Posted by dereklane
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Posted by dereklane
Re: You can start with any of the points you disagree with in any order you like Archived Message
on November 15, 2019, 5:17 pm, in reply to "Re: You can start with any of the points you disagree with in any order you like"
As Mack said, in beef production you cannot remove the production of cereals and the ratio of feed and water to beef (protein) produced is highly inefficient. "
It's inefficient when it is the means of production (like in us feedlots). But they account for a small percentage of global stock. Where I grew up It was unheard of to buy in grain for feed. Cows ate grass and that was it. Same deal with water. You had standing water (in rivers and dams) and that's what the cows drank.they lived outdoors rather than in doors or on concrete. And around those cows were forests (open dry sclerophyl ). Growing food was the taxing part environmentally. Crops needed lots of water, the ground eroded with heavy rains when they came, and the produce was hit and miss at best.
With the buy up of farms by banks and conglomerate cattle stations, ranches and factory level farming of the past 25 years, it's down to the economic bottom line and screw the resources it takes if they cost less and provide more money. Still, most farms globally operate on a more sustainable and older style though admittedly less so here in the uk (because nearly all small farms are supplementing silage/hay with 'corn'). Mostly, I think they needn't. Cows which eat too much shoot it mostly out the back just like they do with the first fresh grass in the springtime. Cereals are to mind an inefficient approach to feeding livestock (inc pigs). Sheep rarely get more than pasture but they do prevent regrowth of forest which is why I'm not keen on them.
My argument was that when you compare like for like (stock vs crops), 99% of modern crop farming is terribly damaging for the local (and mined) environment, whereas perhaps 40% of stock farming is as damaging. The rest are small farmers who still want to leave decent chunks of land to their kids to farm, and that means it needs to be looked after. The microbial
action in land with cows above apart from those grotesque feedlots in the us is way healthier than the average tilth of arable cropped land just about anywhere.
In terms of square miles, as such, there is a more immediate need to fix that issue than to fix the stock farming environmental issues, because they are greater, more dire, and causing far more irreversible damage at this point in time.
I don't subscribe to a meat only diet. I like my veg. But apart from anything else eating shop bought veg to me is relatively pointless aside from for fibre. There's no flavour, there's probably precious little nutrition. They may look like
Vegetables but they don't taste like them!