DEFAULT LIVESTOCK - MEAT: A Benign Extravagance - page 43

(ii) Crop Residues Fadel also states that crop residues from wheat, rice, barley, maize and sugar cane (ba-
gasse) potentially provide enough energy to support the entire world's milk supply, and enough protein to support
a third of it.
(iii) Food Waste In the USA and the UK around about a third of all food is wasted; Cuba in the 1980s was
producing about two kilos of pork per person per year from institutional (not domestic) food waste. 5
(iv) Slaughterhouse Waste According to Dutch food analysts E V Elferink and Sanderine Nonhebel, prior to
the BSE crisis 10 per cent of EU animal feed consisted of meat and bone meal, a figure which seems high. 6 Peter
Brooks' estimates that animal products comprised about four per cent of commercial pig rations in the UK in the
1990s, which seems low by comparison - could that be because the British were putting so much into their cow
rations? 7
(v) Grazing It is hard to obtain a total figure for the amount of meat and dairy produce raised on grass, be-
cause so much grazing takes place on mixed farms where livestock are fed a mixture of grass, crop residues and
feed.
(a) Ranching and Grass Farms The FAO state that about 24 per cent of beef and 12 per cent of dairy are produced
on farms where there is nothing but grazing land. 8 It can be assumed that most of this takes place on land which
is unsuitable for cultivation, and where grazing is the best option for bringing biomass into the food chain.
(b) Land Reserved for Pasture An FAO study from the 1990s estimates that 27 per cent of the world's milk
and 23 per cent of the world's beef is produced on grasslands managed solely for that purpose - representing
roughly an eighth of all animal protein. The figures for dairy in (a) and (b) differ because some of the land in
(b) is found on mixed farms, and hence also included in (c). 9
(c) Mixed Farms About 70 per cent of beef and 87 per cent of dairy is produced on mixed livestock and arable
farms, where livestock often have some access to crop residues, and areas of grazing land that cannot be cultiv-
ated. 10
( d) Fertility Building On many mixed farms livestock fed on leys or rotated grassland are part of the fertility
building cycle. Though they may not be an indispensable part, they often add to the complexity and hence the
resilience of the ecosystem, at little added expense.
(vi) Traction Some meat and dairy comes from animals whose main role is to provide traction.
If you include all the above it is probably safe to say that default livestock farming
provides between a third and two thirds of all the meat and dairy produce currently pro-
duced in the world. I wouldn't like to be more precise than that, not least because the situ-
ation is changing rapidly with the increasing adoption of factory farming in the more pros-
perous developing countries.
However, for convenience, let us suppose that default livestock produce half of all the
world's supply of meat and dairy. In Fig 1, the line AB represents the default half of
the world's available animal products, and the line BC represents the livestock fed on
human-edible crops grown specifically for animals. There are huge environmental gains to
be made from reducing global meat consumption back to this level; it will release large
amounts of feed grain for human consumption, easily enough to feed all those who cur-