I heard something to do with Nitrogen and …cow farts(?) I am really unsure of this and would like to learn more.
Answer -
4 Parts
- Ethical reason for consuming animals
- Methane produced by cows are a harmful greenhouse gas which is contributing to our current climate crisis
- Health Reasons - there is convincing evidence that processed meats cause cancer
- it takes a lot more calories of plant food to produce the calories we would consume from the meat.
Details about the answers are in the comments
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That field could be used to grow a different crop than grass, which would use less water per calorie of human food produced
Also, hardly any cows just eat grass these days. That’s not how you get a lot of meat as fast and as cheap as possible. Also, since cows need a lot of grass, I a lot less area would remain for other crops even if they did (since grass needs way more area for the same amount of calories than stuff like soybeans). So it’s actually a good thing, they aren’t just eating grass.
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If that is the case, then they are more the exception than the rule. (Do you by chance have any source on that? Because I’m pretty sure here in Germany that’s not the case) Also, at least Switzerland produces less beef than it consumes, so that’s not exactly sustainable. I don’t know about the other two.
Funnily enough, having cattle on that land only further fucks it up by causing erosion that can take decades to resopve even after the cattle is removed.
what kind of erosion?
are you thinking of “overgrazing”?
There are of couse exceptions and areas where cattle can graze all year, and the need to deforest areas isn’t as large as other places. However, for the majority of beef production, there are less enviornmentally friendly cattle food implemented. So maybe the solution should be that only the areas that can produce beef sustainably should be allowed to consume it? I would assume that that would be an unpopular policy, so I find it to be a much better solution to reduce the beef consumption even in the areas with sustainable producion and rather let those areas export the excess production.
Who waters the grass to feed cows? You farm them in a suitable region!
depends on the land. normally livestock are put on land which won’t grow anything else.
They actually graze in national forest land in the US. I spent a lot of time tracking wolves to prevent the ranchers and the forest service from shooting wolves so they could safely graze deep into national forest land, destroying the local ecosystem, just as the rivers and bears and caribou started to recover after the reintriduction of wolves.
I think extrapolating from poor US environmental regulations to say that no where in the world is it sensible to produce dairy or beef is a bit of a false equivalence. We also don’t have lead pollution in our water, but saying no one should drink tap water because it has lead in it in a certain part of the US is also silly.
I’m all for alternative protein sources and sustainable agriculture, but eliminating meat consumption likely isn’t the best approach. The US, Brazil, and a bunch of other countries using stupid practices like slash and burn agriculture really need to develop and enforce more sustainable practices via regulations and enforcement.
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as a Swiss, it is an issue. our glaciers are metling more and more every year and we rely on hydropower a lot, we need all the rain and water we can get, even if it seems like there is a lot.
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Jesus your downvotes. Seems facts hurt some real delicate flowers…
It’s a false choice. Land not used for grazing could be rewilded, which provides benefits in both biodiversity and carbon fixing.
Unless you are a small hobby farm, you’re not putting your cows out on pasture alone to raise them for meat. Most grasses are deficient in one or more vital nutrients that the cows need to grow. Most cows today are fed TMR (Total Mixed Rations). These are diets carefully mixed with different grasses, grains, hays, and mineral supplements. There are different metabolic diseases that cows can get when eating diets deficient in different nutrients. Cows that are sick don’t want to eat, and cows that don’t eat don’t grow. To a farmer, that’s like burning money.
that’s true in a few parts of the world. it may not be valid at all, depending where op is from. in general livestock is the most sustainable land use food.
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I’d also like to know, but I imagine that at a small enough scale, it’s mostly letting a few animals live on otherwise unused land, and mostly just protect them. This imagined ideal would disappear extremely quickly, scaling even to village level, and not relevant to modern farming
This is exactly what happens. The highest quality land in a country is used for tillage. The less productive parts are used for grazing. This is how farmers make the most money. They’d be fools to use productive land for grazing and grow crops on poor land.
This is so wrong. I don’t even know where to begin. We grow so much alfalfa (huge waste of water) and soybeans in the US to support our own and other countries’ meat farming, then we ship it across the world. You could find this out with a simple Google search. This is willful ignorance.
Greenhouse gas emissions - Meat accounts for nearly 60% of all greenhouse gases from food production
Water usage - it takes over 1800 gallons of water to produce e just one pound of beef.
In order to help, you don’t even have to go vegan. Reducing meat consumption is helpful too with something like “meatless Monday”
I live in AZ. You know the desert state? The state that catches on fire a lot? Yeah. We’ve had Saudis taking our water, for FREE, to grow food for their cattle back home for YEARS. It’s SO infuriating to see them asking us to conserve water and then looking the other way as we get drained for nothing.
They’re not even the only ones dipping into our water either. It’s ridiculous.
greenhouse gases and water usage are different issues i didn’t address here.
the usa is one of the “few parts of the world” i was talking about, that it is a bad example of sustainable farming.
85% of soybeans are pressed for oil for human use.
and those water use stats include things like the water it takes to raise feed crops. it would make sense, except that we mostly feed livestock plants or parts of plants that people won’t eat. for example, we raise cotton for textiles, and the seed would be industrial waste if we didn’t feed it to cattle. why do we count the water used to make jeans in the water used to make beef? it’s just dishonest.
Woah dude, prime bullshit here.
https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2021/02/Global-soy-production-to-end-use-1536x1108.png
76% of soy production worldwide goes into animal feed.
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But animal feed also contains soy oil, so even allowing for part of soybean production being used for human consumption, there remains a significant part of soy effectively produced for the benefit of livestock. Furthermore, animal feed production incentivizes the cultivation of soy. If there was no animal feed incentive, there would not be a need to expand soy cultivation into virgin land.
Which bring us to animal feed causing increased land usage (which could be reforested if nothing else), methane emissions, and waste production connected with raising livestock.
there is no reason to think that the land would be deforested, nor even that it would not have been deforested for some other reason, if everyone were vegan.
animals are fed parts of plants that people can’t or won’t eat. all of the studies about the ecological impacts ignore this fact and then attribute the water used to produce, say, cotton to beef.
Most deforestation today is to grow animal feed.
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https://theconversation.com/livestock-grazing-is-preventing-the-return-of-rainforests-to-the-uk-and-ireland-198014
If it is anything like here they supplement the feed with a ton of soy beans, which is causing huge problems in Brazil. iirc 87% of soy is used for cattle.
Just globally. Not sure about specific countries. Virtually all of the Amazon deforestation, for example
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We can’t have more cows if they don’t have food. We need to cut down trees to grow other stuff to feed the cattle. Global demand for beef is rising, mainly due to increases of standards of living in Asia.
So how do we raise more cattle without more farmland to grow food for them?
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The cows are the issue though. If people buy beef, it doesn’t come out of the sky. How do you raise an animal without feeding it?
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or at a stretch or could be an argument against beef. but the question was about meat generally.
You forget that most land was forested (even in Europe) before humans decided that grass was more useful than trees.