Isn't the issue here waste entering the water supply from upstream animal farms? Unless everything went 100% vegan (please don't take that bait), you can have the best processes you want on a given farm and still be at risk.
This would be a tremendous benefit if it can be deployed at scale, which I'm sure it eventually could. HOWEVER, This solution fails to address the excessive amount of water consumption required to raise these cows. fresh, clean water is already becoming a major global crisis. The simplest and most effective solution to ensuring our survival as a species remains switching to a plant-based diet. Too many people adopt a cow-first mentality when we should be adopting a humanity-first mentality. The future is Vegan!
Exactly. You want to decrease the water usage inefficiencies up the chain. The govt should advocate eating less animal products (I'm not necessarily saying all) if it really cared about conservation.
Indeed. It is not an all or nothing kind of thing. I've been eating less meat lately for a number of reasons, but I'm far from being vegan.
The Skeptical Science link doesn't seem to touch on water usage, only focusing on greenhouse gas emissions. Groundwater decline and depletion is another factor that should be kept in mind as people consider their food choices.
Not when it's made from dairy, and while animal agriculture is one of the most environmentaly damaging industries on Earth, worsening 5 of 7 symptoms of an ecological overshoot.
Make it from plants and it's another story, but until then ...
Land is not a problem if vegetables come to reign, hydroponics and aeroponics will easily substitute the inefficient land-use.
Tom et al. (2015) [1] also show that in the US the switch to a vegan diet would be less efficient. But it's natural, from an economic perspective, that existing processes are optimized for efficiency and low costs and given the high demand for vegetables and fruits there would obviously be a huge incentive to optimize the production processes and lower the prices.
Vanham et al. (2013) [2,3] show that EU would benefit from a vegan diet when it comes to water usage.
Overall, it's quite obvious that the medical costs of today are extremely large mostly due to overconsumption of animal products. It is unfortunate that they can be easily overconsumed and thus cause health issues. Diet that includes animals is much more destructive when it comes to dead ocean zones, rainforest destruction, species extinction and water pollution, being the biggest factor in mentioned issues.
Glad this is getting closer! Aside from the moral issues, running sunlight, water and feed through a cow is such an inefficient and inelegant way of producing meat...
The problem, as this article sees it, isn't that we eat meat; it's that we feed animals people food, which puts us into competition with livestock while reducing the efficiency of farms. Feed pigs scraps, feed cows grass, save the corn for people.
Also, many of the stats cited by eco-vegans turn out not to be valid. Water requirements for livestock are based off worst-case scenarios (California cows fed from irrigated crops) and are off by 3 orders of magnitude in the common case; greenhouse gas estimates for livestock conflate logging and land speculation with faring.
So what’s the alternative? Beef? Chicken? Pork? Vegetarian?
Every one of these has significant downsides to them (for you vegetarians out there, the phosphorous that leeches into the runoff is huge, affecting the ecosystem in ways we still don’t understand).
I get every point you make, but honestly, what is the real alternative?
As a vegan I applaud every step towards the elimination of animal exploitation, this product might be a nice niche for transitioning but once you get accustomed to plant based whole foods you feel strange eating even “meat replacers” as for the environmental impact I don’t think it can get any worst than animal agriculture.
Thank you for these references; it's great to see some logical arguments here rather than knee-jerk responses.
But I do question how much of some the things you reference are actually problems.
We have plenty of fresh water. Distribution is often our problem when it comes to getting that water to humans everywhere, but stopping livestock production will not fix that.
Does it really matter how much of the USA is used for livestock grazing? Are we missing out on using that land for other things that are important to us?
I have no opinion on soybean production, but, again, does it matter that the lion's share of soybean production goes toward feeding livestock? And if soybean cultivation really is that bad for the environment, are there other things we could be feeding livestock that don't have such bad effects?
The carbon emissions suck, but are there ways to reduce these through better process?
I don't think any of these problems are unsolvable, but likely they're expensive, and there's no political will to tax the bad behavior to the point that it becomes financially better to do the right thing. Getting around that is likely easier than getting a significant chunk of the world to go vegan.
And that's the issue I have with most logical arguments around veganism. Meat production and consumption has a lot of problems, certainly, but vegans seem to believe that the only way to fix those problems is to throw the baby out with the bathwater, when there are almost certainly solutions or at least mitigations to those problems. I get that as an individual, you aren't going to fix those problems, so personally going vegan is a way for people to avoid being a part of the problem. That is a satisfying route for some people, but not for everyone.
one interesting argument that i read was that without meat and dairy production we would not have enough natural fertilizer and we would have to resort to chemical fertilizers instead. i haven't been able to verify this, but if true then organic vegan food production may not be possible without livestock. (unless we change how human waste is being collected)
I disagree with your claim that veganism and vegetarianism can't be backed by logical thinking. Producing meat requires significantly more natural resources (land area, water) and produces significantly more pollution (methane, ground contamination) than producing fruits and vegetables.
Here is an example comparing the amount of water needed to irrigate various crops compared to the amount needed to raise beef.
US Corn Production: 9 gallons water / lb corn
US Wheat Production: 14 gallons water / lb wheat
US Barley Production: 26 gallons water / lb barley
US Alfalfa Production: 31 gallons water / lb alfalfa
I could look for more examples, but this took me about half an hour already, and I think it pains a rather compelling picture by itself. The difference would be less extreme when looking at pork and poultry, but there is still a stark contrast.
Not necessarily. "Environmental" problems are always scope to whatever issue the stakeholder is worried about.
Soy and wheat production in the United States is concentrated on the Great Plains, and made possible by irrigation sourced from groundwater and artificial fertilizer. Problem: that groundwater is being depleted faster than replenishment, and part of the plains will be desert-like within the lifetime of many HN users. So you're looking at destroying some of the more productive farmlands on earth, and have been destroying the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi delta for decades with massive levels of nitrate pollution.
Most of the problems with meat production are about scale. You can actually utilize the waste products of a 200 head herd of cattle, but 20,000 is an industrial waste site. Likewise, you can't pasture large scales of cattle, and feedlots intensify things like methane emissions, etc.
Is the implication that alt meats aren't being consumed and therefore more wasteful? I'm not sure I'm following - because when I started to look at the waste in existing livestock lifecycle you begin to understand that it's never been efficient, nor has the industry done much to pivot with better methods.
Here's a water footprint comparison [0]. Here's a study that showcases where: "Agriculture accounts for 92% of the freshwater footprint of humanity; almost one third relates to animal products." [1] And here's a study that showcases how many people could be fed by grain given the footprint of food livestock need to be raised and bred [2]. And here's data showcasing the significant delta of available land vs diet types for different nations [3], many being unsuitable without external use of land for food.
"Would this still be a problem if we didn’t use most of our agricultural land to grow crops to feed to the animals we eat?"
It depends on the lifestyle. If everyone agreed to go vegan and eat unprocessed food, and we stopped using crops for many industrial uses (ethanol, plant based plastics, etc), then just maybe. However, people want their plastics and there is pressure to move away from petroleum in the long term. My guess would be that plant based industrial products will readily take the place of any reduction in agricultural feed over the next 30 years. And of course this doesn't address convincing the majority of the population to go vegan, which would be the bigger challenge.
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