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Excellent propaganda. It presents facts out of context which may seem very important to the naive. [Danger! Do Not Touch! 40 Million Ohms!]
Water & livestock: Please review 5th grade science: The Water Cycle. Livestock drink water and then return it to the environment, merely delaying it's journey temporarily on its way to the sea to be re-cycled as rain. Ranchers aren't taking water away from all the TreeHuggers in the city.
GHGs & livestock: Please review 5th grade science: The Carbon Cycle. Only fossil fuels increase the [co2] of the atmosphere. The grass removes co2 from the air. The livestock eat the grass, metabolize it and return the co2 to the air. ZERO net change in co2. BTW- while methane is more potent than co2 as a GHG, it is quickly oxidized by O2 in the air and it becomes once again co2.
OTOH- growing veggies for the vegans burns 5-10x more fossil fuel than raising livestock. Tractors are used to plow, seed, fertilize, cultivate several times per year, then harvest. Tractors get lousy mileage. Cowboys ride horses.
I will concede that cutting down the rain forests is not good, and it's done to raise cattle. The soil there has poor fertility, most of the nutrients were tied up in the living trees. I have to wonder how much rain forest could have been bought for preservation with all the money wasted on GW propaganda?
The part about grass fed beef does not compute. The Great Plains supported 60 million buffalo before we exterminated them so we could grow corn & wheat (both grasses) and still have a national cattle herd (another bovine so closely related to bison that they can interbreed) of 80 million. (I'm a strong advocate for grass fed beef. We could easily convert our mono-crop grasslands into more natural pasture grasslands.)
I will also concede that the natural fisheries have been depleted. Limits have been set but those rules are being ignored by several notable nations that should know better. But people need animal protein. More grass fed beef!
Starvation: The film correctly points out that we grow more than enough food to feed the world's population. It's the crooked politics in underdeveloped nations that prevents the adequate distribution of the food.
That's politics, not ecology--but then, so is that film.
Excellent propaganda. It presents facts out of context which may seem very important to the naive. [Danger! Do Not Touch! 40 Million Ohms!]
Water & livestock: Please review 5th grade science: The Water Cycle. Livestock drink water and then return it to the environment, merely delaying it's journey temporarily on its way to the sea to be re-cycled as rain. Ranchers aren't taking water away from all the TreeHuggers in the city.
The Grain (much of which goes to feed Cattle) and Beef Industries tend to draw from Olde Water Aquifers. Which are dropping. This is largely outside of your "cycle." Else it could be located near coastal areas and draw from Desalinated Water . . . . which would also be a mess.
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GHGs & livestock: Please review 5th grade science: The Carbon Cycle. Only fossil fuels increase the [co2] of the atmosphere. The grass removes co2 from the air. The livestock eat the grass, metabolize it and return the co2 to the air. ZERO net change in co2. BTW- while methane is more potent than co2 as a GHG, it is quickly oxidized by O2 in the air and it becomes once again co2.
See, this is where you have mixed your lack of knowledge with arrogance . . . not really good form.
But for those who wish to learn, there is always Wiki . . .
OTOH- growing veggies for the vegans burns 5-10x more fossil fuel than raising livestock. Tractors are used to plow, seed, fertilize, cultivate several times per year, then harvest. Tractors get lousy mileage. Cowboys ride horses.
Pretty much nonsense, but I think you know this is nonsense, as well?
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The part about grass fed beef does not compute. The Great Plains supported 60 million buffalo before we exterminated them so we could grow corn & wheat (both grasses) and still have a national cattle herd (another bovine so closely related to bison that they can interbreed) of 80 million. (I'm a strong advocate for grass fed beef. We could easily convert our mono-crop grasslands into more natural pasture grasslands.)
I will also concede that the natural fisheries have been depleted. Limits have been set but those rules are being ignored by several notable nations that should know better. But people need animal protein. More grass fed beef!
ummm. No. No animal protein is "needed" for humans. Overall the adverse health effects from Beef and Dairy MASSIVELY outweigh any (fictional) benefits.
And the buffalo / bison were exterminated to starve the Plains Indians / Natives into submission. The White US Government intentionally committed an act of Genocide. It is/was so well documented and accepted it became the basis and modeled justification of Germany's later expansion policies in the early 1900's.
But if a "National Herd" were desired, we could just let the buffalo / bison range the area again -- no grains required.
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Starvation: The film correctly points out that we grow more than enough food to feed the world's population. It's the crooked politics in underdeveloped nations that prevents the adequate distribution of the food.
That's politics, not ecology--but then, so is that film.
ummm. No again. It is Crooked First World Corporations and Politics that rob and starve the "Third World" regions.
Really. Have you never actually looked at how the poor areas become poor?
It is propaganda ("information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.")
