#Livestock lobby

[plethoraworldatlas]

Oregon’s gray wolf population did not increase last year due in part to a large number of wolves killed by people, causing concern among conservationists and Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife officials.

The latest Annual Wolf Report found the population remained steady at 178 wolves, marking the first time in eight years that their numbers didn’t increase. Typically, the population has grown by 6% a year. Among the 36 wolf deaths in 2023, 33 were caused by people. The state sanctioned the killing of 16 wolves following livestock deaths and 12 were killed illegally, the report said. 

“The amount of poaching and other suspicious deaths is alarming, impacts our conservation goals and could affect our ability to manage wolves in Oregon,” Bernadette Graham-Hudson, the agency’s wildlife division administrator, said in a news release.

[acti-veg]

Animal farming ranks alongside fossil fuel production as one of the two most destructive industries on Earth. It’s not just the vast greenhouse gas emissions and the water and air pollution it causes. Even more important is the amount of land it requires. Land use is a crucial environmental metric, because every hectare we occupy is a hectare that cannot support wild ecosystems.

Wild ecosystems are crucial for the survival of most species on Earth, and of Earth systems themselves: for example, the rainforest and cerrado of South America help to regulate weather systems. The Amazon rainforest is being destroyed above all by cattle ranching, whose expansion is driven in part by the foodie fad for “grass-fed” beef. The cerrado is being trashed primarily by soy farming to produce feed for pigs and chickens.

Feeding ourselves with animal products is a fantastically profligate and inefficient way of using land, swallowing at least four times as much as all the other food we grow while providing just 17% of our calories. More than any other factor, it drives the destruction of forests, wetlands, savannas, rivers and other habitats. Weaning ourselves off these products is as important as weaning ourselves off oil, gas and coal.

Governments seeking to ban alternatives to animal products have scarcely sought to disguise their motivation: protectionism. Several politicians and officials have openly admitted that they’re trying to defend established industries – meat and dairy – against competition. In every other sector they claim to favour “free markets”, and protectionism attracts major penalties. In this sector, it is enforced by legislation.

[notwiselybuttoowell]

Former officials in the UN’s farming wing have said they were censored, sabotaged, undermined and victimised for more than a decade after they wrote about the hugely damaging contribution of methane emissions from livestock to global heating.

Team members at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) tasked with estimating cattle’s contribution to soaring temperatures said that pressure from farm-friendly funding states was felt throughout the FAO’s Rome headquarters and coincided with attempts by FAO leadership to muzzle their work.

The allegations date back to the years after 2006, when some of the officials who spoke exclusively to the Guardian on condition of anonymity wrote Livestock’s Long Shadow (LLS), a landmark report that pushed farm emissions on to the climate agenda for the first time. LLS included the first tally of the meat and dairy sector’s ecological cost, attributing 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions to livestock, mostly cattle. It shocked an industry that had long seen the FAO as a reliable ally – and spurred an internal clampdown by FAO hierarchy, according to the officials.

“The lobbyists obviously managed to influence things,” one ex-official said. “They had a strong impact on the way things were done at the FAO and there was a lot of censorship. It was always an uphill struggle getting the documents you produced past the office for corporate communications and one had to fend off a good deal of editorial vandalism.”

Serving and former FAO experts said that between 2006 and 2019, management made numerous attempts to suppress investigations into the cow/climate change connection. Top officials rewrote and diluted key passages in another report on the same topic, “buried” another paper critical of big agriculture, excluded critical officials from meetings and summits, and briefed against their work.

"There was substantial pressure internally and there were consequences for permanent staff who worked on this, in terms of their careers. It wasn’t really a healthy environment to work in,” said another ex-official.

Scientists also expressed concern about the way the FAO’s estimate of livestock’s overall contribution to emissions is continuing to fall. The 18% number that was published in 2006 was revised downwards to 14.5% in a follow-up paper, Tackling Climate Change Emissions in 2013. It is currently being assessed at about 11.2% based on a new “Gleam 3.0” model.

But many scientists plot farm emissions on a very different trajectory. One recent study concluded that greenhouse gas emissions from animal products made up 20% of the global total and a 2021 study found that the figure should be between 16.5% and 28.1%.

[tomorrowusa]

A lot of people won't like hearing this, but the meat industry is terrible for this planet.

Last weekend, Elon Musk posted one of his more outrageously false tweets to date: “Important to note that what happens on Earth’s surface (eg farming) has no meaningful impact on climate change.” Musk was, as he has been from time to time, wrong. As climate experts rushed to emphasize, farming actually accounts for around a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Musk spewing disinformation is not exactly news. But even by his standards, his contention regarding livestock agriculture and climate was on a par with George Santos's fantasies.

The tens of billions of chickens, pigs, cows, and other animals we raise and slaughter for food annually account for around 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, primarily from cow burps, animal manure, and the fertilizer used to grow the corn and soy they eat. More than one-third of the Earth’s habitable land is used for animal farming — much of it cleared for cattle grazing and growing all thatcorn and soy — making animal agriculture the leading cause of deforestation and biodiversity loss globally. Deforestation causes emissions itself, but it also represents a missed opportunity to sequester carbon. If that land were “rewilded,” or retired as farmland, it would act as a carbon sink, sucking massive amounts of climate-warming carbon out of the atmosphere. But we keep clearing more and more forestland, especially in the Amazon rainforest and elsewhere in the tropics, mostly for beef, pork, and poultry.

Yep, livestock grazing accounts for almost a third of our usable land.

