[gen220]

("We" below refers to the US, and an increasing proportion of the world that is adopting US farming practices).

There's a good-natured argument to be made that plant-based diets are more sustainable, because we don't generally farm meat sustainably and ensuring that your meat was farmed sustainably is difficult and expensive.

But it's important to underline that sustainable is an insufficient target in the U.S. in 2023. The motion we need is regenerative.

I don't think regenerative farming can be done efficiently without ethical use of livestock.

This is all to say: if you view the health and quality of our food chain as a higher priority than the ethical concerns of consuming meat, you should reconsider your approach to diet construction.

That being said, it's an expensive lifestyle, and will remain expensive as long as our society continues to subsidize processed foods. If we want to generalize a healthier food chain, we have to change the incentive structures that led us here.

[myshpa]

Alan Savory? Regenerative holistic farming? It's mostly bullshit (not my words), apparently.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36826277

[ben_w]

Can you elaborate what you mean by "regenerative"?

I'm anchoring on things like crop rotation for soil nitrogen, but that doesn't feel quite right for your comment, somehow?

[gen220]

It’s a bit of a ramble, but to give you the oeuvre: the problem is that our fruits, vegetables and legumes are not as nutritious today as they were decades ago. The hypothesis motivating regenerative agriculture, is that the explanation for this fact is that we treat soil as a lifeless medium for growing crops, rather than as an organic contributor to a natural ecosystem.

Relevant to this thread, Animals are a core component of a natural ecosystem. This includes grazers, insects and predators. Healthy soil is living soil, full of bacteria that literally digest their environment into free nutrients for a crop to draw from. If we aim to fuel human civilization from the earth, there’s no free lunch — an equal amount of nutrients have to be returned to the earth, and animal husbandry (and consumption) are the historical solutions to this problem.

Regenerative agriculture is agriculture that works in harmony with a living soil and its ecosystem. It means consuming more perennials than annuals, growing polycultures (e.g. the three sisters) instead of monocultures, using crop rotation to let soil lay fallow while it’s used to service the needs of animals.

It’s basically the application of permaculture principles to agronomy.

Other people in this thread have fixated on the climate aspect, and while this is certainly one big motivation for regenerative farming, IMO an equally large one is health — we are fundamentally not as healthy today as our grandparents were at the same age (in terms of cancer incidence, fertility issues, chronic inflammation, diabetes, etc.), and the food chain is an obvious place to scrutinize.

In theory, could you synthesize the perfect cocktail of organic molecules to fertilize soil for healthy crops?

Perhaps, but consider this: would it be less expensive and carry fewer negative externalities than maintaining a herd of animals that have literally co-evolved with these crops for millennia? Especially when you account for the ancillary benefits cattle husbandry (seasonal access to dairy, meat and leather as the herd is culled, etc.)?