I heard something to do with Nitrogen and …cow farts(?) I am really unsure of this and would like to learn more.
Answer -
4 Parts
- Ethical reason for consuming animals
- Methane produced by cows are a harmful greenhouse gas which is contributing to our current climate crisis
- Health Reasons - there is convincing evidence that processed meats cause cancer
- it takes a lot more calories of plant food to produce the calories we would consume from the meat.
Details about the answers are in the comments
Your edit is actually missing the biggest reason–all the energy and water it takes to raise the meat. It’s just not sustainable.
The core issue is soil quality. Without sufficient organic content in the soil, all our food, whether it be plant or meat, has drastically reduced nutritional content meaning we need to consume more for the same effect. We’re heading for a global food shortage because of the one key issue. Healthy soil also sequesters an enormous amount of carbon from the atmosphere. So instead of fighting the beef vs tofu wars, we should be focusing on encouraging agricultural practices that enrich soil rather than destroy it. We have about 50 years of crop cycles left before the majority of arable earth turns to sand.
Shifting your diet to be more plant-based is a good idea, but it’s not the crux of the issue.
Bam!
Because you need considerably more resources to grow meat than you need to to grow a nutritionally equivalent amount of vegetables.
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You forget that most land was forested (even in Europe) before humans decided that grass was more useful than trees.
To learn more about the environmental impact of meat consumption, I recommend this Our World in Data article: https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food
I would highlight this chart: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-per-protein-poore?country=Pig+Meat~Beef+(beef+herd)~Eggs~Lamb+%26+Mutton~Grains~Milk~Other+Pulses~Poultry+Meat~Tofu+(soybeans)~Peas~Nuts~Groundnuts~Fish+(farmed)~Cheese~Beef+(dairy+herd)~Prawns+(farmed)~Tofu
For example, getting 100 g of protein from beef emits ~ 50 kg of CO2. Getting 100 g of protein from tofu only emits ~ 2 kg of CO2.
animals are fed parts of plants that people can’t or won’t eat. all of the studies about the ecological impacts ignore this fact and then attribute the water used to produce, say, cotton to beef.
This is simply not true. Globally, 77% of the land area that’s used for agriculture is used either by livestock or to grow food to feed to livestock (such as corn and soy). Only 23% is used for crops for direct human consumption (1): This makes sense intuitively: If I feed a cow 1 kcal of energy, it will create way less than 1kcal of energy to be consumed. In fact, beef has an energy efficiency of 1.9%. This means, for every 100 kcal the cow eats, you only get out 1.9 kcal (2). Otherwise, cows would defy the laws of physics. Do you really think that the 74 billion chicken, 620 million sheep and 330 million cattle that we slaughter each year for meat just are fed human-food leftovers? (3)
1: https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture 2: https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production#energy-conversion-efficiency 3: https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production#livestock-counts
but cows are pastoral animals an eat mostly grass, not crops. and soy is a great example of what I’m saying: over 80% of soy is pressed for oil, and the industrial waste from that process is most of the soy that is fed to animals.
You’re not getting many answers yet regarding nitrogen.
As a preface: When it comes to climate and environmental concerns with respect to agriculture, the word “nitrogen” does usually not refer to the completely harmless atmospheric nitrogen (N2). Instead, it refers to various compounds that contain nitrogen.
Nitrogenous pollution from cattle comes in two shapes:
The first is methane (NH3). A single cow burps and farts out about 100kg of methane each year. Methane is a greenhouse gas that’s 28 times as potent as CO2. This means a single cow is responsible for as much as 2800kg equivalent in CO2 each year due to burps and farts alone. For reference, the CO2 per capita emissions globally are about 4 tons (4000kg) per year, for all sources combined. Cows, relatively speaking, therefore produce a huge amount of CO2 equivalent.
The second is all the nitrogenous compounds in their excrements. This acts as a fertilizer on soil and in the water. While that sounds good, it leads to various unwanted effects. One is that agricultural runoff causes algal blooms in water that then ends up killing a significant amount of marine life. Another is that nutrient-rich soils tend to seriously decrease plant species diversity. Many native and wild plants actually need nutrient-poor soils to thrive. Those plants will get outcompeted by a small group of fast-growing plants that do well in all the cow-poop-infested soil. These compounds also tend to travel far, via agricultural runoff or even via the air, so ecosystems far away from farms are also impacted.
Is there a way to absorb methane from the atmosphere? Ie like a plant absorbing CO2 is there a substance which does something similar for methane?
Also for runoff, I assume there are no ways to contain this issue. Or is there perhaps a more sinister answers that it is possible but farms have not invested into such structures due to economical reasons.
There is no solution to capture methane in the air. Its lifespan in air is 12years, so if we stop emitting, it will go away by itself. Until then, it’s quite bad. Capturing it at the source is also challenging (can you hemetically seal a cow’s ass without impacting its health?!).
