A bit of perspective on all of the time, effort, and money used into raising food in our country. Has it given us more food to eat?
Believe it or not, it's actually debateable. On one hand, grain yields per acre have risen by half an order of magnitude or more. On the other hand, we shouldn't forget that 70% of grain is fed to livestock, so probably the better measure of how much food we get--especially in light of our meat-heavy diets--is how many meat animals we have.
On that score, it's said that our continent supported 60-100 million bison in the mid-1800s, and the USDA estimates about 45 million adult cattle today.
In other words, all of the subsidies, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and such that we use to "grow more food" may, or may not, result in actually having more food to eat.
Plus, grazing cattle are more picturesque and healthier to eat. Seems that the simple life may have more going for it than we thought!
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3 comments:
Like Wendell said, it is not the use of technology that is bad, it is it's misuse. Thinking that bigger and more is always better has had it effects on our agricultural system. We have lost a respct for nature and it's yield, and through "spinning our wheels" we haven't accomplished much (if anything) but sacrificed a great deal.
It's possible that our cattle population "churns" more often than the bison population did, though.
What was the life expectancy of a bison before Bill Cody and his type got involved? What's the life expectancy of beef or milk stock?
(For some reason sugarry desserts keep me up at night... :^)
Mark, the data I've seen indicate that a decade is a good long life for either a cow or bison, though some might live 20 or 30 years. The churn? Most male bovines live about 2 years until they're slaughtered, most females somewhat longer until calf-bearing becomes problematic--say 5-10 years.
So on one hand you've got more feed going to "grow" the animal. On the other hand, bison regularly reached a ton in weight back then and needed more feed to maintain their bulk.
The long & short of it, IMO, is that this simple comparison does show that modern agriculture isn't as productive as we've been led to believe.
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