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this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2024
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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'
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.
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.
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?
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.
Please provide the numbers then. Pretty sure someone already posted the numbers, in which only 5% is grown for livestock only.
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%.
Habitable land is not the same as the ability to grow food on it.
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.
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.
Umm yeah? No one said it was.
When talking about feed grown specifically for livestock it doesn't actually matter if it's human consumable or not, it's land that could be used to grow human consumable food. They make the distinction between cropland and grazing land pretty clear.
Also you don't just get to dismiss science when it doesn't suit whatever you think. You asked for numbers, there they are.
There are things that can be done with grazing land other than planting crops and almost all of them are better for the environment than having livestock graze on it. They are just talking about the total land at that point, not trying to convince you of anything, stop reading everything so defensively.
And also it's a pretty credible source and it's definitely better than your anecdotal 'we literally don't grow food for cattle at all, ever' nonsense.
We use more than twice as much land to grow feed for livestock than we do for humans, and the livestock only supplies 18% of global calories. It's an inefficient use of land full stop. When there are more people we will need more efficient sources of food. This might mean farming more human food and therefore less animal feed.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013
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.
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.