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Comment by pvaldes | Hacker News Reader

The big plot hole in this master plan that many people apparently can't see or accept. If we remove the production of meat, this will severely harm the production of vegetables. They are connected.

You can't have real agriculture without manure.

Fossil guano is a finite, scarce and very expensive resource, and human manure is not so desirable as replacement by several reasons so, how do they expect to feed their green miracle exactly?.

How efficient is the conversion food-to-meat is irrelevant if you omit half of the products obtained. This food also will turn into leather, milk, workforce and manure, so the calculus is flawed from the start.

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Dovecots [0] have been used for (likely) millenia. And, because of migration, the birds can ultimately bring nutrients in from disparate locations - as opposed to purely localally grazing livestock.

Per leathers: one, we don't have to completely eliminate cattle. Two, synthetics exist. Three, alternatives are being made/investigated [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dovecote [1] https://www.felsie.co.uk/ (and others, if you google around)

I have learned something new today (re manure from dovecotes).

However, I think this is another example of something that is 'just too small to matter' in terms of feeding the world's population today. Often I see 'nice' stories about e.g. using human waste to fertilise fields, that quite frankly do not (usually) scale at all well. We (UK) use tractors to shovel and spread manure - 10s, 100s of tons of the stuff - a dovecote or 10 really isn't going to help, and certainly won't be economic.

It seems a bit like someone telling me I should use an abacus to increase my compute power - 'they were a good idea in the past, why aren't you using them now?'

Most soil fertiliser today comes from fossil fuel. This was the whole Haber Bosch breakthrough. If we give up artificial fertiliser and need to use animal manure, that would not justify the unsustainable scale of livestock we have today. There are also alternative sustainable nutrient sources like compost and seaweed. I don't know how much manure can be replaced with alternatives but I don't think your point lets us conclude that we absolutely need a meat industry like the one that exists currently.

Seaweed has salt. I you put salt in a soil you will ruin it for agriculture. In the first years there are a few salt tolerant vegetables that you can still culture. After a while the accumulated salt will be just too much even for asparagus.

Compost can help. I don't know how much that would scale in any case.

Is true that we can produce some fertilizers chemically, but we need to invest huge amounts of energy for this; After Wikipedia >1% of all the energy that we humans use in the planet is spent just to make ammonia, and many of this is used to make urea. If I'm not wrong we need also natural gas to feed the process, so this energy came basically from non renewables. Is part of the solution but not a miracle cure.

You can't use manure of industrial farms in the fields, too much chemical compounds that can destroy your soil, killing fungi and bacterial life.

I think in my area they try to use manure to produce methane.

> You can't use manure of industrial farms in the fields, too much chemical compounds that can destroy your soil, killing fungi and bacterial life

Source? Preferably reputable

Most fresh manure can destroy the soil. Specially those from birds. Is advisable to dilute it or store it for some months before the use. This will remove many possible problems also with chemicals. Not all, but a lot of them.

This is plainly not accurate - manure from most aninals, especially pig farms, is a hazardous easte to dispose of. Only a small percentage of manure is reused as fertiliser because transporting it is expensive, and messy. Often it needs to be processed before it can be used safely. You can gooogle 'industrial farm US' and see pictures of ani als standing knee deep in their own poop. Also it is illegal to take photos of factory farms in some states.

We feed a lot of grains to aninals as feed. That food coupd be used to feed people. We could certainly downsize meat producting by 70% withiit any adverse impacts -most people eat way too mich meat

PS: There is some strange disbelief below, people think without manure cropping will bot work - this is plainly fanasyland - most of farmland never sees 'natural' fertiliser.

"A recent study by USDA, Economic Research Service identified opportunities for increasing the use of manure as a fertilizer. In 2020, farmers applied manure to less than 8 percent of the 240.9 million acres planted to seven major U.S. field crops."

In uk "In 2019, organic manure was applied to 26% of the area of tillage crops"

This is easilly accessible information.

Some people can only eat meat due to autoimmune issues exacerbated by vegetables. Are we going to sacrifice them?

Is this an argument made in good faith? The commentator said reduce meat consumption and that most people ate too much. They didn't say "ban it for everyone, let the autoimmune suffer"

I purposefully chose an extreme example to put it onto the radar of everyone pushing veganism everywhere. Also if you really study sustainability, you see that reducing meat production doesn't lead to better sustainability anyway.

If you reduce meat production, you'll hike up prices, likely pricing out those with autoimmune diseases that barely survive already. So technically you are true like in "you can still eat meat in theory", but in practice those folks won't be able. Now where is the good faith in that argument?

This is theoretical and not the case in practice. Meat companies are an Oligarchy in The United States which is the largest world meat producer. There are four massive meat companies and if they existed at the onset of anti-trust they would have been broken up long ago. The miracle of the market to competitively decide on a price relies on competitive market environments which do not exist in the largest meat market in the world, The US.

You're saying a lot of stuff and I'm going to need more evidence to be convinced as to your position. For what reason would meat prices increase if people ate less meat?

"eating less meat" != "sacrifice them"

How about this modus ponens chain: "eating less meat" -> "lowering meat production" -> "hiking up meat prices" -> "autoimmune sufferers unable to buy meat" -> "autoimmune sacrificed"

Deal with meat as with any kind of life saving medication in that case. There's already infrastructure for that.

Good Christ, did the parent comment suggest banning all meat?

None of our animals' waste is any hazard to you, unless you slip on it!

You are right that it can be done badly, as can many other things. I'd say you are actually arguing against badly regulated animal farming (especially since you mention the US), rather than animal farming per se.

Hydrogen sulfide is a common killer of farmers in Ireland.

Maybe 1 a year. And this is only emitted in dangerous quantities when the manure is being stirred prior to being removed from storage. So somewhat tangential to original point.

> manure from most aninals, especially pig farms, is a hazardous easte to dispose of. Only a small percentage of manure is reused as fertiliser because transporting it is expensive, and messy

You'd need to cite some sources for that. And explain where the millions of tons of animal manure go.

Here in Northern Europe 100% of manure from housed animals is used, either spread as manure or, increasingly, used for biomethane

> Here in Northern Europe 100% of manure from housed animals is used,

That's the wrong statistics to look it - 100% of waste coffee is used. They already have it, good management will figure out a way to use it.

But you cannot make an argument that we have to keep drinking coffee because fertiliser industry will collapse without waste coffee.

There are thousands of studies about impacts of intensive animal faming on landscape, economy, health and society in general, they are all negative. This was settled like 40 years ago.

I have no idea why you are taking about coffee.

You said

> Only a small percentage of manure is reused as fertiliser because transporting it is expensive, and messy

That's straight up false, for Northern Europe anyway.

Can confirm. It's the norm up here. Wikipedia says the practice was imported from the US after WW2.

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