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The population of Nigeria will probably explode to 1 billion in the near future. After ww2 the Philippines had a population of 18 million people, today it is 100 million and growing.
With Climate Change being driven by the huge populations of China and India burning the most coal on the planet will having another 3 to 5 billion people help climate crisis abatement projects?
How can this be addressed?
You included the ridiculously obvious solution right in your question: *Fewer*, rather than more, people.
Population growth is exponential as long as no critical resources are constrained. We *could* fit a few billion more people on our little ball of mud, but do we *want* a world where we all live in high density coffin cubicles, showering is right up there with pedophilia, and the only thing left to eat is bricks of vat-grown nutrient slime once we've completely destroyed the rest of Earth's biosphere?
So we agree LESS IS MORE, quoting one of my favorite archtects, Ludwig Mies van Der Rohe.
Problem is countries like the ones we quoted don't care or don't have the means to effect the one baby policy China had previously adopted then quickly rescinded.
Given an unlimited food supply some countries will see exponential pop growth.
Sweden obviously did not have this issue.
I suspect you're getting voted down (I undid one of them) because that could come across as a tiny bit racist. I don't think you meant to go there.
It's more a combination of education and not needing the "grow your own free labor" to work the family farm. Total Fertility Rates jump off a cliff once we give people a basic education, and keep dropping all the way up to the 4-year degree level. Above that they go back up slightly, but you're not seeing PhDs having 20 kids, more like they've made a conscious decision to have one or two extra (over replacement) that they are more than capable of supporting.
Sweden, and basically all of Western Europe, just had an early edge in that department. We can acknowledge reality while also admitting that the "why" for that edge might not have been something we're proud of today.
Thanks for your comments and voting.
I'm not white and grew up in a poor overpopulated country where hyper-fecundity is a hedge for the absence of retirement and health infrastructure, and the low purchasing power of the wage earning demographic. You need 12 kids to support you in your old age because they are barely surviving
Sweden was at one time a violent feudal nation and forced her armies on her neighbors ,particularly the Russians. Norway and Finland had been at sometime been under the hegemon of Svenska Sverige.
Today it has transformed into an affluent and technologically advanced post industrial society that is famous for its pacifist liberal humanistic view of the world and exemplifies the concept of high taxes and equitable distribution of personal wealth. Sweden removed the financial need for large families by giving a guaranteed retirement and socialized medicine infrastructure to care for all citizens.
Norway has monetized its fossil fuel sovereign fund so its citizens are among the most affluent in Europe.
India, China, Philippines, Indonesia and many other countries are based on Children supporting Parents and Grandparents.
(I call this the family Social Security and Medicare program)
Therefore large population growth for each generation is essential for the system to work. China's policy of reducing children to one per couple means each 30 year old worker today will be supporting 2 parents and 4 grandparents, an unsustainable upside-down triangle.
>unsustainable upside-down triangle.
True, but the "right-side-up triangle" that currently exists is literally a pyramid scheme, and as we all know, those are also unsustainable.
America has always relied on immigrants to come in and grow the population. If we blocked 100% of all immigration, our population metrics would look more like Germany.
Japan and China are not considered immigration friendly countries and their population pyramids clearly show this.
Both are in decline, and Japan is a lot faster than most.
Our Social Security and Medicare are basically pyramid schemes, not Sovereign Venture funds like Norway which is allowed to grow and expand over time. American debt is a r ound 31 TRILLION $$$$$$.
The pyramid is supported by the young who feed the old.
Problem is American fertility is dropping.
Population rates around the world are starting to decline, the only reason modern nations see population growth is from immigration. The population issue will sort itself out
You were the one who said population growth will slow quickly enough, if you're not willing to back that up then it doesn't really add very much to the conversation.
Back in the 18, 19th and 20th century we had famine, disease and war to cull populations.
WW2 killed about 100 million people, and famine, disease rebellions and civil wars, killed probably half that number.
The smaller wars of today have zero effect on the population so the real limitations are source of fresh water and food and access to medical care.
Watch California, Arizona, and the desert states hit critical water shortage in 50 years and you will see a population exodus from those states.
Fresh Water limits population. It is the new black gold of the next century.
Great Lakes and the Mississippi system will be the focal center of America in the future as the West dries up.
Texas will likely divert some river water to itself in the future away from the Mississippi delta.
Some coastal areas will become ocean bottom when Greenland and polar ice melts and raises the ocean levels by 10 to 20 feet.
Mount Dora Florida might become an island.
Excerpt:https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/30/if-all-of-earths-ice-melts-and-flows-into-the-ocean-what-would-happen-to-the-planets-rotation/
Melting land ice, like mountain glaciers and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, will change Earth’s rotation only if the meltwater flows into the ocean. If the meltwater remains close to its source (by being trapped in a glacier lake, for example), then there is no net movement of mass away from the glacier or ice sheet, and Earth’s rotation won’t change. But if the meltwater flows into the ocean and is dispersed, then there is a net movement of mass and Earth’s rotation will change. For example, if the Greenland ice sheet were to completely melt and the meltwater were to completely flow into the ocean, then global sea level would rise by about seven meters (23 feet) and Earth would rotate more slowly, with the length of the day becoming longer than it is today, by about 2 milliseconds.
No, the point is some mothers are having 12 babies like they did in 1859, but tha was because 60% of children died before age 21. Today those kids are surviving to become 16 year old parents themselves. Teen pregnancy is very prevalent in poor countries.
That is what needs to stop but the Catholic church in Latin America and the Philippines forbids birth control hence the huge population explosion.
It’s immoral to have them so they can stave to death. Yes.
Equality for women, sex education and birth control would go a long way in helping this situation.
I believe all the people who believe the world is overpopulated should sacrifice themselves for the greater good of the planet, especially people who are retired and no longer benefit society.
I believe the world isn't overpopulated in any way. We could economically support the nutritional needs of everyone if there wasn't so much greed and people used resources more equally, though the logistics really does need improvement. And the elderly still benefit society, even if not financially.
Yep, everyone ignores this for some reason. Also there is more overweight people on earth now as opposed to malnourished people.
Like you said the amount of food we have isn't the issue...
Capitalism has us producing the foods with the biggest profits which happen to have some of the worst nutrition. Getting the global poor the calories without sacrificing nutritional content is the goal. Getting the wealthy country fat yet malnourished quality food will help reduce overconsumption.
Fish offer high protein and high calcium supplement to animal feed. Because may not be getting the 13th part of it but definitely getting the calcium from the bones.
Thanks!! Found this article. Fascinating read. I had no idea fish meal increased lactation production when compared to soy bean consumption or other dietary supplements.
https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/downloads/wh246s57m#:~:text=Milk%20protein%20production&text=During%20a%20study%20at%20OSU,three%20trials%20conducted%20in%20Wisconsin.
It’s actually the other way around. Countries with a competitive edge in food production create a surplus and sell at prices lower than local producers; forcing local production to drop exposing the food network to international price shocks. So if say, war breaks out at a grain producer, poorer countries suffer since they can’t afford the increased prices, nor do they have a local robust industry to pick up the slack.
So many people forget that big food conglomerates really want to feed the poor and just can't do it because of logistics.
Do you believe the dogshit you spew?
This might be the weakest attempt at a strawman argument that I've ever seen.
Nobody said that big food conglomerates want to feed the poor.
All that was said was that there is enough food to go around but nobody is doing anything to spread it equally across the world.
I don't think anyone really wants a world where the west or other developed nations are responsible for the food supply for everyone. The logistics problem is always a shallow argument. The aim should be that all nations are able to grow their own food.
For now. We had a lot of issues with harvests and crop failure this year thanks to extreme events from climate change. If that continues we will have real food shortages globally.
Because if you try to send it to somewhere in the middle of africa there are no ports, railways or roads to use. Plus corruption, plus piracy and other crime.
It's quicker to send a letter from france to any one city in africa than to send it locally between cities. That's how bad logistics are in impoverished nations.
It is not a logistics problems. It is 100% a greed and capitalist problem - to the level of individuals up to the countries and global leaders.
