> people choose the cheapest product the cows be damned.
When vfc1 says "One thing implies the other", the charitable interpretation of that statement is likely "given the way our society is structured at this time, it's inevitable that this result will obtain".
When taking care of cows means spending more money on their welfare than some competitor, and when people are willingly disinterested in the welfare of the cows whose milk they consume, we have a good-old-race-to-the-bottom.
The most powerful work I've read on the topic is the 1975 classic "Animal Liberation" by a philosopher Peter Singer. In it he uses excerpts from literature written by the industry (presumably the most-rosy picture you can find of the conditions of animals in the factory farms) to show how horrible the conditions are (and to make an argument why we ought to abstain from consuming and why we ought to try to dismantle the system).
The context OP was speaking to is factory farm conditions relative to animal welfare on the "traditional" 100 herd farm. Fields, grass, no hormones or unnecessary antibiotics.
Singer argues that these conditions aren't good enough, agriculture inevitably leads to stuff he can't live with. That's a reasonable thing to argue. I disagree. It's not reasonable to argue that these conditions are a practical impossibility. That either prices skyrocket or cows can't fields. It's not true. It is possible, and common.
This doesn't help actually fix the problem, because you have equivalent problems with irresponsible production of plant based food (soil erosion, destruction of entire ecosystems and replacing them with plant fields and so on).
If we keep attacking the problem from the wrong angle, we won't ever have a good solution.
> irresponsible production of plant based food (soil erosion, destruction of entire ecosystems and replacing them with plant fields
In most cases, this is actually done to create feed crops like soy and corn. Most of the agricultural fields in the world are used to feed animals either used for slaughter or for dairy and not to feed people directly.
Feeding the same amount of people directly instead of feeding animals and then eating them could be done with a fraction of the agricultural resources.
Dairy production is actually one of the most environmentally impactful things that we do, if we want to go that route.
> Livestock is the world's largest user of land resources, with pasture and arable land dedicated to the production of feed representing almost 80% of the total agricultural land. One-third of global arable land is used to grow feed, while 26% of the Earth's ice-free terrestrial surface is used for grazing.
Pasture land isn't really usable for anything else, and the level of destruction caused by converting land to monocrops far exceeds that of animal grazing.
A lot of pasture land, for example in Amazonia has actually been created by systematic deforestation, also in Europe, which was deforested a couple of centuries ago.
So a lot of that land could be used for reforesting. And if it would be so simple to use that land to raise cattle, why are there factory farms then?
It sounds cheaper to raise the cows on grass which is free food, unlike rations. Clearly the amount of meat produced that way is not sufficient for the demand.
agree 100%. I don't know of any truly sustainable farms that don't involve some nonhuman animals in the value chain. The problem is not that industrial farming is less efficient when incorporating animals, it's that we're calculating efficiency in terms of fossil fuels in > Calories out.
There are all sorts of alternatives to that paradigm, but none allow us to compare a single metric for both. The nature of the debate reminds me of the apocryphal drunk, looking for his car keys below the streetlamp even though he knows he didn't lose them there.
> people choose the cheapest product the cows be damned.
When vfc1 says "One thing implies the other", the charitable interpretation of that statement is likely "given the way our society is structured at this time, it's inevitable that this result will obtain".
When taking care of cows means spending more money on their welfare than some competitor, and when people are willingly disinterested in the welfare of the cows whose milk they consume, we have a good-old-race-to-the-bottom.
The most powerful work I've read on the topic is the 1975 classic "Animal Liberation" by a philosopher Peter Singer. In it he uses excerpts from literature written by the industry (presumably the most-rosy picture you can find of the conditions of animals in the factory farms) to show how horrible the conditions are (and to make an argument why we ought to abstain from consuming and why we ought to try to dismantle the system).