[CuriouslyC]

Non heritage meat breeds are much more efficient at producing meat for a given amount of input. Supplemental feed is mostly used to bring chickens to weight more quickly. Assuming you work, I'm sure you understand doing things you would prefer not to for economic reasons.

Talking about our abundance based on how much food we produce today in this context is like talking about how rich you are when you're spending above your means with a credit card. We're depleting topsoil, depleting aquifers, polluting our water, and breeding blights with our lack of diversity.

You keep talking like it's somehow desirable to remove animals from these food producing systems, but it's not. They work better with animals, and those animals need to be herded and culled to maintain the health of the ecosystem. Everything needs to be in balance.

Why do you think it would be better for the environment to take a bunch of trucks into a forest so you can haul stuff from it to a hundred miles away or more to feed conventional agriculture with all its problems than just have a balanced system initially?

[TollingSteady]

The problem is that this balanced system you bring up does not seem to exist for commercial meat. Having animals like modern broiler chickens are simply an environmentally wasteful way to get calories.

Supplemental feeding of commercially grown oats, for example, means that these animals are not only using resources on the land they're raised on, but they're also directly contributing to the crop monocultures we both agree are unsustainable. Humans could eat these oats directly, which is much more efficient than passing them through other animals first.

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Vegetables, crops, etc. can be grown effectively and less wastefully without farmed animals. Insofar as animals are necessary to a natural ecosystem, it's the native species with lower impact rather than the extremely modified modern livestock that consume massive quantities of input at produce large amounts of GHGs and other unwanted waste.

As for your last sentence, it's disingenuous to act like animals (including the animals in your example who require supplemental feed) aren't the ones consuming the majority of the feed and therefore are the reason for most of those trucks moving conventionally grown crops.

It seems like the most sustainable system is relying on plants: preferably grown in the same country, preferably grown in less intensive organic means, but even plants that don't meet these two criteria are still more sustainable than the best current forms of animal agriculture.

Consider that transportation is only 11% of a food's total greenhouse gas emissions, and dropping red meat and dairy for a single day of the week is better for the environment than making your entire diet 100% local food. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18546681/)

By all data I can find, trying to run plant calories/protein through the inefficient process of creating animal protein, which necessarily involves much higher GHG emissions and calorie waste, is not a good idea — even with a local farm using carbon sequestering.

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But again, given that 99% of U.S. farmed animals live on factory farms (https://sentientmedia.org/u-s-farmed-animals-live-on-factory...), if you're already eating according to the morals you've claimed in this post, our diets will be extremely similar. I'm assuming anyone who avoids animal agriculture we all agree is unsustainable (by not getting meat/cheese at regular restaurants or at general grocery stores, by avoiding baked goods containing factory farmed eggs and dairy, by eating plant-based when you're anywhere that's going to use these kinds of animals) will have much more in common with a vegan than with those following the Standard American Diet, so I'd still have a lot of respect for your commitment.

[CuriouslyC]

If an animal does work to improve an ecosystem, how is that wasteful? I'm not sure what part of "the animals are beneficial" you're missing. We don't need to stop raising animals, we need to change our agricultural practices so that the animals are always just a single part of a larger system that is in balance.

It seems like your problem here is the capitalist society that demands a race to the bottom, pushing farmers to farm in a way that damages the earth. Perhaps you can redirect some of that simmering rage to the root causes of the things that you don't like.

[TollingSteady]

I've still seen no evidence that farmed animals (those that produce commercially viable quantities of meat/milk) do work to improve ecosystems.

As far as I can tell, even in the best case scenario, they consume intense amounts of resources and output a lot of unwanted byproducts, such as greenhouse gases, that are not removed by the farming system.

I honestly believe that current animal agriculture is a root cause of what I'm against, such as increasing global warming. There seem to be less bad forms of animal ag, but I've yet to see any proof that there are good versions.

I think you overestimate my feelings on this topic though. I feel compelled to act with my conscience, but if there were hard data that any of these systems are net positive for the ecosystem, I'd definitely reconsider my stance.