Restoring nature is good for farmers, fisheries and food security | Hacker News Reader

Restoring nature is good for farmers, fisheries and food security

unep.org

33 pointsianai45 comments

Unfortunately, UNEP does not address the unpleasant truth here either. The biggest destroyer of nature is intensive livestock farming, especially for meat production. Today, about 40% of the inhabitable land is used for feeding livestock. Removing subsidies in this area could very quickly bring back biodiversity, fight climate change and increase food security worldwide. Unfortunately, for many, eating meat has become like a fetish and such measures are politically almost impossible to implement. Here some more data about this: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use#half-of-the-world-s-habi...

The diagram included in that document is fantastic, thank you.

So they use 77% of their available land to produce 37% of their protein and 18% of their calories. Imagine how much cheaper calories would be if the land dedicated to plants were simply doubled. Thus eliminating a huge amount of starvation.

The thought of that many lentils makes me gag.

Cows and sheep can easily live on land not suitable for crops. Livestock is a way to essentially turn unproductive, dry grassland into meat.

What you're missing is that half of the year they live on soy from deforested Amazon.

https://ourworldindata.org/soy

And that "unproductive dry grassland" used to be natural habitat for wildlife, until we took it from them, and more often than not used to be forested.

The potential for carbon storage afforesting those areas is huge, so huge that we could store our entire 1.5˚C carbon budget in them.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00603-4

https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass

https://xkcd.com/1338/

Rapid global phaseout of animal agriculture 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...

Agriculture production as a major driver of the Earth system exceeding planetary boundaries

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320356605_Agricultu...

So I take it you buy exclusively free-range grass-fed meat and dairy?

No I started raising my own beef.

Restorative agriculture for the win.

I won't be eating crickets or vegan burgers or whatever zealots think I should eat. Or be deprived of eating.

Sorry for the late reply and you aren't the person I responded to originally, but good for you! Have an upvote

If we had the technology to turn all that grazing land into farmable land, we could support a global population in the tens of billions.

The whole point of livestock is that they can be raised on land that isn't farmable (i.e., cattle for meat or milk), or food that isn't otherwise edible (i.e., pigs and chickens). For most of their lives cattle in the U.S. are raised on land that isn't suitable for farming, and only get fed soy or corn-based feed in their last few weeks to fatten them prior to slaughter.

> For most of their lives cattle in the U.S. are raised on land that isn't suitable for farming, and only get fed soy or corn-based feed in their last few weeks to fatten them prior to slaughter.

Can the land that is used to grow feed crop (soy, corn) be used to be used to grow other things that humans can eat directly? Or can the soy or corn be used by humans directly as opposed to the 'intermediary' of cattle?

If the 'cattle land' be used for other animals that are more efficient (?) in turning plants into protein? (Chicken, pigs, goats, sheep, etc.)

Feed crop is only used to feed cattle during the last few weeks of their life; the majority of their weight comes from grazing on unfarmable pasture land.

Can the land that is used to grow feed crop (soy, corn) be used to be used to grow other things that humans can eat directly?

Humans can eat corn and soy directly...

If the 'cattle land' be used for other animals that are more efficient (?) in turning plants into protein?

Not unless you can genetically engineer chicken and pigs to eat grass and weeds. Goats and sheep are less efficient at turning plants into protein, which is why the bulk of our mammalian meat production is cattle and not sheep or goat.

There are ways to fix this of course without moving to not eating meat of course. Meat eating is not a 'fetish' in any significant way, much as it suits some agendas to make it seem so. I could claim that about any product or food...

I agree on removing subsidies though, they encourage the wrong kind of outcomes and shortcuts.

> There are ways to fix this of course without moving to not eating meat of course.

There are ways to avoid discomfort while walking with a thorn in your toe that don't involve removing the thorn, but why would you do them if you didn't have an irrational love for thorns?

Speaking of avoiding discomfort.

If you have a lawn, you should cultivate it with vegetables. It's easy to produce a surplus that you can share.

Unless you want to avoid putting any sweat equity in...

