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> Cows provide fertilizer Animal industrial complexes destroy ecosystems. The amount of urine and manure is massive, it's a problem in itself. You can't just d
by lopis 5y ago
> Cows provide fertilizer
Animal industrial complexes destroy ecosystems. The amount of urine and manure is massive, it's a problem in itself. You can't just dump all that on farms.
> and have the same neglible environmental impact as other wildlife
Wildlife does not reproduce at the unsustainable scale that we force cows to do so. There are some 40k cows in the USA alone¹ (and many more pigs and chickens, which people eat more of).
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/194302/number-of-beef-and-milk-cows-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/194302/number-of-beef-an...
- saalaa 5y agoIt's 40000000 not 40000.
- Ygg2 5y ago> Animal industrial complexes destroy ecosystems. That doesn't counter what I said. Sure they destroy ecosystems, but only as secondary effects. A field of almonds in a desert will destroy more ecosystems than cows being fed corn or grass. > Wildlife does not reproduce at the unsustainable scale that we force cows to do so. Sure it does, it's just the question of keeping wildlife in check via predation. When wolves disappear so do forests, because deer (or other ruminants) run amok. The way I see it, what US did is convert the biomass of wildlife into the biomass of cows.
- algo_trader 5y ago> The amount of urine and manure is massive, it's a problem in itself. You can't just dump all that on farms. We make mega-tons of fertilizers, so presumably this urine/manure can displace some of the fertilizer? At most, this is a question of cost/regulation/externality? > Wildlife does not reproduce at the unsustainable scale that we force cows to do so Well, yeah, true. But maybe u want to go back in time and tell your parents to have one less child? Let hope we find a balance over the next decades