• SupraMario@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Why is this always brought up, stop spreading this. Animals usually are not fed grain unless it’s harvesting time. We also do not grow food just to feed them. The grain we feed animals is shit you cannot eat. It’s roots/stalks/stems/bad/rotted plant matter. It’s the leftovers from the greens we can consume. Most animals also are raised on land that is not suitable for crops, rocky/hilly/weak topsoil land.

    • Norah - She/They@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      7 months ago

      Mate, I have three chickens at home and I feed them a scratch mix that is mostly grain. I think you’re talking out of your arse, and I strongly doubt you have any actual animal husbandry experience.

    • Lemongrab@lemmy.one
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      7 months ago

      Animals products are less efficient for a simple energy reason. Animals produce heat which radiates away as lost energy, and they rely on consuming autotrophs. All life gets its energy from the sun, we as animals get it one or two down the food chain from plants or other animals (which are also eating plants). Animal-based products are simply less efficient.

      • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        You can think this all you want, but you cannot consume what they do, you also cannot grow crops usually where livestock are raised. Crops need a pretty flat chunk of land, livestock don’t.

        • Lemongrab@lemmy.one
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          7 months ago

          Except for the deforestation needed to increase pasture area and for growing more feed. Destroying habitats and pushing indigenous people further from their homes. Meat on a large scale doesn’t work because it is energetically less efficient. Farmed animals produce waste products like methane which are large contributors to global warming. Even if the land used by livestock was completely unusable for other purposes, they would still be polluting the environment through eutrophication and destroying locally endangered species.

          • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            Everything you just said…is the same shit that happens for plants as well. Deforestation isn’t something that happens only with livestock. It also only really exists now in poor countries for people who are trying to survive by any means. You also are assuming that plants don’t use nutrients from the soil or that the ground has to be fertilized or sprayed with pesticides or that large machinery has to be used to harvest it.

            • Lemongrab@lemmy.one
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              7 months ago

              You forget that the food required to make even small quantities of meat is much higher than just growing plants for human. Better to directly eat the energy produced by autotrophs. Deforestation doesn’t happen in “poor countries” just so people can survive, it happens because corporations lobby the government of corrupt countries like Brazil so they can destroy habitats for feed and pastures.

              Meat production is a simple maths problem to see that wasted energy used by livestock (to survive and grow) is lost energy.

                • Lemongrab@lemmy.one
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                  7 months ago

                  All you did was step around the problem. I am not arguing that what is fed to livestock should be fed to humans, I am saying that livestock take up useful space, pollute the air with methane (which is near to 100x a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2), that the lands are cleared of their native plants to feed the ever growing meat industry, and on a large scale animal feed has to come from somewhere (which is why I bring up the inefficiency of not sourcing the energy from autotrophs). Animal feed may be inedible, but it is also grown specifically to be feed. I am not suggesting the complete veganizing of the whole planet, just the meat on a large scale is killing the planet.

            • Nachorella@lemmy.sdf.org
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              7 months ago

              Ok but we use twice as much land to grow animal feed than we do human food and it has all the same drawbacks. And then the meat we get still only provides 18% of our calories.

              • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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                7 months ago

                No we do not. Provide a source that shows we grow crops directly to feed livestock in any meaningful amounts.

                  • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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                    7 months ago

                    Yep, and that 36% is dead corn that the gov tells farmers to grow, they pay farmers to grow it so we don’t have a famine. The majority is sold over seas and turned into ethanol. The rest that we eat is mainly HFCS. So no we don’t grow it directly to feed animals, it’s grown and not used, so the stuff left in the fields to dry is harvestes whole and tossed into grain. You might want to read your own article.

    • TORFdot0@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Why it is true that you’ll graze non-butcher animals on the leftover stalks and such, we absolutely finish beef and pork on grain and a big portion of the grain harvest is for animal feed.

      • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Almost all of the grain we feed is what I just explained. All of that is ground up and a binding agent (usually molasses) is applied. We do not grow crops just to feed to animals, it’s a complete waste of land. We grow crops for our consumption and use first and whats left over is turned into grain to feed to animals we then butcher and eat.

