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Opinion: "The End of Meat Is Here" - NY Times

I think the problem is that he's another one of these children of tory MP, public school, undergraduate degree at Oxford (can't find his award online so I'm hazarding a third), journalist types that seem to be able to speak with authority so that some lesser mortals think they are somehow "a scientist".

Even more bizarrely, I had the views of Lord Deben thrown at me on this thread as if he was somehow credible and not a loonatic Tory peer.

Odd on a "left wing" discussion forum.
 
lazythursday said:
I'm sure he is sometimes guilty of cherry picking. But the main point of his last controversial Guardian article that this one is responding to was about the fact that organic farming and other small-scale systems can often have higher environmental impacts, and involve greater land use than some conventional systems. This article rubbishes him without taking on that argument whatsoever. I'm sure there is a counter argument - my point is this article certainly isn't it.

And tbh, no-one is worse for cherry picking than the proponents of regenerative grazing, who make all sorts of claims based on shaky studies that haven't been replicated.
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Sometimes?
His entire book goes on like that.

The problem with "regen ag" is it can mean many and several things.
Also, you'd hope that case studies would give different results in different locations and not be universally replicable, because no two farms are the same in terms of size, soil type, microclimate etc etc, which comes nicely back to the very beginning whereupon I said solutions were likely be local, rather than global.
These "just do this" global approaches to farming (and the environment) utterly disregard the entire fields of study of "geography" and "ecology", which is why they tend to eminate from mathematicians.
 
Funky_monks said:
Sometimes?
His entire book goes on like that.

The problem with "regen ag" is it can mean many and several things.
Also, you'd hope that case studies would give different results in different locations and not be universally replicable, because no two farms are the same in terms of size, soil type, microclimate etc etc, which comes nicely back to the very beginning whereupon I said solutions were likely be local, rather than global.
These "just do this" global approaches to farming (and the environment) utterly disregard the entire fields of study of "geography" and "ecology", which is why they tend to eminate from mathematicians.
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Well yes I thoroughly agree with you that regenerative agriculture seems to mean many different things which isn't particularly helpful.

But I've become a bit fed up with doey-eyed hippy-dippy small scale farming advocates who just won't properly engage with the more settled science around carbon emissions and land use. And I'm not talking about the Monbiot end of the spectrum, but the more nuanced/conservative findings of the Committee on Climate Change.
 
lazythursday said:
Well yes I thoroughly agree with you that regenerative agriculture seems to mean many different things which isn't particularly helpful.

But I've become a bit fed up with doey-eyed hippy-dippy small scale farming advocates who just won't properly engage with the more settled science around carbon emissions and land use. And I'm not talking about the Monbiot end of the spectrum, but the more nuanced/conservative findings of the Committee on Climate Change.
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There's a very long post I made about that (linked below).

There is very little that is "settled" around non fossil fuel emissions in agriculture, we don't even really know how much methane ruminants emit, (I know people trying to measure it).

I'd much rather see lots of smaller farms producing stuff hyperlocally (the Simon Fairlie article linked further back is good) and many more county holdings as well as micro farms attached to schools, community centres etc than massive holdings and huge industrial plants producing synthetic highly processed meat substitutes, myself.

We know that farms can sequester carbon, we know that ruminant methane is a natural cycle that's been around as long as ruminants have, we know fossil fuels take carbon sequestered millions of years ago and release it into the atmosphere. We also know that fossil fuels are used to produce synthetic fertiliser. We also know that bare soil gets washed away.
So; we need to build soil, which is then more able to sequester carbon and try to move away from synthetic fertiliser.
So; cover cropping, rotational grazing etc seem to be key aspects.

Not a small farm but I know of a 1500ha farm in Suffolk was entirely arable but now sows covers and has about 3000 sheep in rotation and their soil indices are up, fert use has been slashed therefore, and it now also produces sheep, which is good considering grain prices until recently.

Opinion: "The End of Meat Is Here" - NY Times
 
Funky_monks said:
we know that ruminant methane is a natural cycle that's been around as long as ruminants have
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Well yes... but there's nothing 'natural' about the hugely inflated number of ruminants in modern agriculture. And latest evidence appears to show that warming is causing methane to hang around longer, meaning that it's becoming a bigger and bigger problem. This argument is a bit similar to the Drax one - it's ok that Drax burns wood because it will be reabsorbed through new tree planting - ignoring the fact that there's a considerable timescale and risk involved in that and emissions need to be falling now.
Funky_monks said:
I'd much rather see lots of smaller farms producing stuff hyperlocally (the Simon Fairlie article linked further back is good) and many more county holdings as well as micro farms attached to schools, community centres etc than massive holdings and huge industrial plants producing synthetic highly processed meat substitutes, myself.
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But the question can't be what we'd 'rather see' - it's what will realistically work in terms of cutting carbon emissions and reducing agricultural land use. To be honest I think this is a silly polarised argument because there is probably room for both in a sustainable future system - but that still is likely to involve a considerably smaller, but higher quality, animal agriculture system.
Funky_monks said:
We know that farms can sequester carbon
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Do we? How? Apart from agroforestry, which needs expanding, or BECCs (which is problematic) I'm not sure that we really do know that farms can sequester carbon at anything like the scale required compared to, say, planting trees.
 
