5 ms·

In terms of agriculture, we could use basic research into perennial staple crops. [1] It’s a promising area, but still a ways off. The result, as mentioned in t

by gdubs 7y ago

In terms of agriculture, we could use basic research into perennial staple crops. [1] It’s a promising area, but still a ways off. The result, as mentioned in the article, is less soil disturbance and more long-term carbon sequestration. From a policy perspective, Victory Gardens [2] were a successful strategy during WWII. It would be great to mobilize a similar effort to get people growing food in their own backyards again, and reduce the amount of monocrop farming and all the global transportation and chemical fertilizer production that goes along with it. 1: “The Carbon Farming Solution” 2: Victory Gardens: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden

bjoli 7y ago
Considering how much arable land is used to produce animal feed (about 50%) there is quite a lot of room for improvement, especially considering how inefficient meat production is.
- efnx 7y ago
  The first and easiest thing we can each do, individually, is eat less meat (or better - no meat). My wife and I have been mostly vegan for a year for health reasons and it’s surprisingly easy. Throw on the eco benefit and it’s a very good feeling. Very worth it.
  - godtoldmetodoit 7y ago
    My wife and I made the switch to vegetarian about 3 months ago, and it's been much easier then I expected. I love meat, but knowing both the health and ecological impacts I just couldn't justify my consumption anymore.
    - hkeide 7y ago
      What health effects specifically are you talking about? There is a lot of shaky science in the nutrition field.
  - jeffdavis 7y ago
    My daughter is vegan and sometimes I worry about her diet. A diet is what you do eat, how much, when, etc.; but being vegan only tells you what you don't eat. Surprisingly little about vegan promotional stuff gives practical advice. It's mostly talking about how wasteful meat is and how foolish meat-eaters are. Where is practical material about daily eating habits? Like, what should an athletic teenager eat, how much, and how often? Preferably with pictures of actual normal daily food, not "here's an arcane recipe requiring twelve ingredients and ten steps that you will eat once and forget about". And preferably with approximate nutritional value. For adults it's probably pretty easy simply because adults don't need a lot of food to be healthy, and can skip meals without much downside. Adults are also in many ways less busy. A teenager needs food in the morning rushing to school, and probably needs to pack lunch also because there probably isn't a real vegan meal available at school to buy.
    - vzidex 7y ago
      I'm a young, vegetarian person who is working on going vegan - and making good progress. If you do a cursory search of vegan material, or only pay attention to stuff that pops up on your Facebook/Reddit/HackerNews/Twitter feed, you'll definitely get a lot of "meat = bad"-type material. However, if you put in a little more effort there's a lot of good material available - from recipes, to nutrition advice, to guides on what products are vegan/are not. Hint: I've found appending the term "vegan" to my Google searches for recipes tends to work quite well and yield healthy, reasonable, scalable meals. By putting in the work, I've gotten a bunch of YouTube channels, saved recipes I like, and nutrition advice.
      - jeffdavis 7y ago
        Looking for vegan recipes in google usually doesn't result in staple meals that you can have several times per week. More importantly, a recipe doesn't tell you how much or how often you should eat it in your diet.
    - simonsarris 7y ago
