The article stresses that the reason the amount of agricultural land is falling is because we're getting more efficient, allowing marginal land to fall out of use.
There's considerably more forest in the United States than there was a hundred years ago, and the same is true for most First World countries.
The wilderness land that's actually under attack is mostly in Third World countries where they practice "traditional", "organic" agriculture of the sort beloved by urban First World environmentalists.
I mean it’s true that wilderness is under attack more in poorer countries (they didn’t so thoroughly deforest themselves in the first place after all). But they’re not using traditional, let alone organic, methods.
It’s true that indigenous methods of farming aren’t necessarily environmentally friendly but not true that the people clearing the Amazon for crops today are indigenous people using traditional methods and not farmers with modern equipment and pesticides.
But they aren’t? They’re using fertilizers, pesticides, tractors, and the rest of it. If you just meant to score some cheap points by referring to clearing the forest as “traditional organic methods” then not really anything worth engaging with.
A lot of the farmland in and around where my grandfather grew up has been unused for decades now - 100 years ago a family could farm it and made enough money to live off. Now it's either not economical to work it like they did 100 years ago or it's not economical to buy the right equipment etc to do it the modern way.
Forest != forest. Many of the new forests that were planted in the last few decades were basically tree factories. These forest don't help with biodiversity and don't help with CO2 capture as much as mixed forests.
Define long-term. If the wood takes 20 years to grow, and is then harvested and made into furniture, and that piece of furniture lasts another 20 years, that's pretty long term to me. But of course harvesting wood to be burned up is a crime.
The fossil fuel we get from the earth and burn, adding its carbon to the atmosphere, was stored there for hundreds of millions of years. That's the long term meant.
Well, the creation of fossil fuels was only possible because certain species of the bacteria did not exist yet back then. It's not like we can create new fossil fuels now. Also, no one cares about "hundreds of million of years" timeline.
What you call a crime I call the lesser evil option for heating my house in the country. The other options are peat and coal, neither of which are renewable on anything like the timescale in which a tree can be grown. I keep it at about 15° in the winter, and if I were to do that with electricity, I could simply not afford to heat, and somebody would be burning coal to make the power, anyway.
> The wilderness land that's actually under attack is mostly in Third World countries where they practice "traditional", "organic" agriculture of the sort beloved by urban First World environmentalists.
That’s a really weird way of framing multinational agriculture’s impacts on indigenous land. Like, none of what you’re saying is specifically wrong at a sub-clause level, the wilderness land under attack is “where they…”, but it’s not under attack by them or what they might practice.
They’re not actually the ones rapidly deforesting or otherwise devastating mostly pristine ecosystems. Cattle farms serving the US and many first world countries certainly are. It’s not a testament to our better farming techniques, it’s a testament to our prowess externalizing the costs of our lifestyle and internalizing the benefits of that. We’ve effectively outsourced imperialism. That’s not yay us, that’s gig genocide.
There are so many things in such a short comment to unpack. I don’t think I have the energy to do so right now, but I’ll leave these initial thoughts:
You’ve got a rhetorical style that suggests you’re familiar with sparring on the topic. I’m not interested in that kind of exchange even if I do have energy for it. If that’s how you want to discuss the topic, you may have the last word.
If I’ve mistakenly categorized your reply,
- What happened when natives arrived is as relevant to what their descendants do now, as what happened when europeans arrived characterizes what their descendants do now. I’ll leave that open ended
- Of course businesses which didn’t exist couldn’t have caused things which happened before they existed
- The history of when natives arrived or even whether they migrated is disputed
- All of this historical focus might be interesting from a “how did now come to be?” perspective, but it’s not an analysis of what’s happening now
- Applying a similar historical analysis to euro records doesn’t produce megafauna or any other exculpatory extinction records
Now if we resume conversation, I hope we can agree not to engage such gotcha bullshit.
Traditional is a bit weird with agriculture, techniques like crop rotation have been around since 6000 BC. There are so many ancient improvements third world countries may not even use.
This entire article is about abandoning traditional methods and replacing them with organic agriculture.
You're just creating a straw man to defeat when your original position doesn't even make sense.
Continuous no till, cover cropping, crop rotation, managing mycorrhizal fungi and things like system of rice intensification are hardly traditional and they are also orthogonal whether they are used for organic farming or not but they massively reduce the need for synthetic inputs. This rubs a lot of people proud of conventional agriculture the wrong way because it means their products are really just there to take a shortcut to save money in the short term. The fact that these newer practices are trying to work by understanding the plants and the entire ecosystem you are building rather than treating them as a blackbox which need specific inputs and the recipe is done. Imagine doing something for 30 years and then some new guy comes along and uses a new method that reduces his yields by -10% but saves him expensive inputs and thus results in greater profit while his soil gets better every year and the conventional farmer's soil gets worse. This is particularly annoying to the Bill Gates types who think they are some sort of Messiah because they have a lot of money and push people around.
Also, facts (such as the one in the image linked immediately above) don't cease being facts just because you mod them down.
Before modern agriculture, just about every area could count on having a famine every few years.
That doesn't happen any more, except in areas where the government is fucked up.
And it wasn't "organic farming" that did it.
The "organic" bullshit is a gigantic scam aimed at extracting money from rich First-Worlders at the expense of raising food prices for the impoverished.
When the UK beef farming industry looked into going net zero, they found that the lowest hanging fruit was to stop buying animal feed that was grown on cleared rainforest.
Does anyone who likes beef actually want them to be fed that way? Do the people clearing the rainforests actually want that? Or is it just what will bring them profit in the current system. It's all just a series of poorly applied financial incentives that we are able to change.
Remember back in the 70s when there was panic over overpopulation? I feel like we'll actually be running out of water before then (thanks climate change) but if that hadn't happened, it would have been running out of food. Once we reach "peak optimal food production", our population will eventually outstrip food reserves. We would have to start culling people or we'd starve.
We're not running out of food, but the there's a huge price we're paying for that: We're destroying nature and ecosystems. Don't ever think this comes for free.
Yes. It’s easy to say “Malthus was wrong” because food production has so far kept up with population growth. What that doesn’t account for is that food production has been subsidized by natural resources like aquifers, topsoil, pollinating insects, cheap oil to make fertilizer and mechanized farm machinery - all of which we need to stop abusing either to save the climate or because they will run out anyway.
We need renewable farming as well as renewable energy, and I don’t see any guarantee that such a thing can support a world of 8+ billion people.
That's not why Malthus will eventually have the last (sardonic) laugh.
All of the things you listed can be made renewable on timescales exceeding the natural lifetime of the sun with only engineering (rather than scientific) breakthroughs, including making the sun last longer and moving the earth to a different orbit to suit the light of the engineered sun.
No, Malthus gets the last laugh because the sub-population that reproduces most, regardless of whether that is caused by genes or memes, quickly dominates the overall population; this means that even despite the currently sub-replacement birth rate, it's reasonable to forecast the population to rise to whatever level is necessary to overwhelm food supply, for any level of food supply.
That can be fixed in principle, but the only solutions I can think of requires tech that makes the two forms of social/mind control in Westworld seasons 3 and 4 look like a child's finger painting in comparison to the filmography of the aforementioned show.
Indeed. The only way this doesn't happen is that no subgroups continue to reproduce beyond the replacement rate. I think that's highly unlikely. We can see certain religious groups in developed countries that have way more than 2.1 children per couple. It seems likely to me that development and education doesn't completely make the problem go away.
Actually, the odds of renewable farming to support 8 billion people is much higher than current practices because non renewable practices are constantly losing capacity and must let land stay fallow after decades of in intensive farming.
We should still be very worried about population, but the 'cult of endless growth (on a finite planet)' wants us to breed more consumers/workers as fast as possible :(
At least Elon is considering moving beyond that 'finite planet' limitation. But the way things are going, I suspect that modern civilisation will collapse well before we get there on any significant scale.
> At least Elon is considering moving beyond that 'finite planet' limitation
The limitations of Earth are basically about size of arable land, amount of clean water, lack of toxins in environment and the climate (percentage of areas where it's not too cold/hot for humans to survive outside). Other planets are terrible in all of those aspects and inhabiting them does not make sense (if we can solve these problems there, we can also solve them on Earth, but much cheaper/easier). They are hostile barren rocks that make places like Death Valley or Antarctica look like paradise on earrth.
Imagine recruiting a thousand engineers/technicians for an moon colony, loading them on a fake rocket, landing them in some remote desert, and working them 12 hours a day to build "a new world" ....
They will probably be happy and fulfilled so long as you keep up the illusion.
We need to drive way less to get rid of fossil fuels, electric cars still use a lot of energy (for mining the raw materials, manufacture and use) and are at most a drop in the bucket.
Either driving uses a lot of fossil fuels, and therefore driving without using fossil fuels is better, or the switch from fossil fueled to electric cars is a drop in the bucket of the overall solution. Pick one. Don't bring your dislike of cars and use it to argue against both sides.
People in the US are obsessed with private cars. Perhaps that's why you're worshiping the likes of Musk. Car use needs to be brought down massively, not have the fuel consumption converted to electricity consumption. All those cars are an enormous waste of resources.