The best solution is… less farms, less cows but that means less meat!
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The main issue is probably less meat itself than the ginormous quantities we consume.
Most livestock farming is intensive, meaning they can’t rely on grazing alone and need extra food sources, typically corn. They emit methane, a greenhousing gas on steroids.
That grain is produced through very intensive agricultural methods because we can’t get enough of it. It consumes ridiculously large amount of water and slowly degrades the soils. Nitrates eventually end up in the sea, causing algea to proliferate while other lifeforms are suffocated. See the dead zone in Mexico’s gulf.
71% of agriculture land in Europe is dedicated to livestock feeding.
The percentage must be similar or higher in America, and don’t count North America alone: without grains from Brazil, we’re dead. Period. So next time you hear the world blaming Brazil for deforestation, keep in mind that a large share of it is to sustain livestocks…
Cattle farming in the USA is heavily subsidized, by allowing farmers to use federal land for grazing for free (I believe something similar is in place in Canada?). The claim they “take care of the land” is absurd: nature has been doing that for millenias without needing any help. First nations have been living in these lands also without supersized cows herds and it was going alright. Farms actually prevent wildlife to take back its place.
But I wouldn’t blame them. People in North America (among others, and I live in Canada, definitely me too) eat indecent and unhealthy quantities of meat, and that has to come from somewhere.
Now, simple math will tell you: if everyone in the world was consuming meat in the same quantities as us, there would’nt be enough suitable land on Earth to grow the corn that needs to go with it.
Another thing is not all meats are equal in terms of pollution. From the worst to the least bad, in equivalent kgCO2 per kg of meat you can actually eat: -Veal: 37 -Chicken (intensive, in cage): 18 -Beef: 34 -Pork: 5–7 -Duck, rabbit, pork: 4–5 -Chicken ("traditonal, free range): 3–4 -Egg (for comparison): <2
You can appreciate the orders of magnitude!
There are only 2 ways out of this:
- reduce meat consumption, and pick it right
- grown meat (meat made without the animal around it, in machines)
One can be done today, starting with your next meal. We don’t need meat every meal, we don’t even need meat every day, but it is true that going full vegetarian force a certain gymnastic to get all the nutriments one need.
The other solution is barely getting there, so there are still unknown (food quality, resources consumption, etc.) and the economics may not help it taking off.
The third (and let’s face it: current approach at national level everywhere on this issue) option is to do nothing and keep going as if the problems didn’t exist. This is guaranteeing a famine in the coming decades. When we’ll fail to feed our livestock, and it will start dying, it will be too late to turn around and get the whole agriculture sector to transition. These things take many years.
We’re trying to reduce our meat consumption at home, or to favor the least impacting ones. We still eat too much meat, but I hope we can gradually improve.
The basic problem is that to get 1000 calories of beef, you need to feed the cow something like 10,000 calories. So growing a cow is actually growing an entire field of wheat/corn/etc., then feeding it to the cow, then eating the cow.
Farming all of those crops for the animals takes up a lot of land, consumes fresh water, produces wastes, and uses oil/gas (for farm equipment directly, or to produce things like nitrogen fertilizers) which produces co2. Cows also produce methane (that’s the fart thing) which is a bad greenhouse gas.
You could just eat the wheat/corn/etc. directly (most of the time) and skip the meat step therefore saving a massive amount of environmental impact.
Meat sure is tasty though.
I remember driving through Iowa and seeing vast fields of corn and learning that the majority of that corn was not even destined for human consumption. That kinda blew my mind.
Luckily there is still enough left over to poison the population with high fructose corn syrup
If America was a food, it would be sugar and high fructose corn syrup.
You wanna know another fact? Not all corn can be consumed by humans. There is actually corn that can only be eaten by animals like cows.
Plus is the fact that not all plants have the right amount of vitamins and minerals necessary to maintain the human body like meat does. Although it is possible, it does require research and monitoring to ensure that your getting all the nutrients you need. And yes, meat just tastes good.
What kind of bullshit are you peddling?
If you’re discussing complete proteins then all it takes is rice and beans. Not particularly difficult given that about half the world population survives on that without much meat.
