Excuse me if I digress onto a planetary health strand. But this one has been eating at me and I cannot shake it off.
Anyway I went to a talk by George Monbiot monbiot.com/ recently. He is not a vegan, but is almost there. For example he eats road-kill and I think he hunts. In his talk he claimed that the whole story behind bringing just one pasture-raised leg of lamb to the dinner table was equivalent to taking a flight in an airplane.
I have been trying to find justification for this and as far as I see it so far it is around his aspirations of rewilding. Pasture-raised animals take up a lot of land, by definition. As the planet reduces its dependency on meat, and here we are talking about pasture raised animals, then any land unsuitable for raising crops can be returned to become forest again.
At the heart of this is the fact that if we do not eat animals our global need for land will significantly reduce. In my mind I have a guesstimate of around a sixth of the land needed. Probably in his thinking is if we also much of the 90% of soy and corn crops fields used to feed commercial animals could be rewilded also.
Here in England we have so called forests, but largely these are just woodland surrounded by fields and towns. If 5/6ths of those fields were rewilded into forest land that would be so good for carbon storage as trees came back. It would be so good for bio-diversity, allowing a much more diverse range of flora and fauna.
So what is getting my gut here is something that I had not previously considered. Many people who argue for meat consumption say that you cannot grow crops on some of that land. Monbiot's point is that since growing just crops to feed the world requires so much less land (and I have suggested here that we need around a sixth of the total farm land) then the remaining five-sixths can be rewilded, and thus with significantly more true forests carbon capture could really take off along with much greater bio-diversity.
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I get your point, but my friend's dad is a sheep farmer, and I have to say, the land his sheep graze on isn't really suitable for forestation either. Part is a valley that floods regularly (which would drown the trees) and a lot of it is very rocky. Most land around that area suitable for growing trees is used for trees (although they are usually cut down at some point).
He does loan his sheep out to local crop farmers after they've harvested too, so the sheep eat down the leftover stalks and their manure re-fertilizes the soil for the next crop. Although maybe that carbon has been offset in the calculations (i.e. carbon released from the waste crops and the lower need for chemical fertilizers).
Someone did tell me once that around 90% of the soya and grain fed to cattle is actually byproduct from other industries (soya based oils and the whisky industry). The tour guide at our local whisky distillery did confirm that's where their fermented barley goes.
Considering George has a degree in ecology or somesuch, I'm endlessly baffled by his complete lack of understanding of farming. I've followed his rants on-and-off for a few years, and he reminds me of those eminent experts from long ago who confidently predicted that spaceflight or computers were pie-in-the-sky nonsense.
There is no equivalence to be drawn between eating a leg of lamb and flying in a plane. They are utterly different actions that have different types of impact on the planet. However I can confidently state that there's nothing ecologically unsound about eating a leg of lamb. In fact if there weren't any sheep roaming the hills of Scotland, it would be a blasted wasteland (as, in fact, it was a few hundred years ago, after being comprehensively deforested). Sheep are about the only thing keeping a bare-minimum groundcover in place.
Your estimate of "one-sixth" of the land requirement for a vegan planet seems to have been plucked out of the air. I'm not sure any such figure exists even in theory, because a vegan planet would disappear into an ecological sinkhole within a matter of decades - a century at the outside. In most climates, herbivores play a critical role in soil maintenance, and one of the reasons agricultural land is dropping out of circulation at a rate of millions of hectares per year (due to soil erosion, compaction, salination, and fertility depletion) is the removal of herbivores from cropland. Veganism would accelerate that process.
Your argument seems to be that that you could take one-sixth of the prime farmland (as still exists), convert it to pure-vegan acres, and reforest the rest. The problem there is that, as soon as you'd turned that first one-sixth to useless dust - which would be inevitable - you'd have to start cutting down the forests again. When the last tree is cut down and the last whiff of topsoil blows away, you'd be in a bit of a tight spot.
You're avoiding the obvious (and ecologically-sound) solution for the same reason Nestle and Cargill are avoiding it: ideology. Convert the whole lot to mixed pasture and raise vegetables, perennials [trees/shrubs], and meat. Together. As nature intended. Apart from anything else, you can pasture sheep, pigs and (to a lesser extent) cattle on land that's useless for growing annual vegetables, but excellent for growing perennials. You may have heard of the finest ham on the planet - Jamón Ibérico - which is produced from pigs raised on oak-tree mast. It's a perfect combination of ecological sensitivity and hard economic logic.
