Summary
Grocery prices are expected to rise globally as soil degradation, driven by overfarming, deforestation, and climate change, reduces farmland productivity.
The UN estimates 33% of the world’s soils are degraded, with 90% at risk by 2050. Poor soil forces farmers to use costly fertilizers or abandon fields, raising prices for staples like bread, vegetables, and meat.
Experts advocate for sustainable practices like regenerative agriculture, cover cropping, and reduced tillage to restore soil health.
Innovations and government subsidies could mitigate impacts, but immediate action is critical to ensure food security.
One of solution to this problem is veganic farming.
Agriculture is a major contributor to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and biodiversity loss, mostly through deforestation for the cultivation of animal feeds; enteric fermentation from ruminants like cattle, fertilizers and manure; and soil degradation from intensive farming practices. There is currently a push to transform our farming systems to attempt to alleviate the almost-assured catastrophic burden of increasing amounts of atmospheric carbon. Many forms of agriculture claim they have evolved to follow a more regenerative form of agriculture by increasing soil organic matter (SOM), thus capturing said carbon in their soils. This study reports SOM results from one veganic agriculture (VA) farm from a study period of seven years. There was an observed increase of SOM from 5.2% to 7.2%, equating to an increase of 38.46% over the study’s duration, suggesting that VA is an effective farming mechanism for increasing soil organic matter utilizing 100% plant-based regenerative practices and materials to nourish the soil. The VA farm also realized respectable yields per hectare, reporting a 46% increase in total crop production. This was all achieved by growing a diversity of plant-based crops, implementing four-year crop rotations, building soil fertility through plant-based inputs, cover cropping, and leaving the farm’s fields covered as often as possible. Additionally, by its processes, the VA farm fully eliminated the industrial chain of animal agriculture and associated land use and methane emissions, suggesting VA to be a holistically regenerative form of agriculture, in comparison to animal-based forms of any other system.
has not been peer reviewed.
Then I read their methods … It should not pass peer review. Their variable control is shit.
However all they appear to advocate for, are the things that historically we have done, and are mentioned in the article.
Veganic Farming? Its just Vegans trying to hijack a normal process of crop rotation and cover cropping so they can make some snide remark that apparently it is animal feed that’s the problem.
Veganic farming is the solution to this problem.
It avoids nitrates, run-off and e-coli outbreaks.
There’s also simply way too many people on earth as it is. My country - one of the smallest on earth- had 15 million people back in 1995. Right now, 30 years later, we’re at 18 million. And in 2037, they’re expecting 19 million.
Small numbers on a global scale, but definitely a lot of growth that’s causing issues. There’s a housing shortage, rising prices, healthcare and pensions are under threat, etc etc.
And there’s places that are much, much worse. For example, even India is encouraging population growth. When the country is still very poor. That’s going to help their economy in the short run, but it’s going to be a much larger problem down the line.
We need a controlled population decline, sooner rather than later.
Either we reduce our population in a controlled way, or nature is going to do it in a brutal one through famine, drought, and disease.
We’re going to top out around 12 billion according to demographers. And this is not some theory. Most developed countries are already seeing slowing birth rates and in cases like Japan it’s quite far along.
Given how inefficient and self-destructive most of our farming is, I’m quite optimistic that it’s possible to support 12 billion sustainably. I don’t like this talk of “too many people” because it leads us to generally devalue people. If we’re not actively planning for who to remove first then we’re at least shrugging when thousands die in a disaster.
We don’t have to cheapen ourselves this way. We just have to live and work smarter.
Well you can also turn that around and ask: why do we need more people? What does another individual add?
One might argue that a baby born today might cure cancer or all known diseases. They might invent free, unlimited energy. They could be the greatest writer to ever live. Humanity’s best poet. He could bring about world peace.
But he could also be our next Hitler, Saddam Hussein, etc.
Earth is a finite planet. It’s not getting any bigger. So every human we add to it, takes up yet another square meter that consumes resources for an average of 80 years or so. I’ve seen my country get more crowded and the problems it causes.
We don’t need more people. At all.
Be the change you want to see in the world then, and leave it. After all, what do you add? Why even comment here? Do we need more people with more opinions?
I don’t mean any of that. I just say it aloud to show how petty and shitty it is. Of course if people are just numbers on a tablet then you don’t give a shit if it’s 2 billion or 3 billion. But I would hazard to guess that if you got out more, travelled more, talked to more people, saw where they lived, sang for their childrens’ birthdays and spoke at their funerals, held their hands in the ER, that you would appreciate the fact that everyone does add something. And that although there is no shortage of cruelty and stupidity in our world, it is also overflowing with love and ingenuity.
