Talk:Environmental impacts of animal agriculture

On the table under "Water Conservation" concerning the use of water by certain crops/meats, the average for "milk" has not been averaged, but rather the results of the studies have been added together. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.128.184.246 (talk) 22:01, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

The notion of "efficiency" employed by the anti-meat extremists is meaningless. It necessarily presumes that what farmers produce, and what people want to consume, are undifferentiated food calories. This simply isn't so. People don't want to consume undifferentiated food calories - they want to consume particular foods.

It is true that more resources go into producing a pound of beef than a pound of wheat, but so what? The two outputs not only are not nutritionally equivalent, they also aren't equivalent in the preferences of consumers, and that's what counts. To say that the extra resources that go into producing a pound of meat, vs. a pound of grain for direct human consumption, are "wasted" - inefficiently used - is akin to saying that the extra resources used to produce a Rolex, vs. a Timex, are wasted. The resources are not wasted. They are directed toward the production of something that yields more satisfaction to the consumer than what some alternate use would yield. 72.245.85.43 (talk) 08:36, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

I have a couple of objections to the comment above. Firstly the notion that meat production is an inefficient mean of feeding people based on the resources required to produce food is not simply proposed by "Anti-Meat Extremists". The UN FAO report entitled Livestock's Long Shadow bears out that many people who have studied food production and the degradation of resources that follows found meat to be ineficient. Secondly, in regards to a page that explores the Environmental Effects of Meat Production its is certainly not 'the preference of consumers that counts' as consumers can wnat anything they like, but they cannot escape the consequences of their product selections no matter how ignorant they are of their means of production. We shouldn't simply compare a pound of wheat to a pound of beef. It does provide a neat illustration of how protein produced in different ways uses different resources, it can be emphasised that much plant protein like grains and soya are then fed to beef (therin lies an inefficiency). Comparing the nutrition this simplistically is unhelpful and as no-one is suggesting we replace fields of cows with fields of wheat its a pointless distraction. And just because one can afford a Rolex, it doesn't follow that one must feel compelled to buy one. My Casio is sufficient for telling the time and I have been able to give money to charity. Then this leads to a digression into discussions about selfishness vs selflessness which is not on topic. Dman74 (talk) 13:16, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

The comment "that a pound of beef however, requires 12,000 gallons of water" is totally in correct as it assumes that every drop of water that falls onto a property ends up in beef. Very many beef cattle are totally raised on natural grasses where runoff water ends up in the sea.Cgoodwin (talk) 23:42, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

WikiProject Food and drink Tagging

This article talk page was automatically added with {{WikiProject Food and drink}} banner as it falls under Category:Food or one of its subcategories. If you find this addition an error, Kindly undo the changes and update the inappropriate categories if needed. The bot was instructed to tagg these articles upon consenus from WikiProject Food and drink. You can find the related request for tagging here . If you have concerns , please inform on the project talk page -- TinucherianBot (talk) 11:49, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

I just removed an assertion from the introduction that non-factory farming is more efficient in energy terms. I'm pretty sure that is false and it was still waiting for a citation from May 2008. Barnaby dawson (talk) 20:28, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

kangaroo bacteria

Can following be inserted to article

Researchers in Australia are looking into the possibilty of reducing methane from cattle and sheep by introducing digestive bacteria from kangaroo intestines into livestock

Offcourse replacing all meat by protein-crops is better, the above should be argued as a midterm solution to bridge things —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.245.189.98 (talk) 08:54, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

Article quality and neutrality

I deleted a recent edit that added possibly superfluous information without integrating it properly into the article. It was obvious the citations were from finding the first thing that came up on google. I am going to try to increase the citation quality on this page. It has to start with rejecting new low quality citations, especially when the information is unneeded. Also, I think the article definitely leans away from neutrality towards being anti-cow. Gregwebs (talk) 20:40, 31 August 2009 (UTC)

I agree the edit you reverted was needed because it was original research but what do you mean by citation quality? A source is usually reliable or not and supports a statement or not, rather than having a scale of quality from low to high. If you are going to remove content or make major changes it a good idea to gain consensus first. - Shiftchange (talk) 21:04, 31 August 2009 (UTC)

