Where is there more livestock than people?
erdavis.com
erdavis.com
At grocery stores I would see packaging for “grass-fed beef” or “free-range” and honestly I thought it was like a joke that farmers were pulling on city people, like “gormet hand-picked potatoes” or “premium plastic” or something. What else would cows eat?? I’d probably seen a hundred thousand cows in my life, always in herds roaming around vast pastures. Of course they eat grass.
Then I moved to California, and one day had occasion to drive from SF to LA. North of Bakersfield I encountered the most profound stink I’ve ever smelled while driving, and eventually I saw the source: industrial operations with enormous numbers of cattle in fenced pens shoulder to shoulder so they could hardly move.
I spent the next ten minutes slack-jawed, reconsidering my life experience.
Those feedlots are all over the country, the largest being in Colorado, Texas and Kansas:
https://r-calfusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/160125-Top-...
The one you saw in Coalinga is 19th on the list.
Also in California, you can find beef and dairy cattle roaming freely among the rolling coastal hills that never end up in a a feedlot like that, but you can bet that their meat and dairy isn't cheap. Industrial meat production is a nightmare, but when push comes to shove, few seem to be OK paying $30 for a burger.
If it wasn't clear from context, I was comparing their freedom to that of the cattle in feedlots, not to Wildebeest or Bison.
It can be smelled well over 10 miles away.
I've not had the pleasure of travelling near the Texas CAFOs.
In EU it's a mix: https://www.dairyherd.com/news/european-cows-eat-more-foreig... https://www.beefmagazine.com/americancowman/beef-and-busines...
In general different countries will "finish" their cattle with different grains. Only a few places have the right conditions to have their beef be grass-fed through its whole lifecycle.
Not ideal, but I think cows are pretty flexible when it comes to cheap calories.
Edit: yea def happens https://money.cnn.com/2012/10/10/news/economy/farmers-cows-c...
Silage is the whole plant (even parts not edible by humans), chopped up and fermented.
Depends what you mean by "expensive". You can get one typically for $15 - $50 / bale. Here's a website: https://allhay.com/
Prices are much higher due to the fertilizer and fuel prices. Around me It's going for $50-$55 for a 4x5ft bale (a few years ago it was $20 / bale).
That said, those can weigh quite a bit, a 4x5ft bale will be 800 - 1200 lbs depending on moisture content and field composition. A cow will eat 20-40lbs of food a hay, depending on weather (they eat less in severe cold or heat).
That equates to a single bale lasting one cow a approximately month or in reality, a heard of 30 cows needing about one bale a day.
Using today's price of $50/bale, that's $1.67/day per cow to feed (a couple years ago it was much lower, say $0.5 - $0.75).
Given it takes 2-3 years to maximize beef production AND assuming you only need feed half the year (grass fed cattle often graze), we're talking ~$750 to feed over the 2.5 year average (assuming 2.5 years @ 180 days).
In terms of meat, you're probably going to get somewhere around 450lbs of use-able meat. You have to pay a butchering fee on that as well. That's probably $700. You'll also have transportation, fees, etc (let's just say $200/head). Total you're looking at a cost of $3.67/lb of processed beef. You can then resell for $5-6/lb right now to a reseller. This is a net of around $675.
If you feed grain, you can effectively expect the same thing, but:
1. Grain fed will typically be cheaper per lb.
2. Grain will create a more tender meat (it's why people finish with grain)
3. Cows fed grain gain weight, so profit can be somewhat higher (often offset by organic nature of many grass fed cows)
4. Grain-fed tastes better to most people
That's interesting. For a few years we used to buy a quarter beef from a retired farmer who was the father of a friend. It used to average out to $2.56/lb processed and picked up from the butcher shop. Granted, at this point he was retired and just doing it to keep busy, but that's quite a bit cheaper. I wonder if prices have gone up that much in the last few years or if it just costs less here in MN.
For instance, if you grow your own hay you're probably looking at a lower cost for feed, etc.
The Starbucks literally has an airlock and a biosafety tier positive pressure HVAC system to keep the reek out. It’s insane.
Take them away and most intensive cattle operations in the first world wouldn't be able to survive.
A local rancher told me that they make almost all of their money from hunting parties in elk season. They wouldn't bother with cows except that the cows improve the foraging for the elk, improving their business. The cows are cultivating, seed distribution and fertilization devices in service of the elk herds.
I think that the more wild forage we can maintain along with our domesticated food system, the better. In paradise it's the rule rather than the exception.
Elks are by far the most dangerous wild animal in Sweden, killing about 10 per year in traffic accidents. Add to hat the cost of the elks to the forresting industry and suddenly we are left with very few reasons to keep such an artificially huge elk population.
The outtake (in meat), which is already considered to be at a maximum, only covers 2-3% of Swedish meat consumption.
