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> Without the drugs that keep livestock healthy in concentrated agriculture, we’d lose the ability to raise them that way. Antibiotics for industrial animal fa

• grecy 13y ago
  While I tend to agree with you, the problem is we'll then have a lot less livestock to eat, and there will be a global food shortage. The house of cards is stacked very, very high.
  • rosser 13y ago
    If even some of the land that was freed up by a fall-off in livestock production was instead used to grow plants, we'd actually have a food surplus, and a significant one. EDIT: "even some of"
    • SwellJoe 13y ago
      Not to mention we'd reduce water usage dramatically in a lot of places where water use is one of the most pressing issues people face.
      • bobbydavid 13y ago
        And don't forget air quality! Cow farts are a leading cause of greenhouse gases. Seriously.
    • deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    • colechristensen 13y ago
      Many places which are unsuitable to crop production can be used for livestock production with very wide grazing. Most livestock production is done in hyper-concentrated confinement operations which take up negligible land space. For the wellbeing of the animals, the quality of the environment surrounding these sites, and the quality of the meat -- these confinement operations should be done away with. The space, though, is irrelevant. Eliminating livestock production increases food availability because the feed-conversion-ratio is between 4 and 40 (how many pounds of feed turn into 1 pound of cow,pig,chicken, etc). It is certainly not about space.
      • geoka9 13y ago
        What about the space required to grow food for livestock?
        • seanmcdirmid 13y ago
          Livestock can utilize food sources that we can't (pigs are the greatest food recyclers ever created), and they can graze in wastelands that we otherwise find difficult to make productive. India is primarily vegetarian ONLY because they have lots of land in which to grow things. Most other regions do not have so much grow-worthy land, and require a mix of farming and livestock to sustain their populations.
          • maxerickson 13y ago
            The U.S. devotes 80 million acres to corn production, corn that is mostly used as animal feed: http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn/background.aspx http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn/background.aspx (ethanol has shifted that mostly some, yay!)
            • randomdata 13y ago
              That doesn't mean those 80 million acres are able to grow food humans can eat though. Not every year. For instance, on my farm, while our soil and climate is quite good for growing beans of many varieties, which are great for human consumption, you still need to maintain a rotation to maintain a viable farm. We've had to push cereals out of some of our land because it simply won't grow on their soils. That basically leaves corn as our only real rotation option. To add to that, corn is essentially worthless right now. Its market price is below what it costs to grow. I'd rather grow something I can make money from, but I don't know what that is. You just have to roll the dice and hope the price improves before you have to sell it. As an interesting aside, a neighbour of mine actually did try growing beans year after year, but he soon found himself out of business completely when disease started running rampant and his yields dropped to nothing. It was kind of sad to watch, and frightening to think what could be if we lose the animal markets.
    • DanBC 13y ago
      We already have a food surplus.
  • wwweston 13y ago
    > we'll then have a lot less livestock to eat Even if that's true, while meat is tasty, it's a luxury, and arguably a step in the food chain that's a waste. If the entire industrial meat sector evaporated today, my guess is the biggest impact would be an economic disruption from large number of suddenly unemployed and businesses no longer buying services/products, rather than any kind of food shortage per se. But if we're talking about an antibiotic ban, the impacts wouldn't even reach that far. ABX don't enable production, they enable cheaper production. The most likely outcome isn't a serious collapse in supply, it's some combination of an increase in costs and modest reduction in supply.
    • baddox 13y ago
      > Even if that's true, while meat is tasty, it's a luxury No more a luxury than, say, cancer treatments.
      • rosser 13y ago
        If you don't get your cancer treated, you die. If you don't eat meat, you don't eat meat.
        • seanmcdirmid 13y ago
          If you live in Tibet or any other 4000+ meter environment where growing things is quite a bit more difficult, and you don't eat meat, you die. Say whatever you want about the Chinese, but the Tibetans do very much welcome the fresh vegetables that they can now get via better transport links and internal trade. I visited north Xinjiang once, and was quite over-exposed to meat so much that I was happy to get back to lower elevation lands where I could actually get some vegetables again.
          • gohrt 13y ago
            That's completely off-topic in a conversation that is obviously about large-scale ranches. Do those Tibetans use antibiotics to promote growth?
  • contingencies 13y ago
    Less cheap industrial meat in the overfed west (particularly the US) is not equal to global food shortage.
  • logicallee 13y ago
    pumping them full of antibiotics under factory farm conditions seems like an awful hack anyway. it's like running eighty concurrent webserver processes and killing them 100 times per second round-robin because if you don't kill them constantly they will bring down the whole system. I mean maybe this setup "works" but aren't we really stretching the definition of that word?
    • jff 13y ago
      > it's like running eighty concurrent webserver processes and killing them 100 times per second round-robin because if you don't kill them constantly they will bring down the whole system Ruby on Rails?
