We now feed animals a ton of food and water just to then eat them. Don’t you think just feeding ourselves and skipping the middleman is more productive?
This is true on small scale subsistence farms, but it breaks down when scaled up to the amount of meat consumption in typical developed nations.
Look at historical meat consumption for societies built on agriculture (as opposed to, for example Inuit who relied on hunting). You can also look at food consumption by nation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_meat_consumption Affluence and increased meat consumption are strongly correlated. And while veganism may be a luxury, so is high meat consumption. This would imply that modest meat consumption makes best use of these scraps and inedible parts of plants (i.e. efficiency), but that higher levels of meat consumption is wasteful of resources.
This is true on small scale subsistence farms, but it breaks down when scaled up to the amount of meat consumption in typical developed nations
I’m afraid you’re misinformed.
soy cake is a byproduct of soybean oil production. it’s about 90% of the soy we feed to animals globally. that’s one of the biggest ones, but you’ll find this repeated across the industry: corn cobs and corn stalks used in fodder, crop seconds like onions and tomatoes fed to livestock etc.
Or perhaps soybean oil is a byproduct of the animal feed industry. It sure shows up in lot of products, yet people aren’t typically running out to the stores buying bottles labeled as “soybean oil.” I.e. it’s a cheap industrial filler. Most likely, they are co-products that wouldn’t likely exist without each other due to the economics. It should also be noted that soy cake is human-edible, so feeding it to animals represents that inefficiency I was talking about.
Given that less affluent societies consume less meat (on average) compared to more affluent societies, this demonstrates that meat requires more resources to produce. Otherwise this discrepancy would not exist. Developing nations consume more meat as they become more affluent.
Not enough land for meat? There is technically… but it requires factory farms and STILL we need to chop down huge swaths of the amazon to keep the machine churning.
Not enough land for plant based diets? Is takes only about 1/10th the amount of land to grow plants for human consumption than to grow plants for feeding our animals that we then consume. Sure not every alfalfa farm on the planet can switch to cucumbers out the gate, but well over 10% can…
Why? Every step you move up the food chain requires roughly 10x as much inputs as outputs. To get a pound of protein from a cow you have to feed it 10lbs of plant protein. Almost all cattle feed comes from farms, just like your veggies. Anywhere we grow soybeans and hay for cattle could easily be converted to growing fruits and vegetables for human consumption. There’s a small loss of efficiency by growing human-quality food instead of cattle food in these spaces, but its nothing in comparison to the loss of resources from trying to raise cattle.
Almost none of the meat we eat is truly free-range - it all gets fed farmed produce that comes from farms that could grow food for humans in a fraction of the space.
They don’t need to be. Stop raising livestock and you no longer need to feed them, which allows us to use the remaining land to feed humans. But livestock only make up a small percentage of human diets, so we can actually give back a ton of land to nature and still easily feed everyone.
a large portion of the land used to raise livestock are grasslands. what portion of feed they are given is also, largely, crop seconds or industrial byproduct. the source for your owid link is largely poore-nemecek, a paper I would trust to tell me the co2e of co2
I’d like to see a source for “what portion of feed they are given is also, largely, crop seconds or industrial byproduct”. The vast majority of information I have seen on this topic is that we produce more crops specifically to feed animals than we do to feed humans. Which, just from an energy perspective, is completely logical to me.
soy beans are an excellent example: they’re not grown for livestock. they are grown for people, and what is fed to livestock is industrial byproduct that would otherwise be waste.
Nah, there’s not enough land for animal products. The plant-based diet can feed everyone.
I’m dubious this is actually true
We now feed animals a ton of food and water just to then eat them. Don’t you think just feeding ourselves and skipping the middleman is more productive?
Basic high school biology on trophic levels. The “rule of thumb” is that you only retain about 10% of the energy each time you go up a level.
we feed them parts of plants we can’t or don’t want to eat. they help us conserve those resources.
