10 ms·

Animal agriculture has too many shortcomings. - Greenhouse gas emissions - Deforestation - Land degradation - Water pollution - Water overconsumption - Lo

• korroziya 4y ago
  [dead]
• mdp2021 4y ago
  Those shortcomings are more relevant to intensive, wrong, unregulated and mindless practice. There is a form of farming which keeps those shortcomings contained - with different costs (but also with different quality).
  • sharkjacobs 4y ago
    > Yes, but animal agriculture can be less harmful if you do less of it
    • mdp2021 4y ago
      I beg your pardon? It is not just a matter of "raising less animals", it is also (and mainly) a matter of raising them sensibly.
      • giraffe_lady 4y ago
        It is mostly a matter of raising less animals. No other factor or approach or combination of them can address these things alone, reduction is a necessary step. Defining any of this as "sensible" is an error imo. In a sense it's certainly sensible to have the goal of providing accessibly-priced meat to every member of a large country. Each step along the way is sensible, I'm sure. But then we end up here and there is nothing sensible about it. The sheer scale required to provide all that flesh is nearly profane in its own right. There is simply and frankly no way to do it responsibly at the scale we've chosen to do it. It seems meat will either remain built on human, animal and ecological exploitation at an incomprehensible scale, or it will revert to a rare and expensive luxury mostly available only to an economic elite. I haven't seen a compelling vision of any alternative.
        • davidjones332 4y ago
          [flagged]
    • OJFord 4y ago
      That's only a paraphrasing to the extent that it means higher cost, which means lower demand, which means lower supply. It's not the point that was made, and the 'harm saving' would be greater than proportional to the consequent reduction in supply (ceteris paribus).
  • randomdata 4y ago
    Tell us more about the form of farming that contains the high energy consumption shortcoming listed above. As a crop farmer, even a comparatively small reduction in energy availability from a cloudy year can cause a noticeable impact on yields. I wonder what we would eat if we saw a dramatic decline in available energy.
    • CuriouslyC 4y ago
      He's probably referring to one of a variety of permaculture setups that integrates animals and a food forest into their operation. Carbon zero and super cheap to maintain, but challenging to setup and harder to sell some of the products.
      • randomdata 4y ago
        Still incredibly energy intensive. I honestly cannot think of any food that isn't, at least indirectly if not directly, so I want to know more about these farming practices that can contain the energy need.
        • CuriouslyC 4y ago
          There is a spectrum of permaculture that ranges from low yield totally self managing systems where you basically hunt and forage, to high yield partially automated systems that almost look like slick modern farms. Those low yield systems can still be very productive, but you have to go get it, so it's obviously more of a subsistence farmer or agritourism thing.
          • randomdata 4y ago
            None of this addresses the intense energy requirements. Even the self-managed permacultures would have little chance of survival if the bulk of the energy received was removed.
            • myshpa 4y ago
  • Pxtl 4y ago
    Right, but the amount of meat we could get from non-intensive agriculture is likely an order of magnitude lower, meaning an order of magnitude rise in price.
  • myshpa 4y ago
    > Those shortcomings are more relevant to intensive, wrong, unregulated and mindless practice On average 90 percent of meat and eggs raised in the U.S. come from CAFOs https://mostpolicyinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/ScienceNote_CAFOs.pdf https://mostpolicyinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/...
    • rhn_mk1 4y ago
      "Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations"
  • MrMan 4y ago
    [dead]
• manoDev 4y ago
  Raising SOME animals in SOME places is an efficient way to produce protein, including dairy – like zebu cattle and goat, hardy animals that graze on land that will grow nothing. There are human populations outside the western bubble surviving with minimal resources for a long time thanks to that. Raising large quantities of animals in the rhythm necessary to feed meat daily to a large population is irrational and creates these shortcomings. IMO animal agriculture is just another one of those topics that, if you really deep-dive, turns into a discussion of overpopulation and capitalism.
  • giraffe_lady 4y ago
    It's not an overpopulation problem. When you hit "the world can't support everyone living the way we live" the problem is with the way we live, not with everyone living. We can easily provide healthy nutritious food to everyone and many many more. Just not in the form that we are currently choosing for ourselves.
    • hcarvalhoalves 4y ago
      Define “easily”. Seriously, if you ever dealt with land in your life, you would know agriculture is anything but “easy”. It only exists in today’s shape and form thanks to fossil fuels, massive government incentives and cost externalities.
      • giraffe_lady 4y ago
        OK fine it's hard we still have to do it though you can't just throw up your hands and say "eugenics time!" It still seems pretty clear to me that the problem is resource overconsumption, not simple overpopulation. Let's address that first bit first then see where we are.
        • hcarvalhoalves 4y ago
          The problem is you can’t discuss consumption without addressing the population. The current economic model simply pushes the rest of world to consume at the unsustainable levels of a North American or European citizen. One of those will have to give.
• amanaplanacanal 4y ago
  Like almost all environmental problems, nobody wants to talk about the real root of the problem: people have been having too damn many babies.
  • comte7092 4y ago
    Population growth is peaking and will begin to decline within the lifetimes of people being born today. Your point is a red herring.
  • remexre 4y ago
    I thought the root cause isn't the total number of people, it's the fact that developed-nation lifestyles are a lot more environmentally impactful than developing ones; (6B * current developed-nation avg carbon footprint) > (8B * current global avg carbon footprint)
    • concordDance 4y ago
      They're both causes. E.g. if there were only 500 million people in the world there'd be no issue. Similarly, if everyone lived a somali lifestyle it wouldn't be that bad environmentally.
