youtube video of long-term primal dieter

[TylerDurden]

You just said with farming that the chemicals are another cost and therefore make it more expensive.

I meant that McDonald's is not a farmer/producer but exists at the retail stage, so it's a quite different situation. The farmers need to pump their cattle with many expensive drugs/medicines etc. so lose money. McDonald's uses chemicals to alter the taste to trick their customers into liking their produce, and to help preserve meats for longer, and so on.

[PaleoPhil]

Actually, feedlot cattle have almost no profit margin at all.  Grass-fed have a much higher profit margin. I think that the beef cattle farmers are really taking a hit these last few years, as grain-fed feedlot cows are the norm here.  Give it a few more years, it will turn back the other direction.

Yes, the margins are small, though there is some profit margin, especially with added subsidies, tax credits, etc. they probably get from the US gov't (if there was no profit at all they couldn't stay in business). That's why I said they make their profit on volume, not margin. Same with McDonald's.

I meant that McDonald's is not a farmer/producer but exists at the retail stage, so it's a quite different situation. The farmers need to pump their cattle with many expensive drugs/medicines etc. so lose money.

Small farmers often lose money when they use modern farming methods, yes, and grassfed is more profitable for small farmers, if their pasture is good enough and large enough. Factory farms are the ones that make money using modern methods, again with the help of the governments they pay off with lobbying money, of course (if they weren't making a profit in the long run even with gov't help, they'd go out of business).

McDonald's uses chemicals to alter the taste to trick their customers into liking their produce, and to help preserve meats for longer, and so on.

Correct. They are always looking to sell more food and to more customers and to cut costs. Large corporations almost invariably focus on volume and cost cutting, whereas smaller family operations tend to focus on quality (with exceptions in both instances, of course). This is a good reason why you should get your food from small family farms and markets and gourmet family restaurants rather than big corporations.

[TylerDurden]

Actually, in the UK, there have been big scandals because the British government has (deliberately?) failed to pay the farmers their subsidies on time, and it seems that they heavily depend on regular payments as many have gone out of business. Similiarly, due to competition, prices for commercial pasteurised (grainfed-derived)dairy are now so low that small farmers simply cannot make a profit any more and sell at cost(this doesn't  apply to grassfed, unpasteurised dairy from smaller farmers as they don't then have to buy equipment for pasteurisation and prices for quality milk are higher).

Of course, it's a bit ridiculous that the Minister in charge of agriculture is a vegetarian, last I checked,  and clueless and uncaring re the meat-side of farming. I think he's anti-hunting too which is anathema to farmers.

[Raw Kyle]

The thing being ignored in this discussion is the fact that there isn't enough grazing land to replace grain agriculture with grass fed agriculture to feed the world's population. More calories are derived from land per area with grains than with grass. The farmers that have enough private land (pretty rare as many operations have switched to grain and have land specifically sized and set up for that production) might do better switching, again because of the inflated price of grass fed because it's in fashion like organic was a few years ago. But most operations would not be able to keep half of their cattle numbers with their current land, the cattle would starve. If you don't grow enough grain you can always buy some, but what do you do when there isn't enough grass? Buy some? You need large plots of land. There is a certain capacity to grow the industry with unused grass fields, but once those are mostly used up by newly forming grass fed operations, the costs of production will sky rocket as it will entail optaining land, which is one of the most expensive resources to obtain.

[TylerDurden]

The trouble is that the grains-production requires land. Granted it would be more calorie-intensive than grass, perhaps, in an unhealthy sort of way, but that's all. You're also forgetting that grainfeeding is a mainly western practice with 3rd world nations still feeding their animals mostly on grass. The only solution really is to lower the world population.

Anyway, when I was talking about increasing the rpd community in size I didn't mean converting the entire world, just a number as high as the number of vegetarians in the world or less. That is easily sustainable. After all, a rawpalaeo community wouldn't eat any junk-foods/cereals or smoke tobacco etc. so vast areas given over to factories for such items could be switched to become grassland for cattle etc.

