Hacker News Reader

Comment by rhinoceraptor | Hacker News Reader

People love to neglect grass fed meat. Much of the planet is grasslands that require grazing animals. You put grazing animals on the land, move them around, and that’s it. The only real energy input is the sun.

Compare that to monocropping which requires vast oil and pesticide/herbicide input, displaces local habitats, reduces the biodiversity of the planet.

View on HN

Grass fed beef isn't a solution. Cows still produce a lot of methane. http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2017-10-03-grass-fed-beef-good-or-b...

In North America, much of the land now used for grazing cows was formerly occupied by bison (which are so close to cows that they can actually interbred).

I seriously doubt that this caused any significant net change in methane production.

That’s only one metric to compare. That doesn’t take into account the carbon sequestration from manure, topsoil formation, etc. from grass fed animals.

It also doesn’t take into account the massive energy use (and therefore, carbon release) of fertilizing, seeding, irrigating, harvesting and processing feed for conventional cattle.

So in total, I would expect grass fed meat to be much better than conventional meat, and possibly better than if we were to just eat crops directly.

Where do you move them to during the winter ? Do you fly them to green pastures in the other hemisphere then ? Or maybe you just forgot that 600kg animals won't keep the same meaty and fatty bodyshape if you don't provide them silage or else during the cold seasons ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com