I have been battling with the meat dilemma for over a decade. Although I agree with a lot of what you say concerning meat, I also disagree with some. I have been vegetarian for many years, and although I have no issue eating meat, I refuse to support the food systems we currently have. I currently lack the ability to rear my own animals, but I hope that one day when I have the capacity to, that will chance and I can reintroduce meat back into my diet in an ethical and responsible manner . Few things you said i don't agree with however. Although cows technically replace bison in America, bison at their peak numbered in the 60 million. Currently, global numbers of cattle world wide number close to 1 billion. That is almost 20 times as many so they produce 20 times more methane to add to everything else us humans do to affect our climate. And although Allan Savoury's work talks about managing grassland, mimicking bison migration, if all of our meat was reared like that, then everybody would have enough meat for only a couple of meals a year, which is to say, not much. Anything more than what bison graze (which mimics nature) drastically reduced biodiversity in natural grasslands to my knowledge and over grazing yes, does lead to desertification in hotter areas Therefore, the solution for modern agriculture is to feed cattle large amount of grain (this in not just meat, but for dairy as well, I used to work on a diary farm and we fed our milking cows around 10kg of grain a day, and huge amounts more in winter when the grazing land couldn't recover fast enough to support the vast numbers). As a result, we do need vast amounts of land to support large herbivores as we rear them in too intense of a space. And yes, that grain is farmed with tillage (although as time goes on, we are developing new techniques of low tillage grain production and/or perennial grains) and a lot of that land could be used to feed grains to humans instead, so in terms of calorific efficiency, we gain far less calories per hectare by feeding them to animals. I do agree that not all land can be used for grain or vegetables; I used to live in Norway, and a lot of the landscape there is mountainous and in perpetual darkness part of the year, so the only way it can be used is for meat production. In that case, it makes far more sense for locals to have a meat centered diet, rather than import produce from half way across the world. Despite all this, I really believe that meat rabbits are the most sustainable source of meat and that more people should be rearing their own. So thank you for your videos and the education you provide, we need more people really thinking about how they source their meat and how our food is produced
Agreed. I always say ethical vegetarians/vegans spend to much time harassing small farmers who don't have enough resources to fight back and are ignoring the larger problem. We are on the same team. The key point about beef is that beef is not the only meat! I could probably produce all the meat I could eat year round off of a couple acres if I was only eating only rabbits. Farmed fish have an almost 1:1 feed conversion ratio; goats and sheep are more efficient on pasture, etc. I think we mostly agree. My only other quibble is on the grain issue. I'm not sure it's great for humans to eat a lot of grain, especially industrially farmed grain. Basically I look at most of the grain grown in the US as more or less inedible to humans. I should probably do a video on this but long story short, industrial grain farming is easy, cheap, and efficient, but terrible for humans. If we feed that to animals we lose a lot of calories but get a superior product. There are other caveats as well obviously. At the end of the day I'm a pragmatist. I want to provide resources for people who want to opt out, but I don't expect people to be puritans. I still eat factory farmed meat often enough, but getting away as much as you can helps. I also think that for many people, a meat based diet is genuinely the best diet for them, and even though I love animals, I ultimately put human welfare above them. HOWEVER, there's absolutely no reason that modern agriculture needs to be so brutal, especially with animals. If even basic measures were put in place we could massively reduce animal suffering, with only a small loss in production capacity. If people myself included, want to eat a meat based diet, we should produce what we can and shift our patterns. Beef is fine, but eat more rabbit, geese, goat, sheep, and fish. Prioritize supporting local and/or sustainable operations whenever possible. produce what you can, especially if you've got a little land. With advances in technology and falling human populations this may not matter in the future. But for now i think its the best we can do, and that will have to be good enough.
