The Future of Protein?
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@nzzp said in The Future of Protein?:
relevant:
Yes, plant-based meat is better for the planet
The environmental debate over meatless meat, explained.
Fuck me
Agenda much?
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@mikethesnow said in The Future of Protein?:
@nzzp said in The Future of Protein?:
relevant:
Yes, plant-based meat is better for the planet
The environmental debate over meatless meat, explained.
Fuck me
Agenda much?
it has - but it also has a bunch of useful information on the environmental impacts of meat vs non-meat.
What I found really interesting is that chicken has a very low carbon footprint compared to fake meat. Really, with the beef the main issue is methane... which is a very short lived greenhouse gas (but pretty nasty)
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@ploughboy That's good to hear, not sure how they will overcome the land, water, feed issues though. I'm not sure beef will ever be as climate friendly as chicken or plant based and that could be the long term issue for the beef industry.
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@mikethesnow said in The Future of Protein?:
@nzzp said in The Future of Protein?:
relevant:
Yes, plant-based meat is better for the planet
The environmental debate over meatless meat, explained.
Fuck me
Agenda much?
Raised some very interesting points though no? My take away is if we want to help the planet we need to eat less beef and favour chicken.
The issue is people will not change behaviour even though we know how bad it is for the environment.
Ideally there should be some sort of carbon tax on foods that have a big impact on climate. Beef for example should be much more expensive than it is which may help reduce demand.
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@chimoaus Has anyone got a reasonably simplified resource that shows how beef farming Is not carbon neutral
obviously all the carbon produced by agriculture and horticulture, initially was souced from the atmosphere in the first place, so is it as simple as C02 ->C02 + CH4 where CH4 has a higher effective warming factor?
Other things at play here other than just a one factor approach.
Diversity of food sources is very important for a number of reasons. especially with monoculture farming if we are heavily reliant on pea/soy a bad season or new disease puts food supply at huge risk. you want as much diversity of food as possible to be resiliant to volatility. Cropping in particular can be heavily effected by bad weather at the wrong time, as we are seeing with kumara farming atm. where last year they had there biggest season ever.
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@muddyriver Have a read of the article posted above, should have some answers there. My understanding is most of the mono crops grown are actually fed to animals for us to then eat.
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@tim Agreed, and perhaps will be a market angle in the future for NZ Beef. Still hard to escape the emissions, water use, manure etc.
Australia has a lot more feed lots than many people realise and I happen to live not far from one. Thankfully I am far enough away theat the smell doesn't hit us but when driving past on certain days reminds me of driving past the slaughterhouse on a bad day.
I also think most land clearing in Australia and particularly QLD is for livestock. Australia I believe is one of the worst land clearing nations yet we are quick to condemn Brazil etc.
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can you back that up?
As someone who spends a bit of time on Qld cattle stations, i don't see a lot of evidence. Farmers certainly aren't bulldozing the Daintree to run cows. Those central and North Qld stations are the size of small countries with sparse tree cover as it is. Fuck all grows out west, it's hot and dry.
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@mariner4life yea flying over that place i dont know how cattle even survive
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@mariner4life said in The Future of Protein?:
can you back that up?
As someone who spends a bit of time on Qld cattle stations, i don't see a lot of evidence. Farmers certainly aren't bulldozing the Daintree to run cows. Those central and North Qld stations are the size of small countries with sparse tree cover as it is. Fuck all grows out west, it's hot and dry.
Australia cleared 3.5 million hectares of land in nine years. Check out the state-by-state breakdown
We've been compared with some of the worst countries on earth for land clearing, yet Australia's National Greenhouse Accounts data shows an increase in tree cover in Australia over the last 10 years. So what is actually going on with land clearing in Australia?
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@chimoaus said in The Future of Protein?:
@mariner4life said in The Future of Protein?:
can you back that up?
As someone who spends a bit of time on Qld cattle stations, i don't see a lot of evidence. Farmers certainly aren't bulldozing the Daintree to run cows. Those central and North Qld stations are the size of small countries with sparse tree cover as it is. Fuck all grows out west, it's hot and dry.
Australia cleared 3.5 million hectares of land in nine years. Check out the state-by-state breakdown
We've been compared with some of the worst countries on earth for land clearing, yet Australia's National Greenhouse Accounts data shows an increase in tree cover in Australia over the last 10 years. So what is actually going on with land clearing in Australia?
What do they define as forest? IMHO there's a huge difference between pristine rainforest and scrub land.
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@chimoaus said in The Future of Protein?:
@mariner4life said in The Future of Protein?:
can you back that up?
