💡 Please take a second to share this video on Reddit, Facebook, or Twitter! 🌍 What are your thoughts on grass-fed beef and plant-based diets? 🍎 You can find my video about veganism that I mentioned here: th-cam.com/video/9SdhrN0V7dk/w-d-xo.html
I recently discovered your channel and just wanted to say that youre amazing. I hope that your videos will reach many millions in the future, it would do the world so good
Correct me if I am wrong but I thought grazed cow was supposed to be used on existing grassland that isn't suitable for intensive farming, and thus making use of unused resources. Condensation on the grass was supposed to supply majority of the water and greenhouse gases released are minimal because grass would naturally decompose to generate methane with or without cattles. It's about tapping into the underdeveloped land for food production
As you said, the real solution is to embrace some form of a plant-based diet! Eating less meat -no matter if the animals were grass-fed or not- is better for our climate, nature, and ourselves. During research, we found out that currently more than 80% of farmland is used for livestock (20% for veggies & wheat). But meat and dairy products only account for 18% of the calories and 37% of the protein we eat. We're using all this land to produce only a fraction of global human nutrition... that's extremely inefficient! But together we can start changing it!
i highly appreciate the topic, thumb up! but i have to critic some points: 1) about savories past, that he killed those poor elephants is not really on the topic and just dismisses the person but not the method, he regrets and suffers of his past decision... as all uhumans do, he is just a human no more and no less. 2) livable land is not the same as farmable land, so you get food from the land that is otherwise not possible (because of to little rainfall or what not) 3) 5:50 is about beefproduction in general and not about the regenerative grazing method in specific i believe a transition from the status quo to regenerative grazing in the beef sector would be a massive positive step on the way to a more liveable and better future :)
I wanted to like you comment but then i read the last sentence. Grazing is worse than factory farming for the climate, sadly. I wish this would not be the case.
Jeez , this video is full of a lot of manure. I actually just wrote a blog post about some of these gross misconceptions here: lachefnet.wordpress.com/2020/12/03/regenerative-ag-clearing-up-some-misconceptions/ But below are some additional thoughts to add to and reiterate what's in this blog post. To begin with, rotational grazing is not the same thing as holistic planned grazing also known as adaptive multi-paddock management. So you don't even know what HPG or AMP are. Not to mention, carbon is locked up deeply in the soil via the turnover of microbial necromass mass feed root exudates exuded from the roots of plants, so would help if you actually understood how soil organic matter is largely formed. The science papers supporting HPG are not "outliers". They're part of a growing body of research supporting HPG/AMP. The so-called "vast" body of the papers contradicting HPG/AMP like the meta-analysis by FCRN, for example, rely almost entirely on papers by Holachek & Briske, both of whom looked at short duration grazing management that was NOT HPG/AMP management. Thus that "vast" body of papers you cited is built on a house of cards. And no, not perfect conditions necessary for HPG/AMP to work. HPG/AMP is being used effectively on over 50 million hectacres on all five continents in a variety of grassland ecosystems. Plus there's a large and growing body of research supporting HPG/AMP, though the Sierra Club and others didn't actually do a search for any of this science As for FCRN, their white paper meta-analysis was incredibly flawed for several reasons including not understanding any of the newer soil science as to how soil organic matter is formed as well as not understanding how hydroxzyl radical oxidation works in the troposphere. The whole notion of equilibrium is based on outdated soil science, since the amount of soil if not finite. More soil organic matter can be built via the microbial carbon pump. thus the soil carbon "tub" can keep growing. Again FCRN's understanding of soil science based on newer soil science revolving around soil microbiology is non-existent. Oh boy, than Hayek's paper? That paper doesn't account for improved pastures through better management which increase daily gains. The papers relies solely on feedlot industry research and than of other plant based advocates. Yes, Hayek is an animal rights advocate. With better grazing management, carrying capacities are drastically increased. That means more cattle can be raised on the same amount of land. With the current state of land degradation, there's a lot of land that can be improved with grazing. This is marginal land that's not suitable for crop production. This is where most cattle currently live. Only approximately 6 to 7% of global inventory is in the Amazon. The dynamics of deforestation are quite complex and involve a chain of events. so sadly even without beef cattle or soya deforestation would continue unabated. Grasslands are their own ecosystems...that co-evolved with guess what? RUMINANTS. They weren't and aren't forests. Soils also need to succeed from bacterial dominated soils to fungi dominate soils for trees. You can't just plant trees anywhere especially into bacterial soils where there isn't a lot of rain fall. Rewilding of grasslands needs to include ruminants and predators. Wild ruminants also emit methane. Though when you understand what happens to microbial methane, you actually realize that microbial methane is part of a cycle so cattle and all the other myriad sources of methane in ecosystems cycle the same carbon over and over again. Singing Frog Farms is all of 8 acres. They farm 3 of those 8 acres and bring in all of their compost. I'm friends with Elizabeth and Paul who own that farm. No-till organic is a good solution for market garden production, but it won't sequestered any carbon on the over 3.5 billion hectares of MARGINAL land that's not suitable for crop production but is suitable for grazing. Of current agricultural land that isn't too degraded (about 2 billion hectacres), 65% is marginal and 35% (700 mill hectacres) is arable. Arable land benefits from integrated livestock. Anyway, next time you do research, you might want to actually visit a ranch using regenerative grazing practices so you actually know how it works and that it isn't rotational grazing. I knew almost immediately that this video would be grossly misinformed within the first 10 seconds. Sadly it looks like your entire research consisted of looking at computer screens. If you had been on a ranch using regenerative practices, you'd realize that these types of ranches ARE wildlife preserves where biodiversity is increased below and above ground. Since cattle are kept in tight herds, they only occupy a percent or two of the land at any given time. The rest of the land is enhanced and shared with wildlife. This type of land use are more realistic (less fanciful) ways to maintain open space than rewilidng fantasies. Finally the whole plants versus meats argument is a false dichotomy. There are a myriad of bad ways to grow plants that destroy the environment and release soil carbon into the atmosphere. many of these practices also use hydrocarbon intensive forms of fertilizer as well as emit copious amount of nitrous oxide. So the real distinction that needs to be made is between degenerative versus regenerative forms of food production for ALL the foods humans consume. The HOW and appropriateness of WHERE a food is raised, grown or caught matters as much or more than the WHAT.
@@LittleRadicalThinker But we have no option but to use livestock or our life supporting environments will degrade to a point where they are no longer be life supporting. This man has a poor understanding of what Allan is about and he is are doing a great deal of damage with this video. Here is examples of restoration that were only possible because of livestock. Keep in mind these kind of environments counts for about 2/3s of the worlds land, only grazing animals can take these environments to their full potential. There is no human friendly planet without functioning ecosystems. th-cam.com/video/xMjKcCfBtfI/w-d-xo.html
@@shreeyasingh8948 A little is an understatement given the gross amounts of pseudoscience used in this video. As a bio-chemist I honestly can´t express my disgust in words.
It's very sad to see that agroforestry and silvopasture laning in specific still hasn't penetrated into the mainstream and the discussion at all, on either side. Grazing cattle between lanes of trees greatly increases both the sequestration and the yield of the operation. It's the one thing where it would have an advantage compared to sustainable market gardening. Also the sequestration of grazing operations being frontloaded and then plateauing over time seems to compliment forestry's strong but slow to get going sequestration very well.
Because rewilding, reforestation and aforestation are all leagues ahead both in the result as well as research. The only reason it would "hit the mainstream" is when the animal agriculture industry starts to push it.
Never really heard of silvopasture but will look into it. Problems I can already think of would be when trees are young, the stock would trample the. I'm from NZ, so I will take that as an example; especially in a native forest, there would be no chance for new trees to adequately grow. Also, again in NZ not sure about elsewhere, but if you used pine trees which are farmed for radiata, the pine needles are toxic to animals and most plants. Furthermore, soli holds far more Co2 than trees. This has been heavily researched and cited, so not sure where this videos facts are from.
I'll definitely admit to being sold on holistic management, but I'll have to check out more of the counter-arguments. Savory does mention that holistic management is different from just rotational grazing, so that's good to keep in mind. Also good to remember that much land used for grazing now is not suitable for forest growth (often due to lack of water, like the great plains or savannah areas) where grazing herbivores once held the place that cows do now and also that small veg farms like Singing Frogs (although they are doing it much, much better than the vast majority of other farms) almost always need to get their compost (carbon) off the farm and is most likely extractive in that sense unless they are extremely careful about where they get their organic matter
Singing Frogs and many other vegan farms use plant-based compost and not excretion compost. They often produce enough compost to be self sustaining due to other practices that require a significant reduction in how much is required over several harvests.
@@losgann For sure! And I think it is totally possible for a no-dig compost-mulched veg farm to produce all there own organic matter & compost, but I have never heard of it (around 50% seems to be what the good ones are sitting at). I think those farms are still the most sustainable vegetable farms out there, but it's just not quite as simple as no-dig compost-mulched veg farm = sustainable - we also need to remember where they are getting their organic matter (if, for example, it comes from an environmentally-extractive hay farm, that's got to be accounted for or if it's from food waste that's wonderful but not infinitely scalable & that food is most likely coming from very unsustainable farms)
Interesting video, i'm a beef and sheep farmer in Scotland. One factor you didn't address in this video is that land that is used for grazing ruminants isn't capable of growing an economically viable crop of cereals or vegetables due to the climate, topography or soil type. to me the solution is a combination of growing as much of your own food as possible, eating local seasonal produce and the grass fed system is definitely better for the welfare of the animal than more intensive systems.
Yeah, this is almost always ignored in stories about beef. I'm a big carnivore admittedly! Still, I am trying to reduce the amount of meat I eat for a variety of reasons (climate change is one, better dietary macros is another). But I don't think the world needs to vegan, in part because of your points. In the USA prime land is used for grazing along with marginal land. We could reduce the amount of meat we eat and make sure all of it is sourced in the most responsible way.
I for one am aware that not all land is capable of growing crops, but the thing is, the land use requirement of a plant-based diet is much smaller than that of eating meat so we don't actually need all that land that can only be used for grazing animals for producing food. Instead it can grow native wildlife depending on what can grow on that land. Personally, I'd prefer the return of the likes of buffalo and natural ecosystems than farming the grazing land as I believe that there must be more native wild land than there currently is for the good of the planet (biodiversity) and reducing the overall land use of humans is obviously the necessary action to create this
Yes the video didn't explicitly state this fact but it also didn't state that it could be. A small portion of the vast areas of land currently used for growing food for livestock would ideally be re-purposed for growing foods for human-consumption, with the rest, and any land unsuitable for this (like your land), being either re-forested or re-wilded. As mentioned in the video. Ideally also you would be supported economically to transition away from your current industry.
@@CowMan897 Yes, you've missed my point. Should we switch to a plant-based diet, we won't need to touch that land at all, therefore real buffalo can come back and it will go back to being wild. This is even better than grazing cows (seeing as grazing cows is only trying to mimic it anyway) and doesn't cause unnecessary suffering to sentient beings so is not unethical
Seeing the original TED talk (admittedly, it's been a while), I didn't have the impression he was talking about maintaining current production levels by different means. He was saying some areas do better with grazing (I think his test plot doesn't get enough rain to grow a forest). Better land management, with some honest beef as a byproduct.
He suggested that it's a solution to global warming and that's just wrong. And honestly savory looks and acts a lot like a snake oil salesman. Instead of using his projects to allow real scientists to do research he relies on before and after pictures, personal testimonies - like a snake oil salesman. Everything this man claims should be fact checked.
yeah, isn't Alan savory point is to regenerate degraded land and not to sustain our meat consumption? degraded land > regenerative farming > healed land > forest
@@stauffap yes, because he argued that the state of over grazing animals in poor countries have degraded so much land and that theres a better way of doing that stuff. He used pictures of landscapes he took on the challenge to change. Worked beautifully. He turned desertificated land to green, lush grasslands. Much healthier land
Nice Video! I like your content, because you are differentiated and science based. I'm on the same page with you about 'What should we do?' @6:18 But IMHO your perspective on Grass-Fed beef has some flaws and isn't so thought through. Some things I want to point out, which just leave a bad taste. 1) Allan Savory never (at least in the TED talk) advocated for meat or even eating more of it. Also his proposal never intended to solve climate change and over population. You put these words in his mouth. 2) He "just" proposed a method to recultivate grasslands which got deserted due to human activity -> the rotational grazing. And this methods have the potential to achieve this goal. 3) You use the "elephant story" against him, even though he (in the TED Talk @6:35) said "that was the saddest and greatest blunder of [his] life". 4) You paint a picture that grass fed beef has no right to exist and is even worse than conventional cattle (your comparison of the time-to-grow and meat-performance). You completely ignore the fact, that especially conventional cattle drive the deforestation due to soya production and needs logistics to provide the food. Also you completely ignore that grass fed cattle is a great method to cultivate areas which are not suitable for other agricultural crops. ... Overall I appreciate your try to relativise the hype about grass fed cattle. But I think you didn't helped the cause.
grass fed beef has the potential to cultivate areas that aren’t suitable for crops … why don’t we just stop eating animals, and regrow forests in the un-arable areas, using those lands in an ACTUALLY sustainable, ethical, and environmental way.
I don’t recall any of the supporters of regenerative agriculture or rotational grazing suggest that we should clear more forests to provide more grazing land. However a great deal of forest is cleared to grow crops. I am vegetarian but you have not developed your arguments again grass-fed, rotationally grazed cows to convince me. Also cows are not the major contributor to greenhouse gas - fossil fuels are. Carbon is extracted by mining and pumped back into the atmosphere.
1. Cows are not the major contributor but they are one of the largest contributors. 2. The amount of land the is currently used for crop growth could provide all the food we need now, because so much of it (I think around 30%) is used as feedstock for animals and plants make up the majority if calorific and protein intake around the world. In reality, we wouldn't need all that crop land and we could distribute it better allowing for a significant increase in land for reforestation etc. as he mentioned. No deforestation would be necessary. The carbon sequestration of such would put quite a decent dent in the carbon emissions of transport plus that land would be vital for biofuel projects
You can't detract the fact that cows are a major greenhouse emmiter simply by blaming another source of carbon source. That will never get us anywhere. And I think Rory said his piece well about how land should be used. My fear in promoting rotational grazing over crop production (specifically agroforestry) would be that all of the land currently being used to provide feed for cattle would simply be transformed into pasture rather than being reforested. The amount of land currently being used for cattle pasture is more than enough to feed our population if done better (rotational grazing; grass fed). So let's turn the cattle feed crop land into polyculture havens and bring back our carbon sequestering forests and native animals species.
Your video presents us another side of the spectrum. This video was a critique of an incomplete system and rather than presenting us with complete system with incorporated lifestock, narrative leans more towards the 'all cattle is evil'. Most of your videos are great,but this one missed the mark. Lastly, I want to point out something that is nothing more than my opinion - Your videos on topic of meat seem too subjective. I get that impression from my own experience as sustainable farming practitioner. Just to clarify - I'm not saying lifestock is some magical thing in farming, but by excluding it from my farm I had a lot of problems, mostly with my soil quality. Only after incorporating small amount of lifestock and with the right management practices could I achieve the best results. I would have probably had the same degree of negative effects on my farm if I excluded forestry or some other element in the system. In my experience system that is complete and balanced works the best. I guess Thanos had a point on all that perfectly balanced shenanigans. I wish you a great day, unknown dude from interwebs.
What about the negative effects of a knife being pulled across your animals' throats? Why not transition to plant farming? There are programs out there that can help
Where is that snippet from, where Joel says "we're not sustainable?" seems to might be out of context. I tried to look for it but couldn't find it. Would you mind linking to the source?
Not sure of the source but, I'm sure he's talking about the chickens, he has to buy a lot of food for them. You only need sun, soil, and water for cows. They turn grass into meat with a byproduct of fertile soil.
I agree with less meat consumption. Other than that I disagree with most of this. Folks have taken this work farther than Savory(Gabe Brown, Jerry Doan. Barry Fisher, Richard Perkins just to name few) . The quote you show from Salatin out of context. He said "this is not a sustainable farm, this is a regenerative farm". To question his results is perfectly fine but to knowingly take his words out of context to mislead people does not legitimize your argument. I realize that there is a lot of research that contradicts these guys results. Monsanto has produced countless studies showing that their products are safe too. Look at these studies, question who conducted/funded them and how they were carried out. The instances of increased soil carbon as a result of animal integration(grass fed beef as well as other species) are no longer uncommon. I have the same goals as this content creator, agree that we should consume more plants and less meat but I wonder how deep their understanding of soil biology is. I don't intend to start an argument, I just hate to see folks mislead before they hear the other guys cases before they make form a solid opinion.
You are spot on, this video is attempting to disprove a straw-man, reductive version of what regenerative agriculture actually is. He literally thinks that people are arguing that dead plant roots lock in soil carbon - I think it's pretty safe to say that he has no knowledge of soil biology.
less meat consumption will just result in more mentaI lIIness we all ready have a good idea how this is working out un-natural diet of plant sludge since 1971
Ok I’m partly with you but I understand the savoy technique is more about converting areas affected by desertification back to healthy soil. Like most vegetable mono culture farms (wheat or whatever) just strip the top soil of nutrients , kill off the mycelium networks, and then you basically get the dust bowl. An animal based farm is a way to fix this. Like you want to mimic the Serengetti or bison migration ecosystems where a cattle-ish animal travels across vast distances and is then followed by birds and other animals. Like we need to connect farms (yukon to yellewstone) and convert them back to biodiverse ecosystems to help the planet maintain its delicate climate-stable equilibrium (See the David Attenborough witness statement film). Like there’s a lot of problems with only plant based farms as well (from palm oil to whatever next season’s “super-food” is to the oil based fertiliser heavy mega corn / wheat monoculture deserts). Like there are too many people on the planet but the global population is stabilising and much growth can be attributed to older people living longer. I’ve stewed on this a lot without much success. As a consumer my main goals have been 1) to buy as much as possible from small farms that follow regenerative agriculture methods (kinda in line with the Richard Perkins book of the same name) (veg and meat); 2) to waste less food i.t.o. oh this is expired or ugly so toss it (buy the last/ugliest mango in the supermarket) but also by trying stuff like liver etc. The (controversial sure) healthiest and most nutrient dense part of an animal is the fat. Most tallow and suet gets used for industrial purposes like being added to paint while we basically eat chemically unstable (double bond) highly processed seed oils - I’m pretty sure that rapeseed (canola) or sunflower crop isn’t being grown using no dig. 3) trying to eat less overall 4) mostly buying local 5) getting a large portion of vitamins and calories from eggs (also regenerative agriculture) which are basically an affordable vitamin bomb that doesn’t kill the animal 5) being open to eating a different animal - maybe ducks or pigs fed on foraged tree nuts are a better match for your local ecosystem but farmers wont try if consumers are too fussy 6) being less of a picky squeamish eater (damn I still don’t love liver etc). but the oh I won’t buy that broccoli because someone else might have touched it in the shop or there’s a tiny dot of mould on my cheese toss the block 7) try to prepare as much of my own food from scratch so that I can avoid problematic ingredients 8) avoid superfluous packaging as much as possible (and entirely if it’s not recyclable) 9) understand how your meat is processed (ties in with the squeamish thing). if you want to eat meat you must visit an abattoir once in your life. It’ll inspire you to be less wasteful. 9) mostly only eat small fish like sardines (all of the vitamins again) 10) if I can afford to buy fancy free range eggs then i’m probably part of the population that uses more than my fair share of resources so I won’t have kids because that’s probably the biggest thing I can do for the environment (Also being the fun auntie who can afford nice presents because I don’t have to pay school fees was an equally important factor). Sorry that got long. It’s damn complicated and just because beef can sequester carbon or plants use less land per kilojule doesn’t mean we’re personally absolved from trying to figure out what’s best. this video has given me some new things to think about.
