I grew up in a small town and spent a lot of time driving through cows > people counties through college and young adulthood - every visit back to my parents meant seeing lots of cattle on the way.
At grocery stores I would see packaging for “grass-fed beef” or “free-range” and honestly I thought it was like a joke that farmers were pulling on city people, like “gormet hand-picked potatoes” or “premium plastic” or something. What else would cows eat?? I’d probably seen a hundred thousand cows in my life, always in herds roaming around vast pastures. Of course they eat grass.
Then I moved to California, and one day had occasion to drive from SF to LA. North of Bakersfield I encountered the most profound stink I’ve ever smelled while driving, and eventually I saw the source: industrial operations with enormous numbers of cattle in fenced pens shoulder to shoulder so they could hardly move.
I spent the next ten minutes slack-jawed, reconsidering my life experience.
> Then I moved to California, and one day had occasion to drive from SF to LA. North of Bakersfield I encountered the most profound stink I’ve ever smelled while driving, and eventually I saw the source: industrial operations with enormous numbers of cattle in fenced pens shoulder to shoulder so they could hardly move.
Those feedlots are all over the country, the largest being in Colorado, Texas and Kansas:
Also in California, you can find beef and dairy cattle roaming freely among the rolling coastal hills that never end up in a a feedlot like that, but you can bet that their meat and dairy isn't cheap. Industrial meat production is a nightmare, but when push comes to shove, few seem to be OK paying $30 for a burger.
'freely' is being a bit generous, they're all destined for the slaughterhouse or glue factory. Dairy cows are routinely bred to keep them producing milk and their calves taken away for other purposes such as veal.
Even in pastureland country, cattle typically spend winters packed together in feedlots and are fattened in feedlots on a largely corn-based diet before slaughter. Depending on who is doing the labelling, cattle which were pastured before this fattening process may still be sold as "grass-fed".
For accuracy, for winter that's really climate dependent. Plenty of geography supports year round outdoor cattle if not the majority. Often they will live outdoors for winter but require feed. This is likely to be majority hay with some supplemnt than feedlot type treatment. And not an expert but I believe some large operations will even truck cattle arond, so have summer pastures north and head south for winter type thing.
In general different countries will "finish" their cattle with different grains. Only a few places have the right conditions to have their beef be grass-fed through its whole lifecycle.
> those big bales rolled up are quite heavy - and expensive
Depends what you mean by "expensive". You can get one typically for $15 - $50 / bale. Here's a website: https://allhay.com/
Prices are much higher due to the fertilizer and fuel prices. Around me It's going for $50-$55 for a 4x5ft bale (a few years ago it was $20 / bale).
That said, those can weigh quite a bit, a 4x5ft bale will be 800 - 1200 lbs depending on moisture content and field composition. A cow will eat 20-40lbs of food a hay, depending on weather (they eat less in severe cold or heat).
That equates to a single bale lasting one cow a approximately month or in reality, a heard of 30 cows needing about one bale a day.
Using today's price of $50/bale, that's $1.67/day per cow to feed (a couple years ago it was much lower, say $0.5 - $0.75).
Given it takes 2-3 years to maximize beef production AND assuming you only need feed half the year (grass fed cattle often graze), we're talking ~$750 to feed over the 2.5 year average (assuming 2.5 years @ 180 days).
In terms of meat, you're probably going to get somewhere around 450lbs of use-able meat. You have to pay a butchering fee on that as well. That's probably $700. You'll also have transportation, fees, etc (let's just say $200/head). Total you're looking at a cost of $3.67/lb of processed beef. You can then resell for $5-6/lb right now to a reseller. This is a net of around $675.
If you feed grain, you can effectively expect the same thing, but:
1. Grain fed will typically be cheaper per lb.
2. Grain will create a more tender meat (it's why people finish with grain)
3. Cows fed grain gain weight, so profit can be somewhat higher (often offset by organic nature of many grass fed cows)
> Total you're looking at a cost of $3.67/lb of processed beef.
That's interesting. For a few years we used to buy a quarter beef from a retired farmer who was the father of a friend. It used to average out to $2.56/lb processed and picked up from the butcher shop. Granted, at this point he was retired and just doing it to keep busy, but that's quite a bit cheaper. I wonder if prices have gone up that much in the last few years or if it just costs less here in MN.
