[Coeur de Chene]

http://mosaicscience.com/story/porklife-building-better-pig

I found this horrible, an idea created by the same people who believe a shopping mall is the ideal environment for humans have now created an equivalent for pigs. Some of my thoughts were...
1) Feeding the world? With pork? Why list a selection of countries that are principally muslim...
2) Why doesn't a pig farmer's son, vet and animal researcher know when a pig is happy? With only our first pigs I can show you by their ears, their tail, their stance, their grunt when they are happy. Hasn't he seen a happy pig?
3) Why are the employees looking so uncomfortable!

[Womble]

Thanks for linking to such a well written article. I too found it rather disturbing, but also thought provoking. For instance
 

What’s more, if the Western world going free-range or grass-fed or adopting some other humane treatment means making meat production less efficient, the global supply of meat will be reduced. And that, says Parsons, takes “food out of somebody’s mouth somewhere else in the world”.

So are we as inefficient smallholders actually starving the unlucky people, since we could undoubtably make our land produce more weight of meat if we just got with the times?
 
So, food for thought - thanks for posting!

[Ideation]

Interesting thoughts Womble.

I think a greater issue in this country, is that fact that so much land is getting split up and not used for food production in any meaningful way (i.e equine use).

That, coupled with the rising cost of fuel / importation etc, and the growing population, may ultimatly lead to a real problem whereby we just cannot feed our own populace. . . . let alone any one elses!

[Womble]

It is an interesting dilemma. Smallholdings are of course 'inefficient' in terms of human resources - a thousand acre farm will produce more food per hour of human effort than a five acre smallholding. However, my feeling is that a smallholding can produce just as much food per acre, and in a totally sustainable way.
 
I'm becoming quite fascinated by permaculture principles and how to get everything on a smallholding working together.
 
So much of modern agriculture is about converting fossil fuels into food, and some of the ways we've found to do it are pretty perverse. For example note the discussion recently about bees / neonicotinoids. Some staggering proportion of the USA bee population is literally trucked around the country following things like the orange blossom season. We are interfering with nature on a truly colossal scale. This was brought home to me on a recent business trip to the USA. I took an internal flight from Atlanta (mid-south) to Omaha (mid-North), and flew for about 3 hours over vast areas of nearly identical arable fields, all divided into grids by roads, each with a shiny silo every four squares. No wonder we need to apply so many chemicals to keep this sort of farming viable!
 
The other area is animal welfare. Remember the debate a month ago about Halal slaughter?   I heard an interview on the radio with a representative from a retailers trade body. The interviewer asked "Don't you owe it to your consumers to give them information about how meat was reared and slaughtered?"  The response was "There is nothing in our market research that says customers want to see this".  In other words "We've found that the less we can make meat look as though it was once alive, the more we sell. The last thing we want to do is remind people that their joint of meat was once a living, breathing animal which has now suffered pain and been killed just to provide their Sunday Lunch".
 
But then, I'm a privileged dreamer and just playing at it with my wee parcel of land. Certainly not everybody can live that way, and nor would they want to.
 
Tricky, isn't it?

[Ideation]

I've seen those huge mono culture farms in the USA. . . . . quite some sight.

The big issue we will have here, is that as an Island, which is so heavily populated, without food imports we can only physically manage to feed a very small percentage of our population from the available land.

If it became hugely unviable to import food, where would it all come from?

The options are, I guess, produce more food, produce cleverer food, or reduce the populace.

Personally i'd go for number 3. . . . . but thats a whole other debate.

[Coeur de Chene]

Or we could eat less meat. Cut out the middle man ( the pig ) and get what we need from an almost  vegetarian diet. We are all too greedy wanting a meat laden diet. There is enough food its just badly distributed.

[oaklandspigs]

Great article !

I've seen those huge mono culture farms in the USA. . . . . quite some sight......

Personally i'd go for number 3. . . . . but thats a whole other debate.

We cannot continue to feed an increasing and increasingly ageing population unless factory farming exists.

A 3,000 sow unit is not just a USA thing , there's a 3,500 sow unit in the UK, and quite a few 2,000 sow units.

So we either need to reduce population or factory farm.  Like Ideation, I favour proper policies to manage human population, but of course that will never happen. 

Of course you can't be outraged by this and shop at Tesco !

[ballingall]

Or we could eat less meat. Cut out the middle man ( the pig ) and get what we need from an almost  vegetarian diet. We are all too greedy wanting a meat laden diet. There is enough food its just badly distributed.

Can't do that in the UK. There is too much marginal land. You can't grow vegetables up a mountain, but that mountain can be used to provide for hill sheep. There isn't enough land suitable for growing food in the UK to feed all the population.

[Coeur de Chene]

We've grown vegetables at over 1000 metres. Sepp Holzer, a permaculture farmer and writer farms up to 1,500 metres above sea level. Admittedly not in the UK, but we had snow in June and in September regularly.
There's enough authenticated research that suggests eating less meat,(and creating less waste) would vastly improve our ability to feed everyone.
If every tree planted in a public space was a fruit  tree, if parks, roundabouts, old brown field sites were planted up with veg, Britain could feed itself. But yes, this is unrealistic.