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Comment by banDeveloper | Hacker News Reader

The real problem is majority of crops being grown for animal agriculture, which is an extremely wasteful way of producing food. We'd only need a fraction of the farmlands if we were actually eating the crops we grow. Sadly, we can't count on consumers making rational choices and politicians are not going to tank their popularity by pushing for these changes. It's the same as climate change.

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> which is an extremely wasteful way of producing food.

Depends on what you are optimizing for.

As a farmer, I can make more money growing crops for human consumption. It is the most logical business model. But the real world is a harsh mistress and the nature of... nature means that is isn't realistic to grow the same crops over and over and over again. Disease, soil health, etc. requires crop rotation to sustain a viable farm.

Now the problem of equipment and markets. While I could theoretically introduce more human foods into the rotation, those human foods aren't compatible with the equipment I have. Nor is there a local market for them. This means more heavy iron, more trucking, more fuel, more fertilizer (no animals to help provide it), etc. Is that not a waste?

I primary grow food for humans, but every 2-4 years (depending on the quality of the farmland) in my rotation a field will get a crop destined for animal consumption to address soil health and disease/pest control most particularly. If there is a way to avoid this without simply trading for waste somewhere else, I'm all ears. I'd be happy to grow nothing but human food.

Agriculture is already excessively optimized to a fault, so it seems likely that we have already found what is least wasteful overall. Of course, if you want to minimize a specific waste to the detriment of others then no doubt the calculus changes.

Thanks for making food. I'm a fan. Like Bloomberg's statement about how easy it is to grow crops, you spend enough time in a city and you're prone to start thinking food grows on trees, pun intended.

One of the things I've realized as I've gotten older is that parts of the economy I don't understand are rarely as wasteful as they might appear. Waste is super expensive and no one likes wasting money. The people growing alfalfa know exactly why they're doing it. It's pretty great we can regenerate the soil and feed some cattle at the same time, isn't that kind of sustainable thing the goal?

I'm not sure what you mean by not making rational choices?

People have a preference for meat. Rationality doesn't say what your preferences should be, it just helps you satisfy them.

I mean thinking about long term consequences of their actions and making a choice that leads to the best outcome for the society at large. You're right in saying people have a preference, but the way you say it makes it seem like that's all their is to it, as if people's dietary choices have no broader impact.

People have a preference for meat post huge subsidies, which essentially makes the preference mean nothing whatsoever. If people prefer meat when it's not subsidised, then sure, what the hell, let them have it.

Farming and subsidies go hand in hand. I'm from the midwest. Whether it's growing food in the first place or leaving a field fallow in another, a subsidy is probably involved.

This is a good thing. Farming is very tough business and I would rather keep these guys in business because I like eating quite a bit.

People would still farm without subsidies.

First: they are growing some crops now already that are not subsidised.

Second: a general drop in subsidies will mostly just result in lower land rents. The reward for farm labour will stay roughly the same, because it's mostly set by the general equilibrium in the wider labour market.

Beyond patronage, one of the primary goals of ag subsidies is to prevent farm land from being converted to non-farmland. This effectively increases the ability to comparatively quickly put more crop acres there if for some reason (e.g., weather, war, etc) we need to increase supply. Without subsidies it's likely that the lower land rent would cause more fields to be converted to other purposes and we'd run this a bit leaner (i.e., more in accordance to the market on some shorter time horizon). There's also always an element of keeping more expensive ag in country than relying solely on imports.

I don't know how strong this effect would be, but I've heard these arguments a lot. A good deal of early EU politics were measures to make sure that liberalized trade didn't just result in the French agricultural industry vanishing.

Yes, that argument is common, but it doesn't mean that it holds water.

If you actually wanted to ensure a steady food supply, you'd use subsidies that directly target that.

Eg instead of subsidising actual production of a few specific crops, you'd have subsidies that reward being able to produce eg lots of calories in a field on short notice. (And every year, you'd challenge a random selection of recipients to produce the promised calories on short notice. Of course, if you use that land for already for actual production, that's fine.)

You'd also reward people to stockpile lots of canned food, I guess?

> A good deal of early EU politics were measures to make sure that liberalized trade didn't just result in the French agricultural industry vanishing.

Yes, but that's more of a function of the power of the agricultural lobby, than any rational policy.

They should actually focus on things that have the biggest impact on climate change, and that's certainly not Meat production, but Oil and gas.

Stop chasing that most visible way to fight climate change rather than the most effective one.

We can do multiple things to address climate change at the same time. My proposition is to slowly redirect all the animal agriculture subsidies elsewhere. Animal products going up in price by 3 - 10 fold would surely decrease consumption.

The questions is do people actually want less meat? If they don't then we simply shouldn't do it

You shouldn't aim to make people life's worse, rather one should fix climate change in the least disruptive way possible, which is basically focusing on the infrastructure.

As a meat eater (with no intention of changing) I fully agree.

How we produce meat is an extremely wasteful way of producing food. Changing this would free up tons of farm ground, water and fertilizer.

Do you have a more sustainable way to produce meat in mind? Ethics aside, the addition of another trophic level makes meat production necessarily less efficient than that of an equivalent amount of plants.

If I had an easy way I'd be a hero and likely pretty rich.

I'm excited about vat grown protein (not plant based) over the long term, but in the short term I think we would get some traction from eating less feedlot grain fed meat and more free range grazed meat that could use less desirable land to produce.

It is climate change.

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