• Ballistic_86@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    None of what I said was misinformation. Turning everyone vegan doesn’t resolve factory farming crops. Chemicals to ensure we can actually grow food, monocultures that are terrible for the environment, limitations of where things can grow.

    I’m all for reducing meat consumption, but the utopian world where everyone is vegan has many hurdles to overcome that aren’t just magically resolved. Sure, right now we might be able to reduce land usage for farming, but that is one small aspect of commercial farming under capitalism.

    How do people afford food when they don’t live in a place that can grow it? How do we ensure we can continue to grow food when we are so dependent on chemicals to do so? How does a developing country support agriculture without the huge subsidies currently required in developed nations? How do you educate 8 billion people on how to properly get the nutrients they need from new sources of food? How do convince society that GMOs aren’t bad?

    These are rhetorical, but moving to veganism requires us to think about these types of things before claiming “but less farm land”

    • Rekorse@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      9 months ago

      They didnt say everyone needed to be vegan, just that being vegan become the norm. There will always be edge cases, and people can do whatever they want in the wild of course.

      We can push forward and try to figure out how to slaughter even more despite all the problems that are coming with increased line speeds, or we can choose a different direction and tackle those problems.

      Noone said the solution was perfect, just better. Are you afraid of improving yourself?

      • Ballistic_86@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        I’m not sure if you just aren’t aware or are being intentionally obtuse, but that isn’t what keeps the soil healthy or enables plants to grow. Have you grown plants ever?

        Sure, photosynthesis takes in CO2 and sunlight and converts that into sugars, but plants need much more than that from the soil and water, which we have to add using modern agriculture.

        Growing food on the scale to feed our population now requires crop rotations, fallow fields, nitrogen, phosphates, potash, insecticides, and billions of dollars in agricultural subsidies. You can grow a field of crops once or twice before adding all of the fertilizers and pesticides, but any amount of regular farming requires much much much more than CO2.

        • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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          9 months ago

          I’m familiar with agriculture, having gone to school, read books, and grown plants.

          It seems that you are the one being intentionally obtuse. You and I both know that carbon dioxide is kept elevated in greenhouses on purpose because doing so increases the yield of plants grown in those greenhouses.

          Yes, other chemicals are necessary to build a plant. The most abundant one however is carbon dioxide. It’s where like 99% of the plant’s mass comes from. And the levels of carbon dioxide in the air change the rate of plant growth.

          Nitrogen is also a big limiting factor, but fortunately we’ve found out how to extract nitrogen from the air efficiently using methane, so we can have enough nitrogen fertilizer to feed everyone.