If everyone turned vegetarian—or better still, vegan—we could easily return 75% of current cropland to nature[1], and still feed more people than we do today. Meat is just ridiculously water- and resource-intensive; plus, the animals that are reared for said meat are non-trivial contributors to CO2 and CH4 in the atmosphere.
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
> we can’t create a meal without hurting animals
This is a Western problem. India, for instance, contains more vegetarians than the rest of the world put together, times five.
The reason the DA couldn't go with burglary is because that would require the object taken to have positive value, and those companies don't want to claim they also sell slaughtered animals who were diseased to the verge of death. If they discard their bodies as they corpses they do, they are of no value to the farmers and thus could not have been the subject of a burglary.
Monoculture is what's new and weird.
The earliest crop-raising cultures for which we have decent records (Mesopotamia, Egypt, China) all had specialized fields for different crops.
"We found some evidence for" does not equal " All crops were raised this way".
I.e. just because they found some evidence of specialized fields in the remains of those civilizations, does not mean they grew all their food exclusively that way.
Also, you are simply wrong.
"Three Sisters" The Three Sisters are the three main agricultural crops of various Indigenous peoples of North America: squash, maize ("corn"), and climbing beans (typically tepary beans or common beans). In a technique known as companion planting, the maize and beans are often planted together in mounds formed by hilling soil around the base of the plants each year; squash is typically planted between the mounds. The cornstalk serves as a trellis for climbing beans, the beans fix nitrogen in their root nodules and stabilize the maize in high winds, and the wide leaves of the squash plant shade the ground, keeping the soil moist and helping prevent the establishment of weeds. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(agriculture)
And then when you go to the companion planting wiki article it highlights that it's been in use around the world for many years, China, etc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Companion_planting
To say this, to say that humans just started off right from monoculture is crazy. We just went straight from hunter gatherers to having large curated monoculture fields that are cultivated and specifically planted.
No.
"Though the transition from wild harvesting was gradual, the switch from a nomadic to a settled way of life is marked by the appearance of early Neolithic villages with homes equipped with grinding stones for processing grain." https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/developmen...
Honestly though, more labor and lower yields with the promise that future generations will have healthy soil is a reasonable trade off to me.