I turn crops into fertilizer after they’ve been turned into food. In fact, I am doing so as I post. 😤
Can we eat the humans, after we fattened them up?
sure, if they consent
Soylent Green
Turn the byproducts into animal fodder and biofuel
Zero waste
The issue with using byproducts as animal fodder is that ruminants produce a lot of methane while digesting them. This enteric fermentation in their stomachs accounts for around 6% of global greenhouse gas emissions, while the entire aviation industry sits at just 2-3%. If we give them more food that is harder to digest, they’ll emit even more methane per animal.
Biofuels make a lot of sense though. After extracting the fuel, the remaining digestate can be used to produce biochar or be put directly on fields as fertilizer, which is nice because synthetic fertilizers account for 1-2% of greenhouse gas emissions.
Another option is to burn the byproducts for heat or electricity in winter during short periods when there’s not enough wind and solar power to cover energy demand.
Slurp up the cow farts for fuel
I do tire of explaining to vegans that differences in soil quality mean that crops fit for human consumption cannot be grown everywhere and that making the best use of the land available often involves turning it into food via an intermediary
making the best use of the land
This is probably where we disagree
What do you propose we do with inarable land then?
There are a lot of uses for land that can’t grow food crops. It could be renaturalized for example.
I’m not sure if you’re aware, but the current human population cannot be sustained using only food grown on arable land
It absolutely could. Not with the current diet but if there was a shift to less meat then we could substantially reduce the amount of land used in food production.
If we switched to a 100% plant based diet, there would be a strict decrease in the amount of available food. Animals eat things besides food that could have gone to humans. Land that could be used for growing crops is rarely used for raising livestock.
Straight out not the case. lots of animals are on farmable land. Also animals eat lots of our crops eg 80% of the worlds soy. Here’s one (of many possible ones) reference stating that we would only need 25% of the current agricultural land if the world went vegan. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2022/01/28/if-everyone-were-vegan-only-a-quarter-of-current-farmland-would-be-needed