@@westmeadowrabbitsSomething so many ignore is the EFFORT it takes to grow crops vs letting an animal feed itself on pasture. A cow on one acre will feed a modest person for more than a year… Milk and cheese is a very efficient food as well. I find it much easier to care for my animals than I do growing an equivalent amount of food. The sheer amount of effort, or machinery, required to farm 3 acres (rather than put animals on it) is a key part of this discussion that everyone ignores. A pastoral life is MUCH easier and less fossil fuel heavy than a crop-centered one. Healthy Animals require very little chemical interventions, and mostly do not need anything shipped to them other than feed in less optimal scenarios (wrong animal, wrong environment). Crops have the same fossil fuel management, people driving to the fields and on them to do various stages of management, tilling, spraying, weeding, harvesting, and then the eventual processing and distribution. Small scale meat production on the other hand….? All most operations need is a bit of feed for wintertime only, which can be done at the same time the farmer buys their own family some food…. Then of course processing on site takes almost no machinery, and shipping is more localized than is the case for grains, legumes, etc…
I wonder at the percentage of land considered truly “arable”. In many cases, prime forestland is felled for industrial crop centered agriculture (usually corn or soy, not only for animals but people too…) when animals can actually live in harmony with those environments. Personally I raise goats for milk, and my goats graze amongst forestland. Their pasture is pokeweed, blackberries, undesirable rocky ground in the app mountains. Where I live, good hayfields are rare, flat ground is rarer. I raise chickens free range, they march wherever they want and eat for free from spring to fall. Something that most people do not understand is the sheer effort it takes to grow the variety and amount of plants required to sustain a human being over a decade, compared to how easily one can live off of a mostly meat, eggs, milk products based “herdsman’s” diet. I pretty much fed myself for a very very small amount of effort for a year, as an experiment to see if I could. I drank milk, made yogurt and cheese, ate eggs every day, and had occasional meat. The amount of diversity, effort etc to grow the right vegan nutrient profile is ASTRONOMICAL compared to what I did… My goats know their names, were bottlefed, can carry weight for me, and follow me for walks. They require minimal management, I just do a health checkup once a month/do famacha scoring to check worm loads. Hell goats don’t even need fencing to stay in the same “zone” they call home. They put themselves in their shed at night… I don’t have to chase them, they walk right up to me for some love… Have you considered trying to find “off the grid” farmers like me, who follow protocols you find more appealing in animal care? That would probably be a better way to fight your battle than convince others to go meat free. Setting the example of “look you don’t need to buy the non-ethical meat/milk from the grocery store.” Government really put us small farmers in a tight spot here. It’s harder for me to sell than a corporate farm… my 2 cents
@@akatsukiawsome13That's a good point. Part of the reason why nomadic tribes like the Mongols where able to conquer half the world is because they could filed far larger armies. Not because their population was higher, but because their primary food source was mobile and very low labor.
You missed the most important part of how to push back against the environmental argument. Every single molecule of CH4 a ruminant belches out came from carbon that they ate. And that CH4 emitted eventually breaks down into CO2 in the atmosphere. That CO2 then feeds the plants that the ruminant eats. It's a closed, balanced loop. The real tragedy is environmentalists taking their eyes off the real culprit, which is adding new carbon to the carbon cycle via fossil fuel use. It doesn't matter if CH4 is a much more powerful GHG than CO2. Ruminant livestock is a sustainable cycle that can be perpetuated forever because it's not causing carbon to permanently accumulate in the atmosphere.
100% agree! By their logic we should massacre elephants, and every other wild ruminant because they are adding methane. It doesn't make any sense. I honestly need to remake this video, it was mostly an emotional response after having the same arguments multiple times. I could definitely present the information in a better way.
@@cicolas_nage Firstly, I don't believe individual actions are going to be sufficient or even impactful when it comes to tackling climate change, and the idea that they could comes from none other than fossil carbon propaganda efforts. Anywho, my point about ruminant CH4 emissions is about long term sustainability. Sure, CH4 may be a significantly more harmful molecule than CO2 from a GHG standpoint but the point is that an increase in livestock only increases the equilibrium point at which atmospheric CH4 levels will approach. Meanwhile, emissions from fossil carbon have no equilibrium point, they accumulate. This is really basic science and I have very little patience for these distractions away from the root cause. Especially not when these distractions happen to be politically ineffective. You're trying to convince Americans to eat less meat. You could be putting that effort towards convincing Americans not to tolerate the use of fossil carbon in unnecessary industrial practices. In other words, you are taking on a greater challenge which promises weaker results, if even successful. Keep your eye on the ball. There are plenty of people in this country who are still on the fence as to whether or not climate change is even real. You're out here telling them that preventing it is going to require them to eat less meat. You're not only failing to win them over, you're actively turning them away. And you're also just plain wrong because there's no scientific reason why we can't sustainably continue to eat as much meat as we currently do in perpetuity. And spare the "oh but every little bit helps". This is a serious problem and we need to take the political impact of the ideas we propose seriously.
