Cow
Footnotes:
[1] Patel, Raj, and Jason W. Moore. A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things : A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2017.
[2] Hiroshan Hettiarachchi and Reza Ardakanian, Safe Use of Wastewater in Agriculture: Good Practice Examples (United Nations University, Institute for Integrated Management of Material …, 2016).
[3] Christina Siebe, “Nutrient Inputs to Soils and Their Uptake by Alfalfa through Long-Term Irrigation with Untreated Sewage Effluent in Mexico,” Soil Use and Management 14, no. 2 (1998): 119–22, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-2743.1998.tb00628.x.
The economic value of fodder crops hinges on the modern industrial food system organized around cheap food. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s in Mexico, the Green Revolution played out as the combined forces of oil companies, corporate agricultural technologies and state power crystallized the food system foundations of raw material quantities, cheap labor, and cheap energy. [1] Farm labor has been devalued over time, but cow labor has always been free. Although complicated by inputs and outputs of food, water, waste, and methane, this virtue of free labor nonetheless makes cows essential to the cheap food system. The large amounts of biomass required by cows within the dairy and meat industries ensure an ongoing demand for livestock feed. The current crop rotation system commonly used in the Mezquital is one between several years of planting alfalfa and a couple years of planting maize. Alfalfa is a nitrogen-fixing legume which doesn’t need the additional nitrogen of the wastewater. However, it does benefit from increased organic matter which in turn aids the soil’s water retention capacities. Fodder crops are irrigated by overflow, and maize is irrigated in furrows. [2] Although milk from cows eating Mezquital alfalfa has been researched, tested, and deemed safe, the mechanism of overflow irrigation causes enormous variation among nutrient distribution in alfalfa, which is a ground cover crop. [4]
Footnotes:
[1] Patel, Raj, and Jason W. Moore. A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things : A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2017.
[2] Hiroshan Hettiarachchi and Reza Ardakanian, Safe Use of Wastewater in Agriculture: Good Practice Examples (United Nations University, Institute for Integrated Management of Material …, 2016).
[3] Christina Siebe, “Nutrient Inputs to Soils and Their Uptake by Alfalfa through Long-Term Irrigation with Untreated Sewage Effluent in Mexico,” Soil Use and Management 14, no. 2 (1998): 119–22, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-2743.1998.tb00628.x.
