Hacker News Reader

Comment by goatinaboat | Hacker News Reader

Animal-based products have a significantly higher environmental footprint than plant-based ones.

Almonds, for vegan milk substitute, are implicated in drought in California. Soy is responsible for massive tropical deforestation. Meanwhile you can easily farm sheep and goats on land that no crops can grow on.

View on HN

Implying that animal agriculture is more sustainable is false, unless you're able to back this up with actual data.

80% of Amazon rainforest deforestation has been driven by cattle farming (https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/08/27/how-beef-...)

According to USDA data, over 70% of soy grown in the U.S. is fed to animals (https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/coexisten...)

Dairy uses almost double the water of almond milk per glass, as well as ~4x the carbon footprint and more than 10x the land. See https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46654042 for graphs that represent this wide gulf

As far as farming ruminants, even in the best-case scenario where they're eating land otherwise unfarmable plus maximally effective carbon sequestering practices are in place, it still produces unsustainably massive quantities of GHG emissions (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6392/987) [Most relevant subsection: "Producer mitigation limits and the role of consumers"]

90% of that soy goes to feed lifestock, most of the soy eaten in the states or europe is grown there, since the soy grown in those country is generally not suitable for human consumption.

That’s the whole idea of livestock - feed them plants that we can’t eat

We can eat soy - I had a tasty tofu bowl for lunch. The land used for growing soy animal feed can be also used to grow other plants we can eat directly or after preparation. That requires less land and less resources per calorie which lets us reforest and prevent further rainforest destruction. The carbon opportunity cost of meat is huge, https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-opportunity-costs-food

They are not saying that humans cannot eat soybeans. They are saying that some soybeans are not of high enough quality to be suitable for humans to eat.

90% of the soy that is grown is not fit for human consumption? I'm having a hard time buying that. If they stopped feeding soy to cattle, I find it very unlikely that they would continue producing the same amount in order to get soy that is fit for human consumption. As though what we've been feeding cattle is simply the portion that was already going to be wasted.

I am not the person who wrote that comment above, but they did not say "90% of soy" -- they said "90% of that soy", referring to soy grown in areas of tropical deforestation.

I have no clue if the assertion is correct.

Edit: FWIW, it appears that US soy is mostly used for livestock:

> Just over 70 percent of the soybeans grown in the United States are used for animal feed

https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/coexisten...

And globally, even a higher percentage:

> About 85 percent of the world’s soybean crop is processed into meal and vegetable oil, and virtually all of that meal is used in animal feed.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170112075924/http://www.soyate...

I didn’t say soy, I said “plants”. This includes everything we can’t eat - grass, and perhaps low quality soy.

There’s an immense amount of green things growing we can’t digest that cows, sheep, goats, and chickens will happily chomp on or peck at. The idea is that we then eat the cows, etc. It’s simple really.

As an aside, I’ve been on a fat-loss diet all lockdown long, and if it wasn’t for animal products, it simply wouldn’t have worked as well as it did. I need high protein within a limited calorie budget. Hello, chicken breasts and whey powder.

Anyway, if cows are not a good enough system to feed 7 billion people, we should grow fake cow parts in vats, also neatly eliminating the need to kill the animals. I’d be the first to sign up for a fake steak, if it was chemically identical to a grass-fed one (the taste of which is fantastic, absolutely beyond description)

Hence my sentences 2, 3 and 4.

TomatoDash is going to eat all of the soy folks, discussion over and problem solved.

Seriously though the reason it is fed to animals is likely because of cost. Generally animal feed is chosen based on cost and effectiveness.

Really though, humans can't eat grass, beet pulp shreds, beet molasses, and many other things we feed animals.

The reason why we have those plants is because we are destroying entire ecosystems and worsening climate change. Not a good idea.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com