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Comment by _8j50 | Hacker News Reader

If all the land and resource that goes into feeding cows is used for crops, a lot more people can be supported. It has never been a lack of global food shortage, it is always regional anyways.

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There are an enormous number of products that cattle provide beyond beef, from cosmetics to medicine to important industrial and agricultural products, with manure, bonemeal, and bloodmeal among them.

I agree with this. Tbh there are things that can be done to reduce it's footprint and we should collectively eat less meat. But comparing 1 to 1 what ends up on the cows plat and what ends up in the store generally doesn't do it justice. Absolutely everything gets used and processed.

However, there are many areas of the world where you can't grow human-edible food on the land currently being used to grow grass for feeding livestock. Of course this is not true everywhere, but a lot of area, e.g. in the UK, could only be used for grazing cows or sheep, if not left for nature.

> It has never been a lack of global food shortage

Indeed. It's about availability and right to food, as articulated by Amartya Sen in his Nobel prize winning work on the Bengal (and other) famines.

https://www.prismaweb.org/nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Pove...

However, quite a lot of cattle grazing land isn't really suitable for arable farming. The American approach of raising cattle on soybeans grown on arable land may not be sustainable, but more traditional hillside grazing may be.

WE already feed so much of the world, we have a responsibility to the animals we adopted thousands of years ago to keep them thriving.

Slashing the throats of 55 billion animals every year after only a fraction of their natural lifespan is a very interesting definition of "thriving".

When you feed a cow you are essentially trading up.

Animal meat is much more bioavailable and nutrient dense. Especially when they are eating grass on land unsuitable for crops.

I dont think so... It takes way more than 1 calorie of plant matter to generate 1 calorie of beef

Plant matter that we can’t eat and grows in areas we can’t farm.

The Amazon? Yeah sure but not sure thats a good trade: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2022/amazon...

In theory, I agree. However, this is only currently true for small parts of the beef supply chain in the US. The vast majority of meat tissue growth people eat here comes from factory farms.

I don't have a major problem with meat eating when it's done sustainably and humanely. The real issue is that this is not the case for way too much of it now, and current meat production practices are yet another example of unsustainable overconsumption in general. Yet more than half the population regularly celebrates and enshrines that overconsumption, reinforcing it. This is not a good look to anyone who's really thinking long term & globally about these things.

> in the US

So a truly microscopic fraction of the world's agriculture?

Depends on your definition of microscopic. The USA is a world-leading producer of a number of agricultural products, including corn, soybeans, beef, and in the top 10 producers of a staggering number of other crops.

The US produces 12 million metric tonnes out of the world's 60 million metric tonnes of beef[1] or 20%. Hardly microscopic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beef#Global_statistics

That would be pretty interesting if the opposite was true. Perpetual motion cows.

I thought most beef, pound-for-pound, was factory-farmed, not grazed?

In the US cattle start out grazing and spend a portion of their life there. Then they go to dense feedlots (CAFOs) where they are fed a grain heavy diet.

> When you feed a cow you are essentially trading up.

At a 50x loss in efficiency.

According to this guy [1], the US could feed 800 million people with the grain spent on cows today. Not grass, grain.

[1] https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-m...

Only if that land can be used for growing crops. Nearly all of it can't be used for growing crops.

We don't have to convert cattle farms into cropland, just eat the grain we feed the cows, and if we get sick of that grain, then grow something else where we are growing that grain.

But we don't feed grain to cows, unless it's stuff like brewery mash where it's already been used to make human food.

You cannot necessarily grow different stuff in the same field. Not all crops do well in the same kind of soil. For example, you need totally different soil for potatoes than you do for cereal crops if you want them to actually grow.

That's not correct.

We (in the US anyway) feed a massive quantity of unspent (not brewery mash for example) grains when finishing cattle in feedlots. Corn, barley, milo, soybeans etc along with harvested forages like alfalfa and sorghum (which is often fed as silage).

People do feed brewery mash and other byproducts but that isn't most of what goes into feedlot rations nationwide.

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