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>the extra pesticides that enter the water table from growing the extra plant matter that must be used to feed free-range animals 1) Why must it be grown? Shou

• derefr 9y ago
  You misunderstand the entire concept of modern agriculture, I think: agriculture is demand-driven. People want food, and have money to spend on food, and so companies (farms) come into existence to turn natural resources into food, so that they can take that money. You can't just have there be "less animals", without feeding less people than have the money to pay to be fed—which is effectively impossible without abandoning capitalism: a new company would always come into existence to capture that surplus. Looking at things through a demand-driven lens, #1 and #2 are one-another's answers: if all the existing companies restrict themselves to non-"enriched" agriculture, then the market can only support a certain number of those companies—but there is still demand, so a new company will come into existence that uses (or one of the existing companies "innovate" to use) pesticides and fertilizer, to squeeze more feedstock out of the same land, to produce more meat from a given agricultural base, to answer the unmet demand. (The real "problem" with this system is that demand isn't fixed; the more food there is available in an area, the more new people the people in that area tend to make, creating a positive feedback loop where demand will never be fully satisfied, necessitating a "race to the bottom" of who can squeeze their natural resources the hardest. Fix that, rather than abandoning an allocation system for operating too well.)