Comment on "Forget the pig is an animal - treat him just like a machine in a factory" | Source: Washington Post
usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml 5 months agoIt’s unfortunately largely greenwashing. Animal products have a lot of fundamental inefficiency that really can’t be reduced all that much
Plant-based foods have a significantly smaller footprint on the environment than animal-based foods. Even the least sustainable vegetables and cereals cause less environmental harm than the lowest impact meat and dairy products [9].
www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/8/1614/htm
If I source my beef or lamb from low-impact producers, could they have a lower footprint than plant-based alternatives? The evidence suggests, no: plant-based foods emit fewer greenhouse gases than meat and dairy, regardless of how they are produced.
Plant-based protein sources – tofu, beans, peas and nuts – have the lowest carbon footprint. This is certainly true when you compare average emissions. But it’s still true when you compare the extremes: there’s not much overlap in emissions between the worst producers of plant proteins, and the best producers of meat and dairy.
ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat
Livestock farmers often claim that their grazing systems “mimic nature”. If so, the mimicry is a crude caricature. A review of evidence from over 100 studies found that when livestock are removed from the land, the abundance and diversity of almost all groups of wild animals increases
prowess2956@kbin.social 5 months ago
How do you keep soil fertility up with no animal inputs?
usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
Largely with the same types of fertilizer used today, but counterintuitively much less synthetic fertilizer due to removing the large amount of feed grown. That’s even compared to using as much manure as possible
www.sciencedirect.com/…/S0921344922006528
qyron@sopuli.xyz 5 months ago
Synthetic fertilizers are essentially processed oil and we already know what the extraction, transport, processing and distribution of it entails.
Integrated farming, where animals are integral parts of a well planned farm operation present more advantages than drawbacks.
Animals help in manage soil and landscape (by eating plants that can easily out compete or swarm cultivation areas), can combat pests (chickens and other birds will eat pests naturally present in the soil and areate it in the process), provide fertilizer and can even compost and correct it (chickens and pigs can be used to turn manure piles), which implies less machinery employed.
Goats and sheep are superb at managing dry vegetation or any kind of foliage that can present a fire hazard. Pigs are natural soil plowers, capable of removing stones, stumps and deep roots. Chickens are good to level and clear soil, very fast, and excel at keep tree roots clean of weeds. Angola chickens can clear a field from ticks and other potential parasites very fast.
We do have other sources of soil nutrients that do not entail processing oil but the farmers are often not aware or unreceptive to it.
usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
Yes, but it takes less synthetic fertilizer overall at scale per the earlier source even compared to using maximum amount of manure possible