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Comment by alphakappa | Hacker News Reader

There are many planet saving discoveries like these. There's also a catch, which is why the planet hasn't been saved yet.

> “If we’re able to work out how to scale up the seaweed to such a level to that can feed all of the cows and the sheep and the goats around the world, then it’s going to have a huge impact on the climate;

And there you go. That's the hard part that you cannot just hand-wave away.

You also have to wonder what the impact of growing all this seaweed (or harvesting it) to feed the planet's bovine population will be. In the end, the problem is due to the massive scale of human consumption on this planet. The mitigation might be just as bad when you consider the scale at which you have to produce the 'better' solution.

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From an environmental perspective, it's easier to directly consume fruits, vegetables and nuts yourself, rather than have an animal do the same, then eat the animal. That doesn't address the human appetite for animal proteins, but there is beyond meat.

Perhaps one step further is to bypass even the plants and produce protein directly from CO2!

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/08/nasas-idea-for-making...

> It's a high-protein, flour-like ingredient that contains 50 percent protein content, 5–10 percent fat, and 20–25 percent carbs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_poisoning

> Protein poisoning was first noted as a consequence of eating rabbit meat exclusively, hence the term, "rabbit starvation". Rabbit meat is very lean; commercial rabbit meat has 50–100 g dissectable fat per 2 kg (live weight). Based on a carcass yield of 60%, rabbit meat is around 8.3% fat

Ew. You're not supposed to just eat this. It's a protein replacement. Still eat your fruits and veggies and everything else.

Wow, that sounds nuts and awesome at the same time. :) Thanks for the link!

You can not grow enough fruits, vegetables and nuts to feed the human population without severe deforestation. Also, agriculture uses up pretty much most of the obtainable drinkable water.

A large fraction of "agriculture" goes to feeding livestock, inefficiently. Some land is used for animal feed that is not usable for crops people would eat, but the conversion ratio for a lot of it would be better if we grew food for ourselves directly.

Feed is an efficient way of transferring water from wet places to dry places.

The UN report [1] says that if the world population switches to a fully plant-based diet by 2050, accounting for the expected growth in population, we would actually use less land and less water as we do now. So we could in terms of land and water use. Or do you mean some other reason why this would be impossible?

[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2019/08/4.-SPM_Appro...

I'm also sceptical that the recently proposed diets of fruits, vegetables and nuts actually work out. AFAICT it's an outstanding problem in nutrition science concerning how many of the calories in nuts that humans are able to digest. And yet it seems like the proposed diets just assume "all calories are equal". I've seen reports from journalists who have tried following those diets saying they were constantly hungry.

> I've seen reports from journalists who have tried following those diets saying they were constantly hungry.

This is the inherent problem of journalism - they need sensational results, otherwise the majority of folks wouldn't be bothered to read their journalism.

My 2 cents on this topic: I'm 10+ years vegan and everything is good, it's just no clickbait-worthy story...

Oh, I'm not saying you can't live as a vegan. But the criticism of these diets is they prescribe X grams of this, Y grams of that, and use those numbers to compute a global environmental impact. If the X and Y are both underestimates compared to what an adult needs, then so is the impact.

We tend to count calories in foods via combustion of their components then adding the average caloric content of each gram of fat (9kcal/g), protein (4), alcohol (7), and non-fiber carbohydrate (4) in the average serving size of that food. Keep in mind that US food calories on labels are equivalent to a kilocalorie.

Last I checked, combustion was not one of the stages of digestion in the human digestive tract. I'm not a nutrition researcher, but it's always seemed intuitive to me that different compounds behave differently in a complex, gradual chemical system even if they behave similarly in a simple, rapid high-energy reaction. This is already acknowledged in the fact that dietary fiber is known to be mostly excreted and so isn't counted along with other carbohydrates.

This story is much about a small change by proportion changing several aspects of how digestion works in a mammalian digestive tract, including how efficiently the energy is taken up from other parts of the diet. Now in vitro is not in vivo and cattle aren't humans. But I think we're still far from settled on all calories being the same, and more evidence is building for the opposite conclusion. There are even multiple cases of fecal transplants leading to weight gain or weight loss, with the recipient's digestion suddenly resembling that of the donor causing body weight changes.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-do-food-manuf...

https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03789461

Can you sustainably feed all of humanity by feeding cattle from all the world's grasses? I don't understand your position. What's the better alternative to a more plant-focused diet?

Why not rabbit? It's a much leaner meat, takes less space, and they breed much faster.

1. No. 2. Insects.

Also 3. Less people.

Hopefully beyond meat and similar companies are able to continue to drive forward their research. I had a Beyond Burger for the first time recently and it was unsettling. The flavor was beef-like but the texture was wrong.

I will happily eat either a beef burger or a veggie burger but the Beyond Burger is in the uncanny valley right now.

Try impossible burger I hear it’s way better

Agree, I would rather a nicely flavoured vege pattie than a fake meat one.

No, it’s not. Most of the places where nuts are grown in industrial scale are water challenged.

