I wonder about efficiency. If the meat I get is from 30km away on grassland that couldn’t grow crops it’s grown on land that is otherwise useless for food. How does using an otherwise useless piece of land factor in? Compared to tomatoes from the other side of the world they came on the most efficient cargo ships
I’ll definitely agree with you that animals raised on food humans can eat are terribly inefficient. I also think the meat from those doesn’t taste as good as the ones raised on grass
Likewise the river water cows drink is returned in their urine, delivered to the ground not to waterways, reinforced with extra nitrogen which the plants want
I don’t believe the efficiency calculations are straight forward except in until most extreme cases
I was thinking on another scale entirely. Its probably more efficient to exclusively grow tomatoes around the equator, then use one or two massive container ship to transit around the world.
Livestock get negative points both for their high position in the food web, but also their reduced ability to scale (compared to row crops).
That being said, even on a small scale, to raise a cow you have to go through SO MUCH food that (even ignoring the value of non-food crop like grass) I’d be surprised if livestock wasn’t an order of magnitude less efficient.
Of course like anything it depends on the metric, probably could dump a lot of lead in the ocean chasing efficiency. The general point stands though, livestock just have too many logistical issues to be a good choice on a global scale (without factoring in the subsidiaries that keep livestock farms afloat today).
Yeah, the issue is livestock eat crops to energise themselves, so livestock inheritly requires exponentially more fertiliser than just the crops would.
ruminants eat grass, which humans cannot eat, and turn it into protein, which humans can eat… grass grows on land that humans can’t use to grow crops… and even crops humans do grow cannot be fully eaten by humans, something like 70% of the biomass from cropland is not consumable by humans… which we turn into human food by feeding to to animals that can eat it.
you will see they are already farming everywhere they can farm…
it wouldn’t be “efficient” to ignore 88% of your productive land… and even if you do ignore it, the sun still shines on it, the grass still grows on it… something is going to eat that grass, even if it’s just bacteria… so the ecology is going to keep marching forward no matter what, that is why its a biocycle
how do you not understand that the more meat we consume, the more the crops that need to be grown? the vast majority of farmed animal meat is grown with far more crops than it would ever take to just feed people the plants. its incredibly simple arithmetic.
Being a carnivore is less efficient than even those monoculture global transport lines.
So what defines right vs privilege? Is it just who’s allowed to be stupid?
I wonder about efficiency. If the meat I get is from 30km away on grassland that couldn’t grow crops it’s grown on land that is otherwise useless for food. How does using an otherwise useless piece of land factor in? Compared to tomatoes from the other side of the world they came on the most efficient cargo ships
I’ll definitely agree with you that animals raised on food humans can eat are terribly inefficient. I also think the meat from those doesn’t taste as good as the ones raised on grass
Likewise the river water cows drink is returned in their urine, delivered to the ground not to waterways, reinforced with extra nitrogen which the plants want
I don’t believe the efficiency calculations are straight forward except in until most extreme cases
I was thinking on another scale entirely. Its probably more efficient to exclusively grow tomatoes around the equator, then use one or two massive container ship to transit around the world.
Livestock get negative points both for their high position in the food web, but also their reduced ability to scale (compared to row crops).
That being said, even on a small scale, to raise a cow you have to go through SO MUCH food that (even ignoring the value of non-food crop like grass) I’d be surprised if livestock wasn’t an order of magnitude less efficient.
Of course like anything it depends on the metric, probably could dump a lot of lead in the ocean chasing efficiency. The general point stands though, livestock just have too many logistical issues to be a good choice on a global scale (without factoring in the subsidiaries that keep livestock farms afloat today).
Have you not heard about the tons of fertilisers needed for crops?
Yeah, the issue is livestock eat crops to energise themselves, so livestock inheritly requires exponentially more fertiliser than just the crops would.
ruminants eat grass, which humans cannot eat, and turn it into protein, which humans can eat… grass grows on land that humans can’t use to grow crops… and even crops humans do grow cannot be fully eaten by humans, something like 70% of the biomass from cropland is not consumable by humans… which we turn into human food by feeding to to animals that can eat it.
30% is still quite a lot (much more than just eating a plant!), and the land still has uses beyond just farmland.
https://www.agriculture.gov.au/sites/default/files/images/abares-snapshot-2026-2-land.png
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dib.2022.108852
you will see they are already farming everywhere they can farm…
it wouldn’t be “efficient” to ignore 88% of your productive land… and even if you do ignore it, the sun still shines on it, the grass still grows on it… something is going to eat that grass, even if it’s just bacteria… so the ecology is going to keep marching forward no matter what, that is why its a biocycle
You could use the same argument to throw a datacenter there, but just because nature is undistributed doesn’t mean we need to disturb it.
Efficiency also includes space efficiency, as we have destroyed more habitats in the past hundred years than some extinction events.
how do you not understand that the more meat we consume, the more the crops that need to be grown? the vast majority of farmed animal meat is grown with far more crops than it would ever take to just feed people the plants. its incredibly simple arithmetic.
what do you think people feed cows?
thats right, its crops
GRASS, I know you know it’s grass because you responded to the comment with the grazable pastoral GRASS LAND map.