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The better way would be real agricultural extension services (like those in the past) educating rural people on how to slaughter a goat.

It's not rural people that don't know how. I'd rather have ag extensions educating urban people on how food is produced and should be cooked. I'd like every urban school to have a 4-H program and a land lab (a garden and animal barn for lamb and pig rearing).

"It's not rural people that don't know how. I'd rather have ag extensions educating urban people on how food is produced and should be cooked. I'd like every urban school to have a 4-H program and a land lab (a garden and animal barn for lamb and pig rearing)."

Here, in much of the West (CO here), most rural people are direct or indirect recipients of government incomes or big investment benefits and don't know how to raise or slaughter animals. They assume that cattle only need the plants of semi-arid desert. Beef is, for the most part, stringy and tasteless. What they believe to be tasty, tender, "organic" and only grass fed is actually grown on lush, irrigated land yielding high legume content near a river and very expensive (won't name names there).

Extension services issue quite a bit of information on environmentalism and the like but not much that's useful for high, dry agriculture. 4-H clubs are for women only. Rodeos are for rich animal worshiper "in" crowd--the English saddle kind. Even some of the most remote and sparsely populated counties are regulated to extremes (e.g., permits required for building barns, camping by owners restricted, even on large lots). That's a picture of much of the contemporary West for you. A decade or more for an attentive former Midwesterner on the Rockies can be a surprising education.

Here's an example of what can be done to a rancher in some parts of the West and a clue to the overwhelming demographics of today. People have flooded in from the northeast (mostly)--some of them from the northeast with short stays in California then to settle and control less populated areas of the West (like CO). Being "professionals," they dropped right into business and government to construct the anti-competition, nature worship paradigm of their mother countries. They're not long descended from Europe, either (most only a 100 years or less). They're not assimilating.