Silly analogy. If you're going to remove grazing animals, you might need to figure out how many new fields you'll need for the extra veg required and it's transport, figure out where wool and leather are going to come from, along with the dairy, pet food and all the other derivative products. But sure, we'll just magically stop meat (I think there are ways to easily reduce the need for so much feed without removing meat production) and go to meat free without causing any other issues. Environmental win-win to keep the population Ponzi growing

The anti-meat take is always lacking in nuance

Any of these types of things said about factory farmed meat is correct. For free-range meat, some of the production does cause habitat destruction. However, most animals are raised on land that is not highly productive for crop agriculture. For example dry areas where most crops will deplete water resources or very hilly areas that are more prone to erosion and harder to operate tractors on, etc (this is even mentioned in the our world in data link). So meat and crop production are not a zero sum game and can even be complementary (crop farmers used to always have chickens, etc).

In a grassland environment one can maintain a close to natural environment with the birds and bees with the difference being that cattle are the only megafauna and cattle predators will be killed. Raising crops means completely altering the environment to an unnatural state that then this report tries to amend and killing all the gophers and other pests along with using pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and other chemicals (yes organic farming can reduce this harm).

> The anti-meat take is always lacking in nuance

The pro-meat take is (as always) lacking scientific basis for their claims, and ignores the biggest problems of the field, like biodiversity loss, deforestation, eutrophication/pollution, pesticide/herbicide use, ethical concerns etc. All science points in opposite direction from yours, no science exists supporting your claims.

For scientific rebutal of your opinion see relevant part of the debate "Is livestock grazing essential to mitigating climate change?" between Alan Savory (a big proponent of rotational "regenerative" grazing) and George Monbiot.

I watched it all, but am linking directly to the most relevant part.

https://youtu.be/rhwEaCmQ2XE?t=1235

--- few links ---

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

Biodiversity conservation: The key is reducing meat consumption

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26231772/

Meat eating could lead to habitat loss for 17,000 species by 2050

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22287498/meat-wildlife-bi...

Our global food system is the primary driver of biodiversity loss

https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/our-glob...

How Compatible Are Western European Dietary Patterns to Climate Targets? Accounting for Uncertainty of Life Cycle Assessments by Applying a Probabilistic Approach

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/21/14449

Which Diet Has the Least Environmental Impact on Our Planet? A Systematic Review of Vegan, Vegetarian and Omnivorous Diets

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/15/4110/htm

Global food system emissions could preclude achieving the 1.5° and 2°C climate change targets

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aba7357

Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding...

Coming from farm country in Iowa, I'm glad to see Allan Savory's work getting more publicity. Regenerative grazing definitely works. The problem is restoring a distressed ecosystem (typically soils) back to its natural state after desertification has already occurred in an area that livestock continually grazes. There are a few agTech companies looking at doing just that via different GMO seeding products of native grasses and plants, but the cost is still far too high economically coming in at around $50/acre. I don't think any farmer or rancher would argue that we need more free-range livestock and less confinements/stockyards, but it's a slow process.

It strikes me that this post is opinionated and exactly lacking the nuance described in the previous post.

Nobody argues in favor of the meat industry at large. This is about the difference between localized, grass-fed beef which can be raised where crops cannot.

The single largest issue with industrialized meat production is the environmental impact of the feed, which is a non issue if it is provided locally and organic. In fact, organically raised meat and animal products provide benefits to the local biodiversity.

Note: I’m from the EU where you have strict laws on organic production and farm animals have to be almost exclusively fed with grass.

Please look into the effects of manure on the environnement - like the death zone in the Gulf of mexico.

Everyone is arguing for the industrial meat industry at large. Free range meat will not produce anywhere near the same amount as the industrial industry.

Please go look into L214 and 269 if you want to see how regulation is not respected in farms in the EU.

Manure produced by pasture-raised livestock is great! When the herd moves across the grasslands, it is similar to how the vast bison herds contribute back to the grasslands. That manure gets trampled back down into the grassland, where it helps restore the soil. When the grassy area is eaten to a certain point, you move the herd to a new area and let the old one rest.

