Imagine limiting your concept of camping strictly to “must be isolated and away from everything” and thinking that you can’t also do “I just wanted to be in the woods but still need to work and/or stay in touch”. For the record, that’s potentially doubling your camping time.
Sad.
We have a Jackery 300 and just picked up a 1000. The 300 has been great camping and in power outages but we also just keep it in the living room to charge our small devices. It gets recharged on DIY solar setup.
The Explorer 1000 was crazy cheap for Black Friday and easily powers our chest freezers - we get frequent power outages. The only disappointment is they use a slightly different DC cable for car (ie 12V) that you have to pay extra for, but we can still charge from the inverter on the solar setup until we can source that plug - I ain’t paying the ludicrous $30 Jackery wants for a simple cable.
Very Impressive!
I love that you think you can handle “science”
Do let us know when you start discussing “science”
You don’t even understand how academia and science works.
LOL. If only you knew. But please explain! How does it work Pizza69? HOW? Does it involve trolling and endlessly saying nothing?
I’m sorry for your PhD holding friend.
My partner. The tenured professor. In science.
LOL.
LOL.
LOL.
Bring it
No you.
Oh wait, you don’t actually have a point to make, do you? I mean, beyond “farmer stoopid me so much better”. Is that what you publish? Who reads that except other people who like to say “farmer stoopid” and hear themselves talk at dinner parties.
I am all for research and all for science, even in the very abstract. I make practical use of it constantly. But never mistake the reality of it - you are nothing without farmers.
Sure but if Beyond Meat can make a delicious bit of fake cow or chicken with 1/10 of the land and water, then we have a drop-in replacement that requires no cultural change
I mean, good point but… I really do think it requires a cultural change. I’m a big fan of Beyond Meat products yet so many people don’t view it the same way.
Alas, I have trouble believing their claims about land use and water even while I acknowledge it’s an improvement. And although they are not organic, I can guarantee that animal products are used in the production of their ingredients and that it would be difficult for them to source said ingredients otherwise. Now imagine they blow up and do 1000x the volume…
Me and my stupid farming friends laugh hysterically at people like you, especially when we are discussing peer-reviewed studies in relation to our real-world experience and some one like you comes along, needing desperately to tell us how everything works. We like to say you know “everything” and yet nothing. It’s long been speculated that the arrogance comes from insecurity and that completely blinds you, closing your mind. One of the principal dangers of academia-itis absent real world experience. But I wonder how we would know… we’re just a buncha country bumpkins. Golly gee wilikers huh huh.
Let me know when you’re ready to discuss papers on systems.
I don’t think YOU are not. Maybe even afraid. But feel free to try.
…optimize the model for biodiversity and animal wellbeing
It kind of deliberately doesn’t come across but, primarily from the standpoint of lessening our impact on the earth, I’d like to see no animals produced for food. It really isn’t strictly necessary for our nutrition but we’ve evolved and optimized for it’s consumption to the point where whole species exist only for that purpose, e.g. cows and chickens and so much culture has developed around it. That’s a lot of back tracking.
From the standpoint of their well-being… well, I can’t put humans on some pedestal and say we somehow aren’t part of the ecosystem here. We are animals too** and I think it’s ok to act like it. It’s just not ok to be the completely dominant species to the exclusion and extinction of others not least because it’s literally to our own determent.
So promoting biodiversity to me means living lighter on the land and working in conjunction with other species, plant and animal. For now it’s a compromise that maybe can put us in the direction of the ideal I tried to outline and beyond. There are lots of things that I have done that I think should be more common practice in farming, and many stem from quasi-permaculture principles. This isn’t just “don’t do monocultures” but more like “work with the land”. A good example is that allowing native plants to grow around and in the field - I leave large strips as pathways for beneficials. This one thing has been hugely successful and completely eliminated the need for any pesticides, ‘natural’ or otherwise. Along with mulching, greatly reduce water consumption.
The principal obstacle is all this is our food systems have been optimized for profit - not by farmers but by corporations and others who seek to “add value” through processing. In that less money goes to farmers and less nutrition to consumers. And this isn’t just because of the processing but also moving production away from nutritionally dense and tastier things to whatever ships and processes well both in terms of species and varieties. This means practices that make complete sense for regeneration, biodiversity and nutrition tend to be excluded in favor of more inequitable ‘profit’. Given that we view food as a human right that’s really messed up.
Edit: **I’m not saying that should justifying eating other animals. But I just don’t buy that we are somehow special mainly because it’s that thinking that got us into this mess in the first place. Like we don’t have to adhere to the rules or something.
"Well actshuaaally…
Hurburdur dur durrrr"
what do you think would be the minimal amount of animals and land required to feed those 8 billion organically
It’s a question complicated by the current “realities” of capitalism where, for example, people are willing to have their food grown in terrible conditions in another country and then imported over thousands of miles and many weeks to save a few percent on costs.
If we can ignore all that and I can just spell out what I think is the ideal scenario, it looks basically like this:
These are a lot of preconditions, I acknowledge.
If this can happen I believe we will require less land than we currently use for our combined animal & human food production. Currently that’s around 50% of the land area of the US, or 1.2 billion acres but this includes about 650 million acres for grazing and about the same for forest-use, which I believe means lumber production but could also mean grazing. Only about 400 million acres are used for growing crops and the majority of this is for commodities like soybeans and corn.
