this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2024
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You can indeed. But growing cotton has already resulted in environmental changes beyond my comprehension.
I guess the first step should be to adapt a habit of clothes repair
Growing cattle has also had a massive impact on the environment. And you often need more land for animal based materials because you both need land for the animals and the land to grow food for the animals. With cotton at least you just need land for the cotton.
Why is this always brought up, stop spreading this. Animals usually are not fed grain unless it's harvesting time. We also do not grow food just to feed them. The grain we feed animals is shit you cannot eat. It's roots/stalks/stems/bad/rotted plant matter. It's the leftovers from the greens we can consume. Most animals also are raised on land that is not suitable for crops, rocky/hilly/weak topsoil land.
Food is grown specifically to feed livestock though, it would be a pretty weird trophic pyramid for them to survive on our waste unless you went back to a time where people killed their one pig for the year and salted it away. In our country, the land degradation from clearing hill country for grazing has led to enormous biodiversity loss and a self-fufilling prophecy of eroded weak topsoil that people claim isn't good for anything else (though it could still be rewilded and in other cultures and times would be terraced and swaled to support plant crops).
??? But it's not, we do not grow crops for livestock in any meaningful amounts. It's miniscule what is grown to feed livestock only.
Stop making stuff up, please. Idk what you do on your farm but globally we absolutely grow a lot of food for animals.
Please provide a source that shows that we grow crops directly for livestock consumption in a meaningful amount. So far no one has shown anything that states otherwise.
Over a third of crops are grown to feed livestock, and that's if you're not counting pasture as a crop, which it absolutely is - arguably our first solar powered factory floor. Even areas that were grazed in the past have had the relative proportion of native flora and fauna severely reduced to minimal levels through introduced grasses and overgrazing. To get a feel for land use against calorie production, you could have a browse through https://www.nationalgeographic.com/foodfeatures/feeding-9-billion/ for an overview.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013
We already make enough food to feed the planet multiple times over, the issue isn't how much we've got, it's how to get it to people. Distribution is the issue.
But no, 1/3rd is not grown for livestock, this isn't true at all.
See page 12 of https://www.fao.org/3/a0701e/a0701e01.pdf in terms of feedstock percentages at that time (total production has doubled since then https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/animal-feed-industry-grow-up-due-rising-consumption-aqua-waghmare )
It's a bit of a roundabout way to get your micronutrients https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/animal-feed-additives-market unless you're conflating subsistence farming with the bulk of production and consumption.