Given that such a large percentage of soils around the world are degraded and that regenerative farming can rebuild soil so fast, for example 25cm in 3 years in Ridgedale, isn't this still a good thing? Can growing only crops with no animal inputs do that? And anyway much of the world 's farmland is not suitable for crops. I don't want to get into the morality of eating animals but if people are still eating meat then surely less and better quality is a good way to go. If people eat significantly less than the more land required for better meat argument becomes irrelivant. There seems to be no universal agreement on what regenerative agriculture is and I think you have to look at every possible aspect. For example some regenerative enterprises are far more diverse than the one mentioned. Some are practicing agroforestry and silvopasture. I think small scale regenerative farms based on holistic management and permaculture principles can be very exciting. The potential for increasing biodiversity on such farms is amazing and some insects require the animals, their footprints and manure for part of their lifecycle.
I don't see a moral argument in eating meat or not eating meat other than the way factory farms operate, but to eat meat or not to not eat meat is meaningless on moral grounds. I see plants as just as alive as animals, ive been a vegetable/medicinal plant farmer for the last 8 years...and if you learn to listen carefully you will understand the world of plants, its just that plants are less like a human than an animal, we seem to project aliveness on others that look and act more like we do because we understand that but just because we dont understand the way plants act doesn't mean they're less alive and deserving of life. Take for example the oxalic acid in spinach, to me that communicates the the plant is not interested in being consumed and they are producing this substance to deter humans, to me this is clearly a communication defense mechanism in the same way that a human would say "no" or an animal would cry out, its just a different communication style. I do think there is a difference energetically in consuming animals and plants. meat is heavier but has probably more nutrition overall and vegetables are lighter, maybe more spiritual in energetic experience. Both are valuable and offer very different things but I can't see a moral argument worth having here
@@cressraciti Interesting argument, but I think it's a matter of scale. I think you, I, and vegans would all agree that minimising unnecessary suffering is/should be a common goal. If that's the case, then even if we ascribe as equal the perceived suffering of plants, animals, and humans, then seeing as raising animals for slaughter is a far less efficient method of producing food than simply skipping the middle-man and eating plants directly, by choosing vegetarian/vegan, we can drastically cut down on unnecessary suffering of both plants and animals. Don't forget that the grasses that ruminants feed on are alive too, and what we fondly recall as the "freshly mown lawn smell", is actually a warning to nearby grass that danger is afoot. The only way to completely eliminate anthropogenic suffering is to end the species, which I don't think anyone here is arguing, but when there's an option available that's more ethical, sustainable, healthier, and (in must countries) cheaper, than doesn't it make sense to choose that option?
Well said! Its sad that these types of videos are being put out... They really do more harm than good for the animals (and the Planet) they claim to want to help. This does not even BEGIN to cover the many wonderful types of sustainable and regenerative farming practices that are out there and how much they are helping the planet on MULTIPLE levels, let alone how much better the lives of animals would be if factory farming were replaced by the methods used on small regenerative ag farms and permaculture farms. Thank you for sharing!
Yo vegans can you name a single vegan indigenous culture? Oh yeah that's right, the vegan diet came out of white colonial culture. It's purely a issue of privilege to not rely on meat as a source of nutrition.
Hey, first off thanks for covering regen ag, I practice regen grazing along with veganic ag, and I agree with a few if your points like land usage and whatnot. Overall I’d like to see more vegans as I believe we do have to much meat demand. That being said I believe you made a few critical errors here. 1st off, methane, so the biggest thing in this section was the omission of the action of methanotrophs in your analysis. Healthy soil has much much more of these and they do an incredible job of gobbling up methane produced by ruminants, so much so that if the soil is healthy enough it can eliminate almost all the methane that would’ve made it into the atmosphere. 2nd this is much more minor but it’s true none the less, I’m sure most of you guys have heard of the red seaweed food additive that can eliminate up to 99% of ruminant methane production. Couple that with fact that seaweed is literally the best way to sequester carbon in the world and whose production takes zero land and actually creates habitat in the sea, seems like a win win. Now the reason I say it’s more of a minor point is because it’s not commercially available yet, but it will be very soon, probably by the end of the year. So I don’t fault you for not bringing it up. Also when you started talking about how methane production you started talking about all animal ag and said that were likely underestimating methane output, but those systems don’t compare to regen ag systems due to the formerly mentioned methanotroph action. I think the reason for the variant between the top down and bottom up analysis is the action of methanotrophs and their complete lack of them in conventional feed lots. Now one thing that I think is a big disservice in this video is how you did not mention how incredibly degraded our soils actually are, the UN put us at 55 years of harvests left. The reason I think this is such a disservice is because nothing has shown the efficiency of soil regeneration like these grazing techniques. You mention vegan permaculture and rightly say we need to limit tillage, but unfortunately you failed to mention how much slower these processes are and more importantly how they are not applicable they are to large swaths of countries due to climate. Also you didn’t mention how they aren’t scalable to large farms, And are primarily only applicable to small market garden style farms. I can go into detail on any of that further as I’ve utilized a lot of those practices for years now. You were absolutely right about carbon saturation, but we have such vast amounts of degraded soil that I think we should address that pressing problem 1st. Especially in light of the livestock dietary advancements I mentioned earlier. Also regen ag very typically uses lest implements than standard ag, you also endorsed roller crimping cover crops, and what is powering those roller crimpers? Fossil fuels right? In fact vegan ag at scale will lead to a marked uptick in fossil fuel usage, another problem with using large implements is their soil compaction effects. All your Land usage facts were on point, except a little mis directed, for one thing since a lot of these practices are mob grazing and resting land for 60+days they actually act as natural habitat for wildlife just as much as livestock habitat. A lot of systems are designed to work within the natural habitat and use silvopasturing techniques that plant a lot of trees and turn straight pastures into more savana like habitats. I am currently grazing in silvopasture right now. Your critiques of the chicken meat produced by these systems are again correct but again a bit misdirected. So first off the chickens provide a real jobs on the farm, their main action is to follow the ruminants and scratch apart their poop to get at fly larvae, stopping the pest cycle, in doing this they also spread the manure for better fertilization, that all being said by pasturing these chickens you can actually reduce grain usage by 20%-30%, all this is meaningless to vegans as the chicken you eat eats 100% less grain as you don’t eat chicken. I say this so I can frame my next point. There are regenerative grain production practices that not only build soil, but also stack production of meat on top. This is called pasture cropping and is so versatile it can be practiced in cold or warm climates from North Dakota to Australia. So combined with the grain reduction from pasturing I think this is a great way to be more sustainable. I’m sorry this is so long, it’s just an incredibly nuanced. Anyway thanks for covering regen ag.
Chickens are about the only environmentally stable animal to be used in agriculture (and even they have limits), but anyone who advocates for using large animals like cows or pigs for regenerative agriculture has no idea what they are talking about. No amount of seaweed can ignore the realities of large animals damage to soil like compaction, erosion, and mycelium network disruption. As someone who majored in environmental sciences and minored in soil science, you seem a bit delusional.
@@cabinboy5282 I am very glad that you have those degrees, I can tell you that everything you said is true about mycelium, compaction, erosion when it comes to standard grass fed operations and certainly in CAFO. Its not in any of the science and the massive amounts of soil testing I have done on my farm, and the other regen farms I visit. Its literally the stated Goals of regen ag to increase Mycelium and decrease erosion, and improve Soil compaction, which is a non issue when you have the thick forage for animals to walk in, and the root growth stimulation breaks up and aerates the soil, so it actually accomplishes the opposite to what you say it does, at least in my case, and every case I have personally seen. Now all of my anecdote is from my farm and the results from it, and the 40 other regen operations I have seen results and soil tests from, literally none suffered from what you are describing. I could get on board with what you were saying if I had not seen the opposite in all my years doing this, and from the results on my farm. I understand why anecdote form some shlub like myself would not be convincing to you. I guess you're right about permaculture but permaculture isn't really in a place to endorse or preclude animals. If grazing animals were the antithesis to permaculture why would an almost plurality of permaculture practitioners who is stewarding large amounts of land use grazing animals? Maybe we could ask them why they unnecessarily use grazing animals like this and destroy there land? Its not for the money I can assure you that, There is an old saying that the only money in permaculture is in teaching it. Its funny you mention chickens, I completely disagree with you there, They require a large amount of grain, I put up with the externalized impact of chickens because they do so much other good stuff on the farm like pest and parasite control, composting, fertilizing, Light tilling. I would like to know you’re ideal way to produce food? As someone who studied soil science like yourself I am curious your opinion. I am not one to parrot the most grandiose claims of regen ag advocates, but To me even if Regen ag had half the capabilities it says it does, in light of the alternatives, it’s vastly superior.
Thanks for sharing that. I am vegan myself but I fully support the regenerative agriculture movement. To me it seems logical that bigger animals are part of restoring the eco systems, just depends on how they are managed. I don't know much about farming but I fully resonate with the philosophy behind this movement which is about honoring and respecting nature. I'd rather see people eat regenerative meat once or twice a week than vegans eating fake gmo meat. For me it's all about quality.
@@KatinkaLucas exactly, I’m all for a reduction in meat overall, whether that’s with more vegans or with more people just reducing there personal consumption.
Unfortunately this discussion excludes a lot of information/includes misinformation and pseudoscience on the fact that holistic grazing not only improves the health of grasslands because it restores the ecological niche or large grazers in a natural landscape, but also acts like farmers graze grass to the soil when in fact they rotate them daily to prevent this very thing that leads to soil erosion. Why ignore all of these facts and more??
a lot of land used for grazing was not naturally grassland, prior to human clearing and occupation of the land! In Australia that is very much the case, and some of the indiginous grasslands we human cultivated through periodic burning.
They ignore these facts because they have no logical argument. They have no clue how it actually works and have no desire to learn to educate themselves. But instead make dumbass claims
@Daniel Bifröst Regenerative grazing, if true, is an argument for having animals on the land to aid it. Not an argument for eating said animals. (aka, consuming them outside of that ecosystem and shit them out somewhere else). That's a leap we can only take if we think animals are morally inconsiderable, which is irrational and wrong. The fact that land might need grazing animals on it is not an argument for why we should treat non-human animals as property or objects we are free to violate as we see fit. It might mean we have to live WITH grazing animals, respecting them, letting them live their lives and die of old age or other ways not involving human desires for meat. Instead regenerative grazing has become a way to argue for (exaggarated) meat consumption and animal exploitation. As long as those grazing animals are considered "human food items", as much as "climate fixing machines", we will breed them, prematurely kill them, consume only parts of them, shit them out in some urban sewer, make money from killing them, mutilate them and genetically manipulate them to fit our use for them as food. And that's the same slippery slope that got us into factory farming, and is incompatible with any "natural" system.
10:07 wouldn't the plant growth also sequester methane? these numbers seem off. Also, are they really feeding animals from off-site sources EVERY year or just the first year(s) whilst they re-establish some of the ecosystem?
@@christopherbeddoe406 chickens are monogastric though... They have one stomach. Besides, video said “mostly fed”, not exclusively fed. Looks like you’re looking for a reason to be angry.
no plants do not digest methane. there's sub subsoil bacteria that eat methane as it percolates up through the soil from anaerobic decaying organic matter down below… but the idea these digest all the cattle methane even in regenerative systems (which are better in lots of ways) has never been established in science and there is a significant amount of evidence that the opposite is true, methane production in regenerative systems is still significant.
I do not totally disagree with all of the points but I found this video as biased as the studies you tear down almost totally on the association of the funders. I suspect facts and figure that are just given as truths. For example: were the methane bottom up examples and calculations using grain finished beef numbers or were they using grass finished numbers? Is there top down information for the grazing lands you are questioning or is the top down methane numbers from conventional agriculture. While honest in mentioning grain was brought in to feed the chickens, chickens are relatively efficient protein producers. Does your analysis account for market changes from more expensive beef and a move toward other non-crazed meats. You may have a point on diminishing returns on grazing lands, but is there a model where the grazing land moves over long periods of time restoring more and more fields? I guess my main point is this was more of a biased debunking video than a real look at the impact of moving from conventional agricultural methods.
"For example: were the methane bottom up examples and calculations using grain finished beef numbers or were they using grass finished numbers" Methane emissions from cattle eating grains are typically lower than that of pasture fed cattle, especially the cattle on the northern rangelands of Australia where the grasses have a lot of cellulose and are harder for the cattle to digest. Also you can more easily add dietary supplements to reduce methane to lot fed animals simply because they never move around and have regular human contact. All these dietary interventions to reduce methane only go so far and the costs can be prohibitive, especially the seaweed additives which would require a massive production of a particular type of seaweed on a scale comparable with the land mass of grazing land itself to produce enough. and then that would all need to be collected, transported and distributed to cattle. Forget it.
You're completely overlooking that regenerative ruminate agriculture doesn't have to evolve eating animals. If you let Buffalo wonder around the plains you get 8 foot stands of native grass and diverse ecosystems with little rainfall, but if you try to make that same preserve without Buffalo you get an ecosystem that's constantly returning to sand desert ie the dust bowl but slower. You can achieve the same effect by forcing cows to move regularly between small blocks which has the advantage of working better to create small grasslands at the cost of more human interaction. All the homesteaders I've met that use this method claim it actually cut their workload in half because moving the cows between temporary barriers is easier than having to maintain everything needed to grow food (tractors are awful and break a lot). But on the other hand all of them were basically breaking even selling a couple cows at 4x the market rate so it's not exactly viable unless there is a government subsidy for habitat restoration, or your a homesteader that just wants to go off grid instead of make money.
Farmers need to learn to sell and market. They don’t have a viability issue they have a branding issue. Liver king gets branding. He’s selling pills and protein for 50-60 bucks a hit. Making bank. Branding and increasing the value of your product with words and video will be key.
Sorry, but your Indian friend is lying. Do you know what the soy meal is? Soy meal is the feed for animals. But soy meal is the by-product of soy oil production. And soy oil is almost completely consumed by humans. So what do you suggest? To burn all soy meal after oil extraction? Or do you have any other ideas what to do with by-products? For example OUTLY-UK, is making out products, mostly milk. And rest of oat, the residue of this is by-product, which is too nutritious to let go to waste. So OUTLY is selling this by-product to pig farmers. So what do you suggest? Burn it? Pour in to the sea or what? Animals are eating mostly by-products.
I understand there are companies taking advantage of the green idea while maintaining those bad practices, but grazing animals are part of the ecossystem in many areas of the world. It is possible to mimic their natural existence with domestic animals, maintaining those ecological functions that restore land and are beneficial to biodiversity. In Portugal we have massive problem of undergrazing because all shepherd disapeared and that's one of the problems causing major wildfires. I have sheep in my land and over time I can tell a difference on the biodiversity of insects and herbs growing here. The world was not all covered in forests, there were meadows and prairies that were maintained with herbivores, the largest they are the more they are able to maintain those areas by grazing and trampling small bushes and trees. Think of bisons in America or horses, aurochs, also bisons here in Europe. And think about all the plant associated with pastures that wouldn't exist if pastures weren't a natural habitat. Without those animal all would be covered by forest before human intervention in tha landscape.
Before human intervention there were much more forests, and people burn down those exactly for the reason to help big herbivores spread. This is a common practice since we could control fire.
@@FreeFromAllThings so you mean there were no natural prairies or natural herds, for example of bison in america, or zebras, antilopes, buffalo etc in africa?
@@anateresamatos6212 in many parts of Africa this grazing is natural, because the climate wouldn't allow forests to grow. But yes in Northern America, prairies are "made" by humans, mostly to help the bisons spread.
Dude. You are missing the whole point. No other tool can be used to reverse the effects of desertification and it just so happens it can feed people at the same time.
@@EternalJourneys do you have an example? Of regenerative agriculture without animal inputs? Otherwise that feels like truth by assertion. I'm permaculturalist and I've done a fair amount of research and not found a single working example of a sustainable veganic system.
@@rorylee3582 I don’t have an example of regen ag. But there are plenty of people out there successfully producing and using plant based fertilisers. That, and the comfort of knowing that most plant ecosystems on earth came into existence without ruminants.
@@EternalJourneys you can have your "comfort of knowing" if you want. But the reality is that none of the ecosystems we have access to can function without animals. I cannot take any "comfort" based on systems that disappeared millions of years ago 🤷♀️ but you do you bro.
You have debunked one farm’s claims, not the entire method. Regenerative grazing should be used in CONJUNCTION with regenerative crop farming, that is how the system works. If conventional crop farmers start to incorporate grazing animals, and conventional livestock farms start planting crops, you can easily get to 2.5 times the area for the same amount of animals because the area is shared between two previously separated farming sectors. Your whole approach is positioned by your own wold view and drips with bias.
The point of regenerative grazing is not to grow beef, it is to grow grass. If a farmer is focused on the former they're not doing regenerative grazing.
Actually any organic matter can create soil. But in the case of regenerative farming, it’s all about maintaining SOIL health through rotating crops or grazing.
As a lover of regenerative meat agriculture it was hard to listen to this video. However I always find it annoying to hear the argument that people just want to hear what they want to hear. Firstly that argument applies to everyone so really there is no point in bringing it up. It would be trivial to find the same video same this about all the vegans watching this. Secondly the actual picture is definitely not as clear cut as you would make it out to be. Having done my own research i would say it's complicated. Environmental science isn't that easy. It is easy to count co2 emissions. I think that is the real sin. We focus too much on emissions and lose sight of the bigger picture. I think we can agree that regenerative forms of agriculture are better than conventional. Plant based regenerative is just about as popular as the animal version, that is to say both are small. If you want to promote permaculture do that. I don't see how a take down of regenerative animal agriculture helps. Although you did claim this cooperate conspiracy with purly circumstantial evidence. I don't like big agricultural either. But then you don't like WOP either and your guest called them frauds. Where is the proof? I want to eat meat. And I want a healthy ecosystem. I don't think it's wrong to want both. I don't think it is physically impossible. If regenerative meat has benefits, why can't we celebrate and build on that. I think this video takes the tone it does because that's what you got to do to get attention on youtube. No one wants to watch a fair and balanced discussion of pros and cons of different agricultural practices. People want to see the takedown. But is that what's good for the world?
Thanks, there were also many methodological errors in how the data was presented in this video, like you said it’s not as easy as extrapolating small sets of emissions data and completely ignoring nature cycles like the methane cycle like is done here.
Veganism will always be a multifaceted argument. It doesn’t just stand on the environmental leg. I can’t claim to be an expert on regenerative meat, I’m just hearing about it. From what it sounds like even if it’s better for the ecosystem it’s not widely available and wouldn’t be able to provide the amount of animal flesh people consume right now. If anyone is buying from any other source they’re contributing to factory farming. What I can say is “wanting” to do something doesn’t make it ethical or kind. There are so many reasons to not eat animals, it might just be me but I can’t think of a single good reason to eat them.