I think it’s beautiful. And I don’t presume to know what the “right” number of people is to make a world. Frankly I find that talk disturbing.
The best thing for the environment and soil health is to not farm it. There is no such thing as environmentally friendly agriculture. It is always destructive.
We farm the land we do because it’s profitable.
Irrigated acres make up less than 7% of the land area used for agriculture but produce 65% of the total yield.
Protected culture (greenhouses, high tunnels, etc) produce 10x to 20x more per acre than open field production.
Increasing our water storage and transport infrastructure on a massive scale, combined with expansion of protected culture could reduce our agricultural land requirements by as much as 80%. All wiithout changing our diets.
Imagine 80% of the farmland rewilded? Massive stretches of native ecosystems rebounding without fertilizer or sprays.
There are ways to create sustainable farms. It’s about diversity of crops and cycling what crops are grown each year.
https://www.edibleforestgardens.com/
There is no environmentally friendly factory farming. There is no healthy market-conscious farming. There are absolutely ways to be kind to the earth and grow food for a small community.
We need food for billions not a small community.
Food forest = lower environmental impact per acre but a higher environmental cost per kg of production. It’s also highly environmentally irresponsible to add in invasive species, disease, and pests into and established ecosystem. These are all spread by seed, soil, and plant tissue of the crops we grow.
But…billions make up many small communities. That’s my point. Self-reliance, mutual aid. That’s the answer. Not globalized solutions.
I imagine harvesting, planting, and everything else that needs to be done is much harder in “protected culture” compared to normal agriculture.
We farm the way we do because we have always done it like this, except on a smaller scale obviously, otherwise almost everyone would still be a farmer.
Completely moving over to “protected culture” would be enormously expensive, hard, and unless some really advanced technical advancements happen so, impossible.
Irrigated and/or protected culture… Protected culture for the crops that make sense. Irrigated in for all others.
We farm the way we do because historically we go through periods of innovation then stagnation. When the way we farm no longer works and we either rapidly innovate again or the civilization flounders and dies due to famine and war.
“Enormously expensive,” it’s all in perspective. It’s damn cheap compared to the cost of the environmental damage we are currently doing. FYI The equipment and technology already exist to do it as well.
Irrigated? That seems incredibly water intensive.
FYI The equipment and technology already exist to do it as well.
How do you farm crops like wheat and corn that way?
Not many people have mentioned this so I guess I’ll bring it up:
The two major factors negatively impacting sustainability of agriculture are
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Ammonia (NH3) is mined as a way to enrich agriculture with Protein, more specifically the ammonia bonds with nitrogen allowing plant development, but it’s not exactly infinite. Synthetic Ammonia can be produced but is extremely emission heavy as it is often a petrochemical byproduct with the vast majority of Hydrogen (H) is produced from fossil fuels refining.
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Modern Invasive Pests/Disease are commonly spread across continents. Lack of plant biodiversity leads to viral outbreaks called “blights” which can lower or even wipe out entire regions of crops. Invasive species most notably insects can plague regions for years without any natural predators. Globalization and Industrialization have created these hurdles, but the yield of such practices are absolutely necessary to feed the current human population.
There are no solutions except reducing the human population. Which isn’t going to happen, because people are stupid animals and the people we’ve empowered all over the world are morons who cannot read the writing on the wall.
This isn’t even true. The carrying capacity of earth for people hasn’t been met. We can absolutely engineer things to be both sustainable and livable at current populations. Rhetoric that advises we “depopulate” is borderline neo-fascism, the same stuff Christians say to bring on the apocalypse.
James Cassidy at Oregon State University has his SOIL lecture series on YouTube. We have many ways to repair our soil and to improve farming. Killing people/ “depopulating” isn’t one of them. Shame on you.
I’m saying we need to have less kids and you’re saying that belief is christofascism, lmao
Despite many noteworthy christofascists supporting population growth such as Elon Musk.
Have fun engineering an entirely new way to supply food for over 7 Billion people that nobody has ever tried before. I look forward to your results. It’s a good thing you were taught by the world’s greatest minds over on fucking YouTube.
Read again, he’s a soil scientist and professor at OSU that made his lecture available for free on YouTube.
You didn’t say “less kids,” you said smaller population.
And I can see how much of an appetite you have for learning things that aren’t “kill kill death death,” so yeah. Won’t waste more of my time explaining. You can’t even be bothered to understand that professors can post lectures online.
