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[ChairmanPoo]

I was already eating more greens, milk, and eggs and less meat. Partly for health reasons. Partly for that girl I briefly dated a while ago and want to do that again.
I'd not regard myself as vegetarian per se but I do try to reduce the meat intake. Like I said, mostly for health reasons. I'm trying to make my diet more mediterranean-compliant. Which basically means more salad and grain and less red meat.

I'm doing a lot of cheese salads

[dragdeler]

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[kaijyuu]

I basically survive on bread, cheese, and tomato sauces.

Vegetarian for oh... 12 or so years now. Forgot when exactly I started.

Was forced to go vegan for 2 weeks due to a medical condition, and near the end I felt like I was gonna die. Cheese is just too important to my diet

[Manveru Taurënér]

I've tried for years to cut back on meat, but poor health and other issues have continually gotten in the way. Regardless I personally don't find eating animals a bad thing, as long as it's done in a way that doesn't hurt the environment or cause unnecessary suffering (which sadly isn't achieved by much of any kind of food production currently, animal or not).

Kind of bugs me how much the debate has gotten stuck on methane from animals though. Read the other day of politicians here (Sweden) wanting to start culling moose "for the climate", which is definitely not where the focus should be. Methane breaks down on it's own in the atmosphere as part of a natural cycle, and while it's an issue in the short term with it being more potent than CO2, long term it's a non-issue climatewise (unless it comes from sources outside of the natural cycle such as fossil fuels).

Really wish food production globally would be based more on what can be produced in harmony with the local environment (where there is certainly a place for cattle at least, since it can have huge positive effects if done right) rather than what the short-term profits dictate, but not likely to happen anytime soon with the current systems in place.

[wierd]

The one that always kills me in the vegetarian playbook, is the "Resource use efficiency" fallacy.


Yes. Fallacy.  I will not budge on that, because that is what it is.


Specifically, the notion that "If we used the land we use for raising animals to grow direct-human-use crops instead, we could feed more people, and this is why you should be vegan and not an omnivore."

NO. 

There is such a thing as marginal land.  It is real.  No, you cannot wave a hand at marginal land, and turn it into productive crop land, no matter how much nitrogen fertilizer you dump on it.  That is not how it works. You can raise cattle on (some kinds of) marginal land, but you cannot raise corn or soybeans on it. This is why the very notion is a fallacy, and will always be a fallacy, and should not be accepted as tendered.

In addition, the notion fails to account that most cattle operations are not dry feed lots.

Cattle and Calves (Beef and Dairy)

The Nation’s 94.4 million cattle and calves (beef and dairy) are dispersed widely across the country, with a greater concentration generally in the Central States (map 3).Map 3Overall, the number of cattle and calves in the United States has increased from 30.1 million in 1869, reaching a peak of 132.0 million in 1975. From 2007 to 2014, the Nation’s inventory of cattle and calves saw a steady decline, but has shown 4 years of increase from 2015 through 2018, to 94.4 million.
5 The number of operations with cattle (or calves) has declined steadily during the past 15 years, from 1.2 million in 1995 to 913,246 (2012 Census of Agriculture). The overall decline is due to the decline in number of beef operations. The decrease in the number of cattle operations is due primarily to the decline in the number of operations with fewer than 50 head of cattle (data not shown). The number of operations was down for all size groups from 2007 to 2012 except for the 1 to 9 group, which was up about 10,000 operations. According to the 2012 Census of Agriculture, small cattle operations (1–49 head) accounted for 69.8 percent of all cattle operations but only 11.6 percent of the total inventory of cattle and calves. Large operations (1,000 or more head) accounted for just 1.2 percent of all cattle operations but accounted for 36.9 percent of the total U.S. inventory of cattle and calves (table 2).

Beef Cows

Beef cows are distributed widely across the United States.  In general, however, States in the central part of the Nation have a higher number of beef cows, led by Texas (4.6 million on January 1, 2018). Missouri, Nebraska, and Oklahoma each had about 2 million beef cows.  Beef cows accounted for 77.1 percent of the total cow inventory on January 1, 2018.
6 According to the 2012 Census of Agriculture, 727,906 operations in the United States had beef cows. The number of operations with beef cows has declined gradually since 1996 (1–2 percentper year). This decrease is most notable in the number of small operations (1–49 head) (data not shown).


