Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Buoyed by the equal parts of derision and support I received for writing in “I am So Tired Of Malthus” about how humans are better fed than at any time in history, I am foolishly but bravely venturing once again into the question of how we feed ourselves.
In a book excerpt in the February 2002 Scientific American entitled “The Bottleneck”, the noted ant entomologist Professor Edward O. Wilson put forward the familiar Malthusian argument that humans are about to run out of food. He said that we are currently getting wedged into a “bottleneck” of population versus resources. He warned of the dangers of “exponential growth” in population, and he averred that we will be squeezed mightily before the population levels off.
His solution? In part his solution was that everyone should become a vegivore.
Wilson: “If everyone agreed to become vegetarian, the present 1.4 billion hectares of arable land would support about 10 billion people.
Figure 1. Vegans are not aliens from the star Vega. They are humans who are strict vegivores, as the food chart above shows. They are known for their barbaric habit of boiling and eating the unborn fetuses of rice and wheat. And don’t get me started on what they do to the poor baby carrots, with their so-called … but I digress …
Is this correct? Would we have a net gain in carrying capacity if all the human carnetarians agreed to become vegivores?
Wilson gets his figure of 10 billion people by taking the total amount of the grain that is being fed to animals, and then figuring how many people that grain would feed. In 1999, about 655 billion tons of grain were fed to animals. That’s a lot of grain. At the world average of about 150 kg of grain per person per year, he’s right, that’s an increase of 4 billion more people who would have enough grain. There were 6 billion on the planet in the year 2000, so that makes a total of about 10 billion people.
So up to there, he is correct. But wait. Although he stops the calculation at that point, there’s a few things he is leaving out of the calculation.
First, that’s just grain, which is not enough to keep a person alive. The extra 4 billion people would need additional nuts, seafood, fruits, vegetables, cotton, root crops, and all the other varieties of food and fiber. So the increase would have to be less than 4 billion people.
Second, people have a number of misunderstandings about where animals fit in on the farm. They believe that animals eat lots and lots of food that could be eaten by humans. Their claim is that if we just ate what the animals eat, we could eliminate the inefficiency, and feed many more people than we are feeding now. In other words, their claim is that having animals on the farms reduces the amount of food coming from the farm.
This is what Wilson is repeating here (although he has gone further than others by claiming that this would increase the carrying capacity of the earth by 2/3 again as much as the current population).
I grew up on a ranch where we had both animals (cattle, pigs, chickens) and field crops (hay, alfalfa). I can assure you that anyone who thinks animals reduce available food on the farm is what in my youth we would call a “city slicker”. Farmers around the planet keep animals for meat and milk. What, are farmers all stupid around the planet and only E. O. Wilson and his fellow vegetactivists are smart? Farmers would not keep animals if it were not a net gain.
While in some industrialized countries the cattle get up to 15% of their lifetime nutrition from grain, the vast majority of animals on farms worldwide live on a variety of things that will not or cannot be eaten by humans. Pigs eat garbage, hens eat bugs and grass and kitchen scraps, goats eat leaves, and cows have four stomachs, so they can turn cellulose, which humans cannot eat, into nutritious milk and meat.
If we got rid of all of our chickens worldwide, would we have more food available for humans? Not unless you like bugs and kitchen scraps better than you like eggs. Chickens are the poor woman’s Rumplestiltskin, spinning insects and weeds and melon rinds into golden eggs and tasty meat … I’ll let E. O. Wilson tell her she’s ruining the planet, not me.
If we call the goats down off the steep hillsides where they are grazing around the world, will we be able to put vegetable farms up there? Not unless you can farm sideways without water.
Cattle in the US eat thousands and thousands of tons of cottonseed meal annually, turning it into meat and milk. Would you prefer to eat the cottonseed meal yourself? Sorry, you can’t, it’s mostly cellulose.
