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Comment by eloff | Hacker News Reader

When this technology finally gets there, and I see no reason to think it won't eventually, it will change the world so dramatically. The amount of land and water we won't need to raise animals or food for animals it's staggering. The amount of meat the world consumes will double by the end of the century (will it? I made that up). As the world gets richer, people eat more meat. Combine that with a rising population and the amount of land we need for livestock dwarfs the remaining agricultural land we'll need (again, I made that up, but it could be true.)

We could rewild huge parts of the Earth, returning the habitat to nature.

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> We could rewild huge parts of the Earth

Probably not without radically changing how we grow plants for human consumption, assuming we still eat plants and don't move to an all-meat diet.

Looking over the data for the area I farm, according to government figures, 36% of the cropland is used for animal food. Most farmers here grow a rotation of soybeans, corn, edible beans, and wheat. The edible beans and wheat are intended for direct human consumption. I couldn't find an exact breakdown for soybean use, but on my farm ~60% of the soybeans are intended for direct human consumption and ~40% for animal consumption. I imagine that is not atypical. Corn is primarily intended for animal consumption.

A little back of the napkin math and you get somewhere around 35% of the output after a four year rotation on my farm being intended for animal consumption, which is effectively what the real world data also shows.

The rotation is important to maintaining soil health and keeping disease at bay. I don't see that going away, save further technical advancement, so you'd probably just see the corn shift to something like biofuels if animals weren't eating it to maintain the rotation to grow the human food.

> you get somewhere around 35%

That still has to be in the millions or billions of acres globally. No?

I think the rest of what that post is saying is that 35% is an important part of soil maintenance (ie avoiding another dust bowl). Though I do think with testing we should still be able to drastically reduce the amount of land needed, though likely not exactly 1:1 with previous animal consumption.

Billions, it would appear. But that doesn't necessarily mean that billions of acres can be taken out of service.

While local conditions don't perfectly extrapolate to the world, remember that 100% of my acres grow human food when observed over the span of more than one year. The 35% animal food production seen in a single year is the outcome of the crop rotation.

Certainly, I'd be far more profitable if I could reliably grow beans for human consumption over and over and over, but Mother Nature is a harsh mistress.

What do you use for fertilizer today, and where does it come from? Is there a scaling concern there, as well?

There's a "running out" concern for phosphate.

Technically it can be extracted from the same seawater it's running off into, but IIRC that hasn't been demonstrated in a cheap enough way yet.

Lab grown meat combined with bacteria tank flours - looking forward to it

Soybeans are crushed, meaning the oil and protein are separated. The major crushers are ADM, Bunge, and Cargill. The protein is then toasted into flakes for better animal digestion, and sold to milling operations of meat producers (e.g Smithfield foods). The oil is sold to consumers as soybean oil in most of the world, and marketed as vegetable oil in the US. Hunt-Wesson is the biggest soybean oil buyer in the US.

Your split of 60/40 human/animal split for soybeans is accurate on a calorie basis. I just though I would add some color as to why it is the case… the beans are split.

> Soybeans are crushed ... The oil is sold to consumers as soybean oil in most of the world, and marketed as vegetable oil in the US.

That's the 40% I referred to. Crushers, while generally less profitable, are a better fit for my poorer ground. I lumped this in as animal food to keep things simple, but you're right that there is also human uses. You could write books about the subject if you want to capture all the details and nuance.

The 60% are food grade (IP) soybeans, which generally end up as things like tofu, soy milk, along with other foods where the soybean seeds are eaten whole (more common in Asian countries). I was growing 100% IP soybeans for a while, but as mentioned before wasn't having much luck on my poor ground so had to introduce some less resource intensive crushers into the mix to keep things sustainable.

Ah interesting. I’ve never known anyone who grows IP beans because the farmers I know are in NC which is a meat state.

Are IP beans kept moist or sold dry?

Dry, and strictly so. At least for the market I sell in they must be between 11% and 14.5% moisture off the combine (must be naturally dried).

If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture ... and 77% of it is used for livestock: meat and dairy

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use

More than three-quarters (77%) of global soy is fed to livestock for meat and dairy production. Most of the rest is used for biofuels, industry or vegetable oils. Just 7% of soy is used directly for human food products such as tofu, soy milk, edamame beans, and tempeh.

https://ourworldindata.org/soy

We could also just eat grassfed beef instead of feeding animals soy.

That would require even more land since a given amount of land can grow fewer calories of grass than soy.

> Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture ...

While true, we are talking about cropland, not agriculture land (e.g. pastures). Nowhere near 50% of the world's land area is suitable for cropland.

Yes, it is ... simply deforest more land for our animals ... we could fatten ourselves so much more ;)

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use

Your own link suggests that only 23% of agricultural lands are suitable for cropland.