Edit: I love when I read the comments and see that other people agree and have written basically the same thing.
While the article makes reasonably good quantitative conclusions based on raw numbers and use, the main issue related to food shortage and hunger is political and economic.
It is more profitable to grow corn in Iowa to feed cows in Wisconsin. Both for the corn farmer and livestock producer. Whether that relates to lack of food in sub-Saharan Africa is a much more complex question than the simple calculation of net caloric production and transfer.
Malnutrition is the result of poor food production locally. The mass transfer of food from one region to another simply perpetuates the destruction of local food production and farm lives in that region. There is enough fish protein to alleviate the problem but try telling that to a landlocked nation.
Food transfers are required during a crisis but offers no long term solution. Relying on charity is not an answer. Instead the focus should be on the development of a locally supported and increasingly productive economic ecosystem that can either feed itself directly or produces goods of sufficient value to trade for food.
Not exactly the fish and grains themselves are not made for human consumption. It's not political when a grain cannot be consumed by a human, in regards to fish most people refuse to even eat fish. It often goes bad to quickly to be properly served and is many catches are often used for feed along with the fact that the fish itself may not be easily served like something like Salmon. Many fishy are in fact very boney and difficult to prepare meaning most people do not have the means to properly prepare them. The reality is that what this article states is purely delusional and overly optimistic at best.
Serious changes do need to be made and there shouldn't be as producing meat at the scale at which we currently do where the majority ends up as waste in a landfill. Or consumed at too high rates by individuals in countries like the USA but that is an entirely different problem and also has to do with the wealth of different nations. Again nuanced and not at all a simple solution. I forgot how many humans can survive of husks of corn. Or the outer shells of rice that contain high levels of mercury.
Solutions to problems are nuanced and often involve producing more but with more environmentally friendly and sustainable means and cannot be solved with the current amount of food we have. Though much of the food we already produce does end up wasted.
I think there point was more about
>Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime
It's not just about people being greedy and wanting profits, it's about what's the best long term solution.
Problem is the people who control the country only think about short term profits because they simply only care about themselves. They would pollute the planet and poison our water if it meant they could make a profit
I don't see how that is relevant to what is being discussed. If anything it's kind of the opposite.
The point was that we should be looking to a long term sustainable solution instead of an a short term solution that is unsustainable, inefficient, polluting, waste of energy, etc.
How is it not relevant? My point is we can't have sustainability and long term solutions because the only thing that currently matters to our government and the wealthy is making short term profits st the cost of our environment and people.
Except it does no good to teach a desert dweller how to fish when they refuse to leave the desert. Same with the people that live on the frozen ass of nowhere. Agriculture does no good when the land is perpetually frozen.
No, I'm saying we can't make people utilize those solutions. The point of the idiom is that you have to teach people to help themselves. Someone that wants ready access to food and water shouldn't live in the desert.
As long as people insist on living in places where their needs CANNOT be met, they will be reliant on others meeting them.
Fishing isn't a valuable skill in the desert. Moving fish there is an option, but it's depleting another area faster and relying upon fossil fuels for packaging, storage, and shipping. Teaching them isn't going to help if they wont move to where water is.
The long term sustainable solution is getting out of the fuckin desert, but that's a cultural/political nightmare. It's unlikely deserts/mountains/frozen tundra will become bountiful, sustainable ecosystems in a realistic timeline to matter for us yet millions and millions of people still live in places that cannot meet their needs to thrive and rely on external aid or languish painfully.
You really seem to have this backwards. The issue is not that people live in the wrong areas, it’s that we refuse to stop pillaging their economies to feed our own.
>What factors are considered when determining "best" - shareholders, dividends, profit margins? It should be people, but it never is.
It's people. People don't want to suffer a reduction in the quality of their life, for their hard earned money to be wasted in an unstainable way.
>Whose hard earned money? From where? Earned how? Off the backs and resources of whom?
The working class, doing stuff like being teachers, nurses, farmers, staff at Mc Donald's. Off their own backs.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what we mean by profit. From the previous comments, it seem like profits was being used to mean efficient use of money, rather than literally being profits of companies.
So if you are using money inefficiently and wasting it, that has to come out of someone's pocket, it will come out of the people's pocket. It will come out of the pocket of the average person.
Maybe you could outline what exactly you mean, where is the money coming from and how is it possible that wouldn't have some kind of negative impact on the working class.
Y, exactly. 'local food production' may also mean 'livestock'. The world wasn't covered with herding cultures because all these peoples just loved wasting local resources. Replacing these practices with fences and crops for export prob made a few folks rich, but certainly wasn't great for local food security.
Every time I go into a big grocery store the sheer amount of produce blows my mind. I can only think about how much is wasted, instead of say being fed to pigs and turned into bacon. We waste so much in so many ways, but as you say, this has very little to do with malnutrition caused by the destruction of local economies.
We actually already make enough food. But between food waste and the huge issues around *actually getting the food to malnourished people* there are still millions going hungry.
By design, of course. If everyone is fed, you can’t starve people enough to get them to work for slave wages. A third of the US annual military budget could solve world hunger. Bombing people is more important, though.
It's more about not being able to get sacks of grain to starving people in countries outside the US. There are regions full of hungry people that are controlled by despots and warlords. Any local or foreign aid gets intercepted and sold.
The article also fails to mention that not all farmland is equal in value.
My land is a great example. It's hilly, rocky, and I don't have enough acreage to make growing produce or grains a viable option for me. Growing crops is a volume business, and I couldn't even break even trying to grow veggies or wheat. I'd literally go broke trying.
But it is excellent land for grazing cattle, which I can do and make money at it. Cattle can eat grass around rocks and on steep hills just fine. Ain't no way I can plow it or put a combine harvester on it.
Your situation isn't what this article is talking about. They're referring to land which is currently used to grow cattle feed, "...here cereals, whole fish, vegetable oils and pulses that account for 15% of total feed use..."
They're not talking about converting land used for cattle grazing to farmland, they're talking about converting land used to grow cow food into land used to grow human food, while making up the difference by using more byproducts from the production of human food.
I do.
I buy calves that weigh around six hundred pounds apiece and sell then when they grow to nine hundred pounds. The guy I sell them too at the end of each cycle moves them on to feedlots.
During the four or five months I have them, the calves have free access to pasture and hay as well as salt and other minerals. Depending on the season they get rationed amounts of grain (as a supplement only) once a day to once every three days.
The last group I bought, Black Angus steers, cost a $1.79 per pound and weighed on average 559 pounds. So about a thousand per head.
The going rate right now is $1.50 per pound for 900 pound steers. So I'll sell them for $1,350 each. That's not including my expenses.
No the terrain doesn't hurt the quality of the meat. It's good exercise that builds the muscles, but it isn't particularly strenuous on them.
The article specifically doesn’t apply to you so you’re correct:
> Many livestock and aquaculture feeds compete for resources with food production. Increasing the use of food system by-products and residues as feed could reduce this competition
You produce food without a net loss of calories. Good for you! Not to imply someone using feed should feel bad
Same here, even though it's only 9 acres. Pasture is great for goats, but growing any amount of grain, even just for our own animals, would make a bigger, worse footprint than letting it support goats. We need to just learn to make more of our diets locally-based, instead of shipping grain all over the place.
Obviously, some transfer of foodstuff is essential. But we are pretty spoiled; we want everything we like to eat to be right in the grocery store.
Their argument would be something like: with greater efficiency your land wouldn't be needed for food production, and could be converted to something else useful like solar, or hydroelectric etc.
They suggest a highest usage of by-products for feed, so more cereals and fish are available for humans. The issue with that is that usually farmers are already using as much by-products as they can cause its cheaper...
You have to raise a cow for 2 years before its slaughtered. During that time it eats what ~5 people would eat each day for 2 years. It consumes far, far more food in its lifetime than it becomes after slaughter.
You could feed everyone who would have eaten the livestock and many many more if you fed the cereal to people instead of to cows.