The presence of livestock in a mixed farming economy does not decrease the amount of food that a farm can produce. That is a city slicker’s professorial fantasy. Animals increase the amount of food the farm can produce, otherwise farmers wouldn’t have them. Millions of tons of agricultural and processing leftovers, which would otherwise be wasted, are fed to animals. The animals in turn produce milk and eggs and meat, and then go on to enrich the soil through their urine and manure, just like they were perfected to do on the plains of Africa so long ago … what an amazing planet.
Which is why farmers everywhere around the world keep animals — farmers are not dumb, and they haven’t had the benefit of a college education, so they haven’t forgotten that goats eat leaves, pigs eat garbage, cows eat cellulose, and chickens eat bugs. They know the value of chicken manure and pig manure.
With that introduction, let’s see how we might best estimate the change if everyone became vegetarian. We can do it by looking at the land involved. Here’s the numbers: according to the FAO, out of all the land cultivated by humans, about a quarter of the land is used to grow food for animal consumption. This can be further broken down by the type of animal feed grown:
Figure 2. Area of arable land used for human crops, and for animal crops. Image is Van Gogh, “Ploughed Fields”.
Now if we all became vegivores tomorrow, and we converted all that quarter of the cultivated land to growing food and fiber for human use, what is the possible increase in the number of humans?
Looking at the chart, you would think that humans could increase by about a third of the current number. The land used for animals is about a third of the land used for humans. That would be about two billion more people, not the increase of four billion claimed by Wilson. However, the number cannot even be that large, because we have only looked at one side of the equation. We also have to consider the losses involved. By becoming vegivores, we have freed up the 23% of our cropland used to produce animal food, but we have lost the food coming from the animals. Now how much do we have to give back just to maintain the status quo, to make up for our dietary and other losses? These losses include:
• We would have to replace the loss of the dietary protein provided by the 200 million tons of meat we eat each year, along with 275 million tons of milk, 7 million tons of butter and 47 million tons of eggs. Vegetarians say, “You don’t need animals, you can get enough protein from a vegetarian diet”, which is certainly true.
However, to do it, you need to eat more grains to get this protein, and in a twist of fate, to replace the total amount of meat protein in our diet with protein from grains would require about 50% more grain than we are currently feeding to animals. This is because animals eat many things other than grain, and we need to replace all that lost other-source protein with grain-source protein as well.
So immediately we have to devote about 18% of the total land to replacing lost protein for the existing world population. Subtracting this 18% from our original 23% of freed up land leaves us with only a 5% possible gain. Remember, this is all just to keep the world even, to maintain the world food status quo. We’re not talking at this point of feeding anyone extra. We’re just maintaining the current nutritional supplies of protein for the current population.
• We would also need to replace the amount of fat provided by the aforementioned animal products. While too much fat is a bad thing, dietary fat is an essential necessity of human nutrition.
The weight of dietary fat provided by animals is about a third of the weight of protein provided by animals. In addition, it takes much less land to produce vegetable replacements for the animal fat than for the animal protein. This is because there are vegetable products (oils) which are pure fat, while vegetable products are generally low in protein.
In the event, in order grow the oils to replace animal fat in our diet, we’d have to plant about 3% more of our arable land to sunflowers or the equivalent. Deducting that from our 5% gain in available land, we are down to a 2% gain.
• Next, the land worldwide would be less productive because in many areas, animal manure and urine is the only fertilizer. We could easily lose more than a couple of percent that way, especially in developing nations. And once we do so, we are at zero gain, meaning we couldn’t add one single person to the world by voluntarily becoming vegivores. But there are several further losses yet.
• There is also a giant hidden loss of food in the change to vegevorianism, as tens of millions of tons of agricultural waste would have to be disposed of, instead of being converted by animals into millions of tons of human food. In many cases (e.g. oilseed residue meal) these wastes are not directly consumable by humans.
• In addition to losing the food animals make from waste, without animals to eat the waste we add the resulting problem of disposal of the agricultural waste, which is expensive in terms of time, energy, and money.
