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Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

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Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#91

Post by virtuallynathan »

kieranmaine wrote: post #4

What would make people eat less beef? Since taxes seem a hard sell, would subsidizing chicken + non-meat protein help? As a vegetarian I'm trying to get my head around what would help change the behaviour of the meat eating HN members.

Ruminant animals have an important place in Agriculture. They add nutrients back to the soil, and can be raised in land unfit for growing crops. For example, in the UK only 36% of agricultural land is croppable. The rest of the land is perfect for raising cattle and other ruminants.

In the USA, 44% of land is for agriculture, but only 17% is arable, 27% serves as pasture land.

Only around 10% of a cow's lifetime feed comes from grain, and very little of what they are fed is human consumable. Think leftovers from corn (stalks, etc), leftovers from brewing (malt, oats, all that kind of stuff).

Beef is also very nutrient dense, and provides a large % of bioavailable nutrients and amino acids per gram.

Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arable_land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_United_King... https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8791215 https://downloads.usda.library.cornell.edu/usda-esmis/files/... https://www.beefresearch.org/CMDocs/BeefResearch/Sustainabil... https://medium.com/@beefitsfordinner/fao-affirms-cattles-cri... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_value#Typical_value...

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#92

Post by naravara »

ghaff wrote: post #8
kieranmaine wrote: post #4

What would make people eat less beef? Since taxes seem a hard sell, would subsidizing chicken + non-meat protein help? As a vegetarian I'm trying to get my head around what would help change the behaviour of the meat eating HN members.

Continuing to improve artificial meat (e.g. Impossible Burgers) to get to the point where it's better than the real thing. You don't change people's minds by taking things away from them. You give them a better substitute.

>Continuing to improve artificial meat (e.g. Impossible Burgers) to get to the point where it's better than the real thing.

It already is better than much of the fast-food/cafeteria grade meat people use. Taco Bell's taco meat, for example, was mostly soy protein with other fillers and additives as it is. Swapping it out for lab-meat would actually make it more meaty. The barrier right now is cost, not quality.

You don't need to 100% replace everything. You can have a situation where people eat real meat on special occasions or offered as gifts, but rely on cheaper fake stuff for their everyday meals.

But part of it is also just food-culture. Eating meat used to be a status symbol so once meat got cheap enough to be a staple people insist on having it with every meal. Consequently they've forgotten how to eat and enjoy mostly plant based diets. India, though, has plenty of great and satisfying vegetarian dishes as part of its food culture because meals without meat aren't believed to be any kind of special niche.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#93

Post by ceras »

kieranmaine wrote: post #4

What would make people eat less beef? Since taxes seem a hard sell, would subsidizing chicken + non-meat protein help? As a vegetarian I'm trying to get my head around what would help change the behaviour of the meat eating HN members.

Before adopting this approach, please be aware that chicken has substantially higher animal welfare costs than beef -- likely by orders of magnitude. This makes the calculus more complex, such that if you're sympathetic to animal welfare you may very well reverse the recommendation[0]. The safest recommendations are plant-based alternatives (e.g. Beyond Burger) or fueling cell-based meat research.

A good book on how various animals are treated is Compassion by the Pound[1], authored by agricultural economists. The short of it is that chickens bred for meat are treated very poorly throughout their lives, whereas beef cows are treated reasonably well (with the possible exception of slaughter). Not only that, but you also have to raise far more chickens per pound of meat compared to cows as they're so much smaller, amplifying the effect. It's a far more extreme difference compared than the environmental impact differences.

[0] Some animal welfare activists do so explicitly, whereas others do so implicitly by strictly focusing on chickens. Latter examples are 88% Campaign (https://88percentcampaign.com/) and One Step for Animals (https://www.onestepforanimals.org/). [1] https://www.amazon.com/Compassion-Pound-Economics-Animal-Wel...

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#94

Post by beat »

tareqak wrote: post #6

There is also the problem of food distribution. Ignoring future population growth, the world does produce enough food to people everyone [0] (obtained from the first sentence of [1]). If we are collectively unwilling to solve the distribution problem today, then it there is a good chance that we won't do much about the shortage tomorrow. In addition, unconsumed food waste is also problem, and probably does have some…

Population growth is leveling off. Birth rate globally is already at/below replacement rate (there are ~2B children right now, the UN estimates that in a century, there will still be ~2B children). The growth we are seeing now is a growth of the adult population, not the child population, due to the 1-2 generation overhang between nations getting decent food and health care (especially immunizations), and the birth rate dropping in those nations from the 5-6 of backwards nations to the Meanwhile, in a half-century, we've doubled the population, while significantly reducing food costs and radically reducing hunger globally. I'm with Hans Rosling here... the angst about how the world is hungry and getting hungrier is just our minds telling us stories, contradicting the facts on the ground.

I don't see a good reason to believe that we will have global food shortages in the future. We'll have less hunger, not more, as the population levels out over the next few decades. I'm basing that argument on past behavior, absorbing the needs of much higher population growth with less technology for decades.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#95

Post by virtuallynathan »

mac01021 wrote: post #53
dilap wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a mirror-image question: What will it take to convince vegetarians that a meat-based diet is actually the healthiest way to eat, and that meat can be raised in humane, environmentally-friendly ways? :-) Edit: This a serious question. Down voting is hardly a productive form of dialog.