    • maxerickson 13y ago
      A significant portion of the drugs used in feed are used to tip the digestive chemistry so that the feed is processed more efficiently. It isn't that big an effect, but it isn't really wildly crazy. There's a bunch of studies on feeding ionophores to graze animals (which I take as a demonstration of intent).
  • edvinbesic 13y ago
    It all seems like a vicious cycle of us discovering better ways to fight bacteria and feeding more and more people at the same time at the same price or less. Everything adapts bla bla bla. This could all be alleviated if we just took a step back as a society and took control of our own lives, food included. Maybe spending 20-30 minutes a day on growing your own supply (where applicable) isn't the worst thing in the world if it came down to it.
    • maxerickson 13y ago
      That's a very modest estimate of the time involved if you start talking about people growing a significant portion of the calories they need.
      • edvinbesic 13y ago
        Absolutely, but maybe there is more then one wrong here. Plus the nutrition you get from mass farming these days is less then desirable. It's not about quantity ,but quality as the cliche says. I understand this is not possible everywhere but I grew up on a pretty small suburban home that grew maybe 50% of its own vegetables outside of winter. Having moved to a heavy industrialized nation and moving that down to 0% I can see the difference in quality when eating mass produced food. Again, not everyone if willing or able to do this, but where applicable it should be encouraged and promoted instead of looked down upon as another hippy mentality blabedibla...
  • jrochkind1 13y ago
    So, which would you rather have, a lot less livestock to eat, or no way to treat bacterial infections? Oh, but guess what, you don't get to choose that trade-off -- you'll have a lot less livestock to eat either way. You can do it with or without entering the post-antibiotic era. (Or at any rate, a lot more expensive meat, which will likely result in a lot less of it, sure.) Fortunately, a lot less livestock to eat does not mean a global food shortage. People are quite capable of living with a lot less meat. It may be a global deliciousness shortage, because meat is delicious; but most people on the planet don't eat much meat already (cause they can't afford it). The OP is odd in suggesting "We have a few chances left to turn back the tide of resistance — but only a few, and not much room for mistakes. I hope we take them." -- without any hints as to what these chances are -- and then suggesting that if we don't take them, what we'll 'lose' is cheap meat from routine antibiotic use in livestock! But in fact, ceasing the use of routine antibiotics in livestock production -- before they become useless, because it'll be stopped when they become useless anyhow -- seems like the #1. What else you got?
  • ekianjo 13y ago
    Erm. People have been eating meat on a regular, frequent basis only very recently in History. 60 years ago it was meat just one a month or something. And people didn't just die off because they couldn't eat meat anymore.
    • dnautics 13y ago
      That's simply not true. Inuit have almost exclusively eaten meat for centuries. And there are parts of the world where agriculture and irrigation don't work and animals which can feed on scrub are the staple.
      • ekianjo 13y ago
        Well, I was talking about Europe, mainly, and I assume in most countries of the developed word this was very much the same. I don't think Inuits have very much to do with the industrial production of meat we have nowadays, do they ?
      • seanmcdirmid 13y ago
        Actually, I believe the Inuit don't practice animal husbandry either; they mainly get their food from the ocean (mostly as meat).
      • kayoone 13y ago
        It is, at least in Europe. Ask your grandparents and they will tell you that they maybe ate meat once a week
        • circlefavshape 13y ago
          What? I'm Irish and my grandparents ate meat, fish or eggs pretty much every day of their lives
          • kayoone 13y ago
            Well not in the post WW2 germany my grandparents lived in.
  • mistercow 13y ago
    It's pretty doubtful that a reduction in livestock would lead to a food shortage. The amount of resources it takes to produce a calorie of meat is vastly larger than to produce a calorie of plant-based food.
• contingencies 13y ago
  Unfortunately, you are right. Startup idea: cheap consumer-oriented broad spectrum antibiotic detection kits for meat and fish.
  • kephra 13y ago
    Thats a great idea. But how to apply this in supper market? You could only check it after buying, and slapping the so called bio-butcher, if he sells you antibiotic meat, with the meat he sold.
    • maxerickson 13y ago
      It would enable an effective labeling program.
  • aaronbrethorst 13y ago
    Check for a lack of an organic certification label. The end.