      I'd be very worried about brain development and health. I suspect they are making a big mistake, but its especially so for children. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10408398.2018.1437024 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10408398.2018.1... > The present paper argues that the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics ignores or gives short shrift to direct and indirect evidence that vegetarianism may be associated with serious risks for brain and body development in fetuses and children. Regular supplementation with iron, zinc, and B12 will not mitigate all of these risks. Consequently, we cannot say decisively that vegetarianism or veganism is safe for children. I seriously recommend you read the entire review. I do not think it's something that can be trivially solved with supplementation. Eg: > The AND says that “[v]egans must regularly consume…B-12-fortified foods or B-12-containing supplements,” and “[m]ost vegetarians should” do the same (Melina, Craig, and Levin 2016). The results of Herrmann et al. (2003) suggest that even with supplementation vegans may still tend to cluster in the deficient-to-borderline-deficient range. Vegetarians can achieve adequate B12 levels with supplementation, but some are still in the deficient and borderline-deficient range. Whether it is realistic for vegetarians/vegans to maintain adequate B12 levels throughout their entire childhood via supplementation is an open question. > The consequences of B12 deficiency in childhood for brain and body development are extensive, severe, and can be irreversible. Potential consequences include (among many others) impaired cognitive development/school performance, depression, weakness, fatigue, nerve damage, and failure to thrive (Graham, Arvela, and Wise 1992; Rasmussen, Fernhoff, and Scanlon 2001). Breastfeeding infants whose mothers are vegetarian/vegan are also known to be at risk for B12 deficiency (Graham, Arvela, and Wise 1992; Kühne, Bubl, and Baumgartner 1991; Roschitz et al. 2005; von Schenck, Bender-Götze, and Koletzko 1997).
- hkeide 7y ago
  That's not true in the US. Less than 15% of the feed used for animals would be edible for humans, and much of the land in the US is not suitabe for growing crops other than grass. Most of the food given to animals are farm waste products and leaves etc. Using regenerative farming, cows can even be net carbon negative, meanwhile a lot of human feed uses artificial fertilizer which is a big contributor to carbon emissions. See White Oak Pastures for an example (verified by third parties): https://blog.whiteoakpastures.com/hubfs/WOP-LCA-Quantis-2019.pdf https://blog.whiteoakpastures.com/hubfs/WOP-LCA-Quantis-2019...
  - gdubs 7y ago
    Oak Savanna and regenerative farming, in general, are great things. If we committed to only farming animals in these types of regenerative systems, it would _greatly_ reduce the supply. As a vegetarian, I’m all for that. As someone who really wants us to address climate change, I’m all for that. The fact is, our current system not only ignores the negative externalities of (animal intensive) agriculture — we subsidize it. That’s why I think a carbon tax is a good idea. It would mean meat would become more expensive. This angers a lot of people. But if we get serious about measuring the actual environmental effects of agriculture, it needs to be reflected in the cost. To me, if we solve this problem the world would eat a lot more plants, and the meat that is consumed would be produced by carbon negative, regenerative practices.
  - bjoli 7y ago
    That is not what I said. I said that fodder production takes up a very large part of arable land. In my home country, animal feed and human food take up the same amount of area. That land is suitable for growing human food as well. I suspect that arable land use is about the same in the US. Land that is capable of storing carbon is generally great farmland since the process in carbon sinks is what leads to humus.
apatters 7y ago
Victory Gardens worked because they had a patriotic, pro-war, pro-America appeal. Sort of a "Keep America Great" thing. I suspect there's zero chance that this type of sentiment could be harnessed for "Hey, let's offset carbon emissions [of whom the #1 emitter is our chief political rival, China]" In fact that's the biggest problem with broadening support for decarbonization in general. The largest share of global carbon is emitted by countries like India and China, which billionaires exported thousands of American jobs to, profiting from looser environmental regulations in the process. Of course the average American outside of the SF ivory tower is skeptical about changing his or her own habits to clean up that mess!
- Karunamon 7y ago
