First up, the principal is sound - meat production is very inefficient even if meat consumption is “efficient” just from the narrow perspective of getting adequate protein quickly and conveniently.
If demand for meat decreased then there’d be more food in the supply chain for humans.
We don’t actually have a food production problem, we have a food distribution problem. Ie we do not need to produce -more- food.
Much of what’s grown for animals is not readily edible by humans, corn being the big one - it’s not corn you or I would want to eat.
One of the problems that’s literally never mentioned is that growing produce for humans can either depend on artificial fertilizers from fossil fuels or natural fertilizer from animals. Less animal production for meat, while a very good idea on so many levels, presents a generalized fertility problem.
I don’t really have any answers for #3… just bringing it up as something to consider.
One of the problems that’s literally never mentioned is that growing produce for humans can either depend on artificial fertilizers from fossil fuels or natural fertilizer from animals. Less animal production for meat, while a very good idea on so many levels, presents a generalized fertility problem.
This is the “manure argument”, and it is mentioned, typically by the Big Meat lobby.
While the argument has merit in principle, it neglects the issue of scale. The amount of manure produced by a meat industry of a scale needed to feed billions of omnivorous humans is massively excessive to any possible needs in terms of crop fertilizer. The vast majority of that sh*t ends up in the environment, completely untreated. So, not only does it function as a pathogen that leads to overuse of antibiotics and thus pandemics, it also “fertilizes” rivers and groundwater with nitrate pollution that kills off everything that was there already.
The issue is not just about distribution, it is about type.
The amount of manure produced by a meat industry of a scale needed to feed billions of omnivorous humans is massively excessive to any possible needs in terms of crop fertilizer.
This is true.
Edit to be more clear and add some nuance because re-reading everything I can see how you interpreted my comment the way you did.
The context was essentially replacing animal feed with human food, in whole or in part. I did say “less animal production” but to try to be clear - I am completely discounting industrialized production and CAFOs. I do not consider them legitimate methods. That is really the source of your pollution and excess. I didn’t specify this and I should have.
We can argue that there is some large reduction in animal production where we can find a balance but the debate is always one or the other and dominated by militant vegans who want fresh veggies and NO animal production. Currently that’s not possible.
But another issue that relates to CAFOs is that so much of the manure is not available for composting. We’re not set up for that because there are so many fewer organic operations. So if you reduce animal production across the board without regard to type of operation we absolutely will see a fertility deficit.
It’s not possible without trying. There are other ways to move organic matter from from freshly dead to soil without the accelerated processes of digestion through some warm blooded animal’s intestines.
The problem is the lack of imagination and knowledge on the part of the “organic” types.
And if you don’t understand the laws of physics and how there’s no free energy, no magical cycles of C, N, P, K, S and others, let me know.
The problem is the lack of imagination and knowledge on the part of the “organic” types.
Rest assured, farmers in general are not actually lacking in imagination or knowledge.
And if you don’t understand the laws of physics and how there’s no free energy, no magical cycles of C, N, P, K, S and others, let me know.
Absolutely, please regale us with your outstanding wisdom and intelligence. Do tell us how we can “move organic matter from freshly dead to soil”. I’m not sure what that means but perhaps you can educate us.
Rest assured, farmers in general are not actually lacking in imagination or knowledge.
Yes, they are.
Absolutely, please regale us with your outstanding wisdom and intelligence. Do tell us how we can “move organic matter from freshly dead to soil”. I’m not sure what that means but perhaps you can educate us.
This exactly what I mean. You’re looking for education on some random website in a comment when you should be taking years of education on chemistry, biochemistry, soil sciences, biology, microbiology, ecology and many more.
No they aren’t. That’s just your arrogance and prejudice.
You’re looking for education on some random website in a comment
LOL. Rest assured I did not think you were capable of providing such an education.
Did you know for example, that it’s increasingly common for farmers to not just have a degree in agronomy but also subjects like chemistry soil science, etc? It’s really a requirement if you want to work for any of the larger farming operations. Now my background is in tech, specifically software engineering. My partner has a PhD in biochemistry. A neighboring fruit guy has a PhD in biology and two other farmers I know have advanced degrees in ecology.
But of course you know better and what would I know, I’m just a stupid ignorant farmer.
