> Cows are actually a way to convert otherwise worthless land into food
As someone who lived in a subsistence farm, that's absolutely not true, not on a large scale.
That is true in some places where the soil is not suitable for agriculture and the cows only eat grass, but that would be a minority of cows that exist today.
If that was even remotely true, there would be no cows raised by eating grain.
> irresponsible production of plant based food (soil erosion, destruction of entire ecosystems and replacing them with plant fields
In most cases, this is actually done to create feed crops like soy and corn. Most of the agricultural fields in the world are used to feed animals either used for slaughter or for dairy and not to feed people directly.
Feeding the same amount of people directly instead of feeding animals and then eating them could be done with a fraction of the agricultural resources.
Dairy production is actually one of the most environmentally impactful things that we do, if we want to go that route.
>Growing plants to feed animals and then consuming those animals is an inefficient way of obtaining calories and nutrients. Shifting to a plant-based diet would allow us to feed more people with less land, reducing the pressure on wild habitats.
Not true. Ruminant grazing animals (like cows) use land that generally is not fit for farming plants that humans would consume. They make land productive that otherwise would not be. Also, farming for the staples of plant-based diets annihilates animal life. In order to farm soy beans or whatever plant you eat, you have to tear up the soil and in doing so you will kill every ground squirrel, ground nesting bird, snake, vole, groundhog and rabbit that lives in that plot. Then you have to spray chemical pesticides that will annihilate anything you haven't already mechanically killed with the combine. Not to mention ruminant grazers enhance the soil through their compaction, manure and urine while plant farming has to constantly add external fertilizer to maintain yields.
> Cows are actually a way to convert otherwise worthless land into food. And the grass they're eating is not going to typically store carbon otherwise.
I think this is provably false. As mentioned above, a lot of land used for cattle used to be forest; the global beef market is one of the main drivers for deforestation in the Brazilian rainforest.
There are second order effects, too. Cattle that's factory farmed in the developed world is raised on corn, wheat, soy, and other calorie dense foods. Those crops are grown with a large quantity of fertilizer, and for every calorie of corn, wheat, etc. grown, about one calorie of petroleum is used.
I don't think there's any doubt that beef, in particular, is only economical because of the negative externalities involved. Accounting for those externalities would probably go a long way toward making lab grown meat (more) competitive.
> There exists whole industry of keeping cows and producing diary in humane way.
These are usually market gimmicks. They say a cow is pastured raised if they leave it out an hour a day, grass-fed if it gets fed half the diet in grass the other in grains, etc.
The costs of raising cattle and producing dairy in that way would simply not allow to meet the demand and it will never happen. Factory farms are the reality of what it takes to produce dairy for so many people.
Ultimately, in the end the result the animal dies a horrible death after having lived often a horrible live, so there is nothing humane about that.
> Farm areas that can grow human edible food tend to not be used for animal feed.
This (crop monoculture) is a consequence of animal agriculture, not justification for it. If anything, we could stop cutting down all the rainforests to make room for cattle and their soybeans.
> Farming the plants needed to produce this fake meat takes up land, potentially (and most likely) more land needed to produce equal amounts of meat.
And it will often take up land that is more fertile, and as such has a higher biodiversity cost, than what is needed for grazing animals (which can be done on land more barren or harder to farm).
It is often forgotten that you can herd animals in ways that coexist with the rest of the ecosystem, while farming plant based food (especially products like grains or soy) requires you to raze all existing life in the area you wish to use for farmland reducing it to a monoculture with no room for diversity.
(But it should be made clear that this only counts for grazing animals. Industrial meat production where you feed the animals grains gives you the worst of both worlds).
> At no point did I claim anything about how cows don’t consume a massive amount of grain.
You actually did. You said in repeated comments to me and others that in the west the cows consume grass. And showed it as an argument against the food inefficiency criticism.
> However, the majority of meat we eat today comes from factory farming, and the majority of the feed for those animals comes from... traditional crop farming.
This is incorrect. Cattle is fed primarily on grass. They are grain finished to increase weight at the end. A lot of that space is unusable as crop fields. Also a lot of animal feed is based off of plant byproduct, corn husk, wheat
"What most livestock in the world mostly don’t eat is grain fit for human consumption."
"What most livestock in the world mostly eat is grass and other forages and crop ‘wastes’ and by-products."
Additionaly:
> 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.
There is a legitimate usage of livestock, they can graze in areas not suitable for crop production (especially sheep and goats). They can consume and digest plant matter that we cannot (which is the whole point of utilizing livestock in the first place).
I think in general (as an American) we eat too much meat. And the consumption needs to go down (and it's been staying flat which is saying something). But I think that livestock has a very useful purpose of converting non-crop farmable lands and plant based byproducts into useful food.
Citation needed, no where in your source does it substantiate your claim that cows are reared on factory farms, where they subsequently live out their lives.
> You actually did. You said in repeated comments to me and others that in the west the cows consume grass.
Because they do feed on grass.
Look I get it, you clearly care about animal welfare, which is a good thing, but I was not making the argument you think i was making. Disagreeing with a factually incorrect statement does not mean I am an advocate for the meat industry.
The story is more complicated than you make it out to be, and it is important to have it right. Cows in America start on grass and finish on grain, this is a fact. This does no imply that there isn’t a huge amount of grain used in the process. The food inefficiency criticism is true, it is, however, untrue to say that cows spend their entire lives in CAFOs.
Yeah, we do. Cow feed is grown with petrolium-based fertilizer. Eating a cow that ate plants will always consume more fertilizer and therefore petrolium than just eating the plants directly, because the cow is less than 100% efficient.
> Cows are not killing the planet. They are one of the few things you can raise that doesn't require pesticides or chemical fertilizers.
True in theory. Not in practice. Unfortunately most beef we eat doesn't come from grass fed animals. And if we were to convert the entire industry to grassing only, we wouldn't have enough land to produce the same quantity of meat. Which would imply exactly reduced meat consumption.
> Even if its not, you can still use the resources used to produce that feed to produce human food instead.
If the resources required to produce (or harvest) the cow-food is more than producing synthetic meat: sure.
> And feeding cows waste has its own environmental problems, as it tends to play hob with their digestive systems and make them release considerably more greenhouse gasses.
Waste? How about plain grass? Or growing crops that are not human edible, since the conditions of the farm or land does not allow you to produce human edible crops? Of course those crops would still have to be easily digestible for the cows.
> Cows are treated pretty fairly until the end. They are usually grass feed and graze until they fatten them up for slaughter. They have miles and miles of fields to roam. You can find pigs that are treated fairly or are "free range".
This is a complete fabrication and utter logical fallacy.
> Wouldn't getting rid of ruminant cattle farming reduce the amount of arable land required since so much of it is used to grow animal feed?
I think this is exactly the point missed by the people in this thread saying that a lot of cattle are raised on otherwise useless land. The presumption is that if you got rid of cattle farming you'd have to replace the lost calories for humans by growing other food on that land or cutting down more forests.
But this presumption is false. Even if every bit of land used for raising cattle turned out to be worthless for doing anything else, you'd still have an overall environmental win by getting rid of cattle. Convert not the land used to raise cattle directly but the land used to grow the food they eat to producing vegetables and grains for us.
This is completely false. Animal farming is entirely based on crop farming for fodder.
Farming crop for animal fodder, for human consumption and for biofuel are in direct competition with each other.
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