Denmark will plant 1B trees and convert 10% of farmland into forest
apnews.com
apnews.com
Regarding global warming and CO2, the area conversion of peatlands will help, but the major change here is the introduction of a carbon tax for the entire agricultural industry. And to end confusion regarding other emissions than CO2, it's actually a CO2-equivalent (CO2e) tax, which includes a range of other gasses. E.g., 1kg of methane is 25kg CO2e.
If you'd like to read more, see the two PDF documents below, which are the main official documents. They're in Danish, but upload them to Claude or ChatGPT, and you'll have a much better source of information if you'd like to know more about the specifics and how the actual implementation is planned.
[1] https://www.regeringen.dk/media/13261/aftale-om-et-groent-da...
[2] https://mgtp.dk/media/iinpdy3w/aftale_om_implementering_af_e...
Your pig farmers must be thrilled.
https://agricultureandfood.dk/danish-agriculture/agriculture....
More recent data shows thir pork consumption as nothing noteworthy, though I have no idea how good the data is https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pork-cons...
All that being said, you're right, they're not exactly thrilled with the government adding taxes and monitoring them more.
Do people really still buy this trick?
How does help anyone else than salaries for tax and subsidy administrators?
Is it ideal? maybe not, but it is the real world.
A "climate income" is a good example of that. Everyone gets taxed by usage/pollution, but the collected tax gets redistributed evenly.
That way, on average there is no extra taxation, in fact it's typically a redistribution from top to bottom. And yet every individual will end up with more money the less they pollute. It's that individual incentive that makes the measure effective, but it's the redistribution that makes it socially acceptable (if implemented correctly)
There need to be changes, but I am not convinced that this will have the desired effects. Its quite possible this leads to a net conversion of farmland to residential or commercial property rather than nature.
Many farmers will receive a one-time payment on land sales and some will use this windfall to subsidise their transition from growing livestock to more environmentally-friendly food.
This assumes that the land is equally usable for both activities. Many times, it isn't: a lot of land that's good enough for grazing cows doesn't have enough water available for growing plants that people want to (or can) eat. People can't eat grass.
This probably isn't an issue in Denmark, but in many other places it is.
Just because plastic bags are ubiquitous doesn't mean it's the only nor best way to carry items around, nor that we'd lose the ability to transport goods if they were phased out, nor that they don't come at a cost despite perceiving them as free.
Crop soil needs fertilizer somehow
What is your alternative to manure?
Bonus points if it uses less energy to produce than animals, produces less CO2 than animals, takes up less space than animals, or also produces food at the same time
Cows are so inefficient that we don't need to use marginal land at all to grow food. The majority of arable land is already used for cows yet they produce a disproportionately small amount of food. Weening off cows is a good thing.
Otherwise, you’re right. We’re upsetting the balance of a very complex, very important system and causing a regressive tax in the form of price increases.
I think inevitably, there will be price increases. The questions is just how bad and how many farms survive the transition.
The industry might be accustomed to profiting from the subsidy, but that doesn't make them entitled to it! And certainly the industry has had plenty of time to anticipate and adjust to the problems of carbon emissions.
Farming is not a profitable endeavor. There would be a lot less financial advisors in the world otherwise. A carbon tax will either drive up prices or reduce suppliers, increasing prices. Reducing farmland will require more efficient methods which will also drive up prices
The result will be the public pays more for food, not the agriculture industry makes any more or less money. It will require more imports which will come from countries with less regulation and more exploitable resources.
We've seen the story of disruptions to the food supply play out before. The reality is this is a more dangerous gamble than most people realize.
Food prices declined earlier this year for two consecutive months, though that will be a minor consolation after the significant food price inflation in 2022 and persisting, though at a slower pace, through 2023.
All of that to say, "let them eat cake" mentality is unlikely in a country where they have consistently ranked at the top of a world happiness index. Additionally, while I'm not well versed in Danish politics, I am under the impression that the Social Democrats have responded much better to the mass immigration that has been an ongoing issue for many parties throughout Europe. I think this is indicative of a party that adapts rather more quickly to the consequences of their previous policies and is less ideologically stubborn - at least on some issues.
Individuals, by contrast look at the cumulative effect of inflation. If inflation runs hot for several years and then comes back to a moderate level, prices don’t go down regardless of what economists would have you believe. The effect of inflation has memory.
Economists that make monetary policy decisions look at recent inflation trends + projected inflation because they are tasked with price stability, which requires them to often respond to shocks well outside their control (war in Ukraine, massive government spending, tax cuts, covid-19 pandemic, etc.)
I was trading and researching fixed income and inflation markets (and implementing in multi-billion dollar portfolios) years ago when you had inflationistas claiming the Fed was going to cause double digit runaway inflation. At the same time, you had people claiming the Fed was not doing enough to support markets.
No matter what monetary policy makers do, it will be pretty much universally mocked by pundits and especially anyone that wants to talk their own book.
Academic economists don't really focus much on any particular reading of inflation, unless perhaps they have their own axe to grind about how it is measured or responded to.
Monetary policy can't change the past, which is why they evaluate current and expected inflation, not what happened in two years ago. Just because prices increased dramatically in 2022 does not mean the Fed or any other central bank should aim for deflation.
it creates a national dependency on imported food from countries that do not bankrupt their farmers, and suddenly (shocked!) the entire Danish food supply crosses the borders to arrive and is then subject to federal management. this latter case is of course the purpose, and climate change is merely a pretext. I hope european farmers are able to organize a revolt.
Governance is needed, where progress does not occur naturally.
reality is, governments want smallholding farmers out of the business and to replace them with agribusinesses because it's a process of de-kulakizing their subjects. it has nothing to do with science or environment at all. I think maybe a war over this stuff will give us the reset we need.
Similarly, the solar systems on most farms, was a government research project. The satellite recon to analyse the farm - provided by the government to all farmers, including the tiniest hobby farm, is 100% government researched, deployed, and maintained.
Governments do a lot more science than you are giving them credit for.
This is similar in some ways, but not at all the same.
The history of solar, EVs, batteries etc. show these work hand in hand.
Why invent a way to capture methane from slurry, or form a business to sell that idea to farmers if they're allowed to pollute for free?
if you have a problem with farmers, maybe you should just eat less?
Farms, at least in Europe, are in the majority family owned. Same for those working in them, mostly those that are part of the family [1].
