Personal growth++

I always thought the party of supporting local wasn’t transport but supporting your local economy and small producers, keeping the money within your city and raising buying power for its citizens.

Thank you for sharing, I wasn’t aware the impact of transport was quite so small

Claiming that something is on its whole sustainable is rather loosely defined (i.e what level of impact is considered sustainable and on what metrics), so let’s look a little closer. What many are saying there is that process is still going to inherently be much more inefficient compared to growing plants directly for human consumption

It turns out to be the case that the worst-case production of any plants-based production comes out ahead compared to best-case production of meat, dairy, etc. on virtually all environmental metrics

If I source my beef or lamb from low-impact producers, could they have a lower footprint than plant-based alternatives? The evidence suggests, no: plant-based foods emit fewer greenhouse gases than meat and dairy, regardless of how they are produced.

[…]

Plant-based protein sources – tofu, beans, peas and nuts – have the lowest carbon footprint. This is certainly true when you compare average emissions. But it’s still true when you compare the extremes: there’s not much overlap in emissions between the worst producers of plant proteins, and the best producers of meat and dairy.

https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat

Plant-based foods have a significantly smaller footprint on the environment than animal-based foods. Even the least sustainable vegetables and cereals cause less environmental harm than the lowest impact meat and dairy products [9].

https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/8/1614/htm

Even true of synthetic fertilizer usage compared to the best case of animal manure

Thus, shifting from animal to plant sources of protein can substantially reduce fertilizer requirements, even with maximal use of animal manure

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921344922006528

In terms of biodiversity

Livestock farmers often claim that their grazing systems “mimic nature”. If so, the mimicry is a crude caricature. A review of evidence from over 100 studies found that when livestock are removed from the land, the abundance and diversity of almost all groups of wild animals increases

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-damaging-farm-products-organic-pasture-fed-beef-lamb

If we compare more typical production rather than best to worst, the differences are even more apparent

To produce 1 kg of protein from kidney beans required approximately eighteen times less land, ten times less water, nine times less fuel, twelve times less fertilizer and ten times less pesticide in comparison to producing 1 kg of protein from beef

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25374332/

Carnivores should be shamed for their incredibly stupid diet.

Even worse is the anti-vegan that will berate you for not eating meat, or that say they will purposefully eat twice as much meat just to counter your efforts… And yes, I have met a few of them, generally they blame vegans for their behaviour too 🙄

So crazy to protest ppl profiting off the rape and murder of thousands of sentient beings

I use void fyi

I don’t think anyone is arguing that, particularly when looking at how much devastation is done to the Amazon Rainforest all for the sake of livestock.

Just pointing out an example of how even food items that are vegan may also have a significant negative impact upon the environment (and as mentioned above, some also impact the rights of workers) that folks should take into consideration when deciding upon food choices. Even if something is technically vegan, it does not necessarily mean it is sustainable or ethical.

Personally, I prefer oat milk or rice milk over almond milk because those options have a significantly smaller footprint. If protecting the environment is a priority for someone who made the decision to be vegan, they might want to consider cutting out almonds (or at least almond milk), too.

Grass-fed doesn’t really scale and entails a number of other environmental issues from higher methane to higher deforestation. Even for Ireland in particular, it’s got quite a number of issues

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Increased methane emissions

Grass-fed production requires longer growing times leading to more lifetime methane emissions overall. It also requires more cattle overall due to lower slaughter weight

Taken together, an exclusively grass-fed beef cattle herd would raise the United States’ total methane emissions by approximately 8%.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401/pdf

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Not enough land to meet demand even if 100% of grassland was used

We model a nationwide transition [in the US] from grain- to grass-finishing systems using demographics of present-day beef cattle. In order to produce the same quantity of beef as the present-day system, we find that a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30%. We also find that the current pastureland grass resource can support only 27% of the current beef supply (27 million cattle), an amount 30% smaller than prior estimates

[…]

If beef consumption is not reduced and is instead satisfied by greater imports of grass-fed beef, a switch to purely grass-fed systems would likely result in higher environmental costs, including higher overall methane emissions. Thus, only reductions in beef consumption can guarantee reductions in the environmental impact of US food systems.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401

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Problems in countries that have tried to scale it up

New Zealand has tried to scale up it’s grass-fed production and often touts it. To do so, they end up using heavy amounts of fertilizer in their production so much so that some regions need a 12-fold reduction in their dairy industry size just to have their water meet safety thresholds

The large footprint for milk in Canterbury indicates just how far the capacity of the environment has been overshot. To maintain that level of production and have healthy water would require either 12 times more rainfall in the region or a 12-fold reduction in cows. […] The “grass-fed” marketing line overlooks the huge amounts of fossil-fuel-derived fertiliser used to make the extra grass that supports New Zealand’s very high animal stock rates.