@@westmeadowrabbits be sure to do some research on how artificial fertilizers are produced and include that too, because that's the main part where the cause of climate change intersects with agriculture. Look up steam reforming and Haber-Bosch, it ultimately uses natural gas to produce ammonia for the N component of synthetic fertilizers and emits CO2 in the process. Natural gas of course is also CH4 but the difference between natural gas and ruminant digestion is natural gas isn't in the carbon cycle until we put it there. This is where the real irony is: factory farming livestock uses artificial fertilizer to produce the feed and consumes CH4, while open pasture livestock emits CH4. So at the surface level it might seem like open pasture is bad, but in reality it's only when synthetic fertilizers are introduced that you get to net positive carbon emissions (and fossil fuel-based transportation infrastructure, of course)
@@Nasai1 Couldn't have said it better myself. and you are spot on with your comments about fertilizers as well. People don't seem to understand that without fossil fuels the most effective way to fertilize is with animal manures.
This is a little off the subject but I have a rabbit that's was sneezing a lot toda. I changed the hay with some old hay under the cages so I don't know if the dust caused it.I'm not sure so I quarantined it. Could it also be the heat? Is there any kind of medicine I can give him he's my only male breeder.
You are so right but what has me worried is the kids today are the one's that will have to fight the next war with gun control and eating grass. Kind of makes you think if the meat today and yesterday is what we eat who is going to eat our kids. The one's with no gun controls
never thought about the enormous historical bison population, that's a good point
Thanks for having common sense, Sam. It is rare these days.
Absolutely brilliant about the buffalo and emissions
Its funny how no one ever mentions the hundreds of millions of ruminants living in the wild when discussing methane emissions from agriculture!
I have been battling with the meat dilemma for over a decade. Although I agree with a lot of what you say concerning meat, I also disagree with some. I have been vegetarian for many years, and although I have no issue eating meat, I refuse to support the food systems we currently have. I currently lack the ability to rear my own animals, but I hope that one day when I have the capacity to, that will chance and I can reintroduce meat back into my diet in an ethical and responsible manner .
Few things you said i don't agree with however. Although cows technically replace bison in America, bison at their peak numbered in the 60 million. Currently, global numbers of cattle world wide number close to 1 billion. That is almost 20 times as many so they produce 20 times more methane to add to everything else us humans do to affect our climate. And although Allan Savoury's work talks about managing grassland, mimicking bison migration, if all of our meat was reared like that, then everybody would have enough meat for only a couple of meals a year, which is to say, not much. Anything more than what bison graze (which mimics nature) drastically reduced biodiversity in natural grasslands to my knowledge and over grazing yes, does lead to desertification in hotter areas
Therefore, the solution for modern agriculture is to feed cattle large amount of grain (this in not just meat, but for dairy as well, I used to work on a diary farm and we fed our milking cows around 10kg of grain a day, and huge amounts more in winter when the grazing land couldn't recover fast enough to support the vast numbers). As a result, we do need vast amounts of land to support large herbivores as we rear them in too intense of a space. And yes, that grain is farmed with tillage (although as time goes on, we are developing new techniques of low tillage grain production and/or perennial grains) and a lot of that land could be used to feed grains to humans instead, so in terms of calorific efficiency, we gain far less calories per hectare by feeding them to animals.
I do agree that not all land can be used for grain or vegetables; I used to live in Norway, and a lot of the landscape there is mountainous and in perpetual darkness part of the year, so the only way it can be used is for meat production. In that case, it makes far more sense for locals to have a meat centered diet, rather than import produce from half way across the world.
