Question by farmgirl: vegetarianism more sustainable?
I’m in complete agreement how a vegetarian diet is much more sustainable than a diet filled with meat, dairy and eggs, what I’m not sure I understand is how a vegetarian diet is more sustainable than a diet containing a small percentage of meat, milk and eggs rather than none at all.
For example, lets say you want to get the largest amount of food possible off of a piece of land. You could rotate a small flock of sheep over that area a few months before you plant it. The sheep aerate the soil with their hooves, but more importantly spread the manure helping to fertilize the soil and thus increasing the crop yield. After the sheep were put on the pasture you would rotate a flock of chickens over it. The chickens eat the bugs and till the soil getting it ready for planting. Not only do the animals add fertility to the land, but they supply lots of protein rich meat, milk and eggs. lets say you have 5 sheep and if you breed them yearly you could expect about 10 lambs, each giving 25 lbs. of dressed meat, so 250 lbs of lamb meat a year. The chickens would be able to supply you with an egg a day each and plenty of meat from the roosters and older hens. If the chickens provide their diet from bugs and plants and the sheep from pasture, that really isn’t a lot of space needed to provide feed for them.
With the same amount of land I don’t see how you could produce as much food with only vegetables. Getting the same amount of protein from vegetables that you would get from the meat/eggs, would mean giving up a lot of space to soy and other legumes. With no livestock on the land then you would end up with much poorer soil and the poor soil would substantially decrease the amount of crops you would as opposed to fertile soil.
I definitely understand how you could get more food from crops than with the same amount of resources and space that goes into a large cattle feed lot.
So I don’t know, maybe Im wrong but I just don’t see how someone could produce the same amount of food with only vegetables as you could with a very small amount of livestock?
I’m curious to hear your thoughts 
Dayana: I’m not really talking about ethics, that’s just a matter of opinion but I’m in full agreements about the large scale livestock can be bad for the environment.
Well this isn’t real, I was just giving an example but lest say it’s on 5 acres. And then I guess you would divide up each acre into 4 parts to rotate the sheep through keeping them in each one for a few days so as not to over graze one area.
Im guessing that the 3900 litres for 1 kg of chicken meat is for a chicken in a large commercial farm. The meat chicken breeds they use (Cornish X) consume a lot more water than a more old fashion breed. Chickens in an industrialized farm are kept in a heated area to increase production. Also animals on pasture eating a diet of grass and so need much less water than one in a feedlot eating corn and soy.
Liberty bell: yes, I have heard of the term factory farm it’s used on here ever 5 seconds. I don’t use it because I find it to be a term made up by PETA and such people, the actual term is CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operation).
You don’t know of anyone who eats roosters… umm I not sure you know really what you are talking about. That’s what roosters are used for, meat, you can’t keep them for eggs. If you hatch out 50% roosters ( males) you aren’t just going to keep them to run around as pets, they will attck each other after all.
Best answer:
Answer by Daisy
The vegetarian diet is not sustainable. There has never been a successful vegetarian civilization in the history of mankind. Why? Because we need animals for their flesh, their byproducts, and their fertilizer.
Just compare the calories in meat with the calories in veggies. Then figure out how many more acres of land would have to be cultivated to produce those calories and anyone with a brain can see that we just don’t have the land in the US to feed our own population as vegetarians. Much less the food surplus that we sell/give to the world every year.
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Tags:more, Sustainable, Vegetarianism
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