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Comment by destitude | Hacker News Reader

I live in upper midwest in what should be native forested area and large tracts of forest have been clearcut just for cattle. My neighbor last year cut dozens of acres of heavy forest to raise more cattle. I don't think people fully understand what has been done in many areas to destroy the native environment just to raise cattle.. let alone the corn raised that many cattle ranchers in midwest at least feed their cattle.

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Land use questions are far more of a concern in developing countries than in the US. The area of forested land in the US is actually increasing, not decreasing.

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.

> 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...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_feeding#Corn-fed

Not sure if you're intentionally trying to misunderstand to make some weird point. All I said is that there exists land that is not forest, and is not otherwise suitable for agriculture, but that can be converted by cows into food. This is not only not provably false, it's actually true.

The fact that a lot of cattle production does not do this is not proof that this is not possible.

You do understand that cows aren’t free energy generators from thin air ?

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.

Thermodynamics says nothing about which plants can grow on which land. A lot of land in the world can only sustain grass. Letting animals graze on that land is as close to free as you can get

Uhm......sure, but there absolutely are cows that are raised with very little maintenance on land that is otherwise useless. Here in UK farmers often raise cows on moorlands, which are mostly just a pile of rocks with a bit if soil on top to support minimal vegetation, that land isn't and can't be used for other types of farming - yet farmers happily leave cows on it in the spring and collect them for slaughter in autumn. They feed on what grows there and there's little need to supplement them. Then they are usually slaughtered locally too. I can't believe that this kind of beef farming is even 10% as bad for environment as the big factory farming elsewhere.

Sure it happens, but like others said, this is so low intensity (small scale), that it's basically an edge case.

We can/could raise mountain goats too.

If all meat were raised only this way the lab grown would be probably cheaper.

Have you got any numbers on what percentage of UK beef is reared like that?

It's probably reasonably high, anecdotally every time I got out walking in the hills in most parts of the UK there are large numbers of sheep and cattle grazing on basically unusable wilderness, often which is part of a national park so can't be built on much anyway. They seem to be pretty self sufficient eating grass unless there is a heavy snowfall, which is quite rare in England, farmers would then supplement with feed crops like turnips etc.

Is it possible on the same scale?

The real problem is that forest is not being economically valued for its carbon sequestration capability.

Solving that would require complex carbon cap & trade regulations to be enforced.

Forests have basically no continuous carbon sequestration capability. Most of the carbon they'll ever sequester is already there.

You'd get more by turning it into a tree farm, converting trees to charcoal and burying that.

I don't think you're right here. Forests form soil

https://www.wri.org/insights/forests-absorb-twice-much-carbo...

"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"

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.

You're picturing a world where the only land that exists is forested land and you have to choose to either leave it a forest or cut it and use it for agriculture or grazing. But a lot of land is not forested, and not suitable for agriculture. But it is suitable for grazing. This is the otherwise worthless land that can be converted by cows into food.

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).

It's not about replacing forest with cows. It's about replacing forest with cow-feed.

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.

Grass-finished. Think about what that means. Most (all besides veal?) eat grass. They finish them (fatten them before slaughter) with grain. That 99% isn't 100% grain. It consists of lots of grass.

> Cows are actually a way to convert otherwise worthless land into food

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.

According to the Guardian almost all cows in the UK are raised on grass, I'd guess this is true for most of Europe

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/apr/17/the-eco-...

> Cows are actually a way to convert otherwise worthless land into food

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.

It's the same in the rural and semi-rural Northeast (I mean Vermont and upstate NY specifically), most of the cattle are raised for dairy.

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.

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