It's important to note that almost all of the land that cattle are raised on is unsuitable for any other purpose. They aren't grazing cattle in Manhattan, it's in places like rural Australia or Texas where there is no infrastructure, no arable land, and no human population that is competing with the cattle population for resources.
But in general the point is that meat production does not have to be displacing other food production. Cows are actually a way to convert otherwise worthless land into food. And the grass they're eating is not going to typically store carbon otherwise.
I think this is provably false. As mentioned above, a lot of land used for cattle used to be forest; the global beef market is one of the main drivers for deforestation in the Brazilian rainforest.
There are second order effects, too. Cattle that's factory farmed in the developed world is raised on corn, wheat, soy, and other calorie dense foods. Those crops are grown with a large quantity of fertilizer, and for every calorie of corn, wheat, etc. grown, about one calorie of petroleum is used.
I don't think there's any doubt that beef, in particular, is only economical because of the negative externalities involved. Accounting for those externalities would probably go a long way toward making lab grown meat (more) competitive.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/02/revealed...
The fact that a lot of cattle production does not do this is not proof that this is not possible.
And as the big bag of calories they are, they need to be raised with huge calories intake, which is not exactly commercial TV ad grass.
So you need to raise food for your cows alongside your cows anyway.
You are just transforming energy from a medium to another and thermodynamics says that it’s totally inefficient.
We can/could raise mountain goats too.
If all meat were raised only this way the lab grown would be probably cheaper.
Solving that would require complex carbon cap & trade regulations to be enforced.
You'd get more by turning it into a tree farm, converting trees to charcoal and burying that.
https://www.wri.org/insights/forests-absorb-twice-much-carbo...
Arguably that's a value judgement not everyone shares. For example, if you placed value on the carbon storage capacity and biodiversity contribution of the Forrest then replacing it with cows may not be an increase in efficiency of useful use of the land.
Arguably broad acre farming is currently getting a free ride on a number of external costs, if the math of that were to change meat grown on a small footprint would be much more competitive.
As I said, land use issues where you replace forest with cows is a problem (though not in the US, it is a problem in the developing world).
1% of US cows are grass-finished, the rest eat grain.
These grain-eating cows may be located in a place that has grass, couldn't be forest, and couldn't be agricultural land. And yet they eat grain nonetheless, from another place, that could be agricultural land, forest or otherwise nature that creates biodiversity.
The grain comes from somewhere. That creates land use issues. Not because of replacing forest with cows, but because 99% of cows sold in US stores are eating grain which must come from somewhere that is obviously not only useable for growing just grass.
Yes, in theory it's possible to have cows eat grass only, that's quite obvious. But if you were to limit beef in US stores to only those type of situations, you'd have to reduce the supply by 99% today and radically shift the way beef is produced worldwide.
And even that 1% / 99% isn't the entire story. That only tells you what is grass-finished vs cows that eat grain. An even smaller portion of that 1% are cows that are eating grass from a place that could solely grow grass and could not be used for other purposes such as forest.
As someone who lived in a subsistence farm, that's absolutely not true, not on a large scale.
That is true in some places where the soil is not suitable for agriculture and the cows only eat grass, but that would be a minority of cows that exist today.
If that was even remotely true, there would be no cows raised by eating grain.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/apr/17/the-eco-...
This is completely false. Animal farming is entirely based on crop farming for fodder.
Farming crop for animal fodder, for human consumption and for biofuel are in direct competition with each other.
Though a farmer in the area (an old neighbor actually) recently converted a good portion of his maize fields into a solar energy facility. I'm not sure exactly what his motivations were, but farmers are for the most part not stupid people, especially when it comes to maximizing the productivity of their land.
I'm not so sure about that. Brazil is the second largest producer of beef, and there have been huge outcries because large swathes of the Amazon are being cut down to facilitate beef production (as well as crops such as soya - which I should note is mostly used as animal feed - and palm oil).
Apparently the soil does soon become unsuitable for even raising cattle, so it does become land unsuitable for other purposes. But it certainly didn't start out that way.
If they weren't cutting it down for beef, they'd be cutting it down for something else, like the palm oil mentioned.
These people were cutting and burning these forests just for timber and firewood, and have been for decades.
Even in places where it's banned to do so, and they risk jail.
A smaller profit margin isn't going to prevent them from utilizing the one resource at their disposal.
