this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2024
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Especially if water is factored into the equation. https://www.statista.com/chart/9483/how-thirsty-is-our-food/
this is such a great resource to understand why footprints are ridiculous metrics and how interconnected our industrial agriculture systems are.
This is not a great resource, because cows and sheep get 95% of their water intake from eating grass and drinking rain water. But when you grow vegetables, you actually have to water them a lot.
Excepr they barely eat grass anymore, but imported soy from deprecated tropical forests.
that's not true. cattle hardly get any of the global soy crop, and most of what is fed to animals is the byproduct from making soybean oil. cattle are fed about 2% of global soy iirc and only 7% of all the soy that is fed to any animal is whole soybeans. the rest is basically industrial waste.
I see cows all the time, they eat grass. Because grass is abundant and 100% free. A farmer must be dumb as fuck to pay for soy.
they're not dumb, they just have way more cows in their stables than the piece of land the stable is on could ever support with any crop. Am in Belgium. Pretty sure cows here eat a lot more imported crops (mostly from south america) processed to livestockfeed than they eat local grass.
Well, I don't know how it works in Belgium, but in the UK cows are usually moved between fields and field owners sometimes even pay for grazing animals to graze on their fields to keep them tidy. Paying for soy VS getting paid for grazing is a no brainer here.
if you follow the citations they call that green water and break it down
That's irrelevant when the first graph shows utter bullshit and people fall for it. Cows don't need water, veggies go.
i think we are in agreement that the methodology for quantifying agricultural impacts is flawed
why does cottonseed, which would otherwise go to waste, get counted against cattle, when that is a conservative of resources?
according to this, cattle mostly graze or are fed things that otherwise would be wasted.