Also, plenty of land that is unsuitable for growing grains is still fine for growing grass(eg:- mountainous areas).

[PaleoPhil]

...small farmers simply cannot make a profit any more

Correct, that's my point. The system works to promote large factory farms and puts more and more small farmers out of business so that only those small farmers that revert to old grassfed, organic methods and charge premium prices can survive. My grandfather resisted the modern methods and would have gotten a kick out of seeing farmers go back to the old ways and give it a fancy name like "organic," when it used to be just ordinary farming.

Of course, it's a bit ridiculous that the Minister in charge of agriculture is a vegetarian, last I checked,  and clueless and uncaring re the meat-side of farming. I think he's anti-hunting too which is anathema to farmers.

Yes, he is clearly a disaster for the UK.

The thing being ignored in this discussion is the fact that there isn't enough grazing land to replace grain agriculture with grass fed agriculture to feed the world's population.

Correct. As Tyler has mentioned, many of the problems that combine to make it impossible for all humanity to eat Paleo-type diets stem from overpopulation.

[Paleo Donk]

Correct. As Tyler has mentioned, many of the problems that combine to make it impossible for all humanity to eat Paleo-type diets stem from overpopulation.

How are you so sure about this. Have you done the math? It shouldn't really take that much work to find out how much land used for grain we could convert to grass fed animals. There is an excerpt in Vegetarian Myth that covers this and I remember I did some quick math and it seemed like we would have enough land to cover the worlds population with raw paleo. Though she did have at least one numerical mistake and she even said the population could only be 650 million or so. I'll look up that passage where she goes over calories per acre and give you  guys an estimate based on that sometime soon.

[PaleoPhil]

How are you so sure about this. Have you done the math? It shouldn't really take that much work to find out how much land used for grain we could convert to grass fed animals. There is an excerpt in Vegetarian Myth that covers this and I remember I did some quick math and it seemed like we would have enough land to cover the worlds population with raw paleo. Though she did have at least one numerical mistake and she even said the population could only be 650 million or so.

Um, that's pretty darned close to my guesstimate (around 500 million or so; at most a billion if lots of compromises are made), so why are you acting like you're disagreeing with me when we clearly agree? What am I missing here?

[KD]

I read somewhere once that it is believed there would be enough land in Australia alone to house the entire current population with their own small plots of land. I find this difficult to believe, and perhaps this was just some kooks opinion as I have no reliable source, BUT I think one would be surprised how badly land is misused all around the world. How much is suitable for returning to pastureland, in the first few generations anyway, I do not know.

I also agree that one shouldn't try to save everyone with this diet, as even with the knowledge many couldn't be forced to do so, or even acknowledge and change their worst of habits.

[Paleo Donk]

Um, that's pretty darned close to my guesstimate (around 500 million or so; at most a billion if lots of compromises are made), so why are you acting like you're disagreeing with me when we clearly agree? What am I missing here?

How did you come up with this estimate? You didn't read my post carefully enough. 650 million is not my estimate its Lierre Kieth's. Though she had an example in her book that broke down calories per acre. I then calculated from this that it would be possible to feed the worlds population, but this was a month ago and I forgot what the exact numbers were but I'll look it up soon and get that estimate.

[PaleoPhil]

OK, thanks. I didn't come up with the estimate myself, actually. I think it was Dr. Cordain and some anthropologists who came up with numbers around 500 million, but it was a while ago and I don't remember. I vaguely remember basically stretching it upward to 1 billion after discussing it with people here and taking into account their suggestions of how humanity might use some ingenuity and compromises to enable maybe a billion to eat near-Paleo. Unfortunately, whether it's 500 million or 650 million or a billion is pretty academic, because any of these figures are way less than what we've got already and the world cannot voluntarily and peacefully get back down to those numbers in my lifetime. We discussed it pretty thoroughly in an old thread and I'm too tired and uninterested in the numbers right now to debate it, but I'll check out Lierre's calculations when you post them. It's interesting that she came up with a similar number to the numbers I had seen before. Didn't Tyler mention 500 million recently too or am I dreaming?