• We’d have to do without leather, hide, hair, horn, wool, and feathers. Especially in the developing world, these products are often extremely important to the health, warmth, clothing, and well-being of the local people, and there often are no local substitutes. This would be a huge cost of foregoing animals. In places where jackets are made of local sheepskins to keep out the frozen wind, explaining to some poor shepherd why he should go vegivore and trade his sheep for soybeans could be a tough sell …
• Finally, about half the land currently used for growing animal food is being used to grow grasses for animals. In practice, this land will mainly be the poorest and steepest of each country’s croplands (or else it would be planted to a field crop), and thus is not likely to be suitable for growing much more than grasses.
All up?
You’d lose by not having animals in the world’s farmyards. I don’t think you’d even come near breaking even — and neither do the farmers all around the world. They know what the numbers have just shown — we can support more people in a planet, a region, a country, or a farm if animals are part of our agricultural and dietary mix.
[UPDATE] Twelve years after I wrote this, science is finally catching up with what every kid on a cattle ranch knows … see “Going Vegan Isn’t the Most Sustainable Option for Humanity“.
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Malcom Kirkpatrick;
The reason human population will not stabilize without either compulsory means or a crash are those I have given.>>
There are so many holes in your last post I hardly know where to begin. The hour being late and I have a very early start in the morning so I will only address this last comment of yours because in the end analysis it is the only one that matters.
If you truly believe that the only options for the human race are either compulsory population control or a crash, then if you have an ounce of humanity in you, your only choice is to risk the crash. The prospect of government authority on a global basis with that kind of power, and the corruption that would inevitably result is a thousand times more frightening than a “crash”. Even if I bought into your arguments (which I do not), I would still risk the crash.
My comment about space travel was meant to be sarcastic, not a real world proposal, but my intention also was that the comment be read in context with my additional comment regarding asteroids. Allow me to be more blunt. The chances of an asteroid striking earth with devastating consequences are real, there have been several near misses in the last few years alone. A major war in the middle east involving even a small number of nuclear weapons would interrupt a major portion of the world oil supply, devastating the world economy. A reversal of the last few decades of warming due to natural factors that have repeatedly sent the earth into an ice age would have a major negative impact on the world food supply with only a change of a few degrees. The earth is overdue for a magnetic field reversal that would leave an interim period during the reversal process of several centuries without protection from harmful radiation that the magnetic field currently provides. I could go on for hours with potential events that would devestate the human population, and I can make the case that each of them is more likely to happen in the next 100 years than a population crash. I will take my chances with them, and with the crash you suggest is inevitable because a government with that kind of power would wind up making the dark ages look enlightened.
BTW – some time ago, my brother and my sister, both of whom moved to the big city early in their careers, suggested that my mother move there frome the city she currently lives in, a 15 minute drive from my house. Their argument was that 2/3 thirds of her childred lived in the big city. I calmly observed that 75% of her grandchildren lived a 15 minute drive from her current residence, and thus the debate was ended. The merits of global compulsory population control is not a debate that can be ended with a wry observation. Should someone attempt to put such an obomination in place, then I can only observe that the most likely outcome would be the very crash you fear. The affluence and freedom our society enjoys is so great that the we complain incessantly about the increased intrusion and control governments seek in our economy and personal lives, but very few of us are so agrieved that we would pick up a gun to fight for a revolution. The phrase “give me liberty or give me death” has lost much of its meaning as the current generation has grown up with the horrors of the world wars nothing more than recent history. Todays generation is too comfortable, too priviledged to enforce the meaning of that phrase until an issue so serious comes along that they are prepared to fight for their beliefs and put their lives on the line to defend them.
I’ll take my chances with the crash. And I will fight for the right to do so. To the death.
