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Comment by bantunes | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why this is surprising.

Option A: grow plants, eat plants.

Option B: grow plants, breed animals, feed plants to animals, give animal antibiotics to survive breeding pens, give animal hormones to grow faster, slaughter animal, eat animal.

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It’s not actually that simple. Livestock don’t necessarily eat the same plants people eat. Cattle can eat indigestible-to-humans cellulose in grasses and turn it into meat and milk. Grass can grow on marginal land without fertilizer or irrigation, unlike food crops for humans.

Pigs and chickens can eat garbage and turn them into meat and eggs.

> Cattle can eat indigestible-to-humans cellulose in grasses and turn it into meat and milk. Grass can grow on marginal land without fertilizer or irrigation, unlike food crops for humans.

In central California I've seen cattle gaining weight on high desert scrub. When I look at the land there it looked like inedible, but to a hungry steer, it was quite passable.

The wild pigs there become immensely huge, in large groups - they are a great example of how much edible food there is actually is for animals.

Interesting that you chose cows which are, by far, the worst animal for the environment from the clear-cutting of old growth forests, to the shocking contribution to climate change their gases produce, to the sheer amounts of water and food it takes to grow a full cow.

There's nothing on this planet (w.r.t. our diet) worse for the environment than beef. It's King Bad.

One of those things is a problem with governments. The other is a problem with the cows.

Don't blame the cows if your corrupt government can't keep people from clear-cutting forests.

Yes, but those issues are due to modern farming practices. They're not inherent to beef as a food source. Cattle have been used for millennia to convert inedible plants growing on marginal land into human food.

Cows only make milk after pregnancy. That has to happen somehow. Guess what is done with her baby. Guess where the literal pus from the overworked udders ends up. Yum! All those vegetarians sure are enjoying that.

If you want to know more fun facts, check out Dairy is scary on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcN7SGGoCNI

Yeah. If we just reduced our meat consumption by somewhere between 50 and 75% we could feed the remainder off those sources and probably decrease the environmental impact of food production on net, except for cow's methane production.

The grow plants, feed to animals step takes up nearly 80% of the world’s agriculture: https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets

It's 77% (why round up to artificially boost your narrative?) and this source is intentionally misleading as "This includes grazing land for animals" (I couldn't find an exact source but probably around 30mil km2 of the 40mil km2, e.g. derived from [1]) . Most of this land isn't suitable for producing crops, especially without fertilizers (which bring their own host of problems) and thus the livestock provides additional food that we otherwise wouldn't have. Also worth mentioning that grazing livestock is a natural source of fertilizer.

I'm not arguing against us eating too much meat. We do! Using land usable for human crop production to feed livestock is incredibly inefficient. But your linked graph is just pushing a narrative that's just not true to that extent.

[1] https://www.fao.org/3/x5304e/x5304e03.htm

You really opened my eyes to some new and important information about how agriculture works.

You’re right, that statistic is misleading. We wouldn’t be using grazing land for anything agricultural if not feeding animals. I definitely won’t use this statistic anymore.

For what it’s worth, I didn’t meant to skew things with that 3% in a disingenuous way. Since I had the number 77 I should have used it though, you’re right.

This has sent me down quite a rabbit hole of understanding agricultural practices, their impacts on the environment, and many other parts of this complex system of how humans sustain themselves.

The information is hard to find, surprisingly. It’s good to get a little closer to the truth, though. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

Of course, it started out as:

a) grow plants that humans can eat on soil that will grow them, eat plants.

b) grow plants that humans can't eat, but livestock can, on shit soil that won't support plants that human can eaa, eat the animal.

and in countries that look at the US and go "wow that's fucking barbaric" at their treatment of livestock is generally still the case.

I work with clients in a multi-billion dollar industry (they themselves are in the hundreds of millions in revenue) who sell by-products of food production for cattle feed. In this situation, the food is being grown for humans anyways and only the waste product is used. It doesn't really fit your black & white view of the situation.

Animals also work as food storage - you can convert food that will rot into animal that will roughly maintain itself until slaughter.

Cool: that's called "c", it comes from doing "a" and "b" for a while.

While I completely agree that growing plants has at least 10x less impact to environment, it is not just "grow plants".

You also have to use fertilizer, insecticides, fungicides, herbicides, spend energy (from fossil fuels) to drive tractors, plows, sprinklers. I'm not even going to start with GMO (the technology and the result is fine, but control companies get when you use them is not).

The point was that growing meat is an extra multiple steps on top of everything you just mentioned

Not necessarily. "Environmental" problems are always scope to whatever issue the stakeholder is worried about.

Soy and wheat production in the United States is concentrated on the Great Plains, and made possible by irrigation sourced from groundwater and artificial fertilizer. Problem: that groundwater is being depleted faster than replenishment, and part of the plains will be desert-like within the lifetime of many HN users. So you're looking at destroying some of the more productive farmlands on earth, and have been destroying the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi delta for decades with massive levels of nitrate pollution.

Most of the problems with meat production are about scale. You can actually utilize the waste products of a 200 head herd of cattle, but 20,000 is an industrial waste site. Likewise, you can't pasture large scales of cattle, and feedlots intensify things like methane emissions, etc.

Rotating crops is a solution to the depletion. The main reason that soy and corn are grown so heavily is subsidy

... all of which you have to do when growing plants you then feed to animals, too, so it's still an apples-to-apples comparison.

1)Most land used for animals is not suitable for development.

2)most water used is captured rain water

3)lots of feed is byproduct

4)These animals provide fertilizer and natural tilling of the ground

5) the carbon footprint of raising cattle or other animals is infinitesimally small.

Practices that make it more environmentally friendly (ie no giant feces and urine ponds) could be either mandated or encouraged.

Animals are used more for just meat. Hide is used for products. Poop is used for fertilizer. Pig urine is used to reduce carbon emissions in 18 wheelers. Etc etc

Trying to remove a major food staple is idiotic. There could be ramifications that are not known to us for doing this. Just like people trying to get rid of mosquitoes. We don’t have the entire ecosystem mapped out where we can make these changes without consequence.

I agree it's not surprising but this not a convincing point. I'd expect "plants" to mean very different things in A and B. Not the same plants, not the same quality requirements... I'd expect almost everything to be different between plants-for-humans and plants-for-animals agriculture.

It is not different. The plants are different, but the energy spent is not that different.

Plants grow from seeds, take water and sunlight to grow, etc, regardless of the type of plant or the eventual use thereof.

Use weird pesticides on plants you're growing to feed to animals, and not only do said weird pesticides end up in the water supply that's used for other plants being grown to feed to humans, but also they end up in the animals to which you feed the plants, and therefore in the resultant meat. So when pesticides are banned, they tend to be banned for all uses, not just "plants grown for humans" uses.

99% of plant species are not suitable for human consumption, whereas 99% of animal species can be safely consumed by humans. And as for the remaining 1% of plant species that humans do eat, you will find that if you cut them out of your diet you will see remarkable health improvements.

Who said it is surprising? It's useful to confirm one's assumptions with actual data, which is what this article is doing.

Its not surprising at all once you think about it, but most people have not thought deeply about it.

I posted the quote because I feel like the article's title is click-bait, and has the implied conclusion that plant based "fake meats" are not sustainable, when the opposite is true... real meat is not sustainable.

It’s surprising because it’s dead wrong. Watch Allen Savory’s Ted talk.

Unfortunately, Option A and Option B are not equivalent though.

That's the point

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