Under literally any ethical system you choose.
Forget harm to the animal for a moment.
Breeding animals to slaughter is more water, land and time intensive than growing crops, and produces substantially fewer calories for even more land area. Breeding animals to slaughter also generates far more CO2 then crops, either from the animal directly or from transport and butchering processes.
If it’s pure calories you’re after, might I suggest Uranium? It’s pretty cheap considering what you can theoretically get out of it.
^/s
A calorie is the amount of heat needed to raise the temperature one kg of water by 1°C, so uranium has quite a few, hard to digest though.
Edit: I was curious so I looked it up, 1 gram of uranium has 20 billion calories
I don’t think you understand what calories are.
What does /s mean? Does it mean back by science? Does it mean I should do this?? Please answer quickly, I have a piece of uranium here and I’m dying to eat it
Yes, science has confirmed that Uranium is perfectly edible and that it’ll provide you enough energy for the rest of your life.
letting a cow graze a field and killing it next year takes way less time than tilling and planting and fertilizing and watering and harvesting.
Did you miss ‘/s’ or do you genuinely believe that?
Cause if it’s the latter, you should go to your school and ask for a refund.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t most pastures also planted, fertilized, and watered? You’re also assuming infinite land here - I don’t know shit about farming, but the first google hit I got suggests that cows need about 1.8 acres of pasture per year.
1 cow, consuming 1.8 acres of land, produces on the scale of 0.5 to 1.4 million calories, according to this estimate
However farming produces up to 18 million calories per acre, so if you were growing potatoes you’d have 32 million calories. On the same land that produced up to 1.4 million calories via grazing cow.
However farming produces up to 18 million calories per acre, so if you were growing potatoes you’d have 32 million calories. On the same land that produced up to 1.4 million calories via grazing cow.
so? the work of lettin a cow eat what grows is still less work than planting, tending, and harvesting.
if you ask a seed salesman whether you should buy his product for your pasture, he’ll try to sell it to you. but no, for the most part pasture management is very low intensity: repair fences and deter predators. these have direct analogues in raising crops though in warding off pests that would eat the crops.
You’re also assuming infinite land here
no, i’m not. i was comparing the work done to plant a field of potatoes against raising an equivalent amount of cattle. i’m making no sweeping policy proposals.
most of the crops fed to animals are parts of plants people can’t or won’t eat.
Not relevant. The field that is used to grow food stock for animals could have been used to grow food stock for humans. Potatoes have a high calorie count and are not particularly difficult to grow.
You’ll get far more calories out of the field of potatoes than a field of cows, unless you’re packing them in at the same density as the potato plants which I’m assuming you’re not.
You’ll get far more calories out of the field of potatoes than a field of cows,
if the land is unsuitable for crop production, you can often still raise cattle on it.
Much more land can be used for growing animals than for growing crops. And without animals there would be no dung so the only way to let crops grow would be chemical fertilizer (which is made of oil).
You’re talking about a different issue which is food shortages.
There is absolutely no shortage of arable land on earth, the problem is it isn’t evenly distributed but that’s an easy enough problem to solve if we actually wanted to solve it. The solution isn’t cattle.
It’s obviously not the solution because if it was the solution there wouldn’t be world hunger, you can’t feed millions of people on cow.