Oliver Ramsay says:
September 12, 2010 at 11:22 am
Yeah, Oliver, you’re right … college professors are smart, and farmers are dumb. All of those farmers should just stop pretending that they know what they are doing, sell all of their animals, and become vegetarian. I mean, they are so “primitive” that they still use pointy sticks, how smart can they be?
Do you realize how your post makes you sound? Arrogant, full of contempt for “primitive” people, and with a host of cheap advice. You sure you’re not a college professor yourself? I spent years working in the third world with those “primitive” women farmers. I can assure you that they are not stupid (although many are uneducated), and I’ll take their knowledge and experience on farming over E. O. Wilson’s good intentions and fatuous advice any day.
There’s always tension and misunderstanding between farmers and city slickers.
“A cowboy named Mark was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture in California when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced toward him out of a cloud of dust.
The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, RayBan sunglasses and YSL tie, leaned out the window and asked the cowboy, “If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, Will you give me a calf?”
Mark looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, “Sure, Why not?”
The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his iPhone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location, which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.
The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg , Germany . Within seconds, he receives an email on his iPhone that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses an MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with email on his iPhone and, after a few minutes, receives a response.
Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer, turns to the cowboy and says, “You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves.”
“That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves,” says Mark.
He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on with amusement as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.
Then Mark says to the young man, “Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?”
The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, “Okay, why not?”
“You’re a Congressman for the U.S. Government”, says Mark.
“Wow! That’s correct,” says the yuppie, “but how did you guess that?”
“No guessing required.” answered the cowboy. “You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. You used millions of dollars worth of equipment trying to show me how much smarter you are than I am; and you don’t know a thing about how working people make a living – or about cows, for that matter. This is a herd of sheep. ….
Now give me back my dog.”
Andrew W says:
September 12, 2010 at 1:22 pm
I’ll say it again, simpler this time. You didn’t read what I wrote, and besides, you’re wrong. Wilson didn’t say “stop feeding grain to cows”. He advised that all humans become vegivores, which is an entirely different thing.
Even if Wilson had said what you claim, it is still nowhere near so simple as humans just eating the grain. Among other things, if we did not have animals to soak up any grain surplus, farmers would plant less grain since they could not depend on selling any excess … and so as a result of not feeding grain to cows, people would be forced to plant less grain, and populations would be at grave risk of famine. You ready for that?
I despise these Professor-approved, easy answers that fly in the face of thousands of years of practical farmer wisdom. They are trivial, childish fantasies that could only be dreamed up by someone who has never lived through a hard winter on a farm.
We feed grain to cows for time-tested reasons. It is a joke to think that with a few minutes thought some antomologist can come up with a you-beaut brilliant plan like “don’t feed grain to cows” and have that prove to be better than the millions of real-life experiments done by farmers all over the planet for thousands of years. Farmers raise livestock for a host of very good reasons. Yes, the farmers don’t know about protein and amino acids, as Oliver points out above … so what?
What they do know, and what E. O. Wilson doesn’t seem to have noticed, is that in an uncertain world, a mix of livestock and plants gives the farmers’ kids the best chance of living to adulthood. The farmers don’t care particularly if some other method might put a bit more food in their mouths in a good year. They are concerned with long term survival, not publishing some nonsense in the Scientific American that is meaningless if it happens to be wrong. Farmers aren’t Professors, they can’t afford “wrong”, they can’t afford “oops”. As a result, they use what has proven to work best, which is plants plus animals.
Patrick Kelly says:
September 12, 2010 at 3:25 pm
My apologies for my lack of clarity. Both the 18% and the 23% are percentages of the total amount of land. I’ll fix it above.
Thanks,
w.
Simon Singh thinks we shoukd trust the experts, but you have made a good argument, Willis.
Anyway, where did you learn to say “you-beaut”?
