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Originally r/DataisBeautiful
Makes a great case for plant based alternative meats, which are actually really good now. I was a heavy meat eater, but I swapped out animal beef for impossible beef, and ended up preferring impossible beef in all my recipes.
Jack & Annie's and Quorn are also fantastic options.
I just realised the methane farm in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome wasn't very efficient because they used pigs instead of cattle.
This graph compares a beef farmer in brazil who just burned down the Amazon for an oversized heard and shipped the beef to the USA with my neighbor who owns a historic farm and has 1 cow per acre
Local meat makes very little difference in terms of emissions
hasn’t even been 300 years since we had giant herds of buffalo roaming this country. We removed mega fauna and replaced it with a different species.
I really think that’s methane stat is exaggerated because it pretends like the planet wasn’t covered in cows before we started killing everything.
It likely wasn't. Everyone eating meat is a relatively new phenomenon
That is something I never considered. Very interesting..
Right… elk, buffalo and deer are all prolific grazers. Cows do have a higher impact on the land as they are not natural. That’s why greed is the real issue here. The bad farming practices are greed based.
I’m in a state that sustainable harvests deer to manage the population. We consume the meat and everything. We sustainable harvests cows too! Unlike those disgusting feedlots in central California we have happy cows.
Yes, because all foods are consumed in the same amounts. If not normalized for some sort of "nutrition score", at least normalize for kcal.
Questions for those who can answer them:
1.) What is the difference between "Milk" and "dairy herd" with regards to pollution and land use? Honest question.
2.) I've always wondered, but didn't want to get flamed for asking: What if you have pet chickens? I don't eat them, they live a great chicken life, but I end up with a ton of eggs that I give to people I know. Obviously those eggs are eaten. Does this count as some kind of horrible animal cruelty?
Just going to pitch in real quick. Growing your eggs on site is way better for the environment, since they don't have to be shipped to your grocery store from miles away.
Your chickens, even if you are a pos that doesn't take care of them at all, will still have a better life than in an egg laying factory.
I highly suggest it. I had some for a while. It's surprising how many eggs you end up with as well, you don't need that many and it's easy to give them a nice life.
Chickens are wonderful pets. They eat bugs and poop fertilizer. As a farmer I can tell you your land can sustain chickens, just like it can sustain hundreds of other native birds.
I’m guessing these stats are focusing on a cow farm that cut down a forest versus a cow farm that exists on a prairie. the carbon cycle on most land can handle a certain amount of cows.
I just really hate how these all demonize small scale farmers. Having a couple dozen chickens is much different than having 500,000 chickens. Agricultures byproducts and environmental impacts range widely.
If I buy half a cow from my neighbor, it doesn’t travel, it gets processed locally. The ecological foot print is different than me getting a cow from Brazil.
2.) I’ve always wondered, but didn’t want to get flamed for asking: What if you have pet chickens? I don’t eat them, they live a great chicken life, but I end up with a ton of eggs that I give to people I know. Obviously those eggs are eaten. Does this count as some kind of horrible animal cruelty?
Eh, it depends on how you look at it. Chickens are just domesticated Red Junglefowl, and we've bred them over the last few thousand years to be bigger, (probably tastier), and lay a lot more eggs.
IMO, egg layers and other common breeds are probably perfectly happy and comfortable birds without any 'real' cruelty. The way we've bred them certainly has made them more susceptible to certain health problems and shortened their max lifespan some (compared to their wild ancestors), but my experience with my birds has been that as long as they're healthy, they seem to be perfectly happy with life.
I think of it the same as how we've bred Border Collies into existence. They're very different from their pre-domestication ancestors, but they're also not so severely altered that they have inherent health issues or other severe issues.
Broilers (meat chickens), however are definitely on the crueler side. Those poor things are only meant to convert feed to meat, and the whole living part is probably considered undesirable. Most only need to live somewhere between a month and a year before slaughter, and I imagine if you let them go any longer they'll drop dead from health issues.
