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You should see the cartel Monsanto has on agriculture This is just one more reason we should push for sustainable farming, including meat products. livestock

You should see the cartel Monsanto has on agriculture This is just one more reason we should push for sustainable farming, including meat products. livestock naturally bring nitrogen and other nutrients back into the soil when grazing. Then use that land to grow plants, move the animals where plants pulled the nutrients from the soil, rinse and repeat. Also reduces the need for harmful fertilizers that impact the ecosystem

gen220 3y ago
("We" below refers to the US, and an increasing proportion of the world that is adopting US farming practices). There's a good-natured argument to be made that plant-based diets are more sustainable, because we don't generally farm meat sustainably and ensuring that your meat was farmed sustainably is difficult and expensive. But it's important to underline that sustainable is an insufficient target in the U.S. in 2023. The motion we need is regenerative. I don't think regenerative farming can be done efficiently without ethical use of livestock. This is all to say: if you view the health and quality of our food chain as a higher priority than the ethical concerns of consuming meat, you should reconsider your approach to diet construction. That being said, it's an expensive lifestyle, and will remain expensive as long as our society continues to subsidize processed foods. If we want to generalize a healthier food chain, we have to change the incentive structures that led us here.
- ben_w 3y ago
  Can you elaborate what you mean by "regenerative"? I'm anchoring on things like crop rotation for soil nitrogen, but that doesn't feel quite right for your comment, somehow?
  - gen220 3y ago
    It’s a bit of a ramble, but to give you the oeuvre: the problem is that our fruits, vegetables and legumes are not as nutritious today as they were decades ago. The hypothesis motivating regenerative agriculture, is that the explanation for this fact is that we treat soil as a lifeless medium for growing crops, rather than as an organic contributor to a natural ecosystem. Relevant to this thread, Animals are a core component of a natural ecosystem. This includes grazers, insects and predators. Healthy soil is living soil, full of bacteria that literally digest their environment into free nutrients for a crop to draw from. If we aim to fuel human civilization from the earth, there’s no free lunch — an equal amount of nutrients have to be returned to the earth, and animal husbandry (and consumption) are the historical solutions to this problem. Regenerative agriculture is agriculture that works in harmony with a living soil and its ecosystem. It means consuming more perennials than annuals, growing polycultures (e.g. the three sisters) instead of monocultures, using crop rotation to let soil lay fallow while it’s used to service the needs of animals. It’s basically the application of permaculture principles to agronomy. Other people in this thread have fixated on the climate aspect, and while this is certainly one big motivation for regenerative farming, IMO an equally large one is health — we are fundamentally not as healthy today as our grandparents were at the same age (in terms of cancer incidence, fertility issues, chronic inflammation, diabetes, etc.), and the food chain is an obvious place to scrutinize. In theory, could you synthesize the perfect cocktail of organic molecules to fertilize soil for healthy crops? Perhaps, but consider this: would it be less expensive and carry fewer negative externalities than maintaining a herd of animals that have literally co-evolved with these crops for millennia? Especially when you account for the ancillary benefits cattle husbandry (seasonal access to dairy, meat and leather as the herd is culled, etc.)?
- myshpa 3y ago
  Alan Savory? Regenerative holistic farming? It's mostly bullshit (not my words), apparently. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36826277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36826277
myshpa 3y ago
But animal ag is far from sustainable, unfortunately. Climate change, resource depletion, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, pollution, overpopulation, soil erosion, and overfishing are all symptoms of ecological overshoot. Agriculture is a key culprit in most of those symptoms, and animal ag accounts for 80% of all agriculture. Animal ag is directly responsible for majority of deforestation, is a major driver of biodiversity loss, has twice the greenhouse gas emissions than plant based foods, uses much more fresh water, pollutes the waters and causes dead zones in oceans, overfishing threatens us with empty oceans in 2040's, destroys our soils, etc. etc.. The reforestation potential of animal ag lands is so huge, that we could store our entire 1.5C carbon budget in those lands. We can free up the area a size of Africa (cca 9 Indias) by switching to plant based diets, and use it for reforesting/rewilding. If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares - https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets Reforestation potential of pastures (and abolishment of animal ag) would allow us to store the entire 1.5C carbon budget by rewilding/afforesting previously forested pastures. It would also stop biodiversity loss, which is a very serious problem in this day and age. - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00603-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00603-4 Rapid global phaseout of animal agriculture (and reforesting) has the potential to stabilize greenhouse gas levels for 30 years and offset 68 percent of CO2 emissions this century - https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal.pclm.0000010 https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal... Beef, soy for animal feed and palm oil are responsible for 60+% of tropical deforestation - https://ourworldindata.org/drivers-of-deforestation https://ourworldindata.org/drivers-of-deforestation Our global food system is the primary driver of biodiversity loss - https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/our-global-food-system-primary-driver-biodiversity-loss https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/our-glob... The way we eat could lead to habitat loss for 17,000 species by 2050 - https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22287498/meat-wildlife-biodiversity-species-plantbased https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22287498/meat-wildlife-bi... Livestock and climate change: what if the key actors in climate change are... cows, pigs, and chickens? - ttps://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Livestock-and-climate-change%3A-what-if-the-key-in-Goodland-Anhang/6704c7a0777c82357704d82b9ae8007c1197cb07?p2df The global production of food is responsible for a third of all planet-heating gases emitted by human activity, with the use of animals for meat causing twice the pollution of producing plant-based foods - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/13/meat-greenhouses-gases-food-production-study https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/13/meat-gre... Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers - https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaq0216 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaq0216 Mass Extinctions and Their Relationship With Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentration: Implications for Earth's Future - https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022EF003336 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022EF00...
hooverd 3y ago
"sustainable farming" would require eating less meat though. It would probably be much better quality meat. Sidenote: Monsanto no longer exists. It's Bayer AG now. You can get a direct flight from St Louis to Frankfurt now thanks to this acquisition.