E.M.Smith says:
September 12, 2010 at 4:59 pm
Never heard anyone make any of those claims. Here’s what I find about protein in meat, beans, and spinach, ranked from highest to lowest:
PROTEIN CONTENT, PERCENTVenison, 34%
Veal fillet (roast), 30%
Goose (roast), 30%
Pheasant (roast), 30%
Partridge (roast), 29%
Pork Chops (grilled), 28%
Turkey (roast), 28%
Corned beef canned, 27%
Rabbit, 27%
Pork Leg (roast), 27%
Chicken Calories (average), 26%
Lamb Leg (roast), 25%
Beef Calories (average lean), 25%
Hare, 25%
Offal (average stewed), 24%
Bacon Calories (average rashers), 23%
Lamb Cutlets (grilled), 23%
Lamb breast (roast), 22%
Lamb Chops (grilled), 21%
Pork Belly rashers (grilled), 21%
Lamb Shoulder (roast), 20%
Pork Trotters (boiled), 20%
Duck (roast), 20%
Beefburgers (average), 18%
Meat Paste (average), 15%
Ham & Pork canned, 14%
Sausage (average), 13%
Pigeon (roast), 13%
Luncheon Meat canned, 13%
Red Beans, 10.5%
White Beans, 10.5%
Pinto Beans, 10.5%
Black Beans, 7.5%
Navy Beans, 7.5%
Chickpeas, 7%
Lima Beans, 7%
Blackeyed Peas, 3.5%
Spinach, frozen, chopped or leaf, cooked, boiled, drained, without salt, 3.1%
Spinach, cooked, boiled, drained, without salt, 3%
Spinach, raw, 2.9%
Spinach, canned, drained solids, 2.8%
Doesn’t look like protein from either beans or spinach can hold a candle to turkey. Or to bacon. Or to “offal”, for that matter, which the dictionary defines as “Offal is a culinary term used to refer to the entrails and internal organs of a butchered animal.” Not sure I want to try that no matter how short of protein I get.
However, even animal guts have much more protein than either beans or spinach. For example, to get the protein in a half pound of pork chops, you’d have to eat about five pounds of spinach, or a pound and a half of beans … remind me to sit upwind of you when we try that experiment.
In addition, the protein in plants is generally not “complete”, meaning it does not contain all of the amino acids. As a result, you either don’t digest all the protein, or you have to eat some other protein (beans with corn for example) that provides the missing amino acids.
So no, it is not easy to get enough protein on a vegetarian diet. I was vegetarian for some three years, and I also created the menu and cooked vegetarian meals for thirty people for a year. I found I had to put serious thought into getting enough protein into the food to keep people strong and healthy, so this is more than theory … like I said above, it can be done, but it’s by no means automatic.
Mark Sokacic says:
September 12, 2010 at 5:02 pm
Your question cannot be answered as posed. It depends on the level of technology. If we had dirt cheap fusion power, for example, we could support many more people than we could on wood power …
Gnomish says:
September 12, 2010 at 5:06 pm
Indeed. And just think of how many more people we could feed if instead of giving the partially eaten restaurant food to pigs, we gave the partially eaten restaurant food to humans!
If you have so much corn (and the ability to produce more) that it, routinely, sells for $0.06/lb, why wouldn’t you ferment out some of the starch (sugar) to produce fuel?
Especially, when you can produce it for $1.60/gal, and gasoline is selling for $2.10 to $2.30 Wholesale?
You ethanol-haters are missing two things. 1) We can raise enormous amounts of it very cheaply, and 2) We only use the Starch, not the proteins, oils, etc.
Oliver Ramsay says:
September 12, 2010 at 5:10 pm
Willis says;
For most farmers on this planet, the issue is most definitely survival. They are subsistence farmers who live off of what they grow. To think that their issue is dollars simply tells me that you have not spent time with them.
This is a stupid opening statement with more than a hint of intentional nastiness.
