31 ms·

We should discuss soil as much as coal (2019)

200 points by hkh 6y ago

flyGuyOnTheSly 6y ago
I wonder if changing the cow's diet could limit the amount of methane generated? I've noticed that changing my own diet by eliminating animal products has cut down significantly on methane production in my own gut. My farts literally don't smell like anything at all anymore, when a small one used to clear the room with ease.
- mc32 6y ago
  According to this[1] seaweed helps cut methane emissions by cows. [1] https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-eating-seaweed-can-help-cows-to-belch-less-methane https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-eating-seaweed-can-help-c...
- xnx 6y ago
  Isn't methane odorless?
  - abstractbarista 6y ago
    That is correct. The smells come from hydrogen sulfide and other molecules.
    - projektfu 6y ago
      And the hydrogen sulfide probably comes from the metabolism of cysteine and methionine. A low protein diet will produce less smelly farts.
- mattferderer 6y ago
  This recent article discusses this topic - https://onezero.medium.com/cow-farts-are-not-the-problem-f5764c1b2a5d https://onezero.medium.com/cow-farts-are-not-the-problem-f57... My takeaway from their argument is that eliminating cows may not be as valuable as changing how they're raised & fed.
  - reillyse 6y ago
    This is a good article, I would add to the key takeaway is that methane production from animal husbandry is mostly a closed system, the greenhouse gases being produced by cows are being absorbed from the atmosphere. atmosphere -> photosynthesis in grass -> cows -> atmosphere -> grass etc. So reducing herd sizes doesn't reduce net carbon in the atmosphere.
    - klodolph 6y ago
      A couple problems. Looking at the net carbon paints a very incomplete picture. The effect of methane is very different from CO2, you might describe methane as 30x as powerful a greenhouse gas as CO2 is. The other factor here is that agriculture drives deforestation, which releases sequestered carbon.
  - fnovd 6y ago
    This article misses the point entirely. It's true that most cattle farms are on the small-end, and have plenty of land for their cattle. It's also true that the vast majority of cows slaughtered for meat come from just a few industrial feedlots. Changing the way that "most" farms work might change how much methane truth A cows produce, but the vast majority of cows are truth B cows that aren't impacted by the decisions of small-time farmers. There is not enough land on this earth to allow for free-range cattle at the rate humans consume them. The solution isn't to do it more efficiently, but to stop and do something else. Ford said people would ask for faster horses, and 100 years later we have people wanting cows that fart differently. It's the cheeseburger you want, not another magic chemical added to the lovecraftian nightmare that is factory farming. The way to reduce the impact cows have on the environment is to reduce the number of cows bred for food.
    - mc32 6y ago
      One could also say people are asking for non-meat as a solution when maybe the answer is to make cow farts different.
- EGreg 6y ago
  Um yes New Zealand researchers gave cows seweed and cut emissions 80% by adding just 2% of it https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/01/from-red-seaweed-to-climate-smart-cows-new-zealand-leads-the-fight-against-methane https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/01/from-red-seawe...
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  Did you eliminate all animal products or just some? I have some rooms I’d like to clear out.
- vikramkr 6y ago
  Methane is odorless, so you might still be producing methane - the decrease in odor has more to do with sulfur compounds
belorn 6y ago
People claim that burning biomass is a net-zero effect on the climate because whatever get burned had once collected the carbon from the air. Then we have people arguing that cows are one of the main contributor to global warming because we feed them grass. In cases with produce that get rejected for once reason or an other, it may either go into animal feed or biomass depending on who is paying the more, and thus the greenness of it changes drastically. So why are counting the methane from cows in isolation, while biomass is the sum of carbon released minus carbon extracted?
- idoh 6y ago
  Methane is a lot more powerful of a greenhouse gas than CO2. Turning CO2 from the atmosphere back into CO2 is net even. Turning CO2 into methane is net-bad.
  - jniedrauer 6y ago
    Since methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas and has a much shorter half-life in the atmosphere compared to CO2, I wonder if it might actually save us. We could render the planet inhospitable early enough to be forced to address the problem without shackling future generations with the fallout like we are doing with CO2.
    - dredmorbius 6y ago
      That's ... not great ... but only viable if methane itself doesn't move the climate past a tipping point to runaway greenhouse effects. See "clathrate gun hypothesis", for example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis
    - neckardt 6y ago
      Do you know what the half life of methane in the atmosphere is? I did a search for it but couldn't find it.
