• jeffw@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Obligatory “not vegan” but it’s hilarious to me when people ignore this.

    Why do you think we cut down trees? Yes, more farmland. Farmland for what? To feed the cattle lol

    • jet@hackertalks.com
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      17 hours ago

      Cattle are ruminants - their one super power is they can eat grass from marginal land that can’t grow crops, they don’t need grain at all.

      • jeffw@lemmy.world
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        15 hours ago

        And about 30 seconds on google shows that’s less than 3% of beef production. That’s why deforestation is so rapid.

        If we shifted all of our cattle to grazers, we’d have less than 1/3rd of our current beef production due to land constraints.

        • jet@hackertalks.com
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          15 hours ago

          We have about 5x as much range land as we do arable land on the planet.

          Soil stewardship and replenishment are critical to a sustainable ecology - and ruminants are key to generating new top soil.

          • jeffw@lemmy.world
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            15 hours ago

            Also, for the record, not every inch of land categorized as grazable is not able to support cattle (arid, bad soil fertility, mountains and other terrain issues, etc.). When I said we couldn’t meet current demand, that assumes those were non-issues.

          • jeffw@lemmy.world
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            15 hours ago

            Sure bud. Sure. Just make all the cattle free range and we solve every problem in the world.

            Now we just have to subsidize beef even more than we already do so that people can afford their free range beef. God forbid they eat another form of protein that’s sustainable and environmentally friendly.

            There’s reality and then there’s your hypotheticals. I’ll continue to discuss reality but not absurd hypotheticals like “let’s just change 95% of our beef production”.

            And for the record, 5x is a vast overstatement. It’s closer to 2-3x. Still not plausible. Even if every single inch of grazable land on the planet were filled with cattle (and no other animal), we could not fill current beef demands. And that’s a demand that will grow very rapidly in the coming decades.

            • jet@hackertalks.com
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              15 hours ago

              God forbid they eat another form of protein that’s sustainable and environmentally friendly.

              The non-animal protein that is sustainable and environmentally friendly - where does it get its fertilizer from?

              • jeffw@lemmy.world
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                14 hours ago

                They get it from synthetic fertilizer? You think it comes from cattle lol?

                Dude, you cut a cow and you need WAAAAAY less land and fertilizer than if you feed that cow.

                And yes, not all land for cattle feed can be used for human crops, but even if we had zero beef, we’d have enough land to support human crops.

                I honestly think you’re trolling now because you’re not only denying reality and making up absurd claims, but you’re ignoring my points and not responding to them lol.

                Is synthetic fertilizer bad for the environment? Sure, but we need a hell of a lot less when we decrease beef production. If you add more cattle for natural manure fertilizers, you need more land to grow their feed. This is a self-perpetuating cycle.