This article reads more like an ad for their farm, which granted as far as farms that produce meat from livestock goes, seems really nice.
But their approach is not gonna work at scale, because you cannot have enough farms that operate this way to supply meat to a whole population. They also only compare their approach to what is basically the strip mining approach to crop growth. They don't look at things like crop rotation, or plenty of other farming techniques that prevent your land from becoming an arid desert. The title is clickbait, and the actual content of the article is way off. If this had been an article about how they tried to treat their animals better than our current factory farming conditions, this article would have been a great look at a way to raise livestock that doesn't make me think I'm looking at some sort of dystopian Bond-Villain's greatest evil contraption. But instead they tried to make it about veganism vs. eating meat, and failed to provide any actually compelling reasoning.
There is no ecologically sound way of getting vegetable calories out of the Montana native grasslands. The best way of feeding people using that land would be raising Bison; cattle are an acceptable second choice.
But your basic point still stands. The Montana native grasslands can only support a few cattle per square mile, so it definitely does not work at scale.
There's an interesting UN report from a while back, Livestock's Long Shadow [1], that observes that, nowadays, it's not necessarily even ecologically sound to use the grasslands in the first place. A big feature of their findings are that large-scale grazing tends to prevent forests from forming in wetter climates, and contributes to desertification in more arid ones. Both of those consequences have huge implications if you're worried about climate change.
One of the key goals they set out, aside from getting people to rely less on livestock agriculture in the first place, is to try and convert more of it to CAFOs. Yeah, factory farms are ugly, but they found that it's much more efficient from a land and energy use perspective. As have other disinterested parties. The loudest voices saying otherwise seem to be ones that have a financial interest in selling more grass-fed beef.
A subtext here is that we live in a very different era than the one that the one invoked by more nostalgic approaches to agriculture. Once upon a time, people had no choice but to figure out how to feed themselves off the land they occupied, and nature put much firmer limits on how many people could occupy certain areas. Nowadays, not only is getting food shipped in a realistic option, sometimes it's even the more economical and sustainable one.
I agree that just idling those Montana ranches is probably best. Huge tracts of land just to raise a few cattle. But then what?
Back to Bison? Bison are much more effective at preventing forests from forming than cattle are. So "natural", but from an ecosystem protection and climate change perspective probably not the best choice. "What's best for the environment" is often a large set of conflicting goals...
There re many different kinds of soil. I can totally understand that some soils are better used for this kind of sustainable grazing. Other soils are great for growing crops.
This should not be a veganism vs organic meat discussion, but an organic meat vs intensive meat production discussion. And a separate sustainable crops vs soil-depleting crop production discussion.
You can't feed everybody on just meat; you're going to need crops of various sorts. Feeding crops to animals for meat is incredibly wasteful, but having animals graze on land that's otherwise unusable, is a great idea. I hope this is the future of meat production. But it's not a replacement for sustainable crops.
"I can totally understand that some soils are better used for this kind of sustainable grazing. Other soils are great for growing crops."
One could readily argue that most soils are better used for sustainable grazing. Tillage is very intrusive, destructive and unnatural. Most food crops require tillage.
I used Montana as an example of a soil that would be quickly destroyed with a little bit of tillage. Luckily most soil isn't as fragile as Montana's, but virtually all soil is damaged by tillage.
It's all moot though -- our current level of meat consumption is way above the level that can be met through sustainable grazing.
What's better for the soil also depends on what you consider "good". Is it food production? Is it unspoilt nature? Soil used to grow food is different from soil left to nature, but expecting all soil to remain as natural as possible is unreasonable; we've got 7 billion people to feed, and building houses or streets in not good for soil either.
What matters is how you can produce food efficiently and sustainably. There is soil that can produce more food in a sustainable manner through crops than through grazing. There is also soil where the opposite is true.
I agree that the article would have been more stimulating if it had gone into detail about the methods employed, and the yields, etc.
