Yes, and odds are they are asking as a way to bring up the idea of how many animals are killed in order to harvest plant crops. If you had bothered to go to the link, it would have at least somewhat answered your question because the short version is: fundamentally, significantly less than the amount of animals killed to produce meat.
All it takes is to think it through. If harvesting crops kills a lot of animals (which as the link shows, is already significantly less than some assholes made it up to be), then raising animals for food automatically kills even more animals because it takes way more crops to feed the animals that are raised for meat or dairy, than it takes to just feed humans directly.
about 85% of all soybeans are pressed for oil for human uses. but a soybean is only about 20% oil altogether. that leaves 69% of the soybeans as industrial waste. feeding that industrial waste to animals is actually conserving resources.
so it’s not even true that the land used to make food for animals isn’t used to make food for people: it’s the same land.
That makes no sense. Every part of a soybean can be made for human uses - textured vegetable protein (tvp) is de-fatted soy, for example. 7% of soy is going for human consumption, because that’s how much demand there is for it. Just as the vast majority of soy production is being used to raise animals for food, because that’s how the economics works. You can see the cited study and more in greater detail in this article - which also shows how cattle farming is in and of itself the single largest driver of Amazon deforestation.
And this article is a primer on feed conversion ratios, which demonstrates why eating plants directly will always be fundamentally more efficient and better for the environment than raising animals for food ever can be.
i’m so glad you used this. you can find this graph there that shows that almost all the soy we feed to animals is the industrial waste from oil production
Yes, and odds are they are asking as a way to bring up the idea of how many animals are killed in order to harvest plant crops. If you had bothered to go to the link, it would have at least somewhat answered your question because the short version is: fundamentally, significantly less than the amount of animals killed to produce meat.
All it takes is to think it through. If harvesting crops kills a lot of animals (which as the link shows, is already significantly less than some assholes made it up to be), then raising animals for food automatically kills even more animals because it takes way more crops to feed the animals that are raised for meat or dairy, than it takes to just feed humans directly.
your assumption of bad faith is itself bad faith
This isn’t formal debate school. Welcome to the real internet.
this is a thought-terminating cliche
Ed is quoting some pretty misleading statistics to support your point. if this is the best that you have, you might want to reconsider your position.
Would you care to elaborate on what’s misleading about these statistics?
about 85% of all soybeans are pressed for oil for human uses. but a soybean is only about 20% oil altogether. that leaves 69% of the soybeans as industrial waste. feeding that industrial waste to animals is actually conserving resources.
so it’s not even true that the land used to make food for animals isn’t used to make food for people: it’s the same land.
That makes no sense. Every part of a soybean can be made for human uses - textured vegetable protein (tvp) is de-fatted soy, for example. 7% of soy is going for human consumption, because that’s how much demand there is for it. Just as the vast majority of soy production is being used to raise animals for food, because that’s how the economics works. You can see the cited study and more in greater detail in this article - which also shows how cattle farming is in and of itself the single largest driver of Amazon deforestation.
https://ourworldindata.org/soy
And this article is a primer on feed conversion ratios, which demonstrates why eating plants directly will always be fundamentally more efficient and better for the environment than raising animals for food ever can be.
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/peril-and-promise/2022/03/feed-conversion-ratios-help-explain-meats-outsized-climate-impact/
what does this have to do with what we are discussing, or how many mice were killed for that bun?
the vast majority of soy (85%) is pressed for oil.
sure, but there are not enough people who want to eat soycake for the amount of oil that we produce. so giving it to animals is as good a use as any.
i’m so glad you used this. you can find this graph there that shows that almost all the soy we feed to animals is the industrial waste from oil production
like I don’t know who earthling ed is