[HN Gopher] Where is there more livestock than people?
___________________________________________________________________
Where is there more livestock than people?
Author : nojito
Score : 40 points
Date : 2022-07-17 13:38 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (erdavis.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (erdavis.com)
| rr808 wrote:
| I'm I the only one that is really bothered by the grammar
| mistake? In a headline too. I'm seeing it more and more often,
| even in the news.
| Beldin wrote:
| In response to the question in the headline: the Netherlands,
| pretty much everywhere. Over 5x as many as people [1], even after
| substantial decline last year.
|
| Their droppings are causing us environmental problems, which is
| currently a hot(-button) topic.
|
| [1] https://longreads.cbs.nl/nederland-in-
| cijfers-2021/hoeveel-l...
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Alternatively it's a manufactured problem, designed to require
| the goal of halving the livestock.
| roflyear wrote:
| Manufactured how?
| Gustomaximus wrote:
| I was surprised the lack if sheep areas. Is lamb not a popular
| meat in USA?
|
| Just looked up wool production and didn't realise how much
| Australia produces: https://blog.bizvibe.com/blog/textiles-and-
| garments/top-10-l...
| finiteseries wrote:
| The Wild West preferred cattle, and cattlemen, plus inertia.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheep_Wars
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_war
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| It's too hot for them in most of the agricultural centers in
| the USA. Plenty of goats though.
| bombcar wrote:
| Goat milk is relatively common, but I've not seen goat meat
| for quite awhile.
|
| Lamb is available most places, but usually more expensive.
| Walmart carries it!
| bretpiatt wrote:
| A good number of places in Texas serve goat neat, it just
| gets called cabrito.
|
| https://www.texasmonthly.com/food/on-the-menu-cabrito/
| NamTaf wrote:
| As opposed to all the sheep in famously temperate Australia?
| :)
|
| The temperature argument doesn't stack up to me. Have you got
| a source?
| NamTaf wrote:
| It's not popular, and what lamb is grown there is generally
| also a very mild flavour as far as lamb goes, being less gamey
| than lamb found in other countries.
| umanwizard wrote:
| > Is lamb not a popular meat in USA?
|
| It's not exactly rare, but it's _far_ less popular than beef,
| pork, or chicken.
| h2odragon wrote:
| I live beside one of the "more pigs than people" counties; pretty
| sure that the bulk of the pig count is one farm (with several
| contract barns). At least in theory, there's _one person_ who can
| say those are _his pigs_.
|
| I'd be tempted to train them, arm them, declare the county the
| Free Porcine State.
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| > I'd be tempted to train them, arm them, declare the county
| the Free Porcine State.
|
| Why stop at pigs? Why not free all of the animals at the animal
| farm? Are _some animals more equal than others? ;)_
| burlesona wrote:
| I grew up in a small town and spent a lot of time driving through
| cows > people counties through college and young adulthood -
| every visit back to my parents meant seeing lots of cattle on the
| way.
|
| At grocery stores I would see packaging for "grass-fed beef" or
| "free-range" and honestly I thought it was like a joke that
| farmers were pulling on city people, like "gormet hand-picked
| potatoes" or "premium plastic" or something. What else would cows
| eat?? I'd probably seen a hundred thousand cows in my life,
| always in herds roaming around vast pastures. Of course they eat
| grass.
|
| Then I moved to California, and one day had occasion to drive
| from SF to LA. North of Bakersfield I encountered the most
| profound stink I've ever smelled while driving, and eventually I
| saw the source: industrial operations with enormous numbers of
| cattle in fenced pens shoulder to shoulder so they could hardly
| move.
|
| I spent the next ten minutes slack-jawed, reconsidering my life
| experience.
| [deleted]
| jasonboyd wrote:
| I had a similar experience on that drive from SF to LA. I
| remember a UPS truck driving by me and the man inside wearing a
| face mask (this was pre COVID). I thought it was the weirdest
| thing. A few miles later though and you hit stench. It's hard
| to do it justice in a comment. Saying it's the foulest thing
| I've ever smelled really fails to capture it.
| puppycodes wrote:
| Good ole Coalinga... That towns major exports include factory
| farming and prison... basically hell lol
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalinga,_California
| CalRobert wrote:
| Coaling Station A never fails to disappoint.
| dzdt wrote:
| Even in pastureland country, cattle typically spend winters
| packed together in feedlots and are fattened in feedlots on a
| largely corn-based diet before slaughter. Depending on who is
| doing the labelling, cattle which were pastured before this
| fattening process may still be sold as "grass-fed".
