One strong argument that I see against Veganism is a return to 'regenerative agriculture', or permaculture systems that effectively use livestock for grazing, fertilising, and therefore sequestering carbon into otherwise semi-arable land/non-arable land (i.e. land on which crops and other vegetables simply will not thrive). For farmers using these regenerative agricultural systems, the only way of keeping it profitable or financially feasible in the long-run is to also use the animals as a source of income (whether through dairy or meat).
This is of course not a rebuttal against industrial agriculture, CAFOs, etc. which I think we can all agree with has serious environmental, ethical and moral problems.
What do you think? Can certain farming systems justify the use of livestock? Where do the vegans in this forum stand on this? Is this something you feel strongly about?
The necessary role of livestock in regenerative agriculture
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Re: The necessary role of livestock in regenerative agriculture
Do you mean Allan Savory claims?
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2013/04/allan_savory_s_ted_talk_is_wrong_and_the_benefits_of_holistic_grazing_have.html
Holistic Grazing is pseudoscience, and Savory is a quack.
There's nothing apparently environmentally beneficial about grazing. It doesn't improve the environment, it just creates more greenhouse gases.
Maybe you're talking about something else. Can you provide a source for what you're referencing?
In terms of fertilizer, cows are not a source of nitrogen, that comes from what they eat. Crop rotation, co-planting, and green manure are perfectly adequate replacements for manure (and more environmentally friendly, and less pathogenic).
Ideally, we should also be reclaiming nitrogen and phosphorous among other elements from the human waste stream.
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2013/04/allan_savory_s_ted_talk_is_wrong_and_the_benefits_of_holistic_grazing_have.html
There's no credible evidence to support them, and all of the studies have come to the opposite conclusion Savory asserts on every meaningful point.In 1990, Savory admitted that attempts to reproduce his methods had led to “15 years of frustrating and eratic [sic] results.” But he refused to accept the possibility that his hypothesis was flawed. Instead, Savory said those erratic results “were not attributable to the basic concept being wrong but were always due to management.” In a favorable interview with Range magazine in 2000, Savory seemed unconcerned with the failure of his method in scientific trials: “You’ll find the scientific method never discovers anything. Observant, creative people make discoveries.”
Holistic Grazing is pseudoscience, and Savory is a quack.
There's nothing apparently environmentally beneficial about grazing. It doesn't improve the environment, it just creates more greenhouse gases.
Maybe you're talking about something else. Can you provide a source for what you're referencing?
In terms of fertilizer, cows are not a source of nitrogen, that comes from what they eat. Crop rotation, co-planting, and green manure are perfectly adequate replacements for manure (and more environmentally friendly, and less pathogenic).
Ideally, we should also be reclaiming nitrogen and phosphorous among other elements from the human waste stream.
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Re: The necessary role of livestock in regenerative agriculture
1. No matter what the arguments about land use and ecology and so on, I'd say it's morally wrong to kill someone for food. You still have to justify the moment of putting a knife to a living animal's throat (or however you do it).
2. These arguments are not relevant to people living in areas without desert, such as the Eastern USA, Europe and so on, and so are not an argument for people living in such regions to eat meat now. They may be more of a relevant debate if you live in certain areas of Africa, the middle East, and Mongolia area of the world, and I'm not sure about Australia.
I'll dig a little in to the argument about land use in a minute but the above arguments limit its relevance, especially if you live in areas with no desert and steadier rainfall throughout the year.
I do think however these land use, carbon sequestration arguments are very complicated and it's difficult to come up with a simple answer without doing a lot of reading. At the moment, animal agriculture stays out of the debate. If they do enter the debate in the future, perhaps because the number of people going vegetarian and vegan becomes too large to ignore and as meat subsidies might become a political issue, then they will soon realize most of the arguments go against them and therefore they will need to do what the cigarette companies and then climate change denying fossil fuel companies did and create the illusion of uncertainty. These kind of arguments will likely be the ones that they will use I think, since they're not easy to completely refute in say a short TV segment, and therefore useful if you want to promote inconclusive argument, which could become big factory farmers future strategy. Therefore, vegan advocates may want to get familiar with this.
2. These arguments are not relevant to people living in areas without desert, such as the Eastern USA, Europe and so on, and so are not an argument for people living in such regions to eat meat now. They may be more of a relevant debate if you live in certain areas of Africa, the middle East, and Mongolia area of the world, and I'm not sure about Australia.
I'll dig a little in to the argument about land use in a minute but the above arguments limit its relevance, especially if you live in areas with no desert and steadier rainfall throughout the year.
I do think however these land use, carbon sequestration arguments are very complicated and it's difficult to come up with a simple answer without doing a lot of reading. At the moment, animal agriculture stays out of the debate. If they do enter the debate in the future, perhaps because the number of people going vegetarian and vegan becomes too large to ignore and as meat subsidies might become a political issue, then they will soon realize most of the arguments go against them and therefore they will need to do what the cigarette companies and then climate change denying fossil fuel companies did and create the illusion of uncertainty. These kind of arguments will likely be the ones that they will use I think, since they're not easy to completely refute in say a short TV segment, and therefore useful if you want to promote inconclusive argument, which could become big factory farmers future strategy. Therefore, vegan advocates may want to get familiar with this.
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Re: The necessary role of livestock in regenerative agriculture
Here's Savory's talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI It's promising, but there is insufficient information in it to draw definite conclusions. I would have like to seen dates on the photos, for instance. Is this a fair comparison? Maybe one year was just rainier than another, or one photo was taken a couple of months earlier and another later in a different year! I can show you 2 photos near to my house showing an amazing transformation without animal grazing if anyone wants to see it. Just rained a lot before one of the photos and not at all before the others. There are going to be other variables here.
He doesn't talk about the huge methane contribution that more cows make to global waming. Any gains that do occur from sequestration have to be offset against that. I have read other reports that planting trees and things like that cannot really offset all the carbon we are putting into the atmosphere, so I am very skeptical about claims of a return to pre-industrial levels carbon levels resulting from grazing.
For another point of view, read Eric Marcus's book documenting how animal grazing devastates range lands in the Western US. One possibility is that grazing animals sometimes improved the lands and sometimes makes it worse. I wonder if one possibility is that you need a lot of skill to do it in such a way to make it better, but otherwise it will be worse. This is the sense that I got from reading, in the Omnivore's Dilemna, and elsewhere, about Salatin's Polyface farm.
I would like to know more about why we can't grow vegan food in some of these deserts. Once the animals have made the deserts green again, does that not mean, if grasses can grow there, that it might be possible for at least some plant food to grow there? In order to claim that only animals can feed the people , you need to prove that all plant foods cannot grow in land where grasses can grow. That seems dubious to me. If necessary, can you grow food in the wet season and store it in silos in the dry? I don't know. Maybe.
I was going to post the same Slate article. It's a good rebuttal.
George Monbiot also did a rebuttal, saying that there was basically no evidence: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2014/aug/04/eat-more-meat-and-save-the-world-the-latest-implausible-farming-miracle
Monbiot's article was itself challenged, also in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2014/aug/19/grazing-livestock-climate-change-george-monbiot-allan-savory
More here: http://sustainablefoodtrust.org/articles/george-monbiot-allan-savory/
Unfortunately, once you get sucked in to this debate it seems to goes on forever and a definite conclusion seems elusive, for now at least, however I think the evidence tends to point towards either such cattle being bad for the planet, or inconclusive.
He doesn't talk about the huge methane contribution that more cows make to global waming. Any gains that do occur from sequestration have to be offset against that. I have read other reports that planting trees and things like that cannot really offset all the carbon we are putting into the atmosphere, so I am very skeptical about claims of a return to pre-industrial levels carbon levels resulting from grazing.
For another point of view, read Eric Marcus's book documenting how animal grazing devastates range lands in the Western US. One possibility is that grazing animals sometimes improved the lands and sometimes makes it worse. I wonder if one possibility is that you need a lot of skill to do it in such a way to make it better, but otherwise it will be worse. This is the sense that I got from reading, in the Omnivore's Dilemna, and elsewhere, about Salatin's Polyface farm.