This is a topic that I've just started looking into on my parent's small 20 acre farm, which run a few head of cattle and due to drought, has caused the soil to be highly compacted. Thankfully, the farm itself used to be an orchard (oranges and kiwifruit mainly), so the cattle have alternative feed sources beside just grazing land. (Believe it or not, cows love fruit, including the leaves!)
Recently I attended a seminar run by local government in conjunction with a group [0] about cover crops (which admittedly is more about vegetable farming, but parts can be used for grazing too). Their focus was mainly about getting the root structures right, which the above article hints. The link below shows a rather wide range of farms and environments that are being tested on. It also has information about 'biopesticides' [1], ie. plants that will help mitigate/eradicate unwanted pests, without need for pesticides.
I personally like having spots of news that aren't strictly technical mixed in, but I understand that some people prefer to see that elsewhere. For me, I like seeing what I consider one of the better communities I frequent on the internet discussing all sorts of things (if I could get you guys to write comments on everything I ever read, the internet would be my favorite place).
I also "like having spots of news that aren't strictly technical mixed in", but you described the article as an inaccurate short-sighted advertisement...
Fair point. While I disagree with the article, I enjoyed reading the discussion around it, so I'm not quite sure whether I'm happy or sad it hit front page?
More humane and sustainable forms of animal agriculture would certainly be a step in the right direction from the horrors of the concentrated feeding operations that supply most of the world's meat supply right now. But those techniques were developed for a reason. There's no way to meet the current and rapidly growing demand for meat without completely setting aside the welfare of the animals and the environment. The idea that we can just return to the idyllic farms of hundreds of years ago and still feed steak to billions of people every day is a pipe dream.
The real solution is to reduce the global population but in the meantime switching to a vegan diet will dramatically lower your carbon footprint and help reduce the horrific suffering we inflict on animals every day because we like the way they taste. You might think you understand what it takes to put that bacon on your plate but chances are you have no idea:
There's also a growing body of evidence that a well-planned vegan diet is not only perfectly healthy but healthier than diets rich in animal fats & proteins.
One thing to note is that being vegan is very difficult and most people aren't going to be vegan. One thing everyone can do is to cut their meat intake. People have meat for almost every meal and it's pretty simple to cut back and you still get some health and environmental benefits.
Being vegan is a lot easier than you might think, but you're right that reducing your meat intake and trying to buy more humanely raised meat also helps. What I recommend to my non-vegan friends is to just pick one day a week in which they consume no animal products and then expand from there.
It is hard, you either need to carefully plan your diet or you're risking ruining your health far more than usual. However, it's very easy to greatly reduce your meat intake - just looking around for vegan options lets you put a lot of variety into your daily diet and it turns out that it can be tasty even if you generally hate vegetables, like I do. Even though I sometimes still choose meat out of preference when eating out, I would never expect that I would be able to actively prefer vege and vegan options in so many cases until I tried :) Ended up in me always checking (and contributing to) OpenVegeMap when looking for someplace to eat in a new area.
You could start by going vegetarian instead by choosing to eat a cheese pizza instead of a hamburger. There's a wide world between carnivore and Jainist vegan. There's also a ton of much better vegan/vegetarian meat replacements available than just a few years ago.
As a vegetable hater that was a misconception that I used to have. Turned out that in most cases I even prefer vegan meat substitutes to real meat now for their taste and texture (they can be pretty similar, but the slight differences IMO work against meat).
Also, you don't have to be miserable. There are tons of foods that a lot of people find delicious that aren't meat. You can use substitutes (tvp or lentil/walnuts for tacos, tofu in a stir fry, etc).
Different approaches work for different people. Personally I just went cold turkey but for a lot of people it's easier to set aside a day to try it. Whatever works for you is fine, of course. A lot of people find that, far from being miserable, they feel better and enjoy the food they're eating.
I've been trying to keep my average under 90g/day since about 2010 and most weeks nowadays I average half that.
However I wouldn't call 500g a proper steak, only time I've seen stakes at that size is as novalty items on menus of burger/grill joints, and even then very rarely.