The message regarding livestock agriculture just isn't getting out.

Madre Brava also conducted a media analysis that found that between 2020 and 2022, less than 0.5 percent of stories about climate change by leading news outlets in the US, the United Kingdom, and Europe mentioned meat or livestock. Last month, two groups that work on issues related to animal agriculture — Sentient Media and Faunalytics — published an analysis with similar findings. The organizations looked at the 100 most recent climate change stories from each of the top 10 US media outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and CNN, and found that 7 percent mentioned animal agriculture. Of that 7 percent, most only discussed how climate change-fueled weather events like droughts, floods, and heatwaves impact animal farmers. “Across the 1,000 articles we examined, only a handful of stories reported in depth on the connection between consuming animal products and climate change,” the researchers wrote. The media is an easy target, and some criticism is deserved — it’s a disservice to readers to largely ignore a leading cause of the climate crisis. Part of the problem is that the media, like everyone else, operates in an information environment in which the meat lobby downplays and in some cases suppresses the full extent to which burgers, ribs, and chicken nuggets pollute the planet. But journalists could be doing more to cut through the noise.

We need to speak up more ourselves. Entrenched interests and powerful lobbying groups are not shy about promoting livestock businesses which harm the planet.

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the industry’s leading lobby group, runs a “climate messaging machine,” food journalist Joe Fassler recently wrote in the Guardian, that trains influencers to confuse the public and downplay beef’s emissions. The list goes on. Last year, leaked documents showed that delegates from Brazil and Argentina successfully lobbied the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to remove any mention of meat’s negative impact on the environment, or recommendations for people in rich countries to reduce their meat consumption, in its recent report. Meat giant Tyson Foods spends a much bigger share of its revenue than ExxonMobil lobbying Congress to stop climate policy. Outside the animal rights movement, there aren’t many voices pushing back against these narratives. The US environmental movement has largely shied away from campaigning to reduce meat and dairy production, with some leaders outright rejecting the notion that we need to eat fewer animals. Policymakers largely avoid the issue too.

We have a lot of catching up to do – and fast.

“The food conversation is probably about 20 years behind the energy conversation, and it is catching up, but it’s not visceral to people in the way energy is — that they immediately know energy is a climate issue,” said Michael Grunwald, a food and agriculture columnist for Canary Media, in the Sentient Media panel discussion. But time is in short supply. Experts say that if we don’t change what we eat — especially reducing beef and dairy — we can’t meet the Paris climate agreement of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius or less.

In addition to publicizing the issue, we can lead by example. Eating less meat or even no meat lets people know we're serious about what we're saying.

There will be pushback from the industry and also from populist blowhards. We can imagine at least one saying something like: "Hunter Biden wants to steal your double cheeseburger. SAD!"

But no discussion of carbon emissions is complete without talk of livestock agriculture and its effects.

[climatecalling]

The “gigantic” power of the meat and dairy industries in the EU and US is blocking the development of the greener alternatives needed to tackle the climate crisis, a study has found. The analysis of lobbying, subsidies and regulations showed that livestock farmers in the EU received 1,200 times more public funding than plant-based meat or cultivated meat groups. In the US, the animal farmers got 800 times more public funding. The money spent on lobbying the US government by meat producers was 190 times more than for the alternatives and was three times higher in the EU. The researchers also found that almost all dietary guidelines avoided highlighting the environmental impact of meat production and bans on alternative products using terms such as “milk”. Cutting meat consumption in rich nations is vital to tackling the climate crisis. Livestock production causes 15% of all global greenhouse emissions. Cutting meat and dairy consumption also slashes pollution, land and water use, and the destruction of forests, with scientists saying it is the single biggest way for people to reduce their impact on the planet.

[rjalker]

GrannyGamer1 said in a youtube comment 6 days ago:

Representative democracy? Oh, my sweet, summer child! You've never known real winter. Guess it's that whole preferred race sex, gender, sexuality, able bodies thing again. The lesser of two evils has gotten more and more evil, but you did notice because you weren't affected. But now, they're coming for you. The only thing progressive about the Democratic party is that it's become progressively more corrupt and beholden to corporate lobbies and interests. Funding gen ocide props up failed, late stage capitalism. Just as it always has since Europeans first set foot on western hemisphere shores. This was never a participatory democracy A! Damn near ever soul who doesn't look like you fought and suffered for the ballot box. Particularly indigenous people. What we're seeing in Gaza is the long tradition of white supremacy controlling the lands, houses, resources, economies, education, health, calories per day, the very bodies, living and dead, of an ancient, colonized indigenous population. I'm not the one being silly and naive here. They're screaming the quiet parts out loud now. That's how far the lesser of two evils has gone. Thank to US corporate and political collaboration with the Zionist pry, Google, Musk, Bezos et al have surveillance and weapons technology, battle tested, which makes it's sale more appealing, on Palestinian bodies, coming to Cop Cities, where officers are trained by IDF, all over USA. Oh, you sweet, summer child. You were only placated so long as you caused absolutely no inconvenience. Stay in your house and quibble over talking points spooned out by one of the six corporations controlling "news" in USA and maybe you'll dodge their scrutiny. But don't bet on it. Not if you're subversive enough to love or respect someone who's Queer, disabled, not whit and middle class…. They're coming for you,btoo now. And there's nobody left to speak up for you. We're all just livestock to them. We're all Palestinian. If you don't directly contribute to their agenda, they'll snuff you and sell off pieces of your corpse. The lesser of two evils is evil.