The problem with feedlots is that the manure accumulates. The ground is eaten until it is nothing (because you have the feed), and then the grass dies. Then the soil gets compacted. Meanwhile, since there is nowhere for the manure to go, and it is not being consumed by the grasses, it ends up become sludge, a source of health problems.

> Everyone is arguing for the industrial meat industry at large. Free range meat will not produce anywhere near the same amount as the industrial industry.

If the meat supply is reduced then so be it. And remember, the higher the quality of the meat, the less of it you need in your diet. But that's far different from a policy stance of zero-tolerance for meat, anywhere and everywhere.

> this is about the difference between localized, grass-fed beef which can be raised where crops cannot

Sure, that's obvious. But we don't need those calories to sustain ourselves.

> the environmental impact of the feed, which is a non issue if it is provided locally and organic. In fact, organically raised meat and animal products provide benefits to the local biodiversity.

Sources?

> strict laws on organic production and farm animals have to be almost exclusively fed with grass

EU is one of the largest importers of soy from deforested Amazon. What part of EU grown beef is organic & exclusively fed with grass?

> Sure, that's obvious. But we don't need those calories to sustain ourselves.

This is completely different topic. You won't change people's habits. I for one would be in great favour of large-scale insect farming as they are way more efficient sources of protein but you are not going to change anybody's habit just by arguing from such a perspective.

> Sources?

On the one hand, most models fail to capture carbon sequestration and purely assess carbon exhaust. This is a fair approximation if your source of feed is based upon the deforestation of the Amazon.

However, for grazing animals decomposing gras will just emit the carbon it has captured throughout its lifetime. And most of all, it will regrow rather swiftly. A recent paper which I could find that took this into account is here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965262...

Quote: "However, although the environmental impacts are well defined in LCAs, most of them do not include carbon sequestration, which is an important limitation when studying real emissions in more sustainable animal production systems. In this context, compensated CF -including carbon sequestration-implies a greater reduction in those systems that are more linked to the territory."

> EU is one of the largest importers of soy from deforested Amazon.

Again, there is a categoric difference between typical highly processed industrial agriculture and organic. Especially Spain has a powerful agriculture lobby with vast lands which only produce crops and meat. Certainly, a lot of things are going wrong and due to subsidies there is so much overproduction that European products are dumping the African market. Destroying the local competition.

On the other hand, the US loves to make people fat by subsidising big Corn. In fact, it is subsidised so much that creating high fructose corn syrup is cheaper than buying sugar canes from abroad. Too bad that the sugar in corn is fructose, which promotes fatty liver disease.

> What part of EU grown beef is organic & exclusively fed with grass?

There is the official EU organic label, which has hard criteria. However, there are many other labels which go even further.

Base EU guidelines: https://agriculture.ec.europa.eu/farming/organic-farming/org...

>> biodiversity loss, deforestation, eutrophication/pollution, pesticide/herbicide use, ethical concerns etc

All the arguments in favor of regenerative meat production that I have heard consider, and in fact stress all these issues. Your link was a technical debate about soil carbon storage, (which I suspect regenerative ag proponents would dispute the details of, which would be an interesting thing to get to the bottom of). It doesn't at all cover any of those other more important topics you brought up in this quote. Anyway, a smart guy citing his chosen evidence in a public debate hardly settles any issue either way.

>> no science exists supporting your claims

this is hyperbole, and easily disproved by a quick google search.

"white oak pastures debunked", to avoid finding biased pro-regenerative papers, links to an anti-regenerative writeup: https://civileats.com/2021/01/06/a-new-study-on-regenerative...

which says also: "The new peer-reviewed study looks at the multi-species rotational grazing done on the ranch and found that White Oak’s approach reduced net greenhouse gas emissions of the grazing system by 80 percent. Regenerative practices helped sequester 2.29 megagrams of carbon per hectare annually. To put that into context, sequestering just 1 Mg of carbon per hectare each year on half the rangeland area in California would offset 42 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, roughly the annual emissions from energy use for the state’s commercial and residential sectors."

