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Comment by titmouse | Hacker News Reader

I've seen suggestions that livestock can actually be a key component to carbon sequestration, if done correctly. I think it was mentioned in the documentary Kiss the Ground, narrated by Woody Harrelson, but I may be wrong. I believe the gist was that no-till farming and managed grazing helps to save the topsoil, sequester more carbon dioxide, and make something like cattle farming effectively carbon-negative (ie, they're actually helping to mitigate climate change). I'd recommend watching if you haven't, it shows some compelling examples such as a farmer who's the only one in his area farming this way, and he's also the only one who's having successful harvests while being environmentally conscious.

Also, farmed livestock don't automatically exist in a "living hell". Factory farms, yeah, but a properly-managed ranch should have happy, healthy animals.

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> make something like cattle farming effectively carbon-negative

The situations in which this is the case (which are oversimplified by the doc) are so specific and small scale that to think they will address the environmental impact without acknowledging the insane, unsustainable demand for meat is magical thinking. People love to point to ideas like this and stuff like feeding cows seaweed to avoid the reality of the dire need for significant shifts in our consumption behaviors.

> but a properly-managed ranch should have happy, healthy animals.

again - the percentage of meat that comes from these conditions is so small as to be virtually irrelevant in the context of the animal agriculture industry

That's what they said about solar power but year after year the industry grows.

I think the comparison of an industry of solar panels and batteries to one of the harvesting of living animals is not a very valuable one. Just as one example: you can improve the efficiency of solar panel and/or battery technology and the manufacturing processes but you can't do the same with cows. You could however move away from the breeding of living animals and instead improve something like lab grown meat which might have more overlap with technologies like solar panels.

You have to recognize that the scale of demand for meat REQUIRES the conditions you find in factory farms. You do not get to keep the same demand while having it all come from Happy Healthy Farm™ for a wide variety of reasons.

You can improve the efficiency of cows via selective breeding. In fact, we have improved the efficiency of cows and that process is accelerating.

Manufactured meat can't and won't replace cattle farming. It still needs vast inputs of energy, water and raw ingredients compared to raising a cow.

> In fact, we have improved the efficiency of cows and that process is accelerating.

Care to share some data on that?

I have always been very dumbfounded by the lab meat craze, nature is very efficient by design, so it would be quite hard to even come close to this efficiency.

But on top of that we don't only get meat from animals (quite a few modern things use byproduct of meat production in fact) and the animals help us re/up-cycle things that would be just a waste otherwise.

All the anti-meat anti-animals' thing is just a new kind of religion that is based on the morals of a few alternative types who want to appear more virtuous than anyone else, in a desperate attempt at faux competition (race to the bottom).

> nature is very efficient by design, so it would be quite hard to even come close to this efficiency.

Do you think that the evolutionary goal for animals is "make the most edible mass possible"?

> All the anti-meat anti-animals' thing is just a new kind of religion that is based on the morals of a few alternative types who want to appear more virtuous than anyone else, in a desperate attempt at faux competition (race to the bottom).

What an incredibly shallow reading of an idea that has been around for thousands of years. Clearly a strawman to avoid engaging with important questions.

"so specific and small scale..."

Hm..I think that Gabe Brown would like a word. :) https://www.fwi.co.uk/arable/land-preparation/soils/how-gabe...

not sure why you thought you were addressing my point about "small scale" with an example of a guy with 2000ha... There wasn't even any mention about how much meat his approach produces per hectare.

> unsustainable demand

Scales with population growth, and immigrants don't come to the U.S. just so they can eschew meat. I don't see what's unsustainable about it. Land-use has barely budged. At any rate if the population didn't grow, the demand wouldn't either. As it happens, global population growth is projected to stall in less than 100 years.

Growth in the 1st world means more emissions and land encroachment, until innovation catches up. Electricity is being abated with renewables, but not concrete, ammonia, plastics, etc. There's no free lunch, if we want the juicy GDP growth, that's the price.

> again - the percentage of meat that comes from these conditions is so small as to be virtually irrelevant in the context of the animal agriculture industry

There's the consideration of our own personal choices and options having a place in the conversation, and the other consideration of prescription for improving conditions and/or emissions.

> I don't see what's unsustainable about it

You think 11-20% of GHG emissions[1] coming from livestock and the insanely high water footprint of meat[2] is sustainable?

[1] https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/food-agriculture-environm...

[2] https://waterfootprint.org/resources/Report-48-WaterFootprin...

Emissions are projected to fall through innovation (and methane does not persist in the atmosphere very long, compared to CO2). Water use in itself is not a problem. We waste plenty on inessential things and that's no deterrent either.

Notwithstanding that since global population growth is going to stall anyway, demand for meat will stagnate as well. It could only be "unsustainable" on the conceit that it would skyrocket into perpetuity.

Plenty of things you enjoy and "don't need" necessitate emissions, water, and land encroachment. Increases in efficiency mitigate that. Recently, China's fossil fuel use has plateaued. That is quite an accomplishment because demand for energy had been growing fast.

nothing is less convincing in the face of real problems than handwaving everything with "other things also use water" and "don't worry, everything will just become more efficient"

Meat consumption hasn't grown at all in the last 20 years, in fact it has fallen in many of the rich industrial countries (not having highly demanding physical job allows to drop the protein requirements, so there is that).

Even in the US it has been rather stable. There are just more people getting out of poverty on the planet and they won't deny themselves consumption of this beneficial product just to fit to the ideology "du jour".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_meat_cons...

Those claims don't actually pan out in practice. See the Allan Savory vs George Monbiot debate as an example.

It's just feelgood greenwashing for people who don't want to consider changing their diet.

Kind of like the allure of finding people to tell you that butter and bacon are actually superfoods. How convenient that you were already eating those every breakfast.

> How convenient that you were already eating those every breakfast.

Who is actually doing that? Who has enough time and money to actually do that? I'm confused because in EU it's an extremely rare thing and as far as I'm concerned in the US you have a whole section just for breakfast cereal.

So surely if there are people doing that, there are the minority and considering how in bad health much of the US population is, maybe, just maybe, they are onto something.

Those suggestions — that livestock can be a key component for carbon sequestration — have so far all been proven wrong. Just a recent publication in an ever growing list of many disproving the hypothesis: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2404329122

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