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Comment by wyldberry | Hacker News Reader

There will eventually be a holy war in the comments about how plant based will save us if only we get rid of animals and just mono-crop the world continuing to destroy the soil and biodiversity of the planet in the name of more calories.

There are alternatives that are shown to both provide enough calories, sequester more carbon than created, and steward land to mimic the natures natural cycles.

https://whiteoakpastures.com/pages/environmental-sustainabil... https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50249804-sacred-cow

There's so much more in play than calories when it comes to our relationship to food and the natural world.

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I feel like this is a strawman. I've never met a vegan who wants to "get rid of the animals and just mono-crop the world". Most people advocating plant-based diets, that I've seen, have argued that plant-based diets will lead to less land being used for agriculture and livestock.

Also lets not pretend that 900 million cattle [1] is a boon to biodiversity. In Point Reyes, Tule Elk are being edged out by cattle farmers, for example [2]:

Now she learned that a free-roaming herd of elk had been wandering onto park ranchlands, upsetting cattle ranchers who run cows on leases that cover a third of the seashore’s acreage. The ranchers wanted the elk fenced away from their cows. Oppenheim went home that night and plunged down an internet rabbit hole, reading warnings from environmental groups that the National Park Service (NPS), which manages Point Reyes National Seashore, might shoot the offending animals.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/263979/global-cattle-pop...

[2] https://www.hcn.org/articles/wildlife-the-battle-over-point-...

And more evidence that cattle are a risk to Tule elk, and likely overall biodiversity:

Small numbers of tule elk in Point Reyes have tested positive for Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis or "MAP", a wasting disease known as Johne's Disease. The bacteria was apparently transmitted by dairy cattle or spraying of cattle manure on pasturelands. In 2016 more tule elk tested positive after being euthanized so that their gut tissue could be analyzed. Cattle transmitted the disease to the Tomales Point elk herd shortly after they were first established there in 1978.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tule_elk#Historic_range_and_cu...

No one ever outright says "get rid of animals and mono-crop the world" but that is the reality of what it would take to feed humans on plant based at scale world-wide based on thermodynamics in general. Finding unbiased sources and well-designed studies is hard. When you dig into the research, often you will find that what is written about doesn't match the research.

It's quite clear that you can live a healthy life with most calories from plants in some capacity. It's also quite clear that you can do the same with animals. Where it gets dicey is when we get into the specifics about farming methodologies, sustainability, and ethics.

This is why i linked to white-oak pastures to give an example of regenerative agriculture practices that are proven to work. What's important is that when we talk about animal consumption that there's a ton of sins by the cattle industry specifically that need to be corrected. Moving to a regenerative agriculture method will lower their profits quite a bit, and they often find it helps their message to misdirect towards the "plant-based" (overloaded term) crowd..

The current battle in Montana between Bison restoration and ranchers versus the cattle industry is a great example [1][2] of how cattle industry behaves. Bison restoration and Bison ranching has taken off in Montana and Idaho. There is abig push to try and restore the natural grasslands and grass species that the Bison grazed on to improve the ecology of the area as a whole. Cattle are not compatible with that plan (imo) in Montana. However, bison are ruminant animals which are the linchpins for keeping the soil healthy enough to grow crop without large petroleum inputs (fertilizer). So 900 million cattle may not be a boon on their own, but if we put environment appropriate ruminants (goats, sheep etc) in the same places we can still perform regenerative agriculture.

This topic leans towards heavy nerd snipes because there's so many rabbit holes to go down. For example:

of the land that is used for grazing animals, how much of that is suitable for farming the big three (wheat, corn, soy)?

Assume that every human is capable of getting enough calories to survive: Are they getting enough bio-available nutrition to meet the minimum needs? What about to perform closer to an optimum of mental and physical capacity?

What does it really mean to be nutrient dense? Are we actually able to extract all the nutrients? What about if we started consuming organs again instead of just ribeyes?

[1]https://apnews.com/article/health-environment-and-nature-bus... [2]http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/2/19/yellowstone-...

I don’t support exhaustive mono cropping, but without reading a book, is plants vs animals really the issue?

You seem to have frame it as “land destroying plant only farming” vs “animal and land friendly mixed use” which seems like a false dichotomy. What’s wrong with plant based + rotating crops and sustainable use?

(I eat meat, fwiw)

The essential issue here is that for typical land you can produce more food with plants than you can with animals. Animals act as an extra 'processing' step for food production. Imagine the food chain for eating a plant vs eating an animal. The extra step is highly inefficient by a lot of metrics, but humans have a major diet preference for eating beef/pork/chicken.

Plant -> Person

Plant -> Farm Animal -> Human

Edit: My goal is to explain the basics of the argument that the parent comment was unfamiliar with, not to advocate.

Err. I might be misunderstanding. Don’t you agree with my counter argument to GP?

You’re saying animals are extra steps and I’m saying both plant alone or mixed use could be sustainable?

It really depends on a lot of other inputs. The word sustainable implies planning over centuries or longer, and we just don't know what the population will look like over time, or what their dietary preferences will be. These things change over time.

There are worrying signs. Maybe the largest is the amount of deforestation happening to support the growing beef industry and feedstock for animal agriculture [0].

[0] https://www.worldwildlife.org/magazine/issues/summer-2018/ar...

The over simplification here is that not all plants are equal and not all soils and/or climes can support all plants. So for soils or climes that can only really grow "weeds" that are inedible to humans, if you put them through an animal (specifically a ruminant), then it converts biomass that is inedible to edible for humans.

The effect of this on your diagrams is in diagram 2, with the intermediate farm animal, there are many situations in that scenario where the calories from those plants would be entirely lost, not simply rerouted losslessly to human consumption.

This is such small portion of all meat on the market, it really shouldn't factor into the discussion for how to feed a population.

You know this how? Have you done a calculation?

It seems to me that there are many grassy hills that cannot be farmed using tractors and to farm them using hand tools is too labor-intensive.

That's a great question. It's actually hard to get this type of data. I once tried to calculate something adjacent by looking at feedstock production, but actually a lot of feedstock is used for 'biofuel'.

My knowledge comes from exposure to the agricultural industry. You might be able to find some animals grazing on a grassy hill, but that doesn't scale. In addition, most NA climates don't support year long grazing.

The issue is not plants vs animals. It's the messaging and misinformation around "plant/animal-based" terminology. People align very strongly one way or the other because of an intersection of morality with strongly held cultural beliefs. Then they advocate, one way or the other, and fund studies designed to show their outcomes. Food is a space very, very fraught with intentional misinformation.

This fundamentally ignores a bunch of realities around land quality, thermodynamics, and nutrition bio-availability.

Generally what's wrong with (everything in the nutrtition and fitness space) that the terms are overloaded to mean whatever it is the person speaking it deems at the time. Example: Paul Saladino (carnivoreMD) touts an animal based diet. Then when you dig into what he really recommends for eating is animal products + fruits and plants that have limited defense chemicals that can cause (for some people) disruptions in their life.

The position i advocate for is regenerative agriculture where we sequester more carbon by using the animals to mimic the natural grazing cycles and provide fertilizer for plants. This is incredibly important because in order to produce crop yields like we do, we require massive amounts of fertilizer, which requires petroleum inputs to create which gets us back to thermodynamics. To do crop rotation appropriately in a sustainable way, you need ruminant animals.

It's a complex topic that I invite everyone to spend some time taking a look at because there's really big money in meat production as well as artificial meat production that have a vested interest in winning you over.

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