[quote] You might want to have a hamburger while you can—beef is likely to become as pricey and exclusive as caviar over the next 40 years, predicts a UN agriculture expert. The production costs of raising cows, especially for water, are just too high to accommodate inexorable rises in world population and the hunger for beef, said Henning Steinfeld of the Food and Agriculture Organization.
By 2050, beef will cease to be a “mass product” and could become “the caviar of the future,” he told a conference in Argentina. “The necessary resources for the production of beef will be three, four, five times higher than those of chicken and pork.” As a result, “beef will be what salmon was 50 years ago.”[/quote]
[quote=“jArgon”]it takes 15,000 liters of water to produce 1 Kilo of beef. and then of course there is all the petroleum…
[/quote]
Respectfully, um, no, it doesn’t. Cows live wild and are caught once they reach 1-2 years old. They eat grass and herbs. essentially the only cost in management is their capture.
I think it’s high time we returned to days when meat was a luxury. I love meat and eat it a lot, in fact way too much. If it was expensive to eat a burger or i got a smaller portion of meat and more veg for my money I may just become healthier.
Intensive farming is making us all too complacent and it can’t be healthy eating all that hormone fed meat.
Hasn’t it always been the case that only the rich ever ate beef?
It’s only that until recently the rich were concentrated in the West. What we might expect is that the increase in the most affluent in emerging markets will displace beef consumption from the least affluent in the West.
Respectfully, um, no, it doesn’t. Cows live wild and are caught once they reach 1-2 years old. They eat grass and herbs. essentially the only cost in management is their capture.
Oh, perhaps you’re a corn-fed beef American.
anybody else see the problem there?[/quote]
respectfully, yes it does. and your “live wild & eat grass and herbs” is only still practiced in a tiny portion of the beef industry… factory farming is the norm for the large majority of the industry.
and cows “living wild” and being caught for beef? that’s one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard. where exactly do you think this fantasy of yours occurs? (and even if it does, the tiny fraction of the industry it accounts for is not even worth considering in the overall argument)
and places where cattle are still range fed, like South America, is because they chopped down a rainforest to make the land, and they must continue chopping it down to get decent new range.
70% of America’s grain goes to feeding livestock
30% of the rest of the world’s grain goes to feeding livestock
when over a billion people are starving, and 40-60 million children die a year due to starvation, the livestock industry is, to anyone being honest, criminal and utterly unethical on every level.
Yes, but starvation has nothing to do with the cattle industry. There’s more than enough food to feed the world. It’s politics at the local and regional level that is responsible.
Modern farming methods are freakshow horrible. But they have nothing to do with people not having enough food elsewhere.
[quote=“jArgon”][quote=“urodacus”]Respectfully, um, no, it doesn’t.
[/quote]respectfully, yes it does.[/quote]
[quote=“Annual Review of Environmental Resources”]The projected rapid growth in livestock production is a significant factor in increasing water demand, particularly owing to the demand for water to grow crops that are used as livestock feed, such as maize, other coarse grains, and soybeans (17). However, high estimates of livestock water consumption, such as the 100,000 liters of water per kilogram of beef production estimated by Pimentel et al.(18) for the United States, are not representative of most livestock systems. A well-documented analysis by Beckett & Oltjen (19)of the highly water-intensive U.S. feedlot beef production system shows that 3682 liters of water are required to produce 1 kilogram of boneless beef. This figure is much lower compared to other studies, i.e., 10,060 liters per kilogram (20), 100,000 liters per kilogram (18),and 20,559 liters per kilogram (21, 22). On the basis of Beckett & Oltjen’s findings (19), direct consumption of water accounts for only about 145 liters of water per kilogram of boneless beef, with the vast majority of water for beef production consumed by irrigated pasture and feed crops.[/quote]
jArgon, mate, I’m Australian, and in Australia beef is still raised the traditional way. Millions of head per year are raised wild, and by far the largest proportion of beef exports are raised without a dot of human intervention until the annual round-up.
and no land has been cleared in the process, as that’s essentially desert land anyway with low stocking rates. The only cost for most farmers is digging bores to reach water, and petrol for their helicopters for mustering.
I appreciate that Americans run meat factories in highly unsustainable fashion, raping the land of other countries for soy beans and corn, or razing entire forests in Costa Rica and Guatemala for McDonalds burgers, but Americans eat far too much in general and it shows. However, don’t blame us for your shortcomings.
[quote=“urodacus”]jArgon, mate, I’m Australian, and in Australia beef is still raised the traditional way. Millions of head per year are raised wild, and by far the largest proportion of beef exports are raised without a dot of human intervention until the annual round-up.
and no land has been cleared in the process, as that’s essentially desert land anyway with low stocking rates. The only cost for most farmers is digging bores to reach water, and petrol for their helicopters for mustering.
I appreciate that Americans run meat factories in highly unsustainable fashion, raping the land of other countries for soy beans and corn, or razing entire forests in Costa Rica and Guatemala for McDonalds burgers, but Americans eat far too much in general and it shows. However, don’t blame us for your shortcomings.
Thank you.[/quote]
You need to get back home and talk to some farmers. I was travelling with a couple last year from a community south of Melbourne (one journo one fitter, but both from farming backgrounds), and they said big bad farming practices had come to Oz. It’s all being hushed up to keep people like you happy but horrible overcrowding and inhumane conditions were creeping in. Too much business selling to emerging markets.
Your chicken farms, if nothing else, are as appalling as anywhere.
yeah, chicken farms everywhere suck. and pig farms too.
Beef is still not too bad up north, where i was referring to. the land is too marginal to do much else except run cattle at about 1-2 head per hectare, so there’s not much chance of industrialising that aspect of it.
dairies are indeed getting more high tech, but there’s not much decent dairy land around in places that get enough rain.
what we really should do is reduce the human population by 30-50%. that’d be much more sustainable. toss the stupid economic model of ‘growth at all costs’ out the window.
[quote=“urodacus”]yeah, chicken farms everywhere suck. and pig farms too.
Beef is still not too bad up north, where I was referring to. the land is too marginal to do much else except run cattle at about 1-2 head per hectare, so there’s not much chance of industrialising that aspect of it.
dairies are indeed getting more high tech, but there’s not much decent dairy land around in places that get enough rain.
what we really should do is reduce the human population by 30-50%. that’d be much more sustainable. toss the stupid economic model of ‘growth at all costs’ out the window.[/quote]
Grain feeding? The folks I was talking to said the sheep farming was getting particularly bad, with severe overcrowding which would suggest they were not being allowed to roam free and graze but fed.
I was really bummed out to hear that as I used to buy Australian beef and lamb as it seemed pretty much free range. I don’t mind eating animals that have not been raised like machines, by machines, for machines.