... but actually, looking at the prices, it seems like Tesla cars are super-expensive, meaning that only rich people will buy them, meaning that they don't even "contribute to electrification", they just contribute to rich people's ego.
We can add a few more variables and draw different conclusions.
The quality of the meat is lowering because of intensive "meat factories". Also, the animals are given a lot of antibiotics, which eventually lowers microbial biodiversity also in the land, and, even worse, favours antibiotic resistance at every level, down to the consumer.
I'm not fully sure what different conclusion you are drawing here.
Do you have any pubs on lessened soil microbial diversity from antibiotics on farms? Does it extend beyond the farm, and if so, into water ecosystems? I'm not as familiar with ecosystem effects of antibiotics.
But agricultural land can also be pretty ok for the ecosystem. And many ways to get more out of less make that less likely.
Fortunately there are still some ways untapped of increasing efficiency without increasing impact, like more fine-grained control of chemicals application or replacing tractors with something like https://nexat.de/ that does the same work with less soil compaction, but those are minor optimizations, not game changers or silver bullets.
I'm confident we can have both; industrial-scale monocropping is the bad one. We can do better with farming and land management techniques going back hundreds of years, but that cuts into short-term profit margins.
We can always change how profits are made in farming, and farming tends to be one of the areas that even "free market" economies like the US tend to interfere the most in.
I would be far far far more concerned about the change in labor requirements needed to use these methods. If we suddenly need 30% of our workforce working in fields in order to feed ourselves, profit is not the problem.
And we also need to evaluate these methods for actual increases in ecosystem diversity. When it comes to the ecosystem and land use, most of the population evaluates aesthetics rather than actual environmental impact in terms of how much of the non-human ecosystem is allowed to flourish. Which, for example, results in lots of people thinking that placing their homes in the midst of lots of greenery, sprawled out, is more environmentally friendly than a multi family apartment complex, or a small village with houses right next to each other, where you can walk for most of your daily needs.
Whereas in reality in most ecosystems, the constraint is land untouched by humans, so that apex predators have enough land to exist, and enough of the smaller creatures to feed them. It is very good for humans to live amongst nature, but especially with suburban sprawl we have taken that desire to live amongst nature and made it one of the most environmentally unfriendly ways of existing.
The important caveat, and misleading headline, here is what comes further down in the article: "Global pasture has peaked. Global cropland has not."
We still use an increasing amount of cropland to feed the animals that we're moving closer and closer together in industrial farming (that's why pasture land is decreasing).
I think many still underestimate the effect on climate change of livestock agriculture. Furthermore, livestock agriculture is one of the leading causes of the collapse of biodiversity - a crisis that will have much more dire consequences than climate change, in my opninion. Also a crisis that almost nobody is aware of presently.
1) Growing monocrop plants on a large scale is much more destructive to the environment as it completely destroys the ecosystem. You destroy all other plants and small animals that would regenerate the soil. Instead you just steal from the soil over and over again without regenerating it. Cows shitting provide fertilizer. But this obviously doesn't happen on monocrop land.
2) Most of the places where cows graze grass can NOT support human eatable plant food growing. Only grass can grow there, not eg corn or some grains. So that land can either do nothing or you can unleash cows onto that land to convert that grass into human food (cows).
How exaclty are farmers "stealing" from the soil, when the same patch of land has been used for monocultures a hundred years or more? To me it seems to be a pretty stable cycle at this point, where the soil is not the limiting factor (cf increasing yields over the same period)
Fertilizer is made using energy, this is a critical distinction. The only consumables in the Haber process are air, heat, and pressure.
Ammonia production can be designed to run when energy is cheap, free, or negative in price, this is unlike other energy-intensive industrial feedstocks such as aluminium smelting.
It isn't currently economically efficient to run factories this way, but (again, unlike smelting bauxite) it is physically plausible to start-and-stop Haber process plants on a scale of hours.
Nitrogen fertilizers cause their own cascade of second-order effects when they leach into the water supply, but this can be solved with well-understood chemistry which renders the nitrate largely insoluble in water but available to soil microorganisms, who are happy to share it with crop roots.
My point is that fossil fuels aren't a feedstock for the most important fertilizer, so the use of fossil fuels in their manufacture is instrumental rather than inherent.
Plenty of land that was previously farmland is currently desert or otherwise almost useless. It just takes a different amount of time in different regions.
> How exaclty are farmers "stealing" from the soil, when the same patch of land has been used for monocultures a hundred years or more?
Before the world wars and invention of artificial fertiliser we didn't have monocultures. On the scale of agriculture artificial fertiliser and factory farming is extremely new not something we have been doing for hundreds of years.
The issue is that when the crop is harvested you are taking nutrients out of the field into the crop then taking that crop off the soil. These nutrients need replaced or you will deplete the field. A hundred years ago this would come back in the form of rotations of crops and animals that leave dung to fertilise the land today its done with artificial fertiliser which provides lots of nitrogen but is missing all of the trace nutrients that where removed.
Better artificial fertiliser could help but there are other problems with artificial fertiliser like run off where rain remove the fertiliser from the field and dumps it into wetlands and rivers which are poisoned by the massive amounts of nitrogen.
The old way was sustainable but required lots of manual labour the new way is not sustainable but is easily automated. The real sustainable solution is to automate the old way of farming.
These are the arguments that are always made. The thing is we still devote too much cropland to animals because we have a demand that couldn't possibly be met by grazing animals.
Take wild moose as an example. My home country has an artificially high moose pupilation due to current forresting practices. Yet the annual yield is only something like 3% of the Swedish meat consumption.
Removing crops as a part of animal feed would mean something like reducing our meat consumption by 90%.
Edit: and there are ways of maintaining a healthy soil without animals. I have done it in a very small scale for my plantations (just 40m2) and there are examples of people doing it on a much larger scale. I have yet to find data about yields though, but they seem competitive.
Eh. Most cattle in Sweden is fed with grass or grass-equivalents. I.e. stuff that humans don't want/can't eat.
Now the idiotic argument that is often heard is "well, if we didn't grow grass we could grow something humans want, like.. soybeans". And the answer is no, we couldn't because the land isn't suitable for growing those high-value crops. If it was the case the farmers would be all over it.
> An economist walks by a twenty dollar bill on the sidewalk but decides not to pick it up, because if it were really there someone would have picked it up already
I think many farmers do what has worked for the last X decades; often copying what their forebears do with small adjustments.
that's a joke based on a particular economic theory, by humor the flaws in the theory are indicated, I'm pretty sure every economist walking by 20 bucks on the sidewalk will pick it up.
I don't think farmers have any particular theory that land growing grass cannot grow anything else or their parents would already have done that. So the analogy is really stretched thin.
About 15% is slåtter and grazeland. Slåtter might include some grazing, but the vast majority of things growing there won't be eaten. I think it is pretty safe to say that the vast majority of the grass feed land is suitable for human crops since "vall" is most often used in rotational crop systems.
We CAN grow such crops in Sweden, at least in the southern parts. I lived next to a quinoa field with comparatively high yields. And we have been growing white beans for years. Pre pandemic there were trials with soybeans on Öland and in Skåne with promising results.
> Edit: and there are ways of maintaining a healthy soil without animals. I have done it in a very small scale for my plantations (just 40m2) and there are examples of people doing it on a much larger scale. I have yet to find data about yields though, but they seem competitive.
Gardening isn't farming. All crop farms of any scale use artificial fertilisers that wash off the land an poison our rivers and wetlands its not sustainable. Cutting out artificial fertilisers and gmo crops would cut our crop production by 60%.
We need to go back to our old style of farming before the world wars where we rotated between crops and animals and used the animals dung as fertiliser.
> We need to go back to our old style of farming before the world wars where we rotated between crops and animals and used the animals dung as fertiliser.
You mean, the old style of farming where our agricultural output was sustained by unimaginable tons of ancient manures looted from South America?
We are already using ~all available animal dung as fertilizer; it provides something like 10% of our global fertilizer needs. We can't produce more animal dung than we are now; we already raise an absurd quantity of livestock, and we especially can't do it while also doing the other thing people suggest on this topic, cutting our meat production by 90%.
> Removing crops as a part of animal feed would mean something like reducing our meat consumption by 90%.
You correctly reference that raising vegetable protein is about 10x more efficient than raising animal protein.
Assuming
* it is ~ 20x more efficient to raise single cell protein than it is to raise vegetable protein
* it is too impractical or inefficient to feed single-cell protein to plants
Then it would follow that it would be 2x more efficient to raise single-cell-protein-fed animal protein than it is to raise vegetable protein. This can happen in closed facilities to capture any methane gas.
We observe it is very hard to convince people to switch from carnivore habits to vegetarian habits. Presumably it will be similarily difficult to convince carnivore population to voluntarily switch to eating single cell protein.
It will obviously still be 10x more efficient to eat the single cell protein directly than to eat single-cell-protein fed animal protein, which would in turn be about 2x as efficient as eating vegetable protein.
I don't think meat eating humans care much if the animal ate plant protein or single cell protein. It's not like meat products specify what the livestock ate throughout its short life.
