Of the total area that is used by humans (Agriculture, Urban and Built-up Land),
- urban and built-up land is 1m km²,
- agriculture is 48m km²,
so agriculture is 48 of 49 millions km² used, that’s 98%. The remaining 2% are all streets and housing and other infrastructure together.
This chart also shows how terribly inefficient animal farming is.
Most pasture land isn’t suitable as farmland - there’s examples of overlap of course, but you really can’t draw that conclusion from the chart, it leaves out far too much information.
It’s not only pastures. Growing animal feed is vastly less efficient than growing food for humans directly. We could stop farming animals, use some of that land for growing human food, rewild the excess, and rewild the pastures.
Okay, but can we stop using suitable farmland to grow corn cattle feed?
During peacetime, all the corn fields kept operational with subsidy that just create corn which is fed to livestock seem like a waste.
But if China (or anybody else) pulls a fucky-wucky and makes it difficult to get food imported from outside the US, we slaughter the livestock and then have enough corn to feed the whole nation (and a lot of our allies). Without missing a beat.
Allies? Lol.
I’m wholly in support of this plan.
Yep for sure. The food grown to feed livestock (6M2 km) seems like it’s just feeding humans with extra steps. If you cut that out and feed humans directly. You’d still have livestock on grazing pad (32M2 km), just not the whole feedlot situation.
Or go a step further and stop doing animal farming.
Yeah, and those extra steps require more land and more water and more transportation and more harvesting and more processing etc etc. Every extra step makes the whole system less efficient. We’re essentially sacrificing farmland.
Most of the corn cattle are eating is the stalk and husks. The stuff we’re going to grow regardless and would otherwise throw away.
Near slaughter when they get fattened up on feed lots (called finishing) it’s mostly cracked corn grain, it’s more towards the beggining of life that they’re fed roughage with only a small amount of supporting grain.
This is true. But at the same time, the tradeoff I think more about isn’t pasture versus crop land, but pasture and crop land versus wild land. Personally, I really enjoy eating meat, and have no problem with its production in general. But I also think that we should reserve far more land for nature.
Imo, a good way to strike the balance is via pigouvian taxes. First, of course, a carbon tax. Animal agriculture creates a lot of carbon, so higher prices would drive consumers to lower-carbon alternatives. Then a land value tax - the trick would be deciding how much the intrinsic beauty of nature and access to it by the public is worth - but once we figure out a decent number, the scheme should work quite well. If you want to farm/ranch, you aren’t allowed to use up everyone else’s nature for free. Either generate enough money to pay the public back for using their nature, or bounce. And of course, better rules and oversight for animal welfare - I wanna eat meat, not meat produced with unnecessary suffering.
This combination of approaches would reduce meat consumption and land use in a fair and ethical way, while still not being overbearing or playing favorites by doing things like banning x or y. Unfortunately, this is very much a pipe dream - at least in the US right now, as we have, umm… more pressing issues.
I have a genuine question for you. Is your morality “might is right” or something more sophisticated? I don’t mean any offense. Just curious.
Passive aggressive ad hominem.
Either engage directly with the portion of the argument you take issue with, or ask for clarification regarding the comment.
Okay, do you have a more polite way to ask “are you aware that you’re a nihilist?” I was genuinely curious!
Anyway, he said he’s a rule utilitarian. So, the answer is “no.”
Isolate the nihilistic portions of text, quote them, explain why they are nihilistic to all the thread readers and the OP.
Then inquire if the person you’re confronting stands by that or has a different take in it.
Or, be rude and make it more reddit-like.
If your interest is legitimate, then I can explain.
Racism, speciesism, etc. represent contradictions, and formal systems are vulnerable to the principle of explosion (ex falso quadlibet). Basically, if a contradiction is true then anything is true. That’s what makes bigotry “wrong” in the formal sense (ethics is epistemically very similar to mathematics, but that’s another story). All bigots are obligate nihilists. OP is a speciesist. Ergo, he is an obligate nihilist.
