The bulk of soy production is for cattle feed.

https://ourworldindata.org/soy

This is quite a red herring. The bulk of soy production is waste, that we have managed to use for cattle feed, because they can upcycle it into consumable nutrients.

If we got rid of all cattle, we would not reduce the amount of soybeans grown by 77%, just our utilization of what is grown.

I don't know much about this particular thing. would be glad to read up on this if you share a good source.

Is easy to understand even without bibliography. Soy is an annual herb. It grows all the summer, invest everything on producing fruits in fall and then die in winter.

Beans are the crop. Everything else must wait until they are ready, and by then it will be basically dry matter. Therefore all except the beans is a residual.

Can still be recycled into more human food by herbivores, but we couldn't do it directly. We can't feed on dry stems, withered flowers or brown leaves.

I would highly recommend the book Sacred Cow. It has links to hundreds of studies within for further research. The authors, Diana rogers and Robb Wolf have been on many podcasts since it's release to discuss the topic.

If you want specific studies I can go look up in the book but it sounds like your asking for further reading, not cited sources.

77% of soy beans are used as feed in animal fattening. The basic biology and ecology of trying to push calories through a lossy (25x!) step in the food cycle doesn't work out.

If anyone wants to engage with the consequences of animal agriculture, this is a great starting point: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/climatechange/doc/FAO%20repor...

Yes but before feeding the cow the bean we press it for soybean oil, which now accounts for a significant portion of calories consumed globally (somewhere around 10%, a quick search did not yield the study and I can't recall it exactly).

What do you imagine we would do with the soy pucks that are produced after extruding the oil?

Also, ruminants need non starchy, fibrous plant materials. I can't speak toward chicken and pork but I don't advocate people eat those.

"86% of the global livestock feed intake is made of materials that are inedible by humans" - Sacred Cow, Diana Rogers, source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221191241...

30-70% of their food - depending on the region and local industry - is distillers grains [1]. That’s the waste from ethanol production, including biofuels and alcohol.

Of that last 14% of human edible food, the vast majority is used at the end to fatten up the animals for slaughter.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distillers_grains

It doesn't reflect well on your argument that your quote doesn't appear in the source.

"Results estimate that livestock consume 6 billion tonnes of feed (dry matter) annually – including one third of global cereal production – of which 86% is made of materials that are currently not eaten by humans. In addition, soybean cakes, which production can be considered as main driver or land-use, represent 4% of the global livestock feed intake. Producing 1 kg of boneless meat requires an average of 2.8 kg human-edible feed in ruminant systems and 3.2 kg in monogastric systems. While livestock is estimated to use 2.5 billion ha of land, modest improvements in feed use efficiency can reduce further expansion."

Even the source you are citing agrees that after massaging the numbers as much as possible it's still 3x less efficient to produce calories for human consumption by feeling animals.

I was quoting Diana Rogers, who provided a source for her statements, so I thought I would include it.

I cannot access the full article, but from the abstract that seems to not be congruent with what the study is suggest. Perhaps you are confusing kg for kcal? It could indeed be the fact that it is 3x less efficient by weight.

Given that the article is pointing out that 86% of the feed for animals is not edible by humans, claiming that meat is 3x less efficient calorie wise with these numbers is also making the claim that we are growing plants 2x more calorically dense by meat than weight.

Cattle do not eat solely from a meadow. Even if cows are free range, that's generally only a spring to fall state, in the winter they are eating farmed foods (usually hay).

For factory farmed cattle (which is the most common) the situation is far worse.

An individual cow needs 24lbs of food per day. How much soy does one person consume in a day?

> An individual cow needs 24lbs of food per day. How much soy does one person consume in a day?

This is a false equivalence. The correct question would be "how much soy consume the number of people that could be feed with this cow".

The error is understandable because many of this movements are focused in the individual, and equality among individuals. This is just one way to study ecology, but not the more interesting or rewarding one.

Hay fields are also often monocultures. (https://nrm.dfg.ca.gov/FileHandler.ashx?DocumentID=67408)

Dairy cows and meat cows are entirely different. Old dairy cows do become meat, but it's very poor meat.

In California. The situation can be different in other places and countries.

I never considered this aspect, really good point.

No, it's not a good point. Cows are rarely grown in "meadows". Free-range beef is a minority, and most cow feed comes from monoculture fields. And it takes more monoculture grain to grow a pound of beef versus a pound of vegetables, and it's not even close.

How much of the meat we consume do you really think are grazing in meadows? Even most the grass feed cows are raised in fields that used to be rain forests in Brazil. However you turn it, it’s impossible to claim that cattle raising is a net gain for biodiversity.

