I already know I can't read this. I'll have nightmares for weeks. It's all so horrific.
And you know, it's yet another aspect of our bottomless immigration system. Had we shut our borders entirely around, say, 1960, America would still have around 150M people. In such a nation, you could potentially have shifted much of the meat and dairy industries to more free range, humane practices, while still feeding the hungry masses. Now, at 350M (probably lots more), forget about it. It's impossible. Yet somehow, the massive environmental destruction caused by immigration (can you say "sprawl"?) is never, ever mentioned. And in fact, the same idiots who pester you about your (meaningless) "carbon footprint" are the same idiots holding up "there are no illegal people!" signs. They're so stupid they can't even grasp how they constantly work at cross-purposes.
I can read it. But surely I can't watch the video.
And I don't know, if I had to put into words what I feel as regards having to live in a world where that kind of video is consistently the most clicked on YouTube, what words I could ever use.
By Allen Williams a leading light in the regenerative agriculture movement.
On the question about Feeding The World, let’s look at some key facts:
1. We have looked at the total lbs of consumable food produced by regenerative farms compared to neighboring conventional farms, most are producing 4 x’s more food per acre than their neighbors annually.
2. If we look at just beef production, for grass finishing a steer it takes about 6650 lbs forage DM for the finishing phase. That means about 1 acre needed per head to finish. We harvest about 29M head of fat cattle now. That would require 29 M acres of well managed grass.
3. The average grassland acre in the US is only 30-40% utilized. There are about 119M pasture acres in the US. We have no lack of grazable acres to finish cattle, if needed.
4. Over the past decade farmers have planted about 236M acres of corn and soybeans annually. About 7% of row crop acres are used to produce feed for feedlot cattle. That equals about 16M acres. If we switched those acres to grass for grass finishing, we could finish 20M head annually on those acres alone.
5. If you look at total potential, we could grass finish more than 50M head each year. That’s 21M more than are currently being finished.
6. If all we did was plant complex cover crops and graze those covers in between the cash crops we would have at least one day of grazing per acre per year in 236M acres. Right now most of those acres sit idle between cash crops.
7. What happens when every acre we farm is used for more than one enterprise per year? Why do beef ranchers or dairy farmers only use their acres for beef or dairy? Why not add sheep, poultry, pigs, honey bees, etc to those same acres?
8. The research shows that regenerative farms are far more resilient. When we have drought or too much moisture, fungal disease pressure or pest pressure, the regenerative farms do much better. It’s the conventional farms that are at risk.
The fact is we cannot continue to feed the world doing it conventionally.
Hi Ryan, I'm in favor of regenerative farming, thanks for this. Cutting massively back on immigration is an important part of the story, too, because the demands of the industrialized food production system will only keep growing without doing so. The consumption patterns of the 20 million illegals let into the U.S. in the past four years are skyrocketing from what they consumed previously...
You need to get better sources if you're going to write about this topic. Certainly not a source like Animal Clock. For example, consider the claim by Animal Clock that it takes 1,800 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef. What they don't tell you is that 97% of that water is precipitation (rain and snow). The so-called water footprint is divided into blue water, green water and gray water. Blue water refers to ground water (aquifers) and surface water (lakes, ponds and rivers), green water refers to the precipitation that falls on fields and pastures, and gray water refers to the amount used to dilute waste water. When considering water use, the only one that really matters is blue water. And crops tend to use more blue water than livestock.
Likewise, you have been misinformed about dairy cows. A cow will come back into heat three months after calving, and continue to come back into heat every three weeks until bred. If bred, they will lactate on their own until some six to eight weeks before they calve again. There is no need to extend lactation with "painful techniques". This is true for all cows, regardless of whether they are raised for dairy or beef.
In regards to CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operation), I've visited large farms and small. I also have a small farm where I raise ducks, geese and dairy goats. Those large farms (CAFOs) raised pigs. Their pigs were often kept in much better conditions than the smaller pig farms that I've visited because the larger farms can afford better ventilation and waste disposal systems. The only downside to the large farms is that the pigs can't go outside. Not that they'd miss it. And yes, I prefer to let animals go outside... that's why I raise much of my own food and buy what I don't raise from other local farms... but the truth is that those pigs can't miss what they never know.
In regards to beef production, it is still primarily a pasture-based system. As a rule, cattle raised for beef start their lives on cow-calf operations, where they spend six to eight months on pasture grazing next to their dams. Once they reach a certain weight, they are weaned and sold to stockers who put them back on pasture until they are large enough to send to a feed lot (CAFO) for finishing. The amount of time spent at the feed lot can be anywhere from 30 to 120 days, depending on how fast a steer reaches market weight.
Some small farms have their own feedlots where they fatten their steers before slaughter. Others offer beef from steers that were raised and finished on pasture. Personally, I prefer the latter because it's more flavorful, but I don't have a problem with grain-finished beef either. And the way beef is raised, regardless of how it's finished, is more sustainable and environmentally beneficial than either chicken or pork production. Since beef production doesn't require a lot of expensive equipment, it is also one of the few types of food production that allows farmers to remain fairly independent from the financial sector, which may be why globalhomo is pushing their anti-beef agenda.
Finally, vegetarianism and veganism are not more ethical. Only someone who doesn't know much about food production would believe such a thing. There are studies that suggest a vegan or vegetarian diet causes more death than a diet that includes meat. For example, one study from Australia suggests that 20 field mice are killed in order to produce one loaf of bread. And that's just the field mice. It doesn't include the other animals that may have been killed while the wheat crop was planted or harvested. It also doesn't include the animals that were killed in the feed mills and warehouses.