Even if you have (perfectly valid!) ethical questions about raising creatures as fast as possible only to kill them and harvest their meat; faced with a fellow vegetarian human who cannot be convinced to eat single cell protein, would you convince them to eat SCP-fed animal protein? (better for the environment); or would you convince them to eat vegetable protein? (better for compassion with the livestock creatures)
Assume for a minute you were vegetarian up to this day yourself: you welcome the lower footprint of single-cell proteins, and don't mind eating it most of the time, ... but sometimes you want to treat yourself, just a small treat, would you have the discipline to eat SCP-fed animal protein, or would you insist on eating less efficiently produced vegetable protein?
Le morale: if one is abhorred by the concept of raising creatures for the sole purpouse of eating them, one should stick to the point and not defer to efficiency arguments. Every cover reason backfires... eventually.
It is not just the protein that is a limiting factor in meat production. Especially not for grazing animals. And 20x less seems like a very high estimate compared to the current protein king, the soybean.
What I am saying is: a.sustainable protein will make the largest impact in chicken, but very little impact for the kind of feed and land use we are discussing. Vall and slåtter (I have no idea about the English terms) are almost exclusively used as feed for grazing animals.
And even with chickens I must ask: Is SCP competitive with insects? I have been betting on insects becoming the next big thing in animal feed for some time. 20x less land use per gram of protein compared to soy is no problem for something like the black soldier fly larvae. They are well above 50x.
When I ate insects I fed them compost. I tried one kind that I could feed rest products from forrestry, but I didn't care much for the taste.
The discussion of SCP in feed is the same as soy beans: we can eat it ourselves. Why accept a 3-10x efficiency loss by feeding it to chicken and pigs? We are already eating SCP, and we are bound to eat more of it in the coming decades.
> It will obviously still be 10x more efficient to eat the single cell protein directly than to eat single-cell-protein fed animal protein, which would in turn be about 2x as efficient as eating vegetable protein.
(so you merely reiterate what I wrote) and the paragraph right before it
> We observe it is very hard to convince people to switch from carnivore habits to vegetarian habits. Presumably it will be similarily difficult to convince carnivore population to voluntarily switch to eating single cell protein.
which answers your question:
> Why accept a 3-10x efficiency loss by feeding it to chicken and pigs?
Because citizens enjoy autonomy and the state doesn't force people to eat SCP directly. In the knowledge (not in their defense) that a large group of people eating meat refuse to switch to vegetable protein today, it is naive to think they would however switch to eating SCP directly.
>2) Most of the places where cows graze grass can NOT support human eatable plant food growing. Only grass can grow there, not eg corn or some grains.
This is completely wrong. You can grow regular crops there but usually the land is sloped, the terrain itself is inaccessible or inconvenient for machinery. There are plenty of Asian countries that do terraced rice farming but this requires massive amounts of manual labor compared to a nice, level and flat piece of land on which tractors and combines can drive on.
It is very dependent on geography. The discussion regarding beef/cattle/meat always takes some "global-scale-scope" which is useless since the topology, soil, water etc. is something that almost exclusively determines what is suitable to grow.
You could not, how much you wanted convert the gracing pastures in Sweden to any high-yield farm.
My looking at pictures and videos of such fields in Sweden you seem very wrong. Many videos show cows side by side crops and the land looks no different.
The next time you leave for the wilderness, go to a field, go the edge of it and see if you can figure out if there was a reason they didn't expand it further out.
I wouldn't dream of asking you of taking a random commenter at face value.
Some areas as described by OP are considered desert in Australia. They're above the Goyder Line* and pretty limited in how they can otherwise be exploited by humans. It's hard for people to live there.
(Whether they should be exploited is a different story.)
That is the correct answer, also if I may add: Usually the grazing land also lacks water and means of irrigation required for more valuable nutrition dense crops. Rainfall is only enough for grasses and some limited food crops if you really tried. There is a reason farmers would not touch that land.
> Most of the places where cows graze grass can NOT support human eatable plant food growing.
This is pure propaganda. Do people know that when they repeat it? Or does it just soak into the collective unconsious and become 'common sense' even though it doesn't make any sense?
Who told you these were the only two options? Why would you believe them? What other alternative uses for the land have you explored?
> The climate impact of diets are usually compared in terms of greenhouse gases that are emitted today. But this misses a hidden cost: the carbon opportunity costs of agricultural land. If we were not using this land to grow food, it would be possible that forests and wild grasslands grow on these lands. They would not only harbour wildlife, but also store much more carbon. Meat and dairy products need more land than alternatives, and therefore have a higher opportunity cost.
I'm not really arguing for shoveling rainforests to raise sheep on or something.. But if we enjoy the idea of living (and not starving) food produced locally has to adapt to the local lands.. Which in many places allows for a lot of grass -> cattle etc.
So it needing more land is a kinda worthless metric tbh.
As mentioned in another commemt, the UK meat industry identified imported animal feed from places that were cutting down rainforests as about a quarter of their GHG impact.
So you kind of are suggesting that, while pretending to be some old lady with a pet sheep roaming the hills rather than a global industry producing 400 million tonnes of meat per annum.
If I'm arguing for anything is that the global food production is probably not sustainable.
That doesn't exclude farming, fishing or high-density food-farming (salmon, shrimps etc.). I mean, the number of issues with providing a couple of billion of humans with enough energy and variety in their diet is not insignificant..
A sheep roaming the hills is probably one of the better ways of producing protein..
About 75% of the diet of a regular Swedish cow is grass or grass-equivalents. The rest is made up of peas, beans, rapeseed and of course various grains.
The grains that go to animal feed usually is not fit for human consumption (well, wouldn't pass QC-controls).
Pigs doesn't really eat grass. Neither does chickens... So it's a bit of a different animal (HAHAHA) to farm chickens/pigs vs cows.
While that first sentence is unnecessarily aggressive, the point of your post is correct for non-industrial scale farming, at least in my experience in the US.
In 'standard' farming practice, a vast majority of the feed for cattle is grass, hay, or other sorts of grass things. The last month or so before slaughter they are fed heavy grain to bulk up a little and be more marketable. (source; my farm).
In Industrial scale farming (which one could argue is the actual standard now because people demand cheap meat), cattle are kept in feed lots for their lives and pushed heavy grain.
In my region people grow hay (non-grain grass) on land they grow corn on, and bale it up to sell as livestock feed. It's part of crop rotation bc corn is rough on the soil but they could also just grow soy or a variety of other grain producing plants instead if there wasn't a demand for the hay.
What region is that? I have been a farmer, am the fourth generation of that, and live in an area that is heavily farmed.
No where does anyone rotate hay with row crops. Where do you live where that is common practice, and how does that work? New hay crops need a year at least to establish before you can cut for baling.
> 3) Grazing animals are good for carbon capture, as they need grass to graze, and grass is one of the best carbon sinks.
a) Citation? Most studies I can find on a quick googling show minimal effects.
b) Whereas clearing forest to create pasture for animals to graze is...not good for carbon capture. Quote from WWF: "Alone, the deforestation caused by cattle ranching is responsible for the release of 340 million tons of carbon to the atmosphere every year, equivalent to 3.4% of current global emissions." https://wwf.panda.org/discover/knowledge_hub/where_we_work/a...
Look up for the usage of global soy/ corn productionand then tell me “cows eats grass humans cannot eat”. The Brazilian rainfores is being burned to plant soy to feed european cows. This system is very inefficien but, who cares! Profits.
I hear that paternalistic argument all the time, and almost always coming from the Western countries, but surely food is closer to one's direct needs compared to a climatic thing that might or might not happen according to our models (which models are changing all the time).
In other words you don't need much modelling to see that more expensive food will hurt the world's poor here and now, the climate change thing is in the indistinct future (and it might happen the way we prevision it, or it may not).
Massive flooding and droughts are here now, climate change isn't a future thing anymore. It will become worse every year, but the disasters are already here.
Poor people already eat less meat. On the other hand, climate change will make basic foods more expensive. I'm from India. I've seen the miseries caused when the price of rice or onions goes up. It becomes a major political issue. But if chicken becomes more expensive, no one blinks, because people don't eat that much of it anyway. Maybe some people in the cities grumble because prices at restaurants went up, but that's about it.
Your argument is like saying "Taxing Ferraris more will make life harder for poor people because it increases average transportation prices".
If you look at the land usage for animal products and compare it to their calorie & protein supply, the story gets even worse.
In short:
Of all agricultural land, ~77% is used for meat/dairy production.
This 77% are responsible for only 18% of the calories and 37% of proteins, the rest comes from the plants in our diet.
The numbers may vary a bit, but the scale stays the same. It's ridiculous.
Not all pastoral land is able to yield crops though.
There's a reason that Wyoming is home so many ranches, while San Joaquin valley is overwhelmingly money crops like grapes, almonds, and pistachios.
Some fertility problems (hardening, soil compaction) can be fixed in places like the Steppe and the northern American plains, but retention, drainage, and composition are inherent to the environment, and crop yield is one of those things that's damn near exponential to its inputs.
Honestly I'm glad that the terrain is at least useful for some purpose, out in the Appalachian mountains the % of land that can either support crops or livestock is incredibly small.
Adding to your comment, our wheat preference is also sub-optimal (but not to such a large degree). There are alternative crops with much higher cal/ha.
