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Comment by VT_Drew | Hacker News Reader

The title should read "Industrial Farming is Horrible". Industrial crops aren't much better for the environment.

Citation needed? Others have already provided citations against your claim and the naive reasoning makes it seem obviously untrue: industrial livestock are fed industrial crops and so are worse than eating industrial crops oneself, and probably by a factor of at least 2.

My data-free immediate thought was, '...but industrial meat farming uses N times as many resources [land, water, petrochemicals] to produce the same number of nutrients/calories...'

Now I am interested if this is in fact true. I have certainly heard this argument made, and it is often alluded to e.g. in describing the problem in China of producing enough meat to satisfy an increasingly affluent society (the subtext being, 'with the same constrained resources').

Going to poke around a bit...

TL;DR: it is in fact true. Best would be vegetarian diet; failing that, eliminating beef is a huge win.

QED if you are not vegetarian and have no interest in being, the 'greenest' thing to do is to reduce or eliminate beef consumption.

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/78/3/660S.full is glum.

(I looked at resource usage, not the ethical side; fwiw I'm an ethics-motivated vegetarian myself.)

In my experience, out of the commonly-eaten meats, beef tends to be the priciest anyway.

But not nearly proportional to the ratios of energy/land/water consumption between vegetarian (or say chicken/fish) based food items and beef.

E.g., what's the difference in price between a burger made from ground beef vs a similar sandwich with grilled chicken?

It's also one of the best for you to eat, assuming it's grass-fed.

Source for that? I've never heard of any beneficial effect of red meat consumption.

Jane Goodall's book "Harvest for Hope" had some great statistics about the amount of water alone required to raise a kilogram of beef compared to chicken, rice, etc. I read it over ten years ago but I remember the numbers being jaw dropping. Health issues aside, beef puts a horrible load on the environment.

It is true in our overspecialized food production system, especially when byproducts like manure aren't counted as output.

In smaller, more diverse farms, animals contribute to the overall output because they improve land that is fallow, turn waste into food and manure and provide food that complements plants effectively in our diet.

We have the technology to farm this way, at scale, but it is politically infeasible and there won't be any demand for it until the specialized products of our current system become much more expensive.

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