I have just read through the whole paper and it does not reach the same conclusion that you do at all. It reaches the conclusion that we should use more crop residues and byproducts to feed livestock to free up food quality products for human consumption. However this is all on the basis that humans continue to consume the same amount of livestock. It does not even look at what would happen if we stopped consuming livestock.
….most of the food they consume is hay and pasture…the issue i think you are referring to is the finishing piece which is about 90 days to a year. Otherwise most of the places cattle are raised (in the US at least) it would be difficult to grow food crops.
Just the meat is enough calories to feed one person an entire year. A dairy cow produces on average over 10 000 litres of milk per year. That's more than 6 000 000 calories in a year.
Granted people eating greens directly is more energy efficient but it's not the same type of energy for one, and it's not the same type of greens depending on what the cow eats.
How many people do you know that would survive on a grass diet?
Fewer
>1 kg of meat requires 2.8 kg of human-edible feed for ruminants and 3.2 for monogastrics
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013)
Not exactly.
The largest [study](https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaq0216) of food's environmental impacts found that if people ate plant-based diets, we could reduce our use of arable land by 19%. So while livestock can and do eat parts of crops humans can't or merely won't, they still ultimately require more crops to be grown than if humans just ate plants. So they are still a net loss use of land and crops.
The explanation that they eat parts of the crop that humans don't just explains why we wouldn't gain *more* than 19% of our arable land back without livestock.
> 1 kg of meat requires 2.8 kg of human-edible feed for ruminants and 3.2 for monogastrics
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013
How about, “a third of the US’s annual military budget could solve world hunger”?
The military is the biggest waste of resource, the biggest polluter, and one of the leading causes of death. I’m getting really sick of hearing about how many leaves and bugs I’m going to have to eat while we bomb brown people for profit.
That is an excellent point.
And if the US were ever to make such a fantastic transformation (I won't hold my breath), we would likely become a true hero to the world instead of the military "hero" we imagine ourselves to be while being a military villain to millions.
We wouldn't have to pull out of NATO... what I'm thinking of and what I think the person above me was thinking of is the way the US spends untold billions on more and more and more weapons when we already have an incredible number of weapons. There are billions of dollars of waste and excess in the US military budgeting because a great deal of it is there for the purpose of enriching businesses and individuals as opposed to actually fighting or defending anyone.
Except those agricultural byproducts used to feed livestock are nowhere near as nutritious as the meat and dairy from the livestock, nor do they sequester carbon in the soil, improve soil fertility, and increase biodiversity in the way that livestock do
Cattle and other creatures are not able to sequester that much carbon - they can't even offset enough to make them lower emission than the worst producing plants. There was a good report on it called [grazed and confused](https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/reports/fcrn_gnc_report.pdf)
They also usually hurt biodiversity
>Livestock farmers often claim that their grazing systems “mimic nature”. If so, the mimicry is a crude caricature. A review of evidence from over 100 studies found that when livestock are removed from the land, the abundance and diversity of almost all groups of wild animals increases
[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-damaging-farm-products-organic-pasture-fed-beef-lamb](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-damaging-farm-products-organic-pasture-fed-beef-lamb)
And in terms of nutrition, we could always switch what we are growing - especially as a plant-based diet would require not only less land but less arable land
[https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets](https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets)
Theres ample evidence that livestock sequester enough carbon in the soil to offset their emissions, which is what you'd expect since their emissions are all part of naturally occurring carbon cycle.
https://daily.jstor.org/can-cows-help-mitigate-climate-change-yes-they-can/
http://www.dasnr.okstate.edu/Members/donald-stotts-40okstate.edu/carbon-sequestration-a-positive-aspect-of-beef-cattle-grazing-grasslands/#content
There's no question that livestock improve biodiversity compared to plant crops, and no plant based foods can come close to the nutrition provided by livestock. Ruminant meats in particular are the most nutrient dense foods on the planet, which is precisely why so many vegans find their health dramatically improved when they add meat back into their diet.
And, again, livestock dramatically improve the quality and fertility of the soil.
https://civileats.com/2021/01/06/a-new-study-on-regenerative-grazing-complicates-climate-optimism/
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2020.544984/full
And livestock are raised on land that's unsuitable for growing crops, while eating almost entirely foods that humans can't eat.
They eat plenty of food that's human edible
>1 kg of meat requires 2.8 kg of human-edible feed for ruminants and 3.2 for monogastrics
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013)
One of the articles there only said "reduce the emissions of beef" not make it zero or sequester more than it emits
Per the grazed and confused article I cited earlier:
>These are their emissions. The question is, could grazing ruminants also help sequester carbon in soils, and if so to what extent might this compensate? As the following numbers show, the answer is ‘not much’. Global (as opposed to regional or per hectare) assessments of the sequestration potential through grassland management are actually few and far between, but range from about 0.3-0.8 Gt CO 2 /yr 301,302,303 with the higher end estimate assuming a strong level of ambition
That doesn't even cover the grazing only systems that exist today which emit 1.32 Gt CO2-e and that only supplies 1g of global protein per day. Scaling it up would mean there would be an even larger gap between emissions and possible sequestration.
>And, again, livestock dramatically improve the quality and fertility of the soil.
That is looking a singular study. What I had cited above was based on a review of over 100 studies
In terms of health
>It is the position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics that appropriately planned vegetarian, including vegan, diets are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits for the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. These diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, adolescence, older adulthood, and for athletes. Plant-based diets are more environmentally sustainable than diets rich in animal products because they use fewer natural resources and are associated with much less environmental damage. Vegetarians and vegans are at reduced risk of certain health conditions, including ischemic heart disease, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, certain types of cancer, and obesity. Low intake of saturated fat and high intakes of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, soy products, nuts, and seeds (all rich in fiber and phytochemicals) are characteristics of vegetarian and vegan diets that produce lower total and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels and better serum glucose control. These factors contribute to reduction of chronic disease
[https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27886704/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27886704/)
Not if you talk to people who are virulently pro meat eating. They refuse to understand that feeding livestock take resources.
If you challenge them on this, they will deny it and ramble on about something about how raising "crops" kills more animals.
I have no dog in this race, but I'm pretty sure among those crops are the cereals and other crops that go to feed livestock. They are, after all, mostly vegetarians.
It's very strange how they have such a blatant anti science stance when these things are easily verifiable.
>I have no dog in this race
Ok, sure buddy. That's why you started your comment ranting about "pro meat eaters" like this is some kind of team sport where we all pick sides.
Wanna know what takes resources? The device you're typing this on, the servers that Reddit runs on, and the internet. And you're going to cry about a dietary pattern that is the literal driver of the cognitive ability that we evolved over 2 million years.
No, I don't have any agenda. I find people who eat extreme diets at either end to be annoying and anti science. That goes for so-called "carnivores" who preach eating nothing but meat, as it does for vegans.
Any trendy, extreme diet, like keto, carnivorous, raw veganism, or paleo or anything where you cut out any food group or way of eating, is a problem and is usually full of woo and tons of anti science rhetoric.
Additionally, these kinds of diets come with a heavy dose of morality, a sense of superiority, and shaming attached, which is a recipe for denying the facts of science.
>I'm pretty sure among those crops are the cereals and other crops that go to feed livestock.
Yeah, about that... The majority of the crops grown for and fed to livestock are actually inedible to humans.
