Sustainability Wars

Well I have to say, it’s gunna take awhile for me to get my voice back after this week. Along with attending all my classes I have watched two documentaries. This week I watched “What the Health” and “Cowspiracy” and let me tell you, my blood pressure went through the roof! I realize that not everyone reading this knows my point of view on these subjects so therefore I will do my best to explain my reasoning thoroughly. What was said by these deeply flawed documentaries is incredibly distant from the truth and I would like to make the corrections and provide explanations to the points made in these documentaries. As I am in University and have other things to do, I will not be able to touch on every point made but I do promise to comment on the most interesting and major ones.

I started my trip down bullshit alley with the documentary “What the Health” followed by “Cowspiracy”. “What the Health”  focused on the physical impacts of animal agriculture to society. Starting off the argument that red meat causes diabetes, and cancer along with several other ailments. While also making the claim that eating eggs or any sort of animal product is the equivalent of smoking cigarettes. This got my blood pressure to a dangerous level, therefore I proceeded to pause the documentary and vent to my roommates to whom then vented with me and sat down to watch the rest. In case any dairy friends happen to be reading this I will tell you what claim they made on milk. Apparently, a dairy cow must drink 1000 gallons of water to create 1 gallon of milk. That’s right, go ahead and read that again (just for a reference this is another point where I paused the video to vent).

As much as these false claims got my heart rate up, they were exactly what I expected when deciding to watch these videos. What bothers me about these documentaries is how many people believe that the claims made in the video are true. Contrary to the new Canada Food Guide that just came out this week, red meat is a very healthy source of nutrients along with all animal products. The amount of nutrients found in animal products is notably higher than plant products along with meat being the most easily digestible between the two options. Claims being made that we are herbivores is simply incorrect since we don’t have the digestive tract that can sustain a completely plant-based diet without supplements.

Okay, so those first few paragraphs were pretty dry weren’t they? Well let’s get into the fun conversation. What might this fun conversation be? Claims that animal agriculture doesn’t contribute anything to sustainability. This argument is easily solved by common sense (which isn’t so common), let’s look at all the crop land in the world. This crop land is used as such because the soil can support the demand of nutrients from the crops. As one with common sense would suspect, not all land contains these high nutrients needed to support cropping. Livestock do not use these high value fields as pasture and rangeland, livestock instead use the land that is unable to support high value crop. By using this pasture and rangeland for livestock, farmers and ranchers are returning nutrients to the soil. Which in turn increases the amount of biomass. The extra biomass in pasture and rangeland will sequester much more carbon than a high value crop field therefore increasing plant health. Yet that is not where it ends, animal agriculture also brings sustainability to the farming industry by using the by-products from crops as feed. Take canola for example, only 40% of a canola seed can be used for making canola oil. That leaves 60% of canola as a by-product that is unable to be consumed by humans. Currently this by-product from canola is fed to many dairy cows. If animal agriculture wasn’t around, then where would that product go?

People argue that animal agriculture isn’t sustainable, but I know that without it, nothing is. There are three parts to sustainability, environmental, social, and economic. Too often I find people forgetting about the third part. Environmentally agriculture is doing its part in replenishing the soil with nutrients and keeping plants and animals alike healthy. Socially agriculture is doing it’s best to create jobs, keep animals comfortable and well taken care of with lots of regulations to ensure the welfare of the animal, and educate the public on the importance of agriculture. Economically, agriculture is creating enough revenue to fund new research and programs to further improve agriculture in Canada.

There ya have it, consider yourself educated. Farmkid out.