211–220 of 296 posts
The article states that some 45,000 farmers already have them, but I was unable to find where I could buy some.
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To be fair, rice also provides ~20% of global caloric needs, so this isn’t necessarily an outsized contribution.
To put this into context, animal agriculture is responsible for 18% of the worlds CO2 emissions, uses 83% of the world's farmland, but only produces 18% of our calories and 37% of our protein.
Unfortunately, plant foods do not provide us the necessary nutrients. ALL human civilizations and tribes had animal foods as a part of their diet. There is not a single tribe that survived on plants alone.
So, even if 99.99% of "farm land" was required for animal agriculture, we'd have to keep it that way.
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A lot of grazing is done on marginal farming land. For example land that is very dry or land that is very steep. So generally a statistic like 83% of the world's farmland doesn't make any sense. Not sure if it is possible to count factory farming properly- that takes really good farmland and sends the production to animals.
> A lot of grazing is done on marginal farming land. For example, New Zealand: ~55% is being used for sheep and cattle, and only ~2% of NZ is arable (see https://youtu.be/F_g6-4swJ_s at 14:45) with a major part of the reason why explained near the 10:00 mark (weather in South Island).
In one of his videos in Youtube, permaculture farmer Richard Perkins said that mankind has 6000 years of agriculture, but has mostly concentrated plant breeding efforts to annual plants. We mostly eat annuals. (Plants that grow and die in one year.) But, he said, imagine what kind of perennial (plants that live multiple years) food plants we could have, if we invested similar 6000 years of effort to perfecting perenn…
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I really wish there was a name (that I knew of) for this logical fallacy of using precise quantities of meaninglessly confused categories. What do you think "farmland" is ? Our ancestors who knew how to raise cattle and farm cereals for millennia were surviving on the verge of starvation : why do you think that was ? Were they so dumb they'd rather die of hunger than convert some of their grazing pastures to cereal a…
“The grass/food that cattle eat, what would happen to it if let to decompose ?” It would decompose (once) and then natural habitat would return because we need less of that land, capturing carbon more permanently because it’s released more slowly. In Brazil, exactly the opposite is happening: deforestation to feed cattle. Are you arguing for that deforestation?
Not the same user but I will argue for deforestation any day. Humans are grassland creatures and trees are our enemy. Trees shadow the grass and affect our natural habitat. Even elephants know this and get rid of trees when they see them. [1]
In fact, when the wooly mammoths went extinct, Pleistocene Park turned from a grassland to a forest, and now an ecological disaster [2].
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I really wish there was a name (that I knew of) for this logical fallacy of using precise quantities of meaninglessly confused categories. What do you think "farmland" is ? Our ancestors who knew how to raise cattle and farm cereals for millennia were surviving on the verge of starvation : why do you think that was ? Were they so dumb they'd rather die of hunger than convert some of their grazing pastures to cereal a…
This is a kind of "wronger than wrong" fallacy [0]. Yes, not all pasture land is suitable for cereal crops. But that doesn't negate the fact that most livestock production does present an inefficient tradeoff when optimizing for nutrition and land/climate impact. This is because a) a large portion of cereal crops are diverted to feed livestock and b) very little livestock comes from natural pasture land. So only a mi…
Is there a shortage of food for humans? I dont think there is a supply issue, rather where famines occur it seems political?
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Methane and CO2 are very different things. The former has a massively greater warming effect than the latter, and takes long enough to degrade in the atmosphere that it can significantly affect warming times. If you aren’t paying attention to the rising methane levels in our atmosphere (and possible evidence of a feedback loop) with serious trepidation, you’re a lucky person who probably sleeps well at night.
That’s very misleading because Methane is extremely front loaded in its effects. Year 0 is very bad year 50 is only equal to the amount of carbon in that methane. As rice farming is very consistent year to year, and rice removes carbon as it grows the net effect on future warming is ~zero because all the previous years have already been baked in to current conditions. The great news is reducing Methane from existing…
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To put this into context, animal agriculture is responsible for 18% of the worlds CO2 emissions, uses 83% of the world's farmland, but only produces 18% of our calories and 37% of our protein.
I really wish there was a name (that I knew of) for this logical fallacy of using precise quantities of meaninglessly confused categories. What do you think "farmland" is ? Our ancestors who knew how to raise cattle and farm cereals for millennia were surviving on the verge of starvation : why do you think that was ? Were they so dumb they'd rather die of hunger than convert some of their grazing pastures to cereal a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, rice also provides ~20% of global caloric needs, so this isn’t necessarily an outsized contribution.
To put this into context, animal agriculture is responsible for 18% of the worlds CO2 emissions, uses 83% of the world's farmland, but only produces 18% of our calories and 37% of our protein.
A more useful number might discount the grazing/fodder lands which are not useful for other agriculture.
There are a surprising number of perennial food plants. Not just bushes and trees; vegetable crops too! I recently saw a Gardeners' World episode which showcased a lady with 220+ perennial vegetables in her garden. Including a variety of broccoli, and one of chard! A surprise to me. A benefit to her is, she could have all that without dealing with every plant, every year. But she had plenty of rain and land. Not ever…
Well-designed food forests and agroforestry systems can exceed the calorie production per acre of heavily mechanized and fertilized annual crops like corn, while providing tons more actual nutrition and additional services like wood, good quality soil, etc. with little or no fossil-fuel-based inputs. Check out i.e. Mark Shepard (New Forest Farm) and Martin Crawford (Agroforestry Research Trust) for examples.