4mo ago

Global land use for agriculture across different diets

93 comments

this is based on poore-nemecek 2018, a paper so fraught with methodological faux pas as to be a warning to anyone trying to do a metastudy.
- Following the trail of your comment: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets does indeed cite https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaq0216, but I'd love it if you could provide more details on your criticisms of methodology.
  
  this paper is over half a decade old, and i've been whining about it pretty much that whole time, but i don't recall the last time i actually dug into the methodology. to my recollection, they call it a metastudy and they compare LCAs from disparate studies, but LCAs themselves are not transferable between studies. that's just one point.
  if i recall correctly, they also used some california water study as the basis of their water use claims, but the water use included things like cottonseed, which is not grown for cattle feed, and using it in cattle feed is actually a conservation of resources. cotton is a notoriously light and water-demanding crop, so using the heavy byproduct to add to the water use of california dairies is, to me, dishonest.
  i have no doubt that if i were to slice up this paper citation-by-citation, every one of them would have some misrepresented facts or methodology being repackaged as, i don't say this lightly, vegan propaganda.

Think of all the parking lots we could build with that land!

Looks like we could change to just eating poultry and have roughly the same effect
- Poultry is definitely the more climate friendly of the meats but it doesn't come without problems
  There's still increased risks of pandemic with factory farmed chickens and most chickens are raised in inhumane conditions
  
  lots and lots of ammonia. and they use no land because they are all in overcrowded chicken factories.
- this is exactly what i do: replace most of my beef consumption with pork, chicken, and kangaroo
  i don’t cut out beef entirely because i think abstinence is a recipe for relapse (if i reeeeeally feel like steak or a beef burger i’ll do it but that happens maybe 3 times per year)
  i do not miss beef
  looking at the dairy part of this however i may need to do more research and move to other milks in my coffee!

I suppose this doesn't take into account more humane animal farming? Like not keeping a million chickens and three long barns? Or pigs with a livable space?
- The thing with pigs is: they eat a metric fuck-ton, so a lot of that land usage is to grow grain for feed.
  That’s the vegans’ main point – we grow food to feed it to our food.
  
  pigs are mostly fed crop seconds or other waste product. it's just not true that we are growing food exclusively for pigs.
- Yeah, that would make it even worse. I'm not sure by how much though, because like the other person said this is representative of cropland.
- They still haven't figured out a way to humanely slaughter animals let alone keep them in fulfilling environments that would be impossible to tell from their wild counterparts.
  We can't afford to let animals live full lives. Pigs are butchered at 6 months but can live decades naturally.
  We haven't even begun to approach the conversation of maybe possibly being able to in the maybe distant future being able to consider a humane way to keep animals and then also harvest meat from them when they pass.

I've been avoiding poultry for fucking nothing? I'm gonna go eat a thousand chicken nuggies
- also pork and game meats like kangaroo are pretty fine afaik

I like how poultry-inclusive diets get us 95% of the way there.
- I think things would be markedly better with eating only fish and eggs, although I think the fishing is out of hand already, and egg chickens can be kept in just as horrible of conditions as meat chickens.
  
  that’s conflating ideas though… climate change may very well be an extinction level event… animal cruelty is upsetting, but by far the lesser of 2 issues here

What's new to me in this data is that the increase in cropland for humans for a vegan diet is still less that what we currently feed to animals in spite of the enormous amount of pasture they also require.
- Yep. As a rule of thumb, 1/10th of the energy makes it to the next trophic level in any food chain. We might be doing better than that, but you're still going to to be wasting a lot of land at 30% end-to-end efficiency.
- except that the food that is fed to livestock is largely crop seconds or parts of crops that people can't or won't eat. so we need to find a whole other use for those parts of the plants or accept it as waste.
  
  I know a lot of people who grow feed on prime agricultural land. Like, can you eat alfalfa? Have you ever tried feed varieties of maize?
  
  Or we can use it as compost, which we should be moving towards producing and using instead of manure as fertilizer for a lot of our agriculture. That way it doesn't go to waste even if it does get 'thrown out'.

So my diet is better than a vegan family of four? Glad I got that vasectomy.
- There's more than one way to save the earth :)

I looked at it for five seconds and I figured this doesnt work like this at all
- How so?
  
  oversimplification. letting out a lot of questions. leaving out why all of this is benificial at all. leaving out that science is really divided about vegan diet and its effects on health. lumping every climate, culture, agrarcultural practice in one pot.
  there is no easy answers for complicated questions.
  there can't be when the question isn't even clear in the first place.
  take water, for example: people always talk about how farms and fields use up water. but, is that really true? water goes in a cycle. it never gets used up. if there is no pasture or field, water gets used up anyway. or do you go there to collect it? yes, its bad to taint your water soils with chemicals. but, then just don't use them?
  its plants, factories, chemical industry and cities that use up the water. because thats the water you have to recycle really hard.
  or, take fischeries: they are not mentioned here, not on the graphs. but they destroy our planet as well, by ships, debris from nets, overfisching, crude oil that gets disposed of in the sae, and fish and shellfish farms are the tainting your water really really bad,
  or take biogas farms: they use so much land for corn that it would make your head explode, corn gets used for all kinds of chemicals, it would not help if people ate vegan, since its use is in chemical industry and energy production, so the graph doesnt mention that either.
  the whole thing is oversimplification.

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