
We should discuss soil as much as coal (2019) - hkh
https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/We-should-discuss-soil-as-much-as-coal
======
grawprog
Industrial agriculture has plenty more problems than just cow farts and carbon
dioxide released from disturbed soil. Still on the vein of CO₂ emissions
there's the large amounts of industrial machinery, vehicles and other such
things that are powered by fossil fuels and release large amounts of CO₂.

Then on the vein of soils, we're actually running out of arable soil. Soil
erosion is a huge problem around the world and industrial farming is a large
part of the problem. Farm plots are never left to fallow and replenish, all
nutrients and organic matter are stripped out and replaced with liquid
chemical fertilizers, that run off the fields and pollute waterways.

Not to mention, fertilizers, globally, phosphate reserves are beginning to
deplete. At some point in the next 50-100 years, we'll have come close to
completely running out. Industrial agriculture is heavily dependent on
phosphorous.

[https://foodprint.org/issues/how-industrial-agriculture-
affe...](https://foodprint.org/issues/how-industrial-agriculture-affects-our-
soil/)

[https://www.nrdc.org/stories/industrial-agricultural-
polluti...](https://www.nrdc.org/stories/industrial-agricultural-
pollution-101)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_phosphorus](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_phosphorus)

~~~
tengbretson
You have almost all of this backwards. The more "industrial" the farm, the
more likely they are to employ the precision methods to address the issues you
raise. Talk to any major farmer and they will tell you all about how nutrients
are managed down to the square foot or smaller to reduce waste application.
The tech that makes no-till planting viable, which is one of the most
important ways to reduce erosion and increase sequestration is being adopted
by the biggest players first. Advances in no-till and pesticide technology are
reducing the number of tractor passes per field per year dramatically.

~~~
latch
Really? Source? One of the most comprehensive study on the topic (1), says:

"Our food system has put the focus on short-term production and profit rather
than long-term environmental sustainability. The modern agricultural system
has resulted in huge increases in productivity, holding off the risk of famine
in many parts of the world but, at the same time, is based on monocultures,
genetically modified crops, and the intensive use of fertilizers and
pesticides that undermine long-term sustainability. Food production accounts
for 70 per cent of all freshwater withdrawals and 80 per cent of
deforestation, while soil, the basis for global food security, is being
contaminated, degraded, and eroded in many areas, resulting in long-term
declines in productivity."

USCUSA isn't in love with industrial farming either (2):

"Monoculture degrades soil structure and leaves it more vulnerable to erosion,
resulting in costs for soil replacement, cleanup, and lost farmland value."

Maybe major farmers aren't the most objective not most qualified group of
people to assess the sustainability and [unpaid-for] externalities of their
output?

(1)
[https://www.unccd.int/sites/default/files/documents/2017-09/...](https://www.unccd.int/sites/default/files/documents/2017-09/GLO_Full_Report_low_res.pdf)

(2) [https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/hidden-costs-industrial-
agr...](https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/hidden-costs-industrial-agriculture)

~~~
donw
Both of the links you provided are to political action groups.

It's like linking either the NRA or Everytown/Moms Demand/March For Our Lives
(they rebrand a lot) "studies" on gun control.

Both have very clear objectives, and are quite happy to twist -- or sometimes
outright fabricate[1]! -- data and facts.

[1] [https://massshootingtracker.org](https://massshootingtracker.org)

~~~
hannob
You didn't just write that the UN is a "political action group" and compared
it to the NRA?

~~~
Mrdarknezz
This is the group that put China as the chair of it's Human rights council.

~~~
madacoo
Which arguably makes the NRA look reasonable in comparison.

------
kickout
Bill is correct on a lot fronts here. Soil is the big elephant in the room.
But the problem remains an economic problem as much as a technical one. We
need solutions that are market driven (in addition to the cool innovations he
talks about). [https://thinkingagriculture.io/carbon-sequestering-
incentive...](https://thinkingagriculture.io/carbon-sequestering-incentives-
who-wins/)

~~~
Cthulhu_
"Market driven"? The market has had its chance; "it" is focusing on short-
term, optimized profits, on cutting down the rainforests to make way for
shitty farms to grow cheap shit to feed to cattle, etc. Some consumers have
the funds and the will to buy food from more reputable sources, but I'm
confident there's a lot of scummy stuff happening there too.

The market won't solve this; it's time for legislation to control the market
before it wrings out everything. We live in an age now where even politicians
are wringing out everything they can from a country, funneling billions to
themselves and their friends, leaving the country in shambles while they
retire to their private islands because hey, not their problem anymore.

~~~
sputr
I think your unecesserally criticising the person your commenting on.

They never said free/unregulated market. They just said market driven.

Markets and market forces are tools. If left unregulated they, as you pointed
out, devolve into optimising for the short term and the narrow bad of
monetisable effects (ie the problem of externalities).

