Dairy farmers and farms could be highly taxed

[Ted King]

(vikm) wrote:

Also, vegetarian groups have long known about the horrible impact that animal farming have had on the environment and use it as part of their argument to convince people to either eat less meat or quit altogether. It's probably one of the worst things for the environment that we as humans have our hands in.

And applied physics tells us that eating meat is a terribly inefficient way of using solar power. :-) It's a matter of entropy... of the solar energy stored in plants in the form of chemical energy from the products of photosynthesis, each step up the food chain "loses" about 90% of that energy primarily as heat. So if people were to eat the corn fed to cattle rather than eat the cattle fed the corn there would be a several-fold more efficient use of solar energy. The exception to this would be range fed cattle who eat range plants whose chemical energy would not otherwise be as readily available for human use.

Essentially, the same thing applies to all domesticated animals we eat - hogs, chickens, sheep. And it applies to dairy products and eggs as well.

There are lots of good reasons to cut down on eating animal products. A nice side-effect is that if it is done right it could very well end up benefitting your health as well.