The United States federal government allocates a staggering $38 billion annually to prop up the meat and dairy industries. These subsidies significantly reduce the price of meat products, including hamburgers. Research from 2015 reveals that these subsidies slash the price of a pound of hamburger meat from $30 to the $5 we see today
You don’t want to even start to look into subsidies for things like grain and corn. The subsidies for those are higher than the beef and dairy industry.
True, but they also subsidize the beef and dairy industry. Cattle are fed not only the grain, but the stalks. Feed use … typically accounts for about 40 percent of total domestic corn use.
So the cattle subsidies you see quoted for beef and dairy are usually an underestimate.
But those don’t kill us and our planet
Do you know how much nitrogen fertilizer corn needs? It is one of the heaviest users of petrochemical fertilizer.
More overall to feed it to cattle since that will always have us growing more plants than we would otherwise.
Zero.
The natives that cultivated corn never used petrochemicals. They planted beans with the corn, which provides all the nitrogen needed.
Yes planting the three sisters is a great way to farm in the arid west. It also requires the crops to be hand planted, weeded and harvested. There is no way that this could be done on a large enough scale to feed the current population or even the population 50 years ago.
There is a reason monocroping and petrochemical fertilizer exists. It is the most harmful form of farming, but is also the one way that enough food can be grown.
I dislike the current farming system, but to go back 100+ years to a time. When the only way to have the labor needed to farm was sharecropping or worse doesn’t seem like a solution to me.
The reason it exists is because less people contribute to the growing process.
Its entirely false to think that we cannot feed our existing population without mechanized monocropping. We just need every able bodied person to contribute a few weeks out of the year to the fields. It is a shift, bit its not asking much.
Stop spreading misinformation. We don’t need oil. We van easily feed everyone with sustainable methods. What we can’t do is keep burning fossil fuels.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. I can’t even. Dude you have no idea what you are talking about. Do you even know where we got nitrogen fertilizer before petrochemical? We were scraping bird poop off rookies and digging up bat caves. Destroying those populations as we did.
If you really believe this I would suggest you go try to pick veggies for a day. And not just a few in your back yard. Go out and spend 12 hours in the hot sun bent over as you get paid by the pound. Then come back here and say it is easy.
I recommend reading Conquest of Bread to see how easy it is to feed our population.
It wouldn’t be 12 hours a day. It would be 4 hour days, at most a few months per year, more evenly distributed amongst all able bodied people.
We slave to capital not because we have to.
Okay first off I did my university degree in animal sciences and spent just over ten years in the field. So don’t @ me
Anyway you seem to be suggesting collectivization of farm work. That is a terrible idea on a few fronts.
First, off it would be incredibly inefficient believe it or not much of agriculture is high skilled labor. It takes years to learn how to do it, it is also one of the more dangerous jobs. You have to be able to handle heavy equipment, understand animals and how to handle them safely, be able to do field repairs on equipment that has the ability to kill if done incorrectly. This requires years of experience and tutelage not a few months a year.
Second, what about all the other high skilled workers that are pulled from their jobs to go do a job they don’t know how to do for a third of a year. Do you really want surgeons with 10 years of education doing a job that could cause them to be unable to perform surgery due to the loss of a digit. Throwing away all the years of education and experience they have.
Third, it has been clearly demonstrated that collectivization of farm work leads to lower yields. The western world “won” the cold war in part by being able to feed their population. The USSR couldn’t. The USSR went from about 7% of the population in ag to 50% under collectivization. This also led to several famines because yields dropped.
Fourth, do you understand the logistical feat to move everybody to a farm for a few months and then back to their other job. Where are we going to house them? What about their jobs they are doing back home? Something like might have worked a few hundred years when the number of skilled laborers was relatively low. That is not the case today every field is a field of skilled labor.
Look man if you want to say that laissez-faire capitalism is exploitative I’m not going to argue with you. You want to say that we need to be more fair to the people on the bottom rungs I’m not going to argue with you on that one either. But if you want to try to tell me that collectivization is the solution and we can feed the world without fertilizer I’m going to push back because it’s just not true. I truly wish there was a better system and I would love to see it happen. Innovation in the field of ag would be amazing and there have been some great pushes forward recently. Moving to no till planting has done wonders for soil health, while high intensity grazing has reduced the impact of animal husbandry.
If you want to help make a better food system I am all for it, but don’t go read a book and then tell the people actually doing the work that they need to change. Get your hands dirty and learn how and why it works first. Change can only happen from the inside.
You’re really just going to down vote me for having a counter argument? Come one, if you disagree back it up with a good argument not just a down vote.
Let’s ignore the absolute devastation to our ecosystem for the untold millions of acres of monoculture