If you have enough land, many farmers will roll it for you for free, and give you enough to feed your livestock for the winter. We had 10 acres growing up and asked for 5-6 for winter for our small herd. They kept and sold the rest and we didn’t pay a dime.
I had a similar experience on that drive from SF to LA. I remember a UPS truck driving by me and the man inside wearing a face mask (this was pre COVID). I thought it was the weirdest thing. A few miles later though and you hit stench. It's hard to do it justice in a comment. Saying it's the foulest thing I've ever smelled really fails to capture it.
I had a similar experience. Grew up in a really rural area with family who raised cattle. Spent a lot of time on my Grandfather's farm. But my other grandparents lived in rural California. Driving past all the factory dairy farms was pretty shocking.
You saw a feed lot? They're only used as temporary holding pens for the last 3 months of a cows life. Most cows spend most of their time eating grass in pasture.
I'm in a cow county, but here both people and cows are outnumbered many times by elk and deer. A large part of the local economy is about supporting hunters from the cities.
A local rancher told me that they make almost all of their money from hunting parties in elk season. They wouldn't bother with cows except that the cows improve the foraging for the elk, improving their business. The cows are cultivating, seed distribution and fertilization devices in service of the elk herds.
I think that the more wild forage we can maintain along with our domesticated food system, the better. In paradise it's the rule rather than the exception.
I have been thinking about this lately. In Sweden we have a huge amount of elk, held high by forresting practices (clearcutting releases a huge amount of energy for elk), virtually no predators (we have less than 500 wolves) and policies to keep the number high.
Elks are by far the most dangerous wild animal in Sweden, killing about 10 per year in traffic accidents. Add to hat the cost of the elks to the forresting industry and suddenly we are left with very few reasons to keep such an artificially huge elk population.
The outtake (in meat), which is already considered to be at a maximum, only covers 2-3% of Swedish meat consumption.
I have started considering it a very marginal industry eith large drawbacks and very small benefits.
In response to the question in the headline: the Netherlands, pretty much everywhere. Over 5x as many as people [1], even after substantial decline last year.
Their droppings are causing us environmental problems, which is currently a hot(-button) topic.
They start with the goal of halving the livestock. Then they look for reasons why it’s necessary. So suddenly reports appear that seem to show nitrous deposition is way too high and we need to halve the livestock to fix it.
But when other scientists point out the reports are flawed they are brushed aside. When it is clear the nitrous deposition is not always caused by livestock (for instance because it happens in places where there is no livestock) the arguments are brushed aside. When flaws in the models are pointed out, the arguments are brushed aside. When it’s pointed out that the deposition has been falling for the last decades, the arguments are brushed aside.
Just so they can cling to their manufactured problem proven using pseudoscience, so the goal can be forced. Halving the livestock is a political goal, haggled as a deal during the last government formation. The arguments are mostly smoke and mirrors.
And what they don’t understand is by using the supposedly impartial ‘science’ departments (RIVM) to support their political goals, just as the same institutions are done supporting the governments COVID response with extremely poor science, they are completely destroying trust in that kind of institution in just another large part of the population. Trust is at an all time low.
The end result? The governing parties are up to be wiped away in any near term election so they’ll go any length to cling to power for the remainder of their term. Including manufacturing irrational pseudoscience to further the agreed upon political goals.
Right, you should monocrop Monsanto's latest patented seeds and douse the land with insecticide and herbicide rather than raise some ruminants on prairie land they've roamed for millions of years.
There definitely have not been billions of cows millions of years ago. There is simply not enough „prairie land“ for them. So in reality we grow the latest Monsanto monocrop to feed the livestock, because otherwise there is no way to meet the demand for all of that meat.
1B+ ruminants with similar size / digestive systems? (including buffalo, aurochs, rhinos, etc) Absolutely. There were 30-60 million bison roaming the Great Plains just 170 years ago (not far off from America's current ~90 million head) [1]. The size of ruminants in the ice age and prior was also much bigger than modern cattle [2] [3].
I live beside one of the "more pigs than people" counties; pretty sure that the bulk of the pig count is one farm (with several contract barns). At least in theory, there's one person who can say those are his pigs.