Well maybe then Savory should just not shoot 40 000 Elephants next time then, hmm? Monocultures aren't great, but the majority of them are for feeding those animals in feedlots and factory farms in the first place. We'd need so much less soil on a plant based diet, these problems would diminish greatly all on their own. Of course some amount of animal grazing might still be helpful in specific areas - but touting it as a solution to climate change is absolute bogus.
@@thrumugnyr Hey there, I'd just like to point out that savory built his whole model for rotational grazing when he realized that removing the elephants did not help to bring back the vegetation he thought they were over grazing. It's something he regrets very much, and his entire philosophy now is based on the exact opposite thinking to the thinking that led him to do that. Also you are absolutely right. If we stopped eating meat, we wouldn't need to grow nearly the amount of row crops we do now. We would have to something with all that land and just letting it fallow would be a disaster. Most of that land in in the great plains so it would be best to plant it with native grasses, but the grasses need grazing animals to survive long term. So while it might not be THE solution, its definitely part of the solution.
"but I understand the savoy technique is more about converting areas affected by desertification back to healthy soil" But then there is a problem if Savory's TED talk is promoted as something more, like something that will "reverse climate change." Go to 0:24 and you can see that in the description of the video of the talk. *_That_* seems to be the big problem here and the main objection to the technique. I think a secondary objection would be that Savory's technique, even if it could help bring back areas hurt by desertification, could never be implemented on a large scale if we don't cut back on eating beef.
Good for you for putting in effort on areas where you know you can make a difference. I disagree with some of your ideas like kids being bad for the environment but shifting our understanding of consumption is huge. We'll all have to make sacrifices in our lives to make this world a better place
As someone who is going to college for agriculture and is taking over a farm to raise livestock, this video makes a lot of great points. The terms grass fed beef and rotational grazing are too broad and can be very misleading. On the other hand, there are some big points i think he missed. First being silvopasture. Silvopasture is the practice of combining forage production (grasses) and tinder production (trees). So in other words, planting trees into livestock pastures. This provides a number of benefits including trees sequestering carbon, slowing soil erosion, putting more organic matter back into the soil which is also carbon sequestration, some trees can fixate nitrogen back into the soil which improves soil fertility without having to use fertilizer, additional sources of revenue for farmers ,and finally providing additional shading for livestock which improves quality of live for them. Another point is that in most places in the world grazing animals are essential to the ecosystem and biodiversity. Rewilding can't work everywhere and you can have sustainable grazing operations on small amounts of land as long as you have small amounts of livestock (all should be determine by your climate and what type of land you have access to). Finally, just because some farmers are practices are extremely damaging to the earth or misleading with the terms grass fed or rotational grazing doesn't mean that these ideas when implemented correctly are not extremely beneficial. If you have the ability to, go out to a local farmers market and go talk to the farmers. Ask them about their practices and see if you can tour their farm. Synthetic plant based meat that only huge cooperations are produce is not the route we want to go.
Killing animals for food is unnecessary violence why would you want to raise "livestock" and be part of that cruelty for no reason instead of growing plants and being part of positive change?
Yes brother I also think the same if we just integrate livestock in food forests ( usually smaller animals like goats and chickens as the food forests are so dense ) it is much much better than anything else and it has already been done by many people its just that permaculture is more information intensive ( and less resource intensive) so it's hard for people to learn more about it Hope young and new age agriculture enthusiastis like you would help in giving this a much needed push as you are so interested in it ❤ Edit - i also think it would be better than silvopasture as it would give yield much more produce , sequester much more carbon and would provide habitat for graeter number of biodiversity all while being much more sustainable ❤
The percentage of carbon in topsoil hitting an equilibrium doesnt necessarily mean its no longer sequestering carbon. The topsoil depth can continue to increase each year while maintaining the same percentage of organic matter.
Correct me if I'm wrong please, I thought a lot of the deforestation was to grow feed (soy/corn) for feed lot cattle? Which wouldn't be needed (as much) for grass-fed cattle? Ofc they'd still require a lot of land for the grass to grow on, but I guess that might be more spread out across the globe, can't exactly import a pasture. Really interesting! I never heard about the theory that gress-fed beef could help with climate change, only that it's supposed to be better for the environment in general than intensive factory farming. Although I wonder if that also presumes people eating less meat, since the free roaming cattle stuff tends to be more expensive. I doubt that the whole world will switch to a fully plant based diet, so it seems quite important we find ways to make the remaining animal products as sustainable as possible.
I really agree. As far as I can see, people are not going vegan anytime soon. We just have to accept that as baseline. I think it should be legalized to provide more space to animals, so that meat becomes more expensive in general, making people consume less meat. In that regard, Allan Savory's method is amazing. Cows are happy, ranchers see their land recovering, and it's way better for the environment than factory farming.
Actually most of the pastureland historically was artificially created by cutting down old growth forests and that continues to be a way that pasture is created. When you take into account historical land use changes, animal agriculture is responsible for up to 1/3rd of historical emissions by eliminating many of the best carbon sinks in the world. Certainly natural pasturelands exist, but we are already way past the point where we could sustain our current levels of consumption of grass-fed beef without clearing more forest. There is not enough land that could be made into pastures for grass-fed beef to substitute factory farms. This is why the solution to the environmental problems with cattle needs to be a shift in our relationship with beef and dairy. As a vegan obviously I want that relationship to be non-existent, but realistically maybe people being conscious about reducing their consumption is enough. I would say that with most things people form bad habits around often the best approach to making a significant change is to just say no and find alternatives that work for you.
What i think that if we just integrate livestock in food forests ( usually smaller animals like goats and chickens as the food forests are so dense ) it is much much better than anything else and it has already been done by many people its just that permaculture is more information intensive ( and less resource intensive) so it's hard for people to learn more about it 🤔
@@NitishYadav-lb7zc Interesting idea! I wonder if that's possible, I think all goat pastures I seen always had fences around the trees, otherwise the goats would have gnawed them to death XD But I guess before humans domesticated animals all of them would have lived in forests, so it certainly must work somehow! Sending modern farm animals into existing natural forests might distrub the ecosystem there (idk, could imagine), but we could certainly plant new forests on currently empty pastures! Definitely seen sheep grazing in apple orchards :)
I come from a country (Portugal) that is very proud of it's grass-fed beef (Portugal). However, when the war on Ukraine started, farmers started to say that did not have food to feed their animals, even though they were grass-fed. Grass-fed means very little. Animals still need grains during summer when nothing grows on the ground, animals still need antibiotics and supplements.
Dang. Just when I started to get excited about regenerative farming as a climate solution. Great video but I’m curious about the land use section. It’s true that regenerative farming would require more land for grazing but I would think this kind of farming would use substantially less land overall since the cattle are grazing off land that would otherwise be used for corn production to feed cows. Tons of carbon is lost through tilling land every season for corn and soy planting. I wish you would’ve discussed this further. This is one of the main points of regenerative farming, not losing carbon through erosion or soil depletion. Also it would’ve be nice to hear about the emissions of feedlots because I can’t believe that feedlot meat would be better than regenerative. While your overall argument I understand is to stop eating meat, I think regenerative is still a better option than feedlot.
I'm curious about these points as well. Also, as far as I know, Allan Savory's method isn't just about rotational grazing. It's the main point, but also when I watched his and other regenerative-agriculture-related documentaries, those farmers had planted other things as well. His ideas can be implemented with trees and other profitable plants as well. Also, as a Korean, I know that back in my grandparents were in my age, farmers composted cow poop and straw together to make fertilizer. Cows ate grass, straw, beans, and left over plants. And Koreans had done that for hundreds of years. Allan Savory's method is as natural as it gets is what I'm trying to say. But overall, I also agree that we as human race should consume was less meat. Even then, Allan Savory's method makes meat much more expensive, making people eat less meat anyway! 😂😂😂
He quotes project drawdown, but fails to mention that one of project drawdowns primary recommendations is silvopasture! He also left out this review article showing that they regenerative ag studies that failed used strict research protocols, while the ones they succeeded allowed farmers to flex protocols for local conditions. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ruminant-methane-global-warming-gwp/id1490590788?i=1000461901050
@@alik5883Yes brother I also think the same if we just integrate livestock in food forests ( usually smaller animals like goats and chickens as the food forests are so dense ) it is much much better than anything else and it has already been done by many people its just that permaculture is more information intensive ( and less resource intensive) so it's hard for people to learn more about it
Thanks for the breakdown, it’s something I’ve wondered about for a while. I do believe that holistic grazing has a place in sustainable agriculture (especially as a part of farms that strive to recycle resources within the farm (manure, etc), but also as a way to maintain certain landscapes. However, I do agree that it has to happen in the context of drastic reduction in meat consumption.
I completely disagree with these arguments and conclusions. That said I highly appreciate the effort to make this video and be part of this conversation. In that vein, I really want to discuss why you think regenerative only works in "ideal" conditions. From the papers (not sure why you call them outliers either. I don't think that is necessarily relevant) From what I've read it seems that the success of regenerative grazing has been demonstrated on millions of hectares all over the world. I think we should use what proveable works when it works, where it works. What I mean by that is that I'm all for reforestation but I'm not sure why regenerative grazing can't be a part of that plan. Maybe the biggest misnomer here is the idea of rewilding. That is a thing I've never heard about or read in any paper. If you could actually leave land fallow and it wouldn't turn into desert then I would be more likely to agree with concentrated feedlot farming (however inhumane) but that is not the case. Also the point about carbon saturation in soils. That is certainly one of the best points and has concerned me as well. However, we need to take into account soil erosion. This is a point I think there is not a whole lot of evidence for but since regenerative agriculture focuses on soil health then there is the potential to build new soil, which removes the limit of CO2 sequestration. That is basically the story of PolyFace farm, where they rebuild soil on what was previously horribly eroded land (don't appreciate taking the Salatin clip out of context). Also I take issue with the notion of alternatives to regenerative grazing. As far as I'm aware it's the only agriculture with any scientific literature showing carbon sequestration. I have never heard of that farm you cited. While I don't doubt it's possible and I fully support it, it seems to me that is susceptible to all your previous criticisms in terms of being an "outlier." All current conventional farming releases CO2. And in most cases, cropland CO2 isn't fully counted. You can read the studies. They don't include soil erosion (which is a huge carbon source), which is frankly the root of the issue with agricultural practices. We need practices that look after the health of the soil for both animals and plants. Lastly, the fact that grazing uses alot of land can be a bit of a non-sequitor depending on whether you decide that grazing is a net positive or a net negative. If it's negative then, of course, it's awful that it uses up so much land. However, if you believe that it is regenerative grazing is good then using all that land is a great way to improve ecosystems. In Brazil, (you reference South American deforestation) the cause of that is due to the fact that poor grazing and high tillage erodes the land used to produce soy for cows and cows. And it's a whole lot more convenient for big corporations to just cut down fresh land (in the Amazon and Cerrado and Atlantic Forrest) than to keep using the same land. I believe that teaching regenerative grazing can allow us to produce high-quality food on less land (especially when you factor in getting rid of all the soy farming to make animal feed). I don't think these outright dismissals of regenerative grazing are going to take us in the right direction. That said, at least we're all on the same team of healing the environment. I would say if the meat is probably regenerative then eat as much as you want, and if it isn't then don't eat any. But this is hard for the reasons you have spelt out. Industrial agriculture is heavily subsidized. That's why any regeneratively produced product usually costs more money. Actually, it's for the reason you say, naturally produces animals take longer to produce and don't get as fat, so they cost/lb is higher even is the emission or zero or negative. But I have no idea how to change this culture and our government is so dysfunctional that I don't have high hopes. But I can work to heal soil around the world and I believe regenerative grazing is a great tool to have for anyone pursuing that work.
Yes brother I also think the same if we just integrate livestock in food forests ( usually smaller animals like goats and chickens as the food forests are so dense ) it is much much better than anything else and it has already been done by many people its just that permaculture is more information intensive ( and less resource intensive) so it's hard for people to learn more about it
You make a few fair points but misrepresent a number of others. Alan Savoury uses the elephant story to point out how wrong he was about his original belief in something along the lines of reforestation, culling elephants to help it happen. This experience led to his experiments with rotational grazing and he uses his own story of how wrong human logic can be and yet, that learning though regrettable, can provide useful insights and inspire change for the better. You don’t mention that some of the deepest and most fertile soils, the prairies, were actually formed through the symbiosis of grass and roaming herds of ruminant animals over millions of years and that he symbiosis creates the fertility. An accounting of industrial agriculture’s carbon pollution from energy and fertiliser inputs and carbon emission from tilled soil and annual cropping is required to properly assess the limitations of this best practice grazing. Note well that producing soy for tofu fits into the same category as grain production for feedlot and human consumption, it is carbon emitting. Feedlots are messed up for obvious reasons, but glossing over the industrially produced vegan products is also missing a sober assessment of the situation. The UN assessment of soil erosion has led to the warning that food production may be impossible in 60 years if present practices continue, including growing vegan staples. You are right that deforestation for grazing is an awful mistake, but there are plenty of eroded souls that can be regenerated through rotational grazing and if there is no demand for the animals (meat) there won’t be the incentive to do the regeneration and we damn well need the regeneration. Yes we need to eat less meat, yes there needs to be less cows, yes there needs to be less people, and less industrial agriculture. But we will soon discover our limited toolbox for reversing the problems we have created, has rotational grazing as a key tool. Some people becoming vegan will reduce some carbon emissions, but in the end we need to regenerate and cows evolved for this purpose. Veganism/vegetarianism has a place, vegan ideology will not undo the soil erosion industrial annual cropping has produced.
People always want to focus on the silver bullet solution, but with a problem as massive and complex as climate change, we need to take advantage of every solution we can find. Regenerative farming is not scalable, but it would likely be an improvement to factory farms when used in tandem with reducing meat in our diets.
It's great to see a focus on what would be the best actions to take. Remember, trees are wonderful "carbontakers". Hopefully we can transition to plant-based world as soon as possible in order to take less land and let the trees do their job. The amount of land needed to farm animals is enormous.
Ok in the fall when the frost comes and the leaves fall off and the sap goes down how much carbon is being released? Trees grass, corn it donr make any difference X amount of tons of green plants per acre no matter what kind of plant the end result would still be the exact same.
@@thecollectoronthecorner7061 trees get all of their mass from carbon. They carbon dioxide is one carbon and two oxygen atoms binded together. Trees take the carbon to build their body and release the oxygen because they don't need it. So their emissions are -probably- heavily offset by them growing themselves taller and bigger Edit: actually not probably. It just does
How bout leave the plants to the true herbivores to eat? Crop fields are the main reason there aren’t much trees around anymore, especially monocrops. It’s an absolute abomination and the reason why the planet is overpopulated and polluted in the first place
Yes but not all of the land currently used for animal farming could be easily repurposed. I live in a hilly rural area where most of the steep fields are used for farming sheep/cows - that land would probably be completely unused if it wasn't for animal farming. You're just not going to get a combine harvester up there. My view is that we should drastically cut meat consumption, but ensure that regenerative farmers are protected in the downscaling process. It would wrong if the only farm animals left in the world lived tortured lives in factories, rather than in fields where they're actually cared for.
While I always enjoy your videos, I do try to be skeptical given the information I have through experience and through my own reading. I don't believe that cutting meat out of every person's diet is the answer. While plant-rich diets are certainly a good solution, plant-rich doesn't mean vegan, but instead a diet where plants are consumed a significant amount more than meat, which I do think is possible for many people. However, for some people, including meat in their diet is important for their health, like if they are anemic or have certain dietary conditions. So meat can't be completely cut out. On the sustainability of it, there are certain places where grasslands are beneficial to sequestering carbon. For example the prairies in Canada and the US were historically roamed by Buffalo which essentially performed a rotational grazing pattern. These lands have already been shaped this way. These grass lands in fact are more resisiliant o wildfires in the events of them, because most of their carbon is underground and won't burn if a fire rolls over it. Anyway I'm starting to ramble but my point is that I don't think that it is a black and white issue and that a balance can be found instead of the meat production we have now or no meat at all.
Plus types of meat should be considered, different and more varied types of livestock would have radically different environmental impacts and growing more optimized livestock for different areas could further improve environmental sustainability.
Many hardcore environmentalists like myself will argue for every individual to stop consuming animal products, but we know that will never happen, at least not in our lifetimes. We argue this to cut back the consumption and use of animal products as much as possible, as they cause significantly more harm to the environment than most plant-based practices.
If everyone reduced their animal product intake by 90% we could probably achieve most all the carbon sequestration that agriculture is capable of producing, when you factor in many marginal lands returning to re-forestation or grassland renewal.
What about the land required for growing crops to feed industrial farmed animals? (5:36) Does grazing need more land than industry farming taking that into account?
Emissions from cows is a cyclical process from the food they eat which means over a season the emissions are net zero. However, our use of oil releases greenhouse gases that were trapped for millions of years, which is the true culprit for our issue. When solving problems, start with the biggest problems for the biggest impacts.
hi could someone please help me with the theoretical arguments one could reacted to this video with? like the fact that most organic farms use manure as their fertiliser?
Animal welfare arguments maybe? Since this video is strictly talking about climate change, obviously the life and welfare of the animal isn't as big a priority. He notes that feed lots can be viewed as more green in some regards since the animals grow faster and can be processed sooner, thus allowing for less time to emit greenhouse gases. The use of fertilizer might be a decent retort too. Especially if one could get stats on the amount of fertilizer farms use and how much of that is plant-food compost and how is animal poo. Also the impracticality of a uniform, government enforced, systemic shift in how people behave and do business on a global scale which always seems to be his solution to every "the problem with" video.
How about the fact that his numbers are outdated bs that doesn't tell the whole story? Yes, animal ag creates 14.5% of ghg, but what he didn't tell you is that the WARMING of that 14.5% is negligible because ruminant methane is a flow gas that's already degraded. What he didn't tell you is that most of that comes from developing world countries and animal ag is far more efficient in western countries such that even if we ELIMINATED ruminants completely, it would have a negligible effect on warming.
