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Comment by Gordonjcp | Hacker News Reader

Or consuming terrifying amounts of energy and resources, when you can put a cow in a field until it's big enough to eat.

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97%[0] of cows are finished on feedlots, i.e. get a substantial amount of calories from corn and other feed. Other animals like pigs are exclusively fed feed. Animal factory farming already consumes a terrifying amount of resources, using up a lot of the plant agriculture that we do.

[0] https://littlecreekmontana.shop/blogs/ranch-blog/food-for-th...

86%[0] of livestock feed is inedible by humans. They consume forage, food-waste and crop residues that could otherwise become an environmental burden. 13% of animal feed consists of potentially edible low-quality grains, which make up a third of global cereal (not total crop) production. All US beef cattle spend the majority of their life on pasture and upcycle protein even when grain-finished (0.6 to 1).

[0]http://www.fao.org/ag/againfo/home/en/news_archive/2017_More...

A lot of inedible feed is going to be stuff like alfalfa, which is specifically grown as feed and whose farming has massive negative effects like starving the Colorado river of water [0].

[0]https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/12/colorado...

Then we need to reassess water-use and water rights and let the market sort itself out. Make alfalfa farmers pay for water and send the cost down the value chain. Consumers will signal how much they are willing to pay, and producers will respond by reducing their supply.

Along the lines of letting the market sort it out, we could vote for the government to end meat subsidies, or generalize them into protein subsidies available to alternative proteins.

I agree - currently a lot of farmers have essentially unlimited water rights, and they should pay the true price of water.

It's very easy to say "we should stop growing this and feeding it to animals, and grow that instead and feed it to humans", but it's a lot harder to make that work in reality.

Not everything grows particularly well in a given location.

>crop residues that could otherwise become an environmental burden

Could is doing a lot of work here, especially because someone might quickly read this as would. This statistic makes it seem like 36% of non-forage inedibles can only be processed by livestock, but there isn't evidence for that.

If you work out how to eat straw and bean stalks, and tough heathery grasses, then you've got a real moneyspinner on your hands.

>eat

This is exactly what I mean - the statistic has convinced you of some unwritten law that says that only livestock or humans can eat this stuff. Since humans can't, it has to go to livestock.

But you're completely ignoring that processing these inedibles doesn't have to come in the form of eating them - we can make compost, building materials, packaging. Just because something is doesn't mean it ought to.

You can't really make packaging materials from tough cellulose-y things like bean stalks because mice eat it, you can't really make building materials from it because it goes on fire, and because it's tough and made of cellulose it doesn't really break down well in a compost heap.

Do you know what composts that stuff like crazy, though?

Feeding it to cows.

And even better, it reduces methane and carbon dioxide emissions, because you're turning all that carbon into cows instead of just letting bacteria emit it as gas.

>And even better, it reduces methane and carbon dioxide emissions, because you're turning all that carbon into cows instead of just letting bacteria emit it as gas.

Cows don't work as carbon sinks if you're killing them every 2 years to eat them. You're just reintroducing that carbon in the form of sewage, transportation, and food waste. They need to be allowed to live all 20 years of their lives for the carbon efficiency argument to work. This necessitates (1) massively reducing the population of livestock by ceasing breeding (otherwise it's hurting any gains with carbon storage in the soil) and (2) finding alternative uses for the inedible byproducts of plant agriculture.

Nothing really works as a carbon sink in the long term.

Bear in mind that cows do not actually generate carbon - as with humans, they just move it around.

You know cows are ruminants and people aren't right?

That's why we don't eat grass. Because it doesn't feed us. But it feeds cows.

Finished, yeah, but most of their time they're on land that can't be farmed.

Pigs used to be fed swill but mad cows disease and foot and mouth put paid to that.

The finishing process changes the tase quite a bit. Some folks like the grain taste some like it grassy.

Blind taste-testing overwhelmingly favors feedlot-finished beef.

People used to eating grain-fed beef prefer grain-fed beef, yes.

Go out and find an isolated tribe who only eats occasional wild game. Serve them grain-finished beef and grass-fed beef. Do you actually believe they will choose grass-fed over grain-fed?

I prefer meat that has been fed only grass and never buy grain-fed meat. (I eat mostly lamb, not beef.) I prefer the taste and believe it is better for my health; in particular, the omega 6 fatty acids in grains and in grain-fed meat promotes chronic inflammation. (I don't buy grains either.)

That's your n=1 opinion and it doesn't change the reality of human preferences which are clearly documented in the literature. Even the overall health outcomes associated with grass-fed are not significantly different than grain-fed. The tissue composition may be different, but not health-outcomes.

Imagine thinking modern factory farming is anything as simple as “putting a cow in a field”.

I don't think the expectation is the replicate the horrid factory farming system.

Traditional farming and cattle ranching still exists!

Huge portions of the midwest are used nigh exclusively for cattle grazing. Yes they spend the end of their lives in close quarters eating a lot, but they're not generally being birthed in those environments.

Imagine thinking modern factory farming is the only way to go about things. It really can be as simple as putting a cow in a field with grass and water. My family has been doing it for 150 years.

And that scales for the 32 million cows consumed in America per year? https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/animal-products/cattle-beef/...

imagine thinking this is possible at the scale required to satiate humanities appetite for meat.

It can be, but the reality is that it largely isn’t. You can refine your own iron if you’d like, but most people do not.

And yet that's where all the meat I eat comes from, and indeed most of the meat eaten in this country.

You are wildly mistaken if you believe traditional "cow does whatever it wants until slaughter" farming is where the majority[0] of meat comes from in this country (assuming USA).

[0] https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/us-factory-farming-estima...

I'm not in the USA. You haven't got any form of safe or ecologically sustainable farming in the US, and you need to fix that.

One cow is fine, it's when you try to put millions of cows out there and grow them as fast as possible that you get problems.

This is a nonsensical comment.

Culturing meat is entirely about minimizing resource and land usage, and curbing the serious environmental impacts of the beef industry, which is of course truly infamous for methane emissions and deforestation.

Personally, I doubt that. I strongly suspect that lab-grown meat is mostly about making lots of money selling it for high margins to vegetarians who still want to eat "meat".

Bingo.

I'm an agricultural researcher with a background that includes in vitro biology, now getting another degree focused on entire food systems. I have spent a lot of time looking into the economic realities of food innovation, land-use, energy, water, price-sensitivity, and consumer preferences.

There's nothing wrong with getting excited about lab-grown meat, but we have a loooong way to go before considering it as a realistic food source in the future.

One must consider the current price of food is grounded in the use of fossil fuels, ignoring negative externalities, and millennia of optimization.

To consider lab-grown meat as a future replacement of conventional animal production, you have to go way back to primary energy sources and work your way back from there. Chances are, you'll find that a hypothetical future of lab-grown meat is cost-prohibitive for basically the entire world.

I'm not here to argue the ethics, environmental damage, etc. Just pointing out the COST, and why consumer adoption should not be viewed through the lens of a six-figure salary programmer.

It's some revelation that capitalism is driving this? Shocker.

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