The "Myth" of Sustainable Meat?

Abe Connally wrote:

John Seay wrote: I think we need to test it with a little napkin math:

I raise 300 kgs (660lbs) of rabbit meat a year in an area smaller than most back yards. The area to grow their feed is somewhat larger, but less than 1/3 acre. So, just for the sake of argument, let's assume it is 1/2 of an acre for the space, food, everything. I think that's about 21,000 square feet or so for almost 700lbs of meat. That's about 30 square feet for each pound of meat per year.

We generally eat one rabbit carcass (2.5 lbs) every 2 days for a family of four. That's about a pound a day for my family. Assuming that's your only meat, and you want to eat meat every day, you'd need 365 lbs of meat a year for each family.

So, from my example above, that would require about 11,000 square feet, or around 1/4 of an acre for the meat supply of one family.

Not to be contrary, but when I first read this post, I was concerned about the rounding issues as presented. Mind you, I completely realize that, as you said, it's "napkin math", and was meant to illustrate a point. However, scaling rounded numbers can cause estimation mishaps, so I thought I'd whip out a calculator.

Using the 660 pounds per year and a half acre (1320 pounds per acre of 43,560 square feet), I came up with a rate of 32.9 square feet per pound per year. Working that into a consumption of 1.25 pounds per day (456 pounds per year) per family of four, I came up with 15,002 square feet, or just over a third of an acre.

My personal opinion is that 2.5 ounces of meat per person per day is not sufficient to satisfy the needs of a healthy diet for a large society without other protein sources. I've read a few articles (though not exactly academic papers) that address the overal health of societies where meat is not common (for instance, Southeast Asian peasants). In general terms, the articles said that the lack of good protein sources kept the levels of health and intellectual growth down. I'm being cautious about phrasing this, because I don't want to give the impression that I think people of any category or geographical region or ethnicity are in any way dumb or deficient by nature. However, it seems clear that affluence involves access to resources, and those resources propel societies forward. Poorly managed and ill-respected, those same resources become waste in short order (or "waist", as the case may be), and that's likely worse than constrained resources when applied on a global scale.

Using the same production numbers Abe provided, but increasing the meat consumption rate to eight ounces per day per person (I believe on the high side of what's needed, but I'm trying to test limits), I come up with 24,017 square feet for a family of four (730 pounds per year of meat), or 0.55 acres. So, if the consumption rate per person per day is somewhere between Abe's estimate and mine, then we can safely say that a family of four can produce the meat they need on between a third and a half an acre, which seems completely reasonable to me and is in line with what I've read elsewhere. Even if you increase the consumption rate to a pound a day per person (which sounds like gluttony), the land requirement goes to just over an acre, which doesn't seem impossible, just irresponsible.

The CIA World Factbook (a great site, BTW) says the U.S. has 18.01% arable land, or 437,323,192 acres after some math (carryingcapacity.org says 470 million acres). So, if a quarter of an acre can produce enough meat for a gluttonous diet, and it takes the balance of an acre to produce enough non-meat food to fill out that diet, then we should be able to feed everyone in the U.S. a diet of large proportions and still export enough to feed 100 million more people. So why are there hungry people in this country? Why are we using petrochemicals to move energy out of our transportation loop into our food loop (not to mention using bio fuels to move energy out of our food loop into our transportation loop)?

So, where are we on the "myth of sustainable meat"? I say:

Which is to say that it's not a myth.

Cheers.

JD

Colin Fontaine wrote:"Too many people" isn't an opinion, it's a fact of growth, don't you think there was a reason that up until 1800 the human population remained below 1 billion? Or that any other species on the planet does not overrun the place?

Cj Verde wrote:
Also, most species do overrun their environment until they pollute it so badly the population collapses, like yeast.

Tyler Ludens wrote:

Cj Verde wrote:
Also, most species do overrun their environment until they pollute it so badly the population collapses, like yeast.

I've not heard of many examples of that, actually. Certainly not "most species."

Tyler Ludens wrote:

Cj Verde wrote:
Also, most species do overrun their environment until they pollute it so badly the population collapses, like yeast.

I've not heard of many examples of that, actually. Certainly not "most species."

