How do you know for that sure it will reduce the number of animal lives and reduce CO2? Farming the plants needed to produce this fake meat takes up land, potentially (and most likely) more land needed to produce equal amounts of meat.
Unless they are running a completely solar operation and managing their farms using a system of rotational grazing that sequesters CO2, they most certainly are emitting it.
I see this as only mildly better than CAFOs. Employing holistic management techniques is still the best, and unfortunately, under appreciated way to produce meat in an ethical, sustainable way that also generates new fertile soil and sequesters carbon/methane as a side effect.
I've studied the amount of energy and water necessary to produce beef extensively, both at university and professionally, and I can say from experience that it would be extremely difficult for something like the impossible burger to consume more energy and water than the equivalent amount of actual meat.
Meat is expensive in energy and water because it takes huge amounts of vegetable matter and water for a period of _years_ to get to a point where it's consumable; by contrast, said vegetable matter can be produced in typically less than one year.
Did you study industrial beef production or grass-based holistic management? As far as I'm aware, the latter isn't taught at schools (yet). Although the technique is very old, and based on nature's natural cycle of herd movement, it only caught on again in the early 2000s.
How will said vegetable matter get it's nutrients year after year as the soil it's growing on gets eroded? Wouldn't external fertilizer, pesticides, etc need to be brought in? Doesn't creating that expend huge amounts of energy on it's own?
To be honest, it doesn't make that much of a difference when we compare the cost of calories from vegetable matter to the cost of calories from meat (and, when we're talking about a few ounces of organic matter for a burger, that is basically what we're talking about).
Sure, you have to worry about soil erosion, but by the same token you have to consider the fact that a single cow has a large grazing area. Fertilizers, pesticides etc. are optional but not strictly required, and again don't really change the bottom line.
Could you please enlighten me on how land gets fertilized on it's own without grazing herbivores to create a proper soil micro-biome?
Sure cows need grazing land, but they don't require all the external inputs an industrial soybean farm, for instance, needs. All they require is land, sunlight, electric fences, and some water if rainfall is inadequate or the soil is in bad shape due to prior mismanagement or desertification.
>Could you please enlighten me on how land gets fertilized on it's own without grazing herbivores to create a proper soil micro-biome?
You just keep their shit, let it decay, microorganisms flourish, and then spread it over the fields. Also switching plants regularily helps keeping decent amount of nitrogen in the soil.
>Sure cows need grazing land, but they don't require all the external inputs an industrial soybean farm, for instance, needs
This only works for extensive breeding, which is no more than 20% in the usa [1]. Sure, these eat hay in the winter, but thats not sufficient to keep animals fat enough. Inside their diet basically is the same as others, which is 50kg of corn silage, and some 2-5 kg of dehydrated soy protein. Per day. Good luck producing as much waste as a cow during her life time.
nb : I live and studied veterinary medicine in Europe, where we don't grow soy and import it from south america mostly (USA grows a lot already, idk if its autosufficient though). So yeah, deforestation exists so we can eat beef :)
You're saying grazing is zero input but e.g. a soy bean farm is not. This whole comparison is off.
A soy bean farm is a bad idea, firstly. To maintain balance, you wouldn't just want to farm soy beans.
Next, grass doesn't just magically appear. It too needs nutrients.
Cow manure is one way to improve soil nutrients, but Permaculture shows us many more ways to keep the cycle flowing.
In the end, the best picture is actually that the cows grazing and the soy beans exist together in a larger system of many other products that work together in providing nutrients that the others need.
Cows, though, are ultimately unnecessary for a Permaculture style system, and we can grow food without them. Then they can just be there as our friends and participate in our agricultural systems as fertilizers, if circumstances happen that way.
Everything I'm talking about is based on Permaculture. From the Wikipedia page on Permaculture [1]:
Animals, domestic or wild are a critical component of any wild or designed sustainable ecosystem. Research indicates that without the animal’s participation and contribution, ecological integrity is diminished or impossible. Some of the activities that contribute to the system include: foraging to cycle nutrients, clear fallen fruit, weed maintenance, spreading seeds, and pest maintenance. The nutrients are cycled by animals, transformed from their less digestible form (such as grass or twigs) into more nutrient-dense manure.