Not suitable, but used for plant-based food.

Other arable land is used for animal feed production, and together with grazing land represents the other 77% of agriculture land (37 mil. km2), which supplies only 18% of global calories and 37% of proteins.

Those 23% (11 mil. km2) of agriculture land, crop land, is currently producing 82% of global calories and 63% of proteins.

https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2020/01/Global-land-use-g...

> Other arable land is used for animal feed production, and together with grazing land represents the other 77% of agriculture land

Right, and since we're only talking about cropland, that 77% has no relevance to the discussion. That it keeps coming up is rather bizarre. Indeed, if you keep pounding a square peg into a round hold hard enough it may eventually go in, but one sure does look silly for doing it in the first place.

That 77% CONTAINS crop land.

https://www.renewmethod.com/post/what-is-arable-land

"Arable land is classified as land that can be plowed for the purpose of growing crops."

Please, look at the graph one more time.

Arable land includes meadows, pastures, etc. Animals can (and do) eat from those lands, but cropland is more specific. Your weird tangent has no relevance.

> Probably not without radically changing how we grow plants for human consumption ...

Wrong.

> ~60% of the soybeans are intended for direct human consumption and ~40% for animal consumption. I imagine that is not atypical

Wrong.

> around 35% of the output ... for animal consumption, which is effectively what the real world data also shows ...

Wrong.

> Nowhere near 50% of the world's land area is suitable for cropland.

Wrong.

> Your own link suggests that only 23% of agricultural lands are suitable for cropland.

Wrong.

> Arable land includes meadows, pastures, etc. Animals can (and do) eat from those lands, but cropland is more specific

Wrong (in the context of) https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2020/01/Global-land-use-g...

> Your weird tangent ...

It's called logic. I give up.

You're the only one in this discussion talking about crop land. To focuse solely on crop land and ignore pastures is misleading.

> Eloff: ... won't need to raise animals or food for animals ... we could rewild huge parts of the Earth

> randomdata: probably not ... 36% of the cropland is used for animal food ...

Even if we kept all the arable land for human consumption (to compensate for missing meat, assuming the lab-grown meat will take some time to scale) we'd have 3.3 billion hectares of pastures to rewild/reforest. Or we could reforest those 35% of arable land we use for growing animal feed and instead use a fraction of pastures for nuts/fruit production.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-pasture

Forests cover 40 mil. km2, and animal agriculture takes 37 mil. km2. Majority of plant-based foods is produced on 11 mil. km2. By switching to plant-based we could increase forest cover from 40 mil. km2 to 70+ mil. km2.

"We might even address the very real disaster scenarios presently threatening the world with questions like these: "What if you could make a simple and compassionate change in your life that would increase available farmland, increase available clean water, reduce rainforest destruction, reduce greenhouse gas production, reduce the threat from antibiotic-resistant bacteria, decrease land and waterway pollution, prevent creation of ocean dead zones, end your participation in the deaths of sentient individuals and increase overall human health by switching to a plant-based diet? Would you do it?” This is the reality we actually live in, and this is the choice each one of us faces."

https://yourveganfallacyis.com/en/vegans-would-eat-meat-on-a...

OFF-TOPIC: we should reforest some deserts/barren areas as well

> As the world gets richer, people eat more meat.

Living in central Berlin (Mitte), one of the most expensive parts of the city, it feels the opposite is happening.

Everything here is vegan or vegetarian at least.

Even a steak place next door to where I live has vegan plates.

On that note: it made me sad that all the dramatic changes you listed omitted the suffering of animals.

What it feels like and the story the data tell are two different things. The data is unambiguous, the richer the country, the higher the per-capita meat consumption. Meat consumption in the world is rising rapidly.

That's because you're likely part of the disconnected 1%, even if you're nowhere near that relative to others in your country.

People think of robber barons twirling the mustaches when they picture the 1%, but for global topics, the 1% even includes people who are considered "poor" by western standards.

And, like the robber barons twirling mustaches people picture for their local 1%, you can't extrapolate any good data off of them.

People in the west are so wealthy that choosing to be vegan has become a status symbol, but when you hear "world gets richer", you need to be picturing people who can't afford a choice.

Both my parents grew up in villages where beef was like a few-times-a-year luxury, and of course as their villages have gotten more and more modernized, newer generations can't even imagine such a thing.

Now their country has KFCs...

I think you misread my comment. It was meant exactly as written. "It feels". It is factually not so and I didn't contest the OPs assertion.

However, many things that are now common where adapted by the broad populace because they wanted to copy/be as fancy as the 1%.

On of the most prominent examples is probably the British accent. ;)

I think you misread mine. It's explaining why you can feel that way while OPs assertion is true. It's not claiming you contested anything.