  Per the article: >While Victory Gardens were portrayed as a patriotic duty, 54% of Americans polled said they grew gardens for economic reasons while only 20% mentioned patriotism. (which cites the book Eating for victory : food rationing and the politics of domesticity) Combined with the produce shows and competitions mentioned, I'd put indirect social pressure and saturation advertisement above the patriotism angle with this in mind. I'd wager that if there was a push to have people grow their own veg again, citing economic reasons, and calling them "freedom gardens" or some such, we could see a similar level of success.
  - apatters 7y ago
    I guess if Chinese carbon turns half the planet into a desert we'll be able to use the economic motivation too!
- tzs 7y ago
  > The largest share of global carbon is emitted by countries like India and China India emits about 7% of global emissions. The United States emits about 16% [1]. Per capita India emits about 1/9th what the US does. [1] https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emissions https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emi...
  - 7y ago
goodname 7y ago
I'm aware you said its still a ways off but "green bridges"[1] as well as other persistent pests could become a big issue especially in a broadacre monoculture operation (which is what agriculture generally is if we're talking staple crops). Also from experience with dealing with perennial pastures removing them should the disease get out of control would be a nightmare when the root systems are established. Victory Gardens definitley sound like a good idea though. Just my 2c 1: https://www.agric.wa.gov.au/grains/control-green-bridge-pest-and-disease-management https://www.agric.wa.gov.au/grains/control-green-bridge-pest...
alisson 7y ago
I think for agriculture the way to go is syntropic agriculture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE I've seen people implementing this very successfully, I've been doing it myself for around 4 years now, and its very impressive how much carbon the soil stores after a few years on this practice.
jnordwick 7y ago
Everybody becomes a part time farmers? Yeah, I'll pass and almost everybody else will too. Let's try to stay in reality.
JoeAltmaier 7y ago
A principle pillar of our modern civilization is, we went from 50% farmers to <2% farmers. Freeing all those people to, well, invent our modern civilization. Everybody going back to farming is a way to use the unemployed I guess. Maybe it'll have a comeback once we've automated everything (we're well down that path now).
michaelt 7y ago
I don't know if you've ever tried growing food in your back yard to eat? It's a fine hobby if you enjoy gardening and find satisfaction in the honest simplicity and hard work of digging over soil, weeding, and spreading manure. But the truth is: supermarket food is incredibly cheap, and you'll be putting in 50 hours of labour to grow $20 worth of vegetables. If you enjoy the process and don't mind not getting much output, by all means enjoy it as a hobby. But as a way to feed the nation? I'm skeptical.
- ptah 7y ago
  perennials require less work than annuals
- gdubs 7y ago
  Absolutely, but in the context of this conversation we’re talking about moving away from annuals and all of the labor and inputs associated — towards perennials. Therefore, I’m not saying we should copy the Victory Garden from WWII verbatim, but use it as a model for how every person can use their backyard to combat climate change. The point is not to replace all of agriculture, but find ways that, collectively, individuals can make a dent in the problem. Even if it’s as simple as planting more oak trees and fruit trees. But, some of the comments here lack imagination (to speak kindly of the some of the negativity and snark in some of the other replies) in how we could take a 20th century idea and update it for today. We have more technology available, and more knowledge.
bashmelek 7y ago
Growing food in one's yard is a good use, better than the USA's biggest crop: grass. In the log term, we ought to also build housing that has smaller lawns. Those who do have large lawns could help by growing their own food, trees or having a more low-maintenance plan for it