Despite all this, I really believe that meat rabbits are the most sustainable source of meat and that more people should be rearing their own. So thank you for your videos and the education you provide, we need more people really thinking about how they source their meat and how our food is produced
Agreed. I always say ethical vegetarians/vegans spend to much time harassing small farmers who don't have enough resources to fight back and are ignoring the larger problem. We are on the same team. The key point about beef is that beef is not the only meat! I could probably produce all the meat I could eat year round off of a couple acres if I was only eating only rabbits. Farmed fish have an almost 1:1 feed conversion ratio; goats and sheep are more efficient on pasture, etc.
I think we mostly agree. My only other quibble is on the grain issue. I'm not sure it's great for humans to eat a lot of grain, especially industrially farmed grain. Basically I look at most of the grain grown in the US as more or less inedible to humans. I should probably do a video on this but long story short, industrial grain farming is easy, cheap, and efficient, but terrible for humans. If we feed that to animals we lose a lot of calories but get a superior product. There are other caveats as well obviously.
At the end of the day I'm a pragmatist. I want to provide resources for people who want to opt out, but I don't expect people to be puritans. I still eat factory farmed meat often enough, but getting away as much as you can helps. I also think that for many people, a meat based diet is genuinely the best diet for them, and even though I love animals, I ultimately put human welfare above them. HOWEVER, there's absolutely no reason that modern agriculture needs to be so brutal, especially with animals. If even basic measures were put in place we could massively reduce animal suffering, with only a small loss in production capacity.
If people myself included, want to eat a meat based diet, we should produce what we can and shift our patterns. Beef is fine, but eat more rabbit, geese, goat, sheep, and fish. Prioritize supporting local and/or sustainable operations whenever possible. produce what you can, especially if you've got a little land.
With advances in technology and falling human populations this may not matter in the future. But for now i think its the best we can do, and that will have to be good enough.
@@westmeadowrabbitsSomething so many ignore is the EFFORT it takes to grow crops vs letting an animal feed itself on pasture. A cow on one acre will feed a modest person for more than a year… Milk and cheese is a very efficient food as well.
I find it much easier to care for my animals than I do growing an equivalent amount of food. The sheer amount of effort, or machinery, required to farm 3 acres (rather than put animals on it) is a key part of this discussion that everyone ignores. A pastoral life is MUCH easier and less fossil fuel heavy than a crop-centered one.
Healthy Animals require very little chemical interventions, and mostly do not need anything shipped to them other than feed in less optimal scenarios (wrong animal, wrong environment). Crops have the same fossil fuel management, people driving to the fields and on them to do various stages of management, tilling, spraying, weeding, harvesting, and then the eventual processing and distribution.
Small scale meat production on the other hand….? All most operations need is a bit of feed for wintertime only, which can be done at the same time the farmer buys their own family some food…. Then of course processing on site takes almost no machinery, and shipping is more localized than is the case for grains, legumes, etc…
I wonder at the percentage of land considered truly “arable”. In many cases, prime forestland is felled for industrial crop centered agriculture (usually corn or soy, not only for animals but people too…) when animals can actually live in harmony with those environments.
Personally I raise goats for milk, and my goats graze amongst forestland. Their pasture is pokeweed, blackberries, undesirable rocky ground in the app mountains.
Where I live, good hayfields are rare, flat ground is rarer. I raise chickens free range, they march wherever they want and eat for free from spring to fall.
Something that most people do not understand is the sheer effort it takes to grow the variety and amount of plants required to sustain a human being over a decade, compared to how easily one can live off of a mostly meat, eggs, milk products based “herdsman’s” diet. I pretty much fed myself for a very very small amount of effort for a year, as an experiment to see if I could. I drank milk, made yogurt and cheese, ate eggs every day, and had occasional meat.
The amount of diversity, effort etc to grow the right vegan nutrient profile is ASTRONOMICAL compared to what I did… My goats know their names, were bottlefed, can carry weight for me, and follow me for walks. They require minimal management, I just do a health checkup once a month/do famacha scoring to check worm loads. Hell goats don’t even need fencing to stay in the same “zone” they call home. They put themselves in their shed at night… I don’t have to chase them, they walk right up to me for some love…
Have you considered trying to find “off the grid” farmers like me, who follow protocols you find more appealing in animal care? That would probably be a better way to fight your battle than convince others to go meat free. Setting the example of “look you don’t need to buy the non-ethical meat/milk from the grocery store.”