Incidentally, forests don't store as much carbon as grasslands - reason being, carbon is captured mostly in soil, not in standing biomass. You can store several times more carbon in managed pasture compared to an unmanaged forest. That's why cutting down a rainforest is such a disaster: it's not so much the loss of trees, it's the oxidation of the soil humus that's the problem.
What was the state of our planet before commercial farming took off? As far as my UK history recalls many of the trees were removed from our land by the Anglo-Saxons to provide tillable land for each household. And later of course Henry VIII fighting the armada took its toll on lots of oak.
You argue that land without animals will become barren. I don't see it as a land without animals. Just a land without animals raised to be killed. Rather a land co-existing more naturally with animals, with a more diverse collection of animals. I see cows for example growing up from babies, raising their own babies and living to a ripe old age. As you argue these animals may help support good crop land.
And, although I advocate a vegan lifestyle as being arguably the healthiest lifestyle on the planet the epidemiological evidence is not there that an entirely plant based lifestyle will fulfil long healthy lives generation after generation. Not yet. It is coming though. What we do know is that a primarily plant based lifestyle is the healthiest. So what I am saying is that some residual of meat eating may work for some people. By residual I am thinking of a small piece of meat once per week.
As a total aside I went up to visit a friend's field the other day. This is about 63 acres of land, and its two fields. He allows a local farmer to put cows on the top field each winter. This keeps the undergrowth down. In summer it is a glorious dazzling meadow of flowers. The other day it was a carpet of yellow. The other field is largely trees. Over the last 25 years we have helped plant around 11k trees.
The purpose of our visit was to see our daughter's meadow. She died aged 24 from sudden unexplained death from epilepsy in 2011 and we were fortunate enough to be able to plant 24 trees in her memory in a dell on this land. We have 3 walnut, crab apple, sweet chestnut, mulberry, 2 apple, 2 pear, plum, rowan, silver birch etc and it is surrounded by some oak. Since she was a vegan each year we have vegan picnic on the land.
>> What was the state of our planet before commercial farming took off?
You could write an entire book about that. It depends which country you're talking about and what time period. But yes, England was heavily deforested. Scotland even more so.
>> Just a land without animals raised to be killed.
Well, we've had this conversation before, so I won't rehash the arguments except to note that you're apparently OK with animals being killed for no apparent reason, and with their being preyed upon by other animals. You, as a vegan, are personally are responsible for the same number of animal deaths, plus or minus, as I am. I'm responsible for maybe half a pig, or a tenth of a cow, over and above your tally (I don't eat much chicken). Your animals die in combine harvesters or disc harrows, or are poisoned by pesticides, or are eaten by predators, in the fields where your wheat is grown. In fact because I eat less stuff made from wheat - which as I've pointed out requires a vast amount of land for a given tonnage - my dead-animals count might even be less than yours.
Nature is cruel. No animal lives to a "ripe old age" - the vast majority of them die young. Many die at birth. That's natural selection at work. It's not merely survival of the fittest, but survival of the fit and lucky.
They touch upon this subject in "The Magic Pill", which is available on YouTube. Skip to 1:05 if you don't want to watch the whole thing.
>> What we do know is that a primarily plant based lifestyle is the healthiest.
I agree with you here. My diet - as I've said before - is actually plant-based. That's not because I think it's healthy as such, but because that's what I enjoy eating. My meat consumption is maybe 60-90kg/year, which in my opinion is a close ecological match for my climate. It will vary in different places: for example, people in arid zones should be eating more meat.
I can't comprehend what it's like to lose a child, so I won't comment on that. The trees that you have planted will not just have a beneficial effect in their local niche - they will be re-seeded elsewhere by birds and other animals, indirectly providing habitat and food for many years to come.
The definition of a vegan is to reduce the harm intentionally caused by humans to animals, and that above all else is about the act of needless killing.
Animals killing other animals because they NEED the other animal to live is not an issue for vegans. Animals do not have supermarkets to go shopping in. Animals do not have moral agency. Animals do not look at an animal and ask "do I have a choice?"
Animals when hunting generally go for the weakest animal, the one that is at the back of the pack. By killing and eating the weakest animal the strain of the herd is improved over time. Humans when hunting tend to go for the best of the herd as a challenge. Thus the quality of the herd is depleted over time. Only humans kill the best.
For vegans it is not about how many animals are killed. It is about choice. Humans have choice to reduce the harm they cause.
But even without choice, as I say, omnivore humans cause infinitely more animals to be killed than vegans do because of the overwhelming amount of crops being dedicated to animal fodder.
>> For vegans it is not about how many animals are killed. It is about choice. Humans have choice to reduce the harm they cause.
Indeed. And I do that by choosing to farm responsibly.
