Most of the story is behind a paywall, so I can only access this snippet of it:



https://www.theatlantic.com/health/...acement/678866/

While I'd love to know what the rest of the story says, I get the very strong suspicion that they have no clue about how the milk is produced to make cheese: You can't have milk to make cheese, without also producing the young required for a mammal to produce milk.

There are very rare "precocious milkers" who produce one offspring and then produce large quantities of milk for years and years. (My SIL had one goat out of her whole herd who continued to produce milk for years after kidding, and among her many goat-owning friends, she was the ONLY one who had a precocious milker - it's an extremely rare occurrence)

But most cows (and other milk producers such as goats and sheep) will only produce milk for a limited number of months before their milk dries up, even without being impregnated again. If you want milk from that cow again, it needs to have another calf.

Since approximately half of the calves born will be males, I'd love to know what exactly they propose be done with all those bull calves. You can't let them all grow to adult bull age - bulls are extremely aggressive and will tear each other (and anyone in their way) to shreds in order to get to a cow in heat. You can castrate them to turn them into steers so they are more docile, but then what do you do with them? Let them grow to adulthood, grazing in pastures and eventually dying of old age? (which from what I understand it's possible for a steer to live for 15 years) If the number of cattle and "cow burps/farts" is such an environmental problem, that doesn't solve that at all.

The only logical answer is to either harvest them for veal, or raise them as beef cattle. In other words: meat.

OMG....bull calves!!!

I can image as I see what antics my ram-lambs get up to harassing other lambs at 4 weeks old. The young girls walk away!!

My older boys are a management issue unlike the ewes ....better off in the freezer for everyone!!

Or let them grow to adulthood, in pasture, and get more meat? Free range is the healthiest beef, according to large animal vets out west.

Yes it is - but the point of the story seemed to be eating LESS meat in order to be healthy (wrong), and to save the planet/stop global warming.

And just from the first few lines of the article, it sounds like they thought they had come up with the perfect solution for ALL of that: eat cheese instead of meat!


Meanwhile, if they're cutting down on meat/giving up meat altogether that means they're turning to more produce and grains.

But the demand for more organically grown produce and grains increases. That means no chemically produced fertilizers on the increasing amounts of organically grown grains and produce.

But wait - where does organic fertilizer come from? Animal manure - something which will be in very short supply if meat production is minimized or halted. (unless they're good with the idea of the organic fertilizer being sourced from the sewage in municipal waste treatment plants... yeah, didn't think so!)

It boggles the mind sometimes the complete disconnect so many people have with the actual source of their food and what's required to produce it from the agricultural level.

I live in an area that houses fill the pastures once used by cattle, either beef or dairy. Over 30 years, only one big farm left.

My kids were outliers as I had sheep and horses and dogs long before kids.

In preschool, a teacher asked me if we had 4 dogs......maybe her concern was they were rotties. ( When I visited a friend she moved her terriers to the master bedroom or outside. Nasty creatures. She had 6-8.) Kids don't grow up with dogs like they used to.

Visting kids found horses and sheep a novelty.

I'm suspecting we are being played. Most people have no contact with farm animals, so know nothing.

We are using sheep to regenerate the forest. The deer come to eat my browse and grasses that their forest no longer has. Annoying to have fruit trees destroyed by hungry deer when they have a reserve put aside for them. Forests need to be manged for most production. Even the native Americans altered the forests for maximum production of native trees, bushes, grasses and wildlife.

I'm beginning to think harvesting a few deer a year is less costly that raising sheep!

Cheese. Many people are dairy intolerant. Most adults have trouble digesting dairy. Only a few cultures have used dairy for many many centuries and have adapted to digesting it well.

Most people would benefit from eating meat over dairy.

Anyway, dairy requires graze. Whether as grass or hay.

The big lie is that beef pollutes more than veggies.

If you don't count the fertilizer, that's true. But the fertilizer industry pumps 1,000 more methane into the atmosphere than all the cow burps and farts combined.

https://gizmodo.com/just-one-tiny-i...pa-h-1835376030

So I am going to put cheese on my grass fed hamburger. Grass fed because I don't want the fertilizer for the corn pumping more methane into the air than the cows do.

Maybe the biggest ever told because of the sweep of the consequences.