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Comment by sharkmerry | Hacker News Reader

As a counterpoint, similar to the user above, what about the exploitation of farm labor to harvest everything you eat?

As far back as 1997, over half of all grain grown in the US goes to livestock [1]. So, going from animal protein to plant protein is a net reduction of farm labor and therefore requires less exploitation.

[1] https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-m...

Yep -- when I started researching corn for my own horticultural reasons, I was cold shocked to find out only ~10% goes to feed humans, with the balance going mainly to animal feed and ethanol :

http://worldofcorn.com/#corn-usage-by-segment

Thanks for all the links. I sincerely was asking as a counterpoint, not to troll.

I did know about grain being used to feed cattle, but a lot of the grain they eat is not of "human quality" so saying that we can just switch humans from meat to grain and feed 800 million people is very misleading.

Do you have any sources on the percentage of grain that is not of human-quality? Are there any estimates of what percentage of the non-human quality grain can be filtered to become human-quality? We're not talking about fundamentally different plants, just the difference between seeds, stalks, & husks vs seeds alone. Even putting the exact number aside, we're talking about thousands and thousands of hectares of arable land used solely to feed livestock. Even if the number is only 80 million (back in 1997), it is still a large-enough number to beg the question: is this the best use of our resources?

I've been looking but I cant find anything yet.

> We're not talking about fundamentally different plants, just the difference between seeds, stalks, & husks vs seeds alone.

I think it's also how its stored and # of broken kernels (for corn anyways), etc.

Im not arguing against the point, was just trying to bring some perspective

I don't have a source / link handy at the moment, but a couple relevant notes to consider :

1) the vast (vast) majority of corn consumed by humans is processed into things like corn syrup, modified starch, whiskey, etc, rather than eaten "whole" as a grain [like, say, as tortilla chips or whatever], so the notion of broken kernels, etc, scarcely applies to this particular consideration -- see above-linked infographic

2) The question of what type of corn is grown is a really interesting one -- I could rattle on about this for a long time, but suffice to say that the family of varieties generally known as "Corn Belt Dent" [derived at some length from Nothstine and similar early dent corns] is designed to serve both feed / silage and processing-for-human-consumption [including ethanol] purposes. Now, this is not stuff you eat as "corn on the cob" [those are called sweet corns, though back in the day folks used to eat green Corn Belt Dent roasted as "Trucker Ears"], nor is it the same as popcorn [which is its own family, derived at length from flint corns]. There are in fact varieties designed specifically for silage [the common type of feed, where pretty much the entire plant is fermented and fed to animals; these varieties have less fibrous leaves and sometimes more leaves] and grain / processing / ethanol ['floury' types], but it's a matter of choice / market analysis from the farmer's perspective, and ye olde corn belt dent can serve both purposes if need be.

one quick link re : ethanol : https://articles.extension.org/pages/27536/corn-for-biofuel-...

The thing is, as someone who grew up in the corn belt on a farm, grain farmers by and large aren't involved in exploitative labor practices to any significant degree. The only farms I was aware of that used immigrant labor were feedlot and dairy operations. One of my close friends in high school certainly came from a large farm (16k acres, mostly corn and soybeans, some wheat, and a negligible amount of cattle, maybe 75 head). Their hired labor were easily middle-class, it was not at all similar to the laborers hired at the larger livestock operations (of which swine producers seemed to be the worst). Additionally, while no significant fruit/vegetable crops were grown in my area, those remain another large user of migrant labor. Unless we as a society can accept higher food prices, I don't see this problem going away. And note that while my family's farm was small (1500 acres), the only way it has remained afloat is a cattle feedlot that is barely under the CAFO limit and a focus on alfalfa hay of sufficient quality to sell to large diaries, so not at all immune from these concerns.

That being said, while I am a carnivore I heartily agree that too much animal protein is raised in this country. I don't believe that veganism is a tenable solution (and suspect it isn't actually a long-term healthy diet), Americans in general consume too much animal protein as a percentage of diet. Transitioning to a more reasonable diet is, in my mind, the only viable outcome. That, and growing way less corn in this country, there is a lot of farmland that could be producing crops for direct human consumption instead of making ethanol, which is energy inefficient and wasteful considering we have a petroleum surplus.

Not the user above, but also vegan with similar views (except about large corporations, I love them). If you assume that farm labor must be exploited to harvest crops, and that animals are an inefficient way of spending the crops (calories in are greater than calories out), then you reduce the total amount of crops used to feed someone by taking the animal out of the equation. It's all about chasing the lesser evil.

"I have you; you are completely dished! Do you not know that in the Navy, you must always choose the lesser of two weevils!"

^ tried to resist, could not resist

Exploitation of labor, farm and otherwise, is of equal concern to me. There are several ways I go about minimizing my participation in agricultural labor exploitation, but most prominent are :

1) Buying only produce grown in the USA; 2) Buying from local farms whose labor practices are personally known to me, when practical

The reality of farm labor in the USA today is far removed from "Grapes of Wrath" type situations and even much different than it was 30 years ago, when most harvesting was conducted by itinerant laborers who were often not paid, housed, etc, very well. These days, farmers fiercely compete for labor by offering nice dwellings, pay that is often above local minimum wage, and sponsoring H2A visas [which are in limited supply and also not cheap]. Many orchardists, for example, also pay or offset travel costs for their workers.

All these factors are, as a matter of fact, the main drivers of the current trend toward automation in farming and in harvesting + grading specifically -- folks are finding it cheaper in the long run to invest in a $250k automated harvester than to continue to compete for human labor [and comply with the attendant regulations, enforcement of which is also much amplified in the past few decades]

For reference, check out any recent issue of "Good Fruit Grower" or "Fruit Growers News" e.g. https://www.goodfruit.com/searchresults/?q=labor

This is a common question, but cows and chickens eat lots of plants too.

"All the fertilizer, tractor fumes, transportation, ground tilling, you name it, that go into producing a pound of grain are literally multiplied by 4.5 to produce a pound of chicken breasts, or by 20 to produce a pound of ground beef."

https://stanfordmag.org/contents/can-vegetarianism-save-the-...

Also a vegan and I'm very concerned about the human exploitation as well. Unfortunately, similar to "men's rights", this topic only seems to come up as an attempt at a rebuttal to veganism and very seldom mentioned in its own right. And remember that animal agriculture exploits humans as badly if not worse than the rest of the agriculture system.

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