I don’t get how you can be against manure in any way. Used correctly there is close to no risk of any diseases getting to the end consumer. Usually you would apply manure before planting and by the time you harvest the crop too much time would have passed for any manure bacteria to survive.

Manure brings lots of benefits. We all know it brings nutrients but it also adds a lot of organic matter and very manure heavy plant cycles can even net store carbon in the soil. And if you wouldn’t use the manure where would you put it? We should all know those US style manure lagoons (poop lakes) are all environmental catastrophes. There is literally no better way to use manure than to spread it on crops. The crops take up the nutrients which saves the nutrients from running into water causing algal blooms. In my European country there is a legal requirement that all manure has to be spread on agricultural land because of the environmental benefits of doing so.

And the “poison”. Well that depends on where you live. There are safe pesticides and then there are generally horrifying ones. I don’t trust the US on this but I at least trust the experts on my country’s chemical regulation authority. They have banned lots of agricultural chem and have very strict requirements for new approvals. The main risk with modern agricultural chemicals are the people applying them, not the people eating the produce. Take glyphosphate for example, the most well researched agricultural chemical in existence. All the horror stories about it read as (and this is a real story I read in the newspaper): “I was spraying glyphosphate in my garden while 8 months pregnant and then I accidentally poured the entire 5 liter container on myself, then I had a miscarriage”. Lots of chemicals are like this. If I pour 5 liters of bleach all over myself I would get sick as well but that doesn’t mean bleached clothes are dangerous.

Both cows, horses and even to a limited extent humans can digest fiber. Cows digest fiber in the rumen where it actually turns mostly into organic acids which the cow can oxidize while the anaerobic rumen bacteria cannot. Interestingly the same thing happens in the large intestine in other mammals. For humans the large intestine is quite small and food moves through there too quickly for much fiber to be properly digested. However the easiest digestible fiber, soluble fiber, actually mostly breaks down even in a human’s large intestine and yields us approximately 2 calories per gram of soluble fiber. For insoluble fiber this amount is extremely low since there is not enough fermentation taking place for it to be completely broken down. However for mammals with a much larger large intestine where food passes much slower, even the harder to digest fibers can be utilized to a large degree.

Horses belong to this category and are called hindgut fermenters. Other examples may surprise you like gorillas and orangutans who have incredibly huge large intestines. That’s why those apes can eat leaves all day and is an explanation why their stomachs are huge without them being filled with fat, it’s all intestines.

However a weakness with hindgut fermentation is that the large intestine can only extract solubles from the microbial mass which leaves out a lot of nutrients. A cow can extract those same organic acids from the fermentation but since the rumen is first in their digestive system the whole microbial mass enters their “ordinary” digestive system which means that they can digest the actual bacteria as well, meaning they manage to extract a bunch of extra microbial proteins that hindgut fermenters may miss. The benefit to hindgut fermentation is however that the first shot at digesting the food is given to the animal itself. A horse can digest starch just as well as a human could but a cow suffers considerable losses in starch digestion since the bacteria gets first gibs, turning the starch to organic acids instead of getting broken down into simple sugars directly, which is more efficient. So in short a cow and horse can both digest fiber. However their digestive systems have significant tradeoffs and one is not necessarily better than the other.

Considering that’s a Holstein breed cow and therefore a milking cow, the nutritional demands are entirely different. Getting a cow to produce 40 liters of milk a day is no easy task and requires grass of the highest quality, combined with a generous dose of concentrate feed with grains and legumes/presscake. If a normal hobby horse was fed a diet like this they would turn obese almost instantly. In fact hobby horses usually require as poor quality feed as possible because it turns out that being ridden at walking speed for an hour 1-2 times a week is a very low amount of exercise for a horse. You have to intentionally grow as rough and low quality grass as possible for the horses not to get obese. That’s why oats are no longer given to horses. A race horse or a working horse that’s active for several hours a day can however be given oats or other concentrated feed and may be able to handle, or at least come close to handling, a dairy cow type diet. However these types of hard working horses are rare nowadays.

TLDR dairy cows and horses generally do NOT eat the same diet.

In the US the native herbivore with the “cow-niche” is the American bison. If we would restore ecosystems and replace captive grazers with wild grazers, increasing the wild bison population is the answer and much preferable to having wild cows (who don’t even exist in the first place, the wild version is extinct as mentioned). Of course bison is not an answer to what to do with the cows that already exist in the US of course.