Why would you think that is true? Here in the USA we eat less red meat than we did 45 years ago, and are way less healthy. NHS and the USDA make all kinds of boneheaded dietary prescriptions that are terrible (eat lots of grains, eat trans fats, avoid eggs, avoid butter).
Since the 1970s, at least:
* Americans eat less red meat and more white meat than they used to in the 70's.
* Americans get fewer calories total from meat than they used to, yet eat way more plant material (hint: carbs) than ever before. https://imgur.com/a/LgqUMJz
* Americans and Brits are way more overweight than ever before, with the obesity "trend" starting in the late 70s or early 80s. Obesity should concern you, it kills 10 times the people that the US opioid epidemic does (300K deaths/year vs 30K deaths/year), but culture makes it much harder to take 10 times as seriously. Or talk about at all for that matter. What's a minute increase in bowel cancer comparatively?
Why fear (unprocessed) red meat in 2018, and why on earth listen to the NHS on the subject? Are people who listen to NHS guidelines actually healthier than people in the 1970's, who ate more red meat?
I'm gonna call BS on this unless you provide a citation.
Many people (in the west) eat a breakfast (cereal, pancakes, waffles, bagel, toast) or lunch (PB&J sandwich, salad) that contains no meat every day or every workday. Then you have to account for all the meals where there is no meat (pizza, mac and cheese). You'd need to have a substantial fraction of the population eating meat (almost) literally every meal in order to make up for the people who habitually don't eat meat at particular meals.
Edit: I'm talking about meat for the purpose of environmental impact and sustainability here. I'm not talking about meat from the perspective of strict veganism or the milk in your coffee or the eggs in your baked goods, those have negligible impact compared to raising animals to slaughter for food.
For the record, veganism also excludes dairy products, and we still have a pretty significant impact from things like dairy producing cows (not to mention they are treated just as poorly in factory conditions). And especially in restaurants, meat is very often consumed as a part of the things you mentioned. At least half (sometimes more) of pizza options have meat, mac and cheese when eaten as an entree and not a side almost always has bacon, chicken, etc. People take turkey or ham sandwiches for lunch just as often as PB&J. Burgers, breakfast sandwiches, etc. And look at fast food, how many places do you know where you (or other non-vegans) would actually regularly get meatless options?
The only fast food place we ever eat at is Taco Bell because you can customize everything to have beans instead of beef. We can't really eat at Chick-Fil-A, Wendy's, etc anymore.
Yeah it's not every meal but even many of your examples are often eaten with meat. Pancakes often come with bacon, salad often with chicken, and pizza with pepperoni or sausage. "Almost every meal" might be hyperbole but the prevalence of meat in our food and the sheer volume we traditionally consume is staggering. The USDA estimates about 222 pounds of consumption per capita in 2018 but I couldn't get a good figure on how to translate that in to how much people actually eat (I think that is difficult to do accurately)
Most people don't eat a breakfast with multiple things most days, just a quick meal before work (or they shove a bagel in their face while driving). Most people eat food that requires basically no prep work for lunch most days. Eating out (with the exception of coffee and donuts in certain industries) is not a regular occurrence for most people because it's not justifiable at their income level.
I'm not denying that one can have meat at every meal if they so desire. I'm saying that as a matter of convenience many do not.
The McDonalds drive through doesn't require any prep work and is super cheap. I see tons of people load up on Egg McMuffins with sausage at 6-7am on their way to work.
Many many many foods have eggs or dairy products in them that simply don’t need them. The bread for that pbj could very well have milk, eggs in it. Butter on toast is a dairy product. Eggs are a common ingredient in veggie burgers!
Dairy and small amounts of egg (usually added for it's chemical/material properties) in baked goods don't count as meat for discussions about food sustainability because they don't require raising animals for slaughter. A dairy cow can produce many gallons of milk and a chicken can lay many eggs over its lifetime. They're a drop in the bucket compared to the environmental impact of meat raised for direct consumption.
That's like complaining about oil products used to patch roads in a discussion about the environmental impact of oil.
