this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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[–] usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml 27 points 5 months ago (1 children)

If you have concerns about plant agriculture, they are only magnified by animal agriculture which uses a lot more of it for animal feed

1 kg of meat requires 2.8 kg of human-edible feed for ruminants and 3.2 for monogastrics

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013


Or in environmental terms:

we show that plant-based replacements for each of the major animal categories in the United States (beef, pork, dairy, poultry, and eggs) can produce twofold to 20-fold more nutritionally similar food per unit cropland. Replacing all animal-based items with plant-based replacement diets can add enough food to feed 350 million additional people, more than the expected benefits of eliminating all supply chain food loss.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1713820115

To produce 1 kg of protein from kidney beans required approximately eighteen times less land, ten times less water, nine times less fuel, twelve times less fertilizer and ten times less pesticide in comparison to producing 1 kg of protein from beef

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25374332/

or for overall diets

The diet containing more animal products required an additional 10 252 litres of water, 9910 kJ of energy, 186 g of fertilizer and 6 g of pesticides per week in comparison to the diet containing less animal products

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/public-health-nutrition/article/comparing-the-water-energy-pesticide-and-fertilizer-usage-for-the-production-of-foods-consumed-by-different-dietary-types-in-california/14283C0D55AB613D11E098A7D9B546EA

[–] commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 5 months ago

Data for the production of alfalfa( Reference Mathews, Canevari and Frate 51 , Reference Vargas, Mueller and Frate 52 ) and maize( Reference Vargas, Frate and Mathews 53 , Reference Brittan, Muiner and Klonsky 54 ) used for animal feed were obtained from CRS and were added to the direct water used by the animals using a net feed consumption rate of 5·62 kg maize/kg beef and 2·66 kg alfalfa/kg beef. A feed conversion efficiency of 7·0 was assumed( Reference Horrigan, Lawrence and Walker 10 ). Soya in the feed formulations for beef and poultry was excluded.

since most beef cattle graze for the first year, where they put on the majority of their weight, then why would you attribute all the meat production to feedlots? shouldn't it be halved at least?