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Comment by knuthsat | Hacker News Reader

There's really not that much meat in regenerative agriculture. Given the current per capita consumption of meat in kg, a regenerative ag operation could never accomplish that.

Reducing to 4-30kg of meat per capita per year seems impossible.

No one can even accomplish that with ruminants. That's why there's so much chicken everywhere, because accomplishing that with ruminants is near impossible, so chicken is advertised massively instead.

A nitpick, there's no single food that is great for human health or bad for human health. Diet can contain various things and be healthy and it can also lack meat and be healthy.

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Do you have sources for this?

I used to think similarly, but now I’m not so sure. Gabe Brown, the author of Dirt to Soil, changed my outlook on animals place in a healthy ecosystem.

On his farmland he puts about 700k lbs of cattle on 1acre of land at a time, rotating those cattle frequently across 40 acres. He claims this practice has been an integral part of his regenerative ag method.

http://brownsranch.us/grazing/

I don't think that math works out. That works out to around 6 square meters per cow. Google says cows eat about 160 pounds of grass per day.

Brown has bred his cattle for efficiency.

> A large-framed cow is one that requires a higher intake level for maintenance alone

https://brownsranch.us/livestock/

My math came out similarly to yours but I don’t think it’s unreasonable for there to be 150lbs of waste high cover crop biomass in a 6 square meter area.

Again he is rotating these cattle daily and never depleting the crops of any one area, giving them a chance to grow back by the time the cattle are rotated back through.

Another term you can search for to find visuals of what this sort of density looks like is mobgrazing.

I think in this case Google might not be right. Other sources say it's more like 10-15kg (22-33lbs)[1] for beef cattle. Dairy might be higher.

[1] https://www.thebeefsite.com/articles/3154/how-much-forage-do...

You speak as if a goat is a goat, a cow is a cow, a pig is a pig, a calorie is a calorie, and a protein is a protein. No. The world is much more nuanced than that. Ruminants are thee biggest factor is driving soil-building as part of regenerative agriculture. Goats are by far (in my experience) the quickest way to rebuild parched top soil, or just build soil in a place that badly needs it (say run-through dirt that won't even grow lentils).

Well, I did not say that ruminants aren't a part of regenerative agriculture. There's just not that many to support the current meat consumption levels.

If you're going to grow ruminants just on grass, it takes a lot of time and land to eventually sell the meat compared to what's happening now.

We could argue that a reduction from 100+ kg to 4-30kg of meat per capita per year could be supported this way but I have no idea.

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