The Truth About Agriculture

We see goats everywhere. They show up in my Facebook feed for their adorable antics as babies. I see them on Reddit, doing all kinds of acrobatic feats. In fact, in my opinion, people who don't farm them have started to see them more as pets than what they truly are: a livestock animal capable of producing important commodities like dairy, fiber, and meat. While it's okay to keep livestock as pets (I actually have a pet goat myself), this trend can prevent social acceptance for the consumption of the healthiest red meat there is. It also has disastrous animal welfare implications when people purchase goats, but don't know how to properly care for them. A goat isn't simply a herbivorous dog. They're a lot more complicated than that. This problem is even further complicated by the fact that many veterinarians don't know much about how to treat goats, since veterinary curriculum tends to focus more on horses, cattle, and companion animals like dogs and cats. Th

A picture I took of the typical Brazilian cattle ranch. That small shack is the rancher's house. When beginning the writing of this article, I really had no idea where to start. I didn’t expect to learn much about agriculture when I embarked on my trip to Brazil. I certainly didn’t expect to learn as much as I did. I feel I now have a better grasp on just how dangerous deforestation is, and more importantly what causes it, and how to fix the problem. Before this trip, I had no experience with deforestation in the rainforest; only what I’d researched. On one hand, there was Cowspiracy, claiming deforestation was caused solely by greed for animal products, and applied this logic to say that simply cutting animal products out of one’s diet would eliminate the problem. On the other hand, many in the agriculture community in developed nations like the U.S. and the E.U. claimed that it was a vicious cycle of clearing land for cash crops like corn and rice, which then depleted the

On January 23rd, 2018 at 11:00am sharp, a video was posted on Facebook. Stonyfield Farms, the very same organic company that provided funding for the nasty propaganda film, Food Inc., posted a propaganda short entitled "What are "GMOs?" You can watch it in all its falseness below: Cringe-worthy, right? The video begins with a little girl exclaiming, "That sounds monstrous!" Another proclaims, "They take a gene from a fish and put it into the tomato." This is a reference to an experimental variety of tomato invented in the 90s, which carried the flounder antifreeze gene, for increased frost tolerance. However, this breed of tomato was never commercially available, and therefore no tomatoes contain GMOs. In fact, there are no GMO tomatoes currently available for commercial sale in the Unite States. It gets worse. "Are you kidding me?!" another girl exclaims. The one after her proclaims, "Yeah, I think it's better if we get