Cattle on Feed

Cattle on feed (steers and heifers) are fed a ration of grain or other concentrate in preparation for slaughter, and the majority are in feedlots in States with large grain supplies.On January 1, 2018, three States (Kansas, Nebraska, and Texas) accounted for nearly two-thirds(65.6 percent) of the inventory of cattle on feed in all feedlots with 1,000 or more capacity. Large numbers of cattle on feed are in relatively few feedlots; 128 feedlots (0.5 percent of all feedlots) accounted for 44.1 percent of the total U.S. cattle-on-feed inventory (table 5). Inventory numbers in feedlots typically reach high points in December, January, and February and low points in August and September because of the seasonal availability of grazing resources and the predominance of spring-born calves. As a result, commercial cattle slaughter typically reaches a high point in May and June. Steers and heifers accounted for 80.1 percent of 2017 federallyinspected cattle slaughter (data not shown). Of the 32.2 million head of commercially inspected cattle slaughter, 98.5 percent were federally inspected (table 13).

https://www.aphis.usda.gov/animal_health/nahms/downloads/Demographics2017.pdf

Unless those 128 feed lots, of which 44% of beef comes from, are going to produce a buttload of corn-- the argument is absurd.  The remainder comes from large tracts of graze land, which is often marginal.  This land serves a valuable ecological role as reservoir habitat for a wide variety of plant, animal, and insect lifeforms that would be completely destroyed if it was somehow handwaved into direct human-use, such as cropland. (Further consider that such areas (used for dry feedlots) are often SO MARGINAL, that they have difficulty growing grass at all!!  Take for instance, the area around Dodge City, which has several large feedlots, basically all clustered together. This one is pretty indicative of the local surroundings. Yes-- that's some premium looking soybean land there. /s)


The better argument to be made is to outlaw feedlots, and insist upon 100% graze fed cattle. That would obviate the ethical dubiousness of the cattle industry, rise beef costs sufficiently that americans would stop eating unhealthy amounts of it, and still keep the important reservior populations of plant and animal species through habitat preservation--- but that does not promote veganism.

[WealthyRadish]

It sounds like you're talking about the need for it to be policy driven rather than up to individuals, which is absolutely true, but the rest of it is... what?

Are you talking about the trivial land that the feedlots are built on? The resource question hinges on the use of intensive agriculture (irrigated, fertilized, non-marginal land) to grow corn/soy for animal feed, which could grow other crops (or rather nothing at all, preferably, since it's around 7 pounds of grain for one pound of beef). That's where the "food security" argument comes from (i.e. one number I've heard quoted is feeding an additional 800 million people off the land currently used in the US if it were done without meat), on top of the other arguments about nonrenewable water use, petrochemical and mined fertilizer use, and not emitting the enormous amounts of pollution.

Even on the marginal land issue, it would be environmentally preferable to return the land to wildlife habitat or not clear it to begin with (for instance, 90% of the deforestation of the amazon is for the purpose of converting it to "marginal" land for use in cattle ranching).

[wierd]

See BOTH green bulleted points.


On the first one--  the vast majority of operations are NOT feedlots.  Combine with the second; About half of all production is done on feedlots.

Together, they paint this picture:

About half of the cattle in the US are free range grass fed.  Of the remainder, the operation is performed on marginal land that is so marginal, it has difficulty growing weeds. (as pictured, via the link.)

The argument (resource use), asserts that the land used (which it does not specify!) should be used for cropland.  This is a fallacy, since half of the cattle production is freerange on grass, *NOT ON CORN.*  To honor the statement of the argument, that land would have to be tilled up, all those native grasses exterminated with herbicides, and then planted to soybeans-- BECAUSE THE COWS ARE EATING GRASS. (Further, the cows eating the grass, is the economic incentive for the grass to remain there.  Without that economic incentive, there will be stronger economic incentives to develop that land in other ways, such as industrial parks. You actually *WANT* the cattle operations, since proper grazing simulates the previous indigenous macrofauna, bison, and that macrofauna is necessary for the preservation of that biome. If you read the paper cited, you will note that the majority of cattle ranching happens in the central plains states. The native biome is tall and short grass prairies. Not forests.)

Of the remainder, the land used (the feedlot itself) is so marginal, *IT CANNOT GROW CROPS* (or at the very least, not very profitably at all. They literally are trying to GIVE that land away out there, and nobody is taking it.)