[jiubilant]

What do you think falion's main beef with the college and savos was? Wondering if savos had any strong thoughts about vampires or Necromancy

i'm so glad you asked about this because i've been meaning to write up a post about it

brief history of falion and "the caller":

falion was the master of conjuration at winterhold before phinis gestor. he was an accomplished (if somewhat reclusive and single-minded) scholar of his discipline and popular with his students

he and his research assistant, an ambitious and charismatic young mage named anreth calatil, collaborated for years on a study of life-prolonging magics. this collaboration came to an end after a mysterious quarrel drove a wedge between master and pupil, and rumors soon began to circulate that anreth had abandoned falion's tutelage because she was frustrated with the "timidity" of her former mentor's methods

it soon became clear that anreth, along with a number of impressionable disciples of conjuration, was continuing her research into life-prolonging magics in secret. falion suspected his former research assistant of dark deeds and took his concerns about the potentially dangerous trajectory of her studies to archmage aren, who responded to his concerns in the usual way (by doing nothing)

this, to put it mildly, frustrated falion

as anreth's circle of followers grew and began to challenge falion's authority as master of conjuration, falion took matters into his own hands—first by confronting a now wildly-popular anreth, who mocked his censure, and then by confronting aren. the resulting quarrel culminated in falion quitting in a rage, leaving aren with a dire warning that his negligence would one day result in disaster

falion's dramatic exit left the position of conjuration master open. anreth lobbied for the position but archmage aren, perhaps with falion's warning in mind—or perhaps with the advice of his master wizard, mirabelle ervine, in his ear—gave the position to phinis gestor, a meek former pupil of falion's who was not enthused by the promotion

anreth, outraged, abandoned the college and took half of the conjuration department with her. she and her followers established themselves in an abandoned keep in whiterun. locals soon reached out to winterhold complaining of a "fell glow" from the keep, as well as foul smells and sickness among their livestock, but aren disavowed anreth (now playing to her reputation by referring to herself as "the caller") and her followers and declared their actions out of his jurisdiction

over the next few years, disaffected conjuration students unhappy with phinis's instruction continued to trickle out of winterhold and defect to anreth's tutelage. one such student, orthorn, stole several texts from the college's arcaneum before disappearing. only then did mirabelle ervine, without the archmage's explicit knowledge, take action...more details specific to my rendition of the winterhold questline under the cut

mirabelle, who had known anreth as a student, believed her to be eccentric but not dangerous. she sent ravi to whiterun for the books hoping both that the excursion would keep him out of the thalmor's reach while they plotted together and that "the caller" would be friendlier to the overtures of a layman than those of a college mage

ravi started to suspect something strange after arriving in the village nearest the keep and chatting with the locals, who told him that they'd noticed itinerants—peddlers, cobblers, and other travelers journeying alone or in small parties—disappearing suddenly. they warned him not to go to the keep. he agreed that the situation was a bit beyond him and took a room for the night, planning to write to mirabelle for counsel in the morning—

—and then woke up in the keep, in a cell with a terrified young mage who identified himself as orthorn. orthorn spilled everything: among other questionable research methods, the caller was "cultivating" a "herd" of spellbound vampires for her studies, and releasing them to feed on village livestock at night was "no longer producing useful results"

(she was going to feed them to her vampires)

the two were taken to the vampire pens and thrown inside. every bit of folklore they knew indicated that the starving vampires would succumb to their predatory instincts and make short work of them. instead the vampires restrained themselves in hopes of gaining their freedom. they ordered orthorn and ravi to help them escape. ravi kept their thoughts off dinner by talking nonstop for several hours (his special talent) while orthorn worked on breaking the spell-wards trapping them all inside

they escaped. the oldest and most ruthless vampires fell upon the caller and her followers. ravi and orthorn fled the frenzy, but were pursued by the remaining vampires—some of the kidnapped travelers, recently-turned—who begged to accompany ravi to the college in order to seek a cure for their condition

cue cross-country trip in which cattle were rustled, innkeepers alarmed, and ravi (orthorn having made a break for it as soon as possible) kept up a nonstop soothing ramble about whatever came to mind in order to remind his traveling companions that he was not in fact food

two weeks later the arrival of ravila rano and several hungry vampires at the college caused much consternation. after a heated faculty debate over how to handle the matter responsibly, mirabelle recommended that the caller's hapless victims (who, after all, had never hurt anyone and were repelled by the very thought) seek out falion in morthal for help—with a wizardly escort ensuring their continued good behavior on the way—and that ravi drink some tea for his laryngitis

afterwards mirabelle, in an attempt to relieve her stress headaches, took up smoking. ravi attempted to teach her to blow smoke rings with no success. end of act i

[boyslit]

actually did i ever ramble on here about my 'fake'/fan hsr region? aside from posting Maraschino's combat kit and lines because he's my special 4★ princess

it all kicked off bc of this picrew 👇 my friend found and i loved making little elves with pink hair and then they started putting a story together in my head without my say-so lol

The Stellaron affecting Celarys is actually a half of one and its slowly going mad trying to find it's other half (which is also trying to get home to its counterpart).

The planet itself is largely agriculture and manufacturing for an extremely large confectionary conglomerate, and millennia of farming the land and consuming food grown on it has eventually changed the populaces' hair and skin to be tinted bright pink :3 there's some kind of harmless chemical that does this, don't worry too much about it

So that Stellaron half that's out and about was originally harvested as a gemstone, used to decorate an intricate clock and sold far away for like a bajillion dollars. But the Stellaron half wants to go home, and so anyone who has it ends up wanting to visit Celarys...

