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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   24660 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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Industrial farming of animals requires feeding them, and thanks to thermodynamics this is dramatically less efficient than growing food for humans directly. (Theoretically you can raise some grass-fed cattle on grassland that already exists without clearing new land but this does not scale and still kills the cattle themselves. Note that labeling beef as "grass-fed" does not mean they get their food exclusively from pasture, it includes feeding them hay which itself has to be harvested.) You don't need to throw up your hands and act like there's no way to know if there's more animal death/suffering required for beef or bread, various rough estimates like this are enough to show the intuitively obvious answer is correct.

A life lived only doing the optimal bare minimum to survive is not a life I want to live at all.

It might be more efficient for humanity to subsist on a bland grey nutrient paste, but that's not in any way an argument to say that we SHOULD do that.

Is somebody asking you to consider doing that?

If you're using efficiency as an argument for doing something with no other considerations bounding it (such as enjoyment) then, yes, you are asking exactly that.

Veganism is one point on the spectrum, with people both before it and after it. You cannot dismiss it by appealing to the limit (you’ll note that vegans don’t eat flavorless paste).

Unless you’re arguing that anyone advocating for efficiency in consumption has to eat flavorless paste, otherwise they’re a hypocrite.

The key is not that they're advocating efficiency, it's that they're excluding other things. If they exclude enjoyment, yet they don't eat flavorless paste, indicating that enjoyment actually matters to them, yes, they're a hypocrite.

Responding to "one benefit of X is Y" with "I think you're forgetting about Z" is completely fine.

When somebody (zeke5123) incorrectly says "actually Y isn't a benefit of X" and somebody (sodiummuffin) responds with "actually, you're wrong because etc.", it is completely inappropriate to accuse them of forgetting about Z (assuming that was what astranagant was actually doing).

sodiummuffin never claimed to be doing a fully-fledged accounting of all the pros and cons of veganism.

(you’ll note that vegans don’t eat flavorless paste)

I've seen vegan bacon. It looks like a plastic dog toy.

various rough estimates like this

Many years ago vegans on the internet liked to throw out estimates of how many gallons of water it takes to make pound of beef. But they had various estimates varying by orders of magnitude. It seemed that their "calculations" were actually bullshit. I tried pressing them when they put forth one of the various contradictory claims, but they don't care to explain why the number they stated is orders of magnitude off of other seemingly as valid predictions.

So, maybe your link with bar graphs legit. Maybe it is yet more vegan fantasy math.

Okay, let's turn all pasturage over to tillage (and forget marginal lands such as raising sheep on mountainsides). No more commercial cow, sheep, pig or chicken rearing, all those animals slaughtered and consumed and no replacements.

When talking about mass crop production, we have to consider what crops are (1) commercially desirable (e.g. what wheat for flour for baking) (2) what crops can be grown on particular land (not everywhere is suitable; that's why the American and Canadian plains of wheat for producing 'strong' flour) (3) the evolution of monoculture and loss of traditional varieties of crops, because we're now on mass production scales to feed the world (4) necessity for pesticides, herbicides, and other means of keeping crop loss down (you don't want birds eating the seed once planted, for instance, so how do you cope with that?) (5) downstream damage to environment from mass scale monoculture (rice, for example, is supposedly problematic and involved in contributing to global warming due to greenhouse gases emissions from necessary growth conditions). There's a lot of wild animals, from birds on down to insects, which are considered pests and which need to be controlled (including killing) in order to produce food crops. And that's without touching the GMO question, which may produce hardier crops but which inevitably lead to the same necessity for large scale agri-business production because the economies of scale don't exist for small peasant farmers/small scale farming. Think of those same American plains with no trees, hedges, fences, in sight, just acres upon acres of croppage replacing native prairie and grassland (and think of the Dustbowl era from over-exploitation of same).

I have a notion that there's a vegan ideal of cosy cottage food production which has no basis in the reality of large-scale food production from grains, pulses, vegetables and non-animal foodstuffs, anymore than the majority of meat-consumers know the full details of how meat is produced.

(4) necessity for pesticides, herbicides, and other means of keeping crop loss down (you don't want birds eating the seed once planted, for instance, so how do you cope with that?

除四害! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eradicate_pests_and_diseases_and_build_happiness_for_ten_thousand_generations.jpg

None of that addresses that raising meat for slaughter involves growing more crops, not less. For instance, the U.S. produces 51.5 million acres of hay and 37.3 million acres of wheat per year. Even before trying to account for other sources of animal feed, or that people eat more wheat than beef, or that some of that wheat is itself feeding animals, hay alone is using more land that wheat production.

Most of the 'food' that we feed cattle is agricultural waste that cannot be eaten by people and would otherwise simply be left to rot, and most cattle are raised on marginal land that cannot be used to grow crops. Farmers have a direct financial incentive to reduce inefficiency as much as possible, as inefficiency eats into their profit margins.

However, I think that Zeke was referring to small mammals getting killed during harvesting, which my googling suggests is more due to increased predation from loss of cover than getting chewed up by machinery. Depending on how you balance the utils of cows versus mice versus birds that prey on mice, it's certainly plausible that harvesting a field of wheat could produce more animal suffering than grazing cows on that same field.

