Global Warning/Climate Change

[Ken]

I don't think there are any serious climate analysts who don't think we need to reform our system of corporate agriculture. Especially the utterly ridiculous process of massively subsidizing the ethanol industry in which we burn massive quantities of fossil fuels in order to raise corn to convert back into fossil fuels. People also say the same thing about beef and the meat industry which is the most wasteful component of American agriculture and advocate for a plant-based diet instead. That is nothing new.

I strongly disagree with this. Beef can graze on pasture that is not good for anything else and provide very healthy wholesome milk, cheese, yoghurt, and beef. The alternative is pointless large suburban yards that do nothing but grow grass that then has to be cut.

What percentage of the beef, poultry, and pork industry uses exclusively pasture-fed and grass-fed methods with no supplemental grains being used.
And what percentage of the meat industry relies on commercially harvested grain-based feeds. I'll wait while you look up the answer. The percentages are readily available for beef, pork, and poultry.

Hint, for beef it is less than 2%. For poultry and pork the numbers are far lower than that but I'll let you look them up for yourself.

[nett]

There isn't remotely enough grasslands in the US or anywhere else to support populations with natural grazing of livestock.

You're once making faulty assumptions, because you are unable to think in anything other than industrial terms. Human managed, rotated ruminants are therapeutic for the soil, and sequester nitrogen and phosphorus. Which are two of the most industrial industrial ag inputs. Wendell Berry has shown that a family of 12 can self-sustain on 2.5 acres growing their own food, and raising their own meat and growing their food with surplus using practices that actually build up the soil and environment, increase resilience, improve rainfall patterns, and resist disease and pests. This is with no industrial inputs other than some metallurgy that is no longer able to be sourced from traditional methods.

In terms of habitable land, there is approximately 2.8 acres available per person alive today. If you consider this on a an average household size scale, there is more than enough land to go around by a factor of at least 5, maybe as high at 8.

Again, hands will get dirty, there will be some long days of hard work, but there will also be community, with a growing healthy dependence on neighbors. There will be not only enough, but extra for those who struggle, which happens to be the essence of Christianity.

What is incredibly important (and I believe authentic Christian has the best solutions to this) is avoiding what Marx calls, "primitive accumulation", where fewer and fewer people start to amass all the valuable resources. This creates perverse incentives to adopt unsustainable practices, and ultimately inefficiency, ie: 10 cals of petroleum for 1 cal of food. A single human can turn 1 cal of energy into approximately 1.2 cals of food using only regenerative, sustainable techniques. A group of 100 people can achieve 1/1.5 easily using small amounts of animal labor. At this point, diminishing returns start to set in, and as the scale goes up, real problems emerge. Hence the Dunbar number.

Living this way, humans can drastically change the environment for the better. Previously dead, non-arable land can be made habitable on a very short timescale (especially is industrial inputs are used but sparingly). Rainfall patterns can be changed, and biodiversity can be brought to even higher level than the previous "natural" state.

I believe this was Adam's original mandate to "cultivate and keep" the garden of Eden. Man freely decided that forbidden knowledge from evil gods was more appealing, but that doesn't change the original mandate.

If you don't believe me about this, go read some Sepp Holzer, and see what he's done.

[Ken]

There isn't remotely enough grasslands in the US or anywhere else to support populations with natural grazing of livestock.

You're once making faulty assumptions, because you are unable to think in anything other than industrial terms. Human managed, rotated ruminants are therapeutic for the soil, and sequester nitrogen and phosphorus. Which are two of the most industrial industrial ag inputs. Wendell Berry has shown that a family of 12 can self-sustain on 2.5 acres growing their own food, and raising their own meat and growing their food with surplus using practices that actually build up the soil and environment, increase resilience, improve rainfall patterns, and resist disease and pests. This is with no industrial inputs other than some metallurgy that is no longer able to be sourced from traditional methods.

In terms of habitable land, there is approximately 2.8 acres available per person alive today. If you consider this on a an average household size scale, there is more than enough land to go around by a factor of at least 5, maybe as high at 8.

Again, hands will get dirty, there will be some long days of hard work, but there will also be community, with a growing healthy dependence on neighbors. There will be not only enough, but extra for those who struggle, which happens to be the essence of Christianity.

