Yeah, why not? Humanity seriously needs to develop the technology required for space stations dedicated to farming and livestock, space industry in general. Much better than wasting human talent and potential on adtech nonsense, that's for sure.
That idea seems to show up occasionally in science fiction which has quite the uncanny ability to predict the future so I'm just gonna assume it's going to happen at some point.
If it's complicated you should probably explain. Your link doesn't disprove the parent -- it compares different water and land use of various cattle raising methods.
Over 60% of cropland in the US goes towards raising beef, a food which makes up a very low percent of the calories in an average person's diet.
>
>Beef cattle use nearly 60% of the world’s agricultural land but account for less than 2% of global calories and 5% of global protein consumed
I provide a study from the National Library of Medicine.
This study provides a nuanced view of the topic here,
and provides a lot of data.
If you did read the scientific study I linked to, then you would now know
that land that "food animals" occupy is often not at all suited for other forms
of agriculture.
You would also know that various food animals can be fed and raised on
waste from other agricultural processes that humans could not consume.
That is why I stated "It is more complicated than what the original soundbite
line portrayed it as.
> If you did read the scientific study I linked to, then you would now know that land that "food animals" occupy is often not at all suited for other forms of agriculture.
How much of a cow's diet do you believe comes from resources that would not be otherwise useful to humans?
Your image of cattle grazing out on the range is out of touch with reality. Nearly all beef consumed in America starts with diverting water that could go towards directly feeding humans
Most of the feed that cattle get on feedlots is waste from ethanol and biofuel production, aka distillers grains. We feed cattle very little fresh grain so all of the statistics about cropland use are extremely misleading. Several industries use that grain one after the other.
That feed along with the fresh hay is fed to cows at the end of their life to fatten them up for human consumption. Notice how the article you linked says 200 million acres of cropland used for beef and 325 million overall versus 900 million acres of total farmland? Most of the difference is marginal pasture that can’t grow anything for human consumption. We don’t fertilize or water it, it’s just grassland that grow by itself where we raise cows before sending them to feedlots. Without that cropland going to distillers and cows, over 60% of our farmland would be completely useless. Not only that but most of our cropland isn’t very useful either - 95% of the corn we grow is inedible dent corn. It’s one of the cheapest commodities on the planet that’s only worth growing as a last resort.
We make this tradeoff because those 600 million acres of otherwise unusable farmland are far more resilient than our cropland so we have a huge backup of calories incase of massive crop failure.
That's a good point, I know in Australia, NZ, the Uk/Wales etc, sheep and cattle graze in farmland that would not be easy to reshape (e.g. terraced) for agriculture. So that otherwise "useless" farmland ends up being useful.
Source: rock climbing one day and finding sheep grazing on plush grass in an otherwise inaccessible location. Apparently it's well known, and locals will climb up to look for said lost sheep.
Their feed and hay occupy land and use water that could be used more efficiently to directly feed humans.
My uncle was a cattle rancher in Arizona, on "marginal" land that didn't grow food for humans. It didn't grow enough for his cows either. We would leave out bales of alfalfa to keep the cows healthy. Alfalfa is grown in those big irrigated circles you've surely seen while flying.
Most beef consumed in the US comes from feedlots. Over 70% of "grass-fed" beef sold in the US is imported.
If you want to eat steak you can. But it is going to get less popular or more expensive in the future. There are a lot of negative externalities with consuming meat especially beef (in its current form of mass production). But I don't think anyone is going to ban it.
And hopefully one day we'll live in a world where steak has the incredibly high cost it actually deserves, and people like you can spend your hard-earned money on it still while everyone else eats the fungi equivalent for pennies on the dollar.
So you essentially want to go back to the good old days where the rich and powerful gorged and feasted on the finest foods imaginable while the rest of humanity fed on the scraps. You want the common man to be priced out of high quality meat which is both tasty and nutritious. You want them feeding on some amorphous fungal slop made just for them.
Not the poster: but I want the price of food to represent its true cost and not be artificially cheap (or expensive) because of externalities.
In the United States, we don't have a real market in water; hence, the cost of water in food isn't really represented.
Worse, we "export" a whole lot of water for artificially cheap. Countries with insufficient water to grow crops they would like buy water-intensive crops from the US where water is artifically cheap; hence the massive exports of alfalfa to China. In turn, US aquifiers are ending up depleted and catastrophe looms.