Most of our calories are from monocropped commodities like maize, canola & soy. These are indeed efficient. High calorie per dollar value, but also high calorie per land/fertilizer/water/etc. This is true for eggs, but also true for fruit, nuts, tomatoes. Everything compares poorly to maize.
These types of analysis are full of such biases. "Pasturelands" are huge because they are low intensity... think of outback cattle stations in Australia. There certainly is a conversation to be had about rewilding low intensity lands, or farming them in more eco-friendly ways, considering the high land/food ratio. But... most animal husbandry happens at much, much higher density. Egg farming compares pretty well to fruit, vegetables, almonds, etc.
So yes, if we consume commodity crops instead of meat, fruit, vegetables and other non staple foods then the food system becomes much more efficient. I don't think it's realistic or desirable though.
On paper, where I'm dictator of the world, I can make a lot of things efficient. Food, energy, transport. I could easily find an omnivorous formula more efficient to the average vegan diet, also healthier and tastier. This is a disingenuous game.
I agree that it would be good to have more moores and wild lands. Becoming vegan does not help this cause. Unexploited land is only unexploited because of legal protections. Not one acre will go unexploited because enough people became vegan. This kind of "consumer action" mentality never works, is usually built on a disingenuous simplification, and it's ridiculous here too.
> Becoming vegan does not help this cause. Unexploited land is only unexploited because of legal protections. Not one acre will go unexploited because enough people became vegan.
There was a great interview with one of the guys who bought a black rhino tag and pissed the Internet off.
Very thoughtful guy, and his core message was "Given enough time, the only animals left on this planet will be those that are useful to humans or able to hide from us." In that an economic incentive is the only sure motivator of action over the long term, and so if we want to preserve something then we'd better find a financially sustainable model to do so.
> Furthermore, livestock agriculture is one of the leading causes of the collapse of biodiversity - a crisis that will have much more dire consequences than climate change, in my opinion. Also a crisis that almost nobody is aware of presently.
I see no clear reason why fewer species existing in agricultural production areas will lead to any particular disasters, but I'm happy to be enlightened.
In Russia that has probably happened 50 years ago or so.
In pre-railway times, people had to grow grains everywhere where they lived, including Russian north such as Archangel, and Siberia.
Today, the intensified farming mostly happens in a tiny south-western tip of a country. The downside here is that there's no longer an economical reason for rural life style in most of the country. But, forests and grasslands reclaim former fields all right.
I think the consensus now is that we'll never "run out" of oil, because we will always invent more and more creative (read: expensive) ways of drilling for it like fracking and sideways drilling and deeper drilling.
The catch is that oil will just get more and more expensive. So while we'll never run out, it might cost 10x or 100x or 1000x what it does today, which for many practical purposes is the same as having none.
Functionally won't happen because we have a near infinite demand for petroleum products.
We may see a world where no one drives a gasoline vehicle, but plastics, resins, rubber, kerosine have certain applications where people would be willing to absorb 100x the current cost of extraction.
There is some debate now in Sweden about how much of a good idea is to use nuclear power. The greens are absolutely convinced it's a bad idea. Their arguments against nuclear make no sense to me. But their arguments pro-renewable make even less sense. Towns in Sweden are opposing wind energy on the (green) basis that it disturbs the local wildlife, and I saw a field of solar power replace a field of wheat the other day, and trust me it looks even worse than a wind turbine.
So no matter where one looks, the bottom line seems pretty clear: there are no good compromises that preserve the planet and promote economic development[^1]. Maybe it is time to start talking about the no-compromise solutions? Like colonizing space[^2] and de-industrializing and de-populating Earth? Because if we don't, when global warming gets worse and the majority of people start considering that industrialization is a threat to the environment and their survival, we will just be talking about de-industrialization and forcing everybody to go vegetarian and poor, no choice involved.
[^1]: If you think you have all the material wealth you need, cheers! But poverty still affects the quality of life of most people on the planet, and most people would rather have a better life.
[^2]: Must people imagine cramped space bases separated from vacuum by a paper-thin wall while working under the whipping of something like Amazon 5.0, but lush, ginormous space habitats with sensible bylaws are also an option.
I dont believe you harbor any bad intentions but how could de-populating the earth be anything but evil in practice? Where are we starting? And how are we preventing the selected people from having babies?
What I mean is that as the (probably justified) climate furor goes up, so will go hopelessness. According to the current civic discourse, it's all our fault (well, it really is) and therefore we are a blight for the planet. People may start thinking that having less babies and less population is a good idea. You don't really need to forbid people to have babies, all you need to do is to stop pushing for people to have babies above the replacement rate. In some developed countries and in some underdeveloped countries with easy access to contraceptives, people are already having babies below the replacement rate and the governments are trying to revert the trend.
And this is today; who knows how culture will change if things get really bad.
Leaving the babies aside for a minute, the "industries are bad for the environment" is a widely held belief already. Optimistic people believe in clean industries and if we get them in time, all will be good. If they don't, then the pessimistic people will say that there is no such thing as clean industries, and as the threats associated with global warming get more severe, pushing for de-industrialization may give an easy remedy. It could be an extra-economic movement (political movement, even a violent revolution), not something necessarily incentivized by market forces.
Regarding cattle (and in minor degree, crops), nobody seems to have a good solution.
Don't get me wrong, IMO industries are good for human well-being, and with a bigger, properly-trained population under supportive economic conditions industries will be even more so. But there is only so much of that the planet can take. Therefore, as long as we choose compromise, we are choosing away well-being.
If what I said about compromises and choosing away well-being and cow meat makes my point difficult to understand, here is a thought experiment that may help: imagine that in the year 2050 we discover a way of keeping people young forever at the cost of expending 1000 kW[^1] per person in a biomedical simulation...
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[^1]: kW is a power unit, so that means 1000 kW.h per hour, or 24000 kW.h per day per person.
De-populating is good if it is done by giving people—especially women—greater agency over their own lives.
Across all human societies, improving access to education, employment, finance, and birth control are correlated with a) stronger economies and better standards of living and b) declines in population growth.
You don’t have to prevent people from having babies. You just have to let them choose what they want to do with their lives.
So, reading comments… two things really stand out to me. First, people forget that the USA throws away more food than Africa produces. The planet is not really close to being out of food, stuff is just wasted by the comparatively rich countries. Second, farming is not all or nothing. There are practices that mix plants, offer diverse sections for pollinators, purposeful use of specific plants that keep predators off of cash crops without toxins, and so on. These could be done while fallow grass growing plots are used for grazing and fertilizer production (you know, animal poop).
People always want to believe doom and gloom for some reason, but humans are an incredible animal. We have always found solutions and adopted them because in most cases what is right also happens to be what works best.
> stuff is just wasted by the comparatively rich countries.
I don't think it's fair to call that wasted, as if the food produced in these wealthy nations could be transferred to the poor nations.
The cause of food shortages in Africa is the fact it's a lot of non fertile land.
The cause of food waste in the United States is that we have a LOT of fertile land and relatively few people.
It would be like blaming my water usage for shortages in the southwest. You have to see that the two systems are disconnected and just because one nation wastes food does not mean other nations are denied it.
Global trade has eased a lot of regional shortages, but geography and environment still matter.
The same goes for famine. We may be able to adapt, but some regions simply will not and even with global increases we may still see regional shortages and famines.
As someone living in the USA, I'm not worried. We will be fine because we have such a large buffer. If you live in an area that doesn't. You have plenty reason to worry, especially if global trade hiccups or you're in a relatively poor nation vulnerable to trade disruption.
Africa has probably 60% of the world's arable land and is extremely fertile. The cause of food shortages in Africa is never, even in the worst droughts, that there is not enough land.
Food crises in Africa are always, with I think, no exceptions, caused by 1. political turmoil that makes it impossible or difficult to use the land well, or 2. wars or 3. genocidal policies by one or more population or tribe toward another.
Of course droughts happen. But when unaccompanied by any of the three above, Africa still ought to be able able to feed itself with plenty to spare, even in the most severe droughts experienced.
> Africa has probably 60% of the world's arable land and is extremely fertile.
That is completely untrue.
Looking it up [1], Africa has 219.2 million hectares of arable land as of 2007, compared to 1,406.5 million worldwide. That rounds up to 16%.
I can't imagine where on earth you're getting 60% from.
And if you've been to Africa (or looked at a map), you'd know that it's fertile only in certain parts. The cause of food shortages in Africa are very often that the land within economical transportation distance isn't producing even close to enough food in times of drought. And the idea that you bring up genocide as a major reason for famine is nonsensical.
Quite frankly, you don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about.
We are speaking of Africa as a continent here. Obviously central Sahara can not sustain a very large population. (And coincidentally, neither has it).
Are you sure you know what you're speaking of?
PS. the 60% was from memory, and constitutes currently uncultivated arable land. The total arable land seems to be a somewhat lower percentage of earth's total (but your numbers are way off), but not meaningfully so with regards to my main point.
The World Economic Forum says Africa has 60% of global uncultivated arable land. [1] This might be what you remembered?
Africa’s problem isn’t the availability of arable land it’s soil fertility. The soils in Africa are mostly bad to meh. [2][3] The less fertile the soil the more fertilizer inputs it needs to produce.