@@carnivoreisvegan Ahh if only this were true. You fail to realise that vast tracts of the world's precious arable lands are used for animal grazing or producing feedstock for those animals. If we ate plant based diets we would only require a fraction of those lands. The excess land could be rewilded and so would sequester or store massive amounts of CARBON.
@@imgayasheck595 right, and synthetic fertilizer produces 100 x more methane then previously reported. And all of that costs money. Hope yer willing to pay 10x more for your veganic strawberries.
There are some holes in this. I've worked in this area and there are many new initiatives involving grazing livestock on forest plots and introducing methods that decrease cow rearing emissions. Such steps are far more sustainable and logical.
I agree with the conclusion, but not with saying animals living more free and suffering less as 'cows have more time to emit gases if they are kept in the fields instead of a warehouse in cages'
Yes! I actually support Allan Savory's method, because it makes meat more expensive thus making people consume less meat! lol Also all the cattle must be so happy to wonder around, hang out with their friends, and eat their favorite food. I think it would be much easier to reduce meat consumption by making it expensive, than to try to make people vegetarian, to be honest.
@@alik5883 Would you be happy if you carer went "look I'm gonna give you a good life, let you run around, see your friends but midway your life I'm gonna kill you and sell your body parts"?
If you care about animals you wouldn't treat them as commodities to exploit, kill and then sell excrements and bodyparts of. The solutions he mentioned (reforestation, aforestation, plant based economy) address the root cause: in that animals wouldn't be commodities.
what about (in addition to consuming less meat) switching from beef to goats or sheep, whose diet is also more varied than cows and thus can feed on a much larger variety of plants? The problem with sheep is, of course, that the way we live now sheep's wool is not utilised and is most often thrown away even though it has endless uses. I still keep thinking these types of smaller grazers are much more eco-friendly, you get all the benefits of cows with leather and milk and meat but they are easier to feed and (if utilised correctly) there is the additional bonus of wool used for everything from clothes, building materials and packaging
@@stevencats7137 FAO corrected their own article! They computed emission from cattles throughout their life cycle from birth to store while car was computed only at the exhaust emissions. They should have computed the car from iron ore, plastic, and chemical manufacturing until they are dumped.
I think if you got something wrong from Savory, or I just understood it differently. Disclaimer, I was pretty entrenched in what Savory said so maybe the Backfire Effect hit me, but I try to have an open mind and found this video very interesting and enlightning! However, I think Savory's method was looking at specifically areas that were exposed to desertification to being especially effective. And, to be honest, from what he showed practically, looked like it works. Sure, maybe we can add some reforestation in such areas like Ecosia does, but why not do both? I dont quite get the bashing - in my view he wasn't really speaking about the land you mentioned, but specifically deserted land. Hm.
great video, I learned a lot! But one question: @5:47 you say that beef production is the nr 1 cause of deforestation. But I thought the deforestation was required to grow crops for cows, but the whole idea of grass-fed beef is that cows feed on grass not crops. Am I missing a point?
Can you provide the sources for your research? I'm curious especially about your claim that there's more literature disputing regenerative ag than supporting it.
He links sources in the description: www.notion.so/Grass-fed-Regenerative-Beef-Resources-d74b5f37001e42cdbcfea845c2138bc2 In addition, here is another video on this with sources. th-cam.com/video/OSAz-A7S8ow/w-d-xo.html
@@brianrcVids more than one resources are needed. At least 5. There are always going to be fake articles on both sides I can find 'proof' for both, and obviously there isn't 2 answers.
He didn't include a review article by a researcher explaining why some studies are positive and some were negative. He's not giving you the whole story because he's biased. This article is a peer reviewed review of the literature showing the studies that failed used strict research protocols, while the ones the were positive allowed farmers to vary techniques depending upon current need. He also misrepresented that salatin doesn't believe his farm is sustainable. He only showed you a partial clip to take. It out of context. Grazing management that regenerates ecosystem function and grazingland livelihoods July 2017 African Journal of Range and Forage Science 34(2):1-10 Follow journal DOI: 10.2989/10220119.2017.1334706 W.R. Teague Matt Barnes
5:40 - what a trick you are using. Life stock grazing uses 26% of livable land but includes all animals, so provides 27 gm protein per day per person, not 1 gm. The PDCASS & DIAAS Score of animal protein is very high compared to vegan sources. Most plant sources have 60% score, animal sources is above 90%. Quality of protein matters. And it’s not just about calories and protein, it is also about vitamins and minerals.
@@btudrus What I say is true but I understand you not believing me, as the entire world has been led to believe that meat is healthy and essential in the human diet. You also claimed that growing plants is the worst thing for the environment, which I would love for you to try and explain to me.
The focus here seems to be on beef and the message is eat more plants. What about fish, wild caught salmon, mackerel, sardines. When it comes to carbon, sustainability and also nutrition?
He is not objective in this video trying to tell people about Allan Savory. His opinions is clearly affected by him being vegan and trying to justify this choice, which is a wrong foundation to build research on, and such an approach it will never lead to conclusions worth listing to.
I just can say: AMAZING! Just last week I saw ”the sacred cow” documentary... and they advocated for rotational grazing, but they don’t really justify it very well. I got so many questions!!! But you just have answered them! Thank you so so much!!!!
one side note that applies to this wider topic: since people have grazed since time immemorial, we've created semi-natural ecosystems that will NOT exist without grazing (my academic career is involved with alvars and agriculture). right now, as livestock is grown on a disgustingly massive, destructive scale, these habitats are being destroyed because it's not profitable in a capitalist system to graze in certain patterns in these (mostly coastal) habitats. semi-natural habitats host tons of rare species that have their niche in (mostly) only those habitats. if you must graze, do it where it's beneficial and helps preserve culture and tradition alongside nature. problems start arising when we do a study and think we've found a silver bullet and then try to apply the solution as the band-aid of the century all over the world, when normally solutions exist only within their extremely specific circumstances and contexts.
I don't think governments should actually subsidize plant based solutions. At least in my country, but i think this is the case in most of Europe, meat farmers receive a lot of subsidies. Most of the beef production in Belgium makes no profit at all and survives solely on subsidies. So if the subsidies towards meat farmers would just stop, the farmers would have to stop producing meat anyway. Now of course, leaving farmers totally without income would be unfair, but stopping subsidies to large industrial beef farms would be a start. The money that is freed up can be used to transition farmers towards plant based solutions. Because the production of meat has lowered (because no subsidies) the price of meat should go up. This would then mean that plant based alternatives are most likely cheaper. Not only that, but the higher supply of plants might drop the price. Besides, great content!
Absolutely excellent! I was concerned about your channel after seeing the video that pushed regenerative grazing as a solution, but I'm glad you came back to the topic and did some deeper research on it!
I normally love your videos, but there is a fair bit of commentary I'd like to make on this one, as it feels like a lot of the resources you used have unconsciously fallen victim to the very human tendency of having a conclusion and then finding evidence to support it. 3:52 This is an entirely unfair hit piece, as not only does Allan Savory say in the Ted talk, which you referenced, that his research shows that this was a mistake that they made with the best intentions, but that it pained him deeply to do this and is an error and painful memory he will take to his grave. 4:26 I didn't think this was the point of carbon sequestration arguments for holistic grassland management. I thought the argument was putting carbon back where it's supposed to be before humans denuded these landscapes. Perhaps people thought they could receive infinite CO2. They'd be wrong. 4:46 It's a carbon cycle. The cows don't conjure up CO2 and CH4 out of nowhere. They get it from the plants, who get it from the soil and atmosphere, which the soil gets it from the atmosphere and decaying plants and animal dung. The effect of livestock on carbon emissions has been overstated because this carbon is not coming from outside the cycle like fossil fuels are. 4:58 Beef would get more expensive because supply will be more limited by environmental factors. This is a good thing I'd say. There are cheaper and more environmentally friendly ways to get healthy proteins than beef, and by making beef cost the consumer what it should cost them, hopefully these other avenues will be further developed. (Legumes rock, just need to get menthionine from other sources) 5:45 This number is misleading, as an acre of land in California's central valley is not an acre of land in central Montana. The two have very different trophic potentials, and so marginal lands where we cannot grow human foods can still be used to support cows, sheep, and goats. Also factoring in that ruminants can eat silage, which is primarily composed of the parts of annual crops that we cannot eat, such as stalks of corn, they further increase the efficiency of land usage. Their manure can then be used to fertilize that field the silage comes from. This being said, grain fed beef is horrible. Ruminants aren't well adapted to eating grains so it worsens their health and quality of life, meanwhile these grains could be used to make human food. Ultimately, most healthy ecosystems have evolved to have animals within them, forests and grasslands and more, and if we want to make agricultural systems that mimic them we'll need some sort of animal for it, might as well make it an animal useful to us. I myself am partial to goats, chickens, and ducks as the three combined can eat just about everything we can't. 5:45 Yeah this is absolutely horrific. 100% agree here. This is where inequities in the world are a major problem, as agricultural subsidies in industrialized nations and free trade allow the low prices of crops to out compete developing nations, and so the only way these farmers can advance is to grow cash crops like coffee (if they can) or raise cash cows to then be able to afford the grain imports to feed themselves. Terrible situation caused mostly by greed and a fair bit of shortsightedness. If developed nations were to take those agricultural subsidies and redirect them to forest conservation and improvements in agricultural production in developing nations I don't think this would be as much of a problem. The important takeaway is not actually all my critiques, but rather the red herring that meat is. As far as out of cycle carbon emissions go, it is a minor player. The energy and transportation industries produce way more emissions that are newly entering the carbon cycle. Once an ecosystem has stabilized, ruminants are merely completing the carbon cycle, not destroying it. The carbon sequestration potential is over hyped, and so are the emissions. I wouldn't be surprised if 30 years from now we learn the Koch brothers, Exxon-Mobil, etc. tried to take some of the heat off the fossil fuel industry by pointing fingers at agriculture. There's a lot wrong with agriculture, and frankly if we were to ignore climate change and just focus on everything else wrong with our agricultural system, solving those problems would solve the carbon emissions problem. Monsanto is the closest thing I've seen to true sociopathic evil I've seen on this planet. We should make agriculture the opposite of everything they do.
I'm a bit confused about the definition of "plant-rich". Does that mean not eating animal products at all? Or a certain percentage of one's diet being plants? Or eating chicken and fish but not beef? And is this assuming that a person is eating the most environmentally sustainable plants, or could this person potentially be eating like 5 avocados a day?
I honestly don't know what to think about this. I have been a big believer in rotational grazing or holistic grazing (whichever you want to call it). I think there needs to be more research on it, but I think reforestation should always be the goal, and i think animal integration is a huge part of that for the nutrients they bring and the speed at which they break down organic material. I just want to see a video really explaining the science on it. And not just flashing a bunch of hard to read papers on the screen, that would probably take hours to read.
I think you could say that it is better than what we are doing now. But a lot of people like to point at it as some great solution and absolutely no behaviour change is required. Production will inevitably be lower, that's why people came up with the idea of feeding cereal crops to cows in the first place (because it produces more output than grass). Even with Salatin's farm, it kinda works at improving that particular piece of land, but they still require inputs in terms of animal feed (hay, alfafa, etc) brought onto the land, 'borrowing' the fertility from other pieces of land in the same way). It's an input/output thing. If you are taking meat, eggs, etc as outputs of the from the land, those nutrients are also removed unless you return in some way. (Many proponents of regenerative grazing seem to act like animals are this endless generator of manure and nutrients). And this nutrient flow is one way to the cities. (Unless we return human 'manure' back to the farms from the cities). As of right now, with the major nutrients of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium; only phosphorus is a finite resource. Nitrogen can be fixed with the haber process from the air (energy intensive, requires natural gas), and potassium is pretty much limitless. We are dumping most of our phosphorus as treated sewage, and relying on mined phosphorus deposits from the western sahara. I think at the end of the day, there is an extremely strong case for eating way way less meat than most people currently so. If you imagine a world where intensive animal agriculture is replaced by rotational grazing, you are going to produce way less on the same amount of land. And given that we have already replaced most of the wild animal biomass on this earth with domesticated animals, there is a strong case for not going further and consuming even more land for animal agriculture (trying to preserve as much of nature we still have left, particularly forests). Once upon a time, meat was a infrequent luxury, but people have come to expect it at every meal the richer everyone gets. And it's supplying this demand that causes a lot of the problem relating to habitat destruction. So from my own contemplation of this question, relying on eating a diet that is mostly plant-based is probably the way to go in terms of environmental sustainability (lower down on the trophic pyramid, ie. more efficient). Rotational grazing will probably work at a certain scale, but will not be able to produce the amount of cheap meat that people have come to become used to (and that's why even now, you see the price difference between grain and grass-fed beef). We are probably a long way off from ever converting farmland back fo forests, but at least we can try to slow down the rate of deforestation that is already happening. Like Pollan's 'Eat Food, not too much, mostly plants. *Sorry that turned into a ramble. Wrote this on mobile, so it came more like a train of thought for me.
there is research done in the 1960s it's being suppressed because if does not fit the agenda21/30 or what ever .. they restored an entire eco system.... using keystone animals see Wildebeests Are Saving The Serengeti
I agree, these videos can be frustrating because they flash so much at you with little context. Like the clip of Joel Saltain that cut of mid sentence, he might've followed it up with 'I call my farm positive output' or whatever you get what I mean. I fear that Vegans slander this system because they have moral problems with anything that kills animals, equally big meat eaters tend to look at this with rose tinted glasses because of course we want to keep eating meat. It's a tricky question but very engaging, I'd love to go and study this kinda thiing.
I don't understand your claim that cows emit net positive greenhouse gas. Aren't they part of a cycle? They are not releasing any trapped greenhouse gases.
The fact that governments heavily subsidize meat and dairy industries instead of favoring produce subsidies and moving to more sustainable farming practices is quite sad. Hope this will change in future years.
I realize you have a difficult job, trying to distill incredibly complex problems into 10 minute digestible soundbites for TH-cam, but this video is pretty disappointing. First off, Allan Savory mentions in his own talks how wrong he was to order the killing of the elephants. But you've used it here to set up a strawman against him. Second, you've used that Joel Salatin clip out of context to make it work for your own argument. He is actually speaks just before this that he thinks people should be consuming less poultry and really increasing their consumption of plants. But hey, whatever gets more clicks, right? Similarly, I saw a lot of "exciting" and inflammatory titles pulled from media outlets. These are not great sources. Please use actual research to support the claims you make--not just the ones you are trying to argue against. That is, perhaps there are not a lot of studies looking at rotational grazing because (a) there are fewer people farming this way and/or (b) fewer people funding studies into this way of farming or (c) some other reason. Just because these studies are currently "outliers", does not make them wrong. Finally, this is a really complex problem. You have determined the consumption of animal meat to be a major problem. But I think you are missing too many pieces of the puzzle, because if I waved a magic wand tomorrow and made everybody a vegetarian--guess what--there would still be climate change and the food system would still be broken. You haven't considered food sovereignty, food security, nutrition, and just basic soil science fundamentals like the carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus cycles. A one-size-fits-all solution will not work for agriculture. If anybody reading this comment is interested in learning more, I'd really recommend: Textbooks: -Environment and Food by Colin Sage -Nature and Property of Soils by Weil & Brady -Agroecology: The Ecology of Sustainable Food Systems by Stephen Gliessman -Food Sovereignty: Reconnecting Food, Nature and Community by Wittman, Desmarais, and Wiebe Non-Textbooks: -Wilding by Isabella Tree -Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations by Montgomery And if you have any for me, I'd be interested to hear!
As well, he left out the review study by veteran regenerative ag researcher Teague. He was perplexed as to why his studies showed positive results consistently whole others failed. He found they the ones they failed use strict research protocols, while the ones that showed positive results allowed farmers flexibility to change depending upon their needs. Here's the study. www.researchgate.net/publication/318431266_Grazing_management_that_regenerates_ecosystem_function_and_grazingland_livelihoods
@@carnivoreisvegan very interesting! Will give it a read! I really enjoyed the book "Wilding" by Isabella Tree, because as a non-scientist she does a fantastic job of pointing out a lot of the biases that exist in science, especially when it comes to things like restoration and conservation. I would highly recommend :)
Hello ! What is the source of your graph with the rate of soil carbon sequestration vs. years is grass ? Is it the study from The Food Climate Rsearch Network ? Do you have the link of this study ? Thanks a lot :)
It's just another excuse for livestocks farmers to continue what they are doing. The problem is not HOW it is executed, but that it IS executed. A huge part of our global population should change to a plant-based diet in order to stop the problem. We should also improve the ability of cities to capture carbon, for example, in the form of Green Building! Btw, excellent video :D
Yeah. Unfortunately, being able to switch to a plant based diet is a privilege a lot of people don't have. Being green is expensive, and not everyone can afford that. Luckily, I can cut down on my meat, but not everyone can.
@@Hope_IsNotMyName true. Though, I think that’s because how the world and system is organized. Meat is cheaper/more accesible as the production and demand is a lot higher. If that would be the case for plant-based products, it would be a lot cheaper I guess..
Makes you wonder what would happen if the government quit subsidizing meat and dairy farmers and let the market decide prices. Would beef become the most expensive food? Would the market balance itself?
I knew this from intuitive logical deduction as being someone who’s paid close attention to environmental issues for over 20 years. I knew it’s not sustainable to farm cattle vast majority of the time, regardless of method. But hard to find material that both breaks it down and puts all the pieces together to show the bigger whole picture. Thank you🙏
re: 4:09, I hadn't watched Savory's talk so I didn't know who this “Joel Salatin” you were suddenly mentioning was. I assume they were an example from the talk or otherwise a prominent rotational grazer?
You misrepresented Joel Salatin's remark at 4:11! He's actually saying that it's not sustainable as it's better than sustainable as it's regenerative and not only builds up topsoil but also produces more nutrient dense food, both plant and animal-based :D
And the problem is that there are too many people who eat meat and do not want to reduce their consumption. I'm all for plant-based and synthetic meat and dairy. That will help us all.
@@miniboulanger0079 Actually, when someone pretends that a problem has a complex solution is usually because they refuse to accept the simplest solution. The obvious solution to environmental problems would be to return to the past, when humanity was less numerous, less bulimic and less sophisticated, despite eating both meat and plants. But noooooo, this simple solution doesn't allow for the ideological fight between left-wing vegans and right-wing carnivores!
Almost no human is a carnivore, at least none that live long. Humans evolved as omnivores. This is the same false association as protein=animal flesh, when in fact protein is found abundantly in both plants and animals. This is not a fight between two broad camps - that is for either/or thinkers. The challenge is grow the integrity and quality of life for humans as dependent upon the environment. The science is on this issue is now as self-evident as the science for climate change, and for toxicity and pollutions on human health (both of which unethically opposed by the industries that profit greatly off the public not knowing). The solution is simple because the correlation turns out to be causation. Massive increased meat consumption for the last 200 years is a main driver for all the issues mentioned in the video. There can be a debate about what to do about it. However, there is no valid argument for a "win-win" scenario. Things have to change less we keep down the path of ruin.
well i think that regenerative holitic grazing does help. it might not sequester as much greenhouse gas than what allan savory said but it can regenerate the ecosystem and it can help the soil heal. the point that allan savory, charlie massy, peter andrews and others is that regen ag can help heal the ecosystem, produce healthier food, increase biodiversity, increase resilience and help farmers have better mental health. that is the point of regen ag, helping the ecosystem, not sequestering all the greenhouse gas. it can sequester a large amount and help fight climate change.
