The water use claim regarding beef has been debunked, it was based on the weird accounting trick where you count rainfall on pasture as wasted water for some reason.
Also speaking of pasture, afaik the equation for cattle is completely different whether they're fed corn vs grazing on marginal land as they're supposed to.
The problem is that cattle consumes orders of magnitude more water compared to plants, on top of the fact that they also eat plants, of which they convert a small portion of into (edible) mass.
Their urine, en masse, is highly toxic to the local environment as it kills plants (high salt content, fertilizer burn) and pollutes rivers (pH, over-fertilization, algae blooming).
I live in a very small island where the main industry has been cattle (meat and milk production) for several decades. If the urine of the cows was toxic, the island would have been deserted a long time ago. It is as green as it has ever been, just lookup the Azores for some pictures.
It is true that lot feeds and industrialized cattle production create massive amounts of pollution but so does industrialized agriculture. The problem is on the how and not on the what (see Joel Salatin for a good example).
Cheers; you're right. 'En masse' wasn't sufficient in communicating what I wanted, which was to say "in large, repeated and undiluted amounts".
> The problem is on the how and not on the what
If we could realistically supply the entire demand for beef with cows grazing on fields on the same amount of land, without raising the price directly or by subsidizing the cost, I'd be all in. This is literally impossible as industrialized cattle production is that much more efficient, no matter how revoltingly disgusting it is.
Pretty much all the beef production is done in grazing fields as it is cheaper and less work. It is only the bulk up that is done in feed lots (1-3 months before going to the abbatoir). There is even pasture finished beef production where cows stay in the fields without feed until the end.
I meet quite a bit of animal-activist types (by association) that 'expose' parts of the meat industry by taking jobs and secretly filming (as it's often illegal to do).
Most of the extreme horrors they've recorded are in slaughterhouses, but I have vivid memories of seeing cattle confined in small cages which fecal infected infections. Perhaps that's dairy production, as it doesn't affect the outcome (as much)?
Probably not publicly available data, except in looking at the various flows of cattle. A common one is pasture to weaning, then pasture 'stocking operations, totalling one year, followed by 3 months in feedlot.
I suspect you could find cattle that spend as much as 50% of their lives in confined feeding operations, but that's a guess, and obviously I couldn't say how prevalent.
The 'animal rights' activists clearly insinuate that feedlots are all there is; that seems never to be the case. The actual fractions are moving targets. Even small direct-to-consumer outfits selling quarters and larger (common in Virginia) tend to finish on grain because it makes the meat more palatable.
thats... not how toxicity is working in this sense and your anecdote doesnt disprove what he is saying. Another anecdote - I went surfing at the end of last summer and was advised not to go into the sea as there had been heavy rains up the valley which had washed refuse off the fields and into the estuary. Lots of people who ignored the advice got sick that day as it turns out the runoff is toxic.
At least I have an anecdote that produces a large percentage of the beef and dairy consumed in Portugal. I fail to see proper data from anyone else showing the contrary elsewhere.
That water claim was based on a flawed accounting that's been repeated over and over so much without source. The debunking was posted right here on HN a few years back, don't have time to find it for now, maybe later.
Other than that, what you describe only applies to industrial farming, not grazing cattle. Cows graze pasture, they shit and piss in pasture, it's almost a closed cycle except for the added salt the herder usualy gives them.
What water claim? That cows consume water and excrete concentrated urine? I don't know what you're debunking without a source, but appears to be a straw man.
> industrial farming, not grazing cattle
Grazing requires orders of magnitude more land compared to cramming cows into small cages, which decreases the amount of food you can derive from this already (very) expensive food source.
I love beef, but that doesn't change the fact that it's an incredibly wasteful source of food and it ultimately unsustainable compared to plants, fish, eggs etc.
If you have evidence then please provide it. I'd be happy if you could point out any incorrect claims on this and related Our World In Data pages that cover climate and environmental impacts from beef and the meat industry more generally
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
I’m not sure if you responded to the wrong comment or what because the parent is referencing environment impact but you’re referencing health impacts.
From an environmental point of view, there’s a linear relationship between your consumption of beef and environmental impact. There is no amount of beef that is good for the environment.
From a health point of view, it’s debated, however there are more studies that show red/processed meats having negative health effects than neutral or positive effects. Of course, you can cherry pick the studies that align with your beliefs, but the prevailing data, evidence, and research show beef actually _is_ bad per se.
Note: there is no nutrient (that we know of) that you can only get from beef and no other food source. So it isn’t necessary to include it in your diet.
> There is no amount of beef that is good for the environment.
With a low enough amount of cows bred in more traditional ways, there would be a cycle where an equivalent amount of carbon would be captured by plants vs what is excreted by the cow. That's why animal farming has not been a source of net CO2 for the thousands of years that we have been doing it before industrial times.