I have started considering it a very marginal industry eith large drawbacks and very small benefits.
Their droppings are causing us environmental problems, which is currently a hot(-button) topic.
[1] https://longreads.cbs.nl/nederland-in-cijfers-2021/hoeveel-l...
But when other scientists point out the reports are flawed they are brushed aside. When it is clear the nitrous deposition is not always caused by livestock (for instance because it happens in places where there is no livestock) the arguments are brushed aside. When flaws in the models are pointed out, the arguments are brushed aside. When it’s pointed out that the deposition has been falling for the last decades, the arguments are brushed aside.
Just so they can cling to their manufactured problem proven using pseudoscience, so the goal can be forced. Halving the livestock is a political goal, haggled as a deal during the last government formation. The arguments are mostly smoke and mirrors.
And what they don’t understand is by using the supposedly impartial ‘science’ departments (RIVM) to support their political goals, just as the same institutions are done supporting the governments COVID response with extremely poor science, they are completely destroying trust in that kind of institution in just another large part of the population. Trust is at an all time low.
The end result? The governing parties are up to be wiped away in any near term election so they’ll go any length to cling to power for the remainder of their term. Including manufacturing irrational pseudoscience to further the agreed upon political goals.
[1] https://allaboutbison.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Bison-P... [2] https://softschools.com/facts/extinct_animals/aurochs_facts/... [3] https://www.theextinctions.com/articles-1/ns0atubs8qd60o16it...
I'd be tempted to train them, arm them, declare the county the Free Porcine State.
Why stop at pigs? Why not free all of the animals at the animal farm? Are some animals more equal than others? ;)
And that's humans fault, not theirs.
You can't simply throw up your hands and walk away from a century of animal eugenics
https://peakoilbarrel.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Terrest...
I've seen another image which shows cubes indicating total biomass inclusive of plants and invertebrates. Humans aren't quite so prominant on that, though as a measure of all animal biomass, still a large fraction.
This ... is close though not quite what I had in mind:
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=o3xAu8m8XK4
And NB, that's not the xkcd "Land Mammals" one, though that's also impressive: https://xkcd.com/1338/
One is the instantaneous biomass at any point in time.
The second would be something like "rate of new biomass formation".
A human lives ~82 years, a cow lives ~3, a chicken lives ~6 weeks (for a fryer or broiler). The human lives ~715 times longer than the chicken, but weighs only 30 times more. There's nearly 25 times more chicken biomass cycled per year than human.
(The fact that that chicken biomass goes to feed the human biomass is also a part of this, of course.)
A good proxy would be to multiply the number of animals by the Animal Unit Equivalents (AUE).
What do I win?
Seriously though, check out https://xkcd.com/1338/ "Land Mammals" it's one of the more mind-blowing XKCDs IMO.
> Earth's LAND MAMMALS By Weight [[A graph in which one square equals 1,000,000 tons. Dark grey squares represent humans, light gray represent our pets and livestock, and green squares represent wild animals. The squares are arranged in a roughly round shape, with clusters for each type of animal. Animals represented: Humans, cattle, pigs, goats (39 squares), sheep, horses (29 squares), elephants (1 square). There are other small, unlabeled clusters also. It is clear that humans and our pets & livestock outweigh wild animals by at least a factor of 10. ]] {{Title text: Bacteria still outweigh us thousands to one--and that's not even counting the several pounds of them in your body.}}
Part of the challenge in this particular case is data collection, most of these people sell amongst each other and sell everything they can out of auction: direct, to each other, consume themselves, etc.
I guess in theory you could eat one chicken per 8 weeks and barely keep it balanced, as you can grow a meat chicken in that time.
Just looked up wool production and didn't realise how much Australia produces: https://blog.bizvibe.com/blog/textiles-and-garments/top-10-l...
It’s not exactly rare, but it’s far less popular than beef, pork, or chicken.
The temperature argument doesn't stack up to me. Have you got a source?
Lamb is available most places, but usually more expensive. Walmart carries it!
5.8 million people, 13.5 million pigs
5.46 million people, 6.83 million sheep.
Peasants who were not involved in sheep farming were forcibly evicted or killed, resulting in the sheep-centric agriculture we see today, and also triggered the earliest large Scottish peasant migrations to the Americas.
According to the guides at the Battlefield of Culloden, prior to the Clearances, the Scottish Highlands had a more mixed agricultural and cottage industrial economy, but basically got turned into a sheep production "banana republic" after the British defeated them.