  • goodpoint 4y ago
    By large part most of the problem is due to overconsumption from a minority of the world population. But I don't blame most individuals: people buy what's available in shops and have little choice to do otherwise. The problem is in the economical system.
  • kmeisthax 4y ago
    No, it isn't. In fact, the entire developed world, plus Russia and China, is facing significant demographic cliffs in the near future because people stopped having too many damned babies decades ago. Human population will peak at 10B and start declining from there. In fact, several countries are trying to restart excess-replacement fertility specifically because the decline in working-age population is already too steep and the alternative is to starve the elderly to death[0]. The real root of the problem is that there is no root of the problem. There are hundreds of causes that all feed back into one another. If you try to boil this down into a root-cause narrative, what you will inevitably end up with is a cartoon caricature that, at best, pushes an anti-human narrative; and worse / more likely, blames some proxy for the poor, racial minorities, or foreigners. I know this because the whole 'population bomb' thing wound up being used by fascists to try and paint their shenanigans as environmentally friendly. [0] In Russia, this is literally the only thing that will get Putin chucked out a window. A very large chunk of the country moved to mining towns in the 70s and 80s to take advantage of the Soviet Union equivalent of FIRE[1]. Those pensions are a crushing burden upon the government and any attempt to reduce them causes massive protests and riots. [1] Financial Independence, Retire Early
• macinjosh 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • giraffe_lady 4y ago
    THE single universal defining trait of humans is our refusal to be bound by the limits set for us by our biological past. But regardless, the alternative to an economically catastrophic meat-centric diet isn't starvation and malnutrition come on. It's not even vegetarianism per se. Most humans most places through most of time have eaten much much less meat than we currently do. They've eaten a lot more plants and yes bugs and lichen and seaweed and shit than we do. We don't need to idealize that or try to return to it, but we should remember it. We are extreme outliers among humans who have lived, in this particular way, among others. We should consider the consequences of occupying this extreme and choose where we stand with it deliberately now that we understand what it is.
  • f6v 4y ago
    Many problems can be solved by dramatically reducing cattle population and consuming more poultry.
• JasserInicide 4y ago
  Many of these beyond a surface-level inspection break down upon a closer inspection Inefficient land and resource use Land degradation Loss of biodiversity Soil erosion In the US, most of the land used for grazing is already insufficient for farming most crops. You take cows and such off of them, you're left with near-useless land. Chemical runoff from pesticides and fertilizers Not exclusive to livestock and their feed, feels weird to attribute it to just them. Widely-available meat in the Western world is a Pandora's Box; it's just not going away. It's better to find ways to make it more efficient than to go all pissed-off-vegan and want to ban meat everywhere in favor of ultra-processed replacement monstrosities. You'll win more people to your side too. Furthermore, attacking the end-consumer does absolutely nothing. It's like banning plastic bags/straws, It just makes liberal lawmakers feel good about themselves. You want to really change our diets? Go after the billions in subsidies handed out to farmers for growing corn/soybeans/dairy and such in order to stay competitive against cheaper products overseas. Good luck.
  • throwaway173738 4y ago
    I think the disconnect here is that you presuppose that all land must be put to some productive use.
    • EngManagerIsMe 4y ago
      Or that farming is the only productive use.
    • skrbjc 4y ago
      Much of that "marginal land" originally had animals grazing on it anyway. We have barely more cows in this country now than buffalo at their peak. "Re-wilding" land would just mean we have animals grazing at that we don't eat.
      • myshpa 4y ago
        Before the arrival of European settlers in North America, it is estimated that there were approximately 30 to 60 million bison (also known as buffalo) roaming the continent. We are currently consuming upto three times as many cows each year as there were wild buffalos. https://www.sciencealert.com/the-current-mass-extinction-is-already-far-more-dire-than-we-realized https://www.sciencealert.com/the-current-mass-extinction-is-... - Cows (cattle): In 2021, the United States had approximately 94.4 million head of cattle, including those raised for beef and dairy production. - Beef: In 2021, the United States imported approximately 3.1 billion pounds of beef and veal, that's apx. 6 mil. cows. - Pigs (hogs): In 2020, the United States produced around 129 million hogs. - Pork: In 2021, the United States imported approximately 1.0 billion pounds of pork. - Chickens (broilers): In 2020, the United States produced about 9.1 billion broiler chickens for meat. - Poultry: In 2021, the United States imported around 913 million pounds of poultry meat, including broiler meat and turkey meat. - Turkeys: In 2020, the United States produced approximately 229 million turkeys. Fish, shellfish, ducks, sheep, goats, or dairy products not included. Source: USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service
• concordDance 4y ago
  Almost all of these apply to plant farming too?
  • DrThunder 4y ago
    [flagged]
    • pasquinelli 4y ago
      you should eat more steak than wheat?
      • DrThunder 4y ago
        Absolutely. You think piles of grains are good for you? If you take 2 people and have one eat steak all the time and the other eat wheat all the time, the wheat eater will be obese and have all sorts of auto-immune diseases. Stop believing the anti-meat FDA. Meat is good for you. Additionally, I see you negated to full read my comment where I said FROSTED mini wheats. Yes, the FDA put sugary cereal higher up than meat products.
      • DrThunder 4y ago
        https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36993403/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36993403/
  • PretzelPirate 4y ago
    Of course, most plants we grow are fed to animals. Directly eating plants would reduce the overall impact since we'd grow less.
  • timeon 4y ago
    Yes. And with animal agriculture - especially at scale that is needed for contemporary demand - you need huge amount of plant farming.
  • myshpa 4y ago
    If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
• DrThunder 4y ago
  This isn't relegated to animal agriculture.....