Posted on 11/20/2009 10:40:20 AM PST by Steelfish
As I said about quality, the significance of that varies by the nature of your customer.
Animal feed grains do indeed require protein supplementation for healthy feeding to all livestock. Thats why protein components that are often not human-edible are mixed in. And so are human edible ones too. But that does mean that protein content is indeed a desirable feature of feed grains.
If a piece of land is not as suitable for, say, wheat, and is best used for soybeans of lesser quality according to market conditions, it does not mean that the land cannot be farmed for lower yields of wheat or for another crop entirely. If a piece of land cannot be farmed or profitably used in agriculture for anything but animal feed (which seems very unlikely to me), and if there is some limitation on animal feeds that reduce the market for them, then there would indeed be some environmental benefit to letting it lie fallow or revert to wilderness, though this benefit is probably bought at a foolish price.
And then there are the inputs that go into growing this stuff in the first place - fertilizer, water, fuel, equipment and labor - that is less available for growing human-edible crops, all of which are more limited than viable agricultural land.
I am absolutely not for banning or limiting beef consumption; beef is a good thing indeed. I am also absolutely not for government controls on these things either.
But facts are facts, and if one is to argue with the other side it is best to be scrupulously accurate. We will always win with the facts.
I say that 2/3 of Indians should be sterizized to cut down on the enormous carbon footprint their massive population causes.
sterizized = sterilized but most get the meaning anyway,I’m sure.
Regardless of meaning, that is an unworthy comment.
Funny, I advocate that for the West since one of us emits about 500 times the carbon emitted by the average Indian.
We’re on the same page. Good. Now the culling can begin.
You first, squire.
I see you live in California, so you are around a lot of agriculture -- most of the state is devoted to it.
Vast tracts of agricultural land in this beautiful state are not agriculturally viable for anything but grazing or growing of livestock feed. I'm related to about five generations of folks who've lived it.
The point it that yes, there is quite a lot of ag land whose most efficient use is in livestock or growing of livestock feed; whole areas in the area where I grew up that ARE cultivated are used to grow exclusively livestock feed because anything else wouldn't be profitable.
Damn, that looks like the way to cook a bird!!!!
The Mother in Law just uses sausage to baste hers. We love it that way, great skin, also nice treats before dinner.
This farmer (a fourth generation dryfarmer of feed crops) who lived in one of those two small regions was so proud when he devised a way to dryfarm high-quality organic wheat (it was "organic" by accident, not design, but he pragmatically figured that it might be more attractive to buyers if they knew it was organic). Yet he ended up having to sell most of it as feed grain anyway because buyers were so skeptical of the inferior quality of California-grown wheat with regard to use in baked goods.
Interesting point on California wheat -
There was in fact a great deal more wheat grown in California @100+ years ago than today; it was used as a return bulk cargo to Europe (old sailing ships apparently could take cargos direct around the Horn just as cheaply as across the Atlantic and over the railroads). This was sold mostly in Germany for flour, Germany being short of grains at the time.
The point being that this stuff is perfectly edible.
I don’t get it.
Dead cows don’t fart!
Indian actually has a one-child policies- except Muslims are exempt and have as many kids as they want. It’s a kind of suicide since Islam considers Hindus to be pagan and will wipe them out as soon as they have enough strength.
Overpopulation is mostly a lie anyway.
You want to deal in fact? Here's one: in spite of what anti-meat people will tell you, a LOT of land in agriculture is infinitely better suited to support livestock than it is to support the cultivation, growing, and harvesting of crops for human consumption -- in other words, use of that land to grow crops for human consumption is a woefully inefficient use of resources compared to what it could (and does) produce in/for livestock.
It may "seem unlikely" to you, but that doesn't make it any less true. Livestock ruminants including beef and sheep (as opposed to other livestock animals, such as pigs and chickens) create the opportunity for the amazingly efficient use of agricultural resources, and convert grass and inferior grain into a vastly larger and superior range of end products, from dairy and medicines to meat, clothing, and chemicals; claims that livestock ag is wasteful of water or an otherwise inefficient use of natural resources is pure politically-correct hooey.
Don't you have hundreds of thousands of destitute, sick, malnoursihed people to take care of? Why don't you be about that instead of lecturing us about meat consumption, mmm-kay?
Love, Thinking Americans.
A. I agree (and always have) that this is all politically correct hooey, for lots of reasons -
The notion that there are limited resources available to produce food and that food shortages are the result of resource shortages,
that forcing people in America to reduce consumption will somehow make food appear elsewhere,
that directing consumption patterns will obtain the desired results instead of some awful unintended consequence, etc.
B. The resource argument that much land is better used to raise animals, is perfectly true. There is a great deal of land available for such a purpose, much of which is massively underutilized. Land is not an issue, except perhaps in the case of a few crowded third-world countries where asset misallocation is probably the result of governments interfering with markets. There ARE cases in some countries of, for instance, potentially fine rice-land being used as pasture, merely because the local price of beef or animal feed is extremely high as a result of import restrictions, or of political/social troubles like insecure land titles.
C. On the narrow point regarding non-land resource substitution, the argument holds. Water, fertilizers, etc. are used to raise animals instead of plant foods for direct human consumption, and the US, for instance could live on a vegetarian diet with fewer resources overall used for agriculture.
The proper answer to that is - so what ? If the US uses fewer of these resources it does not mean that these are available for the use of hungry people elsewhere. Its even less feasible to ship these off to Malawi than it is to ship grain there. Its exactly the same fallacy as when our mothers told us to eat our dinners because the kids in Africa were starving. What we did with our dinners had no possible relevance to people starving in Africa. That we spend x resources on raising beef to eat does not affect starving Africans either.
As for the global climate impact - well, we all know its a bunch of hooey. The latest email releases seem dispositive on this matter.
...to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions responsible for global warmingIn a related story, everyone in the United States who eat beef told India to get rid of its unchecked rogue population of cattle wandering the streets and alleys before lecturing anyone else regarding views based on junk science.
You’re welcome to your opinion.
I might be able to live without beef, but do without BEER???
NO WAY!!! That's where I draw the line!!!
The zero will hold his first state dinner for the Indian PM. The way things have been going so far I wouldn’t be surprised if Wagyu beef shows up on the menu.
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