@@rosehalladay5843 I eat them because I think eating locally is of primary importance, and I can raise all my own meat with very little work. Raising all my vegetables is an incredible amount of labour. Plus the provide the most glorious compost for my garden and improve the fields they graze. Seems like a win win.
@@wadebacca putting aside the ethical and health reasons for being vegan, you’re in a unique position that hardly any people have access to. Most people can’t raise their own animals or even have their own gardens. It’s simply not sustainable on the scale we currently consume animal products.
@@rosehalladay5843 your absolutely right, I would agree with the statement that we need an overall reduction in meat consumption, but I cannot agree with the idea that there are “no good reasons, not to be vegan”. In your original comment you stated it’s not widely available, but it’s videos like this that are criticizing companies for adopting it. Veganic ag, which is the only alternative close to regen ag is as far as sustainability is even less wide spread, does this mean people shouldn’t adopt it?
over simplification like this is a red flag...those who think they know seem to actually know the least, you're never going to translate a highly interconnective eco system into something this simple. The more you learn many perspectives the more you will start to grasp at the grandiosity of our living world so everyone should be skeptical of anyone who seems to have a motive like this
Regenerative grazing is an argument for why humans should live ALONGSIDE grazing animals, not EAT them. As soon as animals are considered and intended to be human "food items", you have an unnatural situation that disrupts the romatizised "natural ecosystem" it's dressed as. As soon as those animals are intended to be food for urban, modern, demanding consumers, the animals need to be genetically manipulated, homogenic, mutilated and killed way before the natural end of their lives. They then will be transported to consumers far away, and be digested and shat out in urban sewers, their remains never returning to the land they lived on. Not to speak of the ethics of using selected individuals as climate fixing machines, only to plot to violate their entire existence to appease our aesthetic ideals. Regenerative grazing is not an argument against veganism. It's an argument for humans living alongside wirh and respecting other animals, letting them live their lives and die of old age or other natural causes, their tired bodies returning to the land and feeding wild animals.
@@rubygreta1 There's not enough land to move them around as much as they should move. The landscape handles migrations better than field confinement, and they eat away all of certain kinds of plants and leave others, reducing plant and animal diversity and compressing soil. Even grass fed cattle are supplemented typically with grass or alfalfa raised on other plots.
@@roku3216 that only happens in open field grazing, mob grazing has the opposite effect where the cows eat everything not just there favourites before moving off.
@@wadebacca If you've been part of cattle farming, you will soon learn they never eat everything, and what they do eat can soon become reduced or disappear from the land, There is not enough land available to all but a select very few ranchers, who want to make money, to have such a lofty approach to grazing, and I have yet to see a single parcel of land improved by cattle. (I grew up raising cattle and saw all the ranches in the area, plus feral cattle living in the wild. The best scenario I saw were the half dozen wild ones who at least did no harm on around 1,000 acres.) Even wild bison damage the land they live on if they can't visit each spot briefly twice a year and move on. The National Bison Range in MT can only keep between 350 and 500 bison on 18,500 acres, giving on average roughly 46 acres per bison which are regularly "culled" and managed to keep within acceptable environmental standards for the refuge. www.hcn.org/issues/53.2/indigenous-affairs-tribes-reclaiming-the-national-bison-range (an interesting article on the bison range you might enjoy)
Watching one 20 minute video of guys sitting in white rooms quoting “studies” is never going to convince me over 3x a week 20 minute videos for the last 3 years out on the land (Greg Judy). Edit: I’m science based, and I rarely eat chicken, beef, pork, lamb or goat, but you HAVE to see the transformation of soil and fields that have been managed in a regenerative way to see how they can store rain, sun and carbon before you make a decision. You can’t judge all grazing by conventional grazing, conventional ranching, where they use ivermectin, a pesticide that destroys the life in the soil. Watch about 8 hours of Greg Judy’s best vids from the past three years. Cloven hooved animals, whether you want to eat them or not, are the future of carbon sequestration. But their grazing HAS to be managed. It’s an art and a science.
What an absolute load of total bullshit. Whenever I see land which has had this bullshit performed on it, I can't help but shake my head and think about how vastly inferior they are to forested lands, literally by orders of magnitude. Cloven-hooved animals are *NOT* the future of carbon sequestration, *AGROFORESTRY* is the future of carbon sequestration.
@@frederiksmees5503, how many millions? And how many humans were there on the whole continent before 1500 CE? On a related note, what generally is relationship between the populations of herbivores/grazing herds and predators?
I’m not a doctor, but I am a 7th generation farmer and rancher. I doubt you even approve this comment but I’ll toss my 39 years of Agg hat in the ring. I 100% agree that modern farming practices are a mess. There are false claims in every aspect of Agg, especially in the new BeyondMeat system. I’ll also point out that you omitted over 99.9% of the farmers with published information about regenerative Agg involving animals.
I'm from New Zealand, You are right - there were no mammals in NZ prior to human settlement (except some native bats) , however we had / have a very diverse avian population. Over the millennia of Isolation in the absence of mammalian predation, some of these developed into the largest birds in recent history eg Moa (ratite), Haast Eagle. NZ is also an Island nation so lots of sea birds - all in all there is / was a lot of bird instigated soil biological activity seed spread in droppings e.t.c. I think you are missing the point when you say NZ is an example of how animals are not needed for soil fertility.
Also one of Savorys points is that herd animals are most important in arid climates, the more humidity=the less grazing animals are needed for the plants lifecycles. So correct me if i'm wrong but New Zealand is pretty humid on average, so he needs to account for that as well.
This lady gives is a great presentation about her farm and how regenerative grazing can do many good things in NZ, th-cam.com/video/EauOfH9U-9Y/w-d-xo.html
@@larllarfleton Aridity is not an essential ingredient - however arid zones can go brittle and desertify the fastest. Savory's point is that herbivores are essential for the quickest reclamation of any soil that has been degraded by human activity. As long as they have something to eat they will improve the soil biology.
The Great Plains grasslands of N America had 60 million migrating bison. Arid climates need arid-adapted ruminants to maintain soil. Bison. Cows are water-adapted. Of course the rest of the biotic community is also vital including prairie dogs, beavers, & wolves. Temperate grasslands are the most endangered ecosystems on the planet, & all have large migrating ungulate herds as integral contributors. Some biologists define bison as keystone to the Great Plains. So many native animals are killed for plant agriculture as well. One of countless examples, monarch butterfly habitat is being decimated for avocados, & activists are being killed. Burrowers, ground-dwelling birds, native grazers, native primates, native predators are all either being killed outright or slowly from loss of habitat & migration corridors. I am a certified permaculture designer who lives on a silvopastured orchard. We are in a mega-drought, & our soil is holding water better than next door with no grazers. This is a very small herd that our neighbor moves around to several locations. It can be done beautifully in a polycultural system on a smaller scale. 'Industrial' food production is ecocidal whether plant or animal. Buying plant based foods grown hundreds to thousands of miles away, packaged in plastic, shipped in diesel trucks is not going to help climate change, biodiversity loss, plastic pollution, or ecosystems collapse. Relocalization is the way to go. What can your specific climate support? Maybe your biome can support a vegetarian or even a vegan diet. Mine can't. I eat about 90% localvore within 20 miles of my home, around 40% within 1 mile of my home, including wild foods. I am grateful. What did Native peoples in your biome used to eat? What can you grow, preserve, share with your community, year round within seasonal limits? Relocalize, & eat with the seasons.
Lots of false assumptions here about rotational grazing. The fields you drive by are not grazed in tight rotations & moved up to twice a day like Allan Savory describes. In PROPERLY managed pastures, there can be plenty of deep rooted plants such as trees, wildflowers, & wild grasses. In most places on the planet, the idea of reaching carbon saturation anytime soon is insane.
No mention of the benefits of manure fertilizers vs. synthetic petroleum based fertilizers.. Currently we are using oil to fertilize mono crops and THAT is very unsustainable..
the crops waster for the concentration camps feeding !? over 80 percent of all resources are wasted and stolen for feeding and fattening concentration camps and breeding-knifing corpses WHILE starvation exists. watch the video.
Hi Mic, I think we could all benefit from a live stream of you and I talking about your false claims about regenerative agriculture. I live in a community that practices true regenerative agriculture. I have over ten years of living here in the lifestyle. Much of your information is incorrect. It is far better for the environment to eat regenerative food including beef, chick, fish, shrimp, and pork than supporting the corporate monoculture that is currently destroying the world. My real name is JUSTIN DOLAN, I live in the first house on the right at St. Michael's Sustainable Community. I have attended four Universities and lectured at others. I was a Major crimes investigator and Vegan.
and yet those aren't the only two dietary options (regenerative animal vs monoculture conventional ag (which is mainly done to produce animal feed, not human food anyhow) ). and have you heard of regenerative cropping? It's way less emissions intensive than regenerative cattle per calorie of edible food. the facts around methane emissions are unavoidable for cattle production, and yes, EPA numbers are too-low. the environmental footprint of beef (regenerative or otherwise) are vastly higher per calorie than fruit & vegetables and even grains when you multiply out the land-use, water-use, energy-inputs, toxic outflows (like manure ponds) and GHG emissions. Order of magnitude ~100x fruit and vegetables. yes regenerative has benefits, but Alan Savory has massively oversold them, especially the great big lie he tells when he says "its the only way to save mankind (from climate change)". He's a snake oil salesman, who happily murdered thousands of elephants on a hunch and now brags about his "error".
@@bashful228 yes but if farmers rotationally graze there would be no need for farmers to grow food for agriculture. Also a lot of his stats are off in this vid.
@@bashful228 Hi, I'm a farmer. First, only small percentage of land is usable for vegetable farming, considering the need of irrigation too. It means pumps and so on. Second the vegetables are more productive, but only because they are "miners", they require huge amounts of impunts. Third, theese imputs usually are animal imputs (blood meal, feather meal, fish meal, bone meal and manure). You could change it for less rich compost, but compost create a huge amount of CO2 emissions that vegans never take in account. Fourth vegetable production is seasonal, so it mean huge amount of shipping for long distances, while animal products aren't seasonal and can be local. Usage of land is not a point, some soils can produce only grasses and you can harvest only small amounts of it without depleting the soil, in such situation you can't farm vegetables or crops, herbivore animals are the best way to utilize the grass production. Some how now that there are a lot less herbivores than in the last 100 000yers, the methan production is so much worse, but wasn't a problem for thousands of years? So what would you eat in winter without shipping veggies and fruits from across the world? pasta, bread and sugar? Agriculture is unfortunately orders of magnitude more complicated than 99% of people think. Soil types, clima, weather, amount and type of imputs and outputs for each crop... if you don't know theese facts you shouldn't really comment as if you have "THE SOLUTION". I understand being vegan for ethical reasons, but there is no sustanaibility or regeneration in veganism.
@@bashful228 CH⁴ missions related to meat production are dealt with by the nature of the pastures ruminants need (hydroxil ions). Let's see if you can get through the Science. Walter Jehne providing all the answers. th-cam.com/video/123y7jDdbfY/w-d-xo.html
Whatever supposed merits there might be it remains a fact that slaughtering the victims on farms is wrong. Just as slavery was wrong. Permaculture is regenerative. Humanure is regenerative. And no one needs to be slaughtered.
YES!! I am really sick of seeing the environmental movement embrace regenerative grazing as though it's the solution, and only factory farming is the problem. It's time for people to realize that animal ag is inherently inefficient compared to plant ag. Plant based is where it's at!
I'd be genuinely intrigued by an argument that would support your claim that the time has come for people to understand that animal ag is inherently inefficient compared to animal ag.
Mic, the rocket scientist doesn't also seem to realize that Quantis did both the LCA for Impossible Foods and WOP. Same exact company. The 2019 numbers were also part of the the 2020 peer reviewed papers. Same analysis. Mic is such a dumb ass some times.
Funny how Manic Mic and his so-called expert don't realize that CO2(e) in both GWP 20 and GWP100 are both flawed methodologies. Why? Methane is a short lived gas compared to CO2, so they're not equivalent. That's why Dr. Myles Allen and his team at Oxford developed GWP* to account for these lifetime disparities. Methane in the troposphere is constantly being oxidized by hydroxyl radicals back to cyclical CO2 and water. But the WOP LCA didn't use GWP* because that's not the scientific convention. Using GWP 100 is. If the LCA used the more accurate GWP* method, WOP's numbers would have been about 4 to 5 times BETTER.
Mic the manic vegan also needs to learn how the microbial carbon pump works. What gets saturated is the labile carbon in the top 12 or so inches. But the microbial carbon pump continues to pump out root exudates that feed microbes (bacteria and fungi) that turn over every 7 to 14 days. Those microbes become the necromass which is the basis for additional soil organic matter.....that guess what? HOLDS MORE SOIL ORGANIC CARBON. Soil isn't a finite bath tub....As long as there's photosynthesis, in healthy soils there's always more SOM formation, both POM and MAOM...so would help if Mic the Manic Vegan had a clue as to what the newer microbial soil science paradigms are. His commentary is comically stupid.
His expert has the bottom-up and top down methods backwards. Bottom-up over counts...top down is showing the opposite.... when proper inventories of C12, C13 C14 carbon are accounted for, most top down analysis is showing that the largest source of increasing CH4 in the atmosphere is coming from coal bed gas and fracked gas NOT enteric methane. There however was some confusion with these different carbon isotopes in 2016, since these newer fossil fuels have both signatures from biogenic and thermogenic sources of CH4 so they were originally mis-attributed to animal agriculture. There's also a lot of flux with CH4 emissions from a number of sources, and CH4 amounts are also contingent on the availability of hydroxyl radicals [OH]. So once again, Mic's analysis is really bad. .
I have a hard time believing cows are a problem variable in the equation. Looking at North America prior to cows there were millions of bison. Animals and plants have a pretty symbiotic relationship. I can much more easily buy into other sources of waste, excess and pollution being problems.
Wow, the desperation and mathematical gymnastics based on conjecture and presumption required for this nonsense 'debunking' is laughable. Ok, you're vegan, great, jog on.
All I see is yet another vegan vlogger who has probably zero experience in regenerative agriculture or any sort of experience outdoors really 😊, but seems to have a great hunger for likes and praise from the tribe. Failing to see nuances that are ever so important to understand why regenerative ag works, why it is the most efficient tool of rebuilding soil and revegetating areas destroyed by industrial farming. The guy clearly set out to debunk not to understand first. The tribe of course applauds and takes another step towards becoming blind to reason.
Good job hand-waving away facts you don't like by labeling them incorrectly as being cherry-picked in order to support your blatantly false and downright moronic views.
Why dont you have conversation with somebody who understand ecosystem processes and post that video? you would get so debunked to a point where you would never step outside your door again.
Just like the people hell bent on proving regenerative grazing is the future you have made up your mind in advance and are just juggling numbers to favor your to point. This is not debunking anything. You latch on to veganism like meat eaters latch on to beef. How about mixed diverse local food, befitting its context, instead of silver bullet solutions. There were some rash assumptions and no debunking of a lot of mob grazing claims first off, Just like veganism comes from a idea to do good so does regenerative grazing and is definitly being highjacked by other interests. If you are serieus about debunking, debunk this: Grassland neutralises most of its CH4 this way. Water vapor from plants H20 turns in OH because of sunlight OH +CH4 = CO2. OH is hunderfold present to CO2 ("just have a think" has a great video on this) Carbon storage in grasslands is way quicker than forests so it could be great transition to forestry. Also bringing back native prairie in the US, is basicly climax ecosystem with maximum biodiversity how is that not one of (y)our goals. 2/3 of agricultural land is claimed to be not avaible for cropping due to accesibility and terain so grazing woult be great if it werent for methane (wich is no isue unless truely debunked). Polyface is very clear on there (very local btw) grain use, there was no need to debunk that, i dont know about WOP in this regard. The manure is captured in the soil anyway so it is stored even thoug it is not in such a direct way as with cattle.
I love pigs. I read about pigs in the book Animal Liberation. It was the first animal that I stopped eating. It has been four years now. There is a better, more compassionate, and more loving way to live our lives.
This is basically a commercial ag critique. How does this relate to small homesteads and farms that are not producing massive amounts of food for sale to corporations?
As long as humans are present on the earth we are going to reshape the land. The things we can do to reduce this at least a little should be tried. For some that's going vegan, for others that's planting trees and going renewable. It's not realistic to assume the whole world will adopt one person's idea on how to fix the problem so encouraging people to do what they can should be the main goal.
@@EternalJourneys if you wanna talk about inaccurate data, look no further than the Data Mic uses. Just google “methanotrophs” and wonder why it wasn’t mentioned in this video.
You failed to debunk anything, you really don't seem to understand regenerative agriculture. Here are some TH-cam videos if people want a good primer on the subject. Regenerative Agriculture - The fastest way to climate safety? Just Have a Think Nov 29, 2020 Regenerative Agriculture - Part 1 Just Have a Think Sep 2019 Regenerative Agriculture - Part 2 Just Have a Think Sep 2019 Walter Jehne - The Soil Carbon Sponge, Climate Solutions and Healthy Water Cycles Apr 2018
Agreed!!! Also want to mention Joel Salatin's work as well. Considering the fact that most conventional grass fed cattle farmer get about 80 days out of 1 acre for cattle, he's nearly tripled his yield of grass with rotational grazing.
Don't let your veganism cloud your reason. The great plains were once black with grazing bison. That's about as regenerative as it can get. We can thank Ulysses Grant for almost wiping them from the planet. All bison will certainly die, and be eaten by either people, other mammals, birds, insects, or worms. Have the biological needs of grasslands changed from before?
Literally no regenerative ag person would disagree with you about cover crops and food forests. Those are great things and are encouraged. How do you engage with the fact that North America used to have orders of magnitude more animal impact on the land pre European settlers? North America was jam-packed with Bison, Elk, deer, caribou, moose, beavers, water fowl, migratory birds, birds of prey, bears, wolves, coyotes, cougars, etc..
Yes, and the system functioned and was productive, and provided ecological services. The issue is how we are grazing, the system can handle intensive grazing, and in brittle environments, requires it in order to function ecologically.
Such anger from both sides. No wonder humans can not get on a sustainable path. Until we can figure out how to get along with our own species, it will continue to be impossible to co-exist with all of the other organisms that we MUST SHARE this planet with for much more than a mere blip in history.