Outlawing feedlot use would make corn feeding a non-starter, which covers the small cases that might remain.

The notion is fallacious.  Accept it.

[Manveru Taurënér]

...
Even on the marginal land issue, it would be environmentally preferable to return the land to wildlife habitat or not clear it to begin with (for instance, 90% of the deforestation of the amazon is for the purpose of converting it to "marginal" land for use in cattle ranching).

Depends on the circumstances. Places like the amazon should definitely be left alone, or any place/country for the most part where large grazers like the cattle we keep aren't a natural part of the environment and nature has to be cleared out first. In large parts of Europe though where the aurochs and other large grazers that used to fill that niche all went extinct long ago, our cattle are the only thing keeping that habitat (including plenty of unique plant, insect and bird species) alive, at least when done "right".

But yeah, a more veg-focused diet is definitely the way to go overall, as there definitely isn't as much room for meat production as is currently being done. Not sure how much of this is on topic for the thread or not.

[wierd]

My beef (heh), is that the argument is one for "Veganism", not "ecologically sound dietary policy."

Again, "Outlaw feedlots" results in corn not being used for cattle (because all remaining operations will be grass fed, and full cows dont need to be fed corn, and further-- corn costs money, and grass grows for free.), which satisfies the "Use that land for human use instead."

However, it does not promote veganism.  Which is why it is never addressed as the superior solution it really is, for all the reasons I cited. (Habitat preservation, et al.)


I therefor conclude that the argument is not only fallacious, but also specious.  Being properly informed about the situation causes one to see the ideal solution is one where beef is still produced commercially, exclusively through grass-fed operations.  This provides economic incentive to retain prairie lands as prairie grass habitat, and removes the bane of feedlots (and I whole-heartedly agree they are a bane-- they cause soil erosion, ground water contamination, are high concentration centers for diseases necessitating the excessive use use antibiotics which promotes antibiotic resistant bacteria en-mass, etc---- They SHOULD be outlawed! They ONLY exist, because they are *Extremely Profitable* $$$) from the equation completely.  That ideal solution is *NOT* veganism though.

Should people eat less meat? Absolutely.
Should all the land used for cattle farming be used for soybeans? FUCK NO--  I think I just illustrated why that would be a terrible idea.

[Rolan7]

See BOTH green bulleted points.


On the first one--  the vast majority of operations are NOT feedlots.  Combine with the second; About half of all production is done on feedlots.

Together, they paint this picture:

About half of the cattle in the US are free range grass fed.  Of the remainder, the operation is performed on marginal land that is so marginal, it has difficulty growing weeds. (as pictured, via the link.)

The argument (resource use), asserts that the land used (which it does not specify!) should be used for cropland.  This is a fallacy, since half of the cattle production is freerange on grass, *NOT ON CORN.*  To honor the statement of the argument, that land would have to be tilled up, all those native grasses exterminated with herbicides, and then planted to soybeans-- BECAUSE THE COWS ARE EATING GRASS. (Further, the cows eating the grass, is the economic incentive for the grass to remain there.  Without that economic incentive, there will be stronger economic incentives to develop that land in other ways, such as industrial parks. You actually *WANT* the cattle operations, since proper grazing simulates the previous indigenous macrofauna, bison, and that macrofauna is necessary for the preservation of that biome. If you read the paper cited, you will note that the majority of cattle ranching happens in the central plains states. The native biome is tall and short grass prairies. Not forests.)

Of the remainder, the land used (the feedlot itself) is so marginal, *IT CANNOT GROW CROPS* (or at the very least, not very profitably at all. They literally are trying to GIVE that land away out there, and nobody is taking it.)

Outlawing feedlot use would make corn feeding a non-starter, which covers the small cases that might remain.

The notion is fallacious.  Accept it.

I'll accept that there is marginal land that is usable for livestock and impractical for farming, sure.  Thanks for demonstrating that very thoroughly.  If livestock were only fed on such land, the resource-use-efficiency argument would be fallacious on its face.

But the fact that some of the land can't be cropland doesn't excuse the use of other, arable land on livestock.  It's also grossly inefficient to grow crops then feed them to animals, simply from a nutrition calculation. 

