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Comment by shafyy | Hacker News Reader

I was disappointed to see that this article didn't mention livestock agriculture. Rethinking cities is important for many reasons, but the climate impact is a drop in the bucket.

We use 50% of the habitable land on earth for agriculture, and 77% thereof is used to produce meat and dairy. At the same time, meat and dairy only make up 18% of the world's calory supply, and 36% of the protein supply.

It's crystal clear that the best thing we can do to free up land is to reduce livestock agriculture. This also has some more advantages, for example increasing biodiversity, decreasing zoonotic diseases like the current shitshow we're in, decreasing antibiotics resistance (the next shitshow we're about to enjoy), increasing the number of parks for recreation (which has a positive psychological impact on people). Oh yes, and animal welfare.

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food

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I see this repeated over and over, but I never see any hard data, only graphs. I was under the impression that we use the non eatable parts of crops (i.e. the leaves, discarded fruit parts, roots etc.) to feed livestock, and grassy, unarable hills are also included in this stat. So it all boils down to being extremely efficient (we can't eat the parts of the plants that we discard, and we also can't eat grass from the lands where we can't plant anything else, so we feed them to animals to transform them into more food, throwing them away would be a waste).

I haven't seen any info that clearly states "this land is exclusively used to plant x squared miles of grain that will be only fed to livestock".

Also, from your link, it is clear that livestock AND fisheries produce 31% of the agricultural greenhouse gasses, while crops produce 27%, so not that big a difference.

That's not true. More than 80% of soy production is used as animal feed. Similar story for corn and other grains.

> Also, from your link, it is clear that livestock AND fisheries produce 31% of the agricultural greenhouse gasses, while crops produce 27%, so not that big a difference.

I'm not sure which part you're referring to. But a big chunk of crop that we grow is directly used as animal feed.

Do we really feed the cows the actual whole soy plant? That sounds incredibly wasteful to me.

Or is it just that the parts of soy that we can't eat (stalk, leaves, husks, discarded beans after processing into tofu/milk/etc.) that comprise 80% of the plant, while the rest we consume ourselves?

Do you have any evidence that we only use edible parts of the plant? I'm fairly sure that there are crops that are solely grown to feed animals.

Check out the Carbon Farming Solution - it’s essentially an encyclopedia of land use and its effects on Climate. Incredibly well researched, and doesn’t present anything as a panacea.

The tl;dr is that while pastures and agroforestry can be more sustainable, natural forests are still nearly impossible to beat in terms of carbon sequestration.

In many biomes, there were large herbivores living since ever. They are part of ecosystem and and if you remove them the biodiversity actually declines. Responsible grazing is not a problem at all.

What is a problem: unsustainable farming of grain/wheat to use as feed (or even feeding processed dead animals). Lumping these together is a harmful simplification.

There's a vast difference in historical numbers of large herbivores roaming wild and the amount needed to supply demand for meat. If the current level of demand is constant, it becomes nearly impossible to supply as "grassfed"

How vast? We're basically talking of the same land - how many cows it could support directly vs. indirectly via feedstock production. I don't see any reason why it should be many times more.

Feedstock production is highly efficient. Grazing animals for meat is very inefficient in terms of caloric output. This is to say nothing about morality or even nutrition.

Perhaps, in ideal world, nobody would eat meat. But that isn't going to happen. And zealous painting any and all livestock farming as immoral and evil isn't likely to get us there.

Uhm, how was I doing that?

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