Maybe not wheat and such, but other, more hardy plants.
You can try to grow it, but good luck hauling the tractor, plow, and combine up that steep hill that only a sheep can traverse. It's not a matter of "can I grow corn in that soil?", as you can grow corn on a rock if you throw enough fertilizer at it. It's a matter of "can I grow corn at any kind of scale that doesn't involve tilling and harvesting by hand?" And for context, keep in mind that people are killed in tractor rollover events all the time as a result of trying to traverse an incline.
There might be something to be said about limiting confined animal production fed with our most fertile crop land, but the same arguments aren't relevant for all cattle production.
From an ecological perspective, you're not losing wild nature for agriculture, cattle are just displacing grazing animals which would have been there otherwise.
Her head of cattle to land ratio is some crazy number like 100 acres to a cow/calf pair. Could be less IDK exactly. Consequnetly she owns thousands of acres to feed her cattle.
There is not enough water there to irrigate non-native edible species over her thousands acre ranch. She'd drain every creek, stream, and river to make a farm happen there.
The health benefits of a whole food plant based diet are astonishing, and the whole missing vitamin mineral thing is trivially taken care of.
Becoming vegan will lead to immediate and long term health benefits. And from personal experience its much easier and more fun than you could dare to expect.
I don't disagree that theres a lot of room and a some benefits to reducing meat consumption. But I don't think that's the same as it being sensible for everyone to be vegan.
https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/wjqbem/judge-convicts...
Plant-only diet is terrible for humans just like a meat-only diet. The best diet for humans is a balanced diet.
She cannot have carbs or sugars, but she needs certain kinds of meat like fish or chicken.
The only way to find this stuff out is to have detailed dietary analysis and bloodwork. You might be surprised what you find out about your own body.
That being said, yes eating nutritious plants is never a bad idea. Being vegan on the other hand, is probably overboard for 90% of humans.
My diet is rich in minimally processed foods like vegetables, fruit, flour I mill myself (I have a home mill), but also meat, egg, and dairy.
Liver is an amazing nutritionally dense food, and there's no benefit to not eating it. Eggs are great too. Fish are great. There's nothing wrong with red meat either in reasonable quantities.
All of which is saying that I see "vegan" as sort of orthogonal to dietary health. It includes things that are bad for you and excludes things that are good for you.
Honestly curious - how is this fun? I try to eat less meat for a personal medical reason and finding non-meat dishes is a hassle, and at some restaurants it's impossible.
No. The health benefits of a balanced diet is astonishing. Vegan diets are just as bad for humans as meatatarian diets.
> and the whole missing vitamin mineral thing is trivially taken care of.
It isn't.
> Becoming vegan will lead to immediate and long term health benefits.
No it won't. Having a balanced diet will. That's why all the oldest people are omnivores.
Humans are built to be omnivores.
A vegan diet is a terrible diet for humans. That's why it has to be augmented so much. The cult of veganism has to be countered just like any other cult.
>> and the whole missing vitamin mineral thing is trivially taken care of.
>It isn't.
I'm dead serious when I say that if you can demonstrate this, you'll be handed a PHd on a platter. Possibly a Nobel prize.
Get writing!
PS sorry can't resist, you'll get another Nobel for publishing how humans are 'built to be...'.
And the typical vegan diet is terrible. A whole food plant based diet is fundamentally different - they only share the fact that they are based on non animal products
> I'm dead serious when I say that if you can demonstrate this, you'll be handed a PHd on a platter. Possibly a Nobel prize.
Are you dead serious?
> PS sorry can't resist, you'll get another Nobel for publishing how humans are 'built to be...'.
Well considering we aren't obligate carnivores and we aren't obligate herbivores, I wonder what we are?
Eating meat, just like eating vegetables, fruits, etc made us who we are. We are actually built by our food consumption evolutionarily speaking.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature16990.epdf
> And the typical vegan diet is terrible.
Yes. Because it's not ones humans are designed for.
> A whole food plant based diet is fundamentally different - they only share the fact that they are based on non animal products
Yikes. That just sounds like a rebranding of a terrible idea. Kind of like how "neo-nazis" rebranded to alt-right.
Balanced diet including meat, veggies, etc > vegan/whole food diet. Human society has proven this to be true. The dominant human society is the balanced diet society. No vegan society nor meat-only society truly exists.
I can see some benefit of looking for the extreme though, it's looking for a theoretical optimum.
I'd have thought they could do studies of land use in India for the most extreme possible switch.
"researcher Mary Beth Hall began by estimating the impact of converting all land now used by the livestock industry to cropland for human food"
Why on earth would you do that? Livestock are much less efficient at using land than crops, in terms of how much land you need to produce a calorie. Furthermore, a HUGE percentage of our current crops are used to feed livestock. Without even Googleing it, the assumption should be that we would not use all pasture land for crop land. The total amount of land under crops might even go down under the vegan scenario, since eating the food directly would be more efficient.
Also:
"Burning the excess waste would add some 2 million tons of carbon to the atmosphere, they estimate."
First off, is burning the most likely way this would be disposed of? Why not compost.
Second, crops are carbon neutral. They take CO2 from the atmosphere when growing, so how can they add CO2 to the atmosphere when burnt?
"Fertilizer demands would also go up while the supply of animal manure dwindled."
Again, only true if the amount of crops increased. I'm doubtful.
The points about nutrition are better made though. Animal products are rich in some minerals and vitamins that are sparse in a vegan diet. Not entirely missing, but sparse. But then that's why I'm not a vegan.