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Alright, this one is more contemporary. This is, in indirectly, related to the protests for the farmers (business owners) in EU.

This is about Big Ag and especially Big Meat capital. Note that they will ALWAYS make it seem like it's about jobs, as if jobs are the holiest of sacred divine untouchable things in society.

"What a Meatless Future Could Mean for Farmers" https://getpocket.com/explore/item/what-a-meatless-future-could-mean-for-farmers

thanks to @vcj for posting the article.

For the anti-PBC types. Just imagine that there's no PBC coming, just the collapse of the ABC. It's more or less the same result, liberals just love to make it seem like it's incremental progress that doesn't rock the boat, or green capitalism. If you defend ABC because you hate PBC, don't bother replying.

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According to a USDA-funded report, rising plant-based milk sales could be a factor in the decline of cow’s milk consumption (though overall dairy consumption is on the rise, thanks to cheese).
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This is usually the case. Traditional animal milk had been a local thing because of the lack of a cold chain. Cheese and butter are the value added products made by refining animal milk, and they have a better shelf life (less so for butter).

Value added means that a raw cheap product is used to make a new product that's more expensive and in less supply, instead of selling the raw cheap product. The feed crop sector is *this*.

The problem is, of course, the massive direct and indirect subsidies heading towards Big Dairy, as if cheese and very fat foods aren't already addictive.

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And looking ahead, the CEO of beef giant Cargill said that plant-based meat could make up as much as 10 percent of the meat market within a few years.
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This wouldn't be surprising, but you can't really trust Big Meat. They could buy up lots of small plant-based manufacturers and then turn around and shut them down because it's more profitable to keep selling the more and more expensive animal meat.

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A largely plant-based future would be a win for livestock, 99 percent of which is raised in factory farms
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I appreciate that they mention the fact that makes every "let's end CAFOs, but go grass fed" (animal farming extensivization) proponent sound like a small round clown honking and farting simultaneously.

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But it would also cause a massive shift in a huge part of the economy
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You bet it would. I don't have a perfect figure to show, but I'm attaching one that's in the same vein. "A chronological sequence of various human efforts in addressing climate change." There are many large sectors upstream and downstream of this. Those subsidies and the favoritism, it benefits them too. The input producers (upstream) are regularly behind the "farmer protests"; this means fertilizer and pesticide companies, tractor companies, the chemical and metallurgy giants behind them, and fossil fuels for sure. The downstream corporations are Big Meat and Big Dairy, and many others. Whatever "value added" transformation is added, it means a new layer of corporations. This includes the UPF/UPP corporations too. I would also count Big Pharma as downstream, as they sell a lot of products to treat the symptoms caused by very unhealthful diets.

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one that could lead to dislocation and upheaval for the hundreds of thousands of farmers and meatpacking workers who make their livelihood from raising and slaughtering animals. What does the future look like for them?
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First we need to make the distinction between agriculturist (plant farmer) and zootechnist (animal pharmer). The fact that many animal "raisers" don't do their own animal slaughtering doesn't matter in this, they're responsible for the deaths of those animals.

Mixed farmers can wind down their animal harming operations.
Agriculturalists can switch to food crops, industrial crops, or something else. We're definitely heading for a point where land use needs to be reduced. There are too many farmers trying to commodify land, and it's ruining the planet. There are some strategies for that; in the past, the EU had subsidies for farmers not to farm. I don't really like that, it feels like a hostage situation: "pay up, or the land gets the plow blade!"

One alternative is agricultural extensivization. That's the "land sharing" idea. Practically, it would mean more #veganic agriculture. I repeat, animal farming is a "value added" idea; it causes a perverse incentive to stuff more resources into growing more animals - which would be "organic" in such a land sharing system, though animal farmers absolutely love to cheat their standards, made famous by feed cannibalism and trash feeding (google it).

