8 ms·

Pastures are the future. There's a reason the US Midwest had such great soil — it's not simply a confluence of rivers & luck. The buffalo did their thing, and t

Pastures are the future. There's a reason the US Midwest had such great soil — it's not simply a confluence of rivers & luck. The buffalo did their thing, and the grasses they fed on were fed in turn by them. Replacing corn and soy with ruminants will replenish the soil, provide excellent protein for people, and get rid of the cheap, food-like things made from corn, soy, and their chemically-coaxed out byproducts. It's not too late. (A nice effect of this would be the likely (it'll take a while) replenishment of the Ogallala Aquifer.)

aeternum 5y ago
Before artificial fertilizer, world famines were commonplace and the base rate of starvation was very high compared to today. I hope that anyone truly advocating for a return to that world has studied history and understands the consequences.
smallerfish 5y ago
"Livestock takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land, yet produces less than 20% of the world’s supply of calories." https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets "So if this system is so ideal, why is it that my cow hasn’t tasted a blade of grass since October? Speed, in a word. Cows raised on grass simply take longer to reach slaughter weight than cows raised on a richer diet, and the modern meat industry has devoted itself to shortening a beef calf’s allotted time on earth." https://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/power-steer/ https://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/power-steer/
- cf141q5325 5y ago
  Thats a simplification for a feel good narrative. Your source lists all land that grows anything but forest as agriculture land. Yet on large parts of those areas you cant do anything but pastures. Also, much of the cow feed isnt calories humans can process. Think byproducts of soy production. The youtube channel "What I've Learned" has a great video on it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGG-A80Tl5g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGG-A80Tl5g What they dont mention is the large part livestock (especially cows an chicken) will have to play in producing soil from the dirt left behind after industrial agriculture. Regenerative agriculture is the term here, with rotating cows and chickens on degraded dirt patches to build top soil. All of this of course doesnt take away from the madness that is industrial meat production. But nothing has ever been solved by oversimplified narratives and action-ism.
  - pas 5y ago
    Is regenerative agriculture the new name for holistic planned grazing? (Pushed by Alan Savory) Or it's different and actually works?
    - cf141q5325 5y ago
      Never heard of holistic planned grazing. Regenerative agriculture encompasses (among increased biodiversity) everything that combats and reverses soil erosion and the effects on ground water. So also stuff like creating silvopasture. Not sure what you mean with actually works. There is soil erosion (it determines the value of any farmland you buy) and methods to create new topsoil. Same with different levels at which you deplete ground water. Which part do you think to be quackery? Searching a bit it seems Alan Savory made some outlandish claims about carbon dioxide?
- baxtr 5y ago
  So in summary, there is no way around higher food prices. Either through higher fertilizer prizes or a more sustainable, albeit slower, food production.
- flenserboy 5y ago
  And this speed is making both them and the land sick — cows are meant to eat grass, not the grains used to fatten them quickly. Do also keep in mind that there are wide swaths of land which can usefully be occupied by ruminants that cannot be farmed without piping in almost all the water and dumping fertilizer on it. Such marginal land is counted as arable so as to further attack animal husbandry.
  - smallerfish 5y ago
    > And this speed is making both them and the land sick — cows are meant to eat grass, not the grains used to fatten them quickly. I don't disagree with this part. My point is just that a) livestock are an enormously inefficient way of raising calories and b) that's taking into consideration the horrendous industrial meat system. The US raised 33 million cows to slaughter in 2019 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/194357/total-cattle-slaughter-in-the-us-since-2000/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/194357/total-cattle-slau...). Converting those to be pasture raised would use a vast amount of land (1), a huge reduction of calories already being produced (unsustainably) from corn and soy, and require a lot of additional labor. (1) https://www.omnicalculator.com/biology/cattle-per-acre