Energy is always lost as you move up the food chain, because no predator can capture 100% of the energy stored in their prey.
Consuming plants is not as efficient as photosynthesizing, and consuming animals is not as efficient as consuming plants.
In this case, the cows burn energy from the food they consume for as long as they're alive, meaning it's a physical impossibility for the meat produced from them to contain as much energy as the food they consumed.
Unless you're claiming that raising livestock violates the laws of physics, but that's an entirely different argument.
> When organisms are consumed, approximately 10% of the energy in the food is fixed into their flesh and is available for next trophic level (carnivores or omnivores). When a carnivore or an omnivore in turn consumes that animal, only about 10% of energy is fixed in its flesh for the higher level.
> and the hydrocarbons it takes to transport them/their food etc.
Obviously, if you graze sheep / cattle / goats on marginal land, or even relatively arable land (jumping ahead to your op-cost comments) you don't have to transport food to them.
Transporting grain to feed grass-eating animals is not uniquely a north-American strategy, but is much less common in other parts of the world.
> Considering eating beef is much more energy intensive then eating the equivalent vegetarian diet, there's simply no way cattle farm is energy negative just from bacteria taking carbon from the manure
Eating beef, or raising beef? Again, if you focus on large tracts of relatively non-arable land to run cattle, the numbers are quite different than if you look only at land that can support nutrient- or calorific- dense crops.
I'd suggest Simon Fairlie's excellent 2010 book 'Meat - a Benign Extravagance' for some deeper examination of the logistics / numbers here.
Not really: having an animal in between makes you waste a lot of energy (because the animal only spend a fraction of this energy to build muscles, and the rest is just burned away to sustain its metabolism).
You can take the problem the other way around: the limiting factor is land, and if you have 1 square kilometers of (somewhat fertile) land, you will feed many more humans if you grow potatoes, wheat or rice on the land than if you feed a cow on this land (whether you fees the cow directly with grass or grow corn or soy on it to feed your cows).
You do know that animals have to be fed stuff to grow?
I have a hard time believing that farming plants, feeding those plants to animals and then eating the animals is more efficient than just directly eating plants.
Livestock always takes more land than an equivalent calorie-load of crops. It has to; you're feeding the crops to the animals instead of eating the crops yourself, so there's a lot of energy lost on building cows.
The actual farm footprint may be smaller, but the feed for those animals was still grown somewhere.
(Of course there are resources besides land. In desert environments, livestock still takes more land, but it takes several orders of magnitude less water, since ruminants can digest dry scrub while humans need well-watered grains. But in places that get plenty of rain, livestock is always less efficient.)
Cattle eat more plant calories than the resultant meat. All those plant calories include the “vegetarian suffering.” Purely grass fed meats with no farming will be too inefficient to provide meat to everyone.
But you do realize that the environmental cost of animal farming is guaranteed to be >10x the cost of plant farming, correct? Each step up the food chain wastes roughly 90% of the energy, meaning that you need to grow more than 10 kcal of plants to raise 1 kcal of animal. So feeding animals is 10x as expensive as growing plants, in addition to the costs incurred by actually raising the livestock.
Still, the way energy is circulating in the food chain, you need a lot more land and water for raising X calories of cattle than for the same calories of plants.
Not to mention transportation, anti-biotics, cold chain management, packaging, transmissible diseases, waste management, etc. are all a much higher concern for animal based food. In fact, even pesticides are worse on cattle, because any non food product tends to concentrate in the animal after a life of consuming it.
Because making calories from livestock that grazes on grass is terribly inefficient, which is why we:
1. put them into small boxes usually, which creates a big nitrogen problem (mixing urine and shit is bad news)
2. feed them other stuff, usually made of soy which is grown in burned down rainforests
3. grow the grass with artificial fertilizers (made out of natural gas) and use pesticides, which also requires gasoline (to power machines)
If we're not even talking the CO2e emissions including methane, or the land use, pollution etc then for each calorie of cow you produce you could also create 25 plant based calories. The problem is a lot of people don't want to (only) eat plant based stuff, so we are coming up with ways to manufacture something in a lab that tastes similar to meat.
There are several ways to beat the natural process, which is really not that efficient at all and involves a lot of negative effects on the environment even if we disregard animal suffering. I mean, it does make sense if you think about it from first principles: a cow doesn't only turn grass into meat and milk, but also needs to move, to reproduce, it needs to power its brain, etc. We should be able to save a lot of energy in a lab not doing all those things and become vastly more efficient than what the cow does. And we could build a mass production process that is way more easier to manage than cattle and slaughterhouses. That is the theory.
The vast, vast majority of meat is grown on land which we can put to better use. The tiny amount of livestock that can be put on a natural rotational grazing system in a sound way making use of land that has no better purpose is so, so small, we shall be eating one burger a year at most from that system.
These super foods are grown in such minuscule amounts that the impact is incomparable to the soybeans from Argentina being fed to pigs in Denmark, or Brazilian soy raising billions of chickens, pigs and cows in China.
Energy wasted on growing plants that feed humans directly is feeding a 1st order process. Energy wasted on growing plants that feed animals that feed humans indirectly is feeding a 2nd order process.
Animals need to keep their body warm, grown their body, have immunity, give birth, grow offspring inside their body and then after all that they give you milk and meat.
Am I missing something or your statement sounds like livestock do not require land to grow their food?
Example from ten percent law [0]:
> Sun releases 1000 J of energy, then plants take only 100 J of energy from sunlight; thereafter, a deer would take 10 J from the plant. A wolf eating the deer would only take 1 J. A human eating the wolf would take 0.1J, etc.
We can go directly from plants to people instead of using land, energy and resources to grow plants to feed animals for human consumption with 10% efficiency.
The only time eating beef makes sense wrt energy efficient is if they are raised on soils/climates incapable of producing food crops humans can eat (i.e., grassland with low rainfall).
FYI: people in the rest of the world do eat the way in you describe. i.e., a vegetable-and-grain based diet with a little bit of meat now and again.
The one week's food photo series from different parts of the world will make it abundantly clear.
Btw, 1 lb of beef takes 7 lb of corn to produce (cows in America are primarily fed corn). Are you seriously claiming that eating the cow instead of the corn is more efficient?
Ruminant grazing on natural grasslands is not sufficient to meet the demand for meat. This is why chunks of the Amazon are burned down to create more land for raising livestock. And raising crops for people is much more efficient (in terms of calories per acre) than raising those same crops for animals. Any arguments highlighting the destructive effects of industrial crop farming apply ~10x for meat since much of the meat we eat is raised on soy and other feed crops.
Consuming plants is not as efficient as photosynthesizing, and consuming animals is not as efficient as consuming plants.
In this case, the cows burn energy from the food they consume for as long as they're alive, meaning it's a physical impossibility for the meat produced from them to contain as much energy as the food they consumed.
Unless you're claiming that raising livestock violates the laws of physics, but that's an entirely different argument.
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