Given that we reduce our land use by an average of 76% when we switch to a plant-based diet, the opportunity cost of using land for a cattle farm should feature in any discussion of whether or not it is saving carbon.
Aha! Now we get to use opportunity cost in arguments about the environment then.
Jobs are a cost, not a benefit and all that. In fact, there’s much, much more to go on that very one point. Most of which Monbiot won’t like at all.
the sequence, after being “edited down by the film-makers”, failed to make clear that they were discussing not the actual figures on the farm but “a modelled scenario”.
Suddenly you don”t like models, which is what all your climate woo is based on?
You smug thicko twat, Moonbat.
The implication is that if you abandon meat production you then have all that extra land for planting food crops. Marginal land is perfectly useless for arable farming so would
revert to scrubproduce wonderful “rewilding” cheques but nothing else.Don’t cattle have a plant-based diet? I’m confused. After it’s all rewilded, what if the wolves decide to remain carnivores?
As I enjoy pointing out to vegans, my steak is made of grass. And if that doesn’t annoy them enough, I can always mention that my food craps all over their food.
I’d also argue that, since vegan food is less nourishing than good old meat, you have to eat a lot more of it.
“In particular, we tend to associate the imagery and sensations of our earliest childhood with what is good and right.”
The illustration has a red distinctly USian style barn. Which leads me to surmise the illustrator a) is USian- fair enough. b) is someone who isn’t particularly au fait with the imagery of UKian farms from childhood or otherwise.
Land use would indeed be reduced by 75% if we’d follow Monidiot’s suggestions.
Because the resulting famine would be Malthusian in scale..
And this one is glorious…
Says the one who studiously ignores and/or condemns anything that doesn’t align with his convictions….
Just when you thought Monidiot’s nickname couldn’t be more apt, he just goes and one-up’s himself..
‘Land use would indeed be reduced by 75% if we’d follow Monidiot’s suggestions.
Because the resulting famine would be Malthusian in scale.’
Yes Grikath!!!
@HB: it’s obviously designed to be American-like except for the absurd decision to include sheep.
As Meissen Bison points out, the vast majority of ‘agricultural’ land in the world is not suitable for ‘arable’; too hilly, rocky, wet, dry, untillable, etc., etc..
The c.75% of all agricultural land that applies too does, though, produce grasses and other forms of herbage; which we can’t eat, but our ruminant friends can and can turn that into tasty and nutritious meat.
In my part of the world, all the land fit to be tilled is being tilled. The remaining land is used for ranching. The terrain is to hilly, rocky and forested to be used for anything else. In addition, the ranching reduces the threat of wildfire by clearing out a lot of the undergrowth.
Given that we reduce our land use by an average of 76% when we switch to a plant-based diet,
I’m never switching to a plant based diet, so George can fuck off, can’t he?
Yes Steve. As I like to put it, if God had meant us to only eat vegetables, He wouldn’t have invented steak.
I’d also argue that, since vegan food is less nourishing than good old meat, you have to eat a lot more of it.
Plus, 30-50% of what vegans/veggies do eat is wasted, passing through the anus unused. Humans cannot digest cellulose which is what plants are predominantly made of. Hence the use of animals that can digest cellulose as intermediary food converters.
There’s a little thing called the nitrogen cycle. If we don’t have any artificial fertilisers, and we don’t have livestock either, then we have nothing to replenish the soil. You can’t just grow crops constantly without putting nutrients back in. Historically (ie prior to the Haber process) farming was all mixed, ie you grew crops and raised livestock and rotated each round different parts of the farm over a cycle to maintain fertility. Which is what the middle class lefty favourite organic farming does today. Take the livestock away and farming doesn’t work, period. And no, you can’t put human waste on the ground, because its a) contaminated with heavy metals and plastics, and b) will contain nasty bugs too, that will contaminate the crops.
Do these cunts realise this, or just don’t care?
In my part of the world, all the land fit to be tilled is being tilled.
In almost all parts of the world, MG. No farmer runs livestock on land fit for arable (I suppose it’s possible there may be exceptions for extreme premium livestock, such as wagyu), because it’s not only less profitable, but also a hell of a lot more work. Nobody has to get up at 5am in the winter to milk the wheat!
