I heard something to do with Nitrogen and …cow farts(?) I am really unsure of this and would like to learn more.

Answer -

4 Parts

  • Ethical reason for consuming animals
  • Methane produced by cows are a harmful greenhouse gas which is contributing to our current climate crisis
  • Health Reasons - there is convincing evidence that processed meats cause cancer
  • it takes a lot more calories of plant food to produce the calories we would consume from the meat.

Details about the answers are in the comments

        • matlag@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          A non-peered review article from a totally unbiased source.

          Coming up next, an article demonstrating the benefit of burning oil for the environment by Shell.

            • matlag@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              Today we burn tons of oil. Say tomorrow we have switched to all electric. Do you think we’ll keep extracting oil and that will create an environmental burden because of that oil sitting around?

              That’s the same reasoning.

              Today we grow megatons of corn,… for different things, including feeding livestocks.

              Tomorrow, if we have less livestock, we’ll adapt the crops mix, just like rest of the world has been or is still doing fine without having mega-herds of cows.

              We don’t have too many cows because we had too much crops. We increased the crops to match the herds!

                • matlag@sh.itjust.works
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                  1 year ago

                  No, we had cotton before we had 1billion cows, and it was working fine. We had corn before we had 1 billion cows and we were doing fine.

                  And other regions in the world have crops and never needed mega-herds of cows to deal with by-products.

                  We don’t need more cars because of all the oil we extract. If we don’t need oil, we’ll stop extracting oil. That’s not speculation.

      • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        no. I just want to see how much water they say cows consumed from cotton and the total amount of water they say was used to grow the cotton. and then I want you to ask yourself if it’s reasonable to attribute ANY of that water to cows (it isn’t)

        • fkn@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Cam you link specifically what you mean? I don’t see any attribution of cotton water to cattle in the 2018 Poor, Nemeck.

          • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            1 year ago

            i’m having problems right now even pulling up the full article, but, to my recollection, they didn’t actually gather any of this data themselves, so you should be able to find some oblique reference to water used somewhere in the body of the paper, and then follow the citation to the actual study that did gather the data.