Cowspiracy

[The Grand Nudger]

There -is- alot of marginal land.  More of that than land suitable for mixed veggie production, or production of grain for human consumption, by far, yes.  Once you realize how little land it takes to grow people food, and how quickly said people food devalues, against how much land there is that -isn't- suitable for mixed veggies which -is- suitable for feed grain or livestock, the picture becomes much clearer.  One acre of tomatoes left to trail on the ground will produce an average of 36k lbs of tomatoes in roughly 90 days.  Cage em (or florida tie),  58k lbs per acre.  Cattle don't begin to devalue after 90 days and two weeks.  @110 days, your acre of tomatoes is worth 0$ if not sold (or in whatever portion remains) meanwhile the value of the cattle, both monetarily and nutritionally, continues to increase.  Now, it does take about an acre per cow, if you manage -the grass- intensively and move their confinement daily. Feedlots are good for getting rid of overproduction (and even if we migrate to a full pasture model we'll likely still use feedlots for finishing, we've been finishing cattle (and pigs) on scraps and surplus grain for over 1k years). Basically, what youre looking at .w livestock production, is a lower risk, lower management model compared to vegetable (or even grain) production. It -seems- as though 25 tons of tomatoes ought to make you more cash than a single cow, but the difference in net is marginal while the risk is much, much higher. After all costs have been tallied an acre of farmland under feed grain production might net you 14$, mixed veggies 1.5k$ *. The cow gets you approx 200$ per head. See how it falls on the spectrum between producing feedlot corn for pennies, and risking assets on mixed veggies?

Cattle are indeed still pastured, I'm surrounded by them.  They finish off at feedlots.  That's the whole point of feed lots, fatten them up for a couple of months, till they're very near death - then kill em, lol.  It would be far too expensive for them to sit at the feedlot from birth, and they probably wouldn't survive.  This isn't true of every model.  Chickens, as you've hit on, notoriously shut in**.  They don't have to be.  Pigs, also shut ins, also don't have to be.  TBT, none of the shut in models are the bleeding edge of modern factory farming, but producers have so much invested into the models they can't afford to take the initial hit from switching over to a new model. As their profit allows, and as the market demands, they transition, as usual.

Sometimes I get the feeling that people think farmers are a bunch of good ole boys scratching at the dirt, in awe and ignorance of the wonder of it all. We aren't. We've thought this through better than a social activist could imagine, it's our bread and butter. That's what we're discussing here, social activists with ideas about farming about as divorced from reality as they could be. OFC their solutions to fantasy problems...will be further fantasy. "Just grow people food where you grow livestock feed", they say. Guess what, can't. Any more suggestions? "Stop producing livestock to save the planet", they say. Guess what, can't. Any more suggestions?

*Assuming all goes well from seed to sale, which never happens. One cold snap and you lose 50%, then maybe 10% to disease, and another 10-20% to product standards (not pretty enough), and a further 10-20% due to failure to sell. A bad year you might make 100$ or lose money on any given acre (if you haven't paid off your model requirements and/or the property value is increasing). This is what caused the rise of the megafarm. If you only have a few acres, firstly, you can;t buy in to the conventional market, but more importantly, you can't spread your risk effectively. Buh-bye mom and pop. The model I use asks the consumer to assume all risk in the form of a pre-season lump payment.

**This one is, to me, truly mystifying. The folks who battery farm chickens don;t seem thrilled about it, and the equipment is actually mandated to them from on high by the retailing body (and specific -to- the retailing body). Perdue, for example, makes almost as much money charging farmers for "new" equipment and techniques yearly as they do from selling chickens. It's a scam, plain and simple, a beautiful scam, but a scam nevertheless. That's not to say the equipment and techniques don't work. They do, those chickens are delicious. I grew up wringing their necks and plucking them, old school. They don't taste the same, and they're tiny, so I prefer store-bought (and so does John Q Consumer). The"old cookbooks" btw, don;t call for ingredients they had spotty access too. You might think that fresh herb/spice (and citrus, no less, lol) was widely available then because it is now, but you'd be thinking wrong. You're welcome for that, btw, lol. Old cookbooks and new cookbook recipes are the damning case against livestock production..based upon the moving goalpost of flavor, btw? I brine my chicken as well, it allows for thicker, and therefore juicier, chunks to be fried without overcooking the coating. You're partially curing the meat before applying heat - that's all that's going on there. Used to be you could hang your chickens out for prep, but that's not exactly safe. You know they turn jet black before they're really ready to eat?