      - 6y ago
kickout 6y ago
Bill is correct on a lot fronts here. Soil is the big elephant in the room. But the problem remains an economic problem as much as a technical one. We need solutions that are market driven (in addition to the cool innovations he talks about). https://thinkingagriculture.io/carbon-sequestering-incentives-who-wins/ https://thinkingagriculture.io/carbon-sequestering-incentive...
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  "Market driven"? The market has had its chance; "it" is focusing on short-term, optimized profits, on cutting down the rainforests to make way for shitty farms to grow cheap shit to feed to cattle, etc. Some consumers have the funds and the will to buy food from more reputable sources, but I'm confident there's a lot of scummy stuff happening there too. The market won't solve this; it's time for legislation to control the market before it wrings out everything. We live in an age now where even politicians are wringing out everything they can from a country, funneling billions to themselves and their friends, leaving the country in shambles while they retire to their private islands because hey, not their problem anymore.
  - sputr 6y ago
    I think your unecesserally criticising the person your commenting on. They never said free/unregulated market. They just said market driven. Markets and market forces are tools. If left unregulated they, as you pointed out, devolve into optimising for the short term and the narrow bad of monetisable effects (ie the problem of externalities). But a regulated market is a force to be recond with, and if properly regulated, a force for a lot of good. So you are both right. We need market solutions (as those are most effective) but within a regulated market that makes sure that market forces are pushing everyone in the direction that is good for society.
  - wow_no 6y ago
    You seem extremely mad
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
LatteLazy 6y ago
We're not making any progress on co2e because we've choosen not to. Even if we were, net zero by 2070 (the optimistic outcome here!?) would be pointless, civilisation would be over long before then anyway. I find all this really frustrating. It's like someone moaning they're fat and telling me about their new diet, the 1000th one this week, where they eat 20 cheese burgers a day and hope for the best. Let's get real and either do something or enjoy the ride to hell.
- cagenut 6y ago
  > Let's get real and either do something or enjoy the ride to hell. Easy for anyone not on the Indian sub-continent to say: https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/chapter-3/3-4/3-4-11/figure_3-18-2/ https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/chapter-3/3-4/3-4-11/figure...
- hutzlibu 6y ago
  "Even if we were, net zero by 2070 (the optimistic outcome here!?) would be pointless, civilisation would be over long before then anyway." Why? Even with every worst case szenario of continous droughts and floods and loss of some islands and coastal land etc. We could grow everything we need in (automated) greenhouses. Only if the transistion chaos leads to all out nuclear war, but that is not really a fixed thing.
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    Civlisation will survive, in one shape or the other, but some countries could be totally screwed, others badly damaged. Its possible to imagine that political system crumbles, liberal democracy is gone, and the label is somewhat justified. We are talking about most of bangladesh underwater and about 1 billion refugees globally in a poor scenario. Todays migration problems will pale in comparison. Many if them will die violently. Nothing we've done so far indicates to me that we can quickly organise global rollout of hundred million automated greenhouses to people that cannot posssibly pay for them. Or to build largest damns in human history. Even when we can afford to pay for infrastructure, in UK its taking us 40 years to build 1 line of rail, connecting two biggest cities, and its going to cost roughly as mich as the moon programm did.
ChuckMcM 6y ago
Adding food storage to countries where that capability doesn't exist is a huge multiplier in their agronomic efficiency. There is some excellent discussion of this in the book "Guns, Germs, and Steel" which discusses how these forces shaped the changes in human civilizations.
- 29athrowaway 6y ago
  Some things that do not show up in Guns, germs and steel: - Syphilis may have a new world origin. - The most productive crop is the potato, a crop of new world origin. - The Inca farmed guinea pigs. These are a very viable farm animal. - The Mapuche did not have guns, germs or steel yet, they defeated the Spanish. - The Inca could have defeated the Spanish. They were encountered after a civil war where the nobility was purged. The Inca nobility knew how to run the empire.
  - HugeAcumen 6y ago
    ... Those seem like pretty tiny nitpicks in the context of the wider argument to me. The central point of his book - that there was far more geographic luck involved in European dominance than is popularly understood - holds just fine with all those points you made. Good points though.
  - ChuckMcM 6y ago