I’m still not an expert, but I like to speculate and dream of a better world
I have no disagreement with point 1, I’ve heard that before. But gosh, it’s a tough pill to swallow when you’re not food secure. I think maybe it’s easier for people to accept “there isn’t enough food” than “there is food, but I can’t have any.”
Point 2: I imagine we’d probably grow different food there. I suppose there might be some concern for biodiversity loss, but if we were suddenly gifted a ton of arable land to grow food on we could probably get better variety.
Point 3 is a tough one, it’s something I haven’t really considered before. However, I suppose that raising animals for fertilizer could potentially be more humane and lower impact than raising animals for flesh. For instance, you’re no longer incentivized to slaughter the animals at a young age, and older animals might actually have a lower caloric requirement. Plus you wouldn’t need to raise the mega polluters like cows, you just want whatever gives good fertilizer.
I’m quite sympathetic to the ideas of veganic farming - most of it is just agro-ecological minus the animal contribution.
I knew a farm that was run by vegans. They literally, I kid you not, were running it on an animal sanctuary that had lots of manure which they refused to use. Great big piles of compost I would have cried over.
They drove 4 hours one way to get a load of veganic compost, which if you know anything about moving such things around, was probably enough for a raised bed or two. So when the veganic people talk about “maximizing local plant-based fertility” and “minimizing off-farm inputs”, well, that ain’t exactly what they meant.
This is an extreme example but it illustrates how sometimes the adherence to dogmatic principles in food production results in no production.
Growing vegetables without animal manure -and- without synthetic fertilizers works on a teeeny-tiny scale where you already have sufficient fertility and enough land do basically grow grass for compost. It’s completely untenable for actual high-intensity food production.
Firstly, my general approach to this problem is to worry about it later, because obviously it’s not a problem at all in a world of 8 billion humans all wanting to eat meat every day.
But, since you seem to know what you’re talking about, what do you think would be the minimal amount of animals and land required to feed those 8 billion organically? Assumptions:
animal manure is absolutely required in the absence of synthetic fertilizer (if true, I did not know this, I assumed that a forest could renew itself without the help of fauna)
all 8 billion are willing in theory to go vegan
A rough picture of what that would look like? Lots of cereals and legumes and so on, plus a couple of chickens per hectare?
what do you think would be the minimal amount of animals and land required to feed those 8 billion organically
It’s a question complicated by the current “realities” of capitalism where, for example, people are willing to have their food grown in terrible conditions in another country and then imported over thousands of miles and many weeks to save a few percent on costs.
If we can ignore all that and I can just spell out what I think is the ideal scenario, it looks basically like this:
much less meat consumption overall, closer to 50 kg/person/year vs the current 124kg (wtf?) for Americans
instead of consolidation into huge monoculture operations, many much smaller but highly diversified farms - ideally you should never be more than a few miles from a farm. I include in this urban areas where we set aside land and rooftops for this purpose.
Land for farming should be free and granted to farmers for their long-term use.
All farms should be highly integrated so that any animal production there is happens in conjunction with vegetable production. You need more land for this so you can do things like rotate a field from sheep for a year to vegetables the next
All farms should be using agroecological practices with no artificial fertilizers, minimal tillage, etc.
Processed foods that rely on huge volumes of commodities like corn would not exist. Corn for ethanol? Probably not either.
Farms should leverage collective labor where possible and we should bring agricultural education into the mainstream AND work to remove the biases against farming that are so evident here.
Community composting efforts, including humanure, would help reduce the dependency on animals for fertility.
One of the things that makes this all viable is the higher nutritional density possible from shorter supply chains.
These are a lot of preconditions, I acknowledge.
If this can happen I believe we will require less land than we currently use for our combined animal & human food production. Currently that’s around 50% of the land area of the US, or 1.2 billion acres but this includes about 650 million acres for grazing and about the same for forest-use, which I believe means lumber production but could also mean grazing. Only about 400 million acres are used for growing crops and the majority of this is for commodities like soybeans and corn.
The best proxy for productivity is not actually yield of commodities but dollar value. This is because we want to equate as closely as possible productivity with nutrional value without the value-adds of say, processed foods. A typical acre for commodities might net you $150-300 per acre in profit while a typical acre on an integrated farm growing diverse produce (aka speciality crops) can yield over $25,000 per acre up to as much as double that. If you remove some of the headwinds from farmers like mortgages, competition with cheap imported produce, high marketing costs and high transportation costs you could probably see much more than that.