Previous owners had either had the clock stolen from them or ended up visiting Celarys without the clock, suddenly couldn't remember why they'd wanted to come here so bad and identified the clock as a cursed item and promptly got rid of it, and eventually it ends up in the stash of a rare antiques dealer. The Stellaron half is fed the fuck up at this point, and is basically making this poor man lose his mind, filling his head with nightmares and threats of her doesn't take this fucking clock to some pink little planet at the edge of some galaxy. He finds someone there interested in strange antiques and sells it to the CEO of the confectionary company, President Marinelo Rousseau, who delights in it's cursed history bc he's a weirdo and displays it with his collection of other histories strange antiques.

And where there's a Stellaron, there's mental manipulation and disaster, and also often the Astral Express :3

The president's mental focus and emotional stability take a major hit, and his son Marcelle who's being groomed to take over his position when he retires in a few hundred years starts worrying big time. Between him and the trusted CFO they manage to get him to take a leave of health, but his condition worsens, he starts slipping in the middle of the night to god knows where and returning with wild eyes and dirt under his fingernails. (The Stellaron is making him dig to find his other half buried in the mountainside. He really should have just asked the local miners about it but both halves are half-mad with the grief of not being whole and desperation to reunite, so neither the Stellaron pieces nor the president are making good choices)

Meanwhile, since this is a Stellaron we're talking about, there's all sorts of shit going haywire. The president's recent insistence on increased production and potential deal with the ipc, the stress on the agricultural and manufacturing workers leading to dissatisfaction and organizing in both factors, lobbies in the government from not only ag and manu but also mining because they're also in proximity to the buried Stellaron half and are feeling a desperate need to expand their tunnels unconnected to production directives

The face of the agriculture union movement is a tough rancher named Anaïs who honestly didn't mean to be the driving force behind all this but increased demands are putting stress on her beloved dairy cattle and thus must be stopped.

There are of course weather disturbances affecting crops and livestock and also daily life on the planet. The governor and her assistant are running around putting out fires, so to speak, regarding these issues, especially because the agricultural and livestock products are a huge part of their economy. There are a few Senators looking to take advantage of the chaos but they're less fleshed out lol

eventually the Astral Express crew gets wind of this, March and the trailblazer get excited about the snacks they'll be able to find there, and they arrive to help root out the Stellaron

Marcelle has called his older brother (Lieutenant) Marinelo (Junior) back to Celarys to help. Marinelo arrives about when the express does, recognizes the big train and knows they might be able to help, after news of all the places they've helped out with great disasters.

The dock where the express starts isn't that far from the heart of the main city Rosaire, but Marcelle sets them up in the guest manor on their grounds both as an apology for having to beg their help and to station them closer to important spots in Rosaire and the surrounding land. Let the investigation begin!

Marcelle begrudgingly allows them to contact his little brother Maraschino who is, for most appearances, a drunken philanderer wasting his father's money on personal pleasure... but the truth is that he's got a masterful network of connections and information and has been keeping an eye on the goings-on around the city ever since his dad went off the deep end. He does try to hit on Himeko though and March and the TB close ranks to remind him in no uncertain terms that their mom that himeko is off limits! especially to *you.*

Dan Heng assists with information on stellarons and previvous encounters, Lt Marinelo allows him access to the Rousseau family library which is quite extensive. also. there is a mutual crush there. :3c and Marinelo is worried about acting on it because humans live such a short time compared to Sucrelves which is on average 500 or so years

during the investigation they cross paths with a journalism student who's trying to track down these weird rumors about the Rousseau Confectionary Company's president and his mysterious illness. Laurent Vivier is also keeping tabs on, and writing articles about, the work the governor is doing and the workplace organizing, but this has been his secret passion project ever since he heard the rumor about the president sneaking out at night to go digging in the mountainside with his hands.

anyway that's kind of where i've gotten to with it. but it just keeps kind of expanding on its own, and when I get stuck sometimes I go back to the picrew and play around with character ideas lol

pink hair is fun :) but also dangerous, because sometimes you end up with an entire new region for your favorite game in your head

[sheizara]

Part I

It was the graves that did it. 

Her father Lord Iliphal Tel’vaiel, his wife Sylmae. Her half-brother Halandir, his two children. The Lord Finniall and Lady Cosima Sunmote. 

“And it’s trespassing for Lady Fiorenze or her sister to visit, now?” 

Keranna nodded, idly cupping a long dead, dried rose bloom on one of the border hedges in her palm. 

Was she, Sheizara, the asshole here? “Did you bring me here first on purpose?” 

Keranna simply smiled, “I thought you might like to air your grievances to the family who wronged you; was that a mistaken assumption? Come now, I’ll show you around inside — though I suppose you’re already familiar with a lot of it.” 

She was. All the secret passage ways that the servants took to get from room to room, the best staircases, a perfect spot to sit on the roof to see down the valley into the little town of Glimmerglen that was full of the estate’s tenants. 

Her tenants. 

“You’ll need to hire staff again to keep the house up, if you move here and want to keep the house up. Fiorenze listened to petitions on the second and fourth Tuesdays of the month. I suspect many people will be eager to hear how you intend to remedy the steep tax that the Kingdom has levied on their glasswares and livestock for over a year,” Keranna’s tone was no nonsense. 

She’d never seen her father or Halandir do anything like that. Her mouth went a little dry, “How did Lady Fiorenze manage to convince the Kingdom to reduce their taxes?” 

