El_Duderino 09 wrote: » Why do we need to maintain grasslands? Why would grasslands be better for the environment than unused land and whats it got to do with climate change? If we didn't grow food for animals to eat we could eat the food ourselves and save the energy wasted on producing meat.
gozunda wrote: » Taking a good look at this "meat is maddness" propaganda - what is of note is that Ireland as a island has had a succesful history of extensive livestock farming from mesolithic times onwards. Whilst meat eating may have been seasonal the production of milk and dairy products was of utmost importance to the early irish. These foods formed a principle part of diet of the people of Ireland. The population not only survived but thrived on this diet up to at least early Christian times. In later centuries a decline in livestock farming and a growth of a dependence on crops such as the potato and a much more restricted range of foodstuffs ultimately ended in disaster only in the decades after the famine. Now we have these new 'visionaries' telling us that an agricultural system that has a long history of success and which is suited to irish soils, seasonal changes and provides a wide range of high quality produce for both local and international markets is now wrong and somehow unhealthy. I wonder how many of the vegan brigade have ever managed field scale production of crops and vegetables in an Irish climate and survived on that produce through periods of the year when no crops or foodstuffs can be grown without massive inputs of fertilisers or the heating of covered production in polytunnels. Again an important but missing component of this 'brave new world' proposed by this writer and others like him is how it is proposed to manage soil fertility where no fym or other organic materials would be available and ultimately the removal of grassland cover. Evidently artificial fertilisers would not be permitted due to their manufacture being dependant on carbon inputs. The vision of depleted soils brings to mind the dust bowl disaster of the 1930s as suggested by other posters.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl Rather than telling the rest of us what to do I would suggest that the new visionaries go and try their new system of food production and come back and let us know how they got on - if there any of them remaining that is ...
Buford T. Justice V wrote: In huge swathes of the world, grassland is the tertiary ecosystem and is that way for a reason. In the 1930s in the USA, large areas of grassland used for tillage crops were blown away during years of drought conditions, coining the term 'Dust Bowl'. Here is a short documentary about the conditions.
_Brian wrote: » I do agree with your general point. However I do disagree with the ever intensification of our process. There are more incidences of cattle being housed for longer and longer times to facilitate high intensity farming. Feeds stuf in some cases are moving away from grass based diets. Near me cattle are finished on cakes, bread and chocolate waste among their feed. Commercial market pressures to scale up and produce more and more for lower margins is definitely affecting the production systems in a negative way. I disagree with dairy Cows being housed 24/7/365 and grass belting drawn into them. This excessive intensification isn't at farmers own request but rather a reaction to market forces in order to remain profitable. The consumer is getting what they want cheaper and cheaper products - but at what cost to the products!
yosemitesam1 wrote: The 5 billion or so hectares of grassland in the world need to be managed if they are to maximise the amount of carbon stored, how much carbon do you think can be stored over that sort of an area?? an awful lot I would say
gozunda wrote: » Taking a good look at this "meat is maddness" propaganda - what is of note is that Ireland as a island has had a succesful history of extensive livestock farming from mesolithic times onwards. <<-snip->>
El_Duderino 09 wrote: » It depends onto whether you want to factor in the carbon used to maintain that land. The way to store most carbon is to make it self sustaining and leave it alone.
Harika wrote: » Yes and no, meat was always important, but more important were oats and barley, what makes sense if you look at the calorie intake and time meat takes to become the equivalent of calories in grain, fruits and so on. In these times, people also didn't have three times a day meat, but for special occasions. My grandparents told me that they also didn't have daily meat, but once on Sunday and that was it. So those "propaganda" you mention basically points out to the madness we experience atm, having meat on a daily base, while to keep it cheap, animals are kept in a horrifying style, and if you are fine with that, they are pumped full of antibiotics to keep the diseases in control and hormones to grow them faster. Those antibiotics and hormones, are already having an effect on us humans. If you now take back a step and look at the whole situation, you can easily see that we are consuming too much meat. What worries me is that even with all the food scandals recently and the available information, the idea of even reducing meat intake is resisted heavily.
The production of milk and dairy products was of utmost importance to the early irish. These foods formed a principle part of diet of the people of Ireland. The population not only survived but thrived on this diet up to at least early Christian times.
gozunda wrote: » Like all good foodstuffs- a balanced diet is key.