You cannot produce crops without first destroying habitat that other animals depend on. That is a fact. You can't plant a crop or harvest it without killing animals. Animals are also killed in order to protect crops, and this can include killing endangered animals. (In countries where tropical fruits are grown, endangered apes and monkeys are often killed to protect your bananas, mangoes and avocadoes.) And don't get me started on the honeybees that are flown all over the world in order to pollinate orchards! That some crops require transporting honeybees from, say, Australia to California, should raise some questions about both the sustainability and the environmental impact of those crops.
Livestock will always be more sustainable than crop production. Unlike most crops, livestock may also provide environmental services, including waste disposal. A significant percentage of livestock feed comes from food waste (hulls, peels, rinds, pulp, seeds, oil meal), as well as the waste that comes from producing beer and booze. The few crops that provide environmental services, such as alfalfa, tend to be grown for fodder. So please, take the time to find better sources before you continue writing on this subject. Perhaps start by talking to some of your local farmers.
Hi V, thanks for your comment, it's nice to get feedback from someone in the industry. It doesn't sound like you're really disputing the tens of billions of animals killed in this industrialized system in the United States alone every year; your criticism seems to be regarding the link chosen to highlight that fact, which is fine. Re: veganism or vegetarianism being more ethical, I highlighted in the post that billions of animals are killed every year to raise crops, so you're right that there's no "murder-free" solution to food consumption. The post is meant to highlight the lack of connection between the cheap food we consume and the hidden costs involved, and I encouraged the reader to try to develop a personal connection to local farmers that supply meat.
The reason why the number ("billions") is so high is because most of those animals are chickens. But sure, the lack of connection between the food (cheap or otherwise) that most people consume and the reality on the ground is a major problem. That's why I try to educate people concerning what goes on in food production.
Also, I don't really consider myself as someone in the industry. Yes, I sell cheese, eggs and meat to a small local market, but most of what I grow is for my own kitchen. What I sell pays for feed.
I’ve worked on good farms before. Yes, industrialised agriculture can be a great promoter of cruelty. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
If corn wasn’t subsidised, feedlots wouldn’t be so viable. So much of the earth’s surface is suitable only for grazing (the irrigation water won’t last forever) and pastoral agriculture can provide first-rate welfare: happy lives for animals and farmers alike. Allan Savory blazed the trail in this regard.
ISTR that the world’s finest pork comes from happy pigs fed acorns.
Agriculture can be better and it’s not the creator’s fault that it’s bad. But this subsidisation has got to stop.
One thing to keep in mind is that we just don't see the horrors. The ruining of the plants to 'grow, grow, grow' in awful soil, be non-digestible to bugs (and thus, really, us), the agricultural practice of only putting down 3 main fertilizers rather than trace minerals, etc.
The whole thing means that produce is less digestible, has less in it for us when we can digest it, and ruins our gut biome.
So, we read people living and fasting on bread and water in the middle ages...
But the bread they ate was materially different. It was able to sustain them because it had different things in it than what ours does. Even if you found heritage breeds, the soil and fertilizer practices aren't there.
So, the meat needs to play a bigger role in diets in our modern day because we can't get what we could from produce these days. But, if you could, I'd say produce is fine.
The American faux left recently labeled farmers & farm culture “enemies of democracy”, calling ALL of us racist, sexist, homophobic, uneducated rubes. But none of the farmers in my family & region are like this. They’re all planning to shift to sustainable agriculture if they haven’t already. Small family farms are light years better for raising animals humanely. (I have raised top prize-winning animals myself, with none of the abuses of industrialized farming; industrial farming always degrades quality.). I think the programming of hatred toward farmers is part of the globalist plan to rid the world of ALL small business and to control the world’s food supply in the most inhumane way possible.
With regard to this particular post, you might want to take a read of this paper tracing changes in violence frequency during and across the Neolithic Revolution's transition into agriculture (and hierarchy): https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/9mjnl0ou7s3ee3krty25z/Violence-trends-in-the-ancient-Middle-East-between-12-000-and-400-BCE.pdf?rlkey=yw52gwmzbk7bihm4eixvbet9n&dl=0. In this large archeological study area, there was occasionally a bit of violence between individuals and among the early Paleolithic proximal nomadic groups, but things got much, much more bloody during the ensuing developmental years of human agriculture -- then settled down for a little while as the kluge of state-sponsored policing helped force the frequency of violence back down towards pre-agricultural levels. This culturally-created artificial peace broke down, of course, once state formation and state-sponsored violence became the next big things and metal-edged weapons were put into energetic use. That preamble completed, my main point with regard to your post is that some findings of modern psychiatry (e.g., https://www.amazon.com/Brain-Energy-Revolutionary-Understanding-Health/dp/1637741588/ref=sr_1_1) now strongly suggest that humans entered (and have not yet left) a long age of chronic manic and violent delirium with the beginning of plant-focused agriculture and the addition of large amounts of carbohydrates to the human diet. Concrete support for this interpretative view is found in the fact that use of a ketogenic diet (more meat, more fat, less grains and other starchy plants -- see book reference already given) works remarkably well in reversing an extremely wide range of modern mental illnesses. Moral of the story? Raise and eat more meat, and (thus) give peace a chance...