Anyway, ethics is highly abstract, like math, and using guesswork to reach moral conclusions is generally ineffective. It’s why we had slavery for 10,000 years and Donald Trump is currently in office. There are lots of reasons why people suck at ethics, but it’s mainly lack of education. We get 12 years to study math in school (and even then most people suck at math) compared to 0 years for ethics.
Thank you. Not really demanding to point out that it’s not a private DM and we aren’t mind readers.
Tacking “no offense” and “genuine question” onto what is essentially “Hey is your moral view the most basic possible description of authoritarianism or are you smarter than that?” really doesn’t help it not be offensive or make you sound genuine. If you’re sincere in those statements, I really suggest you rephrase this because right now it reads as extremely patronizing.
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Fuck dude, wake up. That’s two different people you are
talking tosealioning as though they are one.edit: reevaluated the thread.
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No. I guess if I really had to peg my ethical system down, I would choose rule utilitarianism or something similar. But practically, I just try to be nice to people and to do what I feel is the right thing, which I know via what is revealed to me directly via a lifetime of emotional experiences after interacting with others and making various choices.
But I’m confused - why do you ask?
Well, some of your opinions made me think you were concerned with the suffering of animals (human and non), while others made me think you were not so concerned. This sort of juxtaposition is common, and it made me wonder about the way you see the world.
No, it doesn’t.
The entire mid- and western US is largely unable to grow crops - “this land was made for the buffalo, and hates the plow”.
See Bowl, Dust.
To make it grow crops, we’ve been pumping out a massive aquifer since the early 20th century. Subsidence caused by this is a major concern, in addition to the aquifer not refilling as fast as we use it.
In the western portions of CO, basically all of Wyoming, NM, Arizona (arid places), crops simply can’t grow at any significant level - but that land can grow crops for grazing animals, especially cows. Sheep and goats destroy such grazing land, which explains the conflict between cattlemen and sheepherders in the 19th century.
Really the entire breadbasket is naturally suited to cows, not crops, as it supported millions of bison.
You should probably read more before pontificating.
Stop farming animals, rewild the pastures, grow human food where animal feed was once grown.
Yes, but you omitted all the croplands we use for feeding non-human animals.
https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture
Also, if our goal is to find the truth in all of this, why be mean?
They didn’t really omit that as an oversight, it’s just not relevant to their thesis - agricultural land used for animal feed is not super relevant to the disparity in land utilization, as 80% of all agricultural land usage is pasture/grazing. Only 7% of agricultural land is used for growing animal feed.
Agreed about being a little mean though, although I do sympathize with being frustrated about this as AG land use is a very often misunderstood statistic.
You raise some valid points, but I don’t see why it’s necessary to be so rude about it.
How is that rude
This is true, but personally, I vote that instead of cows we reintroduce the buffalo. Let the herds roam free across the land. Allow people to hunt the buffalo for food if they want - but you must use a bow or blackpowder rifle, and can only mount a horse or a bicycle.
A death from arrow wounds is absolutely agonizing, especially for a creature as large as a buffalo - it’s awful that we still allow it. But black powder is much more humane (relatively), and many states have black powder seasons - including several for buffalo. Though if we’re allowing black powder, we really should just let people use proper hunting rounds to minimize the suffering of the animal.
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I lack a magic wand, I can’t suddenly stop people from killing altogether. Meat consumption is down, though, and hopefully will continue to fall until it’s a practice we stop as a culture. In the short term though, we should at least try to make sure those pointless deaths come with as little suffering as possible - people are souring to the cruelty of bowhunting, and that is at least a start.
I don’t really understand how my capacity for language is relevant to that concept, but okay.
Black powder isn’t as humane a round if something goes wrong. Way better to hunt with a semi-auto, just in case you need a quick follow up shot.
Beefalo
I’d hazard a guess that is the point of the graphics considering the special markings highlighting the fact.
Animal food use should be pulled back a lot. But let’s also concentrate on how much of agriculture area is used for non-food.