> cut hay when the ruminants are gone for a season.

But surely only certain places need to do this? for the UK, you need to make hay for the winter, assuming that your meadows flood, or are otherwise muddy. But if your in one of the more temperate areas of the southern USA, surely you don't need to do that?

Up here in Scotland (can't speak for England, it's half a day's drive south of me just to get to the border, but watch Clarkson's Farm) we tend not to make hay very much these days. Mostly we make silage, which is where you cut long grass but instead of allowing it to dry into hay you bale it up while it's still green and wrap it in plastic sheeting. It undergoes anaerobic fermentation, which preserves a lot more of the nutrients, and it doesn't spontaneously combust if it's still a tiny bit damp when you store it.

The silage that you get, then, is basically like a kind of grass sauerkraut, and smells exactly like you'd expect.

That combined with "draff" - distillery mash, the spent malt from brewing "pot ale" for making whisky, and a certain amount of shredded sugar beet tends to make up the majority of winter fodder.

Draff is great because it's still fermenting slowly and generating a lot of heat, so the cows are eating hot food in the winter. It's mostly the fibrey bits of the barley malt, which we can't eat but which cows and sheep - having cellulase in at least one of their stomachs - do incredibly well on. It's absolutely no use for anything else, humans can't eat it and it doesn't really compost down. It just rots, stinks, and emits masses of carbon dioxide and methane when it does. Far better for the environment to lock all that up in a cow.

Ideally your fields don't flood because you plant crops in the autumn that stay in the ground over winter to germinate in the spring, and if they get flooded that's it, you've lost the lot.

You tend not to see soya-based or other leguminous food here very much, because it's expensive, it has to be shipped halfway round the planet, and it's ineffective - you get shitty meat that no-one wants to buy.

You need the cows to graze pasture, chew up the grass, break down all that tough cellulose and poo it out as incredibly highly refined fertiliser.

We eat, just about everywhere in the world, because there's six inches of earth, it rains sometimes, and cows and pigs shit solid gold.