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this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2024
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Growing cattle has also had a massive impact on the environment. And you often need more land for animal based materials because you both need land for the animals and the land to grow food for the animals. With cotton at least you just need land for the cotton.
I dare you to travel to Uzbekistan and see for yourself what's needed to grow cotton for the whole region.
Then maybe not cotton and instead hemp
Hemp and also linen are even harder to grow than cotton, though much of it is due to not as advanced machinery for harvesting and processing. Hemp also sucks as a material for clothing, to make it wearable you have to treat it quite heavily or it's scratchy AF.
Taking production out of the equation linen is the best material of the three: Much better moisture regulation than cotton, only real downside is that it crinkles easily but it also crinkles elegantly so wear it with pride and you'll be fine.
Production-wise the best alternative right now is modal, that is, basically, synthesised cotton, raw material is anything that contains cellulose. Nasty chemicals are involved but in modern processes it's all closed-loop, the nasty stuff all stays within the factory.
Oh, one often overlooked factor: Seams. Modal is better than cotton at being yarn because the cellulose fibres are much longer but nothing compares to the likes of polyester when it comes to not coming apart. I don't think there's an alternative yet, either you use polyester and make the whole garment non-biodegradable or you use modal and live with the reduced durability. Though one idea would be to aggressively get rid of seams, you can knit yarn into any shape whatsoever. Wait: Silica thread is a thing. Usually only used for extreme applications (think firefighter gear), also uses some chemicals to make it usable in sewing machines and it just won't ever hold a knot so when it comes apart it comes apart completely, but it's essentially fancy stone, just like computer chips: Doesn't really biodegrade but it doesn't matter that it doesn't, either.
Another overlooked factor is stretch. There's no natural alternative to elasthan, so no yoga pants or stretch jeans. Tons of stuff nowadays contains elasthan, often just a bit for a tiny bit of stretch simply because it's more comfortable.
This. Y'all should checkout Saintdrew's discussion on crops
I know nothing about growing hemp, but it sounds like what a stoner would say
It is more resource and space efficient than cotton, and can grow in a wide variety of climates. It grows kind of like, idk, a weed. It can be made into comfortable textiles and used in the same application are cotton. Robust plant. The difference between hemp and cannabis is the THC content.
Why is this always brought up, stop spreading this. Animals usually are not fed grain unless it's harvesting time. We also do not grow food just to feed them. The grain we feed animals is shit you cannot eat. It's roots/stalks/stems/bad/rotted plant matter. It's the leftovers from the greens we can consume. Most animals also are raised on land that is not suitable for crops, rocky/hilly/weak topsoil land.
Mate, I have three chickens at home and I feed them a scratch mix that is mostly grain. I think you’re talking out of your arse, and I strongly doubt you have any actual animal husbandry experience.
Your chickens are definitely on a different diet than factory farmed ones, haha
Sure, it’s different to cage hens. But it’s the exact kind of feed that’s used for free range farm chooks.
Edit: I literally get it at a farm supply store because it’s way cheaper than a pet shop.
Well it's both. Many animals can eat a very wide diverse mixture of foods. Like cows, they can eat grass, but also hay or grains. So it could be that you're both right.
I'm not an expert though.
Animals products are less efficient for a simple energy reason. Animals produce heat which radiates away as lost energy, and they rely on consuming autotrophs. All life gets its energy from the sun, we as animals get it one or two down the food chain from plants or other animals (which are also eating plants). Animal-based products are simply less efficient.
You can think this all you want, but you cannot consume what they do, you also cannot grow crops usually where livestock are raised. Crops need a pretty flat chunk of land, livestock don't.
Except for the deforestation needed to increase pasture area and for growing more feed. Destroying habitats and pushing indigenous people further from their homes. Meat on a large scale doesn't work because it is energetically less efficient. Farmed animals produce waste products like methane which are large contributors to global warming. Even if the land used by livestock was completely unusable for other purposes, they would still be polluting the environment through eutrophication and destroying locally endangered species.
Everything you just said...is the same shit that happens for plants as well. Deforestation isn't something that happens only with livestock. It also only really exists now in poor countries for people who are trying to survive by any means. You also are assuming that plants don't use nutrients from the soil or that the ground has to be fertilized or sprayed with pesticides or that large machinery has to be used to harvest it.
You forget that the food required to make even small quantities of meat is much higher than just growing plants for human. Better to directly eat the energy produced by autotrophs. Deforestation doesn't happen in "poor countries" just so people can survive, it happens because corporations lobby the government of corrupt countries like Brazil so they can destroy habitats for feed and pastures.
Meat production is a simple maths problem to see that wasted energy used by livestock (to survive and grow) is lost energy.
Let me know how it works out for you eating grass, brush and stalks and roots of plants, that's what livestock mainly eat.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013
All you did was step around the problem. I am not arguing that what is fed to livestock should be fed to humans, I am saying that livestock take up useful space, pollute the air with methane (which is near to 100x a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2), that the lands are cleared of their native plants to feed the ever growing meat industry, and on a large scale animal feed has to come from somewhere (which is why I bring up the inefficiency of not sourcing the energy from autotrophs). Animal feed may be inedible, but it is also grown specifically to be feed. I am not suggesting the complete veganizing of the whole planet, just the meat on a large scale is killing the planet.
Ok but we use twice as much land to grow animal feed than we do human food and it has all the same drawbacks. And then the meat we get still only provides 18% of our calories.