I agree we need to get along but the two sides are not a level-playing field in terms of destruction. Is it wrong to get angry about selfishness and egos that put taste above ethics and survival of the planet, preventing pandemics etc? Would it be wrong for slaves to get angry about their oppressors? Not exactly the same of course...
Almost ever premises you make is seems to be either misleading in its critique and context or just plain wrong . On the whole your presentation seem disingenuous. Good that you give reference to information. Roots so Deep probably could well do with a comprehensive peer review or another study for repeatability. The farmer, Gabe Brown, lays to waste most of your premises handily also.
ground would never reach an carbon fullness because there is constant roots growing witch means constant bacteria and fungi that consume it and because of the grazing makes sure that the plants are constant growing and the beef might not be negative in carbon upon itself but if put together with the amounts of carbon absorbed into the ground and admitted from the cows it makes it a lot less carbon that is exerted into the atmosphere plus yes it might not be so affective in his region where he live because its only a half a year growing season but imagen that same farming strategy in country's where growing season is all year round it would be able to double those amounts of carbon uptake into the ground with the same amount of cows so you would be negative in carbon emissions since there is always something growing
@@AKA_Yours_2RLY_Music it's not about telling people what to eat, it's about telling people WHO they shouldn't be eating. Animals aren't products, they're sentient beings who feel pain and deserve the right to life. Meat is not healthy. High amounts of fat and cholesterol, no fiber. A whole food plant-based diet is the only diet clinically proven to reverse heart disease and type 2 diabetes. A standard American diet is linked to our top 15 killers. nutritionfacts.org/video/how-not-to-die/
@@bifurioussiren you're speaking like some spiritual guru as if such spiritual practices are sacred to you, but that couldn't be farther from the truth. Your practice is death, not life. Who are you to tell me what is good to eat and what is evil to eat? That is why I have no reason to even humour your argument. I can list all varying levels of benefits from eating strictly animals and you will not even listen, so why should I bother with you but to call you a hypocrite and an imbecile? Preach else where and begone, there will be no ignorance here.
@@bifurioussiren fats and cholesterol are also extremely healthy for you so I really don't know what your argument is about. Are you by any chance a sugar addict? Do you enjoy your toxic canola and soy? Lol
Let's just completely ignore the fact that organic vegetables are the highest input farming enterprise. Requiring massive amounts of compost typically from animal manures. Conventional vegetable farming is fine without these animal inputs because it relies on synthetic NPK salts, but organic, nope...? Organic farming (without animals) cuts off symbiotic ecosystem processes that mimic nature, and require way more energy inputs than organic farming (with animals). Processing plant materials into compost takes huge amounts of human energy, but animals process this plant matter into manures (the best compost) as their natural ecological niche. This video also puts a great focus on GHG emissions, but have you never heard of geoengineering, stratospheric injection of aerosols, and solar radiation management? Can we start asking why there are so many heavy metals in the atmosphere? What implications do programs like HAARP and similar infrastructure around the world working in combination with these atmospheric heavy metals have on our climate? Climate change is being influenced by geoengineering programs. Organic agriculture is deeply intertwined with animal systems and will die if animal agriculture ends. Conventional chemical based agriculture will be fine without animals. Vegan diets are dependant on globalism excluding the tropics. How can you eat a local sustainable vegan diet during winter without being dependent on globalism? Climate change religion scientism is a Trojan Horse for the new world orders technocratic synthetic transhuman diet. Enjoy your cockroach milk lattes and up-cycled food waste soylent green diet in your agenda 2030 smart city! ;)
You have to look better at the charts. 77% of agricultural land is used for feed and grazing. Not all land is agricultural land (that is only 50%). But this FAO study misses some land. Where is the land used for producing biofuels, industrial oils, etc ... ? That number is getting significant as well. Not all agricultural land is used for food, and their numbers do not reflect that.
Factory farming is actually more eco-friendly because is uses less land, not to mention that it’s the only way to produce as much flesh as the planet is consuming for the price tags we pay. Denial is a stage of grief. Just give it up and go vegan!
@@wadebacca my point was that the only viable choice we have is to switch to farming plants only. We could be producing the same amount of food we are now with just 30% of the land we’re using, not to mention distributing it better and with renewable energy.
@@PBandJames1 it’s only viable if our soil is healthy, our soil is not healthy and vegan ag cannot appropriately address this. Vegan ag is like driving your car without changing your oil, you could say “ I’m eliminating 5 qts of oil every 5,000 Kms” but all your doing is hastening the cars demise. I’ve been researching and practicing permaculture for over a decade.
@@wadebacca I haven’t studied this field much. Let’s assume what you’re saying is true: humans will need the aid of ruminants, even in carefully planned permaculture systems proportionate to our needs. There’s still no ethical excuse to not make that a vegan system. We don’t need to exploit, control, or eat animals. We do it for pleasure and profit.
@@PBandJames1 yeah, I absolutely see where your coming from, I do it for self sustainability reasons, I live in Canada with no access to locally grown fresh vegetables for many months, and I raise sheep for compost for my garden as much as for meat and milk. Putting that aside, let’s say we are raising animals for ecological purposes with no slaughter, these animals naturally breed in high numbers because of predation. So our options are to breed these animals and just let them get jacked by predators, or curtail there breeding. Breeding instincts are the strongest instinct in many of these animals, I question whether it’s more moral to allow for the conscious suffering of curtailing there breeding over just killing them, which entails no suffering, I fully admit that this is unjust killing, but life circumstances are not always just, especially when the alternatives are wild animal predation which entails conscious suffering and death, curtailing breeding which entails years of conscious suffering leading to eventual death, which all life does in the end, or just killing and eating them which entails just death. Am I missing another option?
You guide lines regarding methane are based on conventional cattle production in feed lots with concrete floors that have nothing to compare with grassland where the carbon is sequestered to the soil, feeds it's biology and grows grass again as well as increases the organic matter and root systems, contrary to the tillage and mono crops farming way of feed cattle with grains.
We're doing sustainable food production on 11 acres in Puerto Rico, and even discontinued raising truly free range chickens for eggs (even without buying meds or feed for them) because we realized that we can grow more food without chickens than we can with chickens. OR... the amount of work and monetary inputs for infrastructure like fencing in our growing areas would exceed the value.
Funded by stuff, found a study that was made by the same guy and it was not cool. Land was previously depleted and therefor numbers are skewed (land previously depleted by vegetarian food production). Methane big bad. Methane is also broken down over time. Northern America have always had a lot of ruminants, so net methane level does not increase. Can be completely ruled out of the picture if one does not want to offset methane emissions from landfills with killing the world's ruminants. Methane measured from the air above was not from the grazing site, if it was from grain fed cattle it is not relevant. Obviously not relevant since methane in it self is not relevant. Uses more space, excellent for the environment. Close to vegan like countries like India and Bangladesh are more polluting and have higher Co2 emissions than USA.
Question for any vegans that see this, do you eat primarily or solely organic produce? If so, how do you square the fact that the majority of fertilizer used for organic cropping is animal-based with your refusal to harm animals? Asking because I'm trying to figure this whole thing out.
Vegitarian here. I don't like harming animals. I don't think using animal poop is what is physically or mentally harming them. And while the animals are there, something needs to be done with the manure. If we would all stop eating meat almost completely, than manure will not be available so we would need to shift to using other fertilisers, and there are many alternatives that can be used. Its probably best to focus on reducing animal harm first and than just adapt with the changes.
@@Azarilh yes manure has problems, with healthy soil those problems are eliminated. The nutrients are locked into the soil structure. Industrial mono cropping and modern tillage systems destroy that soil structure. Manure that’s been composted with bedding ( wood chips, straw) has very little chance to wash into our aquifers.
@@wadebacca Mono-cropping is mostly used for crops to feed the farmed animals. About 77% of the agrucultural land is used for animal food industry ( and give only 18% of total global calorie supply ). It's just highly inefficient. So if you want manure to fertilise an X amount of crops, you need to double~ those crops to feed the animals so it's counter productive.
So needed because of that new Netflix documentary Kiss The Ground. I wonder if you can do a shorter version in layman’s terms in order to share it with those who cite this documentary.
I agree. Most of the people who cite things like “eco beef” are people who are obviously too lazy to really look into things and (as Mic and the Doc said) just want to quickly latch onto something that supports bad habits. I doubt they will objectively sit through a 20 minute video.
I was just watching it. Very sad. I guess Woody Harrelson is no longer a vegan or he wouldn't be doing the narration, I assume. I came here to hear Mic's de-bunk and post the link on fb and twitter.
@@bw1955 unfortunately it’s this video that might be too lazy to look into the actual science, there is lots of talk of methane emissions but no talk of methane cycles, there is lots of talk of vegan alternatives, but no talk of the huge problems inherent in those practices, I don’t know if it’s the regen ag people that have the data problem here.
@@wadebacca can you specifically say how this video is wrong and how the methane cycle justifies the huge land, water, and resource wastes of farming animals? What are the “inherent” issues with vegan alternatives? Are you talking about Beyond or Impossible Burgers?
Ruminant grazing/farming has never been efficient or sustainable on a large scale to feed a civilization. At one time old Tokyo (Edo) was the largest city on earth prior to Perry's contact, with millions of inhabitants, and it was sustained with zero ruminant consumption and intensive organic farming. Some environmental influencers on TH-cam have been saying lately that Regenerative Grazing is mostly based on wishful thinking and lacks clear scientific evidence. Some have even retracted or corrected videos they have released that were positive about the trend.
@@mommalydia It was mostly due to religious reasons. At one time Buddhism was the dominant religion in Japan, so the emperor tried to forbid the killing/eating of mammals.
@@Magnulus76 I went to Japan and studied at their museums. I would not say it was mostly due to religion. They didn’t start heavily including meat (other than fish) in their diets until trade with the Dutch opened up in the 1800’s.
I can look up the hillsides around the valley here and see which land parcels are grazed and which are left wild, and immediately know which is which because the grazed ones lack plant and animal diversity, plus show greater effects of erosion.
@@Gustav4 It's also the cow. Even the open range ones where I grew up degraded the lake shore and there were some that went feral in the woods, so those five or six did relatively little damage to the thousand acres they wandered on. I guess if you have 200 acres per animal of prime arable land, then it's possible.
@Jonah Whale No desertification has and is being caused by reductionist management which made people put livestock in the wrong place and burned everything to death. Now we have holistic management we can use to make decisions so we can start get the outcomes that we desire.
From my somewhat limited experience working in sustainable ag this is the biggest thing people hold onto for justifying raising cattle/chickens/whoever for production and profit and don’t even question whether the ecology or the animals are even really in a thriving relationship (as much of a relationship with the natural ecology as they can have since we have bred them in completely unnatural ways. By natural I mean nonhuman inflicted elements or beings of nature).
It was just obvious to me that it wouldn't work considering the amount of land it would require (grazing land in the US already huge). At best this might work in a "plant-based society" for the few holdouts among the wealthy willing to pay top dollar for beef.
@Tyelar Rhead Yes, I agree completely. Pastoral societies don't subsist substantially on the flesh of animals, they never have. They might milk the animals and eat them once in a while, but they aren't going to eating animal flesh every day as is common in western countries. That requires intensive agriculture.
Never ceases to amaze me how quickly one who believes something will latch on to anyone who spouts anything that “proves” their thoughts. Also if you point out the potential bias in one study it behooves (pun intended) you to point out the potential bias in the other.
So Mic, please do a deep dive into the production practices of produce farming. What does it take to feed you through the year? From how many countries do you need to import your vegetables? Please do a little digging, actually get some dirt under your nails check out how destructive your vegan diet is before stepping in a cow patty on the otherside of the fence.
"actually get some dirt under your nails check out how destructive your vegan diet is before stepping in a cow patty on the otherside of the fence." The science is very clear that the more you eat whole plant foods, the better it is for the planet. WHAT you eat (animal vs. plant) is generally far more consequential for ecological impacts than is where the food comes from.
Question: Not related to this video. Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn in his reversal of Heart disease wants people to eat a handful of leafy greens 6 times a day with vinegar. My question: He says to boil the greens for about 6 minutes. IS there a reason for it to be boiled and not eaten raw? Is there a reason? This takes a lot of time and raw greens taste a lot better.
@@manilak4415, and then if ask them how that would scale to sustain the global population of meat-eaters, they'll be like: "Why does it matter? It only matters what I do!"
I don’t know why you look at holistic management as a means to eat more meat, instead of working with animals to restore soils. We had millions of Bison in the U.S. (the last of many now extinct large herbivore herds) that would maintain the land and move on because of food availability and predators. Disconnected land, fenced off and maintained by us have disintegrated and eroded to the point of no return under chemicals and lack of animals. Do you garden? Have you ever left thick, tall, uncut grass and see what happens? Sunlight doesn’t reach the soil and results in depleted ground, bare if it happens over time and in large quantity. Why would you prefer to keep animals off the land they evolved with? Healthy soil retains carbon and animals are a huge part in the life cycle of the land. Go to the Midwest, go to the southwest, see the land eroding and turning to desert. The missing factor is the herds. I’m not advocating against veganism, I am mostly plant based myself. It is a huge mistake to think that the grasslands will take care of themselves without animals. Why else would large herds exist in the wild without the land collapsing immediately? More native species on the land, predators and grazers, is the answer. See for yourself. Holistic Management is not a case to eat more meat.
Because of the fact that a vegan world would require less overall land use, it could be assumed that in the gradual transition into that world, we would let the majority of our current animal farm land use to be left to rewild as we introduce Its native animals into that ecosystem.
You made a very good video. I’m a farmer and do study permaculture and regenerative agriculture. Generally speaking what you says reflects the realities in the US but in the rest of the world the picture is quite different. Holistic Management was born in Africa and It is a great tool to organize effective communal grazing practices that don’t degrade the land and instead regenerate it and keep it on balance. You cannot plant in certain areas because they are too degraded but you can use animals to restore ecological functions as water infiltration and than move to more diversified farming practices but you still need the animals in order to keep balance on the cycle of nutrients, especially in environments where humidity and rain are not homogenously distributed during the year. Prohibiting Intensive animal husbandry, meat prices would go way up, more than double, people would start to eat it less and many things could improve. Remember that an animal is the saving account of a farmer.
yeah it only works because those are native animals to these environments, with natural breeding and deaths via their naturally-occurring predators, migration patterns, and (originally) lack of human involvement. Regenerative agriculture only works in the wild with the lifeforms that are native to it
I think you're referring to *restoration* (as opposed to regeneration). There's a big difference. Native ungulates in an intact ecosystem is different than a simplified ecosystem engineered purely for agricultural grazing. Even with native ungulates there's a limit to soil C sequestration, which is primarily controlled by climate (avg soil temp and precipitation at the site).
@@seanprive596 No I am thinking of my brother who was a longhorn rancher, but is now vegan, so beef is off the menu. We find his grazing land is much healthier if we move the pokeys about at intervals and grazing areas that are still being determined. We end up with quality fertilizer and a cut of the grass, and they get to do what they like best, socializing, eating and pooping. It is a work in progress.
@@seanprive596 True - native ungulates can wear down their own ecosystems if they aren't forced to move around. I'm thinking about that "wolves reintroduced to Yellowstone" video that went around a while ago
Same marketing technique as American Spirit Tobacco... "We're sooo much different than other cigarettes." ... and listening to Alan Savory really gives me the creeps. 😶
@@Fearzero I was in denial for years... then the Egyptian government withdrew my visa. I'll get my coat. 🥰 Seriously though. Lemme know more about the debate with La. Savory. ☺️
@@PercivalBlakeney Haha dad jokes never get old. It was on FB. I posted a bunch of stuff from a science based article done by Sierraclub.org and she just ignored it completely. Wasn't much of a debate because she had no answers for my questions about lack of replication of her father's work and lack of support by the scientific community at large.
@@Fearzero People generally ignore arguments that prove them wrong and demonstrate that we have to switch off the TV and get on with stuff. Essentially the ,"Aw gee Mom, do I have to do my homework? ... tidy my room? ... take out the trash? ... be nice to the relatives?" attitude. "Science and technology will cure all of human ills, except the last and most pernicious... that of human apathy." - Helen Keller. Well done for taking her on though. 😊
@@Fearzero, they always run from that article because it's researchers at agricultural universities and working ranchers that most effectively debunk Savory's nonsense. If the people who would love for you be right are saying you're wrong, then it's time to re-evaluate your life.
In depth and factually accurate. Honestly the vast majority of people wouldn't want to or be able to digest all those stats. Thanks so much Mic, it's really a pleasure. I'm still making my transition to veganism and it really started because of the environment. Like you and the doctor said, it's really hard to hear something you like, is bad. If we're all trying to change for the better, I think we deserve factually-accurate data. Thanks again dude, keep it up, it's definitely hard work but I can't stress how much I appreciate it!
It was actually very shallow explanation, it completely omitted the concept methane cycling, used CAFO data and extrapolated it onto regen systems, completely ignored the fact that there is regen grain production called pasture cropping, and ignored the soil crisis we’re heading towards. And also ignored the huge shortcomings of vegan ag.
@@wadebacca I hope he sees this and addresses your points (I'm not familiar with some of them). I do know there's plenty of plants that have been shown which help recycle the nutrients within the soil. Also while I don't doubt for a second grazing and whatnot is needed, it's a little surprising to hear when if the primary objective is less resources to produce nutrition, vegan agriculture has "huge shortcomings". That would suggest the way to harvest more plants to feed on... is to decrease them?
@@dripshameless5605 yeah, I’ve been practicing veganic ag, regenerative ag, and permaculture for over a decade now, the shortcomings I am talking about are things like a the restrictions on climate where vegan ag works, it’s reliance on tillage at large scale ( very bad for the soil) or plastic sheeting which is labour intensive way less efficient and only works at market garden size. Just to name a few, one of regenerative ages biggest pluses is that it can be practical in almost any environment
@@wadebacca Hey also, how is veganism against regenerative ag? I'm learning about it right now. I'm not vegan but basically it's just about not wanting to harm animals right? So shouldn't vegans also support a system, where animals are given a good life (hopefully), AND help replenish the environment? I don't see the problem between vegans and regen ag, what am I missing? Ofc this is all under the assumption that the animals are not being harmed.
I think it's all about everything in moderation. The US isn't going to give up eating meat but if we could persuade people to eat meat sparingly we could reduce negative health benefits and help the land by not artificially saturating it with animal agriculture. Regenerative farming has a place in my opinion with the perspective that it is a step in the right direction which can be built upon from there. We're all on the same team and talking as if there are two sides and only one is right is not going to persuade anyone to change. I'd appreciate videos in the future that are not focused mainly on cancelling another perspective than your own.