The fake meat story is a fraud - if you care about pollution, like every other industry yu can regulate how they handle waste products and other operational practices.
Fake meat is just a consolidation play, which happens to be the factor that made meat production a horror show in the first place. Instead of cutting down rain forests for pasture, we’ll cut them down for more protein sources to manufacture fake meat. Ditto with palm oil, which will drive some apes to extinction because there is a marketing problem with selling lard and a health problem associated with selling hydrogenated oils.
Also Pantanal (a kind of swampland of sorts) create some awesome natural pastures, although raising cattle there is harder because of the floods.
Amazon Rainforest destruction has much to do with stupidity (the land there is sand actually, destroying the forest to plant ANYTHING there, even soybeans, is stupid idea), logging, illegal land grabbing, and issues related to certain US companies (Cargill in particular is a big offender).
Also there a lot of conflict is going on there, including political, that made the destruction faster, including destruction being sped up in name of conservation, for example worldwide media was all happy when a particular logger got arrested, only for the destruction to speed up after his arrest, because the people that kept calling the police on him were actually trying to use the police to push him out so they could squat the land, and indeed they did so, as soon he was kicked out, illegal loggers and miners moved in, and fortified, now THOSE people can't be kicked out because they are heavily armed and the police fears the political fallout of that. Meanwhile the area they squatted had logging sped-up a lot, and trees that previously were being preserved as seed stock got cut down, ruining the management work being done there.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_of_the_Amazon_ra...
http://www7.nau.edu/mpcer/direnet/publications/publications_...
This is blatantly false. It might have been true 70 years ago, but not since the rise of CAFOs or a large international beef market.
* ~70% of US beef comes from a CAFO (where the primary feedstock is corn) [0].
* In the US alone the amount of corn diverted to livestock feed (predominantly beef) could feed 800 million humans [1].
* Brazil produces ~15% of the world's beef (2013) and much of this land (65 Mha) was reclaimed from the Amazon [2].
[0] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iUpRFOPmAE5IO4hO4PyS...
[1] https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-m...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026483771...
The land used to grow the food used to feed most cattle most definitely could be used for other purposes or just left alone.
The vast majority of cattle aren't grass-fed on the high plains just before slaughter. Sustainably produced beef like this simply can't scale and is too expensive for mass consumption.
Most cattle are fed in feedlots using grains produced en masse for that purpose.
That is why beef production has such a huge carbon footprint - because of the massive crop fertilizer inputs needed to feed massive quantities of cattle.
We should absolutely be scrutinizing the fossil fuel industry. There's also no reason to _shift_ blame; both can be blamed at the same time. Ulterior motives behind the origin of carbon footprints does not negate the impact of our diets - particularly animal agriculture.
Electric cars are sold to wealthy people so they can maintain their lifestyle with a fresh narrative of being the solution. Meanwhile, a few meters of road being built releases massive amounts of crap to the air.
Lab-grown meat is the same. Bioreactors taking resources from states away to pump out goo for people to eat states away is not sustainable and will never be sustainable.
We need to return to the land, but governments work hard to ensure every last human is a citizen, and produces wealth for someone else. People who resisted were met with violence and their land seized. The system is going to collapse, I really don't have hope. But the least you could do is spare people the party line of blame and shame. /doomer-rant
This is pretty well documented:
http://www.fao.org/gleam/results/en/
Also, whether one is a vegan or not is irrelevant to the question. These are systemic issues based on, as you yourself say, the lack of price put on CO2 emissions to account for their externalities.
However, the lack of political will to do so up to this point doesn't mean we can or should end industrial society and return to the land. There are less dramatic solution paths, but they will need time to acculturate.
Moving away from meat is the right way forward - ethically, ecologically, and economically.
Not that I disagree with the last bit - I'm mostly vegetarian save for an occasional fish dish.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI&t=1s
Getting rid of ruminant cattle farming will just make the world worse off as food demand gets redirected to a smaller amount of arable land and missing cattle would accelerate climate change and desertification. Humanity does not have a lack of land to live on, there is plenty to go around. City land is expensive because everyone wants to be on small space.
Wouldn't getting rid of ruminant cattle farming reduce the amount of arable land required since so much of it is used to grow animal feed?
"If all the grain currently fed to livestock in the United States were consumed directly by people, the number of people who could be fed would be nearly 800 million,"
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-m...
