Sapere Aude
Tag: agriculture
fighting tons of anti-intellectuals
The rhetoric offended Hayes’ sense of fairness. He knew that environmentalists linked colony collapse to neonicotinoid insecticides and that they thought Monsanto was somehow to blame. But he also knew that Monsanto doesn’t make insecticides. The company’s most famous product, glyphosate—that’s Roundup—kills plants. Its second-most famous product—Roundup-ready seeds—allows plants to resist its most famous product.
If you’re against GMO, you’re part of the problem killing 1m / year. Are your luddite anxieties really worth that much to you?
Modified rice has 5x the zinc and iron and could help eliminate micronutrient deficiency to save over 1M lives each year and boost GDP of poor nations over 20%
the anti gmo arguments are mostly fraudulent
Greenpeace and its partners weren’t fighting the Bt industry. They were protecting it. They were trying to convince the public that the Bt protein was dangerous when produced by plants but perfectly safe when produced by bacteria and sprayed by farmers. The anti-GMO lobby says Bt crops are worse than Bt sprays, in part because Bt crops have too much of the bacterial toxin. In 2007, for instance, Greenpeace promoted a court petition to stop field trials of Bt eggplant in India. “The Bt toxin in GM crops is 1000x more concentrated than in Bt sprays.” But Greenpeace’s internal research belied that statement. A 2002 Greenpeace report, based on Chinese lab tests, found that the toxin level in Bt crops was severely “limited.” In 2006, when Greenpeace investigators examined Bt corn in Germany and Spain, they got a surprise: “The plants sampled showed in general very low Bt concentrations.”
2022-05-04: Sri Lanka is paying the price for scientific illiteracy.
Sri Lanka imposed a nationwide ban on the importation and use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and ordering the country’s 2m farmers to go organic.
The result was brutal and swift. Against claims that organic methods can produce comparable yields to conventional farming, domestic rice production fell 20% in just the first 6 months. Sri Lanka, long self-sufficient in rice production, has been forced to import $450m worth of rice even as domestic prices for this staple of the national diet surged by 50%. The ban also devastated the nation’s tea crop, its primary export and source of foreign exchange.
By November 2021, with tea production falling, the government partially lifted its fertilizer ban on key export crops, including tea, rubber, and coconut. Faced with angry protests, soaring inflation, and the collapse of Sri Lanka’s currency, the government finally suspended the policy for several key crops—including tea, rubber, and coconut—last month, although it continues for some others. Soon enough, advocates will surely argue that the problem was not with the organic practices they touted but with the precipitous move to implement them in the midst of a crisis. But although the immediate ban on fertilizer use was surely ill conceived, there is literally no example of a major agriculture-producing nation successfully transitioning to fully organic or agroecological production. The European Union has promised a full-scale transition to sustainable agriculture for decades. But while it has banned genetically modified crops and a variety of pesticides as well as has implemented policies to discourage the overuse of synthetic fertilizers, it still depends heavily on synthetic fertilizers to keep yields high, produce affordable, and food secure. It has also struggled with the disastrous effects of overfertilizing surface and ground water with manure from livestock production.
In Sri Lanka, as elsewhere, there is no shortage of problems associated with chemical-intensive and large-scale agriculture. But the solutions to these problems—be they innovations that allow farmers to deliver fertilizer more precisely to plants when they need it, bioengineered microbial soil treatments that fix nitrogen in the soil and reduce the need for both fertilizer and soil disruption, or genetically modified crops that require fewer pesticides and herbicides—will be technological, giving farmers new tools instead of removing old ones that have been proven critical to their livelihoods. They will allow countries like Sri Lanka to mitigate the environmental impacts of agriculture without impoverishing farmers or destroying the economy. Proponents of organic agriculture, by contrast, committed to naturalistic fallacies and suspicious of modern agricultural science, can offer no plausible solutions. What they offer, as Sri Lanka’s disaster has laid bare for all to see, is misery.
we can now detect cow farts from space.
For the first time, an instrument onboard an orbiting spacecraft has measured the methane emissions from a single, specific leaking facility on Earth’s surface. The observation — by the Hyperion spectrometer on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) — is an important breakthrough in our ability to eventually measure and monitor emissions of this potent greenhouse gas from space.