There's a difference between sequestering and storing carbon.

Also we should not compare "regular" agriculture and "regenerative" farming, but natural ecosystems and "regenerative" farming.

What's better way to protect/repair nature is obvious then.

This reply feels a bit tangential. The amount of land taken to raise livestock is a small fraction of the land used to grow their feed. You discuss the lack of nuance with respect to the former, but OP was talking about the latter. The land taken for raising animals hadn't even entered OP's equation yet, and can only strengthen their point.

I think the confusion comes from the term free-range meat, which (at least in the US) is a marketing term far removed from what any normal person would consider "free range". It could be -- and often is -- just a barn with a fenced outdoor opening small enough that it amortizes to a few square inches of "free range" land per animal. Many of whom will never get there because they die of various kinds of nastiness before they make it to the opening.

The percentage of human-raised animals who are truly "free range" and roam grasslands in any meaningful sense begins with a decimal point. Cut the per-head subsidies and you cut the incentive to singularly maximize body count at the expense of all potential benefits of free-roaming animals.

Just for context for the reader, "free range meat" costs orders of magnitude more to make and takes so much more room that if industrial farming had to move to free range, I doubt most people could afford it more than once in a blue moon.

> However, most animals are raised on land that is not highly productive for crop agriculture. For example dry areas where most crops will deplete water resources or very hilly areas that are more prone to erosion and harder to operate tractors on

But a key point is around crop diversity, and the monoculture mode of production. From the original page:

> The world has over 50,000 edible plants. However, just three of them, rice, maize, and wheat, provide over 50 per cent of the world's food energy intake.

So for any dry hilly area being used as pasture, and which is sufficient to support grazing animals _without additional feed_, is it really the case that there are _no_ crops, or combinations of crops which could work there? Or is it just that we should do a better job of supporting farmers discovering other ways of making their land productive?

> Raising crops means completely altering the environment to an unnatural state

Raising crops _can_ mean that, but regenerative agriculture can instead focus on working with the environment. Certainly beyond organic, no-till methods, permaculture, "natural farming" are on a spectrum that can deliberately involve and support more complex ecosystems.

I think it's in kind of bad faith to respond with "but agriculture as most commonly practiced can be harmful and ineffective on some pasture land" in the context of an article arguing that we should radically shift how we practice agriculture.

> So meat and crop production are not a zero sum game and can even be complementary (crop farmers used to always have chickens, etc).

100%. And, based on the design, it can not only be complementary, there can be synesthetic effects that end up making even better use of the land.

Another example besides chickens might be, adding water-harvesting features on hilly uplands (that livestock grazes), which replenishes the ground water that are made available to the crop lands.

What percentage of meat and dairy is free-range vs industrial feedlot-raised?

Time to bless the populace with a who knows where it came from virus strain, that results in high uric acid/gout when eating meat. Problem solved.

Let the insects come.

Switching to plant based alternatives won’t really fix the large fields of soy and corn that are the issue. We may need less to feed cattle then, but then we will need to produce more plant protein for direct human consumption or even bioreactors.

Soy is extremely high in protein. And we'd need to grow far less of it than we do now, because there's no conversion loss like with raising meat.

Human consumption of soy & corn is not the problem.

> large fields of soy

https://ourworldindata.org/soy

"More than three-quarters (77%) of global soy is fed to livestock for meat and dairy production. Most of the rest is used for biofuels, industry or vegetable oils. Just 7% of soy is used directly for human food products such as tofu, soy milk, edamame beans, and tempeh"

> fields of ... corn that are the issue

Corn crop is mainly used for biofuels (40%) and as animal feed (36%)

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/time-to-rethink-c...

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/06/corn-industries-susta...

U.S. corn-based ethanol worse for the climate than gasoline

https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/us-corn-based-e...

> We may need less to feed cattle then, but then we will need to produce more plant protein for direct human consumption or even bioreactors

Not at all.