https://www.omnicalculator.com/biology/cattle-per-acre -- I don't know if the defaults are generally applicable for the US, but let's say 0.33 cows per acre (which may be optimistic - see e.g. https://www.outdoorhappens.com/how-many-cows-per-acre-in-your-state/ https://www.outdoorhappens.com/how-many-cows-per-acre-in-you...). A cow raised fully on grass requires around 24 months. So, if the US wants to keep slaughtering 33 million cows per year, 66 million cows need to be alive at any one time. (https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/08/13/746576239/is-grass-fed-beef-really-better-for-the-planet-heres-the-science https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/08/13/746576239/is...) So, minimum land use would be 3 x 66 million = 198,000,000. That's equivalent to the total land used right now for soy, corn AND cotton combined (https://www.nass.usda.gov/Newsroom/2021/06-30-2021.php https://www.nass.usda.gov/Newsroom/2021/06-30-2021.php).
    - dilap 5y ago
      Funnily enough, there used to be about 60 million wild buffalo roaming north america. We killed them off & have devoted vast tracts of land to monocrop agriculture fueled by petrochemical fertilizers.
- rowanajmarshall 5y ago
  > So if this system is so ideal, why is it that my cow hasn’t tasted a blade of grass since October? Keep in mind this is absolutely not true in even the rest of the Western world. American-style cattle factory farms are almost unheard of in the UK, and practically all beef here would count as grass-fed, because that's just how we raise cattle. There is some supplementation over winter when grass doesn't grow (and even that depends on location), but otherwise pasture is the standard.
  - nemo44x 5y ago
    I can’t remember the last time I’ve had a great steak in the UK. The beef is just very low quality compared to what is sourced in the USA. Far too lean in the UK. I and I generally find them a bit tougher too possibly due to more roaming by the cattle. Now, UK pork on the other hand is tremendous.
    - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
      For whatever reason, unless you go super high end, beef in the UK tends not to be great. Given that it's much better in Ireland, which has the same climate, I don't really understand it.
    - OJFord 5y ago
      Are you comparing at similar price points? I wonder if there's just more (too much) interest at the cheap (plumped up with water, for one thing) end here.
    - rowanajmarshall 5y ago
      Likely due to the conditions I described, I think meat here tends to be more "gamey", a bit leaner and all that. Like, steak is popular here but we don't have steak culture like I've seen described in the Midwest, or Texas. A lot of our beef ends up in pies, or sauces, or stuff like that.
- cjbgkagh 5y ago
  There is more to food than calories. I would love to replace livestock with bioreactors but I don’t think people understand the interaction with food and health well enough yet for me to ‘trust the science’. Plus costs have to come way way down. I eat a decent amount of yeast derivatives so it’s getting part of the way there. I also eat free range meat whenever possible because I hope that it is healthier for me; the fact that it is less cruel is definitely a bonus. I get that not everyone can afford it. So instead of pushing everyone into eating cheap to grow grains I would rather have the science improve so even the poor can eat healthier bioreactor food. Edit: the poor and I. I also want healthier bioreactor food. Food fraud is a problem that’s getting worse with inflation and avoiding it is getting expensive.
  - dqv 5y ago
    >pushing everyone into eating cheap to grow grains There is more to plant-based food than grains. Seeds and legumes are full of nutrients. People can and do survive on way less meat.
    - cjbgkagh 5y ago
      Like there is more to food than calories, there is more to life than survival.
      - dqv 5y ago
        I can only guess what you mean by this. If it's that people can't get enjoyment out of eating plant-based food, you're wrong. And if it's that people will have less enjoyable lives because they can't eat meat every day, you're also wrong.
        cjbgkagh 5y ago
        No, and clearly that doesn’t mesh with bioreactor food which typically isn’t enjoyable to eat. I’m saying the science on the health relationship with food isn’t great and I don’t trust it. Especially in the ‘healthy at any size’ era we now live in. I eat meat to help cover gaps in understanding, and by careful measurement I can tell that I’m healthier when I eat it, or specifically less healthy when I don’t. If the science can be improved then maybe we could then shift away from meat.
- makomk 5y ago
