4 ms·

While I completely agree that growing plants has at least 10x less impact to environment, it is not just "grow plants". You also have to use fertilizer, insect

• feet 4y ago
  The point was that growing meat is an extra multiple steps on top of everything you just mentioned
  • Spooky23 4y ago
    Not necessarily. "Environmental" problems are always scope to whatever issue the stakeholder is worried about. Soy and wheat production in the United States is concentrated on the Great Plains, and made possible by irrigation sourced from groundwater and artificial fertilizer. Problem: that groundwater is being depleted faster than replenishment, and part of the plains will be desert-like within the lifetime of many HN users. So you're looking at destroying some of the more productive farmlands on earth, and have been destroying the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi delta for decades with massive levels of nitrate pollution. Most of the problems with meat production are about scale. You can actually utilize the waste products of a 200 head herd of cattle, but 20,000 is an industrial waste site. Likewise, you can't pasture large scales of cattle, and feedlots intensify things like methane emissions, etc.
    • feet 4y ago
      Rotating crops is a solution to the depletion. The main reason that soy and corn are grown so heavily is subsidy
• pwinnski 4y ago
  ... all of which you have to do when growing plants you then feed to animals, too, so it's still an apples-to-apples comparison.