You have an incredibly narrow definition of "harm". Look at the bigger picture here - does it not bother you, for example, that for every kilo of vegetables you eat a few kilos of topsoil has been washed away?
>> Animals do not have moral agency. Animals do not look at an animal and ask "do I have a choice?"
It seems to me that our big brains have become more of a burden than an asset of late. Just look where our decisions have got us. Look at the epidemic of disease and misery caused by doctors who think "a calorie is a calorie".
>> omnivore humans cause infinitely more animals to be killed than vegans do because of the overwhelming amount of crops being dedicated to animal fodder.
If you're talking about Modern Western Humans, of course you're right. Sadly, we're trying to spread the Industrial Farming model across the globe, but not every nation has gone mad the way we have.
Your solution is to simply accept industrial agriculture - with all its senseless killing, economic waste, and environmental destruction - and try to slow down the damage. What's the point? All you get is a temporary reprieve. Fundamentally you've accepted that it's OK to subvert nature in the pursuit of ideological goals. That is a very, very dangerous game to play, because in all of human history, humans have never won against nature.
I'm suggesting we say: "enough already". Let's show a little humility and assume that nature has got it right. That's far more likely to pan out in practice because so many people are waking up to the fact that natural farming works. It gives them what they want, while taking nothing from nature by force.
>> Humans when hunting tend to go for the best of the herd as a challenge. Thus the quality of the herd is depleted over time. Only humans kill the best.
Again, you're looking at one specific dysfunctional behaviour common in the West. Farmers who raise pastured animals can't do this because, if they did, they'd go bankrupt. They save the best for breeding stock and cull the weak (and the unlucky). Their explicit aim is to mimic natural processes.
If you're genuine about reducing harm - as opposed to just promoting a quasi-religious idea - watch the video I suggested. There's an ex-vegan woman (1:05) giving a very succinct explanation of how natural farming does that ... while veganism makes it worse.
Cows and other domestic animals cannot be turned out and left to look after themselves. They are subject to illnesses and other health problems which can require intervention and care from qualified people, who need to be paid for what they do.
If you are suggesting that only a small amount of meat would be available to eat, you will also need armed guards on your animals to prevent rustling! It’s already going on in the UK countryside and would only get worse in the situation you suggest.
If such animals are genuinely necessary for the maintenance of the soil (as some claim) then they are a cost of farming, to be paid for in the same way as any other cost.
If not, then they may disappear, which, whilst any loss of genetic diversity is regrettable, given that they were only domesticated in the first place to be killed doesn't seem to bad.
As for rustling, market forces will take care of this. If there is a restricted supply, the cost of meat would be much higher and out of this cost would come whatever anti-rustling measures are necessary. It's basic economics.
If you don’t maintain the structure and productivity of soil via natural means, ie animal manure, you will have to use expensive artificial means. Your vegetables would grow via the chemicals produced by Monsanto. Animals pay for themselves through the meat they produce.
Market forces are certainly not going to take care of rustling. There are vast areas of the countryside with limited police cover and highly organised criminals who have found a way to make easy money.
I admit ignorance on farming methods. However you are asserting that animals are necessary and setting up a false dichotomy between the current system of animal use (in the UK presumably) and 'expensive artificial means' as though these are the only two options. I suspect there are in fact a whole range of possibilities, including some yet to be tried. (When I visited an arable farm a few years ago on an open day there were no animals, and they used crop rotation for soil improvement)
As for rustling, I was talking about a hypothetical future where demand for meat for consumption is either close to zero because most people are vegan making rustling uneconomic, or meat for consumption being more expensive thus funding prevention methods. I'd expect prevention being a lot cheaper in future due to technology (for example RFID tagging, and drone or low earth orbit satalite monitoring)
So crop rotation is a way to maximise the output from your land, and stops one single crop from draining the soil of a specific nutrient. If you don't fertilise the soil though, the nutrients that are in there will eventually be drawn down completely anyway.
I'm not a farmer, but did grow up in a farming region. They use a lot of silage in those areas. I've heard of a few trials using sludge from human wastewater treatment, but my understanding is that they found quite a lot of undesirable material in the sludge (tampons, used needles, baby wipes) and that there's quite a lot of chemicals mixed in, so it's not suitable for organic farming.
Yes, but humans can be educated to not put tampons headed for sludge. Animals are fed antibiotics as a matter of course, not for the health but to make them fatter quicker. This now means that antibiotics are being found in so-called drinking water at very high levels.
So a good question is do I want a tampon in my sludge or antibiotics? At least I can see a tampon.