It's difficult being a farmer. You are much more at the will of nature than any other industry. Your effort takes a long time to bear fruit (think olives, for example, you do not have fruit for 4~years if you're lucky, and you don't want the oil from a younger tree (lesser phenols, etc...). You have to wait YEARS before you get anything to market. And, there have been many fires in southern Europe...).
All in all, it's indeed difficult to invest in machinery, new technology, etc...
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...
Denmark has no ability to impact global CO2 emissions at all. In fact nobody does except ironically the Chinese and their industrial-growth-at-any-cost coal based approach from the 90s and 00s.
Farming is very carbon emission intensive if the farmland is reclaimed wetland. Converting the farmland to forest and stopping draining (making it more wet again) can definitely reduce carbon emissions significantly.
> Denmark has no ability to impact global CO2 emissions
This is such a tiresome and logically hollow argument. Denmark has the ability to reduce a fraction of the worlds emissions. The size of the fraction is proportional to the size of their emissions. Every country has a responsibility to reduce it's per capita emissions to sustainable levels. China has lower per capita emissions than most richer countries.
Let’s split China population in k Denmark-sized groups, plus one smaller-than-Denmark reminder.
None of the k groups has any ability to impact global CO2 emissions (same as Denmark).
We can reasonably assume that a smaller group has even less ability to impact global CO2 emissions than a bigger group. Hence the smaller-than-Denmark reminder has no ability to impact global CO2 emissions either.
Thus China is made of groups that have no ability to impact global CO2 emissions either. And therefore China as a whole has no ability to impact global CO2 emissions. (Otherwise at least one group within China would have to impact global emissions and we just saw that it isn’t possible).
This is known as the CO2 impossibility theorem, loosely based on Arrow’s concept of “(in)decisive” set.
We certainly need international coordination or actors with a minimal set of morals to achieve it.
I'm afraid most people are smaller-than-Denmark groups, and thus unable whatsoever to impact global emissions. It's just math.
That's what your math sounds like to me.
f = lambda x: (1/x) * x
f(1e309)
(So I guess Denmark is at least 1e309-sized in some metric).
The starting point is just wrong that Denmark can't play a role when it comes to climate change. Denmark can make a change. It is like saying that when voting that no individual vote or county matters, when the opposite is true: every vote matters in the same way.
Every kg CO2 saved is good... (obviously we should strive for the most economic way to save CO2).
The reason Denmark can't do anything isn't because there are few of them, it is because Denmark isn't a significant industrial cluster for energy technology and innovation. For example, India has more people than China and they aren't in a position to do much unless there is some sort of tech breakthrough that hasn't made it to my notice.
A lot of those vegetables are produced yet in Almeria. A lot of milk that goes to Italy is produced in France. EU has this issue checked from the first minute and created a supranational agriculture system based on quotes.
One can even argue that the reduction in environmental and climate impact will create room for other industries that already are carbon-taxed.
2. All produce is not of same quality, 15 million people’s produce will probably only produce 11-12 million produce that is marketable in stores after transporting it
3. Economies of scale matters, going from 15 million people’s produce to a 10 or 8 million produce doesnt just means a linear cost reduction, the price per unit for crops also rises, which can potentially make it hard to compete with other agro hubs in the Eurozone, dwindling Denmark’s independent source of food supply over time.
Edit: Genuinely curious what I'm missing..
High carbon farms balance would be: "high carbon" profit + subsidy - high carbon tax
If ["low carbon" profit - small carbon tax] > ["high carbon" profit - high carbon tax] (e.g. if the carbon tax is high enough), farms have an incentive to lower their carbon emissions.
The subsidy is here to make sure ["low carbon" profit + subsidy - small carbon tax] > 0
This gives an economic incentive to use the lower carbon method, funded by those who use more carbon, while not changing the end price or output.
There will be no food subsidy, however, and a rough estimate of the increase of food cost is something like 1.5%, with beef having the highest increase. Take this estimate with a grain of salt though, as it's difficult to estimate. An increase in food cost is expected though.
Of if there is an equivalent subsidy (i.e. the tax is basically redistributed) it would encourage to produce less carbon/methane intensive production
> Governments pay to keep food cheap > A carbon tax will either drive up prices or [drive up prices]
So, this is just number rearranging. The public pays either way. Ok. The comment you replied to says
> Currently the public subsidizes the agriculture industry by paying for the consequences of the industry's carbon emissions.
So the public pays in this case too. More number rearranging. Not at all clear why this makes prices increase.
So why do you think this implies prices increase? Do you think the price of carbon determined by the government is too high? Or do you just want to ignore this externality until we pay it all at once?
Either the subsidies take into account the carbon tax or they don't. If they do then it's number rearranging. Government gives dollars and then immediately takes some of them back, it's a convoluted appropriations bill. If they don't then food prices go up which is contrary to the government's goal of keeping food cheap at the point of sale.
If you want to reward reducing carbon emissions by giving additional dollars or paying for more expensive but better for the environment equipment then that could potentially be effective.
I’m personally of the opinion we should be doing far more tying together of revenue neutral taxes and subsidies within an industry. When you want to reduce a negative externality you tax that and then redistribute the proceeds equitably back across relevant actors. When you want to increase a positive externality, you equally tax actors and then distribute it asymmetrically according to the behavior you want to encourage. Or combine the two approaches to address both negative and positive externalities in one go.
These approaches allow you to be more targeted, while minimizing overall market distortions.
Whether this plays out as intended remains to be seen. I think externalities need to be priced in somehow, the issue is determining the appropriate cost. If you want the market to decide the cost efficiently there needs to be some mechanism to tie the two measures together (increased environmental quality => lower carbon tax rate). I agree however that manipulating the economics of food production is dangerous and needs to be done slowly and carefully.
"The public" isn't one person. Denmark has progressive taxes; getting rid of subsidies so prices of food increases changes who among the public pays.
> Or do you just want to ignore this externality until we pay it all at once?
> So, this is just number rearranging. The public pays either way.
"The public" isn't one person. Denmark has progressive taxes; getting rid of subsidies so prices of food increases changes who among the public pays.
> Or do you just want to ignore this externality until we pay it all at once?
I'm in favor of the carbon tax. I also think that it has complicated side effects and we should try to understand those effects, and see if we need to change something else to compensate for them.
