AN ACRE A MEAL? - MEAT: A Benign Extravagance - page 21

However a 12 week old calf weighing 115 kilos delivered to a feed lot is unlikely to
come from a beef suckler herd, it is more likely to be a byproduct of the dairy industry (Nix
specifies that his figures are for dairy offspring). The amount of energy a cow puts into its
calf when it is in the womb is relatively insignificant, the main expenditure is when the calf
is suckling. Even so, a dairy cow can rear to three months a good deal more than one calf.
According to a dairy manual written in 1946, when dairy yields were about half what they
are now, 'when milking freely a foster-cow may be suckling as many as four calves at any
one time, and during her lactation she may suckle eight or even a dozen'. 12 Rearing a calf
up to the weaning age of three months certainly represents no more than a tenth of the up-
keep of a modern high yielding dairy cow, plus 150 kilos of solid feed - in total probably
somewhere around 700 kilos of grain equivalent. This suggests that the first 115 kilos of
a beef calf emanating from the dairy industry are produced at a feed to live weight ratio
of about 6:1, which is a feed to meat ratio of about 11:1. Adding this to the 9:1 ratio for
feeding of the animal after weaning, we arrive at an overall figure of … 10:1. 13
The same calculation for pigs, based on Nix again, is a lot easier. An average sized pig
yielding 64 kilos of meat requires 257 kilos of feed, including a proportion of the food giv-
en to the sow that nursed it and the boar that fathered it. This works out at a weight for
weight feed to food ratio of almost exactly 4:1.
CAST versus CIWF
The ten-to-one rule therefore seems to be about right for beef. Shelley was apparently
correct when he pronounced that eating plants 'gathered from the bosom of the earth' was
ten times as efficient as eating the meat from an ox. But beef represents less than 20 per
cent of all the animal protein consumed by humans, and all the other major sources of an-
imal protein - pigs, poultry, dairy and fish - are universally agreed to have feed conversion
ratios markedly lower than beef. 14 This is in part because a sow has up to 20 piglets a year,
and hens and fish are even more prolific, whereas a cow normally only has one calf, and
the costs of maintaining the mother are reflected in the meat. However, this same lack of
fecundity also helps to make the cow more efficient than the pig in another respect. Where-
as pigs have at least a dozen teats, cows only have four (and goats only two) making them
a good deal easier to milk - and milk production is more efficient than meat production,
largely because you don't have to kill the animal to get it.
During the course of my research, I opted to take as a starting point a set of figures for
feed conversion which I found in a report entitled The Global Benefits of Eating Less Meat ,
written by Mark Gold for Compassion in World Farming (CIWF). The table states that ten
kilos of standard animal feed are required to produce one kilo of edible beef; 4 to 5.5 kilos
to produce a kilo of pork; 2.1 to 3 kilos for poultry; and 1.5 to 2 kilos for farmed fish (which