| bombcar wrote:
| Sometimes the packed wintercows are fed grass (those big
| bales rolled up are quite heavy - and expensive).
| officialjunk wrote:
| isn't the corn based diet unique to the United States, since
| corn is a subsidized crop?
| solardev wrote:
| It depends... some parts of Canada use corn, others use
| barley
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_feeding#Country-
| specifi...).
|
| In EU it's a mix: https://www.dairyherd.com/news/european-
| cows-eat-more-foreig...
| https://www.beefmagazine.com/americancowman/beef-and-
| busines...
|
| In general different countries will "finish" their cattle
| with different grains. Only a few places have the right
| conditions to have their beef be grass-fed through its
| whole lifecycle.
| Gustomaximus wrote:
| For accuracy, for winter that's really climate dependent.
| Plenty of geography supports year round outdoor cattle if not
| the majority. Often they will live outdoors for winter but
| require feed. This is likely to be majority hay with some
| supplemnt than feedlot type treatment. And not an expert but
| I believe some large operations will even truck cattle arond,
| so have summer pastures north and head south for winter type
| thing.
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| Doesn't New Zealand have more sheep than people?
| potatochup wrote:
| Yes, but the same applies to pretty much any country with
| agricultural food animals.
| bombcar wrote:
| Which makes sense if you work it out - unless a country would
| only eat the largest animals (cows) you find that people eat
| more than one animal a year, and so there must be more than
| that. (Cow, estimated 500,000 calories, 2,500 per day
| recommended, cow lasts 200 days - even then if you were to
| eat mainly cow you'd need more than eaters because they take
| more than 200 days to mature; but nobody eats pure cow.)
|
| I guess in theory you could eat one chicken per 8 weeks and
| barely keep it balanced, as you can grow a meat chicken in
| that time.
| sweetheart wrote:
| This is sad. The scale of animal subjugation and suffering is
| hard to comprehend.
| newman555 wrote:
| Have no idea why you get downvoted, but I did notice few times
| now how HN crowd doesn't know much about veganism or
| appreciates people who think animal agriculture is cruel.
|
| Ah yeah, and also terribly destructive:
|
| https://youtu.be/LaPge01NQTQ
| giantg2 wrote:
| I actually see a lot of stuff about vegan and vegetarian
| diets on HN.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| Maybe because it's a biased POV, that doesn't take into
| account that the isssue is simply being human, nobody can
| call themselves out or blame some activity more than others.
|
| For example many vegans and animalists own pets to "save them
| from cruelty"
|
| But
|
| _Loss and others of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology
| Institute and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that
| free-ranging domestic cats (mostly unowned) are the top
| human-caused threat to wildlife in the United States, killing
| an estimated 1.3 to 3.7 billion birds and 6.3 to 22.3 billion
| mammals annually._
|
| And that's only in the US...
|
| Wild life is a constant threat to our life style, like it or
| not, being a modern human in modern society means being
| responsible for animal suffering even if you don't personally
| eat them.
|
| For example in my country the war on hunters (mainly by
| radical animalists) produced that
|
| _Roughly 2.3 million wild boars roam around Italy, with
| roughly 20,000 in the area of Rome, according to farm trade
| group Coldiretti. And while African swine fever can 't be
| transmitted to humans, it can infect and kill domestic pigs_
| sweetheart wrote:
| Nothing about what you said is antithetical to veganism, so
| I'm not sure what you're trying to say.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| well, this is the reason why people downvote these
| comments.
|
| muslims don't eat pork, Hindu don't eat cows, every
| religion impose dietary restriction, doesn't mean that
| non believers have to follow them.
|
| Veganism is no exception to the rule: if you believe
| you're reducing animal suffering, good for you, go on
| with your religion and be happy.
|
| But in truth you aren't, vegans kill a lot of animals
| too, there are billions of people in the World that cause
| much less damages than us westerners, even if we lived
| only on rainwater and rocks.
|
| So you might be a "true vegan (TM)" but you aren't better
| for the environment or for animal suffering than anybody
| else.
|
| That's what I was trying to say.
| antiterra wrote:
| I don't see evidence that the HN crowd as a whole doesn't
| know much about veganism. Are you measuring knowledge about
| veganism via adoption of veganism?
|
| From a few years back:
|
| "Ask HN: Have you gone vegan or vegetarian?"
