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Comment by ethanbond | Hacker News Reader

Former Arizona resident here. The solution is simple: stop subsidizing water. It's completely insane that you have cattle ranchers and cotton farms in a nearly Martian landscape. It'd be economically unviable if it weren't for massive water subsidies, so it should be.

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+1 I agree. I would extend this to all farming and meat production, even in non-arid areas.

I read Peter Zeihan's pretty good book "THE END OF THE WORLD IS JUST THE BEGINNING, Mapping the Collapse of Globalization" and he offers lots of good advice for sustaining the human population: optimize on foods like wheat that provide protein and carbs, using fewer resources like water. Peter has lots of equivalent YouTube content if you don't want to buy the book.

I'll offer a hat tip to our little bubble here. Water consumption with respect to the animals themselves is high but once you factor in all of the water used in the production of the feed itself it's crazy especially when considering the subsidies in play.

I'll also say I thoroughly enjoyed Zeihan's book. It was enlightening from many angles but the supply chain dependencies and raw material overviews he did were very informative.

> Water consumption with respect to the animals themselves is high but once you factor in all of the water used in the production of the feed itself it's crazy especially when considering the subsidies in play.

Animals are properly used to upcycle calories which humans can’t consume. Ideally the heavy lifting would be done by bugs, egg chickens and dairy cows.

Subsidies were initiated by politicians who didn’t understand the problem they were trying to solve.

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