nsrxn

one of us is right.

The stalk just gets tossed in for efficiency’s sake because the cows can also digest it.

you literally don't know anything about feeding cows. just stop.

. If cows got more calories out of corn stalks than corn kernels, then they wouldn’t even finish growing the corn and would just feed them stalks.

I don't think so. they may get more calories from silage, but they prefer the kernels, which would help the feed go down easier.

your shepon paper shows a great deal of spinach being fed to chickens. why would it be fed to chickens if it were suitable for human consumption? I don't actually know, but my guess is that it is not suitable for human consumption, and that is why it is fed to chickens. that's a conservation of resources. the potatoes fed to cattle are likely the same.

this paper doesn't discuss this discrepancy at all. I have to say I don't find the analysis very compelling.

a soybean is only about 20% oil to begin with. that means that even using the numbers you have here, the oil is twice as valuable per pound compared to the rest of the bean.

soybean cakes, which production can be considered as main driver or land-use, represent 4% of the global livestock feed intake.

you clipped this out of the abstract, but it's highly relevant to what I've been saying: this is a byproduct of pressing soybeans for oil. if we didn't feed it to livestock, it would be industrial waste.

in didn't say it's free from harms. I'm saying we aren't using that land to grow crops.

do you have the full papers? I can't really examine these claims from the links you provided.

no one said they are exclusively grass fed, not that we should be doing that

Raising plants to feed animals so we can eat the animals is less efficient than raising plants for us to eat.

if that were the situation, you might be right. but since we actually feed livestock mostly crop seconds and byproducts, it's actually a conservation of resources in a lot of situations, with minimal competition with human food sources

beef cattle spend most of their life grazing.

it's not mostly kernels. livestock are fed the entire plant, and the kernels are a slim minority of the weight.