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13985006
| aaron695 wrote:
| carapace wrote:
| Earth!
|
| What do I win?
|
| Seriously though, check out https://xkcd.com/1338/ "Land Mammals"
| it's one of the more mind-blowing XKCDs IMO.
|
| > Earth's LAND MAMMALS By Weight [[A graph in which one square
| equals 1,000,000 tons. Dark grey squares represent humans, light
| gray represent our pets and livestock, and green squares
| represent wild animals. The squares are arranged in a roughly
| round shape, with clusters for each type of animal. Animals
| represented: Humans, cattle, pigs, goats (39 squares), sheep,
| horses (29 squares), elephants (1 square). There are other small,
| unlabeled clusters also. It is clear that humans and our pets &
| livestock outweigh wild animals by at least a factor of 10. ]]
| {{Title text: Bacteria still outweigh us thousands to one--and
| that's not even counting the several pounds of them in your
| body.}}
| bjoli wrote:
| It is the green "wild animals" that make this diagram so mind
| boggling.
| jtlienwis wrote:
| Wisconsin. If you get a chance, come and smell our dairy air. Or
| come and freeze in the land of cheese.
| solardev wrote:
| Do you have cheese ice cream?
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| There's cheese custards but if you get a frozen one like at
| Culvers it'll be milk based
| [deleted]
| seanwilson wrote:
| When people bring up "overpopulation" as a primary cause of
| climate change, I notice most are only counting the 8 billion
| humans that are on earth right now and not the 80 billion land
| animals [1] that are being sheltered, fed then killed each year
| for food. It's a mind bogglingly large number that's hard to
| believe and yet easy to ignore because changing it will mean
| changes to our lifestyles to fix.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_slaughter
| oangemangut wrote:
| 72B of those 80 are chickens, cattle come in at 325M. At least
| chickens are a superfood animal in terms of converting calories
| into food, and generally being lower impact than cattle, pork,
| etc.
| drekk wrote:
| Superfood animals because they eat literal garbage; you're
| still not escaping the order of magnitude conversion loss
| going through a trophic level. In addition we don't know all
| the long-term impacts of eating poultry (or any animal for
| that matter) given growth hormone stimulating factors. We
| also know that red and processed meats definitely cause
| cancer, and cooking "lean" meats / fish creates compounds
| likely to cause cancer in humans (and proven in animal
| models).
|
| You could use chickens to deal with food waste, but you could
| waste less food? Most chickens are grain fed anyways--
| typically corn and soybean. Those calories are already food,
| you don't need to convert them besides cooking them. You're
| also using a living being as a means to an end and giving
| most of them a terrible existence to fit 72B on the
| terrestrial surface.
| adrian_b wrote:
| While the food given to chicken could provide calories to
| humans, it cannot provide a concentrated source of
| proteins.
|
| That is the main usefulness of chicken, because from
| vegetable food it is very difficult to get enough proteins
| without simultaneously getting too many calories.
|
| There are methods to extract proteins from vegetables, but
| for some reason the current methods are inadequate, because
| the price of vegetable protein extracts is much higher than
| the price of chicken meat, for the same quantity of
| proteins, so few people can afford to eat them, even if
| they might like the idea of vegan food.
| seanwilson wrote:
| > That is the main usefulness of chicken, because from
| vegetable food it is very difficult to get enough
| proteins without simultaneously getting too many
| calories.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/28/well/eat/how-much-
| protein...
|
| "The recommended intake for a healthy adult is 46 grams
| of protein a day for women and 56 grams for men. And
| while protein malnutrition is a problem for millions of
| people around the globe, for the average adult in
| developed countries, we are eating far more protein than
| we actually need.
|
| Most American adults eat about 100 grams of protein per
| day, or roughly twice the recommended amount. Even on a
| vegan diet people can easily get 60 to 80 grams of
| protein throughout the day from foods like beans,
| legumes, nuts, broccoli and whole grains."
|
| > so few people can afford to eat them, even if they
| might like the idea of vegan food.
|
| Chickpeas, soybeans and other beans can be about 20%
| protein, lentils about 10%, and they're cheap.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Lentils have a higher protein content than either
| chickpeas or beans, typically between 22% and 25%, never
| so low as 10%. Only soybeans have an even higher protein
| content, but cooking soybeans correctly, so that all
| undesirable substances contained in them are destroyed or
| eliminated, is rather complicated and time-consuming.
