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The problem isn't meat - it's factory farming. For traditional small, diverse farms, meat is an essential part of the biocycle. Animals consume parts of the pla
by beat 11y ago
The problem isn't meat - it's factory farming. For traditional small, diverse farms, meat is an essential part of the biocycle. Animals consume parts of the plants that are inedible by humans, create fertilizer, even manage treelines. But when food is raised in a factory environment, isolated from the rest of the cycle, distortions can happen.
- bryanlarsen 11y agoThat's true. However, you have to take into account quantity too. A small single farmer Saskatchewan farm can grow enough wheat to feed 10,000 people. Or it can grow barley instead to feed to pigs and feed 1,000 people. Or it can grow the wheat to feed 10,000 people and also raise a few cows, pigs and chickens in a complementary fashion as you described. That would provide enough calories to feed another 100 people or so.
- beat 11y agoThe quantity thing isn't about famine-level food, though - it's about industrial scale cost. The cost of food relative to income has plummeted worldwide for over a century. With it, the labor requirements of farming plummeted. In today's world, anyone going hungry is a political problem, not a supply problem. So the answer of growing yet more food, using yet more industrialization, is absolutely the wrong solution. We need to get less efficient, closer to the food again.
- bryanlarsen 11y agoLess efficient means more expensive. And as the article noted, more expensive food triggered wars which killed tens of thousands of people. But that small mixed farm is more efficient than the large factory farm in many ways. They're wasting less food, they're using fewer resources, they're more sustainable in the long term. But they lose in terms of "economies of scale", which translates into labour and capital. And since those are by far the greatest expenses on a farm, they're not as "efficient". The solution? Proper pricing of externalities, eliminating distorting subsidies, and further technological development. Monocultures are a technological problem -- they're much less efficient land usage, but they allow the use of large machines. What if we could replace those expensive large machines with lots of cheap small robots that could harvest all the corn in a field without harming the squash, to give an example of a traditional biculture.
- agentultra 11y agoOr grow crops stacked one on top of another in dense urban areas?
- beat 11y agoI think urban farming is the next frontier. Then again, I live in Minneapolis, where such things are considered normal.
- beat 11y agoRight. Industrialized, capital-intensive farming isn't necessarily more agriculturally efficient, and and it has a lot of cost externalization that is causing global suffering. But it's more powerful financially. And our subsidy system is built to strengthen industrial farming at the expense of integrated family farming. Not surprising, considering one of the benefits of capital-centric economics is the ability to exercise concentrated political influence. So how do we encourage a return to family farming (and the food cost increase that comes with it) at a national, or global scale? I think the first step is admitting we have a problem, and the solution is NOT more industrialization and more efficiency.