gen220 3y ago

("We" below refers to the US, and an increasing proportion of the world that is adopting US farming practices). There's a good-natured argument to be made that plant-based diets are more sustainable, because we don't generally farm meat sustainably and ensuring that your meat was farmed sustainably is difficult and expensive. But it's important to underline that sustainable is an insufficient target in the U.S. in 2023. The motion we need is regenerative. I don't think regenerative farming can be done efficiently without ethical use of livestock. This is all to say: if you view the health and quality of our food chain as a higher priority than the ethical concerns of consuming meat, you should reconsider your approach to diet construction. That being said, it's an expensive lifestyle, and will remain expensive as long as our society continues to subsidize processed foods. If we want to generalize a healthier food chain, we have to change the incentive structures that led us here.

ben_w 3y ago
Can you elaborate what you mean by "regenerative"? I'm anchoring on things like crop rotation for soil nitrogen, but that doesn't feel quite right for your comment, somehow?
- gen220 3y ago
  It’s a bit of a ramble, but to give you the oeuvre: the problem is that our fruits, vegetables and legumes are not as nutritious today as they were decades ago. The hypothesis motivating regenerative agriculture, is that the explanation for this fact is that we treat soil as a lifeless medium for growing crops, rather than as an organic contributor to a natural ecosystem. Relevant to this thread, Animals are a core component of a natural ecosystem. This includes grazers, insects and predators. Healthy soil is living soil, full of bacteria that literally digest their environment into free nutrients for a crop to draw from. If we aim to fuel human civilization from the earth, there’s no free lunch — an equal amount of nutrients have to be returned to the earth, and animal husbandry (and consumption) are the historical solutions to this problem. Regenerative agriculture is agriculture that works in harmony with a living soil and its ecosystem. It means consuming more perennials than annuals, growing polycultures (e.g. the three sisters) instead of monocultures, using crop rotation to let soil lay fallow while it’s used to service the needs of animals. It’s basically the application of permaculture principles to agronomy. Other people in this thread have fixated on the climate aspect, and while this is certainly one big motivation for regenerative farming, IMO an equally large one is health — we are fundamentally not as healthy today as our grandparents were at the same age (in terms of cancer incidence, fertility issues, chronic inflammation, diabetes, etc.), and the food chain is an obvious place to scrutinize. In theory, could you synthesize the perfect cocktail of organic molecules to fertilize soil for healthy crops? Perhaps, but consider this: would it be less expensive and carry fewer negative externalities than maintaining a herd of animals that have literally co-evolved with these crops for millennia? Especially when you account for the ancillary benefits cattle husbandry (seasonal access to dairy, meat and leather as the herd is culled, etc.)?
myshpa 3y ago
Alan Savory? Regenerative holistic farming? It's mostly bullshit (not my words), apparently. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36826277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36826277

myshpa 3y ago

But animal ag is far from sustainable, unfortunately. Climate change, resource depletion, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, pollution, overpopulation, soil erosion, and overfishing are all symptoms of ecological overshoot. Agriculture is a key culprit in most of those symptoms, and animal ag accounts for 80% of all agriculture. Animal ag is directly responsible for majority of deforestation, is a major driver of biodiversity loss, has twice the greenhouse gas emissions than plant based foods, uses much more fresh water, pollutes the waters and causes dead zones in oceans, overfishing threatens us with empty oceans in 2040's, destroys our soils, etc. etc.. The reforestation potential of animal ag lands is so huge, that we could store our entire 1.5C carbon budget in those lands. We can free up the area a size of Africa (cca 9 Indias) by switching to plant based diets, and use it for reforesting/rewilding. If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares - https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets Reforestation potential of pastures (and abolishment of animal ag) would allow us to store the entire 1.5C carbon budget by rewilding/afforesting previously forested pastures. It would also stop biodiversity loss, which is a very serious problem in this day and age. - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00603-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00603-4 Rapid global phaseout of animal agriculture (and reforesting) has the potential to stabilize greenhouse gas levels for 30 years and offset 68 percent of CO2 emissions this century - https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal.pclm.0000010 https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal... Beef, soy for animal feed and palm oil are responsible for 60+% of tropical deforestation - https://ourworldindata.org/drivers-of-deforestation https://ourworldindata.org/drivers-of-deforestation Our global food system is the primary driver of biodiversity loss - https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/our-global-food-system-primary-driver-biodiversity-loss https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/our-glob... The way we eat could lead to habitat loss for 17,000 species by 2050 - https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22287498/meat-wildlife-biodiversity-species-plantbased https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22287498/meat-wildlife-bi... Livestock and climate change: what if the key actors in climate change are... cows, pigs, and chickens? - ttps://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Livestock-and-climate-change%3A-what-if-the-key-in-Goodland-Anhang/6704c7a0777c82357704d82b9ae8007c1197cb07?p2df The global production of food is responsible for a third of all planet-heating gases emitted by human activity, with the use of animals for meat causing twice the pollution of producing plant-based foods - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/13/meat-greenhouses-gases-food-production-study https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/13/meat-gre... Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers - https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaq0216 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaq0216 Mass Extinctions and Their Relationship With Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentration: Implications for Earth's Future - https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022EF003336 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022EF00...

hooverd 3y ago

"sustainable farming" would require eating less meat though. It would probably be much better quality meat. Sidenote: Monsanto no longer exists. It's Bayer AG now. You can get a direct flight from St Louis to Frankfurt now thanks to this acquisition.