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Comment by hx8 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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...

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