31–40 of 62 posts
It's absolutely insane that Regenerative Agriculture was not mentioned once in this. There are farmers that have figured out ways to make their farmland fertile again. These practices just need to be expanded.
> ... While 1% of the world’s land is used for buildings and infrastructure, crops occupy 12% and grazing, the most extensive kind of farming, uses 28%. Only 15% of land, by contrast, is protected for nature. Yet the meat and milk from animals that rely solely on grazing provide just 1% of the world’s protein.
It's unreal when framing this as the "greatest predicament humankind has ever encountered" and all the stats pointing to intensive animal agriculture as the obvious problem that "eat less meat" isn't entertained as a serious option. We're literally growing food to feed to animals that we bred ourselves, while losing ~90% of the calories in the process instead of eating crops directly when meat isn't required to be healthy. I don't share the high hopes people have with things like lab grown meat either as we've been waiting for years for it to arrive at scale and affordable, and it's not going to replace all the cuts of meat people want.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets "If everyone shifted to a plant-based diet we would reduce global land use for agriculture by 75%. This large reduction of agricultural land use would be possible thanks to a reduction in land used for grazing and a smaller need for land to grow crops."
This is a great article. I forgot where I read it, but someone basically said that we need to stop treating soil as just dirt. I have found out through my research that replacing invasive species and lawns with native plants and also composting organic waste, leaves, and twigs and returning that to your lawn are two of the best things a single person or group of persons can do to thwart climate change. Organic materi…
Every year, landsats measuring soil temperature shows a spike in temperature at around spring planting. And this is because commercial agriculture kills off the soil in order to plant a single crop, maximized on yield. And every year, the soil fertility gets worse, because the ecology of fungi and microbes are not established or accumulating in the soil. It’s just planting on dirt. It’s not just nutrients. Living soi…
> We face what could be the greatest predicament humankind has ever encountered: feeding the world without devouring the planet. Already, farming is the world’s greatest cause of habitat destruction, the greatest cause of the global loss of wildlife and the greatest cause of the global extinction crisis. It’s responsible for about 80% of the deforestation that’s happened this century. Of 28,000 species known to be at…
Many mushrooms are also a great meat alternative and have tons of health benefits not found elsewhere and can be great for the environment. They are, for the most part, less concentrated in protein than animals but still much higher than most plants.
> Without a radical change in the way we eat, by 2050 the world will need to grow around 50% more grain. Is that the only way? What if we grow grains that need 50% less water? This article is mind numbingly preachy and ignores that technology can and always has been at the forefront of human progress. Yes, if we wake up one day in 30 years and find that we have made 0 technological progress then we will need 50% more…
This is a great article. I forgot where I read it, but someone basically said that we need to stop treating soil as just dirt. I have found out through my research that replacing invasive species and lawns with native plants and also composting organic waste, leaves, and twigs and returning that to your lawn are two of the best things a single person or group of persons can do to thwart climate change. Organic materi…
How to find out which plants are native to which region?
- garden.org - https://plants.sc.egov.usda.gov/home - http://eol.org # This shows some nice graphs of what pest might ward of other invaders but its quite the challenge to find it. For illustration on what I mean with the graph, here's a good example: https://eol.org/pages/45515235
I am dreaming of having the time and budget to expand on this website of EOL and develop an open source farm where non-tech users can contribute through tools like iNaturalist and collectively create the graph of life. In such a way that we can formulate the world as a LP problem where we maximize for bio-diversity with respect to the surroundings. Imagine being able to insert any terrain, be it France or Somalia, and have a recommended plantplan over time be delivered. I think it's a matter of time till we're there.
> We face what could be the greatest predicament humankind has ever encountered: feeding the world without devouring the planet. Already, farming is the world’s greatest cause of habitat destruction, the greatest cause of the global loss of wildlife and the greatest cause of the global extinction crisis. It’s responsible for about 80% of the deforestation that’s happened this century. Of 28,000 species known to be at…
Most animal feed is the byproduct of things we are not eating[1]. This same study also address the land use concern. Most of it is not fit to grow crops with. I agree that people should reduce meat consumption but I find the general framing around this topic to be dishonest.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22119...
> We face what could be the greatest predicament humankind has ever encountered: feeding the world without devouring the planet. Already, farming is the world’s greatest cause of habitat destruction, the greatest cause of the global loss of wildlife and the greatest cause of the global extinction crisis. It’s responsible for about 80% of the deforestation that’s happened this century. Of 28,000 species known to be at…
Fungi in general are amazing - it blows me away that in western culture we place such little emphasis on their consumption. There are three kingdoms (for the most part) that we can choose to consume - Plants, Animals, Fungi. And yet we just almost ignore the third one for what reason again? Many mushrooms are also a great meat alternative and have tons of health benefits not found elsewhere and can be great for the e…
According to Wikipedia, mushrooms generally have less than 5% protein. Almost every plant food I checked was higher, including wheat (15%), corn (10%), rice (8%), and potatoes (9%). (from United States Department of Agriculture).
Protein rich plants like lentils, soybeans, and nuts are upwards of 30%.
> We face what could be the greatest predicament humankind has ever encountered: feeding the world without devouring the planet. Already, farming is the world’s greatest cause of habitat destruction, the greatest cause of the global loss of wildlife and the greatest cause of the global extinction crisis. It’s responsible for about 80% of the deforestation that’s happened this century. Of 28,000 species known to be at…
> We're literally growing food to feed to animals that we bred ourselves, while losing ~90% of the calories in the process instead of eating crops directly when meat isn't required to be healthy. Most animal feed is the byproduct of things we are not eating[1]. This same study also address the land use concern. Most of it is not fit to grow crops with. I agree that people should reduce meat consumption but I find the…