    Okay. But I'm having a hard time connecting the dots between the way in which crop storage amplifies the agronomic output of a group, and the points you raise. If you're just trying to point out that "Guns, Germs, and Steel" isn't an all inclusive guide to the rise of civilization, or that different people may have made different choices in their analysis, okay I get that too. Every book is just a single voice in the choir of a genre. Is that what you're trying to say? That you didn't like the book?
    - 29athrowaway 6y ago
      I like the book as well as the 3 part documentary with the same name. I think it presents a fair perspective of world history. I agree with the author, 99%.
grawprog 6y ago
Industrial agriculture has plenty more problems than just cow farts and carbon dioxide released from disturbed soil. Still on the vein of CO₂ emissions there's the large amounts of industrial machinery, vehicles and other such things that are powered by fossil fuels and release large amounts of CO₂. Then on the vein of soils, we're actually running out of arable soil. Soil erosion is a huge problem around the world and industrial farming is a large part of the problem. Farm plots are never left to fallow and replenish, all nutrients and organic matter are stripped out and replaced with liquid chemical fertilizers, that run off the fields and pollute waterways. Not to mention, fertilizers, globally, phosphate reserves are beginning to deplete. At some point in the next 50-100 years, we'll have come close to completely running out. Industrial agriculture is heavily dependent on phosphorous. https://foodprint.org/issues/how-industrial-agriculture-affects-our-soil/ https://foodprint.org/issues/how-industrial-agriculture-affe... https://www.nrdc.org/stories/industrial-agricultural-pollution-101 https://www.nrdc.org/stories/industrial-agricultural-polluti... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_phosphorus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_phosphorus
- tengbretson 6y ago
  You have almost all of this backwards. The more "industrial" the farm, the more likely they are to employ the precision methods to address the issues you raise. Talk to any major farmer and they will tell you all about how nutrients are managed down to the square foot or smaller to reduce waste application. The tech that makes no-till planting viable, which is one of the most important ways to reduce erosion and increase sequestration is being adopted by the biggest players first. Advances in no-till and pesticide technology are reducing the number of tractor passes per field per year dramatically.
  - latch 6y ago
    Really? Source? One of the most comprehensive study on the topic (1), says: "Our food system has put the focus on short-term production and profit rather than long-term environmental sustainability. The modern agricultural system has resulted in huge increases in productivity, holding off the risk of famine in many parts of the world but, at the same time, is based on monocultures, genetically modified crops, and the intensive use of fertilizers and pesticides that undermine long-term sustainability. Food production accounts for 70 per cent of all freshwater withdrawals and 80 per cent of deforestation, while soil, the basis for global food security, is being contaminated, degraded, and eroded in many areas, resulting in long-term declines in productivity." USCUSA isn't in love with industrial farming either (2): "Monoculture degrades soil structure and leaves it more vulnerable to erosion, resulting in costs for soil replacement, cleanup, and lost farmland value." Maybe major farmers aren't the most objective not most qualified group of people to assess the sustainability and [unpaid-for] externalities of their output? (1) https://www.unccd.int/sites/default/files/documents/2017-09/GLO_Full_Report_low_res.pdf https://www.unccd.int/sites/default/files/documents/2017-09/... (2) https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/hidden-costs-industrial-agriculture https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/hidden-costs-industrial-agr...
walleeee 6y ago
Agriculture must become net carbon neutral if not negative to confront the effects of climate change. As Gates mentions, soils comprise a larger carbon reservoir than the atmosphere. A successful strategy may include the following (likely necessary but not necessarily sufficient) prongs: - halting deforestation as quickly and entirely as possible - transitioning to net-neutral industrial machinery and power supplies - preserving soil health by crop rotation etc - increasing sequestration of atmospheric carbon and improving soil health by breeding/engineering plants for higher CO2 incorporation rates - breeding/engineering plants for other traits like water/abiotic and pest/biotic stress resilience, reduced fertilizer and nutrient requirements, etc - human consumption habits must transition to less energy-intensive and pollution-producing foods (typically fewer animals and more plants, although the issue is complex)
unholythree 6y ago
I found the company helping farmers in Africa collectively build/buy silos the most surprising of these projects. As someone who spent much of my childhood in the Midwest I took for granted that silos and even co-ops would be a resource farmers would have.
alex_young 6y ago
