Regenesis

I have just read a book called Regenesis: Feeding the World without Devouring the Planet by George Monbiot. I dont agree with all of his proposals, but I did glean some interesting information about agriculture, and particularly about the costs of meat production.

Four companies—Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge and Louis Dreyfus—control, on one estimate, 90 percent of the global grain trade. They are consolidating vertically as well as horizontally, buying into seed, fertilizer, processing, packing, distribution and retail businesses. They continue to snap up their smaller competitors.

Another four companies—ChemChina, Corteva, Bayer and BASF—control 66 percent of the world's agricultural chemicals market, while a similar cluster (with BASF replaced by Limagrain) owns 53 percent of the global seed market. Three corporations—Deere, CNH and Kubota—sell almost half of the world's farm machinery. Another four companies control 99 percent of the global chicken-breeding market... (pp.35-36).

In Europe, maize farming is probably the greatest danger to soil health. The plants are slow to develop in the spring, and are generally harvested too late to follow with a winter group. The stubble is widely spaced and sparse. As a result, the soil in these fields tends to be exposed to the elements at the time of year when rain and wind are most likely to strip it from the land. Most maize is grown in Europe to feed dairy cattle (p.52).

Soy is a key ingredient in chicken feed. One report estimates that it takes 109 grammes of chicken breast. Over three-quarters of the world's soy is fed to farm animals. Much of the rest is used by industry or to make cheap vegetable oil. Only 7 percent is turned into substitutes for meat and milk (p.69).

As farming has intensified, the amount of land used for grazing has slightly but steadily shrunk. But the expansion of grazing land remains the world's greatest cause of habitat loss. It's responsible for 40 percent of the deforestation caused by the food industry, making it almost three times more destructive than palm oil. .. Because 92 percent of the world's natural grasslands have already been occupied by livestock or crops, most of this expansion destroys tropical forests (p. 81).

In 2018, Brazil became the world's largest beef exporter. Large volumes of beef are imported from places where the rainforest was illegally cleared by ranchers (p.82)

Another paper calculates that if a magic switch were thrown, causing the entire world to shift to a plant-based diet, and the land now occupied by livestock were rewilded, the carbon drawn down from the atmosphere by recovering ecosystems would be equivalent to all the world's fossil fuel emissions from the previous sixteen years (p.83).

Kernza is a perennial intermediate wheat grass. Although it is still being developed, the breeders hope to match wheat yields within thirty years. Kernza is at least halfway to success.

At Yunnan University in China, they have crossed an annual Chinese rice variety with a wild African plant of the same genus to produce a perennial crop. Already yields match, and in some cases exceed, those of modern annual rice breeds. The cultivar goes by the name of PR23, and has now been planted across 70000 hectares of China, as a fully-fledged commercial crop (p.183).

As 63 percent of beef demand in the US is for ground meat (the kind that goes into hamburgers and most ready beef meals, the proportion of the carcass that gets minced has risen to match it (p.196).

Monbiot does not see organic farming as a practical solution, because it always seems to produce low yields, usually thirty percent less than conventional farming.

The systems we should favour are those that deliver high yields with low environmental impacts. The systems we should reject are those that deliver high yields but with high environmental impacts, or low yields. Low yields necessarily mean high impacts, because of the area of land they need to produce a given volume of foods (p.228).