Take wild moose as an example. My home country has an artificially high moose pupilation due to current forresting practices. Yet the annual yield is only something like 3% of the Swedish meat consumption.
Removing crops as a part of animal feed would mean something like reducing our meat consumption by 90%.
Edit: and there are ways of maintaining a healthy soil without animals. I have done it in a very small scale for my plantations (just 40m2) and there are examples of people doing it on a much larger scale. I have yet to find data about yields though, but they seem competitive.
Now the idiotic argument that is often heard is "well, if we didn't grow grass we could grow something humans want, like.. soybeans". And the answer is no, we couldn't because the land isn't suitable for growing those high-value crops. If it was the case the farmers would be all over it.
https://jordbruksverket.se/om-jordbruksverket/jordbruksverke...
Horrible link, but it shows that close to 45%(?) is used for "vall/grönfoder" and "betesmark" i.e. grass, grass-equivalents and gracing pastures.
I think many farmers do what has worked for the last X decades; often copying what their forebears do with small adjustments.
You can't copy/paste in farming to get ahead, or be really likeable but have no actual output or contribution.
I don't think farmers have any particular theory that land growing grass cannot grow anything else or their parents would already have done that. So the analogy is really stretched thin.
We CAN grow such crops in Sweden, at least in the southern parts. I lived next to a quinoa field with comparatively high yields. And we have been growing white beans for years. Pre pandemic there were trials with soybeans on Öland and in Skåne with promising results.
Or we could let the wild take over that land.
You correctly reference that raising vegetable protein is about 10x more efficient than raising animal protein.
Assuming
* it is ~ 20x more efficient to raise single cell protein than it is to raise vegetable protein
* it is too impractical or inefficient to feed single-cell protein to plants
Then it would follow that it would be 2x more efficient to raise single-cell-protein-fed animal protein than it is to raise vegetable protein. This can happen in closed facilities to capture any methane gas.
We observe it is very hard to convince people to switch from carnivore habits to vegetarian habits. Presumably it will be similarily difficult to convince carnivore population to voluntarily switch to eating single cell protein.
It will obviously still be 10x more efficient to eat the single cell protein directly than to eat single-cell-protein fed animal protein, which would in turn be about 2x as efficient as eating vegetable protein.
I don't think meat eating humans care much if the animal ate plant protein or single cell protein. It's not like meat products specify what the livestock ate throughout its short life.
Even if you have (perfectly valid!) ethical questions about raising creatures as fast as possible only to kill them and harvest their meat; faced with a fellow vegetarian human who cannot be convinced to eat single cell protein, would you convince them to eat SCP-fed animal protein? (better for the environment); or would you convince them to eat vegetable protein? (better for compassion with the livestock creatures)
Assume for a minute you were vegetarian up to this day yourself: you welcome the lower footprint of single-cell proteins, and don't mind eating it most of the time, ... but sometimes you want to treat yourself, just a small treat, would you have the discipline to eat SCP-fed animal protein, or would you insist on eating less efficiently produced vegetable protein?
Le morale: if one is abhorred by the concept of raising creatures for the sole purpouse of eating them, one should stick to the point and not defer to efficiency arguments. Every cover reason backfires... eventually.
What I am saying is: a.sustainable protein will make the largest impact in chicken, but very little impact for the kind of feed and land use we are discussing. Vall and slåtter (I have no idea about the English terms) are almost exclusively used as feed for grazing animals.
And even with chickens I must ask: Is SCP competitive with insects? I have been betting on insects becoming the next big thing in animal feed for some time. 20x less land use per gram of protein compared to soy is no problem for something like the black soldier fly larvae. They are well above 50x.
you are not explaining where your larvae are getting their proteins... I don't believe they can essentially thrive on CO2 and hydrogen...
The discussion of SCP in feed is the same as soy beans: we can eat it ourselves. Why accept a 3-10x efficiency loss by feeding it to chicken and pigs? We are already eating SCP, and we are bound to eat more of it in the coming decades.
> It will obviously still be 10x more efficient to eat the single cell protein directly than to eat single-cell-protein fed animal protein, which would in turn be about 2x as efficient as eating vegetable protein.
(so you merely reiterate what I wrote) and the paragraph right before it
> We observe it is very hard to convince people to switch from carnivore habits to vegetarian habits. Presumably it will be similarily difficult to convince carnivore population to voluntarily switch to eating single cell protein.
which answers your question:
> Why accept a 3-10x efficiency loss by feeding it to chicken and pigs?
Because citizens enjoy autonomy and the state doesn't force people to eat SCP directly. In the knowledge (not in their defense) that a large group of people eating meat refuse to switch to vegetable protein today, it is naive to think they would however switch to eating SCP directly.
Gardening isn't farming. All crop farms of any scale use artificial fertilisers that wash off the land an poison our rivers and wetlands its not sustainable. Cutting out artificial fertilisers and gmo crops would cut our crop production by 60%.
We need to go back to our old style of farming before the world wars where we rotated between crops and animals and used the animals dung as fertiliser.
You mean, the old style of farming where our agricultural output was sustained by unimaginable tons of ancient manures looted from South America?
We are already using ~all available animal dung as fertilizer; it provides something like 10% of our global fertilizer needs. We can't produce more animal dung than we are now; we already raise an absurd quantity of livestock, and we especially can't do it while also doing the other thing people suggest on this topic, cutting our meat production by 90%.
This is completely wrong. You can grow regular crops there but usually the land is sloped, the terrain itself is inaccessible or inconvenient for machinery. There are plenty of Asian countries that do terraced rice farming but this requires massive amounts of manual labor compared to a nice, level and flat piece of land on which tractors and combines can drive on.
