World hunger, therefore factory farm

22 May 2016 Tags: farming Category: Agriculture Reading Time: about 3 minutes

I’ve herd the argument “there are x billion people in the world, people are staving, without factory farming we couldn’t survive!”.

This is an interesting argument, one I can’t give a straight answer to, only speculation. But my thoughts on world hunger is it’s more an issue of wealth distribution issue, not food distribution. Take America as an example and if nutrition could be measured only in calories. America, the wealthiest country in the world, produces yearly over twice the required calories to feed its population… yet there are still people going hungry suffering from malnutrition. This to me is the simplest illustration that it’s an economic game, not one of food production. If America was struggling to produce the yearly calories for their population, I could accept factory farming as a possible solution. But while food goes to those who pay the most it is not a reasonable justification.

Saving The Bees?

14 April 2016 Tags: bees Category: Agriculture Reading Time: about 3 minutes

Recently I read an article on “Saving the bees” which promoted Bee Hive Adoption. It was the first I had herd of supporting bees via adoption. It struck me as a neat idea at first. But as the article went on, I found it focusing on honey bees and the “unique service they provide”. By the end of it I found myself despising the idea and the article. As it manipulated real concerns into some plea for supporting commercial honey bees. What bothers me is misinformation, there seems to be a lot of it out there.