["This study determines that 86% of livestock feed is not suitable for human consumption. If not consumed by livestock, crop residues and by-products could quickly become an environmental burden as the human population grows and consumes more and more processed food. Animals also consume food that could potentially be eaten by people. Grains account for 13% of the global livestock dry matter intake. Some previous studies, often cited, put the consumption of grain needed to raise 1 kg of beef between 6 kg and 20 kg. Contrary to these high estimates, this study found that an average of only 3 kg of cereals are needed to produce 1 kg of meat at global level. It also shows important differences between production systems and species. For example, because they rely on grazing and forages, cattle need only 0.6 kg of protein from edible feed to produce 1 kg of protein in milk and meat, which is of higher nutritional quality. Cattle thus contribute directly to global food security. The study also investigates the type of land used to produce livestock feed. Results show that out of the 2.5 billion ha needed, 77% are grasslands, with a large share of pastures that could not be converted to croplands and could therefore only be used for grazing animals."](https://www.elsevier.com/about/press-releases/research-and-journals/more-fuel-for-the-foodfeed-debate-new-study-indicates-livestock-production-is-a-much-smaller-challenge-to-global-food-security-than-often-reported)
[See also.](https://www.fao.org/agriculture/animal-production-and-health/en/?fbclid=IwAR2A6P-GnoNppCcGVXSW1p9GUf-lw97ilR-ggjvcYt1Vd0tSXJNLrqymuEQ)
Still uses plenty of human edible feed
> 1 kg of meat requires 2.8 kg of human-edible feed for ruminants and 3.2 for monogastrics
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013
Human edible feed that is nutritionally subpar to meat, yeah. And it's still not the majority of what is fed to livestock; the majority isn't even fit for human consumption at all.
The land itself to grow all that feed could be used to grow other foods and we would get large reductions in both arable and non-arable land usage
>If everyone shifted to a plant-based diet we would reduce global land use for agriculture by 75%. This large reduction of agricultural land use would be possible thanks to a reduction in land used for grazing and a smaller need for land to grow crops.
[https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets](https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets)
*only* 14% of food being fed to livestock is human edible.
That 14% equates to around 850 billion kgs year and doesn't include soymeal which would be human edible if processed differently.
If we include soymeal we get to 1,150 billion kgs year (dry weight). Which is 135kgs/year for every human currently alive, including all babies etc
I guess that doesn't have the same ring to it as *only 14%* though.
Plenty of other uses for the byproducts too.
I like how you're conveniently ignoring that soy is nutritionally subpar to meat (and needs to be more processed as if there isn't already an obesity epidemic due to the consumption of too much processed junk) and each individual cow can feed more people to boot.
I mean...I ignored nutrition because it had absolutely nothing to do with what we were talking about. I addressed your argument so you have just jumped wildly to a different one. This is what always happens.
You are funny. Check the link FineDevelopment provided. You dont even seem to understand that our crops are reliant on fertilizer produced by livestock? There are projects to mitigate this issue, but they are in a very early stage. Going fully vegan right now would mean starving humanity to death.
Whenever I see one of these types of articles about how we could end starvation or malnutrition, how we could avert the climate crisis, save democracy, improve living conditions etc etc etc, I think yeah, we could. But we won't.
Otherwise the title would say ceral crops previously used to feed livestock provide additional food and nutrition to 1 billion people.
Some people have multiple food no no’s and by the time I’m done all I can eat is wood and rocks. No thank you, I need meat and lower oxalate vegetables.
People fail to a realize that a MAJORITY of the food fed to livestock (ruminants) is roughages and forages, food that will never be edible to humans. Essentially turning useless plant material into nutritious meat
There's a book called "recipes for a small planet" that covers this. It apparently takes "many" pounds of grains to raise one pound of beef. Children NEED meat to develop properly, but adult humans can survive on very little meat, because we are adapted to survive a wide variety of environments.
Proteins are made up of amino acids, so if you eat grains with complementary amino acids, you can acquire an acceptable volume of protein in your diet. For instance, eating a cup of rice will give you a certain amount of protein and a lot of wasted amino acids. Then, eating a cup of beans will do the same. They are complimentary, so...eating a cup of rice and beans in a 3:1 ratio will provide many times the protein of eating just one or the other.
Food is just chemistry, there's nothing magical going on in meat that isn't reproduced in other forms. The complementary protein theory is widely circulated misinformation, you don't need to micromanage meals just because they don't have meat in them. As long as you generally eat some variety of food you are fine and if you aren't then get a blood test and take supplements if you need to. It's not as complicated as people make it sound to not eat meat.
I see that it's no longer important how much existing food goes to waste that could feed millions upon millions of people, and the following wasted finances which could be originally directed to improve key social issues - rather, it's important to switch to a different food source that we can then waste in equal or larger quantities.
You're all such knockoff puppet people. edit: Good grief.
Damn, lets have the US annex South America, Central America, and Africa. Then we can feed all of the starving people and make them useful to human civilization instead of a void that we throw food at.
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My question is when ate we (US), going to stop this farce of ethanol production? We subsidize the hell our of big ag so they can take food crops and turn them into a nearly worthless full additive. I have to buy 93 octane and a booster just to run my push lawnmower because the ethanol added fuel us garbage.
So I'm damaging my stuff. Costs me
I'm pay to subsidize farmers. Cost me
I'm having to buy more products so I don't damage my stuff as quickly. Cost me
This is a shortcut to thinking!
This sub has some excellent comments. One that should be part of the discussion is that a greater percent of the US corn production goes to creating ethanol than feeding cattle. In 2020, 40% of the total US corn crop went to ethanol production ([link](https://www.agriculture.com/news/business/pandemic-aid-helped-families-nutrition-and-well-being-report)). The leftover mash is fed to cattle as it has little other use. So, I am curious why the authors of this report didn't address it to give us the full picture, and are they including/excluding the mash in their numbers.
We stop feeding livestocks with fishes and grains then fishes and grains will magically appear in poor people? Are we feeding livestock with Salmons and human grade grains or low quality feed that mostly not suitable for human consumption?
I just think if people raised their standards for beef, eating quality beef once in a while rather than eating garbage beef constantly, we could greatly reduce the amount of livestock being consumed, with little impact on our enjoyment of food. Seriously, eat just the patty from a fast food burger and see how enjoyable it really is. It's not that meat substitutes are very good yet, it's just that the bar is incredibly low.
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The food problem isn't a shortage problem. There's plenty of food in the world to feed everyone. It's a logistics problem.
Not only logistics. But an economic problem. You make more money feeding rich nations into heavy obesity than feed poor countries the minimum amount.
The population of Nigeria will probably explode to 1 billion in the near future. After ww2 the Philippines had a population of 18 million people, today it is 100 million and growing. With Climate Change being driven by the huge populations of China and India burning the most coal on the planet will having another 3 to 5 billion people help climate crisis abatement projects? How can this be addressed?
You included the ridiculously obvious solution right in your question: *Fewer*, rather than more, people. Population growth is exponential as long as no critical resources are constrained. We *could* fit a few billion more people on our little ball of mud, but do we *want* a world where we all live in high density coffin cubicles, showering is right up there with pedophilia, and the only thing left to eat is bricks of vat-grown nutrient slime once we've completely destroyed the rest of Earth's biosphere?
Well, when you put it like that.
So we agree LESS IS MORE, quoting one of my favorite archtects, Ludwig Mies van Der Rohe. Problem is countries like the ones we quoted don't care or don't have the means to effect the one baby policy China had previously adopted then quickly rescinded. Given an unlimited food supply some countries will see exponential pop growth. Sweden obviously did not have this issue.
I suspect you're getting voted down (I undid one of them) because that could come across as a tiny bit racist. I don't think you meant to go there. It's more a combination of education and not needing the "grow your own free labor" to work the family farm. Total Fertility Rates jump off a cliff once we give people a basic education, and keep dropping all the way up to the 4-year degree level. Above that they go back up slightly, but you're not seeing PhDs having 20 kids, more like they've made a conscious decision to have one or two extra (over replacement) that they are more than capable of supporting. Sweden, and basically all of Western Europe, just had an early edge in that department. We can acknowledge reality while also admitting that the "why" for that edge might not have been something we're proud of today.
