I turned to vegetarianism in the mid 1980’s. I thought it would heal the planet, agriculture and my body. I was wrong on all three counts.
My Vegetarian Past
Drinking the Kool-aid
The end of vegetarianism
Combining Proteins
Sustainability
The hired help
Cruelty
Land Use
Industrial Farming
Traditional lifestyle
The Agrarian Standard
House Walls
What’s Natural
Carbon
Keeping a herd vs being in a herd
My Vegetarian Past
My young family of four was vegetarian for 25 years. We ate no flesh, nothing with a face. Our plan was cook our own fresh food, grow it organically on our farm, eliminate sugar, hydrogenated oils, drink clean water, combine foods to get complete proteins, eat quinoa, lentils and whole living foods and we will harm no life, feed our souls and be free. It was not an easy path to take in mid 1980’s, but I was very active in the Green party, and most of my friends were activists, many vegetarians. We thought being a vegetarian was a way to make a difference. The idea that your personal choices made a significant difference in our collective outcome was just one of those things we believed [ii]. It turns out collective action, organization and a clear vision topples fascist regimes, eating tofu and lentils not so much.
At the time being a vegetarian felt great, in the short term, focusing on our food, buying fresh, organic, local, homemade vegetarian food improved our health. In hindsight it was the fresh, homemade food that made the difference. We genuinely believed that the choices we were making were the right ones for our family.
In plain language vegetarianism is unhealthy. Being concerned about your food is very healthy, but not eating meat protein will make you weak, if you are a vegan from when you are young, you will be “shorter in stature and dependent of supplements”i and it leads to obesity as a lack of meat makes your appetite insatiable.
After 25 years of vegetarianism growing our own food in Permaculture gardens and never becoming self sufficent we started producing beef on our quiet 25 acres of land that had been producing pasture raised beef for almost 200 years before we came along. Providing for ourselves was not possible as vegetarians, as producers of beef and poultry it became easy to provide all of our own food.
If something is compelling you to be a vegetarian, look at it as a treatment you do Monday and Friday perhaps. It’s always good to eat salads and lentils but not exclusively. And if you think you are doing it for your health, the cows health or the planets health you will be wrong on all counts. It took me 25 years to figure that out, if your smarter than I am you will learn from my experience.
Drinking the Kool-aid
The turning point for our family to become vegetarian was when my son was hospitalized with Kawasaki syndrome, a sometimes fatal reaction to pesticides. At least that is what we were told at the time. Solutions were clearly outlined in Diet for a New America and Diet for a Small Planet. Cookbooks like Laurels Kitchen and the Moosewood Cookbook became handbooks, turns out they were wrong but this is what we believed:
~The Hook: Vegetarianism; we would save ourselves, the planet and the animals
~The Line: Avoid processed foods; eat no white flour, sugar, no hydrogenated oils.
~The Sinker: Incomplete Protein combined became complete so you don’t need meat after all Quinoa and Broccoli have more protein than meat.
All went well with the first few years of vegetarianism, my eldest son recovered from Kawasaki syndrome and my youngest son who never ate meat had no childhood sicknesses, we were smug. We all felt wonderful and we were healthy.
The end of vegetarianism
For an adult it takes about 8 years for Iron reserves to be depleted. If you spend on supplements about twice what you would spend on a little meat you can drag it out, but anemia is inevitable for 10 year vegetarians. We took supplements; iron pills, B12 shots and the doctors were talking blood transfusions.
My eldest son got a girlfriend who was not a vegetarian and his ordeal ended. My youngest son who had never eaten meat was a hard sell even with horrendously low iron levels. As a parent this is my greatest regret. Faith is blinding, even to the evidence staring at you in the form of your own anemic child.
Enthusiasm for split pea soup became “I am not eating this”, and as any parent knows it is hard to force good food on children. Desperate we turned to the miracle food of the time: Soy in the form of Tempeh and various Yves products. At the time soy was a vegetarian’s best friend, [vii] In fact it is an endocrine disruptor. The effect on my wife was menstrual flow that lasted over a year.