Gosh, you mean that farmers actually need to fertilize their land to make up for lost nutrients? That’s something I’m sure no farmer ever thought of, good thing we have agronomists …
I didn’t say agronomists are stupid, although I’ve known one who definitely was dumber than a box of hammers. I’m saying E. O. Wilson is talking out of his fertilizer production orifice …
———-
Dude, if you think too much protein is a significant problem on this planet, you really should get out more in the developing world. Go eat a few cane rats, get a real world perspective …
But in any case, if people stop eating meat protein, they will have to consume more of some other kind of protein, … is that really so hard to understand? “More grain” means “more grain than you’d have to eat if you were also eating meat.”
You might not have noticed, but some people engage in what is called a “play on words” … look it up sometime.
In any case, “carnivore” comes from “carne”, meat, and “vorare”, to devour. The dictionary lists its meaning as “any animal that eats meat”. I find nothing about whether it eats meat by choice or not.
The same is true with “omnivore”, which is defined as “any animal that eats both meat and vegetable substances.” Again nothing about choice.
Now, you say that the “vore” part “is used to denote an animal that is biologically equipped to eat certain things, rather than one that makes an intellectual decision to do so.”
Humans are biologically equipped to eat both meat and vegetables. That means that we are omnivores. By your carefully parsed definition, a human being who chooses to eat meat would be called a “carnetarian”.
But since nobody calls anyone a “carnetarian”, your interesting definition (which I did not find a mention of in a single dictionary) must not be the one that is commonly in use.
In any case, I was simply playing with the words to try to disconnect the emotional content of some of the things being discussed from the names of the things themselves. A bit of word play, in other words …
Couldn’t agree more.
Willis Eschenbach says:
College professors know that farmers are dumb in theory, and farmers know that college professors are dumb in practice. 😉
Richard Sharpe says:
September 12, 2010 at 9:21 pm
Did you ever notice what a doctor will tell you about any type of difficult diagnosis?
“Get a second opinion”.
That’s how far I trust the “experts”. I trust them as much as I trust any opinion, I trust them as much as my doctor tells me to trust him. Simon Singh says:
Well … let me start and finish by saying I don’t trust Simon Singh. A person stupid enough to blindly trust anyone as he recommends deserves what they get, and they will get it in spades if they trust “climate experts, world academies of science, Nobel laureates”. Simon is as thick as two short planks if he trusts anyone in the world of mainstream climate science. He’s too stupid to know that climate science is badly broken. I wouldn’t trust him to babysit my pet rock.
And I learned to say “you beaut” from my Aussie and Kiwi mates, during the nearly 20 years I lived in the South Pacific.
Mark Sokacic says:
September 12, 2010 at 5:02 pm
“Can anyone here calculate the estimated maximum carrying capacity of the earth for humans or point to a link which does perhaps?
Thanks in advance”
It depends on the size of the humans.
Kum Dollison says:
September 12, 2010 at 9:50 pm
“Ethanol-haters”? Whenever someone writes that thoughtful opposition to ethanol comes from “ethanol-haters”, I know that we have left science and are lost in emotion.
However, I persevere. I oppose the conversion of grain (including corn) to fuel alcohol because:
1. Alcohol is a very poor fuel. It doesn’t contain a lot of energy, it absorbs water, and it is hard on engines. There’s a reason that it has never been used historically as much of a fuel … because it isn’t much of a fuel at all.
2. You say you only use the starch so there’s no problem. So perhaps you could tell us how we can make a tortilla out of what’s left over?
3. Something on the order of a third of the world lives on less than two dollars a day, and about half of those live on a dollar a day or less. So you can fold your paternalistic “sells for $0.06/lb” and gently place it someplace safe. To start with, today’s price is about a third higher than that, $0.08 per pound. But that’s the price if you are buying a trainload of shelled corn. For the poor shlub at the sharp end of the stick who is buying corn by the half kilo, her price will be perhaps four times that, and often more. As a result, you are TAKING FOOD OUT OF HER MOUTH. I’m not sure how you can live with that … I couldn’t. Since you clearly think that you gassing up your car to run to the corner for groceries is worth taking food from the poor for, I don’t really know what to say to you.
