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Comment by chrchr | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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

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.

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