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Comment by hart_russell | Hacker News Reader

I've driven by a few factory farms in California. You know you're close to one when you're hit with the smell of manure many miles out. When you actually drive by the farms, the reality is quite depressing: the cattle are standing in their own shit with barely any space to move. I'm done with red meat myself.

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So the cattle are living in the same condition as many San Franciscans? I live in TX and grew up in FL and the cattle have plenty of room to roam here.

South Dakota cattle are roaming the fields, in fact, about 100,000 died in the early winter storm in 2013. They were still in the summer pastures and had not grown their winter coat. It started as a rain and then turned into a blizzard. The winter pastures are better protected.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/100000-cattle-feared-dead-after...

Glad to hear you've given up red meat. Not to preach too much here, but why just red meat?

Poultry, for example, is no better. Male chicks are dumped onto conveyor belts and ground alive as they provide no value to the farmers (for meat or eggs).

Dairy farms are also equal to or worse than the factory farms you mentioned.

That's pretty bad, it isn't like that in other places. In fact it's better for the environment to rotate grazing lands overall. It helps deal with or reverse desertification. It's not much different than how fish farms have been changing to something closer to what nature offers in places.

My single biggest issue with these meat alternatives is I cannot understand why it's costing so much more than actual meat.

> My single biggest issue with these meat alternatives is I cannot understand why it's costing so much more than actual meat.

I'd imagine it's because of the economies of scale; once production ramps up to sufficiently-high volume, the prices should in theory go down. Availability in fast food should hopefully help with that.

Subsidies are another aspect to this, though I don't know offhand how heavily cattle ranching is subsidized v., say, corn or soy.

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