Combatting the impact of soil without doing anything about our impossible to scale diet is bound to fail isn't it? A huge chunk of our net impact on global warming and deforestation is a direct result of our food system, namely animal agriculture. There is disagreement about just how inefficient turning an acre of corn into slabs of cow, but it should be clear that it is some fraction of the efficiency of just eating that corn as food itself.
- PaulHoule 6y ago
  The statement that "animal agriculture = bad" is a half-truth. It's true that if you feed corn to pigs most of the energy gets thermalized. It's also true that animals can eat grass in places where the soil would dry up and blow away if you tried to grow corn.
  - scaredginger 6y ago
    This is true, but a large proportion of the animals we rear are fed on grains since there is not nearly enough grassland to feed enough animals for everyone to eat a typical western diet. Edit: the very first link I found puts the figure at 97% of cattle in the US coming from feedlots. https://www.thoughtco.com/feedlot-organic-and-grass-fed-beef-127669 https://www.thoughtco.com/feedlot-organic-and-grass-fed-beef...
    - cgh 6y ago
      Cattle only enter feedlots during the final weeks of their lives. For nearly the entirety of their lives, cattle are indeed grazed.
      - alex_young 6y ago
        Citation needed
  - jamil7 6y ago
    "Can" is the operative word here. This argument gets brought up time and time again to support animal agriculture and makes a few generalisations. The first is that all pasture land is unfit for growing crops, the second is that all cattle farming is entirely grass fed, finally all this is localized only to cattle yet is presented as a kind of argument for all animal agriculture.
PaulHoule 6y ago
This kind of talk activates my scam detectors. It first got popular when the makers of herbicides like roundup began to advocate "no-till agriculture" which is claimed to build up carbon reserves in the soil. We will always have claims going around that some change in soil management will sequester carbon at widely distributed sites where we can't measure it at much lower costs than not producing it to begin with (nuclear power) or sequestering it in some place where we can actually measure (inject it into a hole and measure the volume the same way you measure fuel coming out.) That idea of spreading olvine sand on the beach is the same thing: it is so spread out you'll never prove that it worked or didn't work, but it is certain that some Enron-style trader makes money several times on it. These sorts of scams are highly dangerous in a world where people will be attracted to "market" solutions: if there was some rule that you had to save 10 tons of carbon by replacing coal with uranium for the right to claim you saved 1 ton some other way it might be helpful.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  Ah, I see. If it involves Roundup, then axiomatically it must be wrong. Glad to see dogma is triumphing once again.
aaron695 6y ago
Article: "I’m done with cow farts" So everyone talks about cows? Anyway, by bringing cows and all animals to lab grown meat and lab grown hard to grow plant based foods, it hopefully brings them to simple base ingredients. Which means it can all be about the soil and we can concentrate way more exactly. If only environmentalists actually wanted to push the future forward rather than destroying current things. Skipping stupid ideas like changing what people will eat through campaigns and trying to stop home food waste or talking about cow farts.
sandebert 6y ago
I know this isn't real science or anything, but this video helped me better understand the issue with the soil. It's from Bon Appétit, where Brad goes to a ranch in Texas. Jump to 9:30 for the soil bit. It goes on for a couple of minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAO1A6EdVVA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAO1A6EdVVA
- blaser-waffle 6y ago
  > Bon Appétit Easy tiger, I believe they've been cancelled, in the pejorative meme sense of the term. Perhaps warranted (or not), but controversial nonetheless.
mehrdadn 6y ago
Related: see GoogleX co-founder Tom Chi's video on climate change, sustainable agriculture, etc.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyQvfaW54NU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyQvfaW54NU
jillesvangurp 6y ago
Regenerative farming deserves a mention here. Soil is indeed important and industrial scale farming has a negative impact on it because a lot of our modern farming practices are sacrificing soil for short term gains. Regenerative farming restores soil as a side effect of farming more efficiently and ultimately can restore vast amounts of land with a relatively low amount of effort. There have been quite a few projects, some of which are quite large scale demonstrating this can be done. There's a bit of controversy around some of the claims but overall, there are some nice green bits of land that used to be basically desert. Whatever was done to make that so, we need more of it.
a9h74j 6y ago
TIL The Land Institute has made progress following its long-standing vision to develop perennial crops. https://landinstitute.org/our-work/perennial-crops/kernza/ https://landinstitute.org/our-work/perennial-crops/kernza/

