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Captainlarab said:
"The US dairy industry sounds like it has its act together more so than the beef industry, and has learned to breed cattle that are giving more milk for less feed (I met a woman at a Maryland county fair who said her cow was producing 16 gallons a day). I'd love to see a third world development program that involved sharing these superior breeds of dairy cattle with third world farmers who are currently raising less efficient breeds (and possibly razing the rain forest in order to do so)."
This is actually a grave misunderstanding. Yes, a "third world" dairy cow may produce far less milk than a fat northern Holstein, BUT the third world cow can subsist on the scraggly dry grass, survive the droughts and flies, walk ten or twenty miles a day to the watering hole, etc. The "improved" Holstein only produces 16 gallons of milk a day in our cooler northern climate, with a supplemented grain feed, plentiful water, and it has such an enormous udder it could never go for a ten mile hike through the scrubland looking for water. Modern dairy breeds have also lost the instinct to defend themselves from predators. It's like the happy idea of giving farmers in remote "third world" places tractors, so they can plow more fields. There isn't enough fuel, there aren't parts available to repair the tractors, fields that large can't be irrigated, fertilized, etc.
The fact is, sustainable agriculture and food production works on a small scale - the kind of small farm your grandfather might have had. Industrial agriculture is not sustainable in the long term. However, without industrial agriculture, you get what people in the old days and in poor countries get: meat is an expensive delicacy, used sparingly and on holidays, or eaten mostly by the rich.