> I don't think it's fair to call that wasted, as if the food produced in these wealthy nations could be transferred to the poor nations.
I don't think that's the claim. The claim is that the title implies that we've reached peak supportable population but because of the waste the USA's food production could support more population than it does. Nobody's getting mad at you for not sending your cheese rinds to Africa.
Phew, European Union mandates destroying crops if they go beyond quotas assigned to a given country. It is not even like throwing away some leftovers that should have better use, they just destroy ready to eat food.
>People always want to believe doom and gloom for some reason, but humans are an incredible animal. We have always found solutions and adopted them because in most cases what is right also happens to be what works best.
For example these 6 companies are working on single cell protein (SCP) food from CO2 + energy input, by for example hydrogenotrophs. This may sound like technology that is not democratically accessible, as they are found for example in hydrothermal vents. However they are also found in more mundane places like soil, or ... the human gut, and hence faeces.
Let the world turn to shjt ... for dinner. Finding out how to culture them is probably the bigger challenge. An open science community on how to collect, identify, culture these would probably have the highest impact on combating climate change per buck of effort.
Solein / Solar Foods was recently featured on HN, with claimed figures of protein production efficiency:
SCP protein is about 20x more efficient than vegetable protein
SCP protein is about 200x more efficient than animal protein (and vegetable protein is about 10x more efficient than vegetable-protein fed animal protein)
Incidentally this implies SCP-protein fed animal protein to be about 2x as efficient as vegetable protein!
It turns out plants (or at least the cells of plant roots) can release proteases and absorb the resulting smaller peptide fragments, but it seems far from obvious that it is cost-effective to feed single cell protein to plants especially in competition with other consumers of soil proteins...
To grow these hydrogenotrophs you need CO2 and hydrogen and some trace minerals.
I suggest using radiative cooling near the south pole to:
* condense CO2 out of air
* to generate electric power by using the local (cold) environment as the hot bath, and the atmospheric infrared window (8-13 micrometers) as the cold bath. This way energy generation does not heat the polar environment (to the contrary it helps cool the poles).
* this energy can then be used make hydrogen, and heat well isolated ovens in which the cultures are grown.
So we can generate large amounts of food on otherwise unused area (without competing with solar panels or agriculture for land use), helping to cool the environment, helping to remove CO2, lowering demand of agricultural land by competing on price point, allowing us to rewild large amounts of agricultural land.
Any yearly surplus could be turned into a form of low bio-accessibility and buried where it came from...
While I'm on the climate change topic: we've known for a long time how to help water freeze over (Snomax, Pseudonomas Syringae) to ensure the basic human necessity of sliding down a snow covered hill on wooden planks but don't know how to help the ocean freeze over?
the seasonal ice region is the region around the poles which melt and refreeze each year, the ocean in this region is super-cooled (a meta-stable state):
why don't we sprinkle ice nucleating proteins (INP's) in this region? especially shortly around fall (northern hemisphere) or spring (southern hemisphere) when it is a...
No mention of fertilizer usage, which is created using fossil fuels. Of course you need less land if you take the biomass from a million+ years ago and use it as feedstock for you crops today to produce more than the soil ever could naturally. And even that isn't enough looking at the decline in topsoil thickness which takes 75+ years to build up to even make high yields possible.
Scan down the page to see the graph. It's an "s-curve" growth trend you'd expect in any species, as studied in ecology[1]. The expected peak was also put in the early 2020s by the Club of Rome studies in the 1970s[2]. Now we get to the fun part of seeing whether we level out at this population or go into collapse.
It also happens to be the normalization function used in neural networks to squash the summed inputs from a feed-forward layer. Interesting to think of the connection there.
A generic animal model isn't going to work. Much of the increase in food production isn't going directly to feeding humans. It's going to livestock, making ethanol for fuel, etc.
I agree those are factors, but it's not clear they require a new model.
From a complexity analysis, the exponential terms will dominate over fixed coefficients, which is what i take your factors to be. In other words, how much livestock, ethanol, etc. do we need? That's mainly dependent on # of people, not living standard. Ofc it's more complex, but again, not clear the usual ecological model won't work and indeed it appears to be.
IMHO, people traditionally migrated to areas with arable land. Then civilization sprang up around that arable land. As more and more people moved in, rather than staying valuable as arable land, it became residential/commercial/industrial land. This pushes agriculture further and further from those initial ideal conditions. This seems inevitable as long as people prefer density.
Bootstrap farmers attract other farmers, which creates communities, which attracts non-farmers. That progression inevitably leads to those some of the largest communities becoming not only non-farming, but anti-farming.
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 188 ms ] threadThe article stresses that the reason the amount of agricultural land is falling is because we're getting more efficient, allowing marginal land to fall out of use.
There's considerably more forest in the United States than there was a hundred years ago, and the same is true for most First World countries.
The wilderness land that's actually under attack is mostly in Third World countries where they practice "traditional", "organic" agriculture of the sort beloved by urban First World environmentalists.
It's "organic", too. Slash and burn doesn't typically use pesticides or artificial fertilizers.
And they are.
That’s a really weird way of framing multinational agriculture’s impacts on indigenous land. Like, none of what you’re saying is specifically wrong at a sub-clause level, the wilderness land under attack is “where they…”, but it’s not under attack by them or what they might practice.
They’re not actually the ones rapidly deforesting or otherwise devastating mostly pristine ecosystems. Cattle farms serving the US and many first world countries certainly are. It’s not a testament to our better farming techniques, it’s a testament to our prowess externalizing the costs of our lifestyle and internalizing the benefits of that. We’ve effectively outsourced imperialism. That’s not yay us, that’s gig genocide.
You're aware that about 90% of the megafauna in the Americas went extinct within a few centuries after the arrival of the early Native Americans?
Yeah, well, it wasn't Archer Daniels Midland or Cargill that did that.
You’ve got a rhetorical style that suggests you’re familiar with sparring on the topic. I’m not interested in that kind of exchange even if I do have energy for it. If that’s how you want to discuss the topic, you may have the last word.
If I’ve mistakenly categorized your reply,
- What happened when natives arrived is as relevant to what their descendants do now, as what happened when europeans arrived characterizes what their descendants do now. I’ll leave that open ended
- Of course businesses which didn’t exist couldn’t have caused things which happened before they existed
- The history of when natives arrived or even whether they migrated is disputed
- All of this historical focus might be interesting from a “how did now come to be?” perspective, but it’s not an analysis of what’s happening now
- Applying a similar historical analysis to euro records doesn’t produce megafauna or any other exculpatory extinction records
Now if we resume conversation, I hope we can agree not to engage such gotcha bullshit.
I'm talking facts.
Someone is bullshitting here, all right, but it's not me.
I agree that this conversation isn't really serving any purpose, though.
Traditional is a bit weird with agriculture, techniques like crop rotation have been around since 6000 BC. There are so many ancient improvements third world countries may not even use.
https://panamaupclose.com/2020/05/25/farmers-learn-not-to-sl...
This entire article is about abandoning traditional methods and replacing them with organic agriculture.
You're just creating a straw man to defeat when your original position doesn't even make sense.
Continuous no till, cover cropping, crop rotation, managing mycorrhizal fungi and things like system of rice intensification are hardly traditional and they are also orthogonal whether they are used for organic farming or not but they massively reduce the need for synthetic inputs. This rubs a lot of people proud of conventional agriculture the wrong way because it means their products are really just there to take a shortcut to save money in the short term. The fact that these newer practices are trying to work by understanding the plants and the entire ecosystem you are building rather than treating them as a blackbox which need specific inputs and the recipe is done. Imagine doing something for 30 years and then some new guy comes along and uses a new method that reduces his yields by -10% but saves him expensive inputs and thus results in greater profit while his soil gets better every year and the conventional farmer's soil gets worse. This is particularly annoying to the Bill Gates types who think they are some sort of Messiah because they have a lot of money and push people around.
Forest for the trees with these things...
What you call "ideological stench" others call "facts".
None of these "newer practices" are responsible for the increase in forest cover in the United States over the past century.
None of them are responsible for this:
https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/images/US...
Also, facts (such as the one in the image linked immediately above) don't cease being facts just because you mod them down.
Before modern agriculture, just about every area could count on having a famine every few years.
That doesn't happen any more, except in areas where the government is fucked up.
And it wasn't "organic farming" that did it.
The "organic" bullshit is a gigantic scam aimed at extracting money from rich First-Worlders at the expense of raising food prices for the impoverished.
Does anyone who likes beef actually want them to be fed that way? Do the people clearing the rainforests actually want that? Or is it just what will bring them profit in the current system. It's all just a series of poorly applied financial incentives that we are able to change.
Meat in a Net Zero World:
https://wrap.org.uk/sites/default/files/2021-09/Meat-in-a-Ne...
On an unrelated note, the Overpopulation wikipedia page is interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpopulation
Only, we can't do that by just dismissing any discussion of the current problems — the best way to have a catastrophe is to ignore all the problems.
We need renewable farming as well as renewable energy, and I don’t see any guarantee that such a thing can support a world of 8+ billion people.
All of the things you listed can be made renewable on timescales exceeding the natural lifetime of the sun with only engineering (rather than scientific) breakthroughs, including making the sun last longer and moving the earth to a different orbit to suit the light of the engineered sun.
