Re:Civilizational Collapse, Part 4
by whatshisface on Tuesday August 27, 2019 @10:21AM
(#20809833)
I'm not an expert on global agriculture, but a lot of the famous Texas cattle ranches can basically only grow grass. If the natural state of the land is brush that only goes up to your ankles you aren't going to feed much other than grazers off it. The efficient solution would be to use the good land to grow food and the rest of the land to feed livestock, and that's what tends to happen (feedlot factory farms fueled by cereal crops notwithstanding).
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> the famous Texas cattle ranches can basically only grow grass
Why? Anyway, wheat is a grass.
Re:Civilizational Collapse, Part 4
by dredmorbius on Tuesday August 27, 2019 @12:31PM
(#20811513)
Wheat is the simple-starch-rich seed kernel of a hybridised grass.
Much of Texas lacks water -- generally West Texas, a line extending from roughly Austin. In the US generally, the 100th parallel divides the moister east from the drier west. Topsoils are also far poorer than further east.
There was an experiment conducted some years ago on dryland farming. It ended poorly:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl
Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time is an excellent telling of this:
https://books.google.com/books?id=np1RwDQfpjsC&pg=PP1#v=onep...
Not all grasses are equally edible. Most aren't, in fact.