  Humans cannot survive on calories alone, though, and certainly aren't going to be healthy living on them. Protein has always been one of the most expensive parts of a healthy diet.
  - dqv 5y ago
    That's a great point. I can get a can of black beans for $0.50 (and dried black beans for even cheaper). I can get a chicken breast for ~$2. The black beans still net 98g of protein. But I also get an additional 500 calories more than the chicken beast. And that's with the subsidies for poultry. I'm also going to pre-empt the "not a complete protein source" argument with the fact that we're talking about a healthy diet and no one is eating only beans or only chicken in their diet. Plant proteins are always going to win in terms of cost efficiency over meat. There is always going to be a cost for the increased protein density of meat.
    - flenserboy 5y ago
      Check the DIAAS numbers and you might change your mind.
      - dqv 5y ago
        I think it would have to be a lot more drastic to change my mind.
  - 2ndorder 5y ago
    'Humans cannot survive on calories alone' - that made me smile... To add diseases, Ustilago maydis [1]: likes warm, moderatly dry, seeds spore-forming from and over wind transport, ya'll know fast driving cars on motorhighways or even the mechanic tail-spinning of modern 200m wind turbines, now i am not someone who may collect (realy) every physical fact (or the political ones) in a modell (hobbyist), but it sounds -financially-rewarding-(crossed out) -interesting-looking- interesting for me... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ustilago_maydis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ustilago_maydis
- nemo44x 5y ago
  Flavor too. Corn fed beef is preferred in many applications. You’d never smoke a grass fed brisket for example. Even cattle raised on grass do best for steaks if they’ve been fed grain the last few months before slaughter.
vegetablepotpie 5y ago
Only about ~10% of corn is used to make food consumed by people. Of the remainder, roughly ~30% is used for animal feed, ~30% for export, and ~30% for fuel ethanol. Replacing the cheap processed food production with grazing land will not do much to increase the amount of animal protein available to the population. If our goal is to have more pasture, it would make more sense to eliminate ethanol production, reduce the amount of corn we feed to animals, and reduce the amount of corn we send to the world.
- flenserboy 5y ago
  Yes. Replace the corn with cows.
- delecti 5y ago
  What is the export percent used for? I don't think it's true, but if that export 30% were all used for food for people then it'd be disingenuous to say only 10% is used for human food.
  - wintermutestwin 5y ago
    I don't know, but maybe it is being exported for use as cattle feed like the alfalfa in California: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26124989 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26124989
- politician 5y ago
  I’d add “fuel ethanol” to the list of things worse than Bitcoin.
  - mlyle 5y ago
    A little bit of it is good for various reasons. Trying to solve a substantive part of our liquid fuel problem with it is madness.
Desertfoxatx 5y ago
The midwest has great soil because billions of organisms died millions of years ago in a shallow sea that covered most of the central united states today.
- dv_dt 5y ago
  I’m not sure that’s correct, or at least is not complete. There were many cycles of grasses and wildlife involved in building up the soil.
  - eatmyshorts 5y ago
    No, it's correct. The plains states are so fertile because of hundreds of millions of years of shallow ocean water led to huge amounts of plankton to die and settle. That's also why there's oil in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas.
- AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  I thought the soil was great because of the Yellowstone Caldera Supervolcano dropping huge amounts of volcanic ash every 650,000 years. How long has it been? Oh, right around 650,000 years..........
  - Desertfoxatx 5y ago
    You aren't wrong. All the life sustaining minerals/elements we have in the earths lithosphere are being renewed by volcanism. It is why the plant life was able to exist in the first place.
- Forge36 5y ago
  Similar to "The Black Belt"? https://vigorousnorth.blogspot.com/2008/11/black-belt-how-soil-types-determined.html?m=1 https://vigorousnorth.blogspot.com/2008/11/black-belt-how-so... https://web.archive.org/web/20100526092708/http://www.southernspaces.org:80/contents/2004/tullos/4a.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20100526092708/http://www.southe...
- cjbgkagh 5y ago
99_00 5y ago
What % of global population will have to expire for a fertilizer free future possible? Population of US in 1780 was 3 million. Today it’s 300 million.

