Plutarch on animal ethics

[StCapps]

It is possible to grow food everywhere on the Earth. Agricultural tech right now is way more advance than most farmers are exploiting.

Cost matters, sometimes it's too expensive to grow food in some places, and eating animals feeds more people and saves resources for something other than food, in certain locations.

Veganism for everybody, is simply not feasible, even if you could be done on a far larger scale than it is now, doesn't change that fact.

There are fixed costs upfront to build industrial greenhouses, and the variable costs include power and increased water consumption, but it works out economically. There are large greenhouses in Siberia right now doing just that.

In most cases, the economics are in favor of agriculture over meat, but that is not universally the case, for every single location on the planet.

[Speaker to Animals]

Cost matters, sometimes it's too expensive to grow food in some places, and eating animals feeds more people and saves resources for something other than food, in certain locations.

Veganism for everybody, is simply not feasible, even if you could be done on a far larger scale than it is now, doesn't change that fact.

There are fixed costs upfront to build industrial greenhouses, and the variable costs include power and increased water consumption, but it works out economically. There are large greenhouses in Siberia right now doing just that.

In most cases, the economics are in favor of agriculture over meat, but that is not universally the case, for every single location on the planet.

In most cases, I think the economics are more in favor of using high tunnels on existing fields. Where greenhouses come into play for substantive food production for a community is in regions with little arable land. You can plop a greenhouse down on anything that is flat. The costs to produce food from a greenhouse are more expensive, but you get high yields and it's year-round production. There are some good benefits to that.

In some areas, it's actually much more economical to grow certain kinds of produce locally in a greenhouse than to import them. There is a greenhouse in Idaho, for instance, that produces citrus. All the heat they use to do this comes from geothermal vents for free. So there is little energy costs involved. They just need to pay for additional water. Distribution costs from that greenhouse to local grocers is much, much lower than distribution costs for a Central Florida grower who has to sell to his co-op who then sell to distributers that then sell to grocer, and the produce has to be shipped across North America.

Much of the environmental impact of our food consumption can be rectified by just growing those foods locally in greenhouses. Instead of shipping fruit in from many thousands of miles away, you can just grow it locally and consume it locally.

[Speaker to Animals]

Example:



The environmental impact of shipping citrus all the way from Florida to Idaho is much higher than shipping citrus down the road. Anywhere you can exploit geothermal vents like that you can do something similar.

Without the distribution costs, you'd be doing pretty well to get the same prices people pay for Florida oranges in Boise. The Florida grower only sees a small percentage of that final cost whereas the local grower can realize far more of it (all of it if he sells at a farmer's market).

[Speaker to Animals]

The average temp in this Siberian city is -29F. They are growing their tomatoes locally in a single experimental venture.





Ag tech is way more advanced than humans are typically leveraging right now.

[StCapps]

See vegans, take note, StA is making good points that you could use to back up your argument in favor of helping the environment through growing more fruits, vegetables and grains locally. Yet you insist on virtue signaling how much more moral you are than people who eat meat and animal products, and drive people away from the vegan lifestyle because so many vegans are sanctimonious twats who look down their noses at people who behave differently than they do.

Try to annoy less people with your antics, and it's a lot easier to recruit. Pro tip.

[JohnDonne]

Capps is just going full autist and trying to think of some poor third world villager that barely survives on cow milk, as an excuse to not go vegan. But he’s not that villager, and vegan arguments are not directed towards that villager, he’s just throwing up distractions.

We could go vegan, and because of all the money saved not subsidizing inefficiency in meat, we could send our surplus food to starving people

Leave our your "subsidy" canard and focus on whether it is actually more efficient to consume only plant calories (it's not). Also, what metric do you wish to use to measure efficiency? Cost/price efficiency? Maybe. Land efficiency? Definitely not. Energy efficiency? Probably not.

The government spends 38 billion per year to subsidize the animal agriculture industry. That's literally true, not a canard.

You say it's not more efficient to consume only plant calories, you mean like pound for pound, beef against soy? That might be true on a caloric and protein level, but in the actual creation of that beef, you're actually using disproportionately more water, land, and energy. I'm speaking of how 95% of beef is actually produced and how 95% of plants are produced.

If we want to talk about Pasture raised cattle being better in terms of land use then we should compare it to it's equivalent in scale, like a small scale vegan organic farm, not industrial agriculture.

If the amount of grains fed to animals in the U.S. is enough to feed 840 billion people, but instead it's used to make meat to feed 350 million people then that should tell you something about the efficiency of meat.

[Speaker to Animals]

They spend even more subsidizing grains.

[JohnDonne]

See vegans, take note, StA is making good points that you could use to back up your argument in favor of helping the environment through growing more fruits, vegetables and grains locally. Yet you insist on virtue signaling how much more moral you are than people who eat meat and animal products, and drive people away from the vegan lifestyle because so many vegans are sanctimonious twats who look down their noses at people who behave differently than they do.

Try to annoy less people with your antics, and it's a lot easier to recruit. Pro tip.

Lol you're like the pope of annoying antics, I think you don't even agree with your own opinions, rather you simply don't want to be wrong on the internet.

For the record I like what STA is talking about, there's no false dichotomy between being a vegan activist and supporting local, high density farms.

[JohnDonne]

They spend even more subsidizing grains.

True, but grain subsidies wind up being meat subsidies, since more than half of all grain in the U.S. goes to feeding animals.

[Speaker to Animals]

They spend even more subsidizing grains.

True, but grain subsidies wind up being meat subsidies, since more than half of all grain in the U.S. goes to feeding animals.

The point is it is a useless quip.

Focus on efficiency by various metrics: costs in dollars, calories per acre, costs on human health. If a society switches to a plant-based diet, they still need things like dairy and eggs to remain healthy. Then they need more land because it is not necessarily land efficient. Calories per acre.. you might have a plus for plant-based there. in terms of health and longevity, score goes to a mostly meat-based diet (consider Inuit and Masai prior to contact).