After much consultation with gynecological specialists, naturopaths and doctors, she ended vegetarianism and soy and so ended her lengthy period.
I craved protein which I found in a spicy chick pea dish called Channa Masala from a local Indian restaurant, never being satiated I became obese. The “fact” that broccoli had more protein than meat is per calorie, it sounds good but you have to eat a head of broccoli to get the same amount of protein as a thumb sized piece of red meat.
Like Buddha I became a fat vegetarian. When you compare a vegetarian dish like Chana Masala with a meat dish you see there are trade offs, the meat less salt, less calories, less carbohydrates, Iron is present, and the vegetarian dish less cholesterol, no Iron, more calories. Choose your poison. Add a bun and condiments it changes the equation. Add a Nan and a Somoza and it tips again. Pick a different two examples and get different results.
What were looking for was unprocessed, natural food and vegetarianism got mixed into the soup so to speak, it turns out the best food choices were making food at home, for us, growing our own food. Vegetarianism had nothing to do with that.
Making and growing our own food on a meat centered diet was easier and healthier. Our experience was that a vegetarian diet was not hard to produce; it was impossible to produce. You could not be independent and do it yourself. You could on meat and potatoes.
Reflecting upon it after we realized the vegetarian diet was an entirely corporate centered, city centered, shopping centered diet. The vegetarian diet was a consumer’s diet. The meat based diet, in our case was an entirely local, self sufficient, independent, country based diet. One represented dependence on a corporate food supply and the other depended upon our independence and resilience.
This is best explained by Wendell Berry in his article “The Agrarian Standard”
Combining Proteins
A whole generation of vegetarians believed the sincerity of Francis Lappe when she stated you could get “complete” proteins from eating two different plant based protein sources together, like beans and rice.
Turns out it is not true. No plant-based foods has a complete set of amino acids. Your body can store amino acids but only to a point. You need to eat complete proteins and complete amino acids most of the time. That means eating meat.
The outcome is outlined in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition,
“Availability of essential amino acids and nitrogen in vegan diets”
“Vegan children often fail to grow as well as their omnivorous cohorts despite protein intakes that exceed RDA. Explanations for inadequate growth include deficiencies of energy, calcium, zinc and vitamins B-12 and D. Due to decreased bioavailability, amino acids and nitrogen in vegan diets may be inadequate to support normal growth. Bioavailability of amino acids and nitrogen may be decreased by dietary fiber, food processing and storage, inadequate energy, and other unknown factors. Bioavailability should be considered when evaluating adequacy of intakes of protein, amino acids and nitrogen from vegan diets by infants and children.”
The good news; like a rat, you can live for a short while on meat lovers pizza and cigarette butts or even a vegan diet But for the long term listen to your body, if you need supplements, iron, B12 shots, and blood transfusions, maybe its time to rethink what your doing, surrender your ego and admit you were wrong.
The scientifically unsound rationales for food combining has lead to a tempest in a vegan teapot, for a Francis Lappe tribute or a detailed denial go here.
So food combining is nonsense as a mixed meal passes through the small intestine, each enzyme goes about its business simultaneously, and in so doing, the absorbable building blocks of our food are absorbed as they become available.
Each type of nutrient – protein, fat and sugar has dedicated nutrient-specific absorptive mechanisms; they need not compete with one another for absorption. The enzymes never read “Diet for a New America”.
The internet and most vegetarian and vegan books have charts and graphs to convince you food combining is valid and will make up for a lack of nutrition in one form or another. Your experience will teach you that you will get sick, iron deficient and you will be a negligent parent if you do not feed you child a varied, whole diet that you cook for them. There is no good take out, brand or quick fix to being a parent and cooking healthy food for your children. Vegetarianism, veganism, or foot combining has no part in a healthy food paln.
Sustainability
While vegetarians we had a 25 acre homestead. Our garden covered almost 2 acres with thirty 75 foot rows of vegetables, grains, fruit trees, blueberry bushes, rhubarb beds and asparagus beds. The post vegetarian farm included chicken coops, a small goat barn and a 10 acre pasture for cattle. One of our concerns was that in North American the average meal travels 2,000 km from farm to plate; we were trying to grow a substantial portion of our food locally.
