[honkycat]

I am not a vegan. But I do hold a lot of environmental values.

There is a LOT of interesting writing on the economy of the meat industrial complex.

In essence: It is totally propped up by with subsidies from the US Government. They LOSE money on every cow slaughtered. They destroy our planet. All of the profits go to the billionaire farm owners who lobby to keep the laws in place. It is so horribly corrupt.

Personally, I find it disgusting that we give hand-outs so these billionaire ranchers can:

- Feed us unhealthy food

- Destroy the environment with greenhouse gasses and farm run-off

- Take up MASSIVE amounts of space

- Use massive amounts of water

- Create drug-resistant bacteria by pumping the animals full of antibiotics

- create horrible living conditions for animals and suppress anti-meat propaganda with ag-gag laws

- Pay their workers in the factory farm a pittance to do depressing, disgusting work so the owners can hoover up all of the profit.

Check out https://meatonomics.com/ for more information.

[chrisco255]

You're linking to a website with a clear agenda, hardly a reliable source. First off, who are the billionaire ranchers and secondly, why would it be wrong for them to exist (since they exist for every other major industry, too, including tech).

- Farm land for vegetables takes up MASSIVE amounts of space, and it's not the same as leaving that land to nature and wildlife - Animals have to be killed in the production of veggie farms, from pesticides to rodents - Water doesn't get "used" up when you feed cattle with it. It goes through the same cycle it has for billions of years for all the other animal life on this planet. What gives? - Factory farms are more common for vegetables than they are for cattle, and it's not like the harvesters are getting paid any more than the ranchers. They're often paid less. 91% of cattle ranches are family owned (https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2015/Cattl...)

[nabnob]

Raising cattle also requires additional land use for growing feed.

[yellowapple]

And in turn more water used, and that water doesn't go back into the ground as urine.

That said, actual ranching (i.e. giving livestock room to graze) would be far less of an environmental burden (so long as it's in places where one doesn't have to burn down forests to make that grazing land).

[SilasX]

>It is totally propped up by with subsidies from the US Government. They LOSE money on every cow slaughtered.

I don't think the math works out on that one.

This page [1] gives total meat consumption per person per year as 222.2 lb, which would be (x320 million) = 71 billion lb/year.

This page [2] gives total farm subsidies (which is a high estimate since it include all subsidies not just those to meat) as $20 billion.

So, that's $0.27/lb as an upper bound on the magnitude of the subsidy.

[1] https://www.globalagriculture.org/whats-new/news/en/32921.ht...

[2] https://www.downsizinggovernment.org/agriculture/subsidies

[everdev]

222.2 lb / year sounds high!

I'm not sure if 7M vegetarians would move the needle much, but even ignoring them, that's about 0.6lbs of meat every day for every man, woman and child.

Assuming toddlers and the elderly don't eat that much, that puts some adults closer to a pound of meat a day every day.

That's a lot more meat consumption than I would have estimated.

[yellowapple]

> that's about 0.6lbs of meat every day for every man, woman and child.

That doesn't sound all that high at all. I probably would've guessed slightly lower at less than 0.5lbs/person, but knowing the average American diet that seems well within reason. If I ate a 1/4 lb burger twice a day (i.e. for lunch and dinner) or a 1/2 lb burger once a day (i.e. just for lunch or dinner), that'd be pretty close on beef alone.

[rhinoceraptor]

I think more needs to be done to promote grass fed beef as well. If done well, it can have a negative carbon footprint, versus imitation meats which have many of the same problems that grain fed beef does (monocropping, destruction of local ecosystems, use of pesticides, etc.).

[everdev]

How would grass fed beef generate a negative carbon footprint?

[rhinoceraptor]

They eat grass, distress the soil and leave their fertilizer behind. The grass regrows, which captures carbon via photosynthesis.

Obviously I have no idea what I'm talking about, so I don't know if the methane produced by cattle has a bigger impact. But it definitely seems better than both grain fed meat and monocrops, in terms of energy input and environmental/ecosystem impact.

The major energy input in the system is the sun, not fossil fuels for fertilizer/pesticide production and farm equipment to plant and harvest crops.

[everdev]

Yeah I've never heard of carbon neutral cows. If you're saying that the grassland would be replaced with concrete, then there would be a reduction in carbon sequestration.

But still, I don't think it's close. Cows produce a lot of methane:

https://animals.howstuffworks.com/mammals/methane-cow.htm

> Cows emit a massive amount of methane through belching, with a lesser amount through flatulence. Statistics vary regarding how much methane the average dairy cow expels. Some experts say 100 liters to 200 liters a day (or about 26 gallons to about 53 gallons), while others say it's up to 500 liters (about 132 gallons) a day. In any case, that's a lot of methane, an amount comparable to the pollution produced by a car in a day.

> In New Zealand, where cattle and sheep farming are major industries, 34 percent of greenhouse gases come from livestock.

