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Huge Reduction in Meat-Eating 'Essential' To Avoid Climate Breakdown (theguardian.com)
Huge reductions in meat-eating are essential to avoid dangerous climate change, according to the most comprehensive analysis yet of the food system's impact on the environment. From a report: In western countries, beef consumption needs to fall by 90% and be replaced by five times more beans and pulses. The research [PDF] also finds that enormous changes to farming are needed to avoid destroying the planet's ability to feed the 10 billion people expected to be on the planet in a few decades. Food production already causes great damage to the environment, via greenhouse gases from livestock, deforestation and water shortages from farming, and vast ocean dead zones from agricultural pollution. But without action, its impact will get far worse as the world population rises by 2.3 billion people by 2050 and global income triples, enabling more people to eat meat-rich western diets.
Switching to a plant based diet will reduce your carbon footprint by less than one ton/year. Having one fewer child will reduce it by _60_ tons per year.
Source: http://www.sciencemag.org/news...
The CO2 impact of children is the equivalent of burning a 55 gallon drum of oil, per week, per child.
We might not eat 100% of a cow, pig, etc... but the net waste is practically zero. AFAIK, practically every cell of a cow now has commercial value for something. A friend who once had a summer job at a slaughterhouse told me that most of the trash leaving a slaughterhouse comes from garbage cans in the offices & break room, and most of the remainder comes from the janitorial or maintenance departments (detergent containers, old knives, etc) & ends up getting recycled.
Actually, something like 70% of our agricultural land isn't useful for growing human food. It's used for pasture, hay, and feed grain because you throw stuff out there and then go crudely harvest it. Pigs will eat corn cobs, so you can just dump an entire uprooted corn plant in front of the pig and that's that.
That land isn't economically-viable for food production: you'd have to use a hell of a lot more irrigation, fertilization, and pesticides, with lower yields despite all that, plus more human investment. The amount of greenhouse gas and runoff involved per unit food produced would be massive. Instead, we'd pave over it, build cities, and employ the labor in new factories--assuming we could find a way to feed people.
It has been observed that some regions grow beef entirely on waste byproducts, with 100% of their feed coming from corn stalks, wheat stalks, and the like. More often, it's that plus pasture. Irrigation and fertilization of feed crop is either not used or not used as intensively as for produce, and the use of cover crop also provides an alternative to moisture retention, fertilization, and weed control: legumes add nitrogen to the soil between crop cycles, vetch crowds out weeds aggressively, and any dense cover planting (including plantings during crop growth) retains moisture. Such cover crops also provide feed and forage for livestock.
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The population will level off as prosperity increases. Japan and several European countries are already below replacement levels.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
As a new study in Nature makes clear, not only did processing and eating meat come naturally to humans, it’s entirely possible that without an early diet that included generous amounts of animal protein, we wouldn’t even have become human—at least not the modern, verbal, intelligent humans we are.
Layman Terms
If you want to get into the weed
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Our society has "advanced" to the point where the majority of the people in big cities have no clue how food is created. If we'd get out of our sterile, windowless office cubicles and actually travel around the country and observe the realities of our world, it'd be obvious that there are VAST stretches of land that do nothing but grow otherwise worthless grass and weeds that humans are not built for eating, yet are perfectly suitable for ruminant herds of cattle. This is converting inedible biomass into edible meat.
The idea that we need to force everyone into a vegetarian diet in order to produce enough food to feed the world is outrageous. It's counter-productive, as switching everyone to a strictly vegetarian diet would actually REDUCE food supplies because now you can't make use of the worthless grass and weeds.
You forgot the easiest, which also can not only reduce growth, but also reduce population itself:
4. War.
Unstable war-torn countries tend to have the HIGHEST birthrates, and the fastest population growth rates.
The country with the highest birthrate in Asia is Afghanistan.
The highest birthrates in Africa are in Mali, Niger, and Angola.
Birthrate by country
People in war-zones move toward an r-selection reproductive strategy.
The feed conversion ratio typically compares dry weight of feed to gross live weight of the animal. If you'd compare by nutrients, the numbers can be 3x worse because of water, bones, and intestines. Even for poultry it'd be better to eat the poultry feed directly instead of converting it into chicken.
From WattAgNet.com:
For white leghorns the FCR is closer to 1.5.
Maybe that is somewhat inflated by water that isn't counted in the feed weight. But 3x? Hardly. (Birds get a lot of their water from the waste of their energy metabolism.)
Meanwhile: Have you looked at what chickens eat? (I have - in detail - because my wife and I raise the birds.) If you want to make porridge of layer chow, grower chow, insects, grass, etc. you're welcome to try it. (Don't forget to include the fuel and other inputs of any cooking and/or processing you have to do to it to make it digestible by a human.) But I bet you'd have to eat a LOT more than 3x the weight of that gorp to actually absorb and utilize the nutrients you'd get from a roast chicken or a plate of eggs.
I'll let the birdies do the chemical magic of turning that low-grade veggie junk into the raw material for tasty and nutritious meals.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way