It turns out that the diet of our grandparents, meat and potatoes was extremely local and easy to achieve. We learned vegetarians cannot eat locally, they need that 2,000 km broccoli or blueberry harvested with illegal labour or food that has unforeseen consequences for those who do live sustainably.
Because of its high protein content, quinoa is highly valued to vegans. Higher pricing afforded by the increased demand have made it unobtainable for the local Andean people who rely on it.
Ethical questions should give a thinking person pause to reflect on the effect their diet has on the poorest in the world. So why not grow quinoa. I lived in Ottawa; short cold springs, followed by long dry hot summers and long cool falls. Quinoa likes long cool springs like you find in the mountains of the Andes. Every food has its own unique requirements, you can’t just grow what you want; you grow what will grow in your bioregion.
The hired help
The other side of the sustainable coin is how much time and effort you can put into your farm. When we joined other farmers in the area who were using Community Supported Agriculture to market their produce we made 2 discoveries.
First the enthusiasm of most millennial and boomers for sustainable agriculture ended when they had to go beyond clicking a keyboard. Turns out dopamine addicted keyboard monkeys don’t make good farm workers. Who knew?
Second all the farmers we knew were hiring seasonal workers from Jamaica to fill those food baskets for the millennial type downtown. Hmmm, so that evangelical self righteous vegan Millennial who smugly drinks fair trade coffee while starving the quinoa farmers in the Andes, sitting on his or her air conditioned ass still has a black man sweating in the field for them. How Woke is that?
The employment of foreign workers poses serious ethical questions concerning the obligations of the employers, consumers and governments. This issue is largely ignored by consumers who are driven by a desire for cheap fresh food they don’t have to work for. Any moral obligations to these people are lost in the shuffle to get a 5.99 box of strawberries. [xiv] Why should you work for $9.00 per hour and live in a shed instead of $20.00 per hour living in a house with drywall and running water. That question is hidden from you by Loblaws, Costco and Wal-Mart, you know its happening but you probably don’t really care [xv].
But your good, you buy Fair trade coffee right? It makes you feel good about yourself, but it does not protect the farms or farm workers. It all sounds really good, but the premiums paid by consumers are not going directly to farmers, the quality of Fair Trade coffee is uneven and it has evolved from an economic and social justice movement to largely a marketing campaign with little net benefit to the workers. [xvi]
And really why fair trade coffee? Why not fair trade Ontario carrots? Why not fair trade oil with the profits not going to fuedal arab kings? Why coffee? Because it makes no difference thats why.
The choices you do make pose a genuine ethical dilemma between two moral directions, you are either growing your own food as a peasant, or you are a slave owner holding on by the chains of consumerism, you never corrected the legacy of the colonial mercantilist system that in the past supported the monarichies and today support large corporations that obtain special privileges from local governments, preventing others from competing and flourishing.
What goes around comes around and your apathy will come around and bite you when you finally figure out that the Family Compact still lives and that historical level of corruption in your Canadian parliament buildings today is worse than you could possibly imagine.
Cruelty
We all want to minimize animal suffering and promote sustainable agriculture, sadly a vegetarian diet might be the worst possible thing you could do to achieve that goal. One steer death delivers on average, a carcass of about 288 kilograms. This is approximately 68% boneless meat which, at 23% protein equals 45kg of protein per animal killed. This means 2.2 animals killed for each 100kg of useable animal protein produced.
Producing protein from wheat means a monoculture. Sit on a tractor pulling a plow and the predatory birds that follow you are not there to socialize; small mammals, snakes, lizards, frogs and insect life is killed in vast numbers.
The poisoning of mice is both overlooked by the public but well studied by farmers because of its huge cost. Each area of grain production has a mouse population explosion on average every four years, with 500-1000 mice per hectare. Poisoning kills at least 80% of the mice.