Dairy production absolutely requires raising animals for slaughter. There is no beef industry without the dairy industry. Like mammals, cows produce milk as food source for their offspring - the dairy industry ensures that cows are always producing offspring. Those offspring don't get milk - it's sold to us. Those male offspring become veal and are slaughtered early. Those female offspring become more dairy cows. Those dairy cows that can no longer produce milk are slaughtered for meat and myriad other uses.
That's a huge reason why veganism is growing far faster than vegetarianism. People are realizing the systemic connection between the industries and understanding that all animal products must be eschewed.
Going full vegan may not be necessary, but we do need to drastically reduce our consumption of meat. I know a lot of people who eat meat twice per week, for example. That seems like something that could work for everybody.
And if we eat less meat, we can more easily afford to get the meat we do eat from these kind of organic pastures.
It means B12 (Yeast has poor bioavailability) Zinc Iron D2 Pills (No such thing as D3 on plant based foods) and a ton of Carbohydrates from grains potatoes legumes rice fruits etc
and people still wonder why the majority of Vegans return back to meat.
Nonsense. The only supplement vegans require is B12, but most meat eaters are deficient too. Everything else is readily available from a sensible vegan diet. Complex carbs are perfectly healthy, despite the best efforts of meat industry propagandists to confuse the issue. Meanwhile the typical meat-heavy diet is deficient in a number of important nutrients, most notably fiber.
The American Dietetics Association's official position is that vegan diets are healthy for people at all stages of life but don't that that distract you from your favorite bro science blog.
B12 must be supplemented, the rest is wrong. Not sure what's your point regarding carbs. Source: I do plant-based and perform blood tests for all the things you mentioned and more.
George Monbiot's comment on the article [0] basically makes the same point.
If all meat farming was done this way, optimised for environmental impact and animal welfare, there simply wouldn't be space for it. We'd all have no choice but to eat a lot less meat.
The resulting diet would be something a lot closer to veganism / vegetarianism than most people's idea of a "normal" meat-eating diet.
We are only able to eat the quantities of meat that are currently considered normal by treating animals like shit and harming the environment in the process.
A point that seems to be lost on most people who advocate for a plant based diet is that not all plants have the same environmental impact. Among plants as a class, there is a 60x range in the amount of calories provided per unit of resources required. So it matters a lot which plants you replace meat consumption with.
Generally speaking, beans, grains, and plant oils provide a lot of calories per input, whereas leafy greens and berries provide less calories per input than meat. So, if you replace your meat consumption with a bunch of kale salads and berry smoothies, your diet probably has a similar environmental impact to a diet that includes meat. But if you replace your meat consumption with beans, rice, olive oil, etc. then you're probably reducing the environmental impact of your diet.
Isn't this premise flawed though? I'd assume that even low-calorie plants are still way ahead of your average cow in terms of environmental impact. You have omitted methane emissions from that calculation, even though their impact is significant. You also ignored that plants produce oxygen instead of consuming it.
I don't think the premise is flawed. If plants have a 60x range in input (as proxied by cost) per calorie provided, then animals can consume plants at the top end of that range and still provide more calories per input than plants at the low end. 60x is a huge range.
With regard to the methane from cows concern: just eat chicken or pork. Chicken is probably the most environmentally friendly meat (in terms of calories provided per input).
It’s worth reading the “Guardian Pick” comment from George Monbiot, another Guardian journalist, for an interesting response/analysis of the articles proposals:
Not much that I can add to this conversation, but let me share a pet peeve: the phrase "save the world," which is used indiscriminately in so many contexts that's its devoid of meaning.
Save the world for whom? The tacit answer seems to be: for humans. Most vegans, including me, are vegan because we find the exploitation of animals morally unjustifiable. Our world includes the nonhuman world. And by being vegan we are saving it.
It seems that vegans have no problem shifting their consumption of food to a part of the biota that they feel doesn’t have the capacity to understand what is happening to them or to feel or respond to the pain of the process of being harvested for our food.