I'd be tempted to train them, arm them, declare the county the Free Porcine State.
It would be nice to repeat the maps using weight. The weight of a cow is like 700Kg (1500 pounds) and the weight of a chicken is like 3Kg (6 pounds). So a cow is like 250 chickens. (Can someone with CGI abilities make a gros image of a cow made of 250 chickens?)
I've seen another image which shows cubes indicating total biomass inclusive of plants and invertebrates. Humans aren't quite so prominant on that, though as a measure of all animal biomass, still a large fraction.
This ... is close though not quite what I had in mind:
About the last graph from xkcd: It's weird that is does not include chickens! As discussed in a sibling comment, raising a chicken takes 1/10 of the time of raising a cow, so I guess the current biomas is misleading lower.
One is the instantaneous biomass at any point in time.
The second would be something like "rate of new biomass formation".
A human lives ~82 years, a cow lives ~3, a chicken lives ~6 weeks (for a fryer or broiler). The human lives ~715 times longer than the chicken, but weighs only 30 times more. There's nearly 25 times more chicken biomass cycled per year than human.
(The fact that that chicken biomass goes to feed the human biomass is also a part of this, of course.)
Calories could be a good measure - a whole chicken appears to be about 1200 and a cow between 500,000 and 600,000 - so a cow is about 500 chickens or so.
Calories is a great metric. Better than mass. However, what I really want to see is calories produced per a unit of time. It takes about 8 weeks to raise a meat chicken and about 80 for beef cattle. 1 Cow = 50 chickens.
Seriously though, check out https://xkcd.com/1338/ "Land Mammals" it's one of the more mind-blowing XKCDs IMO.
> Earth's LAND MAMMALS By Weight [[A graph in which one square equals 1,000,000 tons. Dark grey squares represent humans, light gray represent our pets and livestock, and green squares represent wild animals. The squares are arranged in a roughly round shape, with clusters for each type of animal. Animals represented: Humans, cattle, pigs, goats (39 squares), sheep, horses (29 squares), elephants (1 square). There are other small, unlabeled clusters also. It is clear that humans and our pets & livestock outweigh wild animals by at least a factor of 10. ]] {{Title text: Bacteria still outweigh us thousands to one--and that's not even counting the several pounds of them in your body.}}
A county I have a farm in averages ~2 humans per square mile. Cows, chickens, pigs (really all animals) outnumber humans. Though this map isn't entirely accurate. Every farmer seems to have a handful of pigs, cows, goats, horses, ducks, turkeys, donkeys, chickens, etc at the very least.
Part of the challenge in this particular case is data collection, most of these people sell amongst each other and sell everything they can out of auction: direct, to each other, consume themselves, etc.
Which makes sense if you work it out - unless a country would only eat the largest animals (cows) you find that people eat more than one animal a year, and so there must be more than that. (Cow, estimated 500,000 calories, 2,500 per day recommended, cow lasts 200 days - even then if you were to eat mainly cow you'd need more than eaters because they take more than 200 days to mature; but nobody eats pure cow.)
I guess in theory you could eat one chicken per 8 weeks and barely keep it balanced, as you can grow a meat chicken in that time.
It's not popular, and what lamb is grown there is generally also a very mild flavour as far as lamb goes, being less gamey than lamb found in other countries.
I was also curious since there were historically Basque sheepherders in Northern Nevada, which is generally not very cool, although the mountain summer ranges are somewhat cooler.
The sheep economy was forced upon Scotland by the British during the Highland Clearances [1] which followed the subjugation of the Highlands after the failed Jacobite Rebellion.
Peasants who were not involved in sheep farming were forcibly evicted or killed, resulting in the sheep-centric agriculture we see today, and also triggered the earliest large Scottish peasant migrations to the Americas.
According to the guides at the Battlefield of Culloden, prior to the Clearances, the Scottish Highlands had a more mixed agricultural and cottage industrial economy, but basically got turned into a sheep production "banana republic" after the British defeated them.
When people bring up "overpopulation" as a primary cause of climate change, I notice most are only counting the 8 billion humans that are on earth right now and not the 80 billion land animals [1] that are being sheltered, fed then killed each year for food. It's a mind bogglingly large number that's hard to believe and yet easy to ignore because changing it will mean changes to our lifestyles to fix.