    • uncertainty@lemmy.nz
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      7 months ago

      Food is grown specifically to feed livestock though, it would be a pretty weird trophic pyramid for them to survive on our waste unless you went back to a time where people killed their one pig for the year and salted it away. In our country, the land degradation from clearing hill country for grazing has led to enormous biodiversity loss and a self-fufilling prophecy of eroded weak topsoil that people claim isn’t good for anything else (though it could still be rewilded and in other cultures and times would be terraced and swaled to support plant crops).

    • Nachorella@lemmy.sdf.org
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      7 months ago

      It’s brought up because it’s true.

      research

      edit: link doesn’t appear to be working, but it’s the paper by Emily Cassidy called ‘redefining agricultural yields’

      • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        But it’s not, these papers and studies all assume the land that cattle graze on is suitable for crops. You cannot grow crops on a massive hill properly. It’s why the all the states that are flat usually have crops grown and all the hilly/dryer states raise livestock. No one is saying livestock can fully replace plants, but to many think we can replace everything with plants only. This is complete junk science.

        • Nachorella@lemmy.sdf.org
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          7 months ago

          This has nothing to do with grazing land. This is crop suitable land being used to grow crops that is then fed to livestock. There are no assumptions being made and it is not junk science, you’re just not very good at reading.

          • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            Except it’s not, we are not growing crops just to feed to animals, as I’ve explained multiple times now, grain is created from the shit we cannot consume. Why is this so difficult to understand?

            • Nachorella@lemmy.sdf.org
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              7 months ago

              It’s difficult because it’s just very untrue and wrong. This is very widely documented, grains are absolutely grown just to feed animals. The majority of corn and soy in the US is grown to feed animals. I’m not sure why you’re so insistent on something that can so easily be looked up, you don’t even need vegan sources, the animal ag industry reports this stuff.

              • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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                7 months ago

                Please provide the numbers then. Pretty sure someone already posted the numbers, in which only 5% is grown for livestock only.

                • Nachorella@lemmy.sdf.org
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                  7 months ago

                  You’re pretty funny, before you said they only graze, then you said we simply don’t grow food for cattle, now you’ve admitted we do based on some random dude pulling 5% out of a hat.

                  info you won’t read

                  They cite a paper that puts the land used purely for growing feed at about 38% of our cropland. If you combine it with grazing land it goes up to about 80%. Cropland for food humans eat is just 16%.

                  • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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                    7 months ago

                    Almost half (44%) of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture.

                    Habitable land is not the same as the ability to grow food on it.

                    The UN FAO does not provide breakdowns of the amount of land directly devoted to feed, food, and industrial production. It does provide this in tonnage terms, however, converting this to area estimates is complex, especially when co-products are considered.

                    So most stats that are pulled out of someones ass, because they came up with a system that says all feed we provide to animals is more than the tonnage we eat ourselves. No shit we feed way more grain to a 2k lb cow. It’s 2k fucking lbs. It doesn’t even provide a breakout of what isn’t actually human consumable, because it’s bullshit stats.

                    If we combine global grazing land with the amount of cropland used for animal feed, livestock accounts for 80% of agricultural land use.

                    And if I combine the road as part of my land in front of my farm I have more land…this is fucking stupid. Grazing land is not usually suitable for plants. It’s why crops are not planted usually in places that are rocky or have to many hills.

                    You’re source is bullshit.

                • FireRetardant@lemmy.world
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                  7 months ago

                  You are misreading that 5% claim. 95% of global livestock are fed food grown specifically to feed them. 5% are fed the way you claim.

                  • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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                    7 months ago

                    Which is not true, hell even the users other source doesn’t say that. If we grew 95% of our crops to feed animals, there wouldn’t be a high price on livestock, it would be a lot cheaper and vegetables would be extremely expensive. I can buy 10lbs of potatoes for like $5 still.

      • pine@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        7 months ago

        That 46% is land whose biodiversity and ecosystems have been intentionally crushed for the meat industry.

        • Gloomy@mander.xyz
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          7 months ago

          100 % or this chart is made up of food we got by intentionally crushing land for the meat Industry. It shows how the food we feed livestock is spread across different feeding sources, not the land uses by said food source.

          I poated it because the person I replied to insisted that most of the food animals are fed is just the uneatable byproduct of agricultural products made for humans. This chats shows its defnetily not the main source used to feed animals, as it only makes up about 5 %