>>There is no such thing as sustainable animal agriculture - it is a lie used to greenwash products

Yeah I absolutely don't agree. I don't believe it can be done at scale - but it can be done. Watch a channel like Harry's Farm on youtube - guy basically has cattle on moors where nothing else could possibly grow - they just stay there all year, eat grass, then one day they get slaughtered. There is nothing about farming them this way that's unsustainable.

>>The only sane and ethical response to this devastation is to completely reject the economic exploitation of animals - to adopt a fully vegan philosophy.

I think you might be getting too much of that "greenwashed" propaganda yourself friend.

We should be fighting against factory farming with all our might, and especially the US is a sad place when it comes to animal rights. But going out and saying it can't be done sustainably is a lie peddled by people who either literally can't imagine how it can be done, or who don't want to see it. I believe meat can be sustainably produced, but it should be reflected in its cost - people shouldn't be eating meat 3x times a day because it's so cheap.

Nearly 100% of my meat comes from locally raised grass-fed-and-finished cows. They are rotationally grazed and live their whole lives in the outdoors. It is actually much, much cheaper than buying meat from a supermarket - ground beef is half the price, steaks are as little as 10%, because all cuts are priced the same. (My dairy comes from another, similar farm, and while it is much better, it is more expensive.) I also went all through the slaughterhouse and no, there's no kids there.

I eat a lot of eggs. 100% of my eggs and the occasional chicken come from my parents, who, with twelve chickens, produce an insane surplus of eggs, letting them eat whatever bugs they find and feeding them scraps.

People will argue this isn't scalable, and maybe it isn't. But the price of my beef suggests it is underutilized at this time. Certainly more rural and semirural people could keep chickens. I would favor this alternative anyway, since industrial-scale food production isn't just inhumane, it produces inferior products that are subject to enormous risks and shocks as producers race to centralize and become more and more efficient. You don't want hyperefficiency in your food supply. Hyperefficiency means fragility.

Massive industrialized agriculture is its own ecological disaster. The farming of corn for ethanol (!!!) and the massive, endless fields of soybeans and canola in the US midwest (foods eaten by almost no American a few decades ago) are permanently destroying the ecology of nearly half the US. It's annihilating topsoil at alarming rates, eradicated huge swaths of natural wildlife, and filled watersheds with massive amounts of fertilizer and pesticides which are then contributing to killing all the fish. You see how we've come full circle.

Do you know what would be great and sustainable for the midwest? Fill the plains with cows. For thousands of years, they were filled with ruminants. The cows must be kept in tightly packed herds to emulate their behavior when predators are present. This will regenerate the topsoil, as that's what formed much of it in the first place, and end the flow of poison into the waterways. I'm not opposed to returning the buffalo instead, if you prefer.

You talk about greenwashing - that's a big part of the push behind veganism. Obviously there's sincere people like you, but there's a lot of money in producing highly processed foods and (soon) artificial meat. Highly processed foods (besides being a health disaster) can be easily produced via "food science" from relatively stable, controllable inputs, which animals are not. They are much easier to scale, which is where the real money comes from when you're selling commodities. Frequently, even when one input does become a problem, it can be replaced with no obvious impact to the consumer.

It's not about taking a holistic look what what we need to do ecologically and environmentally, which would include meat. It's about cash.

> fated to death from birth

Everything born into this world will die. That's nothing special about livestock.