At least 100 mice are killed per hectare per year (500/4 × 0.8) to grow grain. Average yields are about 1.4 tonnes of wheat/hectare; 13% of the wheat is useable protein. Therefore, at least 55 sentient animals die to produce 100kg of useable plant protein: 25 times more than for the same amount of rangelands beef.
Some of this grain is used to “finish” beef cattle in feed lots (some is food for your car as ethanol, the byproduct of ethanol production fed to cattle, pigs and poultry), some makes bread. Soy has a similar production profile, it is also produced in a monoculture. It may surprise the city vegan mouse but more of his country mouse cousins are sacrificed to produce useable protein from grains and soy resulting in more suffering than the very destructive rangelands cattle.
The question of sentience; the capacity to feel, perceive or be conscious is debatable. Many think the billions of insects and spiders killed by grain production are not sentient, but they perceive and respond to the world around them. You may dismiss snakes, frogs and lizards as cold-blooded creatures incapable of sentience, and you may be right. Go out now and squish a frog, who cares? I do. But what about mammals that sing, mice?
Mice are sentient. They sing complex, personalized love songs to each other that get more complex over time. [xvii] Singing of any kind is a rare behavior among mammals, previously known only to occur in whales, bats and humans. Girl mice try to get close to a skilled crooner mouse. Now researchers are saying song innovations are not genetically programmed and mice learn to vary their songs as they mature.
Baby mice left in the nest sing to their mothers — a kind of crying song to call them back. For every female killed by the poisons we administer, on average five to six totally dependent baby mice will, despite singing their hearts out to call their mothers back home, inevitably die of starvation, dehydration or predation.
When cattle and wild herbivores are harvested they are killed instantly. Mice die a slow and very painful death from poisons. From a welfare point of view, these methods are among the least acceptable modes of killing.
Certianly more cruel than the hunting of deer which is strictly controlled and female doe tags are rare, the buck tag common, so Bambi is not left mother less. However, many times numbers of dependent baby mice are left to die when we deliberately poison their mothers by the millions.
Replacing red meat with grain products leads to many more sentient animal deaths. Relying on grains and pulses brings destruction of native ecosystems, significant threats to native species and at least 25 times more deaths of sentient animals per kilogram of food. Most of these animals sing love songs to each other, until we inhumanely mass-slaughter them
Land Use
Given the limited amount of productive land in the world, it would make sense to focus our attentions on getting the most energy per hectare for human consumption. It is unfortunate that the production of grains results in more suffering, but it also results in more environmental damage than pasture raised beef.
Wheat, rice and pulses require multiple hundred acre lots of clear land, no trees or native vegetation. That act alone results in the deaths of thousands of animals and plants per hectare. At 7 billion people we have lost more than half of our native vegetation, mostly to increase production of monocultures of introduced species for human consumption.
Most of the world’s arable land is already in use. If more people want their nutritional needs to be met by plants, our arable land will need to be even more intensely farmed. This will require a net increase in the use of fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides and other threats to biodiversity and environmental health. Or, if existing laws are changed, more native vegetation could be cleared for agriculture.
Putting aside the economic stupidity of range cattle of cattle on public lands in the western US, Cattle mostly graze on native ecosystems; pasture. These maintain far higher levels of native biodiversity than croplands. Pasture is usually not suitable for producing crops, so production of meat doesn’t limit production of plant foods. Grazing is the only way humans can get substantial nutrients from 70% of the planet.
In some cases pastures have been altered to increase cattle friendly plants and grazing, if done improperly can cause soil loss, most farmers do it properly and add to the soil and prevent erosion, but importantly it doesn’t result in the native ecosystem “blitzkrieg” required to grow crops.
We can also meet part of our protein needs using sustainably wild-harvested meat such as rabbit, deer and bear that thrives on the same pastureland. Unlike introduced meat animals, they don’t damage native biodiversity. They are low methane-producing and produce an exceptionally healthy low-fat meat.
Most beef produced for human consumption comes from animals raised on grazing lands with very little or no grain supplements. At any time, only 2% of a nations herd of cattle are eating grains in feed lots; the other 98% are raised on and feeding on grass. Many cattle slaughtered, especially animals for hamburgers feed solely on pasture. The reason is to achieve a lower fat content; the extra fat produced by grains is not needed or wanted. That fat is desirable for the marbling and sizzle in a steak, but not suitable for the mandated fat content of a commercial hamburger.