The industry isn't "choosing carbon" but rather it's responding to the immense challenge of feeding billions affordably while dealing with slim margins and unpredictable conditions. Adjustments require viable, scalable alternatives, not just finger-wagging.
I think we focus on supporting innovation rather than vilifying an essential industry.
If the externalities of that carbon generation are priced in I end up paying more for the polluting tractor so I choose the less polluting tractor and make more money.
I can only speak to small and medium farms, but if we're talking large horsepower cultivators / row farming, It's really a choice between keep my old pre-emissions diesel/buy a pre-2006 used tractor from auctions/marketplace for 50k, or double down and lease a 250k-400k new mid-size tractor.
You make it seem like many farmers have choices, but old "dirty" tractors are the only financial options for many without signing up for indentured servitude to JD/Case/etc
Will it or will farmland value take a dump but remain unchanged in use?
I always thought of farmland these days as a use of last resort and if it could be marketable for buildings, it’s already not economically worth it as a farm except speculatively
The value in the land isn’t in its use (which is getting 1% ROI), but in speculation it may be granted permission to be converted to housing, or because of tax loopholes.
Land at the edge of cities and towns where there is a reasonable chance of development happening costs orders of magnitude more than the average.
The person renting that land then farms it (presumably for a profit) for additional ROI.
It's never that easy as "Meat is great".
Spending two minutes reading about the biogenic carbon cycle destroys this misconception.
"As a by-product of consuming cellulose, cattle belch out methane, there-by returning that carbon sequestered by plants back into the atmosphere. After about ten years, that methane is broken down and converted back to CO2. Once converted to CO2, plants can again perform photosynthesis and fix that carbon back into cellulose. From here, cattle can eat the plants and the cycle begins once again. In essence, the methane belched from cattle is not adding new carbon to the atmosphere. Rather it is part of the natural cycling of carbon through the biogenic carbon cycle."
According to that logic, burning fossil fuels also is not harmful for the environment, because the CO2 eventually gets consumed by plants.
1) Even if cows would only eat the grass that was there (and we would not have converted any forest or other vegetation into grazing lands), the methane and CO2 stays in the atmosphere for a long time before being used by plants again, contributing to the greenhouse effect in that time. The reality is, we can only cover a very small percentage of the demand with this "3 happy cows on a vast pasture" phantasy. Most cow feed is planted additionally, often in countries like Brazil, and then fed to the cows.
2) The carbon impact is not the only negative impact of the scale of livestock agriculture we run these days. As it says in the article, another big impact is eutrophication of water bodies.
3) Just basic physics: Livestock agriculture, especially beef, is a very inefficient way of producing protein and calories. Have a look at this data: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-per-protein-poore
So, please don't come at me with your cute comments. The reality is that we have too much livestock agriculture. It's not sustainable to feed 8 billion people like this. The scientific consesus is clear on this.
Unrelated but since you brought the topic up, it would of course make sense that releasing vast amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere that took millions of years to bind into the earth in mere decades might be a bad idea. Then again, we're only guessing there as well. We have no clue if the world will be better or worse for us to live in 50 years, and how much of it will be attributable to CO2.
But I digress -- this comment thread was about cow farts and the utter silliness of grasping at such straws when speaking about an otherwise serious subject like the futures of our children.
Umm, no, we are not guessing. But I see where this will end, so let's stop this discussion right here.
No, the difference in logic is based on the source of the CO2. Fossile fuels are burried in the ground and are not part of the carbon cycle. By removing them from the ground, we are adding new carbon to the carbon cycle rather. Coversely, if you burn wood, that carbon was (mostly) going to end back up in the carbon cycle and you've just sped up it's cycle and increased the portion of the cycling carbon that is in the atmosphere.
There are changes we can make to the cycle that do affect global warming (cutting down all the forests and killing all the kelp would greatly decrease the capacity of the cycle). Conversely, we can expand the carbon cycle by planting trees (that actually survive and form forests.)
However, you can't fix global warming by expanding the carbon cycle because you can't scale the natural cycle to match all the new carbon that is being added to it by buring fossile fuels. There are only two solutions, adding less carbon to the cycle by burning fewer fossile fuels and finding ways to remove carbon from the cycle by sequeresting it in long term ways.
Carbon taxes can fail to actually cause change if they allow fossil fuel burning to be offset by temporary bumps to the carbons cycle capacity because this doesn't really solve the problem and at best slightly delay it.
Cow "farts" (actually burps) are kinda the opposite, the methane is already part of the carbon cycle. However methane is a way more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 so by increasing amount of carbon cycle that is amospheric methane you are accelerating global warming until the methane decays into CO2.
https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/492...
"Total GHG emissions from livestock supply chains are estimated at 7.1 gigatonnes CO2 -eq per annum for the 2005 reference period. They repre- sent 14.5 percent of all human-induced emissions using the most recent IPCC estimates for total an- thropogenic emissions (49 gigatonnes CO 2 -eq for the year 2004; IPCC, 2007)"
Surprisingly there are fewer cows than people, but there's still a billion cows, and a billion of anything adds up quickly.
That's not to say that the other things aren't important as well. Gas flaring from refineries is a pure waste that should be drastically curtailed.
But I'm doubtful that implementing them only for one industry in one small country is very helpful.
That is of course impossible, so there is some tension there :)
You should read the introduction.
Polish farmers are going to eat you alive for this.
Eh, people don't know that Google Translate can translate documents (PDF, Doc etc.) as well?!
And the farmers alao get shafted in the process, farmers are always totalitarian's first target. Venezuela, Rwanda, Zimbawe, Cuba.
"Danish Crown, one of Denmark’s largest Danish meat producer, is facing significant financial challenges as pig deliveries to its processing plants have dropped in the 2023/24 financial year."
Danish Crowns problems aren't entirely due to external factors, part of it is also that Danish Crowns is struggling to run its business properly.
Both Denmark and Netherland are big in agriculture export and they are very good at it. I am not against planting trees but it on top of farm land doesn't make any sense to me.
Source: I’ve planted thousands of trees.
I don't remember the details, but I believe it goes something like farm -> heath -> shrubland -> young forest -> mature forest, where each phase has a unique ecosystem of both plant species and animal life.
