Willy: What is leather made from?
Billy: Hide.
Willy: huh?
Billy: Hide.
Willy: huh?
Billy: Hide. The cow's outside.
Willy: Why should I? I'm not afraid of the cow.

The problem is that unless you're talking about climactic and ecological conditions like the Argentine pampas, you wind up with a low population of awfully scrawny and unprofitable cows without supplemental feedstocks like alfalfa and grain.

My grandparents in Poland had huge fat cows.

Let's analyze this grains and water issue, since you bring it up.

When a plant grows, it consumes water. Does it not? The water goes up the roots and evaporates out the leaves. IT goes up into the clouds and falls elsewhere at a later time. Have I lost you yet?

It is a cycle of nature. Newton did not invent it. Bill Gates did not engineer it.

Cows come over and pick off the big rich grainy plant, since that is what animals do. OR else, like you seem to enjoy, a farmer collects it and feeds it to the cow.

Where has all that water disappeared to exactly? You seem to worry about 25,000 lost liters per half pound of ultimate meat, but I do not worry about supposed lost water. The water went thru the plant, thru the cow, or past the plant and cow, maybe to evaporate into the clouds and fall elsewhere.

Maybe we ought not to be growing plants and cows in deserts. Ever think about that?

Maybe man has lost touch with nature, with reality itself.

We produce far more food than the world can consume, even in its bloated over populated state. Heinous dictatorships, guerilla governments, and rapacious banks have conspired to make sure millions starve around the world. But this is not due to any food shortages.

Better yet, all this food is grown on relatively little land. But at a price. Intense chemical farming is not sustainable.

But why would you rip on meat when the problem is not the cow, nor the human, but the mechanized, chemical spewing pseudo farm?

Frankly, I think this whole problem can be solved by doubling or tripling the available land for use in farming and getting rid of the so called progressive farming practices, that in reality are eating away at the land's ability to feed us. The toxins that are being released into the land in the name of big farming are an embarrassment. It is those companies that ought to be legislated out of existence. Not cows nor humans.

BIG MONEY is programming you people to believe in a shortsighted blindered unreality. But you refuse to see it. In your RAGE against free thinkers like me, you prefer to stick to those truthy factoids that were custom designed to be palatable to you so that you never question them. The definition of a "cow"... and I am not talking about our four legged beloved beasts out in the field.

sorry, the dogma doesn't cut it. It's trumped by historical experience, and science.

The oceans like the land can be farmed and the release of human intelligence and freedom to act will solve any perceived shortages of anything.

That did not work with the passenger pigeon, which once flew in migrating flocks that sometimes darkened American skies from horizon to horizon, for hours on end.

It did not preserve the salmon runs in the rivers of New England, where once the salmon were so plentiful that they were easily harvested with pitchforks, and indentured servants had a clause in their contracts that they not be fed with them more than once a week.

It did not work with the Atlantic cod stocks, which were once the staple food species for nearly every frozen food dinner in the USA.

"Human intelligence and freedom" all too often simultaneously partakes of GREED and DENIAL.

At the time that it happened, no one could believe that a species that were once as abundant as the passenger pigeons, the salmon of the rivers of New England, or the cod could ever disappear. Until they did.

That should remind you that the potential for human intelligence coexists with the potential for human stupidity. The real constant is the power that the human species is capable of wielding, for good or ill. In this case, including not simply the power to eat through everything we find like termites, but the power to check ourselves.

Problem is the government advocates think by regulating and wasting resources via taxation they have all the answers when in reality they are the problem.

I've heard many a criminal sociopath, rapist, abuser, and thief say the same thing- "if it weren't for those damned cops..."

What you're referring to as "freedom" is the "freedom" to commit crimes- to poison, to loot and plunder, to drive species over the edge of extinction.

That isn't what being "conservative" is supposed to be about.

In fact, when it comes right down to it, you're expressing a position as radically libertine as the defenses of amorality and egocentricity espoused by the Marquis de Sade.

I'm not the one "ripping on meat." I even mentioned that I occasionally eat it myself. Most often, when it's served to me as a guest.

I'm an omnivore. Animal flesh is not important enough to me to go to the expense of buying the organically grass-grazed stuff.

You brought up how your ancestors raised cattle in Poland. I didn't bring up Poland. I know nothing about it.

Let's analyze this grains and water issue, since you bring it up.

When a plant grows, it consumes water. Does it not? The water goes up the roots and evaporates out the leaves. IT goes up into the clouds and falls elsewhere at a later time. Have I lost you yet?

It is a cycle of nature. Newton did not invent it. Bill Gates did not engineer it.

Cows come over and pick off the big rich grainy plant, since that is what animals do. OR else, like you seem to enjoy, a farmer collects it and feeds it to the cow.

Where has all that water disappeared to exactly? You seem to worry about 25,000 lost liters per half pound of ultimate meat, but I do not worry about supposed lost water. The water went thru the plant, thru the cow, or past the plant and cow, maybe to evaporate into the clouds and fall elsewhere.

Oh, if only it were that simple...there would be no need for irrigation at all, if rain simply transpired, evaporated, and fell in the same place again.

And grasses do not = "grain", as anyone who's ever fed horses or cattle can tell you.

I'm no expert on these matter. But at least a know a little bit. And when I don't, I either look it up, or I keep my mouth shut. A policy that's served me well in several ways, and which I recommend to others.

Maybe we ought not to be growing plants and cows in deserts. Ever think about that?

Oh, all the time. I live in California, where the top two irrigated crops are alfalfa and cotton- neither of which has any business being grown in this climate region, in my opinion.

As Marc Reisner pointed out in his landmark work Cadillac Desert, as of 1986, the alfalfa crop of CA drank up as much irrigation water as every human in the state:

“In California, the single biggest consumer of water is not Los Angeles. It is not the oil and chemicals or defense industries. Nor is it the fields of grapes and tomatoes. It is irrigated pasture: grass grown in a near-desert climate for cows. In 1986, irrigated pasture used about 5.3 million acre-feet of water — as much as all 27 million people in the state consumed, including for swimming pools and lawns…. Is California atypical? Only in the sense that agriculture in California, despite all the desert grass and irrigated rice, accounts for proportionately less water use than in most of the other western states. In Colorado, for example, alfalfa to feed cows consumes nearly 30% of all the state’s water, much more than the share taken by Denver…. The West’s water crisis — and many of its environmental problems as well — can be summed up, implausible as this may seem, in a single word: livestock.”

Intense chemical farming is not sustainable.

But why would you rip on meat when the problem is not the cow, nor the human, but the mechanized, chemical spewing pseudo farm?

Why fly off the handle at me? I agree with you, as a search of my archive will show (although considering the volume of my comments at this point, I admit that's liable to take some time.)