This is true on small scale subsistence farms, but it breaks down when scaled up to the amount of meat consumption in typical developed nations.
Look at historical meat consumption for societies built on agriculture (as opposed to, for example Inuit who relied on hunting). You can also look at food consumption by nation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_meat_consumption Affluence and increased meat consumption are strongly correlated. And while veganism may be a luxury, so is high meat consumption. This would imply that modest meat consumption makes best use of these scraps and inedible parts of plants (i.e. efficiency), but that higher levels of meat consumption is wasteful of resources.
I’m afraid you’re misinformed.
soy cake is a byproduct of soybean oil production. it’s about 90% of the soy we feed to animals globally. that’s one of the biggest ones, but you’ll find this repeated across the industry: corn cobs and corn stalks used in fodder, crop seconds like onions and tomatoes fed to livestock etc.
Or perhaps soybean oil is a byproduct of the animal feed industry. It sure shows up in lot of products, yet people aren’t typically running out to the stores buying bottles labeled as “soybean oil.” I.e. it’s a cheap industrial filler. Most likely, they are co-products that wouldn’t likely exist without each other due to the economics. It should also be noted that soy cake is human-edible, so feeding it to animals represents that inefficiency I was talking about.
Given that less affluent societies consume less meat (on average) compared to more affluent societies, this demonstrates that meat requires more resources to produce. Otherwise this discrepancy would not exist. Developing nations consume more meat as they become more affluent.
a soybean is only about 20% oil, but oil makes up almost half the soy beans value
it’s produced in an oil press
soy cake is the byproduct of soybean oil production, and if we didn’t feed it to livestock, it would be industrial waste
and it is eaten by humans, but not in the quantities it is produced due to soy ean oil production.
Which part are you dubious about?
Not enough land for meat? There is technically… but it requires factory farms and STILL we need to chop down huge swaths of the amazon to keep the machine churning.
Not enough land for plant based diets? Is takes only about 1/10th the amount of land to grow plants for human consumption than to grow plants for feeding our animals that we then consume. Sure not every alfalfa farm on the planet can switch to cucumbers out the gate, but well over 10% can…
commie is a troll. They’re very fun to argue with, but just know that you aren’t changing anyone’s mind when you do
I’m dubious that there is enough room for plants, but not meat
Why? Every step you move up the food chain requires roughly 10x as much inputs as outputs. To get a pound of protein from a cow you have to feed it 10lbs of plant protein. Almost all cattle feed comes from farms, just like your veggies. Anywhere we grow soybeans and hay for cattle could easily be converted to growing fruits and vegetables for human consumption. There’s a small loss of efficiency by growing human-quality food instead of cattle food in these spaces, but its nothing in comparison to the loss of resources from trying to raise cattle.
Almost none of the meat we eat is truly free-range - it all gets fed farmed produce that comes from farms that could grow food for humans in a fraction of the space.
it’s not clear that grasslands could (or should) be converted to human crops.
They don’t need to be. Stop raising livestock and you no longer need to feed them, which allows us to use the remaining land to feed humans. But livestock only make up a small percentage of human diets, so we can actually give back a ton of land to nature and still easily feed everyone.
https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture
a large portion of the land used to raise livestock are grasslands. what portion of feed they are given is also, largely, crop seconds or industrial byproduct. the source for your owid link is largely poore-nemecek, a paper I would trust to tell me the co2e of co2
I’d like to see a source for “what portion of feed they are given is also, largely, crop seconds or industrial byproduct”. The vast majority of information I have seen on this topic is that we produce more crops specifically to feed animals than we do to feed humans. Which, just from an energy perspective, is completely logical to me.
soy beans are an excellent example: they’re not grown for livestock. they are grown for people, and what is fed to livestock is industrial byproduct that would otherwise be waste.
What do you think animals eat?
industrial waste, crop seconds, and grazed grass, mostly