Cj Verde wrote:

Colin Fontaine wrote:"Too many people" isn't an opinion, it's a fact of growth, don't you think there was a reason that up until 1800 the human population remained below 1 billion? Or that any other species on the planet does not overrun the place?

Colin, perhaps your mean it's a function of growth?
Also, most species do overrun their environment until they pollute it so badly the population collapses, like yeast.
Also, the population explosion coincides nicely with the availability if cheap, easily accessible fuel.

Abe Connally wrote:The US throws away more than half of the food/biomass it produces. So, right there, if we managed our waste streams in a better way, we could support 50% more people on the exact same land and inputs that we are currently using.

Cj Verde wrote:
If we could flip the premise around, could you give me an example of a species that does not naturally overrun it's environment. I can't think of any but that doesn't mean self-limiting species don't exist.

Colin Fontaine wrote:Is there really enough space to have residence, farms, pasture's, forests, habitat for wildlife and water sources for an ever growing population?

Colin Fontaine wrote:How will we be able to feed metropolitan cities good meat? We're talking millions of people in a condensed area. Can surrounding permaculture farms rise to the task of supplying them all?

Colin Fontaine wrote:can it continue to be this way if we remain on our current trend of consumption, or will certain things have to change?

Jonathan Fuller wrote:

Abe Connally wrote:The US throws away more than half of the food/biomass it produces. So, right there, if we managed our waste streams in a better way, we could support 50% more people on the exact same land and inputs that we are currently using.

Abe,

In a totally non-confrontational, only slightly pedantic way I wish to correct a math error in the above statement. If 50% of the biomass is waste and we can support 300 million folks on the remaining 50% we could I think, support 100% larger population if we utilized that waste stream perfectly. i.e. 300 mil folks eating 50 gazillion tons of food = 600 mil folks eating 100 gazillion tons of food.

tel jetson wrote:the only issue I see with your math, J.D., is that you're assuming "arable land" means that it will support animals at the rate you cite. and if it would, what level of inputs are required?

Abe Connally wrote:

tel jetson wrote:the only issue I see with your math, J.D., is that you're assuming "arable land" means that it will support animals at the rate you cite. and if it would, what level of inputs are required?

actually, just use the lawns, that's where I found the land in my example. So, it takes max .55 acres for a family of 4 to produce their own meat, and we have 21 million acres growing rabbit food (lawns). So, we could supply a minimum of 38 million families (152 million people, 1/2 of the US) rabbit meat without touching any other aspect of the US food system.

Tyler Ludens wrote:

Cj Verde wrote:
If we could flip the premise around, could you give me an example of a species that does not naturally overrun it's environment. I can't think of any but that doesn't mean self-limiting species don't exist.

I was responding to your statement "most species do overrun their environment until they pollute it so badly the population collapses." I could not think of many examples of species "polluting" their environment so badly the population collapses. The rabbits and foxes do not "pollute" their environment.

Cj Verde wrote: as far as I know, most species will expand their population until checked by ... something.

Cj Verde wrote:

Tyler Ludens wrote:

Cj Verde wrote:
If we could flip the premise around, could you give me an example of a species that does not naturally overrun it's environment. I can't think of any but that doesn't mean self-limiting species don't exist.

I was responding to your statement "most species do overrun their environment until they pollute it so badly the population collapses." I could not think of many examples of species "polluting" their environment so badly the population collapses. The rabbits and foxes do not "pollute" their environment.

I had to go back to Colin's original sentence... I added "pollute" and should not have. It's just one way that species "overrun." I think the original discussion was about population growth. So, as far as I know, most species will expand their population until checked by ... something.

We don't know the yield limit of permaculture, but there is a limit. Some have said the yield is infinite but there is a limit to the amount of solar energy the earth receives.

tel jetson wrote:

Abe Connally wrote:

tel jetson wrote:the only issue I see with your math, J.D., is that you're assuming "arable land" means that it will support animals at the rate you cite. and if it would, what level of inputs are required?

actually, just use the lawns, that's where I found the land in my example. So, it takes max .55 acres for a family of 4 to produce their own meat, and we have 21 million acres growing rabbit food (lawns). So, we could supply a minimum of 38 million families (152 million people, 1/2 of the US) rabbit meat without touching any other aspect of the US food system.

Gilbert Fritz wrote:...So does the book "Tree Crops", which started this whole Permaculture thing.