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147 comments on Can sustainable farming feed the world?

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UbikValis2 on March 21, 2006 - 3:48pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
You lose 90% of the protein, 99% of the carbohydrates and 100% of the fiber when you turn grain into livestock.

Percentage of energy return (as food energy per fossil energy expended) of most energy efficient factory farming of meat: 34.5%

Percentage of energy return (as food energy per fossil energy expended) of least energy efficient plant food: 32.8%

Source: Organic Gardening and Sustainable Agriculture Facts and Statistics

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markincalgary on March 21, 2006 - 5:39pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I happened to be reading Gene Logsdon's All Flesh Is Grass over my break just now. The author is promoting, in his fun to read way, pasture-based livestock farming rather than grain-based farming. How timely.

Ubik, you're committing a bit of a non-sequitor here...and Leanan is kind of at fault for bringing up a point that is largely orthogonal to your main point (50% reduction in meat production). It's a sad day when two people who agree waste their time arguing.

Your point about consuming more grain directly, rather than via livestock, is a fair one. The same goes for your point that meat consumption should be cut in half. But you are failing to address Leanan's point that livestock can convert largely indigestable stuff (ie. grass, legumes, shrubs, and brush) to human-digestable food (meat). And this can all be done with a bare minimum of labour or fossil fuels as input (see the book above).

My understanding is that 70% of grain produced in the US is fed to livestock (source: Joel Salatin's excellent, but unfortunately named, You Can Farm). This is absurd, especially when you realize that cattle, sheep, and goats are quite inept at digesting grain (but this is not true of pigs, chicken, and several varieties of farmed fish). Cultivating land so that you can feed livestock something that they aren't particularly good at digesting is a type of lunacy that will end with increasing transportation fuel costs. It is my belief that meat production would only fall slightly if land used to grow grain was converted to pasture for ruminant livestock to graze directly. Mr. Logsdon actually makes the argument that this change could bring an increase in per-acre production, and all with much less fuel consumption.

As for water, all the water consumed by a livestock animal is not wasted. With pastured livestock, much of it spread onto pasture as urine. In effect, you get some irrigation for free just by watering your cattle. The same goes for the protein, carbohydrates, and fiber. The pies can either be left for the benefit of the pasture, or used for vegetable production.

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NC on March 22, 2006 - 9:13am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Mark,

Well said.

There is a sustainable way to grow meat animals and vegetables on the same land.  This used to be called crop rotation.  Vegetable to grains to grass and back to vegetables again over a 5-7 year period.  Grazing the cattle on the grass is very efficient and there is that manure to spread on fields that are going into vegetables or grains.  You need wonderful design of the farm to allow water and fences to be in the right place as you move the animals around but it used to be common practice.

I can't find the link, but there was a Smithsonian magazine article a few years ago about intensive rotation where a small farm (less than 150 acres?) had cattle, pigs, chickens, grains, grass and vegetables all in a complex cycle one following the other.  I remember the chickens followed the cattle and picked apart the pies looking for seeds and grubs.  The chickens were modified free range using large movable pens (12 x 12 feet cages on wheels) that concentrated them over recently grazed land.  Everybody got moved daily.  Feed efficiency was very high and I think the only fertilizer was phosphorous in low doses.

High intensive grazing is making a comeback see Texas link here and Wisconsin link here.  Clearly if this can work in these two extremes the rest of the country could adopt.

The down side to all these approaches is they can only be scaled so far.  One operator can't raise 5000 head of cattle plus chickens and rotate crops, etc.  You need multiple farms/operations to do that large of production.  In a climate where everything is based on margin and volume this approach loses every time.  Hence the consolidation to very large specialized crop or animal production in recent decades.

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147 comments on Can sustainable farming feed the world?

Comments can no longer be added to this story.