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Think of all that tobacco farmland that could be converted to food crops
You want to convert something to useful land? Get rid of golf courses.
Por que no los dos?
And livestock
Livestock is more useful than tobacco and golf courses
Debatable. Depending on the golf course location and management, there could be an argument for them at least providing some space for biodiversity.
Tobacco doesn't produce as much of use, but also doesn't come with the same methane emissions, or slurry runoff.
Which golf course isn't an artificial mix of sand, roads and monoculture full of pesticides? I would guess they also have traps against wildlife that may damage their perfect loan.
I was definitely thinking of a hypothetical golf course; I'm not under any illusions that the vast majority are biodiversity deserts.
We have way more than enough livestock. Humans should be eating less meat.
Sorry for not being clear; that was the point I was trying to make.
Not for the same resource input it doesn't.
Vital eh?
I'd forgotten that I ought to be dead.
Humans can synthesize all amino acids themselves. Any external source is optional, and outside of extreme scenarios like quickly gaining muscle mass nothing you need to think about.
If you do find yourself in the extreme scenario, you will have no problems picking from the huge range of non-meat protein sources.
Hm, it seems you are right. Not sure how I didn't know that.
So is my understanding correct in that there are 3 groups of substances: vitamins, minerals, essential amino acids; that you would have a bad time without? Bringing the total to calories, vitamins, minerals, essential amino acids, and water?
In that case I suppose a minimum number of Livestock products are helpful in fulfilling that, though as the increase of supplemented products probably reduces the need, the amino acids can still be chemically synthesized, right?. The main criticism is also the amount, we are consuming (way) more livestock products than needed to fulfill nutritional requirements. Especially meat would still be optional, right?
I don't actually have experience with vegan diets, I've always figured eating little meat would get me most of the way with least of the effort.
Quite the reverse in fact! Livestock produces fewer calories and nutrients per square meter than crops.
On earth we have a land shortage. If you grow animal feed, that could have also been a foodcrop. In terms of land efficiency, meat is an order of magnitude less efficient.
I'll try to take a more nuanced and in depth look.
As a start, I'm relatively sure the main use of a large chunk of agricultural land is solely food production. A cursory search gives data like this image
from this page.
It's reasonable to assume some of the plant waste of food crops feeds some of the livestock, but if that much land is exclusively used for animals it would seem reasonable we could at least double the human plant food production with a reduced animal portion in that land use.
From a pure energy efficiency perspective animals are around 10%, so if you take half of produced plant calories and use them for animals, that will result in 10x fewer calories of animal products than the other half of the plants. This lines up with the energy spread by end human food product, which seems to be something like this:
By the raw numbers and that coarse approach we expect 75% ⸱ 10% : 25% ≈ 1:3.3, the actual data seems to be slightly worse at 1:4.
So it seems to me we are using something like 25% of the land area to produce 80% of the food, just by not passing it through animals. And if you are right then some of the animal calories are even supplemented with the plant waste of those 25%.
The raw energy approach is actually quite a good approach by now, because we can use technology to transition most things into each other. You can pass plant waste into animals and loose 90% of the energy, or convert cellulose into (digestible) sugar and get the full energy. Or use it for other things that take energy like drug production. Using the plant waste on animals still brings that opportunity cost that means more land is used in other places to get the cellulose for those alternative uses, or to produce sugar the old fashioned way from more dedicated crops.
Traditionally you had land that you could not use for agriculture but could use to graze goats, you had plant material you could not use for anything but feeding animals. Animals were our bioreactors to transform that material or land into usable products. Now we have better chains of use.
The energy approach will finally be complete when we can turn plant material straight into animal products, with methods like lab grown meat or artificial milk, but we are not there yet. When we are, the energy balance of those should be close to that of plants and this entire problem simplifies greatly.
much of the waste that is fed to animals does not have a better use, as you are suggesting. for instance, soycake. no one wants to eat that, but it's high protein. giving it to animals conserves resources.
this assumes some sort of centralized economy, instead of letting farmers give wasted apples to their neighbors horses or whatever.
much of the land that is attributed to animal agriculture is grazing land, and is not suitable for growing crops.
And cemeteries
And enough pavement that anyone can store their cars close to pretty much any destination they have in mind.
Do we actually need more food crops though?
I thought we already produced enough food to feed the whole planet. Distribution is the real problem.
Smaller more diverse farms would help, but the grocery stores would have to learn how seasonal, regional crops work. Instead of offering pineapples, kiwis, and strawberries 365 days a year.
Why can't they? At least in North America refrigerated railcars make year round fresh fruit an option. Plus frozen fruit is an option anywhere
I vote just keeping the fields dormant so we can actually do crop rotation and stave off massive crop failures.
Personally I'd like to see the fields replaced with the forests that were cut down for them in the first place but that's not likely to happen
They'd just be replaced by soft woods to be cut down every 20 or 30 years. Trees are nice, but North America's old growth forests are what they are at this point. They're not a great carbon sink, either.
IMHO, trees got stuck in the mind of the environmentalist movement in the 1970s, and it distracted from a bunch of things that were way more important. I'd almost call it controlled opposition.
Arguably we need more algae and other water dwelling carbon sinks.
Would work if we decentralized the fuck out of everything and people could live in the forests