I heard something to do with Nitrogen and …cow farts(?) I am really unsure of this and would like to learn more.
Answer -
4 Parts
- Ethical reason for consuming animals
- Methane produced by cows are a harmful greenhouse gas which is contributing to our current climate crisis
- Health Reasons - there is convincing evidence that processed meats cause cancer
- it takes a lot more calories of plant food to produce the calories we would consume from the meat.
Details about the answers are in the comments
Unless you are a small hobby farm, you’re not putting your cows out on pasture alone to raise them for meat. Most grasses are deficient in one or more vital nutrients that the cows need to grow. Most cows today are fed TMR (Total Mixed Rations). These are diets carefully mixed with different grasses, grains, hays, and mineral supplements. There are different metabolic diseases that cows can get when eating diets deficient in different nutrients. Cows that are sick don’t want to eat, and cows that don’t eat don’t grow. To a farmer, that’s like burning money.
that’s true in a few parts of the world. it may not be valid at all, depending where op is from. in general livestock is the most sustainable land use food.
This is so wrong. I don’t even know where to begin. We grow so much alfalfa (huge waste of water) and soybeans in the US to support our own and other countries’ meat farming, then we ship it across the world. You could find this out with a simple Google search. This is willful ignorance.
Greenhouse gas emissions - Meat accounts for nearly 60% of all greenhouse gases from food production
Water usage - it takes over 1800 gallons of water to produce e just one pound of beef.
In order to help, you don’t even have to go vegan. Reducing meat consumption is helpful too with something like “meatless Monday”
livestock production in the UK and Ireland is still linked to rainforests abroad since chickens, pigs and cows are often fed imported soybeans. Brazil is the world’s largest soybean exporter, and much of its crop is grown on deforested land.
Many people might also be surprised to learn that Ireland and western regions of Great Britain are home to rainforests: temperate forests sometimes called Celtic or Atlantic rainforests. And, like their tropical counterparts, UK and Irish rainforests are threatened by grazing livestock, particularly deer and sheep.
Just globally. Not sure about specific countries. Virtually all of the Amazon deforestation, for example
That field could be used to grow a different crop than grass, which would use less water per calorie of human food produced
depends on the land. normally livestock are put on land which won’t grow anything else.
They actually graze in national forest land in the US. I spent a lot of time tracking wolves to prevent the ranchers and the forest service from shooting wolves so they could safely graze deep into national forest land, destroying the local ecosystem, just as the rivers and bears and caribou started to recover after the reintriduction of wolves.
as a Swiss, it is an issue. our glaciers are metling more and more every year and we rely on hydropower a lot, we need all the rain and water we can get, even if it seems like there is a lot.
Also, hardly any cows just eat grass these days. That’s not how you get a lot of meat as fast and as cheap as possible. Also, since cows need a lot of grass, I a lot less area would remain for other crops even if they did (since grass needs way more area for the same amount of calories than stuff like soybeans). So it’s actually a good thing, they aren’t just eating grass.
