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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   26051 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024

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The beef lobby claim

7% of total corn produced in the U.S. is fed to feedlot cattle

Corn acreage used to feed feedlot cattle is 0.2% of total U.S. land area, 1.4% of total U.S. cropland acres, and 7% of total U.S. harvested corn acres.

The problem is the 7% of corn acres?

Does the bacteria in the cow that releases methane, release more methane than would be released by the natural decomposition of the forage material?

I don't know how the beef lobby computes it (and whether they import cereal from foreign countries) but if you take account for all animal feed (not just beef) it is more than 7%:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-cereals-animal-feed?tab=chart

release more methane than would be released by the natural decomposition of the forage material?

Honestly I don't know but the point is not to let the cereal decompose, that would be dumb. It's to use those lands to produce something else, something that wouldn't produce any CH4 and ideally that would absorb a bit of it. Anyway it would be better to burn the cereals and to produce energy with it (we get no CH4 - worse than CO2 - and more energy).

This paper https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00589-6

has a nice visualization of the flows of inputs.

/images/1714930968548955.webp

I believe the bacteria in cows produce less methane when fed corn than their typical forage. The forage would decompose releasing methane if not eaten by cows. Cattle graze and forage on land unsuitable for other uses. We may get the CH4 anyway and there would be no beef. Deer, elk, bison and moose may then forage the areas with the cow deficit.

Yes but we wouldn't produce the forage in the first place. Or you can burn it to produce energy (and CO2 is still better than CH4)

Much of the the forage would exist in any event.

You can feed it to some other animal then, the cow is the worse.

https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-footprint-food-methane

While I enjoy the image of chicken drives with mounted riders moving their herds flocks of chickens from pasture to pasture I suspect there are reasons this isn't done.

Absent cows it's more likely the forage would be consumed by other existing ruminants, bison, deer, elk, moose, etc.

The reason is that people eat a lot of beef. Farmers don't try to optimize the environmental impact of our food, they optimize their revenue (and they are right to do so).

More chicken in the US, which also seems to use more cereals. https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery/chart-detail/?chartId=58312

They optimize their revenue by using land that is best suited for the purpose. If beef weren't the most productive / renumerative use it'd likely already be used for something else.

That EA paper I linked suggested that the reclaimed land be paved over to reduce "wild animal suffering." Because if the earth is a lifeless void there will be no suffering.

It's things like this that make me suspicious that EA is especially beset with Dunning–Kruger.

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