Could We Still Have Enough Food In America If We Stopped Using Pesticides?

[kerbiloid]

3 hours ago, Nuke said:

im the smart one in my family, im also the biggest carnivore. coincidence, i think not.

Moreover, you have organized a gang of carnivores.

[Nuke]

6 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Moreover, you have organized a gang of carnivores.

well im also the cook so...

 

i give them the ultimatum where il make what they want if they do dishes. ive yet to see anyone take me up on the offer.

Edited July 16 by Nuke

[kerbiloid]

Just now, Nuke said:

6 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Moreover, you have organized a gang of carnivores.

well im also the cook so...

The alpha-beast.

[GluttonyReaper]

10 hours ago, darthgently said:

This is crucial.  Many activists like to speak in terms of plants being more "efficient" than livestock.  But that assumes that the meat is the only output.  Which is silly.  The "inefficiency" goes back into the soil as manure and rebuilding soil is a common good.  Nothing is really ever "wasted" forever in a planetary ecology.

A bit off-topic, but I believe the inefficiency that is usually being referred to here is immediate land-use and water consumption - i.e. short-term efficiencies of limited resources. As mentioned, this is specifically a problem with industrial meat farming, which needs high-nutrient plant inputs and vitamin supplements to maintain quality (e.g. soya from South America, which is mostly used as livestock feed), which would be more efficiently directly consumed by humans. The numbers I've seen thrown around (alas, unsourceable...) suggest a 5-10% transference of energy between trophic levels, so skipping one is always going to help in these cases.

Admittedly I'm not sure how much of that lost energy/mass is recoverable (and if social norms were different, we could do the same with human manure I suppose...), but it doesn't change the more immediate inefficiency of producing less usable calories per unit land used. And again, this only applies to mass industrial farming - I'm sure there's very reasonable ways of using livestock to produce nutrition from less farmable land, same as fishing.

[darthgently]

17 minutes ago, GluttonyReaper said:

A bit off-topic, but I believe the inefficiency that is usually being referred to here is immediate land-use and water consumption - i.e. short-term efficiencies of limited resources. As mentioned, this is specifically a problem with industrial meat farming, which needs high-nutrient plant inputs and vitamin supplements to maintain quality (e.g. soya from South America, which is mostly used as livestock feed), which would be more efficiently directly consumed by humans. The numbers I've seen thrown around (alas, unsourceable...) suggest a 5-10% transference of energy between trophic levels, so skipping one is always going to help in these cases.

Admittedly I'm not sure how much of that lost energy/mass is recoverable (and if social norms were different, we could do the same with human manure I suppose...), but it doesn't change the more immediate inefficiency of producing less usable calories per unit land used. And again, this only applies to mass industrial farming - I'm sure there's very reasonable ways of using livestock to produce nutrition from less farmable land, same as fishing.

I can guarantee you the manure from feedlots is a commercial product that is not wasted.  In fact, it probably is utilized in growing vegan crops to a significant degree.  Nothing is wasted

[darthgently]

Another factor frequently not taken into account is that the multi-stomach bovine digestive process is better at breaking down cellulose. 

A lot of energy from food in humans is used in the digestion of food.  Cellulose takes a lot more energy to digest.  Skipping the bovine means vegans often require more dietary calories to cover this digestion overhead.  And the vegan produces the methane instead of the cow, so net balance on that metric. 

Of course cattle eat a far higher amount of cellulose than a human, even a vegan, could ever tolerate, so I'm not saying vegans flatulate as much as a bovine. 

But the bovine can be raised on high cellulose grasses on unimproved land that don't require the delicate conditions that vegan crops like avocado, spinache, and such require.  And their presence improves the land in general

[kerbiloid]

The cow contains 100..200 kg of cellulose consuming bacteria in the largest chamber of the stomach.

The cow actually can't digest the cellulose, it herds the bacteria, feeds them with the cut grass, and then eats a mess of the bacterial wastes and the excessive bacteria.

Thus we can treat the cow as a bacterial colony inside a harvesting  sandcrawler.

Edited July 16 by kerbiloid