this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2025
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Industrial agriculture in all its forms, including monocrop agriculture, is terrible for the environment.
"The environment" in and of itself is more complex than just emissions. Things like the water cycle and latent heat have to be considered too. Look at sustainable and regenerative farms. Ruminants regenerate the topsoil, irrigate ground naturally, and sequester carbon in the soil. This offsets their methane emissions. Also soil health and biodiversity in particular, I suspect, is something that we don't care about enough.
FWIW, I've been learning about how to become a regenerative farmer. There's a lot of learn about in terms of how one can contribute to the good of society by improving the environment around oneself. By looking for a plot for a farm, I've learned that there are laws here for land that can be used to farm crops, and land that cannot. A lot of that land can however support grazing animals.
On an aside, on the topic of "meat farming" vs plants, we should also consider essential amino acid yield and nutrient density when doing environmental impact assessments, and not just crude protein yield. Otherwise it's not really a fair comparison.
You're optimistic but wildly ignorant of the scale of the problem. If we were to switch to open grazing for ethical meat production, just supporting the current US population at current meat consumption rates would require essentially every scrap of undeveloped land and absolutely destroy our ecosystem. It's not possible.
Monoculture is a problem, but meat production is 30x more damaging than even the most damaging monoculture plant farms. The sheer amount of energy needed to grow a cow is incredible, that animal is only getting about 10% efficiency out of its food. You can feed a dozen people on the farmland needed to raise one cow.
That's not to say nobody should be eating meat, it's still an important component of regenerative farming. But for it to actually be sustainable long term, we really need to tone it down and accept that meat should cost a whole hell of a lot more than it does.
Doubt I'm gonna make any friends here though, sorry y'all!
Naw, we love you! Keep asking the hard questions.
What came to mind when I read this is a question: how are we getting more efficiency out of eating plants than ruminants are, when they are animals that have expressly developed over eons to do so?
You shouldn't belittle people on the internet, especially since you don't know me very well at all. But we are civil here, so I'm going to let that pass :)
I understand that you think it's not possible.
Even considering usage of pesticides, chemicals, and the loss of topsoil and biodiversity? It is estimated that we only have 90 harvests or so remaining. What happens then?
We aren't, that's just a general trend in biology. On average, consumers only receive about 10% of the energy that goes into growing the organism they eat. To be clear, I'm not saying the consumer is getting on 10% of the nutrition they eat, but that the amount of energy in the food when it's eaten is only about 10% of the total energy that organism needed to grow.
That's a fair call-out, I'll do better.
All of these things are worse with farming animals. 60% of the cropland in the US goes to feeding cattle. Those cattle proved a tenth of the nutrition that that cropland could produce otherwise. Eliminating cattle farming would double our available cropland and make regenerative farming practices actually possible.
To be clear, I certainly don't think cattle farming needs to be eliminated, it's just not feasible to be such a massive part of our diet.
In the US. Assuming you're from there, and I believe perhaps partially because there are a lot of other things on your mind right now that its common in discussions that Americans assume that what is true in the US is also true in the rest of the world. Perhaps it's a good gentle reminder that it is not always the case.
Yes, eliminating animal husbandry would be a very shortsighted move, indeed. Again, we really should be looking at nutrient density and essential amino acid yields and factoring that into environmental impact.