It is possible to get the leanness of a carnivore diet while moderating meat consumption. Just eat all your plant foods raw and unmixed. Eat the plant foods which currently taste good. (And stick to plant foods that are edible raw! Don't eat raw unsprouted beans. Can be deadly. And stick to those sprouted legumes which are traditionally eaten raw sometimes.) I dropped 30 pounds in a couple of months on such a diet. (After bloating up from attempting the high starch "Eat to Win" diet.)
This is not an easily sustainable long term diet. But it is a fantastic cutting diet.
It might be more sustainable if sprouted nuts were available in stores. Black walnuts taste fruity if starting to sprout.
Caring for goats has been a significant part of my life, and today, unfortunately, we had to say goodbye to one of the males. This particular goat held a special place in my heart; he was not just a livestock, but a cherished companion. Always by my side, his presence brought joy to every moment. His affectionate nature and lively personality made him more than just another animal on the farm.
The loss of my dear friend during today's slaughter deeply saddened me, leaving a void that is hard to fill. His absence is felt keenly, and I find myself reminiscing about the times we shared.
Reflecting on life on this planet, it's hard not to see it as a place of suffering, a realm where the cycle of life revolves around death. Each creature, with its own unique character and emotions, is caught in this intricate web of existence, driven by the instinct for survival.
I've pondered the nature of the divine and concluded that if there are entities akin to gods, they must be vastly different from our traditional conceptions. These beings, if they exist, operate on a plane beyond our comprehension, perhaps feeding on the essence of life itself. Like my bond with the goat, they may regard us with a mix of care and detachment, ultimately using us to sustain their own existence.
The notion of a just deity seems misplaced in a world where every being, regardless of its actions, meets the same fate. Perhaps these entities, if they exist, find amusement in the drama of human existence, favoring those who embody the extremes of good and evil.
In many ways, life mirrors the dynamics of the Stanford prison experiment, where power dynamics shape behavior and violence lurks beneath the surface. Civilizations rise and fall, echoing the chaos of the experiment's conclusion.
Even in agriculture, a practice essential for our survival, the specter of suffering looms large. It's a sobering realization that our very sustenance may be intertwined with the darker impulses of our world.
As I navigate the complexities of farming, I'm confronted with the dilemma of attachment. Despite the practicality of raising animals for sustenance, the emotional bonds formed make each loss a poignant reminder of the moral quandaries inherent in our existence.
I have long harbored the suspicion that on death, we get to re-experience all our actions but frorm the point of view of those we have affected by our actions. (Hence the golden rule.) Would this then include the lives of each animal we have consumed? For a while that thought kept me from my weekly roast chicken, but in the end I succumbed and I eat meat at least once a week.
I currently live in Northern Spain, and do have the option of local free-range meat, but it is three times more costly and often less tasty! I don't know what conditions local factory animals live under, probably a degree or two better than those you write about, but still horrendous I am sure.
The only real solution, as you say, is to raise your own animals and slaughter them. We have a ways to go before that. Maybe the collapse of civilization will light a fire under our arses.
The horrors of modern factory farming caused me to give up meat decades ago. While I don’t look like a fitness model, I am very healthy and active despite being over 70. People can thrive on many different diets. I salute you for acknowledging that our current industrialized food production system has serious ethical problems.
Bivalves!!! Bro you gotta up those numbers in terms of bivalve intake. They clean the water, have no sensory organs and cannot feel pain or hellish imprisonment like factory animals do, they are super healthy, very low resource consumption. It's the perfect compromise between veganism and paleo diet.
My solution to this in the past and when able has been to buy sheep directly from a farmer and butcher myself. Unfortunately buying free range organic at the store is a non starter for me. I have to prioritize where my money goes. I eat a raw primal diet, following Aajonus Vonderplanitz. Have for years. My priorities are in this order: milk, eggs, meat. I spend $10/gal on raw milk, of which I drink around a half gallon a day. I spend $6/dozen on pasture raised non organic eggs. Then to balance that I spend $3-$5/lb on the cheapest meat the Mexican butchers sell.
Here’s another problem with the organic meat: it’s usually vacuum packed in plastic (ugh) and pre-frozen. I won’t eat raw meat that’s been frozen. It’s no longer a healthful food, and no longer raw.
The same blindness happens with milk, which drives me crazy. The $14/gallon organic milk in Whole Foods is most likely to be UHT. Of course. It hardly ever sells. They have to. And so you pay $14/gallon for something vastly more toxic than the cheap industrial milk. The irony.
The problem is, you can’t get away from it. Forget about the abuse of animals. Do we care about cows more because they look like us? What about the abuse of a broccoli field. The horrible mutilation of the plants, soil, and countless microbial lives. The worst dairy farm can’t compare to this death.
So what is the answer? Do what you can, but be smart. Prioritize your health over emotions, recognizing that as long as you participate in the food system you can’t avoid causing pain.
Come on, I know you don't really believe plants and soil feel pain. They don't have a nervous system. If you mean actual animals like field mice which get killed, sure.
Hi man, since you're clearly concerned about the suffering our food production causes, you may be interested to know about the work people have done to try to to quantify how different animal products affect levels of animal suffering in the world.
Bottom line: if you do eat meat, eat cows, not small animals like chicken or farmed fish. Eggs are approximately as bad as chicken. Dairy is fairly irrelevant in comparison.
This is because of the conditions the animals are held in, the way they're killed, and their body size, which means that for larger animals you get more calories per animal killed.
