Study about the nutritional impacts of removing animals from agriculture

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Canastenard
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Re: Study about the nutritional impacts of removing animals from agriculture

Post by Canastenard »

I haven't done much about this since the last time I posted contrary to what I said I would do, but I'd like to say that I'm probably not going to work on this until the next year (which is in, well, not too much time from now - easy joke to do at the end of the year). Or at least a few days after Christmas. Doing research on this takes time and I don't feel like spending it on this project for now.

If anyone has any idea to add on this then don't hesitate to suggest them or even to edit the page itself though. I'll make sure to go back some time after Christmas.

Just a question though: I suggested that pathogens may not be a huge concern on crops that are meant to be eaten cooked or processed, but as I suggested it earlier trees can be beneficial to fields where crops grow, and if fruits or nuts are harvested from those trees and can be eaten raw then they might be contamined with those pathogens because of volatility. Indeed the article I posted in my last post talked about viruses that can cause illness in those who breathe dust from sewage fertilizers can get illness from it, so even without trees that provide additional sources of food that might be a problem for neighbours. Probability for enterovirus infection are said to be around 1 in 1,000,000 which seems pretty low (but still unfortunate), but for noroviruses it's at least 1 in 1,000 which is much higher and I'd say too high to be acceptable.
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brimstoneSalad
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Re: Study about the nutritional impacts of removing animals from agriculture

Post by brimstoneSalad »

I've been pretty busy with the upcoming holidays too. I'm going to try to catch up on things soon.

Interesting about the pathogens. Using high risk waste on fields to grow green manure might make more sense for areas where anything from those fields might be eaten raw/unprocessed or that are close to towns or cities.
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Canastenard
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Re: Study about the nutritional impacts of removing animals from agriculture

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I don't know if I'll go full steam ahead again right now about this, but I found something interesting today: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5399451/

Chinese seaweed production removes 9,500 tons of phosphorus from the ocean per year. This is to be compared with Wikipedia that says 910,000 tons of elemental phosphorus (the element, not phosphate rocks) is produced each year from mined phosphate rocks, unfortunately without source. With seaweed cultivation from all over the world, that would mean it could provide a non negligible part of the world's demand in phosphorus.

In the thread about element scarcity in the future I mentioned how removing metals from sludge waste could be a win-win for both the high-tech and agricultural industries. The former could recover critical elements without having to mine nature, and it would be an important step to make a potentially safe fertilizer the later could use. Now we need to remove potentially toxic organic molecules, pathogens and bad odors. Intense heat sounds like an easy way to do that, but it would come at the cost of generating a lot of greenhouse gases which is not desirable (although I'm pretty sure sewage waste generates methane anyway, but I feel like heating it could make it worse, is that true?)
My point is that if we can make sure sewage waste can be made safe as fertilizer, then it could be a reliable way to fertilize our crops, and with phosphorus taken from the sea for the farming of seaweeds (and also sessile bivalves since there's no ethical reason why their farming should be excluded from an ideal vegan world) it would fill inevitable losses (like leaves of crops eaten by pests) and thus close the cycle, effectively making synthetic fertilizers from mined rocks no longer the main source of phosphorus in our food supply. The problem of phosphorus scarcity will probably not be one from anytime soon, but for the sake of future generations that could be concerned I think it might be worth mentioning ways to avoid being dependent to mined phosphorus in the Wiki page.
Appeal to nature: the strange belief that what is perceived as "natural" is necessarily safer, more effective or morally superior compared to what isn't.
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brimstoneSalad
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Re: Study about the nutritional impacts of removing animals from agriculture

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That's a pretty good find, it's worth mentioning.
We could probably multiply that by the ratio of total world coastline for an upper bound, and subtract waters too cold or too high/low latitude to grow in for a reasonable estimate.

It might be an argument that we should eat more seaweed.
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Re: Study about the nutritional impacts of removing animals from agriculture

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I did some modifications to the Wiki page, and wanted to add a section about mushrooms. But I thought a moment, "Wait, aren't mushrooms grown in a manure substrate?" and a quick search about mushroom cultivation shown me that manure use is mainstream in mushroom cultivation. I'm pretty sure mushrooms don't need animal manure to grow well, but I'm wondering, on which substrate would mushrooms grow in a vegan world? We'd be better without animal manure anyway because it's better to directly eat food rather than transforming food into fertilizer (manure) to then transform it back into food, and with that logic mushrooms would only be grown on inevitable and practically incompressible waste. Maybe composted food waste could become the primary means of growing mushrooms? Composting the wrong thing, like diseased plants which could contamine healthy plants that grow on their compost (I've seen marks of bacterial infection in my leafy greens in my fridge sometimes), or walnuts which have juglone which is toxic to other plants, would make the compost unusable for plant agriculture, but could it be appropriate for growing mushrooms? I don't expect people to be careful about which kind of food they throw away in their wasted food bin, so reserving such a compost solely for growing mushrooms might make composting more practical.

Which would mean asking people to throw away their food waste in a separate bin from everything else, which wouldn't be a big deal since people are already expected to put their junk in different bins for the sake of recycling; maybe this way to put wasted food back in the food system by transforming it into mushrooms might be described in the "Food system" section of the Wiki page.
Last edited by Canastenard on Mon Jan 29, 2018 5:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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brimstoneSalad
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Re: Study about the nutritional impacts of removing animals from agriculture

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I think a mushroom section would be good.

Mushrooms can be grown on a lot of different substrates. Manure is used sometimes, probably because it's cheap and plentiful, but straw is pretty common too.