“Connections, mostly, and a position in the Magistry that gave her access to lobby the government directly once the Regency settled in; She would know the exact details, I mostly stayed out of it and just made sure that the estate’s portions were paid on time,” her guide looked out one of the intricately paned windows out toward the garden again, as if to make a subtle point. 

“What were the children’s names? My… uh…” there was a word, wasn’t there? “Niblings?” 

“Sylmae and Finn.” 

Sheizara pressed her thumb and forefinger into her eyes and pressed deep enough to see spots. The title and responsibility that came with it were clearly inseparable. She’d just wanted to be rich, to claim something that had been denied her by a half-brother that had cast her out and attempted to erase her entire existence. Spite and ignorance had blinded her to the realities. 

Or had they? 

“Was I told about them?” 

The elegant arch of Keranna’s eyebrow wasn’t enough of a warning for the deep disappointment and outright scorn in her tone, “All of the graves were listed in section 13 subsection b in the estate paperwork that you and your legal counsel were provided as part of the proceedings.” 

She might be the asshole, here. 

“Right. You’re a professional, what do you think I should do?” It was a cowardly question, Shei knew, but she hadn’t been prepared for how much this was all going to be. 

“You wanted so badly to be the Lady Tel’vaiel, so be the Lady Tel’vaiel. Invite Fiorenze — not Lady, even though it’s still appropriate to call her such as she was granted the title of Lady Sunmote, she considers it to be an insult — to visit her garden and the graves of her family whenever she pleases, and fix what you have left to lay fallow for well over a year.” 

Well, shit.

[plethoraworldatlas]

A beef industry group is running a campaign to influence science teachers and other educators in the US. Over the past eight years, the American Farm Bureau Foundation for Agriculture (AFBFA) has produced industry-backed lesson plans, learning resources, in-person events, and webinars as part of a program to boost the cattle industry’s reputation.

Beef has one of the highest carbon footprints of any food, but AFBFA funding documents reveal that the industry fears that science teachers are exposed to “misinformation,” “propaganda,” and “one-sided or inaccurate” information. The campaign from the AFBFA—a farming-industry-backed group that "educates" Americans about agriculture—is an attempt to fight back and leave school teachers with a “more positive perception” of the beef industry, the funding documents reveal.

According to survey data included in these documents, educators who attended at least one of the AFBFA’s programs were 8 percent more likely to trust positive statements about the beef industry. Some 82 percent of educators who participated in a program had a positive perception of how cattle are raised, and 85 percent believed that the beef industry is “very important” to society.

The beef industry “knows it has a trust issue,” says Jennifer Jacquet, a professor of environmental science and policy at the University of Miami. The industry is attempting to influence public opinion by starting with children, says Jan Dutkiewicz at the Pratt Institute’s Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies. Dutkiewicz points out that one of the AFBFA’s objectives outlined in its most recent funding document is to run events that “engage educators and students … to increase their understanding and positive perceptions of the beef industry.”

...

The AFBFA is a contractor to Beef Checkoff, a US-wide program in which beef producers and importers pay a per-animal fee that funds programs to boost beef demand in the US and abroad. In 2024, Beef Checkoff has approximately $42 million to disperse across its initiatives, and a funding request reveals that the AFBFA’s campaign for 2024 is projected to cost $800,000. The allocation of Beef Checkoff funding to programs like this is approved by members of the Cattlemen’s Beef Board and the Federation of State Beef Councils, two groups that represent the cattle industry in the US.

One lesson plan provided as part of the program directs students to beef industry resources to help devise a school menu. In another lesson plan students are directed to create a presentation for a conservation agency regarding the introduction of cattle into their ecological preserve. A worksheet aimed at younger students has them practice their sums by adding up the acreage of cow pastures. Another worksheet based around a bingo game aimed at 8- to 11-year-olds asks teachers to “remind students that lean beef is a nutritions source of protein that can be incorporated in daily meals.”

Science teachers in many states are currently updating their lessons to incorporate the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)—a set of teaching guidelines that encourage educators to place more emphasis on how science is used in the real world. AFBFA funding documents show that the foundation intends to use the adoption of the NGSS as an opportunity to provide teachers with learning materials that relate to the beef industry.

“Furthermore, NGSS requires teachers to approach challenging topics such as climate change and sustainability,” reads an AFBFA funding authorization request for its education program. It continues: “Teachers and students are receiving information from educationally trusted sources that do not represent agriculture accurately or in a balanced way, and beef production is often the target of "misinformation". To achieve balance and to ensure the accuracy of information, a concerted effort must be made to engage teachers in the conversation around these topics.”

Dutkiewicz says that food production should be taught in US schools but that industry-funded material is unlikely to provide objective information about the impact of beef production. “I worry that clearly partial resources that are strategically designed to achieve a corporate messaging are being provided by a Checkoff program,” he says.

[mariacallous]

German farmers’ irate marathon protests that reached a high point last week has evoked comparisons to the 1524-1525 German Peasants’ War, the largest uprising in Western Europe before the French Revolution. Across the country, well-ordered columns of tractors, many-hundred-strong, thundered along autobahns en route to urban centers, occupying main squares in almost every major city and hundreds of towns. In some places, the farmers clashed with police; in others, effigies symbolizing the current center-left German government—composed of the Social Democrats, Greens, and liberal Free Democrats—hung from a yardarm.