What is incredibly important (and I believe authentic Christian has the best solutions to this) is avoiding what Marx calls, "primitive accumulation", where fewer and fewer people start to amass all the valuable resources. This creates perverse incentives to adopt unsustainable practices, and ultimately inefficiency, ie: 10 cals of petroleum for 1 cal of food. A single human can turn 1 cal of energy into approximately 1.2 cals of food using only regenerative, sustainable techniques. A group of 100 people can achieve 1/1.5 easily using small amounts of animal labor. At this point, diminishing returns start to set in, and as the scale goes up, real problems emerge. Hence the Dunbar number.

Living this way, humans can drastically change the environment for the better. Previously dead, non-arable land can be made habitable on a very short timescale (especially is industrial inputs are used but sparingly). Rainfall patterns can be changed, and biodiversity can be brought to even higher level than the previous "natural" state.

I believe this was Adam's original mandate to "cultivate and keep" the garden of Eden. Man freely decided that forbidden knowledge from evil gods was more appealing, but that doesn't change the original mandate.

If you don't believe me about this, go read some Sepp Holzer, and see what he's done.

You are doing the same sort of faulty math that Murphy criticizes when it comes to energy.

Yes, if you take the total measured acreage of arable land in the US (about 900 million acres) and divide by the total population you come up with about 2.8 acres per person. But you cannot possibly divide the entire nation into 2.8 acre subsistence plots and move the entire population onto the land in some sort of Khmer Rouge style agrarian revolution. To do that would be to revert to the stone age. And most of that "arable land" can't be farmed in remotely the level of intensity that Wendell Berry is talking about because it lacks water and nutrients. Good luck raising a family of 12 on a 2.8 acre plot of South Dakota prairie with no water. You can read about that life in "Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder" which is the actual story of the Ingalls Wilder family and their failed attempts to farm in the Dakotas. Except they had more like 150 acres, not 2.8.

I support transitioning to more sustainable forms of agriculture. Which means things like more local smaller scale sustainable food production. But that also means moving away from a meat-based diet. And I love my hamburgers and steaks as much as the next person.

Of course if we reduced the world population by 95% then everyone could have their own idyllic pastoral life. But that is a pretty extreme objective. And most people would quickly tire of the sheer amount of work required to successfully feed a family exclusively through subsistence farming.

[nett]

There isn't remotely enough grasslands in the US or anywhere else to support populations with natural grazing of livestock.

You're once making faulty assumptions, because you are unable to think in anything other than industrial terms. Human managed, rotated ruminants are therapeutic for the soil, and sequester nitrogen and phosphorus. Which are two of the most industrial industrial ag inputs. Wendell Berry has shown that a family of 12 can self-sustain on 2.5 acres growing their own food, and raising their own meat and growing their food with surplus using practices that actually build up the soil and environment, increase resilience, improve rainfall patterns, and resist disease and pests. This is with no industrial inputs other than some metallurgy that is no longer able to be sourced from traditional methods.

In terms of habitable land, there is approximately 2.8 acres available per person alive today. If you consider this on a an average household size scale, there is more than enough land to go around by a factor of at least 5, maybe as high at 8.

Again, hands will get dirty, there will be some long days of hard work, but there will also be community, with a growing healthy dependence on neighbors. There will be not only enough, but extra for those who struggle, which happens to be the essence of Christianity.

What is incredibly important (and I believe authentic Christian has the best solutions to this) is avoiding what Marx calls, "primitive accumulation", where fewer and fewer people start to amass all the valuable resources. This creates perverse incentives to adopt unsustainable practices, and ultimately inefficiency, ie: 10 cals of petroleum for 1 cal of food. A single human can turn 1 cal of energy into approximately 1.2 cals of food using only regenerative, sustainable techniques. A group of 100 people can achieve 1/1.5 easily using small amounts of animal labor. At this point, diminishing returns start to set in, and as the scale goes up, real problems emerge. Hence the Dunbar number.

Living this way, humans can drastically change the environment for the better. Previously dead, non-arable land can be made habitable on a very short timescale (especially is industrial inputs are used but sparingly). Rainfall patterns can be changed, and biodiversity can be brought to even higher level than the previous "natural" state.

I believe this was Adam's original mandate to "cultivate and keep" the garden of Eden. Man freely decided that forbidden knowledge from evil gods was more appealing, but that doesn't change the original mandate.

