How Much Corn Goes To Animal Feed

This fascinating map from National Geographic shows the proportion of the world's crops that are grown for direct human consumption (in green) versus all the crops that are grown for brute feed or biofuels (in majestic):

Crops grown for nutrient (green) versus for animal feed and fuel (purple)

Click to enlarge. (National Geographic)

Only 55 percent of the earth's crop calories are actually eaten straight by people. Some other 36 percent is used for animal feed. And the remaining 9 percentage goes toward biofuels and other industrial uses. (Those figures come from this newspaper by Emily Cassidy and other researchers at the University of Minnesota'due south Found on the Surroundings.)

The proportions are even more striking in the United States, where just 27 percent of ingather calories are consumed directly — wheat, say, or fruits and vegetables grown in California. By contrast, more than 67 percent of crops — especially all the soy grown in the Midwest — goes to animal feed. And a portion of the rest goes to ethanol and other biofuels.

Some of that brute feed eventually becomes nutrient, obviously — simply it's a much, much more indirect process. Information technology takes about 100 calories of grain to produce just 12 calories of chicken or 3 calories worth of beefiness, for instance.

So why does this map matter?

The map itself comes from Jonathan Foley's fascinating, visually rich exploration in National Geographic of how we can maybe feed everyone as the globe'due south population grows from 7 billion today to 9 billion by mid-century. (Foley directs the Academy of Minnesota's Constitute on the Surroundings.)

Feeding 9 billion people won't exist piece of cake: that's basically like adding two new Indias to the world in the next few decades. And, making matters even trickier, humans have at present cultivated nigh of the earth's arable land and are pushing upwardly against the limits of freshwater consumption. So the traditional strategy of "detect new farmland to grow more food" is getting even harder.

There are lots of possible strategies here. Farmers could increment agricultural productivity by boosting ingather yields — either through new farming techniques or through improved ingather genetics. But fifty-fifty if the rapid charge per unit of improvement in crop yields over the 20th century continued, that still wouldn't produce enough food for anybody.

Another possibility, every bit the map higher up shows, is that the earth could devote more existing farmland back to feeding people. Again, as the numbers advise, just 55 percent of crop calories go directly toward people. The balance goes toward biofuels or animal feed.Humans can't consume biofuels, obviously. And animal feed is likewise an inefficient way of feeding people — about i-tenth as efficient, on a calorie ground, as eating crops directly.

One implication of that is that, as countries like Mainland china and India grow and swallow more milk and meat, the pressure level on global farmland volition grow. But, alternatively, if the world shifted even a small portion of its nutrition away from resources-intensive meats or grew fewer biofuels, nosotros could wring more than food calories out of existing farmland.

In that location are other strategies too, which Foley details in his piece. Many countries notwithstanding don't farm every bit efficiently as they could due to insufficient fertilizer use. And a lot of food still gets wasted, either by consumers or due to poor storage infrastructure. In August 2014, one of Foley's colleagues, Paul West, published a paper in Science showing that farming tweaks in just a handful of countries could fix a lot of these inefficiencies.

Farther reading: How to feed 3 billion extra people — without trashing the planet

Source: https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel-animal-feed

Posted by: mcgaugheyaguied1981.blogspot.com

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