It is very dependent on geography. The discussion regarding beef/cattle/meat always takes some "global-scale-scope" which is useless since the topology, soil, water etc. is something that almost exclusively determines what is suitable to grow.
You could not, how much you wanted convert the gracing pastures in Sweden to any high-yield farm.
But sure, keep on looking at a picture of grass and decide that the land is suitable for other crops.
The next time you leave for the wilderness, go to a field, go the edge of it and see if you can figure out if there was a reason they didn't expand it further out.
I wouldn't dream of asking you of taking a random commenter at face value.
(Whether they should be exploited is a different story.)
Meh.
You make an argument that has no practical value. And you make it in a way that is offensive.
Yes, if we had slave labor like the 3rd world then we could farm all the mountains.
This is pure propaganda. Do people know that when they repeat it? Or does it just soak into the collective unconsious and become 'common sense' even though it doesn't make any sense?
Who told you these were the only two options? Why would you believe them? What other alternative uses for the land have you explored?
If you could grow something more valuable than grass on a piece of land you can be quite sure that most farmers would.
> The climate impact of diets are usually compared in terms of greenhouse gases that are emitted today. But this misses a hidden cost: the carbon opportunity costs of agricultural land. If we were not using this land to grow food, it would be possible that forests and wild grasslands grow on these lands. They would not only harbour wildlife, but also store much more carbon. Meat and dairy products need more land than alternatives, and therefore have a higher opportunity cost.
So it needing more land is a kinda worthless metric tbh.
So you kind of are suggesting that, while pretending to be some old lady with a pet sheep roaming the hills rather than a global industry producing 400 million tonnes of meat per annum.
That doesn't exclude farming, fishing or high-density food-farming (salmon, shrimps etc.). I mean, the number of issues with providing a couple of billion of humans with enough energy and variety in their diet is not insignificant..
A sheep roaming the hills is probably one of the better ways of producing protein..
No where does anyone rotate hay with row crops. Where do you live where that is common practice, and how does that work? New hay crops need a year at least to establish before you can cut for baling.
About 75% of the diet of a regular Swedish cow is grass or grass-equivalents. The rest is made up of peas, beans, rapeseed and of course various grains.
The grains that go to animal feed usually is not fit for human consumption (well, wouldn't pass QC-controls).
Pigs doesn't really eat grass. Neither does chickens... So it's a bit of a different animal (HAHAHA) to farm chickens/pigs vs cows.
In 'standard' farming practice, a vast majority of the feed for cattle is grass, hay, or other sorts of grass things. The last month or so before slaughter they are fed heavy grain to bulk up a little and be more marketable. (source; my farm).
In Industrial scale farming (which one could argue is the actual standard now because people demand cheap meat), cattle are kept in feed lots for their lives and pushed heavy grain.
Pigs don't eat grass. Chickens don't eat grass.
Land used for livestock feed is 2x what is used for humans (in the US). Nevermind the land required to raise the livestock.
If you're so educated, answer this for me: how much extra plants do we need to cultivate to feed the world's animal livestock?
It's a lot. Way more than what people eat. WAY more.
The diet will say it is "50% grass" but it is not. That 50% is the stems etc.. from corn and whatever.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-dam...
Forests can also grow there. They are far more valuable for bio-diversity and as carbon sinks.
Before the world wars and invention of artificial fertiliser we didn't have monocultures. On the scale of agriculture artificial fertiliser and factory farming is extremely new not something we have been doing for hundreds of years.
The issue is that when the crop is harvested you are taking nutrients out of the field into the crop then taking that crop off the soil. These nutrients need replaced or you will deplete the field. A hundred years ago this would come back in the form of rotations of crops and animals that leave dung to fertilise the land today its done with artificial fertiliser which provides lots of nitrogen but is missing all of the trace nutrients that where removed.
Better artificial fertiliser could help but there are other problems with artificial fertiliser like run off where rain remove the fertiliser from the field and dumps it into wetlands and rivers which are poisoned by the massive amounts of nitrogen.
The old way was sustainable but required lots of manual labour the new way is not sustainable but is easily automated. The real sustainable solution is to automate the old way of farming.
Ammonia production can be designed to run when energy is cheap, free, or negative in price, this is unlike other energy-intensive industrial feedstocks such as aluminium smelting.
It isn't currently economically efficient to run factories this way, but (again, unlike smelting bauxite) it is physically plausible to start-and-stop Haber process plants on a scale of hours.
Nitrogen fertilizers cause their own cascade of second-order effects when they leach into the water supply, but this can be solved with well-understood chemistry which renders the nitrate largely insoluble in water but available to soil microorganisms, who are happy to share it with crop roots.
My point is that fossil fuels aren't a feedstock for the most important fertilizer, so the use of fossil fuels in their manufacture is instrumental rather than inherent.
a) Citation? Most studies I can find on a quick googling show minimal effects.
b) Whereas clearing forest to create pasture for animals to graze is...not good for carbon capture. Quote from WWF: "Alone, the deforestation caused by cattle ranching is responsible for the release of 340 million tons of carbon to the atmosphere every year, equivalent to 3.4% of current global emissions." https://wwf.panda.org/discover/knowledge_hub/where_we_work/a...
"Ranching’s capital account is always in debt, because wild ecosystems store more carbon than the fields and pastures that have taken their place."
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-dam...
1) Growing monocrop plants on a large scale is much more destructive to the environment as it completely destroys the ecosystem. You destroy all other plants and small animals that would regenerate the soil. Instead you just steal from the soil over and over again without regenerating it. Cows shitting provide fertilizer. But this obviously doesn't happen on monocrop land.
2) Most of the places where cows graze grass can NOT support human eatable plant food growing. Only grass can grow there, not eg corn or some grains. So that land can either do nothing or you can unleash cows onto that land to convert that grass into human food (cows).