I often wonder how the plant feels when the sharp cow hoof shears a leaf or stalk as it grazes. Does it mourn the loss of the immature seed heads that fall to the ground to be consumed by the waiting insect hordes or buried forever in the soil to be consumed by the soil microbes? A generation lost to a random grazer who was totally unappreciative of the effort that the plant expended sucking nutrients from soil and carefully metering out available water all the while competing with each of its anchored neighbors for vital sunlight.
As the horse grazes the pasture do the bunches of grass shout pain filled warnings to their neighbors as they are forcefully yanked from the ground by their roots and consumed whole to be digested and deposited some time later as a turd that will feed their fellow grasses? Oh the indignity of losing your closest kin to a ruminant who deposits their crushed, altered remains on your shimmering blades so that they can feed you and your surviving kinsmen. By their deaths do you so prosper.
Does the plant yearn for mobility so that it could exact some revenge upon the aggressors? Is kudzu the plant kingdom equivalent of a super-hero – taking land that humans value for farming and agriculture out of production? Do insects pass on to their plant hosts the bold tales of the lands currently under conquest by invasive plant species? Is there something in the vibrational frequencies of the bee and insect wings that conveys information to the plants about how the plants in the next field are faring? Are they suffering from lack of water on that sunny slope? Are you lucky to be growing here on the shady side of the ridge because your cousins on the other side are spindly and dry? Is the farmer currently murdering your fibrous friends with their machines that foul the air and compress the soil so that extra work is necessary before life-giving roots can once again permeate its matrix?
Does the elm or the hackberry tree feel indebted to the birds who eat their seeds and shit them out along my fence lines so that I have new bird-shit elms and hackberries to clear each year, like magic?
Were the oaks disappointed to see the jays stealing their acorns to be deposited miles away from the mother tree thus reforesting the plains on retreat of the glaciers after the last ice age or did they somehow communicate to the birds that it would be appreciated?
I think the answer to the old question about whether a tree falling in a forest makes a sound if there are no ears to hear it has to be a resounding yes. It is the chemical scream of an injured plant crying out for another opportunity at life as it crashes to the forest floor. As humans, we don’t have ears to hear these screams and have only recently documented their existence [0]. Much remains to be studied.
Believe me, I know the plant cognition literature quite well ([0],[1] or [2],[3] for the technical literature) which is why I would consume lab grown meat over free growing plants if it ever came to a head.
However, your mock poetry about plants yearning for freedom is close to being an ad-hominem attack. Are you saying you don't eat plants because you feel their pain? My guess is probably not. Instead, you are trying to deflect attention away from the suffering of those whom we know do feel pain.
>Are you saying you don't eat plants because you feel their pain? My guess is probably not.
You are correct. I am, like we all have evolved to be, omnivorous. I supped on delicious pig parts with potatoes and brussels sprouts last night. The seasonings I used included crushed plant seeds, pressed seed oils, and real butter from someone's cow.
Vegans, like those people who choose to eat meat-heavy diets are making a conscious choice to ignore a specific option from all the available food sources.
Your body has evolved to be able to handle all of it, some of it may be better for your health over the long run but that doesn't mean that you can't eat it. It means that you have chosen not to eat it for philosophical reasons.
I'm not in your head so I don't know why you have chosen to be vegan except that you say that you don't want to cause pain to that part of the biota that we understand has the capacity to experience pain. It appears to be an ethical question for you. Stick to your guns. Live your life.
I wrote the "mock poetry" as you describe it in a tongue-in-cheek way in order to have the reader see life from a different perspective, that of the plants that you would potentially be consuming. I have also followed the literature about plant growth, etc. for many years. I don't have a green thumb so I usually end up feeling sorry for the plants who unwittingly fall into my cart when I'm on my annual garden upgrade adventures. I do what I can to make their growing environment more growth friendly, ultimately so that I can eat the fruits of my, and their, labors.
After catching the NYT article that I linked I was grazing HN posts and found this one and at that point I knew that I had found the perfect article to challenge a vegan's belief system about the ethics of eating something that knew that it was being injured in the process and perhaps felt pain and sent itself into damage control as a result of the attack on its life.
