Utisz wrote: ↑Tue Mar 16, 2021 6:05 am
I think in the west where my family is from, there is little in the way of crops as the quality of the land is supposedly quite poor, being more boggy and hilly in general (hence the perhaps mistaken phrase "to Hell or to Connacht"). I think around my area, literally no land (aside from garden plots) is dedicated to crops, but rather everything is used for grazing.
This is a perfect example of why the argument that we should all move to a completely plant-based diet is so flawed. In places like your home area, grazing is the most productive thing to do with the land. It is also reasonably low in environmental impact, and keeps the traditional landscape. Stopping that kind of farming and leaving the land alone would just make a load of scrubland, with less biodiversity and a lot of native plants and bugs would die out having evolved to live alongside humans on land farmed that way.
It is the same in Wales with hill sheep farming, and large tracts of Scotland and Northern England. The whole of the West of England is mixed farming, with some land good enough for arable and other lands only suited to pasture.
There is no equivalence in this with the way large tracts of rainforest in Brazil have been lost in order to grow soybean to feed to factory farmed beef herds in Texas.
There is also a lot of overlap between supporters of veganism and organic farming. But take manures out of the equation and organic farming doesn't stack up. Put simply, if we took synthetic fertiliser out of the equation we would need three new earth-sized planets to produce enough manure to maintain the current global arable output. You need mixed farming to make organic farming work, and it makes no sense not to eat the animals raised from a ecological viewpoint.
Equally there is merit in the argument that we can not just keep on wasting inputs denuding resources of water and minerals and polluting and degrading the environment the way that is happening globally. A more nuanced approach will be required.