#AGRICULTURE

[allthecanadianpolitics]

The Alberta government is proposing additional restrictions on wind and solar farms that conservationists think are more about limiting renewable energy than protecting the environment. Last year the Alberta government imposed a seven-month moratorium on new renewable energy projects, after which Premier Danielle Smith announced her government would be taking an “agriculture first” approach to regulating renewable energy project locations. That approach includes preventing renewable energy projects from being within 35 kilometres of “pristine viewscapes” and parks and protected areas, and a near total ban where soil conditions are prime for yielding crops. “We need to ensure that we’re not sacrificing our future agricultural yields, or tourism dollars, or breathtaking viewscapes to rush renewables developments,” Smith said at the time.

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Tagging: @newsfromstolenland, @abpoli

[meriol-lehmann]

chemin champoux, saint-paul-de-joliette

[nando161mando]

[thetetra]

I see this and sure its cool and funny but like, I also think about all the reasons why we don't do it now.

You think this bear learned to be wary of people or do you think poachers waited for it to grow up then shot it as it came up expecting to be fed?

I think of things like that every time I hear a complaint about how someone who lives out in "nowhere" talks about B.L.M. rules about land use and some "fuckin' turtle" they have to protect.

Like yeah... you have to share the planet with other people and other life. I am reminded of the ideology I learned in ag-econ classes in college. "A pig is a way of raising the value of grain". Basically if it takes 15 lbs of grain to make 1 more lbs of pig and por sells for more than 15x a pound of grain then you should maximize the grain to pork conversion. Makes sense very straightforward and it WILL make you money. But it is a very narrow view of life. What is life like for a pig who has a feeding trough on one side and a trough to shit in on the other? What sorts of diseases are we spawning in such places? What is the value of eating animals that are healthy as opposed to horrifyingly obese? What about the ethical and moral demands of taking care of another life form... even one we plan to consume? All of that and more is lost when we simply increase the value of grain.

I see that sort of thinking with the polar bear at the helm of a ship, I see it all the time. I want to live in a society that values the rules that are there to respect and preserve life, complexity and depth.

Polar bear on board a Soviet icebreaker, 1970.

[thepromiscuousfinger]

[honkytonkdyke]

I NEED TO KNOW I HAVE TO PROVE SOMETHING

i'm using seen as you have been in the general vicinity of a cow outside of a vehicle (driving down a highway thing). cows are a very big part of my life but i live in the usamerican south so i want to know. HAVE YOU SEEN/INTERACTED WITH COWS

[headspace-hotel]

I will write this thought about Veganism and Classism in the USA in another post so as to not derail the other thread:

There are comments in the notes that say meat is only cheaper than plant based foods because of subsidies artificially lowering the price of meat in the United States. This is...part of the story but not all of it.

For my animal agriculture lab we went to a butcher shop and watched the butcher cut up a pig into various cuts of meat. I have had to study quite a bit about the meat industry in that class. This has been the first time I fully realized how strongly the meat on a single animal is divided up by socioeconomic class.

Like yes, meat cumulatively takes more natural resources to create and thus should be more expensive, but once that animal is cut apart, it is divided up between rich and poor based on how good to eat the parts are. I was really shocked at watching this process and seeing just how clean and crisp an indicator of class this is.

Specifically, the types of meat I'm most familiar with are traditionally "waste" parts left over once the desirable parts are gone. For example, beef brisket is the dangly, floppy bit on the front of a cow's neck. Pork spareribs are the part of the ribcage that's barely got anything on it.

And that stuff is a tier above the "meat" that is most of what poor people eat: sausage, hot dogs, bologna, other heavily processed meat products that are essentially made up of all the scraps from the carcass that can't go into the "cuts" of meat. Where my mom comes from in North Carolina, you can buy "livermush" which is a processed meat product made up of a mixture of liver and a bunch of random body parts ground up and congealed together. There's also "head cheese" (made of parts of the pig's head) and pickled pigs' feet and chitlin's (that's made of intestines iirc) and cracklin's (basically crispy fried pig skin) and probably a bunch of stuff i'm forgetting. A lot of traditional Southern cooking uses basically scraps of animal ingredients to stretch across multiple meals, like putting pork fat in beans or saving bacon grease for gravy or the like.

So another dysfunctional thing about our food system, is that instead of people of each socioeconomic class eating a certain number of animals, every individual animal is basically divided up along class lines, with the poorest people eating the scraps no one else will eat (oftentimes heavily processed in a way that makes it incredibly unhealthy).