aeternum 5y ago

Before artificial fertilizer, world famines were commonplace and the base rate of starvation was very high compared to today. I hope that anyone truly advocating for a return to that world has studied history and understands the consequences.

smallerfish 5y ago

"Livestock takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land, yet produces less than 20% of the world’s supply of calories." https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets "So if this system is so ideal, why is it that my cow hasn’t tasted a blade of grass since October? Speed, in a word. Cows raised on grass simply take longer to reach slaughter weight than cows raised on a richer diet, and the modern meat industry has devoted itself to shortening a beef calf’s allotted time on earth." https://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/power-steer/ https://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/power-steer/

cf141q5325 5y ago
Thats a simplification for a feel good narrative. Your source lists all land that grows anything but forest as agriculture land. Yet on large parts of those areas you cant do anything but pastures. Also, much of the cow feed isnt calories humans can process. Think byproducts of soy production. The youtube channel "What I've Learned" has a great video on it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGG-A80Tl5g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGG-A80Tl5g What they dont mention is the large part livestock (especially cows an chicken) will have to play in producing soil from the dirt left behind after industrial agriculture. Regenerative agriculture is the term here, with rotating cows and chickens on degraded dirt patches to build top soil. All of this of course doesnt take away from the madness that is industrial meat production. But nothing has ever been solved by oversimplified narratives and action-ism.
- pas 5y ago
  Is regenerative agriculture the new name for holistic planned grazing? (Pushed by Alan Savory) Or it's different and actually works?
  - cf141q5325 5y ago
    Never heard of holistic planned grazing. Regenerative agriculture encompasses (among increased biodiversity) everything that combats and reverses soil erosion and the effects on ground water. So also stuff like creating silvopasture. Not sure what you mean with actually works. There is soil erosion (it determines the value of any farmland you buy) and methods to create new topsoil. Same with different levels at which you deplete ground water. Which part do you think to be quackery? Searching a bit it seems Alan Savory made some outlandish claims about carbon dioxide?
baxtr 5y ago
So in summary, there is no way around higher food prices. Either through higher fertilizer prizes or a more sustainable, albeit slower, food production.
flenserboy 5y ago
And this speed is making both them and the land sick — cows are meant to eat grass, not the grains used to fatten them quickly. Do also keep in mind that there are wide swaths of land which can usefully be occupied by ruminants that cannot be farmed without piping in almost all the water and dumping fertilizer on it. Such marginal land is counted as arable so as to further attack animal husbandry.
- smallerfish 5y ago
  > And this speed is making both them and the land sick — cows are meant to eat grass, not the grains used to fatten them quickly. I don't disagree with this part. My point is just that a) livestock are an enormously inefficient way of raising calories and b) that's taking into consideration the horrendous industrial meat system. The US raised 33 million cows to slaughter in 2019 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/194357/total-cattle-slaughter-in-the-us-since-2000/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/194357/total-cattle-slau...). Converting those to be pasture raised would use a vast amount of land (1), a huge reduction of calories already being produced (unsustainably) from corn and soy, and require a lot of additional labor. (1) https://www.omnicalculator.com/biology/cattle-per-acre https://www.omnicalculator.com/biology/cattle-per-acre -- I don't know if the defaults are generally applicable for the US, but let's say 0.33 cows per acre (which may be optimistic - see e.g. https://www.outdoorhappens.com/how-many-cows-per-acre-in-your-state/ https://www.outdoorhappens.com/how-many-cows-per-acre-in-you...). A cow raised fully on grass requires around 24 months. So, if the US wants to keep slaughtering 33 million cows per year, 66 million cows need to be alive at any one time. (https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/08/13/746576239/is-grass-fed-beef-really-better-for-the-planet-heres-the-science https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/08/13/746576239/is...) So, minimum land use would be 3 x 66 million = 198,000,000. That's equivalent to the total land used right now for soy, corn AND cotton combined (https://www.nass.usda.gov/Newsroom/2021/06-30-2021.php https://www.nass.usda.gov/Newsroom/2021/06-30-2021.php).
  - dilap 5y ago
    Funnily enough, there used to be about 60 million wild buffalo roaming north america. We killed them off & have devoted vast tracts of land to monocrop agriculture fueled by petrochemical fertilizers.
rowanajmarshall 5y ago