In this scenario food costs would very likely stay about the same or even go down because farmers can get very good margins and better economies of scale from higher demand.
So, back to the question of how much land - if you use the dollar amount and take $2 trillion as the figure we spend on food, and assuming margins around 30% that means revenue of $100k per acre. This would mean you’d need about 20,000,000 acres. Even assuming my napkin math is way off and it’s double or triple that… it’s a lot less.
Interesting. That certainly looks like a better world than the current one.
This model seems to be optimizing for a specific conception of human nutrition and wellbeing. Fair enough, that will definitely be an easier sell than veganism (if still extremely hard due to entrenched interests).
Personally (like many others here) I would prefer to go further still and optimize the model for biodiversity and animal wellbeing. 40% of current US meat consumption is still pretty high, seems it would be possible to cut that much more without conceding any ground on human nutrition. All of our nearest ape cousins are heavily (if not absolutely) vegan. That to me offers a pretty big clue about what’s possible and even advisable.
In this alternative model, I suspect the bottom line for the animal biomass necessary for manure would be above the bottom line for optimal human nutrition, and lower than the figure necessary to produce a kilo of meat per person per week. Especially if it involves lots of egg-laying manure-producing chickens instead of large grazing ruminants. Such a model would require less land still. And if there’s one thing even better for the environment than a best-practices agroecological farm with well-paid cooperative workers, it’s no farm at all and a forest in its place.
Um… Mostly the way it’s being grown now? Did you miss the part where that’s already farm land being used to feed our food?
Edit: the last sentence was unnecessarily rude, sorry about that… Also, reading some of your other replies, I see more what you meant. I still think it’s a very solvable problem though.
I also think it’s a very solvable problem. But there are a lot of complex moving parts in our food production system. I’m thinking of this in the context of the current highly industrialized state of agriculture and the current demands of consumers and how do you make a shift toward sustainable agriculture while also reducing meat production and animal exploitation.
So for me, the way it’s being grown now isn’t actually an option. 5000 acres of feed corn on dead soil that’s continually pumped with synthetic fertilizers is a thoroughly bad idea and turning those acres into corn (or anything) for humans is every bit as bad.
Believe it or not, it’s actually rather hard to get quality manure inputs for many farms. Depends on where you are of course. But the stuff weighs a lot, is never where you want it and the largest quantities are from CAFOs which are decidedly NOT high quality and require a lot more work to be useable in a sustainable context. That manure is sold, sure, and ends up in food production, but not to the exclusion of synthetic inputs. If you eliminate CAFOs then there’s even more demand for manure such that sustainable operations which require high quality compost because they don’t use synthetic fertilizers are going to have a hard time getting enough fertility.
So it’s easy to generalize and say there is excess manure from so much animal production, but the reality is that much if not most of that manure is not where you need it. I think a lot of folks don’t realize that sustainable meat production that isn’t integrated with sustainable vegetable production adds a lot of complexity, and yet that’s where we are at right now. The integrated food systems (e.g. rotational grazing etc) of times gone by were much more efficient but are relatively uncommon today, mainly because of market forces.
Hopefully this is a better summary of the point I was trying to make yesterday.
Have you worked out how that food will be grown?
I’m not the expert, but I believe we’re currently growing that food for the animals.
If demand for meat decreased then there’d be more food in the supply chain for humans.
First up, the principal is sound - meat production is very inefficient even if meat consumption is “efficient” just from the narrow perspective of getting adequate protein quickly and conveniently.
I don’t really have any answers for #3… just bringing it up as something to consider.
This is the “manure argument”, and it is mentioned, typically by the Big Meat lobby.
While the argument has merit in principle, it neglects the issue of scale. The amount of manure produced by a meat industry of a scale needed to feed billions of omnivorous humans is massively excessive to any possible needs in terms of crop fertilizer. The vast majority of that sh*t ends up in the environment, completely untreated. So, not only does it function as a pathogen that leads to overuse of antibiotics and thus pandemics, it also “fertilizes” rivers and groundwater with nitrate pollution that kills off everything that was there already.
The issue is not just about distribution, it is about type.
This is true.