I think in a food forest system designed to feed us sustainably, it can be helpful to have regenerative grazing in between the treed swales... but that doesn't mean you need to eat the animals or kill them... they can just live there with you and everyone is happy. I never took Savory as someone telling me I shouldn't be WFPB. You would be adding a carbon sink to the farm if you were regeneratively grazing for the purpose of building the soil and not for building beef right? If there is a cap off on the carbon in the top of the soil, how long does that take to work it's way 10 feet down? I've seen 'terra preta' soil slices in south america and it's super deep... not saying that's from grazing but it is curious how you saturate at depth. When you have deep rooted trees on contoured swales with 12 foot deep soil roots in between, that's getting a lot of carbon pumped down in the soil. Soil needs to be cut to regrow is what I read, so when you do it with an animal you add the benefit of their enzymes being fertility being added back to the soil and how they trample it out. It sounds like in this video most of the regenerative grazing is assuming they're selling the meat instead of just composting animals that have passed. You do so much research, love your videos ... I guess my curiosity is what is the best use of the grass parts of a farm in between the food forest bits... as far as I understood, grazing was the highest form of that and increased nitrogen and carbon fixation, but if you have enough rain that you don't need grass in between so you have a larger rainfall catchment area then it's not a problem I think it would be REALLY AWESOME if you would critique permaculture practices with such statistics... it would be interesting to see what your world has to say about it... in permaculture and biointensive food production we only hear our own voices
Can you please make a video on the no longer vegan Sarah Lemkus and her family? I am really worried about her claims (insta stories) as I have vegan kids myself and being vegan for 8 years now... Thanks a lot! Keep up an amazing work and content! 👍
4:07 RE: Grazing and carbon negative, what aspect of grazing livestock generates carbon emissions? I thought grazing livestock's contribution to climate change was the generation of methane not carbon.... ???
@@staceyrobson5697 not only soil improvements, but this doc also showed the huge Benefits of integrating animals to deal with pests, seems like vegans would prefer to drive up and down their fruit tree rows with a tractor and insecticide/herbicide instead of feeding the snails to the ducks.
The one thing you're missing from the discussion is how much of the conventional beef is raised on incredibly low rotation pastures until the feedlot, practically wasting that land by comparison. Yes intensive rotation uses up to 3x as much total pasture land, but it uses that land far more efficiently and doesn't involve all the ecological and ethical consequences of a feedlot. Including all the emissions produced and toxins dumped and soil lost and land used growing grains and legumes for the aforementioned feedlot.
There is a new doco(based on boom Sacred Cow) that my partner (a flexiterian ) is asking me (a vegan) to read/watch. I would love your thoughts on this 🙏
Great Doc actually, but someone as biased as Mic wouldn't like it, i presume, he's completely against meat, it doesn't even matter if it's healthier or better for the environment.
You should interview or debate Gabe Brown or Ray Archuletta so that people can see differing opinions other than your own so they can decide how to interpret the facts themselves instead of depending on you to decipher the facts for your audience. It would make your argument stronger.
A big question I want to ask is, do you find any place in nature where there are not animals as part of the environmental mix? I eat vegan most the time. I do eat meat when it is served to me and less than once a month at home. but again vegan most the time and I would be quite content to never eat meat or animal products. But as a farmer for over 40 years, I can tell you animals benefit the soil and the plants that grow and the plant food you eat. I've done it both ways, with and without animals and with animals is better. and yes, New Zealand does have animals, maybe not large ones but animals none the less.
Animals in the natural world are not so densely concentrated on one patch of land. When you graze animals in a limited area you essentially put the soil’s degradation on fast-forward, only then to force it to recover later on. Ruminant animals in the natural world will graze for miles and miles, and the soil in the wild will additionally be biodiverse already - all kinds of plants growing in one area. When animals graze in an environment such as this, the soil is able to recover in an ongoing manner, as the impact is spread wider and more thinly. When using rotational fields, the field is intensively depleted. This “regenerative agriculture” cannot compare to the biodiverse wild environment which animals would otherwise graze on. Additionally, it’s important to remember that the animals we are discussing are not found in the natural world - this is a problem we have designed.
@@Geogaddii what you say has been the common thinking for decades. but what we have discovered is we had the wrong idea. If you look at how bison used to roam, the traveled in very large, very dense herds. They would forage the plants intensively for a day and move on. The new regenerative grazing system is mimicking the way nature used the prairie. So, the truth is, animals in the natural world are that densely concentrated on one patch of land for a short time. That's why we move livestock every day or 2 at the most. Multiple trials and folks who have tried it will tell you, their soil is better, and they actually get to run more head per acre. The trick is take them off the grazed area before they take it down to nothing. Leave enough for the pasture to come back and it does quite nicely. it really works. There is one more thing, and that is you need diversity of plants in your pasture mix. Not just mono culture. At least 3 in the mix but 8 or more plant types or more is optimum.
THE WATER PROBLEM WOP did not even go into the water footprint WOP is near the moist East coast - Gulf cost Not the arid western USA The reason the east coast states are moister is because the earth spins from west to east Water over the Atlantic ocean evaporates and the east coast spins into that moist air . The west coast spins away from the pacific ocean WOP would never have worked in the western states
Mikey!!...I was waiting for this!! I've been looking up Allan Savory and his holistic management crap for the past couple of weeks and I felt something didn't add up!! I knew there was something off about the whole "more cattle will save the planet" BS.
Mic is not an sustainable agriculturalist and it shows. Vegan permaculture is like removing rock, paper or scissors from the equation. Ideologies & science arent compatible. Decreasing biodiversity opposes the fundamental permaculture principle that biodiversity is sustainable. Seriously promoting vegan permaculture is flabbergasting. And that cover cropping and grazing are mutually exclusive... Bovine heards arent inherently misplaced, theyre a part of the prarie ecosystem. Sincerely - a sustainable agricultural science student
A big issue with veganism is the use of bees in pollination, and the escalated use of toxic poisons to produce the extra veg, considering rising costs and supply issues of these toxic poisons
The bees are used for pollination only because there are a lot of bees form the HONEY industry. Otherwise, they'd use alternative methods like wind pollination. No need to use bees. What extra veg you are talkin about? If everyone went vegan, we would need to produce less food, cos guess what animals eat- In fact currently almost 50% of current crops are used to feed the farmed animals to produce way less food in the form of animal food ( from 3% to 17% only! That is a big waste of food ).
@@Azarilh wind pollination is not anywhere near the same as insect pollination, that is an evolutionary fact. The protein replacement of meat is not confined to feedlots/sow stalls/battery hens/fish pens. A great quantity of meat is harvested outside of plant friendly growing conditions, climate, geology, post cropping management. The majority of global farming is from 2ac/2ha mixed family farms,
@@666bruv A long portion of the animal industry is built in places where they removed natural habitats. 60+% of the reason of Amazon forest being chopped down is for animal industry. And almost 50% of all crops we have, are destined to feed the animals, which in exchange give back about 3 to 30 % calories. So there is a huge loss of food, water, land, natural habitats, nutrients...
@@Azarilh i agree that large scale industrial animal production is greatly flawed, and needs to be banned, but, there is no chance of removing animal protein from the global diet, asia and africa have a large population of hungary mouths
@@666bruv As i mentioned earlier, animals are fed our crops, which converts poorly into way less animal based food. For beef, for example, 97% of the calories from the plants the animals ate, are lost forever, and you get only 3% of those calories in the form of beef. So if you truly want to feed the hungry, you should go vegan. Also, non industrial animal farming is even more unsustainable then the industrialised one. As it uses even more land. Even with the industrialised farming, if the entire world would eat as much meat as Americans do today, we would need another planet for all the space required to produce all that meat. ( it was 137% global land required in 2011, meat consumption increased since then, so t's probably about 150% now. )
Interesting! Lots of open range grazing here in the southern Sierra Nevada. I always thought it was strange that cattle are allowed to graze in the Golden Trout Wilderness area, but apparently preexisting grazing rights were the issue there. The upside is that the number of cattle is much less than it was in the 1990s. So, I guess that's progress. And on a related topic, what about using goats to clear under brush as a way to reduce forest fires? We had some extremely serious fires this last summer and the snowfall so far this year isn't looking too good so far!
Forests do need to be managed (and humans have been doing it for thousands of years), otherwise you get a forest fire hazard in the making. Whether it's through selective logging or forest-based agriculture, both outcomes are beneficial over simply doing nothing.
@@bread9905 Humans are animals. And vegans are idiots because that’s not how humans developed. these systems wouldn’t be made in humans would not be making near the impact. If it wasn’t for all the liberals congregating in big cities. When we were a more rural society, the environment was far less impacted. We also had a better society that wasn’t brainwashed and co-opted by a lot of nonsense.
@@Magnulus76 fire is part of nature. Forest lands need fire. It’s the idiots on the left that prevented forest fires for decades that caused the problems in California. Lightning causes forest fires which regenerate the land. It is a necessary part of managing a forest to be healthy. People are screwing up the forest, not nature and animals and by people I’m talking about people on the left that think there shouldn’t be forest fires.
I will say as a vegan I do not promote beyond or impossible burgers or honestly avoid anything that’s processed that comes out of box. I know it’s not easy with everything and circumstances for other, but majority of our food is going through some sort of “process” but we can control some of this process by what we buy and where. We need to push supporting our local farmers and markets outside of these boxed chains. I do agree with the amount of greenwashing on both sides even the notion of “zero waste” no such thing. Humans make waste. It’s gotten out of control because there’s a big money run when it comes to consumers buying awareness to where their products come from and how they are made. I think also there’s a lot of political waste with the SDG, ESG full of greed, I think we need to start developing communities around homesteading, farming, instead of subdivisions.
I will say as an omnivore I share many of these thoughts. I’ve researched both side and they both can prove that the other side isn’t completely true and have convoluted arguments. The real problem either way is the monopolization of essential social structures, in this case food production. All I know is the science is inconclusive, because it’s all too easy to weaponize into propaganda. My main hope is that permaculture communities will be tough and deliver what they promise, healthy land and abundant food. Thus we can demonopolize the food market through local production. I just worry that this cows vs. soy conversation will cause economic civil warfare through political regulations, which ultimately undermines collective efforts to demonopolize.
@@tylerglenn7811 I couldn’t agree more I think everyone is making predictions on things that don’t exist yet. Whether it be electrification of commodities, decentralization of economies, circular economies, gmo vs non gmo, etc. Especially with the internet. Everyone thinks their opinion is valid and can’t be refuted. So there’s a lot of uninformed slogans, catch phrases, and dead language that’s being passed around as fact and not thought. I do think the science shows inconclusive due to many inferences that aren’t comparative to the issues we have, but to be “sustainable” is a tough “sell” when the system as a whole is built for-profit, this I believe is a feature more than it is an error. So to some degree there will be some sort of disparity when it comes to an economic engine that fuels food production, but most important it still takes production (energy) to fuel any “sustainable” project One of my favorite books when it comes to these sorts of topics is “Limits to growth” it highlights on the systems that are cohesive within its natural order. And certain aspects of life we cannot choose to overlook that all communicate a feedback loop within the system. When it comes to a lot of these issues it boils down to population growth, birth rates, industrialization, production, and capital investment. When it comes to policies and development these are some of the main issues and factors. I think it’s going to have to come down to people building and removing themselves from highly dense cities, truly building a life of sustenance. I will say becoming vegan has helped me with that and opening my eyes of the level of factory farming isn’t sustainable for a point of progress. Will everyone go vegan absolutely not, that’s like asking for world peace (which I don’t believe in) I’m at peace with the world vs trying to fabricate a fake one. But I think with the amount of crops we do make can be used for good and feed people. But there’s no money in that for big business so it comes back to supply chain and production. I personally think sustainability isn’t built into the system by design (an after thought maybe?). So we keep trying to mask a problem with technology and data that doesn’t exist for a problem we already know to solve…just do less of what those problems are vs trying to contain it and still think we can progress that way by using pretty labels and technology that we don’t know works just yet. I agree that permaculture and homesteading communities are growing, and hope they figure it out as well but there’s still some commercialization that may not truly depict the production (energy) it takes to build that type of culture. Let alone at what cost? And at what cost does it affect others? How much is enough?
@@Chasenoir I appreciate the book recommendation. I also agree science get weaponized against “the other” all too easy. I think people need to realize that the strength of science is far more substantial the long term. I mean we’ve invented a million diets by trying to take advantage of science as fast as possible. We have made so many discoveries that we need to take time and try to explore their connections rather than weaponizing our piece of the puzzle against someone else with a different piece of the puzzle. I will definitely have to check out your book. I have not “done the math” per se and would be interested in seeing more about that. I can 1000% agree with you statement that some people will need to leave cities in favor of service small town communities. At the most simple principle monopolies thrive is cities and become irrelevant to communities. However the problem is that our system literally pushes people out of small communities and into cities. Where I am from in west Texas we grow up go to college and move anywhere else. Our population is dwindling especially since people have less children. Meanwhile my dad is purchasing up land a ridiculous values then is subsidized to do minimal maintenance on them and let them sit unproductive. This happens because nobody loves the land because it’s been quite abused. However, our current system actually drains the local economies and chases people out of these small communities. Just look at our current community banking system. It’s crashing and making small communities stagnate. Meanwhile, all this land sits unused and a permaculturist could make it highly productive in 3-10 years depending on their plans. I just imagine if you let community banks come back to life (national regulations crush them) and teach people how to love their land (permaculture). There’s no reason my we couldn’t get actual vast swaths of land moving from neglect to productivity. I think veganism has a positive role to play. I currently live in a city and partial veganism keeps me healthy and let’s me budget. However some people in the country need a cow to get them through droughts when their crop yield is low. Or to make use of some land that is still arid for various reasons. They help us stay resilient.
I am a vegan regenerative organic farmer but I did thought pasture raised animals were better than CAFO and most of my friends & family eat a SAD. So I would encourage them to eat pasture raised organic. Your video makes me question that. Thanks. Just to clarify I don't raise animals, just plants for human consumption, although some of our grain does go to feed animals.
His video omitted (hopefully not on purpose) an important thing called the methane cycle, which healthy soil enables. He also used CAFO emissions and extrapolated outwards and applied it to regen ag.
Given that such a large percentage of soils around the world are degraded and that regenerative farming can rebuild soil so fast, for example 25cm in 3 years in Ridgedale, isn't this still a good thing? Can growing only crops with no animal inputs do that? And anyway much of the world 's farmland is not suitable for crops. I don't want to get into the morality of eating animals but if people are still eating meat then surely less and better quality is a good way to go. If people eat significantly less than the more land required for better meat argument becomes irrelivant. There seems to be no universal agreement on what regenerative agriculture is and I think you have to look at every possible aspect. For example some regenerative enterprises are far more diverse than the one mentioned. Some are practicing agroforestry and silvopasture. I think small scale regenerative farms based on holistic management and permaculture principles can be very exciting. The potential for increasing biodiversity on such farms is amazing and some insects require the animals, their footprints and manure for part of their lifecycle.
I don't see a moral argument in eating meat or not eating meat other than the way factory farms operate, but to eat meat or not to not eat meat is meaningless on moral grounds. I see plants as just as alive as animals, ive been a vegetable/medicinal plant farmer for the last 8 years...and if you learn to listen carefully you will understand the world of plants, its just that plants are less like a human than an animal, we seem to project aliveness on others that look and act more like we do because we understand that but just because we dont understand the way plants act doesn't mean they're less alive and deserving of life. Take for example the oxalic acid in spinach, to me that communicates the the plant is not interested in being consumed and they are producing this substance to deter humans, to me this is clearly a communication defense mechanism in the same way that a human would say "no" or an animal would cry out, its just a different communication style. I do think there is a difference energetically in consuming animals and plants. meat is heavier but has probably more nutrition overall and vegetables are lighter, maybe more spiritual in energetic experience. Both are valuable and offer very different things but I can't see a moral argument worth having here
@@cressraciti Interesting argument, but I think it's a matter of scale. I think you, I, and vegans would all agree that minimising unnecessary suffering is/should be a common goal.
If that's the case, then even if we ascribe as equal the perceived suffering of plants, animals, and humans, then seeing as raising animals for slaughter is a far less efficient method of producing food than simply skipping the middle-man and eating plants directly, by choosing vegetarian/vegan, we can drastically cut down on unnecessary suffering of both plants and animals.
Don't forget that the grasses that ruminants feed on are alive too, and what we fondly recall as the "freshly mown lawn smell", is actually a warning to nearby grass that danger is afoot.
The only way to completely eliminate anthropogenic suffering is to end the species, which I don't think anyone here is arguing, but when there's an option available that's more ethical, sustainable, healthier, and (in must countries) cheaper, than doesn't it make sense to choose that option?
Well said! Its sad that these types of videos are being put out... They really do more harm than good for the animals (and the Planet) they claim to want to help. This does not even BEGIN to cover the many wonderful types of sustainable and regenerative farming practices that are out there and how much they are helping the planet on MULTIPLE levels, let alone how much better the lives of animals would be if factory farming were replaced by the methods used on small regenerative ag farms and permaculture farms. Thank you for sharing!
@@stardust4459 it's joyful anytime the truth is being shared. So no, it's not sad that these truth videos come out.
@@cressraciti love this
Yo vegans can you name a single vegan indigenous culture? Oh yeah that's right, the vegan diet came out of white colonial culture. It's purely a issue of privilege to not rely on meat as a source of nutrition.
Yeah but what’s your justification for not being vegan?
Hey, first off thanks for covering regen ag, I practice regen grazing along with veganic ag, and I agree with a few if your points like land usage and whatnot. Overall I’d like to see more vegans as I believe we do have to much meat demand. That being said I believe you made a few critical errors here.
1st off, methane, so the biggest thing in this section was the omission of the action of methanotrophs in your analysis. Healthy soil has much much more of these and they do an incredible job of gobbling up methane produced by ruminants, so much so that if the soil is healthy enough it can eliminate almost all the methane that would’ve made it into the atmosphere. 2nd this is much more minor but it’s true none the less, I’m sure most of you guys have heard of the red seaweed food additive that can eliminate up to 99% of ruminant methane production. Couple that with fact that seaweed is literally the best way to sequester carbon in the world and whose production takes zero land and actually creates habitat in the sea, seems like a win win. Now the reason I say it’s more of a minor point is because it’s not commercially available yet, but it will be very soon, probably by the end of the year. So I don’t fault you for not bringing it up. Also when you started talking about how methane production you started talking about all animal ag and said that were likely underestimating methane output, but those systems don’t compare to regen ag systems due to the formerly mentioned methanotroph action. I think the reason for the variant between the top down and bottom up analysis is the action of methanotrophs and their complete lack of them in conventional feed lots.