In an extremely heavily cultivated landscape like Denmark (seriously, look at a satellite photo), converting farmland back into forest is a multi-decade project requiring constant maintenance. Converting farmland into marshland (which is the "original" stone-age landscape in many areas) is a multi-century project.
Just like it was a multi-century project to convert it into farmland, by the way. Europe has been cultivated for millennia.
exactly, and we're talking about Denmark, after all
In some sense it was good, and basically help shape modern Denmark, but it's just not needed anymore, and has come at the cost of wildlife, native plants and sea creatures. It didn't start out like that, but when you add modern intensive farming on top of killing of most of your nature areas, then things starts to go very wrong. Denmark has almost nothing of it's original nature left.
Edit: add planting trees
One thing I have wondered was the relative benefits of a concentrated wilderness versus distributed habitat.
The common agricultural policy set-aside distributes payments for the wilderness across many farms (for equity, one supposes), whereas a concentrated wilderness would benefit few (and probably only the landowners).
It feels like wetlands is a huge ignored area. If what I read at the time holds (I think it was like 6-12x sequestration rate in some regions), a simple thing like rising sea levels would have a huge impact.
And anthropogenic destruction of wetlands is also a huge issue and one that is relatively easy to reverse in a lot cases (dams, rerouted rivers). And in some cases, water can just be rerouted occasionally to create temperarly wetlands that are good ecosystems as well. Mossy Earth I think is doing some of these.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgzwrgv71no
It would transform the biodiverse habitat into barren, species-poor salt marsh and tidal mud.
The only way to bring back these lost or dying ecosystems is across large stretches of land, hundreds if not thousands of acres across. We have tiny pockets left in Cornwall, Wales and Scotland, but for the most part the country is ecologically baren in comparison to that a couple of thousand years ago.
Vast and continuous National Parks are one of the few viable ways to maintain or bring back our species rich ecosystems. Distributed "wilderness" between city blocks or cattle grazing land is duct tape on a leaky bucket.
In the UK we pay farmers to raise lamb on marginal land yet they still aren't competitive with lamb shipped from the other side of the world. I'm not sure why we should be subsidising that, especially when there is a lot of environmental damaged associated with it.
It turns out that when shit hits the fan, countries need to handle the basic needs of their population themselves.
Agriculture in the EU is renowned for not being financially unjustified. For decades it's been a finantial no-brainer to import the bulk of agricultural products from south America and Africa. This is not new or the result of some major epiphany, it's the natura consequence of having an advanced economy and a huge population with high population density. The EU already imports 40% of the agricultural products it consumes.
EU subsidies were created specifically to mitigate the strategic and geopolitical risk of seeing Europe blockaded. Agricultural subsidies exist to create a finantial incentive to preserve current production capacity when it makes no finantial sense, and thus mitigate a strategic vulnerability.
No, its because far lobbies are an important political block
Protecting your agricultural capacity is what convinces the part of the population that does not directly benefit from the subsidies.
Wrong. If you try to educate yourself, you will notice that EU's common agricultural policy even went to the extent of paying subsidies to small property owners to preserve their properties as agricultural land. This goes way beyond subsidizing production, or anything remotely related to your conspiracy theory.
Just because someone benefits from subsidy programs that does not mean that any conspiracy theory spun around the inversion of cause and effect suddenly makes sense. I recommend you invest a few minutes to learn about EU's common agricultural policy before trying to fill that void with conspiracies.
Groups that already have subsidizes are better at defending them. Even if in absolute terms their numbers aren't as big.
Subsidizing exports similarly has very different goals.
There’s a reasonable argument for having a food stockpile in case of emergencies, but extra farmland is harder to justify.
The point of extra farmland is to make up for some expected shortfall, but you’re better off stockpiling food during productive periods than have reserve capacity for use when something else is going wrong.
PS: It is common to have quite large stockpiles of food. Many crops come in once a year and then get used up over that year. But that assumes a 1:1 match between production and consumption, a little extra production = quite a large surplus in a year.
The US’s domestic demand for food is vastly below the actual production, exports and biofuels need not be maintained in a war.
In the US, Nixon era policy and legal thinking drives all things. Price is king, except it isn’t. Our crazy governance model means that corn is better represented than humans, so our food is more expensive, less nutritious, and our supply chains are incredibly fragile.
I'm still mad about it, yes. Germany's dependence on Russian gas was a terrible thing, but risking my livelihood for 4D geopolitics chess is much worse.
Sure about that? I remember a cold winter.
> Blizzards, record winds, red weather warnings and biting cold. The long winter of 2023/2024 has featured heavy precipitation and a number of extreme weather events.
https://www.uu.se/en/news/2024/2024-03-04-a-researcher-expla...
And
> Large parts of Europe are starting the 2023-2024 winter season with an abundance of snow and cold, a stark contrast from last year, which was abnormally warm and snowless.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/12/04/europe-sno...
Utterly brain dead. So much so that you know someone’s getting paid from these decisions.
https://agricultureandfood.dk/media/m1qfuuju/lf-facts-and-fi...
https://www.dyrenesbeskyttelse.dk/artikler/landbrugets-bundl...
and also that this source is probably biased toward minimizing the numbers while your source might be pulling in the other direction. the true number is probably somewhere in between and depends on what you include. like, could the raw products be imported instead and the refined in Denmark without those 22% taking a hit?
I think it's the same for Denmark, though the mostly hold pigs in stead of cattle.
Planting trees on farms is incredibly important for maintaining and protecting the soil. The Americans learned that the hard way in the 1930s. [2]]
[1] https://www.climatechangenews.com/2022/08/05/us-funded-trees...
[2] https://www.history.com/topics/great-depression/dust-bowl
Grasses, not trees, maintained and protected the soil for what became the US Dust Bowl.
The "Great American Desert" was essentially treeless. As your [2] links points out, European agricultural methods "[exposed] the bare, over-plowed farmland. Without deep-rooted prairie grasses to hold the soil in place, it began to blow away."
The man from Kansas was now a peon and a pariah; and the experience was making a worse man of him."
-- Aldous Huxley, "After Many a Year Dies the Swan" -- 1939
They were warned what would happen. Yes, it was the grasses that keep the soil in place.