For example. there's Brian Tomasik's work [1] which rightly includes effects on wild animals [2]. While he also has some uncommon underlying ideas like believing in and caring about invertebrate suffering, this might actually be a plus for you as a fellow low-agreeableness type of guy, if at least you find it interesting to read about. Even if you're very much not any kind of utilitarian unlike him, his conclusions would hold under most plausible ethical systems, I think. As for how that cashes out specifically: many in this comment section point out that eating beef, particularly grass-fed, may actually cause less suffering than crops, because of crop deaths to small animals. Tomasik agrees that beef may be net-positive for reducing suffering, but more because the use of land for their grazing reduce the numbers of wild animals born, who would destined to die painfully otherwise; whereas I think he agrees with me that the crop deaths argument for beef doesn't really work considering most cattle are themselves fed crops to some extent, like in the winter, even if nominally "grass-fed".
Of course there's the methane emissions angle for cows, but people concerned with suffering reduction or utilitarians generally agree with online dissident rightists that this shouldn't be much of a concern, though for different reasons, putting it lightly. (Basically they think the other factors I mentioned above when comparing eating chickens and cows are much more important.) In fact there's a serious concern that lib environmentalism which causes normies to switch from beef to chicken is causing huge amounts of harm.
PS I would caution against putting much stock in how those carnivore influencers look, since they're probably on TRT.
PPS as someone who used to read a lot more "dissident right" type of stuff, I found it very cool to see one of those guys writes about stuff like wild animal suffering, with those infamous Komodo dragon videos. Basically I used to think more about the things the (moderate) dissident right considers problems, until I read more utilitarian / effective altruism type stuff and went more in that direction. Both because the problems they care about seem like 100x bigger but also they have more rigorous epistemics, compared to most rightists (cf. Richard Hanania's writing on that, like "Coping with Low Human Capital"). On the other hand the autism goes in a more weird direction on that side compared to round here (I'm thinking with the transgender-autism comorbidity).
Edit: OK, having just been reading again about Nazi atrocities I was felt weird about how I phrased this comment and want to make it clear that by "dissident right" I was thinking more of NRx or "alt-centre" people I guess, maybe up to BAPists or whatever, rather than "Dissident Right", which is not exactly what the label suggests. Obviously Nazism is evil and this DR label seems to include that to some extent.
Thanks for the comments, Meel. I will check out the links you provided. I agree with your analysis that eating grass-fed, free-range beef is some degree morally better than eating caged animals such as chickens with much shorter lifespans and a much higher number of deaths. In addition modern chickens are so strange -- bred to be basically giant breasts on legs with supercharged growth. It can't be healthy to consume such things...
With respect to effective altruism, I havn't looked into it carefully but my surface-level association with it is poor; I think of Sam Bankman-Fried and others like him who use effective altruism as a way to virtue signal without real action. Additionally, from what I've heard (and please correct me if I'm wrong) they focus on things which they think will have the greatest impact for the lowest price, and that usually turns into initiatives that can easily backfire: I'm thinking of dramatically increasing Africa's population growth (via clean water initiatives, vaccines, etc.) -- as I've written about elsewhere, such actions come with second-order negative effects that are not well understood: https://neofeudalreview.substack.com/p/the-sad-skinsuiting-of-the-environmental .
Indeed, one of the key features of modern technological society is that it initiates some major technological change without understanding the implications, which then requires additional technological change to deal with the second order effects of the actions, which then requires even more technological changes in an endless loop...Ellul comments on how this works in "The Technological Society." Perhaps you mean effective altruism in a different light, though, and if so I'm open to hearing about it.
Yeah, it's actually a meme internally that many people call themselves "EA-aligned" or "EA-adjacent", partly because they don't want to associate with the Bankman-Fried image or dodgy stuff like that. Truth is, it's a broad category of things, and most people focus on a specific "cause area" with the main ones being AI safety, animal welfare, and I would guess only a minority of attention (if not money/people) focused on the original human poverty cause area which involves things like malaria nets for Africa. As others have argued [1], a lot of the value comes from being a Schelling point for philosophy/STEM nerds with less concern for taboos to congregate.
I definitely agree about backfire being a risk. However I would argue that with the concept of "longtermism", EA is among the most likely to consider this carefully, and a lot has been written about our "cluelessness" regarding this, like here [2], which actually addresses the point on population growth as an example. (On the other hand, if you're a pessimist about human capability, you might think this just gives a false sense of security.)
I will check out Ellul, seems interesting from a brief look.
Basically there's good philosophy going on from that sphere which might be relevant to you, and cross-fertilisation between ideological movements is usually an improvement. Even if it's not object level things like animal welfare, but simply better norms around discussions and epistemology, quantifying stuff, or a focus on detail regarding policy, for example. Going in the other direction from here to EA, I can tell you that things like group IQ differences are quite well-known there, probably because dissident right types make it more salient, which is a very good thing since it's such an influential factor in society.
I already know I can't read this. I'll have nightmares for weeks. It's all so horrific.
And you know, it's yet another aspect of our bottomless immigration system. Had we shut our borders entirely around, say, 1960, America would still have around 150M people. In such a nation, you could potentially have shifted much of the meat and dairy industries to more free range, humane practices, while still feeding the hungry masses. Now, at 350M (probably lots more), forget about it. It's impossible. Yet somehow, the massive environmental destruction caused by immigration (can you say "sprawl"?) is never, ever mentioned. And in fact, the same idiots who pester you about your (meaningless) "carbon footprint" are the same idiots holding up "there are no illegal people!" signs. They're so stupid they can't even grasp how they constantly work at cross-purposes.