"reforestation" doesn't work in areas that are supposed to be grasslands and rewilding is all well and good but won't reverse desertification fast enough as the density of existing ruminants isn't high enough. Rewildind and holistical grazing are not in conflict with eachother as the savory Institutes main goal is about restoring biodiversity. All of the land that the savory Institute has worked with has seen an increase in biodiversity and Isabella Tree of the Knepp rewilding project in England consorted the savory hub on advice when adding grazing mammals like cattle, deer, horses and logs to actually increase bio diversity
Comparing meat generated co2 to vehicles is not fair. The co2 created by meat is already in atmosphere which is then again locked by the grass/other plants and the cows are fed that again. But when we talk about vehicles, the co2 is permenantly locked up underground and we dig it up and release it into atmosphere, and it has no where to go so it stays in atmosphere. So unlike meat where co2 is already in atmosphere and keeps rotating, fuel that vehicles burn adds up additional co2 in the atmosphere.
Like so many other climate-related challenges, we know what the solution is here, a steady transition away from meat. We just need strong political action and the will of consumers to enact it.
Lol no. Tribal people eat meat and they’re the most stable and environmentally friendly amongst everyone in this planet. The answer destroying agriculture altogether and lowering the human population back to hunter gatherers
Why do videos like this ignore how millions of buffalo once roamed the American plains? Thousands of years ago herds of herbivores roamed across the ice bridge from Asia to the Americas. Grass fed herbivores is as natural as it gets. Returning cattle to their native environment is a win-win situation.
I think your completely wrong, it's like saying electric cars are the way forward to reduce emissions but everyone has to have one for that to work... of course there is a proper way to graze cattle on grass. Some farmers do it right some do it wrong. You can't just say grass fed beef isn't sustainable just because some farmers in America haven't got it right yet. You didn't even mention any other countries. Here in the uk 70% of beef farms are carbon neutral if not more. Beef is a big problem in the states and it needs changing for the future of everyone and farming it self. Us beef farmers get all the blame when usa beef farms are dragging us down.
Could you explain exactly what is on the x and y axes of the "Rates of Soil Carbon Sequestration" graph that shows how soils come to C equilibrium? Thanks!
Im from Argentina, sadly we are proud of eat, produce and export a lot of good meat. But nobody is aware of the problems that it causes and the economy of the country is not allowing to change the way we generate money for the country
I remember watching your old video about grazing and thought something didn't sound right. Your my favorite creator on youtube and I'm really glad you corrected that view. Misinformation is rampant with this topic and although there was a lot of good info in that old vid, maybe take it down?
Live reaction : 00:35 I do not remember the scientifist saying we should eat more meat. 03:57 he also said that it was it's greatest mistake and that he did not take this act willfully. Okay, before anyone reads this message, let it be clear that I do not vow for any denial to the existential crisis we face. I just want this channel to produce the best thing possible but I feel like this video is of lower quality. So here now, read the message : Frankly, I'm disappointed by your video. It feels biased and though fact checked, I would have liked to see some well known source (FAO for instance). The scientist did not vow for massification of cattle ranching. He just pointed out that it worked in savannas and arid regions, where growing food is nearly impossible half of the year. Having myself not cut the grass in my garden for 6 months, the terrain is in a terrible state and the soil is covered by moss, which is bad for biodiversity. That's because the grass died in summer and fell into an opaque blanket. When we finally mowed the lawn in early October, some grass sproute back, but we still have much moss left. Hopefully next year we can take some goats to mow it naturally and create a local ecosystem where bugs and cats "play" together xD. Pastoralism is older than agriculture, so I see no point in avoiding it when necessary. I do not see how you could grow crops in Mongolia for instance, where temperatures never exceed 16°C. Maybe you should have made clearer that it was for Temperate climates, which only half of the world population inhabit. To end on a positive note, I would like you to know that I find the rest of your videos pretty intelligent and interesting, well documented. And as a suggestion, maybe you could do a video on artificial meat because I really feel like this is a big hoax (electricity, chemicals, health ...).
I don't know the numbers, but in Southern Africa elephants have to be culled regularly when they get to numerous for the parks in which they are protected and thrive, otherwise the habitat cannot support them. Elephants destroy a lot of trees.
He did that according to the conventional scientific wisdom at the time which holistic grazing actually challenges/debunks. Elephants are doing much better now at Allan Savory's Zimbabwe farm under holistic grazing
@@hendrikbarboritsch7003 Isn't that because these elephants are constrained to small areas due them not being allowed in farmed lands? Common sense says big animals need big lands.
@@ixian_technocrat Ding ding ding! This. They’re basically restricted and have to be “controlled” because they’re losing their natural habitat to agriculture, like most other wildlife across the planet. The problem with elephants is that they’re huge so can do real damage to infrastructure such as fencing, crops, etc. Wildlife control is one of the unseen costs of farming. In the USA it’s wolves and other predators, in the UK it’s foxes, deer and birds, etc etc. Everywhere there is farming there is the inconvenience of wildlife. It’s a war that nature will lose every single time, unfortunately.
I enjoyed listening to this but I have to talk about you discussing subsidies for veggies and fruit instead of meat. Many governments already give subsidies to the animal agriculture industry to keep them afloat. It is this subsidy AND mass factory farming that makes meat so much cheaper than fruit and veg
Thank you for making this video! I just watched Kiss the Ground (which gave me culty vibes) and heard about someone starting a RA cattle farm but looking at that exact paper you showed I wasn’t so sure. I had a problem with how they converted methane to CO2 amounts. They used the 100year equivalency when CH4 is way more potent when you look at the 20 year equivalent. They can’t guarantee sequestration for more than that either. I think no till and RA farming has a role to play but for the reasons you stated I don’t think it’s a perfect fix.
Actuelly, it's just the opposite. Ruminant methane is far less potent using the ipcc's new calculations using gwp* (the star is intentiondl). After 20 years, methane from ruminant herds has essentially degraded, meaning world livestock.herds, being stable in number for 20 years (actuelly thousands if you count wild ruminant herds in the same numbers) they they no longer contribute to warming. Listen to this Farmgate podcast with Dr myles allen of the ipcc podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ruminant-methane-global-warming-gwp/id1490590788?i=1000461901050
The goal is to try and mimic ruminants’ natural environment as much as possible. Instead of having natural predators to rotate/move animals, use fences. Such farmers may be adamant because they see consistent results of local environments improving with these methods.
@@fred4141 Having experience with grazing animals doesn't make a rancher an environmetal scientist. The problem is already in the education of the participants of animal agriculture. And only these believe this misinformation and as I have found out ignore quickly everything to the contrary and say something like sience is flaky / some studies say this and some studies say that. And they ignore that there is always a scientific consensus even if a few studies tell a diffrent story (because of bias, a to small dataset or because a wrong methodology)
One of the scientists doing regenerative ag studies that ended up positive a bunch of times was perplexed that some studies didn't come out positive when all of his did. He wrote a peer reviewed review in it and came to the conclusion that all the studies they had strict study protocols that didn't allow fwrmers to vary depending upon conditions failed, while the ones they gave farmers the lead to change according to local conditions were positive. Here's his rewiew study. Grazing management that regenerates ecosystem function and grazingland livelihoods July 2017 African Journal of Range and Forage Science 34(2):1-10 Follow journal DOI: 10.2989/10220119.2017.1334706 W.R. Teague Matt Barnes
To be honest, when i saw the allan savory ted talk recently before seeing this, what i understood was that we should work towards regenerating ecosystems by bringing back the different animals that make up the system that were driven away like plants, herbivores and carnivores and all that and that a stable ecosystem does consequently bring back soil quality and stop desertification and keep water. Maybe it was because I had watched about keystone species and the serengeti rules prior. Which i realize sounds better than what these people were advocating
I feel you may have missed the point; savory’s point was to regenerate degraded lands to allow a higher organic matter top soil then for the cattle to fade away as bigger (native) plants reestablish? I might be wrong but I thought that was the idea?
Could someone help me find a study that shows actual methane emissions from gas fed cattle? I have only been able to find the one that estimates a hypothetical amount under the assumption that grass fed cattle emit the same level as feedlot cattle. Were grass fed cattle emissions actually tested?
I remember reading a guardian article not so long ago saying that if you count the farmland that is used to grow food for animals and the land animals use. They use about 83% of ALL farmland in the world, but only contribute 16% of the calories.
I have heard that agriculture were responsible for only 4% of greenhouse emissions, others say that it contributes a third or half of it. What's true? Well, meat eaters say 4%, vegans would say at least half. I do not see how I could take any of you serious. It is certainly difficult to achieve unbiased scientific data on those problems, and your cherry-picking, driven by your agendas, doesn't make it any better. Crop farming's impact on greenhouse emission is dangerously underestimated, that's for sure. When you cultivate moors and change them into crop land - which we have done in Germany by the hundreds of thousands of hectares to produce "green energy" via bio mass - the very first tilling sets free some so and so many thousand tons, I forgot, more than anything else. It takes decades for green energy to make up for that, let alone the anual consumption of diesel, fertilizers and pesticides for biomass production. We had 60% of our agricultural land as grasland after WW II, we have less than 30% now. Grasland can only be turned into food via ruminants. So we relied much more upon that food source then than we do now. Up to today the world's agriculural land consists by two thirds of grasland, although the actual percentage is declining throughout the world. Ground has to be covered, always was. Bare freshly ploughed ground looks and smells amazing - I am a farmer. But meat does not destroy the climate. The way we produce it matters through. Here's my tribute to George Carlin, my revised and updated list of the eleven commandments: 1. Eat local produce. 2. Eat seasonal produce. 3. Favour food from regenerative agriculture. 4. Plough less, plant no-till, use cover crops and crop rotation. 5. Encourage local subsistency systems, permaculture and agroforstry. 6. Focus on good, high-yielding crops with high nutritional value (i.e. potatoes deliver ten times the calories of grain per hectare, who came up with these grain crops anyway, it's the least effective way to use acreage). 7. Integrate livestock farming into your system/farm (the segregation of crops versus livestock is a large scale farming systems' invention of very questionable benefit). 8. Reduce the use of pesticides, fertilizers, gmos and water as far as possible. 9. Feed ruminants with gras, hay, gras silage and by-products, not with crops. 10. Consider reimplementation of draft animals where feasible. 11. Get that stick out of your rear entrance and do what you've known for ages needs to be done. But none of that will happen, because you want to breed that famous sire that revolutionizes the breed (=wipes it out), and ride that self-propelled air seeder over those 1100 acre plots of land, don't you? Pity, folks. It would be so, so easy...
He is not objective in this video trying to tell people about Allan Savory. His opinions is clearly affected by him being vegan and trying to justify this choice, which is a wrong foundation to build research on, and such an approach it will never lead to conclusions worth listing to.
OK, so regenerative farming is possible without grazing, as replacement for our monoculture and artificial fertilizer based industrial agriculture. But what about desertification in areas where intensive farming is not the culprit?
Do what post civil war botanists do, plant crops that can feed crops. For example, peanuts. I was watching a video on the history of George Washington carvir and he was known for peanuts specificly, for refurtalizing soil after the huge boom and plantings of cotton; which defurtalized the soil after the civil war, even before and after.
Please read Alans Book. You clearly didn't because Alan's claims are not as generalized as you state in this video. In his book he starts by explaining the different environments from lush/fertile in moderate climates to more brittle/dryer environments. He certainly doesn't claim we all should eat more grass-fed beef, instead he has proven that increasing stock levels and increasing the rotation restores ecologies in brittle environments. I appreciate your work to create more awareness for climate change, but please don't burn down hero's like Alan Savory in the process unless you have done enough research yourself. That means reading books, not only scanning the internet voor narrowly focused research abstracts. It would be nice to publish a correction on this in his honor. Have a great day!
I think you are mixing up carbon emissions with methane emissions from cows. The grassland practice of ploughing soil releases carbon, not the act of grazing itself. That's how it seems you interpreted it. Grazing rotationally is still better than feed lots for producing meat, the amount of time the animal is alive for isn't the driving factor of emissions, the stocking rate is.
Uh-oh! If ruminating cows are a problem, then we need to also hunk about ridding the planer of ruminating buffalo, deer, wilda beasts, water buffalo, antelopes , wild goats and sHeep, etc!
Though I'm usually a fan of your videos, I feel like you didn't research both sides of the issue that well. There's more to a healthy climate than methane emissions. There's also fossil fuels and chemicals involved in monocropping to both feed vegetarians and industrially raised animals which have a far greater cost than considering an animal based alternative. Also how do methane emissions of cows actually compared to the fossil fuel industry? You've definitely seemed to repeat a lot of misleading stats of a certain side of the debate while not considering the full picture.
Monocropping isn’t used to “feed vegenatrians”, ffs it’s mainly used to feed animals, sometimes PEOPLE. “Vegetarians” don’t eat a substantially larger amount of plant food than your average meat-eater, so why would you pin monocropping on them specifically? To talk about the alternatives to raising animals industrially without comparing those methods to the plant-based equivalent (which OCC did with reference to no-till farming), is truly not looking at both sides. This comment is really hypocritical.
@@farmpunk_dan in my original comment I said "to feed both vegetarians and industrially raised animals...". Did not intend to pin this on vegetarians. Hope that helps
@@purplkaret don't you eat pasta? Or beans? Or some form of corn? We ended up where we are now with lots of monocrops with a less than 10% vegetarian population and you put them as equal culprits of monocroping as industrially farmed animals? c'mon Animal consumers are the culprit!
@@Danirio96 I personally try to avoid such food products, but I know that is an issue with commercially available traditionally farmed animals. As a consumer, I only purchase local regeneratively farmed meat and animal products, meaning they are not being fed by monocrops. As someone with pretty severe allergies to a variety of plant products, I acknowledge that while avoiding meat products is a solution for some, I would like an acknowledgement from people who choose veganism that it isn't the solution for everyone. With that basis, we can begin to discuss the best approaches to both animal and vegetable consumption. I think it's important as consumers to rethink farming and food as a whole, with the climate and the animals' wellbeing in mind. Hope that clarifies where my initial comment.
Ok so a cow makes methane So what. She made it out of natural things. She did not create it from nothing. She never added too or subtracted from what is already here and always present.
The answer is to know your farmer. Doesn’t matter what you eat. That’s the only true way to know what you’re eating, and it’s effects on the planet. Grass-fed beef practices rather than conventional row crop beef production, would be extremely beneficial for our planet. Consider how much row cropping and even vegetable cropping sequesters carbon compared to holistic farming. I think this report is holding some claims against holistic grazing as self evident, when they are not black and white. As a holistic farmer myself, it comes as no shock that I dispute your claims but, I’m living the scenario out.
The argument of author is outright wrong. Savory is used for natural grassland. Like Savannah. Not a forest to convert to grazing field. Check American desertification in the absence of buffaloe.
Desertification is a complex topic with numerous approaches. And the rate of desertification is far too fast for this to even be a contender. And I didn't look into this but it wouldn't surprise me if he's wrong about that as well.
The impact of cattle in Co2 emmission in developed countries like USA or France is about 2/4% of total emission. To stop eating meat won't have the same positive impact than stoping all transport, because transportation represent way more in term of emission...
I think people will realize that any kind of beef just isn't sustainable and will transition to plant-based diets over time. At least, that's what I'm hoping! Great video, well researched!
💡 Please take a second to share this video on Reddit, Facebook, or Twitter!
🌍 What are your thoughts on grass-fed beef and plant-based diets?
🍎 You can find my video about veganism that I mentioned here: th-cam.com/video/9SdhrN0V7dk/w-d-xo.html
In 2020 my new years resolution was to not eat beef.
Can you do a video on Plastic Bank and Ocean Hero?
I recently discovered your channel and just wanted to say that youre amazing. I hope that your videos will reach many millions in the future, it would do the world so good
Can you do a video on plastic-eating mushrooms?
Correct me if I am wrong but I thought grazed cow was supposed to be used on existing grassland that isn't suitable for intensive farming, and thus making use of unused resources. Condensation on the grass was supposed to supply majority of the water and greenhouse gases released are minimal because grass would naturally decompose to generate methane with or without cattles.
It's about tapping into the underdeveloped land for food production
cudos for changing your opinion when presented with new facts.
he did?
@@suryamohan3410 0:45
@@suryamohan3410 1:28
I agree! The basis of the standard model in science is based on that principle. It adds to his credibility.
not an easy thing to do
As you said, the real solution is to embrace some form of a plant-based diet!
Eating less meat -no matter if the animals were grass-fed or not- is better for our climate, nature, and ourselves. During research, we found out that currently more than 80% of farmland is used for livestock (20% for veggies & wheat). But meat and dairy products only account for 18% of the calories and 37% of the protein we eat. We're using all this land to produce only a fraction of global human nutrition... that's extremely inefficient! But together we can start changing it!
Can you give me source?
💚Love your channel💚 thanks for saying this
Go vegan
Where did you get the 80%?
@@htoodoh5770 are you serious lol. Go check their channel out
@@kaykay1570 Not going vegan.
i highly appreciate the topic, thumb up!
but i have to critic some points:
1) about savories past, that he killed those poor elephants is not really on the topic and just dismisses the person but not the method, he regrets and suffers of his past decision... as all uhumans do, he is just a human no more and no less.
2) livable land is not the same as farmable land, so you get food from the land that is otherwise not possible (because of to little rainfall or what not)
3) 5:50 is about beefproduction in general and not about the regenerative grazing method in specific
i believe a transition from the status quo to regenerative grazing in the beef sector would be a massive positive step on the way to a more liveable and better future :)
I wanted to like you comment but then i read the last sentence.
Grazing is worse than factory farming for the climate, sadly. I wish this would not be the case.
@@happygimp0 why is grazing worse than factory farming?
I'm thinking about silvopasture-based ruminant production plus keeping per capita ruminant meat consumption to a nutritionally-accepted minimum.
@Juba - يوبا - ⵊⵓⴱⴰ - ᛄᚢᛒᚨ How so?
4:11 actually Joel said i dont call it sustainable i call it regenerative
Greg Judy has some good animal grazing videos.
Dude this was a great breakdown. I've wondered about this for a while!
Exactly, instead of some garbage music video
Jeez , this video is full of a lot of manure. I actually just wrote a blog post about some of these gross misconceptions here: lachefnet.wordpress.com/2020/12/03/regenerative-ag-clearing-up-some-misconceptions/ But below are some additional thoughts to add to and reiterate what's in this blog post.