by gdubs 7y ago

bjoli 7y ago

Considering how much arable land is used to produce animal feed (about 50%) there is quite a lot of room for improvement, especially considering how inefficient meat production is.

efnx 7y ago
The first and easiest thing we can each do, individually, is eat less meat (or better - no meat). My wife and I have been mostly vegan for a year for health reasons and it’s surprisingly easy. Throw on the eco benefit and it’s a very good feeling. Very worth it.
- godtoldmetodoit 7y ago
  My wife and I made the switch to vegetarian about 3 months ago, and it's been much easier then I expected. I love meat, but knowing both the health and ecological impacts I just couldn't justify my consumption anymore.
  - hkeide 7y ago
    What health effects specifically are you talking about? There is a lot of shaky science in the nutrition field.
- jeffdavis 7y ago
  My daughter is vegan and sometimes I worry about her diet. A diet is what you do eat, how much, when, etc.; but being vegan only tells you what you don't eat. Surprisingly little about vegan promotional stuff gives practical advice. It's mostly talking about how wasteful meat is and how foolish meat-eaters are. Where is practical material about daily eating habits? Like, what should an athletic teenager eat, how much, and how often? Preferably with pictures of actual normal daily food, not "here's an arcane recipe requiring twelve ingredients and ten steps that you will eat once and forget about". And preferably with approximate nutritional value. For adults it's probably pretty easy simply because adults don't need a lot of food to be healthy, and can skip meals without much downside. Adults are also in many ways less busy. A teenager needs food in the morning rushing to school, and probably needs to pack lunch also because there probably isn't a real vegan meal available at school to buy.
  - vzidex 7y ago
    I'm a young, vegetarian person who is working on going vegan - and making good progress. If you do a cursory search of vegan material, or only pay attention to stuff that pops up on your Facebook/Reddit/HackerNews/Twitter feed, you'll definitely get a lot of "meat = bad"-type material. However, if you put in a little more effort there's a lot of good material available - from recipes, to nutrition advice, to guides on what products are vegan/are not. Hint: I've found appending the term "vegan" to my Google searches for recipes tends to work quite well and yield healthy, reasonable, scalable meals. By putting in the work, I've gotten a bunch of YouTube channels, saved recipes I like, and nutrition advice.
    - jeffdavis 7y ago
      Looking for vegan recipes in google usually doesn't result in staple meals that you can have several times per week. More importantly, a recipe doesn't tell you how much or how often you should eat it in your diet.
  - simonsarris 7y ago
    I'd be very worried about brain development and health. I suspect they are making a big mistake, but its especially so for children. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10408398.2018.1437024 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10408398.2018.1... > The present paper argues that the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics ignores or gives short shrift to direct and indirect evidence that vegetarianism may be associated with serious risks for brain and body development in fetuses and children. Regular supplementation with iron, zinc, and B12 will not mitigate all of these risks. Consequently, we cannot say decisively that vegetarianism or veganism is safe for children. I seriously recommend you read the entire review. I do not think it's something that can be trivially solved with supplementation. Eg: > The AND says that “[v]egans must regularly consume…B-12-fortified foods or B-12-containing supplements,” and “[m]ost vegetarians should” do the same (Melina, Craig, and Levin 2016). The results of Herrmann et al. (2003) suggest that even with supplementation vegans may still tend to cluster in the deficient-to-borderline-deficient range. Vegetarians can achieve adequate B12 levels with supplementation, but some are still in the deficient and borderline-deficient range. Whether it is realistic for vegetarians/vegans to maintain adequate B12 levels throughout their entire childhood via supplementation is an open question. > The consequences of B12 deficiency in childhood for brain and body development are extensive, severe, and can be irreversible. Potential consequences include (among many others) impaired cognitive development/school performance, depression, weakness, fatigue, nerve damage, and failure to thrive (Graham, Arvela, and Wise 1992; Rasmussen, Fernhoff, and Scanlon 2001). Breastfeeding infants whose mothers are vegetarian/vegan are also known to be at risk for B12 deficiency (Graham, Arvela, and Wise 1992; Kühne, Bubl, and Baumgartner 1991; Roschitz et al. 2005; von Schenck, Bender-Götze, and Koletzko 1997).
hkeide 7y ago
That's not true in the US. Less than 15% of the feed used for animals would be edible for humans, and much of the land in the US is not suitabe for growing crops other than grass. Most of the food given to animals are farm waste products and leaves etc. Using regenerative farming, cows can even be net carbon negative, meanwhile a lot of human feed uses artificial fertilizer which is a big contributor to carbon emissions. See White Oak Pastures for an example (verified by third parties): https://blog.whiteoakpastures.com/hubfs/WOP-LCA-Quantis-2019.pdf https://blog.whiteoakpastures.com/hubfs/WOP-LCA-Quantis-2019...
- gdubs 7y ago
  Oak Savanna and regenerative farming, in general, are great things. If we committed to only farming animals in these types of regenerative systems, it would _greatly_ reduce the supply. As a vegetarian, I’m all for that. As someone who really wants us to address climate change, I’m all for that. The fact is, our current system not only ignores the negative externalities of (animal intensive) agriculture — we subsidize it. That’s why I think a carbon tax is a good idea. It would mean meat would become more expensive. This angers a lot of people. But if we get serious about measuring the actual environmental effects of agriculture, it needs to be reflected in the cost. To me, if we solve this problem the world would eat a lot more plants, and the meat that is consumed would be produced by carbon negative, regenerative practices.
- bjoli 7y ago
  That is not what I said. I said that fodder production takes up a very large part of arable land. In my home country, animal feed and human food take up the same amount of area. That land is suitable for growing human food as well. I suspect that arable land use is about the same in the US. Land that is capable of storing carbon is generally great farmland since the process in carbon sinks is what leads to humus.