More than just small farms, we need integrated rural communities where everyone does a bit of everything, which was one of Hinton's big claims for the communes in the north of China, where they mixed in light industries and handicrafts so actually there was a lot of off-farm employment which made for better incomes for families and collective and sometimes brought skills, but also still as many people walking about the crops and pulling the odd weed they found thus saving on pesticides, or spotting that crumbling bit of the irrigation channel before it collapsed. Trouble is I suppose that works best when you start with peasant communities and we have none. Quick round of the fields then off to hot-desk my multimedia node :D Though maybe we can learn again.
 
lazythursday said:
Well yes... but there's nothing 'natural' about the hugely inflated number of ruminants in modern agriculture. And latest evidence appears to show that warming is causing methane to hang around longer, meaning that it's becoming a bigger and bigger problem. This argument is a bit similar to the Drax one - it's ok that Drax burns wood because it will be reabsorbed through new tree planting - ignoring the fact that there's a considerable timescale and risk involved in that and emissions need to be falling now.

But the question can't be what we'd 'rather see' - it's what will realistically work in terms of cutting carbon emissions and reducing agricultural land use. To be honest I think this is a silly polarised argument because there is probably room for both in a sustainable future system - but that still is likely to involve a considerably smaller, but higher quality, animal agriculture system.

Do we? How? Apart from agroforestry, which needs expanding, or BECCs (which is problematic) I'm not sure that we really do know that farms can sequester carbon at anything like the scale required compared to, say, planting trees.
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I'll find some papers for you, although if you look back far enough in this thread I've probably linked them.

Trees don't sequester anything like the amount of carbon that grasslands do for at least 20 years after planting.

There is also the issue of what happens to the trees - if we are talking spruce monoculture for timber then all the carbon sequestered (apart from the root mass and leaf matter dragged underground by soil organisms) is not ultimately sequestered as the timber degrades in the atmosphere. To actually sequester the carbon, you'd need to cut the trees down and bury them.
Correctly fertilised and limed pasture sequesters more carbon as the soil structure improves - not that I'm against tree planting. Right tree, right place.

Number of global farmed ruminants is falling and has been slowly for some time. Also, numerous habits supporting massive herds of wild ruminants have been cleared of them and lots of that land put under the plough (great plains of the US, parts of Africa). There's no evidence to suggest that the total number of ruminants (farmed plus wild) is higher than in history, when vast herds of bison roamed the great plains and buffaloes/elephants etc roamed the savannah
 
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JimW said:
More than just small farms, we need integrated rural communities where everyone does a bit of everything, which was one of Hinton's big claims for the communes in the north of China, where they mixed in light industries and handicrafts so actually there was a lot of off-farm employment which made for better incomes for families and collective and sometimes brought skills, but also still as many people walking about the crops and pulling the odd weed they found thus saving on pesticides, or spotting that crumbling bit of the irrigation channel before it collapsed. Trouble is I suppose that works best when you start with peasant communities and we have none. Quick round of the fields then off to hot-desk my multimedia node :D Though maybe we can learn again.
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Couldn't really agree more, plus expansion of urban agriculture - I just don't know how most people working part time and farming part time fits with capitalism
 
Cid said:
I wrote a review of <searches> Feral on here back in 2015... I do veer back and forth on him, but have found it really hard to take him seriously since then.
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You could get a fishing kayak, there are supposed to be salmon back in the Don. :)
 
lazythursday
You could do worse than looking at some of the output of Vandana Shiva, if you want a non globalist view of agriculture and environment.
Also, might mean not having to trawl through this thread, because a lot of the things you mention I've discussed here and on the other "meat" thread.