No, Malthus gets the last laugh because the sub-population that reproduces most, regardless of whether that is caused by genes or memes, quickly dominates the overall population; this means that even despite the currently sub-replacement birth rate, it's reasonable to forecast the population to rise to whatever level is necessary to overwhelm food supply, for any level of food supply.
That can be fixed in principle, but the only solutions I can think of requires tech that makes the two forms of social/mind control in Westworld seasons 3 and 4 look like a child's finger painting in comparison to the filmography of the aforementioned show.
At least Elon is considering moving beyond that 'finite planet' limitation. But the way things are going, I suspect that modern civilisation will collapse well before we get there on any significant scale.
The limitations of Earth are basically about size of arable land, amount of clean water, lack of toxins in environment and the climate (percentage of areas where it's not too cold/hot for humans to survive outside). Other planets are terrible in all of those aspects and inhabiting them does not make sense (if we can solve these problems there, we can also solve them on Earth, but much cheaper/easier). They are hostile barren rocks that make places like Death Valley or Antarctica look like paradise on earrth.
They will probably be happy and fulfilled so long as you keep up the illusion.
You mean, the guy who pumps out private cars with years and years of massive government subsidies?
... but actually, looking at the prices, it seems like Tesla cars are super-expensive, meaning that only rich people will buy them, meaning that they don't even "contribute to electrification", they just contribute to rich people's ego.
Every unsustainable behaviour works, right up until the point that it doesn't.
The quality of the meat is lowering because of intensive "meat factories". Also, the animals are given a lot of antibiotics, which eventually lowers microbial biodiversity also in the land, and, even worse, favours antibiotic resistance at every level, down to the consumer.
This is not even considering animal well-being...
Do you have any pubs on lessened soil microbial diversity from antibiotics on farms? Does it extend beyond the farm, and if so, into water ecosystems? I'm not as familiar with ecosystem effects of antibiotics.
Fortunately there are still some ways untapped of increasing efficiency without increasing impact, like more fine-grained control of chemicals application or replacing tractors with something like https://nexat.de/ that does the same work with less soil compaction, but those are minor optimizations, not game changers or silver bullets.
We can always change how profits are made in farming, and farming tends to be one of the areas that even "free market" economies like the US tend to interfere the most in.
I would be far far far more concerned about the change in labor requirements needed to use these methods. If we suddenly need 30% of our workforce working in fields in order to feed ourselves, profit is not the problem.
And we also need to evaluate these methods for actual increases in ecosystem diversity. When it comes to the ecosystem and land use, most of the population evaluates aesthetics rather than actual environmental impact in terms of how much of the non-human ecosystem is allowed to flourish. Which, for example, results in lots of people thinking that placing their homes in the midst of lots of greenery, sprawled out, is more environmentally friendly than a multi family apartment complex, or a small village with houses right next to each other, where you can walk for most of your daily needs.
Whereas in reality in most ecosystems, the constraint is land untouched by humans, so that apex predators have enough land to exist, and enough of the smaller creatures to feed them. It is very good for humans to live amongst nature, but especially with suburban sprawl we have taken that desire to live amongst nature and made it one of the most environmentally unfriendly ways of existing.
We still use an increasing amount of cropland to feed the animals that we're moving closer and closer together in industrial farming (that's why pasture land is decreasing).
I think many still underestimate the effect on climate change of livestock agriculture. Furthermore, livestock agriculture is one of the leading causes of the collapse of biodiversity - a crisis that will have much more dire consequences than climate change, in my opninion. Also a crisis that almost nobody is aware of presently.
1) Growing monocrop plants on a large scale is much more destructive to the environment as it completely destroys the ecosystem. You destroy all other plants and small animals that would regenerate the soil. Instead you just steal from the soil over and over again without regenerating it. Cows shitting provide fertilizer. But this obviously doesn't happen on monocrop land.
2) Most of the places where cows graze grass can NOT support human eatable plant food growing. Only grass can grow there, not eg corn or some grains. So that land can either do nothing or you can unleash cows onto that land to convert that grass into human food (cows).
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-dam...
Ammonia production can be designed to run when energy is cheap, free, or negative in price, this is unlike other energy-intensive industrial feedstocks such as aluminium smelting.
It isn't currently economically efficient to run factories this way, but (again, unlike smelting bauxite) it is physically plausible to start-and-stop Haber process plants on a scale of hours.
Nitrogen fertilizers cause their own cascade of second-order effects when they leach into the water supply, but this can be solved with well-understood chemistry which renders the nitrate largely insoluble in water but available to soil microorganisms, who are happy to share it with crop roots.
My point is that fossil fuels aren't a feedstock for the most important fertilizer, so the use of fossil fuels in their manufacture is instrumental rather than inherent.
Before the world wars and invention of artificial fertiliser we didn't have monocultures. On the scale of agriculture artificial fertiliser and factory farming is extremely new not something we have been doing for hundreds of years.
The issue is that when the crop is harvested you are taking nutrients out of the field into the crop then taking that crop off the soil. These nutrients need replaced or you will deplete the field. A hundred years ago this would come back in the form of rotations of crops and animals that leave dung to fertilise the land today its done with artificial fertiliser which provides lots of nitrogen but is missing all of the trace nutrients that where removed.
Better artificial fertiliser could help but there are other problems with artificial fertiliser like run off where rain remove the fertiliser from the field and dumps it into wetlands and rivers which are poisoned by the massive amounts of nitrogen.
The old way was sustainable but required lots of manual labour the new way is not sustainable but is easily automated. The real sustainable solution is to automate the old way of farming.
Take wild moose as an example. My home country has an artificially high moose pupilation due to current forresting practices. Yet the annual yield is only something like 3% of the Swedish meat consumption.
Removing crops as a part of animal feed would mean something like reducing our meat consumption by 90%.
Edit: and there are ways of maintaining a healthy soil without animals. I have done it in a very small scale for my plantations (just 40m2) and there are examples of people doing it on a much larger scale. I have yet to find data about yields though, but they seem competitive.
Now the idiotic argument that is often heard is "well, if we didn't grow grass we could grow something humans want, like.. soybeans". And the answer is no, we couldn't because the land isn't suitable for growing those high-value crops. If it was the case the farmers would be all over it.
https://jordbruksverket.se/om-jordbruksverket/jordbruksverke...
Horrible link, but it shows that close to 45%(?) is used for "vall/grönfoder" and "betesmark" i.e. grass, grass-equivalents and gracing pastures.
I think many farmers do what has worked for the last X decades; often copying what their forebears do with small adjustments.
You can't copy/paste in farming to get ahead, or be really likeable but have no actual output or contribution.
I don't think farmers have any particular theory that land growing grass cannot grow anything else or their parents would already have done that. So the analogy is really stretched thin.
We CAN grow such crops in Sweden, at least in the southern parts. I lived next to a quinoa field with comparatively high yields. And we have been growing white beans for years. Pre pandemic there were trials with soybeans on Öland and in Skåne with promising results.
Or we could let the wild take over that land.
Gardening isn't farming. All crop farms of any scale use artificial fertilisers that wash off the land an poison our rivers and wetlands its not sustainable. Cutting out artificial fertilisers and gmo crops would cut our crop production by 60%.
We need to go back to our old style of farming before the world wars where we rotated between crops and animals and used the animals dung as fertiliser.
You mean, the old style of farming where our agricultural output was sustained by unimaginable tons of ancient manures looted from South America?
We are already using ~all available animal dung as fertilizer; it provides something like 10% of our global fertilizer needs. We can't produce more animal dung than we are now; we already raise an absurd quantity of livestock, and we especially can't do it while also doing the other thing people suggest on this topic, cutting our meat production by 90%.
You correctly reference that raising vegetable protein is about 10x more efficient than raising animal protein.
Assuming
* it is ~ 20x more efficient to raise single cell protein than it is to raise vegetable protein
* it is too impractical or inefficient to feed single-cell protein to plants
Then it would follow that it would be 2x more efficient to raise single-cell-protein-fed animal protein than it is to raise vegetable protein. This can happen in closed facilities to capture any methane gas.
We observe it is very hard to convince people to switch from carnivore habits to vegetarian habits. Presumably it will be similarily difficult to convince carnivore population to voluntarily switch to eating single cell protein.
It will obviously still be 10x more efficient to eat the single cell protein directly than to eat single-cell-protein fed animal protein, which would in turn be about 2x as efficient as eating vegetable protein.
I don't think meat eating humans care much if the animal ate plant protein or single cell protein. It's not like meat products specify what the livestock ate throughout its short life.
Even if you have (perfectly valid!) ethical questions about raising creatures as fast as possible only to kill them and harvest their meat; faced with a fellow vegetarian human who cannot be convinced to eat single cell protein, would you convince them to eat SCP-fed animal protein? (better for the environment); or would you convince them to eat vegetable protein? (better for compassion with the livestock creatures)
Assume for a minute you were vegetarian up to this day yourself: you welcome the lower footprint of single-cell proteins, and don't mind eating it most of the time, ... but sometimes you want to treat yourself, just a small treat, would you have the discipline to eat SCP-fed animal protein, or would you insist on eating less efficiently produced vegetable protein?