> Initially, grazing areas were filled with a variety of grasses and flowers that grew naturally, offering a diverse diet for cows and other ruminants. However, in order to improve the efficiency of feeding livestock, many of these pastures became reseeded with perennial ryegrass. With the aid of artificial fertilizers, perennial ryegrass grows quickly and in huge quantities. The downside is that it lacks the nutritious content of other grasses and prevents more nutritious plants from growing. One commentator called it the "fast food" of grasses.

> Believers in naturally grown, mixed-species pastures say that the use of them will reduce greenhouse gases, improve animal health and meat quality and reduce the use of artificial fertilizers.

Sounds like it's still a carbon emitter, but if you're going to do it try to find cows that are eating on native, organic grass.

[JohnFen]

> They eat grass, distress the soil and leave their fertilizer behind. The grass regrows, which captures carbon via photosynthesis.

I think the equation is a lot more complicated than that. For instance, did you know that the vast majority of weight that your body regularly sheds is due to the carbon you breathe out? The average human breathes out around 2.3 lbs of C02 per day. That increases a lot when you're engaging in physical exertion.

I'm guessing that the same holds true for cows, but the poundage is going to be a lot higher because their body mass is a lot larger. Cows (and people) have to eat as much they shed in order to avoid wasting away, and most of that is carbon.

I would expect that a fully grown cow is essentially carbon neutral, not carbon-absorbing, if you're just looking at the dietary cycle.

[rhinoceraptor]

Of course, I’m saying the resulting soil production is where the carbon is being captured.

[hkyeti]

Oxford and CSIRO scientists already proved grass fed cattle is worse for greenhouse gases than CAFO beef farming. Carbon sequestration no where near makes up for the increases emissions.

[rhinoceraptor]

If you take the historical view, we have about as many cattle now as there were bison in North America.

[hkyeti]

http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2017-10-03-grass-fed-beef-good-or-b...

[everdev]

Yes, it's sad on many levels. Never heard of a billionaire farmer though. Maybe Purdue (chicken)?

[honkycat]

Tyson, Cargill, JBS, National Beef are all multi-billion dollar companies whose owners are billionaires.

Calling them "ranchers" is probably a stretch though, haha!

[yellowapple]

Yeah, definitely a stretch, and one that I feel distorts the picture.

"Billionaire ranchers" conjures up an image of some guy with a cowboy hat and gold chains in a mansion overlooking endless expanses of pastures and barns. In reality most independent ranchers don't live so lavishly :)

[mfatica]

How do local farmers fall into the mix? I buy a cow every year from a local farm - they raise and slaughter the cow and deliver the whole thing butchered and packaged. I much prefer this to anything I could buy at the grocery store.

[honkycat]

Personally, I don't have a problem with locally raised beef. Factory farms make up the majority of beef.

Stats are here: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/its-time-to-end-factory-f_b_1...

[hkyeti]

Oxford and CSIRO scientists already proved grass fed cattle is worse for greenhouse gases than CAFO beef farming. Carbon sequestration no where near makes up for the increases emissions.

[yellowapple]

Do you have a citation for this? Curious about how they figured that, given:

* The emissions from the livestock themselves should be identical given the same number of cows and the same dietary input; CO₂ output might increase for pasture-raised cattle, given the higher physical activity, but methane output (IIRC the primary concern re: cattle and their environmental impact) shouldn't change all that much

* Non-livestock emissions (from e.g. motorized equipment) seem much easier to minimize in a traditional ranch setting - especially considering that independent ranchers once upon a time ran their ranches without motorized equipment at all, and some still do - than for a modern factory farm

[hkyeti]

Sure: http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2017-10-03-grass-fed-beef-good-or-b...

[yellowapple]

Full report: https://www.fcrn.org.uk/sites/default/files/project-files/fc...

Now granted, I haven't read the entirety of the 127-page report, but it doesn't seem to say much of anything about CAFO at all (searching for "CAFO" or "factory" gives zero results, and searching for "concentrate" gives five results that all have nothing to do with CAFO), so I'm not sure how that's supposed to function as a citation for the specific claim that CAFO is somehow more environmentally friendly than free range ranching.

What the report actually seems to be claiming is that free range cattle ranching is not carbon neutral on a global scale. It can be carbon-neutral or even outright carbon-sequestering on a local scale, however, with the right diet / plant availability and other factors, albeit with other environmental tradeoffs/externalities (for example, the crops that help reduce methane output when used as feed tend to require more fertilizer to grow).

[dalore]

Stop misrepresenting the facts, they are not Oxford or CSIRO scientists at all. It's the "Food Climate Research Network" which is a think tank operating out of the University of Oxford. No one has "proved" anything.

In science it's actually hard to "prove" anything. You can disprove something though.

[rhinoceraptor]

If the cow was well managed and grazed, it's probably carbon neutral or even a carbon sink.

The grass grows via the sun, the cows eat the grass and leave natural fertilizer, which sequesters carbon when the grass regrows.