200 points by hkh 6y ago

I wonder if changing the cow's diet could limit the amount of methane generated? I've noticed that changing my own diet by eliminating animal products has cut down significantly on methane production in my own gut. My farts literally don't smell like anything at all anymore, when a small one used to clear the room with ease.

mc32 6y ago
According to this[1] seaweed helps cut methane emissions by cows. [1] https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-eating-seaweed-can-help-cows-to-belch-less-methane https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-eating-seaweed-can-help-c...
xnx 6y ago
Isn't methane odorless?
- abstractbarista 6y ago
  That is correct. The smells come from hydrogen sulfide and other molecules.
  - projektfu 6y ago
    And the hydrogen sulfide probably comes from the metabolism of cysteine and methionine. A low protein diet will produce less smelly farts.
mattferderer 6y ago
This recent article discusses this topic - https://onezero.medium.com/cow-farts-are-not-the-problem-f5764c1b2a5d https://onezero.medium.com/cow-farts-are-not-the-problem-f57... My takeaway from their argument is that eliminating cows may not be as valuable as changing how they're raised & fed.
- reillyse 6y ago
  This is a good article, I would add to the key takeaway is that methane production from animal husbandry is mostly a closed system, the greenhouse gases being produced by cows are being absorbed from the atmosphere. atmosphere -> photosynthesis in grass -> cows -> atmosphere -> grass etc. So reducing herd sizes doesn't reduce net carbon in the atmosphere.
  - klodolph 6y ago
    A couple problems. Looking at the net carbon paints a very incomplete picture. The effect of methane is very different from CO2, you might describe methane as 30x as powerful a greenhouse gas as CO2 is. The other factor here is that agriculture drives deforestation, which releases sequestered carbon.
- fnovd 6y ago
  This article misses the point entirely. It's true that most cattle farms are on the small-end, and have plenty of land for their cattle. It's also true that the vast majority of cows slaughtered for meat come from just a few industrial feedlots. Changing the way that "most" farms work might change how much methane truth A cows produce, but the vast majority of cows are truth B cows that aren't impacted by the decisions of small-time farmers. There is not enough land on this earth to allow for free-range cattle at the rate humans consume them. The solution isn't to do it more efficiently, but to stop and do something else. Ford said people would ask for faster horses, and 100 years later we have people wanting cows that fart differently. It's the cheeseburger you want, not another magic chemical added to the lovecraftian nightmare that is factory farming. The way to reduce the impact cows have on the environment is to reduce the number of cows bred for food.
  - mc32 6y ago
    One could also say people are asking for non-meat as a solution when maybe the answer is to make cow farts different.
EGreg 6y ago
Um yes New Zealand researchers gave cows seweed and cut emissions 80% by adding just 2% of it https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/01/from-red-seaweed-to-climate-smart-cows-new-zealand-leads-the-fight-against-methane https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/01/from-red-seawe...
Scoundreller 6y ago
Did you eliminate all animal products or just some? I have some rooms I’d like to clear out.
vikramkr 6y ago
Methane is odorless, so you might still be producing methane - the decrease in odor has more to do with sulfur compounds

belorn 6y ago

People claim that burning biomass is a net-zero effect on the climate because whatever get burned had once collected the carbon from the air. Then we have people arguing that cows are one of the main contributor to global warming because we feed them grass. In cases with produce that get rejected for once reason or an other, it may either go into animal feed or biomass depending on who is paying the more, and thus the greenness of it changes drastically. So why are counting the methane from cows in isolation, while biomass is the sum of carbon released minus carbon extracted?

idoh 6y ago
Methane is a lot more powerful of a greenhouse gas than CO2. Turning CO2 from the atmosphere back into CO2 is net even. Turning CO2 into methane is net-bad.
- jniedrauer 6y ago
  Since methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas and has a much shorter half-life in the atmosphere compared to CO2, I wonder if it might actually save us. We could render the planet inhospitable early enough to be forced to address the problem without shackling future generations with the fallout like we are doing with CO2.
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    That's ... not great ... but only viable if methane itself doesn't move the climate past a tipping point to runaway greenhouse effects. See "clathrate gun hypothesis", for example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis
  - neckardt 6y ago
    Do you know what the half life of methane in the atmosphere is? I did a search for it but couldn't find it.
    - 6y ago

kickout 6y ago

Bill is correct on a lot fronts here. Soil is the big elephant in the room. But the problem remains an economic problem as much as a technical one. We need solutions that are market driven (in addition to the cool innovations he talks about). https://thinkingagriculture.io/carbon-sequestering-incentives-who-wins/ https://thinkingagriculture.io/carbon-sequestering-incentive...