> So if this system is so ideal, why is it that my cow hasn’t tasted a blade of grass since October? Keep in mind this is absolutely not true in even the rest of the Western world. American-style cattle factory farms are almost unheard of in the UK, and practically all beef here would count as grass-fed, because that's just how we raise cattle. There is some supplementation over winter when grass doesn't grow (and even that depends on location), but otherwise pasture is the standard.
- nemo44x 5y ago
  I can’t remember the last time I’ve had a great steak in the UK. The beef is just very low quality compared to what is sourced in the USA. Far too lean in the UK. I and I generally find them a bit tougher too possibly due to more roaming by the cattle. Now, UK pork on the other hand is tremendous.
  - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
    For whatever reason, unless you go super high end, beef in the UK tends not to be great. Given that it's much better in Ireland, which has the same climate, I don't really understand it.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    Are you comparing at similar price points? I wonder if there's just more (too much) interest at the cheap (plumped up with water, for one thing) end here.
  - rowanajmarshall 5y ago
    Likely due to the conditions I described, I think meat here tends to be more "gamey", a bit leaner and all that. Like, steak is popular here but we don't have steak culture like I've seen described in the Midwest, or Texas. A lot of our beef ends up in pies, or sauces, or stuff like that.
cjbgkagh 5y ago
There is more to food than calories. I would love to replace livestock with bioreactors but I don’t think people understand the interaction with food and health well enough yet for me to ‘trust the science’. Plus costs have to come way way down. I eat a decent amount of yeast derivatives so it’s getting part of the way there. I also eat free range meat whenever possible because I hope that it is healthier for me; the fact that it is less cruel is definitely a bonus. I get that not everyone can afford it. So instead of pushing everyone into eating cheap to grow grains I would rather have the science improve so even the poor can eat healthier bioreactor food. Edit: the poor and I. I also want healthier bioreactor food. Food fraud is a problem that’s getting worse with inflation and avoiding it is getting expensive.
- dqv 5y ago
  >pushing everyone into eating cheap to grow grains There is more to plant-based food than grains. Seeds and legumes are full of nutrients. People can and do survive on way less meat.
  - cjbgkagh 5y ago
    Like there is more to food than calories, there is more to life than survival.
    - dqv 5y ago
      I can only guess what you mean by this. If it's that people can't get enjoyment out of eating plant-based food, you're wrong. And if it's that people will have less enjoyable lives because they can't eat meat every day, you're also wrong.
      - cjbgkagh 5y ago
        No, and clearly that doesn’t mesh with bioreactor food which typically isn’t enjoyable to eat. I’m saying the science on the health relationship with food isn’t great and I don’t trust it. Especially in the ‘healthy at any size’ era we now live in. I eat meat to help cover gaps in understanding, and by careful measurement I can tell that I’m healthier when I eat it, or specifically less healthy when I don’t. If the science can be improved then maybe we could then shift away from meat.
makomk 5y ago
Humans cannot survive on calories alone, though, and certainly aren't going to be healthy living on them. Protein has always been one of the most expensive parts of a healthy diet.
- dqv 5y ago
  That's a great point. I can get a can of black beans for $0.50 (and dried black beans for even cheaper). I can get a chicken breast for ~$2. The black beans still net 98g of protein. But I also get an additional 500 calories more than the chicken beast. And that's with the subsidies for poultry. I'm also going to pre-empt the "not a complete protein source" argument with the fact that we're talking about a healthy diet and no one is eating only beans or only chicken in their diet. Plant proteins are always going to win in terms of cost efficiency over meat. There is always going to be a cost for the increased protein density of meat.
  - flenserboy 5y ago
    Check the DIAAS numbers and you might change your mind.
    - dqv 5y ago
      I think it would have to be a lot more drastic to change my mind.
- 2ndorder 5y ago
  'Humans cannot survive on calories alone' - that made me smile... To add diseases, Ustilago maydis [1]: likes warm, moderatly dry, seeds spore-forming from and over wind transport, ya'll know fast driving cars on motorhighways or even the mechanic tail-spinning of modern 200m wind turbines, now i am not someone who may collect (realy) every physical fact (or the political ones) in a modell (hobbyist), but it sounds -financially-rewarding-(crossed out) -interesting-looking- interesting for me... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ustilago_maydis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ustilago_maydis
nemo44x 5y ago
Flavor too. Corn fed beef is preferred in many applications. You’d never smoke a grass fed brisket for example. Even cattle raised on grass do best for steaks if they’ve been fed grain the last few months before slaughter.