The U.S. produces 51.5 million acres of hay and 37.3 million acres of wheat per year. So setting aside all other forms of animal feed, more land goes to producing hay alone than to wheat.

However, I think that Zeke was referring to small mammals getting killed during harvesting, which my googling suggests is more due to increased predation from loss of cover than getting chewed up by machinery.

Which is why I'm pointing out that raising cattle at scale involves harvesting even more land. Estimating the effects on animals from cropland is difficult, but it's not a comparison that favors beef to begin with.

A lot of hay production is a tax write off- it’s cheaper to have a guy come bail up your hay on land you aren’t using for agriculture than it is to pay taxes on it. Some of that land is also fallowed, or hay is otherwise a secondary product(certain kinds of hunting leases, for example).

The Saw Doctors - Hay Wrap

You can grow hay/alphalpha on extremely marginal land, which is largely unusable for other crops. I’m not arguing that these crops never displace food commodities, but in general I would expect that farmers favor food crops which are typically more valuable.

But zeke5123 is talking about accidentally killing animals as part of growing and harvesting crops, not optimal land use. That seems like it would be similar per-acre whether you're growing alfalfa or wheat.

It's a completely different subject but I'm reminded of Scott's 2015 post about California's water crisis:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/11/california-water-you-doing/

34 million acre-feet of water are diverted to agriculture. The most water-expensive crop is alfalfa, which requires 5.3 million acre-feet a year. If you’re asking “Who the heck eats 5.3 million acre-feet of alfalfa?” the answer is “cows”. A bunch of other crops use about 2 million acre-feet each.

All urban water consumption totals 9 million acre-feet. Of those, 2.4 million are for commercial and industrial institutions, 3.8 million are for lawns, and 2.8 million are personal water use by average citizens in their houses.

Which leads to interesting calculations like this:

The California alfalfa industry makes a total of $860 million worth of alfalfa hay per year. So if you calculate it out, a California resident who wants to spend her fair share of money to solve the water crisis without worrying about cutting back could do it by paying the alfalfa industry $2 to not grow $2 worth of alfalfa, thus saving as much water as if she very carefully rationed her own use.

But in any case the question of whether alfalfa is worth the resource usage has little to do with zeke5123's objection.

But zeke5123 is talking about accidentally killing animals as part of growing and harvesting crops, not optimal land use. That seems like it would be similar per-acre whether you're growing alfalfa or wheat.

Alfalfa maybe, but generic hay production probably kills fewer animals because of less pest control, tilling, etc.- even though being a mouse caught in a mower is pretty bad, just like being a mouse caught in a combine harvester.

California agriculture is feckin' crazy, because they're growing water-heavy crops in places never meant to grow anything, in order to exploit the good climate and growing seasons. And because they don't have sufficient water resources, they have to drag it out of rivers originating in other states.

But hey, that's their economy and their problem to sort out.

You never gain-feed cattle for years, you finish them on grain in a lot for a few months to put some marbling on them. Have you seen grain prices? Even before 2020 you'd quickly go broke trying to raise beef on grain.
And clearing jungle for pasture is a net improvement for animal welfare, because jungles are obscene murder temples of pure agony, while well-tended pastures are grass and flowers and a few voles (if you don't care about insects).

This whole thing gets very silly when you start quantifying it, which is why the people doing the quantifying only ever do it in ways that give the impression of making their moral arguments "sciency"

Sorry, I was going off half-remembered information about how "grass-fed" labeling is meaningless in some countries. A more relevant point is that grass-fed labeling includes food sources like hay, which still have to be harvested, which brings us back to the inherent thermodynamic inefficiency of feeding another animal so you can later eat its meat.

And clearing jungle for pasture is a net improvement for animal welfare, because jungles are obscene murder temples of pure agony, while well-tended pastures are grass and flowers and a few voles (if you don't care about insects).

I was responding based on his assumptions that areas like cropland are bad for animals, rather than being good because they involve creating areas where fewer animals are born into lives of suffering. Yes, with the right set of moral assumptions you can view every animal born into the wild as a bad thing, which would be a point in favor of anything that involves using lots of land in a way that leads to a low density of animal life. But once you're considering things at that level of indirect effects, you should also consider that using resources and land to raise cattle trades off against using it in other ways. Strip-mines and suburbs don't have a high density of animals either, even tree farms aren't that high, it's difficult to predict the effects on land use if people redirected money from meat to something like housing.

In the sufficiently long term the biggest effect might be on social attitudes, as humans gain more and more power over the environment a society in which ethical vegetarianism is the norm also seems more likely to care about wild animal suffering and act accordingly. (Like those ideas regarding genetically-engineering wild animals to reduce their suffering.) If nothing else wild animals with brains capable of suffering are already becoming a smaller percentage of Earth's population, so the average welfare of animals (including humans in the average) is increasingly driven by whether humanity continues to scale up the population of animals we raise for slaughter alongside our own population. For instance look at Earth's distribution of mammal and bird biomass - obviously neither mammals or biomass are the metrics we care about, but it gives a sense of the trend.

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