On Monday, the caravans descended from all directions on Berlin, Germany’s capital city. An estimated 10,000 farmers, agriculture sector workers, and sympathetic citizens marched through the city as snow and freezing winds coursed down its wide avenues. The protesters’ sirens, horns, and cowbells created a din that could be heard many blocks away. Despite the fact that the demonstration shut down the city center and disrupted traffic all around Berlin, the ruddy-faced farmers, thickly bundled atop their imposing machinery got thumbs-ups, approving waves, and words of encouragement from passersby.

The signs fastened to their machinery expressed their dire messages: “If the farmer dies, so does the country,” “Better death than slavery,” “The death of farming = starvation,” and “If German farmers are ruined, you’ll be importing your food.”

The immediate object of the agricultural sector’s ire was the Jan. 4 government announcement that it will cancel a longtime subsidy for diesel fuel. Farmers rely on diesel for many types of machinery and are reimbursed about 21 euro cents (23 U.S. cents) per liter (about a quarter of a gallon) of fuel. That’s about 12 percent of a liter’s total price. This is worth about 1,700 euros ($1,850) a month to the average farm and runs German taxpayers around 440 million euros ($482 million) annually.

Environmentalists and market-minded liberals had long had the diesel subsidy in their sights, but it was pushed onto the front burner late last year, when Germany’s highest court ruled unconstitutional the government’s appropriation of 60 billion euros ($65 billion) left over from COVID-19 pandemic emergency aid for climate measures. The ruling left a gaping 17-billion-euro ($18.5-billion) hole in the 2024 budget that the government has been racing to plug ever since.

The traditionally arch-conservative farmers’ lobby—never a friend of any of the government’s coalition partners—protested vehemently as if the scratched benefit would bankrupt every hard-working, salt-of-the-earth homestead in Germany. But neither this nor other dark prophecies will transpire—and not because the government backed down on Jan. 4 and agreed to reduce the subsidy in phases over three years. In fact, the diesel subsidy has very little impact on most farms’ well-being.

Experts say that the average German farmer isn’t facing existential threat and that the nullified diesel rebate alone would pinch only those small farms already teetering.

“Most farmers aren’t poor,” said Stephan Cramon-Taubadel, an agricultural economist from the University of Göttingen. He pointed to the farmers’ lobby’s own recent study, which show the average income of a full-time farmer is 82,000 euros a year—and that’s just agricultural income, usually only one part of many farms’ total income.

In fact, an astounding half of this income, roughly, hails from subsidies. And that’s just for being farmers—not for specifically being small, family-run farms, or farms hit hard by drought, or farms that are cleaner or less-emissions-intensive or more decent to livestock.

On the contrary, most of the subsidies are distributed per hectare, meaning that the largest agribusinesses are reaping the lion’s share. The condition of the German farmer today is dramatically different than that of their 16th-century predecessors involved in the peasants’ war, who bore heavy taxation and suffered egregious injustice under the yoke of the nobility.

Germany’s nearly 270,000 farmers are recipients of a vast number of direct and indirect subsidies, most of which dwarf the diesel rebate—and even increased in total last year by 200 million euros ($217.5 million) compared to 2022.

The largest chunk of this pie hails from the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy, which allocated German farmers about 7 billion euros in 2023, some of which was calculated per hectare (2.5 acres) of farmland, other parts of which went toward specific funding programs for sustainable and environmentally sound farming and rural development. The German government—in other words, German taxpayers—kicks in another roughly 6 billion euros. (In return, Germans pay some of the lowest food prices compared to household income in Europe, which are lower only in Luxembourg and Ireland.)

Moreover, German farmers are coming off banner seasons: In 2022 and 2023, profits rocketed upward by more than 30 percent each year, despite high inflation and, in 2022, the lingering COVID-19 pandemic.

“German farmers had a record year,” said German agriculture expert Alfons Balmann of the Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development.

What, then, are Germany’s farmers griping about? Why does one farmer after another interviewed on German television insist that the political class is not listening to them? That they won’t be taken for granted? That they won’t allow change to happen over their heads?

The ham-fisted defense of agriculture’s status quo is not new, but rather the decades-long mission of the Deutscher Bauernverband (DBV), the agricultural sector’s powerful political lobby. Germany’s Christian Democrats above all have loyally served the DBV since the early postwar years—and today is no different. Conservatives such as Bavaria’s governor, Markus Söder, took to the farmers’ stage in Munich, expressing his undiluted support for their demands. “Without our farmers, there’s no Germany,” he said.

But this rigidity comes at the expense of making changes in our modern food production system in line with the changing times and sensibilities. For years now, there has been pressure on German farmers to reform their existing business model: from the EU, from Germany’s environmental agencies, from animal rights and biodiversity advocates, and from the climate movement.

The angry farmers, argued Jost Maurin of the newspaper Die Tageszeitung, partly have “themselves to blame for the fact that their sector is currently losing the energy tax rebate completely. They have ignored all justified demands for a reform of climate-damaging subsidies for decades. For years, the authorities have recommended to employ financing to promote more environmentally friendly agriculture. But climate arguments simply bounce off Germany’s subsidy champions.” One of the options left to the government, Maurin said, was to simply lop off the diesel rebate, killing two birds with one stone.

There’s no better example of this attitude and the close cooperation between the agricultural lobby and European conservatives than the EU reform measures that were ambushed last year by the European People’s Party, the alliance of the continent’s conservatives in the European Parliament. With the agricultural lobby at its back, the European People’s Party led the charge to water down a nature restoration measure and vehicle emissions regulation, as well as to kill off completely a bill that would have reduced the use of toxic pesticides.