The dairy herd seems to be about beef from a dairy herd. So still meat, but offset by the fact that milk is produced as well. Not sure how they calculate it, nor have I ever seen beef labelled as that (...granted I also haven't bought any in years), but it makes sense.
This just seems like a pet with a byproduct to me but maybe someone knows more about the effects of breeding for egg laying on chicken quality of life
I hadn't considered that they would sell the meat from dairy cows, so thanks for that answer. My neighbor has cows but that's the extent of my knowledge on them.
A few of my chickens are basically "mutts", which haven't been bred for anything specific. (we got them from a local who sells chickens, she turned out to know even less than I do about them, though. They're not as healthy as the others and I suspect they are inbred) The rest of them were picked up from a farm supply store and seem to be specific "breeds", I have some easter eggers, some Australorps, a welsummer, a black star, and some rhode island reds. I may not be doing everything right BUT my chickens have a half acre to run around on instead of being locked in a tiny box their entire lives, and the meanest thing any of them have endured is me catching them by the tail feathers before putting them back over the fence.
Dairy is the farm, milk is the product. As to pollution and land use factory farms will always cause pollution because they squeeze too many animals into an area smaller then they can live in healthily for profitability. (Cows for example need 2 acres per cow in lush lands or 50 acres per cow arid lands).
As for chickens. In my opinion as long as you have at least two chickens (they are social animals), maintain them properly, protect them from predation, keep up with vet visits/vaccinations, and let your chickens out to forage, they are a wonderful addition to a neighborhood. But make sure you read up on egg safety, especially if you plan to share your eggs.
But milk has it's own "farm" section too, so that doesn't make sense. It would make more sense to get rid of milk and cheese sections and combine them with dairy herd, but then that stat doesn't make sense because it seems it would be way higher than the beef herd.
See how they specified "beef" dairy herd. They are talking only about the livestock. The animals. The veal. The cattle they breed. The animals they cull and sell. They aren't talking about the lactating products.
Then you have milk. The product. Lactating dairy cows have a productive phase when they are kept specifically and separately to produce milk. I know it comes off as cruel but in agriculture animals are livestock and thought of in terms of lineitems when listed out.
I hope that helps. It's a bad graph, the creater carved out specific data points for their own personal politics which makes it hard to read. (Hence the cute notes littered around the chart). I too would have wrapped dairy cows and milk production into one line.
Water resources aren't even on the chart. Nuts, for example, can use way too much water. Almonds in California are a battle.
Water resources aren't even on the chart. Probably because it's about "greenhouse gas emissions across the supply chain"?
I just grabbed the first three. The real question is, why didn't this data table mention it?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2772427122000560
https://oggardenonline.com/how-might-conserving-water-lower-greenhouse-gas-emissions.html
It's also kind of unfair to go by weight. A kg of beef is way more harmful to the environment, but it's also got a lot more calories and essential to live vitamins and minerals in it than any fruit or vegetable.
Wild caught fish is there, but no wild caught game?
I'm thinking the footprint for that should be quite neutral.
Well, until everyone does it anyway, then the wild game would vanish rather quick.
That's why there's felling permits.
Oh in English that's more to do with trees, but shortly for moose for instance, the government maintains data and dishes out how many can/should be shot, and then those permits are given out to hunting clubs. You can't just go shooting any animal, willy nilly.
this is poore-nemecek 2018. it is not good science.
can you expand on that for those of us who don’t wanna Google and confirmation bias ourselves?
they combine disparately methodized LCA data. this is explicitly against good practice. the fact that they found outrageous disparities got them great headlines and impressive graphs, but the underlying science is questionable at best. I could go deeper but this is the thousand foot view.
It's a meta analysis, so I'm not sure it would be possible to get identical methodologies for all data sets.
of course it's not. Meta analyzes fly in the face of the guidance for LCAs. it's just not good science.
since I'm already being tasked to address this again, it's worth pointing out that poore and nemecek didn't even gather the LCA data themselves. they, themselves, actually cite other meta-analyzes of LCA data. those meta-analyzes do recognize that they are violating best practices in the text themselves, and just go ahead and do it anyway. egregiously, poore and nemecek Don't even acknowledge this faux pas and pass off their "findings" as sound investigation.