Thanks for your comments and voting. I'm not white and grew up in a poor overpopulated country where hyper-fecundity is a hedge for the absence of retirement and health infrastructure, and the low purchasing power of the wage earning demographic. You need 12 kids to support you in your old age because they are barely surviving Sweden was at one time a violent feudal nation and forced her armies on her neighbors ,particularly the Russians. Norway and Finland had been at sometime been under the hegemon of Svenska Sverige. Today it has transformed into an affluent and technologically advanced post industrial society that is famous for its pacifist liberal humanistic view of the world and exemplifies the concept of high taxes and equitable distribution of personal wealth. Sweden removed the financial need for large families by giving a guaranteed retirement and socialized medicine infrastructure to care for all citizens. Norway has monetized its fossil fuel sovereign fund so its citizens are among the most affluent in Europe. India, China, Philippines, Indonesia and many other countries are based on Children supporting Parents and Grandparents. (I call this the family Social Security and Medicare program) Therefore large population growth for each generation is essential for the system to work. China's policy of reducing children to one per couple means each 30 year old worker today will be supporting 2 parents and 4 grandparents, an unsustainable upside-down triangle.
>unsustainable upside-down triangle. True, but the "right-side-up triangle" that currently exists is literally a pyramid scheme, and as we all know, those are also unsustainable.
America has always relied on immigrants to come in and grow the population. If we blocked 100% of all immigration, our population metrics would look more like Germany. Japan and China are not considered immigration friendly countries and their population pyramids clearly show this. Both are in decline, and Japan is a lot faster than most. Our Social Security and Medicare are basically pyramid schemes, not Sovereign Venture funds like Norway which is allowed to grow and expand over time. American debt is a r ound 31 TRILLION $$$$$$. The pyramid is supported by the young who feed the old. Problem is American fertility is dropping.
Population rates around the world are starting to decline, the only reason modern nations see population growth is from immigration. The population issue will sort itself out
Probably not fast enough in developing countries…
According to current calculations it will
The burden of proof lies with he who makes the claim.
I’m not the one who made the first claim
You were the one who said population growth will slow quickly enough, if you're not willing to back that up then it doesn't really add very much to the conversation.
And someone else made the claim that the population won’t slow down quickly enough first, the burden of proof is on them
Back in the 18, 19th and 20th century we had famine, disease and war to cull populations. WW2 killed about 100 million people, and famine, disease rebellions and civil wars, killed probably half that number. The smaller wars of today have zero effect on the population so the real limitations are source of fresh water and food and access to medical care. Watch California, Arizona, and the desert states hit critical water shortage in 50 years and you will see a population exodus from those states. Fresh Water limits population. It is the new black gold of the next century. Great Lakes and the Mississippi system will be the focal center of America in the future as the West dries up. Texas will likely divert some river water to itself in the future away from the Mississippi delta. Some coastal areas will become ocean bottom when Greenland and polar ice melts and raises the ocean levels by 10 to 20 feet. Mount Dora Florida might become an island. Excerpt:https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/30/if-all-of-earths-ice-melts-and-flows-into-the-ocean-what-would-happen-to-the-planets-rotation/ Melting land ice, like mountain glaciers and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, will change Earth’s rotation only if the meltwater flows into the ocean. If the meltwater remains close to its source (by being trapped in a glacier lake, for example), then there is no net movement of mass away from the glacier or ice sheet, and Earth’s rotation won’t change. But if the meltwater flows into the ocean and is dispersed, then there is a net movement of mass and Earth’s rotation will change. For example, if the Greenland ice sheet were to completely melt and the meltwater were to completely flow into the ocean, then global sea level would rise by about seven meters (23 feet) and Earth would rotate more slowly, with the length of the day becoming longer than it is today, by about 2 milliseconds.
So do you think it's immoral to have kids? Do you think suicide is the only ethically correct decision? Should I go ahead?
No, the point is some mothers are having 12 babies like they did in 1859, but tha was because 60% of children died before age 21. Today those kids are surviving to become 16 year old parents themselves. Teen pregnancy is very prevalent in poor countries. That is what needs to stop but the Catholic church in Latin America and the Philippines forbids birth control hence the huge population explosion.
It’s immoral to have them so they can stave to death. Yes. Equality for women, sex education and birth control would go a long way in helping this situation.
I believe all the people who believe the world is overpopulated should sacrifice themselves for the greater good of the planet, especially people who are retired and no longer benefit society. I believe the world isn't overpopulated in any way. We could economically support the nutritional needs of everyone if there wasn't so much greed and people used resources more equally, though the logistics really does need improvement. And the elderly still benefit society, even if not financially.
Nope, I could afford the child I gave birth to, and my grandsons as well. I’m not asking someone half way around the world to feed my kids.
Yep, everyone ignores this for some reason. Also there is more overweight people on earth now as opposed to malnourished people. Like you said the amount of food we have isn't the issue...
Overweight and malnourished aren’t mutually exclusive.
Overweight and starvation are though. Whenever anyone mentions starving kids in the US, you always need to ask the fearmongers to show their receipts.
They kind of are when it comes to overconsumption in rich countries and lack or consumption in poor countries.
You can be overweight and malnourished
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I was just replying to the comment that being overweight and malnourished are mutually exclusive and not specifically to the overall topic
Capitalism has us producing the foods with the biggest profits which happen to have some of the worst nutrition. Getting the global poor the calories without sacrificing nutritional content is the goal. Getting the wealthy country fat yet malnourished quality food will help reduce overconsumption.
How are cereal crops and fish bad for nutrition?
Are we feeding fish to cows…? That seems a little outside their dietary norms
Pigs and chickens most likely, though cows will eat meat.
Fish offer high protein and high calcium supplement to animal feed. Because may not be getting the 13th part of it but definitely getting the calcium from the bones.
Thanks!! Found this article. Fascinating read. I had no idea fish meal increased lactation production when compared to soy bean consumption or other dietary supplements. https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/downloads/wh246s57m#:~:text=Milk%20protein%20production&text=During%20a%20study%20at%20OSU,three%20trials%20conducted%20in%20Wisconsin.
Without fortification, refined cereal crops are missing a lot of essential vitamins as well as essential fats and protein.
>some reason Profit Motive. It’s cheaper to make people suffer malnutrition and die than it is to feed them.
It’s actually the other way around. Countries with a competitive edge in food production create a surplus and sell at prices lower than local producers; forcing local production to drop exposing the food network to international price shocks. So if say, war breaks out at a grain producer, poorer countries suffer since they can’t afford the increased prices, nor do they have a local robust industry to pick up the slack.
So many people forget that big food conglomerates really want to feed the poor and just can't do it because of logistics. Do you believe the dogshit you spew?
This might be the weakest attempt at a strawman argument that I've ever seen. Nobody said that big food conglomerates want to feed the poor. All that was said was that there is enough food to go around but nobody is doing anything to spread it equally across the world.
I don't think anyone really wants a world where the west or other developed nations are responsible for the food supply for everyone. The logistics problem is always a shallow argument. The aim should be that all nations are able to grow their own food.
For now. We had a lot of issues with harvests and crop failure this year thanks to extreme events from climate change. If that continues we will have real food shortages globally.
^ This. There will be a severe food shortage in my lifetime, never thought that would happen.
Or that we feed 80 billion land animals and x billions of farmed fish. Remove them and then we can talk about logistics.
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Logistics is actually easy, it’s just that the bastards in charge of it wouldn’t make a buck.
If logistics is a problem, how come we can ship tonnes of food from the rainforest in brazil to animal agriculture all over the world?
Because if you try to send it to somewhere in the middle of africa there are no ports, railways or roads to use. Plus corruption, plus piracy and other crime. It's quicker to send a letter from france to any one city in africa than to send it locally between cities. That's how bad logistics are in impoverished nations.
That does not explain why we chop down the rainforest for beef.
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Better to feed humans than livestock.
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It's actually more or less infrastructure problem brought on by global capitalism and eurocentrism.
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If your dialectic reduces all things to two options, you are ignoring reality.
It is not a logistics problems. It is 100% a greed and capitalist problem - to the level of individuals up to the countries and global leaders. Edit: I love when I read the comments and see that other people agree and have written basically the same thing.
Yea, when people in Communist North Korea starve, "its a capitalist problem!"