I think this is exactly the point missed by the people in this thread saying that a lot of cattle are raised on otherwise useless land. The presumption is that if you got rid of cattle farming you'd have to replace the lost calories for humans by growing other food on that land or cutting down more forests.
But this presumption is false. Even if every bit of land used for raising cattle turned out to be worthless for doing anything else, you'd still have an overall environmental win by getting rid of cattle. Convert not the land used to raise cattle directly but the land used to grow the food they eat to producing vegetables and grains for us.
I also think vegetables are very energy inefficient compared to for example potatoes. Not sure how we can defend growing anything with such a minuscule calorie count given the impact of pesticides and herbicides on the environment.
Cattle are herbivores, so we're feeding _them_ plant matter for them to convert to meat for us to eat. We're also growing massive amounts of soy and corn just to feed those cattle already, when we could be growing substantially less than that to feed ourselves.
> Not sure how we can defend growing anything with such a minuscule calorie count given the impact of pesticides and herbicides on the environment.
Not sure how we can defend the current status quo when we're growing many times the amount of crops to feed the animals using those pesticides and herbicides, _and_ pumping said cattle full of antibiotics, but yet here we are.
I'm aware that you linked the Allan Savory TED talk, but that's been heavily controversial and many of the studies on it find limited effects beyond any other reasonable strategy.
> I always like to point out that before the Europeans decimated the American bison, there were more head of bison roaming the west than there are head of cattle today. Just turning our monocrop soy and corn farms in the midwest back to prairie (by actually doing nothing to the land - just leave it alone), we could have regenerative ranching and cows and more food for less energy input than we do today.
I don’t know for sure if that’s true, but it sure as hell wouldn’t surprise me.
Also Bison grew at natural rates and lived for 20+ years... Beef cattle are slaughtered around 2/3 years - so you're turning over ~2,000lbs of mass per head every few years. Just an unfathomably massive industry.
Like what? What do you propose as a better use of the high plains? (Let’s define this as land west of 100 degree W to Rocky Mountains) There are no natural resources, no large cities, lack of infrastructure, etc. Other than wind farms, what can you do with grasslands that receive less than 10” of rain a year that sits on top of a rapidly depleting aquifer?
Farming on the high plains mostly isn't sustainable. Certainly not the way it's done now. Not in the context of climate change.
California uses more water to grow animal feed (Alfalfa + irrigated pasture) than it does for all residential and commercial uses combined.
It's basically all farms and cities now. Several of the forests left are mere tree plantations.
Perhaps one day the yearly reminder that our forests are dying will stop because there's none left.
https://ourworldindata.org/exports/forest-area-as-share-of-l...
Nasa [0] claims that the single biggest reason for deforestation is conversion to cropland and pasture, and Vice [1] says that 80% of the deforestation is for cattle in Brazil. Meanwhile, in the US almost 70% of all crops grown are used as animal feed [2] (e.g. all that midwestern corn and soy) - and the efficiency of that is staggeringly low; Only about 3% of the calories used for beef feed translate into our human food,
> They aren't grazing cattle in Manhattan,
They're not because it's a concrete jungle, and land is expensive in the immediate areas.
[0] https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Deforestation/def...
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/bjwzk4/feeling-sad-about-the...
[2] https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel...
When you properly recognize this your reduction disarms nothing.
https://svensktkott.se/om-kott/miljo-och-klimat/hur-mycket-m...
Traditionally yes, but my understanding is nowadays, at least in America, a lot of cattle are fed grain in industrial feedlots.
Now, there are places where forest was cut down for grazing. Thats true. We also have experience where leaving the land alone a few decades reverts it back to forest (this is seen in forests in the eastern US which were once grazing lands for domesticated herbivores and now are back to being mature forests.
If Jews can grow tomatoes in the desert, then what land could possibly not used for agriculture?
Besides, the majority of the land use that is used for growing animals or growing animal feed is in the lather category.
So as it is a statement that is always asserted without evidence, it can also be dismissed without evidence.
If a cattle farm isn't built in Erath County Texas, that land is going to sit there doing nothing. It has no other productive use case.
The point of this is that pointing out how much land beef production uses isn't as insightful as it may at first seem, because that land isn't being taken from another economic activity.
Also, the DFW area is the 4th largest region in the country - proving that you CAN put people and cows on the same land
That looks like prime wind turbine power generation country.