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Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

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241–250 of 296 posts

Re: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you tried to get all your calories from eating eggs, your diet would have too much fat and not enough carbs. In reality you need a balanced and varied diet, and the world couldn’t support 7 billion people all deciding to get their protein intake from one specific food item anyway. Animal products are simply better at providing the protein you need. You _can_ get all of it from plant based sources (I’m not sure whe…

"not enough carbs" is the easiest problem to solve (just add wheat/rice/potato etc.) ... in fact the normal problem is too much carbs.

That depends on whether you care about eating too many calories. If your average person got all their protein from eggs, they’d eat too much fat, way too much saturated fat, and have very few calories left to get in all of their other nutritional needs.

Incidentally, that’s why it is possible to eat a healthy plant based diet if you’re very active. If you burn 2000 active calories a day, then it matters less if you’re eating nutritionally inefficient food, because you can make up for it in volume.

Re: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

#242
How will it affect the top soil nutrients? I used to be told about crop rotation and resting by farmers in south Asian countries for the soil to regain the nutrients, doesn't having rice grow year after year destroy the top soil and result in poor productivity?

Re: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

#243
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reasoning is completely wrong: there's an input and an progressive decay as output, the amount of methane in the atmosphere at any given point is directly related to the input.

Yes, this is exactly what I say in my comment. The amount of methane in the atmosphere is directly proportional to the input rate . That’s why, as I said, in steady state , when the we keep steady the amount of rice under cultivation, the amount of methane in atmosphere is not changing over time. Can you point to which part exactly is “completely wrong”?

> Can you point to which part exactly is “completely wrong”?

First you said:

> Not really. These GHG emissions from rice are in steady state with the amount of CO2 and methane in the atmosphere.

And then now

> That’s why, as I said, in steady state, when the we keep steady the amount of rice under cultivation, the amount of methane in atmosphere is not changing over time.

These two statements are contradictory. If we assume steady state, then yeah the amount of methane is stable, but changing the way we cultivate rice is the opposite of steady state: if we reduce the methane emissions, then the amount of methane in the atmosphere will decrease that's it.

Re: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> As far as CO₂ emissions from cattle, where do your think the C comes from ? The grass/food that cattle eat, what would happen to it if let to decompose ?

I don't know about other countries, but the percentage of meat in the U.S. that comes from cattle roaming pastures and eating grass is very small (because it costs so much more).

Re: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, meat protein is a great source of nutrition. No, it is not magically better than equivalent vegetarian nutrition. It’s not magic, but the protein from animal sources is just scientifically better than protein from plant sources. If you want to compare the nutritional benefits of different protein sources you need to account for how bioavailable they are. Some plant sources aren’t bad, but none are as good as a…

Quoting your linked paper: > Vegetable proteins, when combined to provide for all of the essential amino acids, provide an excellent source for protein considering that they will likely result in a reduction in the intake of saturated fat and cholesterol. > [..] When the more accurate PDCAAS scale is used, soy protein was reported to be equivalent to animal protein with a score of 1.0, the highest possible rating (Ha…

You could revise your claim that vegetable proteins are just as good as animal sourced proteins, to the far more specific claim that soy proteins being as good as animal proteins if you like. Because soy is the only plant source that is comparable in quality to animal sourced proteins (which is why the majority of vegan protein supplements are soy-based).

Even then, if you were to get all or a majority of your protein requirements from soy, then that's a lot of soy. You'd have to eat 1-2 pounds or more of boiled soy beans per day. Which aside from being a very atypical diet, would also be above the level of isoflavone consumption that has been studied to be safe (incidentally, consuming large quantities of whey protein also has some unpleasant side-effects in most people, like extreme flatulence, constipation and the associated discomfort).

Implementing a highly restrictive diet, that eliminates entire food groups that you've evolved to rely on, is unsurprisingly complicated. It also unsurprisingly puts you at risk of deficiencies in the nutrients that your new diet is deficient in. Which is why vegans are unsurprisingly at an increased risk of negative health outcomes associated with those deficiencies.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00330...

Your claim that vegetable protein is just as good as animal protein is honestly just misinformation, as well as being dangerous health advice. You can eat a healthy vegan diet if you put the effort into planning it properly, which anybody following your erroneous advice would not be doing.

Re: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The whole "plant based" thing is based on the simplified Wall Street model of food based on misunderstanding of nutrition. For their purposes, protein and fat are just protein and fat whether they come from meat, milk, eggs or dairy... or if they come from grass seeds. If that was the case, it would make sense that we replace ALL animal agriculture with grain farming. Grains can practically be transported and stored…

>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.

FYI, India contains about 280 million vegetarians.

Re: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arr we saying that cattle today are 4 times the weight of 400yrs ago?

Domestic animals in the Middle Ages were definitely smaller than today, you can see it in illustrations that depict agricultural work. For people who lived in swampy areas (e.g. north of England), having lighter animals with longer legs was actually preferrable. Meat-and-fat balls of today would get stuck and drown in mires.

Regular cows getting stuck and breaking their legs still happens sometimes except maybe in industrial farming.

The cows in the Swiss alps (Wallis) for example are much sturdier and smaller to accommodate for rocky and steep terrain.

Re: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

#248
post #168

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…

Humans have been cultivating perennials for just as long as annuals. It's why we have so many varieties of olive trees, apple trees, etc.

Re: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

#249
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That math isn’t mathing. With the rice field active, there’s more methane in the atmosphere every year, compared to the world where the rice field doesn’t exist.

It’s climate change . If global methane from rice fields is identical in 2000, 2023, and 2050 … it has zero impact on climate change. Rice cultivation isn’t completely static, so the it’s changes in rice cultivation that result in climate change.

Rice cultivation hasn't been a factor in climate for all time, only relatively recently. The increase in methane can have an accumulating warming effect. Think about it like this - the amount of rice fields is the derivative of climate change. If you increase the amount of rice fields once and don't decrease it, climate change will slowly but surely rise, even if rice fields don't increase.

Re: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

#250
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kill people frequently. Some people criticize me for it, but I rightly point out that my own murders is a tiny fraction of city-wide deaths, and if I stopped, no one would even notice the difference. I'm not even the biggest contributor! Fast-food restaurants and soft drink companies keep promoting unhealthy diets from which people develop diseases which eventually leads to thousands deaths per year. Plus, most peo…

littering is not on the same moral plane as murder though

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