The best proxy for productivity is not actually yield of commodities but dollar value. This is because we want to equate as closely as possible productivity with nutrional value without the value-adds of say, processed foods. A typical acre for commodities might net you $150-300 per acre in profit while a typical acre on an integrated farm growing diverse produce (aka speciality crops) can yield over $25,000 per acre up to as much as double that. If you remove some of the headwinds from farmers like mortgages, competition with cheap imported produce, high marketing costs and high transportation costs you could probably see much more than that.
In this scenario food costs would very likely stay about the same or even go down because farmers can get very good margins and better economies of scale from higher demand.
So, back to the question of how much land - if you use the dollar amount and take $2 trillion as the figure we spend on food, and assuming margins around 30% that means revenue of $100k per acre. This would mean you’d need about 20,000,000 acres. Even assuming my napkin math is way off and it’s double or triple that… it’s a lot less.
Yes, they are.
No they aren’t. That’s just your arrogance and prejudice.
You’re looking for education on some random website in a comment
LOL. Rest assured I did not think you were capable of providing such an education.
Did you know for example, that it’s increasingly common for farmers to not just have a degree in agronomy but also subjects like chemistry soil science, etc? It’s really a requirement if you want to work for any of the larger farming operations. Now my background is in tech, specifically software engineering. My partner has a PhD in biochemistry. A neighboring fruit guy has a PhD in biology and two other farmers I know have advanced degrees in ecology.
But of course you know better and what would I know, I’m just a stupid ignorant farmer.
I also think it’s a very solvable problem. But there are a lot of complex moving parts in our food production system. I’m thinking of this in the context of the current highly industrialized state of agriculture and the current demands of consumers and how do you make a shift toward sustainable agriculture while also reducing meat production and animal exploitation.
So for me, the way it’s being grown now isn’t actually an option. 5000 acres of feed corn on dead soil that’s continually pumped with synthetic fertilizers is a thoroughly bad idea and turning those acres into corn (or anything) for humans is every bit as bad.
Believe it or not, it’s actually rather hard to get quality manure inputs for many farms. Depends on where you are of course. But the stuff weighs a lot, is never where you want it and the largest quantities are from CAFOs which are decidedly NOT high quality and require a lot more work to be useable in a sustainable context. That manure is sold, sure, and ends up in food production, but not to the exclusion of synthetic inputs. If you eliminate CAFOs then there’s even more demand for manure such that sustainable operations which require high quality compost because they don’t use synthetic fertilizers are going to have a hard time getting enough fertility.
So it’s easy to generalize and say there is excess manure from so much animal production, but the reality is that much if not most of that manure is not where you need it. I think a lot of folks don’t realize that sustainable meat production that isn’t integrated with sustainable vegetable production adds a lot of complexity, and yet that’s where we are at right now. The integrated food systems (e.g. rotational grazing etc) of times gone by were much more efficient but are relatively uncommon today, mainly because of market forces.
Hopefully this is a better summary of the point I was trying to make yesterday.
The problem is the lack of imagination and knowledge on the part of the “organic” types.
Rest assured, farmers in general are not actually lacking in imagination or knowledge.
And if you don’t understand the laws of physics and how there’s no free energy, no magical cycles of C, N, P, K, S and others, let me know.
Absolutely, please regale us with your outstanding wisdom and intelligence. Do tell us how we can “move organic matter from freshly dead to soil”. I’m not sure what that means but perhaps you can educate us.
This is the comment I was waiting for.
I’m quite sympathetic to the ideas of veganic farming - most of it is just agro-ecological minus the animal contribution.
I knew a farm that was run by vegans. They literally, I kid you not, were running it on an animal sanctuary that had lots of manure which they refused to use. Great big piles of compost I would have cried over.
They drove 4 hours one way to get a load of veganic compost, which if you know anything about moving such things around, was probably enough for a raised bed or two. So when the veganic people talk about “maximizing local plant-based fertility” and “minimizing off-farm inputs”, well, that ain’t exactly what they meant.
This is an extreme example but it illustrates how sometimes the adherence to dogmatic principles in food production results in no production.
Growing vegetables without animal manure -and- without synthetic fertilizers works on a teeeny-tiny scale where you already have sufficient fertility and enough land do basically grow grass for compost. It’s completely untenable for actual high-intensity food production.
The amount of manure produced by a meat industry of a scale needed to feed billions of omnivorous humans is massively excessive to any possible needs in terms of crop fertilizer.
This is true.
Edit to be more clear and add some nuance because re-reading everything I can see how you interpreted my comment the way you did.
The context was essentially replacing animal feed with human food, in whole or in part. I did say “less animal production” but to try to be clear - I am completely discounting industrialized production and CAFOs. I do not consider them legitimate methods. That is really the source of your pollution and excess. I didn’t specify this and I should have.
We can argue that there is some large reduction in animal production where we can find a balance but the debate is always one or the other and dominated by militant vegans who want fresh veggies and NO animal production. Currently that’s not possible.
But another issue that relates to CAFOs is that so much of the manure is not available for composting. We’re not set up for that because there are so many fewer organic operations. So if you reduce animal production across the board without regard to type of operation we absolutely will see a fertility deficit.
First up, the principal is sound - meat production is very inefficient even if meat consumption is “efficient” just from the narrow perspective of getting adequate protein quickly and conveniently.
If demand for meat decreased then there’d be more food in the supply chain for humans.
I don’t really have any answers for #3… just bringing it up as something to consider.
Or we could just use the 70% of farm land to feed us instead of the animals that make up 10-20% of a diet.
Have you worked out how that food will be grown?
In fact, you did not. At any time. In any of your tail-chasing comments.
And that… that is the most hilarious part of all. You have NO point to make at all. You never once got past acting like you are a whole long week out of elementary school.
LOL.