A vegan diet produces far greater animal suffering and significantly more environmental degradation. Protein obtained from grazing livestock costs far fewer lives per kilogram: it is a more humane, ethical and environmentally-friendly dietary option.
The challenge for the ethical eater is to choose the diet that causes the least deaths and environmental damage. There would appear to be far more ethical support for an omnivorous diet that includes grass fed red meat and even more support for one that includes sustainably wild-harvested deer, moose and bear.
Industrial Farming
Industrial beef farming that involves mass feed lots, crowding, unfair market practices and finishing on grains has some serious ethical and moral problems, so after 25 years of vegetarianism I decided to do it the way I wanted to see it done. That enterprise became Lanark Highlands Grass Fed Beef.
We never succeeded as vegetarian homesteaders on our small farm on the edge of the Canadian Shield. The rolling hills and meadows intespersed with forests is scenic and teaming with wildlife, but that diversity and rocky soil is not suitable for growing vegetable, grain and soy production. It is however ideally suited for pasture and forest, the forest edge abundant due to the pastures.
It was relatively easy to small scale beef farm and feed our family and dozens more on this poor quality farmland. By focusing the garden on potatoes we could turn 50 pounds of seed potatoes into 300 pounds of harvested potatoes with mostly tractor power. By keeping cattle we were now awash in locally produced protein with minimal effort.
One 20 month old cow equals 4,000 quarter pound hamburgers. Keeping chickens could provide a dozen eggs a day and a dozen chickens every couple of months in the freezer. All of this for about 10% of the work and effort of keeping a diverse garden that could not feed one vegetarian family.
We were trying to feed ourselves because that is the way most food on this planet is produced, by small scale farmers. Most food is produced without the taint of Monsanto, Cargill or a “modern supply chain” despite government support to a corporate controlled food system. It is locally produced and consumed. We wanted to free ourselves from corporate control.
This is not some hippy fantasy; it’s backed by facts. Hilal Elver is a lawyer, diplomat, research professor in International Studies, University of California, and previously appointed to the United Nations Environment chair in environmental diplomacy.
She states “Empirical and scientific evidence shows that small farmers feed the world, 70 percent of food we consume globally comes from small farmers.
Currently, most government subsidies go to large agribusiness. This must change. As rural people are migrating increasingly to cities, this is generating huge problems. If these trends continue, by 2050, 75 percent of the entire human population will live in urban areas. We must reverse trends by providing new possibilities and incentives to small farmers, especially for young people.”
A new class of serf is being created by our governments for the benefit of the corporate class. We wanted no part of it and my observation is that veganism is part of the strategy of creating serfs in condominiums under the guise of a lie about a green diet.
Traditional lifestyle
It turns out what really does well in the rocky hills of the Lanark Highlands where our farm is situated, is beef pasture.
While you can find people living on the 12th floor of a condo typing into discussion groups things like a pound of hamburger takes “2,500 gallons of water, 12 pounds of grain, 35 pounds of topsoil and the energy equivalent of one gallon of gasoline to produce one pound of beef” [xx] It does not.
I know it does not because I have kept cattle. I have measured the water they drink, I paid for the fuel for my tractor and my truck to transport them and I never fed them any grain. In regards to 35 pounds of topsoil loss, the 10 acre pasture where I keep my half dozen cattle is deep green, luscious grass. Erosion is not a problem.
My animals spent most of their days sitting in cool shade. They have a good life, a life that would not exist if we did not have a symbiotic relationship, I tend and protect them, and then I eat some of them. Most survive to reproduce; it has been that way for tens of thousands of years.
The other side of the coin as advocated by Peta is that “…On today’s farms, animals used for food are crammed by the thousands into filthy, windowless sheds or stuffed into wire cages, metal crates, and other torturous devices.” [xxi] I am sure this is true, somewhere, which is one of the reasons I was a vegetarian for 25 years. It is also one of the reasons I decided to start farming.
