Where is there more livestock than people?

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/

[ Parent | on HN ]

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

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.)

[ Parent | on HN ]