Le morale: if one is abhorred by the concept of raising creatures for the sole purpouse of eating them, one should stick to the point and not defer to efficiency arguments. Every cover reason backfires... eventually.
What I am saying is: a.sustainable protein will make the largest impact in chicken, but very little impact for the kind of feed and land use we are discussing. Vall and slåtter (I have no idea about the English terms) are almost exclusively used as feed for grazing animals.
And even with chickens I must ask: Is SCP competitive with insects? I have been betting on insects becoming the next big thing in animal feed for some time. 20x less land use per gram of protein compared to soy is no problem for something like the black soldier fly larvae. They are well above 50x.
you are not explaining where your larvae are getting their proteins... I don't believe they can essentially thrive on CO2 and hydrogen...
The discussion of SCP in feed is the same as soy beans: we can eat it ourselves. Why accept a 3-10x efficiency loss by feeding it to chicken and pigs? We are already eating SCP, and we are bound to eat more of it in the coming decades.
> It will obviously still be 10x more efficient to eat the single cell protein directly than to eat single-cell-protein fed animal protein, which would in turn be about 2x as efficient as eating vegetable protein.
(so you merely reiterate what I wrote) and the paragraph right before it
> We observe it is very hard to convince people to switch from carnivore habits to vegetarian habits. Presumably it will be similarily difficult to convince carnivore population to voluntarily switch to eating single cell protein.
which answers your question:
> Why accept a 3-10x efficiency loss by feeding it to chicken and pigs?
Because citizens enjoy autonomy and the state doesn't force people to eat SCP directly. In the knowledge (not in their defense) that a large group of people eating meat refuse to switch to vegetable protein today, it is naive to think they would however switch to eating SCP directly.
This is completely wrong. You can grow regular crops there but usually the land is sloped, the terrain itself is inaccessible or inconvenient for machinery. There are plenty of Asian countries that do terraced rice farming but this requires massive amounts of manual labor compared to a nice, level and flat piece of land on which tractors and combines can drive on.
It is very dependent on geography. The discussion regarding beef/cattle/meat always takes some "global-scale-scope" which is useless since the topology, soil, water etc. is something that almost exclusively determines what is suitable to grow.
You could not, how much you wanted convert the gracing pastures in Sweden to any high-yield farm.
But sure, keep on looking at a picture of grass and decide that the land is suitable for other crops.
The next time you leave for the wilderness, go to a field, go the edge of it and see if you can figure out if there was a reason they didn't expand it further out.
I wouldn't dream of asking you of taking a random commenter at face value.
You make an argument that has no practical value. And you make it in a way that is offensive.
Yes, if we had slave labor like the 3rd world then we could farm all the mountains.
(Whether they should be exploited is a different story.)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goyder%27s_Line
Meh.
This is pure propaganda. Do people know that when they repeat it? Or does it just soak into the collective unconsious and become 'common sense' even though it doesn't make any sense?
Who told you these were the only two options? Why would you believe them? What other alternative uses for the land have you explored?
If you could grow something more valuable than grass on a piece of land you can be quite sure that most farmers would.
> The climate impact of diets are usually compared in terms of greenhouse gases that are emitted today. But this misses a hidden cost: the carbon opportunity costs of agricultural land. If we were not using this land to grow food, it would be possible that forests and wild grasslands grow on these lands. They would not only harbour wildlife, but also store much more carbon. Meat and dairy products need more land than alternatives, and therefore have a higher opportunity cost.
So it needing more land is a kinda worthless metric tbh.
So you kind of are suggesting that, while pretending to be some old lady with a pet sheep roaming the hills rather than a global industry producing 400 million tonnes of meat per annum.
That doesn't exclude farming, fishing or high-density food-farming (salmon, shrimps etc.). I mean, the number of issues with providing a couple of billion of humans with enough energy and variety in their diet is not insignificant..
A sheep roaming the hills is probably one of the better ways of producing protein..
About 75% of the diet of a regular Swedish cow is grass or grass-equivalents. The rest is made up of peas, beans, rapeseed and of course various grains.
The grains that go to animal feed usually is not fit for human consumption (well, wouldn't pass QC-controls).
Pigs doesn't really eat grass. Neither does chickens... So it's a bit of a different animal (HAHAHA) to farm chickens/pigs vs cows.
In 'standard' farming practice, a vast majority of the feed for cattle is grass, hay, or other sorts of grass things. The last month or so before slaughter they are fed heavy grain to bulk up a little and be more marketable. (source; my farm).
In Industrial scale farming (which one could argue is the actual standard now because people demand cheap meat), cattle are kept in feed lots for their lives and pushed heavy grain.
Pigs don't eat grass. Chickens don't eat grass.
Land used for livestock feed is 2x what is used for humans (in the US). Nevermind the land required to raise the livestock.
If you're so educated, answer this for me: how much extra plants do we need to cultivate to feed the world's animal livestock?
It's a lot. Way more than what people eat. WAY more.
No where does anyone rotate hay with row crops. Where do you live where that is common practice, and how does that work? New hay crops need a year at least to establish before you can cut for baling.
The diet will say it is "50% grass" but it is not. That 50% is the stems etc.. from corn and whatever.
a) Citation? Most studies I can find on a quick googling show minimal effects.
b) Whereas clearing forest to create pasture for animals to graze is...not good for carbon capture. Quote from WWF: "Alone, the deforestation caused by cattle ranching is responsible for the release of 340 million tons of carbon to the atmosphere every year, equivalent to 3.4% of current global emissions." https://wwf.panda.org/discover/knowledge_hub/where_we_work/a...
"Ranching’s capital account is always in debt, because wild ecosystems store more carbon than the fields and pastures that have taken their place."
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-dam...
Forests can also grow there. They are far more valuable for bio-diversity and as carbon sinks.
We might as well do, but what's the alternative? The less-off people, the plebs, eating less meat? How would that be fair?
In other words you don't need much modelling to see that more expensive food will hurt the world's poor here and now, the climate change thing is in the indistinct future (and it might happen the way we prevision it, or it may not).
Poor people already eat less meat. On the other hand, climate change will make basic foods more expensive. I'm from India. I've seen the miseries caused when the price of rice or onions goes up. It becomes a major political issue. But if chicken becomes more expensive, no one blinks, because people don't eat that much of it anyway. Maybe some people in the cities grumble because prices at restaurants went up, but that's about it.
Your argument is like saying "Taxing Ferraris more will make life harder for poor people because it increases average transportation prices".
In short: Of all agricultural land, ~77% is used for meat/dairy production. This 77% are responsible for only 18% of the calories and 37% of proteins, the rest comes from the plants in our diet.
The numbers may vary a bit, but the scale stays the same. It's ridiculous.
https://u4d2z7k9.rocketcdn.me/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Glo...
https://earth.org/data_visualization/adopting-a-plant-based-...
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets#more-plant-based-d...
There's a reason that Wyoming is home so many ranches, while San Joaquin valley is overwhelmingly money crops like grapes, almonds, and pistachios.
Some fertility problems (hardening, soil compaction) can be fixed in places like the Steppe and the northern American plains, but retention, drainage, and composition are inherent to the environment, and crop yield is one of those things that's damn near exponential to its inputs.
Honestly I'm glad that the terrain is at least useful for some purpose, out in the Appalachian mountains the % of land that can either support crops or livestock is incredibly small.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-dam...
Most of our calories are from monocropped commodities like maize, canola & soy. These are indeed efficient. High calorie per dollar value, but also high calorie per land/fertilizer/water/etc. This is true for eggs, but also true for fruit, nuts, tomatoes. Everything compares poorly to maize.
These types of analysis are full of such biases. "Pasturelands" are huge because they are low intensity... think of outback cattle stations in Australia. There certainly is a conversation to be had about rewilding low intensity lands, or farming them in more eco-friendly ways, considering the high land/food ratio. But... most animal husbandry happens at much, much higher density. Egg farming compares pretty well to fruit, vegetables, almonds, etc.
So yes, if we consume commodity crops instead of meat, fruit, vegetables and other non staple foods then the food system becomes much more efficient. I don't think it's realistic or desirable though.
On paper, where I'm dictator of the world, I can make a lot of things efficient. Food, energy, transport. I could easily find an omnivorous formula more efficient to the average vegan diet, also healthier and tastier. This is a disingenuous game.
I agree that it would be good to have more moores and wild lands. Becoming vegan does not help this cause. Unexploited land is only unexploited because of legal protections. Not one acre will go unexploited because enough people became vegan. This kind of "consumer action" mentality never works, is usually built on a disingenuous simplification, and it's ridiculous here too.
There was a great interview with one of the guys who bought a black rhino tag and pissed the Internet off.
Very thoughtful guy, and his core message was "Given enough time, the only animals left on this planet will be those that are useful to humans or able to hide from us." In that an economic incentive is the only sure motivator of action over the long term, and so if we want to preserve something then we'd better find a financially sustainable model to do so.
And land can't hide.
I see no clear reason why fewer species existing in agricultural production areas will lead to any particular disasters, but I'm happy to be enlightened.
The classic example is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign : in that case, exterminating species in agricultural areas was intentional, but the results were not.
