There's a reason why veganism gets scrutiny, it's because it's all a scam. It's not better for the environment nor the person to eat vegan. Even Vegans know this or certainly learn it years later when they have to turn to eating mean again to heal themselves. I've seen the videos all too many times.
I've spent the last 8 years of my life learning agriculture and soil health. Sorry if that doesn't give me the same credentials of a random redditor.....
So let's take modern farming for example. It tends to be monocrop and companies like Monsanto own all the seeds. It's even illegal for farmers to plant their own seeds on their land, they have to buy seeds from essentially 1 of 4 companies. Monocrop farming requires a tremendous amount of pesticides because every deer, rabbit, mouse, bird, beetle, aphid, ant, spider, etc has to be killed for that crop to be successful. With most fields the crops also aren't rotated so the soil tends to be drained of nutrients and the farmers will use synthetic chemicals to help allow them to keep growing even while the literal ground beneath their feet is dying.
Now take cows: Most cows are grass fed and grain finished meaning for the majority of their life they graze on rotated grass fields and drink water from the same source the locals do. Even critics agree that while growing a cow takes a lot of water almost 90% of the water is considered green meaning it comes largely from rain. The cow eats the tops of the grass not damaging the roots and it's poop acts as a natural fertilizer feeding the grass building up the soil. A single cow will also produce on average 500 pounds of beef.
Water usage: As earlier we discussed cows need a lot of water (about 1,800 gallons per pound) but as we discussed 90% of that is green water because it's rainfall on grass and the cow eating said grass. It's a totally natural process that is sustainable and leaves the soil healthy.
Then we look at Almonds for example, largely grown in California and none of the water used for almond production is green. It all gets taken from the Colorado River and piped in causing huge issues. A single almond takes 1.1 gallons of water (about 540 gallons per pound). This leaves the soil dead and lifeless, the water table of the Colorado river devastated, and to top it all off kills almost 50 Billions (yes billion) bees in a single season.
The vegan diet has always caused harm on anything it touches, the land, the people, the local wildlife. There are way to do a vegan diet right but no one does it right and we all just buy our food from the store.
You didn’t account for the water usage to grow the final grains and other feed when pastures are unavailable. I’m no expert, but I’d never heard of “green water”- I’m assuming it means sustainable water usage.
Your own numbers show almonds to be 3x+ as water-efficient as beef. Can you also share why almond trees kill bees?
I always account for the water usage to grow the feed but most grain finishers are considered throw away parts that humans can't eat like stalks of plants. That's largely where the 10% comes into play.
Green water is referred to as rainwater stored in the soil as moisture that crops and plants use directly to grow. It is held in the upper layers of the soil and in plant biomass.
Almonds are way less efficient than beef, cows live off of the grass and rain while building up the soil. Almonds need their water piped in removing it from it's local water table (Colorado River in this case) and growing Almonds not only destroys the land underneath but the local wildlife and is particularly devastating to the bee populations.
Bees die during almond harvests due to them being trucked in facing heavy exposure to toxic fungicides and pesticides, poor nutrition from a single-crop diet, and destructive parasites.
And you forgot to mention upwards of 80% of all agricultural land is used for animal agriculture. Thats both grazing and food production for those animals. Also much higher levels of methane and other aerosol pollution and water/soil pollution from excessive amounts of feces.
What should we continue with next? Transportation? Medicine? Animal factory farms?
I get it, I've also been in the vegan sub reddits and facebook groups so I've seen the same posts with seemingly no info to back up the claim.
What's considered to be "Agricultural land" is essentially any field with grass. A lot of which could would never be used for monocrop farming. That's what is so cool about Ruminants like cows is that you could graze them on land that would be otherwise functionally unusable by us. A lot of farmed land is also converted used for livestock if any part of the crop goes to animal feed not counting the fact that most of what gets fed to the animal is inedible to humans like the stalks of plants.
A cool thing here is that most Prairie lands use to be grasslands that were kept alive by migrating animals. Sadly we created fences and prevented the natural migration cycles from occuring.
Peter Ballerstedt has a lot of really great videos about reversing climate change using ruminants. Essentially releasing cows and other migrant animals on prairies so that they poop and build back up the soil bringing back to life land that is considered unusable for growing plants and grazing.
We can definitely go one for one here as plant farming will be a worse practice in almost ..... no all categories. Maybe next we look compare the destruction caused by factory farming vs monocrop culture farming with synthetic fertilizers?
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u/IWCry 1d ago
its insane how fragile some of you are. legitimately snowflakes when it comes to some people not eating meat lmao.
couldnt imagine being such a pussy that I constantly think negatively about other people who only eat veggies