Exactly correct...
Ecotopia and Open Borders are incompatible. Shout it in the streets!
https://rulesforreactionaries.substack.com/p/rule-11-exploit-the-environmentalists
^^ this ^^
I can read it. But surely I can't watch the video.
And I don't know, if I had to put into words what I feel as regards having to live in a world where that kind of video is consistently the most clicked on YouTube, what words I could ever use.
By Allen Williams a leading light in the regenerative agriculture movement.
On the question about Feeding The World, let’s look at some key facts:
1. We have looked at the total lbs of consumable food produced by regenerative farms compared to neighboring conventional farms, most are producing 4 x’s more food per acre than their neighbors annually.
2. If we look at just beef production, for grass finishing a steer it takes about 6650 lbs forage DM for the finishing phase. That means about 1 acre needed per head to finish. We harvest about 29M head of fat cattle now. That would require 29 M acres of well managed grass.
3. The average grassland acre in the US is only 30-40% utilized. There are about 119M pasture acres in the US. We have no lack of grazable acres to finish cattle, if needed.
4. Over the past decade farmers have planted about 236M acres of corn and soybeans annually. About 7% of row crop acres are used to produce feed for feedlot cattle. That equals about 16M acres. If we switched those acres to grass for grass finishing, we could finish 20M head annually on those acres alone.
5. If you look at total potential, we could grass finish more than 50M head each year. That’s 21M more than are currently being finished.
6. If all we did was plant complex cover crops and graze those covers in between the cash crops we would have at least one day of grazing per acre per year in 236M acres. Right now most of those acres sit idle between cash crops.
7. What happens when every acre we farm is used for more than one enterprise per year? Why do beef ranchers or dairy farmers only use their acres for beef or dairy? Why not add sheep, poultry, pigs, honey bees, etc to those same acres?
8. The research shows that regenerative farms are far more resilient. When we have drought or too much moisture, fungal disease pressure or pest pressure, the regenerative farms do much better. It’s the conventional farms that are at risk.
The fact is we cannot continue to feed the world doing it conventionally.
Allen Williams
Hi Ryan, I'm in favor of regenerative farming, thanks for this. Cutting massively back on immigration is an important part of the story, too, because the demands of the industrialized food production system will only keep growing without doing so. The consumption patterns of the 20 million illegals let into the U.S. in the past four years are skyrocketing from what they consumed previously...
You need to get better sources if you're going to write about this topic. Certainly not a source like Animal Clock. For example, consider the claim by Animal Clock that it takes 1,800 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef. What they don't tell you is that 97% of that water is precipitation (rain and snow). The so-called water footprint is divided into blue water, green water and gray water. Blue water refers to ground water (aquifers) and surface water (lakes, ponds and rivers), green water refers to the precipitation that falls on fields and pastures, and gray water refers to the amount used to dilute waste water. When considering water use, the only one that really matters is blue water. And crops tend to use more blue water than livestock.
Likewise, you have been misinformed about dairy cows. A cow will come back into heat three months after calving, and continue to come back into heat every three weeks until bred. If bred, they will lactate on their own until some six to eight weeks before they calve again. There is no need to extend lactation with "painful techniques". This is true for all cows, regardless of whether they are raised for dairy or beef.
In regards to CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operation), I've visited large farms and small. I also have a small farm where I raise ducks, geese and dairy goats. Those large farms (CAFOs) raised pigs. Their pigs were often kept in much better conditions than the smaller pig farms that I've visited because the larger farms can afford better ventilation and waste disposal systems. The only downside to the large farms is that the pigs can't go outside. Not that they'd miss it. And yes, I prefer to let animals go outside... that's why I raise much of my own food and buy what I don't raise from other local farms... but the truth is that those pigs can't miss what they never know.
In regards to beef production, it is still primarily a pasture-based system. As a rule, cattle raised for beef start their lives on cow-calf operations, where they spend six to eight months on pasture grazing next to their dams. Once they reach a certain weight, they are weaned and sold to stockers who put them back on pasture until they are large enough to send to a feed lot (CAFO) for finishing. The amount of time spent at the feed lot can be anywhere from 30 to 120 days, depending on how fast a steer reaches market weight.
Some small farms have their own feedlots where they fatten their steers before slaughter. Others offer beef from steers that were raised and finished on pasture. Personally, I prefer the latter because it's more flavorful, but I don't have a problem with grain-finished beef either. And the way beef is raised, regardless of how it's finished, is more sustainable and environmentally beneficial than either chicken or pork production. Since beef production doesn't require a lot of expensive equipment, it is also one of the few types of food production that allows farmers to remain fairly independent from the financial sector, which may be why globalhomo is pushing their anti-beef agenda.
Finally, vegetarianism and veganism are not more ethical. Only someone who doesn't know much about food production would believe such a thing. There are studies that suggest a vegan or vegetarian diet causes more death than a diet that includes meat. For example, one study from Australia suggests that 20 field mice are killed in order to produce one loaf of bread. And that's just the field mice. It doesn't include the other animals that may have been killed while the wheat crop was planted or harvested. It also doesn't include the animals that were killed in the feed mills and warehouses.
You cannot produce crops without first destroying habitat that other animals depend on. That is a fact. You can't plant a crop or harvest it without killing animals. Animals are also killed in order to protect crops, and this can include killing endangered animals. (In countries where tropical fruits are grown, endangered apes and monkeys are often killed to protect your bananas, mangoes and avocadoes.) And don't get me started on the honeybees that are flown all over the world in order to pollinate orchards! That some crops require transporting honeybees from, say, Australia to California, should raise some questions about both the sustainability and the environmental impact of those crops.
