4mo ago

Global land use for agriculture across different diets

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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?
  
  people definitely eat alfalfa sprouts. to be clear, i didn't say no land is used explicitly for feed, but much of the land that is used for growing feed is actually growing some crop that will produce multiple products, with feed being only one of them.
  
  Yeah, I like alfalfa sprouts too. That's not what the fields here are full of though.
  It's not my lived experience that it's all or even mostly byproducts. Unless you have hard numbers, that seems like the meat industry equivalent of "the climate has always changed".
  
  dig into poore-nemecek, and you'll find onions are part of the feed crop.
  
  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'.
  
  even so, we would still probably expand cropland to feed a vegan world
  
  We would need to expand the cropland growing food for humans, yes. But there is a lot of cropland currently growing types of corn and hay that we as humans can't eat, just so we can feed animals and get a less than 20% return on calories from the 'food' we get when we eat animal muscle and organs.
  Which is why our total crop land use would go down if we didn't eat animals: we need less space to grow calories and nutrients for us that we do to feed the animals we eat. So much gets wasted with the current process that it is unsustainable, and we need to start shifting this now to avoid running into severe land and water deficiencies with the changing climate.
  
  our total crop land use would go down if we didn’t eat animals
  even poore-nemecek doesn't say this. do you have a source that does?
  
  well that part is just logical
  about 10% of the energy and nutrients animals consume get passed down into humans (ie for 10kg of feed we get 1kg of meat - i’m actually surprised it’s even this much!)
  that means if we get those nutrients from plants directly for every 10kg of plant we get - perhaps not 10kg since there’s still waste, but you don’t waste 90% of the plant to consume
  
  like when cocal cola is stealing the water of whole regions by taking it for basically free, and selling it? or like when in south spain people have no water, because all those vegtable farms?

93 comments