Oh, so the No Original Research policy means that the reversion was good. Wikipedia's guidelines clearly states what are the highest quality sources- scientific, peer reviewed journals. I am trying to move citations of this and other pages in that direction. New edits that are based on the first google result instead of scientific, peer reviewed journals will just move the articles in the opposite direction. - Gregwebs (talk) 22:34, 31 August 2009 (UTC)

"A 2006 study at the University of Chicago concluded that a person switching from a typical American diet to a vegan diet with the same number of calories would prevent the emission of 1485 kg of carbon dioxide. The difference exceeds that of an individual switching from a Toyota Camry to the hybrid Toyota Prius, and collectively amounts to over 6% of the total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.[15]"

Is most of this emissions from transportation of meat, though? This isn't really explained. How much of a difference would it make if meat transportation were switched to electric vehicles?

Unreferenced part of the section on benefits of free range hunting

The idea that hunting within the limits of capability of the environment is less harmful to the environment than intensive farming is not true. Any savings from free hunting are minuscule and there is hardly any species in the world, which was not driven on the edge of extinction, when being designated as a food (and money) source. Another thing is that that what we understand as intensive farming and its side effects, is not how farming should be performed in the first place. It is not common knowledge, that green house gas emissions could be reduced by hunting and fishing. If somebody proposed something like that, it would need a proper reference and signature. Atmapuri (talk) 14:21, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for bringing forth the need for citations in this section. It is important to discuss the role of hunting in the environmental impact of meat production. So while I don't like to see uncited statements, it would be worse to simply delete this content and put nothing in its place. Maybe you can come up with some citations that show how hunting effects the environment? Certainly green-house gases associated with hunting would be a complex issue. However, it is obvious that hunting normally uses existing land and ecosystems. As long as the land is capable of replenishing the hunted population, it is also obvious that hunting does not destroy the land. Certainly we should all be ashamed of the common phenomenon of humans devastating animal populations through hunting and driving them to extinction, however there is land where hunting is well managed. Gregwebs (talk) 19:49, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

I made hunting and fishing a separate section, noted potential bad consequences, and removed some (uncited) detail about good consequences. Gregwebs (talk) 20:00, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

THIS PAGE BEGS FOR NEUTRALITY TAG=

Come on, this reads straight of PETA. The whole entry reads like PROGANDA FOR Veganism. Please NPOV! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 167.206.60.106 (talk) 19:12, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

Edits to add discalimer to Livestock's Long Shadow report

These edits are still not being properly cited- the *published* article should be cited according to Wikipedias guidelines. Also, this is not a World Bank source. This is also a *much* lower quality source than the 2006 report and needs to be weighted as such. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Gregwebs (talk • contribs) 03:44, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

World Bank employee and World Bank are not the same. This is true. However, it still does deserve to be mentioned. So what would be your suggestion? Atmapuri (talk) 06:57, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Added POV Tag

I tagged this article with a POV tag for some very simple reasons. The first is this article has a significant amount causation/correlation confusion in the things it implicates as being part of meat production. Second it conflates a lot of things that are practices currently/somethings employed in meat production in all/some/few/nearly-no (Depending on the practice) countries as requisite parts of meat production. Third it has no analysis of the comparative energy efficiency and land productivity of attempting to grow things on that land that are directly human consumable in amounts that can feed the same number of people, it presupposes that every lb of animal feed grown means one lb of directly human consumable food isn't grown - this is a false assumption as much of the land that can be used for making feed is entirely unsuitable to growing things directly human consumable in anywhere near the same quantity as they can grow feed that can be fed to animals which are then fed to humans. It also doesn't even compare between different practices of raising livestock. For example concentration-farming/feed-lots of cows feeding them corn is why they have to be fed lots of antibiotics, whereas if you feed them grasses (their natural diet) they don't really need those antibiotics even on concentration.

As of right now this is a piece of vegetarianist/veganist propaganda, and harms environmental arguments by associating them with extremist BS. As an environmentalist I have a problem with dishonesty and being associated with extremists. This actually got me to login to my account for the first time in 3 or 4 years. Lordkazan (talk) 20:11, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

new information from the book Meat: A Benign Extravagance should be integrated into this article. it destroys most of the content. also see http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/06/meat-production-veganism-deforestation Lordkazan (talk) 13:26, 13 September 2010 (UTC)