We should discuss soil as much as coal (2019)

Industrial agriculture has plenty more problems than just cow farts and carbon dioxide released from disturbed soil. Still on the vein of CO₂ emissions there&#x27;s the large amounts of industrial machinery, vehicles and other such things that are powered by fossil fuels and release large amounts of CO₂.<p>Then on the vein of soils, we&#x27;re actually running out of arable soil. Soil erosion is a huge problem around the world and industrial farming is a large part of the problem. Farm plots are never left to fallow and replenish, all nutrients and organic matter are stripped out and replaced with liquid chemical fertilizers, that run off the fields and pollute waterways.<p>Not to mention, fertilizers, globally, phosphate reserves are beginning to deplete. At some point in the next 50-100 years, we&#x27;ll have come close to completely running out. Industrial agriculture is heavily dependent on phosphorous.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;foodprint.org&#x2F;issues&#x2F;how-industrial-agriculture-affects-our-soil&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;foodprint.org&#x2F;issues&#x2F;how-industrial-agriculture-affe...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nrdc.org&#x2F;stories&#x2F;industrial-agricultural-pollution-101" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nrdc.org&#x2F;stories&#x2F;industrial-agricultural-polluti...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Peak_phosphorus" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Peak_phosphorus</a>

Bill is correct on a lot fronts here. Soil is the big elephant in the room. But the problem remains an economic problem as much as a technical one. We need solutions that are market driven (in addition to the cool innovations he talks about). <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thinkingagriculture.io&#x2F;carbon-sequestering-incentives-who-wins&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thinkingagriculture.io&#x2F;carbon-sequestering-incentive...</a>

Agriculture must become net carbon neutral if not negative to confront the effects of climate change. As Gates mentions, soils comprise a larger carbon reservoir than the atmosphere. A successful strategy may include the following (likely necessary but not necessarily sufficient) prongs:<p>- halting deforestation as quickly and entirely as possible<p>- transitioning to net-neutral industrial machinery and power supplies<p>- preserving soil health by crop rotation etc<p>- increasing sequestration of atmospheric carbon and improving soil health by breeding&#x2F;engineering plants for higher CO2 incorporation rates<p>- breeding&#x2F;engineering plants for other traits like water&#x2F;abiotic and pest&#x2F;biotic stress resilience, reduced fertilizer and nutrient requirements, etc<p>- human consumption habits must transition to less energy-intensive and pollution-producing foods (typically fewer animals and more plants, although the issue is complex)

I found the company helping farmers in Africa collectively build&#x2F;buy silos the most surprising of these projects. As someone who spent much of my childhood in the Midwest I took for granted that silos and even co-ops would be a resource farmers would have.

Adding food storage to countries where that capability doesn&#x27;t exist is a huge multiplier in their agronomic efficiency. There is some excellent discussion of this in the book &quot;Guns, Germs, and Steel&quot; which discusses how these forces shaped the changes in human civilizations.

Regenerative farming deserves a mention here. Soil is indeed important and industrial scale farming has a negative impact on it because a lot of our modern farming practices are sacrificing soil for short term gains.<p>Regenerative farming restores soil as a side effect of farming more efficiently and ultimately can restore vast amounts of land with a relatively low amount of effort. There have been quite a few projects, some of which are quite large scale demonstrating this can be done. There&#x27;s a bit of controversy around some of the claims but overall, there are some nice green bits of land that used to be basically desert. Whatever was done to make that so, we need more of it.

I know this isn&#x27;t real science or anything, but this video helped me better understand the issue with the soil.<p>It&#x27;s from Bon Appétit, where Brad goes to a ranch in Texas. Jump to 9:30 for the soil bit. It goes on for a couple of minutes.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=EAO1A6EdVVA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=EAO1A6EdVVA</a>

Combatting the impact of soil without doing anything about our impossible to scale diet is bound to fail isn&#x27;t it?<p>A huge chunk of our net impact on global warming and deforestation is a direct result of our food system, namely animal agriculture.<p>There is disagreement about just how inefficient turning an acre of corn into slabs of cow, but it should be clear that it is some fraction of the efficiency of just eating that corn as food itself.

People claim that burning biomass is a net-zero effect on the climate because whatever get burned had once collected the carbon from the air. Then we have people arguing that cows are one of the main contributor to global warming because we feed them grass. In cases with produce that get rejected for once reason or an other, it may either go into animal feed or biomass depending on who is paying the more, and thus the greenness of it changes drastically.<p>So why are counting the methane from cows in isolation, while biomass is the sum of carbon released minus carbon extracted?

Article: &quot;I’m done with cow farts&quot;<p>So everyone talks about cows?<p>Anyway, by bringing cows and all animals to lab grown meat and lab grown hard to grow plant based foods, it hopefully brings them to simple base ingredients.<p>Which means it can all be about the soil and we can concentrate way more exactly.<p>If only environmentalists actually wanted to push the future forward rather than destroying current things.<p>Skipping stupid ideas like changing what people will eat through campaigns and trying to stop home food waste or talking about cow farts.

TIL The Land Institute has made progress following its long-standing vision to develop perennial crops.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;landinstitute.org&#x2F;our-work&#x2F;perennial-crops&#x2F;kernza&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;landinstitute.org&#x2F;our-work&#x2F;perennial-crops&#x2F;kernza&#x2F;</a>

Related: see GoogleX co-founder Tom Chi&#x27;s video on climate change, sustainable agriculture, etc.: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=QyQvfaW54NU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=QyQvfaW54NU</a>

I wonder if changing the cow&#x27;s diet could limit the amount of methane generated?<p>I&#x27;ve noticed that changing my own diet by eliminating animal products has cut down significantly on methane production in my own gut.<p>My farts literally don&#x27;t smell like anything at all anymore, when a small one used to clear the room with ease.

We&#x27;re not making any progress on co2e because we&#x27;ve choosen not to.<p>Even if we were, net zero by 2070 (the optimistic outcome here!?) would be pointless, civilisation would be over long before then anyway.<p>I find all this really frustrating. It&#x27;s like someone moaning they&#x27;re fat and telling me about their new diet, the 1000th one this week, where they eat 20 cheese burgers a day and hope for the best. Let&#x27;s get real and either do something or enjoy the ride to hell.

This kind of talk activates my scam detectors.<p>It first got popular when the makers of herbicides like roundup began to advocate &quot;no-till agriculture&quot; which is claimed to build up carbon reserves in the soil.<p>We will always have claims going around that some change in soil management will sequester carbon at widely distributed sites where we can&#x27;t measure it at much lower costs than not producing it to begin with (nuclear power) or sequestering it in some place where we can actually measure (inject it into a hole and measure the volume the same way you measure fuel coming out.)<p>That idea of spreading olvine sand on the beach is the same thing: it is so spread out you&#x27;ll never prove that it worked or didn&#x27;t work, but it is certain that some Enron-style trader makes money several times on it.<p>These sorts of scams are highly dangerous in a world where people will be attracted to &quot;market&quot; solutions: if there was some rule that you had to save 10 tons of carbon by replacing coal with uranium for the right to claim you saved 1 ton some other way it might be helpful.