3 million people, 9-10 million sheep
Maybe compared to beef but when chickens are being fed crops they're not efficient compared to eating crops directly. 72 billion chickens is still an insane number of extra lives to support.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_efficiency
"In comparing the cultivation of animals versus plants, there is a clear difference in magnitude of energy efficiency. Edible kilocalories produced from kilocalories of energy required for cultivation are: 18.1% for chicken, 6.7% for grass-fed beef, 5.7% for farmed salmon, and 0.9% for shrimp. In contrast, potatoes yield 123%, corn produce 250%, and soy results in 415% of input calories converted to calories able to be utilized by humans.[4] This disparity in efficiency reflects the reduction in production from moving up trophic levels. Thus, it is more energetically efficient to form a diet from lower trophic levels."
For any humans it is very easy to cover most of their energy needs with vegetable food and the majority of them, for whom the expenses for food form a non-negligible part of their budget, have very strong incentives to do this, because calories from vegetables are many times cheaper than calories from animals.
Animals are not eaten as a source of calories, but mainly as a source of proteins.
When discussing the efficiency of using animals for food, they must be compared with the vegetables used for their food based on their protein content, not on their calories content.
When vegetable protein extracts are compared with meat, all the energy and chemicals consumed for protein separation and any other additional costs must be taken into account.
> When discussing the efficiency of using animals for food, they must be compared with the vegetables used for their food based on their protein content, not on their calories content.
Why do you think that? I think you're overestimating how much protein people need and underestimating how much protein regular plant-based food contain.
Potatoes are about the cheapest food, not renowned to be high in protein and yet eating 2000g of them a day will give you ~40g of protein and ~2000 calories which is close to the recommended amounts even if you're not trying to get protein. A cheap can of cooked chickpeas or beans is an easy 40g of protein, even cheaper if you cook from dry beans. Seitan (you make it by washing flour dough with water until it's mostly protein + gluten left) is about 75% protein, even more than steak: https://www.menshealth.com/uk/nutrition/food-drink/a25976250...
gluten is protein.
I cook and eat chickpeas from time to time, but less frequently than lentils or peas, which have a higher protein content than chickpeas, so I am aware of their properties.
While you are right that 200 g of chickpeas would provide 40 g of proteins and this is not a quantity of chickpeas too large for being eaten during a day, that is only at most a half of the recommended protein intake for a 75 kg human.
While the energy requirements for doing some hard physical work are more similar between different people, the basal energy consumption rates when doing sedentary work in front of a computer, only interspersed with short exercises or walks, vary much more from human to human.
Eating 2 kg of potatoes in a single day, i.e. 2000 calories, would be enough for a large gain of weight per day in my case. I eat around 1600-1700 calories for a stable weight around 76 kg (before starting to count calories, during many years I had a stable weight of over 110 kg).
Moreover, counting all the 40 g of proteins from 2 kg potatoes as part of the necessary protein intake is incorrect.
There exists indeed a minimum protein intake, which is required to ensure a sufficient nitrogen intake, in the form of the amino- group, which can be transferred from amino-acids that are in excess to those that are deficient, to balance their proportions.
However, the real required protein intake is frequently much larger than that needed to provide enough nitrogen. The required protein intake must be high enough so that the required intakes are satisfied for all of the essential amino-acids.
So the recommended protein intake, which varies between studies, depending on methodology, from 0.8 to 1.2 g of protein per kilogram of body weight, is valid only for proteins from animal sources.
The proteins from vegetables like potatoes or chickpeas, have an unbalanced amino-acid profile, so they must provide a higher protein quantity to also contain enough of their more scarce amino-acids.
I am too lazy to make the computation now, but it is likely that a 75 kg human would have to eat no less than 5 kg of potatoes per day, i.e. more than 4000 calories, to get enough proteins, with enough of each amino-acid. Unless doing a lot of hard work, that would be impossible.
About seitan, even if wheat has a high-protein content in comparison with most other cereals, where I live the price of wheat flour divided by its protein content is only 3 times less than the price of chicken breast divided by its protein content.
However, proteins from wheat have only half of the lysine needed by humans, so you need a double quantity of wheat proteins. So correcting for the lysine content makes chicken breast only 1.5 times more expensive than wheat flour.
If you add the value of the time lost with making seitan from wheat flour, it is hard to compete in price with chicken breast.
How do your protein and calorie recommendation line up with what e.g. the US or UK recommend? You think they're missing something? So are you saying you think most people on plant-based diets are likely deficient in protein? And what does that do to their health?
I only meant potato as an example of how you'll get close to protein targets by eating enough daily calories of even things that aren't considered to be high in protein, so with a balanced plant-based diet where you hit daily calorie targets, I think protein is a nonissue that's overblown.
Crop-fed chicken might be cheap, but how does it make sense that it can be cheaper than eating the crops directly?
You could use chickens to deal with food waste, but you could waste less food? Most chickens are grain fed anyways—typically corn and soybean. Those calories are already food, you don't need to convert them besides cooking them. You're also using a living being as a means to an end and giving most of them a terrible existence to fit 72B on the terrestrial surface.