    • smtddr 13y ago
      Well, you have to believe the USDA Organic label is actually being used correctly[1]. I say this as a USDA-Organic fan who tries his best to buy his family only things that carry that label. I'd buy a setup that allowed me to test my food; I thought about this awhile back[2]. 1. http://www.ams.usda.gov/AMSv1.0/ams.fetchTemplateData.do?template=TemplateN&topNav=&leftNav=NationalOrganicProgram&page=NOPFraudulentCertificates&description=NOP%20Fraudulent%20Certificates http://www.ams.usda.gov/AMSv1.0/ams.fetchTemplateData.do?tem... 2. https://twitter.com/SMTDDR/status/347885004606545920 https://twitter.com/SMTDDR/status/347885004606545920
• Angostura 13y ago
  Routine dosing is already banned in the EU
• tokenadult 13y ago
  One should ban antibiotics for animals world wide. I wouldn't go quite that far. I am on record here on HN as agreeing with a doctor who said in an interview, "Q: Do you think we have enough data to know what’s happening with the antibiotics used on the farm? "A: I think we know enough to say that we need to be doing a better job of improving appropriate use of antibiotics in all sectors, humans and animals. "Q: But the agriculture sector is different, because antibiotics have been used there for a long time with an eye toward improving the growth of the animals, really for food purposes, to make them bigger and fatter with less food. Does that concern you as a use? "A: Certainly the CDC believes quite firmly, and I think there are a number of veterinary experts here and in other places who agree with the stance that we should never be using antibiotics in agriculture or in people for any other purpose than to treat infections. "Using antibiotics to promote growth in animals is not a good use of antibiotics. It’s not careful use of this really delicate and invaluable resource."[1] I am also on record as saying, responding to a passage in another thread-opening article, >> "What Europe did: In the EU, all antibiotics used in human medicines are banned on farms—and no antibiotics can be used on farms for 'non-medical purposes,' i.e., growth promotion." << I'd like to see the United States follow that lead immediately, and I write this as a man who has several uncles and cousins who are farmers, including some who raise cattle. It makes sense to me to have lines of defense against transmission of animal-infecting, and especially antibiotic-resistant-animal-infecting, microbes to human beings, by controlling what animals raised as lifestock eat and how they are treated with veterinary medicines.[2] Animals get sick, both on and off the farm. Careful veterinary practice can enhance human health, by reducing sources of zoonotic infections. The epidemiologists who work to prevent human disease also keep track of news of animal infections on the farm and in the wild.[3] With this in mind, I can't agree with the policy idea One should ban antibiotics for animals world wide. expressed in the parent post. We should be careful about the use of antibiotics, many of which were originally "natural" substances emitted by microorganisms as a defense against other microorganisms, and we should use antibiotics mostly to treat cases of actual human or animal disease, and also use other infection control measures to prevent the spread of infectious diseases either to humans or to nonhuman animals, wherever they live. AFTER EDIT: Meanwhile, in human medicine, the development through natural selection of multiple-drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis is very alarming. I wish India were doing better in controlling tuberculosis. Both a newspaper in the United States, which did much to break the story,[4] and a newspaper from India[5] are in agreement with official sources from both countries[6][7] that much more needs to be done to stop the spread of drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis in India, which could threaten the health of the whole world. (A century and a half ago, tuberculosis was perhaps the world's leading cause of death.) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6599795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6599795 (expressing agreement with the quoted expert in the thread-opening article) [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5674781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5674781 [3] http://www.cdc.gov/ncezid/ http://www.cdc.gov/ncezid/ http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/ http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/ [4] http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303444204577460734274201756 http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230344420... [5] http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-06-23/news/40134749_1_stop-tb-department-mario-raviglione-jmm-meeting http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-06-23/news... [6] http://www.iom.edu/Reports/2012/Facing-the-Reality-of-Drug-Resistant-Tuberculosis-Challenges-and-Potential-Solutions-in-India.aspx http://www.iom.edu/Reports/2012/Facing-the-Reality-of-Drug-R... [7] http://www.tbcindia.nic.in/pdfs/RNTCP%20Response%20DR%20TB%20in%20India%20-%20Jan%202012%20update.pdf http://www.tbcindia.nic.in/pdfs/RNTCP%20Response%20DR%20TB%2...
• sampo 13y ago
  > Antibiotics for industrial animal farms are one of the reasons bacteria develop multiple resistances. I have the impression (but haven't really checked any real sources on this) that the carefree use of antibiotics on farm animals is mostly an American thing. And that the use of antibiotics in animal farming is much more regulated in Europe. Don't know for sure, though. And don't know about the rest of the world.
  • kayoone 13y ago
    Certainly true. My dad is a veterinarian and said its quite heavily regulated in germany and possibly Europe
  • refurb 13y ago
    It would be interesting to see the incidence of multi-drug resistant bacteria in the US vs. the EU. Most people get MDR infections from other people, not from animals. I'm not saying animal to human infections don't occur, they obviously do, but it's not a major source of transmission.
  • drzaiusapelord 13y ago
    Antibiotics on the farm are banned in the EU for anything but treating infections. This seems to be a largely an American problem. The real problem is that American politics are broken and adding even sane common-sense regulation against a mountain of lobbyists and corrupt politicians is an uphill battle that usually ends in failure (patent reform bill recently) or various compromises that kill any chance of the bill being very effective (ACA). I think the US is a case study in how this level of "direct democracy" usually gets gamed by monied interests.