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
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.
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…
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
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.