To begin with, rotational grazing is not the same thing as holistic planned grazing also known as adaptive multi-paddock management. So you don't even know what HPG or AMP are. Not to mention, carbon is locked up deeply in the soil via the turnover of microbial necromass mass feed root exudates exuded from the roots of plants, so would help if you actually understood how soil organic matter is largely formed. The science papers supporting HPG are not "outliers". They're part of a growing body of research supporting HPG/AMP. The so-called "vast" body of the papers contradicting HPG/AMP like the meta-analysis by FCRN, for example, rely almost entirely on papers by Holachek & Briske, both of whom looked at short duration grazing management that was NOT HPG/AMP management.
Thus that "vast" body of papers you cited is built on a house of cards. And no, not perfect conditions necessary for HPG/AMP to work. HPG/AMP is being used effectively on over 50 million hectacres on all five continents in a variety of grassland ecosystems. Plus there's a large and growing body of research supporting HPG/AMP, though the Sierra Club and others didn't actually do a search for any of this science
As for FCRN, their white paper meta-analysis was incredibly flawed for several reasons including not understanding any of the newer soil science as to how soil organic matter is formed as well as not understanding how hydroxzyl radical oxidation works in the troposphere. The whole notion of equilibrium is based on outdated soil science, since the amount of soil if not finite. More soil organic matter can be built via the microbial carbon pump. thus the soil carbon "tub" can keep growing.
Again FCRN's understanding of soil science based on newer soil science revolving around soil microbiology is non-existent.
Oh boy, than Hayek's paper? That paper doesn't account for improved pastures through better management which increase daily gains. The papers relies solely on feedlot industry research and than of other plant based advocates. Yes, Hayek is an animal rights advocate. With better grazing management,
carrying capacities are drastically increased. That means more cattle can be raised on the same amount of land. With the current state of land degradation, there's a lot of land that can be improved with grazing. This is marginal land that's not suitable for crop production. This is where most cattle currently live. Only approximately 6 to 7% of global inventory is in the Amazon. The dynamics of deforestation are quite complex and involve a chain of events. so sadly even without beef cattle or soya deforestation would continue unabated.
Grasslands are their own ecosystems...that co-evolved with guess what? RUMINANTS. They weren't and aren't forests. Soils also need to succeed from bacterial dominated soils to fungi dominate soils for trees. You can't just plant trees anywhere especially into bacterial soils where there isn't a lot of rain fall. Rewilding of grasslands needs to include ruminants and predators. Wild ruminants also emit methane. Though when you understand what happens to microbial methane, you actually realize that microbial methane is part of a cycle so cattle and all the other myriad sources of methane in ecosystems cycle the same carbon over and over again.
Singing Frog Farms is all of 8 acres. They farm 3 of those 8 acres and bring in all of their compost. I'm friends with Elizabeth and Paul who own that farm. No-till organic is a good solution for market garden production, but it won't sequestered any carbon on the over 3.5 billion hectares of MARGINAL land that's not suitable for crop production but is suitable for grazing. Of current agricultural land that isn't too degraded (about 2 billion hectacres), 65% is marginal and 35% (700 mill hectacres) is arable. Arable land benefits from integrated livestock.
Anyway, next time you do research, you might want to actually visit a ranch using regenerative grazing practices so you actually know how it works and that it isn't rotational grazing. I knew almost immediately that this video would be grossly misinformed within the first 10 seconds. Sadly it looks like your entire research consisted of looking at computer screens. If you had been on a ranch using regenerative practices, you'd realize that these types of ranches ARE wildlife preserves where biodiversity is increased below and above ground. Since cattle are kept in tight herds, they only occupy a percent or two of the land at any given time. The rest of the land is enhanced and shared with wildlife. This type of land use are more realistic (less fanciful) ways to maintain open space than rewilidng fantasies.
Finally the whole plants versus meats argument is a false dichotomy. There are a myriad of bad ways to grow plants that destroy the environment and release soil carbon into the atmosphere. many of these practices also use hydrocarbon intensive forms of fertilizer as well as emit copious amount of nitrous oxide. So the real distinction that needs to be made is between degenerative versus regenerative forms of food production for ALL the foods humans consume. The HOW and appropriateness of WHERE a food is raised, grown or caught matters as much or more than the WHAT.
@@REGENETARIANISM he just has very broken misinformed knowledge and bias. He can’t help.
@@LittleRadicalThinker But we have no option but to use livestock or our life supporting environments will degrade to a point where they are no longer be life supporting. This man has a poor understanding of what Allan is about and he is are doing a great deal of damage with this video.
Here is examples of restoration that were only possible because of livestock. Keep in mind these kind of environments counts for about 2/3s of the worlds land, only grazing animals can take these environments to their full potential. There is no human friendly planet without functioning ecosystems.
th-cam.com/video/xMjKcCfBtfI/w-d-xo.html
@@shreeyasingh8948 A little is an understatement given the gross amounts of pseudoscience used in this video. As a bio-chemist I honestly can´t express my disgust in words.
It's very sad to see that agroforestry and silvopasture laning in specific still hasn't penetrated into the mainstream and the discussion at all, on either side.
Grazing cattle between lanes of trees greatly increases both the sequestration and the yield of the operation. It's the one thing where it would have an advantage compared to sustainable market gardening.
Also the sequestration of grazing operations being frontloaded and then plateauing over time seems to compliment forestry's strong but slow to get going sequestration very well.
Hi Gewreid, do you know any experience of this system? Grazing cattle between lanes of trees. I am very interested in reading about that. Thanks.
Because rewilding, reforestation and aforestation are all leagues ahead both in the result as well as research. The only reason it would "hit the mainstream" is when the animal agriculture industry starts to push it.
Never really heard of silvopasture but will look into it. Problems I can already think of would be when trees are young, the stock would trample the. I'm from NZ, so I will take that as an example; especially in a native forest, there would be no chance for new trees to adequately grow. Also, again in NZ not sure about elsewhere, but if you used pine trees which are farmed for radiata, the pine needles are toxic to animals and most plants. Furthermore, soli holds far more Co2 than trees. This has been heavily researched and cited, so not sure where this videos facts are from.
I'll definitely admit to being sold on holistic management, but I'll have to check out more of the counter-arguments. Savory does mention that holistic management is different from just rotational grazing, so that's good to keep in mind. Also good to remember that much land used for grazing now is not suitable for forest growth (often due to lack of water, like the great plains or savannah areas) where grazing herbivores once held the place that cows do now and also that small veg farms like Singing Frogs (although they are doing it much, much better than the vast majority of other farms) almost always need to get their compost (carbon) off the farm and is most likely extractive in that sense unless they are extremely careful about where they get their organic matter
Singing Frogs and many other vegan farms use plant-based compost and not excretion compost. They often produce enough compost to be self sustaining due to other practices that require a significant reduction in how much is required over several harvests.
@@losgann For sure! And I think it is totally possible for a no-dig compost-mulched veg farm to produce all there own organic matter & compost, but I have never heard of it (around 50% seems to be what the good ones are sitting at). I think those farms are still the most sustainable vegetable farms out there, but it's just not quite as simple as no-dig compost-mulched veg farm = sustainable - we also need to remember where they are getting their organic matter (if, for example, it comes from an environmentally-extractive hay farm, that's got to be accounted for or if it's from food waste that's wonderful but not infinitely scalable & that food is most likely coming from very unsustainable farms)
Savory says that so he can sell his proprietary method. He needs to obfuscate as much as possible with as many different claims as possible.
@@imgayasheck595 This is the conclusion I came to as well.
It's beyond me that you don't have millions of subs. Such high quality content!
true
It was not high quality content when he attacked veganism
Interesting video, i'm a beef and sheep farmer in Scotland. One factor you didn't address in this video is that land that is used for grazing ruminants isn't capable of growing an economically viable crop of cereals or vegetables due to the climate, topography or soil type. to me the solution is a combination of growing as much of your own food as possible, eating local seasonal produce and the grass fed system is definitely better for the welfare of the animal than more intensive systems.
Yeah, this is almost always ignored in stories about beef. I'm a big carnivore admittedly! Still, I am trying to reduce the amount of meat I eat for a variety of reasons (climate change is one, better dietary macros is another). But I don't think the world needs to vegan, in part because of your points. In the USA prime land is used for grazing along with marginal land. We could reduce the amount of meat we eat and make sure all of it is sourced in the most responsible way.
I for one am aware that not all land is capable of growing crops, but the thing is, the land use requirement of a plant-based diet is much smaller than that of eating meat so we don't actually need all that land that can only be used for grazing animals for producing food. Instead it can grow native wildlife depending on what can grow on that land. Personally, I'd prefer the return of the likes of buffalo and natural ecosystems than farming the grazing land as I believe that there must be more native wild land than there currently is for the good of the planet (biodiversity) and reducing the overall land use of humans is obviously the necessary action to create this
Also.... we have a huge habit loss crisis of grasslands... so... more corn fields would be better?
Yes the video didn't explicitly state this fact but it also didn't state that it could be. A small portion of the vast areas of land currently used for growing food for livestock would ideally be re-purposed for growing foods for human-consumption, with the rest, and any land unsuitable for this (like your land), being either re-forested or re-wilded. As mentioned in the video. Ideally also you would be supported economically to transition away from your current industry.
@@CowMan897 Yes, you've missed my point. Should we switch to a plant-based diet, we won't need to touch that land at all, therefore real buffalo can come back and it will go back to being wild. This is even better than grazing cows (seeing as grazing cows is only trying to mimic it anyway) and doesn't cause unnecessary suffering to sentient beings so is not unethical
Seeing the original TED talk (admittedly, it's been a while), I didn't have the impression he was talking about maintaining current production levels by different means. He was saying some areas do better with grazing (I think his test plot doesn't get enough rain to grow a forest). Better land management, with some honest beef as a byproduct.
He suggested that it's a solution to global warming and that's just wrong. And honestly savory looks and acts a lot like a snake oil salesman. Instead of using his projects to allow real scientists to do research he relies on before and after pictures, personal testimonies - like a snake oil salesman. Everything this man claims should be fact checked.
@@stauffap What do you know to open your mouth? You are dead wrong, probably know it and still fake it. Shame on you!
@@ulfullring3936
Just say what i'm wrong about. It's frustrating that i even have to mention this. What am i wrong about and why am i wrong about it?
yeah, isn't Alan savory point is to regenerate degraded land and not to sustain our meat consumption? degraded land > regenerative farming > healed land > forest
@@stauffap yes, because he argued that the state of over grazing animals in poor countries have degraded so much land and that theres a better way of doing that stuff. He used pictures of landscapes he took on the challenge to change. Worked beautifully. He turned desertificated land to green, lush grasslands. Much healthier land
Nice Video!
I like your content, because you are differentiated and science based.
I'm on the same page with you about 'What should we do?' @6:18
But IMHO your perspective on Grass-Fed beef has some flaws and isn't so thought through.
Some things I want to point out, which just leave a bad taste.
1) Allan Savory never (at least in the TED talk) advocated for meat or even eating more of it. Also his proposal never intended to solve climate change and over population. You put these words in his mouth.
2) He "just" proposed a method to recultivate grasslands which got deserted due to human activity -> the rotational grazing.
And this methods have the potential to achieve this goal.
3) You use the "elephant story" against him, even though he (in the TED Talk @6:35) said "that was the saddest and greatest blunder of [his] life".
4) You paint a picture that grass fed beef has no right to exist and is even worse than conventional cattle (your comparison of the time-to-grow and meat-performance).
You completely ignore the fact, that especially conventional cattle drive the deforestation due to soya production and needs logistics to provide the food.
Also you completely ignore that grass fed cattle is a great method to cultivate areas which are not suitable for other agricultural crops.
...
Overall I appreciate your try to relativise the hype about grass fed cattle.
But I think you didn't helped the cause.
Yes, I noticed this is well and felt it necessary to comment several times.
grass fed beef has the potential to cultivate areas that aren’t suitable for crops … why don’t we just stop eating animals, and regrow forests in the un-arable areas, using those lands in an ACTUALLY sustainable, ethical, and environmental way.
@@charlescarmichael56 maybe these areas are also not suitable for forests?
Scrolled down the commentary section; I have a feeling that most commentiers never watched Savory`s TED talk.
I don’t recall any of the supporters of regenerative agriculture or rotational grazing suggest that we should clear more forests to provide more grazing land. However a great deal of forest is cleared to grow crops. I am vegetarian but you have not developed your arguments again grass-fed, rotationally grazed cows to convince me. Also cows are not the major contributor to greenhouse gas - fossil fuels are. Carbon is extracted by mining and pumped back into the atmosphere.
1. Cows are not the major contributor but they are one of the largest contributors.
2. The amount of land the is currently used for crop growth could provide all the food we need now, because so much of it (I think around 30%) is used as feedstock for animals and plants make up the majority if calorific and protein intake around the world. In reality, we wouldn't need all that crop land and we could distribute it better allowing for a significant increase in land for reforestation etc. as he mentioned. No deforestation would be necessary. The carbon sequestration of such would put quite a decent dent in the carbon emissions of transport plus that land would be vital for biofuel projects
You can't detract the fact that cows are a major greenhouse emmiter simply by blaming another source of carbon source. That will never get us anywhere.
And I think Rory said his piece well about how land should be used. My fear in promoting rotational grazing over crop production (specifically agroforestry) would be that all of the land currently being used to provide feed for cattle would simply be transformed into pasture rather than being reforested. The amount of land currently being used for cattle pasture is more than enough to feed our population if done better (rotational grazing; grass fed). So let's turn the cattle feed crop land into polyculture havens and bring back our carbon sequestering forests and native animals species.
Your video presents us another side of the spectrum. This video was a critique of an incomplete system and rather than presenting us with complete system with incorporated lifestock, narrative leans more towards the 'all cattle is evil'. Most of your videos are great,but this one missed the mark. Lastly, I want to point out something that is nothing more than my opinion - Your videos on topic of meat seem too subjective. I get that impression from my own experience as sustainable farming practitioner. Just to clarify - I'm not saying lifestock is some magical thing in farming, but by excluding it from my farm I had a lot of problems, mostly with my soil quality. Only after incorporating small amount of lifestock and with the right management practices could I achieve the best results. I would have probably had the same degree of negative effects on my farm if I excluded forestry or some other element in the system. In my experience system that is complete and balanced works the best. I guess Thanos had a point on all that perfectly balanced shenanigans. I wish you a great day, unknown dude from interwebs.
What about the negative effects of a knife being pulled across your animals' throats? Why not transition to plant farming? There are programs out there that can help
Blah blah blah you using internet kills more living beings than some regenerative farmer 😂 so stfu!@@alisiademi
Where is that snippet from, where Joel says "we're not sustainable?" seems to might be out of context. I tried to look for it but couldn't find it. Would you mind linking to the source?
He finishes the statement by saying they are regenative. Trying to restore the land.
@@bobeeman9730 Yeah really hated that little character assassination segment.
m.th-cam.com/video/pHUSzgFk0vs/w-d-xo.html
Joel Salatin being asked about chickens at 1:28:20
Not sure of the source but, I'm sure he's talking about the chickens, he has to buy a lot of food for them. You only need sun, soil, and water for cows. They turn grass into meat with a byproduct of fertile soil.
I agree with less meat consumption. Other than that I disagree with most of this. Folks have taken this work farther than Savory(Gabe Brown, Jerry Doan. Barry Fisher, Richard Perkins just to name few) . The quote you show from Salatin out of context. He said "this is not a sustainable farm, this is a regenerative farm". To question his results is perfectly fine but to knowingly take his words out of context to mislead people does not legitimize your argument. I realize that there is a lot of research that contradicts these guys results. Monsanto has produced countless studies showing that their products are safe too. Look at these studies, question who conducted/funded them and how they were carried out. The instances of increased soil carbon as a result of animal integration(grass fed beef as well as other species) are no longer uncommon. I have the same goals as this content creator, agree that we should consume more plants and less meat but I wonder how deep their understanding of soil biology is. I don't intend to start an argument, I just hate to see folks mislead before they hear the other guys cases before they make form a solid opinion.
You are spot on, this video is attempting to disprove a straw-man, reductive version of what regenerative agriculture actually is. He literally thinks that people are arguing that dead plant roots lock in soil carbon - I think it's pretty safe to say that he has no knowledge of soil biology.
less meat consumption will just result in more mentaI lIIness we all ready have a good idea how this is working out un-natural diet of plant sludge since 1971
Ok I’m partly with you but I understand the savoy technique is more about converting areas affected by desertification back to healthy soil. Like most vegetable mono culture farms (wheat or whatever) just strip the top soil of nutrients , kill off the mycelium networks, and then you basically get the dust bowl. An animal based farm is a way to fix this. Like you want to mimic the Serengetti or bison migration ecosystems where a cattle-ish animal travels across vast distances and is then followed by birds and other animals. Like we need to connect farms (yukon to yellewstone) and convert them back to biodiverse ecosystems to help the planet maintain its delicate climate-stable equilibrium (See the David Attenborough witness statement film). Like there’s a lot of problems with only plant based farms as well (from palm oil to whatever next season’s “super-food” is to the oil based fertiliser heavy mega corn / wheat monoculture deserts). Like there are too many people on the planet but the global population is stabilising and much growth can be attributed to older people living longer. I’ve stewed on this a lot without much success. As a consumer my main goals have been 1) to buy as much as possible from small farms that follow regenerative agriculture methods (kinda in line with the Richard Perkins book of the same name) (veg and meat); 2) to waste less food i.t.o. oh this is expired or ugly so toss it (buy the last/ugliest mango in the supermarket) but also by trying stuff like liver etc. The (controversial sure) healthiest and most nutrient dense part of an animal is the fat. Most tallow and suet gets used for industrial purposes like being added to paint while we basically eat chemically unstable (double bond) highly processed seed oils - I’m pretty sure that rapeseed (canola) or sunflower crop isn’t being grown using no dig. 3) trying to eat less overall 4) mostly buying local 5) getting a large portion of vitamins and calories from eggs (also regenerative agriculture) which are basically an affordable vitamin bomb that doesn’t kill the animal 5) being open to eating a different animal - maybe ducks or pigs fed on foraged tree nuts are a better match for your local ecosystem but farmers wont try if consumers are too fussy 6) being less of a picky squeamish eater (damn I still don’t love liver etc). but the oh I won’t buy that broccoli because someone else might have touched it in the shop or there’s a tiny dot of mould on my cheese toss the block 7) try to prepare as much of my own food from scratch so that I can avoid problematic ingredients 8) avoid superfluous packaging as much as possible (and entirely if it’s not recyclable) 9) understand how your meat is processed (ties in with the squeamish thing). if you want to eat meat you must visit an abattoir once in your life. It’ll inspire you to be less wasteful. 9) mostly only eat small fish like sardines (all of the vitamins again) 10) if I can afford to buy fancy free range eggs then i’m probably part of the population that uses more than my fair share of resources so I won’t have kids because that’s probably the biggest thing I can do for the environment (Also being the fun auntie who can afford nice presents because I don’t have to pay school fees was an equally important factor). Sorry that got long. It’s damn complicated and just because beef can sequester carbon or plants use less land per kilojule doesn’t mean we’re personally absolved from trying to figure out what’s best. this video has given me some new things to think about.
