Hacker News Reader

Comment by maccam94 | Hacker News Reader

From a recent Bloomberg article[1]

The last two graphs show that 41% of the land in the contiguous 48 states is used for feeding livestock. More than 33% of the 48 states is just pasture, most of which I believe is used by cattle.

What would it take to shift protein consumption from beef (3% efficient) to products like poultry (21%) and eggs (31%)? [2]

I think we have to take a hard look at taxes, fees, and subsidies for land use and agricultural products, but there's not much political pressure to do so right now.

1: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/

2: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/10...

View on HN

Land used for grazing livestock is often no good for growing crops.

> For example, US NRCS statistics indicate that about 59 percent of US non-federal pasture and unforested rangeland is unsuitable for cultivation, yet such land has value for grazing of livestock.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arable_land#Non-arable_land

Oh yeah, I"m not suggesting that the pasture could be converted to cropland. I think we just aren't pricing in a bunch of externalities for beef production that would otherwise raise the price and shift consumption to poultry.

The fees to access that land are very low ($1.70/cow/month)[1]. Maybe those lands would have more ecological value if they weren't being grazed, so add a charge for the environmental burden. A tax on bovine methane emissions is also necessary.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grazing_fee#United_States

Also I totally forgot about water usage as well. Most of the time it is much cheaper to use water than it should be, and cattle consume huge amounts of it.

wow. those numbers are so cool. never knew poultry was so efficient. No wonder it’s so much cheaper.

What would it take to make beef production more efficient? genetic engineering perhaps.

People wil naturally switch to more efficient food as population goes up and food resources become more scarce.

It's not exactly surprising, is it? Besides efficiency, what would increase the price of a piece of food? (In the long run I assume supply would match demand so a mismatch there wouldn't be the cause.)

So I think the answer to your question about increasing efficiency is probably pretty difficult. There's already a huge profit motive to increase efficiency, so if a few labcoats could easily solve the problem I'm sure they would have by now. I think the answer is to eat animals who reach maturity faster (or just grow more per unit time?). Like insects :-)

>What would it take to make beef production more efficient?

Nothing. Large animals that live long lives are inefficient by their very nature. The bigger an animal is, the more of its energy consumption goes to maintenance rather than growth. And the longer it lives before reaching slaughter weight, the more that inefficiency compounds. If you somehow turned cattle into 5 pound animals that mature in 6 weeks, they would be efficient, but they also wouldn't really qualify as cattle any more and their meat would likely be noticeably different than beef.

Cheaper? Where I live in the US, chicken is much more expensive than beef, unless you're comparing it to steak.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com