However, going back to historic sustainable levels means a drastic reduction in consumption of meat and dairy - probably a few times per year or something like that. Putting all livestock together, it would mean people could eat meat maybe once a month. Eggs and dairy may be a little more common, as those are collected throughout the life of the animal.
> There is no amount of beef that is good for the environment.
That's a tautology. In that strict sense, there's no amount of you that's good for the environment, either. Unless we all commit suicide, we have to accept the fact that our behavior changes the environment. So, yes, quantities matter a lot.
Dairy from cows grazing on marginal land that is not otherwise suitable / efficient for other cultures is very competitive as far as producing proteins is concerned. Proteins are a necessary nutrient.
Industrial cattle fed corn is an entirely different story and should almost certainly be counted as a different category as far as climate impact is concerned.
Do you have a reference for this that tries to quantify the CO2/CH4 emissions per kg beef? For chicken, I've seen estimates of 3.3 kg CO2/kg of industrial chicken meat compared to 5.3 kg CO2/kg of organic chicken meat. Of course, from an animal welfare point of view, organic chicken is a lot better.
Carbon emissions from cattle comes from their feed. They're not fed petroleum. There is some incidental fossil fuel consumption involved particularly in producing industrial feed (corn), but that doesn't really apply for pasture-fed cattle. All that carbon was just captured by the grass or otherwise corn used to feed them.
CH4 is another issue, but again, unless I'm missing something, total CH4 from cattle in the atmosphere should be proportional to the average number of heads alive. If we don't increase herd size, it won't go up — unlike CO2 from fossil fuel use.
The bovid methane drumbeat is bandied by people who conveniently fail to account for the millions of missing American bison that used to produce comparable output.
Did they? Did anyone measure that? Or is that simply an assumption? Relatively small dietary changes can greatly reduce the amount of methane produced by cows (I believe you add something like 15% seaweed to the feed), so it's not at all clear that a free range bison would be similar.
Wild Bison aren't eating seaweed in the great plains. Cows in the plains spend their majority of their life eating the same grasses that the bison ate, then they spend a few months on a corn diet.
It's largely (heh) about their size and that they're not really as optimized for meat as e.g. pigs. They breed comparatively slowly and take longer to grow.
Moreover the weight of a cow carcass is no higher than 60% that of the animal, while for pigs the lower bound is ~78%. Poultry is also very efficient in this regard, especially turkey yielding 80%+.
Where I'm from domestically consumed beef comes mostly from dairy cows so it's not particularly good, but it appears to be the more environmentally sound choice than growing them just for the meat(not that this was the aim - it's just cheaper).
The sooner we can get lab grown beef the better. I don't care if it's more expensive or even if it isn't as efficient in terms of energy input as growing, raising, and slaughtering actual cows. It'd still come with tons of benefits like reducing antibiotic use, taking up less land, causing less suffering, eliminating illnesses, etc.
We're not about to run out of land. My recommendation is to use nuclear power to desalinate seawater and turn the Sahara Desert into a vast grassland on which we can raise a couple of billion cattle in order to feed the world. I think the same should be done in the Australian Desert.
Current enourmous land use by meat industries has many negative effects. We should individually switch to plant based (if you haven't already) and in public policy rapidly remove all subsidies from meat and animal industries and fully price in all negative externalities (GHG, antibiotics risks, pandemic risks, air and water pollution). At the same time subsidize plant based alternatives. As a result plant based alternatives would be several times lower in cost than the meat versions, which in turn would drive consumption changes.
The problem with only reducing meat from cows and sheep is that other meat sources are still worse than plant based with regard to climate change and we're at a juncture where climate policy need to shift into full gear on all fronts. Not a time for half measures. Meat from chicken is also likely even worse than beef in terms of pandemic risk and perhaps also antibiotics resistance risk. In addition to that chicken meat industries cause much more animal suffering than all other land based animal meat industries combined which I think is a very strong argument to phase out chicken meat production - that industry wouldn't last a week if the type of animal protection regulation people in general think already exists for it would in fact be enacted, applied and enforced.
The idea that negative externalities should be priced in is the standard view in economics. I think most people, if provided the reasoning for it, would accept such pricing in when it comes to such serious global problems as climate change, antibiotics resistance, pandemic risk and air and water pollution.
Now is exactly the time for half measures - radical options proposed in the past largely failed due to their simplistic view of human nature.
We're actually getting there with electricity. Renewables - the very definition of a half-measure - are being deployed at a much higher rate than nuclear, which on the face of it is the ideal solution - but only in a world where megaprojects are delivered on time and within budget. Ironically China and Russia are doing great here - I suppose the secret ingredient is totalitarianism.