However if a decision was made to ban all animal agriculture I would be a strong opponent of not rewilding any cows. They are not native and they are not even fit for living in the wild anymore. Just take a Holstein milking cow for example. What use does producing 40liter of milk per day have in the wild? None! Calves can’t drink even close to that amount. The lactating moms would get mastitis. They are not even fit to only make milk for just their calves anymore. Let the domestic cows die out in that case.

Well no shit. That applies to most animals we humans care for, even the ones who we don’t typically eat. Try throwing a hairless cat or a pug out into the wild. They can’t manage without us no more.

Interestingly enough you don’t have to be so specific as Black Angus. All cows are totally extinct in the wild. They derive from the Eurasian auroch which went extinct in most places of its original range over 3000 years ago. The absolute last one died in 1627 in Poland, but even that one was probably not pure auroch. If everyone went vegan we would probably still keep a few cows around in zoos but we would have no where near the amount we have today. If we wanted to reintroduce something similar we would have to rely on reintroducing european buffalos, which are another species but still native to Europe.

The original point is that billionaires, as I interpret it, is that billionaires are worse than animals. Or at least that if we look at billionaires as if they were animals we would still diagnose them as ill. My point is that that’s not true. Animals can be just as psychotic. Most have absolutely no morals and a subset of them regularly do things that are way worse than what the billionaires are doing, hence my examples.

However animals are not humans. Billionaires are humans. If we say billionaires are like animals that’s already a really bad grade. We humans are supposed to be much better than that. I’m not defending billionaires at all. I’m saying one should compare them to something else. There are much better and more effective ways to criticize them than this.

They don’t do that because they physically can’t. If they could they would. If you have two starving bears and throw them one carcass. Only one will eat because they will fight and scream away the weaker one.

Hey I’m no big supporter of billionaires but “that behavior in any other species we would classify it as some kind of divergent behavior” is extremely wrong. Altruism is extremely rare outside humans. Most animals would absolutely love to get every single piece of food in the forest all to themselves. They steal food from each other constantly. Whole species are based on the very concept of stealing as their main or sole life strategy. There are fish out there whose main food is the juveniles of the exact same fish species. Literal baby-eating as their main strategy.

We humans are supposed to be better than animals. Comparing someone to an animal is comparing them to something bad.

There are many different kinds of farms and they all need different inputs. Most impacted would be the corn and soy farms who produce a low value good for a lot of inputs in the form of fertilizer, seeds, sprays, fuel for heavy machinery etc. Least impacted would be beef producers who use wild grazing. Almost no inputs as the land produced the grazing by itself, at the same time they produce a high value good.

Of course there are lots of intermediates but those would be the extremes.

4 most important parts of artificial fertiliser are nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and sulfur.

Nitrogen is Infinite. It’s made from the air which is 78% nitrogen. Energy is needed to fix it. Usually its natural gas but it doesn’t have to be. Electricity can also be used. There are real world plants who use hydro or wild energy to make it, even if they are few today.

Phosphorus is plentiful on Earth, both in soil, rock and sea water. However in most natural sources the concentration is too low to actually refine today. Phosphate rock which is the main source today is limited. 70% of the current Reserves are in one single country, Morocco. All world reserves combined should last for a our 300 years. After that we will either have to extract phosphorus from less phosphorus dense sources or we have to recycle it better from human excrete. Nevertheless we have plenty of time to come up with that technology. Main problem right now is not it running out but the risk of how concentrated it is. What if Morocco doesn’t want to share?

Potassium is extremely plentiful around the world. It’s 2,6% of the Earth’s mass and even the potassium rich minerals we currently use are expected to last hundreds if not thousands of years. Mined all over the world but mostly in Canada, china and Russia and Belarus. Not really a problem. Also plentiful in seawater.

Sulfur has many different sources and in most it’s a byproduct. Main source is as a biproduct of refining fossil fuels but it’s also created as a byproduct of mining for other minerals. The amount needed for agriculture is also comparably small. There is so much sulfur out there it’s even mixed into concrete just to get rid of it. I don’t see sulfur as a main concern.

So to summarize I’m really not concerned about any of them except for phosphorus and for that one it’s mostly the question of how willing Morocco is to share it. Long term when sulfate rock runs out 300 years I’m quite secure we have found out how to commercially extract it from a less dense mineral. Either that or we have finally started seriously recycling it from human excrete. Phosphorus is very easily recycled. The technology is already here. More sewage plants would just have to do it. And if we are starting to slowly reach peak phosphorus the pure financial incentives will make sewage plants start recovering it. Now it doesn’t happen because the mineral phosphorus is just too cheap and convenient.