Hi there everyone,
Let me start this by saying that this is an honest question. I figure nobody would be better suited to answer my question than a group laser-focused on the negatives of the technology.
I see these types of memes a lot and see statistics of gallons consumed in a lot of articles I read. What I don't understand though is where the water goes that it can't be reclaimed or naturally return from a gas to a liquid.
As a kid(long ago), I was taught of the cycle of rain and the conversion between gases and liquid. It's my understanding that when a liquid is used to cool something, it also follows the same conversion process as it cools.
Could someone explain to me what's going on in this process where the 264 billion gallons of water used in the meme do not return to a liquid state?
I would appreciate any insight into the process that seems to defy this cycle that I am missing. Like I said prior, my knowledge of this process ended in middle school science class so I'm confident that I'm missing something.
Thanks for your time!
Yeah but Agriculture produces stuff we actually need instead of automating people's jobs and child porn
Though not all agriculture is equal. We don't need to be eating nearly so much meat, dairy, and so on though. Per capita consumption has gone through the roof in previous decades. If we are concerned about water, we should also be also reducing our consumption. For a number of other reasons too
You are right but I find it quite hard to raise arguments against cattle raising when the animals existing allow for a better outcome than if they didn't.
An objective example: I've recently read a paper on how two landrace breeds, one of sheep and one of cows, are more effective at preventing wild fires than conventional cleaning efforts through the use of machinery to manage vegetation. The animals selectively eat vegetation that is usually source of ignition or facilitates fast spread of fire, reach areas where machines can not go and do not destroy the landscape. Apparently there are good indicators that the grazing may even lead to soil improvement and more biodiversity.
Regardless, there are people trying to remove these animals from the landscape. I don't agree. Better to have animals roaming around, living their lives, than burning fuel to try and make a poor work at cleaning what otherwise are abandoned tracts of land and then have wild fires destroying everything in they path, often caused by malicious human hand.
The better approach for those cases is to let the wild grazers back into the land. Cattle and other modern farm animals don't graze like wild life did
https://sentientmedia.org/cattle-ranching-terrible-for-biodiversity/
Moreover in the net, having cattle on those is usually a net negative to the ecosystem
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-damaging-farm-products-organic-pasture-fed-beef-lamb
There are no wild grazers here. Closest to it are wild boars and a few introduced deers. I'm in Portugal. Old country. We had a large number of landraces, adapted to specific locations, mostly bred for free range grazing and foraging but the commercial breeds nearly wiped them out.
If we assume that's true, this still leaves the emission side of things which are quite high for cattle. Cattle are some of the heaviest emitters because of how they digest. Are we at least in agreement that the production level and thus consumption level should come down?
We do.
I still remember meat being treated as a speciality dish, not a daily presence. And the animals were allowed to grow slowly. Herds were smaller. The most affordable meats were normally rabbit, chicken and pidgeon, all animals most people raised at home.
Industrial farming is a monstrosity.