I don't know how it's done specifically, but I understand mushrooms are even grown on things like spoiled dairy (probably just a component of the medium).
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Canastenard
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Re: Study about the nutritional impacts of removing animals from agriculture

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I searched a bit about mushrooms and found an interesting article: https://www.hunker.com/13427013/soil-types-for-growing-mushrooms
Basically it's saying that different kinds of mushrooms grow better on different substrates. For example, oyster mushrooms and shiitake grow well in a substrate rich in wood chips. That article says that "White button mushrooms prefer compost as substrate" which I suppose is not implied to inherently need animal products, but most links talking about white mushrooms in particular mention animal manure as an important substrate material. But there are some exceptions like this one: https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/17218264
According to that person, spent substrate for growing other mushroom species could be a good material for white button mushroom substrate if fortified with compost, the mention of which is consistent with the mention of compost as good WBM substrate material in the link I provided before. However, WBMs are the most consumed mushrooms in the world, so there would be an important need to cultivate other kinds of mushrooms to provide substrate material.
After that, spent mushrrom substrate can be used as a soil amendment, as it had a good nitrogen to carbon ration of about 13:1, according to this study: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d1c1/839ab5cf086154d25ecf7287e1743bac40bc.pdf However another study mentions a higher C:N ratio for spent substrate for oyster mushrooms: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214317316301007 which I think suggests WBMs need a more concentrated amount of amino acids to grow. Maybe we could supplement it with a little bit of alfalfa to increase the protein content? I'm not necessarily a huge fan of the idea since growing a crop to compost it seems wasteful to me, but maybe it would be necessary to make sure the compost has an adequate protein content; it could be grown as part of crop rotation, can fix nitrogen, and apparently doesn't need much pesticides (according to this at least: http://agric.ucdavis.edu/files/242006.pdf). It however seems to need a lot of water, so should be grown in regions where water scarcity isn't a big problem (for example not in California... where a lot of water is already spent to grow alfalfa for livestock feed :roll: )

I think I might edit the Wiki article, but I'd like to have someone else's opinion before doing that.
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Re: Study about the nutritional impacts of removing animals from agriculture

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I don't think I'm gonna participate in completing the sustainable vegan agriculture page from now on, as I'm not an expert and I have bigger priorities in my life right now. However there was something I've been wondering about: what happens to bioreactor waste?

By that I mean the waste from the reactors where single-celled organisms are grown, often for recombinant proteins naturally only found in animals (casein, collagen, etc.) as we will need them if we want to make animal agriculture as obsolete as possible. Since you only need specific proteins, that means once the cell culture has made enough proteins they're purified so you take the protein you need and nothing else, and that means there's a lot of waste (DNA, cell membranes, other proteins, etc.) If you don't get any use of this waste then it might be argued that recombinant protein cultivation would be as wasteful as animal agriculture which would be ironic since the inefficiency of animal agriculture is one of the things we want to avoid.

I searched "what happens to bioreactor waste" on Google and found the concept of "bioreactor landfill" which sounds like bioreactor waste is only good for landfilling and would have no added value besides methane production for energy purposes which would sound incredibly wasteful. But after reading a bit less superficially it actually sounds like it literally means it — landfills that act as bioreactors — and there's nothing that says it can only contain waste from bioreactors in the sense I had in mind, nor did I find anything about what I originally searched. Maybe it could be fed back to the new population of cingle-celled organisms alongside additional feed? Or as mushroom substrate? Worst case scenario could it be used as composting material? I just hope it's not simply landfilled, or at the very least if that's the case, then the cell culture should only be fed things unsuitable as human food.
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brimstoneSalad
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Re: Study about the nutritional impacts of removing animals from agriculture

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Canastenard wrote: Tue Mar 27, 2018 12:49 pm However, WBMs are the most consumed mushrooms in the world, so there would be an important need to cultivate other kinds of mushrooms to provide substrate material.
I think that's more to do with the low cost than anything inherent to them. Other mushroom types have better flavor, texture, are more convenient, etc.
So I don't think shifting to more mycoculture would have a problem of insufficient demand for other mushroom types.
Canastenard wrote: Tue Mar 27, 2018 12:49 pmAfter that, spent mushrrom substrate can be used as a soil amendment, as it had a good nitrogen to carbon ration of about 13:1,
Did you get that backwards? You mentioned C:N later.
Canastenard wrote: Tue Mar 27, 2018 12:49 pmMaybe we could supplement it with a little bit of alfalfa to increase the protein content?
Or bioreactor waste, as you mention in the next post. That's very protein rich if you're only getting a single protein from it.
Canastenard wrote: Tue Mar 27, 2018 12:49 pmI think I might edit the Wiki article, but I'd like to have someone else's opinion before doing that.
Please do. Don't hesitate to ask on Mushroom forums either. There are some real experts there.
When we hit a wall, we need to do more original research and interviews. Nothing wrong with that. :)
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brimstoneSalad
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Re: Study about the nutritional impacts of removing animals from agriculture

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Canastenard wrote: Tue May 15, 2018 2:59 pm I don't think I'm gonna participate in completing the sustainable vegan agriculture page from now on, as I'm not an expert and I have bigger priorities in my life right now.
I'm sorry to hear that.

I hope it's not the former holding you back: it's very useful just to get these ideas down, and even to say what we don't know to pave the way for further research.
Like I said in the last post, we should try to ask experts for advice when we don't know; no problem with original research here like on wikipedia.
Canastenard wrote: Tue May 15, 2018 2:59 pmHowever there was something I've been wondering about: what happens to bioreactor waste?
That's a fair question for single protein products (like casein). These microbes are usually cultivated to make the production very efficient, but it's probably true there's some excess biomass. It can likely be fed back into the system to an extent, but using it to grow mushrooms is a good alternative.

I'm pretty sure it's still going to be more efficient than milk.
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