An aside, the NHS have a tree planting wing, nhsforest, with a green champion in every trust, maybe more, who get free trees from nhsforest hq. Turns out that they aren’t good at matching trees to suitable land and based on Hartlepool the 200 trees planted a year ago are dead. Underfunded, my arse
For someone who allegedly lives in the country, Moonbat must have blinkers on.
Drive round a fair bit of the UK & most of the northern half & you’ll notice lots of drystone dykes / stone walls on the non level bits.
That’s because there were so many feckin rocks in steep fields unfit for ploughing, that the rocks had to be removed to improve the grazing, ( you can’t grow crops on gradients this steep & on soil 2″ deep at best)
@Bongo
Even when the land is good for trees its still not over. Looking after developing woodland is hard work. It takes vastly more effort than planting the trees.
Bboy – a juicy T-bone is proof that God loves us.
Vegetables are for livestock and slaves. I intend to be neither. I don’t think I’d eat George Monbiot tho, too stringy and he looks like he has intestinal worms.
Or at least, in every picture I’ve seen of him he’s had the quietly desperate look of a man about to fill his Y-fronts. Perhaps he’s just a progressive. I’ve never met a vegetarian who seems healthy.
Hitler is the most famous vegetarian in history. Did he look healthy to you? Maybe if he’d had a better diet, WW2 could have been averted. Sort out that Sudetenland business over a slap up meal of veal and Barolo.
So, when you think about it, vegetarianism is also antisemitism.
@Steve
Remember that Satan tempted Eve with vegetarian fare, not steak.
There’s always these weird assumptions about efficiency when people talk about ‘plant-based’ diets.
Sure, it takes 10 lbs of grass to make one pound of cow, 10 pounds of cow to make one pound of human.
But you can’t get even 1 lb of human from 100lb of grass. Cows are feed on grass and can graze on marginal lands that require little to no managment (ie, no articifical fertilizer or additional water). Plant food production for humans requires either massive amounts of management – or massive amounts of marginal land.
So you’re either greatly increasing the use of artificial fertlizers and water drain or you’re . . . using the same or more amount of land to grow plants ‘organically’.
@Jim
nd no, you can’t put human waste on the ground, because its a) contaminated with heavy metals and plastics, and b) will contain nasty bugs too, that will contaminate the crops.
Do these cunts realise this, or just don’t care?
The latter. These Malthusians want deaths to achieve depopulation
Talking of human waste, Spanish have a use for it
https://youtu.be/JauznFkz5tE?t=69
“And no, you can’t put human waste on the ground…”
Sorry to burst your bubble Jim, but (treated) human waste IS used in this fashion:
https://civileats.com/2020/01/30/questions-remain-about-using-treated-sewage-on-farms/
I wonder if Moonbat realises that it’s only modern agricultural practices, supported by fossil fuels and the associated agrochemical industry that permits him and his fellow moon howlers to indulge themselves with veganism?
Vegan food is ultraprocessed camouflaged slop that he would happily ban if it was fossil fuel based
“Sorry to burst your bubble Jim, but (treated) human waste IS used in this fashion:”
Yes it is, but its a) very low in plant nutrients, crops grown with it still need artificial fertilisers, just not so much, b) contains heavy metals and any land that has has to be monitored for heavy metal contamination – you can’t go sticking it on year after year, eventually you reach a safe limit, and c) increasingly contains microplastics, the effects of which are as yet unknown.
I won’t allow the stuff on my farm, because of (b) and (c) above. I wouldn’t put it past our overlords to suddenly pull the rug from under us and declare that any land thats had sewage sludge is now considered contaminated and cannot be used for food production in future. And hey, coincidentally we want to re-wild lots of the UK at the same time……..
The Chinese have been collecting human waste and spreading it on their crops for millennia (I’m sure they aren’t unique in this), and no doubt getting interesting diseases and parasites as a result. During the Cultural Revolution, teenagers grooved to the Mao-approved song: “The Night-Soil Collectors are Coming Down the Mountain”.