Net result is that for lots and lots of people in the world, buying a paltry pound of corn meal costs a third or a half of a day’s wages. So while you can make a first world wage and wear nice clothes and own a car and sneer at the cheapness of corn at six cents a pound, most people on the planet do not have that luxury. Turning perfectly good food into third-class fuel is simply stupid, not to mention arrogant and anti-poor folks.
4. It is not economical. It has to be supported by the taxpayer. Why should I pay for your fuel, as I am forced to do today? Seriously, where do you get the … … the nerve to force me to pay for your freakin’ fuel? I should send you a bill.
5. Depending on how you measure it, it might save a little CO2, it might add a little CO2, or perhaps no change. Big whoop.
6. The artificial demand for ethanol has led a number of countries to chop down tropical forest and plant ethanol plants. The birds and the animals of the forest thank all of you “ethanol-lovers” for that, I’m sure.
So you are supporting a system that chops down tropical forests; takes food from the poor; provides a third-rate, low-energy, corrosive fuel; makes no difference to the CO2 situation; and forces me to pay to gas up your car.
And you probably think you are a sensitive, environmentally conscious guy … when you are not insulting people who have very good reasons for thinking that your idea sucks.
Willis Eschenbach says:
September 12, 2010 at 11:11 pm
“[…]1. Alcohol is a very poor fuel. It doesn’t contain a lot of energy, it absorbs water, and it is hard on engines. There’s a reason that it has never been used historically as much of a fuel … because it isn’t much of a fuel at all.”
Energy density, various fuels:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Energy_density.svg
Ethanol is worse than Diesel or Gasoline, but not that much worse.
My argument is with your claim that rearing less meat would make little or no difference to how many people the planet could support given current farming technology, most of your post was built around that claim. I think you’re wrong, outside of places with industrial farming like North America and Europe, grain is rarely fed to livestock, and indeed even in North America and Europe grain as a subsistence feed for livestock is a relatively recent development.
Grain stores well, it’s probably the easiest of foods for a subsistence farmer to store, any surplus not sold is normally stored for following years, the idea of subsistence farmers feeding a valuable grain surplus to livestock is ridiculous.
“I despise these Professor-approved, easy answers that fly in the face of thousands of years of practical farmer wisdom.”
Having been a farmer my whole life I’ve started to get that feeling lately.
GM says: September 11, 2010 at 11:35 pm
The word “ecosystem” was heavily present in my post. For those who can read, of course. In a functioning ecosystem, goats never reach the kind of numbers that threaten the existence of the ecosystem because there are plenty of predators that keep their population in check. In a world where everything is seen as existing for humans to devour, those predators are eliminated (Why? Because they eat goats) and the number of goats is maximized (which usually ends up in the overshoot scenario I described). Again, sustainability is all about having functioning ecosystems, overshoot is about maximizing the short term at the expense of ecological capital and not taking the long term carrying capacity into account.
=============================================================
GM now I know who you are – Sheldon Cooper – you fit the description perfectly of course you WOULD have to show up here – see below.
Sheldon is distinctive for his overtly intellectual personality: he is calculating and cynical, he exhibits a strict adherence to routine, a lack of understanding of irony, sarcasm and humor, a habit of constantly expressing admiration for his superior intellect (which is sometimes found offensive by the other characters), and a complete lack of humility; these characteristics are the main sources of his character’s humor and the center of a number of episodes.
Can’t wait for your next show –erm – sorry – post!
Doug
I can attest to Willis’s statement that alcohol isn’t much of a fuel. Back in the day, when speed was king for me, a bunch of us played around with running alcohol fuels in racing motorcycles and the hassles alcohol brought were huge, though interesting in a perverse kind of fashion. Its only real benefit was its cooling properties, which enabled tuners to do more radical stuff with valve timing and compression ratios, etc. When production watercooled two-strokes came along, life for the hobby bike racer/tuner became very simple – set ’em up, then leave ’em alone!
