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40% of lost calories globally are from beef, needing 33 cal of feed per 1 cal

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Re: 40% of lost calories globally are from beef, needing 33 cal of feed per 1 cal

#221

Post by ponector »

onraglanroad wrote: post #214
piva00 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recommend you visiting the Brazilian region of Pantanal, if possible travel through Mato Grosso do Sul -> Mato Grosso -> southern Pará where it transitions into the Amazon. You will see vast areas of cattle ranching, soybeans plantation used for cattle feed, and other crops that can be used as cattle feed. All that area used to be the Pantanal and Amazon, now transformed to grow beef. If we would reduce the calorie…

And none of that is for feeding starving people who have no food. It's all to grow profitable luxury food.

I don't know which one is worse: to grow soybeans to feed cattle or to use as biodiesel.

What is really upsetting, the speed with which jundles are replaced with oil palm.

Humans have mastered exploitation of everything: the nature, the livestock and other humans.

Re: 40% of lost calories globally are from beef, needing 33 cal of feed per 1 cal

#222

Post by mcv »

kshahkshah wrote: post #6

Not trying to be overly flippant... who cares? The paper opens with "to feed a growing population" without asking is that what we need? want? where we are actually heading to? Is feeding the world a real problem? I've yet to see compelling evidence that it really is except as a secondary effect of logistics, energy supply, and war. edit: I understand the environmental impacts. I think we should solve our energy probl…

Feeding the world is mostly a political-economic problem. Political-economic decisions make it hard to feed everybody, when we technically have more than enough to feed everybody. But one of the decisions that make it hard to feed everybody is the decision to eat lots of beef in rich countries. Land that's used to grow food for cattle could (in many but not all cases) also be used to grow food for poor people, but there's no money in that.

That's not the only one; there's lots of other ways in which food is wasted or used inefficiently. Although the situation has improved tremendously over the past half century, there are still a lot of people suffering from malnutrition.

Re: 40% of lost calories globally are from beef, needing 33 cal of feed per 1 cal

#223

Post by luqtas »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #184
luqtas wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you type like using land from semi-deserts isn't destroyed for meat production... you need to plant, fertilize and apply pesticides to maintain grass! or do you think grass with sometimes 60% of protein per gram grows out of nowhere? or that the global grain production, which more than 85% goes into feeding livestock that it's sometimes 20 times less efficient to produce the same quantity of protein, can't be distrib…

Ranches in Montana and Texas definitely do none of those things. It's native grass, running about 1 cow per acre. Fertilizer and pesticide for an acre would be way more expensive than the profit on 1 cow per acre.

[dead]

Re: 40% of lost calories globally are from beef, needing 33 cal of feed per 1 cal

#225

Post by stevenally »

tracker1 wrote: post #77

I think we need more ruminant animals raised on grass as a means of regenerative farming... I think beef largely gets a bad rap for a lot of reasons that largely don't hold to grass fed cattle farming.

Depends how the farming is done....

https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_fight_desertif...

Re: 40% of lost calories globally are from beef, needing 33 cal of feed per 1 cal

#226

Post by colechristensen »

jamespo wrote: post #205
colechristensen wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh. Grow beef mostly grazed on marginal land that can't support other agriculture. This is how a LOT of beef is produced and how most of it SHOULD BE. They're not "lost calories" if they're produced on large swaths of semi-arid land that don't support any other kind of agriculture. And on the opposite side... a LOT of those "lost calories" are corn. Corn is substantially more productive than other crops and people do…

This is the first I've heard of a lot of beef produced on semi-arid land incapable of supporting anything else, any source on that?

This is a pretty basic fact about agriculture but you'll find people are selective about sharing facts when they have a narrative in mind. There are VASTLY different environmental impacts which depend on HOW you raise an animal, not just if. (and places where arguments about water usage per animal are pointless because water is very plentiful)

It is also a pretty fundamental driver of much of human history and caused a lot of conflicts when you'd have migrant/nomad peoples who either followed wild herds or managed their own herds and peoples who stayed put, owned land, and planted crops -- both of these strategies often driven heavily by geography not by choice. These people would meet at the margins and there'd be war.