Cthulhu_ 6y ago
"Market driven"? The market has had its chance; "it" is focusing on short-term, optimized profits, on cutting down the rainforests to make way for shitty farms to grow cheap shit to feed to cattle, etc. Some consumers have the funds and the will to buy food from more reputable sources, but I'm confident there's a lot of scummy stuff happening there too. The market won't solve this; it's time for legislation to control the market before it wrings out everything. We live in an age now where even politicians are wringing out everything they can from a country, funneling billions to themselves and their friends, leaving the country in shambles while they retire to their private islands because hey, not their problem anymore.
- sputr 6y ago
  I think your unecesserally criticising the person your commenting on. They never said free/unregulated market. They just said market driven. Markets and market forces are tools. If left unregulated they, as you pointed out, devolve into optimising for the short term and the narrow bad of monetisable effects (ie the problem of externalities). But a regulated market is a force to be recond with, and if properly regulated, a force for a lot of good. So you are both right. We need market solutions (as those are most effective) but within a regulated market that makes sure that market forces are pushing everyone in the direction that is good for society.
- wow_no 6y ago
  You seem extremely mad

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

LatteLazy 6y ago

We're not making any progress on co2e because we've choosen not to. Even if we were, net zero by 2070 (the optimistic outcome here!?) would be pointless, civilisation would be over long before then anyway. I find all this really frustrating. It's like someone moaning they're fat and telling me about their new diet, the 1000th one this week, where they eat 20 cheese burgers a day and hope for the best. Let's get real and either do something or enjoy the ride to hell.

cagenut 6y ago
> Let's get real and either do something or enjoy the ride to hell. Easy for anyone not on the Indian sub-continent to say: https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/chapter-3/3-4/3-4-11/figure_3-18-2/ https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/chapter-3/3-4/3-4-11/figure...
hutzlibu 6y ago
"Even if we were, net zero by 2070 (the optimistic outcome here!?) would be pointless, civilisation would be over long before then anyway." Why? Even with every worst case szenario of continous droughts and floods and loss of some islands and coastal land etc. We could grow everything we need in (automated) greenhouses. Only if the transistion chaos leads to all out nuclear war, but that is not really a fixed thing.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  Civlisation will survive, in one shape or the other, but some countries could be totally screwed, others badly damaged. Its possible to imagine that political system crumbles, liberal democracy is gone, and the label is somewhat justified. We are talking about most of bangladesh underwater and about 1 billion refugees globally in a poor scenario. Todays migration problems will pale in comparison. Many if them will die violently. Nothing we've done so far indicates to me that we can quickly organise global rollout of hundred million automated greenhouses to people that cannot posssibly pay for them. Or to build largest damns in human history. Even when we can afford to pay for infrastructure, in UK its taking us 40 years to build 1 line of rail, connecting two biggest cities, and its going to cost roughly as mich as the moon programm did.

ChuckMcM 6y ago

Adding food storage to countries where that capability doesn't exist is a huge multiplier in their agronomic efficiency. There is some excellent discussion of this in the book "Guns, Germs, and Steel" which discusses how these forces shaped the changes in human civilizations.

29athrowaway 6y ago
Some things that do not show up in Guns, germs and steel: - Syphilis may have a new world origin. - The most productive crop is the potato, a crop of new world origin. - The Inca farmed guinea pigs. These are a very viable farm animal. - The Mapuche did not have guns, germs or steel yet, they defeated the Spanish. - The Inca could have defeated the Spanish. They were encountered after a civil war where the nobility was purged. The Inca nobility knew how to run the empire.
- HugeAcumen 6y ago
  ... Those seem like pretty tiny nitpicks in the context of the wider argument to me. The central point of his book - that there was far more geographic luck involved in European dominance than is popularly understood - holds just fine with all those points you made. Good points though.
- ChuckMcM 6y ago
  Okay. But I'm having a hard time connecting the dots between the way in which crop storage amplifies the agronomic output of a group, and the points you raise. If you're just trying to point out that "Guns, Germs, and Steel" isn't an all inclusive guide to the rise of civilization, or that different people may have made different choices in their analysis, okay I get that too. Every book is just a single voice in the choir of a genre. Is that what you're trying to say? That you didn't like the book?
  - 29athrowaway 6y ago
    I like the book as well as the 3 part documentary with the same name. I think it presents a fair perspective of world history. I agree with the author, 99%.