Its the wrong grass !!!
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/combat-climate-change-with-less-gassy-diet-for-cows-study-2077787.html
Another great post, Willis 🙂
A couple of things the veggies/academics/deep-greens/theorisers [delete whichever is inapplicable] forget.
1. Ploughland is subject to topsoil erosion. Inexpensive production of grain staples relies on the nutrients in topsoil. Topsoil loss rates exceed the geologists’ estimates for topsoil creation. Shifting the balance of farmland from pasture to more ploughland is contrary to the principles of sustainable agriculture. It makes no sense to *decrease* the productive lifespan of farmland.
2. Animal manure consists of mostly bacteria. Those bacteria are food for the beneficial soil bacteria compete with fungi that are diseases of our staple grains, for example take-all in wheat. Some see virtue in purchasing a “cure”, others see virtue in prevention.
Mark Sokacic said @ur momisugly September 12, 2010 at 5:02 pm
“Can anyone here calculate the estimated maximum carrying capacity of the earth for humans or point to a link which does perhaps?
Thanks in advance”
We don’t know the rate of topsoil loss with any great accuracy. Topsoil creation rate has recently been revised downward by the geologists. The next great glaciation will lower sea levels and create an increase in available land, but at the cost of much lower rainfall. What do you want to feed these humans on? One of our ancestors (h. robusta IIRC) ate grasses and similar stuff. Presumably the GMO technicians will be able to engineer “people” to do the same again. Lots of room for speculation there…
“BTW, protein is not a significant problem on a vegetarian diet. Just mix some beans and leaves with the grains. (Spinach and beans can have higher protein content than meat). ”
Spinach, leaves and beans do not have a higher content of protein than meat. (!)
Soy is the only veg that has not only a useful amount of protein, but also, low enough carbs so in theory is could be used as a ‘meat’ component.
However, many people are allergic to it and lots of others just don’t like the taste, and there is an issue with soy being suspected to be unsafe to eat.
So whilst that is not settled, for now, soy is something to feed the livestock and to treat as an elective secondary food — it’s not a staple.
Btw, if you eat a chicken every week throughout your life, you will have made an extra 420 years of chicken life possible in your time. ;-D
Choose life, eat meat!
GM really goes to great lengths to widen the pool of bs! Most of the agricultural environments in the developed world in which goats are a minor factor have few or nil predators interested in or even capable of killing and eating goats. His nonsense about farmers and their sole role of keeping predators at bay is the stuff of fairytales for children dating from the long-ago. I know full well that predators preying on livestock in the Third World can be a problem, but GM’s silly generalisations are just that. Much of the world has passed the stage wherein lonely goatherds keept watch over their charges.
I’d just like to say THANK YOU! to Willis Eischenbach for once again doing his homework and coming up with a brilliant piece. I fully intend to crap the arrogance and poor common sense of the vegan nuts down their throats the next time I get a pamphlet at my Catholic services about why Jesus would not eat cows (never mind the fact that he DID…LOL)
Gail Combs says: September 12, 2010 at 4:09 pm
Dried, sanitized human waste from sewage treatment facilities has been considered as fertilizer. The only problem is the ” household and industrial chemicals” that go down the drain and could poison the fields.
Somewhere I learned that human waste concentrated heavy metals, lead, cadmium, etc., and that is the reason it isn’t widely used. I can’t find a reference to look this up easily.
DirkH says: September 12, 2010 at 11:17 pm
Energy density, various fuels:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Energy_density.svg
Ethanol is worse than Diesel or Gasoline, but not that much worse.
According to your wiki source, ethanol has 35-40% less energy than Diesel or Gasoline, or conversely the latter two have 50% more energy than ethanol. That seems significant energy-wise.