However, as the article you referenced says,
> "As part of Roosevelt’s New Deal, Congress established the Soil Erosion Service and the Prairie States Forestry Project in 1935. These programs put local farmers to work planting trees as windbreaks on farms across the Great Plains. The Soil Erosion Service, now called the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) developed and promoted new farming techniques to combat the problem of soil erosion." [2]
A bunch of people didn't understand this in Haiti and now they are severely doomed and suffering. Probably not something you want to be incorrect about on the global scale.
Although, it is the grasses that hold the top soil in place, it can be mitigated by planting trees.
They also believed in "rain follows the plow."
> windbreaks on farms
Sure, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plains_Shelterbelt .
But that was only one of many techniques developed. https://archive.org/details/bighughfatherofs0000well/page/11... mentions "if subject to wind erosion, it calls for stubble-mulch farming, wind strips and windbreaks." (That's a biography about Hugh Hammond Bennett, who led the Soil Erosion Service ... but not the Shelterbelt!)
In general (a few paragraphs earlier):
'Modern soil conservation is based on sound land use and the treatment of land with those adaptable, practical measures that keep it permanently productive while in use,” he explains. “It means terracing land that needs terracing; and it means contouring, strip cropping, and stubble-mulching the land as needed, along with supporting practices of crop rotations, cover crops, etc., wherever needed. It means gully control, stabilizing water outlets, building farm ponds, locating farm roads and fences on the contour, and planting steep, erodible lands to grass or trees.“'
Earlier at https://archive.org/details/bighughfatherofs0000well/page/96... you can read about the then-novel idea of contouring;
"Tillage is proceeding across the slopes, rather than up and down hill. It is being done on the contour on 15,362 acres. Farmers are finding that it not only serves as a brake on running water but also reduces the cost of mule-power and tractor-power."
Oh, interesting. In 'Predicting and Controlling Wind Erosion', Lyles (1985) writes "Despite the credit the Prairie States Forestry Project has received in ending the Dust Bowl, windbreak plantings under the Project did not begin on a large scale until 1936", and says "the cardinal principle of wind erosion control is maintaining vegetative materials on the soil. ... this practice of conserving or maintaining vegetation on the surface has evolved into various forms of tillage management, which currently go under the generic name of conservation tillage and have become a major technique for erosion control." (See https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3742385.pdf )
This suggests again that trees and windbreaks in general are not the primary solution to the regions affected by the Dust Bowl, but rather grasses, including crops.
And obviously the connection to Denmark is meant to be that a lack of trees causes problems so replacing things with trees must be good. Even if there hasn't been news about those problems happening there.
There’s a natural way of doing that, which is to cut subsidies and let the market handle it. But the farmers have political power because they have a lot of money because of the policies they’ve set up back when they had political power because they had a lot of money… Anyways, so what is actually happening is that the farmers have decided that if their land is unprofitable then the government needs to pay a hefty price to them for it.
The government could just cut the subsidies which means we would use less money, then buy the land in bankruptcies, likely just with the money we spend less. Instead we’ll see a lot of additional spending to buy the land, and then down the line subsidies will increase to “make up” for all the land they “lost”.
Subsidies and/or tarrifs always distort the market and have unintended consequences.
What removing subsidies do is unleash the potential. Lots of farming communities that live with subsidies are convinced that removing them is a dooms day scenario.
However evidence often doesn't support this. Japan used to protect its market for beef. Then this was forced to be opened by the US. Japan farmer then realized that their specialization was high quality beef. And now Japan is globally famous and exports lots of high quality beef.
Removing subsidies can lead to structural changes and consolidation, but it can also have lots of positive effects.
And the other situation is no subsidy, fewer players as they have to take what little profit there is and spend it more on overhead, and presumably less money reinvested in the local economy overall because of less economic activity from fewer players as well as that subsidy no longer being available to spend back on overhead and recirculate into the economy. And profit is presumably held by fewer and wealthier people who spend even less proportionally in the local economy than someone with less means.
Compare subsidies to farmers, all farmers are highly inefficient farming with no exports. No great public transport system and roads with potholes.
To:
No subsidies. Highly efficient farmers that export. Fantastic bus connection and roads in the whole countryside.
> take what little profit there is
Before there was no net profit at all, it was a net lose to society. You were moving profits from other sectors to the farm sector.
> And profit is presumably held by fewer and wealthier people
If a farmer is successful, they should make money, just like people in all other sectors in the economy.
Nobody makes the argument that we should subsidize all manufacturing, so that we can have lots of small relatively poor manufacturing sites that lose money.
This if course doesn't necessarily work for every country, but the general doom and gloom about subsidy is often proven wrong.
Farming subsidies are a national security tool, not a handout.
Anyway, it's clear that your position is political in nature otherwise you'd be just as outraged by green subsidies.
Denmark set aside DKK 53.5 billion for green subsidies in 2022. But this isn't market distortion to the same degree as farming subsidies, is it? That's the flaw in your argument. It's inconsistently applied based on politics, isn't it?
Re. green subsidies that is better characterised as investment in technology of the future. You might also like to compare subsidies to the fossil fuel sector as well.
Meat has many more negative externalities than plants. Thats the argument for substituting green farming.
Of course it’s political.. anything is to some degree.
You should educate yourself. Europe imports around 40% of the agricultural production it consumes.
The "surplus" is referenced in economical value and reflects luxury exports such as wine, which is hardly what keeps Europe alive in case of all-out war.
The whole point of Europe's common agricultural policy is food security including an event of all-out war.
Your comments sound like advocating against having a first-aid kit just because you sell silk scarves.
The green subsidies are also paid out to farmers… it is outrageous. Imagine if we were still paying subsidies to weavers because of their “strategic importance in case of war” and also paying them green subsidies to avoid using the toxic chemicals they would otherwise use doing the thing they are only doing in the first place because it justifies the theater that has the state maintaining their consistent income.
It's absurd to not acknowledge they are both.
This is a particularly ignorant and clueless opinion to have.
The whole point of Europe's common agricultural policy is to preserve the potential of agricultural production as a strategic asset. Europe's strong economy and huge population density, coupled with cheap access to agricultural production from south America and Africa, renders most agricultural activity economically unfeasible. The problem is that this means Europe is particularly vulnerable to a blockade, and in case of all out war the whole continent risks being starved in a few months.
The whole point of EU's common agricultural policy is to minimize this risk.
