Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
In fact the ratios for milk and eggs are not at all similar to that of beef, they are
universally agreed to be a great deal better than 10:1. Here is another example of the
10:1 ratio expressed in units of land, which in this case explicitly refers to grazing:
A given area of suitable land can produce up to ten times more food by growing plants, than by grazing
animals on it.
5
In the next example, Jeremy Rifkin, who is usually scrupulous about facts, makes
it clear he is talking about feedlot beef :
It takes nine pounds of feed to make one pound of gain in a feedlot steer, with
six pounds of this consisting of grains and by-product feeds and three pounds of
roughage. Only 11 per cent of the feed goes to produce the beef itself, with the
rest either burned off as energy in the conversion process, used to maintain nor-
mal bodily functions, or excreted or absorbed into parts of the body system that
are not eaten - like hair or bones.
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Nick Fiddes gives a range of values:
The conversion of grain into animal flesh requires about ten calories for every calorie provided for
human consumption, or five grams of protein input for the production of one gram of meat protein; for beef
the ratio is more like twenty to one.
But when he is required to generalize, he comes out with this:
it makes about ten times more sense in efficiency terms to eat the grain, than feed it to the cows and
then eat them.
7
Even the advocate of meat-eating, Marvin Harris, opts for 10:1 in respect of hu-
man energy input:
The net calorie return on each calorie of human effort invested in plant production is on the average
about ten times greater than the net calorie return obtainable from animal production.
8
And elsewhere he gives 10:1 as the conversion factor for calories in grain:
It takes nine additional calories to provide one calorie for human consumption when grain is converted
into animal flesh.
Although the 10:1 figure is infectious, this Professor of Political Science at the
University of Maryland took a bit of convincing:
In 1990, when I first read that ten people could be fed with the grain that you would feed a cow that
would be turned into the food for one person, I was impressed. But I was not moved … I thought, if I give
up meat, it won't have that impact: it probably won't have any impact on anything at all, except me. I was
wrong.
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But here is a student journalist who has no hesitation about pasting the ten to one
estimate into her copy, and appending some rather unconvincing scientific authentic-
ation:
