charlotte-reva wrote: ↑Mon Jul 24, 2017 3:07 am
new argument, this time a beef raiser. [...]
Basically, he is a pasturizing beef, and he says that his beef cattle is needed because it can pasturise the land and use this grass to feed the cattle and thus is less polluting that a imported soy steack.
That's incorrect.
1. Whether eating grass or grain, cows produce methane.
2. Cows may produce more methane over a lifetime on grass because they grow more slowly, so per steak the carbon footprint is probably higher.
3. Soy protein yield per acre is WAY higher than cows (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edible_protein_per_unit_area_of_land ), which means we need less farmland. We're probably dealing with something like:
A. 10 acres of managed pasture vs.
B. Over 9 acres of forest or wild grasslands (wild land captures more carbon) and less than one acre of soybeans
Intensive grazing is very harmful to the environment, locally and world-wide due to greenhouse gas emissions.
3. The embodied energy of transporting food is relatively low both by land and sea, which is typically how food reaches you. It's a widely believed myth that the energy cost of food transportation is at all comparable to production. Even a soy steak made in Taiwan and shipped to you frozen would likely be better for the environment than locally produced beef. The only exception might be air transportation if you ordered overnight shipping or something (it's no easy task to calculate; you should ask him to show his math and sources rather than make assumptions).
charlotte-reva wrote: ↑Mon Jul 24, 2017 3:07 amHe also sas that mountains landscapes are not propoer to any cultures at all and can be made profit of beef pasturizing.
Just let them grow forest, and grow your soybeans somewhere else. There is much more farmland than we need. We should allow most of it to return to forest, which could capture more greenhouse gasses.
But also, it's not true that we can not grow food on mountains. There are many ancient technologies that allow that easily.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrace_%28agriculture%29
We should only do this if we need to, otherwise let it return to forest completely.
charlotte-reva wrote: ↑Mon Jul 24, 2017 3:07 amThus, as his cattle is grass fed it is not consumping cerals.... He says vegans are not provinding solutions agriculture wise for the world and if he wouldnt do that, the mountains will just returns to forest and close themselfves thus no benefits for food would be made of thoses lanscapes.
We have plenty of farmland already, without any growing on any mountains or deserts, to feed the whole world vegan. All we have to do is convert a small part of the existing farmland which grows grain for animals to grow food for humans. If we stop eating meat we can do that easily. The rest of the land can returned to forest. He is harming the environment by not allowing it to regrow forest and instead raising cows on it. He is not helping human beings have more food. We already waste so much. We do not need more beef, we need more forest and fewer polluting cows.