Livestock will always be more sustainable than crop production. Unlike most crops, livestock may also provide environmental services, including waste disposal. A significant percentage of livestock feed comes from food waste (hulls, peels, rinds, pulp, seeds, oil meal), as well as the waste that comes from producing beer and booze. The few crops that provide environmental services, such as alfalfa, tend to be grown for fodder. So please, take the time to find better sources before you continue writing on this subject. Perhaps start by talking to some of your local farmers.
Hi V, thanks for your comment, it's nice to get feedback from someone in the industry. It doesn't sound like you're really disputing the tens of billions of animals killed in this industrialized system in the United States alone every year; your criticism seems to be regarding the link chosen to highlight that fact, which is fine. Re: veganism or vegetarianism being more ethical, I highlighted in the post that billions of animals are killed every year to raise crops, so you're right that there's no "murder-free" solution to food consumption. The post is meant to highlight the lack of connection between the cheap food we consume and the hidden costs involved, and I encouraged the reader to try to develop a personal connection to local farmers that supply meat.
The reason why the number ("billions") is so high is because most of those animals are chickens. But sure, the lack of connection between the food (cheap or otherwise) that most people consume and the reality on the ground is a major problem. That's why I try to educate people concerning what goes on in food production.
Also, I don't really consider myself as someone in the industry. Yes, I sell cheese, eggs and meat to a small local market, but most of what I grow is for my own kitchen. What I sell pays for feed.
As a dairy farmer myself I heartily endorse all the facts and sentiments in this wonderful comment.
Thank you!
I’ve worked on good farms before. Yes, industrialised agriculture can be a great promoter of cruelty. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
If corn wasn’t subsidised, feedlots wouldn’t be so viable. So much of the earth’s surface is suitable only for grazing (the irrigation water won’t last forever) and pastoral agriculture can provide first-rate welfare: happy lives for animals and farmers alike. Allan Savory blazed the trail in this regard.
ISTR that the world’s finest pork comes from happy pigs fed acorns.
Agriculture can be better and it’s not the creator’s fault that it’s bad. But this subsidisation has got to stop.
One thing to keep in mind is that we just don't see the horrors. The ruining of the plants to 'grow, grow, grow' in awful soil, be non-digestible to bugs (and thus, really, us), the agricultural practice of only putting down 3 main fertilizers rather than trace minerals, etc.
The whole thing means that produce is less digestible, has less in it for us when we can digest it, and ruins our gut biome.
So, we read people living and fasting on bread and water in the middle ages...
But the bread they ate was materially different. It was able to sustain them because it had different things in it than what ours does. Even if you found heritage breeds, the soil and fertilizer practices aren't there.
So, the meat needs to play a bigger role in diets in our modern day because we can't get what we could from produce these days. But, if you could, I'd say produce is fine.
The American faux left recently labeled farmers & farm culture “enemies of democracy”, calling ALL of us racist, sexist, homophobic, uneducated rubes. But none of the farmers in my family & region are like this. They’re all planning to shift to sustainable agriculture if they haven’t already. Small family farms are light years better for raising animals humanely. (I have raised top prize-winning animals myself, with none of the abuses of industrialized farming; industrial farming always degrades quality.). I think the programming of hatred toward farmers is part of the globalist plan to rid the world of ALL small business and to control the world’s food supply in the most inhumane way possible.
With regard to this particular post, you might want to take a read of this paper tracing changes in violence frequency during and across the Neolithic Revolution's transition into agriculture (and hierarchy): https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/9mjnl0ou7s3ee3krty25z/Violence-trends-in-the-ancient-Middle-East-between-12-000-and-400-BCE.pdf?rlkey=yw52gwmzbk7bihm4eixvbet9n&dl=0. In this large archeological study area, there was occasionally a bit of violence between individuals and among the early Paleolithic proximal nomadic groups, but things got much, much more bloody during the ensuing developmental years of human agriculture -- then settled down for a little while as the kluge of state-sponsored policing helped force the frequency of violence back down towards pre-agricultural levels. This culturally-created artificial peace broke down, of course, once state formation and state-sponsored violence became the next big things and metal-edged weapons were put into energetic use. That preamble completed, my main point with regard to your post is that some findings of modern psychiatry (e.g., https://www.amazon.com/Brain-Energy-Revolutionary-Understanding-Health/dp/1637741588/ref=sr_1_1) now strongly suggest that humans entered (and have not yet left) a long age of chronic manic and violent delirium with the beginning of plant-focused agriculture and the addition of large amounts of carbohydrates to the human diet. Concrete support for this interpretative view is found in the fact that use of a ketogenic diet (more meat, more fat, less grains and other starchy plants -- see book reference already given) works remarkably well in reversing an extremely wide range of modern mental illnesses. Moral of the story? Raise and eat more meat, and (thus) give peace a chance...
PS: here's an example of what the psychiatrist/author mentioned above is talking about: https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/article/nourishing-brain-ketogenic-diet-17915513.php. The rich parents of the kid concerned are now sponsoring a randomized clinical study that will be managed by the psychiatrist/author, Christopher Palmer.
