4 ms·

What do you think they are feeding the animals for? To make food.

• triceratops 6mo ago
  Massively inefficient approach to "food security". Burn fossil fuels to grow animal fodder, feed and raise animals, wtf. Huge amounts of energy lost at each stage of that process.
  • margalabargala 6mo ago
    Food availability is orders of magnitude higher than needed to feed all humans. Efficiency isn't an issue. Any hunger is an economic and logistical problem not a production problem.
    • bitmasher9 6mo ago
      Efficiency is a long term issue, especially water efficiency.
  • jfengel 6mo ago
    Meat is hugely inefficient, but Americans demand it. If you told Americans in a crisis, "For food security reasons you're all limited to a quarter pounder per day", we'd have a national riot. They're used to three times that. They'd insist that they'd die without enough protein, and vegetable protein sources don't count. Even limiting their meat to a half-pound per day would cause riots, even though that is more than enough protein. So efficiency just isn't on the table here. We're going to over-support our meat industry.
    • triceratops 6mo ago
      That doesn't explain growing corn for ethanol.
      • Brian_K_White 6mo ago
        You can't turn farming capacity on and off. If you need a given level of capacity, it has to already be there up & running, the entire system including all the people filling all the roles with all the experience, and all the machinery, all the distribution and economic relationships and countless support dependencies. What you CAN do quicker is change what you use that capacity for. And even what you do with the current product right this moment even before you have time to change what you will harvest next year. Corn that that is normally only fed to animals is still absolutely a ready resource for people if they need it. Most of our food is fully artificially constructed out of base ingredients these days. Every box and bag and can on the shelves that needs a carbohydrate barely cares at all where it comes from or what it originally tastes like raw.
        • triceratops 6mo ago
          But what is this system trying to secure against? America already grows enough animal fodder without counting corn for ethanol. If some calamity strikes corn production for animal fodder, it will equally affect corn production for ethanol. Because it's the same crop. And also why can't you scale farm production up and down? It isn't like manufacturing and factories. Preserve farmland and produce enough for the country's consumption needs. That'll keep farm labor and machinery sufficiently busy. It also prevents the waste of fertile soil growing food that's never eaten.
        • sfink 6mo ago
          That can explain a little. Not the 40% of all corn grown that is used for ethanol. Which would be better for the nation's security? Having all this ethanol, or having 31x the energy provided by that ethanol via solar production? We couldn't actually use that much solar power right now, but that's part of the opportunity cost: we aren't gearing up to make use of it because we're generating all of this ethanol that we don't need instead! The capacity maintenance argument works both ways: pay to maintain the capacity to grow vastly more corn than we'll ever need, or pay to maintain the capacity to generate tons more energy that we're far more likely to need. (Also, taking land that has been largely destroyed by industrial corn farming and changing it into land that's growing some more valuable food crop isn't just a matter of changing your mind about what to grow the next year.)
    • andriy_koval 6mo ago
      > Meat is hugely inefficient wondering if there is a strong evidence for this?.. What is more efficient?
• Teever 6mo ago
  Given that there are significantly cheaper, healthier and more efficient alternatives to eating animals isn't it more accurate to say that they're feeding the animals to make money?
  • andriy_koval 6mo ago
    > Given that there are significantly cheaper, healthier and more efficient alternatives to eating animals this statement is very disputable. What alternatives are available in your opinion?
    • Teever 6mo ago
      Producing and eating less animals. I don’t mean to sound glib but that’s all there is to it. The juice from animal husbandry just isn’t worth the squeeze if you look at the cascading consequences of environmental and health consequences of a meat heavy diet. I eat meat. A lot of meat. Far too much, but I acknowledge that it isn’t good and that I need to change.
      • andriy_koval 6mo ago
        > health consequences of a meat heavy diet. my research and lots of experiments on myself say that there are positive consequences, and there is no much negative consequences if focus on lean unprocessed meat. As for "cascading consequences of environmental", I also think there is a way to grow meat with reduced consequences.
        • Teever 5mo ago
          This is very true, but unfortuantely most people don't have portion control and they don't eat the right lean unprocessed meat. I'm skeptical that we can grow meat with significantly reduced environmental consequences. Like unless you're talking about some technologically advanced and not yet ready for mass production lab grown meat kind of thing it will always be more ecologically friendly and cheaper to just grow food that humans eat instead of growing food for animals to eat which are then eaten by animals. That thermodynamic reality just isn't going to change.