Fertilizer requires manure. Without manure you need synthetic fertilizer, which breaks the natural feedback loop and no longer good Permaculture practice.
Sure grass doesn't magically appear on it's own, but it can when you rotate some ruminants around from paddock to paddock. I have a friend who has a business doing this. She drives around a truck full of sheep and revitalizes land that has been turned to desert due to overgrazing or mismanagement [2].
> How will said vegetable matter get it's nutrients year after year as the soil it's growing on gets eroded?
1. It won't be eroded if you practice good farming, e.g. Permaculture
2. The meat industry is horrendously worse at regeneration of land than the worst farm practices
3. How else do you expect nutrients arrive in soil? It's a process that happens naturally very easily and just needs to be managed
Are you sure? Cows eat plants. The footprint from cows is largely due to the fact that you need 14 pounds of grain per pound of cow, if I remember correctly. Unless these burgers are somehow taking 14 pounds of grain to produce per pound of burger, I think we're in a better place.
That said, eliminating cows I still don't think will help the environment. That freed up land will be bought and used for some other purpose. It's natural capitalism. If you want to fix the environment, you need heavy penalities / taxes for nonsustainable resource usage. That's the only way.
Cows don't need grain. Grain feeding is part of industrial meat production that is highly detrimental to the environment. Feeding cows grass (and rotating them) though has the total opposite effect. It creates soil that can hold more water and sequester carbon. So it eliminates the need for grain production because cows simply eat grass while naturally fertilizing it.
> Farming the plants needed to produce this fake meat takes up land, potentially (and most likely) more land needed to produce equal amounts of meat.
And it will often take up land that is more fertile, and as such has a higher biodiversity cost, than what is needed for grazing animals (which can be done on land more barren or harder to farm).
It is often forgotten that you can herd animals in ways that coexist with the rest of the ecosystem, while farming plant based food (especially products like grains or soy) requires you to raze all existing life in the area you wish to use for farmland reducing it to a monoculture with no room for diversity.
(But it should be made clear that this only counts for grazing animals. Industrial meat production where you feed the animals grains gives you the worst of both worlds).
>>potentially (and most likely) more land needed to produce equal amounts of meat
>Please explain this in more detail.
Sure! Plants are much less nutrient dense that animals. So for them to create fake meat that's equally nutrient dense as real meat, their farms have to be adequately large. You need a ton of plants to achieve the density of meat. Animals on land however are already nutrient dense. The only physical space they need is enough room to graze.
>>and sequesters carbon/methane as a side effect
>I have not heard of a farming practice that sequesters methane released from ruminants. Can you provide more information?
Scientists and farmers in this area can do a much better job explaining it than I [1], [2], [3].
You should become familiar with the energy pyramid. It's an order of magnitude more efficient to extract energy from plants than to pass the plant energy through animals first. https://www.brainpop.com/science/energy/energypyramid/
You're right that animal-based foods are much more calorie-dense than plant-based foods. But an animal contains roughly 1/10 of the calories of all the plants that collectively went into feeding it.
The animal's only energy source is plants. Some portion of that energy goes into producing muscle and organ tissue. Some of it is converted to heat. The rest is used for respiration, digestion, thinking, walking around, dreaming, and all the other ongoing processes of life. Animals don't undergo photosynthesis, nor do they spontaneously generate energy.
Unless there's something else you're getting at here. Energy loss and trophic levels is a pretty well-understood idea.
Admittedly, there is a bit more nuance to the issue; for example, a cow can produce milk and meat from grass, which, for humans, creates available nutrients where there were none before. However, we could also plant that field of grass with corn or potatoes and get many more calories for the same amount of water and sunlight.
Unless they are running a completely solar operation and managing their farms using a system of rotational grazing that sequesters CO2, they most certainly are emitting it.
I see this as only mildly better than CAFOs. Employing holistic management techniques is still the best, and unfortunately, under appreciated way to produce meat in an ethical, sustainable way that also generates new fertile soil and sequesters carbon/methane as a side effect.