General Suburban Updates and Rumours

[ac3r]

Much of the farmland around here is cash crop rather than food for humans.

I’m confused by your terminology. Most of the food that is grown for humans is sold for cash. Does “cash crop” mean something else?

I think they're illustrating that a lot of the stuff we grow is just sold for livestock feed, filler or shipped off to other markets. That is in contrast to more traditional forms of subsistence farming where what is grown is used locally (either by the farmer, village, nearby towns or cities). Before globalization, we would farm in the latter method.

In that sense, they're right in that we grow a lot of "useless" stuff like soy bean and corn that is used to feed livestock which we then slaughter by the hundreds of millions just to eat them or turn them into some other meat product (pet food etc). If, instead of killing nearly a billion animals each year, we could just eat the crop we grow and still get the same amount of protein, we'd waste much less farmland - not to mention cut emissions down as well as water usage. People love to blame oil companies and stuff for destroying our planet, but people who eat meat have a pretty heavy hand in it as well. Meat production is an extremely destructive industry.