I only needed to find a vegan poster who would make the argument that eating plants is more ethical than eating animals because animals feel it when we hurt them. You came along and my heart skipped with joy, or maybe I have an undiagnosed arrhythmia. I quickly began to type out in my word processor all the things you see gathered in that "mock poetry" part of my posted reply. My mind was flooded with bullshit so I flushed it into that post.
Poetry, like art, is subject to individual interpretation.
I intended to cause the reader, and you, to consider that plants may also be disinclined to accept our established usage of them as a food source. Perhaps they are in fact just resigned to their fates and immediately launch into damage control as soon as a credible threat appears.
If you took my post personally then maybe the lack of collagen in your diet has thinned your skin a bit too much. You should consider adding supplements to your diet to correct that deficiency. Of course the best sources of collagen are animal products. The choice is yours.
Using grasslands for grazing is one of the prime destructive forces in riparian areas. You end up with less diversity than you began with. Cropland tends to have less diversity because the only animal or insect visitors to it are those that can benefit from the presence of the crop or the presence of some other creature that depends on that crop.
Employing pesticides and herbicides and fungicides erodes the viability of the cropland even further making it necessary for periodic supplementation.
Vegans have a moral issue with consuming anything that they think may be capable of being opposed to their consumption.
From parent:
>Most vegans, including me, are vegan because we find the exploitation of animals morally unjustifiable. Our world includes the nonhuman world. And by being vegan we are saving it.
I guess it's okay to fail to consider that there is a portion of the nonhuman world that might not want to be exploited. Hard to justify that you are saving that portion of it by cultivating it so you can eat it.
I wonder when we'll see the disclaimer in the movie credits that no plants were harmed in the making of the movie.
I think the main thing veganism and vegetarianism have done in recent years is win over minds. As opposed to the clichéd vegan that will mention that fact whenever they can, the number of quiet vegetarians and vegans around me has skyrocketed in recent years. Even though they hardly ever discuss it, the fact that more and more people around me, even though still a minority, refuse meat and/or dairy products for themselves has really denormalised the role of meat in our society.
And that, in turn, makes even meat eaters more likely to consider voting for a political party that will restrict industrial farming practices, or to consider eating meat from farms like the authors'. And in that sense, it might still be the answer, regardless of the effectiveness of the veganism/vegetarianism itself.
I recently started reducing my meat consumption, and I was surprised by how many people are doing the same without making a big deal out of it. That is the sort of change that sticks.
they begin the article by saying pasture raised, organic meat is better for the environment than single-crop, fertilizer grown crops, through a reduction in emissions and and increase in biodiversity and health of the soil. It does not compare it to the obvious alternative of more sustainably grown crops, using crop rotation, cleaner sources of energy for farm equipment, etcetera.
It's a common argument I've heard against vegan/vegetarian diets to compare the best possible scenario of meat production, no matter how uncommon, to the average case of plant production.
I see it as equivalent to trying to discredit the value of college by pointing out Bill Gates.
Cultivated land, regardless of how it's cultivated, is generally way worse for habitat conservation than pasture land because you are by definition destroying the native flora to plant food crops.
Here in the Canadian prairies, the ranches are by far the best conservators of native ecosystems because cows can graze on the same plants that bison did for the last millenia.
My province of Saskatchewan is one of the biggest producers of pulse crops in the world (chickpeas, lentils, etc..) but has also some of the worst habitat destruction worldwide (less than 3% of native grasslands remaining) precisely because so much land was plowed under to produce those crops.
Keep in mind that the majority of soy and corn a fed to animals. In this context the argument that "soy farms deplete the soils and destroy forrests" becomes a lot weaker...
Yes, roaming, free living animals are good for the planet, but you don't have to eat them to have them roaming around.
Yes stopped reading there as everyone going vegan would actually plummet the demand for industrial crops because eating them directly is order of magnitude more efficient than eating them through inefficient proxy like meat. Any time one eats 1000 kcal worth of meat they are effectively eating 10000 kcal worth of soy/maize.