It is possible to get the leanness of a carnivore diet while moderating meat consumption. Just eat all your plant foods raw and unmixed. Eat the plant foods which currently taste good. (And stick to plant foods that are edible raw! Don't eat raw unsprouted beans. Can be deadly. And stick to those sprouted legumes which are traditionally eaten raw sometimes.) I dropped 30 pounds in a couple of months on such a diet. (After bloating up from attempting the high starch "Eat to Win" diet.)
This is not an easily sustainable long term diet. But it is a fantastic cutting diet.
It might be more sustainable if sprouted nuts were available in stores. Black walnuts taste fruity if starting to sprout.
Caring for goats has been a significant part of my life, and today, unfortunately, we had to say goodbye to one of the males. This particular goat held a special place in my heart; he was not just a livestock, but a cherished companion. Always by my side, his presence brought joy to every moment. His affectionate nature and lively personality made him more than just another animal on the farm.
The loss of my dear friend during today's slaughter deeply saddened me, leaving a void that is hard to fill. His absence is felt keenly, and I find myself reminiscing about the times we shared.
Reflecting on life on this planet, it's hard not to see it as a place of suffering, a realm where the cycle of life revolves around death. Each creature, with its own unique character and emotions, is caught in this intricate web of existence, driven by the instinct for survival.
I've pondered the nature of the divine and concluded that if there are entities akin to gods, they must be vastly different from our traditional conceptions. These beings, if they exist, operate on a plane beyond our comprehension, perhaps feeding on the essence of life itself. Like my bond with the goat, they may regard us with a mix of care and detachment, ultimately using us to sustain their own existence.
The notion of a just deity seems misplaced in a world where every being, regardless of its actions, meets the same fate. Perhaps these entities, if they exist, find amusement in the drama of human existence, favoring those who embody the extremes of good and evil.
In many ways, life mirrors the dynamics of the Stanford prison experiment, where power dynamics shape behavior and violence lurks beneath the surface. Civilizations rise and fall, echoing the chaos of the experiment's conclusion.
Even in agriculture, a practice essential for our survival, the specter of suffering looms large. It's a sobering realization that our very sustenance may be intertwined with the darker impulses of our world.
As I navigate the complexities of farming, I'm confronted with the dilemma of attachment. Despite the practicality of raising animals for sustenance, the emotional bonds formed make each loss a poignant reminder of the moral quandaries inherent in our existence.
I have long harbored the suspicion that on death, we get to re-experience all our actions but frorm the point of view of those we have affected by our actions. (Hence the golden rule.) Would this then include the lives of each animal we have consumed? For a while that thought kept me from my weekly roast chicken, but in the end I succumbed and I eat meat at least once a week.
I currently live in Northern Spain, and do have the option of local free-range meat, but it is three times more costly and often less tasty! I don't know what conditions local factory animals live under, probably a degree or two better than those you write about, but still horrendous I am sure.
The only real solution, as you say, is to raise your own animals and slaughter them. We have a ways to go before that. Maybe the collapse of civilization will light a fire under our arses.
Why I mostly eat wild meat my dad or I kill
very cool!
The horrors of modern factory farming caused me to give up meat decades ago. While I don’t look like a fitness model, I am very healthy and active despite being over 70. People can thrive on many different diets. I salute you for acknowledging that our current industrialized food production system has serious ethical problems.
Bivalves!!! Bro you gotta up those numbers in terms of bivalve intake. They clean the water, have no sensory organs and cannot feel pain or hellish imprisonment like factory animals do, they are super healthy, very low resource consumption. It's the perfect compromise between veganism and paleo diet.
This, right here:
“ If we treat animals in this manner, without any dignity or concern, why would that process not extend eventually to the rest of us?”
🎯💯🎯
My solution to this in the past and when able has been to buy sheep directly from a farmer and butcher myself. Unfortunately buying free range organic at the store is a non starter for me. I have to prioritize where my money goes. I eat a raw primal diet, following Aajonus Vonderplanitz. Have for years. My priorities are in this order: milk, eggs, meat. I spend $10/gal on raw milk, of which I drink around a half gallon a day. I spend $6/dozen on pasture raised non organic eggs. Then to balance that I spend $3-$5/lb on the cheapest meat the Mexican butchers sell.
Here’s another problem with the organic meat: it’s usually vacuum packed in plastic (ugh) and pre-frozen. I won’t eat raw meat that’s been frozen. It’s no longer a healthful food, and no longer raw.
The same blindness happens with milk, which drives me crazy. The $14/gallon organic milk in Whole Foods is most likely to be UHT. Of course. It hardly ever sells. They have to. And so you pay $14/gallon for something vastly more toxic than the cheap industrial milk. The irony.
The problem is, you can’t get away from it. Forget about the abuse of animals. Do we care about cows more because they look like us? What about the abuse of a broccoli field. The horrible mutilation of the plants, soil, and countless microbial lives. The worst dairy farm can’t compare to this death.
So what is the answer? Do what you can, but be smart. Prioritize your health over emotions, recognizing that as long as you participate in the food system you can’t avoid causing pain.
Come on, I know you don't really believe plants and soil feel pain. They don't have a nervous system. If you mean actual animals like field mice which get killed, sure.
Hi man, since you're clearly concerned about the suffering our food production causes, you may be interested to know about the work people have done to try to to quantify how different animal products affect levels of animal suffering in the world.
Bottom line: if you do eat meat, eat cows, not small animals like chicken or farmed fish. Eggs are approximately as bad as chicken. Dairy is fairly irrelevant in comparison.
This is because of the conditions the animals are held in, the way they're killed, and their body size, which means that for larger animals you get more calories per animal killed.