I imagine it depends on the vegetarian. And not all meats/animals are the same. I myself eat meat, but do not eat mammals. I am looking forward to the widespread availability of safe, delicious, lab-grown meats. > the healthiest way to eat I suspect that, for most people, the best plant-based diet is equal to the best omnivorous diet in terms of nutrition. Admittedly, it can take more effort to get your protein. > me…

> We don't spend nearly as much energy feeding the free-range ones, but the land-footprint needed to serve them is even greater.

That land likely can't be used for anything else, only a small % of land can be used for growing crops.

> The ones that live in tiny spaces and eat corn have high carbon footprints because of all the farming that has to happen to feed them and all the land that is prevented from being forest to serve that need.

Only about 10-15% of US cattle heads are on feedlots at any given time. The food at feedlots doesn't always compete with human edible food, and only represents about 10% of their lifetime food.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#96

Post by avip »

QML wrote: post #24

Don’t we already know how to do this? For example, the concept of companion planting — growing plants which behave symbiotically together — is a centuries old idea. The issue is whether we have an economic incentive to.

To clarify: you suggest we could grow more food using fewer resources if we used the centuries-old idea of companion planting? That sounds highly unlikely. The problems we know companion planting could solve (=pests) are solved way more effectively in modern monoculture.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#97

Post by ericd »

ceras wrote: post #93
kieranmaine wrote: post #4

What would make people eat less beef? Since taxes seem a hard sell, would subsidizing chicken + non-meat protein help? As a vegetarian I'm trying to get my head around what would help change the behaviour of the meat eating HN members.

Before adopting this approach, please be aware that chicken has substantially higher animal welfare costs than beef -- likely by orders of magnitude. This makes the calculus more complex, such that if you're sympathetic to animal welfare you may very well reverse the recommendation[0]. The safest recommendations are plant-based alternatives (e.g. Beyond Burger) or fueling cell-based meat research. A good book on how…

You have to raise and kill more chickens per pound of meat, but aren't they much, much less intelligent than cows?

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#98

Post by ericd »

mac01021 wrote: post #53
dilap wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a mirror-image question: What will it take to convince vegetarians that a meat-based diet is actually the healthiest way to eat, and that meat can be raised in humane, environmentally-friendly ways? :-) Edit: This a serious question. Down voting is hardly a productive form of dialog.

I imagine it depends on the vegetarian. And not all meats/animals are the same. I myself eat meat, but do not eat mammals. I am looking forward to the widespread availability of safe, delicious, lab-grown meats. > the healthiest way to eat I suspect that, for most people, the best plant-based diet is equal to the best omnivorous diet in terms of nutrition. Admittedly, it can take more effort to get your protein. > me…

>Show me a carbon-neutral cow.

Any purely grass fed cow should be close, no? They're part of the normal carbon cycle, and that carbon is pulled back in when the grass regrows. The problem is when you bring sequestered carbon (fossil fuels) into the mix.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#99

Post by flavor8 »

ghthor wrote: post #77
alisson wrote: post #20

There's a great method called Agroforestry that uses forest floors to produce more food: Quick overview of a farmer's land that uses this method: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stABAx82TbY he harvest around 3x more cocoa per hectare than traditional methods and its one of the most valuable in the world right now. Big producers joining to make it more scalable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE

I love this idea, its something I've thought a lot about. Our large scale farming strategies seem fundamentally ignorant. Nature it full of complex systems of independence that we should be using directly in our farming strategies. I'm particularly interested in fungi to support the nutrient and immune systems of my farms. See the work of Paul Staments using fungi to treat bee colony collapse.

> Our large scale farming strategies seem fundamentally ignorant.

For a great example of this, check out:

http://nautil.us/issue/66/clockwork/herbicide-is-whats-for-d...

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#100

Post by ericd »

ergothus wrote: post #19
kieranmaine wrote: post #4

What would make people eat less beef? Since taxes seem a hard sell, would subsidizing chicken + non-meat protein help? As a vegetarian I'm trying to get my head around what would help change the behaviour of the meat eating HN members.

As a vegetarian that actually doesn't like many vegetables (I don't like bell peppers, for example, which severely limits my options) and who was a huge carnivore before going veggie ( and with more than one hunter in the family): I see two groups of meat eaters. Group A, who just like the taste and texture of meat. For them, a variety of substitutes that adequately matched would suffice. As of today, we have many fa…

Making convincing lab-grown A5 wagyu will help a lot with both groups, I'm guessing, assuming it can be done for less than the real thing.

In fact, I'd probably start there, since it's probably the first type of meat that could be made cheaper than the real thing, and it's a total luxury good that most people never get to experience, so it's not really competing with the real thing in most peoples' minds. Similar to the Tesla business model, start with the high margin stuff and move down as you ramp up volume and start getting efficiencies of scale and more R&D.

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