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But if the demand for meat drops, and demand for veggies goes up, do you think farms will all of a sudden abandon monocrop practice? Of course not, because that

by moltar 5y ago

But if the demand for meat drops, and demand for veggies goes up, do you think farms will all of a sudden abandon monocrop practice? Of course not, because that’s how farming-at-scale system is designed. They want to use fewer tools, ultra specialize in one crop, offload it in bulk at the end of the season. In the end you’ll get a huge selection of bland and tasteless vegetables, engineered to grow fast and large with a thick skin to prevent pests from eating it.

colordrops 5y ago
Not following the logic here - because monocropping is bad, it's ok to adopt a practice (growing cattle) that uses 10 times the monocropping per unit of food? Isn't that the opposite of what you want to do?
- deleted 5y ago
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- moltar 5y ago
  That’s not the logic at all. The logic is what I said. If you start growing more plants it will not fix monocropping issue. It will only make it worse. If you don’t want to eat beef that has been fed monocropped feed then vote with your wallet and buy sustainable meat that was pasture raised (on non-arable land).
  - bscphil 5y ago
    You can't just claim that switching from corn and soy to a wide range of other vegetables would make things worse with no argument. If nothing else this goes against basic common sense because (1) we eat more than two vegetables, and (2) people eating vegetables directly instead of feeding those vegetables to animals is a vastly more efficient way to feed a population. The absolute best case scenario for your argument is that monocropping turns out to be just as bad under a shift-to-vegetables model, but in that case we still end up reaping enormous environmental wins. Just because vegetables might not (?) solve the monocropping problem doesn't mean that we don't have good reasons to switch to them, as was originally argued. I'm not really sure how you avoid that, and frankly, the number of large scale climate change studies urging a shift to our diets seems to bode poorly for attempts to push this line.
  - colordrops 5y ago
    It's not remotely scalable to convert the entire beef supply to pasture raised. With that out of the way, and with an understanding that monocrop fed beef uses a lot more land that monocrop plants per calorie, assuming that people won't eat more calories on plant based diets vs meat based diets, it's simple math that plants will reduce monocropping. I don't get how you can't see this.

by moltar 5y ago

colordrops 5y ago

Not following the logic here - because monocropping is bad, it's ok to adopt a practice (growing cattle) that uses 10 times the monocropping per unit of food? Isn't that the opposite of what you want to do?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
moltar 5y ago
That’s not the logic at all. The logic is what I said. If you start growing more plants it will not fix monocropping issue. It will only make it worse. If you don’t want to eat beef that has been fed monocropped feed then vote with your wallet and buy sustainable meat that was pasture raised (on non-arable land).
- bscphil 5y ago
  You can't just claim that switching from corn and soy to a wide range of other vegetables would make things worse with no argument. If nothing else this goes against basic common sense because (1) we eat more than two vegetables, and (2) people eating vegetables directly instead of feeding those vegetables to animals is a vastly more efficient way to feed a population. The absolute best case scenario for your argument is that monocropping turns out to be just as bad under a shift-to-vegetables model, but in that case we still end up reaping enormous environmental wins. Just because vegetables might not (?) solve the monocropping problem doesn't mean that we don't have good reasons to switch to them, as was originally argued. I'm not really sure how you avoid that, and frankly, the number of large scale climate change studies urging a shift to our diets seems to bode poorly for attempts to push this line.
- colordrops 5y ago
  It's not remotely scalable to convert the entire beef supply to pasture raised. With that out of the way, and with an understanding that monocrop fed beef uses a lot more land that monocrop plants per calorie, assuming that people won't eat more calories on plant based diets vs meat based diets, it's simple math that plants will reduce monocropping. I don't get how you can't see this.