I'm not going to claim that the inefficiency is the cause of world hunger - that's due to issues of wealth and distribution.  We could easily feed the hungry without reducing our use of livestock.  However, it simply is inefficient. 

As an aside, I find it disgusting that we're deforesting so much of the Amazon to supply McDonalds and similar companies with inefficient beef.  (oh, ninja'd)

And ninja'd by wierd...  Okay, I guess we basically agree:

I therefor conclude that the argument is not only fallacious, but also specious.  Being properly informed about the situation causes one to see the ideal solution is one where beef is still produced commercially, exclusively through grass-fed operations.

I don't know what vegetarians were claiming that cattle grazing on marginal land were a waste of the land.  You say their argument doesn't specify what land they meant, then you seemed to assume the silliest option and tore into them for it.

[wierd]

The argument they tender, ignores the devil in the details.

I just bring the devil out for dinner.

(and, just to note-- the majority of the land use involved in US cattle ranching, is the large tracts of prairie grasses used to grass feed. NOT the corn fields in iowa that supply the feedlots.  In terms of total acres used, the overwhelming majority used for cattle production, is in fact the grassy fields.  To satisfy the argument, all that grass would have to be exterminated.  That is beyond absurd and destructive, and the argument is taken from a dangerous position of ignorance. )

[NJW2000]

Ok, I'm going to try not to get too drawn in here, especially as wierd is showing some pretty strong signs that they'll not give an inch. I'll restrict myself to one post.

The argument (resource use), asserts that the land used (which it does not specify!) should be used for cropland. 

Pretty sure you're talking at cross purposes here, or even not really reading what Radish wrote. I think Radish is talking about the land used to grow the stuff fed to non-grazed livestock. Not the feedlot, not the land used for grazing, but the place that grows the feed for the feedlot. At least 14% of which is edible to humans, some of it being corn. Presumably on land that could be used to grow corn for human consumption. Just a clarification.

I know you can graze cows, I've been in the country before. Never heard of someone grazing pigs.

In the UK, for example, apparently over 80% of pigs are raised in "intensive farms", and yeah, I got that from wikipedia, who apparently got it from the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intensive_pig_farming#Popularity

These intensively farmed pigs are not resource efficient because they use feed. They are the most commonly consumed type of pigs, and possibly the only type some people can afford or even find. This is just one example: beef, and maybe mutton, are somewhat uncommon in not necessarily relying on crops.

So... yeah, there are resource efficient ways to produce some meat. Not news. Are there enough resource efficient ways to raise enough for the 7.8 billion of us on the planet, minus Jains and Buddhists? Maybe we'll find out when we manage to outlaw beef feedlots, and I guess most pork, not all mutton, maybe lamb, I suspect chicken and many other birds, and a great deal of farmed fish. Until then... not consuming any of the inefficiently produced things is probably a good idea. As is learning to adopt a lifestyle that minimises or excludes such consumption, and prepares one for the possibility that the resource efficient meats will simply never be common enough to form a large part of one's diet. Focusing on beef alone is perhaps a little disingenuous, actually.

Feel free to ignore the argument for vegetarianism from resource inefficiency if it doesn't apply in your case - if a farmer shot a couple of squirrels and sold them to you, your squirrel and lentil stew would be as resource-efficient as it is delicious. I do think it's a fallacy to assume that any argument for vegetarianism has to cover all cases of eating any kind of animal under any circumstances. All you've shown is that there are multiple positions this argument might support - which makes it an argument, albeit not a decisive one, for all of them. Any argument for vegetarianism that shows that in most cases the way we eat animals is wrong is a valid argument for vegetarianism. Ideologies like vegetarianism are always going to be supported by a range of arguments, and can always become more nuanced.


One can always take any individual argument for a broad ethical stance and show that there exists some position outside it that the argument doesn't quite apply to. Doing so can result in a new paper for ethics professors, and a nice sense of superiority for amateurs, if nothing else.

[WealthyRadish]

Part of the confusion is that the report you quoted and the lines you highlighted are about increasing market concentration (fewer, larger companies controlling the market). I think you're using it to infer something about the proportion of currently living cattle that are fed on marginal land, but it's not what's at issue.

