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    Re: Yes straightforward perhaps... Archived Message

    Posted by dereklane on December 27, 2019, 8:16 am, in reply to "Re: Yes straightforward perhaps..."

    In the uk at least I think you're under estimating the role livestock take in preventing the soil quality from total annilation. If the soil dies, so does everything else. The insect population collapse is enough of a cause for massive concern (which affects everything upward from there) so as not to discount the role of commercial cropping. Pesticide, herbicide, poison, traps and bullets are all used to decimate the population of small creatures in the pursuit of grains, fruits and vegetables. They don't end up on your plate but they still end up dead. Things out of sight are only out of mind for those who don't acknowledge that bigger picture.

    I see it as misguided to proclaim that going veg will save our planet; no really quantifiable reasoning behind it, unless the focus is only on factory farming. My argument is that since omnivores and vegetarians both eat grain, veg, fruit and nuts, and the equilibrium is in deficit in those areas, if the environment is the primary concern, we must adjust that deficit first. Right now, animal dung keeps the soil rich in microbial action. When cattle have finished grazing a field, or the farmer finished spreading muck, the soil takes a net benefit from it. When the potatoes or carrots are up and out of the soil and off to the supermarkets, there is a net loss, not even so much from the veg being moved but from the application of npk, herbicides, pesticides, and the fact that after each season you end up with bare earth or monoculture crops largely unmarried by grassland, woods or forest.

    Of course there are better ways of doing things. Practically speaking, the easiest approach is partly what is sometimes done in mixed farmland (spreading muck), smaller and more varied planting methods, hand picking etc. We get less practical as we go, unless we change the entire infrastructure of the U.K. (Which is still one of the most fertile places on the planet- there are whole continents where the idea of living only on veg is practically impossible, and should be discouraged if we are concerned about climate change).

    I'm all for it, a more cohesive and intelligent farming style and more workers on the land is a good thing. But the idea that saying we could change tomorrow and work with an ethically bankrupt farming method because it doesn't include animals (and it really doesn't; animals are excluded by death in the field for cropping) until we come up with something better doesn't make sense. It comes from the basic notion that we don't like animals to suffer and yet proliferates just that, to further detriment of the environment they need to survive.

    In oz a cousin of mine runs 4000 cattle on 15000 acres. The land is covered in forest, mulga scrub, natural grassland, with ponds and rivers and no poise run off into those rivers. No chance of growing crops out there in any meaningful way without serious tapping of resources that couldn't recover from the process. But if he could, the scrub would disappear first and then the grasslands. The native wildlife would disappear with it, because you can't have Roos and birds eating what you're trying to grow (even spreading seed without intervention you end up with a decimated crop before it's even germinated). It would be poorer land and sustain far fewer creatures than while cattle are there.

    Similar issues here though smaller scale. We haven't yet come up with ways that work to feed large numbers of people without destroying the landscape and while ecosystems to do it. Grazing animals come closest to doing that, and there are better ways to do that too. Fruit cropping can be decent, if the pesticides are laid off, except they're often not. Monoculture cropping however, is really detrimental. Nothing lives except the final product, which then is removed.

    I'm coming at this from an angle of years of thought, experimentation, failures. I've been growing plants and animals or involved in the process for maybe 35 years (more counting childhood). I get the impression that many of the vegan arguments put forward are not from the perspective of knowledge but perhaps general theories. Folk like mollison (and a couple of people in the uk whose names I can't recall) are well versed in the practicalities. All those I've read have concluded the same; both animals and plants play a significant role in permaculture systems that work in perpetuity.

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