Vandana Shiva - Wikipedia
 
I think, Funky_monks, you are just as guilty as Monbiot of cherry picking science. I'm not an ecologist or soil scientist, so I know I'm going to struggle making sense of / weighing up the value of individual papers on, say, the carbon storage value of grasslands. Therefore I rely on work done by teams of scientists who do understand this stuff. It's simply a plain fact that most work of this kind - for instance the Committee on Climate Change's Land Use Report, or the Zero Carbon Britain work done by the Centre for Alternative Technology - argues strongly for tree planting and peat restoration as the main land-based sequestration activities, and for a change of diet involving significantly less meat and dairy (though by around 20% or so, not some kind of vegan utopia). Now you might argue that these kinds of reports are simply behind the times in terms of emerging science, but let's wait and see.
 
lazythursday said:
I think, Funky_monks, you are just as guilty as Monbiot of cherry picking science. I'm not an ecologist or soil scientist, so I know I'm going to struggle making sense of / weighing up the value of individual papers on, say, the carbon storage value of grasslands. Therefore I rely on work done by teams of scientists who do understand this stuff. It's simply a plain fact that most work of this kind - for instance the Committee on Climate Change's Land Use Report, or the Zero Carbon Britain work done by the Centre for Alternative Technology - argues strongly for tree planting and peat restoration as the main land-based sequestration activities, and for a change of diet involving significantly less meat and dairy (though by around 20% or so, not some kind of vegan utopia). Now you might argue that these kinds of reports are simply behind the times in terms of emerging science, but let's wait and see.
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Loads of my posts on here are fully referenced with peer reviewed journal articles, and I've discussed the science at length - and been quite critical in parts. Sadly, this thread has a tendency to become very circular, with people quoting the same research at me over and over - if you are interested, you can read back through the thread.

It may not be your field of science, but it is mine - I'm a university Agricultural Sciences lecturer, my background before my career in agriculture is biology/ecology, and, whilst I do undertake research, I am employed within teaching and learning, my emphasis being on disseminating/making the science understandable, not only to under/post grads, but I am involved with KEF (knowledge exchange framework), communicating this stuff to industry/the public (in some cases). Therefore unlike those on research contracts, I don't spend my time studying one, specific thing (eg, we have a postgrad studying cattle social interactions), my job is very often to read the body of research and communicate it to people.

The interesting thing about policy makers is how quickly they have leapt on two papers, Poore and Nemeck (2018) and the Eat Lancet report - see the post I quoted.

Another interesting thing that I have touched upon is how so few papers (I identified about 5) are reported on over and over again in the lay press in order to seemingly manufacture a scientific consensus. 5 papers is nobody's consensus.
 
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Isn't it bad form to use a thread to badmouth someone who you supposedly have on ignore?

Someone, I might add, who's spent a lifetime involved in this field.

Oh, and it's four studies that I counted, plus one new one added lately, so 5, which I gave reasonable answers to, its not my fault that the same studies were posted (in various forms) eleventy billion times.

I guess it's time for this:

FB_IMG_1661949017478.jpg
 
Funky_monks said:
Isn't it bad form to use a thread to badmouth someone who you supposedly have on ignore?

Someone, I might add, who's spent a lifetime involved in this field.

Oh, and it's four studies that I counted, plus one new one added lately, so 5, which I gave reasonable answers to, its not my fault that the same studies were posted (in various forms) eleventy billion times.

I guess it's time for this:

View attachment 340781
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www.iflscience.com

Professor Brian Cox: "It's Very Difficult To Argue With An Idiot"

Professor Brian Cox: "It's Very Difficult To Argue With An Idiot"
www.iflscience.com www.iflscience.com
 
Funky_monks said:
Isn't it bad form to use a thread to badmouth someone who you supposedly have on ignore?

Someone, I might add, who's spent a lifetime involved in this field.

I guess it's time for this:

View attachment 340781
Click to expand...
Seeing as you've started up childish, disruptive bullshit like this, I'm making it mutual ignore now. I'm sure you know the rules about that. If not be sure to look then up before referencing me in any way at all.
 
I know, lets make the price of dairy go up for people during a cost of living crisis!

Nice one, Tarquin, that'll show those lumpen plebs.

To add lazythursday, this is why you'll have to read back through the thread - just as a discussion seems to be happening about a particular aspect of this, the thread gets spammed with a load of stuff that's not related to the topic at hand, and thus we go round in a massive circle.

I do, outside of Urban, spend quite a lot of time talking to the general public about agriculture - discourse and occasionally robust debate do take place, which I am fine with. Most of my family is from Salford, we moved to the country when I was a kid, so I kind of straddle both worlds and understand that farming is utterly alien to loads of people. There's some quite sensible discussion at some points on this thread - a number of posters on here seem to have quite a good working knowledge of climate change and agriculture. You might also want to look at the food shortages thread.
 
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editor said:
Absolutely. I've lost count of the amount of independent studies and experts he has casually batted away, often for the most flippant of reasons. It was as bad as arguing with a conspiracy loon so I gave up engaging.
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Their point seems to be that you haven’t though. There’s a small set of studies that are being endlessly and circularly referenced, creating the impression of a wider consensus when none exists.

