Thanks, but I believed you that he said it, I was asking for any sort of source to back it up. The argument he makes in that interview is terrible and should in no way inform your opinion unless you have actual evidence to back it up.
You talk about the forests of scotland, the vast majority of these are monoculture plantations with absolutely terrible biodiversity. By far the largest producers of meat in scotland are factory farms where animals are fed using things like soy, only a minority of livestock entering the food market are reared anything like sustainably.
There is nowhere near enough land to grass feed the amount of ruminants that we consume, so feed crops need to be grown or imported.
Cart before horse - before industrial scale animal farming relatively little soy oil was produced for human consumption. If we weren’t growing soy to use it mostly for animal feed we would grow things like palm oil, which grows in the same climate and yields something like 14x as many calories per acre on the same land.
Edit: Or instead of growing soy with the objective of making animal feed (with the added bonus of getting some oil from it) we could grow crops which have far higher calorific yields like maize, potatoes etc.
Which would be an argument against using palm instead of soy if we grew soy primarily for its oil, rather than gaining the oil as a byproduct of growing soy to feed animals.
over 80% of soy is pressed for oil. they press it in an oil press. The byproduct of that process is soy meal or soy cake. The oil is only about 20% of the bean but makes up about half of its crop value. soybeans are grown for oil and because they rotate with corn. they help fixate nitrogen for other crops and they produce oil. The fact that we’re able to also feed the byproduct of the oil production to animals is a conservation of resources.
I’m open to any answer in this; but I think he misses the point here that every animal in itself would need a field of grass in food volume to survive.
No matter how you put it, it seems to me that adding an extra animal to the equation requires more food/water/space, not less.
When you’re adding a cow to an existing wild field, the field and its inhabitants don’t disappear. When you start planting crops in that field, you destroy the whole associated ecosystem.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/interview-with-crocodile-2001-04-18/
Thanks, but I believed you that he said it, I was asking for any sort of source to back it up. The argument he makes in that interview is terrible and should in no way inform your opinion unless you have actual evidence to back it up.
I’ve described some real world examples in a different comment https://lemmy.world/comment/10805817
You talk about the forests of scotland, the vast majority of these are monoculture plantations with absolutely terrible biodiversity. By far the largest producers of meat in scotland are factory farms where animals are fed using things like soy, only a minority of livestock entering the food market are reared anything like sustainably.
There is nowhere near enough land to grass feed the amount of ruminants that we consume, so feed crops need to be grown or imported.
You’re just plain wrong.
About which part?
Everything. Apart from monoculture forests. But it’s better this way than no forests at all just a century ago.
the vast majority of the soy fed to animals is the byproduct of pressing soybeans for oil.
Cart before horse - before industrial scale animal farming relatively little soy oil was produced for human consumption. If we weren’t growing soy to use it mostly for animal feed we would grow things like palm oil, which grows in the same climate and yields something like 14x as many calories per acre on the same land.
https://www.soyinfocenter.com/HSS/soybean_crushing1.php
Edit: Or instead of growing soy with the objective of making animal feed (with the added bonus of getting some oil from it) we could grow crops which have far higher calorific yields like maize, potatoes etc.
I don’t think palm rotates with corn, so I don’t believe it would be grown instead of soy beans.
Which would be an argument against using palm instead of soy if we grew soy primarily for its oil, rather than gaining the oil as a byproduct of growing soy to feed animals.
over 80% of soy is pressed for oil. they press it in an oil press. The byproduct of that process is soy meal or soy cake. The oil is only about 20% of the bean but makes up about half of its crop value. soybeans are grown for oil and because they rotate with corn. they help fixate nitrogen for other crops and they produce oil. The fact that we’re able to also feed the byproduct of the oil production to animals is a conservation of resources.
I’m open to any answer in this; but I think he misses the point here that every animal in itself would need a field of grass in food volume to survive.
No matter how you put it, it seems to me that adding an extra animal to the equation requires more food/water/space, not less.
When you’re adding a cow to an existing wild field, the field and its inhabitants don’t disappear. When you start planting crops in that field, you destroy the whole associated ecosystem.