For example. there's Brian Tomasik's work [1] which rightly includes effects on wild animals [2]. While he also has some uncommon underlying ideas like believing in and caring about invertebrate suffering, this might actually be a plus for you as a fellow low-agreeableness type of guy, if at least you find it interesting to read about. Even if you're very much not any kind of utilitarian unlike him, his conclusions would hold under most plausible ethical systems, I think. As for how that cashes out specifically: many in this comment section point out that eating beef, particularly grass-fed, may actually cause less suffering than crops, because of crop deaths to small animals. Tomasik agrees that beef may be net-positive for reducing suffering, but more because the use of land for their grazing reduce the numbers of wild animals born, who would destined to die painfully otherwise; whereas I think he agrees with me that the crop deaths argument for beef doesn't really work considering most cattle are themselves fed crops to some extent, like in the winter, even if nominally "grass-fed".
Of course there's the methane emissions angle for cows, but people concerned with suffering reduction or utilitarians generally agree with online dissident rightists that this shouldn't be much of a concern, though for different reasons, putting it lightly. (Basically they think the other factors I mentioned above when comparing eating chickens and cows are much more important.) In fact there's a serious concern that lib environmentalism which causes normies to switch from beef to chicken is causing huge amounts of harm.
PS I would caution against putting much stock in how those carnivore influencers look, since they're probably on TRT.
[1] How Much Direct Suffering Is Caused by Various Animal Foods? https://reducing-suffering.org/how-much-direct-suffering-is-caused-by-various-animal-foods/
[2] How Does Vegetarianism Impact Wild-Animal Suffering? https://reducing-suffering.org/vegetarianism-and-wild-animals/
PPS as someone who used to read a lot more "dissident right" type of stuff, I found it very cool to see one of those guys writes about stuff like wild animal suffering, with those infamous Komodo dragon videos. Basically I used to think more about the things the (moderate) dissident right considers problems, until I read more utilitarian / effective altruism type stuff and went more in that direction. Both because the problems they care about seem like 100x bigger but also they have more rigorous epistemics, compared to most rightists (cf. Richard Hanania's writing on that, like "Coping with Low Human Capital"). On the other hand the autism goes in a more weird direction on that side compared to round here (I'm thinking with the transgender-autism comorbidity).
Edit: OK, having just been reading again about Nazi atrocities I was felt weird about how I phrased this comment and want to make it clear that by "dissident right" I was thinking more of NRx or "alt-centre" people I guess, maybe up to BAPists or whatever, rather than "Dissident Right", which is not exactly what the label suggests. Obviously Nazism is evil and this DR label seems to include that to some extent.
Thanks for the comments, Meel. I will check out the links you provided. I agree with your analysis that eating grass-fed, free-range beef is some degree morally better than eating caged animals such as chickens with much shorter lifespans and a much higher number of deaths. In addition modern chickens are so strange -- bred to be basically giant breasts on legs with supercharged growth. It can't be healthy to consume such things...
With respect to effective altruism, I havn't looked into it carefully but my surface-level association with it is poor; I think of Sam Bankman-Fried and others like him who use effective altruism as a way to virtue signal without real action. Additionally, from what I've heard (and please correct me if I'm wrong) they focus on things which they think will have the greatest impact for the lowest price, and that usually turns into initiatives that can easily backfire: I'm thinking of dramatically increasing Africa's population growth (via clean water initiatives, vaccines, etc.) -- as I've written about elsewhere, such actions come with second-order negative effects that are not well understood: https://neofeudalreview.substack.com/p/the-sad-skinsuiting-of-the-environmental .
Indeed, one of the key features of modern technological society is that it initiates some major technological change without understanding the implications, which then requires additional technological change to deal with the second order effects of the actions, which then requires even more technological changes in an endless loop...Ellul comments on how this works in "The Technological Society." Perhaps you mean effective altruism in a different light, though, and if so I'm open to hearing about it.
Yeah, it's actually a meme internally that many people call themselves "EA-aligned" or "EA-adjacent", partly because they don't want to associate with the Bankman-Fried image or dodgy stuff like that. Truth is, it's a broad category of things, and most people focus on a specific "cause area" with the main ones being AI safety, animal welfare, and I would guess only a minority of attention (if not money/people) focused on the original human poverty cause area which involves things like malaria nets for Africa. As others have argued [1], a lot of the value comes from being a Schelling point for philosophy/STEM nerds with less concern for taboos to congregate.
I definitely agree about backfire being a risk. However I would argue that with the concept of "longtermism", EA is among the most likely to consider this carefully, and a lot has been written about our "cluelessness" regarding this, like here [2], which actually addresses the point on population growth as an example. (On the other hand, if you're a pessimist about human capability, you might think this just gives a false sense of security.)
I will check out Ellul, seems interesting from a brief look.
Basically there's good philosophy going on from that sphere which might be relevant to you, and cross-fertilisation between ideological movements is usually an improvement. Even if it's not object level things like animal welfare, but simply better norms around discussions and epistemology, quantifying stuff, or a focus on detail regarding policy, for example. Going in the other direction from here to EA, I can tell you that things like group IQ differences are quite well-known there, probably because dissident right types make it more salient, which is a very good thing since it's such an influential factor in society.
[1] https://open.substack.com/pub/richardhanania/p/why-ea-will-be-anti-woke-or-die?r=2vfwr0&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=12853538
[2] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LdZcit8zX89rofZf3/evidence-cluelessness-and-the-long-term-hilary-greaves