2017-06-10: Methane-free cows
Scientists are also tweaking the cows themselves. The Genome Canada project identifies cows that produce fewer greenhouse gases, with the ultimate goal of distributing the responsible genes—conveniently transported in the form of bull semen—to areas that don’t have the resources to develop their own greener cows.
2020-04-02: Rice paddies produce a LOT of methane from the bacteria in the muck. Adding fish to the rice paddies could cut it by 90%
2023-09-08: Methanotrophs
A strain of bacteria called methylotuvimicrobium buryatense 5GB1C can remove methane efficiently even when it is present in lower amounts. If it became widespread, the technology has the potential to help slow global warming.
Typically, this group of bacteria thrive in environments with high levels of methane (5k – 10k ppm). The normal concentrations in our atmosphere have much lower levels of 2 ppm. But certain areas such as landfills, rice fields and oilwells emit higher concentrations of 500 ppm. To implement methane-eating bacteria on a mass scale, 1000s of high-functioning reactors will be needed.
A series of canals brought the water, trapped underground, to the areas where it was needed; anything left was stored in surface reservoirs. To help keep it moving, chimneys were excavated above the canals in the shape of corkscrewing funnels. These funnels let wind into the canals, which forced the water through the system.
how to deal with the situation in 2050 when most of current agricultural land is arid.
“I have never met or heard of someone coming to our Eastern Washington apple-growing region to pick apples for leisure. It must be an East Coast or urban thing.” Pheasant Orchards found the idea of picking for fun “hilarious and sad,” a reflection of just how estranged from nature modern Americans must feel. “We don’t try to build our own furniture, or cars. We don’t feel the need to go to the forest ourselves to cut a tree down when we need lumber. Our economy has raised people’s quality of life by becoming more efficient and productive. I don’t understand why we want to go backwards when it comes to agriculture.”
if true (requires a lot more study) this would be major good news
It is now conceivable that the human race will reach “peak impact” before the end of this century.
The decoupling is a breaking of the link between economic and population growth on the one hand and resource use on the other. Some decoupling indicators from the report: The per-capita farmland requirement has declined by half in the last half-century. In absolute terms, cropland has expanded 13% and pasture 9% in that time period, but the sum of the 2 has remained stable since the mid-1990s. Total water consumption increased by 170% between 1950 and 1995, but per-capita water consumption peaked around 1980 and declined thereafter. The least decoupled environmental impact is greenhouse gas emissions from energy: global per-capita emissions increased by nearly 40% between 1965 and 2013.
The American Egg Board’s members are appointed by the FDA, and it was they who funded a secret, deceptive smear campaign against startup Hampton Creek’s vegan egg replacement.
From paying food bloggers to post egg-heavy recipes to buying Google ads that returned results for eggs to people searching for Hampton Creek, to lobbying food experts, animal-rights activists and others to speak out in favor of the poultry industry, the AEB pulled out all the stops to undermine their competition.
Until now, researchers believed farming was “invented” some 12 ka ago in the Cradle of Civilization — Iraq, the Levant, parts of Turkey and Iran. A new discovery offers evidence that trial plant cultivation began far earlier — 23 ka ago.
“FOR SALE: Largest ranch in the US within a single fence. Texas fixer-upper with more than 1000 oil wells; 6800 head of cattle; 500 quarter horses; 120 km2 of cropland; tombstones for legendary cowboys, long-dead dogs, and a horse buried standing up. Favorite of Will Rogers and Teddy Roosevelt. Colorful history of drinking and divorce. 15-minute drive to rib-eyes at the Rusty Spur in Vernon. Ideal for Saudi oil sheiks, billionaire hedge funders, and dot-commers who can tell a cow from a steer. Profitable. 0 debt. Property taxes only $800K a year. Price: $725M. Everything you can see, as far as the eye can see, is the ranch”. He points straight ahead, then behind him, then left. “Each horizon is this ranch.”
also, the world’s largest working cattle ranch is on the market. Australia’s remote Anna Creek Station clocks in at 24k km2—more than 12x the size of Waggoner –and its sale package will include 160k head of cattle.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 