|
| Nevertheless, even if the dry legumes have about the same
| protein content as raw lean meat, while in raw lean meat
| the rest of the content is mainly water, dry legumes
| contains at least twice as much starch as proteins, so
| when eating the same quantity of proteins as legumes
| instead of meat, one will eat at least 3 times more
| calories.
|
| I actually eat about 2 thirds of my daily protein intake
| from high-protein vegetables, e.g. lentils or peas, and
| only 1 third from meat, but if I would replace the last
| third, of proteins from meat, also with proteins from
| vegetables I could not avoid gaining weight. I have made
| various experiments with different diets, so I know this
| for sure.
|
| Moreover, I am able to eat 2 thirds of the protein intake
| from vegetable sources only because I normally do not eat
| any cereals or any other starchy food that would provide
| additional calories over those that are automatically
| ingested together with the vegetable proteins. So this is
| a problem that I have studied during a long time, until
| succeeding to find a balance between protein intake and
| energy intake, without gaining weight. Most people, who
| also eat things like bread or sweets, would not be able
| to eat such a large part of their protein intake from
| vegetable sources, without becoming overweight.
|
| That recommended protein intake of 46 g / 56 g per day,
| quoted by you, comes from an older study whose
| methodology has been severely criticized. Other studies,
| which are more credible in my opinion, conclude that the
| real recommended protein intake should be at least 50%
| higher, so closer to 100 g per day than to 56 g per day
| (and the 56 g per day was for a 70 kg male, any bigger
| individual must eat a proportionally greater quantity).
| seanwilson wrote:
| > At least chickens are a superfood animal in terms of
| converting calories into food
|
| Maybe compared to beef but when chickens are being fed crops
| they're not efficient compared to eating crops directly. 72
| billion chickens is still an insane number of extra lives to
| support.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_efficiency
|
| "In comparing the cultivation of animals versus plants, there
| is a clear difference in magnitude of energy efficiency.
| Edible kilocalories produced from kilocalories of energy
| required for cultivation are: 18.1% for chicken, 6.7% for
| grass-fed beef, 5.7% for farmed salmon, and 0.9% for shrimp.
| In contrast, potatoes yield 123%, corn produce 250%, and soy
| results in 415% of input calories converted to calories able
| to be utilized by humans.[4] This disparity in efficiency
| reflects the reduction in production from moving up trophic
| levels. Thus, it is more energetically efficient to form a
| diet from lower trophic levels."
| adrian_b wrote:
| Comparing food efficiencies by energy content, i.e. by
| calories, between vegetables and animals, is completely
| futile and irrelevant.
|
| For any humans it is very easy to cover most of their
| energy needs with vegetable food and the majority of them,
| for whom the expenses for food form a non-negligible part
| of their budget, have very strong incentives to do this,
| because calories from vegetables are many times cheaper
| than calories from animals.
|
| Animals are not eaten as a source of calories, but mainly
| as a source of proteins.
|
| When discussing the efficiency of using animals for food,
| they must be compared with the vegetables used for their
| food based on their protein content, not on their calories
| content.
|
| When vegetable protein extracts are compared with meat, all
| the energy and chemicals consumed for protein separation
| and any other additional costs must be taken into account.
| seanwilson wrote:
| > Animals are not eaten as a source of calories, but
| mainly as a source of proteins.
|
| > When discussing the efficiency of using animals for
| food, they must be compared with the vegetables used for
| their food based on their protein content, not on their
| calories content.
|
| Why do you think that? I think you're overestimating how
| much protein people need and underestimating how much
| protein regular plant-based food contain.
|
| Potatoes are about the cheapest food, not renowned to be
| high in protein and yet eating 2000g of them a day will
| give you ~40g of protein and ~2000 calories which is
| close to the recommended amounts even if you're not
| trying to get protein. A cheap can of cooked chickpeas or
| beans is an easy 40g of protein, even cheaper if you cook
| from dry beans. Seitan (you make it by washing flour
| dough with water until it's mostly protein + gluten left)
| is about 75% protein, even more than steak:
| https://www.menshealth.com/uk/nutrition/food-
| drink/a25976250...
| adrian_b wrote:
| Actually I have studied very carefully the various
| recommendations for the daily protein intake and also
| most of the proteins that I eat daily come from
| vegetables, so I know what I am talking about.
|
| I cook and eat chickpeas from time to time, but less
| frequently than lentils or peas, which have a higher
| protein content than chickpeas, so I am aware of their
| properties.