Government really put us small farmers in a tight spot here. It’s harder for me to sell than a corporate farm… my 2 cents
@@akatsukiawsome13That's a good point. Part of the reason why nomadic tribes like the Mongols where able to conquer half the world is because they could filed far larger armies. Not because their population was higher, but because their primary food source was mobile and very low labor.
I raise meat rabbits as a part of becoming self-sustainable. I use and have sold their poop as fertilizer. I’m still a newbie btw
Awesome! Subscribed and shared!
Thanks! ❤
Totally agree
You missed the most important part of how to push back against the environmental argument. Every single molecule of CH4 a ruminant belches out came from carbon that they ate. And that CH4 emitted eventually breaks down into CO2 in the atmosphere. That CO2 then feeds the plants that the ruminant eats. It's a closed, balanced loop.
The real tragedy is environmentalists taking their eyes off the real culprit, which is adding new carbon to the carbon cycle via fossil fuel use. It doesn't matter if CH4 is a much more powerful GHG than CO2. Ruminant livestock is a sustainable cycle that can be perpetuated forever because it's not causing carbon to permanently accumulate in the atmosphere.
100% agree! By their logic we should massacre elephants, and every other wild ruminant because they are adding methane. It doesn't make any sense.
I honestly need to remake this video, it was mostly an emotional response after having the same arguments multiple times. I could definitely present the information in a better way.
@@cicolas_nage Firstly, I don't believe individual actions are going to be sufficient or even impactful when it comes to tackling climate change, and the idea that they could comes from none other than fossil carbon propaganda efforts.
Anywho, my point about ruminant CH4 emissions is about long term sustainability. Sure, CH4 may be a significantly more harmful molecule than CO2 from a GHG standpoint but the point is that an increase in livestock only increases the equilibrium point at which atmospheric CH4 levels will approach. Meanwhile, emissions from fossil carbon have no equilibrium point, they accumulate.
This is really basic science and I have very little patience for these distractions away from the root cause. Especially not when these distractions happen to be politically ineffective. You're trying to convince Americans to eat less meat. You could be putting that effort towards convincing Americans not to tolerate the use of fossil carbon in unnecessary industrial practices. In other words, you are taking on a greater challenge which promises weaker results, if even successful. Keep your eye on the ball.
There are plenty of people in this country who are still on the fence as to whether or not climate change is even real. You're out here telling them that preventing it is going to require them to eat less meat. You're not only failing to win them over, you're actively turning them away. And you're also just plain wrong because there's no scientific reason why we can't sustainably continue to eat as much meat as we currently do in perpetuity. And spare the "oh but every little bit helps". This is a serious problem and we need to take the political impact of the ideas we propose seriously.
@@westmeadowrabbits be sure to do some research on how artificial fertilizers are produced and include that too, because that's the main part where the cause of climate change intersects with agriculture. Look up steam reforming and Haber-Bosch, it ultimately uses natural gas to produce ammonia for the N component of synthetic fertilizers and emits CO2 in the process.
Natural gas of course is also CH4 but the difference between natural gas and ruminant digestion is natural gas isn't in the carbon cycle until we put it there. This is where the real irony is: factory farming livestock uses artificial fertilizer to produce the feed and consumes CH4, while open pasture livestock emits CH4. So at the surface level it might seem like open pasture is bad, but in reality it's only when synthetic fertilizers are introduced that you get to net positive carbon emissions (and fossil fuel-based transportation infrastructure, of course)
@@Nasai1 Couldn't have said it better myself. and you are spot on with your comments about fertilizers as well. People don't seem to understand that without fossil fuels the most effective way to fertilize is with animal manures.
Well done sir
This is a little off the subject but I have a rabbit that's was sneezing a lot toda. I changed the hay with some old hay under the cages so I don't know if the dust caused it.I'm not sure so I quarantined it. Could it also be the heat? Is there any kind of medicine I can give him he's my only male breeder.
Sneezing can be caused by a lot of things, dust being the most likely. I wouldn't worry as long as it doesn't persist.
Thanks
You are so right but what has me worried is the kids today are the one's that will have to fight the next war with gun control and eating grass. Kind of makes you think if the meat today and yesterday is what we eat who is going to eat our kids. The one's with no gun controls