There are a million sources but here: https://clear.ucdavis.edu/explainers/cattle-and-land-use-dif...

There are plenty of places around the world where you have maybe a hundred acres per animal or more. Whereas the best farmland can support one animal on the order of an acre of land.

Re: 40% of lost calories globally are from beef, needing 33 cal of feed per 1 cal

#227

Post by missedthecue »

gradus_ad wrote: post #26

"lost calories" as if having people consume animal feed to reduce total caloric loss is a good idea.

Exactly. A major problem with the usefulness of these studies (many of which make it into major journals) is that they seldom account for the fact that a lot of animal feed and human food sources do not compete with each other. For example, cattle are fed processed corn stocks and leaves after the cobs are removed. Corn stalks and leaves would otherwise rot if not consumed by livestock. Cows do not compete with humans for this calorie source.

Re: 40% of lost calories globally are from beef, needing 33 cal of feed per 1 cal

#228

Post by nkurz »

Alupis wrote: post #131
Dylan16807 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So you understood the crop we're discussing is rarely destroyed - and more often donated, diverted to secondary markets (ie. sold in grocery stores), or exported - yet still felt compelled to say a home cook could use them? In the context of someone talking about home cooks using them, and you acting like "People do not eat tart cherries directly." is a counterargument , yes I felt compelled to correct that. The in…

People do not eat tart cherries directly. The overwhelming majority of people will never process them into something edible either. "People in need" are not going to spend time and money processing tart cherries into juice concentrate or pie filling... especially when a can of either is cheaper than the raw ingredients to make your own. Your point is ridiculous, absurd and pedantic beyond any reasonable purpose.

Most of what you are saying is correct, but I feel the need to respond to your far too many repeated assertions that "People do not eat tart cherries directly": Except for when they do!

I grow several varieties of sour cherries in my yard, and frequently use them whole and without further processing. Usually I use them in a recipe like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clafoutis. Sometimes I pit them first, sometimes I don't. Sometimes I'll even happily snack on them raw.

No, like most small fruit you aren't going eat them because you are desperate for calories. But they actually aren't any harder to prepare or use than lots of other tasty things that people traditionally grow.

Re: 40% of lost calories globally are from beef, needing 33 cal of feed per 1 cal

#229

Post by mcv »

tracker1 wrote: post #96
capitainenemo wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if food shortages aren't an issue, reducing the amount of land dedicated to food production is a win for ecosystems. Not saying people have to go vegetarian, but reducing meat consumption or using more efficiently produced meats (in terms of land use) would overall make the world a nicer and more interesting place. And, really, with the whole neu5gc thing, it might be that humans would be better off focusing on…

Grass fed cattle can use land that is generally not fit for vegetation farming... because of excess rocks, etc. Ruminants that are being naturally (grass) fed are also regenerative in terms of soil health. They don't tend to "bulk up" as much as conventional (grain fed and/or finished) options though, so are more expensive to produce... the gas emissions are another issue that is largely different for grass fed, wher…

> Grass fed cattle can use land that is generally not fit for vegetation farming

Can, but that doesn't mean it always is. There's lots of cattle that never even comes outside, and is fed food that humans could also eat.

I recall reading that during the famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s, Ethiopian farmers were exporting beans to feed cattle in Europe because that was more profitable than feeding people in Ethiopia.

Beef is simply extremely inefficient. And so, unfortunately, is cheese (I can do without beef, but not without cheese). If cattle is grazing on land that's simply not usable for anything else, that's a completely different matter, but that's not how most cattle are fed.

Re: 40% of lost calories globally are from beef, needing 33 cal of feed per 1 cal

#230

Post by mcv »

tracker1 wrote: post #102
heathrow83829 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

meat uses up enormous quantities of water. potatoes for instance use about 75 gallons to produce 2000 calories compared to say 1500 to 2500 gallons for 2000 calories of beef.

For grass fed cattle, the vast majority of said water is from rain that would have fallen on the land with or without the cattle. It's not generally municipal supplies of water in use for naturally raised cattle.

Absolutely. But not all beef is grass fed. The situation would be very different if it was.
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