Now one thing that I think is a big disservice in this video is how you did not mention how incredibly degraded our soils actually are, the UN put us at 55 years of harvests left. The reason I think this is such a disservice is because nothing has shown the efficiency of soil regeneration like these grazing techniques. You mention vegan permaculture and rightly say we need to limit tillage, but unfortunately you failed to mention how much slower these processes are and more importantly how they are not applicable they are to large swaths of countries due to climate. Also you didn’t mention how they aren’t scalable to large farms, And are primarily only applicable to small market garden style farms. I can go into detail on any of that further as I’ve utilized a lot of those practices for years now.
You were absolutely right about carbon saturation, but we have such vast amounts of degraded soil that I think we should address that pressing problem 1st. Especially in light of the livestock dietary advancements I mentioned earlier. Also regen ag very typically uses lest implements than standard ag, you also endorsed roller crimping cover crops, and what is powering those roller crimpers? Fossil fuels right? In fact vegan ag at scale will lead to a marked uptick in fossil fuel usage, another problem with using large implements is their soil compaction effects.
All your Land usage facts were on point, except a little mis directed, for one thing since a lot of these practices are mob grazing and resting land for 60+days they actually act as natural habitat for wildlife just as much as livestock habitat. A lot of systems are designed to work within the natural habitat and use silvopasturing techniques that plant a lot of trees and turn straight pastures into more savana like habitats. I am currently grazing in silvopasture right now.
Your critiques of the chicken meat produced by these systems are again correct but again a bit misdirected. So first off the chickens provide a real jobs on the farm, their main action is to follow the ruminants and scratch apart their poop to get at fly larvae, stopping the pest cycle, in doing this they also spread the manure for better fertilization, that all being said by pasturing these chickens you can actually reduce grain usage by 20%-30%, all this is meaningless to vegans as the chicken you eat eats 100% less grain as you don’t eat chicken. I say this so I can frame my next point. There are regenerative grain production practices that not only build soil, but also stack production of meat on top. This is called pasture cropping and is so versatile it can be practiced in cold or warm climates from North Dakota to Australia. So combined with the grain reduction from pasturing I think this is a great way to be more sustainable.
I’m sorry this is so long, it’s just an incredibly nuanced. Anyway thanks for covering regen ag.
Chickens are about the only environmentally stable animal to be used in agriculture (and even they have limits), but anyone who advocates for using large animals like cows or pigs for regenerative agriculture has no idea what they are talking about. No amount of seaweed can ignore the realities of large animals damage to soil like compaction, erosion, and mycelium network disruption.
As someone who majored in environmental sciences and minored in soil science, you seem a bit delusional.
@@cabinboy5282 I am very glad that you have those degrees, I can tell you that everything you said is true about mycelium, compaction, erosion when it comes to standard grass fed operations and certainly in CAFO.
Its not in any of the science and the massive amounts of soil testing I have done on my farm, and the other regen farms I visit. Its literally the stated Goals of regen ag to increase Mycelium and decrease erosion, and improve Soil compaction, which is a non issue when you have the thick forage for animals to walk in, and the root growth stimulation breaks up and aerates the soil, so it actually accomplishes the opposite to what you say it does, at least in my case, and every case I have personally seen. Now all of my anecdote is from my farm and the results from it, and the 40 other regen operations I have seen results and soil tests from, literally none suffered from what you are describing. I could get on board with what you were saying if I had not seen the opposite in all my years doing this, and from the results on my farm.
I understand why anecdote form some shlub like myself would not be convincing to you.
I guess you're right about permaculture but permaculture isn't really in a place to endorse or preclude animals.
If grazing animals were the antithesis to permaculture why would an almost plurality of permaculture practitioners who is stewarding large amounts of land use grazing animals? Maybe we could ask them why they unnecessarily use grazing animals like this and destroy there land? Its not for the money I can assure you that, There is an old saying that the only money in permaculture is in teaching it.
Its funny you mention chickens, I completely disagree with you there, They require a large amount of grain, I put up with the externalized impact of chickens because they do so much other good stuff on the farm like pest and parasite control, composting, fertilizing, Light tilling.
I would like to know you’re ideal way to produce food? As someone who studied soil science like yourself I am curious your opinion. I am not one to parrot the most grandiose claims of regen ag advocates, but To me even if Regen ag had half the capabilities it says it does, in light of the alternatives, it’s vastly superior.
I wonder why mic didnt like your comment...
Thanks for sharing that. I am vegan myself but I fully support the regenerative agriculture movement. To me it seems logical that bigger animals are part of restoring the eco systems, just depends on how they are managed. I don't know much about farming but I fully resonate with the philosophy behind this movement which is about honoring and respecting nature.
I'd rather see people eat regenerative meat once or twice a week than vegans eating fake gmo meat. For me it's all about quality.
@@KatinkaLucas exactly, I’m all for a reduction in meat overall, whether that’s with more vegans or with more people just reducing there personal consumption.
Unfortunately this discussion excludes a lot of information/includes misinformation and pseudoscience on the fact that holistic grazing not only improves the health of grasslands because it restores the ecological niche or large grazers in a natural landscape, but also acts like farmers graze grass to the soil when in fact they rotate them daily to prevent this very thing that leads to soil erosion. Why ignore all of these facts and more??
Because Mic the Vegan has an Agenda and isn't above playing fast and loose with the facts aka lying.
a lot of land used for grazing was not naturally grassland, prior to human clearing and occupation of the land! In Australia that is very much the case, and some of the indiginous grasslands we human cultivated through periodic burning.
They ignore these facts because they have no logical argument. They have no clue how it actually works and have no desire to learn to educate themselves. But instead make dumbass claims
because he's vegan and hates it being told it's not good.
@Daniel Bifröst Regenerative grazing, if true, is an argument for having animals on the land to aid it. Not an argument for eating said animals. (aka, consuming them outside of that ecosystem and shit them out somewhere else). That's a leap we can only take if we think animals are morally inconsiderable, which is irrational and wrong.
The fact that land might need grazing animals on it is not an argument for why we should treat non-human animals as property or objects we are free to violate as we see fit. It might mean we have to live WITH grazing animals, respecting them, letting them live their lives and die of old age or other ways not involving human desires for meat. Instead regenerative grazing has become a way to argue for (exaggarated) meat consumption and animal exploitation.
As long as those grazing animals are considered "human food items", as much as "climate fixing machines", we will breed them, prematurely kill them, consume only parts of them, shit them out in some urban sewer, make money from killing them, mutilate them and genetically manipulate them to fit our use for them as food. And that's the same slippery slope that got us into factory farming, and is incompatible with any "natural" system.
10:07 wouldn't the plant growth also sequester methane? these numbers seem off. Also, are they really feeding animals from off-site sources EVERY year or just the first year(s) whilst they re-establish some of the ecosystem?
@@christopherbeddoe406 chickens are monogastric though... They have one stomach. Besides, video said “mostly fed”, not exclusively fed. Looks like you’re looking for a reason to be angry.
@Tyelar Rhead methane breaks down in 15 years
@@Geogaddii th-cam.com/video/QMvpop6BdBA/w-d-xo.html&ab_channel=SavoryInstitute watch this WHOLE lecture then get back to me!
no plants do not digest methane. there's sub subsoil bacteria that eat methane as it percolates up through the soil from anaerobic decaying organic matter down below… but the idea these digest all the cattle methane even in regenerative systems (which are better in lots of ways) has never been established in science and there is a significant amount of evidence that the opposite is true, methane production in regenerative systems is still significant.
@@collinmallett1206 Savory is a snake oil salesman, a man who happily killed tens of thousands of elephants and now brags about it as a "mistake".
I do not totally disagree with all of the points but I found this video as biased as the studies you tear down almost totally on the association of the funders. I suspect facts and figure that are just given as truths. For example: were the methane bottom up examples and calculations using grain finished beef numbers or were they using grass finished numbers? Is there top down information for the grazing lands you are questioning or is the top down methane numbers from conventional agriculture. While honest in mentioning grain was brought in to feed the chickens, chickens are relatively efficient protein producers. Does your analysis account for market changes from more expensive beef and a move toward other non-crazed meats. You may have a point on diminishing returns on grazing lands, but is there a model where the grazing land moves over long periods of time restoring more and more fields? I guess my main point is this was more of a biased debunking video than a real look at the impact of moving from conventional agricultural methods.
Very intelligent rebuttal....thank you
"For example: were the methane bottom up examples and calculations using grain finished beef numbers or were they using grass finished numbers"
Methane emissions from cattle eating grains are typically lower than that of pasture fed cattle, especially the cattle on the northern rangelands of Australia where the grasses have a lot of cellulose and are harder for the cattle to digest. Also you can more easily add dietary supplements to reduce methane to lot fed animals simply because they never move around and have regular human contact.
All these dietary interventions to reduce methane only go so far and the costs can be prohibitive, especially the seaweed additives which would require a massive production of a particular type of seaweed on a scale comparable with the land mass of grazing land itself to produce enough. and then that would all need to be collected, transported and distributed to cattle. Forget it.
You're completely overlooking that regenerative ruminate agriculture doesn't have to evolve eating animals. If you let Buffalo wonder around the plains you get 8 foot stands of native grass and diverse ecosystems with little rainfall, but if you try to make that same preserve without Buffalo you get an ecosystem that's constantly returning to sand desert ie the dust bowl but slower.
You can achieve the same effect by forcing cows to move regularly between small blocks which has the advantage of working better to create small grasslands at the cost of more human interaction. All the homesteaders I've met that use this method claim it actually cut their workload in half because moving the cows between temporary barriers is easier than having to maintain everything needed to grow food (tractors are awful and break a lot). But on the other hand all of them were basically breaking even selling a couple cows at 4x the market rate so it's not exactly viable unless there is a government subsidy for habitat restoration, or your a homesteader that just wants to go off grid instead of make money.
Farmers need to learn to sell and market. They don’t have a viability issue they have a branding issue. Liver king gets branding. He’s selling pills and protein for 50-60 bucks a hit. Making bank. Branding and increasing the value of your product with words and video will be key.
Sorry, but your Indian friend is lying. Do you know what the soy meal is? Soy meal is the feed for animals. But soy meal is the by-product of soy oil production. And soy oil is almost completely consumed by humans. So what do you suggest? To burn all soy meal after oil extraction? Or do you have any other ideas what to do with by-products? For example OUTLY-UK, is making out products, mostly milk. And rest of oat, the residue of this is by-product, which is too nutritious to let go to waste. So OUTLY is selling this by-product to pig farmers. So what do you suggest? Burn it? Pour in to the sea or what? Animals are eating mostly by-products.
I understand there are companies taking advantage of the green idea while maintaining those bad practices, but grazing animals are part of the ecossystem in many areas of the world. It is possible to mimic their natural existence with domestic animals, maintaining those ecological functions that restore land and are beneficial to biodiversity. In Portugal we have massive problem of undergrazing because all shepherd disapeared and that's one of the problems causing major wildfires. I have sheep in my land and over time I can tell a difference on the biodiversity of insects and herbs growing here. The world was not all covered in forests, there were meadows and prairies that were maintained with herbivores, the largest they are the more they are able to maintain those areas by grazing and trampling small bushes and trees. Think of bisons in America or horses, aurochs, also bisons here in Europe. And think about all the plant associated with pastures that wouldn't exist if pastures weren't a natural habitat. Without those animal all would be covered by forest before human intervention in tha landscape.
Exactly those areas should be forests...
Before human intervention there were much more forests, and people burn down those exactly for the reason to help big herbivores spread. This is a common practice since we could control fire.
@@FreeFromAllThings so you mean there were no natural prairies or natural herds, for example of bison in america, or zebras, antilopes, buffalo etc in africa?
@@anateresamatos6212 in many parts of Africa this grazing is natural, because the climate wouldn't allow forests to grow. But yes in Northern America, prairies are "made" by humans, mostly to help the bisons spread.
Dude. You are missing the whole point. No other tool can be used to reverse the effects of desertification and it just so happens it can feed people at the same time.
Rewilding without ruminants is absolutely viable. Dude
@@EternalJourneys do you have an example? Of regenerative agriculture without animal inputs? Otherwise that feels like truth by assertion.
I'm permaculturalist and I've done a fair amount of research and not found a single working example of a sustainable veganic system.
@@rorylee3582 I don’t have an example of regen ag. But there are plenty of people out there successfully producing and using plant based fertilisers. That, and the comfort of knowing that most plant ecosystems on earth came into existence without ruminants.
@@EternalJourneys no, not really.
@@EternalJourneys you can have your "comfort of knowing" if you want. But the reality is that none of the ecosystems we have access to can function without animals. I cannot take any "comfort" based on systems that disappeared millions of years ago 🤷♀️ but you do you bro.
You have debunked one farm’s claims, not the entire method. Regenerative grazing should be used in CONJUNCTION with regenerative crop farming, that is how the system works. If conventional crop farmers start to incorporate grazing animals, and conventional livestock farms start planting crops, you can easily get to 2.5 times the area for the same amount of animals because the area is shared between two previously separated farming sectors. Your whole approach is positioned by your own wold view and drips with bias.
No bias. Using animals for grazing does not require us to eat those animals. It can be a symbiosis relationship.
The point of regenerative grazing is not to grow beef, it is to grow grass. If a farmer is focused on the former they're not doing regenerative grazing.
it's about the soil actually
@@elloohno1349 because grasslands generate soil.
@@lewissmart7915 actually you have it backwards. Soil comes before forage.
@@slk1451 you can't build the soil without growing things in it.
Actually any organic matter can create soil. But in the case of regenerative farming, it’s all about maintaining SOIL health through rotating crops or grazing.
As a lover of regenerative meat agriculture it was hard to listen to this video. However I always find it annoying to hear the argument that people just want to hear what they want to hear. Firstly that argument applies to everyone so really there is no point in bringing it up. It would be trivial to find the same video same this about all the vegans watching this. Secondly the actual picture is definitely not as clear cut as you would make it out to be. Having done my own research i would say it's complicated. Environmental science isn't that easy. It is easy to count co2 emissions. I think that is the real sin. We focus too much on emissions and lose sight of the bigger picture. I think we can agree that regenerative forms of agriculture are better than conventional. Plant based regenerative is just about as popular as the animal version, that is to say both are small. If you want to promote permaculture do that. I don't see how a take down of regenerative animal agriculture helps. Although you did claim this cooperate conspiracy with purly circumstantial evidence. I don't like big agricultural either. But then you don't like WOP either and your guest called them frauds. Where is the proof?
I want to eat meat. And I want a healthy ecosystem. I don't think it's wrong to want both. I don't think it is physically impossible. If regenerative meat has benefits, why can't we celebrate and build on that.
I think this video takes the tone it does because that's what you got to do to get attention on youtube. No one wants to watch a fair and balanced discussion of pros and cons of different agricultural practices. People want to see the takedown. But is that what's good for the world?
Thanks, there were also many methodological errors in how the data was presented in this video, like you said it’s not as easy as extrapolating small sets of emissions data and completely ignoring nature cycles like the methane cycle like is done here.
Veganism will always be a multifaceted argument. It doesn’t just stand on the environmental leg. I can’t claim to be an expert on regenerative meat, I’m just hearing about it. From what it sounds like even if it’s better for the ecosystem it’s not widely available and wouldn’t be able to provide the amount of animal flesh people consume right now. If anyone is buying from any other source they’re contributing to factory farming.
What I can say is “wanting” to do something doesn’t make it ethical or kind. There are so many reasons to not eat animals, it might just be me but I can’t think of a single good reason to eat them.
@@rosehalladay5843 I eat them because I think eating locally is of primary importance, and I can raise all my own meat with very little work. Raising all my vegetables is an incredible amount of labour. Plus the provide the most glorious compost for my garden and improve the fields they graze. Seems like a win win.
@@wadebacca putting aside the ethical and health reasons for being vegan, you’re in a unique position that hardly any people have access to. Most people can’t raise their own animals or even have their own gardens.
It’s simply not sustainable on the scale we currently consume animal products.
@@rosehalladay5843 your absolutely right, I would agree with the statement that we need an overall reduction in meat consumption, but I cannot agree with the idea that there are “no good reasons, not to be vegan”. In your original comment you stated it’s not widely available, but it’s videos like this that are criticizing companies for adopting it. Veganic ag, which is the only alternative close to regen ag is as far as sustainability is even less wide spread, does this mean people shouldn’t adopt it?
Beans not beings. ✌🏾
@Vegan Games
Groan.
(Good... I'm impressed but...)
Groan.
🥰
Oh my I just loved this word play
Love this!
Beans are disgusting though.
@@83uwb
Worse yet...
the peasants are revolting.
I'll get my coat.
😁
over simplification like this is a red flag...those who think they know seem to actually know the least, you're never going to translate a highly interconnective eco system into something this simple. The more you learn many perspectives the more you will start to grasp at the grandiosity of our living world so everyone should be skeptical of anyone who seems to have a motive like this
Regenerative grazing is an argument for why humans should live ALONGSIDE grazing animals, not EAT them.
As soon as animals are considered and intended to be human "food items", you have an unnatural situation that disrupts the romatizised "natural ecosystem" it's dressed as.
As soon as those animals are intended to be food for urban, modern, demanding consumers, the animals need to be genetically manipulated, homogenic, mutilated and killed way before the natural end of their lives. They then will be transported to consumers far away, and be digested and shat out in urban sewers, their remains never returning to the land they lived on.
Not to speak of the ethics of using selected individuals as climate fixing machines, only to plot to violate their entire existence to appease our aesthetic ideals.
Regenerative grazing is not an argument against veganism. It's an argument for humans living alongside wirh and respecting other animals, letting them live their lives and die of old age or other natural causes, their tired bodies returning to the land and feeding wild animals.
Regenerative grazing is bullshit, no pun intended
Mic has a way of explaining it grazefully.
Why? Makes sense to me. Cows eat grass. Then they are moved to another area to eat grass. Grass grows back. Makes sense to me.
@@rubygreta1 There's not enough land to move them around as much as they should move. The landscape handles migrations better than field confinement, and they eat away all of certain kinds of plants and leave others, reducing plant and animal diversity and compressing soil. Even grass fed cattle are supplemented typically with grass or alfalfa raised on other plots.
@@roku3216 that only happens in open field grazing, mob grazing has the opposite effect where the cows eat everything not just there favourites before moving off.