YOU. ARE. RIGHT.
Well maybe then Savory should just not shoot 40 000 Elephants next time then, hmm? Monocultures aren't great, but the majority of them are for feeding those animals in feedlots and factory farms in the first place. We'd need so much less soil on a plant based diet, these problems would diminish greatly all on their own. Of course some amount of animal grazing might still be helpful in specific areas - but touting it as a solution to climate change is absolute bogus.
@@thrumugnyr Hey there, I'd just like to point out that savory built his whole model for rotational grazing when he realized that removing the elephants did not help to bring back the vegetation he thought they were over grazing. It's something he regrets very much, and his entire philosophy now is based on the exact opposite thinking to the thinking that led him to do that.
Also you are absolutely right. If we stopped eating meat, we wouldn't need to grow nearly the amount of row crops we do now. We would have to something with all that land and just letting it fallow would be a disaster. Most of that land in in the great plains so it would be best to plant it with native grasses, but the grasses need grazing animals to survive long term. So while it might not be THE solution, its definitely part of the solution.
"but I understand the savoy technique is more about converting areas affected by desertification back to healthy soil"
But then there is a problem if Savory's TED talk is promoted as something more, like something that will "reverse climate change." Go to 0:24 and you can see that in the description of the video of the talk. *_That_* seems to be the big problem here and the main objection to the technique. I think a secondary objection would be that Savory's technique, even if it could help bring back areas hurt by desertification, could never be implemented on a large scale if we don't cut back on eating beef.
Good for you for putting in effort on areas where you know you can make a difference. I disagree with some of your ideas like kids being bad for the environment but shifting our understanding of consumption is huge. We'll all have to make sacrifices in our lives to make this world a better place
As someone who is going to college for agriculture and is taking over a farm to raise livestock, this video makes a lot of great points. The terms grass fed beef and rotational grazing are too broad and can be very misleading. On the other hand, there are some big points i think he missed.
First being silvopasture. Silvopasture is the practice of combining forage production (grasses) and tinder production (trees). So in other words, planting trees into livestock pastures. This provides a number of benefits including trees sequestering carbon, slowing soil erosion, putting more organic matter back into the soil which is also carbon sequestration, some trees can fixate nitrogen back into the soil which improves soil fertility without having to use fertilizer, additional sources of revenue for farmers ,and finally providing additional shading for livestock which improves quality of live for them.
Another point is that in most places in the world grazing animals are essential to the ecosystem and biodiversity. Rewilding can't work everywhere and you can have sustainable grazing operations on small amounts of land as long as you have small amounts of livestock (all should be determine by your climate and what type of land you have access to).
Finally, just because some farmers are practices are extremely damaging to the earth or misleading with the terms grass fed or rotational grazing doesn't mean that these ideas when implemented correctly are not extremely beneficial. If you have the ability to, go out to a local farmers market and go talk to the farmers. Ask them about their practices and see if you can tour their farm. Synthetic plant based meat that only huge cooperations are produce is not the route we want to go.
Killing animals for food is unnecessary violence why would you want to raise "livestock" and be part of that cruelty for no reason instead of growing plants and being part of positive change?
Yes brother I also think the same if we just integrate livestock in food forests ( usually smaller animals like goats and chickens as the food forests are so dense ) it is much much better than anything else and it has already been done by many people its just that permaculture is more information intensive ( and less resource intensive) so it's hard for people to learn more about it
Hope young and new age agriculture enthusiastis like you would help in giving this a much needed push as you are so interested in it ❤
Edit - i also think it would be better than silvopasture as it would give yield much more produce , sequester much more carbon and would provide habitat for graeter number of biodiversity all while being much more sustainable ❤
The percentage of carbon in topsoil hitting an equilibrium doesnt necessarily mean its no longer sequestering carbon. The topsoil depth can continue to increase each year while maintaining the same percentage of organic matter.
Correct me if I'm wrong please, I thought a lot of the deforestation was to grow feed (soy/corn) for feed lot cattle? Which wouldn't be needed (as much) for grass-fed cattle? Ofc they'd still require a lot of land for the grass to grow on, but I guess that might be more spread out across the globe, can't exactly import a pasture.
Really interesting! I never heard about the theory that gress-fed beef could help with climate change, only that it's supposed to be better for the environment in general than intensive factory farming. Although I wonder if that also presumes people eating less meat, since the free roaming cattle stuff tends to be more expensive.
I doubt that the whole world will switch to a fully plant based diet, so it seems quite important we find ways to make the remaining animal products as sustainable as possible.
I really agree. As far as I can see, people are not going vegan anytime soon. We just have to accept that as baseline. I think it should be legalized to provide more space to animals, so that meat becomes more expensive in general, making people consume less meat. In that regard, Allan Savory's method is amazing. Cows are happy, ranchers see their land recovering, and it's way better for the environment than factory farming.
Thing is that you need even more land per kg of meat with this method, all things considering.
Actually most of the pastureland historically was artificially created by cutting down old growth forests and that continues to be a way that pasture is created. When you take into account historical land use changes, animal agriculture is responsible for up to 1/3rd of historical emissions by eliminating many of the best carbon sinks in the world. Certainly natural pasturelands exist, but we are already way past the point where we could sustain our current levels of consumption of grass-fed beef without clearing more forest. There is not enough land that could be made into pastures for grass-fed beef to substitute factory farms. This is why the solution to the environmental problems with cattle needs to be a shift in our relationship with beef and dairy. As a vegan obviously I want that relationship to be non-existent, but realistically maybe people being conscious about reducing their consumption is enough. I would say that with most things people form bad habits around often the best approach to making a significant change is to just say no and find alternatives that work for you.
What i think that if we just integrate livestock in food forests ( usually smaller animals like goats and chickens as the food forests are so dense ) it is much much better than anything else and it has already been done by many people its just that permaculture is more information intensive ( and less resource intensive) so it's hard for people to learn more about it 🤔
@@NitishYadav-lb7zc Interesting idea! I wonder if that's possible, I think all goat pastures I seen always had fences around the trees, otherwise the goats would have gnawed them to death XD But I guess before humans domesticated animals all of them would have lived in forests, so it certainly must work somehow! Sending modern farm animals into existing natural forests might distrub the ecosystem there (idk, could imagine), but we could certainly plant new forests on currently empty pastures! Definitely seen sheep grazing in apple orchards :)
I come from a country (Portugal) that is very proud of it's grass-fed beef (Portugal). However, when the war on Ukraine started, farmers started to say that did not have food to feed their animals, even though they were grass-fed. Grass-fed means very little. Animals still need grains during summer when nothing grows on the ground, animals still need antibiotics and supplements.
(Portugal)
Dang. Just when I started to get excited about regenerative farming as a climate solution.
Great video but I’m curious about the land use section. It’s true that regenerative farming would require more land for grazing but I would think this kind of farming would use substantially less land overall since the cattle are grazing off land that would otherwise be used for corn production to feed cows. Tons of carbon is lost through tilling land every season for corn and soy planting. I wish you would’ve discussed this further. This is one of the main points of regenerative farming, not losing carbon through erosion or soil depletion. Also it would’ve be nice to hear about the emissions of feedlots because I can’t believe that feedlot meat would be better than regenerative. While your overall argument I understand is to stop eating meat, I think regenerative is still a better option than feedlot.
I'm curious about these points as well. Also, as far as I know, Allan Savory's method isn't just about rotational grazing. It's the main point, but also when I watched his and other regenerative-agriculture-related documentaries, those farmers had planted other things as well. His ideas can be implemented with trees and other profitable plants as well. Also, as a Korean, I know that back in my grandparents were in my age, farmers composted cow poop and straw together to make fertilizer. Cows ate grass, straw, beans, and left over plants. And Koreans had done that for hundreds of years. Allan Savory's method is as natural as it gets is what I'm trying to say. But overall, I also agree that we as human race should consume was less meat. Even then, Allan Savory's method makes meat much more expensive, making people eat less meat anyway! 😂😂😂
He quotes project drawdown, but fails to mention that one of project drawdowns primary recommendations is silvopasture!
He also left out this review article showing that they regenerative ag studies that failed used strict research protocols, while the ones they succeeded allowed farmers to flex protocols for local conditions.
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ruminant-methane-global-warming-gwp/id1490590788?i=1000461901050
@@alik5883Yes brother I also think the same if we just integrate livestock in food forests ( usually smaller animals like goats and chickens as the food forests are so dense ) it is much much better than anything else and it has already been done by many people its just that permaculture is more information intensive ( and less resource intensive) so it's hard for people to learn more about it
Thanks for the breakdown, it’s something I’ve wondered about for a while. I do believe that holistic grazing has a place in sustainable agriculture (especially as a part of farms that strive to recycle resources within the farm (manure, etc), but also as a way to maintain certain landscapes. However, I do agree that it has to happen in the context of drastic reduction in meat consumption.
I completely disagree with these arguments and conclusions. That said I highly appreciate the effort to make this video and be part of this conversation. In that vein, I really want to discuss why you think regenerative only works in "ideal" conditions. From the papers (not sure why you call them outliers either. I don't think that is necessarily relevant) From what I've read it seems that the success of regenerative grazing has been demonstrated on millions of hectares all over the world.
I think we should use what proveable works when it works, where it works. What I mean by that is that I'm all for reforestation but I'm not sure why regenerative grazing can't be a part of that plan. Maybe the biggest misnomer here is the idea of rewilding. That is a thing I've never heard about or read in any paper. If you could actually leave land fallow and it wouldn't turn into desert then I would be more likely to agree with concentrated feedlot farming (however inhumane) but that is not the case.
Also the point about carbon saturation in soils. That is certainly one of the best points and has concerned me as well. However, we need to take into account soil erosion. This is a point I think there is not a whole lot of evidence for but since regenerative agriculture focuses on soil health then there is the potential to build new soil, which removes the limit of CO2 sequestration. That is basically the story of PolyFace farm, where they rebuild soil on what was previously horribly eroded land (don't appreciate taking the Salatin clip out of context).
Also I take issue with the notion of alternatives to regenerative grazing. As far as I'm aware it's the only agriculture with any scientific literature showing carbon sequestration. I have never heard of that farm you cited. While I don't doubt it's possible and I fully support it, it seems to me that is susceptible to all your previous criticisms in terms of being an "outlier." All current conventional farming releases CO2. And in most cases, cropland CO2 isn't fully counted. You can read the studies. They don't include soil erosion (which is a huge carbon source), which is frankly the root of the issue with agricultural practices. We need practices that look after the health of the soil for both animals and plants.
Lastly, the fact that grazing uses alot of land can be a bit of a non-sequitor depending on whether you decide that grazing is a net positive or a net negative. If it's negative then, of course, it's awful that it uses up so much land. However, if you believe that it is regenerative grazing is good then using all that land is a great way to improve ecosystems. In Brazil, (you reference South American deforestation) the cause of that is due to the fact that poor grazing and high tillage erodes the land used to produce soy for cows and cows. And it's a whole lot more convenient for big corporations to just cut down fresh land (in the Amazon and Cerrado and Atlantic Forrest) than to keep using the same land. I believe that teaching regenerative grazing can allow us to produce high-quality food on less land (especially when you factor in getting rid of all the soy farming to make animal feed).
I don't think these outright dismissals of regenerative grazing are going to take us in the right direction. That said, at least we're all on the same team of healing the environment. I would say if the meat is probably regenerative then eat as much as you want, and if it isn't then don't eat any. But this is hard for the reasons you have spelt out. Industrial agriculture is heavily subsidized. That's why any regeneratively produced product usually costs more money. Actually, it's for the reason you say, naturally produces animals take longer to produce and don't get as fat, so they cost/lb is higher even is the emission or zero or negative. But I have no idea how to change this culture and our government is so dysfunctional that I don't have high hopes. But I can work to heal soil around the world and I believe regenerative grazing is a great tool to have for anyone pursuing that work.
Yes brother I also think the same if we just integrate livestock in food forests ( usually smaller animals like goats and chickens as the food forests are so dense ) it is much much better than anything else and it has already been done by many people its just that permaculture is more information intensive ( and less resource intensive) so it's hard for people to learn more about it
You make a few fair points but misrepresent a number of others. Alan Savoury uses the elephant story to point out how wrong he was about his original belief in something along the lines of reforestation, culling elephants to help it happen. This experience led to his experiments with rotational grazing and he uses his own story of how wrong human logic can be and yet, that learning though regrettable, can provide useful insights and inspire change for the better. You don’t mention that some of the deepest and most fertile soils, the prairies, were actually formed through the symbiosis of grass and roaming herds of ruminant animals over millions of years and that he symbiosis creates the fertility.
An accounting of industrial agriculture’s carbon pollution from energy and fertiliser inputs and carbon emission from tilled soil and annual cropping is required to properly assess the limitations of this best practice grazing. Note well that producing soy for tofu fits into the same category as grain production for feedlot and human consumption, it is carbon emitting. Feedlots are messed up for obvious reasons, but glossing over the industrially produced vegan products is also missing a sober assessment of the situation. The UN assessment of soil erosion has led to the warning that food production may be impossible in 60 years if present practices continue, including growing vegan staples. You are right that deforestation for grazing is an awful mistake, but there are plenty of eroded souls that can be regenerated through rotational grazing and if there is no demand for the animals (meat) there won’t be the incentive to do the regeneration and we damn well need the regeneration.
Yes we need to eat less meat, yes there needs to be less cows, yes there needs to be less people, and less industrial agriculture. But we will soon discover our limited toolbox for reversing the problems we have created, has rotational grazing as a key tool. Some people becoming vegan will reduce some carbon emissions, but in the end we need to regenerate and cows evolved for this purpose. Veganism/vegetarianism has a place, vegan ideology will not undo the soil erosion industrial annual cropping has produced.
People always want to focus on the silver bullet solution, but with a problem as massive and complex as climate change, we need to take advantage of every solution we can find. Regenerative farming is not scalable, but it would likely be an improvement to factory farms when used in tandem with reducing meat in our diets.
It's great to see a focus on what would be the best actions to take. Remember, trees are wonderful "carbontakers". Hopefully we can transition to plant-based world as soon as possible in order to take less land and let the trees do their job. The amount of land needed to farm animals is enormous.
Don't forget the ocean.
Ok in the fall when the frost comes and the leaves fall off and the sap goes down how much carbon is being released? Trees grass, corn it donr make any difference X amount of tons of green plants per acre no matter what kind of plant the end result would still be the exact same.
@@thecollectoronthecorner7061 trees get all of their mass from carbon. They carbon dioxide is one carbon and two oxygen atoms binded together. Trees take the carbon to build their body and release the oxygen because they don't need it. So their emissions are -probably- heavily offset by them growing themselves taller and bigger
Edit: actually not probably. It just does
How bout leave the plants to the true herbivores to eat? Crop fields are the main reason there aren’t much trees around anymore, especially monocrops. It’s an absolute abomination and the reason why the planet is overpopulated and polluted in the first place
Yes but not all of the land currently used for animal farming could be easily repurposed. I live in a hilly rural area where most of the steep fields are used for farming sheep/cows - that land would probably be completely unused if it wasn't for animal farming. You're just not going to get a combine harvester up there.
My view is that we should drastically cut meat consumption, but ensure that regenerative farmers are protected in the downscaling process. It would wrong if the only farm animals left in the world lived tortured lives in factories, rather than in fields where they're actually cared for.
While I always enjoy your videos, I do try to be skeptical given the information I have through experience and through my own reading.
I don't believe that cutting meat out of every person's diet is the answer. While plant-rich diets are certainly a good solution, plant-rich doesn't mean vegan, but instead a diet where plants are consumed a significant amount more than meat, which I do think is possible for many people. However, for some people, including meat in their diet is important for their health, like if they are anemic or have certain dietary conditions. So meat can't be completely cut out.
On the sustainability of it, there are certain places where grasslands are beneficial to sequestering carbon. For example the prairies in Canada and the US were historically roamed by Buffalo which essentially performed a rotational grazing pattern. These lands have already been shaped this way. These grass lands in fact are more resisiliant o wildfires in the events of them, because most of their carbon is underground and won't burn if a fire rolls over it.
Anyway I'm starting to ramble but my point is that I don't think that it is a black and white issue and that a balance can be found instead of the meat production we have now or no meat at all.
Plus types of meat should be considered, different and more varied types of livestock would have radically different environmental impacts and growing more optimized livestock for different areas could further improve environmental sustainability.
Many hardcore environmentalists like myself will argue for every individual to stop consuming animal products, but we know that will never happen, at least not in our lifetimes. We argue this to cut back the consumption and use of animal products as much as possible, as they cause significantly more harm to the environment than most plant-based practices.
If everyone reduced their animal product intake by 90% we could probably achieve most all the carbon sequestration that agriculture is capable of producing, when you factor in many marginal lands returning to re-forestation or grassland renewal.
What about the land required for growing crops to feed industrial farmed animals? (5:36)
Does grazing need more land than industry farming taking that into account?
Emissions from cows is a cyclical process from the food they eat which means over a season the emissions are net zero. However, our use of oil releases greenhouse gases that were trapped for millions of years, which is the true culprit for our issue. When solving problems, start with the biggest problems for the biggest impacts.
Provide a source for your first claim.
hi could someone please help me with the theoretical arguments one could reacted to this video with? like the fact that most organic farms use manure as their fertiliser?
Animal welfare arguments maybe? Since this video is strictly talking about climate change, obviously the life and welfare of the animal isn't as big a priority. He notes that feed lots can be viewed as more green in some regards since the animals grow faster and can be processed sooner, thus allowing for less time to emit greenhouse gases. The use of fertilizer might be a decent retort too. Especially if one could get stats on the amount of fertilizer farms use and how much of that is plant-food compost and how is animal poo. Also the impracticality of a uniform, government enforced, systemic shift in how people behave and do business on a global scale which always seems to be his solution to every "the problem with" video.
How about the fact that his numbers are outdated bs that doesn't tell the whole story? Yes, animal ag creates 14.5% of ghg, but what he didn't tell you is that the WARMING of that 14.5% is negligible because ruminant methane is a flow gas that's already degraded. What he didn't tell you is that most of that comes from developing world countries and animal ag is far more efficient in western countries such that even if we ELIMINATED ruminants completely, it would have a negligible effect on warming.
@@carnivoreisvegan Ahh if only this were true. You fail to realise that vast tracts of the world's precious arable lands are used for animal grazing or producing feedstock for those animals. If we ate plant based diets we would only require a fraction of those lands. The excess land could be rewilded and so would sequester or store massive amounts of CARBON.
They could switch to using nitrogen fixing plants, seaweed fertiliser, synthetic fertilizer as well as human manure.
@@imgayasheck595 right, and synthetic fertilizer produces 100 x more methane then previously reported. And all of that costs money. Hope yer willing to pay 10x more for your veganic strawberries.
There are some holes in this.
