Your #1 is false.

Grain crops store really well on their own, as in decades, cows on the other hand need to eat constantly.

What they are good for is eating indigestible cellulose like corn stalks, but modern farming is largely feeding them grains specifically cultivated to feed them.

>modern farming is largely feeding them grains specifically cultivated to feed them.

In cattle at least, they spend much of their life grazing before going to feedlots.

>1 kg of meat requires *2.8 kg of human-edible feed for ruminants* and 3.2 for monogastrics

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22119...

That's true for many, yes, but it's only true in terms of time, not number of calories needed.

Yes. If the argument is about energy efficiency, I agree. Any system that is less than 100% efficient at turning calories into calories will result in, well, fewer calories.

However, we shouldn't assume health and diet are simply a matter of calories as input. Even conceding that beef isn't a particularly good choice for human health given it's saturated fat content, I don't know that replacing beef in the diet with corn would necessarily result in better health outcomes.

You don't need to 1:1 plant corn for human consumption on that farmland due to increased efficiency.

Options range from other crops, parks, leaving it fallow, solar, growing bio fuels, etc.

Realistically we aren't going to replace beef any time soon, but who knows what happens in the future.

I was referring to 1:1 calorie replacement, not land use.

Ahh ok, but even then I doubt we would stick with corn.

The energy conversion ratio gives it in calories. About 1.9% for beef.

https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production#efficiency-of-mea...

This assumes humans could turn 100% of the feed into usable calories. Considering 1) the link defines feed to include grazing and 2) humans are 0% efficient at turning cellulose into calories, the quoted number probably doesn't mean what you think it means.

We have many ways of turning cellulose into useful calories. Fire being perhaps the oldest.

If we could eat fire to sustain ourselves, then that would be a cogent point.

Even if you’re just talking about biological calories rather than as a unit of energy, fire reduces energy expenditure to stay warm. Thus acting as a significant food supplement both historically and currently.

This is still a bit of a stretch to make a relevant point given the context of the discussion. I don’t think many are promoting getting rid of cattle to make room for biomass fuel.

I've seen that argument made several times. EV's are great on land, boats have several options, but for mid to long range air travel biofules have a lot going for them. Unfortunately they need a lot of land.

The underlying numbers seem reasonable with US airlines use ~10 billion gallons of fuel per year while the US produces ~15 billion gallons of ethanol being freed up by the rise in EV's.

Globally things aren't as rosy, but freeing even 1/5 of the land devoted to grazing, alfalfa, and feed corn would go a long way. Reducing US beef consumption would have positive health impacts. So from a policy standpoint shifting the specific subsides seems like a good idea.

Even if we can't get net zero the more we can cut quickly the longer we have to finish the job.

I don’t think that premise holds. With the exception of sugar beets, crops are largely net negative in terms of energy production. You don’t create a more efficient system by adding layers of inefficiency.

> You don’t create a more efficient system by adding layers of inefficiency.

We care quite a lot about the form energy takes not just absolute quantities. $4 gets you ~200/kWh from solar enough to drive ~800 miles, or enough premium gas that to send an equivalent car less than 1/10th as far. Similarly, people happily pay 30c/kWh for 300kW fast charging because waiting around is it's own cost.

In comparison with bio fuels, green hydrogen is wildly energy negative wasting ~80% of input energy and you need to completely redesign all passenger aircraft.

>We care quite a lot about the form energy takes not just absolute quantities.

Yes, I've already mentioned this:

>However, we shouldn't assume health and diet are simply a matter of calories as input.

In the context of the discussion, it's an error IMO to compare energy as if they are interchangable. People aren't just consuming beef just for it's caloric value. The "form" of energy (protein & fat) is an important consideration too.

>In comparison with bio fuels, green hydrogen

The constant digression of a topic focused on nutrition into one merely about energy makes for a tiresome conversation and largely misses the point. Just because you can make a loose connection with the topic at hand doesn't mean that discussion is relevant.

I'm not seeing 1.9% and that sounds way off.

US produces about 27 billion pounds of beef, roughly half of that weight comes from feedlots where they eat ~80% of feedlot calories comes from grains.

There's a bunch of numbers tossed around but it's something like 60-70 billion pounds of grain to get those 27 billion pounds of beef.

I should rephrase that. Beef is bad in terms of efficiency - about %2. But cows are magic devices that can turn grass into milk and beef.

1. The Holodomor wasn't a natural famine. People starved because the food was physically taken away from them and distributed elsewhere (like cities), starting with the grain. Once they ran out of grain and couldn't fill the (unreasonable from the start) quotas, they started taking away livestock also.

Yep, I'd fall under war against Ukrainians. Cows can turn grass into milk and beef. Most families that had livestock survived. Those that lost it died. Source: Standford lecture on Youtube about Holodomor

One of the main reasons why Mongols were so effective was use of livestock en mass. It gives you food, cavalry, transportation and clothes from grass. You get the shortest logistical supply chains in northern Eurasian plane.

But if we wouldn't feed those crops to animals first to convert them to protein, but instead consumed them directly, we would need just a fraction of them and the herbicides required by them.

We can’t eat grass and hay. Cows do. They have multiple stomachs just to digest it.

The majority of cattle feed isn't hay or grass, but instead crops like Alfalfa or Soy. And in the end, it doesn't really matter, it's the underlying land use and it's impact that's relevant.

The feed conversion ratio for beef has the worst efficiency of all kinds of meat of 1:25.

This dataset by OWI is very enlightening when it comes to the types of our food and what kinds of different impact (landuse, animal feed, transport, ...) they have:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-emissions-supply-cha...

Your point by itself is valid. But in a practical sense, that is not the diet of the cattle that comprise most of the American beef supply. https://www.worldanimalprotection.us/latest/blogs/what-do-co... has data and citations. To summarize, 70% of dairy cattle feed is not hay or grass (soy, corn, distilling industry byproduct). That figure is 80% for beef cattle.

That's because the US government heavily subsidizes corn and soy production for...reasons, not because it's even the most efficient way to go beef in an undistorted market.

2) Not true.

3) More livestock => more crops => more herbicide