I also agree that one shouldn't try to save everyone with this diet, as even with the knowledge many couldn't be forced to do so, or even acknowledge and change their worst of habits.

Yeah, I have no interest in saving everyone (it's a futile endeavor anyway and the current powers that be are mainly pushing things in the wrong direction--such as the nut in the UK who wants to force vegetarianism), and I have zero interest in forcing anyone. My focus is on myself and my close relatives and friends.

However, sometimes I get the impression that Tyler's going to become world dictator and sterilize everyone with an IQ lower than his, though. (Just kidding)

[wodgina]

I read somewhere once that it is believed there would be enough land in Australia alone to house the entire current population with their own small plots of land. I find this difficult to believe, and perhaps this was just some kooks opinion as I have no reliable source, BUT I think one would be surprised how badly land is misused all around the world. How much is suitable for returning to pastureland, in the first few generations anyway, I do not know.

I also agree that one shouldn't try to save everyone with this diet, as even with the knowledge many couldn't be forced to do so, or even acknowledge and change their worst of habits.

Kook for sure, Australia is mostly desert. It's dry and has terrible soil for the most part. We are already over populated. Around 21 million now and I think there were 300 000 aborigines originally.

We are running out of water and suffering soil erosion and salinity issues.

[KD]

Yeah, I knew at the time and now that if one considered land quality, there would be no way this could be true. I don't even remember what I'm referring to, but I imagine they must have only been going on total land mass and how it actually compares to individuals.

As a disclaimer, because of the actual geography this is almost totally useless information, but I crunched some numbers anyway

2,970,000 sq miles in Aus

which means 6bil could be divided into 0.000495 sq mile plots 0.3168 acres which is roughly 13,000 sq ft per individual, even though the population of course includes many dependents.

I think it is interesting the physical relationship of land to people. Maybe we can build dubai like cities with massive skyscrapers in all the deserts where all the civilized can live off whatever gourmet runoff of the extended pastureland and wild food food forests.

for the world (again not considering actual geography, just being not-water) it works out to about 6 acres per each 6bil

[cherimoya_kid]

Vat-grown meat and hydroponics will eventually, I think, take care of what the land can't do.

[TylerDurden]

I reckon that a much higher population than 650 million could be raised on grassfed land. And a lot more if the concept of palaeo foods was widened to include insects as well. The Aborigines had (live) witchetty grubs as a staple, for example. Obviously, with a change to a rawpalaeodiet from a cooked,palaeodiet, there would be even more land available as restaurants/factories etc. wouldn't need space for cooking ovens, microwave ovens etc. etc.

[PaleoPhil]

More than a billion, Tyler? I already twice indicated the possibility of a billion.

[Paleo Donk]

This is taken from The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Kieth

A ten acre mid-atlantic farm of perennial polycoluture would produce

3000 eggs
1000 broilers
80 stewing hens
2000 pounds beef
2500 pounds pork
100 turkeys
50 rabits

She comes up with about 7 million calories per year, which is another issue but I did the math on this and came up with a similar estimate so I'll stick with this for now. Assuming we need 2500-3000 calories per day, this would be around 900k-1 million calories per year, so this lot would feed about 7 people. Keith actually says 9 people, but this on 2000 calories a day, which I don't think is a good estimate. This is assuming zero-carb of course but, I'm looking for a very general estimate so the specifics do not matter here yet.

