Plight of Bull Calves

Your article doesn't say what you appear to think you are saying. It does not say that going vegan would be greater at reducing emissions than eliminating flying. It is bringing in other woolly factors such as land use and not explaining how it is weighting such factors and why. It does however note that pasture based beef (such as in Ireland) generates 1/12th of that generated in deforested areas on 1/50th of the land

It also isn't clear what it is presenting and how it is obtaining statistics. It may be be assessing the impact on a global basis of everyone going vegan vs everyone stopping flying. In which case you are including the reduction of billions who live in poverty but might have a cow, but will never be on a flight.

You are not considering the effect of the billions of people who eat food but will never get near a plane.

I'm sure that if I did a scientific study of the poorest 200m people in India and China, I could legitimately conclude that if they gave up drinking tea that the effect on emissions would be multiples of times greater than if they gave up transatlantic flights. What I couldn't do is extrapolate to conclude that Theolonius Monk would be better off giving up tea in Dublin than jaunts to New York if he wanted to decrease his carbon footprint.

Not really. You could knock a billion off the population and we'd still be at what we were 10-20 years ago. And we were already

The fact is that by being more efficient with land we can make a huge impact. And nobody want to hear it but factory grown food might be the way forward. It's far less land use. We could re-nature large parts of land that was used for food production. And factory grown foods are getting better. Problem is that if they taste exactly the same or better, people still won't eat them because people want to have what they have now.

Massive depopulation is the only way to lessen climate change if we don't make any other changes and don't want to adjust our lifestyle.

Vertical farming isn't without issues either. I'm not a million miles from a place that grows herbs and things in water and some chemicals in a purpose built tunnel. They were doing grand but the energy price rises has them closed down temporarily (or so they say) after the purchasers of what they grew wouldn't up the price to them to cover the rise in energy costs. Once again, the primary producer screwed over.

unless you only eat whole foods and no processed stuff, which is unlikely, you don't really know what you're eating anyway! remember horsemeatgate etc.

Massive depopulation is on the way anyway. World population will peak at about 8.8billon around 2050 before declining rapidly.

Most of the world except sub Saharan Africa is below the tipping point replacement rate.

I'm not quite sure below know what they are wishing for; depopulation will mean a disproportionate amount of old people working late into life with very few young people around to provide services, near empty schools etc.

But hey it good for the environment 🥺

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/27/world-population-bomb-may-never-go-off-as-feared-finds-study

Yep...they always find a way to co-opt/bastardise anything that might be a threat to them and ultimately ensure their own survival ... its sickening really...it very much acts against the interest of our species as a whole when companies get to those kind of levels.

The severe drawbacks should be discussed side by side with the efficiencies of scale when it comes to very large companies.

price-taker

nounECONOMICS

noun: price-taker; plural noun: price-takers a company or individual that must accept the prevailing prices in the market of its products, its own transactions being unable to affect the market price.

Expecting individual farmers to band together in large enough numbers and somehow control/affect the market so a fair return is given that reflects the costs of production and the investment of time and resources to achieve said production not to mention a margin on top for risk is somewhat unrealistic...they wouldnt be let anyway I suspect...like I said every other entity that is involved in the chain has their margin protected except the producer.

Perhaps if enough banded together and withheld supply it might have an effect but they'd need to go without income for quite some time to achieve anything....and some groups have tried to no avail (it wasn't very well thought out admittedly) ....they were undercut by others deciding to sell anyway....in the case of beef ...you have invested money in feeding coming up to a finish (in the multiples of hundreds per animal) and see that having to continue while the value of the animal declines as it approaches a spurious age limit where its automatically devalued all the while with no income coming in...how long can you hold out realistically while you watch your livelihood circle the drain?....one would need to have a lot of faith in ones fellow man and yyou would also be thinking of replacements you have to purchase by a certain time limit or have no income source next year...its the same story with a lot of production tbh

The rest of the industry has the primary producer by the balls and they know it and get better at using that leverage and influence as time progresses ..over time they work as an organised group towards exerting more and more control on the supply (a disjointed disparate disorganised group of individuals in wildly varying circumstances) and extracting higher and higher amounts of profits and moving the value up the chain away from the people that spend the longest amount of time, invest the mmost in the individual animal and carry the greatest risk. So it may annoy you that people assert farmers are price takers but that does not make it any less true.

They are about the clearest examples of price takers I can think of as are most primary producers the world over.

That representative body doesn't represent me and hasn't for a very long time.....they haven't been all bad but farmers are a very disparate group ... we are not unified and are unlikely to be is definitely one thing that gives

You have full time farmers on varying acreages

You have part time farmers

You have young and old farmers with very different outlooks and priorities and wisdom and lack thereof (the wisdom is not all with the older heads)

You have guys on huge acreages with massive payments doing well and you have guys on massive payments just keeping their heads above water due to bad decisions (or luck in some cases)

You have very large dairy farmers in a company structure with thousands of acres and hundreds of cows under them and the ear of the guys that have the ear of the minister

You have lads with a hundred acres and 20 cattle farming extensively and another lad with 40 acres doing traditional breeds and market gardening.

You have a lad with 5 acres and a shed used for finishing cattle with a capacity of 500 head and a factory contract

You have a lad that has 1000 acres on mountain somewhere in the arsehole of sligo lucky to be able to run a couple of hundred sheep....

Which reminds me you have sheep farmers and mixed farmers and tillage farmers and dairy + beef and tillage with a bit of contracting and goat milkers and every other thing in between

You have a farm that is just a factory feedllot that is there to suppress prices by ensuring supply

Then you have the jobbers and lifestyle boys etc etc...

.its Nigh on impossible for one group to represent farmers interests as farmers aren't one group....the more farmers are in a group the less anyones interests will be represented properly and the more fragmented the representative groups are the less **** use their representation will be.

As for a dedicated minister ...forgive me for being a cynic but most ministers primary concern is themselves...and I'm not criticising them for that..that again is a systemic issue....and in fairness to the current minister maybe he is doing his best...he's been less damaging for agriculture than the last 3 or 4 ministers for education have been for education (leaving out Joe mc Hugh...he didn't get enough time to have a fair crack at making an even bigger balls of it)

Is it even legal to band together to drive up the price for consumers? I mean this is not legal for companies, price fixing etc.

There was a farmer spokesman on the news years ago saying a steak should be twenty euro, this is the other extreme, price gouging.