72B of those 80 are chickens, cattle come in at 325M. At least chickens are a superfood animal in terms of converting calories into food, and generally being lower impact than cattle, pork, etc.
> At least chickens are a superfood animal in terms of converting calories into food
Maybe compared to beef but when chickens are being fed crops they're not efficient compared to eating crops directly. 72 billion chickens is still an insane number of extra lives to support.
"In comparing the cultivation of animals versus plants, there is a clear difference in magnitude of energy efficiency. Edible kilocalories produced from kilocalories of energy required for cultivation are: 18.1% for chicken, 6.7% for grass-fed beef, 5.7% for farmed salmon, and 0.9% for shrimp. In contrast, potatoes yield 123%, corn produce 250%, and soy results in 415% of input calories converted to calories able to be utilized by humans.[4] This disparity in efficiency reflects the reduction in production from moving up trophic levels. Thus, it is more energetically efficient to form a diet from lower trophic levels."
Comparing food efficiencies by energy content, i.e. by calories, between vegetables and animals, is completely futile and irrelevant.
For any humans it is very easy to cover most of their energy needs with vegetable food and the majority of them, for whom the expenses for food form a non-negligible part of their budget, have very strong incentives to do this, because calories from vegetables are many times cheaper than calories from animals.
Animals are not eaten as a source of calories, but mainly as a source of proteins.
When discussing the efficiency of using animals for food, they must be compared with the vegetables used for their food based on their protein content, not on their calories content.
When vegetable protein extracts are compared with meat, all the energy and chemicals consumed for protein separation and any other additional costs must be taken into account.
> Animals are not eaten as a source of calories, but mainly as a source of proteins.
> When discussing the efficiency of using animals for food, they must be compared with the vegetables used for their food based on their protein content, not on their calories content.
Why do you think that? I think you're overestimating how much protein people need and underestimating how much protein regular plant-based food contain.
Potatoes are about the cheapest food, not renowned to be high in protein and yet eating 2000g of them a day will give you ~40g of protein and ~2000 calories which is close to the recommended amounts even if you're not trying to get protein. A cheap can of cooked chickpeas or beans is an easy 40g of protein, even cheaper if you cook from dry beans. Seitan (you make it by washing flour dough with water until it's mostly protein + gluten left) is about 75% protein, even more than steak: https://www.menshealth.com/uk/nutrition/food-drink/a25976250...
Actually I have studied very carefully the various recommendations for the daily protein intake and also most of the proteins that I eat daily come from vegetables, so I know what I am talking about.
I cook and eat chickpeas from time to time, but less frequently than lentils or peas, which have a higher protein content than chickpeas, so I am aware of their properties.
While you are right that 200 g of chickpeas would provide 40 g of proteins and this is not a quantity of chickpeas too large for being eaten during a day, that is only at most a half of the recommended protein intake for a 75 kg human.
While the energy requirements for doing some hard physical work are more similar between different people, the basal energy consumption rates when doing sedentary work in front of a computer, only interspersed with short exercises or walks, vary much more from human to human.
Eating 2 kg of potatoes in a single day, i.e. 2000 calories, would be enough for a large gain of weight per day in my case. I eat around 1600-1700 calories for a stable weight around 76 kg (before starting to count calories, during many years I had a stable weight of over 110 kg).
Moreover, counting all the 40 g of proteins from 2 kg potatoes as part of the necessary protein intake is incorrect.
There exists indeed a minimum protein intake, which is required to ensure a sufficient nitrogen intake, in the form of the amino- group, which can be transferred from amino-acids that are in excess to those that are deficient, to balance their proportions.
However, the real required protein intake is frequently much larger than that needed to provide enough nitrogen. The required protein intake must be high enough so that the required intakes are satisfied for all of the essential amino-acids.
So the recommended protein intake, which varies between studies, depending on methodology, from 0.8 to 1.2 g of protein per kilogram of body weight, is valid only for proteins from animal sources.
The proteins from vegetables like potatoes or chickpeas, have an unbalanced amino-acid profile, so they must provide a higher protein quantity to also contain enough of their more scarce amino-acids.
