of the livestock in developed countries is reared in grain-fed CAFOs. These are, in most cases, grain that is suitable for human consumption or could be made so. Moreover, almond milk is still ecologically preferable to cows milk.
- krageon 5y ago> almond milk Life is already hard enough for people with nut allergies (which is apparently more common than I thought), so let's just make that oat milk and call it a day. A lot better for the environment too :)
- klyrs 5y agoVariety is good. People can also be allergic to oat. https://www.healthline.com/health/oat-allergy https://www.healthline.com/health/oat-allergy
- aczerepinski 5y agoAnd oat milk preferable to almond milk.
- Broken_Hippo 5y ago"most of the livestock in developed countries is reared in grain-fed CAFOs" That simply isn't true. It is very, very common in the US. I've not seen a trace of it in Norway: Farmers here seem a bit appalled. From what I understand, at least some aspects of this sort of farming have been outlawed in much of Europe, and Europe is full of so-called "developed countries".
- 5y ago
- sAbakumoff 5y agoRight, 100 companies responsible for 70% of global emissions and yet we fight farms and plastic straws and farting animals.
- enkid 5y agoAccording to the EPA [0], Agriculture, forestry, and other land uses make up 24% of global emissions, second only to electricity and heat production, suggesting trying to reduce emissions is going to take more than a single approach. [0] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...
- nightski 5y agoGlobally yes. If you look at the United States it is 10%, of which less than half is animal related. You could solve this without reducing consumption as well. Food additives exist which bring down methane emissions to practically nothing.
- cheese_goddess 5y agoIn the data you linked to, 24% of (all) greenhouse gas emissions come from what's known as "land-use change", which is what it sounds like, changes to land use from forests to cropland. The emissions of the remaining categories in the pie chart (namely: Industry, Transportation, Buildings, Electricity and Heat Production and Other Energy) are primarily the byproduct of burning fossil fuels (and to a lesser extent from cement production). If you take each of those categories on its own, you can compare them almost favorably to land use changes. But if you take them all together, they add up to 76%. That is the percentage of greenhouse gas emissions that come from burning fossil fuels. Burning fossil fuels is the major contributor to anthropogenic climate change, in fact is is the cause of anthropogenic climate change. Again: 76% of all emissions (only a small part of that is from cement production). Note also that the economist article makes it clear that land use change would be only minimally reduced, at best, from everyone going vegan because the majority of reduction would be in the use of pasture, much of which is not possible to cultivate anyway. So we'd still have to use the same land for cultivating food for humans that we do now to grow feed for animals. The conclusion to draw is that even if everyone on the planet went vegan, but we continued to burn fossil fuels the same as before, we would still not have done anything to stop climate change and we would only slow it down a little. To eliminate climate change we must radically reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels.
- DustinBrett 5y agoIf everyone ..., we'd have world peace.
- coolso 5y ago
- saucyfox 5y agoLook up the requirements for produce standardization before we pitchfork about the needs of farming. If we could get more "ugly" food cheaply to stores than we could easily feed the ENTIRE WORLD with our current farming infrastructure.
- SllX 5y agoIsn’t “ugly” produce just canned or used in manufactured foods like jarred sauces or jams? If that’s the case then it’s already on store shelves.
- Broken_Hippo 5y agoSometimes. Other times, it just goes to waste in the fields and even if they give it away, no one seems to want to pay for hauling it away.
- SllX 5y agoWell that’s unfortunate. Not even used as compost? That doesn’t seem very efficient.
- giantrobot 5y ago"Ugly" produce out in a field needs to be picked, transported, and stored. Even if it's going to end up as compost it costs money to get it from the field to where it'll be composted. If it's just left in place it'll get composted when the field is turned over. In the meantime it'll feed wild animals that will themselves feed other wild animals. It's not like it's a total waste, it just doesn't make it to store shelves. Note that produce might be "ugly" because of actual problems with that piece of produce. Unless you can examine every single piece to differentiate between a bruise, rot, or vermin it's probably best just to leave it in the field.
- SllX 5y agoIs it even fair to characterize it as waste at all at that point? If it’s presently not economical to do anything else with it other than leave it in place, that doesn’t seem the worst given that it’ll break down into the soil and/or feed into the wild food chain. Or is food that doesn’t go into feeding people somehow just considered “wasted” under industry nomenclature?
