not to start a flamewar or anything, but one of the best things we could all do for the environment is just going vegetarian. It's way more efficient.

nadiatims wrote:

not to start a flamewar or anything, but one of the best things we could all do for the environment is just going vegetarian. It's way more efficient.

more efficient in what way, though?

Like i said, farm animals actually provide a beneficial purpose on some types of land. They do the jobs much more efficiently than weedkillers do, for example. And if they are farmed in a way that requires no petrol, their efficiency overall is going to come way up.

But yeah, in general, we do need to cut way down on it. If we only had large animals where they were necessary to keep the ecosystem running, we'd still have to eat a lot less than we do now.

The other problem with these methods are that they are still a lot more labour intensive than monoculture in terms of harvesting. So even if the yield is good, and the petrol and water costs low, there is still the human cost to factor back in. I wonder how it weighs up really, though.

Blahah wrote:

IceCream wrote:

more efficient in what way, though? [...] farm animals actually provide a beneficial purpose on some types of land. They do the jobs much more efficiently than weedkillers do, for example.

More efficient in that a large proportion of the arable land in the world is currently used to grow feedstocks for animals, and another large proportion is used directly for grazing animals. Generally meat production has about a 10% trophic efficiency, meaning that for every 1000kCal of meat, you input about 10,000kCal of plant material, and for every hectare of meat-producing land, another 10 hectares of land are required to produce extra food for those animals. It wont happen, but if the world were vegetarian, we would easily have enough land to feed a population three times the projected maximum that the human population will ever reach. That's a much greater efficiency than could be achieved by any other alteration to our food production that has ever been proposed.

But what about if you compare the efficiency of entirely non oil produced meat of various types to crops produced with oil? What are the numbers like then? I'm imagining that even with crops, producing with fertilisers and machines, there's going to be a loss of more than 10% with current methods. Is that right?

Of course, if you can produce crops without oil, that's even better. But the harvesting of those crops, like you said, is difficult or labour intensive without machinary, whereas you potentially can farm animals more easily without machinary.

Then you also have the added benefits animals can provide in maintaining certain types of land and their ecosystems to factor in, and the health of the countryside in general. Because, if they were providing a useful function by keeping weeds down on the type of land that we want to preserve for other reasons to start with, the trophic inefficiency is relatively unimportant. In fact, this is already going on... farmers and national parks co-operate to do this, and no money changes hands because they both benefit.

Blahah wrote:

I don't have time to do the literature review now (I'll come back and do it later), but in general IceCream, forest farming is a very niche solution, and not to the problem you are thinking of.

Right, but one of the interesting things, i thought, was that it doesn't have to be forest farming. You can apply similar ideas in other areas of farming, in order to produce better, less oil consuming results. One of the examples in the BBC documentary, was that just by preserving biodiversity of grass in fields and not tilling the soil, you can produce strong hardy grass, meaning that cattle don't have to be brought inside in winter, and you can cut out a bunch of fuel costs. Another example was the double cropping and spreading the straw in the 福岡正信 video, which meant that they didn't have to keep the rice under water all summer, and didn't have to fertilise or spray pesticides, and still came out with better yields than their next door neighbour. (that bit was in the english video linked from the japanese version).

Blahah wrote:

I also think some of the things you've asserted as problems at the start of the post are not necessarily problems (pesticides, fertilizers) or have economic causes unrelated to the productivity of farming (farmers not turning a profit in some countries).

Well, it depends. Pesticides will always cost money, even if they do eliminate the dangers to helpful species like bees. I watched another Japanese program where they introduced frogs to paddy fields rather than using pesticides (they even built little walkways for them, it was cute ), so wherever a more natural way of keeping down pests is possible, it would be more cost efficient, wouldn't it?

Fertiliser is only a problem in so far as it requires oil, as far as i know. But it seems like there are problems with tilling the land, which makes it require fertiliser in the first place. I thought the footage from the 80s of the "bird feast" after tilling compared with the dead emptiness of today after so many years of heavy machinary tilling (in the BBC documentary) was quite striking. And it obviously reduces work and money if you don't need to do that. Perhaps there would be an automated way to mulch instead, for example...?

Of course, engineering also has a huge role to play in producing hardier and higher yielding plants as well though. Incorporating both could possibly give even stronger results. I'm not against large scale farming per se, but i just find the idea that you could incorporate methods from other forms of environmental management and potentially eliminate fuel costs quite interesting!! But yeah, some of the people doing this are just hippies spouting nonsense about "the balance of nature", and against scientific evidence for stuff which makes me wanna roll my eyes and puke a little.

I'm interested to hear your response about this kind of thing, since you know a hell of a lot more about this subject than i do...

Last edited by IceCream (2012 April 10, 10:39 am)

Hasn't anyone here ever heard of the man who saved a billion lives?

wow, he's great!!!

ok, i've read more, watched more videos, asked more questions when i was volunteering today, and i think while looking at the whole system is still important, yeah, it's not really going to be enough.

These ideas are probably more helpful for small scale things, not feeding the world, though of course there's still stuff to take from it.

Also, i was wrong about the soil. Just cos it's nice to dig doesn't make it nice to grow lol... apparently it's quite acidic, which is good for growing some stuff but not others.

soooo, i should learn more ^_^

oh, i was watching this this though: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwmqr3oo0Ms
a little bit unrelated, but interesting. I wonder if they'll eventually be able to sort of engineer better, more disease resistant soil for crops using different microbes and stuff then?? That would be a nice complement to engineering better crops, wouldn't it? (or do they do that too already??)

Last edited by IceCream (2012 April 11, 10:24 am)