Cassidy et al. / Environmental Research Letters
Shifting crops grown for animal feed and biofuel to food for direct human consumption can feed an additional 4 billion people with existing cropland, a study says.
Posted on 08/06/2013 9:11:24 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The lab-grown burger taste-tested Monday in London is billed as one way to avert a looming food crisis by freeing up the agricultural resources used to feed billions of cattle each year. Another way to avert the crisis is to stop eating animal products altogether, according to a recent study.
In fact, "we find that doing a complete radical shift away from grain-fed animals, and stop producing biofuels, that you can increase calorie availability enough for 4 billion people," Emily Cassidy, a researcher at the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, told NBC News.
She and colleagues examined 41 major crops grown around the world, which account for more than 90 percent of global crop production, to find out how much food is being produced and how it is being used.
They found that 36 percent of the calories produced are used for animal feed. Of those, 12 percent wend their way to the human diet as meat and animal products. Another 4 percent of human-edible calories are used to produce biofuels.
Growing all those crops for direct human consumption instead increases available food calories by up to 70 percent, Cassidy and colleagues report in the Aug. 1 issue of Environmental Research Letters.
When those additional calories are translated to the number of people who can be fed a 2,700-calorie-a-day diet, the team's math shows an additional 4 billion people can be fed with food grown on existing farmland.
(Excerpt) Read more at nbcnews.com ...
Well, paying farmers to NOT plant crops also contributed to the problem. The idiot who came up with that ‘solution’ should be fed soylent green forever!
That's so much bullshiiite I didn't have to read any further.
I'm not going to waste much time on this other than to say that one of the top five problems the American Farmer (I retired from farming quite a while back, so I know what I'm talking about) has faced for more that 60 years is overproduction.
We have had mountains and mountains of surplus meat, food stuffs, you name it, for more than 60 years.
And the revolution to increased food production is still in it's infancy.
This may give you hope: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3000427/posts?page=5#5
Most of the earth is empty today. Make a choice, move to an empty space.
Oooooooo, yeah!! How far are you from WA state?
Screw that noise.
Well, you can rest easy, because your fears of planetary overcrowding have no basis in reality. The facts:
1. 71% of the earth's surface is water- no people there.
2. 29% is land. Of that 29%;
3. less than 1% is occupied by humans,
4. 40% is pure wilderness- not occupied,
5. 15% desert - not occupied,
6. 15% near desert- sparsely occupied,
7. 22% agricultural- sparsely occupied.
The earth is in absolutely no danger of becoming full. There is no danger of the planet ever containing so many people that you can't take 5 steps without bumping into someone.
Good thing for you that isn’t in the shape of a gun.
No more Muzzies? Sounds good to me. I’ll take an order of pork ribs and supersize it. :-)
Oh, come on. If all of the world’s people live on only 1% of the land, why doesn’t the Earth get out of balance and roll over?
(there’s a congressman who’d like to know)
There’s a reason we have canine teeth.
I hope the leftists lead by example and stop eating and vote to cut off funding for EBTs so their dependents will stop eating too.
If we stop eating the animals they will continue to reproduce thus causing more competition for their own food sources thus resulting in more animals dying a slow painful death from starvation. By eating them we are saving them from a terrible fate!
The Almighty isn't worried about cattle taking food from people.
Ummmm! Makes me hungry thinking about my daily ration of tofu and polenta.
Give up my 3 favorite foods, meat, milk and eggs? NO THANK YOU!
I like the way you think.
How Christians are spearheading the urban farming movement in the Motor City.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2013/january-february/organic-city.html
MARANATHA!
Nope. Makes absolute sense. I was explaining to my wife how liberals want to destroy the energy sector, because that would destroy industry, which is what they want.
What you say is true, they simply want humans to depopulate, and there is only one way THAT is going to happen.
Liberals always think they will be part of the “chosen ones” because their intentions are so pure. They never realize that once they put the machine in motion, they get ground up with all the rest of us.
Milk is good food but the milk you buy in the store only contains trace amounts of vitamin D until the milk manufacturer fortifies it with more vitamin D. Milk producers fortify milk by adding an oily mixture of vitamins A and D to liquid milk prior to homogenizing.
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