But a regulated market is a force to be recond with, and if properly
regulated, a force for a lot of good.

So you are both right. We need market solutions (as those are most effective)
but within a regulated market that makes sure that market forces are pushing
everyone in the direction that is good for society.

------
walleeee
Agriculture must become net carbon neutral if not negative to confront the
effects of climate change. As Gates mentions, soils comprise a larger carbon
reservoir than the atmosphere. A successful strategy may include the following
(likely necessary but not necessarily sufficient) prongs:

\- halting deforestation as quickly and entirely as possible

\- transitioning to net-neutral industrial machinery and power supplies

\- preserving soil health by crop rotation etc

\- increasing sequestration of atmospheric carbon and improving soil health by
breeding/engineering plants for higher CO2 incorporation rates

\- breeding/engineering plants for other traits like water/abiotic and
pest/biotic stress resilience, reduced fertilizer and nutrient requirements,
etc

\- human consumption habits must transition to less energy-intensive and
pollution-producing foods (typically fewer animals and more plants, although
the issue is complex)

------
unholythree
I found the company helping farmers in Africa collectively build/buy silos the
most surprising of these projects. As someone who spent much of my childhood
in the Midwest I took for granted that silos and even co-ops would be a
resource farmers would have.

------
ChuckMcM
Adding food storage to countries where that capability doesn't exist is a huge
multiplier in their agronomic efficiency. There is some excellent discussion
of this in the book "Guns, Germs, and Steel" which discusses how these forces
shaped the changes in human civilizations.

~~~
29athrowaway
Some things that do not show up in Guns, germs and steel:

\- Syphilis may have a new world origin.

\- The most productive crop is the potato, a crop of new world origin.

\- The Inca farmed guinea pigs. These are a very viable farm animal.

\- The Mapuche did not have guns, germs or steel yet, they defeated the
Spanish.

\- The Inca could have defeated the Spanish. They were encountered after a
civil war where the nobility was purged. The Inca nobility knew how to run the
empire.

~~~
triceratops
> Syphilis may have a new world origin.

Smallpox, measles, bubonic plague, whooping cough are all way scarier than
syphilis.

> The most productive crop is the potato,

The thesis of _Guns, Germs, and Steel_ was Europe's east-west orientation
allowed varieties domesticated in one place to easily grow in another. If
different varieties of potatoes grow differently at different latitudes (I
don't know, I'm not an expert), then it doesn't really matter how productive a
crop the potato is. You may also be basing this on more modern potato
varieties.

> The Inca farmed guinea pigs.

Guinea pigs are pretty small. The Inca didn't have horses, only llamas. Horses
were militarily very important. Look at how much trouble the Plains Indians
gave the US government, relative to their numbers. They only acquired horses
after Europeans came to the New World and adapted their culture and ways
around them very rapidly.

> The Mapuche did not have guns, germs or steel yet, they defeated the
> Spanish.

After initially being defeated, acquiring guns, steel, and horses from the
Spanish and then rebelling against them.[1]

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arauco_War#Campaigns_of_Caupol...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arauco_War#Campaigns_of_Caupolic%C3%A1n_and_Garc%C3%ADa_Hurtado_de_Mendoza)

~~~
jcranmer
> The thesis of Guns, Germs, and Steel was Europe's east-west orientation
> allowed varieties domesticated in one place to easily grow in another.

It's worth noting that despite the east-west orientation of Eurasia, there is
quite little evidence of technology and agriculture actually being shared
between the Mediterranean and Chinese origins, especially if you restrict
yourself to the traditional origin-of-civilization innovations such as
agriculture itself, pottery, metallurgy. By contrast, the Americas show a
great deal more transmission along its north-south axis, with maize (from
Mesoamerica) almost completely supplanting native North American domesticants,
pottery appearing to come from the Amazon rainforest, and metallurgy arriving
from the Andes.

~~~
riffraff
Didn't a lot of things from Asia come to the Mediterranean to become
omnipresent things? E.g. oranges, lemons, rice.

Isn't wheat itself something that spread both ways from the middle East?

~~~
29athrowaway
Wheat, barley, lentils, peas, chickpeas.

Goats, sheep, pig...

Most of those come from the fertile crescent.

~~~
jcranmer
For all intents and purposes, I equate the Fertile Crescent with the
Mediterranean world. The big divide I'm talking about is crossing from China
across the variety of deserts to reach Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean.

------
jillesvangurp
Regenerative farming deserves a mention here. Soil is indeed important and
industrial scale farming has a negative impact on it because a lot of our
modern farming practices are sacrificing soil for short term gains.