Why it is true that you’ll graze non-butcher animals on the leftover stalks and such, we absolutely finish beef and pork on grain and a big portion of the grain harvest is for animal feed.
Almost all of the grain we feed is what I just explained. All of that is ground up and a binding agent (usually molasses) is applied. We do not grow crops just to feed to animals, it's a complete waste of land. We grow crops for our consumption and use first and whats left over is turned into grain to feed to animals we then butcher and eat.
I can only speak to the USA, but in my area the number one crop in this area is dent corn and soya. Of the corn grown here 40% goes into ethanol production, and 36% is used for animal feed.
Commercial poultry production heavily relies on grain -- typically corn. It's the primary ingredient in the processed feed overwhelmingly used for commercial poultry, as seen in this typical mix.
We absolutely grow crops specifically to feed livestock. And this is ignoring the 52 million acres used for alfalfa and hay-grass.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013
Just because they feed corn doesn't mean it's edible to humans, a lot of the corn grown is left to dry on the plant and then harvested. We do this so we don't end up with another famine. Not saying corn is what we should be growing for that, but it's a very easy and hardy plant.
Food is grown specifically to feed livestock though, it would be a pretty weird trophic pyramid for them to survive on our waste unless you went back to a time where people killed their one pig for the year and salted it away. In our country, the land degradation from clearing hill country for grazing has led to enormous biodiversity loss and a self-fufilling prophecy of eroded weak topsoil that people claim isn't good for anything else (though it could still be rewilded and in other cultures and times would be terraced and swaled to support plant crops).
??? But it's not, we do not grow crops for livestock in any meaningful amounts. It's miniscule what is grown to feed livestock only.
Stop making stuff up, please. Idk what you do on your farm but globally we absolutely grow a lot of food for animals.
It's brought up because it's true.
research
edit: link doesn't appear to be working, but it's the paper by Emily Cassidy called 'redefining agricultural yields'
But it's not, these papers and studies all assume the land that cattle graze on is suitable for crops. You cannot grow crops on a massive hill properly. It's why the all the states that are flat usually have crops grown and all the hilly/dryer states raise livestock. No one is saying livestock can fully replace plants, but to many think we can replace everything with plants only. This is complete junk science.
This has nothing to do with grazing land. This is crop suitable land being used to grow crops that is then fed to livestock. There are no assumptions being made and it is not junk science, you're just not very good at reading.
Except it's not, we are not growing crops just to feed to animals, as I've explained multiple times now, grain is created from the shit we cannot consume. Why is this so difficult to understand?
It's difficult because it's just very untrue and wrong. This is very widely documented, grains are absolutely grown just to feed animals. The majority of corn and soy in the US is grown to feed animals. I'm not sure why you're so insistent on something that can so easily be looked up, you don't even need vegan sources, the animal ag industry reports this stuff.
Please provide the numbers then. Pretty sure someone already posted the numbers, in which only 5% is grown for livestock only.
You're pretty funny, before you said they only graze, then you said we simply don't grow food for cattle, now you've admitted we do based on some random dude pulling 5% out of a hat.
info you won't read
They cite a paper that puts the land used purely for growing feed at about 38% of our cropland. If you combine it with grazing land it goes up to about 80%. Cropland for food humans eat is just 16%.
Habitable land is not the same as the ability to grow food on it.
So most stats that are pulled out of someones ass, because they came up with a system that says all feed we provide to animals is more than the tonnage we eat ourselves. No shit we feed way more grain to a 2k lb cow. It's 2k fucking lbs. It doesn't even provide a breakout of what isn't actually human consumable, because it's bullshit stats.
And if I combine the road as part of my land in front of my farm I have more land...this is fucking stupid. Grazing land is not usually suitable for plants. It's why crops are not planted usually in places that are rocky or have to many hills.
You're source is bullshit.
Umm yeah? No one said it was.
When talking about feed grown specifically for livestock it doesn't actually matter if it's human consumable or not, it's land that could be used to grow human consumable food. They make the distinction between cropland and grazing land pretty clear.
Also you don't just get to dismiss science when it doesn't suit whatever you think. You asked for numbers, there they are.
There are things that can be done with grazing land other than planting crops and almost all of them are better for the environment than having livestock graze on it. They are just talking about the total land at that point, not trying to convince you of anything, stop reading everything so defensively.
And also it's a pretty credible source and it's definitely better than your anecdotal 'we literally don't grow food for cattle at all, ever' nonsense.
We use more than twice as much land to grow feed for livestock than we do for humans, and the livestock only supplies 18% of global calories. It's an inefficient use of land full stop. When there are more people we will need more efficient sources of food. This might mean farming more human food and therefore less animal feed.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013
You are misreading that 5% claim. 95% of global livestock are fed food grown specifically to feed them. 5% are fed the way you claim.
Which is not true, hell even the users other source doesn't say that. If we grew 95% of our crops to feed animals, there wouldn't be a high price on livestock, it would be a lot cheaper and vegetables would be extremely expensive. I can buy 10lbs of potatoes for like $5 still.
What you say is true for 5% of animal feed globaly.
That 46% is land whose biodiversity and ecosystems have been intentionally crushed for the meat industry.
Beef is fed (extra) soy. A lot of porc as well
I mean you can make leather from all kinds of skins. And there's one... animal... that we have a particularly large amount of on earth and we regularly have to get rid of a significnat number of deceased of without currently re-using their skin. Hrm... cool idea for an industrialist horror movie...