Stone Age Farmers On Plant Diets May Have Lacked Vitamins.
Tomorrow’s Challenge Is Ensuring Livestock Diets For The Developing World
CHURCHVILLE, Va.–”It’s easy to tell from the skeletons of our ancestors whether they were agriculturists or hunter-gatherers,” says Arthur de Vany of California State University, an expert on Stone Age diets.
“The agriculturists have bad teeth, bone lesions, small and underdeveloped skeletons and small craniums, compared to hunter- gatherers.”
Experts now believe humans spent 2 million years as hunters and scavengers, eating meat-oriented diets that were about 65 percent livestock calories and 35 percent plant calories. After people learned to farm, just 10,000 years ago, they could feed larger populations–but plant-only diets produced poorer health, de Vany says.
The early farmers who ate mainly plants lacked key vitamins, minerals and amino acids, according to Loren Cordain of Colorado State University, another expert on ancient diet. This led to higher infant mortality, shorter life-spans, more infectious diseases, widespread iron deficiency anemia and bone mineral disorders.
The animal-plant balance in the American diet today is 38 percent livestock calories and 62 percent plant calories. Worldwide, only 17 percent of the calories coming from livestock. No wonder the world is in the biggest. No wonder that Indonesia has been clearing tropical forest to grow corn and soybeans for chicken feed.
Looking at the modern end of history, the U.S. Council for Agricultural Science and Technology agrees with the meat-health argument, reporting that “where intakes of animal products are low, increases in meat (in particular), milk and eggs in the diets of toddlers and school children have resulted in marked improvement in growth, cognitive development and health.”
Can the world provide livestock calories for everybody? That is truly the farming challenge of the 21st century. CAST expects world meat demand to rise about two-thirds in the next 20 years, with 90 percent of the increased consumption in the Third World. Sheep, goats, dairy cattle and beef cattle in the Third World produce more than a kilogram of human food for each kilogram of grain consumed.
But much of that Third World livestock production exploits the world’s limited supplies of grassland. Most of those grasslands have limited potential to produce more, due to poor rainfall or soil quality.
In the First World, it takes about three kilos of grain to produce a kilo of meat, and a bit less than one kilo of grain to produce a kilo of milk or eggs.
CAST says claims that First World farmers need 10-12 kilos of grain and huge amounts of water to produce meat are clearly inaccurate. Such claims extrapolate the high-grain rations and feedlot lifestyle of a steer’s final weeks to his whole life, and assume all of the animal’s feed is irrigated when most of it is not.
Moreover, says CAST, the First World has worked hard to raise its grain and forage yields, so fewer acres produce more livestock feed.
Using moisture-conserving conservation tillage, U.S. farmers can now produce 70 bushels of sorghum an acre on land that was previously too dry for crops. On better land, they produce 200 bushels of corn an acre, where their grandfathers grew only 25 bushels. The higher grain yields also produce larger tonnages of crop stalks, which are excellent feed for ruminant animals such as cattle.
The First World has also radically improved feed rations and veterinary medications, raising the world’s livestock feed efficiency by 15 percent just in the period 1983-93.
More of the world’s hogs and poultry have been moved indoors, where they suffer less stress from heat, cold, rain and snow, and fight less among themselves. This raises their feed efficiency about 20 percent.
In the years ahead, CAST expects research, including biotechnology, to help breed animals more resistant to disease, create more effective vaccines and further improve the nutritional value of animal feeds.
CAST thinks the milk output per cow could be doubled. Better understanding of animal nutrition will also permit reduced pollution from odors and wastes.
“A primary requirement for feeding a growing world population is thus to increase crop yield per hectare,” says CAST, “because there is limited opportunity to increase the area of land cultivated without adverse environmental impact.” That makes agricultural research the biggest factor in providing high-quality diets for the world’s children.
DENNIS T. AVERY is based in Churchville, Va., and is director of global food issues for the Hudson Institute of Indianapolis. His views are not necessarily those of BridgeNews, whose ventures include the Internet site www.bridge.com.
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Dennis T. Avery is based in Churchville, Va., and is director of global food issues for the Hudson Institute of Indianapolis.