Edit to be more clear and add some nuance because re-reading everything I can see how you interpreted my comment the way you did.
The context was essentially replacing animal feed with human food, in whole or in part. I did say “less animal production” but to try to be clear - I am completely discounting industrialized production and CAFOs. I do not consider them legitimate methods. That is really the source of your pollution and excess. I didn’t specify this and I should have.
We can argue that there is some large reduction in animal production where we can find a balance but the debate is always one or the other and dominated by militant vegans who want fresh veggies and NO animal production. Currently that’s not possible.
But another issue that relates to CAFOs is that so much of the manure is not available for composting. We’re not set up for that because there are so many fewer organic operations. So if you reduce animal production across the board without regard to type of operation we absolutely will see a fertility deficit.
It’s not possible without trying. There are other ways to move organic matter from from freshly dead to soil without the accelerated processes of digestion through some warm blooded animal’s intestines.
The problem is the lack of imagination and knowledge on the part of the “organic” types.
And if you don’t understand the laws of physics and how there’s no free energy, no magical cycles of C, N, P, K, S and others, let me know.
Rest assured, farmers in general are not actually lacking in imagination or knowledge.
Absolutely, please regale us with your outstanding wisdom and intelligence. Do tell us how we can “move organic matter from freshly dead to soil”. I’m not sure what that means but perhaps you can educate us.
Yes, they are.
This exactly what I mean. You’re looking for education on some random website in a comment when you should be taking years of education on chemistry, biochemistry, soil sciences, biology, microbiology, ecology and many more.
No they aren’t. That’s just your arrogance and prejudice.
LOL. Rest assured I did not think you were capable of providing such an education.
Did you know for example, that it’s increasingly common for farmers to not just have a degree in agronomy but also subjects like chemistry soil science, etc? It’s really a requirement if you want to work for any of the larger farming operations. Now my background is in tech, specifically software engineering. My partner has a PhD in biochemistry. A neighboring fruit guy has a PhD in biology and two other farmers I know have advanced degrees in ecology.
But of course you know better and what would I know, I’m just a stupid ignorant farmer.
I’m still not an expert, but I like to speculate and dream of a better world
I have no disagreement with point 1, I’ve heard that before. But gosh, it’s a tough pill to swallow when you’re not food secure. I think maybe it’s easier for people to accept “there isn’t enough food” than “there is food, but I can’t have any.”
Point 2: I imagine we’d probably grow different food there. I suppose there might be some concern for biodiversity loss, but if we were suddenly gifted a ton of arable land to grow food on we could probably get better variety.
Point 3 is a tough one, it’s something I haven’t really considered before. However, I suppose that raising animals for fertilizer could potentially be more humane and lower impact than raising animals for flesh. For instance, you’re no longer incentivized to slaughter the animals at a young age, and older animals might actually have a lower caloric requirement. Plus you wouldn’t need to raise the mega polluters like cows, you just want whatever gives good fertilizer.
You don’t need animals for fertilizer you can follow the veganic farming way of doing things to reduce nitrite runoff and e-coli contamination.
This is the comment I was waiting for.
I’m quite sympathetic to the ideas of veganic farming - most of it is just agro-ecological minus the animal contribution.
I knew a farm that was run by vegans. They literally, I kid you not, were running it on an animal sanctuary that had lots of manure which they refused to use. Great big piles of compost I would have cried over.
They drove 4 hours one way to get a load of veganic compost, which if you know anything about moving such things around, was probably enough for a raised bed or two. So when the veganic people talk about “maximizing local plant-based fertility” and “minimizing off-farm inputs”, well, that ain’t exactly what they meant.
This is an extreme example but it illustrates how sometimes the adherence to dogmatic principles in food production results in no production.
Growing vegetables without animal manure -and- without synthetic fertilizers works on a teeeny-tiny scale where you already have sufficient fertility and enough land do basically grow grass for compost. It’s completely untenable for actual high-intensity food production.
Firstly, my general approach to this problem is to worry about it later, because obviously it’s not a problem at all in a world of 8 billion humans all wanting to eat meat every day.
But, since you seem to know what you’re talking about, what do you think would be the minimal amount of animals and land required to feed those 8 billion organically? Assumptions:
A rough picture of what that would look like? Lots of cereals and legumes and so on, plus a couple of chickens per hectare?
