A lot of agriculture is driven by fossil fuels though. Or, more specifically, fossil fuels in energy and transportation, as well as in fertilizer production.

[–] Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Probably more so for fruit and vegetables than meat though, crops require diesel farm equipment in virtually every aspect of their production, whereas animals are self propelled

[–] DillyDaily@lemmy.world 11 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Well except that we first need to use all the sane diesel farm equipment to grow soy and corn crops that we can then feed to those self propelled animals.

In most of the westernised supply chain livestock animals don't get to propel themselves very far anyway. Where once farmers would drive cattle to market on hoof, now they litteraly drive them in a truck.

[–] Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Depends where you live, the cattle and sheep where I live just wander around in the paddocks and eat grass for the most part.

Besides, cattle trucks are public transport for cows anyway, very efficient.

[–] drhugsymcfur@lemmy.world 3 points 7 months ago

That is not how Western cattle farming works. As someone in the industry I can confidently say that no cow sold to a processor get a majority of their calories through grazed uncultivated grassland.

That is a feasible strategy for subsistence farming, but not in our for-profit farming model.

[–] Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world 5 points 7 months ago

That's a BIG part of the reason agriculture scores so high on this chart, yeah

I'm not saying that animal husbandry isn't contributing a lot to climate change, but compared to fossil fuels, it's absolutely miniscule.