I am too lazy to make the computation now, but it is likely that a 75 kg human would have to eat no less than 5 kg of potatoes per day, i.e. more than 4000 calories, to get enough proteins, with enough of each amino-acid. Unless doing a lot of hard work, that would be impossible.
About seitan, even if wheat has a high-protein content in comparison with most other cereals, where I live the price of wheat flour divided by its protein content is only 3 times less than the price of chicken breast divided by its protein content.
However, proteins from wheat have only half of the lysine needed by humans, so you need a double quantity of wheat proteins. So correcting for the lysine content makes chicken breast only 1.5 times more expensive than wheat flour.
If you add the value of the time lost with making seitan from wheat flour, it is hard to compete in price with chicken breast.
Isn't this why you combine proteins to make them complete? Like rice-and-beans? Soybean is a complete plant protein anyway.
How do your protein and calorie recommendation line up with what e.g. the US or UK recommend? You think they're missing something? So are you saying you think most people on plant-based diets are likely deficient in protein? And what does that do to their health?
I only meant potato as an example of how you'll get close to protein targets by eating enough daily calories of even things that aren't considered to be high in protein, so with a balanced plant-based diet where you hit daily calorie targets, I think protein is a nonissue that's overblown.
Crop-fed chicken might be cheap, but how does it make sense that it can be cheaper than eating the crops directly?
We don’t have to eat those specific things… we grow a lot of edible items that is fed to them too and farmers make planting decisions based on knowing they will sell it for animal fodder.
So it is your claim that all or even a substantial portion of pastureland is suitable for growing human crops? Lol, okay. It also doesn't even touch the issue of byproducts like husks and some greens. Name a plant which humans eat all of, besides maybe cabbage and other cultivars of the same species.
Superfood animals because they eat literal garbage; you're still not escaping the order of magnitude conversion loss going through a trophic level. In addition we don't know all the long-term impacts of eating poultry (or any animal for that matter) given growth hormone stimulating factors. We also know that red and processed meats definitely cause cancer, and cooking "lean" meats / fish creates compounds likely to cause cancer in humans (and proven in animal models).
You could use chickens to deal with food waste, but you could waste less food? Most chickens are grain fed anyways—typically corn and soybean. Those calories are already food, you don't need to convert them besides cooking them. You're also using a living being as a means to an end and giving most of them a terrible existence to fit 72B on the terrestrial surface.
While the food given to chicken could provide calories to humans, it cannot provide a concentrated source of proteins.
That is the main usefulness of chicken, because from vegetable food it is very difficult to get enough proteins without simultaneously getting too many calories.
There are methods to extract proteins from vegetables, but for some reason the current methods are inadequate, because the price of vegetable protein extracts is much higher than the price of chicken meat, for the same quantity of proteins, so few people can afford to eat them, even if they might like the idea of vegan food.
> That is the main usefulness of chicken, because from vegetable food it is very difficult to get enough proteins without simultaneously getting too many calories.
"The recommended intake for a healthy adult is 46 grams of protein a day for women and 56 grams for men. And while protein malnutrition is a problem for millions of people around the globe, for the average adult in developed countries, we are eating far more protein than we actually need.
Most American adults eat about 100 grams of protein per day, or roughly twice the recommended amount. Even on a vegan diet people can easily get 60 to 80 grams of protein throughout the day from foods like beans, legumes, nuts, broccoli and whole grains."
> so few people can afford to eat them, even if they might like the idea of vegan food.
Chickpeas, soybeans and other beans can be about 20% protein, lentils about 10%, and they're cheap.
Lentils have a higher protein content than either chickpeas or beans, typically between 22% and 25%, never so low as 10%. Only soybeans have an even higher protein content, but cooking soybeans correctly, so that all undesirable substances contained in them are destroyed or eliminated, is rather complicated and time-consuming.
Nevertheless, even if the dry legumes have about the same protein content as raw lean meat, while in raw lean meat the rest of the content is mainly water, dry legumes contains at least twice as much starch as proteins, so when eating the same quantity of proteins as legumes instead of meat, one will eat at least 3 times more calories.
I actually eat about 2 thirds of my daily protein intake from high-protein vegetables, e.g. lentils or peas, and only 1 third from meat, but if I would replace the last third, of proteins from meat, also with proteins from vegetables I could not avoid gaining weight. I have made various experiments with different diets, so I know this for sure.
