Do you agree with Richard Dawkins?

[The Grand Nudger]

Crop rotation is great, it's part of the overall package, but it doesn't meet the nutrient requirements of commercial vegetable production (except in the wildest fanatasies of the organic movement). This is why farms use crop rotation -in addition- to fertilization.

The animals we eat often eat things that we cannot (que ruminants), we often (though clearly not often enough) grow things for them to eat on land unsuitable for production of things we can eat. I've already addressed this. You continue to ignore it.

I'm waiting for you to provide me with a solution so I can be specific. If crop rotation is your solution, then I'm sorry to say, it isn't sufficient, and all environmental harmed caused by ag in the present moment applies (which includes all of the suffering you hope to prevent, and the starvation in our own species you consistently ignore). Crop rotation is often pointed to as though it were some kind of perpetual motion machine. It is not.

(your Cornell link is a great one, that's why we shouldn't feed cattle grains, they dont do well on grain to begin with, they eat grass, and that's how we should produce beef. You did notice the huge bump for pasture land right at the beginning of that paper, didn't you? If we shifted subsidies from corn to pastureland we could produce beef for the average consumer (which is why we went with grain btw) at the same cost -albeit not quite as much......maybe. People would have to eat -less beef-, not -no beef-, next?)

Honestly, you seem to think that by arguing against the worst case scenarios of production that somehow, almost as if by magic, we will be left with vegetarianism. This is not the case. We don't do things in a very intelligent manner currently, get past that, get over it, I'm not arguing for it. We're discussing what you are arguing for, we are trying to establish your argument. Your argument is not "we should engage in more ethical livestock production", or "We should be more ethically minded omnivores", is it? If we made the switch to grass fed, pasture raised beef I'd probably stop eating it, not for ethical reasons, but because I don't really like the taste. Nevertheless, it would qualify as "ethical" by your standards, would it not?

If we converted all feedlot cropland to cropland for human consumption we would still require fertility, would we not? Where would we get it, and how have you avoided any suffering in the sourcing of it, given our limited options in this regard? Feeding people on a diet of straight corn isn't going to work any better for us than it does for cattle. Is this really what you want to find yourself arguing for, subjecting human beings to a part of a process you describe as unethical when it is directed at the poor cow? Que that comment I made about shuffling the suffering around. What you have put forward thusfar is inadequate, it belies a complete lack of understanding as to why we do what we do in ag, and our alternatives. If all I knew about ag was that I didn't want to hurt animals the I could see myself adopting a similar point of view......unfortunately there is just a little bit more to it than all that.

That a completely vegetarian diet may cause more suffering (dependant upon the solution) than the one we currently enjoy is a simple matter of fertility. We would have to grow more crops than we already do (and some of us are already starving). This would require more nutrients than we currently use. We source quite a bit of this fertility from intensive livestock production, and other bits from oil. Remove intensive livestock production and we need more oil. Remove oil and we need more intensive livestock production. Is this difficult to understand? What we do here, in our country, is leverage the less-than-sentient oil more heavily than the sentient livestock. It's a compromise born of ingenuity. That being said, we give very little consideration to what suffering the oil itself causes, and seemingly, neither do you.

(crop rotation, btw, was a product of the dark ages, the original green revolution. "We" did no such thing, nor is it some high tech solution for the problems we face today. It has been known to us for literally a thousand years, and is insufficient. Hopefully you didn't think it was the cutting edge. This was actually part of the badass combo we used to bootstrap our population and diets. The other half was our own feces. They leveraged less livestock for fertility by the use of "nightsoil" than we currently do, and oil was unavailable to them as a solution. We figured out, in the interceding few hudred years, that this was not such a good idea when presented with alternatives. Even so, to this very day, there are those who would argue that we should return to this system.)