I humbly suggest to people to get beyond the end of your keyboard and actually look around the real world. If you want to find unethical producers, expose them, but maybe spend some time finding ethical producers and support them.
A whole world full of farmers that are producing food in an ethical and fair way awaits you. Do not look for fair trade as in you can buy it in a cup of coffee at Whole foods, Loblaws or Costco. You can’t, and you never will. But fair in that if you go looking you will find thousands of local farmers trying to make a go of it and they do not “cram thousands of animals in windowless sheds”.
‘Two men look out through the same bars; one sees the mud and one the stars’
(Frederick Langridge, 1896) [xxii]
The point is you will find what you are looking for. For me I found a traditional lifestyle best articulated by Wendell Berry in “The Agrarian Standard”. Am I harping on this to much?
House Walls
Everyone would be vegetarians, according to Paul McCartney, if only slaughter houses had glass walls. He may be right, but I would tend to side with the wisdom of the Lakota who say ”When a man moves away from nature his heart becomes hard.” [xxiii]. There is killing in nature. I am not sickened by it; I am indebted to it for the essential amino acids flesh provides.
From my chair at the dinner table I can see my cattle field and I want to give thanks for the life taken. Cruelty is fed, not weakened, by tears [xxiv] and I am kinder to my animals because of the connection I have with them. As for the slaughter house having glass walls ending meat eating, I doubt it. What it would do is make people sensitive to the sacredness of life and the gift given to them thru the death of one aminal so that another can live.
My beef cattle live in pastures and take shelter in forests; they have shelter from the winter wind but they are healthier outside; they get sick with pneumonia in a barn. At slaughter they are inside a barn for the first time in their lives.
The mooing sounds they make means they are a bit apprehensive (yes I understand “cow”) and they calm down when they see me. I am their comfort, it makes farming less honest than hunting. A deer knows a life of constant awareness of impending death by coyote or cougar. But the cattle see me as a protector and in the end I betray them. That bothers me, the lack of truthfulness, but the slaughter house walls, poetic but not relevant.
What I share with Vegetarians is the abhorrence for the mistreatment and cruelty of animals. All too often social media vegans argue the ethical nature of slaughterhouses. But essentially I share a similar goal; to reduce cruelty and create a sustainable farm. A steer raised by a family and killed with the least suffering should be celebrated by vegans, but they would argue “There is no way to humanely kill an animal.” Your right, so we rely on factory farming?
There is no system of food production that does not kill. Organic soy and wheat are products of mono-cropping. Earlier we discussed that producing wheat and other grains results in at least 25 times more sentient animals being killed per kilogram of useable protein.”
If the 2% or 3% of the population that are Vegans want to be agents of change they need to work with the 97% or 98% of the population that are meat eaters to create community farms. The huge majority has to listen to the fringe and receive help and innovation from the other side.
Closing ourselves into certain sects will only make the agricultural industry stronger. Internet trolls, and crazy vegans and paleo diet freaks, your time to fight will come in the future. When factory farms are illegal and drag net fisheries are shut down, then we can sit down for a discussion.
Until then, the forces of corporate fascism will continue thier strategy of divide and conquer. My focus is on creating a sustainable farm that provides organic, non-gmo, and healthy food to my community.
Do we want vegan slime sold as meat from corporate laboratories where no animal had to die but we become so detached from nature that we are happier living in a fascit corporate oligarchy rather than a sustainable self sufficient community of farmers and artisans? That’s not my vision is it yours?
What’s Natural?
There is a mutual trust and benefits to the farming relationship. It promotes the well-being of both parties. The animal benefits from a safe environment free from predators. The farmer benefits by eating some of his friends.
While it seems obvious to me, for some it needs to be stated that the lamb is protected from the wolf/coyote by the farmer and his dogs. Only one short hour from Ottawa Ontario there is a wide variety of natural predators that will dine on your vegetable crops, chicken, goat or cattle. Wolves, Bears, Coyotes, Cougars are all very real part of the Ottawa Valley ecosystem. In the City urban coyotes and foxes are a constant, yet they mostly eat rodents. Removal of coyotes causes more problems for farmers with the resulting dramatic increase in rodent abundance and a decrease in rodent diversity [xxvii]
The biggest wild life threat we faced on our farm were deer. Those vegetarians competed directly with this vegetarian, and were a source of endless frustration.