https://theconversation.com/11-000-litres-of-water-to-make-one-litre-of-milk-new-questions-about-the-freshwater-impact-of-nz-dairy-farming-183806

Keep in mind that this is the case with New Zealand still using plenty of feed because their definition of grass-fed still allows for plenty of supplemental grain. A fully grass-fed system would fair even worse in that regard

The national dairy industry [in New Zealand] is consistently the country’s largest consumer of grain and feed at approximately 75 percent (Figure 4). The majority of dairy farms are on non-irrigated pasture-based systems (75 to 80 percent), where up to 25 percent of the annual diet could consist of supplemental feeding. With the recently high dairy prices experienced of over NZ$9.30 (US$6.05) in the last two years (Appendix 2), farmers have looked to maximize milk yields by utilizing more “purchased” feed for conversion to milk solids

(emphasis mine)

https://apps.fas.usda.gov/newgainapi/api/Report/DownloadReportByFileName?fileName=New Zealand Grain and Feed Market Situation_Wellington_New Zealand_NZ2023-0003.pdf

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Problems with grass-fed production in Ireland

In the UK and Ireland, the land that grass-fed cows are on is primarily actually not natural grass-land - its natural state is temperate rainforest

Most of the UK and Ireland’s grass-fed cows and sheep are on land that might otherwise be temperate rainforest – arable crops tend to prefer drier conditions. However, even if there were no livestock grazing in the rainforest zone – and these areas were threatened by other crops instead – livestock would still pose an indirect threat due to their huge land footprint […] Furthermore, most British grass-fed cows are still fed crops on top of their staple grass

https://theconversation.com/livestock-grazing-is-preventing-the-return-of-rainforests-to-the-uk-and-ireland-198014

The seed oil thing in particular isn’t really backed up by current research

June 22, 2022—While the internet may be full of posts stating that seed oils such as canola and soy are “toxic,” scientific evidence does not support these claims, according to experts. Guy Crosby, adjunct associate of nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, was among those quoted in a May 31, 2022 Consumer Reports article who pushed back on the idea

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/scientists-debunk-seed-oil-health-risks/

If you are looking at plant-based meats as that video seems to be, there is some degree of evidence showing that it still comes out ahead health-wise compared to animal meat . That being said, aiming for more of a whole-foods plant-based diet is of course even better health-wise

Other people have answered more thoroughly, but it should be added that even your source never calls grass fed beef carbon neutral (on the very first paragraph it even says that it isn’t), just that it has a better CO2 footprint than grain fed beef (and that not by much, as has been pointed out)

It’s not carbon neutral if you look at studies that account for more factors. For instance, here’s an article with an interview of the researchers in the field talking about how there is no carbon-neutral beef

There’s not been a single study to say that we can have carbon-neutral beef

[…]

We also have to ask how much of the sequestered carbon in these systems is actually due to the cattle. What would happen to the land if it were simply left fallow?

The answer is, depending on the land, and on the kind of grazing, it might sequester even more carbon https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2022/10/03/beef-soil-carbon-sequestration/

If we look at much more rigorous reviews on the carbon sequestration potential of “regenerative grazing” it’s pretty slim. It cannot even sequester enough to counteract just grazing only production which only produces 1g protein/person/day

Ruminants in grazing-only systems emit about 1.32 Gt […] These are their emissions. The question is, could grazing ruminants also help sequester carbon in soils, and if so to what extent might this compensate? As the following numbers show, the answer is ‘not much’. Global (as opposed to regional or per hectare) assessments of the sequestration potential through grassland management are actually few and far between, but range from about 0.3-0.8 Gt CO 2/yr 301,302,303 with the higher end estimate assuming a strong level of ambition.

https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/reports/fcrn_gnc_report.pdf

And keep in mind that this doesn’t scale very well due to the massive land it requires. Already clearing land for pastures is a large deforester. Trying to even scale to a quarter of beef demand would require using 100% of grassland which would put enormous pressure for further deforestation

We model a nationwide transition [in the US] from grain- to grass-finishing systems using demographics of present-day beef cattle. In order to produce the same quantity of beef as the present-day system, we find that a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30%. We also find that the current pastureland grass resource can support only 27% of the current beef supply (27 million cattle), an amount 30% smaller than prior estimates

[…]

If beef consumption is not reduced and is instead satisfied by greater imports of grass-fed beef, a switch to purely grass-fed systems would likely result in higher environmental costs, including higher overall methane emissions. Thus, only reductions in beef consumption can guarantee reductions in the environmental impact of US food systems.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401

Are the majority of livestock grass fed?