Regenerative farming restores soil as a side effect of farming more
efficiently and ultimately can restore vast amounts of land with a relatively
low amount of effort. There have been quite a few projects, some of which are
quite large scale demonstrating this can be done. There's a bit of controversy
around some of the claims but overall, there are some nice green bits of land
that used to be basically desert. Whatever was done to make that so, we need
more of it.

------
sandebert
I know this isn't real science or anything, but this video helped me better
understand the issue with the soil.

It's from Bon Appétit, where Brad goes to a ranch in Texas. Jump to 9:30 for
the soil bit. It goes on for a couple of minutes.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAO1A6EdVVA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAO1A6EdVVA)

~~~
blaser-waffle
> Bon Appétit

Easy tiger, I believe they've been cancelled, in the pejorative meme sense of
the term. Perhaps warranted (or not), but controversial nonetheless.

------
alex_young
Combatting the impact of soil without doing anything about our impossible to
scale diet is bound to fail isn't it?

A huge chunk of our net impact on global warming and deforestation is a direct
result of our food system, namely animal agriculture.

There is disagreement about just how inefficient turning an acre of corn into
slabs of cow, but it should be clear that it is some fraction of the
efficiency of just eating that corn as food itself.

~~~
PaulHoule
The statement that "animal agriculture = bad" is a half-truth.

It's true that if you feed corn to pigs most of the energy gets thermalized.

It's also true that animals can eat grass in places where the soil would dry
up and blow away if you tried to grow corn.

~~~
scaredginger
This is true, but a large proportion of the animals we rear are fed on grains
since there is not nearly enough grassland to feed enough animals for everyone
to eat a typical western diet.

Edit: the very first link I found puts the figure at 97% of cattle in the US
coming from feedlots. [https://www.thoughtco.com/feedlot-organic-and-grass-
fed-beef...](https://www.thoughtco.com/feedlot-organic-and-grass-fed-
beef-127669)

~~~
cgh
Cattle only enter feedlots during the final weeks of their lives. For nearly
the entirety of their lives, cattle are indeed grazed.

~~~
alex_young
Citation needed

------
belorn
People claim that burning biomass is a net-zero effect on the climate because
whatever get burned had once collected the carbon from the air. Then we have
people arguing that cows are one of the main contributor to global warming
because we feed them grass. In cases with produce that get rejected for once
reason or an other, it may either go into animal feed or biomass depending on
who is paying the more, and thus the greenness of it changes drastically.

So why are counting the methane from cows in isolation, while biomass is the
sum of carbon released minus carbon extracted?

~~~
idoh
Methane is a lot more powerful of a greenhouse gas than CO2. Turning CO2 from
the atmosphere back into CO2 is net even. Turning CO2 into methane is net-bad.

~~~
jniedrauer
Since methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas and has a much shorter
half-life in the atmosphere compared to CO2, I wonder if it might actually
save us. We could render the planet inhospitable early enough to be forced to
address the problem without shackling future generations with the fallout like
we are doing with CO2.

~~~
neckardt
Do you know what the half life of methane in the atmosphere is? I did a search
for it but couldn't find it.

~~~
wahern
9.1 years according to
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane)

~~~
nvader
That's funny.

[https://www.foodsource.org.uk/building-
blocks/agricultural-m...](https://www.foodsource.org.uk/building-
blocks/agricultural-methane-and-its-role-greenhouse-gas) claims

> it is a relatively short-lived GHG, with emissions breaking down after an
> average of around 10 years.

Looks like someone didn't understand what half-life means, or is being
misleading.

~~~
projektfu
On average, a molecule of methane breaks down in less than 10 years. That is a
true interpretation.

~~~
07t15
Half life implies that one half of the mehane molecules decay in that period
(or that a single one has a 50% of decaying).

------
aaron695
Article: "I’m done with cow farts"

So everyone talks about cows?

Anyway, by bringing cows and all animals to lab grown meat and lab grown hard
to grow plant based foods, it hopefully brings them to simple base
ingredients.

Which means it can all be about the soil and we can concentrate way more
exactly.

If only environmentalists actually wanted to push the future forward rather
than destroying current things.

Skipping stupid ideas like changing what people will eat through campaigns and
trying to stop home food waste or talking about cow farts.

------
a9h74j
TIL The Land Institute has made progress following its long-standing vision to
develop perennial crops.

[https://landinstitute.org/our-work/perennial-
crops/kernza/](https://landinstitute.org/our-work/perennial-crops/kernza/)

------
mehrdadn
Related: see GoogleX co-founder Tom Chi's video on climate change, sustainable
agriculture, etc.:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyQvfaW54NU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyQvfaW54NU)

------
flyGuyOnTheSly
I wonder if changing the cow's diet could limit the amount of methane
generated?

I've noticed that changing my own diet by eliminating animal products has cut
down significantly on methane production in my own gut.

