Is it fuck. You complained about their methodology and then went on to cite an example of a problematic methodology that they simply did not use. You have not read the paper.
Skua
joined 1 year ago
I'm afraid they're straight up lying. The paper doesn't mention cotton even once. See for yourself in the paper here or the database here. It doesn't even specify one type of feed for the beef cattle, because it is a meta-analsyis of hundreds of others papers about specific practices in specific areas. It takes a weighted average of those depending on how much of the world's production the area studied in each one accounts for.
the paper tries to quantify all the inputs and outputs for foods, but it fails to actually calculate either the actualy outputs (like non-food animal products), or the actual costs of the inputs (many of which would be waste products)
Emphasis mine, of course. The remaining four-fifths of your comment focussed entirely on inputs too. The paper does not do this and never intended or claimed to. It collates the work of other papers that did it. Why tell such an obvious lie? Your comment is literally right there
The paper is a meta-analysis, it's not trying to calculate those things at all. It's collating and standardising the results of other studies doing that. To take Ridoutt et al 2011 as an example because it's the first beef one that comes up in the dataset, regarding feedlots:
In the feedlot subsystem, water and energy use was calculated using data reported in a benchmarking study of Australian beef cattle feedlots (Davis and Wiedemann 2009). The composition of the feedlot ration was based on detailed, multi-year records provided confidentially by a large feedlot operator. Consumptive water use associated with the production of each feed component was calculated using national statistics (ABS 2008a,2008b) and various CSIRO data sources (e.g. Ridoutt and Poulton 2010). The EcoInvent v2 database (http://www.ecoinvent.org) was the source of water use information for mineral supplements (<0.01% by mass). The feedlot operator also provided data on the transportation distances of the feed components which were used to calculate fuel use in transporting commodities to the feedlot.
It's depending on the work of the 1,530 source papers to calculate the inputs appropriately. You would know this if you had looked at the paper, so where did you get the idea that it is as you described?
Right, but they didn't do that. It's a meta-analysis, so they took the value that each study got for a given crop in a specific country and then weighted all of the values by the share of global production that that country is responsible for. So if we pretend that the only three countries are Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, they did the following:
- Found three studies from Estonia, two from Latvia, and two from Lithuania
- Averaged the values of the three Estonian studies
- Did the same for the two Latvian ones and the two Lithuanian ones
- Found that Estonia is responsible for 60% of the world's beef, Latvia 25%, and Lithuania 15%
- Took their three national averages and weighted them 0.6 for Estonia, 0.25 for Latvia, and 0.15 for Lithuania to get the final value for beef
- Repeat for each other crop
The dataset was 1530 studies across 39,000 farms in 119 countries
The original paper says that they weighted each measure to the country's national production and then weighted those by the country's share of global production. They didn't just average each result they got for beef with no regard for location.
What's wrong with it?
I would if I could
The other comments are right, but if you don't like tofu there are absolutely other options. Legumes in particular are really good for the same kind of role in many dishes, and in my opinion are generally far more enjoyable. Get some mushroom and/or seaweed flavours in there for the umami and butter beans for the texture and all the nutritional goodness and I'm a happy man
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-kcal-poore
They have that too. Beef is still the worst by a huge margin
Agriculture makes up a full quarter of our total emissions. Some of that is because of shipping it, of course, but there is absolutely no question whatsoever that agriculture is a huge contributing factor to climate change
Alright, point me to the page of the study or the line of the database that counts the full water usage of cottonseed in beef production. Should be easy for you.