The production of animal protein requires significantly more water than the production of plant protein (Pimentel et al. 2004). Although US livestock directly uses only 2% of the total water used in agriculture (Solley et al. 1998), the indirect water inputs for livestock production are substantial because of the water required for forage and grain crops. Each year, a total of 253 million t grain are fed to US livestock, requiring a total of about 25 × 1013 L water (Pimentel et al. 2004). Worldwide grain production specifically for livestock requires nearly three times the amount of grain that is fed to US livestock and three times the amount of water used in the United States to produce grain feed (Pimentel et al. 2004).
Animal products vary in the amounts of water required for their production (table 2). For example, producing 1 kg chicken requires 3500 L water, whereas producing 1 kg sheep (fed on 21 kg grain and 30 kg forage) requires approximately 51,000 L water (table 2; USDA 2003, Pimentel et al. 2004). If cattle are raised on open rangeland and not in confined feedlot production, 120 to 200 kg forage are required to produce 1 kg beef. This amount of forage requires 120,000 to 200,000 L water per kg (Pimentel et al. 2004), or a minimum of 200 mm rainfall per year (Pimentel et al. 2004).
Now what exactly is "open rangeland?" According to Britannica.com:
Rangelands are distinguished from pastureland by the presence on them of native vegetation, rather than of plants established by human societies, and by their management principally through the control of the number of animals grazing on them, as opposed to the more intensive agricultural practices of seeding, irrigation, and the use of fertilizers. The tallgrass prairies of the North American Great Plains, the Ukraine, and parts of Argentina and Hungary formerly made ideal rangelands but were too well-suited to cultivated crops to be left for grazing purposes. Rangelands are thus more generally confined to areas of marginal or submarginal agricultural land or to areas that are entirely unsuited to permanent cultivation.
In short, ruminants are a required part of the management of such land, you cannot grow row crops on such land (voiding any idiotic idea of better agricultural use), and with the exception of the increased weight of beef walking off that land after growth, ALL available water "used" on rangeland is returned to the soil and air.
In short, the figure of water usage in meat production is insanely inflated. The claim of 34 trillion gallons annually of water usage in meat production is a flat out fabrication. In point of fact, that annual figure would be 2.4 times the annual outflow of the Mississippi river. There is simply no way that the amount of water being claimed can be "consumed" in meat production. Were the ruminants NOT on the rangeland, the same amount of water would be consumed by the plants and transpired into the air or returned to the soil. Water use there in meat production is nearly net zero.
That brings up a couple of ancillary points. If you want to define"consumed" as water being essentially unusable after said "consumption" then the rivers flowing into the ocean and the transpiration of ALL vegetation are the REAL consumers of potable water. I don't see people considering diverting the Mississippi into permanent water storage, or even any serious attempt to recharge aquifers with that otherwise "consumed" water.
I could step through the film and counter most of the points, but it is simply a waste of time. Believers who pass judgment based upon emotion are rarely swayed by facts. Propaganda that purports to show facts, when those "facts" are easily shown to be fabrications, will not sway people who have education and are capable of critical thinking.
The most efficient source of protein for people food is soybean Tofu. The problem is most prefer a rare steak to a lump of grilled Tofu.
We could provide more efficient meat by buying up all the marginal cattle ranches in Montana and free ranging Bison. Less ecological damage and better tasting burgers.
Tofu is a soy product with endocrine system disruptors. The way chicken farmers get around the injunction against using hormones is to include soy in the feed, which accomplishes much the same thing. I'll eat tofu no more than once a month. Bison is a good thought. There are also beefalo, which are a bison cattle cross. The Texas longhorn was used as a survivor in really bad rangeland where others might not survive.
Personally, I think that if beef had a dollar per pound tax that funded FREE heart care for everyone in the country - no one ever had to pay a direct dime for hospital or doctor or medicine because the entire system was funded through that tax -which could be used for no other purpose, it could accomplish a lot. Beef use would drop slightly, people would be healthier, and a major source of personal bankruptcies eliminated. (Just an off-the-cuff thought.)
None are so blind as those who will not see. Maybe members here should read something besides the popular press and then analyze, rather than just repeat what they read.
short on time-- It's planting season, so I'll respond to the comments above little by little.
Re: water consumption: US beef cattle herd ~70,000,000 head. One head drinks about 10 gal /d , so yearly consumption ~ 250 billion gal. Yearly water consumption in only LA & NYC combined is ~1.2 Trillion gal....just to give things some perspective.
True, feeding cattle takes pasture grass &/or grain, which requires water, but the grass would be growing there whether or not the cattle are the "middle man" in the food chain or we just ate the veggies directly. That water usage is a wash.
Use some logic; you don't need details: water is not destroyed by running it thru plants or animals. It's The Water CYCLE.
True, feeding cattle takes pasture grass &/or grain, which requires water, but the grass would be growing there whether or not the cattle are the "middle man" in the food chain or we just ate the veggies directly. That water usage is a wash..
Not necessarily. In many cases, the grass wouldn't be growing there unless irrigated. And, irrigating huge fields for cattle to graze on, plus the animals' drinking water requirements, takes more water than simply irrigating vegetables.
I believe that even the beef industry acknowledges this.
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