The animal industry feeds the plants as much as the plants feed the animals. I’m not sure how vegans feel about synthetic fertilizer like miracle grow, but that’s what will have to be used in place of manure if the meat industry goes away.
Many of the organic crops grown use animal manure to fertilize the plants. I know you can use seaweed and other plants for compost(weeds are already composted back in via tilling, seaweed requires harvesting from the ocean or long distance shipping from farms), as well as cycling crops to prevent nutrient deficiency…
BUT manure doesn’t just add nutrients. It adds beneficial bacteria that helps keep the soil healthy and make the nutrients bioavailable to plants. It conditions the soil for water retention, and helps break up clay soil and add organic matter to sandy soil.
Will vegans keep animals just for manure? Or will organic lables on food be less important? Are we going to start scraping the forests for leaves to chop up an add to farm soil? That can’t be good for forests though. I guess I’m just confused about how to maintain large farms without access to large amounts of manure.
The ideal answer is compost, regenerative agriculture, and (better treated) human-sources waste.
Organic crop yields will almost certainly reduce a bit without animal waste fertilizer, but that is fine since crop consumption will fall by a greater amount due to not needing to feed a bunch of extra animals.
an interesting idea, but anything that decays and “composts” can be used as a fertilizer so.
This includes things like organic scraps, you don’t just have to use animal shit. Although it’s a pretty good one if you have access to it.
I think personally, we should move to a more decentralized food production system, to help alleviate some of the costs of industrial agriculture, which are pretty heavy.
Hi friend, I propose you try an experiment: post a small handful of anonymous comments on the Internet, try to make them benign as possible but casually slip in an acknowledgement that you are vegan. Something along the lines of “God that recipe looks amazing, but I think I might swap out the beef broth for veggie broth as I am vegan” like I said the point of this experiment is to say something completely as benign and inoffensive as possible.
Once you post sit back and wait for the responses to roll in. You will likely find that while not every time, it is incredibly common for people to send you pictures of bacon, and an abundant of angry responses to the mere offhand mention of the word.
I sincerely wish it was a straw man fallacy, but it unfortunately is a exceedingly common response to the word.
hey non vegan vegan fun fact, you would be surprised at the sheer amount of consumption and productive the livestock sector of agriculture creates.
Likewise you could easily just respond to the last line with “you can’t take away my gas stove, i’m just going to burn gas lamps in my home now” and get a little bit eepy and sleepy due to all the buildup of combustion products inside your home.
It is, but many vegans also do really unhelpful things that are closer to trying to berate or shame people into not eating meat and it is obviously not effective.
Well, I guess I’m just not sure why you’re trying to give us advice about something you have zero experience with.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say that you don’t actually care what kind of approach is more convincing, and you’re just trying to tell us to shut up, or say things in a way that makes us easy to ignore.
You have no idea what you’re talking about at best, and realistically, you don’t even want us to be successful. So, thank you for your unsolicited advice on which tacts are unhelpful, but, just so you know, I will be promptly tossing it into the trash.
that can be true, but we also grow a substantial amount of feed for agriculture usage, even if it’s not local to us. A lot of alf alfa being grown is exported.
It’s all dependent on whatevers cheapest at the end of the day. And regardless of this fact, a lot of energy is still lost in this process, cows are a significant contributor to climate change, ironically.
We recommend four widely applicable high-impact (i.e. low emissions) actions with the potential to contribute to systemic change and substantially reduce annual personal emissions: having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year), avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tCO2e saved per roundtrip transatlantic flight) and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e saved per year). These actions have much greater potential to reduce emissions than commonly promoted strategies like comprehensive recycling (four times less effective than a plant-based diet) or changing household lightbulbs (eight times less).
Total aviation is responsible for about 2.5% of worldwide carbon emissions. That’s all air travel, private jets included. While it’s obviously very popular to focus on the luxuries of the rich, it just won’t be effective to focus on those when fighting climate change, let alone being a solution as you claimed.
What’s an easier solution, in your opinion? Getting the ultra wealthy to give up their yachts and jets (by getting rid of the ultra wealthy entirely, which also addresses the evils of capitalism), or convincing hundreds of millions of people to change just about everything about the diet they’ve been eating for tens of thousands of years?
That’s actually a good question. Considering the political power the ultra-rich wield, I’m not sure. But I think we should focus what brings the most bang for the buck.
all of agriculture is only about 20% of our GHG emissions. cows are a fraction of that… there are definitely bigger issues.
as for the alfalfa, it’s also a small fraction of global crops. 2/3 of all crop calories go to humans with only 1/3 going to livestock… this includes about 70% of the weight of the global soy crop (after we have pressed it for oil), as well as fodder like corn stalks. we basically fed livestock trash and get food. it’s a pretty good deal.