Evidence for that rather large claim?

Please also explain how any large monoculture crop is a net gain for diversity?

>> most the grass feed cows are raised in fields that used to be rain forests in Brazil

> Evidence for that rather large claim?

While most cows in Brazil are grass-fed, about half are raised on former rainforest:

"Nearly 50% of Brazilian livestock are raised in fields that used to be rainforest."[0,1]

"Most cows in Brazil, the world’s largest beef exporter, are grass-fed."[2]

See also:

How beef demand is accelerating the Amazon’s deforestation and climate peril[3]:

> Cattle ranchers in the Brazilian Amazon — the storied rainforest that produces oxygen for the world and modulates climate — are aggressively expanding their herds and willing to clear-cut the forest and burn what’s left to make way for pastures. As a result, they’ve become the single biggest driver of the Amazon’s deforestation, causing about 80 percent of it, according to the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.

Cattle Ranching in the Amazon Region[4]:

> Cattle ranching is the largest driver of deforestation in every Amazon country, accounting for 80% of current deforestation rates. Amazon Brazil is home to approximately 200 million head of cattle, and is the largest exporter in the world, supplying about one quarter of the global market. Low input cost and easy transportation in rural areas make ranching an attractive economic activity in the forest frontier; low yields and cheap land encourage expansion and deforestation. Approximately 450,000 square kilometers of deforested Amazon in Brazil are now in cattle pasture. Cattle ranching and soy cultivation are often linked as soy replaces cattle pasture, pushing farmers farther into the Amazon.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/meat-consumption-linked-to-t...

[1] http://www.cbra.org.br/portal/downloads/publicacoes/rbra/v42...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-12-17/saving-th...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/08/27/how-beef-...

[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20180928055440/https://globalfor...

Ok so that's Brazil, not 50% of the world's supply. Still though, that sucks.

You are moving the goalposts. The parent post was comparing non-animal agriculture with animal agriculture in terms of biodiversity. I'll copy it here for you.

> It sounds like you are suggesting non-animal agriculture kills or displaces more animals than animal agriculture.

Animal agriculture is better for biodiversity than crop monocultures. I understand that the truth can be shocking for some people, but there are dozens of ecological studies pointing to the environmental value of pastures and meadows, specially as ecotones.

As the initial plan to demonize cattle failed, now you are silently replacing "non-animal agriculture" by "rainforests" as a straw man to attack the original claim. Sorry, but this was not the point that we were discussing.

"Non-animal agriculture", also known as "Agriculture", has replaced happily as many rainforest hectares as cattle, if not more. Take a look to the fate of Indonesian rainforests

No, no goalposts have been moved. It is worse for the environment, in all aspects, including biodiversity, to raise animals to eat than to eat the crops directly.

The reason is simple: to produce the same amount of energy (and protein) with livestock as you would with crops, you have to use orders of magnitude more resources and you affect the environment orders of magnitude more: you use more fuel, release more greenhouse gases, use more water, use more land area, destroy more soil, et.c.

And while it might be true that one hectare used for grazing might be more biodiverse than one hectare used for, your example, soybeans. But 85 percent of the world's soybean crop is processed into meal and vegetable oil, and virtually all of that meal is used in animal feed.

I think you need to look up the meaning of the expression "straw man". And about the rainforests: Tropical rainforests are the most biologically diverse terrestrial ecosystems in the world, and right now, huge areas of that rainforests are destroyed for the land to be used to raise cattle.

"it might be" true. Enough said. It toke a long of time to admit the obvious.

Oh gosh, you really think you are clever, while leaving ample proof of the absolute opposite.

> Without cattle there is not the need of meadows anymore.

This is just silly. I can't imagine an internally consistent worldview that would assert something like this. Of course natural biomes are valuable regardless of the presence of cattle. Besides, modern cattle are domesticated creatures and don't even really have a native (i.e. not man-made or facilitated) environment.

The assertion regarding soy fields is at best a misunderstanding of the actual data regarding land use, or at worse, a meaningless tautology.

For those who don't have time to click and read the link in the other reply by user vnorilo, I'll just quote the relevant paragraph:

> More than three-quarters (77%) of global soy is fed to livestock for meat and dairy production. Most of the rest is used for biofuels, industry or vegetable oils. Just 7% of soy is used directly for human food products such as tofu, soy milk, edamame beans, and tempeh. The idea that foods often promoted as substitutes for meat and dairy – such as tofu and soy milk – are driving deforestation is a common misconception.