El_Duderino 09 wrote: » Sure. If you just ignore it, it could he eroded. Couldn't it just be planted with the type of plants that will take care of themselves and left alone? I'm not talking about manicured fields that will be destroyed in a drought if not maintained. If we cut down meat consumption we wouldn't need a lot of the land we use now as so much of it is farmed to feed animals which are then farmed for us. Very inefficient and intensive use of land.
Buford T. Justice V wrote: » This was quite common in Ireland even as far as the 70s where I remember pigs and cattle being killed and shared out and receiving the same in return.
Buford T. Justice V wrote: » You missed the whole point. It ALREADY HAS the type of plants that takes care of themselves. Grasses. Grass that is deep rooted to cater for the infrequent rainfall and resistant to burning that happens on occasion even in the best managed grassslands. That ecosystem depends on ruminants (buffalo replaced by cattle) to transfer nutrients and alternate grazing systems to allow certain grass and other species to grow and prosper. Or is your point that we should destroy the grassland ecosystem to put in place some artificial ecosystem and destroy the ecology of the system already in place? And what exactly is this supposed-better system that you are advocating that would cater for the climatic extremes that exists already?
Harika wrote: » I want to add here, that Irish animal farmers, and EU in general, need food imports to feed their animals. From grassland alone, we wouldn't be able to sustain the meat output that we are having atm. So where does this food come from? brazil/argentina, where the rain forest is burned down to plant GMO soja, that is exported to EU to feed our cattle, chickens and pigs. I am not against GMO but always laugh when people avoid GMO food but don't care if the burger was fed with GMOs.
djmc wrote: » I find it funny sometimes how so many people are so far removed from nature that they no longer know what they are. There is a reason our eyes are not on the sides of our heads and we have a set of canine teeth in our mouths. Wild animals know this just by the look of us.
• "Hexane is used to process nearly all conventional soy protein ingredients and edible oils and is prohibited when processing organic foods." • Soybeans are bathed in hexane as part of their processing by food manufacturers. • "Hexane is a neurotoxic chemical that poses serious occupational hazards to workers, is an environmental air pollutant, and can contaminate food."
merryberry wrote: » Is the problem the fact we have way too many animals or that our emission reduction target too high. I think it would b unfair to blame an agri sector for responding to a growing global demand for meat. It is efficient in terms of its ghg emmisions and because these emissions are biological, it is very difficult to reduce without reducing the herd. Better education on the demand side
Zillah wrote: » Well that's the problem with capitalism: it's very hard to fight incentive. There are no easy answers to the problem, but it's also a little irresponsible to just shrug and say the market demands it. We are talking about the potential loss of trillions of dollars to the global economy over the next century because of climate change - ignoring the toll on human life, loss of habitat, and extinction of species - but also, in the long run, the question of life and human civilisation on this planet at all. This could be the biggest question facing industrialised society since the threat of nuclear winter. Our great-great-grandchildren might be sitting in class discussing the reasons for why our generation deliberately perpetuated behaviours that we knew beyond a shadow of a doubt were doing terrible damage to the planet.
El_Duderino 09 wrote: » Sure. If you just ignore it, it could he eroded.Couldn't it just be planted with the type of plants that will take care of themselves and left alone? I'm not talking about manicured fields that will be destroyed in a drought if not maintained. If we cut down meat consumption we wouldn't need a lot of the land we use now as so much of it is farmed to feed animals which are then farmed for us. Very inefficient and intensive use of land.
Zillah wrote: » Uh huh. And you use those predator eyes to chase down deer in the woods, do you? There's absolutely nothing natural about farming, and especially the intensity and conditions of modern farming. We've taken nature and subjected it to industrialisation - don't kid yourself that there is anything natural about it. Our natural state was to pick off a couple of stragglers in a vast and thriving ecosystem that barely noticed our presence. We've demolished most of that ecosystem and replaced it with industrialisation. Ireland used to be trees coast to coast. We need farming to support our civilisation, but don't for a second try to claim there is anything natural about raising millions of animals in captivity for slaughter.
Harika wrote: » In the 70s how often did you have meat then?