There is little biodiversity inside the factory. Few species thrive there. But that doesn't mean life outside of the factory is doomed.
In pre-railway times, people had to grow grains everywhere where they lived, including Russian north such as Archangel, and Siberia.
Today, the intensified farming mostly happens in a tiny south-western tip of a country. The downside here is that there's no longer an economical reason for rural life style in most of the country. But, forests and grasslands reclaim former fields all right.
The catch is that oil will just get more and more expensive. So while we'll never run out, it might cost 10x or 100x or 1000x what it does today, which for many practical purposes is the same as having none.
We may see a world where no one drives a gasoline vehicle, but plastics, resins, rubber, kerosine have certain applications where people would be willing to absorb 100x the current cost of extraction.
https://ourworldindata.org/peak-agriculture-land
This seems like blogspam taking advantage of their Creative Commons licencing.
So no matter where one looks, the bottom line seems pretty clear: there are no good compromises that preserve the planet and promote economic development[^1]. Maybe it is time to start talking about the no-compromise solutions? Like colonizing space[^2] and de-industrializing and de-populating Earth? Because if we don't, when global warming gets worse and the majority of people start considering that industrialization is a threat to the environment and their survival, we will just be talking about de-industrialization and forcing everybody to go vegetarian and poor, no choice involved.
[^1]: If you think you have all the material wealth you need, cheers! But poverty still affects the quality of life of most people on the planet, and most people would rather have a better life.
[^2]: Must people imagine cramped space bases separated from vacuum by a paper-thin wall while working under the whipping of something like Amazon 5.0, but lush, ginormous space habitats with sensible bylaws are also an option.
Also I’m not sure depopulation is exactly a “zero compromise” solution.
And this is today; who knows how culture will change if things get really bad.
Leaving the babies aside for a minute, the "industries are bad for the environment" is a widely held belief already. Optimistic people believe in clean industries and if we get them in time, all will be good. If they don't, then the pessimistic people will say that there is no such thing as clean industries, and as the threats associated with global warming get more severe, pushing for de-industrialization may give an easy remedy. It could be an extra-economic movement (political movement, even a violent revolution), not something necessarily incentivized by market forces.
Regarding cattle (and in minor degree, crops), nobody seems to have a good solution.
Don't get me wrong, IMO industries are good for human well-being, and with a bigger, properly-trained population under supportive economic conditions industries will be even more so. But there is only so much of that the planet can take. Therefore, as long as we choose compromise, we are choosing away well-being.
If what I said about compromises and choosing away well-being and cow meat makes my point difficult to understand, here is a thought experiment that may help: imagine that in the year 2050 we discover a way of keeping people young forever at the cost of expending 1000 kW[^1] per person in a biomedical simulation...
----
[^1]: kW is a power unit, so that means 1000 kW.h per hour, or 24000 kW.h per day per person.
Across all human societies, improving access to education, employment, finance, and birth control are correlated with a) stronger economies and better standards of living and b) declines in population growth.
You don’t have to prevent people from having babies. You just have to let them choose what they want to do with their lives.
People always want to believe doom and gloom for some reason, but humans are an incredible animal. We have always found solutions and adopted them because in most cases what is right also happens to be what works best.
These narratives are supported by people who are threatened by the prospect that there are no limits to human growth and potential.
I don't think it's fair to call that wasted, as if the food produced in these wealthy nations could be transferred to the poor nations.
The cause of food shortages in Africa is the fact it's a lot of non fertile land.
The cause of food waste in the United States is that we have a LOT of fertile land and relatively few people.
It would be like blaming my water usage for shortages in the southwest. You have to see that the two systems are disconnected and just because one nation wastes food does not mean other nations are denied it.
Global trade has eased a lot of regional shortages, but geography and environment still matter.
The same goes for famine. We may be able to adapt, but some regions simply will not and even with global increases we may still see regional shortages and famines.
As someone living in the USA, I'm not worried. We will be fine because we have such a large buffer. If you live in an area that doesn't. You have plenty reason to worry, especially if global trade hiccups or you're in a relatively poor nation vulnerable to trade disruption.
Food crises in Africa are always, with I think, no exceptions, caused by 1. political turmoil that makes it impossible or difficult to use the land well, or 2. wars or 3. genocidal policies by one or more population or tribe toward another.
That is completely untrue.
Looking it up [1], Africa has 219.2 million hectares of arable land as of 2007, compared to 1,406.5 million worldwide. That rounds up to 16%.
I can't imagine where on earth you're getting 60% from.
And if you've been to Africa (or looked at a map), you'd know that it's fertile only in certain parts. The cause of food shortages in Africa are very often that the land within economical transportation distance isn't producing even close to enough food in times of drought. And the idea that you bring up genocide as a major reason for famine is nonsensical.
Quite frankly, you don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/269235/arable-land-world...
2. Africa and the world definitely has more arable land than what you're suggesting there: https://www.afrik21.africa/en/africa-arable-land-increased-b...
Even statista (your source), claims that the total amount of arable land in Africa is 1119 million hectares: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1287280/agricultural-lan...
We are speaking of Africa as a continent here. Obviously central Sahara can not sustain a very large population. (And coincidentally, neither has it).
Are you sure you know what you're speaking of?
PS. the 60% was from memory, and constitutes currently uncultivated arable land. The total arable land seems to be a somewhat lower percentage of earth's total (but your numbers are way off), but not meaningfully so with regards to my main point.
Africa’s problem isn’t the availability of arable land it’s soil fertility. The soils in Africa are mostly bad to meh. [2][3] The less fertile the soil the more fertilizer inputs it needs to produce.
1. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/how-africa-can-feed-t....
2. https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/soils/use/?...
3. https://www.isda-africa.com/isdasoil/?location=-17.741%2C-45...
I don't think that's the claim. The claim is that the title implies that we've reached peak supportable population but because of the waste the USA's food production could support more population than it does. Nobody's getting mad at you for not sending your cheese rinds to Africa.
Sometimes, the burden of responsibility is too much for some people. Fatalism and cynicism are an easier way out.
https://proteindirectory.com/alt-protein-database/?_ingredie...
For example these 6 companies are working on single cell protein (SCP) food from CO2 + energy input, by for example hydrogenotrophs. This may sound like technology that is not democratically accessible, as they are found for example in hydrothermal vents. However they are also found in more mundane places like soil, or ... the human gut, and hence faeces.
Let the world turn to shjt ... for dinner. Finding out how to culture them is probably the bigger challenge. An open science community on how to collect, identify, culture these would probably have the highest impact on combating climate change per buck of effort.
Solein / Solar Foods was recently featured on HN, with claimed figures of protein production efficiency:
SCP protein is about 20x more efficient than vegetable protein
SCP protein is about 200x more efficient than animal protein (and vegetable protein is about 10x more efficient than vegetable-protein fed animal protein)
Incidentally this implies SCP-protein fed animal protein to be about 2x as efficient as vegetable protein!
It turns out plants (or at least the cells of plant roots) can release proteases and absorb the resulting smaller peptide fragments, but it seems far from obvious that it is cost-effective to feed single cell protein to plants especially in competition with other consumers of soil proteins...
To grow these hydrogenotrophs you need CO2 and hydrogen and some trace minerals.
I suggest using radiative cooling near the south pole to:
* condense CO2 out of air
* to generate electric power by using the local (cold) environment as the hot bath, and the atmospheric infrared window (8-13 micrometers) as the cold bath. This way energy generation does not heat the polar environment (to the contrary it helps cool the poles).
* this energy can then be used make hydrogen, and heat well isolated ovens in which the cultures are grown.
So we can generate large amounts of food on otherwise unused area (without competing with solar panels or agriculture for land use), helping to cool the environment, helping to remove CO2, lowering demand of agricultural land by competing on price point, allowing us to rewild large amounts of agricultural land.
Any yearly surplus could be turned into a form of low bio-accessibility and buried where it came from...
While I'm on the climate change topic: we've known for a long time how to help water freeze over (Snomax, Pseudonomas Syringae) to ensure the basic human necessity of sliding down a snow covered hill on wooden planks but don't know how to help the ocean freeze over?
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7ec7/8b0733c1cdae7ced5d7388...
or 1989:
https://journalofweathermodification.org/index.php/JWM/artic...
the seasonal ice region is the region around the poles which melt and refreeze each year, the ocean in this region is super-cooled (a meta-stable state):
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/202...
why don't we sprinkle ice nucleating proteins (INP's) in this region? especially shortly around fall (northern hemisphere) or spring (southern hemisphere) when it is a...
[1]https://www.britannica.com/science/population-ecology/Logist... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth
It also happens to be the normalization function used in neural networks to squash the summed inputs from a feed-forward layer. Interesting to think of the connection there.
From a complexity analysis, the exponential terms will dominate over fixed coefficients, which is what i take your factors to be. In other words, how much livestock, ethanol, etc. do we need? That's mainly dependent on # of people, not living standard. Ofc it's more complex, but again, not clear the usual ecological model won't work and indeed it appears to be.
Bootstrap farmers attract other farmers, which creates communities, which attracts non-farmers. That progression inevitably leads to those some of the largest communities becoming not only non-farming, but anti-farming.