@@wadebacca If you've been part of cattle farming, you will soon learn they never eat everything, and what they do eat can soon become reduced or disappear from the land, There is not enough land available to all but a select very few ranchers, who want to make money, to have such a lofty approach to grazing, and I have yet to see a single parcel of land improved by cattle. (I grew up raising cattle and saw all the ranches in the area, plus feral cattle living in the wild. The best scenario I saw were the half dozen wild ones who at least did no harm on around 1,000 acres.) Even wild bison damage the land they live on if they can't visit each spot briefly twice a year and move on. The National Bison Range in MT can only keep between 350 and 500 bison on 18,500 acres, giving on average roughly 46 acres per bison which are regularly "culled" and managed to keep within acceptable environmental standards for the refuge. www.hcn.org/issues/53.2/indigenous-affairs-tribes-reclaiming-the-national-bison-range (an interesting article on the bison range you might enjoy)
Watching one 20 minute video of guys sitting in white rooms quoting “studies” is never going to convince me over 3x a week 20 minute videos for the last 3 years out on the land (Greg Judy). Edit: I’m science based, and I rarely eat chicken, beef, pork, lamb or goat, but you HAVE to see the transformation of soil and fields that have been managed in a regenerative way to see how they can store rain, sun and carbon before you make a decision. You can’t judge all grazing by conventional grazing, conventional ranching, where they use ivermectin, a pesticide that destroys the life in the soil. Watch about 8 hours of Greg Judy’s best vids from the past three years. Cloven hooved animals, whether you want to eat them or not, are the future of carbon sequestration. But their grazing HAS to be managed. It’s an art and a science.
What an absolute load of total bullshit. Whenever I see land which has had this bullshit performed on it, I can't help but shake my head and think about how vastly inferior they are to forested lands, literally by orders of magnitude.
Cloven-hooved animals are *NOT* the future of carbon sequestration, *AGROFORESTRY* is the future of carbon sequestration.
Guess meat-eaters don't need Cinderella or Snow White when they can believe in fairy tales about sustainable animal farming
So true. Lolz
👏👏👏🤣🤣🤣👍👍👍
Sustainable animal farming only exists in the imagination of non vegans and anti vegans. It doesn't actually happen in real life.
@@davidthescottishvegan so how did millions of bison live on American prairie??
@@frederiksmees5503, how many millions? And how many humans were there on the whole continent before 1500 CE? On a related note, what generally is relationship between the populations of herbivores/grazing herds and predators?
I’m not a doctor, but I am a 7th generation farmer and rancher. I doubt you even approve this comment but I’ll toss my 39 years of Agg hat in the ring. I 100% agree that modern farming practices are a mess. There are false claims in every aspect of Agg, especially in the new BeyondMeat system. I’ll also point out that you omitted over 99.9% of the farmers with published information about regenerative Agg involving animals.
I'm from New Zealand, You are right - there were no mammals in NZ prior to human settlement (except some native bats) , however we had / have a very diverse avian population. Over the millennia of Isolation in the absence of mammalian predation, some of these developed into the largest birds in recent history eg Moa (ratite), Haast Eagle. NZ is also an Island nation so lots of sea birds - all in all there is / was a lot of bird instigated soil biological activity seed spread in droppings e.t.c. I think you are missing the point when you say NZ is an example of how animals are not needed for soil fertility.
Also one of Savorys points is that herd animals are most important in arid climates, the more humidity=the less grazing animals are needed for the plants lifecycles.
So correct me if i'm wrong but New Zealand is pretty humid on average, so he needs to account for that as well.
@@larllarfleton New Zealand has an oceanic climate and gets a LOT of rain. So he's definitely missing something.
This lady gives is a great presentation about her farm and how regenerative grazing can do many good things in NZ,
th-cam.com/video/EauOfH9U-9Y/w-d-xo.html
That's silly because that's a small country. Murica had more bison than cows today...
@@larllarfleton Aridity is not an essential ingredient - however arid zones can go brittle and desertify the fastest. Savory's point is that herbivores are essential for the quickest reclamation of any soil that has been degraded by human activity. As long as they have something to eat they will improve the soil biology.
The Great Plains grasslands of N America had 60 million migrating bison. Arid climates need arid-adapted ruminants to maintain soil. Bison. Cows are water-adapted. Of course the rest of the biotic community is also vital including prairie dogs, beavers, & wolves. Temperate grasslands are the most endangered ecosystems on the planet, & all have large migrating ungulate herds as integral contributors. Some biologists define bison as keystone to the Great Plains.
So many native animals are killed for plant agriculture as well. One of countless examples, monarch butterfly habitat is being decimated for avocados, & activists are being killed. Burrowers, ground-dwelling birds, native grazers, native primates, native predators are all either being killed outright or slowly from loss of habitat & migration corridors.
I am a certified permaculture designer who lives on a silvopastured orchard. We are in a mega-drought, & our soil is holding water better than next door with no grazers. This is a very small herd that our neighbor moves around to several locations. It can be done beautifully in a polycultural system on a smaller scale. 'Industrial' food production is ecocidal whether plant or animal.
Buying plant based foods grown hundreds to thousands of miles away, packaged in plastic, shipped in diesel trucks is not going to help climate change, biodiversity loss, plastic pollution, or ecosystems collapse. Relocalization is the way to go. What can your specific climate support? Maybe your biome can support a vegetarian or even a vegan diet. Mine can't. I eat about 90% localvore within 20 miles of my home, around 40% within 1 mile of my home, including wild foods. I am grateful. What did Native peoples in your biome used to eat? What can you grow, preserve, share with your community, year round within seasonal limits? Relocalize, & eat with the seasons.
Lots of false assumptions here about rotational grazing. The fields you drive by are not grazed in tight rotations & moved up to twice a day like Allan Savory describes.
In PROPERLY managed pastures, there can be plenty of deep rooted plants such as trees, wildflowers, & wild grasses.
In most places on the planet, the idea of reaching carbon saturation anytime soon is insane.
No mention of the benefits of manure fertilizers vs. synthetic petroleum based fertilizers.. Currently we are using oil to fertilize mono crops and THAT is very unsustainable..
th-cam.com/video/Ce40y8clI4M/w-d-xo.html
Lol... people believe this nonsense.
the crops waster for the concentration camps feeding !? over 80 percent of all resources are wasted and stolen for feeding and fattening concentration camps and breeding-knifing corpses WHILE starvation exists.
watch the video.
Hi Mic, I think we could all benefit from a live stream of you and I talking about your false claims about regenerative agriculture. I live in a community that practices true regenerative agriculture. I have over ten years of living here in the lifestyle. Much of your information is incorrect. It is far better for the environment to eat regenerative food including beef, chick, fish, shrimp, and pork than supporting the corporate monoculture that is currently destroying the world. My real name is JUSTIN DOLAN, I live in the first house on the right at St. Michael's Sustainable Community. I have attended four Universities and lectured at others. I was a Major crimes investigator and Vegan.
and yet those aren't the only two dietary options (regenerative animal vs monoculture conventional ag (which is mainly done to produce animal feed, not human food anyhow) ). and have you heard of regenerative cropping? It's way less emissions intensive than regenerative cattle per calorie of edible food.
the facts around methane emissions are unavoidable for cattle production, and yes, EPA numbers are too-low. the environmental footprint of beef (regenerative or otherwise) are vastly higher per calorie than fruit & vegetables and even grains when you multiply out the land-use, water-use, energy-inputs, toxic outflows (like manure ponds) and GHG emissions. Order of magnitude ~100x fruit and vegetables.
yes regenerative has benefits, but Alan Savory has massively oversold them, especially the great big lie he tells when he says "its the only way to save mankind (from climate change)". He's a snake oil salesman, who happily murdered thousands of elephants on a hunch and now brags about his "error".
@@bashful228 yes but if farmers rotationally graze there would be no need for farmers to grow food for agriculture. Also a lot of his stats are off in this vid.
@@bashful228 Hi, I'm a farmer. First, only small percentage of land is usable for vegetable farming, considering the need of irrigation too. It means pumps and so on. Second the vegetables are more productive, but only because they are "miners", they require huge amounts of impunts. Third, theese imputs usually are animal imputs (blood meal, feather meal, fish meal, bone meal and manure). You could change it for less rich compost, but compost create a huge amount of CO2 emissions that vegans never take in account. Fourth vegetable production is seasonal, so it mean huge amount of shipping for long distances, while animal products aren't seasonal and can be local. Usage of land is not a point, some soils can produce only grasses and you can harvest only small amounts of it without depleting the soil, in such situation you can't farm vegetables or crops, herbivore animals are the best way to utilize the grass production. Some how now that there are a lot less herbivores than in the last 100 000yers, the methan production is so much worse, but wasn't a problem for thousands of years? So what would you eat in winter without shipping veggies and fruits from across the world? pasta, bread and sugar?
Agriculture is unfortunately orders of magnitude more complicated than 99% of people think. Soil types, clima, weather, amount and type of imputs and outputs for each crop... if you don't know theese facts you shouldn't really comment as if you have "THE SOLUTION".
I understand being vegan for ethical reasons, but there is no sustanaibility or regeneration in veganism.
@@Darynifiction This is an excellent summary, thank you.
@@bashful228 CH⁴ missions related to meat production are dealt with by the nature of the pastures ruminants need (hydroxil ions). Let's see if you can get through the Science. Walter Jehne providing all the answers.
th-cam.com/video/123y7jDdbfY/w-d-xo.html
Whatever supposed merits there might be it remains a fact that slaughtering the victims on farms is wrong. Just as slavery was wrong. Permaculture is regenerative. Humanure is regenerative. And no one needs to be slaughtered.
YES!! I am really sick of seeing the environmental movement embrace regenerative grazing as though it's the solution, and only factory farming is the problem. It's time for people to realize that animal ag is inherently inefficient compared to plant ag. Plant based is where it's at!
I think you typo’d at the end there, lol
Right on. Plant based is where it's at and that's a fact.
I'd be genuinely intrigued by an argument that would support your claim that the time has come for people to understand that animal ag is inherently inefficient compared to animal ag.
@@v.a.n.e. >animal ag is inherently inefficient compared to animal ag
Lol
It’s like putting Solar Panels on the roof of a Coal electricity plant to power its lights!
Hahahahahahaha omg 🤣
Mic, the rocket scientist doesn't also seem to realize that Quantis did both the LCA for Impossible Foods and WOP. Same exact company. The 2019 numbers were also part of the the 2020 peer reviewed papers. Same analysis. Mic is such a dumb ass some times.
Funny how Manic Mic and his so-called expert don't realize that CO2(e) in both GWP 20 and GWP100 are both flawed methodologies. Why? Methane is a short lived gas compared to CO2, so they're not equivalent. That's why Dr. Myles Allen and his team at Oxford developed GWP* to account for these lifetime disparities. Methane in the troposphere is constantly being oxidized by hydroxyl radicals back to cyclical CO2 and water.
But the WOP LCA didn't use GWP* because that's not the scientific convention. Using GWP 100 is. If the LCA used the more accurate GWP* method, WOP's numbers would have been about 4 to 5 times BETTER.
Mic the manic vegan also needs to learn how the microbial carbon pump works. What gets saturated is the labile carbon in the top 12 or so inches. But the microbial carbon pump continues to pump out root exudates that feed microbes (bacteria and fungi) that turn over every 7 to 14 days. Those microbes become the necromass which is the basis for additional soil organic matter.....that guess what? HOLDS MORE SOIL ORGANIC CARBON. Soil isn't a finite bath tub....As long as there's photosynthesis, in healthy soils there's always more SOM formation, both POM and MAOM...so would help if Mic the Manic Vegan had a clue as to what the newer microbial soil science paradigms are. His commentary is comically stupid.
His expert has the bottom-up and top down methods backwards. Bottom-up over counts...top down is showing the opposite.... when proper inventories of C12, C13 C14 carbon are accounted for, most top down analysis is showing that the largest source of increasing CH4 in the atmosphere is coming from coal bed gas and fracked gas NOT enteric methane. There however was some confusion with these different carbon isotopes in 2016, since these newer fossil fuels have both signatures from biogenic and thermogenic sources of CH4 so they were originally mis-attributed to animal agriculture. There's also a lot of flux with CH4 emissions from a number of sources, and CH4 amounts are also contingent on the availability of hydroxyl radicals [OH]. So once again, Mic's analysis is really bad. .
I have a hard time believing cows are a problem variable in the equation. Looking at North America prior to cows there were millions of bison. Animals and plants have a pretty symbiotic relationship. I can much more easily buy into other sources of waste, excess and pollution being problems.
We have less cows now then we have is past generations, people are also eating less meat.
@@dabbking in the US, sure, globally however, the cow population has gone up 50% since 1960s
@@OatmealTheCrazy also there is a lot more cars globally now
Wow, the desperation and mathematical gymnastics based on conjecture and presumption required for this nonsense 'debunking' is laughable. Ok, you're vegan, great, jog on.
What part of his maths was incorrect?
All I see is yet another vegan vlogger who has probably zero experience in regenerative agriculture or any sort of experience outdoors really 😊, but seems to have a great hunger for likes and praise from the tribe. Failing to see nuances that are ever so important to understand why regenerative ag works, why it is the most efficient tool of rebuilding soil and revegetating areas destroyed by industrial farming. The guy clearly set out to debunk not to understand first. The tribe of course applauds and takes another step towards becoming blind to reason.
Earthling ed made a good video and he explains this
Doen't matter how much time you spend outdoors, the math just doesn't work..
@@sebleblan because his numbers aren't real..
@@JakeJonesx You mean the published numbers?
@@aki-fi3gk what is the video title called?
Good job at cherry-picking the data to support your incorrect views. All should read the actual study, before agreeing with any of his conjecture.
Good job hand-waving away facts you don't like by labeling them incorrectly as being cherry-picked in order to support your blatantly false and downright moronic views.
Why dont you have conversation with somebody who understand ecosystem processes and post that video? you would get so debunked to a point where you would never step outside your door again.
So a healthy ecosystem needs to import 50% grain feed from external sources?
@@y37chung Also, get Allans book from 2016
Just like the people hell bent on proving regenerative grazing is the future you have made up your mind in advance and are just juggling numbers to favor your to point. This is not debunking anything. You latch on to veganism like meat eaters latch on to beef.
How about mixed diverse local food, befitting its context, instead of silver bullet solutions.
There were some rash assumptions and no debunking of a lot of mob grazing claims first off, Just like veganism comes from a idea to do good so does regenerative grazing and is definitly being highjacked by other interests.
If you are serieus about debunking, debunk this:
Grassland neutralises most of its CH4 this way. Water vapor from plants H20 turns in OH because of sunlight OH +CH4 = CO2. OH is hunderfold present to CO2 ("just have a think" has a great video on this)
Carbon storage in grasslands is way quicker than forests so it could be great transition to forestry.
Also bringing back native prairie in the US, is basicly climax ecosystem with maximum biodiversity how is that not one of (y)our goals.
2/3 of agricultural land is claimed to be not avaible for cropping due to accesibility and terain so grazing woult be great if it werent for methane (wich is no isue unless truely debunked).
Polyface is very clear on there (very local btw) grain use, there was no need to debunk that, i dont know about WOP in this regard. The manure is captured in the soil anyway so it is stored even thoug it is not in such a direct way as with cattle.
Yeah, that was what i felt from him as well, he's just trying to make the numbers play for him.
I love pigs. I read about pigs in the book Animal Liberation. It was the first animal that I stopped eating. It has been four years now. There is a better, more compassionate, and more loving way to live our lives.
This is basically a commercial ag critique. How does this relate to small homesteads and farms that are not producing massive amounts of food for sale to corporations?
As long as humans are present on the earth we are going to reshape the land. The things we can do to reduce this at least a little should be tried. For some that's going vegan, for others that's planting trees and going renewable. It's not realistic to assume the whole world will adopt one person's idea on how to fix the problem so encouraging people to do what they can should be the main goal.
What about the unnecessary suffering caused to living sentient beings for a 15 min taste pleasure?
Maybe. But if inaccurate data is being used to promote a solution, then it need to be debunked and the facts set straight.
@@EternalJourneys if you wanna talk about inaccurate data, look no further than the Data Mic uses. Just google “methanotrophs” and wonder why it wasn’t mentioned in this video.
Cattle don't produce anywhere near as much methane on a grassfed diet, so your methane calculations are completely wrong
He will just spread bullshit
@@nawmeethecrazyhumanbeing199 i see what you did there ;D
You failed to debunk anything, you really don't seem to understand regenerative agriculture. Here are some TH-cam videos if people want a good primer on the subject.
Regenerative Agriculture - The fastest way to climate safety? Just Have a Think Nov 29, 2020
Regenerative Agriculture - Part 1 Just Have a Think Sep 2019
Regenerative Agriculture - Part 2 Just Have a Think Sep 2019
Walter Jehne - The Soil Carbon Sponge, Climate Solutions and Healthy Water Cycles Apr 2018
Agreed!!! Also want to mention Joel Salatin's work as well. Considering the fact that most conventional grass fed cattle farmer get about 80 days out of 1 acre for cattle, he's nearly tripled his yield of grass with rotational grazing.
Don't let your veganism cloud your reason.
The great plains were once black with grazing bison. That's about as regenerative as it can get.
We can thank Ulysses Grant for almost wiping them from the planet.
All bison will certainly die, and be eaten by either people, other mammals, birds, insects, or worms.
Have the biological needs of grasslands changed from before?
Literally no regenerative ag person would disagree with you about cover crops and food forests. Those are great things and are encouraged.
How do you engage with the fact that North America used to have orders of magnitude more animal impact on the land pre European settlers? North America was jam-packed with Bison, Elk, deer, caribou, moose, beavers, water fowl, migratory birds, birds of prey, bears, wolves, coyotes, cougars, etc..
Yes, and the system functioned and was productive, and provided ecological services. The issue is how we are grazing, the system can handle intensive grazing, and in brittle environments, requires it in order to function ecologically.
Thanks!
THANKS SO MUCH!
Such anger from both sides. No wonder humans can not get on a sustainable path. Until we can figure out how to get along with our own species, it will continue to be impossible to co-exist with all of the other organisms that we MUST SHARE this planet with for much more than a mere blip in history.
Thanks
I agree we need to get along but the two sides are not a level-playing field in terms of destruction. Is it wrong to get angry about selfishness and egos that put taste above ethics and survival of the planet, preventing pandemics etc? Would it be wrong for slaves to get angry about their oppressors? Not exactly the same of course...
Almost ever premises you make is seems to be either misleading in its critique and context or just plain wrong .
On the whole your presentation seem disingenuous.
Good that you give reference to information.
Roots so Deep probably could well do with a comprehensive peer review or another study for repeatability.