I think it’s probably fine. it will work itself out when the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.
i think it’s a lot more likely to work out better in a highly decentralized system, i’m not much of a commie myself personally, as i prefer to live outside the bounds of normalcy, and unless i get a lot of say in the commie meetings i’m not sure i can justify existing in that society lol.
TBF land clearance for grazing land is a catastrophic issue for the environment and going on in places like the Amazon rainforest.
Some ecosystems are naturally evolved to supporting grazing species like the grasslands of North America which was once home to millions of Buffallo but that’s not true of most land currently used for grazing.
It’s at a point where I’m all for a UN resolution to end land clearance in locations like the Amazon Rainforest, to be enforced by lethal means if necessary.
Billions of lives may depend on securing such important ecosystems.
The UN doesn’t even have any influence with the UN. Even if I supported lethal enforcement of environmental protections (which I do in many cases), the UN’s idea of enforcement is a kindly-worded letter. If the USA doesn’t back something the UN has no power. And the USA is one of literally only two countries in the entire world that don’t recognize access to healthy food as a human right.
hey vegans, cool fact, plant based diets are vastly more efficient and effective at feeding people than meat based diets.
Meat consumes plants to exist, most of that energy is lost. Not so much with plants.
Just start telling people this shit lmao. Who cares about morality when you can pretend to be saving the environment instead.
The animal industry feeds the plants as much as the plants feed the animals. I’m not sure how vegans feel about synthetic fertilizer like miracle grow, but that’s what will have to be used in place of manure if the meat industry goes away.
Many of the organic crops grown use animal manure to fertilize the plants. I know you can use seaweed and other plants for compost(weeds are already composted back in via tilling, seaweed requires harvesting from the ocean or long distance shipping from farms), as well as cycling crops to prevent nutrient deficiency…
BUT manure doesn’t just add nutrients. It adds beneficial bacteria that helps keep the soil healthy and make the nutrients bioavailable to plants. It conditions the soil for water retention, and helps break up clay soil and add organic matter to sandy soil.
Will vegans keep animals just for manure? Or will organic lables on food be less important? Are we going to start scraping the forests for leaves to chop up an add to farm soil? That can’t be good for forests though. I guess I’m just confused about how to maintain large farms without access to large amounts of manure.
Veganic agriculture is already a thing, and it works fine.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegan_organic_agriculture
https://goveganic.net/
We humans shit as well
The ideal answer is compost, regenerative agriculture, and (better treated) human-sources waste.
Organic crop yields will almost certainly reduce a bit without animal waste fertilizer, but that is fine since crop consumption will fall by a greater amount due to not needing to feed a bunch of extra animals.
an interesting idea, but anything that decays and “composts” can be used as a fertilizer so.
This includes things like organic scraps, you don’t just have to use animal shit. Although it’s a pretty good one if you have access to it.
I think personally, we should move to a more decentralized food production system, to help alleviate some of the costs of industrial agriculture, which are pretty heavy.
Cool, but steak is my favorite animal.
true, cows are my favorite food.
Boobs are my favorite source of entertainment.
Wait… Nope, nothing to do with sustenance
You think? I’m pretty sure that’s the purpose of boobs.
i thought it was for us to legislate female top wear?
deleted by creator
Hey non-vegan, fun fact: No one really cares when you tell them eating plants are more efficient.
Common responses include “bAc0Nnnnnn!” and “I’m gonna eat two times the amount of meat to make your efforts useless”.
Amazing strawman at the end there.
Hi friend, I propose you try an experiment: post a small handful of anonymous comments on the Internet, try to make them benign as possible but casually slip in an acknowledgement that you are vegan. Something along the lines of “God that recipe looks amazing, but I think I might swap out the beef broth for veggie broth as I am vegan” like I said the point of this experiment is to say something completely as benign and inoffensive as possible.
Once you post sit back and wait for the responses to roll in. You will likely find that while not every time, it is incredibly common for people to send you pictures of bacon, and an abundant of angry responses to the mere offhand mention of the word.
I sincerely wish it was a straw man fallacy, but it unfortunately is a exceedingly common response to the word.
It really isn’t. I know plenty of anti-vegans who react in that manner.
hey non vegan vegan fun fact, you would be surprised at the sheer amount of consumption and productive the livestock sector of agriculture creates.
Likewise you could easily just respond to the last line with “you can’t take away my gas stove, i’m just going to burn gas lamps in my home now” and get a little bit eepy and sleepy due to all the buildup of combustion products inside your home.