vegetablepotpie 5y ago

Only about ~10% of corn is used to make food consumed by people. Of the remainder, roughly ~30% is used for animal feed, ~30% for export, and ~30% for fuel ethanol. Replacing the cheap processed food production with grazing land will not do much to increase the amount of animal protein available to the population. If our goal is to have more pasture, it would make more sense to eliminate ethanol production, reduce the amount of corn we feed to animals, and reduce the amount of corn we send to the world.

flenserboy 5y ago
Yes. Replace the corn with cows.
delecti 5y ago
What is the export percent used for? I don't think it's true, but if that export 30% were all used for food for people then it'd be disingenuous to say only 10% is used for human food.
- wintermutestwin 5y ago
  I don't know, but maybe it is being exported for use as cattle feed like the alfalfa in California: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26124989 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26124989
politician 5y ago
I’d add “fuel ethanol” to the list of things worse than Bitcoin.
- mlyle 5y ago
  A little bit of it is good for various reasons. Trying to solve a substantive part of our liquid fuel problem with it is madness.

Desertfoxatx 5y ago

The midwest has great soil because billions of organisms died millions of years ago in a shallow sea that covered most of the central united states today.

dv_dt 5y ago
I’m not sure that’s correct, or at least is not complete. There were many cycles of grasses and wildlife involved in building up the soil.
- eatmyshorts 5y ago
  No, it's correct. The plains states are so fertile because of hundreds of millions of years of shallow ocean water led to huge amounts of plankton to die and settle. That's also why there's oil in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas.
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
I thought the soil was great because of the Yellowstone Caldera Supervolcano dropping huge amounts of volcanic ash every 650,000 years. How long has it been? Oh, right around 650,000 years..........
- Desertfoxatx 5y ago
  You aren't wrong. All the life sustaining minerals/elements we have in the earths lithosphere are being renewed by volcanism. It is why the plant life was able to exist in the first place.
Forge36 5y ago
Similar to "The Black Belt"? https://vigorousnorth.blogspot.com/2008/11/black-belt-how-soil-types-determined.html?m=1 https://vigorousnorth.blogspot.com/2008/11/black-belt-how-so... https://web.archive.org/web/20100526092708/http://www.southernspaces.org:80/contents/2004/tullos/4a.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20100526092708/http://www.southe...
cjbgkagh 5y ago

99_00 5y ago

What % of global population will have to expire for a fertilizer free future possible? Population of US in 1780 was 3 million. Today it’s 300 million.