Science Forums 2

[razetheladder]

i'm not entirely clear on what you were saying in your post, but i think you may be confused about the way agriculture works. first, it is most certainly not true that "those feed yards also produce the fertilizer we use in the field that now produce many times the yields of previous generation of crops". factory farms produce huge amounts of manure (i'm guessing this is the fertilizer you were referring to?), but there's so much that they don't know what to do with it. a lot of it just goes into waterways, completely destroying them. check out this article to see what actually happens rollingstone.com/politics/story/12840743

the main reason yields have gone up is increased pesticides, mechanization, and new seed varieties. those first two are bad for human health and bad for global warming. we'd be better off switching to organic farming, which has lower yields but is more sustainable.

"agriculture its self produces a very large amount of CO2, uses even larger amounts of fresh water and requires many forms of fertilizer."

maybe you mean that if we were all vegetarian we'd have to grow more crops? if that's what you meant, then you should know that we currently feed 70-80 percent of US grain to animals, and it takes 5-10 more grain fed to an animal to get 100 calories from meat than if we just ate the grain in the first place. going vegetarian would mean we could reduce our yield by 50 percent and still feed everyone. which fits perfectly with switching to lower yield organic agriculture.

"aside from some major health problems"

did you mean vegetarianism causes health problems? because all the evidence is that a vegetarian diet is far healthier than almost all meat-based diets.

finally, if by "alliterative motive" you meant ulterior motive, then i am happy to admit that in addition opposing global warming, i also oppose needlessly inflicting barbaric suffering on animals.