Item — HN Reader

Just to play devil's advocate

1. Livestock is a really good energy storage. In case of war, natural disaster crops diseases there is a backup. Most people that survived Holodomor, because the had cows.

2. No animal protein maybe bad for your health (meat is a different story)

3. Crops need a lot of herbicide

4 comments

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.

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