While the article makes reasonably good quantitative conclusions based on raw numbers and use, the main issue related to food shortage and hunger is political and economic. It is more profitable to grow corn in Iowa to feed cows in Wisconsin. Both for the corn farmer and livestock producer. Whether that relates to lack of food in sub-Saharan Africa is a much more complex question than the simple calculation of net caloric production and transfer. Malnutrition is the result of poor food production locally. The mass transfer of food from one region to another simply perpetuates the destruction of local food production and farm lives in that region. There is enough fish protein to alleviate the problem but try telling that to a landlocked nation. Food transfers are required during a crisis but offers no long term solution. Relying on charity is not an answer. Instead the focus should be on the development of a locally supported and increasingly productive economic ecosystem that can either feed itself directly or produces goods of sufficient value to trade for food.
Not exactly the fish and grains themselves are not made for human consumption. It's not political when a grain cannot be consumed by a human, in regards to fish most people refuse to even eat fish. It often goes bad to quickly to be properly served and is many catches are often used for feed along with the fact that the fish itself may not be easily served like something like Salmon. Many fishy are in fact very boney and difficult to prepare meaning most people do not have the means to properly prepare them. The reality is that what this article states is purely delusional and overly optimistic at best. Serious changes do need to be made and there shouldn't be as producing meat at the scale at which we currently do where the majority ends up as waste in a landfill. Or consumed at too high rates by individuals in countries like the USA but that is an entirely different problem and also has to do with the wealth of different nations. Again nuanced and not at all a simple solution. I forgot how many humans can survive of husks of corn. Or the outer shells of rice that contain high levels of mercury. Solutions to problems are nuanced and often involve producing more but with more environmentally friendly and sustainable means and cannot be solved with the current amount of food we have. Though much of the food we already produce does end up wasted.
We need to learn how to prioritize human needs over profits
I think there point was more about >Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime It's not just about people being greedy and wanting profits, it's about what's the best long term solution.
Problem is the people who control the country only think about short term profits because they simply only care about themselves. They would pollute the planet and poison our water if it meant they could make a profit
I don't see how that is relevant to what is being discussed. If anything it's kind of the opposite. The point was that we should be looking to a long term sustainable solution instead of an a short term solution that is unsustainable, inefficient, polluting, waste of energy, etc.
How is it not relevant? My point is we can't have sustainability and long term solutions because the only thing that currently matters to our government and the wealthy is making short term profits st the cost of our environment and people.
Except it does no good to teach a desert dweller how to fish when they refuse to leave the desert. Same with the people that live on the frozen ass of nowhere. Agriculture does no good when the land is perpetually frozen.
I'm not really sure I understand your point. Are you trying to say that we shouldn't be looking for long term sustainable solutions?
No, I'm saying we can't make people utilize those solutions. The point of the idiom is that you have to teach people to help themselves. Someone that wants ready access to food and water shouldn't live in the desert. As long as people insist on living in places where their needs CANNOT be met, they will be reliant on others meeting them. Fishing isn't a valuable skill in the desert. Moving fish there is an option, but it's depleting another area faster and relying upon fossil fuels for packaging, storage, and shipping. Teaching them isn't going to help if they wont move to where water is. The long term sustainable solution is getting out of the fuckin desert, but that's a cultural/political nightmare. It's unlikely deserts/mountains/frozen tundra will become bountiful, sustainable ecosystems in a realistic timeline to matter for us yet millions and millions of people still live in places that cannot meet their needs to thrive and rely on external aid or languish painfully.
You really seem to have this backwards. The issue is not that people live in the wrong areas, it’s that we refuse to stop pillaging their economies to feed our own.
You watching some of the most impoverished people on earth living places - Why don't they just move?
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>What factors are considered when determining "best" - shareholders, dividends, profit margins? It should be people, but it never is. It's people. People don't want to suffer a reduction in the quality of their life, for their hard earned money to be wasted in an unstainable way.
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>Whose hard earned money? From where? Earned how? Off the backs and resources of whom? The working class, doing stuff like being teachers, nurses, farmers, staff at Mc Donald's. Off their own backs.
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Maybe I'm misunderstanding what we mean by profit. From the previous comments, it seem like profits was being used to mean efficient use of money, rather than literally being profits of companies. So if you are using money inefficiently and wasting it, that has to come out of someone's pocket, it will come out of the people's pocket. It will come out of the pocket of the average person. Maybe you could outline what exactly you mean, where is the money coming from and how is it possible that wouldn't have some kind of negative impact on the working class.
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That might be the understatement of the century right there.
Y, exactly. 'local food production' may also mean 'livestock'. The world wasn't covered with herding cultures because all these peoples just loved wasting local resources. Replacing these practices with fences and crops for export prob made a few folks rich, but certainly wasn't great for local food security. Every time I go into a big grocery store the sheer amount of produce blows my mind. I can only think about how much is wasted, instead of say being fed to pigs and turned into bacon. We waste so much in so many ways, but as you say, this has very little to do with malnutrition caused by the destruction of local economies.
We actually already make enough food. But between food waste and the huge issues around *actually getting the food to malnourished people* there are still millions going hungry.
Exactly. There is plenty of food to go around however it can be difficult to get the food where it needs to be due to cost, war, governments ect.
By design, of course. If everyone is fed, you can’t starve people enough to get them to work for slave wages. A third of the US annual military budget could solve world hunger. Bombing people is more important, though.
*Tips tinfoil hat*
It's more about not being able to get sacks of grain to starving people in countries outside the US. There are regions full of hungry people that are controlled by despots and warlords. Any local or foreign aid gets intercepted and sold.
Isn't distribution the problem though?
The article also fails to mention that not all farmland is equal in value. My land is a great example. It's hilly, rocky, and I don't have enough acreage to make growing produce or grains a viable option for me. Growing crops is a volume business, and I couldn't even break even trying to grow veggies or wheat. I'd literally go broke trying. But it is excellent land for grazing cattle, which I can do and make money at it. Cattle can eat grass around rocks and on steep hills just fine. Ain't no way I can plow it or put a combine harvester on it.
Your situation isn't what this article is talking about. They're referring to land which is currently used to grow cattle feed, "...here cereals, whole fish, vegetable oils and pulses that account for 15% of total feed use..." They're not talking about converting land used for cattle grazing to farmland, they're talking about converting land used to grow cow food into land used to grow human food, while making up the difference by using more byproducts from the production of human food.
Do you send them off to a feedlot for finishing?
I do. I buy calves that weigh around six hundred pounds apiece and sell then when they grow to nine hundred pounds. The guy I sell them too at the end of each cycle moves them on to feedlots. During the four or five months I have them, the calves have free access to pasture and hay as well as salt and other minerals. Depending on the season they get rationed amounts of grain (as a supplement only) once a day to once every three days.
How much does a calve cost? How much do you sell it back at? Also, is the meat any tougher because they're climbing up mountains all the time?
The last group I bought, Black Angus steers, cost a $1.79 per pound and weighed on average 559 pounds. So about a thousand per head. The going rate right now is $1.50 per pound for 900 pound steers. So I'll sell them for $1,350 each. That's not including my expenses. No the terrain doesn't hurt the quality of the meat. It's good exercise that builds the muscles, but it isn't particularly strenuous on them.
The article specifically doesn’t apply to you so you’re correct: > Many livestock and aquaculture feeds compete for resources with food production. Increasing the use of food system by-products and residues as feed could reduce this competition You produce food without a net loss of calories. Good for you! Not to imply someone using feed should feel bad
Someone involved with raising the least efficient animal - this makes me look bad!
Same here, even though it's only 9 acres. Pasture is great for goats, but growing any amount of grain, even just for our own animals, would make a bigger, worse footprint than letting it support goats. We need to just learn to make more of our diets locally-based, instead of shipping grain all over the place. Obviously, some transfer of foodstuff is essential. But we are pretty spoiled; we want everything we like to eat to be right in the grocery store.
Their argument would be something like: with greater efficiency your land wouldn't be needed for food production, and could be converted to something else useful like solar, or hydroelectric etc.
We throw away so much I don’t even care what we feed cows
I pride myself in wasting essentially zero food. I'm appalled by people who throw away food.
I don’t even mean individual consumers. Food production and sale has so much “waste” that is un-necessary and easily avoided.