Owners of farmland are provided a incentive to keep their farms on standby even if they don't produce anything exactly to mitigate this risk. It would be more profitable to invest in some domains such as, say, real estate. Look at the Netherlands: they are experiencing a huge housing crisis and the whole land in Holland consists of dense urban housing bordered by farm land. It would be tempting for farmers to just cash out on real estate if they didn't had an economic upside.
You would do better if you educated yourself on a topic before commenting on it.
If war breaks out, you need to feed people, maintain roads, build vehicles, etc.
Note that I actually agree with your position but this is an interesting discussion on a topic I hadn't thought about deeply enough!
This happened before, twice. The solution was convoys, it worked both times.
Right now Lula wants to form a coalition with Russia, so what makes you think, in case of war, Brazil would keep selling to the EU? Maybe because USA would threathen Brazil? In that case they would focus on feeding themselves, and not the EU still.
In the entirety of human history, a base war tactic is Siege. What makes you think nobody will try it again?
That’s tempting even with subsidies. I have friend who own farming land at the outskirts of the city, they rent it to a farmer at almost net zero to themselves after taxes, but would make a small fortune if they could develop the land. The reason farmers don’t sell their land to real estate and 100x the value instantly isn’t that they don’t want to because of subsidies, it’s that they aren’t allowed to due to zoning laws, and zoning laws are what they are to protect property values, because everyone involved in designing them own at minimum one property. The only political party we have representing renters in any capacity never get any power in the governmental bodies that govern zoning laws.
> The whole point of Europe's common agricultural policy is to preserve the potential of agricultural production as a strategic asset.
Nothing about that required the current setup. Imagine if we were talking about government subsidies for private militias because we needed to maintain the much more directly important military capacity. Wouldn’t that be crazy? Why is the farming subsidies seen differently. Why must the government pay to private institutions who’s worth had disappeared. If we want governments to maintain farmable land so be it. We don’t have to finically support an artificial elite based them having owned a one profitable asset. Just let it degrade in value and buy it when it hits bottom.
Not really? It is very protective to maintain an agricultural, energy, and industrial base; not doing so is immensely risky.
Take Germany the first winter after the Ukraine invasion as an example, a mad scramble to fill a huge hole in their energy sector. Imagine the same scenario but with food, or munitions.
You simply cannot rely solely on global supply chains for industries that are critical to survival of a nation. The ability to power, feed, and defend yourself is a primary concern of a nation state and is worth economic inefficiency.
With all that said, I have _no_ idea how Europe and Denmark specifically does subsidies for agriculture. It could be asinine. But philosophically, imo, it is uncontroversially necessary in some form or another. It is far too risky to save a penny on importing wheat from Brazil and risk famines.
Because you can live without private militias but you can't live without food?
That all said - farming has gotten vastly more productive both per man hour and per acre over the past 100 years. Logically we simply do not need the same amount of land devoted to agriculture as we did before - at least in most cases.
So long as your food security is not being impacted - and I do mean under the worst possible stress model you can come up with - I don't see a problem with plans like this. Land use changes over time, and it should be expected.
Plus, it looks like a large portion of this will be simply a different form of agriculture - forestry. This will probably be more in-demand in 50-100 years with current trends, but that's a wild guess.
Groundwater in Denmark is drinkable and most people wanna keep it that way. But unfortunately, fertilizer has killed of huge areas of sealife.
We also have way more people to feed and house than 100 years ago, you cannot look at productivity increase in isolation, demand for both food and land has also risen significantly.
Denmark is a part of the EU. Their agricultural policy follows EU's common agricultural policy. Food security is evaluated accounting for all members, not individual member-states in isolation. In case of a scenario that puts food security at risk, such as an all-out war, it's in her best interests of all member states if the whole Europe can preserve it's food security.
Food security is simply not a relevant concern here.
Also, German economy is stagnate, based on a cheap russian gas and cooperation with china. So now, the idea is to target South America for exports while balancing it with import of South American foodstuff(EU-Mercosur agreement, that we know will not be ratified by individual countries in a democratic process, but by the Commission).
The problem Germany has to fix is the Common Agricultural Policy, that's one of the pillars of the EU. They are using the Green Agenda to force countries to reforest their fields. Of course the whole reforestation program is designed in a way that benefits states (Germany) that have got rid of their forests long time ago, and is unfavorable for countries that developed their agriculture after the WW2 - like Denmark and Finland.
Expect a heated discussion between Germany and France, rise of right wing parties in smaller countries, and a push for stricter integration.
https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/11/19/eu-mercosur-tra...
https://forest.fi/article/whos-to-pay-the-cost-of-eus-nature...
https://hir.harvard.edu/germanys-energy-crisis-europes-leadi...
In all western countries, far right groups are crawling to grab more and more power gradually. Those groups feed basically on farmer followers, ruthlessly brainwashed with fake news, antiscience and outrage, and the system has proven to work well (See US).
Until now traditional parties believed that could control the situation and appease the farmers with more money, and maybe even benefit of some votes of grateful people on return. The wake up has being brutal. Each euro given to farmers is just a victory reclaimed by this groups, that nurture a higher discontent.
So now that they are coming for they political heads and the time is running out, traditional politicians feel the pressure to take some delayed unpleasant decisions before is too late, and getting rid of the fake farmers to build a market from there is a first step. If fake farmers can sell subsidized meat for a lower price, the real farmers suffer for it.
Nature is an abstraction, not a weird angry god. We need to capture GHG and stop emitting more but that’s pretty much it. That will most likely involve reforestation as it’s a good carbon sink but using the expression “returning thing to nature” is not a correct way to frame it.
There’s already a housing crisis…
Where this might actually make sense is around waterways to prevent erosion. And farmers have taken down a large percentage of the tree rows between fields that were planted in the dust bowl days in an effort to use every inch of their field.
Although, I am personally in favor of simple regulations instead cash handouts.
It's as if your economic planning is based own how good it appears to a potential time traveler from 100 years ago
"The people work 30 hours a week and eat wine and cheese whenever they want! Everybody is rich!"
And having people living healthy, well-fed, lives of leisure seems like a pretty good definition of rich to me. What’s the better one?
> Both Denmark and Netherland are big in agriculture export and they are very good at it.
And both are tiny and being swarmed by sustainability issues.
Because trees don't grow well in the ocean? :)
There is developed areas (cities/towns/industry) and farm land.
Most of the land not suitable for farming was turned into farm land. Through extremely hard work over the past 150 years. Like straightening rivers, draining marshes, and planting up the heath.