Fixing this, though, will have other effects like perhaps doubling the price of steak. We'll still eat more of it and at a lower cost than we did 75 years ago, but not as much or as cheaply as today. Quality will also probably rise, too, as the measures that produce higher quality beef will be a smaller proportion of the price.
Meat is not scalable. If 8+ billion people want to live on this planet, they will not all be eating steak every night. Sorry if that offends you. If people find an alternative that looks, tastes, and acts like meat but is as or more nutritional and much less ecologically damaging to produce, then great, problem solved.
Secondly, the only reason "the common man" can afford meat in the quantities he can now is because of massive amounts of subsidies and incredibly damaging practices.
So frame your overly-emotional argument however you want, but there are realities you aren't addressing and they don't go away because of your feelings.
Here's a reality you aren't addressing: people don't really want to eat insects. Here's another: about 2 years ago a president was elected in my country partly by promising that the poor would get to eat meat regularly once again.
Make people miserable at your own peril. The simple fact is nobody really wants to be reduced to eating worms and bugs. No one really gives a shit about how "scalable" it is either. Whoever finds a way to provide what people want will have enormous power.
> If people find an alternative that looks, tastes, and acts like meat
Pretty big if you got there. The "alternatives" so far don't really fulfill any of those criteria. They also have the added bonus of offending a person's basic dignity with the knowledge that they're eating insects. There are literal animals out there who receive better treatment.
I do not presume to know your dietary habits, but I find it interesting that only ~4% of US beef production is "grass fed" yet everyone claims to be only eating beef grazed on semi-arable land using regenerative agriculture.
"they graze on semi-arable areas where crops can't be grown"
That may or may not be where your steak comes from, but it is not, as a rule, where most steak comes from. Most steaks come from cattle started on grass and finished on corn, and an increasing amount come from cattle who graze on Brazilian rainforest land clear-cut just for that purpose.
Your numbers and definitions are apparently based on cooked google search results and are wrong. You should read more about how cows are fed and raised before forming opinions.
93% of cattle's caloric intake (whether grass or grain finished) does not compete with human suitable food sources.
Also, all cattle are grass-fed for some of their lives:
>While the diet provided to finishing cattle in feedlots relies on some human-edible inputs (i.e., corn grain), the forages and byproducts fed to cattle throughout their lives are largely inedible to humans. For example, once the entire lifetime feed intake of cattle is accounted for (meaning all the feed they consume from birth to harvest), corn accounts for only approximately 7 percent of the animal’s diet. The other 93 percent of the animal’s lifetime diet will consist largely of feed that is inedible to humans, thus not in direct competition with the human food supply.
You say "You should read more about how cows are fed and raised before forming opinions." And you shouldn't assume you know everything about strangers on the internet. I'm no rancher, but I'm quite familiar with cattle production. Growing up in rural Missouri I took part in most aspects of it.
You seem to be arguing against something other than my comment. "Also, all cattle are grass-fed for some of their lives"...yes...as I stated "Most steaks come from cattle started on grass and finished on corn"
There are certainly large swaths of the world where cattle production can be regenerative to the ecosystem, but not enough to support the demand. Meeting the world's increasing appetite for beef as developing nations adopt the dietary habits of wealthier nations is turning into an environmental catastrophe.
>The other 93 percent of the animal’s lifetime diet will consist largely of feed that is inedible to humans, thus not in direct competition with the human food supply.
Just because feed is inedible to humans does not mean it doesn't compete with the human food supply or lead to environmental and resource problems. Take alfalfa, which is one of the most popular feed crops for cattle:
>How much of California's water goes to alfalfa?
About 1,000,000 acres of alfalfa are irrigated in California. This large acreage coupled with a long growing season make alfalfa the largest agricultural user of water, with annual water applications of 4,000,000 to 5,500,000 acre-feet.
No, it doesn't compete with human suitable food or land used for growing human suitable food.
Without livestock agriculture, most of our farmland in the US would not be farmable. Also, most of the "grain" we feed cows is waste from ethanol production, not corn humans eat.
If you run into these people in person, ask them specifically where they get their beef. The facade of extreme scrutiny and knowledge over where their beef comes from falls apart immediately.