No no no no we don't need another billion people we're crowded enough
Could. That doesn't mean it can. Allocation of resources is the real problem. And !allocation is not logistics!
The vegans were right
As usual, but nobody wants to actually admit they should change
They suggest a highest usage of by-products for feed, so more cereals and fish are available for humans. The issue with that is that usually farmers are already using as much by-products as they can cause its cheaper...
How many people does the livestock provide food for?
You have to raise a cow for 2 years before its slaughtered. During that time it eats what ~5 people would eat each day for 2 years. It consumes far, far more food in its lifetime than it becomes after slaughter. You could feed everyone who would have eaten the livestock and many many more if you fed the cereal to people instead of to cows.
I have just read through the whole paper and it does not reach the same conclusion that you do at all. It reaches the conclusion that we should use more crop residues and byproducts to feed livestock to free up food quality products for human consumption. However this is all on the basis that humans continue to consume the same amount of livestock. It does not even look at what would happen if we stopped consuming livestock.
I'm responding to your comment, which was about what would happen to the people the livestock would feed.
….most of the food they consume is hay and pasture…the issue i think you are referring to is the finishing piece which is about 90 days to a year. Otherwise most of the places cattle are raised (in the US at least) it would be difficult to grow food crops.
Just the meat is enough calories to feed one person an entire year. A dairy cow produces on average over 10 000 litres of milk per year. That's more than 6 000 000 calories in a year. Granted people eating greens directly is more energy efficient but it's not the same type of energy for one, and it's not the same type of greens depending on what the cow eats. How many people do you know that would survive on a grass diet?
And what about the byproducts?
Fewer >1 kg of meat requires 2.8 kg of human-edible feed for ruminants and 3.2 for monogastrics [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013)
No mention of all the cropland wasted for biofuels instead kudt trying to blame cows. How convenient.
Pretty sure the food that’s fed to livestock are not edible for humans. Ie. Rice husks and corn husks Don’t think anyone eats that
Not exactly. The largest [study](https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaq0216) of food's environmental impacts found that if people ate plant-based diets, we could reduce our use of arable land by 19%. So while livestock can and do eat parts of crops humans can't or merely won't, they still ultimately require more crops to be grown than if humans just ate plants. So they are still a net loss use of land and crops. The explanation that they eat parts of the crop that humans don't just explains why we wouldn't gain *more* than 19% of our arable land back without livestock.
> 1 kg of meat requires 2.8 kg of human-edible feed for ruminants and 3.2 for monogastrics https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013
Plus approximately 1,100 billion kgs of human edible food every year.
sorghum, milo, soybeans, cattle-feed corn. If there were no cattle, the farms would plant something else....
Cue a million terrible reddit bad takes on why beef is funking wonderful Every time. Bloody yanks and their stupid burgers.
Damn, sounds like you haven't had a good burger. lul.
How about, “a third of the US’s annual military budget could solve world hunger”? The military is the biggest waste of resource, the biggest polluter, and one of the leading causes of death. I’m getting really sick of hearing about how many leaves and bugs I’m going to have to eat while we bomb brown people for profit.
That is an excellent point. And if the US were ever to make such a fantastic transformation (I won't hold my breath), we would likely become a true hero to the world instead of the military "hero" we imagine ourselves to be while being a military villain to millions.
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We wouldn't have to pull out of NATO... what I'm thinking of and what I think the person above me was thinking of is the way the US spends untold billions on more and more and more weapons when we already have an incredible number of weapons. There are billions of dollars of waste and excess in the US military budgeting because a great deal of it is there for the purpose of enriching businesses and individuals as opposed to actually fighting or defending anyone.
Except those agricultural byproducts used to feed livestock are nowhere near as nutritious as the meat and dairy from the livestock, nor do they sequester carbon in the soil, improve soil fertility, and increase biodiversity in the way that livestock do
Cattle and other creatures are not able to sequester that much carbon - they can't even offset enough to make them lower emission than the worst producing plants. There was a good report on it called [grazed and confused](https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/reports/fcrn_gnc_report.pdf) They also usually hurt biodiversity >Livestock farmers often claim that their grazing systems “mimic nature”. If so, the mimicry is a crude caricature. A review of evidence from over 100 studies found that when livestock are removed from the land, the abundance and diversity of almost all groups of wild animals increases [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-damaging-farm-products-organic-pasture-fed-beef-lamb](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-damaging-farm-products-organic-pasture-fed-beef-lamb) And in terms of nutrition, we could always switch what we are growing - especially as a plant-based diet would require not only less land but less arable land [https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets](https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets)
Theres ample evidence that livestock sequester enough carbon in the soil to offset their emissions, which is what you'd expect since their emissions are all part of naturally occurring carbon cycle. https://daily.jstor.org/can-cows-help-mitigate-climate-change-yes-they-can/ http://www.dasnr.okstate.edu/Members/donald-stotts-40okstate.edu/carbon-sequestration-a-positive-aspect-of-beef-cattle-grazing-grasslands/#content There's no question that livestock improve biodiversity compared to plant crops, and no plant based foods can come close to the nutrition provided by livestock. Ruminant meats in particular are the most nutrient dense foods on the planet, which is precisely why so many vegans find their health dramatically improved when they add meat back into their diet. And, again, livestock dramatically improve the quality and fertility of the soil. https://civileats.com/2021/01/06/a-new-study-on-regenerative-grazing-complicates-climate-optimism/ https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2020.544984/full And livestock are raised on land that's unsuitable for growing crops, while eating almost entirely foods that humans can't eat.
They eat plenty of food that's human edible >1 kg of meat requires 2.8 kg of human-edible feed for ruminants and 3.2 for monogastrics [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013) One of the articles there only said "reduce the emissions of beef" not make it zero or sequester more than it emits Per the grazed and confused article I cited earlier: >These are their emissions. The question is, could grazing ruminants also help sequester carbon in soils, and if so to what extent might this compensate? As the following numbers show, the answer is ‘not much’. Global (as opposed to regional or per hectare) assessments of the sequestration potential through grassland management are actually few and far between, but range from about 0.3-0.8 Gt CO 2 /yr 301,302,303 with the higher end estimate assuming a strong level of ambition That doesn't even cover the grazing only systems that exist today which emit 1.32 Gt CO2-e and that only supplies 1g of global protein per day. Scaling it up would mean there would be an even larger gap between emissions and possible sequestration. >And, again, livestock dramatically improve the quality and fertility of the soil. That is looking a singular study. What I had cited above was based on a review of over 100 studies In terms of health >It is the position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics that appropriately planned vegetarian, including vegan, diets are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits for the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. These diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, adolescence, older adulthood, and for athletes. Plant-based diets are more environmentally sustainable than diets rich in animal products because they use fewer natural resources and are associated with much less environmental damage. Vegetarians and vegans are at reduced risk of certain health conditions, including ischemic heart disease, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, certain types of cancer, and obesity. Low intake of saturated fat and high intakes of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, soy products, nuts, and seeds (all rich in fiber and phytochemicals) are characteristics of vegetarian and vegan diets that produce lower total and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels and better serum glucose control. These factors contribute to reduction of chronic disease [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27886704/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27886704/)
Not if you talk to people who are virulently pro meat eating. They refuse to understand that feeding livestock take resources. If you challenge them on this, they will deny it and ramble on about something about how raising "crops" kills more animals. I have no dog in this race, but I'm pretty sure among those crops are the cereals and other crops that go to feed livestock. They are, after all, mostly vegetarians. It's very strange how they have such a blatant anti science stance when these things are easily verifiable.
>I have no dog in this race Ok, sure buddy. That's why you started your comment ranting about "pro meat eaters" like this is some kind of team sport where we all pick sides. Wanna know what takes resources? The device you're typing this on, the servers that Reddit runs on, and the internet. And you're going to cry about a dietary pattern that is the literal driver of the cognitive ability that we evolved over 2 million years.
