Global warming hoax infects agriculture

Today the food editor, no less, of Parade magazine fell for the leaky boat of global warming. You get Parade in your Sunday newspaper, and its the glitzy, fluffy puff piece that rarely tackles anything serious.

The article was on how to save money, and recommended one way was to not eat meat. It repeated the outright lie that livestock grazing causes 18% of the greenhouse gasses that allegedly poison earth's atmosphere. Vegetarians and animal rights activists love this dubious statistic, because it makes their case for them.

The fact is that a good share of the wide open spaces in the U.S. aren't good for anything but grazing animals. There isn't enough water to farm it, and without animals grazing to keep the grass growing, it will turn into a 1930s-style dust bowl. They like to perpetuate the myth that the land can just lay there, if only the animals didn't exist.

The land and vegetation need animals to fertilize and break the top crust, to allow what moisture does fall to go down to the roots of the grass and other plants. If this doesn't happen, the vegetation dies and the land turns to dust, as it did in the 1930s. If domestic animals like cattle and sheep didn't exist, wildlife like deer and elk take over.

Meat is the best source available to the human diet for zinc, iron and Vitamin B complex trace minerals. These come into cattle and sheep from grazing the wide open ranges, and are passed to humans in the meat--as man cannot eat and digest grass, and even if he did, it passes through without leaving off the vitamins and minerals. Animals can harvest the vitamins and minerals, and pass them on to man.

That Parade magazine would just blithely fall for a global warming bugaboo is not unusual--it happens all the time. But someone who will present the facts--that's rare.

Like they say, common sense is really very uncommon.