For a number of years we already produce more than enough food for everyone on the planet, the actual problem now is to deliver and distribute because in hot climate countries food spoils very quickly. Also some countries have complicated political situations and food help is seen as intervention. But in developed countries food distribution should be happening without problems.
Another lovely fact is that more plant mass is eaten by the animals grown for food than humans, so the plant production problem is non-existent. At least when it comes to human consumption.
1. Not all dirt is equal. Land being able to grow some kind of plant matter does not mean that the land is suitable for growing plants humans will eat.
2. The plants animals eat are easy to process mechanically at huge scale. The plants humans eat, not so much.
It's far from a solved problem. Meat is the historical solution.
> Land being able to grow some kind of plant matter does not mean that the land is suitable for growing plants humans will eat.
I don't agree. Ground that can grow animal food pretty much always can grow a human food. I know of no exception (particularly for high production foods).
About the only exception I can think of is undeveloped grazing land in the mountains. However, that's such a small percentage of the food that goes into feeding livestock that it's hardly worth mentioning. Most of our meats don't come from animals living on mountain ranges, that's too expensive. It takes ~2 acres to pasture a single cow if you don't actively farm that pasture. On the flip side, that same 2 acres if farmed can easily feed about ~2 cows.
In other words, you cut your land requirements in half if you don't pasture your cows.
> The plants animals eat are easy to process mechanically at huge scale. The plants humans eat, not so much.
Humans do require a bit more processing of their foods than animals do, but not much and not enough to introduce any sort of scaling problem. Certainly not more costly than meat processing. Most meat processing requires manual interaction which is super expensive. On the flip side, plant based processing is pretty much completely automated. About the only part that isn't 100% automated is transport (and usually harvesting, though that's changing fast). As with everything, manual processes are the most expensive part of anything because humans cost a lot of money.
Meat is a solution to the energy density problem. Meats are high in protein and energy which makes for a good winter food for farmers (so long as you can keep it cold, it will last a long time).
> Most of our meats don't come from animals living on mountain ranges, that's too expensive.
It's also an ecological mess. Cows aren't native to North American mountain ranges and are tremendously destructive. Also, native predators get hunted to protect the non-native cattle which causes an even bigger environmental mess.
> On the flip side, that same 2 acres if farmed can easily feed about ~2 cows.
Yes? But it's a terrible practice. The cows end up piled atop each other in big barns waste deep in their own shit. Then they end up draining the barns into massive shit ponds which have to be filtered with large RO systems. The densely packed cattle are in such poor health they are over-medicated to prevent disease and that medication ends up in the food chain.
Pasture raised beef is just much better. I'd just as soon we limited how much total beef was raised and did it in pastures rather than corn-fed barn raised beef. Its more humane and while it's not been proven, the large amounts of antibiotics in barn raised beef is almost certain to have effects on humans who eat that beef.
There are alternatives which split the difference between humane and productive. Generally what small time farmers will do is keep cows in pastures that don't have enough food to feed them but do have enough area for them to roam. They'll then use their farming ground to produce enough hay to feed the cattle.
But that said, small time farmers are getting priced out by factory farms. Unfortunately, the dollar is king when it comes to meat production.
The worst part is that there's no real way for a consumer to fix this problem. You can significantly reduce or eliminate your meat consumption and that won't affect factory farms. Remember, they are the cheap meat. So who gets the brunt of reduced consumption? Generally smaller operations as they end up priced out of the market.
The only 2 ways I know of to really hurt factory farmers is for either lab grown meat to be less expensive or for government regulations to outlaw the practice. If the quality of lab grown meat is high enough, however, you are going to see major issues with small time farmers being priced out of the cattle industry completely.
> The worst part is that there's no real way for a consumer to fix this problem.
About all you can do is buy local grass fed or go vegetarian. As you say, it's not a huge thing, but at least I'm not participating.
> Generally smaller operations as they end up priced out of the market.