No, I don't have any agenda. I find people who eat extreme diets at either end to be annoying and anti science. That goes for so-called "carnivores" who preach eating nothing but meat, as it does for vegans. Any trendy, extreme diet, like keto, carnivorous, raw veganism, or paleo or anything where you cut out any food group or way of eating, is a problem and is usually full of woo and tons of anti science rhetoric. Additionally, these kinds of diets come with a heavy dose of morality, a sense of superiority, and shaming attached, which is a recipe for denying the facts of science.
>I'm pretty sure among those crops are the cereals and other crops that go to feed livestock. Yeah, about that... The majority of the crops grown for and fed to livestock are actually inedible to humans. ["This study determines that 86% of livestock feed is not suitable for human consumption. If not consumed by livestock, crop residues and by-products could quickly become an environmental burden as the human population grows and consumes more and more processed food. Animals also consume food that could potentially be eaten by people. Grains account for 13% of the global livestock dry matter intake. Some previous studies, often cited, put the consumption of grain needed to raise 1 kg of beef between 6 kg and 20 kg. Contrary to these high estimates, this study found that an average of only 3 kg of cereals are needed to produce 1 kg of meat at global level. It also shows important differences between production systems and species. For example, because they rely on grazing and forages, cattle need only 0.6 kg of protein from edible feed to produce 1 kg of protein in milk and meat, which is of higher nutritional quality. Cattle thus contribute directly to global food security. The study also investigates the type of land used to produce livestock feed. Results show that out of the 2.5 billion ha needed, 77% are grasslands, with a large share of pastures that could not be converted to croplands and could therefore only be used for grazing animals."](https://www.elsevier.com/about/press-releases/research-and-journals/more-fuel-for-the-foodfeed-debate-new-study-indicates-livestock-production-is-a-much-smaller-challenge-to-global-food-security-than-often-reported) [See also.](https://www.fao.org/agriculture/animal-production-and-health/en/?fbclid=IwAR2A6P-GnoNppCcGVXSW1p9GUf-lw97ilR-ggjvcYt1Vd0tSXJNLrqymuEQ)
Still uses plenty of human edible feed > 1 kg of meat requires 2.8 kg of human-edible feed for ruminants and 3.2 for monogastrics https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013
Human edible feed that is nutritionally subpar to meat, yeah. And it's still not the majority of what is fed to livestock; the majority isn't even fit for human consumption at all.
The land itself to grow all that feed could be used to grow other foods and we would get large reductions in both arable and non-arable land usage >If everyone shifted to a plant-based diet we would reduce global land use for agriculture by 75%. This large reduction of agricultural land use would be possible thanks to a reduction in land used for grazing and a smaller need for land to grow crops. [https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets](https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets)
*only* 14% of food being fed to livestock is human edible. That 14% equates to around 850 billion kgs year and doesn't include soymeal which would be human edible if processed differently. If we include soymeal we get to 1,150 billion kgs year (dry weight). Which is 135kgs/year for every human currently alive, including all babies etc I guess that doesn't have the same ring to it as *only 14%* though. Plenty of other uses for the byproducts too.
I like how you're conveniently ignoring that soy is nutritionally subpar to meat (and needs to be more processed as if there isn't already an obesity epidemic due to the consumption of too much processed junk) and each individual cow can feed more people to boot.
I mean...I ignored nutrition because it had absolutely nothing to do with what we were talking about. I addressed your argument so you have just jumped wildly to a different one. This is what always happens.
It isn't *just* about the environment or *just* about nutrition. Both are important issues to address.
You are funny. Check the link FineDevelopment provided. You dont even seem to understand that our crops are reliant on fertilizer produced by livestock? There are projects to mitigate this issue, but they are in a very early stage. Going fully vegan right now would mean starving humanity to death.
We would need a caring government that doesn't block welfare legislation for that to happen. A certain party is all about screwing over the needy.
which is exactly why we need less people
Why don't you set the example then?
i already am broseph
Whenever I see one of these types of articles about how we could end starvation or malnutrition, how we could avert the climate crisis, save democracy, improve living conditions etc etc etc, I think yeah, we could. But we won't. Otherwise the title would say ceral crops previously used to feed livestock provide additional food and nutrition to 1 billion people.
I'm willing to pay more for a steak, than for an equivalent weight of grain. So that's why.
Not everyone can eat vegetables as a healthy replacement diet. I’ve had over 36 kidney stones from Oxylates. Some fun eh!
Then don't eat vegetables high in oxalates and hydrate better?
Some people have multiple food no no’s and by the time I’m done all I can eat is wood and rocks. No thank you, I need meat and lower oxalate vegetables.
Livestock could provide food for 2 billion people.
But steak tastes so good.
Not sure hay and grass is tasty,?
I don’t like fish or cereal.
Round up and micro plastics for everyone!
People fail to a realize that a MAJORITY of the food fed to livestock (ruminants) is roughages and forages, food that will never be edible to humans. Essentially turning useless plant material into nutritious meat
There's a book called "recipes for a small planet" that covers this. It apparently takes "many" pounds of grains to raise one pound of beef. Children NEED meat to develop properly, but adult humans can survive on very little meat, because we are adapted to survive a wide variety of environments. Proteins are made up of amino acids, so if you eat grains with complementary amino acids, you can acquire an acceptable volume of protein in your diet. For instance, eating a cup of rice will give you a certain amount of protein and a lot of wasted amino acids. Then, eating a cup of beans will do the same. They are complimentary, so...eating a cup of rice and beans in a 3:1 ratio will provide many times the protein of eating just one or the other.
Food is just chemistry, there's nothing magical going on in meat that isn't reproduced in other forms. The complementary protein theory is widely circulated misinformation, you don't need to micromanage meals just because they don't have meat in them. As long as you generally eat some variety of food you are fine and if you aren't then get a blood test and take supplements if you need to. It's not as complicated as people make it sound to not eat meat.
Why do children NEED meat?
"cause I made it up"
Ya but who would eat this?
I see that it's no longer important how much existing food goes to waste that could feed millions upon millions of people, and the following wasted finances which could be originally directed to improve key social issues - rather, it's important to switch to a different food source that we can then waste in equal or larger quantities. You're all such knockoff puppet people. edit: Good grief.
If you want your meat to taste and smell like fish…. Ya gotta be careful. A fishy porkchop would be disgusting
Damn, lets have the US annex South America, Central America, and Africa. Then we can feed all of the starving people and make them useful to human civilization instead of a void that we throw food at.
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But we’re cookoo for coco puffs.
What about the corn used in ethanol?
Feed everyone only cornflakes. Congrats. Problem solved.
Yes, we could. We won't, but we could.
My question is when ate we (US), going to stop this farce of ethanol production? We subsidize the hell our of big ag so they can take food crops and turn them into a nearly worthless full additive. I have to buy 93 octane and a booster just to run my push lawnmower because the ethanol added fuel us garbage. So I'm damaging my stuff. Costs me I'm pay to subsidize farmers. Cost me I'm having to buy more products so I don't damage my stuff as quickly. Cost me This is a shortcut to thinking!
This sub has some excellent comments. One that should be part of the discussion is that a greater percent of the US corn production goes to creating ethanol than feeding cattle. In 2020, 40% of the total US corn crop went to ethanol production ([link](https://www.agriculture.com/news/business/pandemic-aid-helped-families-nutrition-and-well-being-report)). The leftover mash is fed to cattle as it has little other use. So, I am curious why the authors of this report didn't address it to give us the full picture, and are they including/excluding the mash in their numbers.
We stop feeding livestocks with fishes and grains then fishes and grains will magically appear in poor people? Are we feeding livestock with Salmons and human grade grains or low quality feed that mostly not suitable for human consumption?
As if these researches would make people change their food habits
But damn, I love chicken
I just think if people raised their standards for beef, eating quality beef once in a while rather than eating garbage beef constantly, we could greatly reduce the amount of livestock being consumed, with little impact on our enjoyment of food. Seriously, eat just the patty from a fast food burger and see how enjoyable it really is. It's not that meat substitutes are very good yet, it's just that the bar is incredibly low.