The Comforting Lie of "Climate-Friendly Meat"
The Comforting Lie of "Climate-Friendly Meat"
The industry insists that meat’s problems can be solved with technical fixes. We’ve seen this before.
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Ah, yes, that pillar of good practices, US, where corn is so heavily subsidized its by-products had to be force injected into the entire food chain to justify it, to the point all food is rendered sweet by default.
I know it’s popular but believe it or not, the US isn’t the cause of all the world’s problems.
Only 23% of ag land worldwide is used to grow crops for direct human consumption. That’s lower than the US number by the way.
The fact remains that if you actually care about reducing farmland and fertilizer use, you’d go vegan.
Or was I right and that was just a throwaway comment meant to make you feel better about your habits?
Let's go back to examples I have at hand (I'm in Portugal and live in a somewhat rural area).
50 to 60 sixty years back, there was a lot more cattle roaming the area, as this was wool country. Even then, through field rotation, the production/consumption of feed was close to zero (abundant rains, predictable sunny intervals) allowed for fields to produce using what was at hand for fertilizer.
Come the 90's, with the end of the wool industry, flocks reduce drastically but the production of feed crops and cereals remains the same, with marginal use of synthetic fertilizers.
Come the 2000's and the berry craze explodes, with large extensions of land converted into greenhouses or intensive growth fields, that divert and consume huge amounts of water and require tons of synthetic agrochemicals.
The problem with corn in the US we have it here with berry farms and common greenhouses, that actively refuse manures and composts, thus injecting amounts of nitrogen and phosphorous previously absent from the soil. I can widen the scope to include peach and plum orchards.
The only area we have identified has being satured with those elements is further south, again due to intensive tomato farming. And an area where cattle is also raised.
I'm not white washing my option: I want sustainable agricultural practices to become norm, not exception.
Only 23% of ag land worldwide is used to grow crops for direct human consumption.
this is misleading as fuck. much of the land used to grow crops for humans is the exact same land, the exact same plant, the exact same bean (sometimes) as the land used to feed animals. much of what is given to animals are parts of plants that people can't or won't eat. another huge portion of the ag land is pastureland, and much of that isn't even suitable for growing crops.
That wasn’t intended to mislead and I provided my source so others could read.
It’s why I referenced the US data first (I know it better) but now it has a paywall.
I found another source saying,
Today only 55 percent of the world’s crop calories feed people directly; the rest are fed to livestock (about 36 percent) or turned into biofuels and industrial products (roughly 9 percent).
Feeding crops to animals for us to eventually eat is always going to be less efficient and more costly environmentally.
plant-based replacements for each of the major animal categories in the United States (beef, pork, dairy, poultry, and eggs) can produce twofold to 20-fold more nutritionally similar food per unit cropland. Replacing all animal-based items with plant-based replacement diets can add enough food to feed 350 million additional people, more than the expected benefits of eliminating all supply chain food loss.
Feeding crops to animals for us to eventually eat is always going to be less efficient and more costly environmentally.
but very few people want to eat the parts of plants that we feed to animals after we process the rest of the plant for human food. soy, for instance: most people don't want to eat soy cake, so feeding it to animals and then eating the animals is actually a good use of the "crop calories".
If we only raised enough animals to eat our waste, you’d have a great point. But as I’ve shown, we don’t do that.
If we only raised enough animals to eat our waste, you’d have a great point.
I have a good point, anyway. besides our waste, there is also a great deal of ag land that is unsuitable for crop cultivation. my point is still the same: using the metric of land use is not a great way to understand efficiencies in the agriculture sector. I don't believe any single metric is the key, probably.
off the top of my head, multigenerational ecosystem stability without artificial inputs might be the metric id aim to achieve, but it's hard to say what kinds of impacts that might have (efficiency would surely be impacted). given the vastness and interdependency of the modern agricultural system I don't believe any radical change is prudent. if the issues we are facing from carbon emissions are what we are looking to address, I would say we need to focus on other sources of carbon emissions primarily, rather than upset the agricultural system.
I don’t know of any other way to put this…
We have land that we dedicate solely to growing food for animals. Not the waste, not land that is otherwise unusable.
That is not environmentally friendly when we could feed far more people by NOT doing that or using less farmland to feed our current population.
Did that make more sense?
We have land that we dedicate solely to growing food for animals. Not the waste, not land that is otherwise unusable.
I haven't disputed this
You seem to be by repeatedly bringing up the fact that animals can eat parts of the plants we can’t when it makes up a minuscule part of the equation so I though it prudent to really drive home.
And now I know what part of the problem is give your other comment. I’ve already linked you a study showing how and why we could feed more people on less farmland and I even quoted the important part of it in my comment so you didn’t even have to click.
we could feed far more people by NOT doing that
I don't think so.