People no longer use wood as a fuel, or in very small amounts compared to the past, and some former pastures have been re-colonized by trees.
Czechia is currently 34 per cent forest. Used to be less than 20 per cent in the Theresian cadastre (mid 18-th century).
Two things were immediately apparent from the old photographs - less forest - tons of fruit trees
Fitting is also this anecdote I heard when visiting a historical mill. They had a huge linden tree in their yard, and they told us that in the olden days this was a symbol of prosperity, because the original owner showed off that they could afford to plant a useless, non-fruit-bearing - a status symbol.
Coming full circle - the best thing would be if we could plant tons of trees that also produce food - something like the baobabs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adansonia_digitata . E.g. pigs were fed oak's acorns in fall.
[1]: https://www.forskning.no/norges-forskningsrad-partner-miljoo...
This is up from about 2% in the early 1800s, back when ships were built from wood, and firewood was used for heating. Funnily, the slow and steady build-up during those 200 years was partially motivated by the fact that when the British destroyed the fleet in 1807, there was simply not enough wood to build a new one.
So I’ll offer the “metatropolis” anthology, which as a bonus has an audiobook version read by the Star Trek cast. Anyone got anything else?
One thing I like about The Ministry for the Future, is that it doesn't focus on the "apocalyptic" aspect (i.e., the usual fighting for survival), but rather examines the political and economic aspects.
I don't recall the glaring errors right now, however, given this is an area where I (at least once upon a time) was an expert, it was quite bad to read this and realize there are likely other serious errors in topics with which I am not at all familiar.
While this is of course a work of fiction, getting verifiable facts wrong, intentionally or not, ruins it for me.
To piggyback on the rest of this thread, people like meat and don't want to stop eating lots of meat. People are not going to like things that make them stop eating meats, whether it's governement buying out producers, a carbon tax, a carbon quota, whatever.
"Ministry of the Future" is full of stuff like "and the central bankers could reshape the economy, so they did by doing XYZ" as if "XYZ" was important but barely discusses the fact that "reshaping the economy" might upset lots of people. How were they convinced to give up air travel, cars, etc?
I think the point of the book is that when the consequences are serious enough, it pushes significant social and behavioral change that people would not consider or accept otherwise. It's hard for us to imagine how society could actually change so drastically, but when people have been through a crisis of immense proportions, they think differently. India completely transforming its governance structure seems implausible but only because we haven't experienced 20M people dying at once from a preventable cause. These kind of events are triggers for social revolutions. We've seen this in history.
the eco-terrorism was an interesting aspect that I hadn't thought of before, but actually seems quite plausible
Why is that?
I really liked Snow Crash and Anathem. Reamde was okay. I don't remember much about Diamond Age or Cryptonomicon.
I kind of wonder if it is easier for me to enjoy fiction that requires more "suspension of disbelief" with ftl or time travel, alien races and magic.
In comparison when I don't have to suspend any disbelief, we haven't met aliens, other worlds are actually too far to get to, and physics and science is unyielding... it is harder to enjoy myself.
Let's hope butter and bacon from Poland is going to cover our needs.
We can reduce land use and have food security if people were not so intend on eating/drinking animal products every day (and there are perfectly fine vegetarian alternatives).
A huge chunk of that output is purely for export.
Pole here - Poland switched form being a pork exporter to an importer over the course of the last few decades.
Top external suppliers are...
Denmark (53kt)
Belgium (50kt)
Germany (44kt)
The Netherlands (24.5kt)
Spain (24.5kt)
That's really hilarious: Poland imports it's pork from Denmark.
(ASF and almost no piglets breeding)
It's not like this will happen overnight anyways.
What criteria are you using?
Cutting food production in half would not jeopardize food security. Switching focus to plant-based food production would more than double it again.
In all earnesty, what does it change to send troops to Ukraine? What did any of these red lines we European were afraid of help?
Should not send tanks, it could start a war.
Should not send planes, it could start a war.
Should not allow Ukraine to attack inside Russia, it could start a war.
Sure, but Europe's not growing. It is purely in "shrink forever" mode. This is easily measured, any time fertility drops below 2.1 that's what happens. But ignore that a moment, what if you wanted to depopulate Europe? This might be a good policy for that. Get the timing just right, and it's not even a genocide... food shortages that don't starve anyone just encourages the last few breeders to put a lid on it, and voila! The fantasy of more than a few out there.
Increased lifespans will soon come to an end, but even if magically they could remain you'd just end up on a planet where everyone's too old to have children anymore, and human extinction is locked in. Every second fertility rate's below 2.1, there are fewer people of reproductive age and within your own lifetime there won't even be enough of those to sustain a world population in the tens of millions if suddenly they switched back to 2.1 (and they won't). This is doomsday. But be sure to have fewer children to reduce your carbon footprint.
the government will offer to buy the land from farmers etc.
but they can just say 'no'
Some serious "but who will pick the cotton vibes".
As if farmers in Cambodia aren't draining his tractor's oil into the river passing through their land.
Bonus points the politicians can then import the food using a shell company in Singapore and steal tax dollars.
Beef emits 49.89 kg CO2 eq. per 100 grams of protein. Tofu 1.98 kg.
As much as I'd love for Europe to be reforested, the reduced food security might come back to bite us.
This takes years, which isn't enough in the case of a major food security event, i.e. war.
This won't be implemented overnight.
We could also just make less bio fuel, or eat more plants less animals, etc.
Lots of options, sure we need some food security, but there are limits to how much overproduction we need.
IIRC, I had read somewhere a while ago that Denmark was going to convert to fully organic farming.
So, just now, I googled for a relevant phrase and found this as one of the results:
https://ecobnb.com/blog/2017/07/denmark-organic/
This was the search I used:
https://www.google.com/search?q=Denmark+doing+fully+organic+...
- More forests protect a country against sudden supply chain crises. It's is just a small protection (and only for the commodity wood) but still
- Forests are the first line of defense in drone warfare as we've seen in the War in Ukraine, where maneuvers are often concentrating on, and gains are counted in, Tree-Lines.
Well, it is. More expensive food means a worse quality of life for normal people. It also means more time spent working to pay for groceries, and less time and money to do things that threaten the elites like accumulating capital or performing activism.