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It increases methane emissions and doesn’t scale
We model a nationwide transition [in the US] from grain- to grass-finishing systems using demographics of present-day beef cattle. In order to produce the same quantity of beef as the present-day system, we find that a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30%. We also find that the current pastureland grass resource can support only 27% of the current beef supply (27 million cattle), an amount 30% smaller than prior estimates
[…]
If beef consumption is not reduced and is instead satisfied by greater imports of grass-fed beef, a switch to purely grass-fed systems would likely result in higher environmental costs, including higher overall methane emissions. Thus, only reductions in beef consumption can guarantee reductions in the environmental impact of US food systems.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401
Taken together, an exclusively grass-fed beef cattle herd would raise the United States’ total methane emissions by approximately 8%.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401/pdf
Further, plenty of the land that grazing takes place on is not naturally grassland, and the “grass-fed” that you’ll see anywhere are still getting grain as well
Most of the UK and Ireland’s grass-fed cows and sheep are on land that might otherwise be temperate rainforest – arable crops tend to prefer drier conditions. However, even if there were no livestock grazing in the rainforest zone – and these areas were threatened by other crops instead – livestock would still pose an indirect threat due to their huge land footprint
[…]
Furthermore, most British grass-fed cows are still fed crops on top of their staple grass
Places that have tried to scale grass-fed production up have all kinds of problems. For instance, New Zealand often likes to tout its grass-fed production, but the production levels are so high that it’s a heavy polluter. It would require a 12-fold reduction in size in one region to meet the bare minimum standards for drinking water safety
The large footprint for milk in Canterbury indicates just how far the capacity of the environment has been overshot. To maintain that level of production and have healthy water would require either 12 times more rainfall in the region or a 12-fold reduction in cows.
[…]
The “grass-fed” marketing line overlooks the huge amounts of fossil-fuel-derived fertiliser used to make the extra grass that supports New Zealand’s very high animal stock rates.
That’s like 3% of the cows. The rest is raised in factory farms.
The number of cattle that can be raised this way is so small it isn’t a valid option to meet demand.
Also, that land could be used for other things like goat farming which would be far more energy efficient than cattle.
that land could be used to house millions of humans
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- Ethical reasons: hundreds of billions of animals are killed every year (not counting fish), after living a miserable and short life.
- Environmental: greenhouse emissions (CO2 and methane), deforestation for pastures, water pollution, are all caused by animal agriculture. If everyone went vegan we’d need only 25% of the land we currently use for agriculture.
- Health: there is some evidence that meat causes cancer, and convincing evidence that processed meat causes cancer. Also, the use of antibiotics for animals can lead to the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Cow farts are methane, which are a more aggressive form of greenhouse gas, though with shorter lifespan.
For the cancer risk, this is the pertinent info:
An analysis of data from 10 studies estimated that every 50 gram portion of processed meat eaten daily increases the risk of colorectal cancer by about 18%.
That’s about half a hot dog. Seeing as the news isn’t exploding, this means that this is relative risk. Meaning your current chances of getting colorectal cancer is X. Eating a hot dog every other day continuously multiples your chance by 1.18. American Cancer Society states that over their lifetime, 1 in 23 men (4.35%) of men will develop colorectal cancer. This means if you ate 1 hot dog every other day continuously, a man’s odds of contracting colorectal cancer changes from 4.35% to 5.13% over their lifetime.
That’s just for colorectal cancer. It also affects other types of cancer (like breast cancer) and increases the chance of dying from heart disease considerably.
But there weren’t any good numbers on those I saw in there. Which is why I ignored the entire “meat” claim as it didn’t list useful metrics. “Might cause cancer” doesn’t really help anyone. There only seemed to be useful data about processed meat and colorectal cancer.
For the methane issue. Apparently adding seaweed to their feed reduces that by up to 82%:
It would be such a small but significant thing to pass a law requiring adding seaweed to their feed. Even if they passed the cost on, it would raise the price of meat insignificantly. It’s crazy that we haven’t done it yet. Same with making new roofs white to reflect light instead of absorbing it.
Trials in Tasmania this year sadly did not reach anywhere near the original methane reduction goals.
I mean, it’s better than nothing but seriously dairy is fucked long term. It will always be an inefficient system compared to consuming plant-based proteins directly, and lab grown milk protein is gonna be huge. And that is good news, because dairy farming sucks in terms of land use, fertilizer run off, animal welfare, and, here in NZ at least, the destruction of native tree based ecosystems to make way for grass monocultures.
I looked it up and it says a 28% reduction was achieved. That’s still a huge reduction and perhaps, with other feed formulations, an even bigger reduction can be made.
EVEN at 18% it’s way too fucking high
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Most tree and forest loss is from making land for grazing.
Not for grazing but for crops that are fed to animals in animal agriculture.
over 80% of soybeans are pressed for oil for human uses.
Without a source this is just a bogus claim.
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76% of soybeans world wide are used as animal feed as per your own source. I’m not sure what you are trying to argue with your original comment to me?
the bulk of what’s fed to animals is industrial waste from making soybean oil.
Care to quote the relevant parts of your sources? I’m not going to read everything from that just to find this claim.
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Its not bad in my world
Same world as everyone else tho
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Yeah man. Why even try at this point /s
Ask the cow what she thinks?