I would love to see some legislative reform on the large scale use of antibiotics in meat raising. That wouldn't necessarily help smaller farmers, but it might push larger scale farms into somewhat less heinous practices.
we need shit farming. 2 reasons: 1. grazing. grasslands sequester more carbon than even forests. 2. phosporous. if you go to iowa. the farmers feed pig shit to grow corn and then feed the corn to the pigs so they'd shit. it's the only way. Soil P is a non renewable resource. when we run out of P, we cant farm anymore.
> Ground that can grow animal food pretty much always can grow a human food.
Not necessarily with the productivity to justify the human effort, though, which is the important bit. You can let cattle graze low-yielding grassland with essentially no effort. You're not going to bother with the intense labour requirements of picking the scant vegetable crop you'd get off the same land. Not when you can easily ship vegetables from highly productive ground.
3. We massively overproduce grains in the average year because falling short one year is really, really bad.
Since we're going to have too much grain most years, we might as well feed the excess to livestock and turn it into meat. In bad years we can reduce the amount of livestock to keep the available grain constant.
The same goes for ethanol.
Efficiency is the often the enemy of security, and food security is very, very important.
But growing soybeans year after year after year doesn't work very well, ecologically speaking[1]. Crop rotation is essential for soil and crop health. For a whole lot of practical reasons, animal feed is more efficient to add to the rotation than, say, a fruit crop. Good or bad, agriculture does not operate in one dimension.
[1] Source: I grow soybeans for the human market. To which I'll add that human grade soybeans themselves are less efficient to grow than animal grade soybeans. They command a pretty sizeable premium to reflect that added cost of production. It's not exactly as simple as shifting your diet to eating animal feed.
Well plant production for meat includes things like soybeans and corn. While they're non-perishable it's not what those in food-insecure places would want to eat. Grains yes, but I hazard malnutrition is owing to lack of other food sources.
On the local level I think companies lobby against redistributing excess foods for free to keep prices high. Something's got to give, either food waste is drastically diminished or we redistribute all of it.
Grass fed livestock is indeed a large portion of the world's meat consumption. Places like Argentina, Brazil, New Zealand, England, Texas have a great deal of cows, sheep, and goats walking the land and not fed through a trough. Please account those in your calculations of what it would take to replace a cow with a pile of corn.
Labelled grass fed beef that has not seen a feedlot is under 1% of the US market. It is also a dubious proposition that grass fed beef has any environmental advantages. At best it will find a niche as a luxury product as meat is replaced by plant-based foods.
Even in Argentina, the amount of beef that is purely grass-fed has dwindled. The popular image of standard Argentinian beef coming from bulls roaming the pampas has been obsolete for at least a decade now. Argentinian beefs are now fed maize etc. on feedlots like in most other developed countries.
Feedlot cattle more than double in weight in under 200 days. Beef cattle are slaughtered at under 24 months. How could 93% of a feedlot animal's diet be grazed grass?
The numbers there show the percentage of potentially human palatable food that is consumed by cattle, namely corn.
As the article points out, byproducts such as alcohol production waste are used in feedlot feed. This very much does not mean that a high percentage of feed is grazed grass.
If you have ever made the mistake of trying to eat feed corn, you know that the real world amount of human palatable food fed to cattle is about zero. But that does not matter.
The reason it does not matter is that the land, fuel, water, and capital equipment that goes into making feed for cattle is still entailed in feeding cattle, for about half the weight of each steer.
Tl;dr: the article is not apropos.
EDIT: I should clarify that I do not mean that feed amounts to half the weight of the steer. It takes 6kg of feed to add 1kg to the weight of a steer. Feedlot cows consume about three times in feed what they weigh on the way to slaughter.
We also don't produce food to feed people but instead to generate a profit. Food companies waste massive amounts of food in order to maintain profitable prices. Sure we produce enough food to feed the planet, but it's not profitable to provide food to people who can't afford it.
For a number of years we already produce more than enough food for everyone on the planet, the actual problem now is to deliver and distribute because in hot climate countries food spoils very quickly. Also some countries have complicated political situations and food help is seen as intervention. But in developed countries food distribution should be happening without problems.