Coal - It's what's for dinner! [View all]
(If you’re a cow) ….
Chinese scientists have developed a cost-effective method of converting coal into protein, which they say could feed livestock much more efficiently than natural plants, while using a tiny fraction of the land.
According to Our World in Data, grazing land for livestock and farming land for animal feed production combine to take up an astonishing 40 million square kilometers (15.4 million square miles) of land. That's well over a quarter of the Earth's entire dry land area, and nearly 40% of the land defined as "habitable."
This is one of the reasons the meat-heavy Western diet is under fire as environmentally unsustainable; growing plants to feed animals makes wretchedly inefficient use of land, which could otherwise be left as forest or used for other purposes.
One solution is moving toward lab-grown meat – but another may be to start producing protein for livestock feed using other methods. This would be a particular boon to China. According to Biotech researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the country is currently forced to import around 80% of its protein raw materials in the form of soybeans and the like – and that's a serious food security issue for the nation.
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https://newatlas.com/science/coal-protein-feed/
I think I’ll just reduce my meat consumption….
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