Balmann, of the Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development, said that the writing is on the wall for the farmers, and pointed to an extensive study sponsored by the DBV, green nongovernmental organization, and German agencies that charts a path toward sustainable farming.

What do Germany’s farmers say they need to make it happen? Another 10 billion euros each year in government aid. But farmers shouldn’t expect to be given something more from government without giving something up in return.

[vegance]

Im reading up on politics for the european parliament elections and it’s just awful. EU is simply a big protector of the agrarian/livestock industry :( im voting green but almost all parties are yapping about protecting farmers by massively subsidising factory farming and exempting them from climate goals and sacrificing nature for grazing lands. My country produces a huge surplus of animal products yet EU parliamentary campaigns are calling it “food security”.

It’s disappointing for sure. I wish there were stronger vegan fractions in major left wing parties, but agrarian lobby is still too strong for that.

But most left parties still have many great positions. Right wing parties are trying to take over European politics, and any vote against that is important and valuable.

And right wing parties are faaaar more anti vegan than most left wing parties.

Safe entry for refugees and immigrants, women’s rights, LGBTQ* rights, less nationalism, less classism, more environmental protection. Those are all worthy causes for your vote!

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Brazilian farmer lobby calls on top court to stop government rice import plan

Brazil's leading farming lobby, the CNA, has petitioned the country's Supreme Federal Tribunal to strike down the government's plan to import up to 1 million mt of rice.

The Brazilian government plans to tender for 300,000 mt of milled rice on June 6 to cool prices on the domestic market, after floods overwhelmed the country's main rice-growing state from early May.

The rice industry says the imports will deter future planting and are unnecessary, with ample domestic supply. The legal case filed on June 3 by the CNA, the Brazilian Agriculture and Livestock Confederation, seeks the cancellation of the tender, arguing it violates the constitution.

"The CNA underlines in this (legal) action that 84% of the state's planted area was actually harvested before the rains began and highlights that there is no risk of undersupply," the CNA said in a statement on its website.

Continue reading.

[is-the-owl-video-cute]

If you know you know I suppose, but I’m taking out the most obviously identifying parts of this ask because we are growing closer to actually having a day without a nonsense and if I don’t censor it people are going to accuse me of sending all 12 people who follow me to mob this person. Because no, I don’t agree with this take as you present it, and no I don’t follow them and don’t want to sift through posts trying to find the actual take. Since I’m removing them from this equation in general though, I’m going to address this claim solely as presented here because whether that is what that other person was actually saying or not, this mindset is not uncommon in certain circles.

Disclaimer over, let’s move on.

First of all, no. To move to a more sustainable future it does not make sense to eat less farmed meat and more hunted meat. See the current overfishing issue if you want a real world example of why, but the more blunt answer is that humans do eat a lot of meat and we just eat a lot in general. Ultimately, not everyone who needs meat can just grab a shotgun and find an alligator. Many people who need meat are in fact disabled to begin with, and even those who aren’t probably have a job and can’t afford to take time away to hunt, skin, and dress an opossum several times a week. We already have issues with the average person not having time to cook proper meals, we can’t expect anyone to have the time or energy to gut a deer every week or so. Even if they did, while opossums and deer are very common now, they would not be very common if we all started doing this. Farming animals is sustainable because it means we control how many there are at any given time. We can also assure that farmed animals are both treated for and checked for zoonotic diseases and parasites before it hits our plate. If we just shrugged and went back to hunting for food full time there would be a massive uptick in localized epidemics of diseases that haven’t been relevant to medicine in the US for several decades at least.

Second, a cattle ranch can still exist with native habitat incorporated into it. A field of crops absolutely cannot. Between the monoculture, pesticides, and soil depletion, there genuinely is not a particularly sustainable way to grow crops the way we have been. Commercial crops are a FAR greater threat to the environment than livestock is, additionally, we use livestock to make eco-friendly fertilizer. Limit the animal agriculture and you limit the resource, if you can’t find enough natural fertilizer, you need alternatives. The alternatives are “night soil” or chemicals synthesized in labs. The former would again cause millions of deaths due to disease, the latter can be incredibly toxic to wildlife. Again. Bad. That’s not conservation. Conservation isn’t making more corn fields to make up for lack of cattle farms. That isn’t helpful to anyone.

People absolutely WOULD starve from this. People would die of disease left and right from this. I’m not even sure what the logic of calling this a more sustainable future would be. Want a more sustainable food source in the US? Hunt and process feral cat meat I suppose. Feral rats, mice, house sparrows, and starlings too. Pythons as well if you can get them. The cats and rodents will be major vectors for disease so freeze deep and cook them well. Why on earth would it be preferred to hunt and eat native species rather than the invasive ones if the goal is conservation.

Want sustainable futures? Lobby against highways. Fight for and donate to habitat restoration. Support land back movements. Closing meat and dairy farms only hurts the working class, particularly the disabled (or infants who, you know, may need formula that is actually accessible and not price gouged by scarcity of ingredients, the US already struggles with this the last thing we need is less milk available).

[animalsoutloud]

Choose plant based....

For The Animals - who are mutilated alive without pain relief and placed in small, cramped cages where they can hardly move.

For The Environment - which is damaged heavily by factory farms, leading contributors to climate change. Mass areas of rain forests are being cleared as well for growing grain to feed livestock.

For Taste - in addition to being introduced to exciting new foods, there are ever growing companies and eateries that are producing delicious plant based foods with the same textures and tastes as animal based meat.

For Equality - as animal agriculture thrives on the discrimination of animals, we can reject the notion that some lives matter less than others and value all living beings' right to live their life regardless of what they look like, what their species is, and how their bodies can be used by humans.

