Reacting to Trump administration proposals calling for higher-paced processing, critics say protections for workers, animals and food safety are not the only concerns.
Industrial slaughter houses are just a problem in general. Faster speeds or not. Industrial animal agriculture is not sustainable. Sustainable alternatives are possible but require a complete societal revolution to accomplish. The way modern society is structured fundamentally prevents it from being a possibility.
As long as animal agriculture exists in any scale it’s the invariable outcome. As long as there’s mass demand, there will continue to be mass production
Only under the capitalist system that incentivizes exploiting demand for profit. Without the profit incentive, there is no need to meet mass demand. Demand must deal with what is supplied or cope.
Any economic system is going to face enormous pressure with the mass demand not being addressed, capitalistic or not. The demand side of the equation is going to be changed if you want to avoid an uprising. We’re not talking about some small level of reduction in production
For instance, if you wanted to move to a grass-fed only beef production, you could only supply at most around a quarter of all current beef production while using 100% of grassland (which would create deforestation pressure). This is while simultaneously increasing methane emissions and number of cattle slaughtered. If you want to avoid a methane emission increase, you’d need to go far lower production
We model a nationwide transition [in the US] from grain- to grass-finishing systems using demographics of present-day beef cattle. In order to produce the same quantity of beef as the present-day system, we find that a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30%. We also find that the current pastureland grass resource can support only 27% of the current beef supply (27 million cattle), an amount 30% smaller than prior estimates
Taken together, an exclusively grass-fed beef cattle herd would raise the United States’ total methane emissions by approximately 8%.
Industrial slaughter houses are just a problem in general. Faster speeds or not. Industrial animal agriculture is not sustainable. Sustainable alternatives are possible but require a complete societal revolution to accomplish. The way modern society is structured fundamentally prevents it from being a possibility.
As long as animal agriculture exists in any scale it’s the invariable outcome. As long as there’s mass demand, there will continue to be mass production
Only under the capitalist system that incentivizes exploiting demand for profit. Without the profit incentive, there is no need to meet mass demand. Demand must deal with what is supplied or cope.
Any economic system is going to face enormous pressure with the mass demand not being addressed, capitalistic or not. The demand side of the equation is going to be changed if you want to avoid an uprising. We’re not talking about some small level of reduction in production
For instance, if you wanted to move to a grass-fed only beef production, you could only supply at most around a quarter of all current beef production while using 100% of grassland (which would create deforestation pressure). This is while simultaneously increasing methane emissions and number of cattle slaughtered. If you want to avoid a methane emission increase, you’d need to go far lower production
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401/pdf