Quote:
Originally Posted by brian_wilbanks
they didnt have to slaughter 100K cattle a day. Because they didnt have 6 billion people to feed.
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You're still missing my point. I'll try this once more, and if you don't get it after that I'll just assume the problem is your comprehension:
It's the practices not the quantity. We feed the wrong foods to livestock, including corn. In fact in the Americas we're raising the wrong livestock. Cattle originating from the middle east and Africa aren't able to digest many of the tougher-
and now more predominate grasses of the American plains.
And it doesn't stop with livestock raised for food. We're stupid enough to think our cats and dogs need wheat, corn, peas and carrots in their food. Now with pigs it's feasible to take whatever crops normally for human consumption and feed them to pigs if they've gone bad. This minizes waste, which again goes back to indigenous traditions and habits of using everything possible.
Crops themselves need to be raised in a more eco-friendly way. Rather than pesticides, we need to retool our approach to natural controls on pest populations. In Kenya Siafu ants are welcomed when they sweep through and kill every insect or other pests in the field. We'd be well advised to find a naturally occurring North American predator to control pests we encounter here, and likewise with other major land masses using the species there.
Remerging nature with human habitation should be the eventual goal with consideration to what's best for both [no bears in Central Park, etc.].
But for those who still think eating meat is the problem consider this. The reason the middle east is now a desert, where once it was the ancient bread basket for the known world, is because of agriculture, not pastoralization of lifestock. The practice of irrigation led to completely destabilizing the water table for thousands of miles and as water was replenished it built up salts from the bedrock to the upper layors. Normally the water table never dimishes so low that this happens. That is before people bumbled along in their methods of raisng wheat and vegtables in a manner unsustainable with the ecology over the coruse of centuries.
Even today our knowledge of soil renewal isn't completely understood and likely won't be. However, some ancient methods did go right. In South America the Aztecs and Mayans used methods that encouraged an explosion of soil bacteria that may well have led to the Amazon tropics in what was normally the poorest soil on Earth.
We should examine those methods proven to work over millennia and duplicate those on the assumption that,
by sheer accident and chance, they produced results lasting the ages.