Animal agriculture is unsustainable at the scale we operate in today in the United States. Meat doesn’t equal feedlot, and pastured ruminant agriculture helps sustain the land.

> pastured ruminant agriculture helps sustain the land.

That totally depends on which land we're talking about. In a lot of places, forest was cut down to create the pasture, and so grazing to "sustain the land" is perhaps misguided.

That still leaves fruits and vegetables, which proportionally compose much more of a diet than nuts.

Yes, but I imagine the OP included nuts in the list because of their protein and fat - you don't find much of either in fruit and veg, with a few exceptions (avocado, soy beans).

That's an interesting way to put it into words. In paper sounds like a really unefficient pipeline (vegetables -> animals -> humans).

Thanks for that, made me reflect on how stupid it sounds but how common it is.

It's not really stupid, the idea is cows eat plant matter that humans can't eat. Cellulose mainly from grass and other plants.

They aren't eating the same plants that you eat.

That works up to a certain point, since the production is limited by the area of naturally occurring grasslands. When all the grassland is used, forests are cleared. Today, grazing is responsible for 80% of all deforestation in the Amazon [1].

[1] https://wwf.panda.org/knowledge_hub/where_we_work/amazon/ama...

> They aren't eating the same plants that you eat.

Humans don't eat corn and soy? Because that's what is fed to industrially raised beef cattle.

Cows are much better at extracting nutrients from, say, grass than humans are.

In places where nuts, vegetables, fruits aren't available, meat may be a more environmentally friendly choice.

But almost nobody is eating pasture-raised meat, though the industrial meat complex loves that you think that or are pointing it out as if that's how beef is made.

The US farming methods (grainfed, feed lots, etc) are very different from what we do in New Zealand.

In New Zealand every farmer I've ever met (and I've met many) let their cattle feed on fresh pasture almost entirely. We are blessed with lots of land per person, and lots of rainfall, perfect for growing grass. In the dry part of summer or the cold part of winter when fresh pasture isn't growing fast enough, they supplement with hay and silage (both produced from fresh pasture that is typically harvested at the beginning of summer).

But I know that outside of my own experience, other things are occasionally fed such as waste products from food processing, brewing, etc. And I know that when you sell animals you can legally tick "grass fed" as long as the animal has had access to pasture, regardless of what percentage of their diet actually came from that pasture. So it is possible that some cattle from NZ have eaten mainly non-grass foods, but in practice I've never actually seen that happen.

As for seaweed, we have a lot of coastline so we could utilize this strategy more effectively than the US could.

If you travel through Austria you will find herds of cattle on every pasture cutting the grass instead of machines. From what I've heard cattle farming in the US is different.

Yeah, but farming in general is different in Austria, just look at the rates of e.g. cage eggs in the US, where 95% are caged. Plus even in Austria you have to watch out, a lot of the cheaper meat is from large German farms with similar conditions.

I asked a small town butcher in Scotland if his beef was grass-fed and got seriously laughed at. Then he sold me some damn good steaks.

Because it was, or because it wasn't?

I mean, I'd guess it was, but equally it could be "why do you care, it tastes good", so ...?

It’s was A) “that’s what cows eat”

> Cows are much better at extracting nutrients from, say, grass than humans are.

That's because we human cannot digest grass due to the lack of the proper mictobiote, but most cows in the modern world aren't fed with grass anymore but instead with soy, corn or other kind of high-nutrients food (for which we human are totally equiped to eat).

That just means the inefficiency is in the feed used and the farming practices, not in the animal.

Not really: having an animal in between makes you waste a lot of energy (because the animal only spend a fraction of this energy to build muscles, and the rest is just burned away to sustain its metabolism).

You can take the problem the other way around: the limiting factor is land, and if you have 1 square kilometers of (somewhat fertile) land, you will feed many more humans if you grow potatoes, wheat or rice on the land than if you feed a cow on this land (whether you fees the cow directly with grass or grow corn or soy on it to feed your cows).

It's easier to consume those things... until winter arrives. Unless you support the massively carbon intensive process of shipping ~80% of each hemisphere's food supply to the other during winter, this isn't viable. Even if that is acceptable, it isn't sustainable.

Perfect is the enemy of good. Should we try to eat local? Absolutely. Eating seasonally is one simple way to do reduce the carbon footprint of your diet [0]. But getting momentum for the right direction -- which is decreased animal protein consumption, is absolutely the right step. It takes much more energy to raise livestock than it is to feed directly from the land.

Also, shipping doesn't have to be so carbon intensive. Renewable energy has a lot way to go with plenty of options: wind, solar, hydro, geo, nuclear.

[0]: https://www.seasonalfoodguide.org/why-eat-seasonally

Shipping food that doesn’t need to be refrigerated or airlifted really has a minuscule carbon footprint.

Chopping down and burning rainforest carbon sinks to plant food crops, now that’s where the real problem is.