For World Hunger - because plant based foods use much less land and water than that which is used to produce animal based meat, we can feed millions of people.

For Health - as plant based foods tend to contribute to lower body weight, lower blood pressure, and lower cholesterol among other health benefits.

For Compassion - as humans, we hate to see other living beings suffer and die. But factory farms hide this suffering from us and lobby for laws to keep the public from knowing.

For Choices - unlike meat eating animals who need animal based meat to live, we have access to plenty of naturally grown foods as well as there are more and more plant based versions of meat and dairy being created.

For Reflection - as we can break from tradition and the notion of 'that is just the way things are' and instead be able to look at things from other perspectives.

For Peace - when you choose plant based, you have a sense of peace in your meals in that you are alleviating animal suffering and helping people and the planet.

[acti-veg]

Someone recently posited that dismissing "harvesting grain kills mice tho" with statistics about how much grain is fed to livestock is too detached and akin to "repeating propaganda" because that's not true everywhere.

They used Australia as an example of a place that "doesn't do COFA" and has a huge problem with the astronomical numbers of rodents dying in grain harvest. They claim that over there there are way more animal lives lost to grain harvesting than slaughter and that grain consumption is as optional as meat consumption, but vegans "dismissing" those concerns are doing nothing to help. They also said something about some vegans thinking intentional slaughter is objectively worse than incidental death due to monoculture, but that "utilitarians are held to a stricter moral standard" and that the sheer number of deaths should make it worse.

I don't even know where to begin learning the details of the food systems in Australia. I know the statistics and some details globally and in my home country but I feel out of my depth with this conversation. Do you have any guidance you could share?

Well the first thing to recognise is that Australia absolutely does do intensive feeding operations, that’s a frankly bizarre claim. There is no way they could feed the number of animals they farm and kill without it. Here is a farming consultancy talking about it and advocating it, here is the department of agriculture acknowledging pigs, sheep and cattle in feedlots, here is meat and livestock Australia discussing it, here is RSPCA Australia discussing it.

It took me about five minutes to find all of these, so they can’t have done much honest research on this topic. The same thing is true of the ‘huge problems of astronomical numbers of animal lives lost to grain. Australia is currently experiencing an ‘epidemic’ of mice due to sustainable unseasonable weather and rainfall, every reference I could find on this topic was talking about how we can get rid of them - there doesn’t seem to be any such concern about mice being lost to grain harvesting.

In fact, the only source I could find talking about this (making the exact same points you’ve included here) was written by the Center For Consumer Freedom, a notorious animal agriculture lobbying group. It’s literal propaganda. The sole reference in that piece is a ‘study’ they link to, which is actually just an opinion piece in The Conversation. The only actual source there is a paper that actually supports the opposite conclusion.

“While the number of mice found in fields substantially decreased after harvest, their numbers substantially increased in the border regions. When it came to disappearances, a category that included both mouse deaths and migration out of the study area, there was no significant difference between the three habitats. The study concluded that changes in the number of field animals were “the consequences of movement and not of high[er] mortality in crops”.

So the factual basis of this argument is obviously deeply questionable, but you can still make the argument ‘ok we don’t know details but it’s highly likely some animals do die to provide plants for human consumption.’ This is undoubtedly true. However, it’s not just true of grain, it’s true of all the plants, it’s true of medicine, building materials, electronics - everything. If we stopped eating grain they’d be calling us hypocrites for not boycotting sprouts.

Furthermore, who is dismissing these problems? I don’t know any vegan who doesn’t want to improve plant agriculture, arguing for agriculture without animal inputs is a fundamental part of what veganism is about. Acknowledging the reality that whatever we eat will cause harm is not hypocrisy, nor is trying to reduce that harm by boycotting industries who directly and purposely exploit and kill billions of animals for profit.

Veganism is, as we all know, about doing whatever is possible and practicable to avoid animal exploitation. We have to eat something. Incidental vs purposeful deaths absolutely do matter, animals die as a result of grain harvesting, but they’re not exploited for grain. Those things are ethically very different, even if both are wrong. We can harvest crops without harming animals, that is what veganic farming is, there is no way to produce animal products without exploiting animals.

As for ‘utilitarians are held to a stricter moral standard,’ since when? If we feed more humans from harvesting grain than we kill in producing it, that’d be fine for most utilitarians. Interestingly, it’d also create the moral imperative to feed that grain to humans directly rather than farmed animals, since those farmed animals will suffer to produce less food and produce less good than would have been produced had that grain been fed to humans directly.

However, that data just does not exist. It is a hugely speculative assumption that more animals are killed to produce grain than to produce meat, there isn’t anything even resembling reliable statistics on that front. It is also an argument only relevant to utilitarians which… is fine for them, but for anyone is not a utilitarian the response is just… okay, so what? I’m not a utilitarian.

This is phrased as if veganism is dependent on utilitarianism as part of its ethical principles, which they may have gotten from someone like Singer but it’s a misunderstanding to suggest that is what vegsnism is, and arrogant to insist we should all hold ourselves to the same ‘strict standard’ as utilitarians, whatever the hell that means.

In conclusion, it’s a confused piece of pseudo-philosophy, likely sourced from corporate propaganda, which is based on assumptions, the misrepresentation of data and some odd assumptions about the ethical basis for veganism. You don’t need to learn anything about the food systems of Australia to debunk this argument, since evidently the person making it didn’t bother to learn about it themselves.