Letters to the Editor
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Are Times reporters literally stupid or just biased?
But elsewhere, the reporters note that one pound of chemical fertilizer contains more of the major nutrients -- nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium -- than 100 pounds of manure. The conclusion is obvious: "organic" fertilizer cannot replace the synthetic fertilizer necessary to feed the current planetary population of 6.5 billion, much less the 9 billion expected by mid-century.
Why does hog manure weigh 100 pounds? Because it's full of water, fat and organic material along with the actual nutrient molecules.
But that helps you spread it on the ground and keeps it from being blown away by wind.
If you apply one pound of chemical fertilizer, you're going to end up using at least 100 pounds of water and mulch when you're finished spreading it.
With hog manure, the water and the mulch come along with the nutrient molecules.
Are Times reporters unable to think clearly, or just unwilling to make the effort?
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Animal agriculture is the problem, not the solution.
The grain and legumes and water which are used to raise livestock can feed and hydrate far more people if given directly to them, and not instead concentrated into animal flesh that will feed far fewer people at far greater cost. And that's not even taking into account the fuel necessary to raise the animals from birth to death, transport them, and "process" them into plastic wrap covered chunks. Lastly, there is the issue of raising and killing animals under terrible conditions in factory farms -- pigs -- that are more intelligent than dogs and who suffer terrible physical and mental pain in the process.
According to Time Magazine, "Vegetarianism is much more environment-friendly than diets revolving around meat. [According to Cornel ecologist David Pimentel], 'In terms of caloric content, the grain consumed by American livestock could feed 800 million people—and, if exported, would boost the U.S. trade balance by $80 billion a year.' Grain-fed livestock consume 100,000 liters of water for every kilogram of food they produce, compared with 2,000 liters for soybeans. Animal protein also demands tremendous expenditures of fossil-fuel energy—eight times as much as for a comparable amount of plant protein. Put another way, says Pimentel, the average omnivore diet burns the equivalent of a gallon of gas per day—twice what it takes to produce a vegan diet."
So what to use instead of pig manure? If we must use manure, I can think of six billion bipeds that produce lots of the stuff every day.
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@--DurianJoe
As Carl Sagan used to say: 'Well . . . maybe.'
But what if you graze the livestock instead of feeding them raised grains?
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hybrid
Maybe there's a transitional hybrid solution. The Prius of agriculture? And surely if you're not destroying the soil with every crop, you're going to need less fertilizer, right? Maybe the basic model is flawed, by not accounting for this fact, but I'm not smart enough to see whether it is or not.
The thing that strikes me most is that modeling like this views the whole thing as a system, but in reality it doesn't really function like one. Not an efficient, well-thought-out one anyway. I wonder what happens if the model is re-worked to create several diversified food microsystems instead of devoting huge swaths of land to growing wheat for the world. I agree; I'd like to hear from more experts about how to make this work - and soon.
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We may not be stuck, but the model needs to change
Current large-scale, monoculture agriculture (organic or not) depends on two things: expectations that the product will become part of the commodities market, and that the product will be shipped around the globe to wherever there is a buyer for such huge quantities. I would imagine that most crops produced from mega farms does not end up in your grocery store's produce section--I would wager a healthy sum that it goes to the manufacturers of highly processed foods and becomes part of your frozen microwave meal or your sugary breakfast cereal.
This is a completely different approach than the bio-diverse, organic approach to farming. This type relies on seasonal foods, diversity of crops and animals on the same farm, and primarily local (or regional) consumption. There are fewer consumers needed to support the farm, because each consumer buys more from the farm's wide variety of products through the entire year, not just at the end of one or two harvest seasons.
I don't think we can compare the two--a mega farm that just provides a single crop (i.e. corn) can probably produce vastly larger quantities of that crop than a bio-diverse sustainable farm of the same size. However, the mega farm only produces a single element in the diets of people, and there must be many, many buyers to consume it all. Hence the commodities market and global shipping of products.
The goals of the bio-diverse sustainable farm are to provide a wide variety of items and to farm all year, but it produces fewer of each item. The trick is to become a supplier of many food staples to the local and regional community, throughout the year. Corn, wheat, soy, fruits from orchards, vegetables, cows, pigs, chickens, goats, etc.
The yield could be greater overall because of the sheer variety--a good amount of many more things, rather than just the maximum amount of one thing. That's just mathematics.
I think we are trying to compare apples to oranges here. Or rather Corn (with a capital C) to corn, wheat, soy, fruits from orchards, vegetables, cows, pigs, chickens, goats, milk, eggs, compost for your garden and straw for your straw bale house.
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@dm8877
But what if you graze the livestock instead of feeding them raised grains?
That works nicely if you have enough grazing land. How much suitable land do we have that is not already occupied by people, farms, or commercial development?
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@dm8877
As Alkaline said, there is not enough grazing land for all the livestock we now have, unless you want to devote almost all grassland to their use (but that would exclude chickens and other birds). But then, you'd still have problems with the fuel used to transport and process the animals, the water used to keep them alive, and the methanol produced by billions of cattle that, despite the fart humor, really does add to global warming.
The flip side is that raising animals in the outdoors and letting them graze would rid the world of the horrors of factory farming, (though the horrors of slaughterhouses would continue), but this would raise the price of meat to what it really ought to be if we cared about raising animals in a humane and sustainable fashion, i.e., a price which many people would not be willing to pay, which would be a good thing if that was there only alternative.
The fact of the matter is that vegetarianism is a more environmentally sustainable diet, not to mention less expensive and healthier and more compassionate. The other fact of the matter is that I expect our species to extinguish itself long before it seriously contemplates moving to vegetarianism.