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
Because you need considerably more resources to grow meat than you need to to grow a nutritionally equivalent amount of vegetables.
That field could be used to grow a different crop than grass, which would use less water per calorie of human food produced
Also, hardly any cows just eat grass these days. That’s not how you get a lot of meat as fast and as cheap as possible. Also, since cows need a lot of grass, I a lot less area would remain for other crops even if they did (since grass needs way more area for the same amount of calories than stuff like soybeans). So it’s actually a good thing, they aren’t just eating grass.
depends on the land. normally livestock are put on land which won’t grow anything else.
Unless you are a small hobby farm, you’re not putting your cows out on pasture alone to raise them for meat. Most grasses are deficient in one or more vital nutrients that the cows need to grow. Most cows today are fed TMR (Total Mixed Rations). These are diets carefully mixed with different grasses, grains, hays, and mineral supplements. There are different metabolic diseases that cows can get when eating diets deficient in different nutrients. Cows that are sick don’t want to eat, and cows that don’t eat don’t grow. To a farmer, that’s like burning money.
that’s true in a few parts of the world. it may not be valid at all, depending where op is from. in general livestock is the most sustainable land use food.
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
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.
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.
Who says that land couldn’t be used for much else? You could grow fruit, nuts, rice, whatever
This is nonsense.
‘Exception for male dairy calves, production is predominantly pastoral-based, with young stock spending relatively brief portions of their life in feedlots. ’
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6039332/
Almost all cattle spends some time on feedlots, as grain improves the meat close to slaughter. Ignore these sites that give the false impression that almost all cows are raised in feedlots. It is blatantly incorrect and obvious to anyone that drives outside the city and looks out of the window.
- 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.
A lot more water to make the food for cows than what humans consume.
A lot more food to feed a cow than what it would take to feed the human the same type of food.
And the growth of that food to keep feeding these animals in large batch is pretty much creating dead areas of land that gets ruined if it’s not carefully monitored. And the run off into the water supply is a problem. This is why industrial level of farming is really really bad for the environment.
You’re supposed to move cattle around in pastures for regrowth and not entirely decimate it. The capitalists do not care about that until a court summons tells them to care about that.
Currently there’s some better methods however the consumption stays high.
Health wise : all meat diets (meat at every meal) can produce issues in your body.
Cured meat or heavy salted meat can lead to heart issues and kidney stones.
You should mix in some fruit and vegetables and maybe even substitute some entire meals so that meat is consumed only a few times a week if only for your body’s sake. Your taste buds aren’t the same organ as your heart. They aren’t the organs that make your body stay alive.
The point is that you can grow a plant based diet for a human for much less resource cost than you could for a cow.
Multiplied by the amount our current meat industry runs at and you get decimation of large swaths of lands, much higher emission of greenhouse gasses, etc…
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.
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 false. Cows in the US are primarily fed corn. Not the can’t/won’t eat stuff.~
Edit: I am wrong. They said only fed about 8% human edible grain.
won’t eat
Is not the point of the argument when we’re taking about what humans shouldn’t eat. We can’t cater to wants anymore when growing percentage are starving.
can’t eat
Which is bullshit. We didn’t invent their diet. we substituted it. They might eat grass but we eat plenty of other green substitutes. The amount we consume of it doesn’t come close to their needs though.
cows eat mostly grass but, for instance, poultry are fed a lot of soy. that soy is usually (almost always) in the form of so-called “soy meal” or “soy cake”, but that is actually a waste product from pressing soybeans for oil. it would be industrial waste if we didn’t feed it to livestock.
Your edit is actually missing the biggest reason–all the energy and water it takes to raise the meat. It’s just not sustainable.
