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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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Okay, let's turn all pasturage over to tillage (and forget marginal lands such as raising sheep on mountainsides). No more commercial cow, sheep, pig or chicken rearing, all those animals slaughtered and consumed and no replacements.

When talking about mass crop production, we have to consider what crops are (1) commercially desirable (e.g. what wheat for flour for baking) (2) what crops can be grown on particular land (not everywhere is suitable; that's why the American and Canadian plains of wheat for producing 'strong' flour) (3) the evolution of monoculture and loss of traditional varieties of crops, because we're now on mass production scales to feed the world (4) necessity for pesticides, herbicides, and other means of keeping crop loss down (you don't want birds eating the seed once planted, for instance, so how do you cope with that?) (5) downstream damage to environment from mass scale monoculture (rice, for example, is supposedly problematic and involved in contributing to global warming due to greenhouse gases emissions from necessary growth conditions). There's a lot of wild animals, from birds on down to insects, which are considered pests and which need to be controlled (including killing) in order to produce food crops. And that's without touching the GMO question, which may produce hardier crops but which inevitably lead to the same necessity for large scale agri-business production because the economies of scale don't exist for small peasant farmers/small scale farming. Think of those same American plains with no trees, hedges, fences, in sight, just acres upon acres of croppage replacing native prairie and grassland (and think of the Dustbowl era from over-exploitation of same).

I have a notion that there's a vegan ideal of cosy cottage food production which has no basis in the reality of large-scale food production from grains, pulses, vegetables and non-animal foodstuffs, anymore than the majority of meat-consumers know the full details of how meat is produced.

(4) necessity for pesticides, herbicides, and other means of keeping crop loss down (you don't want birds eating the seed once planted, for instance, so how do you cope with that?

除四害! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eradicate_pests_and_diseases_and_build_happiness_for_ten_thousand_generations.jpg

None of that addresses that raising meat for slaughter involves growing more crops, not less. For instance, the U.S. produces 51.5 million acres of hay and 37.3 million acres of wheat per year. Even before trying to account for other sources of animal feed, or that people eat more wheat than beef, or that some of that wheat is itself feeding animals, hay alone is using more land that wheat production.