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Comment by graycat | Hacker News Reader

Ah, my father in law was a farmer, grew wheat, corn, soy beans, but sometimes raised chickens. Along with the corn, when he fed the chickens anchovies from Chile he noticed rapid growth, called the little fish a growth factor.

Wellllll, long before his growth factor, we assumed we knew what a good balanced diet for chickens was. Then, presto, bingo, the issue was what barrels of fish, soy beans, ..., to feed the chickens to provide the diet for minimum cost. Right: Linear programming, the "diet problem", applied math in farming!

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>soy beans, ..., to feed the chickens to provide the diet for minimum cost.

Which points to the irony of all this. The real goal of the “project” is not better nutrition or more efficient farming, is a marketable product. You want to know how to make it more nutritious, cheaper, sustainable, healthier and efficient? Eliminate animal farming and feed humans directly.

> You want to know how to make it more nutritious, cheaper, sustainable, healthier and efficient? Eliminate animal farming and feed humans directly

I hear that a lot.

Apart fom the nutritional benefits of eating meat, notr every place in the world is suitable to the sort of cropping required.

Where I live the land is well suited for grazing sheep, and not well suited for cropping

Cattle crammed into feed lots is a sad thing, I am not advocating it. I am advocating an approach sensitive to the needs of the land and people

>not every place in the world is suitable to the sort of cropping required.

That would be relevant if the livestock were grassfed but in the modern world where Soybeans from brazil are shipped to UK to feed cattle or From USA to Australia to feed pigs that doesn’t seem to be a problem.

Soybeans is pretty much one of the best crops for feeding animals because it fixates all the nitrogen it needs, unlike 95% of other grain crops. The only thing more efficient to grow fertilizer wise is alfalfa, which is what most cows are fed, but would not be any good for feeding pigs or chickens because it is hard to digest like grass.

Animals are grass fed around me. There is some supplementary feeding, but mostly hay made in summer for winter.

The economics of farming do not stack up, here, with feed from off the farm.

Mostly sheep, a smattering of beef.

What most people tend to forget is the scale of factory farming. About 30,000,000 cows 130,000,000 pigs and 8,000,000,000 chickens are killed yearly in the US alone. You can imagine that they cannot be just grassfed besides the fact that pigs and chickens do not eat grass so they are fed soy that could fed to humans, animals are not magic machines that turn air into food, the only thing capable of converting nitrogen water and sunlight into protein are plants, any step in the middle generate loses, animals need energy for their vital processes so the rate of conversion of fed-to-edible calories is aprox. Poultry:11% pigs:10% Beef:1%

(I could cite the sources if anyone wish to investigate more) All this is just the efficiency aspect of it, let’s pretend they don’t need water or create any waste.

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