|
| While you are right that 200 g of chickpeas would provide
| 40 g of proteins and this is not a quantity of chickpeas
| too large for being eaten during a day, that is only at
| most a half of the recommended protein intake for a 75 kg
| human.
|
| While the energy requirements for doing some hard
| physical work are more similar between different people,
| the basal energy consumption rates when doing sedentary
| work in front of a computer, only interspersed with short
| exercises or walks, vary much more from human to human.
|
| Eating 2 kg of potatoes in a single day, i.e. 2000
| calories, would be enough for a large gain of weight per
| day in my case. I eat around 1600-1700 calories for a
| stable weight around 76 kg (before starting to count
| calories, during many years I had a stable weight of over
| 110 kg).
|
| Moreover, counting all the 40 g of proteins from 2 kg
| potatoes as part of the necessary protein intake is
| incorrect.
|
| There exists indeed a minimum protein intake, which is
| required to ensure a sufficient nitrogen intake, in the
| form of the amino- group, which can be transferred from
| amino-acids that are in excess to those that are
| deficient, to balance their proportions.
|
| However, the real required protein intake is frequently
| much larger than that needed to provide enough nitrogen.
| The required protein intake must be high enough so that
| the required intakes are satisfied for all of the
| essential amino-acids.
|
| So the recommended protein intake, which varies between
| studies, depending on methodology, from 0.8 to 1.2 g of
| protein per kilogram of body weight, is valid only for
| proteins from animal sources.
|
| The proteins from vegetables like potatoes or chickpeas,
| have an unbalanced amino-acid profile, so they must
| provide a higher protein quantity to also contain enough
| of their more scarce amino-acids.
|
| I am too lazy to make the computation now, but it is
| likely that a 75 kg human would have to eat no less than
| 5 kg of potatoes per day, i.e. more than 4000 calories,
| to get enough proteins, with enough of each amino-acid.
| Unless doing a lot of hard work, that would be
| impossible.
|
| About seitan, even if wheat has a high-protein content in
| comparison with most other cereals, where I live the
| price of wheat flour divided by its protein content is
| only 3 times less than the price of chicken breast
| divided by its protein content.
|
| However, proteins from wheat have only half of the lysine
| needed by humans, so you need a double quantity of wheat
| proteins. So correcting for the lysine content makes
| chicken breast only 1.5 times more expensive than wheat
| flour.
|
| If you add the value of the time lost with making seitan
| from wheat flour, it is hard to compete in price with
| chicken breast.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > protein + gluten
|
| gluten is protein.
| hirundo wrote:
| I'm in a cow county, but here both people and cows are
| outnumbered many times by elk and deer. A large part of the local
| economy is about supporting hunters from the cities.
|
| A local rancher told me that they make almost all of their money
| from hunting parties in elk season. They wouldn't bother with
| cows except that the cows improve the foraging for the elk,
| improving their business. The cows are cultivating, seed
| distribution and fertilization devices in service of the elk
| herds.
|
| I think that the more wild forage we can maintain along with our
| domesticated food system, the better. In paradise it's the rule
| rather than the exception.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "Where is there more livestock than people?"
|
| Earth.
| gus_massa wrote:
| It would be nice to repeat the maps using weight. The weight of a
| cow is like 700Kg (1500 pounds) and the weight of a chicken is
| like 3Kg (6 pounds). So a cow is like 250 chickens. (Can someone
| with CGI abilities make a gros image of a cow made of 250
| chickens?)
| loonster wrote:
| I think it would be more useful to track weight produced. This
| statistic is probably hard to track...
|
| A good proxy would be to multiply the number of animals by the
| Animal Unit Equivalents (AUE).
| bombcar wrote:
| Calories could be a good measure - a whole chicken appears to
| be about 1200 and a cow between 500,000 and 600,000 - so a
| cow is about 500 chickens or so.
| loonster wrote:
| Calories is a great metric. Better than mass. However, what
| I really want to see is calories produced per a unit of
| time. It takes about 8 weeks to raise a meat chicken and
| about 80 for beef cattle. 1 Cow = 50 chickens.
| sperm wrote:
| Or emissions (methane?). Iirc, sheep have the most emissions
| per pound.
| sushxbehshx wrote:
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| Kinda like this?
| https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/p0qws3/self...
| colaco wrote:
| Or the ratio of animal weight to human weight per county...
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| Denmark
|
| 5.8 million people, 13.5 million pigs
| yakubin wrote:
| Scotland
|
| 5.46 million people, 6.83 million sheep.
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(page generated 2022-07-17 23:01 UTC)