That’d be an interesting post-apocalypse setting. The world outlawed farming animals, because it was cruel. As a result, most species of livestock have gone extinct. Now, the technology that has allowed for a life without livestock has failed, and the people left have to figure out what new species can be farmed.
the technology that has allowed for a life without livestock has failed
That would be the ability to grow crops? So only wild plants would grow for some reason? Impossible to farm anything then really, only viable lifestyles are scavenging, foraging and hunting
I mean more some future where we have synthetic meats, vertical farms, and things like that. Presumably crops selected for a vertical farm wouldn’t do as well outside of one.
Also, there is good reason farming animals has been done historically. Some crops aren’t available all year, and animals, like cows, can grow from just grass, which we can’t digest. They produce a product that’s available all year. Also, currently we don’t really need things like wools, as we’ve invented alternatives (mostly based on petroleum). If those alternatives are gone, we still need textiles.
So, even if we’re in a future form of humanity and all of our present farming methods failed, sowing seeds and harvesting crops would be the first kind of farming to be “restored” or “rediscovered” or whatever, because it’s vastly more efficient, and assuming you’re recovering from some sort of disaster scenario, feeding as many people as quickly as possible would probably be the goal. They’d probably grow rice and soy or something.
Animal farming is really for luxury goods, except in very remote places where crops can’t be grown
Not really. Rice, soy, wheat, and corn do not grow all year round, and that’s assuming those are retained. It took a long time to selectively breed the grains that we know as rice and corn to be as productive as they are. They started pretty similar to grasses. Farming will still be good, and they can be preserved with things like fermentation and pickling, but farming animals was not just done as a luxury.
The fact is that animals need to be fed, and they are inefficient. Most animals eat plants, so to create 1,000kcal of beef products, for example, it takes 25,000kcal of plant products. Most animal feeds are based on corn or soy, which otherwise could be turned into human food products directly with a 25x efficiency bonus.
I suppose you could make an argument that grass-fed livestock might work, but then I guess an explanation for why grass is growing but other crops aren’t.
My underlying point is that animal protein is inefficient compared to plant protein
That’d be an interesting post-apocalypse setting. The world outlawed farming animals, because it was cruel. As a result, most species of livestock have gone extinct. Now, the technology that has allowed for a life without livestock has failed, and the people left have to figure out what new species can be farmed.
That would be the ability to grow crops? So only wild plants would grow for some reason? Impossible to farm anything then really, only viable lifestyles are scavenging, foraging and hunting
I mean more some future where we have synthetic meats, vertical farms, and things like that. Presumably crops selected for a vertical farm wouldn’t do as well outside of one.
Also, there is good reason farming animals has been done historically. Some crops aren’t available all year, and animals, like cows, can grow from just grass, which we can’t digest. They produce a product that’s available all year. Also, currently we don’t really need things like wools, as we’ve invented alternatives (mostly based on petroleum). If those alternatives are gone, we still need textiles.
So, even if we’re in a future form of humanity and all of our present farming methods failed, sowing seeds and harvesting crops would be the first kind of farming to be “restored” or “rediscovered” or whatever, because it’s vastly more efficient, and assuming you’re recovering from some sort of disaster scenario, feeding as many people as quickly as possible would probably be the goal. They’d probably grow rice and soy or something.
Animal farming is really for luxury goods, except in very remote places where crops can’t be grown
Not really. Rice, soy, wheat, and corn do not grow all year round, and that’s assuming those are retained. It took a long time to selectively breed the grains that we know as rice and corn to be as productive as they are. They started pretty similar to grasses. Farming will still be good, and they can be preserved with things like fermentation and pickling, but farming animals was not just done as a luxury.
The fact is that animals need to be fed, and they are inefficient. Most animals eat plants, so to create 1,000kcal of beef products, for example, it takes 25,000kcal of plant products. Most animal feeds are based on corn or soy, which otherwise could be turned into human food products directly with a 25x efficiency bonus.
I suppose you could make an argument that grass-fed livestock might work, but then I guess an explanation for why grass is growing but other crops aren’t.
My underlying point is that animal protein is inefficient compared to plant protein