My farts literally don't smell like anything at all anymore, when a small one
used to clear the room with ease.

~~~
mattferderer
This recent article discusses this topic - [https://onezero.medium.com/cow-
farts-are-not-the-problem-f57...](https://onezero.medium.com/cow-farts-are-
not-the-problem-f5764c1b2a5d)

My takeaway from their argument is that eliminating cows may not be as
valuable as changing how they're raised & fed.

~~~
fnovd
This article misses the point entirely.

It's true that most cattle farms are on the small-end, and have plenty of land
for their cattle.

It's also true that the vast majority of cows slaughtered for meat come from
just a few industrial feedlots.

Changing the way that "most" farms work might change how much methane truth A
cows produce, but the vast majority of cows are truth B cows that aren't
impacted by the decisions of small-time farmers.

There is not enough land on this earth to allow for free-range cattle at the
rate humans consume them. The solution isn't to do it more efficiently, but to
stop and do something else. Ford said people would ask for faster horses, and
100 years later we have people wanting cows that fart differently.

It's the cheeseburger you want, not another magic chemical added to the
lovecraftian nightmare that is factory farming. The way to reduce the impact
cows have on the environment is to reduce the number of cows bred for food.

~~~
mc32
One could also say people are asking for non-meat as a solution when maybe the
answer is to make cow farts different.

------
LatteLazy
We're not making any progress on co2e because we've choosen not to.

Even if we were, net zero by 2070 (the optimistic outcome here!?) would be
pointless, civilisation would be over long before then anyway.

I find all this really frustrating. It's like someone moaning they're fat and
telling me about their new diet, the 1000th one this week, where they eat 20
cheese burgers a day and hope for the best. Let's get real and either do
something or enjoy the ride to hell.

~~~
hutzlibu
"Even if we were, net zero by 2070 (the optimistic outcome here!?) would be
pointless, civilisation would be over long before then anyway."

Why?

Even with every worst case szenario of continous droughts and floods and loss
of some islands and coastal land etc.

We could grow everything we need in (automated) greenhouses.

Only if the transistion chaos leads to all out nuclear war, but that is not
really a fixed thing.

~~~
ClumsyPilot
Civlisation will survive, in one shape or the other, but some countries could
be totally screwed, others badly damaged. Its possible to imagine that
political system crumbles, liberal democracy is gone, and the label is
somewhat justified.

We are talking about most of bangladesh underwater and about 1 billion
refugees globally in a poor scenario. Todays migration problems will pale in
comparison. Many if them will die violently.

Nothing we've done so far indicates to me that we can quickly organise global
rollout of hundred million automated greenhouses to people that cannot
posssibly pay for them. Or to build largest damns in human history.

Even when we can afford to pay for infrastructure, in UK its taking us 40
years to build 1 line of rail, connecting two biggest cities, and its going to
cost roughly as mich as the moon programm did.

~~~
Tade0
The same UK had its CO2 emissions per capita peak in 1973 and lowered that
number by over 45% since then.

Sure, some of that happened through offshoring, but still - it's nothing to
sneer at.

~~~
ClumsyPilot
What you are referring to is production-based CO2 accounting, whereas we
really should be taking consumption-based CO2 metric.

No doubt progress has been made, but it's a fraction of what it should be. Uk
had a chance to invest in nuclear power and didn't, has poor quality housing /
insulation resulting in a lot of unnecessary CO2 emissions and money wasted on
heating, and has a stupid law that banned large (read: economical) wind
turbines!

~~~
Tade0
What about Hinkley Point C? Sure, financially the results so far are terrible,
but so are other such projects in Europe.

~~~
ClumsyPilot
It's good in the environmental seance, but what I meant was:

in the 80's Uk had a chance to invest in nuclear to become like France, almost
entirely nuclear-powered. Instead the skills needed to build nuclear power-
plants have been lost, and now even replacing existing few reactors is a great
challenge.

------
PaulHoule
This kind of talk activates my scam detectors.

It first got popular when the makers of herbicides like roundup began to
advocate "no-till agriculture" which is claimed to build up carbon reserves in
the soil.

We will always have claims going around that some change in soil management
will sequester carbon at widely distributed sites where we can't measure it at
much lower costs than not producing it to begin with (nuclear power) or
sequestering it in some place where we can actually measure (inject it into a
hole and measure the volume the same way you measure fuel coming out.)

That idea of spreading olvine sand on the beach is the same thing: it is so
spread out you'll never prove that it worked or didn't work, but it is certain
that some Enron-style trader makes money several times on it.

These sorts of scams are highly dangerous in a world where people will be
attracted to "market" solutions: if there was some rule that you had to save
10 tons of carbon by replacing coal with uranium for the right to claim you
saved 1 ton some other way it might be helpful.

~~~
pfdietz
Ah, I see. If it involves Roundup, then axiomatically it must be wrong. Glad
to see dogma is triumphing once again.