grawprog 6y ago

Industrial agriculture has plenty more problems than just cow farts and carbon dioxide released from disturbed soil. Still on the vein of CO₂ emissions there's the large amounts of industrial machinery, vehicles and other such things that are powered by fossil fuels and release large amounts of CO₂. Then on the vein of soils, we're actually running out of arable soil. Soil erosion is a huge problem around the world and industrial farming is a large part of the problem. Farm plots are never left to fallow and replenish, all nutrients and organic matter are stripped out and replaced with liquid chemical fertilizers, that run off the fields and pollute waterways. Not to mention, fertilizers, globally, phosphate reserves are beginning to deplete. At some point in the next 50-100 years, we'll have come close to completely running out. Industrial agriculture is heavily dependent on phosphorous. https://foodprint.org/issues/how-industrial-agriculture-affects-our-soil/ https://foodprint.org/issues/how-industrial-agriculture-affe... https://www.nrdc.org/stories/industrial-agricultural-pollution-101 https://www.nrdc.org/stories/industrial-agricultural-polluti... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_phosphorus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_phosphorus

tengbretson 6y ago
You have almost all of this backwards. The more "industrial" the farm, the more likely they are to employ the precision methods to address the issues you raise. Talk to any major farmer and they will tell you all about how nutrients are managed down to the square foot or smaller to reduce waste application. The tech that makes no-till planting viable, which is one of the most important ways to reduce erosion and increase sequestration is being adopted by the biggest players first. Advances in no-till and pesticide technology are reducing the number of tractor passes per field per year dramatically.
- latch 6y ago
  Really? Source? One of the most comprehensive study on the topic (1), says: "Our food system has put the focus on short-term production and profit rather than long-term environmental sustainability. The modern agricultural system has resulted in huge increases in productivity, holding off the risk of famine in many parts of the world but, at the same time, is based on monocultures, genetically modified crops, and the intensive use of fertilizers and pesticides that undermine long-term sustainability. Food production accounts for 70 per cent of all freshwater withdrawals and 80 per cent of deforestation, while soil, the basis for global food security, is being contaminated, degraded, and eroded in many areas, resulting in long-term declines in productivity." USCUSA isn't in love with industrial farming either (2): "Monoculture degrades soil structure and leaves it more vulnerable to erosion, resulting in costs for soil replacement, cleanup, and lost farmland value." Maybe major farmers aren't the most objective not most qualified group of people to assess the sustainability and [unpaid-for] externalities of their output? (1) https://www.unccd.int/sites/default/files/documents/2017-09/GLO_Full_Report_low_res.pdf https://www.unccd.int/sites/default/files/documents/2017-09/... (2) https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/hidden-costs-industrial-agriculture https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/hidden-costs-industrial-agr...

walleeee 6y ago

Agriculture must become net carbon neutral if not negative to confront the effects of climate change. As Gates mentions, soils comprise a larger carbon reservoir than the atmosphere. A successful strategy may include the following (likely necessary but not necessarily sufficient) prongs: - halting deforestation as quickly and entirely as possible - transitioning to net-neutral industrial machinery and power supplies - preserving soil health by crop rotation etc - increasing sequestration of atmospheric carbon and improving soil health by breeding/engineering plants for higher CO2 incorporation rates - breeding/engineering plants for other traits like water/abiotic and pest/biotic stress resilience, reduced fertilizer and nutrient requirements, etc - human consumption habits must transition to less energy-intensive and pollution-producing foods (typically fewer animals and more plants, although the issue is complex)

unholythree 6y ago

I found the company helping farmers in Africa collectively build/buy silos the most surprising of these projects. As someone who spent much of my childhood in the Midwest I took for granted that silos and even co-ops would be a resource farmers would have.

alex_young 6y ago

Combatting the impact of soil without doing anything about our impossible to scale diet is bound to fail isn't it? A huge chunk of our net impact on global warming and deforestation is a direct result of our food system, namely animal agriculture. There is disagreement about just how inefficient turning an acre of corn into slabs of cow, but it should be clear that it is some fraction of the efficiency of just eating that corn as food itself.