The farmer, Gabe Brown, lays to waste most of your premises handily also.
ground would never reach an carbon fullness because there is constant roots growing witch means constant bacteria and fungi that consume it and because of the grazing makes sure that the plants are constant growing and the beef might not be negative in carbon upon itself but if put together with the amounts of carbon absorbed into the ground and admitted from the cows it makes it a lot less carbon that is exerted into the atmosphere plus yes it might not be so affective in his region where he live because its only a half a year growing season but imagen that same farming strategy in country's where growing season is all year round it would be able to double those amounts of carbon uptake into the ground with the same amount of cows so you would be negative in carbon emissions since there is always something growing
Yeah, well my uncle has a farm and he.... just kidding - go vegan
Well since you feel it necessary to tell people what to eat, meat is healthy for you
@@AKA_Yours_2RLY_Music it's not about telling people what to eat, it's about telling people WHO they shouldn't be eating. Animals aren't products, they're sentient beings who feel pain and deserve the right to life.
Meat is not healthy. High amounts of fat and cholesterol, no fiber. A whole food plant-based diet is the only diet clinically proven to reverse heart disease and type 2 diabetes. A standard American diet is linked to our top 15 killers.
nutritionfacts.org/video/how-not-to-die/
@@bifurioussiren you're speaking like some spiritual guru as if such spiritual practices are sacred to you, but that couldn't be farther from the truth. Your practice is death, not life. Who are you to tell me what is good to eat and what is evil to eat? That is why I have no reason to even humour your argument. I can list all varying levels of benefits from eating strictly animals and you will not even listen, so why should I bother with you but to call you a hypocrite and an imbecile? Preach else where and begone, there will be no ignorance here.
@@bifurioussiren fats and cholesterol are also extremely healthy for you so I really don't know what your argument is about. Are you by any chance a sugar addict? Do you enjoy your toxic canola and soy? Lol
@@AKA_Yours_2RLY_Music dude he literally just presented u with a study
This video isn’t data driven at all…its simply an attack on a single farm and that farm’s claims. Biased and misleading.
Let's just completely ignore the fact that organic vegetables are the highest input farming enterprise. Requiring massive amounts of compost typically from animal manures. Conventional vegetable farming is fine without these animal inputs because it relies on synthetic NPK salts, but organic, nope...? Organic farming (without animals) cuts off symbiotic ecosystem processes that mimic nature, and require way more energy inputs than organic farming (with animals). Processing plant materials into compost takes huge amounts of human energy, but animals process this plant matter into manures (the best compost) as their natural ecological niche.
This video also puts a great focus on GHG emissions, but have you never heard of geoengineering, stratospheric injection of aerosols, and solar radiation management? Can we start asking why there are so many heavy metals in the atmosphere? What implications do programs like HAARP and similar infrastructure around the world working in combination with these atmospheric heavy metals have on our climate?
Climate change is being influenced by geoengineering programs.
Organic agriculture is deeply intertwined with animal systems and will die if animal agriculture ends.
Conventional chemical based agriculture will be fine without animals.
Vegan diets are dependant on globalism excluding the tropics.
How can you eat a local sustainable vegan diet during winter without being dependent on globalism?
Climate change religion scientism is a Trojan Horse for the new world orders technocratic synthetic transhuman diet.
Enjoy your cockroach milk lattes and up-cycled food waste soylent green diet in your agenda 2030 smart city! ;)
15:05 Why did you say 38% of earth's habitable surface is used for feed and grazing .THE CHART SAYS 77%
You have to look better at the charts. 77% of agricultural land is used for feed and grazing.
Not all land is agricultural land (that is only 50%).
But this FAO study misses some land.
Where is the land used for producing biofuels, industrial oils, etc ... ?
That number is getting significant as well. Not all agricultural land is used for food, and their numbers do not reflect that.
I went vegan for about a year. Worse decision of my life. Eat more beef.
You never were vegan.
Veganism is about the ethics, it's not a diet.
@@Azarilh actually I did. And my brain turned to shit.
@@WWFarms51 So stopping paying for the exploitation and slaughter of animals turned your brain into poop? I don't see the logic.
Factory farming is actually more eco-friendly because is uses less land, not to mention that it’s the only way to produce as much flesh as the planet is consuming for the price tags we pay.
Denial is a stage of grief. Just give it up and go vegan!
Land usage is important but not even close to the right metric for environmentally sustainable.
@@wadebacca my point was that the only viable choice we have is to switch to farming plants only.
We could be producing the same amount of food we are now with just 30% of the land we’re using, not to mention distributing it better and with renewable energy.
@@PBandJames1 it’s only viable if our soil is healthy, our soil is not healthy and vegan ag cannot appropriately address this. Vegan ag is like driving your car without changing your oil, you could say “ I’m eliminating 5 qts of oil every 5,000 Kms” but all your doing is hastening the cars demise. I’ve been researching and practicing permaculture for over a decade.
@@wadebacca I haven’t studied this field much. Let’s assume what you’re saying is true: humans will need the aid of ruminants, even in carefully planned permaculture systems proportionate to our needs.
There’s still no ethical excuse to not make that a vegan system. We don’t need to exploit, control, or eat animals. We do it for pleasure and profit.
@@PBandJames1 yeah, I absolutely see where your coming from, I do it for self sustainability reasons, I live in Canada with no access to locally grown fresh vegetables for many months, and I raise sheep for compost for my garden as much as for meat and milk. Putting that aside, let’s say we are raising animals for ecological purposes with no slaughter, these animals naturally breed in high numbers because of predation. So our options are to breed these animals and just let them get jacked by predators, or curtail there breeding. Breeding instincts are the strongest instinct in many of these animals, I question whether it’s more moral to allow for the conscious suffering of curtailing there breeding over just killing them, which entails no suffering, I fully admit that this is unjust killing, but life circumstances are not always just, especially when the alternatives are wild animal predation which entails conscious suffering and death, curtailing breeding which entails years of conscious suffering leading to eventual death, which all life does in the end, or just killing and eating them which entails just death.
Am I missing another option?
You guide lines regarding methane are based on conventional cattle production in feed lots with concrete floors that have nothing to compare with grassland where the carbon is sequestered to the soil, feeds it's biology and grows grass again as well as increases the organic matter and root systems, contrary to the tillage and mono crops farming way of feed cattle with grains.
We're doing sustainable food production on 11 acres in Puerto Rico, and even discontinued raising truly free range chickens for eggs (even without buying meds or feed for them) because we realized that we can grow more food without chickens than we can with chickens. OR... the amount of work and monetary inputs for infrastructure like fencing in our growing areas would exceed the value.
Funded by stuff, found a study that was made by the same guy and it was not cool.
Land was previously depleted and therefor numbers are skewed (land previously depleted by vegetarian food production).
Methane big bad. Methane is also broken down over time. Northern America have always had a lot of ruminants, so net methane level does not increase. Can be completely ruled out of the picture if one does not want to offset methane emissions from landfills with killing the world's ruminants.
Methane measured from the air above was not from the grazing site, if it was from grain fed cattle it is not relevant. Obviously not relevant since methane in it self is not relevant.
Uses more space, excellent for the environment. Close to vegan like countries like India and Bangladesh are more polluting and have higher Co2 emissions than USA.
Question for any vegans that see this, do you eat primarily or solely organic produce? If so, how do you square the fact that the majority of fertilizer used for organic cropping is animal-based with your refusal to harm animals? Asking because I'm trying to figure this whole thing out.
Vegitarian here. I don't like harming animals. I don't think using animal poop is what is physically or mentally harming them. And while the animals are there, something needs to be done with the manure.
If we would all stop eating meat almost completely, than manure will not be available so we would need to shift to using other fertilisers, and there are many alternatives that can be used.
Its probably best to focus on reducing animal harm first and than just adapt with the changes.
@@WinterGK those other fertilizers have far more externalized problems than animal manure.
@@wadebacca Manure itself has problems, like being inconsistent with quality and the side effect of a lot methane produced.
@@Azarilh yes manure has problems, with healthy soil those problems are eliminated. The nutrients are locked into the soil structure. Industrial mono cropping and modern tillage systems destroy that soil structure. Manure that’s been composted with bedding ( wood chips, straw) has very little chance to wash into our aquifers.
@@wadebacca Mono-cropping is mostly used for crops to feed the farmed animals. About 77% of the agrucultural land is used for animal food industry ( and give only 18% of total global calorie supply ). It's just highly inefficient.
So if you want manure to fertilise an X amount of crops, you need to double~ those crops to feed the animals so it's counter productive.
So needed because of that new Netflix documentary Kiss The Ground. I wonder if you can do a shorter version in layman’s terms in order to share it with those who cite this documentary.
I agree. Most of the people who cite things like “eco beef” are people who are obviously too lazy to really look into things and (as Mic and the Doc said) just want to quickly latch onto something that supports bad habits. I doubt they will objectively sit through a 20 minute video.
I was just watching it. Very sad. I guess Woody Harrelson is no longer a vegan or he wouldn't be doing the narration, I assume. I came here to hear Mic's de-bunk and post the link on fb and twitter.
@@JaneWeeks yes, excruciatingly disappointed in the celebrities that were featured. Vystopian trigger.💔
@@bw1955 unfortunately it’s this video that might be too lazy to look into the actual science, there is lots of talk of methane emissions but no talk of methane cycles, there is lots of talk of vegan alternatives, but no talk of the huge problems inherent in those practices, I don’t know if it’s the regen ag people that have the data problem here.
@@wadebacca can you specifically say how this video is wrong and how the methane cycle justifies the huge land, water, and resource wastes of farming animals? What are the “inherent” issues with vegan alternatives? Are you talking about Beyond or Impossible Burgers?
I'm in the process of buying an acre of land. Going to start some veganic polyculture to prove how viable this system really is. Great vid as always!
How's it going 2 Year's on?
@@Madronaxyz I put it on hold to save up so I can get something more substantial. The one I was hoping for was local but the sale fell through :c
The biocyclic vegan certification program in Europe is showing that we can grow our food without animals. In fact, it’s better for the land.
Ruminant grazing/farming has never been efficient or sustainable on a large scale to feed a civilization.
At one time old Tokyo (Edo) was the largest city on earth prior to Perry's contact, with millions of inhabitants, and it was sustained with zero ruminant consumption and intensive organic farming.
Some environmental influencers on TH-cam have been saying lately that Regenerative Grazing is mostly based on wishful thinking and lacks clear scientific evidence. Some have even retracted or corrected videos they have released that were positive about the trend.
Meat consumption was also limited and even banned by some leaders in Japan over the years. Due to land use being so limited
@@mommalydia It was mostly due to religious reasons. At one time Buddhism was the dominant religion in Japan, so the emperor tried to forbid the killing/eating of mammals.
@@Magnulus76 I went to Japan and studied at their museums. I would not say it was mostly due to religion. They didn’t start heavily including meat (other than fish) in their diets until trade with the Dutch opened up in the 1800’s.
I can look up the hillsides around the valley here and see which land parcels are grazed and which are left wild, and immediately know which is which because the grazed ones lack plant and animal diversity, plus show greater effects of erosion.
yo, what's up!!
its not the cow, its the how.
@@Gustav4 It's also the cow. Even the open range ones where I grew up degraded the lake shore and there were some that went feral in the woods, so those five or six did relatively little damage to the thousand acres they wandered on. I guess if you have 200 acres per animal of prime arable land, then it's possible.
@@roku3216 exactly the open range ones are the problem, the intensively grazed ones are the ones building soils.
@Jonah Whale No desertification has and is being caused by reductionist management which made people put livestock in the wrong place and burned everything to death. Now we have holistic management we can use to make decisions so we can start get the outcomes that we desire.
Regenerative Agriculture gives me jaundice in my yet too orange face
From my somewhat limited experience working in sustainable ag this is the biggest thing people hold onto for justifying raising cattle/chickens/whoever for production and profit and don’t even question whether the ecology or the animals are even really in a thriving relationship (as much of a relationship with the natural ecology as they can have since we have bred them in completely unnatural ways. By natural I mean nonhuman inflicted elements or beings of nature).
It was just obvious to me that it wouldn't work considering the amount of land it would require (grazing land in the US already huge). At best this might work in a "plant-based society" for the few holdouts among the wealthy willing to pay top dollar for beef.
@Tyelar Rhead Yes, I agree completely. Pastoral societies don't subsist substantially on the flesh of animals, they never have. They might milk the animals and eat them once in a while, but they aren't going to eating animal flesh every day as is common in western countries. That requires intensive agriculture.
Never ceases to amaze me how quickly one who believes something will latch on to anyone who spouts anything that “proves” their thoughts. Also if you point out the potential bias in one study it behooves (pun intended) you to point out the potential bias in the other.
So Mic, please do a deep dive into the production practices of produce farming. What does it take to feed you through the year? From how many countries do you need to import your vegetables? Please do a little digging, actually get some dirt under your nails check out how destructive your vegan diet is before stepping in a cow patty on the otherside of the fence.
"actually get some dirt under your nails check out how destructive your vegan diet is before stepping in a cow patty on the otherside of the fence." The science is very clear that the more you eat whole plant foods, the better it is for the planet. WHAT you eat (animal vs. plant) is generally far more consequential for ecological impacts than is where the food comes from.
Question: Not related to this video. Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn in his reversal of Heart disease wants people to eat a handful of leafy greens 6 times a day with vinegar. My question: He says to boil the greens for about 6 minutes. IS there a reason for it to be boiled and not eaten raw? Is there a reason? This takes a lot of time and raw greens taste a lot better.
This will be a good one since I keep encountering it on social media.
IKR! It’s also funny how 99% of animal products come from factory farms, but all these omnis I encounter are getting it from pastures...
@@manilak4415, and then if ask them how that would scale to sustain the global population of meat-eaters, they'll be like: "Why does it matter? It only matters what I do!"
@@manilak4415 OMG, seriously! It drives me crazy.
it does scale, I would actually recommend reading a proper book on the topic rather than TH-cam videos ;) ‘Sacred cow’ would be a good start.
@@MarkusWaas, a primer on the laws of thermodynamics ought to be enough.
I don’t know why you look at holistic management as a means to eat more meat, instead of working with animals to restore soils. We had millions of Bison in the U.S. (the last of many now extinct large herbivore herds) that would maintain the land and move on because of food availability and predators. Disconnected land, fenced off and maintained by us have disintegrated and eroded to the point of no return under chemicals and lack of animals.
Do you garden? Have you ever left thick, tall, uncut grass and see what happens? Sunlight doesn’t reach the soil and results in depleted ground, bare if it happens over time and in large quantity.
Why would you prefer to keep animals off the land they evolved with? Healthy soil retains carbon and animals are a huge part in the life cycle of the land.
Go to the Midwest, go to the southwest, see the land eroding and turning to desert. The missing factor is the herds.
I’m not advocating against veganism, I am mostly plant based myself. It is a huge mistake to think that the grasslands will take care of themselves without animals. Why else would large herds exist in the wild without the land collapsing immediately? More native species on the land, predators and grazers, is the answer.
See for yourself. Holistic Management is not a case to eat more meat.
Because of the fact that a vegan world would require less overall land use, it could be assumed that in the gradual transition into that world, we would let the majority of our current animal farm land use to be left to rewild as we introduce Its native animals into that ecosystem.
You made a very good video. I’m a farmer and do study permaculture and regenerative agriculture. Generally speaking what you says reflects the realities in the US but in the rest of the world the picture is quite different. Holistic Management was born in Africa and It is a great tool to organize effective communal grazing practices that don’t degrade the land and instead regenerate it and keep it on balance. You cannot plant in certain areas because they are too degraded but you can use animals to restore ecological functions as water infiltration and than move to more diversified farming practices but you still need the animals in order to keep balance on the cycle of nutrients, especially in environments where humidity and rain are not homogenously distributed during the year. Prohibiting Intensive animal husbandry, meat prices would go way up, more than double, people would start to eat it less and many things could improve. Remember that an animal is the saving account of a farmer.
It can definitely be the same in the US.
Regenerative grazing works, we know this from the buffalo; it just doesn't work for a food source.
It presumably would work for a food source if you did it sustainably, but that would require a MASSIVE reduction in meat consumption.
yeah it only works because those are native animals to these environments, with natural breeding and deaths via their naturally-occurring predators, migration patterns, and (originally) lack of human involvement. Regenerative agriculture only works in the wild with the lifeforms that are native to it
I think you're referring to *restoration* (as opposed to regeneration). There's a big difference. Native ungulates in an intact ecosystem is different than a simplified ecosystem engineered purely for agricultural grazing. Even with native ungulates there's a limit to soil C sequestration, which is primarily controlled by climate (avg soil temp and precipitation at the site).
@@seanprive596 No I am thinking of my brother who was a longhorn rancher, but is now vegan, so beef is off the menu. We find his grazing land is much healthier if we move the pokeys about at intervals and grazing areas that are still being determined. We end up with quality fertilizer and a cut of the grass, and they get to do what they like best, socializing, eating and pooping. It is a work in progress.
@@seanprive596 True - native ungulates can wear down their own ecosystems if they aren't forced to move around. I'm thinking about that "wolves reintroduced to Yellowstone" video that went around a while ago
Same marketing technique as American Spirit Tobacco...
"We're sooo much different than other cigarettes."
... and listening to Alan Savory really gives me the creeps.
😶
I was debating his daughter last week. She's in denial.
@@Fearzero
I was in denial for years... then the Egyptian government withdrew my visa.
I'll get my coat.
🥰
Seriously though. Lemme know more about the debate with La. Savory.
☺️
@@PercivalBlakeney Haha dad jokes never get old. It was on FB. I posted a bunch of stuff from a science based article done by Sierraclub.org and she just ignored it completely. Wasn't much of a debate because she had no answers for my questions about lack of replication of her father's work and lack of support by the scientific community at large.
@@Fearzero
People generally ignore arguments that prove them wrong and demonstrate that we have to switch off the TV and get on with stuff.
Essentially the ,"Aw gee Mom, do I have to do my homework? ... tidy my room? ... take out the trash? ... be nice to the relatives?" attitude.
"Science and technology will cure all of human ills, except the last and most pernicious... that of human apathy." - Helen Keller.
Well done for taking her on though.
😊
@@Fearzero, they always run from that article because it's researchers at agricultural universities and working ranchers that most effectively debunk Savory's nonsense. If the people who would love for you be right are saying you're wrong, then it's time to re-evaluate your life.
What do you think about Richard Perkins Ridgedale Permaculture in Sweden? He does Regenerative Agriculture.
In depth and factually accurate. Honestly the vast majority of people wouldn't want to or be able to digest all those stats. Thanks so much Mic, it's really a pleasure. I'm still making my transition to veganism and it really started because of the environment. Like you and the doctor said, it's really hard to hear something you like, is bad. If we're all trying to change for the better, I think we deserve factually-accurate data. Thanks again dude, keep it up, it's definitely hard work but I can't stress how much I appreciate it!