To add to what the sibiling commenters had said. I was born in the village in part of the world where there are strong 4 seasons. So winters are full (less lately) of snow and bellow 0 celsius. People here store large veraety of vegetables over the winter. Potatoes, pumpkins, onions, garlics and others are stored as is as I remember. Other which could not be stored for long raw are fermented and kept in glass jars, it is called ‘turšija’ here :) Then there are grains and legumes and beans and dried stuff and you can easily thrive on localy sourced food even during winter.

That's only because people insist on eating the same food all year. There are plenty of vegetables that grow and harvest in the colder months. If we ate summer vegetables in the summer and winter vegetables in the winter we wouldn't need to ship food around so much.

Kale is a traditional food at Christmas in Sweden. I was surprised when I learned that it can survive in the winter, and that you harvest it by brushing away the snow. Snow even provides an insulating layer that protects the kale.

But doesn't the animal save you time. The animal essentially consumes these things for you so you don't have to.

Humans cannot get or synthesize all of the amino acids from a plant diet.. we need animals or chemistry.

That's not true for most people. You just need to eat a mix of vegetables that provide the "essential" amino acids. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_amino_acid E.g. Mexican corn and beans, Japanese rice and soybeans, or Cajun red beans and rice. You might need a Vitamin B12 supplement to help stitch all those together but the amino acids you need are 100% available from plants.

Quinoa, a plant, produces all essential proteins to humans. It is known as a "complete protein" food source [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_protein

Algae provide all the essential proteins [1].

[1] https://www.antenna.ch/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/AspectNut_...

True that that's a non-trivial problem, but seaweed farming is actually something that we could massively scale up. With vertical farms, a ton (metaphorically speaking; more than that literally) of food can be grown in a small surface area of ocean. Would be much more efficient for feeding livestock than relying on farmland that could be growing human food. (Although as an aside I'm personally in favour of a decent amount of natural grazing space and time for farmed animals, so I'd like to see a balance.)

Why not have the herd on a surface barge and have an automated system pull seaweed up a conveyor belt to feed them? This would free up the land acreage for human use!

OK, that's 2% of the cows' food intake taken care of. How are you going to supply the other 98% to them, if you have them on a barge, surrounded by water?

Deliver hay by air bale.

It’s a big of cosmic irony that cows will be eating what so called sea-cows evolved to eat by way of their natural environment.

The obviously this messes with cows’ gut bacteria. Wonder if it has any significant effects on cows or is it better all around?

Scaling is a pretty common objection in this kind of articles but I have a hard time understanding the reasoning for it. Scaling is always an issue regardless of what the new technology is so the question is then if there is specific reasons to doubt that scaling can not be solved.

To compare two different tactics to reduce global warming, electric cars and seaweed for cows. It sound as a much easier job to grow seaweed compared to the electrification of the transport sector by scaling up electric engines and battery production, and we (as a human species) are pretty sure the later will happen regardless because we can't continue to burn fossil fuels.

It's not that scaling is an objection, it's that scaling is a barrier.

Supply chains today tend to depend on things we already know how to and are actively mass producing. To add a new paradigm-shifting stage in the chain, it needs to grow to sufficient scale, which requires funding and R&D, and the path there isn't always clear. In other words, it's not so much that we can't get there, so much as we don't know how.

If there was a profit motive, and it wasn't free to emit greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, I bet we would figure it out.

It’s simple really. After global warming causes sea levels to rise, the cows will be underwater anyway, they can just find their own seaweed to eat.

Problem solved!

They’ll just become sea cows, obviously.

Hopefully we'll be beyond meat at that point /s. But yeah most panaceas are too good to be true, and are usually thought of by people forgetting to take into account all of the necessary terms in their equation.

REALLY? Someone flagged this?

Fucking hell HN, you need to chill.

>In the end, the problem is due to the massive scale of human consumption on this planet.

The technology required to alter human nature to consume less or alternatively the technology required to win the deadliest war ever fought is going to be a lot harder to develop than it would be to grow a lot of seaweed.

I would rather we focus on cutting down the rest of the 90% of emissions than the natural emissions which have been occurring since before the industrial revolution messed it up.

There is a fine balance in nature and maybe cows are the wrong place to experiment.

How many cows were there pre industrial revolution compared to today? I would guess at at least 2 orders of magnitude increase, is that all 'natural'?

Look I'm not putting up an argument where neither of us have the data to look at this factually, but I don't think we had any problems in the pre industrial revolution era.

My point is - The focus should be on optimizing the sources that contribute the most to these emissions.

The article mentions this could reduce Australias ghg emissions by 10%, figures I've found for the UK suggest 3%. That's a massive cut no matter how you cut it, and shouldn't be ignored.

You cant just say cows were domesticated before the industrial revolution, ergo cows are ok, and shouldn't be part of the solution. Animal husbandry has changed massively in the past 2/300 years, you are comparing apples and oranges.

My 2 orders of magnitude guess is conservative. Population has increased by well over one order of magnitude since the industrial revolution. Per capita meat/dairy consumption accounts for the rest.

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