The lesson to be learned is that we are part of the natural world; a giant table is set by nature, and at it you are both served from and served to at one time or another. [xxviii] Extracting yourself from the natural order leads to mental illness. This is possibly why vegetarians were more likely than non-vegetarians to suffer from all four of the categories of mental illnesses. For example, vegetarians were twice as likely to have anxiety disorders and five times more likely to have eating disorders. [xxix]
Yet people who connect with nature by simply walking for 90 minutes in a natural area, as opposed to high-traffic urban setting, showed decreased activity in a region of the brain associated with a key factor in depression. [xxx] Animals improve mental health, even for people with challenging disorders. The studies are impressive enough that clinical settings are opening their doors to animal-assisted interventions. [xxxi]
The animal-human relationships confer significant physiological and psychological benefits to people who tend to the needs of animals [xxxii] which suggest that people are hardwired to tend to animals.
It has been an advantage during human evolution over the last 2.6 million years. [xxxiii] It is why people continue to be drawn to animals. [xxxiv]
Carbon
Keeping animals is good for the land. [xxxvi] Grazing animals can reverse desertification when you graze moderately and time grazing so those plants can put on good growth in the spring. When you keep the soil covered [xxxvii] aiming to optimize forage production for moisture conservation you maintain the soil organic carbon pool. [xxxviii]
The soil is the key to our survival; animals are the key to soil. One third of the earth’s surface is Grasslands; these are vast landscapes that have the capacity, if properly managed, to address humanity’s most urgent challenges of food insecurity, poverty, and climate change.
Currently, grasslands are turning to deserts at alarming rates not because of animal use but because of a lack of and improper animal use. Holistic Management of grasslands results in the regeneration of soils, increased productivity and biological diversity, as well as economic and social well-being. [xxxix]
The oligarchs who run the techno industrial state want to tax carbon rather than sequester it. They want compliant consumers in the city eating the latest soy perversion techno food that is beyond meat [xl] in calories, salt and higher in saturated fat than just plain hamburger [xli]. They want migrants, modern day serfs, rootless, living as commodities played off against each other based on their race, gender or culture but never questioning the class war that is engulfing them.
Don’t work with an independent farmer
Do not read the Agrarian Standard by Wendell Berry.
And certainly don’t reflect on it.xlii https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-agrarian-standard/
Don’t read it; this subversive article may make you want to hug a farmer.
Keeping a herd vs being in a herd
One would think their was a debate about GMOs, synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and industrial agriculture. Their really is not, the purpose of the corporate food system is to increases profit and take control of food as a commodity. Veganism is one step in dividing and conquering the market. Do not think in terms of conspiracies think in terms of the business case and the available margin to business. Then things start to make sense.
Make no mistake, there is little to no benefit for us as individuals in the industrial vegan food order and a myriad of pitfalls.
Media loves a debate; it attracts eyeballs they can sell. The need for GMOs, synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and industrial agriculture or for that matter vegan vs meat eater is just another debate carefully maintained to benefit a few very wealthy people.
It leads one to the belief that individual choice can change society. It has accomplishes its real goal of a society divided and conquered. You were monitored thru social media and manipulated into seeking moral purity to distract you from the collective action that might bring about the real change we need.
Education, organization and commitment to collective action will politically overthrow the status quo. It’s less likely to happen if you are anemic, smug, distracted and manipulated by social media, brainwashed into thinking your choice of food groups is going to affect political change. Simply put your moral purity is irrelevant, but your collective action is inherently dangerous to the political order that is killing our planet.
You will know your non violent political organizing is becoming effective when they attract the attention of the police and your find the RCMP at your door. Until then you and your vegan friends are just circle jerking in the wind. Not that their is anything wrong with that.
~The End~