Meat production requires a magnitude more soy (in raw materials) to produce the same output as e.g. tofu/tempeh/soy milk production.

A large part of cattle feed soy is based on leftovers from the food industry.

It's the other way around. According to the article, 77% of soy production goes to animal feed.

or is the soy oil a way to make more money off of animal feed?

you're absolutely right - preparing a high quality beef meal takes a lot more than just processing soy, but what I was aiming at was that we will replace one mass consumption with the other, just like we always do and that may mask the problem but I believe it won't solve it. I could be wrong though.

> but what I was aiming at was that we will replace one mass consumption with the other, just like we always do and that may mask the problem but I believe it won't solve it

You're comparing two cases of "mass production" without any quantifier.

Beef has an over 15 times larger carbon footprint compared to tofu.

https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food

So sure, if everyone switches we would substitute one mass production for another, but we could feed 15 times as many people (all else equal).

The issue is not judt the extra procesding cost.

I haven't ran the numbers, but parent hinted at a cow needing to eat, say, 10 Kg of soy per Kg of meat produced, while you could have just eaten the soy directly.

Meat production uses a lot of land to produce food for your food, that's why it's so inneficient. Instead you could just use a tiny fraction of that land, and grow enough food for everyone.

That would still be a good thing. If everybody would switch from cow's milk to soy milk we would cut green house gase emissions by two thirds. The affects on land and water usage are even greater. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46654042

I agree with your point, but: Eating it directly would be a lot mor efficient use of that soy and would decrease the demand for soy anyway.

But it is more efficient. Less soy needed for soy product then for the same meat calories.

Why not grass fed meat then there’s no soy at all!

Because that does not work on scale.

This discussion is about how producing meat requires tons and tons of land in the form of soy bean fields that feed the animals, which indirectly and directly contributes to deforestation. Now you come along and say, just eat meat produced using this other method which takes a lot MORE land for the same amount of meat production?

But our fields are already grass - we don’t need to deforest to grow any soy at all.

No they're not, at least they're not pasture. They're either already farmed fields or they're wild meadows. Putting meadows to intense use would destroy whole ecosystems that may look like "just grass" from afar, and farmed fields are obviously already in use.

> No they're not, at least they're not pasture.

Thanks for telling me what the fields around me are!

I don't think anyone in this whole thread was talking about your local fields here.

There's not enough grass-land in the world for everyone to eat grass-fed beef. That's the whole point of not feeding them grass in the first place.

It’s a massive waste of land though.

How is it wasting land to feed cattle on it? It’s often not doing anything else.

Any land reclaimed from livestock feeding could be returned to nature, be it rainforests in Brazil or woodlands in Europe. Livestock uses a massive amount of agricultural land in comparison to plant production meant for direct human consumption.

It's just a very very simple math based on the amount of crops it takes to grow animals for meat -- and soy is much more efficient than grass in that sense, so your suggestion would make things decidedly worse for environment.

I don't know what you know about European agriculture, but woodlands in Europe aren't 'nature' in any primitive sense.

If the grass pasture is already there in cycle, it's not being used for anything else. Might as well put cattle on it.

> but woodlands in Europe aren't 'nature' in any primitive sense.

Europe is varied, not sure where you live but the forests in Northern/North-Central Europe that I'm familiar with absolutely do support wildlife. I think it shouldn't be controversial that returning agricultural land to nature, whatever "nature" means in different areas, is good for environment.

Anyway, this is wildly beside the point, which is that pasture feeding cattle can't satisfy the current demand for meat, not even close. Converting soy fields to grazing fields would be an ecological disaster without a serious decrease in worldwide meat consumption, as the yields would be far lower.

> Converting soy fields to grazing fields

But why would you do that? Don't cut down forests for soy, and don't cut it down for pasture either. Use existing green grass fields to feed cattle. This can be done in between crop rotations.

> without a serious decrease in worldwide meat consumption

Maybe that's the point?

Eat less (if you want to eat at all) and eat grass-fed. Do cattle even choose to eat soy when they have green grass available?

> Maybe that's the point? Eat less (if you want to eat at all) and eat grass-fed. Do cattle even choose to eat soy when they have green grass available?

Eating less meat was the point from the start as the main/only way to decrease soy footprint, so if you're not suggesting to replace soy feed with grass then this whole discussion was in the end more or less pointless.

Livestock has been raised in Europe for Millenia with no soy anywhere near them. Grass grazed cattle & chickens are completely sustainable and beneficial to the environment they're on. Sourced locally they're a fuckton healthier and less polluting than shipping soy and avocados across the planet.

Monocrops are terrible for the planet & wildlife, and are only even viable due to heavy use of pesticides & NPK fertliser.

Organic farming requires large amounts of animal manure to work, guess where it comes from?

Please go read about regenerative agriculture - that's the way forward.

>If the grass pasture is already there in cycle, it's not being used for anything else. Might as well put cattle on it.

This is true, technically speaking. Practically, you couldn't produce even a fraction of the amount of meat that the market wants using this way. If all meat was grass fed meat, it would be a luxury good. I don't think that would be too bad to be honest, it would lead to much less meat consumption overall.

Basically, "just eat grass fed meat" = "everyone must eat a lot less meat, unless they're rich I guess"

Cattle is also disastrous for the water supply. Unfortunately, mass production of meat is just very expensive for the health of the planet.

Not all land is a good pasture. In many parts of the world, good pasture are also efficient carbon sinks. In my part of the world those carbon sinks are rare (only about 10% of pastures are carbon sinks), and the few that are good are even better as farmland.

That overlap is not 100%. Some good pasture is bad farmland, but the claim that good pasture is good farmland is a good rule of thumb