PaulHoule 6y ago
The statement that "animal agriculture = bad" is a half-truth. It's true that if you feed corn to pigs most of the energy gets thermalized. It's also true that animals can eat grass in places where the soil would dry up and blow away if you tried to grow corn.
- scaredginger 6y ago
  This is true, but a large proportion of the animals we rear are fed on grains since there is not nearly enough grassland to feed enough animals for everyone to eat a typical western diet. Edit: the very first link I found puts the figure at 97% of cattle in the US coming from feedlots. https://www.thoughtco.com/feedlot-organic-and-grass-fed-beef-127669 https://www.thoughtco.com/feedlot-organic-and-grass-fed-beef...
  - cgh 6y ago
    Cattle only enter feedlots during the final weeks of their lives. For nearly the entirety of their lives, cattle are indeed grazed.
    - alex_young 6y ago
      Citation needed
- jamil7 6y ago
  "Can" is the operative word here. This argument gets brought up time and time again to support animal agriculture and makes a few generalisations. The first is that all pasture land is unfit for growing crops, the second is that all cattle farming is entirely grass fed, finally all this is localized only to cattle yet is presented as a kind of argument for all animal agriculture.

PaulHoule 6y ago

This kind of talk activates my scam detectors. It first got popular when the makers of herbicides like roundup began to advocate "no-till agriculture" which is claimed to build up carbon reserves in the soil. We will always have claims going around that some change in soil management will sequester carbon at widely distributed sites where we can't measure it at much lower costs than not producing it to begin with (nuclear power) or sequestering it in some place where we can actually measure (inject it into a hole and measure the volume the same way you measure fuel coming out.) That idea of spreading olvine sand on the beach is the same thing: it is so spread out you'll never prove that it worked or didn't work, but it is certain that some Enron-style trader makes money several times on it. These sorts of scams are highly dangerous in a world where people will be attracted to "market" solutions: if there was some rule that you had to save 10 tons of carbon by replacing coal with uranium for the right to claim you saved 1 ton some other way it might be helpful.

pfdietz 6y ago
Ah, I see. If it involves Roundup, then axiomatically it must be wrong. Glad to see dogma is triumphing once again.

aaron695 6y ago

Article: "I’m done with cow farts" So everyone talks about cows? Anyway, by bringing cows and all animals to lab grown meat and lab grown hard to grow plant based foods, it hopefully brings them to simple base ingredients. Which means it can all be about the soil and we can concentrate way more exactly. If only environmentalists actually wanted to push the future forward rather than destroying current things. Skipping stupid ideas like changing what people will eat through campaigns and trying to stop home food waste or talking about cow farts.

sandebert 6y ago

I know this isn't real science or anything, but this video helped me better understand the issue with the soil. It's from Bon Appétit, where Brad goes to a ranch in Texas. Jump to 9:30 for the soil bit. It goes on for a couple of minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAO1A6EdVVA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAO1A6EdVVA

blaser-waffle 6y ago
> Bon Appétit Easy tiger, I believe they've been cancelled, in the pejorative meme sense of the term. Perhaps warranted (or not), but controversial nonetheless.

mehrdadn 6y ago

Related: see GoogleX co-founder Tom Chi's video on climate change, sustainable agriculture, etc.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyQvfaW54NU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyQvfaW54NU

jillesvangurp 6y ago

Regenerative farming deserves a mention here. Soil is indeed important and industrial scale farming has a negative impact on it because a lot of our modern farming practices are sacrificing soil for short term gains. Regenerative farming restores soil as a side effect of farming more efficiently and ultimately can restore vast amounts of land with a relatively low amount of effort. There have been quite a few projects, some of which are quite large scale demonstrating this can be done. There's a bit of controversy around some of the claims but overall, there are some nice green bits of land that used to be basically desert. Whatever was done to make that so, we need more of it.

a9h74j 6y ago

TIL The Land Institute has made progress following its long-standing vision to develop perennial crops. https://landinstitute.org/our-work/perennial-crops/kernza/ https://landinstitute.org/our-work/perennial-crops/kernza/