Look I’m not trying to defend the free market, but agriculture is not a free market. It’s heavily subsidized and is subject to a lot of regulations
Yeah it is worth mentioning that the meat, dairy, etc. industries do receive outsized subsidies
If I were in charge of the agriculture subsidies I would totally rework them to favor a vegetarian diet.
If you live in the EU, there’s a citizens intative (like a petition but more official) for that exact thing that needs 1 million signatures https://eci.ec.europa.eu/025/public/#/screen/home
That’s a shame there dre only 3days left and it’s still 150k sigratures off
Yeah :(
hell yes, I’m vegan btw!
Preach!(Vegan btw)
I genuinely wish lab grown meat was something that we had large scale at low cost access to.
This chart shows our nutritional needs, but people buy and sell based on an emotional need. Meat is an emotional need. Lab grown could collapse that red bar without people feeling like they lost anything, but alas, it’s just wishful thinking. It’s too far away of a technology.
Is it actually more land/energy efficient than livestock? I’ve never seen any numbers on it, I’ve only heard people talk about the ethical side of things.
Once at scale, it’s hard to imagine it not being much more efficient. You only are feeding a much smaller group of cells compared to an entire being
Besides just culture meat, there’s also stuff like precision fermentation out there that’s super interesting (and already is being used commercially). With it you can create biologically identical proteins. You can buy things like ice creams with non-animal whey in a number of stores
I guess this also counts steppe lands in Mongolia where shepards pass through with their herds once a year. The numbers likely look different if you look at industrialized countries where animals live in stables.
I think the numbers might surprise you. This is where the original graphic came from and contains much more information on the topic. More developed countries especially tend to use far more land for agriculture due to their larger animal agriculture industries (by both percentage of our total agricultural land use and absolute size of our animal agriculture industry compared to less developed countries). Even the land that is used to grow crops is mostly there so that we have something to feed the literal billions of animals we kill per year in the US alone. Even with more efficient land use and farming techniques the sheer scale of our animal agriculture industry vastly outweighs whatever inefficiency is involved in things like what you are describing. And as the chart near the bottom shows, despite our increases in efficiency with the abhorrent practices of factory farming, producing 100 grams of protein in the form of beef for example is far far far more inefficient still. And that’s not even taking into account things like how much water it takes to produce that protein, the effect on the ecosystem, the ethical implications, the effect on the climate, etc.
Yep it takes plenty of feed:
1 kg of meat requires 2.8 kg of human-edible feed for ruminants and 3.2 for monogastrics https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013
For anyone curious what things look like for some of those other environmental issues:
Transitioning to plant-based diets (PBDs) has the potential to reduce diet-related land use by 76%, diet-related greenhouse gas emissions by 49%, eutrophication by 49%, and green and blue water use by 21% and 14%, respectively, whilst garnering substantial health co-benefits
[…]
Plant-based foods have a significantly smaller footprint on the environment than animal-based foods. Even the least sustainable vegetables and cereals cause less environmental harm than the lowest impact meat and dairy products [9].
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/8/1614/htm
To produce 1 kg of protein from kidney beans required approximately eighteen times less land, ten times less water, nine times less fuel, twelve times less fertilizer and ten times less pesticide in comparison to producing 1 kg of protein from beef
If everyone ate as much meat, dairy, etc. as many industrialized countries do, there would be no land left. If everyone ate like Americans, we would need 137% of the world’s habitable land which includes forests, urban areas, arable and non-arable land, etc. Cutting down every forest wouldn’t even be enough
Not here to shit on anyone’s beliefs but the story is not as simple as the numbers suggest. Factory farming is problematic for sure, but of the global calorie supply numbers you are looking at for example, 80% of it is non-human edible food stuffs and by-products that we feed to livestock to obtain dairy and meat. It is not a simple case of replacing these crops with human edible crops, farming generally doesn’t work like that. The 77% agricultural land statistic that you’re seeing includes a vast amount of land that is not arable, as in it cannot be used to grow crops and instead is put to use in feeding livestock instead. Another common misconception (not pictured here) is that livestock consume far too much fresh water reserves, but over 50% of all fresh water goes towards just rice, wheat and cotton crops.
This is a meme obviously so I don’t want to get too dense or argumentative, but check out the below video if you are interested in clearing up some commonly held misconceptions regarding livestock and meat.
That video cites a number of heavily misleading stats. Here’s one video looking at the problems with that video. If we look at that very same study for that 80% claim it also notes that it still takes more human edible feed
1 kg of meat requires 2.8 kg of human-edible feed for ruminants and 3.2 for monogastrics
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013
Using all available land still very much has a cost when it comes to things like deforestation. Clearing land for pastures is the leading cause of deforestation in the Amazon
Extensive cattle ranching is the number one culprit of deforestation in virtually every Amazon country, and it accounts for 80% of current deforestation
Additionally, it still takes more arable land as well
The research suggests that it’s possible to feed everyone in the world a nutritious diet on existing croplands, but only if we saw a widespread shift towards plant-based diets.
[…]
If everyone shifted to a plant-based diet we would reduce global land use for agriculture by 75%. This large reduction of agricultural land use would be possible thanks to a reduction in land used for grazing and a smaller need for land to grow crops.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
Water usage from growing animal feed is enormous in the places where it matters quite significantly such as the American West where it’s the main driver of water usage. Over 50% of the colorado river’s water usage goes just to animal feed
Correspondingly, our hydrologic modelling reveals that cattle-feed irrigation is the leading driver of flow depletion in one-third of all western US sub-watersheds; cattle- feed irrigation accounts for an average of 75% of all consumptive use in these 369 sub-watersheds. During drought years (that is, the driest 10% of years), more than one-quarter of all rivers in the western US are depleted by more than 75% during summer months (Fig. 2 and Supplementary Fig. 2) and cattle-feed irrigation is the largest water use in more than half of these heavily depleted rivers
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064&context=wffdocs