Moreover, I am able to eat 2 thirds of the protein intake from vegetable sources only because I normally do not eat any cereals or any other starchy food that would provide additional calories over those that are automatically ingested together with the vegetable proteins. So this is a problem that I have studied during a long time, until succeeding to find a balance between protein intake and energy intake, without gaining weight. Most people, who also eat things like bread or sweets, would not be able to eat such a large part of their protein intake from vegetable sources, without becoming overweight.
That recommended protein intake of 46 g / 56 g per day, quoted by you, comes from an older study whose methodology has been severely criticized. Other studies, which are more credible in my opinion, conclude that the real recommended protein intake should be at least 50% higher, so closer to 100 g per day than to 56 g per day (and the 56 g per day was for a 70 kg male, any bigger individual must eat a proportionally greater quantity).
Have no idea why you get downvoted, but I did notice few times now how HN crowd doesn’t know much about veganism or appreciates people who think animal agriculture is cruel.
Maybe because it's a biased POV, that doesn't take into account that the isssue is simply being human, nobody can call themselves out or blame some activity more than others.
For example many vegans and animalists own pets to "save them from cruelty"
But
Loss and others of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that free-ranging domestic cats (mostly unowned) are the top human-caused threat to wildlife in the United States, killing an estimated 1.3 to 3.7 billion birds and 6.3 to 22.3 billion mammals annually.
And that's only in the US...
Wild life is a constant threat to our life style, like it or not, being a modern human in modern society means being responsible for animal suffering even if you don't personally eat them.
For example in my country the war on hunters (mainly by radical animalists) produced that
Roughly 2.3 million wild boars roam around Italy, with roughly 20,000 in the area of Rome, according to farm trade group Coldiretti. And while African swine fever can't be transmitted to humans, it can infect and kill domestic pigs
well, this is the reason why people downvote these comments.
muslims don't eat pork, Hindu don't eat cows, every religion impose dietary restriction, doesn't mean that non believers have to follow them.
Veganism is no exception to the rule: if you believe you're reducing animal suffering, good for you, go on with your religion and be happy.
But in truth you aren't, vegans kill a lot of animals too, there are billions of people in the World that cause much less damages than us westerners, even if we lived only on rainwater and rocks.
So you might be a "true vegan (TM)" but you aren't better for the environment or for animal suffering than anybody else.
I don’t see evidence that the HN crowd as a whole doesn’t know much about veganism. Are you measuring knowledge about veganism via adoption of veganism?
The comment contributes absolutely nothing to the conversation. No definition, no solution, no relevance.
If livestock is less than people is it ok then? These graphs are just hotspots it's impossible to use them quantifiably at USA levels. They only show there are a lot of "cows" "there"
You are just roping your common repetitive viewpoints into the story.
Why don't you care about human slavery? Do you not think that is cruel? I'm guessing because you are rich and the poor can eat vegan cake on the other side of the world? Why do vegans get to bring up veganism every conversation when so many people have such awful lives like being slaves?
None of this is relevant to livestock heat maps using a measure of X times people.
Lab grown meat is the answer. One can never convince a statistically significant amount of people to switch to meat, so one must find ways to make the meat itself more sustainable.
It's thinking with the end in mind. Once you axiomatize the ends, you can then figure out the means to get there.
This is an unhinged reply. The fact that you ask why the other commenter doesn’t care about slavery really drives home the point that you don’t know what you’re talking about and you have a hard time constructing an argument. I hope you educate yourself about veganism. there are endless resources!
At grocery stores I would see packaging for “grass-fed beef” or “free-range” and honestly I thought it was like a joke that farmers were pulling on city people, like “gormet hand-picked potatoes” or “premium plastic” or something. What else would cows eat?? I’d probably seen a hundred thousand cows in my life, always in herds roaming around vast pastures. Of course they eat grass.
Then I moved to California, and one day had occasion to drive from SF to LA. North of Bakersfield I encountered the most profound stink I’ve ever smelled while driving, and eventually I saw the source: industrial operations with enormous numbers of cattle in fenced pens shoulder to shoulder so they could hardly move.
I spent the next ten minutes slack-jawed, reconsidering my life experience.