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Comment by dpflan | Hacker News Reader

The irony is too strong:

“”” The goals are to improve agricultural productivity, produce hardier beasts and reduce practices that are costly or considered inhumane. “””

I can’t help but think about Oryx and Crake.

I’m more interested in applying these principles and efforts and resources to plants and non-animal sources. I feel that further modifying animal agriculture is orthogonal to direction we can move civilization and is not necessary if we can essentially apply the same techniques for increasing commodity yields to non-animal ag.

(I would love counter arguments and opinions to this. Perhaps I am not seeing the whole picture or far enough.)

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We'll, the reality is that most people will continue eating meat regardless of what people like me and you think of it, so it's probably a good idea to put some effort into minimizing the negative consequences.

Also, we can research lots of things at once, and research funding is not a zero-sum game. I don't think anybody's defunding non-animal agriculture research for this.

Finally, there's a good chance that this sort of research will produce results that will be useful in other fields (e.g. for genetically engineering of plants, or curing genetic disorders in humans).

Good points, thanks!

1. This is true, I do feel that such consumption is guided by and influenced by culture more so than just taste buds.

2. I feel there could be a bias towards whichever research leads to the best economic results, and with the current economic system we live in, I feel the most wealth generating outcome will overshadow.

3. I agree, science is non-linear and we can do much more of it these days, the benefits of many parallel efforts will compound.

Meat could get very expensive soon if climate change reduces the amount of easily farmable land, and that might quickly change peoples opinions. Part of the reason I’m eating more vegetarian food is because the quality of meat that I want to be eating is very expensive.

This isn't zero sum. Some land is not suitable for farming (too dry or too hilly), but is useful for grazing. Land that's suitable for both often does better when rotated between crops and livestock. And grassland may be better than farmland at carbon sequestration.

It's probably a good idea to move away from feeding corn to livestock, though.

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