The FoodCo is the one driving price up. Them and consumer behavior.
Everyone appreciates the farmers, some farmers just don't seem to appreciate the harms certain types of farming put on everyone else and the ecosystem, and they'll hide behind how essential calories are to protect their interests.
You're aware the farming lobby is one of the strongest in many countries right? They're not under-served politically. Farming is one of the most subsidized industries.
Wheres the billionare farmers in the cover of Forbers?
Where?
Btw.: more than 50.000 Ukrainian soldiers are dead by the latest estimates I have read.
I guarantee you if Europe heeded Trumps warning and cut Russia off instead of outsourcing energy production to them, Ukraine would not have been invaded. Even today, there is still Russian gas flowing through Ukraine into Europe. It's unconscionable, and Europeans should be ashamed that they elected such traitors for leaders.
Putin invaded because he thought nobody would do shit, because everyone was signalling nobody would do shit. Biden said he won't do shit and stopped selling weapons to Ukraine and lifted Russian sanctions. Obama did not do shit the last time with Crimea and Donbas. Germans were laughing at Trump who warned them that Putin will start shit if they continue like this, and for the most part, Europeans just increased their dependence on Russian gas.
The moral culpability here could not be clearer. Of course Putin bears ultimate responsibility, but he was empowered and encouraged by spineless corrupt pathetic western leaders.
Lucky denmark for being able to just be anti-farmer. France and other countries have to choose a major city to demolish to meet their commitments.
"Denmark will plant 1B trees and convert 10% of citizens into healthy mulch.
The future has no jobs.
I literally passed it by while walking the dog on the morning it started, and just 10 minutes later when returning, a neat and large pile of logs stripped of branches was at the roadside and a handful of trees were gone. Two days later when taking the same route, the forest was no more, just a handful of funny trees sitting on barren mudlands surrounded by enormous piles of logs marked and tagged for transport to various destinations.
Sometimes these idiotic musings and the little chuckle I get internally are the brighter part of my morning. Even in fading vision there are things to appreciate.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-climate-deniers-pl...
Large parts of Europe are basically forests that have been temporarily cut down. If you let the land be, the forest will often grow back with minimal effort.
HN threads are usually much better quality than this ( anyone with opposed ideas are downvoted to oblivion ).
Rubbish thread. Nothing to learn here.
There's a lot more reasons to plant trees than direct AGW offset.
A huge amount of farmland is now surplus to production. Grasses and fields of weeds aren't always ideal. Taking land out of production can also attract offset funding for farmers (-yes, this is a secondary economic outcome and may also incur other costs)
People are healthier around trees. People like trees. Even Bill Gates may actually like trees.
We have done a lot of deforestation, and that absolutely has negatively impacted our climate, and we should work to reverse it.
> Affluence does not equal wisdom.
True
Just waiting for someone to factcheck about planting trees: there must be nuance. In australia we burn em to protect people and the environment for example. We have done it for millenia.
When those trees die and then rot or burn, that CO2 will be released right back into the atmosphere. They’ll temporarily hold some, yeah, but it’s like trying to rapidly fire a squirt gun at a fire when someone else is spraying it with a firehose of gasoline.
Especially because trees plant themselves. If they want to set aside the land for forest and seed it a little to get going - great - but those large tree planting operations are a waste of time at best or carbon credit loopholes at worst.
Climate and environment are two separate things, and are in fact sometimes at odds with each other. Denmark is doing semi-alright on climate, but is absolutely terrible on environment. Aquatic ecosystems in the country are basically completely destroyed by agriculture, to the point where previously productive shallow waters are completely dead due to oxygen depletion.
> Deforestation plays a significant role in climate change, contributing 12–20% of global greenhouse gas emissions
> They're destroying their own industry and people's livelihood and food security, for barely moving the needle on the altar of enviromentalism.
The environnemental impact of their AG is peanuts on a global scale but cause massive problems on their own lands and coast. Food security will still be largely fine : there’s large surpluses and you are actually safer stocking grains than livestock, especially in modern silos. For industry and livelihood I’m sure those guys are smart enough to shift to others activities. That may be quite easy when you look at the current meat industry profitability.
The fallacy is to say "I, as an individual in a small country, cannot do anything because these other large countries are, collectively, much more powerful". Well, no kidding. Any Denmark-sized administrative section of a larger country (say, a US state, a Chinese province, or a German bundesland) has the same or smaller influence on the climate. Often a much smaller influence due to how international diplomacy works.
It's a category error. Whether progress is made in Denmark-sized chunks or in US/EU/China/Germany-sized chunks is irrelevant, as long as the average velocity per human is the same on a global scale. It's not high enough at the moment, but it's equally significant wherever it happens.
Denmark isn't just trying to reduce their CO2 footprint, though. It's also dealing with terrible soil and water quality, both the result of many years of hyper-intensive farming. That's a local problem that needs local policy to solve.
I am the a huge fan of forests and spend a lot of time in the woods, but man, more trees will not feed us.
If we bring back our meat consumption (especially beef) to something more balanced for our health we can free-up a massive amount of surface.
I'm not saying that everyone should be vegetarian or vegan. I'm following the notes of the IPCC and studies that says that we can, and should, reduce some of our meat consumption and get those proteines from all the many other sources (peas, tofu...).
Beef is the coal of food. Lets progress to something more efficient, dense and good for our environment and our health.
More importantly, most of the gas Californias consume is imported as well.
I guess its OK to drill and build coal electric plants as well as it is elsewhere. /s
[1] https://www.perplexity.ai/search/how-much-energy-california-...
I love green tech like solar etc, made my home even more efficient etc but we need fresh food to LIVE!
We also yearly import 1.8 million tons of soy from South America to feed said pigs, because we can't grow enough food for them ourselves.
It would be nice to have some nature to walk in, it's something I miss here and something there's a lot of in England, and it's great combined with their public footpath system!
As currently we're destroying the nature, and waters due to this extremely intensive farming and as others have mentioned Denmark is producing 200-300 % of our domestic need + it requires significant import from south America where it wouldn't surprise me if this import lead to significant deforestation.
I know China is also working on increasing their domestic production[1] which is one of the primary markets that Denmark is exporting a lot to , It was 85000 tons last year[2]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/08/business/china-pork-farms... [2]https://effektivtlandbrug.landbrugnet.dk/artikler/marked/103...