I've worked in this area and there are many new initiatives involving grazing livestock on forest plots and introducing methods that decrease cow rearing emissions. Such steps are far more sustainable and logical.
I agree with the conclusion, but not with saying animals living more free and suffering less as 'cows have more time to emit gases if they are kept in the fields instead of a warehouse in cages'
Yes! I actually support Allan Savory's method, because it makes meat more expensive thus making people consume less meat! lol Also all the cattle must be so happy to wonder around, hang out with their friends, and eat their favorite food. I think it would be much easier to reduce meat consumption by making it expensive, than to try to make people vegetarian, to be honest.
That struck a cord too. Just leave animals alone its not that hard!
but that's how time works
@@alik5883 Would you be happy if you carer went "look I'm gonna give you a good life, let you run around, see your friends but midway your life I'm gonna kill you and sell your body parts"?
If you care about animals you wouldn't treat them as commodities to exploit, kill and then sell excrements and bodyparts of. The solutions he mentioned (reforestation, aforestation, plant based economy) address the root cause: in that animals wouldn't be commodities.
what about (in addition to consuming less meat) switching from beef to goats or sheep, whose diet is also more varied than cows and thus can feed on a much larger variety of plants? The problem with sheep is, of course, that the way we live now sheep's wool is not utilised and is most often thrown away even though it has endless uses. I still keep thinking these types of smaller grazers are much more eco-friendly, you get all the benefits of cows with leather and milk and meat but they are easier to feed and (if utilised correctly) there is the additional bonus of wool used for everything from clothes, building materials and packaging
We have a couple of milk cows and a small flock of hair sheep. the sheep dont have wool the naturally shed their winter coats.
Emissions are still comparable to beef. Additionally, nobody in America wants to eat that even if it was better. The true solution is plant based.
@@stevencats7137 FAO corrected their own article! They computed emission from cattles throughout their life cycle from birth to store while car was computed only at the exhaust emissions. They should have computed the car from iron ore, plastic, and chemical manufacturing until they are dumped.
There are many hair sheep that are not used for wool. Very good meat breeds very good for the environment.
@@davidhickenbottom6574 by very good do you men.. very bad ???
I think if you got something wrong from Savory, or I just understood it differently. Disclaimer, I was pretty entrenched in what Savory said so maybe the Backfire Effect hit me, but I try to have an open mind and found this video very interesting and enlightning!
However, I think Savory's method was looking at specifically areas that were exposed to desertification to being especially effective. And, to be honest, from what he showed practically, looked like it works. Sure, maybe we can add some reforestation in such areas like Ecosia does, but why not do both? I dont quite get the bashing - in my view he wasn't really speaking about the land you mentioned, but specifically deserted land.
Hm.
great video, I learned a lot! But one question:
@5:47 you say that beef production is the nr 1 cause of deforestation. But I thought the deforestation was required to grow crops for cows, but the whole idea of grass-fed beef is that cows feed on grass not crops. Am I missing a point?
Can you provide the sources for your research? I'm curious especially about your claim that there's more literature disputing regenerative ag than supporting it.
He links sources in the description:
www.notion.so/Grass-fed-Regenerative-Beef-Resources-d74b5f37001e42cdbcfea845c2138bc2
In addition, here is another video on this with sources.
th-cam.com/video/OSAz-A7S8ow/w-d-xo.html
@@brianrcVids Ah great thank you! My eyes glanced right over that link in the description
@@brianrcVids more than one resources are needed. At least 5. There are always going to be fake articles on both sides I can find 'proof' for both, and obviously there isn't 2 answers.
@@someguy86 There are many studies and resources in the links. It's not about number. It's about quality. And evaluating the evidence.
He didn't include a review article by a researcher explaining why some studies are positive and some were negative. He's not giving you the whole story because he's biased.
This article is a peer reviewed review of the literature showing the studies that failed used strict research protocols, while the ones the were positive allowed farmers to vary techniques depending upon current need.
He also misrepresented that salatin doesn't believe his farm is sustainable. He only showed you a partial clip to take. It out of context.
Grazing management that regenerates ecosystem function and grazingland livelihoods
July 2017
African Journal of Range and Forage Science 34(2):1-10
Follow journal
DOI:
10.2989/10220119.2017.1334706
W.R. Teague
Matt Barnes
I'm glad to see you finally turned around on veganism. Environmentalists and vegans should be one and the same.
not really you can eat insects which is incomparably sustainable than veganism or eat more farm raised fish
5:40 - what a trick you are using. Life stock grazing uses 26% of livable land but includes all animals, so provides 27 gm protein per day per person, not 1 gm. The PDCASS & DIAAS Score of animal protein is very high compared to vegan sources. Most plant sources have 60% score, animal sources is above 90%. Quality of protein matters. And it’s not just about calories and protein, it is also about vitamins and minerals.
Protein is healthier and can be (but not always, as you pointed out) more abundant when sourced from plants
@@quinbydahl9907 That's complete nonsense.
@@btudrus What I say is true but I understand you not believing me, as the entire world has been led to believe that meat is healthy and essential in the human diet. You also claimed that growing plants is the worst thing for the environment, which I would love for you to try and explain to me.
@@quinbydahl9907 true brother....plant protein moreover is healthier if cooked in the right way
The focus here seems to be on beef and the message is eat more plants.
What about fish, wild caught salmon, mackerel, sardines. When it comes to carbon, sustainability and also nutrition?
I’ve see quite a few commercials recently about fast food chains using grass fed beef so this video came at the perfect time 😀
One note about “grass fed” is that it can also mean that the animals are raised on a factory farm but just fed harvested grass instead of grain.
He is not objective in this video trying to tell people about Allan Savory. His opinions is clearly affected by him being vegan and trying to justify this choice, which is a wrong foundation to build research on, and such an approach it will never lead to conclusions worth listing to.
I just can say: AMAZING!
Just last week I saw ”the sacred cow” documentary... and they advocated for rotational grazing, but they don’t really justify it very well. I got so many questions!!! But you just have answered them!
Thank you so so much!!!!
one side note that applies to this wider topic: since people have grazed since time immemorial, we've created semi-natural ecosystems that will NOT exist without grazing (my academic career is involved with alvars and agriculture). right now, as livestock is grown on a disgustingly massive, destructive scale, these habitats are being destroyed because it's not profitable in a capitalist system to graze in certain patterns in these (mostly coastal) habitats. semi-natural habitats host tons of rare species that have their niche in (mostly) only those habitats. if you must graze, do it where it's beneficial and helps preserve culture and tradition alongside nature. problems start arising when we do a study and think we've found a silver bullet and then try to apply the solution as the band-aid of the century all over the world, when normally solutions exist only within their extremely specific circumstances and contexts.
I don't think governments should actually subsidize plant based solutions. At least in my country, but i think this is the case in most of Europe, meat farmers receive a lot of subsidies. Most of the beef production in Belgium makes no profit at all and survives solely on subsidies. So if the subsidies towards meat farmers would just stop, the farmers would have to stop producing meat anyway. Now of course, leaving farmers totally without income would be unfair, but stopping subsidies to large industrial beef farms would be a start. The money that is freed up can be used to transition farmers towards plant based solutions.
Because the production of meat has lowered (because no subsidies) the price of meat should go up. This would then mean that plant based alternatives are most likely cheaper. Not only that, but the higher supply of plants might drop the price.
Besides, great content!
Absolutely excellent! I was concerned about your channel after seeing the video that pushed regenerative grazing as a solution, but I'm glad you came back to the topic and did some deeper research on it!
Not quite deep enough. Skimmed the surface.
fantastic video, but please add your sources to the description, or did you hide them anywhere else? :)
I normally love your videos, but there is a fair bit of commentary I'd like to make on this one, as it feels like a lot of the resources you used have unconsciously fallen victim to the very human tendency of having a conclusion and then finding evidence to support it.
3:52 This is an entirely unfair hit piece, as not only does Allan Savory say in the Ted talk, which you referenced, that his research shows that this was a mistake that they made with the best intentions, but that it pained him deeply to do this and is an error and painful memory he will take to his grave.
4:26 I didn't think this was the point of carbon sequestration arguments for holistic grassland management. I thought the argument was putting carbon back where it's supposed to be before humans denuded these landscapes. Perhaps people thought they could receive infinite CO2. They'd be wrong.
4:46 It's a carbon cycle. The cows don't conjure up CO2 and CH4 out of nowhere. They get it from the plants, who get it from the soil and atmosphere, which the soil gets it from the atmosphere and decaying plants and animal dung. The effect of livestock on carbon emissions has been overstated because this carbon is not coming from outside the cycle like fossil fuels are.
4:58 Beef would get more expensive because supply will be more limited by environmental factors. This is a good thing I'd say. There are cheaper and more environmentally friendly ways to get healthy proteins than beef, and by making beef cost the consumer what it should cost them, hopefully these other avenues will be further developed. (Legumes rock, just need to get menthionine from other sources)
5:45 This number is misleading, as an acre of land in California's central valley is not an acre of land in central Montana. The two have very different trophic potentials, and so marginal lands where we cannot grow human foods can still be used to support cows, sheep, and goats. Also factoring in that ruminants can eat silage, which is primarily composed of the parts of annual crops that we cannot eat, such as stalks of corn, they further increase the efficiency of land usage. Their manure can then be used to fertilize that field the silage comes from. This being said, grain fed beef is horrible. Ruminants aren't well adapted to eating grains so it worsens their health and quality of life, meanwhile these grains could be used to make human food. Ultimately, most healthy ecosystems have evolved to have animals within them, forests and grasslands and more, and if we want to make agricultural systems that mimic them we'll need some sort of animal for it, might as well make it an animal useful to us. I myself am partial to goats, chickens, and ducks as the three combined can eat just about everything we can't.
5:45 Yeah this is absolutely horrific. 100% agree here. This is where inequities in the world are a major problem, as agricultural subsidies in industrialized nations and free trade allow the low prices of crops to out compete developing nations, and so the only way these farmers can advance is to grow cash crops like coffee (if they can) or raise cash cows to then be able to afford the grain imports to feed themselves. Terrible situation caused mostly by greed and a fair bit of shortsightedness. If developed nations were to take those agricultural subsidies and redirect them to forest conservation and improvements in agricultural production in developing nations I don't think this would be as much of a problem.
The important takeaway is not actually all my critiques, but rather the red herring that meat is. As far as out of cycle carbon emissions go, it is a minor player. The energy and transportation industries produce way more emissions that are newly entering the carbon cycle. Once an ecosystem has stabilized, ruminants are merely completing the carbon cycle, not destroying it. The carbon sequestration potential is over hyped, and so are the emissions. I wouldn't be surprised if 30 years from now we learn the Koch brothers, Exxon-Mobil, etc. tried to take some of the heat off the fossil fuel industry by pointing fingers at agriculture. There's a lot wrong with agriculture, and frankly if we were to ignore climate change and just focus on everything else wrong with our agricultural system, solving those problems would solve the carbon emissions problem. Monsanto is the closest thing I've seen to true sociopathic evil I've seen on this planet. We should make agriculture the opposite of everything they do.
I'm a bit confused about the definition of "plant-rich". Does that mean not eating animal products at all? Or a certain percentage of one's diet being plants? Or eating chicken and fish but not beef? And is this assuming that a person is eating the most environmentally sustainable plants, or could this person potentially be eating like 5 avocados a day?
I honestly don't know what to think about this. I have been a big believer in rotational grazing or holistic grazing (whichever you want to call it). I think there needs to be more research on it, but I think reforestation should always be the goal, and i think animal integration is a huge part of that for the nutrients they bring and the speed at which they break down organic material. I just want to see a video really explaining the science on it. And not just flashing a bunch of hard to read papers on the screen, that would probably take hours to read.
I think you could say that it is better than what we are doing now. But a lot of people like to point at it as some great solution and absolutely no behaviour change is required. Production will inevitably be lower, that's why people came up with the idea of feeding cereal crops to cows in the first place (because it produces more output than grass).
Even with Salatin's farm, it kinda works at improving that particular piece of land, but they still require inputs in terms of animal feed (hay, alfafa, etc) brought onto the land, 'borrowing' the fertility from other pieces of land in the same way). It's an input/output thing. If you are taking meat, eggs, etc as outputs of the from the land, those nutrients are also removed unless you return in some way. (Many proponents of regenerative grazing seem to act like animals are this endless generator of manure and nutrients). And this nutrient flow is one way to the cities. (Unless we return human 'manure' back to the farms from the cities). As of right now, with the major nutrients of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium; only phosphorus is a finite resource. Nitrogen can be fixed with the haber process from the air (energy intensive, requires natural gas), and potassium is pretty much limitless. We are dumping most of our phosphorus as treated sewage, and relying on mined phosphorus deposits from the western sahara.
I think at the end of the day, there is an extremely strong case for eating way way less meat than most people currently so. If you imagine a world where intensive animal agriculture is replaced by rotational grazing, you are going to produce way less on the same amount of land. And given that we have already replaced most of the wild animal biomass on this earth with domesticated animals, there is a strong case for not going further and consuming even more land for animal agriculture (trying to preserve as much of nature we still have left, particularly forests). Once upon a time, meat was a infrequent luxury, but people have come to expect it at every meal the richer everyone gets. And it's supplying this demand that causes a lot of the problem relating to habitat destruction.
So from my own contemplation of this question, relying on eating a diet that is mostly plant-based is probably the way to go in terms of environmental sustainability (lower down on the trophic pyramid, ie. more efficient). Rotational grazing will probably work at a certain scale, but will not be able to produce the amount of cheap meat that people have come to become used to (and that's why even now, you see the price difference between grain and grass-fed beef). We are probably a long way off from ever converting farmland back fo forests, but at least we can try to slow down the rate of deforestation that is already happening. Like Pollan's 'Eat Food, not too much, mostly plants.
*Sorry that turned into a ramble. Wrote this on mobile, so it came more like a train of thought for me.
there is research done in the 1960s it's being suppressed because if does not fit the agenda21/30 or what ever .. they restored an entire eco system.... using keystone animals
see Wildebeests Are Saving The Serengeti
I agree, these videos can be frustrating because they flash so much at you with little context. Like the clip of Joel Saltain that cut of mid sentence, he might've followed it up with 'I call my farm positive output' or whatever you get what I mean. I fear that Vegans slander this system because they have moral problems with anything that kills animals, equally big meat eaters tend to look at this with rose tinted glasses because of course we want to keep eating meat. It's a tricky question but very engaging, I'd love to go and study this kinda thiing.
I don't understand your claim that cows emit net positive greenhouse gas. Aren't they part of a cycle? They are not releasing any trapped greenhouse gases.
The fact that governments heavily subsidize meat and dairy industries instead of favoring produce subsidies and moving to more sustainable farming practices is quite sad. Hope this will change in future years.
hey, great quality video but I think you are missing a few points here. would you be open to debate Robb wolf on this?
I realize you have a difficult job, trying to distill incredibly complex problems into 10 minute digestible soundbites for TH-cam, but this video is pretty disappointing.
First off, Allan Savory mentions in his own talks how wrong he was to order the killing of the elephants. But you've used it here to set up a strawman against him.
Second, you've used that Joel Salatin clip out of context to make it work for your own argument. He is actually speaks just before this that he thinks people should be consuming less poultry and really increasing their consumption of plants. But hey, whatever gets more clicks, right?
Similarly, I saw a lot of "exciting" and inflammatory titles pulled from media outlets. These are not great sources. Please use actual research to support the claims you make--not just the ones you are trying to argue against. That is, perhaps there are not a lot of studies looking at rotational grazing because (a) there are fewer people farming this way and/or (b) fewer people funding studies into this way of farming or (c) some other reason. Just because these studies are currently "outliers", does not make them wrong.
Finally, this is a really complex problem. You have determined the consumption of animal meat to be a major problem. But I think you are missing too many pieces of the puzzle, because if I waved a magic wand tomorrow and made everybody a vegetarian--guess what--there would still be climate change and the food system would still be broken. You haven't considered food sovereignty, food security, nutrition, and just basic soil science fundamentals like the carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus cycles. A one-size-fits-all solution will not work for agriculture.
If anybody reading this comment is interested in learning more, I'd really recommend:
Textbooks:
-Environment and Food by Colin Sage
-Nature and Property of Soils by Weil & Brady
-Agroecology: The Ecology of Sustainable Food Systems by Stephen Gliessman
-Food Sovereignty: Reconnecting Food, Nature and Community by Wittman, Desmarais, and Wiebe
Non-Textbooks:
-Wilding by Isabella Tree
-Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations by Montgomery
And if you have any for me, I'd be interested to hear!
Thank you for this!!
As well, he left out the review study by veteran regenerative ag researcher Teague. He was perplexed as to why his studies showed positive results consistently whole others failed. He found they the ones they failed use strict research protocols, while the ones that showed positive results allowed farmers flexibility to change depending upon their needs.
Here's the study.
www.researchgate.net/publication/318431266_Grazing_management_that_regenerates_ecosystem_function_and_grazingland_livelihoods
@@carnivoreisvegan very interesting! Will give it a read!
I really enjoyed the book "Wilding" by Isabella Tree, because as a non-scientist she does a fantastic job of pointing out a lot of the biases that exist in science, especially when it comes to things like restoration and conservation. I would highly recommend :)
Hello ! What is the source of your graph with the rate of soil carbon sequestration vs. years is grass ? Is it the study from The Food Climate Rsearch Network ? Do you have the link of this study ? Thanks a lot :)
It's just another excuse for livestocks farmers to continue what they are doing. The problem is not HOW it is executed, but that it IS executed. A huge part of our global population should change to a plant-based diet in order to stop the problem. We should also improve the ability of cities to capture carbon, for example, in the form of Green Building! Btw, excellent video :D
Yeah. Unfortunately, being able to switch to a plant based diet is a privilege a lot of people don't have. Being green is expensive, and not everyone can afford that. Luckily, I can cut down on my meat, but not everyone can.
@@Hope_IsNotMyName true. Though, I think that’s because how the world and system is organized. Meat is cheaper/more accesible as the production and demand is a lot higher. If that would be the case for plant-based products, it would be a lot cheaper I guess..
Makes you wonder what would happen if the government quit subsidizing meat and dairy farmers and let the market decide prices. Would beef become the most expensive food? Would the market balance itself?
I knew this from intuitive logical deduction as being someone who’s paid close attention to environmental issues for over 20 years. I knew it’s not sustainable to farm cattle vast majority of the time, regardless of method. But hard to find material that both breaks it down and puts all the pieces together to show the bigger whole picture. Thank you🙏
re: 4:09, I hadn't watched Savory's talk so I didn't know who this “Joel Salatin” you were suddenly mentioning was. I assume they were an example from the talk or otherwise a prominent rotational grazer?
Joel salatin is a rotational cow farmer
Hey sorry! My mistake. He's a prominent rotational grazer in the US. He's kind of become a meat farming celebrity in the regenerative ag space.
Charlie, I gotta ask, and just for my own curiosity. Do you eat a plant based diet?