- balls187 5y agoI wasn't able to read most of the article; is there a shortage of farmland that necessitates needing to consider our diets?
- evan_ 5y agoMaybe not yet, but with aquifers drying out, soil eroding, phosphate production slowing, increasing fuel prices, temperatures trending up, pollinators dying off, drought, blight, infestations- it's hard to imagine agriculture not being affected by at least one of those things in coming decades.
- purephase 5y agoOr, we could return some of this farmland back to it's natural state, plant trees and build out our carbon sync capabilities.
- nradov 5y agoIn the USA at least we have more farmland than we need.
- kaycebasques 5y agohttps://archive.fo/qgsTs https://archive.fo/qgsTs
- Apocryphon 5y agoWhat if only resource-intensive livestock was phased out? Say, chicken and pork(?) was still eaten. One also wonders why there’s no name for a diet that permits the eating of fowl, similar to pescatarianism. On the other hand, what happens to population nutrition if cow’s milk was eliminated from the food supply?
- bigyellow 5y ago> On the other hand, what happens to population nutrition if cow’s milk was eliminated from the food supply? It vastly improves as a result of lowered cholesterol, fat and hormone consumption.
- soco 5y agoI would miss a lot my cheese. But I would hope some tasty vegan alternatives are in development, are they?
- Spivak 5y agoCashew cheese is really really good. I’m vegetarian but not vegan and it’s still my goto mac and cheese casserole, nacho cheese, “chicken” dip, and queso base. The downside is that you need a powerful blender to make it yourself since it’s effectively a flavored nut butter.
- giantrobot 5y agoI have yet to find a vegan/vegetarian "cheese" that even resembles actual cheese. I'm not a cheese expert but even my unrefined pallet can tell the difference between "cheese" and cheese. It is ridiculous how bad some of that shit tastes. I don't think "cheese" will get anywhere close to cheese until it's made from vat/lab grown milk. Then it'll just be real cheese just not coming from animals.
- LatteLazy 5y agoSo what? We have no shortage of farmland.
- grardb 5y agoThat's only true if you have no issue with habitat destruction to make more room for farmland, which is happening all the time.
- LatteLazy 5y agoWe don't need anymore farm land now. We already grown enough food for everyone. We just stock pile it in weird places. Or we destroy habit because it's cheaper than farming properly. So just stop doing that.
- bryanlarsen 5y agoA magazine called The Economist should understand why we use almost all of our arable land for farming. It's because that's the cheapest way to do it. We could grow all of our food in greenhouses and return 99.9% of our farmland to nature. We don't do that because that would be more expensive and cheaper alternatives make growing wheat & corn in greenhouses highly unprofitable. Conversely, if suddenly 75% of the arable land came onto the market, it would drive the price of land down dramatically, making it profitable to farm it less intensively (aka more cheaply). In other words, we'd still farm about the same amount of land, but we'd use less fertilizer and herbicide and the price of food would go down. Those are awesome results, but land usage would not be significantly different.
- kiba 5y agoIf our government subsidizes investment in greenhouse, would that be sustainable?
- teaearlgraycold 5y agoI don’t think so. Subsidies are good when they get a market over a small initial cost. They pull you out of a local minimum. Greenhouses will never be cheaper than using the Earth as well always have.
- thecolorblue 5y ago> Greenhouses will never be cheaper than using the Earth as well always have. This needs to be tested. There are a lot of expenses in bare field farming including transportation, pest control, low yield from weather, etc.
- kiba 5y agoObviously, greenhouse makes sense, but only for relatively high value crops. My question was merely about the government not going bankrupt through large scale subsidization. But maybe I should consider research & development too.
- 5y ago
- wnolens 5y agoI've found being vegan too difficult with IBS. Fruits and vegetable and grains are what cause symptoms, so I quite literally need to eat meat (and the other things in small quantities)
- gameswithgo 5y agoThen you get 4x as many people eventually.
- b0mbadilh0le 5y ago
- dang 5y agoPlease don't use HN for ideological battle. It's tedious, predictable, and against the site guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- stjohnswarts 5y agoThis is where the human species will have to go eventually but probably not in my lifetime.