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

if we're talking about the switch to lab-grown meat using plant proteins, lab-grown meat can be grown anywhere, it doesnt need wide horizontal pastures or grazing lands

vertical vegetable farming didn't take off because of margins, but vertical meat farming might be possible, as the premium on meat might make the economic equation of growing soy on level three to feed cells on level two before shipping them out in trucks on level one attainable

The key word you used is "intensive". Livestock are animals in too, and we can use techniques to harvest animal products while maintaining a balance in the ecosystem. You can see this in grazing management to turn desert back into grasslands in Africa. And instead of spraying insecticide that runs off and kills things downstream, we can pasture chickens in the same fields we grow crops and they'll happily turn those insects into eggs and meat.

Intensive agriculture is fighting nature. We can work with nature instead for both crops and animal products and still get great yield.

> According to a UNEP report, some 20,000 flowering plant species upon which many bee species depend for food could be lost over the coming decades without greater conservation efforts. However, if done in harmony with nature, agriculture – one of the biggest drivers of biodiversity loss – can be pollinator friendly, which ultimately helps bees and farmers alike.

This is important to me. When we moved into our country home, we noted that there was a lot of agriculture around us. We've made a concerted effort to plant and maintain lots of native species, and we've seen a boom in the concentration of unique bugs.

While this is small-scale and anecdotal, the results of our efforts have been super visible to us, and I imagine if everyone had just a couple of native flowers in their yard -- let alone rebuilding "green walls" -- it would go a long way.

Biodiversity/species loss through habitat destruction (either directly or through anthropogenic climate change) should be one of the greatest shames of society.

On the other hand mass famine and children starving to death, especially in the global south, is pretty shameful too.

I think deaths from malnutrition are shameful regardless of age, but I think that's far more an issue of how we distribute resources than our actual ability to produce calories from the land. Aside from simple inequality, both food waste and meat production are huge sources of inefficiency.

In recent decades, actual deaths from malnutrition have declined meaningfully though we still have a ways to go. And IIRC the absolute numbers of people suffering from malnutrition, though a couple orders of magnitude larger than those that are actually killed by it, has also declined in absolute terms, even as the population has grown.

If you're actually concerned about children starving to death, rather than make comments against people trying to avoid species destruction, you might do more good by giving up meat, aggressively reducing food waste, and making periodic donations to an organization like Direct Relief International.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/malnutrition-death-rates?...

key word search "hedgerows"

congrats on your local success! many more to come...

Are those 20000 plant species of any actual relevance though? There're hundreds of thousands. For context:

>The world’s food supply depends on about 150 plant species. Of those 150, just 12 provide three-quarters of the world’s food. More than half of the world’s food energy comes from a limited number of varieties of three “mega-crops”: rice, wheat, and maize.

Not everything is valuable by just existing.

Not all value comes from being mass-produced by humans.

Specifically, the 20,000 species you're talking about, are

> some 20,000 flowering plant species upon which many bee species depend for food

which has intrinsic value.

And if you really need to tie it back to humans, we need those native bee species, because the ones we've mass-produced are not as good at the job.

https://www.ecowatch.com/honeybees-pollinators-native-specie...

The problem is that we are not able yet to judge which are valuable and which are not.

Most of the current chemical techniques are still extremely inefficient in comparison with what can be done by living cells and we are not yet able to design catalysts comparable with the natural enzymes.

The disappearance of any species of living beings may have as a consequence the definitive loss of some valuable knowledge about useful chemical processes, which might be discovered again by humans decades or centuries later, if ever.

When we will become able to recreate some kind of living being, after storing enough information about it, then we will afford to decide that it is not valuable and that we can let it become extinct or even intentionally eliminate it from nature.

Until then, permitting the destruction of information that we do not understand yet, and which has a chance, however small, to become essential for our own survival, is extremely stupid, even for those who believe that the other living beings exist only to serve them, as written in the Genesis.

I let my yard grow wild, just removing some of the invasive weeds. It saves me a ton of watering costs, and the hum of bees is ever-present.

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