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We don’t need to stop eating cows. We need cows to stop eating grain and beans. To do that, we need to stop encouraging overproduction of grain and beans with tax, price, trade, biofuel, and insurance subsidies...
To do that, we need to understand that food production is every bit as political as food consumption. Going vegan isn’t going to take a single acre of grain out of production; the harvest will just be rerouted with the help of the Federal government...
To stop that, we need to force farmers to act like businesses instead of feudal land barons on the public dole, so that crappy farmers will go out of business and good farmers will be the ones that grow food for people, efficiently...
To do that, we need to restore representative democracy in rural areas by funding integrated food businesses largely led by marginalized people who don’t view farming as the holy pursuit of pastoral demigods...
We also need to come to a far more nuanced understanding of agriculture and forestry. People need to understand the difference between reforestation and aforestation, and that random people planting trees in random places is likely to do far more harm than good...
People need to understand that ruminants spend most of their lives on pasture and rangeland unsuited to production of human-edible plants and 1.) help maximize the ability of soil to sequester carbon far more durably than trees...
And 2.) produce food that would otherwise have to come from plowed soil (releasing carbon) or broadscale no-till planting (releasing pesticides and fungicides and encouraging still more crop gene editing)...
The bottom line is, you can’t eat your way out of the erosion of democracy or the consequences of public ignorance of agroecology. You’re actually going to have to... try. /THREAD
