Vegan madness

I heard someone commenting on a report about the sequencing of the bovine genome on AM on Friday. To quote from the transcript:

Dr Robert Sparrow from Monash University says the development won't spare animals any needless suffering and he says genetic breakthroughs in the livestock industry are not the key to sustainable food production.

ROBERT SPARROW: The beef industry essentially takes land and grain that could be used to support human beings and feeds them to cows.

Cattle are an incredibly inefficient way to produce food. They are a luxury food and if we were really concerned about the environment we would be eating a much more vegetarian diet.

What planet is he on? He can try running a plough and harvester up and down the rocky, hilly country we farm - our beef cattle are NOT taking land that could be used for anything except growing grass and kangaroos. (And we don't feed them grain.)

Apparently, Dr Sparrow is a "Senior Lecturer, Centre for Human Bioethics" at Monash University, with a whole lot of publications about the ethics of this, that and the other thing. It seems that none of his papers cover the ethics of blindly pushing a vegan philosophy without connecting it to reality, and the ethics of saying someone's livelihood is an unnecessary luxury.

The reality is that cattle are actually an efficient converter of low quality feed into higher quality protein. As well, if they were a luxury foodstuff, the value of the animal would be much higher, and farmers would not need to be so "efficient" in their production methods. It is fair to say that cattle farming is not the most environmentally sensitive system but this is largely due to economic pressures. (I think dairy farming is worse.)

Most beef production is on unirrigated pasture, with lower use of sprays and chemicals. Dairy farming is more intensive and reliant on irrigation. The other major users of irrigation in victoria are fruit orchards and vineyards. For all the hot air about rice farming, the fact is that rice farming is only really undertaken when there is an excess of water. From what I can see, the worse excesses of irrigation and spray usage are in the cotton industry.

All these activist vegetarians pushing their "eat more mung beans" need to get a handle on the realities of farming today, the industrialisation of the production of their favourite pulse and the impact on the land of the irrigation and chemicals necessary to produce it at a price that the tightwads in Australia will pay (or the chinese have difficulty beating.) Don't try the "Organic" argument - the only reason the world can produce enough food is because of the use of chemicals to manage pests that eat those foods and diseases that destroy those foods. 100% Organic production would require more land, labour and water than can be provided.

Bah. I hope they all suffer iron and vitamin deficiencies.

Still Dry...

Hangind out for rain again. Some is forecast for tomorrow (friday), but I'll believe it when I see it (or at least can measure it in the gauge.)

I've been contemplating takeover and change. Why do people buy up something good, then alter it? (Or why don't people recognise success when they see it?) I was reading about Hummers (you know, the big military vehicles), and how the rights to a civilian version were sold to a US car company (GM?) They had the H1 - very similar to the original, totally impractical but with the appeal of the original. Then there was the H2 - toned down, a bit easier, but still like the original. Now there is the H3 - which is really not a Hummer. But you can't buy a proper Hummer now, because the car company has the rights and doesn't make one. The fact that the original was not a big seller is obivously why they brought out the subsequent models - but they have now cut off the niche market that wanted them in the first place. (OK, they are also an awful gas guzzler, I don't really want one and I am in Australia - but I am attracted by the original, and not the later versions. I'll never buy an H3, but I might have bought an H1.)

I'm also worried by the cavalier attitude toward farming and food production in Australia. We can't all be niche sellers and the market is not made up from niche buyers. However, the average beef farm seems no longer able to support itself without the farmer having outside income. Corporate farms seem to do OK, but that is a scaled up, margin-oriented exercise, and seems to be targetted at either a) niche markets (eg Wagyu) or b) mass market, undifferentiated meat (McDonalds, Supermarkets, frozen hamburgers, meat pies etc.)

I had a friend who tried to do small volume quality beef - but transport costs killed the business. He couldn't charge enough for the beef to cover his transport costs, and he couldn't grow the business enough to get the economies of scale.

Where does this leave us? Facing a future with far too little quality produce - because the bulk of Australia will not (cannot?) pay for the cost of producing quality.