You misrepresented Joel Salatin's remark at 4:11! He's actually saying that it's not sustainable as it's better than sustainable as it's regenerative and not only builds up topsoil but also produces more nutrient dense food, both plant and animal-based :D
Here we are again...
...the endless fight between vegans and carnivores...
When the real problem is not WHAT is consumed, but HOW MUCH is consumed!
And the problem is that there are too many people who eat meat and do not want to reduce their consumption. I'm all for plant-based and synthetic meat and dairy. That will help us all.
@@miniboulanger0079 Actually, when someone pretends that a problem has a complex solution is usually because they refuse to accept the simplest solution.
The obvious solution to environmental problems would be to return to the past, when humanity was less numerous, less bulimic and less sophisticated, despite eating both meat and plants.
But noooooo, this simple solution doesn't allow for the ideological fight between left-wing vegans and right-wing carnivores!
@@Faustobellissimo how do you propose we “return to the past” then? how is that simpler
@@Julela5353 I said "simpler", I didn't say "easier".
Almost no human is a carnivore, at least none that live long. Humans evolved as omnivores. This is the same false association as protein=animal flesh, when in fact protein is found abundantly in both plants and animals. This is not a fight between two broad camps - that is for either/or thinkers. The challenge is grow the integrity and quality of life for humans as dependent upon the environment. The science is on this issue is now as self-evident as the science for climate change, and for toxicity and pollutions on human health (both of which unethically opposed by the industries that profit greatly off the public not knowing). The solution is simple because the correlation turns out to be causation. Massive increased meat consumption for the last 200 years is a main driver for all the issues mentioned in the video. There can be a debate about what to do about it. However, there is no valid argument for a "win-win" scenario. Things have to change less we keep down the path of ruin.
well i think that regenerative holitic grazing does help. it might not sequester as much greenhouse gas than what allan savory said but it can regenerate the ecosystem and it can help the soil heal. the point that allan savory, charlie massy, peter andrews and others is that regen ag can help heal the ecosystem, produce healthier food, increase biodiversity, increase resilience and help farmers have better mental health. that is the point of regen ag, helping the ecosystem, not sequestering all the greenhouse gas. it can sequester a large amount and help fight climate change.
"reforestation" doesn't work in areas that are supposed to be grasslands and rewilding is all well and good but won't reverse desertification fast enough as the density of existing ruminants isn't high enough. Rewildind and holistical grazing are not in conflict with eachother as the savory Institutes main goal is about restoring biodiversity. All of the land that the savory Institute has worked with has seen an increase in biodiversity and Isabella Tree of the Knepp rewilding project in England consorted the savory hub on advice when adding grazing mammals like cattle, deer, horses and logs to actually increase bio diversity
Comparing meat generated co2 to vehicles is not fair. The co2 created by meat is already in atmosphere which is then again locked by the grass/other plants and the cows are fed that again. But when we talk about vehicles, the co2 is permenantly locked up underground and we dig it up and release it into atmosphere, and it has no where to go so it stays in atmosphere. So unlike meat where co2 is already in atmosphere and keeps rotating, fuel that vehicles burn adds up additional co2 in the atmosphere.
Like so many other climate-related challenges, we know what the solution is here, a steady transition away from meat. We just need strong political action and the will of consumers to enact it.
Lol no. Tribal people eat meat and they’re the most stable and environmentally friendly amongst everyone in this planet. The answer destroying agriculture altogether and lowering the human population back to hunter gatherers
Why do videos like this ignore how millions of buffalo once roamed the American plains? Thousands of years ago herds of herbivores roamed across the ice bridge from Asia to the Americas. Grass fed herbivores is as natural as it gets. Returning cattle to their native environment is a win-win situation.
I think your completely wrong, it's like saying electric cars are the way forward to reduce emissions but everyone has to have one for that to work... of course there is a proper way to graze cattle on grass. Some farmers do it right some do it wrong. You can't just say grass fed beef isn't sustainable just because some farmers in America haven't got it right yet. You didn't even mention any other countries. Here in the uk 70% of beef farms are carbon neutral if not more. Beef is a big problem in the states and it needs changing for the future of everyone and farming it self. Us beef farmers get all the blame when usa beef farms are dragging us down.
Could you explain exactly what is on the x and y axes of the "Rates of Soil Carbon Sequestration" graph that shows how soils come to C equilibrium? Thanks!
Anyone else watched cowspiracy?
Yes!
Even cowspiracy was forced to retract their insane numbers.
Who needs brilliant when this channel is brilliant
There was more Buffalo on the plains in North America at the turn of the century than there is commercial beef nowadays. Something to think about.
Any source on that?
Im from Argentina, sadly we are proud of eat, produce and export a lot of good meat. But nobody is aware of the problems that it causes and the economy of the country is not allowing to change the way we generate money for the country
I remember watching your old video about grazing and thought something didn't sound right. Your my favorite creator on youtube and I'm really glad you corrected that view. Misinformation is rampant with this topic and although there was a lot of good info in that old vid, maybe take it down?
Live reaction :
00:35 I do not remember the scientifist saying we should eat more meat.
03:57 he also said that it was it's greatest mistake and that he did not take this act willfully.
Okay, before anyone reads this message, let it be clear that I do not vow for any denial to the existential crisis we face. I just want this channel to produce the best thing possible but I feel like this video is of lower quality. So here now, read the message :
Frankly, I'm disappointed by your video. It feels biased and though fact checked, I would have liked to see some well known source (FAO for instance). The scientist did not vow for massification of cattle ranching. He just pointed out that it worked in savannas and arid regions, where growing food is nearly impossible half of the year. Having myself not cut the grass in my garden for 6 months, the terrain is in a terrible state and the soil is covered by moss, which is bad for biodiversity. That's because the grass died in summer and fell into an opaque blanket. When we finally mowed the lawn in early October, some grass sproute back, but we still have much moss left. Hopefully next year we can take some goats to mow it naturally and create a local ecosystem where bugs and cats "play" together xD.
Pastoralism is older than agriculture, so I see no point in avoiding it when necessary. I do not see how you could grow crops in Mongolia for instance, where temperatures never exceed 16°C. Maybe you should have made clearer that it was for Temperate climates, which only half of the world population inhabit.
To end on a positive note, I would like you to know that I find the rest of your videos pretty intelligent and interesting, well documented. And as a suggestion, maybe you could do a video on artificial meat because I really feel like this is a big hoax (electricity, chemicals, health ...).
great response, well thought out
Killing 40k elephants because they’re a problem to their own habitat ? Is this guy real life Thanos ??!
I don't know the numbers, but in Southern Africa elephants have to be culled regularly when they get to numerous for the parks in which they are protected and thrive, otherwise the habitat cannot support them. Elephants destroy a lot of trees.
He did that according to the conventional scientific wisdom at the time which holistic grazing actually challenges/debunks. Elephants are doing much better now at Allan Savory's Zimbabwe farm under holistic grazing
@@hendrikbarboritsch7003 Isn't that because these elephants are constrained to small areas due them not being allowed in farmed lands? Common sense says big animals need big lands.
@@ixian_technocrat Ding ding ding! This. They’re basically restricted and have to be “controlled” because they’re losing their natural habitat to agriculture, like most other wildlife across the planet. The problem with elephants is that they’re huge so can do real damage to infrastructure such as fencing, crops, etc. Wildlife control is one of the unseen costs of farming. In the USA it’s wolves and other predators, in the UK it’s foxes, deer and birds, etc etc. Everywhere there is farming there is the inconvenience of wildlife. It’s a war that nature will lose every single time, unfortunately.
It wasn't conventional knowledge. At the time he was criticised as well. He has always been a crank.
This channel absolutely worth more!
I enjoyed listening to this but I have to talk about you discussing subsidies for veggies and fruit instead of meat. Many governments already give subsidies to the animal agriculture industry to keep them afloat. It is this subsidy AND mass factory farming that makes meat so much cheaper than fruit and veg
Thank you for making this video! I just watched Kiss the Ground (which gave me culty vibes) and heard about someone starting a RA cattle farm but looking at that exact paper you showed I wasn’t so sure. I had a problem with how they converted methane to CO2 amounts. They used the 100year equivalency when CH4 is way more potent when you look at the 20 year equivalent. They can’t guarantee sequestration for more than that either. I think no till and RA farming has a role to play but for the reasons you stated I don’t think it’s a perfect fix.
Actuelly, it's just the opposite. Ruminant methane is far less potent using the ipcc's new calculations using gwp* (the star is intentiondl). After 20 years, methane from ruminant herds has essentially degraded, meaning world livestock.herds, being stable in number for 20 years (actuelly thousands if you count wild ruminant herds in the same numbers) they they no longer contribute to warming.
Listen to this Farmgate podcast with Dr myles allen of the ipcc
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ruminant-methane-global-warming-gwp/id1490590788?i=1000461901050
Regenerative grazing is such a confusing topic. Those who use it swear by it, but the science is certainly flaky.
Not flaky, wrong.
@@kindclaw6605 with all due respect, are you a rancher? Do you have any experience with grazing animals?
The goal is to try and mimic ruminants’ natural environment as much as possible. Instead of having natural predators to rotate/move animals, use fences. Such farmers may be adamant because they see consistent results of local environments improving with these methods.
@@fred4141 Having experience with grazing animals doesn't make a rancher an environmetal scientist. The problem is already in the education of the participants of animal agriculture. And only these believe this misinformation and as I have found out ignore quickly everything to the contrary and say something like sience is flaky / some studies say this and some studies say that. And they ignore that there is always a scientific consensus even if a few studies tell a diffrent story (because of bias, a to small dataset or because a wrong methodology)
One of the scientists doing regenerative ag studies that ended up positive a bunch of times was perplexed that some studies didn't come out positive when all of his did. He wrote a peer reviewed review in it and came to the conclusion that all the studies they had strict study protocols that didn't allow fwrmers to vary depending upon conditions failed, while the ones they gave farmers the lead to change according to local conditions were positive. Here's his rewiew study.
Grazing management that regenerates ecosystem function and grazingland livelihoods
July 2017
African Journal of Range and Forage Science 34(2):1-10
Follow journal
DOI:
10.2989/10220119.2017.1334706
W.R. Teague
Matt Barnes
To be honest, when i saw the allan savory ted talk recently before seeing this, what i understood was that we should work towards regenerating ecosystems by bringing back the different animals that make up the system that were driven away like plants, herbivores and carnivores and all that and that a stable ecosystem does consequently bring back soil quality and stop desertification and keep water. Maybe it was because I had watched about keystone species and the serengeti rules prior. Which i realize sounds better than what these people were advocating
I feel you may have missed the point; savory’s point was to regenerate degraded lands to allow a higher organic matter top soil then for the cattle to fade away as bigger (native) plants reestablish? I might be wrong but I thought that was the idea?
Yes, vegans are misrepresenting Savory to smear him because they want to eliminate animal ag instead of improving the world with animal ag.
Could someone help me find a study that shows actual methane emissions from gas fed cattle? I have only been able to find the one that estimates a hypothetical amount under the assumption that grass fed cattle emit the same level as feedlot cattle. Were grass fed cattle emissions actually tested?
I remember reading a guardian article not so long ago saying that if you count the farmland that is used to grow food for animals and the land animals use. They use about 83% of ALL farmland in the world, but only contribute 16% of the calories.
@Juba - يوبا - ⵊⵓⴱⴰ Yeah, love that channel
I have heard that agriculture were responsible for only 4% of greenhouse emissions, others say that it contributes a third or half of it. What's true? Well, meat eaters say 4%, vegans would say at least half. I do not see how I could take any of you serious. It is certainly difficult to achieve unbiased scientific data on those problems, and your cherry-picking, driven by your agendas, doesn't make it any better. Crop farming's impact on greenhouse emission is dangerously underestimated, that's for sure. When you cultivate moors and change them into crop land - which we have done in Germany by the hundreds of thousands of hectares to produce "green energy" via bio mass - the very first tilling sets free some so and so many thousand tons, I forgot, more than anything else. It takes decades for green energy to make up for that, let alone the anual consumption of diesel, fertilizers and pesticides for biomass production. We had 60% of our agricultural land as grasland after WW II, we have less than 30% now. Grasland can only be turned into food via ruminants. So we relied much more upon that food source then than we do now. Up to today the world's agriculural land consists by two thirds of grasland, although the actual percentage is declining throughout the world.
Ground has to be covered, always was. Bare freshly ploughed ground looks and smells amazing - I am a farmer. But meat does not destroy the climate. The way we produce it matters through. Here's my tribute to George Carlin, my revised and updated list of the eleven commandments:
1. Eat local produce.
2. Eat seasonal produce.
3. Favour food from regenerative agriculture.
4. Plough less, plant no-till, use cover crops and crop rotation.
5. Encourage local subsistency systems, permaculture and agroforstry.
6. Focus on good, high-yielding crops with high nutritional value (i.e. potatoes deliver ten times the calories of grain per hectare, who came up with these grain crops anyway, it's the least effective way to use acreage).
7. Integrate livestock farming into your system/farm (the segregation of crops versus livestock is a large scale farming systems' invention of very questionable benefit).
8. Reduce the use of pesticides, fertilizers, gmos and water as far as possible.
9. Feed ruminants with gras, hay, gras silage and by-products, not with crops.
10. Consider reimplementation of draft animals where feasible.
11. Get that stick out of your rear entrance and do what you've known for ages needs to be done.
But none of that will happen, because you want to breed that famous sire that revolutionizes the breed (=wipes it out), and ride that self-propelled air seeder over those 1100 acre plots of land, don't you? Pity, folks. It would be so, so easy...
HOLISTIC MANAGEMENT IS NOT ROTATIONAL GRAZING
You deserve so many more subscribers! Very high quality and underrated channel
He is not objective in this video trying to tell people about Allan Savory. His opinions is clearly affected by him being vegan and trying to justify this choice, which is a wrong foundation to build research on, and such an approach it will never lead to conclusions worth listing to.
Amazing how you dive into the complex topic and explain us what's going on in clear language!
OK, so regenerative farming is possible without grazing, as replacement for our monoculture and artificial fertilizer based industrial agriculture. But what about desertification in areas where intensive farming is not the culprit?
Do what post civil war botanists do, plant crops that can feed crops. For example, peanuts. I was watching a video on the history of George Washington carvir and he was known for peanuts specificly, for refurtalizing soil after the huge boom and plantings of cotton; which defurtalized the soil after the civil war, even before and after.
Humanity is not worth saving if it stays speciesist. "Animal Liberation" by Peter singer should be read in every school on earth.
yea no
Please read Alans Book. You clearly didn't because Alan's claims are not as generalized as you state in this video. In his book he starts by explaining the different environments from lush/fertile in moderate climates to more brittle/dryer environments. He certainly doesn't claim we all should eat more grass-fed beef, instead he has proven that increasing stock levels and increasing the rotation restores ecologies in brittle environments. I appreciate your work to create more awareness for climate change, but please don't burn down hero's like Alan Savory in the process unless you have done enough research yourself. That means reading books, not only scanning the internet voor narrowly focused research abstracts. It would be nice to publish a correction on this in his honor. Have a great day!
I think you are mixing up carbon emissions with methane emissions from cows. The grassland practice of ploughing soil releases carbon, not the act of grazing itself. That's how it seems you interpreted it. Grazing rotationally is still better than feed lots for producing meat, the amount of time the animal is alive for isn't the driving factor of emissions, the stocking rate is.
Uh-oh! If ruminating cows are a problem, then we need to also hunk about ridding the planer of ruminating buffalo, deer, wilda beasts, water buffalo, antelopes , wild goats and sHeep, etc!
Though I'm usually a fan of your videos, I feel like you didn't research both sides of the issue that well. There's more to a healthy climate than methane emissions. There's also fossil fuels and chemicals involved in monocropping to both feed vegetarians and industrially raised animals which have a far greater cost than considering an animal based alternative. Also how do methane emissions of cows actually compared to the fossil fuel industry? You've definitely seemed to repeat a lot of misleading stats of a certain side of the debate while not considering the full picture.
Monocropping isn’t used to “feed vegenatrians”, ffs it’s mainly used to feed animals, sometimes PEOPLE. “Vegetarians” don’t eat a substantially larger amount of plant food than your average meat-eater, so why would you pin monocropping on them specifically? To talk about the alternatives to raising animals industrially without comparing those methods to the plant-based equivalent (which OCC did with reference to no-till farming), is truly not looking at both sides. This comment is really hypocritical.
@@farmpunk_dan in my original comment I said "to feed both vegetarians and industrially raised animals...". Did not intend to pin this on vegetarians. Hope that helps
@@purplkaret don't you eat pasta? Or beans? Or some form of corn? We ended up where we are now with lots of monocrops with a less than 10% vegetarian population and you put them as equal culprits of monocroping as industrially farmed animals? c'mon Animal consumers are the culprit!
@@Danirio96 I personally try to avoid such food products, but I know that is an issue with commercially available traditionally farmed animals. As a consumer, I only purchase local regeneratively farmed meat and animal products, meaning they are not being fed by monocrops. As someone with pretty severe allergies to a variety of plant products, I acknowledge that while avoiding meat products is a solution for some, I would like an acknowledgement from people who choose veganism that it isn't the solution for everyone. With that basis, we can begin to discuss the best approaches to both animal and vegetable consumption. I think it's important as consumers to rethink farming and food as a whole, with the climate and the animals' wellbeing in mind. Hope that clarifies where my initial comment.
Ok so a cow makes methane So what. She made it out of natural things. She did not create it from nothing. She never added too or subtracted from what is already here and always present.
It's going to take everyone's active participation for us to make actual strides. Loved the video, thank you!
which shows the impracticality of the proposed solution.
The answer is to know your farmer. Doesn’t matter what you eat. That’s the only true way to know what you’re eating, and it’s effects on the planet. Grass-fed beef practices rather than conventional row crop beef production, would be extremely beneficial for our planet. Consider how much row cropping and even vegetable cropping sequesters carbon compared to holistic farming. I think this report is holding some claims against holistic grazing as self evident, when they are not black and white. As a holistic farmer myself, it comes as no shock that I dispute your claims but, I’m living the scenario out.
most plant sludge ends up rotting at the dump while creating methane gases
This video is golden!
Thank you for your work🙏
The argument of author is outright wrong. Savory is used for natural grassland. Like Savannah. Not a forest to convert to grazing field. Check American desertification in the absence of buffaloe.
Desertification is a complex topic with numerous approaches. And the rate of desertification is far too fast for this to even be a contender. And I didn't look into this but it wouldn't surprise me if he's wrong about that as well.
The impact of cattle in Co2 emmission in developed countries like USA or France is about 2/4% of total emission.
To stop eating meat won't have the same positive impact than stoping all transport, because transportation represent way more in term of emission...
lets talk about the methane gases vegans make aka farting all day 8 billion farting vegans with rotting plant sludge in their gut
I think people will realize that any kind of beef just isn't sustainable and will transition to plant-based diets over time. At least, that's what I'm hoping! Great video, well researched!