Saturated Fat Controversy

[The Grand Nudger]

Im not going to wade into the nutrition aspect of this, but there are realities of agricultural production not taken into account in your opinions (and, widely, in the opinions so often espoused by vegans). We don't actually produce more grain than we need, for example. People are starving. Additionally, the majority of grain grown isn't fit for human consumption and the land it's grown on doesn't support production for human consumption. Nor, for that matter, is the land that we raise cattle on widely suitable for producing something else. There's a reason that cattle dominate the scrubland rather than the river valleys...and why you don't see blocks of tomato growing on pasture.

Not all fields and crops are created equal, lol.

As to the issue of domesticated animals and their prospect for life outside of that system...well.... Domesticated animals respond positively to what would be, in a natural environment, a predator. Ourselves, our dogs, etc. They've been bred and conditioned for affability and receptiveness, so that we can manage them more effectively and with less labor. All the barnyard animals in the world, set loose, would literally waddle right up to the plate.

Where they'll be eaten alive, asshole first. You can test this yourself if you have any livestock or pets. Stop caring for them. They'll either find another human benefactor, or they'll starve and/or be exterminated as pests. Best case scenario (and only because we already exterminated their natural predators..aside from ourselves, as pests).

This one, though, deserves special attention, even if it;s short and sweet.

Eliminating those animals would cause a drop of the demand for grain, and thus would decrease the prices. It's simple supply-and-demand.

Grain production isn't allowed to operate on a supply and demand basis. We learned long ago that fluctuations in the price of grain had miserable human consequences. If the price of grain drops..producers will switch to something else. So, institutionally, we create a floor and we operate a variety of crop insurance schemes (or what amounts to them).

All that eliminating animals that we eat would do, is create a greater number of starving people, while impoverishing the producers themselves.

Using the place I'm in as an example - the bluegrass. Right know, it's dominated by calving operations supported by a three crop rotation of soy, corn, and winter grains. If we nixed cattle......they'd go to burley tobacco. If they dropped that....hay. If they dropped that...real estate. We know this, because that's what people do when they get out of cattle. They don't auto-magically start making people food because it doesn't make economic sense any more than grain producers are going to start (or keep) producing grain if the price falls - and in production...that's a reality that can't be ignored.

Its a reality we're trying to change, in this region, specifically, with melon production...but were not there yet, and it's really only the bottom of their hills that will ever be productive in that sector. They still have to pay the note on the top of the hill.....

...and on that note, if we really wanted to eliminate the livestock (regardless of it being a terrible idea that would starve people and throw a wrench in all sorts of shit that people don't realize contain animal products...), all it would take is offering the producer the difference, in cash, between that livestock and whatever they switch too. That's how we get them to switch. Land grant institutions have programs and funds offered through Extension that persuade and compensate producers for changing crops to something of interest to researchers.

Recently, we've been turning landlocked cattle pasture into marine shrimp facilities..and a whole host of other aquacultural whatsits. Wrap your head around that, lol.

In sum, if you wanted to feed more people, the solution isn't killing the cows or reducing the amount of -anything- we eat currently produced..because, as noted..in fantasy utopia land we'd have our food situation handled already..but in reality we don't. It's offering producers greater incentives. Anything, really, even cattle. More fundamentally, it's offering non producers incentive to become producers, as a dwindling fraction of a percent of people are farmers and those farmers are uniformly about to die of old age...their kids were strongly encouraged to leave the farm, they receive something like 16 cents on the dollar for what they produce..and what they produce is intentionally kept at a low price so that consumers can afford it.

It's the best worst job in the world..and you pretty much have to love it to stick with it, because the land is worth more as a housing development than it is as a strawberry field. If you want a thorough explanation of the above and why the reality of production doesn't match that particular vegan talking point, look into agricultural land use classification and maps, here.

https://websoilsurvey.sc.egov.usda.gov/App/HomePage.htm

If you absorb the info on those maps you'll be able to understand why there are so many cattle, and why there are so many cattle in specific places - and it's not an issue that can be resolved by ideology because the productive capacity of any piece of this earth doesn't give two shits about how we feel..about eating meat. The majority of land in use, in the us and globally, isn't physically capable of supporting anything but livestock and feed grain. At least not in it's current state, and it's not like there are oodles of ameros floating around in redneckistan for the infrastructure and land improvements that would be required to change that.