You feel that way because you're disconnected from the poor being referenced by "living in central Berlin"

There is no suffering necessarily involved in the raising of animals for meat. A cow raised for beef does not suffer, for instance.

Sounds like eating real meat is going to become a wealthy person thing.

I think you're overestimating that, probably because of vegan propaganda. Eg. A lot of the water you use for animals turns into milk or pee (or sweat?), and goes back to the cycle of water.

I don't like posting videos but this one goes through several points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGG-A80Tl5g

Literally no one worth a mention was saying the animal slaughter industry adds or removes water from the water cycle in meaningful quantities. The issue with their water usage is in the redirection of the limited fresh water sources into the virtually unlimited saltwater oceans, or pollutes it beyond the point of usability for any form of life.

The limit on fresh water is a local problem. Maybe that's an issue in California during dry years, but not in North Carolina or Iowa, which are subject to completely different rainfall patterns.

And one of the problems in California is how much water almonds use.

Yup, drupes and nuts account for about 10% of California's water usage, behind only domestic animal agriculture (~30%) and feed exported for foreign animal agriculture (~15%).

None of these belong in the desert, if anywhere.

But neither of those places has the diversity or scale of California’s agricultural system—it’s one of the most reliable suppliers of the food on America’s plate. And that’s why California’s water problem is a local problem for most Americans.

Only if it's cheaper.

They said the same thing about plant based meat - and it hasn't because it's more expensive.

Pretty sure it's not more expensive. People that are willing to buy vegan are just generally richer and more likely to be able to spend more. Thus the prices are artificially inflated by market segmentation.

At least where I'm from the companies make way more profit from their vegan substitutes then their equivalent meat products.

I agree that making the same volume of food is probably cheaper if you're processing vegan only ingredients - but if you look at the amount of nutrients / $, vegan substitutes are nowhere close to meat

That's honestly highly unlikely.

These animals consume the same products the vegan alternatives are made with... for months or years, depending on the animal.

It might be true in places without massive animal farms, but that's usually connected to more human attention which would make it even more unlikely.

> These animals consume the same products the vegan alternatives are made with...

How many people are living off of grass?

the quantity of animals is way too high for them to be fed with grass, as that would turn into a logistical nightmare.

It's usually a special feed, which is composed of corn, often bones and other substances.

That animals convert grass and plants in general to meat is undeniable. But I think the issue is, livestock is generally fed with human grown plants, which could be fed directly to humans and save a lot of energy (food and water) wasted in the process, because the amount of calories, for example, that you take off meat is nowhere near the calories contained in the food the animal consumed during its lifetime. Now, regarding if nutrients are missing from a plants only diet, that's another matter.

Plant based meats are

1) Still not real meat, hence is only considered by a limited target consumer

2) Is still relatively new to the mass-market. Hence still isn't at it's lowest price point.

My understanding is that subsidies also drive down the cost of meat quite drastically.

They could market this like crazy to the eco-conscious crowd.

To add to the other points being made... meat is subsidized and doesn't include the cost of the externalities. It's hard to imagine that in the long run, plant based meat or lab grown meat will be more expensive than growing, feeding, and looking after animals.

Agreed. Lobbies won't let the current system go for a very long time.

If Tobacco industry can hang on, Meat industry is not going away any time soon. Also a change of this kind can come only gradually, if at all.

We can't just tell all the farmers to go and take a Python bootcamp.

Growing meat in an ultra-sterile environment using complex biologics, some of which the current source is to extract them from animals. I’d bet on fusion becoming mainstream first.

From first principles, it should be eventually.

I doubt it, considering the demographic problems and the end of globalization, we’re likely to see about two billion people starve in most of our lifetimes, mostly in East Asia. It’s going to be a rough ride.

I don't see that happening. I see the opposite of that happening.

People have been predicting this mass starvation of poor people in X parts of the world since before even Paul R. Ehrlich opened his mouth. In his book "the population bomb" he claimed it would be because of overpopulation. Now that we've seen trends indicating all the opposite on that front, the new fad is apparently blaming it on climate change.

Either way, forgive me for being extremely doubtful. While its true that past catastrophes averted are no guarantee of future catastrophes averted, modern history has shown a remarkable tendency towards people heading off the worst of a given doom scenario before it becomes reality. Add to that the observable tendency of people to emotionally be attracted to particularly awful predictions even if their behavior indicates them as believing otherwise in practice, and the the skepticism about most doom scenarios like the one you mention is a good idea.

All data in our world today across the board indicates improving human standards of living and this has been going on for a long time. No concrete evidence shows a trend in the opposite direction to anywhere near a severe enough degree to assert the starvation of billions, or even millions. Problems exist, sure, and there are many dangerous environmental trends, but even these don't concretely establish anything like what you describe.

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