- cheese_goddess 5y agoI can't read this article but I've seen this data before and the argument that accompanies it, here: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets But there's a bunch of problems with the argument. First, it's obvious from the graphs that we can save pretty much the same amount of land if everyone switched to a lacto-ovo-pescaterian diet, rather than a strict vegan diet. The difference in emission reductions between the two diets is 2%. Second, as others have pointed out, most of the reduction in land use comes from pasture, which is not always useful for agriculture. This is not as clear cut as either side on this debate may think. On the one hand, much pastureland was created by humans in older times who deforested large areas precisely to raise their cattle. For example, this is the case in much of North-Western Europe. On the other hand there are vast areas of the Earth that are not naturally covered in forsts- think of the steppes, for instance. How much of that land should, or even can be returned to trees is not clear. Some part of it will remain whether we want it or not, simply because forests can't grow everywhere on Earth. There's no reason not to use such land for pasture. Third, as the ourworldindata.org article makes it clear, it's not just calories and amount of proteins that matters in nutrition, but also the quality of protein, micronutrients and minerals. Some of these, namely B12 vitamin, cannot be obtained from plant sources and must be supplemented in the diets of anyone going vegan. So "if everyone were vegan, only a quareter of current farmland would be needed" plus many hundred times the current amount of supplements of B12 and other nutrients. The costs of supplementing the entire population of Earth with at the very least B12 is not often discussed but it is an important question: if everyone goes vegan what will be the cost of ensuring nobody goes malnourished as a result? Yet another observation is that not all dairy production comes from cow milk. In large parts of the world, for example all around the Mediterrannean and in large swathes of Asia, dairy comes primarily from small ruminants, sheep and goats, and some of those places also happen to occupy natural pastureland (again, think of the steppes). There's no reason not to consume dairy from small ruminants raised on such pastureland. There is a common misconception that I see in discussions like this, that emissions from farming come from "cow burps" (sometimes people say "cow farts"). As a matter of fact, cows, like all animals, cannot produce new carbon gasses, like CO₂ and methane. They can only return to the environment what they take from the environment: plants bind CO₂ from the atmosphere, animals take the CO₂ from plants and other animals and then they release it back to the atmosphere. So these emissions cannot add new carbon to the atmosphere, they are part of the natural atmospheric carbon cycle and they are not normally counted towards the increase in CO₂ and methane levels in the atmosphere. So what causes all the emissions from the agricultural sector? That's land use change. Which means, cutting down forest and replacing it with cropland, be it for human or animal feed. Because forests bind large amounts of carbon in plant tissues, when trees are cut down and not replaced with new trees, but crops that don't have the same capacity to bind carbon, a large amount of carbon ends up in the atmosphere with nowhere to go. And that is the principal contribution to greenhouse gas emissions by agriculture. Finally, and lest we forget: emissions from agriculture are the minor contributor to climate change. The major contributor is burning fossil fuels. Three quarters of greenhouse gas emissions are caused by burning fossil fuels. Burning fossil fuels, not farming or agriculture, is the cause of climate change. Fossil fuels bind carbon over millions of years and we have released a gigantic amount of it within a mere 200 years. Reducing fossil fuel burning is the primary target for greenhouse gas emission reductions- not food. https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector
- sleepingadmin 5y agoNo need to go into the debate about veganism. 90% of Canada is unused and owned by the queen. Lets say we take even 10% more. The queen can keep 80%. That 10% is now going to be a giant vertical factory farm, fully automated. Our robot farmers produce more food than the earth can consume. World hunger ends and everyone who used to farm and such can go do something else. Perhaps those people learn to produce meats artificially. That gets automated and we're good. Every human on earth eats as much as they please and can go work on more important issues.
- Decabytes 5y agoI have chronic GI distress. One of the things that upsets it is vegetables. I can eat them if they have been cooked down enough, but I have a really hard time digesting them if they are in smoothies, salads, as vegetable spread etc. Because of this I'm careful about how I ingest them. I wish this wasn't the case
- jacknews 5y agoThe 'plants, eggs, fish' diet is almost the same impact as vegan, and probably much more acceptable to people. IMHO, dairy will soon be man-made, we'll produce milk in factories with yeast, and fish will be indoor-farmed, so we just need to stop eating beef, pork, lamb.