But I've also said there's quite a high level of chemicals mixed into human sludge too. Aside from the bleaches and washing powders and soaps we wash down the drains at home, a lot of industrial chemicals, and no doubt antibiotics, go through our drains too.
Also you might be able to see said tampon, but you can't see the blood borne diseases it carries...
I don't see anyone suggesting turning out farm animals to be uncared for. Rather the call is for new animals not to be created to replace the existing ones when they are killed.
1- How do we keep numbers in check, with the lack of natural predators? Could we soon be like bunny island?
2- How do we utilise the free-range animals to manage farm land, whilst also stopping them from eating the crops before they've been harvested? Unless we keep a flock of domesticated cows/sheep specifically to put on plots of land for that purpose (which would then need to be fed in the same way we feed them now)?
Honestly, it drives me mad when armchair experts come up with daft ideas about how to manage farming and the food supply. It's precisely that sort of thing that led to (for example) the rabbit plague in Australia and the apple snail plague in S.E.Asia.
Until you actually have some practical experience of these things, it's impossible to really know how it works. IMO farming has more in common with the movie industry than with, say, factories stamping out widgets. It's a high-risk enterprise where fortunes can be made or lost overnight, it's more art than science, and your success (or otherwise) is determined largely by the vagaries of fashion, the whim of big buyers, or which way the wind is blowing (literally).
benwl : no, there is not a 'third way'. The principal issue here is conservation of mass. Everything you take off the farm must be replaced somehow, and there are two ways that can happen: you either introduce mined/manufactured chemicals, or you recycle the output of animals. In a perfect world, human manure would also be composted and returned to the land. In a less-than-perfect world, you can capture the manure output of herbivores (which is 90%+ of their food consumption) and export the fairly modest content of their meat. Done properly, this process actually creates more soil from inorganic rock, via a bunch of inscrutable microbiological and chemical processes, thus compensating for the (small) amount of mass removal. Take the animals away, and those processes stop or slow dramatically.
Crop rotation is used to minimize soil-borne diseases; it has little or nothing to do with maintaining fertility. Possibly you're referring to fallowing, where a cover crop is left for a season or two to allow the land to recover (bacterial action, fungi, and microlivestock perform the necessary services). This is both uneconomic and pointless - it can actually take two or three years before the land is back to its pre-crop state of fertility.
If you are in the UK, with its rather mild climate, soil erosion and fertility depletion is hard to see. But it's happening nonetheless, and it's happening on those animal-free farms you're referring to (especially if they're not fallowing for long periods). In less forgiving climates, you can turn a productive farm into a desert within a couple of decades. I'm sure you're familiar with the US experience?
Just put some ruminants out there already. You can rotate them through incredibly rapidly, and you can follow them with (say) chickens, which eat the larvae in cow manure, and spread it around so you don't get localised 'fertility bombs'. This is about as close as you can get to the natural animal interactions that occur in nature (or that did occur, before we wiped out free-ranging herbivores).
Penel : Most natural farmers must cull heavily to prevent the burden of disease. Animals only get recurrent illnesses when you coop them up in concrete and dose them up with antibiotics. Let them free range and nature will take some of them; the farmer, in his role as uber-predator, weeds out the rest of the weak ones (or at least prevents them breeding). Over time, you're left with a landrace breed that's well-adapted to the local climate and rarely gets sick. Breeding a population of sickly animals and paying the vet to come and sort them out is a good way to lose all your profits.
As you said, the primary pests are of the two-legged kind .. but that's a whole different issue!
The reason why deer, as just one example, are being killed by humans is because they have no natural predators. We have a nature out of balance right now.
I completely agree, we have a very out of balance country that has killed off the natural predators that used to exist. Which is why I'm asking how to effectively control population growth?
James O'Brien on LBC this morning did an hour on predatory birds. It seems the UK in the guise of Natural England has banned culling of predatory birds, including magpies, wood pidgeons. newscientist.com/article/22... The reason for the banning is what I find interesting.
It's not really clear why they're banning it, did the radio interview give more detail? The way it reads is that they're going to more tightly control shooting licences, which I'm picturing will then work more like fishing licences?
I don't know if this answers my question about population control though...
Good point. If there were a genuine equivalence, the price would be in the same ballpark. Not necessarily the same, because environmental externalities tend to be subsidized away by governments. But you would expect a leg of lamb and an airline flight to at least have the same number of zeros in the price.
Going back to my original question. It is the carbon foot print of that leg of lamb that is under question. Monbiot argues if we can return much of the land to forest then we move very much forward on our carbon capture stakes. Not only is our land much more carbon neutral but we have a naturally much more bio-diverse planet.