apatters 7y ago

Victory Gardens worked because they had a patriotic, pro-war, pro-America appeal. Sort of a "Keep America Great" thing. I suspect there's zero chance that this type of sentiment could be harnessed for "Hey, let's offset carbon emissions [of whom the #1 emitter is our chief political rival, China]" In fact that's the biggest problem with broadening support for decarbonization in general. The largest share of global carbon is emitted by countries like India and China, which billionaires exported thousands of American jobs to, profiting from looser environmental regulations in the process. Of course the average American outside of the SF ivory tower is skeptical about changing his or her own habits to clean up that mess!

Karunamon 7y ago
Per the article: >While Victory Gardens were portrayed as a patriotic duty, 54% of Americans polled said they grew gardens for economic reasons while only 20% mentioned patriotism. (which cites the book Eating for victory : food rationing and the politics of domesticity) Combined with the produce shows and competitions mentioned, I'd put indirect social pressure and saturation advertisement above the patriotism angle with this in mind. I'd wager that if there was a push to have people grow their own veg again, citing economic reasons, and calling them "freedom gardens" or some such, we could see a similar level of success.
- apatters 7y ago
  I guess if Chinese carbon turns half the planet into a desert we'll be able to use the economic motivation too!
tzs 7y ago
> The largest share of global carbon is emitted by countries like India and China India emits about 7% of global emissions. The United States emits about 16% [1]. Per capita India emits about 1/9th what the US does. [1] https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emissions https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emi...
- 7y ago

goodname 7y ago

I'm aware you said its still a ways off but "green bridges"[1] as well as other persistent pests could become a big issue especially in a broadacre monoculture operation (which is what agriculture generally is if we're talking staple crops). Also from experience with dealing with perennial pastures removing them should the disease get out of control would be a nightmare when the root systems are established. Victory Gardens definitley sound like a good idea though. Just my 2c 1: https://www.agric.wa.gov.au/grains/control-green-bridge-pest-and-disease-management https://www.agric.wa.gov.au/grains/control-green-bridge-pest...

alisson 7y ago

I think for agriculture the way to go is syntropic agriculture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE I've seen people implementing this very successfully, I've been doing it myself for around 4 years now, and its very impressive how much carbon the soil stores after a few years on this practice.

jnordwick 7y ago

Everybody becomes a part time farmers? Yeah, I'll pass and almost everybody else will too. Let's try to stay in reality.

JoeAltmaier 7y ago

A principle pillar of our modern civilization is, we went from 50% farmers to <2% farmers. Freeing all those people to, well, invent our modern civilization. Everybody going back to farming is a way to use the unemployed I guess. Maybe it'll have a comeback once we've automated everything (we're well down that path now).

michaelt 7y ago

I don't know if you've ever tried growing food in your back yard to eat? It's a fine hobby if you enjoy gardening and find satisfaction in the honest simplicity and hard work of digging over soil, weeding, and spreading manure. But the truth is: supermarket food is incredibly cheap, and you'll be putting in 50 hours of labour to grow $20 worth of vegetables. If you enjoy the process and don't mind not getting much output, by all means enjoy it as a hobby. But as a way to feed the nation? I'm skeptical.

ptah 7y ago
perennials require less work than annuals
gdubs 7y ago
Absolutely, but in the context of this conversation we’re talking about moving away from annuals and all of the labor and inputs associated — towards perennials. Therefore, I’m not saying we should copy the Victory Garden from WWII verbatim, but use it as a model for how every person can use their backyard to combat climate change. The point is not to replace all of agriculture, but find ways that, collectively, individuals can make a dent in the problem. Even if it’s as simple as planting more oak trees and fruit trees. But, some of the comments here lack imagination (to speak kindly of the some of the negativity and snark in some of the other replies) in how we could take a 20th century idea and update it for today. We have more technology available, and more knowledge.

bashmelek 7y ago

Growing food in one's yard is a good use, better than the USA's biggest crop: grass. In the log term, we ought to also build housing that has smaller lawns. Those who do have large lawns could help by growing their own food, trees or having a more low-maintenance plan for it