Europe
Europe community on dbzer0. Intended to be a place to discuss European news, politics, or just general topics from a European perspective. Since this is on dbzer0 expect the community to lean more leftist-anarchist but a wide range of views are accepted here (within reason).
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are such a great example. only 7% of the global crop is fed directly to livestock. over 80% of the global supply is pressed for oil. the byproduct is about 67% of the total crop weight that would be industrial waste if we didn't feed it to livestock.
I assume the paper means that byproduct by specifying "soybean cake" in a seperate category.
"Soybean cakes can therefore be considered inedible for humans but they are derived from an edible product and can be considered as the main driver of soybean production."; "If the EFA of the part used as feed material is > 66%, then the feed material is considered as the main driver of land-use and therefore in competition with food production. Practically, this is the case only for soybean cakes (EFA=72%)" https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gfs.2017.01.001
So the soybean byproduct is not a net positive with no drawbacks.
the oil, a few years ago when I last looked this up, was about half the value of the he soybean, despite only being 1/5 of the weight of the bean. and it was tending upward. I don't know if it's definitive to say one way or another, but my interpretation is that over 4/5 soybeans are processed in an oil press to extract the oil, and we feed the industrial waste to livestock.
I found this graphic. Even if we feed the waste the industrial waste to livestock and deduct that from the demand for animals (76 % – 13.2 % = 62.8 %) which I don't think we can do 1:1, over 60 % of the world wide soy bean production is only done for animal feed. From the graphic I don't know if the mentioned waste is even fed to the animals.
But in the worst case scenario eating plant based would save 60 % of soy beans from ever being made, while the new demand from the plant based diets must be lower. Because lots of non-plant based people eat soy products already, especially in Asia and it still only makes up 20 % of the soy bean production right now.
you're misreading this graphic
a soybean is about 20% oil.
13.2% is human edible oil, biodiesel is another 2.8%, and another .3% is lubricants. that means 16.3% of the global crops oil is extracted. that's about 85% of the total crop that's pressed.
that leaves about 69% as industrial waste, which we feed to livestock, and another 7% of the crop is fed directly to them, but this includes crop seconds.