If one where to simply list behavior and action from having a positive effect on the environment, neutral, or negative, it would not be that hard to see that general farming is on the negative side. It can be promoted as a better alternative to even worse things but to even cross the line into neutral one has to go elsewhere than just cutting out meat of ones diet.
A common thread in environment positive food is that it moves the environment towards a better balance and away from mono-organisms. Open fields with pasture raised livestock has this effect when used proportionally in countries where single-crop and forest has started to reduce the bio diversity, such as in Sweden. Fishing in overpopulated lakes helps so that less common species don't get out competed or eaten. Honey from bees has positive side effects that sugar canes do not. A bit less studied but possible areas is also seaweed or mussel farms since those filter water and can reduce eutrophication (through the health aspects makes this a difficult balance).
Veganism isn't the answer simply because that diet alone does not have a net positive effect on the environment, and the reduction compared to even worse diets isn't impactful enough. We have to start actually looking for actions that have a positive effect, rather than simply going from bad to slightly bad diet.
Of course not. It's not The Answer. There is no single magic bullet.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
The current problem is the end to end status quo. What we eat. How we travel. Etc. That collective mindset needs to change; and since many of these habits are social (i.e., we assume the norm around us) we need to nudge the want for change forward. It's like a row of dominoes.
Diet might not be the final answer. But it certain helps us to move in the direction of being able to tackle the really hard stuff. We can't just sit and watch. The collective fear that will create is frightening.
There are some negative comments about the amount this farm produces but at 3500 acres and 75 tonnes of meat, I very much doubt they are attempting to maximise their output as a farm, especially considering the other camping and nature activities they host.
It is also an estate which will have other land uses so I would be more interested in seeing what would be reasonable to expect of the same amount of land used exclusively for farming cattle in this way because I think this could be a lot higher.
Then we can argue about whether this is scalable ;-)
Isn’t most of soya and corn produced used for feeding cattle to produce meat anyway? Is there some comparison on amount of soya needed if everyone on earth goes vegan vs soya consumed by meat industry?
Soy is pressed for oil. The remaining meal is used almost exclusively for livestock feed. Its not good for much else.
As for corn, it takes 0.8lbs of corn to make 1lb of meat. Its a net gain. The difference comes from grazing of course. And before we talk about "that grazing land could have been used for grain", only 8pct of US grazing land could be converted to cropland.
Not sure if you've read the article. The point he's making is that sustainable farming doesn't share all of the downsides of veganism, soil degradation for instance.
Not sure what the question is here. But the article points to veganism on it's own not inherently being the best option. That there are definitely ways to be sustainably vegan, but veganism alone doesn't guarantee sustainability.
It doesn't matter: We know this isn't something that the world is going to do. This isn't really something viable and for most of history, has been something necessary for survival. Not only that, but it would seem better to get the overall birth rate down since the goal of no more children isn't really something to look forward to (though it should be a viable choice). It really is better to look at the other options that provide more reasonable solutions.
We aren't really in danger of the population dying out, but we do have a need to balance out population and get health care (including birth control and other family planning) around the globe. For this, we need generous immigration policies and folks willing to redistribute money or otherwise spread these things.
I don't know if that works for reducing your carbon footprint. Children don't add to your personal carbon footprint. They're individuals on their own.
You'd never consider yourself to be part of your parents carbon footprint, in need of "reduction", would you?
In a global sense, sure less population means less carbon footprint, but that isn't the end-goal of civilization. To me, the end goal of civilization is life---human life in all its myriad ways, and to its utmost fulfilment. An earth without humans is a poorer earth.
As humans we have reached a point where if we collectively decided to have fewer kids, whole social fabrics will collapse.
Everyone's social security hinges of having just as many people contributing to it today. China had to rid it's one child policy, and Japan is facing a similar problem. How do you support twice as many old people with only half as many working young folk.
I'm migration may be the answer, but if the rise of "nationalist" movements around the world is any indication. Then natives don't quite want immigrants to be that solution.