I think she has farmland acreage estimates in her book but I'm going to use this government site - http://www.ers.usda.gov/StateFacts/US.htm

The US has 2.26 billion acres of which 41 percent of which is farmland or 922 million acres. This is broken down to the following

Harvested cropland - 310 million acres
Woodland - 75 million
Pastureland - 410 million

If we used all the pastureland and harvested cropland for the above (720 million acres) and using the figure of .7 people fed per acre, this alone would be able to feed 500 million people. Obviously, there are a lot of assumptions here, namely that all the cropland would be able to produce equally and that Kieth's .7 people per acre figure is correct. Even if we take half of this figure, the US is nearly fully self-sustainable.

[majormark]

^ interesting. So we dont have to go around killing people than?

Well maybe just for fun :-).

[Squall]

Reading this thread is like reading bad economics. The majority of you appear to be making reverse Malthusian arguments. Only problem is, Malthus, and all of his doom-saying descendants, have been systematically wrong. Mainly this is because they misunderstand some fundamental aspects of markets.

Whether or not the world will ever be able to sustain billions of people on an RPD-style diet is not a question anyone can really answer in the present. Nor do they need to. That is merely a production/distribution problem for future suppliers who will have different information than we do. Whether or not they solve that problem isn't so much a matter of possibility as it is profitability. If prices for grass-fed beef are so high because demand is so high, entrepreneurs will be signaled into those markets where they can innovate, reduce prices, and generate profits.

Malthus discounted the role of profit-driven innovation in his equations, and in your discourse many of you are doing the same thing. Believe it or not, food distribution problems aren't really problems for consumers to solve. These problems are entrepreneurial problems. The risk of solving them will be voluntarily accepted by future entrepreneurs in anticipation of profit using information we don't have and innovations we would never have thought of.

Furthermore, I don't think any of you have to worry about increased demand cutting off your supply. The more people consuming grass-fed meat will most likely drop the price in the long-term, absent of course any legislative meddling.

[Raw Kyle]

Profit driven innovation is what gave us mass grain agriculture in the first place.

It's just like the organic label, as soon as large corporations and shady governments got their hands on it the label was rendered mostly pointless. Dole organic bananas? I bet they are very stringent...being overseen by the always moral USA government.

Trying to pull more profits out of nature shows every time that there are no free lunches and you can't create anything that isn't there. All of the larger fruits and vegetables of today simply have less micro nutrients and leave behind poorer soil in their wake. The same thing will happen if technology, driven by profit, starts trying to "innovate" grass fed agriculture. I'm actually a pretty firm believer that there isn't even a such thing as efficiency, there is just choosing to do or not to do certain work.

[yon yonson]

yes, efficiency is not the answer. jevon's paradox shows that efficiency actually increase overall consumption:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

i think it's pretty ironic that most "green" minded individuals blindly support efficiency...

[Raw Kyle]

yes, efficiency is not the answer. jevon's paradox shows that efficiency actually increase overall consumption:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

i think it's pretty ironic that most "green" minded individuals blindly support efficiency...

Cool I've never heard of that. I don't want to get blasted but I think in the physics sense efficiency doesn't exist. You can stop wasting things, but if you want something to be done, all ways to it in the end use the same amount of energy. The only efficiency is stop doing things that you don't need to be doing, like carting water around when people could be drinking local water, stuff like that.

[PaleoPhil]

^ interesting. So we dont have to go around killing people than? ...

Oh well, I guess we don't need Tyler's reign of terror after all. Boo hoo!

[TylerDurden]

Oh well, I guess we don't need Tyler's reign of terror after all. Boo hoo!

 The trouble is we do.  That is, as technology increases(even if population doesn't increase further), the negative effect of  each one individual on the environment will correspondingly increase, no matter how theoretically benevolent that person may be to wildlife etc. I envision a concrete-/plastic-ridden future, otherwise, in which so-called futuristic "national parks" only consist of 2 or 3 trees with the land being no more than half an acre across.

Though, for obvious reasons, no one would allow IQ-selection to be a factor in determining population-decrease, as most people are of average intelligence. A simpler solution would be to heavily tax anyone with more than 1 child, give far more rights(or money) to childless people( which would be taken away if they get children in future etc.).