Comment by dilap | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dilap | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Cows eat grass, which is just out there, growing naturally. Those aren't calories humans could be consuming; we don't have the right kind of stomaches. You can view a cow as machine for extracting the nutrients in grass into a dense, human-digestible form. Pretty cool.

I'm also not sure your "modern agriculture" point stands -- are industrial farming methods sustainable over the long scale?

Think about America pre-colonization: a continent filled with ruminants happily munching away, being hunted at sustainable levels. To my mind that is peak sustainability and environmental friendliness.

Whereas a huge environmental problem we have right now is soil depletion, which is largely driven by agriculture.

Cows could actually help solve this problem, because their manure contributes to the health of the soil.

https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_worl...

It's far from obvious that a veggie burger would be healthier for the environment than eating cows.

(Disclaimer: haven't watched the ted talk, but familiar with the ideas and seemed like a good summary to link to.)

Maybe it would be better to say "cows would eat grass" but unfortunately >90% of beef comes from cows who don't, and are raised on feed[1].

1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevebanker/2016/01/29/the-gras...

I think it'd probably be good to stop feeding grain to cows, but even "grain-fed" cows eat grass (or hay) most of their lives -- it's at the end when they're sent to the feed lots to fatten them up that they eat grain.

"you don't need to grow vast quantities of grain to raise cows, just to increase their biomass enough to feed large quantities of people"

Think about America pre-colonization: a continent filled with ruminants happily munching away, being hunted at sustainable levels. To my mind that is peak sustainability and environmental friendliness.

That's with a population of on the order of 10 million for the entire continent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_indigeno...

Naturally grazing cows wouldn't even come close to sustaining the current demand for meat. Industrialized animal agriculture exists for a reason.

Not to mention that that 10 million count includes many tribes/societies based around fishing, and an entire civilization based around farming sustainably:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahokia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(agriculture)

That's fair, but still, my point is raising beef is not intrinsically unsustainable and destructive.

Though I agree, it's probably not a reasonable primary food for most people at current population levels.

Yeah it might make sense to do on a controlled scale in the right climates, but it wouldn’t even come close to meeting current demands. People would have to get used to eating meat a few times a week.

I just posted this in a cousin comment, but a whole lot of experts disagree with Savory's claims: https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/04/allan-savorys-ted-t...

The TED talk is really good and sounds convincing, but in the end it's a bunch of pretty pictures going against what appears to be scientific consensus.

It doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong, but the tone of the piece and the fact that it's funded by Kellog's is certainly at least eye-brow raising:

There’s no such thing as a beef-eating environmentalist.

Slate’s coverage of food systems is made possible in part by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

Anyway, I think it's fair to at least say the topic is debated.

(Also, I wouldn't recommend being too overly swayed by "scientific consensus": scientists are just people, who are mostly sheep; lots of scientific consensuses turn out to be wrong. I'm reminded of the Feynman quote:

–Have no respect whatsoever for authority; forget who said it and instead look what he starts with, where he ends up, and ask yourself, "Is it reasonable?")

Cows eat grass which grows on land which used to have rainforest on it but which has been cleared, wiping out thousands of species, to make more cows. (Okay not all cows, but rainforest clearance for pastureland is a big problem where there are or used to be rainforests).

Cows also produce a massive amount of methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas, and they're not very efficient converters of plants into grass.

It is therefore well established that beef production is the least efficient and environmentally friendly form of meat production.

Yes, it's bad to cut down rainforests to raise beef, just like it's bad to cut down rainforests to make palm oil. That's not really a knock against raising cows in natural grassland, though.

Re GHGs, you have to weigh the methane against the carbon sequestration the cows promote.

These guys are working with local (to me) farms to study and enhance that:

https://www.marincarbonproject.org/about

It also just doesn't seem to me, on a gut level, that having 90 million cows in the US is our main problem (especially compared to historical levels of 20 million bison). I think we should be much more focussed on the 20 million barrels of oil a day we're burning through (compared to historical levels of basically 0).

Shoot. Wait wait wait. That's a really excellent point. What?

We've killed most of the sizable animals on the planet. We really absolutely have. No question. Passenger pigeon flocks, billions of fish, vast populations of whales and bison and all the major megafauna we wiped out.

That's a holocaust of farting biomass. Complete slaughter. There's no way that our beef herds offset the megafauna that were here before the landbridge migration to North America when it comes to methane.

I haven't heard something genuinely new in this debate for a long time. Thank you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com