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Animal agriculture converts scrub land into carbon sinks that produce food.

PaulHoule 1y ago
It can. In permaculture models where you are not supplying a lot of inputs and able to cycle 100% of the manure back on grass it's great. In 20 years of running a horse farm the quality of our pasture and hay has been steadily getting better because we've been building soil. Apply huge amounts of nitrogen fertilizer to grow corn, badly contaminating the Mississippi river and creating a dead spot in the Gulf of Mexico, feeding animals in CAFO where discarding of the manure is a problem and that's something different. Real life systems are a little more complex than that as a cow might be grown up on scrub land and then fattened up at a CAFO for the last few months. Who knows what the long term fate of land that is cleared in the Amazon rain forest is.
bluebarbet 1y ago
This is a regionally-contingent oversimplification that obscures the much more essential fact that animal agriculture always requires substantially more land than arable agriculture to produce the same amount of food. Land is very much a finite resource and I personally would prefer to see a bit more of it left to nature (or "scrub", as you call it).
- seec 1y ago
  You are the one making an oversimplification. The type of food you get from animal agriculture is nowhere near the same thing as what you get from large scale plant agriculture. On top of that, what you harvest from plant agriculture needs enormous amounts of processing and requires a whole lot of modern machinery and a very complex supply chain. And at the end of it the nutritional profile of your output is not at all the same, you can get closer by adding even more processing, that requires even more supply chain wizardry, more energy and more secondary input but suddenly you are not really more efficient than the animal farm; how shocking...
- throwpoaster 1y ago
  This presupposes a collectivist agricultural policy, no? Some people just own scrub. They don’t have the arable land you rightly suggest is more efficient at growing the same amount of food. Most land is scrub. You can like leaving more of it that way, but no one else will notice in percentage terms.

It can. In permaculture models where you are not supplying a lot of inputs and able to cycle 100% of the manure back on grass it's great. In 20 years of running a horse farm the quality of our pasture and hay has been steadily getting better because we've been building soil. Apply huge amounts of nitrogen fertilizer to grow corn, badly contaminating the Mississippi river and creating a dead spot in the Gulf of Mexico, feeding animals in CAFO where discarding of the manure is a problem and that's something different. Real life systems are a little more complex than that as a cow might be grown up on scrub land and then fattened up at a CAFO for the last few months. Who knows what the long term fate of land that is cleared in the Amazon rain forest is.

bluebarbet 1y ago

This is a regionally-contingent oversimplification that obscures the much more essential fact that animal agriculture always requires substantially more land than arable agriculture to produce the same amount of food. Land is very much a finite resource and I personally would prefer to see a bit more of it left to nature (or "scrub", as you call it).

seec 1y ago
You are the one making an oversimplification. The type of food you get from animal agriculture is nowhere near the same thing as what you get from large scale plant agriculture. On top of that, what you harvest from plant agriculture needs enormous amounts of processing and requires a whole lot of modern machinery and a very complex supply chain. And at the end of it the nutritional profile of your output is not at all the same, you can get closer by adding even more processing, that requires even more supply chain wizardry, more energy and more secondary input but suddenly you are not really more efficient than the animal farm; how shocking...
throwpoaster 1y ago
This presupposes a collectivist agricultural policy, no? Some people just own scrub. They don’t have the arable land you rightly suggest is more efficient at growing the same amount of food. Most land is scrub. You can like leaving more of it that way, but no one else will notice in percentage terms.