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by _c3ag 940 days ago
regenerative farming couldn't be replicated [0] by anyone...

[0] https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2017-2-march-april/feature...

seriously, how do you expect land regenerating by adding thousands of cattle on it? if you roam in Brazil, you can find almost deserts in vegetation that have RICH diversity like the Pantanal, just because livestock was managed there for +25 years! and then owners stop activity for a number of years (to let flora thrive) to later raise corn or soy, which is way less aggressive and with modern practices they (the farms) have lifespans (if well managed) predicted by biologists of almost 100 years. (i worked in one for a brief period of time)

the guy who proposed the "regenerative agriculture" movement always made big money from livestock and at some point even got in-between the government with a freaking study that concluded that they had to kill ~ 40,000 elephants (and they killed) for maintaining the health of the ecosystem.......... ⟨i think if we still made billiard balls out of elephants tusks, i wouldn't be surprised if that guy had a company that made them⟩

if you want to dive in esoteric practices to thrive food and sustainability, go vegan and maybe take a look at stuff like this [which doesn't have any meaningful replication so far]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S18773... & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_G%C3%B6tsch

2 comments

This is a more nuanced issue than this comment would lead you to believe. "the guy" is probably referencing Allan Savory, check out his Ted Talk about the elephant story. He gets a lot of undeserved aggression. Here's a link to some of Savory's responses to the Manbiot ("go vegan") perspective - https://savory.global/statement-on-the-allan-savory-george-m...
the person execute a poor study on ecosystem, concludes that 40,000 elephants should be killed to maintain other organisms... and he shouldn't be target of aggression? who knows if their political and military involvement didn't took part on the government liberating that shit! the guy cares _so much_ about life/sustainability that still eat meat/cheese (like mammals other than humans are really primitive creatures) and has livestock under his belt

also, have you read the first link i send? his studies on land regeneration includes areas that were recovering after expelling livestock... this guy and his practice is a joke. not even entering into other sensible topics like animal welfare, production and efficiency of the kingdom plantae/fungi vs. animalia etc.

maybe they should read a bit what science is observing and concluding after hundreds of years of research in something summarized like; https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.1201/97814200466...

edit: i mean, sure, everyone makes mistakes. sometimes they cost an entire set of thousands of mammals but the problem is after that, trying to lure consumers into a practice that not even 50 years of research on the subject concluded anything relevant [0] (to the point that we can't even differentiate efficiency between the default way of letting cattle pasture vs. holistic management), shouldn't be other motif to rant?. caring for the environment should be a black and white resolution with the best tools we have right now. life is too precious to fuck just because you want a steak at your table... and we know, for a long time that going vegan is the best way! or at least stop this freaking modern consumerism of animal products.

[0]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338777621_A_half_ce...

> caring for the environment should be a black and white resolution

I've been thinking on that since I was a wee lad. The best tools are impossible to find, it is hard to explain why we shouldn't to X any more since we now know that Y is the better tool and X makes Y impossible. I still think we should try X and Y, it's just a really hard communication issue. It is not helped by using ambivalent words like "the environment".

Skimmed the paper you cite and it mentions that it is hard to talk about this since flame wars make people very careful.

impossible to find? we even have suggestions from nutrition orgs. that moving to a plant based diet can save us billions of dollars because health will improve!

apart from health, we already know that plants are more efficient than meat by an order of magnitude, any day, any time & don't cite "places that we can't raise crops" because that doesn't cut our consumption rate... unless you are living at and like a rural Kazakhstan citizen. there are 20,000 edibles plants so far, why do we need meat and cheese?

and i can't see much of a flame wars regarding this. the only people defending its practice are those using it. bad science is everywhere and taking down conclusions by playing the victim of a flame wars is to support absurd practices. like the 21st century psychoanalysis (which couldn't prove itself better than placebo), homeopathy dissolving doses of medicine in bazillions of liters (seriously?) etc.

it feels that socially we are dumb enough (to not know even how to communicate) that less than 100 years ago we throw 2 nuclear bombs on human settlements, we made propaganda of cigarettes with Tour de France cyclists and so on. ~ 500 years ago we reached America rapping people and building churches to talk about heaven

I don't know what weird tangent the Sierra Club went off into, but here's Wikipedia on the subject[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regenerative_agriculture