If you don't believe me about this, go read some Sepp Holzer, and see what he's done.

You are doing the same sort of faulty math that Murphy criticizes when it comes to energy.

Yes, if you take the total measured acreage of arable land in the US (about 900 million acres) and divide by the total population you come up with about 2.8 acres per person. But you cannot possibly divide the entire nation into 2.8 acre subsistence plots and move the entire population onto the land in some sort of Khmer Rouge style agrarian revolution. To do that would be to revert to the stone age. And most of that "arable land" can't be farmed in remotely the level of intensity that Wendell Berry is talking about because it lacks water and nutrients. Good luck raising a family of 12 on a 2.8 acre plot of South Dakota prairie with no water. You can read about that life in "Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder" which is the actual story of the Ingalls Wilder family and their failed attempts to farm in the Dakotas. Except they had more like 150 acres, not 2.8.

Sepp Holzer has shown how to permanently cultivate water supply in any arable (by his definition) climate. The Dakotas have artesian wells which make things pretty easy. I never said everyone has to have their own 2.8 acres, and never interact with another human. a group of 100 people would get almost 300 acres, and in more challenging places, that number might need to be higher, and people might need to work together over distances more than in warmer places.

I have no interest in the nuclear family isolationist stuff of Little House on the Prairie.

I support transitioning to more sustainable forms of agriculture. Which means things like more local smaller scale sustainable food production. But that also means moving away from a meat-based diet. And I love my hamburgers and steaks as much as the next person.

Can you please provide any evidence that a plant-based diet needs less industrial inputs? Please don't just paste links, explain it to me. How do you turn 1 calorie into more than 1 with just plants.

I have never seen an explanation of plant-based salvation that doesn't either ignore fossil fuel inputs, or assume magical green technology that will never exist.

The green-energy-vegan crowd has very little overlap with the knows-how-to-do-math crowd, so this is not surprising.

Of course if we reduced the world population by 95% then everyone could have their own idyllic pastoral life. But that is a pretty extreme objective.

Malthusian nonsense. I've already addressed this.

And most people would quickly tire of the sheer amount of work required to successfully feed a family exclusively through subsistence farming.

How exactly did humans survive until petroleum was discovered? Perelman estimates that the average subsistence farmer in the UK, farming far less than 2.8 acres of his own land, but working communal land, "worked" around 25 hours per week on average. This work was very diverse, sometimes consisting of the hard labor of plowing by hand, and sometimes simply walking a few miles with a herd or sheep.

Hunger is a powerful motivator, but even so, you might be right there, the epigenetic effects of industrialism may have made large groups of people simply useless in the physical world. I personally don't think we're that far gone, I think most people can learn to be productive, especially with some benevolent and patient oversight.

[Robert]

There isn't remotely enough grasslands in the US or anywhere else to support populations with natural grazing of livestock.

Do you not know that there were millions of bison who grazed all across the continental US just a few hundred years ago? I guess you will say that there is not free range areas big enough for that. Why do we need free range when managed herds are working well?

[Ken]

There isn't remotely enough grasslands in the US or anywhere else to support populations with natural grazing of livestock.

Do you not know that there were millions of bison who grazed all across the continental US just a few hundred years ago? I guess you will say that there is not free range areas big enough for that. Why do we need free range when managed herds are working well?

That isn't the point I'm making.

Over 98% of beef production and well over 99% of poultry and pork production is not done by natural grazing. It is done by raising grain crops like corn and soybeans and using those to feed animals. Rangeland grazing of cattle without supplemental feeding is a very niche product. Which is fine, but due to the nature of trophic pyramids it takes about 10 kg of grain to produce 1 kg of beef. You can find various figures ranging from 20-1 to 8-1 for beef production, but it is far more efficient in terms of calories of food produced to just produce grains for human consumption rather than to produce grains to use feeding animals for meat production. The numbers for pork are somewhat lower than for beef, and the numbers for chicken are lower still. But there is no form of grain-fed meat production that is more efficient than just eating the grains themselves.

There is a whole separate issue of water. Cattle require enormous quantities of water. You can't raise cattle on dry rangeland without sources of water. It takes more than 1000 gallons of water to produce a kg of beef. That is problematic for raising cattle in the vast stretches of the west where access to water is limited.