That is the main usefulness of chicken, because from vegetable food it is very difficult to get enough proteins without simultaneously getting too many calories.
There are methods to extract proteins from vegetables, but for some reason the current methods are inadequate, because the price of vegetable protein extracts is much higher than the price of chicken meat, for the same quantity of proteins, so few people can afford to eat them, even if they might like the idea of vegan food.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/28/well/eat/how-much-protein...
"The recommended intake for a healthy adult is 46 grams of protein a day for women and 56 grams for men. And while protein malnutrition is a problem for millions of people around the globe, for the average adult in developed countries, we are eating far more protein than we actually need.
Most American adults eat about 100 grams of protein per day, or roughly twice the recommended amount. Even on a vegan diet people can easily get 60 to 80 grams of protein throughout the day from foods like beans, legumes, nuts, broccoli and whole grains."
> so few people can afford to eat them, even if they might like the idea of vegan food.
Chickpeas, soybeans and other beans can be about 20% protein, lentils about 10%, and they're cheap.
Nevertheless, even if the dry legumes have about the same protein content as raw lean meat, while in raw lean meat the rest of the content is mainly water, dry legumes contains at least twice as much starch as proteins, so when eating the same quantity of proteins as legumes instead of meat, one will eat at least 3 times more calories.
I actually eat about 2 thirds of my daily protein intake from high-protein vegetables, e.g. lentils or peas, and only 1 third from meat, but if I would replace the last third, of proteins from meat, also with proteins from vegetables I could not avoid gaining weight. I have made various experiments with different diets, so I know this for sure.
Moreover, I am able to eat 2 thirds of the protein intake from vegetable sources only because I normally do not eat any cereals or any other starchy food that would provide additional calories over those that are automatically ingested together with the vegetable proteins. So this is a problem that I have studied during a long time, until succeeding to find a balance between protein intake and energy intake, without gaining weight. Most people, who also eat things like bread or sweets, would not be able to eat such a large part of their protein intake from vegetable sources, without becoming overweight.
That recommended protein intake of 46 g / 56 g per day, quoted by you, comes from an older study whose methodology has been severely criticized. Other studies, which are more credible in my opinion, conclude that the real recommended protein intake should be at least 50% higher, so closer to 100 g per day than to 56 g per day (and the 56 g per day was for a 70 kg male, any bigger individual must eat a proportionally greater quantity).
Ah yeah, and also terribly destructive:
For example many vegans and animalists own pets to "save them from cruelty"
But
Loss and others of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that free-ranging domestic cats (mostly unowned) are the top human-caused threat to wildlife in the United States, killing an estimated 1.3 to 3.7 billion birds and 6.3 to 22.3 billion mammals annually.
And that's only in the US...
Wild life is a constant threat to our life style, like it or not, being a modern human in modern society means being responsible for animal suffering even if you don't personally eat them.
For example in my country the war on hunters (mainly by radical animalists) produced that
Roughly 2.3 million wild boars roam around Italy, with roughly 20,000 in the area of Rome, according to farm trade group Coldiretti. And while African swine fever can't be transmitted to humans, it can infect and kill domestic pigs
muslims don't eat pork, Hindu don't eat cows, every religion impose dietary restriction, doesn't mean that non believers have to follow them.
Veganism is no exception to the rule: if you believe you're reducing animal suffering, good for you, go on with your religion and be happy.
But in truth you aren't, vegans kill a lot of animals too, there are billions of people in the World that cause much less damages than us westerners, even if we lived only on rainwater and rocks.
So you might be a "true vegan (TM)" but you aren't better for the environment or for animal suffering than anybody else.
That's what I was trying to say.
I believe in science and data, not videos.
I'm not into "videos that corroborate my opinions" religion.
sorry.
From a few years back:
“Ask HN: Have you gone vegan or vegetarian?” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13985006
The comment contributes absolutely nothing to the conversation. No definition, no solution, no relevance.
If livestock is less than people is it ok then? These graphs are just hotspots it's impossible to use them quantifiably at USA levels. They only show there are a lot of "cows" "there"
You are just roping your common repetitive viewpoints into the story.
Why don't you care about human slavery? Do you not think that is cruel? I'm guessing because you are rich and the poor can eat vegan cake on the other side of the world? Why do vegans get to bring up veganism every conversation when so many people have such awful lives like being slaves?
None of this is relevant to livestock heat maps using a measure of X times people.
> HN crowd doesn’t know much about veganism
It's common - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
An actual solution, rather than vegans saying they are vegan, is also common on HN - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
It's thinking with the end in mind. Once you axiomatize the ends, you can then figure out the means to get there.
Earth.