As someone who spends a bit of time on Qld cattle stations, i don't see a lot of evidence. Farmers certainly aren't bulldozing the Daintree to run cows. Those central and North Qld stations are the size of small countries with sparse tree cover as it is. Fuck all grows out west, it's hot and dry.
Australia cleared 3.5 million hectares of land in nine years. Check out the state-by-state breakdown
We've been compared with some of the worst countries on earth for land clearing, yet Australia's National Greenhouse Accounts data shows an increase in tree cover in Australia over the last 10 years. So what is actually going on with land clearing in Australia?
From that ABC article:
Despite the clearing of more than 3.5 million hectares nationally during the 2010-2018 period, according to the National Greenhouse Accounts(NGA) data there has been a net increase in tree cover in Australia during that time.
To get to that conclusion, they have compared the amount of cleared land (3.78 million hectares) with the amount of land regrown (4.19 million hectares), to come up with a "net forest clearing" figure of negative-401,000 hectares.
Again, the lion's share of that regrowth — 2.7 million hectares —has reportedly happened in Queensland, and to a lesser extent in New South Wales. -
if that article is right, and it seems to tie itself in knots to say that the data is hazy
then only 10% or so of clearing is of "forest" 30 years or older.
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There was an article in the Herald the other day about a startup making cheese with casein protein expressed in yeast. There are other companies doing this, for ice cream too.
This is a more interesting and economically/technically feasible application of biotechnology for animal product alternatives than growing mammalian cells.
Impossible Meat already to this with a heme protein (from soy bean plant roots, expressed in pichia pastoris) to simulate the "bleeding" of myoglobin containing muscle juice in cooked beef.
Will be interesting to look into the economics. I have a related idea I am interested in exploring.
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@tim said in The Future of Protein?:
There was an article in the Herald the other day about a startup making cheese with casein protein expressed in yeast. There are other companies doing this, for ice cream too.
This is a more interesting and economically/technically feasible application of biotechnology for animal product alternatives than growing mammalian cells.
Impossible Meat already to this with a heme protein (from soy bean plant roots, expressed in pichia pastoris) to simulate the "bleeding" of myoglobin containing muscle juice in cooked beef.
Will be interesting to look into the economics. I have a related idea I am interested in exploring.
Sounds interesting, I am sure once it is affordable and tastes similar consumers will make the switch to the environmentally sustainable option. Also, countries that import most of their animal meat will love the ability to create their own food supply.
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@mariner4life said in The Future of Protein?:
if that article is right, and it seems to tie itself in knots to say that the data is hazy
then only 10% or so of clearing is of "forest" 30 years or older.
The problem is it takes a fucken long time to replace 30+ year old forest and its ecosystems. That 10% in QLD is 370,900 hectares of forest, that is a fucken tragedy. Sure, you can plant some trees, but Koalas and most native fauna can't survive in these trees planted in offsets.
I have no idea why we should be allowed to clear native forest when so much of the country has already been cleared. We should be trying to be more efficient with the land we have.
I think the long term solution will be for the Govt to pay some sort of incentive for forested land people own. If farmers or landholders get rewarded for regeneration and forest then they will be less likely to chop it down.
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@chimoaus said in The Future of Protein?:
@mariner4life said in The Future of Protein?:
if that article is right, and it seems to tie itself in knots to say that the data is hazy
then only 10% or so of clearing is of "forest" 30 years or older.
The problem is it takes a fucken long time to replace 30+ year old forest and its ecosystems. That 10% in QLD is 370,900 hectares of forest, that is a fucken tragedy. Sure, you can plant some trees, but Koalas and most native fauna can't survive in these trees planted in offsets.
At a guess, 30+ years?
I have no idea why we should be allowed to clear native forest when so much of the country has already been cleared. We should be trying to be more efficient with the land we have.
I think the long term solution will be for the Govt to pay some sort of incentive for forested land people own. If farmers or landholders get rewarded for regeneration and forest then they will be less likely to chop it down.
My wife plans to stop working the land and let it recover. That's not just good management, but setting aside a few hundred acres for native reforestation also provides an opportunity to sell carbon credits to filthy polluters...
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@antipodean said in The Future of Protein?:
At a guess, 30+ years?
Unfortunately, it's not that simple is it. A functioning forest is made up of so many components that it would be very difficult to replicate by replanting. Plants, fungi, insects etc have a very symbiotic relationship, and I am sure there is a lot more to it then we understand.
This is why offsets are so fucken stupid. You can't clear pristine Black-throated finch habitat for a mine and then plant trees elsewhere and expect those birds to move. They are in that area for a reason and not in the other area.
