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Comment by ip26 | Hacker News Reader

Meat has high calories per pound. But a cow must eat 10,000 calories of plants to produce 1,000 calories of beef.

Chickens need as few as 2,000 calories of plant to produce 1,000 calories of chicken.

If they are eating roughage humans can't eat, it's useful. But if we are farming corn to feed cows, we could have been farming something humans (or chickens) can eat instead with less land, fertilizer, etc.

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Ok, but the plants a cow is eating are inedible to humans, and they mostly graze on infertile land. Most food they are fed in the finishing stage is farm byproduct that would otherwise get thrown out. Only 7% of a cow's lifetime food intake will be crops that compete with human food demand.

What a cow is really doing is turning inedible sources of food into nutritious human food.

Field corn is hardly a byproduct. It's inedible to humans, yes, but a different crop could be grown instead.

This entire thread is hijacked by talking about "cow farts". Meat, the way it's farmed today, is far more intensive than what meets the eye. There's the land required to raise the crops that feed the animals, there's transportation of this feed and the raw material to grow the feed, there's the deforestation caused by the land requirement, and on and on.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding...

That's because they shouldn't be fed grains.

Field corn is grown for the starch, which is turned into ethanol. The remaining bits are turned into animal feed. Those bits are the byproduct. The main product is ethanol, which the government has induced a huge demand for under the pretext of environmental protection.

It is not profitable to grow field corn solely for animal feed.

> they mostly graze on infertile land

This is true during the first year of life. After that, most cattle are moved to dense feedlots. Further, the infertile land they're grazing on, in many cases, is infertile precisely because of the way it's grazed. In the scenario where herds graze huge tracts of unbroken native grasslands, the result is increasingly fertile soil.

When grazing animals are confined to small lots, the resulting erosion of topsoil and over-grazing reduce the fertility of the land.

> the plants a cow is eating are inedible to humans > Most food they are fed in the finishing stage is farm byproduct that would otherwise get thrown out.

True in many cases, but missing the larger point. This waste would typically be scattered over huge tracts of land, sequester carbon and re-fertilize the soil over long time horizons. Instead, we turn it into methane and artificially fertilize.

> What a cow is really doing is turning inedible sources of food into nutritious human food.

True, but fails to consider the negative externalities.

There are exceptions where meat makes sense. At higher than 4000 meters, you aren’t going to grow much more than barley, so meat is pretty much it. I’ve never been so sick of meat than during a trip on the Tibetan plateau. Likewise for dry scrub land (Nevada, Wyoming, Arizona, irrigation can only do so much). Then there is the efficiency at which food for livestock can be grown vs for people.

Yes, absolutely. It's difficult to argue for nuance in approach. I really have no idea how to make the general argument effectively.

That's interesting, as on the Nepal side you get only Dahl Bhat (rice and lentils), with maybe some pickles and luxury, a fried egg!

However in Mendoza, Argentina near to Aconcagua, you are inundated with beef steak and red wine, which sounds great, but after a few days of that you're feeling pretty heavy!

Nepal has much more agriculture than Tibet given that much of their land is much lower (Kathmandu is 1,400 meters, Lhasa is 3,655 meters). So most Nepalese are Hindu and can be vegetarians, while vegetarianism simply can’t exist in traditional Tibet (you won’t survive, so even Buddhist monks eat meat, incidentally the one thing Tibetans most like about being apart of China is easy access to agriculture imports).

South America I wonder if it’s more about converting nutrient poor jungles to grazing land?

Right, but humans can't live off grass and grass is produced from photosynthesis which is for all practical purposes an unlimited energy source. Not too worried if we waste grass.

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