What Bamboo barriers can you get? I have a real problem with my bamboo spreading and someting that could help stop this would be a miracle.

Aside from the whole swapping thing, it’s a great way to meet like-minded people, share tips, and enjoy a bit of socialising!

It is very possible to raise meat sustainably (e.g. Joel Salatin’s methods). Animals can be raised on land not suitable for growing other food (e.g. arid saltbush plains, hilly/rocky land, etc), and can be fed with the byproducts of other pursuits (e.g. oilseed pressings, prunings, grass clippings, garden waste, vegetable scraps, fish guts, etc).

Adding animals into a vegetable garden or small farm properly will actually increase the total amount of food that can be produced, not only through direct yields (eggs, meat, milk, etc), but also through faster nutrient cycling (food-to-manure is a faster process than composting) and reduced workload (e.g. using pigs to plow an area before planting, ducks for pest control, chickens to control weeds and remove seeds from mulch and compost, etc).

All that said, this is not the way we generally produce meat. It’s true most people eat too much of it, and the type of meat they’re eating is produced at a significant environmental cost.

I guess I just take issue with blanket statements like “producing meat is a wasteful process all the way around”, “meat eaters take in 14 times more water and use 20 times more energy” and “throughout this [meat production] process, a cycle of waste and contamination occurs”. Those things are only true if meat is raised in the wrong way to begin with.