Hacker News Reader

Comment by nextstep | Hacker News Reader

Veganism is not a health choice for most vegans, it’s an ethical one. Plant-based foods use fewer resources per calorie and do not require cruel treatment of animals.

View on HN

If you let ruminant livestock graze in a carefully managed pattern instead of feeding them grain (grown and transported from miles away), it improves the land and reduces the amount of pollution:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI

Cattle are not very efficient at converting grain to protein. It’s about 7:1. Pork is 2:1, in comparison. Poultry is close to 1:1.

If all livestock were raised in this way there would be nowhere near enough of them to feed current demand for meat (not saying that's a bad thing).

Allan Savory holds a very fringe view not supported by scientists in this field, which you wouldn't know from his TED talk.

Don't forget that not all lands are good carbon sinks. The Swedish department of agriculture claimed in a report (nr 25:2010 iirc. In Swedish ) that the vast majority of Swedish grazeland would not meaningfully decrease carbon emissions regardless of grazing systems

> Plant-based foods use fewer resources per calorie and do not require cruel treatment of animals.

They kind of have to at some point, otherwise you're using artificial nitrogen to top up the soil and that's not just bad for the soil but is also depleting a limited resource (The nitrogen comes from what IIRC is, a single mine).

I remember reading about some farmers that managed to buck the usual statistics by getting around half a thousand chickens to an acre of farmland -- the chickens acted as a natural form of pest-control for the farmland, and their shit and corpses (when they died) provided a natural source for the NPK needed to feed the soil.

The thing is, vegans forget that plants, etc. have all evolved with death as part of the equation. Animal death is required in some form, to supply the micro-organisms in the soil with the proper nutrients. Anyone who has studied farming and agriculture knows that the ideal isn't to eliminate animal death (something that is pretty much impossible unless you want to destabilize the ecosystem and starve your plants), but try to minimize it and ensure that the death is not wasted.

I think this mistake in understanding goes back to school, where children are taught that if you give plants soil, water and sunlight, they will grow. They could take that opportunity to talk about the NPK cycle, the billions of micro-organisms in the soil that need to be fed to provide the plants with nutrients, the fact that dead animals help feed the plants and the micro-organisms, etc. Not teaching children about this when children are capable of understanding it is a disservice given that for many people that is the only schooling that they will ever have on farming and agriculture.

I had never heard that animal corpses were used in a large scale industrial farming fertilizer so I just looked through the most common soil fertilizers, at least in the U.S. I don't believe a single one of them uses animal corpses.

It seems that the common types of fertilizer[1] are:

- anhydrous ammonia (Nitrogen pulled from the air[2])

- urea ammonium nitrate (Nitrogen pulled from natural gas and plants[3])

- granular urea (Nitrogen pulled from natural gas and plants[3])

- ammonium nitrate (Nitrogen from mixing ammonia [5] and and synthesized nitric acid [4])

- diammonium phosphate (Nitrogen from ammonia and phosphoric acid [6])

You may be correct that small farmers use animal corpses, and you may be correct that using artificial nitrogen is bad for the soil, but 97-99% of the plant foods grown in the U.S. appear to use non-animal based fertilizers. Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong about the science of this.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-explosion-ammonia/fac...

[2] http://www.greenvalleychemical.com/Green_Valley_Chemical/Anh...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urea#Production

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonium_nitrate#Production

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia_production

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diammonium_phosphate

> you may be correct that using artificial nitrogen is bad for the soil > but 97-99% of the plant foods grown in the U.S. appear to use non-animal based fertilizers.

Congratulations. You managed to ignore the entire point of my argument by hyper-focusing on one small part of it and posting something that literally means nothing (The fact that the majority of the US agricultural industry does something does not inherently prove that that is beneficial to the consumer, to the soil, or to the planet).

    it is true that fruits and vegetables grown decades ago
    were much richer in vitamins and minerals than the
    varieties most of us get today. The main culprit in
    this disturbing nutritional trend is soil depletion:
    Modern intensive agricultural methods have stripped
    increasing amounts of nutrients from the soil in which
    the food we eat grows. Sadly, each successive generation
    of fast-growing, pest-resistant carrot is truly less
    good for you than the one before
    [...]
    What can be done? The key to healthier produce is
    healthier soil. Alternating fields between growing
    seasons to give land time to restore would be one
    important step. Also, foregoing pesticides and fertilizers
    in favor of organic growing methods is good for the
    soil, the produce and its consumers. Those who want to
    get the most nutritious fruits and vegetables should buy
    regularly from local organic farmers.

(https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-an...)