In the U.S more than 29 million cows are killed in the meat and dairy industries every year. Each and every year. And that's just cows. If many of these 29 million cows did not exist then that would leave room for other animals. If these 29 million animals were not created by humans for purely human consumption then their waste products (methane, co2, faeces) would not be causing more problems than society can deal with.
I am sure you enjoyed your char sui. Remember an animal would think that char sui was rubbish. They would prefer to eat the animal fresh, no sugar, no salt, no peppers or whatever other dressings you used to make the meat taste nice. And oh, the animal would never even cook the animal flesh.
Am sure some people argue just for the sake of arguing. Probably monbiot is one of them.
No one can really believe that we are going to stop farming cows or any other animals that we eat.
Am a bit of a dreamer too and often dream of that perfect world. But I have to say it's not about farming, more to do with the murderous culture of humans on humans. Humans cruelty to animals. Animals cruelty on animals.
Having said that...you'll be surprised how much my neighbour's dogs love the remains of my char sui pork ribs. Paws and heads hanging over the fence, whimper/begging away. I sometimes sit in the garden eating in front of them. They go crazy when they see me licking all the char sui source of the ribs.
Its not as simple as will we stop farming cows - yes or no. The question is to what extent we farm them and how, and there are a huge range of possibilities between the current estimate of about 1 billion cows and 0 at the other end.
I don't think monboit is arguing for its own sake. If we trouble to read his articles, regardless of whether you agree or not with his suggestions they are thoughtful and well structured and this is consistent with his whole journalistic career.
The possible effects of climate change are scary and I understand why some people want to respond with denial but I don't want to have my grandchildren ask me someday what I did about it and say "nothing, I thought people were just arguing for the sake of it"
Personally I don't understand why anyone would deny that the climate is changing. It always has done. The last ice age only ended about 10,000 year ago. There weren't many humans or animals around then so can't blame them for any warming of the planet.
Its only been in the last hundred years or so that humans have started to have an effect on the planet.
There really no need to go through the list and the percentage on what is what.
Personally I think you have been given fantastic explanations and advice by one of the members on this forum.
I do have grandchildren ( just 7 at this moment in time ) and are been very well educated in their schools and by their parents on what's going on in the world. I understand am to be a grate grandfather soon.
Having said that. My replys to andyswarbs are genuinely with sincerity to what he has written.
The meat industry mafia with intensive farming is going to continue to grow and the rainforest along with other forests and Brazilian Savanna are going to continue to disappear.
Yes, it "gets one’s gut", "gets one’s goat" 🐐, & gets one thinking 🤔 💭 , andyswarbs! 👍👍
Thank you 🙏 for sharing your thinking aloud 🤔 💬 analysis, Andy, and thank you for sharing George Monbiot ( en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geo... ). Much appreciated! 😌 🙏
George Monbiot shows that we are currently destroying our world. We are destroying our natural environment and many plants and species are threatened with extinction. Solidarity is under pressure while inequality, hate and violence are increasing. During this programme, Monbiot presents an alternative vision. He believes it is time to come up with new ideas; to present a new story based on solidarity and a sense of belonging, and light a path to a better world.
George Monbiot, a British zoologist from origin, has proven to be a versatile journalist, writer and environmentalist. He worked for the BBC and writes weekly op-eds and investigative articles for The Guardian. He wrote several bestsellers such as; Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life and The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order.
In his latest book, Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis, Monbiot describes how we are destroying the world we live in. An alarming amount of plants and animals go extinct, while an ideology of extreme competition and individualism rules the world. We tend to overlook the consequences of climate change, and all the risks it poses to our societies.
In his keynote, Monbiot articulates a vision of a better world and shares his idea to create a new kind of politics: a ‘politics of belonging’. After the keynote we will engage in a conversation with him and the audience on his visions on the future. What is needed to safeguard the future and the environment? How can we create a society in which compassion and solidarity are the key features for a better world?
Sparks 💥 💥 of hope 🙏 . . . realistic hope ☺️ . . . that we can become self-motivated to "help ourselves" — ground up(wards) ⬆️ (not ‘ground down’ ,’,’,’,’,’🧂. . . 😔 😞 ). And, we (no longer) need await (nor seek, nor expect) ‘leadership’ from top down ⬇️ . . . We ‘do for ourselves’ — in the here & now. 👍👍
I was out hillwalking today and spotted some sheep grazing on one of the hills,but I can't find a way to share the photo without it linking to a personal page! I can send it privately if you wish to see the terrain they graze on around here though
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Oxford real farming conference believe agricology is the future. 