It’s a vast, complicated, problem. The solution to it isn’t going to be simple either. Yes, meat consumption needs to come down. But there are clearly a huge number of other factors and consequences to that which need to be considered as well.
 
editor said:
Seeing as you've started up childish, disruptive bullshit like this, I'm making it mutual ignore now. I'm sure you know the rules about that. If not be sure to look then up before referencing me in any way at all.
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You said you were on mutual ignore on 19 August Opinion: "The End of Meat Is Here" - NY Times yet you've continued to refer to Funky_monks eg post 1154. Do mi sanctions only go one way?
 
Pickman's model said:
You said you were on mutual ignore on 19 August Opinion: "The End of Meat Is Here" - NY Times yet you've continued to refer to Funky_monks eg post 1154. Do mi sanctions only go one way?
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Not only do they appear to go only one way, they appear only ever to be implemented by one moderator, and always to involve that moderator and another poster who disagrees with that moderator (if there's any examples I've missed which don't fall into this category, I'll be happy to withdraw this whole comment and apologise).

Whether or not the principle of Mutual Ignore is worthwhile, the way it's used is completely one sided and makes the whole moderation system look increasingly ridiculous.

edited to correct "forced" to "mutual"
 
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WouldBe said:
"The price of milk has nearly tripled since 2021"

Is pure bullshit. A 2l bottle of milk at my local shop has gone from £1.29 to £1.39 in that time. :facepalm:
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It's almost like these people just make shit up (you can pick either AR or Plant Based News for this)...... :D

To be fair though, if you spend five minutes reading "Plant Based News" and have a modicum of intelligence, you know they are just making stuff up to make veges/vegans feel good. I wouldn't expect them to run a well balanced article, in the same way that I wouldn't expect the "Angling Times" to run an article entitled: "Fishing - It's a bit shit really, isn't it?"
 
beesonthewhatnow said:
Their point seems to be that you haven’t though. There’s a small set of studies that are being endlessly and circularly referenced, creating the impression of a wider consensus when none exists.

It’s a vast, complicated, problem. The solution to it isn’t going to be simple either. Yes, meat consumption needs to come down. But there are clearly a huge number of other factors and consequences to that which need to be considered as well.
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No. Not true at all. If you'd been paying attention you'd see that I've referenced several major studies, all of which have been dismissed on a whim..
 
Pickman's model said:
You said you were on mutual ignore on 19 August Opinion: "The End of Meat Is Here" - NY Times yet you've continued to refer to Funky_monks eg post 1154. Do mi sanctions only go one way?
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In which case I apologise while pointing out thT we're both guilty of breaking that sanction, although it'll be FM who has been the worst offender BY FAR.
andysays said:
Not only do they appear to go only one way, they appear only ever to be implemented by one moderator, and always to involve that moderator and another poster who disagrees with that moderator (if there's any examples I've missed which don't fall into this category, I'll be happy to withdraw this whole comment and apologise).
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Posters can - and have - asked for mutual ignore to be implemented, and I have put sets of posters on mutual ignore several times in the past. So your assumption is wrong.

Note: please take all further discussion of this matter to the feedback forum.
 
I've literally only responded to new material (presumably that wasn't authored by editor) or when I've been badmouthed whilst apparently being on ignore.

Most other threads, Id let it go, but this is quite literally my field of science, about which I am reasonably well read, have applied the science during my career and find it reasonably objectionable that a layman with no experience and whos knowledge comes from "The Guardian" newspaper or "Plant Based News", should fucking mansplain my field/career to me.
 
Even Clint is getting on board!



At 92 years old, actor Clint Eastwood has been in the Hollywood spotlight for decades but his newest project, a documentary called Why on Earth, could be one of his most important roles. Created by animal-rights advocate and filmmaker Katie Cleary, the documentary was filmed across five countries and focuses on the way humans have destroyed animal habitats and are ultimately destroying themselves by fueling the climate crisis through unsustainable practices such as deforestation for palm oil production, poaching, shark finning, and animal agriculture.
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In 2018, an Oxford study published in the journal Science found that following a plant-based diet is “the single biggest way” to slow environmental destruction. This comprehensive study was based on five years of research and data from nearly 40,000 farms in 119 countries. To come to this conclusion, researchers examined the environmental impact of producing 40 foods—which amount to 90 percent of all food eaten on earth. Led by Joseph Poore, the researchers found that the meat and dairy industries are responsible for 60 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and that if individuals removed animal products from their diets, they would reduce their carbon footprint by 73 percent. The researchers also found that if meat and dairy production were to cease, global farmland use would be reduced by 75 percent.

More recent studies have come to similar conclusions, including a 2021 study published in Nature Food that found meat production was responsible for twice as much greenhouse gas emissions than growing and processing plants for food. [--]
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