I know that conditions in factory farms are gross and cruel to animals, but I don’t understand how it isn’t sustainable from an environmental perspective. Less cruel and more natural means for raising livestock take up much more land. With all the beef eaten in the United States, could most of it easily be raised on grass pastures, or would that require an unreasonably enormous portion of land be devoted to grazing? As for chickens, I know they’re generally considered carnivores but are fed grains in most farms, which is less healthy for them. They also aren’t given much space to move around inside giant pens.
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With the huge appetite for meat humanity has, and with a growing population, it seems like the means of raising livestock that are the most popular became that way because they were the most efficient. I’m not saying efficient is best for the animals or for the quality of the product, but it seems like it’s designed to use the least amount of land and produce the most output. Are these more efficient methods really worse for the environment than other means?
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Please feel free to point me to sources for more reading on the subject!
In: Planetary Science
Eating as much meat as we do is unsustainable. But you’re probably right that factory farming is most efficient.
Vast amounts of grains are raised to feed meat animals. This means we use a lot of fuel and other resources to do so. Pesticides, herbicides, loss of topsoil, death of soil organisms, etc.
It’ll get us eventually.
Also, cows are already raised on pasture. They only go to the feedlot for their last 6 months or so to get fattened up on grain.
Your underlying assumption that this much meat is being consumed is what’s unsustainable.
1 calorie of meat needs to be fed 10 calories of plants to grow. If we just fed the plants to humans directly we could feed 10 times as many humans.
It’s efficient in regards to how much meat is produced yes.
But meat is inheretly an inefficient way to feed humans. A calorie of beef first needs 10 calories to feed the cattle. It produces lots of methane wich is a really strong climate killer gas. Factory farms need to feed their animals too. Often the food are cheap imports like soy grown on razed jungle, transported across the globe.
A sustainable solution simple isn’t able to provide billions of humans with so much meat. So the solution is to eat less meat overall
On top of the issues with meat farming, there’s also the issue of WHERE the feed for said meat is farmed. A lot of factory farming happens on desert land, because consistent climate lowers the risk of inclement weather wiping out the crop, but that also means the water has to come from elsewhere. If this water comes from a nearby river, things can get pretty hairy – see Lake Mead’s ongoing water crises, or how the construction of the LA Aqueduct basically destroyed the ecosystem of the Owens Valley – but there’s also issues with pumping groundwater, which in a lot of cases, can take decades or even centuries to renew.
Adding onto the grain point, over 50% of the grain we grow in the US goes to livestock – we’re growing food to feed our food, which is pretty dang unsustainable.
The industry uses about half all water in the US yearly. The second highest source of methane, a really potent greenhouse gas, comes from cow burps and farts, which contributes heavily to and climate change. And don’t even get me started on how unsustainable their big vats of poop are ….
It IS the most efficient mean, but its not the most sustainable method.
This is because conversion, in each level of food chain, only 10% of energy is transferred up.
This is why there is bio capacity. eco-system can only support so much animals, so when you set up a factory that vastly out paces the bio capacity of said region, you then need to artificially boost the production using other means. (fertilization), biomass/material taken from another system.
This is why one of the current fears is phosphorus depletion, as 90% of phosphor comes from phosphor rocks.
And to compound this issue, the product of the factory farm isn’t recycled back to the region, its shipped to another place, so what you essentially have is a factory that is constantly depleting regional biomass then import from another environment. This isn’t a cycle, and eventually, one or more part of the chain will become depleted.
Well, only until the bio-companies that are testing out lab grown meat start to kick into gear. At that point there’ll be less demand for actually farmed meat.
>I know that conditions in factory farms are gross and cruel to animals, but I don’t understand how it isn’t sustainable from an environmental perspective. Less cruel and more natural means for raising livestock take up much more land. With all the beef eaten in the United States, could most of it easily be raised on grass pastures, or would that require an unreasonably enormous portion of land be devoted to grazing? As for chickens, I know they’re generally considered carnivores but are fed grains in most farms, which is less healthy for them. They also aren’t given much space to move around inside giant pens.
>With the huge appetite for meat humanity has, and with a growing population, it seems like the means of raising livestock that are the most popular became that way because they were the most efficient. I’m not saying efficient is best for the animals or for the quality of the product, but it seems like it’s designed to use the least amount of land and produce the most output. Are these more efficient methods really worse for the environment than other means?
The non-sustainability stems from the inherent [energy inefficiency](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-efficiency-of-meat-and-dairy-production) of using animal products for sustenance.
Higher organisms spend most on their energy on simply *existing*, not on growing steaks, so not a whole lot of the effort/energy you put into any kind of animal farming system (factory or otherwise) ends up on plates. Expending the equivalent of 100 calories of energy in order to get beef worth 2 calories or milk worth 25 calories is just never going to be a good deal if the alternative is to just use the 100 calories you started with.
It’s like fueling a lawnmower that sits within a hamsterwheel that powers the truck carrying it. Why not just pour the fuel into the truck directly?
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