This is a naive, short-sighted analysis. It makes sense at the level of a singe individual or couple, but, unfortunately, the world is filled with other people. It may be unintuitive, but if you have an environmentalist bent, having more children is a better strategy than having less. I've expanded on this idea if anybody is interested:
Let's say we'd compare the carbon foot print of an average 10-kids Yemenite family with an average single guy with no kids living in Los Angeles. I'm not sure if the single guy would have a lower foot print.
Put it another way, if the poorest half of world population suddenly disappeared, would it solve the problem? I could be wrong but I doubt it.
My understanding is that what matters is not so much how many we are, but what the richest do.
> Let's say we'd compare the carbon foot print of an average 10-kids Yemenite family with an average single guy with no kids living in Los Angeles. I'm not sure if the single guy would have a lower foot print.
If you assume those 10 children are also going to have 10 children each, and those children are also going to have 10 children, etc. You're talking 1000 people in 3 generations.
People are a resource, not a cost. Norman Borlaug saved one billion lives through improving agriculture. How many people like that would remain unborn?
I don't particularly care about the planet, but I agree with you. What irks me more is that there is an element of consent involved with birth. Life is mostly suffering and struggle for the majority, and it is a mean thing to bring someone into existence and have them deal with the meaninglessness and misery that is existence, all by themselves so.
And what happens when they can't cope, or they don't follow the rules, or they simply want to exercise their freedom to cease to exist? We end up blaming them.
Friend, I recognize this thought pattern because it's one that I've had before. While I didn't recognize it at the time I was in a deep state of depression, on the verge of committing suicide, thinking that maybe I wouldn't feel tired or defeated anymore.
I'd seriously consider seeking out a psychologist, they are really good. There's so much light out there in the world.
Having gone to the medical industry for help with my own extreme bout of depression, I very much don't recommend it. They have very little idea what they're doing when it comes to depression, but being doctors they refuse to admit this and keep applying leeches to balance the humors or whatever the treatment fad of the day is.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, the flavor of the week as you call it, began to develop out of Stoicism, a school of philosophy that was forming in the early 300s BC. CBT began to be formalized in the 1960s, and it's backed with numerous studies confirming it's efficacy.
In lots of parts of the world, livestock farming is feasible in ways that arable farming isn't: sloping, rocky terrain and so on. It's not going to go away entirely.
"Artificial" livestock rearing where the animals are treated as boxes into which feed can be put that emits meat does achieve a higher capital intensity, but it's reliant on cheap imported feed.
This is the kind of thing that is very hard to solve by individual market action.
This article could be written by a small scale vegetable farm as well. I could write something similar about the herb box on my window sill. Look how great my herb box is. I don’t even use pesticides.
But the question is how to reverse out of high impact industrial meat farming. That a tiny farm is having some success doesn’t move the needle. Veganism and buying from small farms works today on an individual basis, but how could you roll them out to an entire population. It’s also why demonizing veganism in the title is cheap clickbait.
The choices people make every day in the supermarket aren’t veganism vs buying from this person’s tiny farm. Seems tacky to compare the fringe groups while ignoring the elephant in the room. Especially when wresting the status quo would entail monumental cultural level transformation in any direction.
The focus on veganism as an answer to environmental problems is absurd. Yes, beef is a huge problem, and it's not particularly healthy for you anyway. But cutting out eggs, chicken, honey, or dairy isn't going to make anywhere near the same amount of impact, and replacing calories with some plant products (like corn, soy, almonds, lettuce, or avocados) may even be worse for it.
Veganism is not any sort of reasonable answer to any environmental problems. Our environmental problems are a pricing problem...that goes for oil, suburban sprawl, overfarming, overfishing, excessive water usage, etc. Nobody is paying for their externalities, and no amount of voluntary diet restrictions for a race of omnivores will offset that. For example, once you cut out beef, the next best thing you can do for the environment is not to cut out pork or dairy, but to stop driving in a single occupancy vehicle. Proper pricing gives you that information, fundamentalist ideologies do not.