It was actually very shallow explanation, it completely omitted the concept methane cycling, used CAFO data and extrapolated it onto regen systems, completely ignored the fact that there is regen grain production called pasture cropping, and ignored the soil crisis we’re heading towards. And also ignored the huge shortcomings of vegan ag.
@@wadebacca I hope he sees this and addresses your points (I'm not familiar with some of them). I do know there's plenty of plants that have been shown which help recycle the nutrients within the soil. Also while I don't doubt for a second grazing and whatnot is needed, it's a little surprising to hear when if the primary objective is less resources to produce nutrition, vegan agriculture has "huge shortcomings". That would suggest the way to harvest more plants to feed on... is to decrease them?
@@dripshameless5605 yeah, I’ve been practicing veganic ag, regenerative ag, and permaculture for over a decade now, the shortcomings I am talking about are things like a the restrictions on climate where vegan ag works, it’s reliance on tillage at large scale ( very bad for the soil) or plastic sheeting which is labour intensive way less efficient and only works at market garden size. Just to name a few, one of regenerative ages biggest pluses is that it can be practical in almost any environment
@@wadebacca oh you've done it yourself, that's awesome! I really hope he sees your comment and responds. Thank you!
@@wadebacca Hey also, how is veganism against regenerative ag? I'm learning about it right now. I'm not vegan but basically it's just about not wanting to harm animals right? So shouldn't vegans also support a system, where animals are given a good life (hopefully), AND help replenish the environment? I don't see the problem between vegans and regen ag, what am I missing? Ofc this is all under the assumption that the animals are not being harmed.
I think it's all about everything in moderation. The US isn't going to give up eating meat but if we could persuade people to eat meat sparingly we could reduce negative health benefits and help the land by not artificially saturating it with animal agriculture. Regenerative farming has a place in my opinion with the perspective that it is a step in the right direction which can be built upon from there. We're all on the same team and talking as if there are two sides and only one is right is not going to persuade anyone to change. I'd appreciate videos in the future that are not focused mainly on cancelling another perspective than your own.
Came for the science, stayed for the puns.
If you find any science rather than conjecture please let us know
@@Glenburrows I may be vegan, but I do occasionally eat troll.
Just kidding man, I sincerely hope you got something out of that snarky comment.
@@ElteHupkes A small moment of truth, nothing more.
18:35 highlights conclusions
I think in a food forest system designed to feed us sustainably, it can be helpful to have regenerative grazing in between the treed swales... but that doesn't mean you need to eat the animals or kill them... they can just live there with you and everyone is happy. I never took Savory as someone telling me I shouldn't be WFPB. You would be adding a carbon sink to the farm if you were regeneratively grazing for the purpose of building the soil and not for building beef right?
If there is a cap off on the carbon in the top of the soil, how long does that take to work it's way 10 feet down? I've seen 'terra preta' soil slices in south america and it's super deep... not saying that's from grazing but it is curious how you saturate at depth. When you have deep rooted trees on contoured swales with 12 foot deep soil roots in between, that's getting a lot of carbon pumped down in the soil. Soil needs to be cut to regrow is what I read, so when you do it with an animal you add the benefit of their enzymes being fertility being added back to the soil and how they trample it out. It sounds like in this video most of the regenerative grazing is assuming they're selling the meat instead of just composting animals that have passed. You do so much research, love your videos ... I guess my curiosity is what is the best use of the grass parts of a farm in between the food forest bits... as far as I understood, grazing was the highest form of that and increased nitrogen and carbon fixation, but if you have enough rain that you don't need grass in between so you have a larger rainfall catchment area then it's not a problem
I think it would be REALLY AWESOME if you would critique permaculture practices with such statistics... it would be interesting to see what your world has to say about it... in permaculture and biointensive food production we only hear our own voices
Also loved the vid and the info.
Can you please make a video on the no longer vegan Sarah Lemkus and her family? I am really worried about her claims (insta stories) as I have vegan kids myself and being vegan for 8 years now... Thanks a lot! Keep up an amazing work and content! 👍
@@theterriblepuddle1830 wow, that's a nice comment! 👍
I farm in the Midwest. Just starting to integrate livestock into our operation. What steers you toward vegan?
Read the book Sacred Cow The Case for Better Meat.
Please give your children fat and protein. They need to grow and thrive .
@@edwardciucci fat and protein is abundant on a vegan diet.
4:07 RE: Grazing and carbon negative, what aspect of grazing livestock generates carbon emissions? I thought grazing livestock's contribution to climate change was the generation of methane not carbon.... ???
Methane is considered a carbon gas (greenhouse gas) emission. It is made of one carbon atom and 4 hydrogen. CH4.
Yeah almost everything is made of carbon
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon
New Zealand is a non-brittle environment. Resting benefits it.
You can tell he doesn’t understand how this actually works...
This reminds me of my frustration with the documentary "Biggest Little Farm" :(
It is hard to think it's bad though when you see the improvement of their soils why is it bad I'm not picking btw I am looking to be educated
@@staceyrobson5697 not only soil improvements, but this doc also showed the huge Benefits of integrating animals to deal with pests, seems like vegans would prefer to drive up and down their fruit tree rows with a tractor and insecticide/herbicide instead of feeding the snails to the ducks.
6 weeks into carnivore diet. I feel amazing !
Great video Mic
The one thing you're missing from the discussion is how much of the conventional beef is raised on incredibly low rotation pastures until the feedlot, practically wasting that land by comparison.
Yes intensive rotation uses up to 3x as much total pasture land, but it uses that land far more efficiently and doesn't involve all the ecological and ethical consequences of a feedlot.
Including all the emissions produced and toxins dumped and soil lost and land used growing grains and legumes for the aforementioned feedlot.
Not to mention the fact that when the animals are rotated out and the land is rested for 60+ days it’s basically returned to nature for that time.
A MORINGA PLANTATION WOULD BE A VERY REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURE AND SOURCE OF COMPLETE PROTIEN
There is a new doco(based on boom Sacred Cow) that my partner (a flexiterian ) is asking me (a vegan) to read/watch. I would love your thoughts on this 🙏
Great Doc actually, but someone as biased as Mic wouldn't like it, i presume, he's completely against meat, it doesn't even matter if it's healthier or better for the environment.
@@MaxIronsThird maybe but that doesn't make Sacred Cow scientific and neutral / reliable in many claims
@@spiral-m what doesn't make it scientific or neutral? Have you watched it?
You should interview or debate Gabe Brown or Ray Archuletta so that people can see differing opinions other than your own so they can decide how to interpret the facts themselves instead of depending on you to decipher the facts for your audience.
It would make your argument stronger.
A big question I want to ask is, do you find any place in nature where there are not animals as part of the environmental mix? I eat vegan most the time. I do eat meat when it is served to me and less than once a month at home. but again vegan most the time and I would be quite content to never eat meat or animal products. But as a farmer for over 40 years, I can tell you animals benefit the soil and the plants that grow and the plant food you eat. I've done it both ways, with and without animals and with animals is better. and yes, New Zealand does have animals, maybe not large ones but animals none the less.
Animals in the natural world are not so densely concentrated on one patch of land. When you graze animals in a limited area you essentially put the soil’s degradation on fast-forward, only then to force it to recover later on. Ruminant animals in the natural world will graze for miles and miles, and the soil in the wild will additionally be biodiverse already - all kinds of plants growing in one area. When animals graze in an environment such as this, the soil is able to recover in an ongoing manner, as the impact is spread wider and more thinly. When using rotational fields, the field is intensively depleted. This “regenerative agriculture” cannot compare to the biodiverse wild environment which animals would otherwise graze on. Additionally, it’s important to remember that the animals we are discussing are not found in the natural world - this is a problem we have designed.
@@Geogaddii what you say has been the common thinking for decades. but what we have discovered is we had the wrong idea. If you look at how bison used to roam, the traveled in very large, very dense herds. They would forage the plants intensively for a day and move on. The new regenerative grazing system is mimicking the way nature used the prairie. So, the truth is, animals in the natural world are that densely concentrated on one patch of land for a short time. That's why we move livestock every day or 2 at the most. Multiple trials and folks who have tried it will tell you, their soil is better, and they actually get to run more head per acre.
The trick is take them off the grazed area before they take it down to nothing. Leave enough for the pasture to come back and it does quite nicely. it really works. There is one more thing, and that is you need diversity of plants in your pasture mix. Not just mono culture. At least 3 in the mix but 8 or more plant types or more is optimum.
12:25 We have the year 2021, why do you still use units that are obsolete since more than 100 years?
Use units like meter.
🌱 Vegan for life 🌍
THE WATER PROBLEM
WOP did not even go into the water footprint
WOP is near the moist East coast - Gulf cost Not the arid western USA
The reason the east coast states are moister is because the earth spins from west to east
Water over the Atlantic ocean evaporates and the east coast spins into that moist air .
The west coast spins away from the pacific ocean
WOP would never have worked in the western states
Mikey!!...I was waiting for this!! I've been looking up Allan Savory and his holistic management crap for the past couple of weeks and I felt something didn't add up!! I knew there was something off about the whole "more cattle will save the planet" BS.
Mic is not an sustainable agriculturalist and it shows. Vegan permaculture is like removing rock, paper or scissors from the equation. Ideologies & science arent compatible.
Decreasing biodiversity opposes the fundamental permaculture principle that biodiversity is sustainable. Seriously promoting vegan permaculture is flabbergasting. And that cover cropping and grazing are mutually exclusive...
Bovine heards arent inherently misplaced, theyre a part of the prarie ecosystem.
Sincerely - a sustainable agricultural science student
A big issue with veganism is the use of bees in pollination, and the escalated use of toxic poisons to produce the extra veg, considering rising costs and supply issues of these toxic poisons
The bees are used for pollination only because there are a lot of bees form the HONEY industry. Otherwise, they'd use alternative methods like wind pollination. No need to use bees.
What extra veg you are talkin about? If everyone went vegan, we would need to produce less food, cos guess what animals eat-
In fact currently almost 50% of current crops are used to feed the farmed animals to produce way less food in the form of animal food ( from 3% to 17% only! That is a big waste of food ).
@@Azarilh wind pollination is not anywhere near the same as insect pollination, that is an evolutionary fact.
The protein replacement of meat is not confined to feedlots/sow stalls/battery hens/fish pens. A great quantity of meat is harvested outside of plant friendly growing conditions, climate, geology, post cropping management. The majority of global farming is from 2ac/2ha mixed family farms,
@@666bruv A long portion of the animal industry is built in places where they removed natural habitats. 60+% of the reason of Amazon forest being chopped down is for animal industry.
And almost 50% of all crops we have, are destined to feed the animals, which in exchange give back about 3 to 30 % calories. So there is a huge loss of food, water, land, natural habitats, nutrients...
@@Azarilh i agree that large scale industrial animal production is greatly flawed, and needs to be banned, but, there is no chance of removing animal protein from the global diet, asia and africa have a large population of hungary mouths
@@666bruv As i mentioned earlier, animals are fed our crops, which converts poorly into way less animal based food. For beef, for example, 97% of the calories from the plants the animals ate, are lost forever, and you get only 3% of those calories in the form of beef.
So if you truly want to feed the hungry, you should go vegan.
Also, non industrial animal farming is even more unsustainable then the industrialised one. As it uses even more land.
Even with the industrialised farming, if the entire world would eat as much meat as Americans do today, we would need another planet for all the space required to produce all that meat. ( it was 137% global land required in 2011, meat consumption increased since then, so t's probably about 150% now. )
Interesting! Lots of open range grazing here in the southern Sierra Nevada. I always thought it was strange that cattle are allowed to graze in the Golden Trout Wilderness area, but apparently preexisting grazing rights were the issue there. The upside is that the number of cattle is much less than it was in the 1990s. So, I guess that's progress. And on a related topic, what about using goats to clear under brush as a way to reduce forest fires? We had some extremely serious fires this last summer and the snowfall so far this year isn't looking too good so far!
Goats are great at brush and kudzu clearance. Chickens are good at bug clearance. Sheep also eat weeds, cows won't touch and vice versa.
Forests do need to be managed (and humans have been doing it for thousands of years), otherwise you get a forest fire hazard in the making. Whether it's through selective logging or forest-based agriculture, both outcomes are beneficial over simply doing nothing.
Why not restore the forest with it's natural imhabitants? They did the job before humans arrived. We need to let nature do it's thing more!
@@bread9905
Humans are animals. And vegans are idiots because that’s not how humans developed. these systems wouldn’t be made in humans would not be making near the impact. If it wasn’t for all the liberals congregating in big cities. When we were a more rural society, the environment was far less impacted. We also had a better society that wasn’t brainwashed and co-opted by a lot of nonsense.
@@Magnulus76 fire is part of nature. Forest lands need fire. It’s the idiots on the left that prevented forest fires for decades that caused the problems in California. Lightning causes forest fires which regenerate the land. It is a necessary part of managing a forest to be healthy. People are screwing up the forest, not nature and animals and by people I’m talking about people on the left that think there shouldn’t be forest fires.
can someone summarize what the data says why its not regenerative ? Cause I can´t follow ...
People love to hear good news about their bad habits, even if it's bullsh*t.
Are we talking about vegans?
I will say as a vegan I do not promote beyond or impossible burgers or honestly avoid anything that’s processed that comes out of box. I know it’s not easy with everything and circumstances for other, but majority of our food is going through some sort of “process” but we can control some of this process by what we buy and where. We need to push supporting our local farmers and markets outside of these boxed chains. I do agree with the amount of greenwashing on both sides even the notion of “zero waste” no such thing. Humans make waste. It’s gotten out of control because there’s a big money run when it comes to consumers buying awareness to where their products come from and how they are made. I think also there’s a lot of political waste with the SDG, ESG full of greed, I think we need to start developing communities around homesteading, farming, instead of subdivisions.
I will say as an omnivore I share many of these thoughts. I’ve researched both side and they both can prove that the other side isn’t completely true and have convoluted arguments. The real problem either way is the monopolization of essential social structures, in this case food production.
All I know is the science is inconclusive, because it’s all too easy to weaponize into propaganda. My main hope is that permaculture communities will be tough and deliver what they promise, healthy land and abundant food. Thus we can demonopolize the food market through local production. I just worry that this cows vs. soy conversation will cause economic civil warfare through political regulations, which ultimately undermines collective efforts to demonopolize.
@@tylerglenn7811 I couldn’t agree more I think everyone is making predictions on things that don’t exist yet. Whether it be electrification of commodities, decentralization of economies, circular economies, gmo vs non gmo, etc. Especially with the internet. Everyone thinks their opinion is valid and can’t be refuted. So there’s a lot of uninformed slogans, catch phrases, and dead language that’s being passed around as fact and not thought.
I do think the science shows inconclusive due to many inferences that aren’t comparative to the issues we have, but to be “sustainable” is a tough “sell” when the system as a whole is built for-profit, this I believe is a feature more than it is an error. So to some degree there will be some sort of disparity when it comes to an economic engine that fuels food production, but most important it still takes production (energy) to fuel any “sustainable” project
One of my favorite books when it comes to these sorts of topics is “Limits to growth” it highlights on the systems that are cohesive within its natural order. And certain aspects of life we cannot choose to overlook that all communicate a feedback loop within the system. When it comes to a lot of these issues it boils down to population growth, birth rates, industrialization, production, and capital investment. When it comes to policies and development these are some of the main issues and factors.
I think it’s going to have to come down to people building and removing themselves from highly dense cities, truly building a life of sustenance. I will say becoming vegan has helped me with that and opening my eyes of the level of factory farming isn’t sustainable for a point of progress. Will everyone go vegan absolutely not, that’s like asking for world peace (which I don’t believe in) I’m at peace with the world vs trying to fabricate a fake one. But I think with the amount of crops we do make can be used for good and feed people. But there’s no money in that for big business so it comes back to supply chain and production. I personally think sustainability isn’t built into the system by design (an after thought maybe?). So we keep trying to mask a problem with technology and data that doesn’t exist for a problem we already know to solve…just do less of what those problems are vs trying to contain it and still think we can progress that way by using pretty labels and technology that we don’t know works just yet.
I agree that permaculture and homesteading communities are growing, and hope they figure it out as well but there’s still some commercialization that may not truly depict the production (energy) it takes to build that type of culture. Let alone at what cost? And at what cost does it affect others? How much is enough?
@@Chasenoir I appreciate the book recommendation. I also agree science get weaponized against “the other” all too easy. I think people need to realize that the strength of science is far more substantial the long term. I mean we’ve invented a million diets by trying to take advantage of science as fast as possible. We have made so many discoveries that we need to take time and try to explore their connections rather than weaponizing our piece of the puzzle against someone else with a different piece of the puzzle.
I will definitely have to check out your book. I have not “done the math” per se and would be interested in seeing more about that.
I can 1000% agree with you statement that some people will need to leave cities in favor of service small town communities. At the most simple principle monopolies thrive is cities and become irrelevant to communities. However the problem is that our system literally pushes people out of small communities and into cities.
Where I am from in west Texas we grow up go to college and move anywhere else. Our population is dwindling especially since people have less children. Meanwhile my dad is purchasing up land a ridiculous values then is subsidized to do minimal maintenance on them and let them sit unproductive. This happens because nobody loves the land because it’s been quite abused. However, our current system actually drains the local economies and chases people out of these small communities. Just look at our current community banking system. It’s crashing and making small communities stagnate. Meanwhile, all this land sits unused and a permaculturist could make it highly productive in 3-10 years depending on their plans.
I just imagine if you let community banks come back to life (national regulations crush them) and teach people how to love their land (permaculture). There’s no reason my we couldn’t get actual vast swaths of land moving from neglect to productivity.
I think veganism has a positive role to play. I currently live in a city and partial veganism keeps me healthy and let’s me budget. However some people in the country need a cow to get them through droughts when their crop yield is low. Or to make use of some land that is still arid for various reasons. They help us stay resilient.
I see this a lot, thanks Mic.
Does anyone know what did he study?
I’ve been hearing more about this recently. Thanks for the vid
I am a vegan regenerative organic farmer but I did thought pasture raised animals were better than CAFO and most of my friends & family eat a SAD. So I would encourage them to eat pasture raised organic. Your video makes me question that. Thanks.
Just to clarify I don't raise animals, just plants for human consumption, although some of our grain does go to feed animals.
His video omitted (hopefully not on purpose) an important thing called the methane cycle, which healthy soil enables. He also used CAFO emissions and extrapolated outwards and applied it to regen ag.