Where is there more livestock than people?

Re:Where is there more livestock than people? by gus_massa on Sunday July 17, 2022 @11:10AM (#32127475)

It would be nice to repeat the maps using weight. The weight of a cow is like 700Kg (1500 pounds) and the weight of a chicken is like 3Kg (6 pounds). So a cow is like 250 chickens. (Can someone with CGI abilities make a gros image of a cow made of 250 chickens?)

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Re:Where is there more livestock than people? by MonkeyMalarky on Sunday July 17, 2022 @11:53AM (#32127873)

Kinda like this? https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/p0qws3/self...

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Re:Where is there more livestock than people? by dredmorbius on Sunday July 17, 2022 @10:53PM (#32134049)

Not a map, but trending of terrestrial vertebrate biomass from 10,000 BCE to (projected) 2050:

https://peakoilbarrel.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Terrest...

I've seen another image which shows cubes indicating total biomass inclusive of plants and invertebrates. Humans aren't quite so prominant on that, though as a measure of all animal biomass, still a large fraction.

This ... is close though not quite what I had in mind:

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=o3xAu8m8XK4

And NB, that's not the xkcd "Land Mammals" one, though that's also impressive: https://xkcd.com/1338/

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Re:Where is there more livestock than people? by gus_massa on Monday July 18, 2022 @08:27AM (#32137507)

About the last graph from xkcd: It's weird that is does not include chickens! As discussed in a sibling comment, raising a chicken takes 1/10 of the time of raising a cow, so I guess the current biomas is misleading lower.

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Re:Where is there more livestock than people? by dredmorbius on Monday July 18, 2022 @06:38PM (#32144981)

There are two ways to consider such charts.

One is the instantaneous biomass at any point in time.

The second would be something like "rate of new biomass formation".

A human lives ~82 years, a cow lives ~3, a chicken lives ~6 weeks (for a fryer or broiler). The human lives ~715 times longer than the chicken, but weighs only 30 times more. There's nearly 25 times more chicken biomass cycled per year than human.

(The fact that that chicken biomass goes to feed the human biomass is also a part of this, of course.)

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Re:Where is there more livestock than people? by loonster on Sunday July 17, 2022 @12:15PM (#32128094)

I think it would be more useful to track weight produced. This statistic is probably hard to track...

A good proxy would be to multiply the number of animals by the Animal Unit Equivalents (AUE).

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Re:Where is there more livestock than people? by bombcar on Sunday July 17, 2022 @12:36PM (#32128315)

Calories could be a good measure - a whole chicken appears to be about 1200 and a cow between 500,000 and 600,000 - so a cow is about 500 chickens or so.

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Re:Where is there more livestock than people? by loonster on Sunday July 17, 2022 @04:01PM (#32130659)

Calories is a great metric. Better than mass. However, what I really want to see is calories produced per a unit of time. It takes about 8 weeks to raise a meat chicken and about 80 for beef cattle. 1 Cow = 50 chickens.

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Re:Where is there more livestock than people? by sperm on Sunday July 17, 2022 @11:23AM (#32127592)

Or emissions (methane?). Iirc, sheep have the most emissions per pound.

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Re:Where is there more livestock than people? by colaco on Sunday July 17, 2022 @11:35AM (#32127717)

Or the ratio of animal weight to human weight per county…

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