How did South Korea achieve this success? Sometimes it is attributed to the fancy technology that weighs and tracks the compost, and to the R.F.I.D. chips used in some municipalities to insure that households pay in proportion to the amount of waste they produce. That is important, but also I say the government shouldn’t act directly. There needs to be an intermediary between the government and the people. Groups like us.
Tag: agriculture
Destroy agriculture
After 12 ka of feeding humankind, all farming except fruit and veg production is likely to be replaced by ferming, brewing microbes through precision fermentation. Dairy farming in the United States will be “all but bankrupt by 2030”. The American beef industry’s revenues will fall by 90% by 2035.
Formo is trying to do the same for cheese. They use genetically modified microorganisms to produce milk protein rather than alcohol. They then “brew” them in a bath of nutrients and plant-based feed, and after it has finished, they strain out the milk proteins.
By combining these proteins with water, plant-based fats and carbs, and a pinch of salt, they have created a completely lab-grown milk. This can be processed just like cow’s milk to make all sorts of cheeses. Formo says its process also uses orders of magnitude less land and produces far fewer CO2 emissions than dairy farming. What’s more, their cheese tastes like normal cheese and has near identical nutritional value.
Natural produce isn’t
Most of the foods found in the grocery store at one point were much smaller, bitter, sour or unpalatable, comparing supermarket produce with the wild ancestors they were cultivated from.
GMO Eggplant
Conventionally grown brinjal is one of the most heavily sprayed crops in South Asia. Historically, farmers have sprayed as many as 84x in a growing season to protect their crops. Genetically modified insect-resistant eggplant (Bt brinjal) had a 39% reduction of pesticides and a 51% reduction in the number of times that farmers applied pesticides.
2020-11-19:
Bt eggplant offers a 51% increase in yield, a 37.5% decrease in pesticide use, increased farmer profits and decreased farmer sickness. Wow!
Agribusiness Climate Sabotage
But if we want to have a meaningful impact on climate change we will have to confront agribusiness, which spends more on lobbying in the United States than even defense lobbyists. A good first step in the United States would be to break up agribusiness giants that have virtual monopolies in regional seed, chemical, and meat markets. Several Democratic Party presidential candidates have called for such anti-trust action, such as rolling back the recent takeover of Monsanto by Bayer. Internationally, we need governments to sanction the kind of arson going on in the Amazon with punitive measures commensurate with the global threat it poses to humanity.
Cosmic Crisp
Brooke Jarvis writes on the development and promise of the newest apple hitting store shelves this fall, and what it took to make it happen. The Cosmic Crisp is debuting on grocery stores after this fall’s harvest, and in the nervous lead-up to the launch, everyone from nursery operators to marketers wanted me to understand the crazy scope of the thing: the scale of the plantings, the speed with which mountains of commercially untested fruit would be arriving on the market, the size of the capital risk. People kept saying things like “unprecedented,” “on steroids,” “off the friggin’ charts,” and “the largest launch of a single produce item in American history.”
Non-animal whey protein
The US is the single largest exporter of whey products, with estimated sales of $10B last year. The category will grow by 6% annually through 2023. But for all its popularity, all that whey still comes from cows, a fact increasingly seen as a liability for climate- and health-conscious dairy and protein lovers.
Speed Breeding
Combining speed breeding with gene editing and other technologies is the best way to improve crops. We already have test fields with 3x yield. Getting another 2x would feed more than 20B people. They trick the crops into flowering early by using blue and red LED lights for 22 hours a day and keeping temperatures between 16 and 22 degrees Celsius. They can grow up to 6 generations of wheat, barley, chickpeas and canola in a year instead of only 1-2 crops each year using old farming methods.
Land Animals by Weight
cattle are an insane amount of the biomass of the planet. this has to stop.
Land Use
Fascinating. So much land wasted for shitty burgers.
33% of US land is used for pasture — by far the largest land-use type in the contiguous 48 states. And 25% of that land is administered by the federal government, with most occurring in the West. That land is open to grazing for a fee. There’s a single, major occupant on all this land: cows. Between pastures and cropland used to produce feed, 41% of US land in the contiguous states revolves around livestock.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 