I would like to know more about why we can't grow vegan food in some of these deserts. Once the animals have made the deserts green again, does that not mean, if grasses can grow there, that it might be possible for at least some plant food to grow there? In order to claim that only animals can feed the people , you need to prove that all plant foods cannot grow in land where grasses can grow. That seems dubious to me. If necessary, can you grow food in the wet season and store it in silos in the dry? I don't know. Maybe.
I was going to post the same Slate article. It's a good rebuttal.
George Monbiot also did a rebuttal, saying that there was basically no evidence: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2014/aug/04/eat-more-meat-and-save-the-world-the-latest-implausible-farming-miracle
Monbiot's article was itself challenged, also in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2014/aug/19/grazing-livestock-climate-change-george-monbiot-allan-savory
More here: http://sustainablefoodtrust.org/articles/george-monbiot-allan-savory/
Unfortunately, once you get sucked in to this debate it seems to goes on forever and a definite conclusion seems elusive, for now at least, however I think the evidence tends to point towards either such cattle being bad for the planet, or inconclusive.
Last edited by Jamie in Chile on Fri Oct 27, 2017 11:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The necessary role of livestock in regenerative agriculture
Hmm what I know of permaculture is it is a pretty new concept with some admirable though lofty goals:ForFoodsSake wrote: ↑Fri Oct 27, 2017 7:34 am One strong argument that I see against Veganism is a return to 'regenerative agriculture', or permaculture systems that effectively use livestock for grazing, fertilising, and therefore sequestering carbon into otherwise semi-arable land/non-arable land (i.e. land on which crops and other vegetables simply will not thrive). For farmers using these regenerative agricultural systems, the only way of keeping it profitable or financially feasible in the long-run is to also use the animals as a source of income (whether through dairy or meat).
http://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/can-arable-be-permacultural
So I imagine any shift towards long-term regenerative agriculture would be a case of out of pocket, for interest, knowledge gain.
I'm sure there are cases of farmers benefiting from crop rotating with pigs rooting up soil or sheep eating the left over sugar beats and feces going back into the soil, but I don't know the stats on feeding and looking after the animals lifespan, cost, environment ect.
Maybe you had a wild boar nature reserve next-door they rounded up with minimal energy every year into a tighter spot tourists could see and they added more fertilizer to the field with their feces, maybe they give out licenses to hunt a few every year, great for the environment, low effort farming, most ethical before just leaving them alone, it's all possible.
It's like trophy hunting in South Africa, I'm not going to say profit isn't helping preserve some habitat and species but it's a pretty perverse industry, just as a country agree to protect certain areas out of principle and take what you can get from eco-tourist initiatives but let the animals follow out their own interests.
So in short I'm not aware of any profitable land regenerative livestock agriculture from conception to death, or that could happen in the future that wouldn't otherwise involve protected land put aside for wildlife tourism but even then just ethically leave them alone, foster a system which is self-regulating.
You might get kicks out of trapping fish into small tanks or pools for use as fertilizer, in the developed world I think this counts as playing around with knowledge avenues, not doing what is most profitable, maybe you could transfer basic skills like this to subsistence farmers who can't afford seed patents and mono-culture seed saving isn't cutting it for the soil quality, but really this is in need of a long-term political solution which animals aren't useful to be apart of.
Simmilerish thoughts on the DIY appeal, subsistence farmers and conservative animal husbandry tradition:
http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&p=30945
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Re: The necessary role of livestock in regenerative agriculture
I may be going down the rabbit hole on this one, but this issue just keeps coming up and I think I am going to save this thread and I'll just be able to refer to it any time this issue comes up anywhere, so hopefully it'll be worth it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EDpuQMpyYw is a vegan challenging Savory. Quite comprehensive and convincing actually (although he is very pro vegan so danger of bias). A good point is made that these grazing systems will only work if there is a water source for the cattle, which is probably true. In areas where there is only rain for a part of the year , you might be able to grow plants for that part of the year at least which could be half of two thirds of the year in some cases. Plants might survive several weeks without water, but how do you get massive amounts of water to cows in Africa or the Middle of the East in a dry season. This video sneakily continues into a second part in order to try and trick you into not realizing it's nearly 20 minutes long.