I’m no vegan but that’s a common vegan talking point
It is, but many vegans also do really unhelpful things that are closer to trying to berate or shame people into not eating meat and it is obviously not effective.
no arguments there
Out of curiosity, how many people have you convinced to go vegan?
None. Why do I have to convince a single person to criticize an argument I don’t think is convincing?
Well, I guess I’m just not sure why you’re trying to give us advice about something you have zero experience with.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say that you don’t actually care what kind of approach is more convincing, and you’re just trying to tell us to shut up, or say things in a way that makes us easy to ignore.
You have no idea what you’re talking about at best, and realistically, you don’t even want us to be successful. So, thank you for your unsolicited advice on which tacts are unhelpful, but, just so you know, I will be promptly tossing it into the trash.
I have a lot of experience with people trying to convince me of things.
And you are welcome to take the advice I didn’t give to you in the first place and throw it in the trash.
how much experience do you have with people convincing you of things?
A lot. I just said.
How much experience do you have repeating useless questions?
You think they don’t? And environmentalism is also morality.
environmentalism is morality sure, but doesn’t it seem silly to use an appeal to morality to push for more morality.
but much of the plant matter that animals eat is grazed or waste from some other agricultural product.
that can be true, but we also grow a substantial amount of feed for agriculture usage, even if it’s not local to us. A lot of alf alfa being grown is exported.
It’s all dependent on whatevers cheapest at the end of the day. And regardless of this fact, a lot of energy is still lost in this process, cows are a significant contributor to climate change, ironically.
There was a good discussion of this on Reddit recently. Sorry to link to Reddit, but it’s a good, topical post worth perusal.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Agriculture/comments/1dv7fw9/how_much_good_land_is_used_to_grow_food_for/
ETA:
yeah that pretty much checks out. The best solution to climate change is to kill shit like private jets and yachts. But that’s unlikely to happen.
I severely doubt those emissions are anything but negligible because there are so few yachts and jets.
Edit: Yeah, just downvoting is cheap, so here’s just a single statistic for you: https://ourworldindata.org/global-aviation-emissions
Total aviation is responsible for about 2.5% of worldwide carbon emissions. That’s all air travel, private jets included. While it’s obviously very popular to focus on the luxuries of the rich, it just won’t be effective to focus on those when fighting climate change, let alone being a solution as you claimed.
What’s an easier solution, in your opinion? Getting the ultra wealthy to give up their yachts and jets (by getting rid of the ultra wealthy entirely, which also addresses the evils of capitalism), or convincing hundreds of millions of people to change just about everything about the diet they’ve been eating for tens of thousands of years?
That’s actually a good question. Considering the political power the ultra-rich wield, I’m not sure. But I think we should focus what brings the most bang for the buck.
all of agriculture is only about 20% of our GHG emissions. cows are a fraction of that… there are definitely bigger issues.
as for the alfalfa, it’s also a small fraction of global crops. 2/3 of all crop calories go to humans with only 1/3 going to livestock… this includes about 70% of the weight of the global soy crop (after we have pressed it for oil), as well as fodder like corn stalks. we basically fed livestock trash and get food. it’s a pretty good deal.
obviously, but in terms of livestock, cows are pretty significant.
30% of all global stock going to feed is a pretty large percentage of global crop production.
I think it’s probably fine. it will work itself out when the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.
We don’t base policy on some chuds thoughts
I’m quoting the iww constitution, so I don’t know what chud you’re talking about
i think it’s a lot more likely to work out better in a highly decentralized system, i’m not much of a commie myself personally, as i prefer to live outside the bounds of normalcy, and unless i get a lot of say in the commie meetings i’m not sure i can justify existing in that society lol.
the iww encourages your autonomy
TBF land clearance for grazing land is a catastrophic issue for the environment and going on in places like the Amazon rainforest.
Some ecosystems are naturally evolved to supporting grazing species like the grasslands of North America which was once home to millions of Buffallo but that’s not true of most land currently used for grazing.
absolutely. I have some ideas about what to do about it, but none of them involve buying beans
It’s at a point where I’m all for a UN resolution to end land clearance in locations like the Amazon Rainforest, to be enforced by lethal means if necessary.
Billions of lives may depend on securing such important ecosystems.
I don’t have any influence with the un.
Haha not saying you do but it’s what I would like to see happen
The UN doesn’t even have any influence with the UN. Even if I supported lethal enforcement of environmental protections (which I do in many cases), the UN’s idea of enforcement is a kindly-worded letter. If the USA doesn’t back something the UN has no power. And the USA is one of literally only two countries in the entire world that don’t recognize access to healthy food as a human right.