this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
325 points (87.2% liked)
Science
12986 readers
11 users here now
Subscribe to see new publications and popular science coverage of current research on your homepage
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
No shit? Is this not obvious and generally understood?
No, I think you're in a bubble if you think that
Ohhh I most definitely am in a bubble. But it's also just common sense. You have to produce plant food, then ship the food to cows for them to eat and grow then to be killed and eaten. And it's not like you put 60 kilos in and you get 60 kilos of meat. Just look at yourself for an example. So it's only natural that if you simply feed the plants to the humans it would be better in every way. People should know this shit mate.
I asked how bad this really is: to produce one kilogram of beef requires 25 kilograms of grain – to feed the animal – and roughly 15,000 litres of water
animals are fed parts of plants that people can't or won't eat. and cows eat mostly grass.
Yeah and no. Cows eat about 2% of their weight each day. Over 98% of this comes from food that we grow for them. It's true that a lot of it we humans wouldn't eat, but we still grow it for them to eat. The idea of cows eating grass in a field and that's what they eat is extremely rare.
For the US as a example less than 1% of the cows feed is grass. The majority of things like soy (77% of what is grown and we could eat) goes to cow feed.
"There were about 92 million head of cattle in the United States at the end of 2015, with roughly 30 million head slaughtered that year. For perspective, the grass-fed industry currently slaughters about 230,000 head, or less than 1% of the total conventional slaughter."
If we take 7% of all soy out because it's fed directly to animals, and another 6.9% is eaten, but not as oil, and 20% of each of the remaining beans are made of oil, we find 17.22% is the maximum amount of oil we could get if all the soy beans not fed to animals or eaten by people are pressed for oil.
It turns out that the chart shows 13.2% is oil for humans to eat, and 4.0% is used industrially (and these are all oil uses), totaling 17.2%,then basically all soy not eaten directly by animals or as various human foods is pressed for oil.
source https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2021/02/Global-soy-production-to-end-use.png
"grass fed" means they aren't grain-finisged, but most of their diet is grass until they get to the feedlot.
almost all soy is pressed for oil. what is fed to livestock is almost entirely industrial waste from that process.
Using it to make plant-based meat alternatives or tofu or soy milk would be more efficient than feeding it to animals, where most of the nutrients and calories are used up by their metabolism.
yea. we do. but we don't use all of it for human food. i don't see anything better to do with the industrial waste than feed it to livestock.
After extracting the protein and nutrients for plant-based products there's not much nutrition left to use it as animal feed though. It's probably not nutritionally appropriate for cows, pigs and chickens at that point. Using it for insect farming would seem more realistic to me, or as a growth medium for edible mushrooms.
when you have a ton of soy cake, I guess you can decide what to do with it.
beef cattle eat mostly grass for most of their lives
almost no soy goes to cattle at all
EDIT: Ignore ... I didn't realise this was all about the environment ... though that being said ... it's basic common sense ... each stage of processing adds inefficiencies.
It's fairly universal common sense that plenty of fruit and vegetables and core to a healthy diet. From there it really isn't a stretch to at least wonder whether going vegan is pretty healthy. The only things that would preclude such an idea from seeming feasible are probably propaganda around dairy and meta products, unfortunately. But even then, you can start thinking about the health problems of red meat and high fat diets.
This article is about environmental impact, not health impact
Ha ... time to sleep! Sorry ... rather dumb of me!!!