> I think most people, if provided the reasoning for it, would accept such pricing in when it comes to such serious global problems as climate change
That's a very charitable assumption.
There are many people who can't even begin to imagine, much less understand the issue at hand.
Going vegan because climate change and animal suffering is going to be a hard sell.
> Now is exactly the time for half measures - radical options proposed in the past largely failed due to their simplistic view of human nature.
Not sure I understand. What are some examples of "radical options" in policy you think have been attempted and failed? What are examples of "non-radical" options you think there's evidence would yield better outcomes?
With "not the time for half measures" I meant that if only half measures are deployed now then it seems likely millions of humans, many from regions least responsible for climate change, will be harmed, killed or displaced.
The idea of pricing in costs is already very familiar to people in their everyday lives. There are social norms like "you break it, you pay" and various regulations that price in costs.
> Going vegan because climate change and animal suffering is going to be a hard sell.
Keep in mind the distinction between policy level and individual level. The policy suggestion was remove meat industry subsidies, price in externalities, subsidize plant based foods. On the individual level the best outreach approach varies case by case depending on where the recipient is at. Are you already vegan or in the process of switching to vegan? If not then feel free to lift any individual level objections or obstacles you personally have and we can discuss them.
> With "not the time for half measures" I meant that if only half measures are deployed now then it seems likely millions of humans, many from regions least responsible for climate change, will be harmed, killed or displaced.
Half measures is what's feasible. The measures you're proposing are not.
> Keep in mind the distinction between policy level and individual level. The policy suggestion was remove meat industry subsidies, price in externalities, subsidize plant based foods.
You're mistaken in the assumption that the majority will be willing to vote for this. Every point of yours is politically unpalatable.
The seaweed/algea story is pushed strongly by meat industry greenwashing efforts. It isn't large scale deployed anywhere and the potential benefits are overblows.
https://www.wired.com/story/carbon-neutral-cows-algae/
"What’s more, feeding cattle algae is really only practical where it’s least needed: on feedlots. This is where most cattle are crowded in the final months of their 1.5- to 2-year lives to rapidly put on weight before slaughter. There, algae feed additives can be churned into the cows’ grain and soy feed. But on feedlots, cattle already belch less methane—only 11 percent of their lifetime output. ... This means that even if algae diets on feedlots worked perfectly, it wouldn’t help with the 89 percent of cows’ belches that occur earlier in their lives."
Seaweed, garlic, etc. has shown to reduce methane. Yet at the same time creates uncertainty around more nitrous oxide, which might makes it even worse.
I find the methane issue quite dubious: as it gets oxidized over time, the quantity of methane from cattle in the atmosphere is more or less proportional to the number of heads. The problem with CO2 otoh is that it keeps increasing because we create it from fossil sources.
There are two problems with methane: for one, while it is "sitting" in the atmosphere, its greenhouse effect is much stronger than CO2's. After that somewhat short-lived period, it oxidizes to CO2 and water, so it still at best ends up as bad as CO2.
So even if we stopped producing CO2 from fossil fuels today, we would still be increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere though breeding cows and other livestock, moving through a CH4 phase that does even more harm. Livestock are releasing the C trapped in plant bodies.
That carbon in cow farts & burps was grass yesterday, which was atmospheric CO2 last week. Cows are not fed petroleum products, though some petroleum may be used in the production of industrial feed (but not or much less for pasture feeding).
Atmospheric CH4 does not "do harm" as such, it's indeed a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming in proportion to its prevalence. Said prevalence, as I'm trying to point out, is proportional to the number of heads of cattle. As such, if we don't increase the number of heads significantly, the impact will be constant.
Contrast with fossil fuels for, say, transportation: their impact on greenhouse effect is constantly increasing at a rate proportional to the number of cars/planes/trips.
Or put another way: we have to stop using ICE cars and planes altogether to stop increasing greenhouse effect; we only have to keep eating the same amount of beef and cheese to stop their impact.
But the C trapped in plant bodies comes from sequestered atmospheric CO2, no? It's not possible to permanently increase atmospheric CO2 purely through livestock, only "temporarily" increase methane (permanently, if we keep the livestock industry running forever).
There is only one place that actual surplus carbon comes from, and that is fossil fuels. Everything else is part of the closed-loop carbon cycle.
There's also what they're being fed, which apparently is mostly soy and corn... and require a lot of land, water (and chemicals) at this scale. As far as I understand, it'd be much more efficient to grow calories and proteins that we can directly consume instead.
Maybe beef is bad largely due to their sheer volume (c.f. China's per capita emission is much lower than North America or Europe, but their aggregate impact is still enormous due to their large population).
Pork is where it starts being risky.
Beef, lamb etc. are the most problematic parts.