The problem with the certified standards issue is that people want cheap stuff, and that also creates race to the bottom conditions. You see that reflected in the desire of farmers to ban imports that compete with them, and that is a reasonable desire. Food is easily "green laundered" across the various supply chain steps, so certifications lose their relevance. And distributors can easily import cheaper stuff and try to match the high price of certified foods and make larger profits. The more whole the foods are, as plants, the easier it is to make the supply chain transparent and short.

Agriculturalists can switch the type of crops. The machinery is not that specialized, despite what the article will say. There are things to LEARN and a bunch of tweaking to be done for the machinery, for sure, but that is normal farming activity.

The other side of this is the initial problem: overproduction. Why value added exists. There are too many crop farmers producing too much. If they didn't have these "grain sinks", the grain would be too cheap. Certain countries in the world, famously the US, use this cheap grain for foreign policy. Not cool. So production actually needs to decrease, and that can happen in two ways: land sparing (and rewilding) or extensivization and semi-rewilding (agroecology and veganic). The semi solution would require more jobs and fewer inputs, but there are good arguments in favor of both. It depends on how many people will live in rural areas, because automation will further drop the actual farmer population for many types of crops. And, no, one guy owning an army a robots who do the work isn't "working class".

To be clear, the farmers are a tiny percent of the population, like 1-5% in the developed countries. People living in rural areas aren't inherently farmers, that's a preindustrial condition. After industrialization and especially after the Green Revolution, rural society died, now we're just seeing it's undead corpse twitch towards "blood and soil" fascism.
The people living there are ignorant and trapped, they have no economy, no future, no prospects, and the few big farmers aren't suddenly going to start sharing. That's why conservative politicians love these places: lots of subsidies for business owners, a trapped population dependent on a modicum of welfare who will vote however they are told to vote to keep that going. I'd probably be looking for lots of drugs and drinking lots of refined alcohol in that situation too, it's fucked up. Alcohol, btw, is also a value added product based on cheap crops.

The people in these rural places need opportunities to move away, to escape the poverty trap. That's what the money needs to be for. Or, if we decide that the industrial fossil-fuel agriculture is over, then it's time for the masses to return to the land. That will require land redistribution or something, I'm not into feudalism.

Animal farmers are toast for sure. That's the other side. Are we playing "too big to fail capitalism" here? or what? This protection of small-mid business owners is how you get fascist movements. They get all entitled and land "ownerous" and then try to storm the parliament or something similar. It's not the working class doing that. They need to lose, it's obligatory. What that means is loss of their capital. The bloody shitty (literally) buildings - not sure what else could be done with them. Keep some as museums, demolish the rest, they're a horror on the face of the planet. And, yes, it's fine if these farmers get welfare and retraining.

But someone has to lose. There is no way this improves without someone losing.

We have to get over this idea that businesses failing and rich people losing their wealth is a bad thing, because if every business owner is too big to fail, then you have some type of "socialism for the business owning class" and it's not going to end well.

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A paper from the Breakthrough Institute, a nonprofit that advocates for technological solutions to environmental problems, tried to answer that question.
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Just to be clear, the BI is a bunch of green capitalism apologists. Be very suspicious with what they write. They're core promoters of ecomodernism, the idea that business can go on overall, we just need technological fixes to replace some of the problematic stuff, and nothing really will change. That's well exemplified with plant-based or lab-based burgers which are meant as form and function replacements for animal-based burgers. We don't *need* that; it's fine if such technologies are developed, but those aren't necessary. People changing and systems changing is what is necessary, and that's what these green capitalism apologists abhor: change in the system. You can see how this works out with the Cargill statement above. That's what "ecomodern meat" looks like.

For those unaware of how big business works: start-ups are like feed crops for corporations.
The small players will sell out. Only cooperatives with many members have a better chance of not selling out.

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#meatIndustry #animalFarming #BigMeat #BigDairy #BigAg #supply #foodRegime #climateChange #sustainability of what?