Hacker News Reader

Comment by philg_jr | Hacker News Reader

> When farming, the questions are even more complex. The livestock generates manure that fertilizes the fields, so much of that "lost" energy is recovered.

Which is why grassfed > cornfed in pretty much every situation except for the extra fat/flavor you might get from cornfed beef. Having cows that consume grass is a win-win. The grass absorbs sunlight instead of reflecting it back into the atmosphere like a feedlot does, the grass is digested better, and manure fertilizes the grass. And when the cows are moved to different pastures and chickens are brought in, they help to agitate the manure into the soil to help that fertilizing process along.

I wish the grassfed beef industry was embraced more instead of people attempting to swear off beef completely.

View on HN

Trends in agriculture are driven heavily by cost. This is where the vegan fundamentalists go wrong, arguing that meat is "more expensive". But in the days before modern agriculture, people raised animals and had meat - it was economically beneficial to do so, even for people living at the edge of famine.

Cornfed beef is a result of economics, too - it's cheaper to buy corn than use pasture, and/or it produces meat that can sell for higher prices. We don't just see corfed beef for fancy prime steaks. It's used in cheap fast food hamburgers as well.

Fast food and junk food are the cheapest food. They've applied industrial logic to every link in the food chain. If meat was as expensive as vegans argue, we wouldn't see it as the basis of so much fast food.

Cows are fed very, very little corn. Corn is not cheaper than grass! Grass is free and widely available in the great American plains. More than 90% of a cow's diet over its lifetime is grass and hay. Less than 10% is grain or non-human edible leftovers from corn stalks, such as corn silage:

https://www.progressiveforage.com/forage-types/silage/what-i... https://beef.unl.edu/cattleproduction/forageconsumed-day

Net of methane production from the cattle may affect that.

I don't know if it does or doesn't, but you might want to incorporate that into your model.

(NB: I'm not a vegitarian myself. I'm quite familiar with arguments. And have some familiarity with feedlots.)

If we didn't have cattle, would we have buffalo? Large wild herbivores in general? (Hmm, results of a quick google... there were 30-60m buffalo in the 19th century, and there are 94m cows in the US today. Given relative size, methane output has probably been more or less static over that period.)

That's a good question and I don't know.

The net terrestrial vertebrate biomass has shifted markedly over the past century (and undoubtedly over the previous 50,000 years of the Human Diaspora). What the pre-Columbian American bison population was I have no idea.

Total pre-industrial wildlife biomass ~10,000 BCE, by estimates, was ~1/7 that of the present, and smaller than humans in total:

http://peakoilbarrel.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Terrestr...

Some people think buffalo herds exploded when native Americans died off.

The herds may not have been that big pre-columbus.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com