It’s a question complicated by the current “realities” of capitalism where, for example, people are willing to have their food grown in terrible conditions in another country and then imported over thousands of miles and many weeks to save a few percent on costs.
If we can ignore all that and I can just spell out what I think is the ideal scenario, it looks basically like this:
These are a lot of preconditions, I acknowledge.
If this can happen I believe we will require less land than we currently use for our combined animal & human food production. Currently that’s around 50% of the land area of the US, or 1.2 billion acres but this includes about 650 million acres for grazing and about the same for forest-use, which I believe means lumber production but could also mean grazing. Only about 400 million acres are used for growing crops and the majority of this is for commodities like soybeans and corn.
The best proxy for productivity is not actually yield of commodities but dollar value. This is because we want to equate as closely as possible productivity with nutrional value without the value-adds of say, processed foods. A typical acre for commodities might net you $150-300 per acre in profit while a typical acre on an integrated farm growing diverse produce (aka speciality crops) can yield over $25,000 per acre up to as much as double that. If you remove some of the headwinds from farmers like mortgages, competition with cheap imported produce, high marketing costs and high transportation costs you could probably see much more than that.
In this scenario food costs would very likely stay about the same or even go down because farmers can get very good margins and better economies of scale from higher demand.
So, back to the question of how much land - if you use the dollar amount and take $2 trillion as the figure we spend on food, and assuming margins around 30% that means revenue of $100k per acre. This would mean you’d need about 20,000,000 acres. Even assuming my napkin math is way off and it’s double or triple that… it’s a lot less.
Interesting. That certainly looks like a better world than the current one.
This model seems to be optimizing for a specific conception of human nutrition and wellbeing. Fair enough, that will definitely be an easier sell than veganism (if still extremely hard due to entrenched interests).
Personally (like many others here) I would prefer to go further still and optimize the model for biodiversity and animal wellbeing. 40% of current US meat consumption is still pretty high, seems it would be possible to cut that much more without conceding any ground on human nutrition. All of our nearest ape cousins are heavily (if not absolutely) vegan. That to me offers a pretty big clue about what’s possible and even advisable.
In this alternative model, I suspect the bottom line for the animal biomass necessary for manure would be above the bottom line for optimal human nutrition, and lower than the figure necessary to produce a kilo of meat per person per week. Especially if it involves lots of egg-laying manure-producing chickens instead of large grazing ruminants. Such a model would require less land still. And if there’s one thing even better for the environment than a best-practices agroecological farm with well-paid cooperative workers, it’s no farm at all and a forest in its place.
Um… Mostly the way it’s being grown now?
Did you miss the part where that’s already farm land being used to feed our food?Edit: the last sentence was unnecessarily rude, sorry about that… Also, reading some of your other replies, I see more what you meant. I still think it’s a very solvable problem though.
I also think it’s a very solvable problem. But there are a lot of complex moving parts in our food production system. I’m thinking of this in the context of the current highly industrialized state of agriculture and the current demands of consumers and how do you make a shift toward sustainable agriculture while also reducing meat production and animal exploitation.
So for me, the way it’s being grown now isn’t actually an option. 5000 acres of feed corn on dead soil that’s continually pumped with synthetic fertilizers is a thoroughly bad idea and turning those acres into corn (or anything) for humans is every bit as bad.
Believe it or not, it’s actually rather hard to get quality manure inputs for many farms. Depends on where you are of course. But the stuff weighs a lot, is never where you want it and the largest quantities are from CAFOs which are decidedly NOT high quality and require a lot more work to be useable in a sustainable context. That manure is sold, sure, and ends up in food production, but not to the exclusion of synthetic inputs. If you eliminate CAFOs then there’s even more demand for manure such that sustainable operations which require high quality compost because they don’t use synthetic fertilizers are going to have a hard time getting enough fertility.
So it’s easy to generalize and say there is excess manure from so much animal production, but the reality is that much if not most of that manure is not where you need it. I think a lot of folks don’t realize that sustainable meat production that isn’t integrated with sustainable vegetable production adds a lot of complexity, and yet that’s where we are at right now. The integrated food systems (e.g. rotational grazing etc) of times gone by were much more efficient but are relatively uncommon today, mainly because of market forces.
Hopefully this is a better summary of the point I was trying to make yesterday.