Even the 70% lean ground beef is made by injecting extra leftover fat back into the ground-up meat because the extra fat is undesirable on the "better" cuts. (Gross!)

I've made, or eaten, many a recipe where the only thing that makes it non-vegan is the chicken broth. Chicken broth, just leftover chicken bones and cartilage rendered and boiled down in water? How much is that "driving demand" for meat, when it's basically a byproduct?

That class really made me twist my brain around about the idea of abstaining from animal products as a way to deprive the industry of profits. Nobody eats "X number of cows, pigs, chickens in a lifetime" because depending on the socioeconomic class, they're eating different parts of the animal, splitting it with someone richer or poorer than they are. If a bunch of people who only ate processed meats anyway abstained, that wouldn't equal "saving" X number of animals, it would just mean the scraps and byproducts from a bunch of people's steaks or pork chops would have something different happen to them.

The other major relevant conclusion I got from that class, was that animal agriculture is so dominant because of monoculture. People think it's animal agriculture vs. plant agriculture (or plants used for human consumption vs. using them to feed livestock), but from capitalism's point of view, feeding animals corn is just another way to use corn to generate profits.

People think we could feed the world by using the grain fed to animals to feed humans, but...the grain fed to animals, is not actually a viable diet for the human population, because it's literally just corn and soybean. Like animal agriculture is used to give some semblance of variety to the consumer's diet in a system that is almost totally dominated by like 3 monocrops.

Do y'all have any idea how much of the American diet is just corn?!?! Corn starch, corn syrup, corn this, corn that, processed into the appearance of variety. And chickens and pigs are just another way to process corn. That's basically why we have them, because they can eat our corn. It's a total disaster.

And it's even worse because almost all the USA's plant foods that aren't the giant industrial monocrops maintained by pesticides and machines, are harvested and cared for by undocumented migrant workers that get abused and mistreated and can't say anything because their boss will tattle on them to ICE.

[reasonsforhope]

-via University of Exeter, September 13, 2024

The production of low carbon, plant-based insulating blocks by agricultural workers from farm materials could help to support rural economies and tackle labour shortages, experts believe.

A major new study will test if the materials, for use in local construction, could lead to a “Harvest to House” system of building.

The University of Exeter-led study will show if small-scale farmers could diversify into making sustainable building materials for use on their own farms, or for construction in the local area. This could also benefit their own businesses, communities and the environment.

Arable farm workers in the region will be involved in the small-scale trial of a manufacturing process. Researchers will explore the human, environmental, and infrastructural barriers and opportunities for production through working with farmers and farm workers.

A short animated, visual ‘manual’ of the pilot manufacturing system, in an accessible and easy to digest format that can be readily shared and referred to by time-pressed farmers and workers, as well as people outside agriculture.

The project is part of the Ecological Citizen(s) Network+, led by The Royal College of Art, the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) at the University of York and Wrexham Glyndŵr University, as well as a range of partners from industry, charities, culture and civil society.

//Ed's note: What they're doing is designing a social-economic-environmental intervention that attempts to address a number of complex problems simultaneously. Its a business model innovation also to see if small farms can also make sustainable building materials in their offtime as an additional source of income. Note how in all my African and Asian stories, social enterprises usually include farmers in their business models but this is a first in the UK and Europe I'm guessing to think about these things in a holistic socially oriented community-centric manner.

[ketyoulater]

[mulherergativa]

[webdiggerxxx]

palestine, 2012

[ancientsstudies]

Demeter

The roof of the cabin constructed of growing grass and has tomato vines growing on the walls.

[probablyasocialecologist]

The global food economy is massively inefficient. The need for standardized products means tons of edible food are destroyed or left to rot. This is one reason more than one-third of the global food supply is wasted or lost; for the U.S., the figure is closer to one-half. The logic of global trade results in massive quantities of identical products being simultaneously imported and exported—a needless waste of fossil fuels and an enormous addition to greenhouse gas emissions. In a typical year, for example, the U.S. imports more than 400,000 tons of potatoes and 1 million tons of beef while exporting almost the same tonnage. The same is true of many other food commodities and countries. The same logic leads to shipping foods worldwide simply to reduce labor costs for processing. Shrimp harvested off the coast of Scotland, for example, are shipped 6,000 miles to Thailand to be peeled, then shipped 6,000 miles back to the UK to be sold to consumers. The supposed efficiency of monocultural production is based on output per unit of labor, which is maximized by replacing jobs with chemical- and energy-intensive technology. Measured by output per acre, however—a far more relevant metric—smaller-scale farms are typically 8 to 20 times more productive.

5 November 2024

[typhlonectes]

[bangtanghan]

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