Buford T. Justice V wrote: » rainforest isn't burned down to produce soya. The soya is grown in former livestock grazing areas which are then displaced to rougher grazing bordering rainforest. And then displaced further when demand for soya increases again. So it's actually the soya causing the rainforest destruction and the livestock feed is increasingly an unwanted (by the consumer) byproduct of consumer led demand for soya.
ganmo wrote: » Whats natural about talking to something that sends a signal to space and then back to earth only to make a noise nearby the first thing. whats natural about sitting into a 1500kg car to transport your 90kg 20 miles and then back to where you started We are so far from being natural that arguing about whats natural or not is pointless.
merryberry wrote: » But do u agree with that it isn't just agriculture that is contributing to this global problem, that people need to eat and that farmers need to make a livelihood. I'm no expert on the topic but I don't see any solution to the problem of climate change
Buford T. Justice V wrote: » And, fyi, rainforest isn't burned down to produce soya. The soya is grown in former livestock grazing areas which are then displaced to rougher grazing bordering rainforest. And then displaced further when demand for soya increases again. So it's actually the soya causing the rainforest destruction and the livestock feed is increasingly an unwanted (by the consumer) byproduct of consumer led demand for soya.
Zillah wrote: » Your tone implies you think you're arguing against me, but you're backing up my point. It was djmc that was using nature to argue in favour of eating meat. What is or isn't natural doesn't justify our decisions. I'm biologically an omnivore, in that I can eat meat as well as plants, as my ancestors did for countless generations. But we're not obligate meat-eaters, like, say, a cat, which will get sick and die if it doesn't eat meat. We can be perfectly healthy without eating meat, regardless of what our ancestors did. Of course: we have to eat. Each region of the planet has its own unique qualities that make it more or less suitable for different types of food production, and not every scrap of land being used to raise animals could be converted to growing crops, but the fact remains that raising animals is an extremely expensive and wasteful way to produce food. For every calorie of beef we create the animal had to eat ten calories of food - food that could have been eaten directly by humans. We could significantly reduce agriculture's contribution to global warming by scaling down animal farming and replacing it with other crops where possible. There's no argument to be made against the feasibility of it, at the end of the day our problem is that people want to eat meat and they don't care what the consequences are. They don't like to admit that, so they come up with other rationalisations, like claiming its part of our rich heritage, or it's natural (whatever the hell that has to do with anything), or make untenable arguments about why it wouldn't work. Climate change isn't solely caused by animal rearing, of course. We are an oil-based economy, but we're already making extremely good strides towards renewable energy with virtually no carbon footprint, but we should be looking at all of the sources of greenhouse gases and making efforts every where that is possible, which includes the staggering number of animals being reared.
Zillah wrote: » For every calorie of beef we create the animal had to eat ten calories of food - food that could have been eaten directly by humans. QUOTE] but of that 10 calories it will only be somewhere between 0 and 5 that will be based on grains a good part of which will be based on waste products. something to remember about veg growing is they are far from environmentally friendly with very heavy cultivations, much more dangerous pesticides etc which might not allow them to scale up and be better for the environment.
Zillah wrote: » Your tone implies you think you're arguing against me, but you're backing up my point. It was djmc that was using nature to argue in favour of eating meat. What is or isn't natural doesn't justify our decisions. I'm biologically an omnivore, in that I can eat meat as well as plants, as my ancestors did for countless generations. But we're not obligate meat-eaters, like, say, a cat, which will get sick and die if it doesn't eat meat. We can be perfectly healthy without eating meat, regardless of what our ancestors did.
Zillah wrote: » Of course: we have to eat. Each region of the planet has its own unique qualities that make it more or less suitable for different types of food production, and not every scrap of land being used to raise animals could be converted to growing crops, but the fact remains that raising animals is an extremely expensive and wasteful way to produce food. For every calorie of beef we create the animal had to eat ten calories of food - food that could have been eaten directly by humans.
Zillah wrote: » we could significantly reduce agriculture's contribution to global warming by scaling down animal farming and replacing it with other crops where possible.
Zillah wrote: » There's no argument to be made against the feasibility of it, at the end of the day our problem is that people want to eat meat and they don't care what the consequences are. They don't like to admit that, so they come up with other rationalisations, like claiming its part of our rich heritage, or it's natural (whatever the hell that has to do with anything), or make untenable arguments about why it wouldn't work.
Zillah wrote: » Climate change isn't solely caused by animal rearing, of course. We are an oil-based economy, but we're already making extremely good strides towards renewable energy with virtually no carbon footprint, but we should be looking at all of the sources of greenhouse gases and making efforts every where that is possible, which includes the staggering number of animals being reared.