Spoiler: Rest of this dumb argument (click to show/hide)

Like this:

Unless those 128 feed lots, of which 44% of beef comes from, are going to produce a buttload of corn-- the argument is absurd.  The remainder comes from large tracts of graze land, which is often marginal.  This land serves a valuable ecological role as reservoir habitat for a wide variety of plant, animal, and insect lifeforms that would be completely destroyed if it was somehow handwaved into direct human-use, such as cropland. (Further consider that such areas (used for dry feedlots) are often SO MARGINAL, that they have difficulty growing grass at all!!  Take for instance, the area around Dodge City, which has several large feedlots, basically all clustered together. This one is pretty indicative of the local surroundings. Yes-- that's some premium looking soybean land there. /s)

Nobody thinks the 128 feed lots themselves could produce corn instead, on the tiny amount of obviously marginal land they occupy.

Farmers on distant non-marginal land produce the corn, and then it's shipped to the feedlots. One part of environmental vegetarianism is preferring that this non-marginal land isn't used to produce animal feed. If the non-marginal land were not used to be produce animal feed, some of this non-marginal land could produce nothing at all (great), be converted to pasture for grazing (fine, relieves pressure on existing habitat like the Amazon), or grow food if necessary. Again, it's the non-marginal land being used to produce animal feed that is at issue in the "could be used to grow crops for direct human consumption instead" argument.


There's another minor issue in using the feedlot numbers to infer something about the prevalence of grass-fed beef as a portion of the market, when most grazing of cattle in the US is part of the grain-fed process (the report implicitly mentions that fluctuations in feedlot occupancy depends on the spring-summer grazing/calving cycles). Cattle ranchers generally raise young calves and then ship them to the feedlots to be fattened up immediately before slaughter, with a relatively small amount actually being purely grass-fed beef.

But again, this is still unrelated to the total amount of intensively grown crops that are harvested and shipped to the feedlots.

Edit:

Should people eat less meat? Absolutely.
Should all the land used for cattle farming be used for soybeans? FUCK NO--  I think I just illustrated why that would be a terrible idea.

Here it is concisely; the "fallacy" you're talking about is a misunderstanding about the land use argument. Saying that the "grow food for people instead" argument (such that it is) is false because marginal land can't be used for intensive agriculture is a strawman on your part, because again, the environmentalist argument is about the non-marginal land use, not about converting ranches to farms.

[ChairmanPoo]

You can totally "graze" pigs.  You need oak groves though.



This is actually very frequent in (specially central and southern) Spain. And (along with the pig breed) a big determinator of quality pig products. Prime iberian ham  is done with iberian-breed acorn grazing pigs, and it's usually over 50€/kg

[wierd]

true enough;  However, the argument I mostly hear here in the US, is about beef production specifically.

While the US does produce pork, we do not do it on truly epic scales, like we do beef.  For that, you need to go to China.

I am personally of the opinion that pork is not a very good meat product to begin with, for a wide number of reasons. "It tastes good" is not a good reason, IMO, certainly not in the face of the many glaring impacts its widespread production causes.

Pork's wild habitat is indeed forest. Pigs are browsers, not grazers.  If left to go to their own devices, they revert to a more feral state with grizzled furry skin and nasty disposition, in just a few generations, because that is what survives in there.  They cannot be reliably or efficiently cultivated in a permaculture setting, as a consequence. (oak groves, as pointed out by Poo, are not actually permaculture, and the time it takes to put one into production is something like 20 to 50 years, depending on the oak species.)  Further, forests do not have very strong carry capacity, and attempting it would not produce a large supply, even under very idealized conditions.

BUT--- The argument is not "We should stop eating pork."  The argument is "We should stop eating *MEAT*".

Again-- about half of the cattle operations in the US are grass-feed operations.  Those operations serve ecologically important roles in preserving biodiversity, that would vanish instantly if the notion they purport was enacted, as pointed out.

I would be more apt to accept certain statements, if they were better worded, and not blanket statements taken from positions of ignorance, that are convenient and easy to regurgitate to others.  If you look into it, you will find that there are literally millions of acres of grass pasture allocated to cattle production (and that this number far exceeds the allocation for corn utilization);  Reallocating that to soybean use, would devastate a wide variety of local lifeforms. 

The amended argument should then be:

"All the land we use to grow corn and other feedstock for drylots should be used for human use instead."

To which, I would say "I agree. Drylots should not exist. (gives reasons why.)"

But if they then go "And this is why you should give up meat completely", I will then go "No, that does not follow."