To elaborate and give a few exmples, LCA data is highly specific to a single production process, and might cover entirely different things.
There's a huge difference between "one liter of paint from prepared from pigment and solvent" and "Me driving over to get a house sanded and cleaned, then repainted, per square meter of wall". But both are LCA's for painting, but the latter will be much higher.
It can go the other way too. There are also lots of sub-processes that have negative costs. Putting up a new streetlight has a environmental higher cost than replacing one, because replacing one gives you an old streetlight to recycle. You can't just create a pile of "streetlight LCA data" and take the average.
They can even be very time-specific. If I'm sitting on a giant mountain of gravel, I can give you an LCA for your zen garden that's much lower than last year when I had to import gravel from Norway.
Looking at chocolate here, they include lots of land-use-change, which is caused by cocoa farmers expanding and turning trees into cocoa farms. But that's only because they're expanding. The next harvest won't have that change.
I have trouble believing that those giant CO2 spewing cargo ships are so small a factor.
Because you've been fooled by the focus on those ships.
They're not problematic because of their greenhouse emissions. Hauling stuff by sea is very efficient - by greenhouse gas emissions it is more efficient than rail freight. They're problematic because they burn very dirty fuel which releases sulphur dioxide and particulates which are a different kind of pollutant. However, they're released far from human population centres, and their most serious effects are localised, unlike greenhouse emissions, which are global. The environmental problems of cargo ships are there, but they are not the serious, urgent threat to human life that climate change is.
As such, they are a distraction.
Idk but they do carry a lot.
It's why the "buy local" movement wouldn't really save much CO₂. Driving the trucks from the harbour to the consumers emits more, AIUI.
The majority of CO2 from moving food is created by you driving to the supermarket for groceries. It's not hard to see how when you compare a 15 ton truck moving 30 tons of food, compared to a 2 ton car moving 4 kg of food. That truck can move 1000 times further than a personal car for about the same amount of CO2 per kilo of food.
This same logic means it's more efficient to buy tomatoes from a continent away than to drive to the market to buy tomato seeds.
Farmers co op shares a central processing and distribution facility. Beef travels 30 minutes in and out to final destination. It all happened in a local region it’s local.
Yes, that's right.
Cow raised 10 miles from my house. Killed on farm butchered on farm. I pick up cow and drive it 10 miles to my freezer. Cow sits in freezer for 1 year with other frozen farm products.
What are you talking about? I’m so confused at what you think buy local means?
Right, that's buying local. As opposed to having a cow raised 2000 km from your house and the meat shipped to you, which would be not buying local.
I'm not sure what you're confused about.
But shipping doesn’t eliminate the truck driving from the harbour to the grocery store - that’s still needed. It just also adds a ship.
Yes, all things being equal that's true.
The first point is that even if it is true, for some products producing them takes much more energy than moving them. Cows are the extreme example, IIRC, where raising cows for meat takes like 80 times as much energy as delivering it.
The second point is that all things are rarely equal. You can raise bananas in a greenhouse, for example, but it will be a lot less energy efficient than shipping it from the tropics.
Yeah, that's a good point. But I've always looked at the buy local movement as a way to fuck over billionaires.
I'm totally in favor of buying local! It preserves local culture, helps your neighbors, and deprives capital of a way to exploit people out of sight. The food is fresher, and having to cook with seasonal ingredients adds variety and gives fun challenges.
But it won't prevent much carbon from entering the atmosphere.
The tree nuts do, however, demand a shit ton of water.
I don't get the big difference between milk and cheese? It's not even the processing
Now do water requirements per gram of protein.
A kilo of 'food' can be dense and rich ... or neither.
Are we also doing animal torture then?
pig superiority
Kentucky fried fuck that. Chicken ftw.