My Most Recent Anti-Ag Experience
One of my favorite things to do, anytime, anywhere, is play “The Farming Game.”
The Farming Game is a board game which is kind of like Monopoly, but better. Maybe I like it so much because I’m competitive and like to brag about my win when I inevitably beat my brother so bad, he has to quit out of shame. Maybe I like it because it’s just quirky and ag-nerdy enough to make me laugh. Maybe I like it because in the farming game, I can take out $100,000+ of “debt” (even though I know I’m not supposed) to buy 50 cows, multiple leases, grain, and fruit. Regardless, I LOVE The Farming Game because it’s not real life; it’s a fictional farm where you can almost guarantee four cuttings of hay a year and run your cows on the same land you put your wheat. In the real world, however, farming doesn’t always go this way.
People have been farming and raising livestock on the land, pretty much, since God said “let there be light.” Over the years, we’ve made technological advances in agriculture which allows farmers and ranchers to feed the world. However, one thing we cannot do in real life (but something I frequently do is the Farming Game) is plant crops anywhere and graze cattle anywhere.
According to National Geographic, “[Earth] is 71% water and 29% land, though large areas are uninhabitable deserts, mountains, lakes, and permafrost. A little over 50 million square kilometers is farmland, not all of which is capable of supporting crops.”
Why, you ask, can we not grow crops in certain areas? Well, the anti-ag animal activist who came at me HARD on Instagram last week seemed to think it was because us cattle ranchers are greedy with the land and won’t allow farmers to farm on prime grazing soil. This may be the case in some fantasy land like the Farming Game, but it’s not the case in real life.
Scroll through the screenshots below to view my interaction with an anti-ag.
I give the extreme example of the Crazy Mountains in Big Timber, Montana. No one could grow a successful crop in the Crazies, even if it was deforested, its soil is not suitable to grow mass crops. Even if it was suitable for growing hundreds of acres or turnips or corn, the weather is in-climate and inconsistent, there’s a fair chance your crops would freeze, even in the dead of growing season. Just ask some of my more agriculturally adventurous friends about growing small gardens near the Crazies — they know the risk of it not working simply due to weather.
Taking a less extreme example, let’s look at the massive farm fields in the Midwest. In states such as Iowa and Nebraska, farmland is plentiful, and the agriculturists utilize it as such. There’s also prime land in that area for grazing. Farmers and ranchers know what land should be used for farming and what should be used to house animals. Furthermore, these farmers and ranchers OWN OR LEASE the land they plant crops on or manage livestock on; meaning it is their decision on what they want to do with said land. It’s not up to some anti-ag activist who doesn’t even know if a cow gets up first on it’s back legs or front legs to decide this for them.
Another counter-point to the anti-ags argument that ranchers are taking land away from farmers, is that even if every ranch on the planet was sold, all the ranchers quit their jobs, and no one “forcibly mass produced” livestock as we’re so accused of — we’d still need land for these animals to inhabit. I mean: what do these anti-ags want us to do with all these animals? KILL THEM?? For living off the grass grown on land which could be used to feed us superior humans?
Usually, an anti-ag will pivot this specific argument with something like “well you ranchers make livestock reproduce with artificial insemination and embryo transfer, you make the population this large. You make animals have babies just so you can steal them away from their mother and sell them.”
I could see where one would think that on the surface; however, if you would go one, teeny, tiny, baby step further, you’d realize that livestock are just like any other animal, and if we didn’t “make them reproduce” they would still reproduce at the same rate on their own much like wildlife. If livestock producers have control of breeding operations, we are actually able to control the livestock population and do it in a safe environment, something that could not be done if livestock were left as wild animals.
The last point I want to make here, before I get too long winded, is that when commenting back and fourth with this anti-ag, she said I “had my thumbs in my ears” so I “couldn’t hear the truth.” When in fact, I asked multiple times to have an open, friendly conversation about animal ag and said I would provide statistics and facts to back up my claims. This anti-ag, however, was incredibly rude, sarcastic, and down-right wrong about many facts she shared regarding the ag industry. When I called her on this, she, herself (to quote the anti-ag here) put her thumbs in her ears, told me I was bragging about “feeding the world” to build up my ego, and came at me with multiple bogus statics which can be disproven by a simple Google search. And the icing on the cake? She claimed that animal agriculture — the industry whose entire purpose is to feed others — was actually causing starvation.
One thing I don’t have to deal with in my beloved Farming Game is uneducated, close-minded, anti-ags, publicly attacking my character and for that, I am grateful. But until that fantasy becomes a reality, I’ll do my best to keep fighting the good fight for good food, good people, and even the people who don’t support the ag industry but have to eat anyway.