Another 20 minutes to spare?! There is also a response to this! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4b8SFSIGK0 which shows some evidence in favour of this type of grazing. It looks like overall the evidence in favour is more specifically selected bits and pieces and not as good but hard to say for sure.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EDpuQMpyYw is a vegan challenging Savory. Quite comprehensive and convincing actually (although he is very pro vegan so danger of bias). A good point is made that these grazing systems will only work if there is a water source for the cattle, which is probably true. In areas where there is only rain for a part of the year , you might be able to grow plants for that part of the year at least which could be half of two thirds of the year in some cases. Plants might survive several weeks without water, but how do you get massive amounts of water to cows in Africa or the Middle of the East in a dry season. This video sneakily continues into a second part in order to try and trick you into not realizing it's nearly 20 minutes long.
Another 20 minutes to spare?! There is also a response to this! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4b8SFSIGK0 which shows some evidence in favour of this type of grazing. It looks like overall the evidence in favour is more specifically selected bits and pieces and not as good but hard to say for sure.
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Re: The necessary role of livestock in regenerative agriculture
No matter the answer of whether cows can make these environments more productive than human-edible plant agriculture (which is an interesting question), it doesn't reverse desertification, and it's still damaging to the global environment with respect to climate change.
With respect to food security, if it were the case that cows are more productive than crops:
1. We already have plenty of productive cropland, we don't need cows (current world production of soy, corn, and other staples easily meets nutritional needs of everybody on Earth), and exacerbated climate change is a more serious issue for global crop production than having a little more food from deserts.
2. We would also need to compare grass harvesting and use to produce human food through other processes like juicing and growing fungi (like straw mushrooms).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dryland_farming
Are you up for starting the wiki article on this issue? What should it be called?
If so, sign up for the wiki and I'll give you editing permissions.
http://philosophicalvegan.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
With respect to food security, if it were the case that cows are more productive than crops:
1. We already have plenty of productive cropland, we don't need cows (current world production of soy, corn, and other staples easily meets nutritional needs of everybody on Earth), and exacerbated climate change is a more serious issue for global crop production than having a little more food from deserts.
2. We would also need to compare grass harvesting and use to produce human food through other processes like juicing and growing fungi (like straw mushrooms).
And cows take a lot of water in dry environments. If you have that water, you can do limited irrigation instead to hold crops over between rains.Jamie in Chile wrote: ↑Fri Oct 27, 2017 11:01 pm A good point is made that these grazing systems will only work if there is a water source for the cattle, which is probably true.
Right, dryland farming.Jamie in Chile wrote: ↑Fri Oct 27, 2017 11:01 pmIn areas where there is only rain for a part of the year , you might be able to grow plants for that part of the year at least which could be half of two thirds of the year in some cases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dryland_farming
Are you up for starting the wiki article on this issue? What should it be called?
If so, sign up for the wiki and I'll give you editing permissions.
http://philosophicalvegan.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
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Re: The necessary role of livestock in regenerative agriculture
What do you mean "this issue"? Just for avoidance of doubt - do you mean the Savory/Monbiot debate, or do you mean dryland farming. I'm not really the expert on any of this although I suppose I could summarise the arguments that I made in this post. Let me think about it.
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Re: The necessary role of livestock in regenerative agriculture
The general issue of benevolent grazing and speculative environmentally beneficial beef production.Jamie in Chile wrote: ↑Sun Oct 29, 2017 9:31 pm What do you mean "this issue"? Just for avoidance of doubt - do you mean the Savory/Monbiot debate, or do you mean dryland farming. I'm not really the expert on any of this although I suppose I could summarise the arguments that I made in this post. Let me think about it.
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Re: The necessary role of livestock in regenerative agriculture
I'm talking more specifically about Simon Fairlie's claims in his book "Meat: A benign extravagance"brimstoneSalad wrote: ↑Fri Oct 27, 2017 7:46 pmMaybe you're talking about something else. Can you provide a source for what you're referencing?
Some of it can be found in the summary here:
http://letthemeatmeat.com/post/2773863502/meat-a-benign-extravagance-book-review
Last edited by ForFoodsSake on Fri Nov 03, 2017 7:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.