So yes, you can raise cattle, pigs, and chickens using natural rangelands. But the amount of cattle you can produce doing that wouldn't remotely meet the food needs of a 330 million population. The wild plains bison herds of 200 years ago supported a vastly smaller human population.

There is basically no math you can do to generate an agricultural system on any kind of landscape where meat production is more efficient in terms of calories produced than grain production, or other forms of vegetable foods like potatoes, legumes, etc. That is why intensely populated countries like India concentrate on grain production not grazing meat on open pastures.

[MaxPC]

What can go wrong when you play around with atoms?

[Robert]

It is done by raising grain crops like corn and soybeans and using those to feed animals.

Lots of grazing in every field I drive by with cattle in it.

[Ken]

It is done by raising grain crops like corn and soybeans and using those to feed animals.

Lots of grazing in every field I drive by with cattle in it.

If you are talking about Central Texas then they are almost certainly doing supplemental feeding, especially during the dry winter months. And definitely when they go to the feed lots for finishing.

They are also using land that could be producing more calories of food production if they just grew grains or legumes. It is mathematically impossible to produce as much food in the form of beef as you can with the same acreage producing vegetable grains. That would violate the laws of thermodynamics. When cattle eat food about 90% of the flood calories are lost to heat, movement, and biochemical processes within the cow’s cells. Only about 10% of the food the cow eats gets stored on the cow in the form of meat.

That doesn’t mean beef, pork, and chickens can’t be raised in environmentally sound and sustainable ways. Of course they can be. But it is always going to be more inefficient to raise grains (or grass) to feed to cows than it is to just raise the grains and other vegetables directly for human consumption. By about a factor of 10.

So in a world of diminishing resources it is always going to be more efficient to use a plant-based diet.

[nett]

It is done by raising grain crops like corn and soybeans and using those to feed animals.

Lots of grazing in every field I drive by with cattle in it.

If you are talking about Central Texas then they are almost certainly doing supplemental feeding, especially during the dry winter months. And definitely when they go to the feed lots for finishing.

They are also using land that could be producing more calories of food production if they just grew grains or legumes. It is mathematically impossible to produce as much food in the form of beef as you can with the same acreage producing vegetable grains. That would violate the laws of thermodynamics. When cattle eat food about 90% of the flood calories are lost to heat, movement, and biochemical processes within the cow’s cells. Only about 10% of the food the cow eats gets stored on the cow in the form of meat.

That doesn’t mean beef, pork, and chickens can’t be raised in environmentally sound and sustainable ways. Of course they can be. But it is always going to be more inefficient to raise grains (or grass) to feed to cows than it is to just raise the grains and other vegetables directly for human consumption. By about a factor of 10.

So in a world of diminishing resources it is always going to be more efficient to use a plant-based diet.

Come on Ken, step outside the very small box you're living in, and think. The diminishing resource you need to raise grains and vegetables is OIL. I assume I don't need to convince you that we should be reducing our dependance on oil. The energy inputs to raise these crops are insane, both in terms of machinery power, and industrial processes to do things like artificial nitrogen fixation via Haber–Bosch. Green energy has no solutions that don't involve more battery production, and more detrimental mining.

You can't farm at insanely high levels of yield efficiency long term. This is something a lot of people know, but very few people talk about, because there are no scale solutions. As I've said before, Iowa loses 2 lbs of topsoil for every pound of corn produced. hard pan in the west is getting worse every year, and there are no solutions other than bigger bulldozers to rip it. But often times when you rip, you set up the next hardpan to go deeper and get harder. The soil in large swathes of the US is already in critical condition, biodiversity is falling of a cliff, and rainfall patterns are a mess.

Ruminants (especially combined with fowl) do the work for you when managed properly. Dale Strickler took a tired old corn farm in Kansas that was barely able to grow anything, and was able to get to over 5 feet of topsoil in less than 15 years with well managed pasturing and drip irrigation. He has been able to grow feed grasses at higher efficiency than anything currently out there in commercial ag with creative use of cover crops and cross planting. Dale also says that his 300 acres receives 1-2 inches more rainfall each year than his neighboring farms. Microclimates are real, and they can have a regenerative effect.

Your hyper focus on efficiency is very misguided. Trying to force unnatural yields out of plants that are not grown properly depletes the soil, ruins the water supply, and wrecks long term rainfall patterns.

In contrast, The creation is designed for sustainable high yields when managed correctly.