Les wrote: “There is no longer enough arable land to meet the ever increasing demand for meat without CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations).” He notes that’s why he shifted to a plant-based diet, and asserts it is healthier for body, animals, and planet.
I agree that CAFOs are unconscionable. With everything else, I completely disagree. It’s not possible to eat a truly healthy (ie long-term sustainable) plant-based diet without securing a source of B-12 and adequate amounts of omega-3 fatty acids. To accomplish those 2 needs, most people in most parts of the world, esp. in most of the US, have to increase our consumption of fossil fuels for procurement, concentration, storage, transportation, and delivery of those necessary ingredients to human health. First world people who successfully live on plants (usually for a period of time before reverting) are living off the nutritional capital their bodies and our rich food supply system have stored up; when that’s exhausted either reversion or ill health follow.
It is animal protein and fat that provides the B-12 and omega-3 fatty acids we humans must have for peak health. CAFO farming actually fails in that regard because confined feeding operations feed animals on grains rather than grasses, and grains are too rich in little-needed omega-6 fatty acids, while grasses produce essential omega-3 fatty acids. Since animals, like humans, are what they eat, grain diets produce animal fat tilted too high toward omega-6 fatty acids compared to a dearth of omega-3s in grain-fed animals. When humans eat animals rich in omega-6 and short on omega-3, we develop more acidic systems - the precursor to chronic and acute ill-health. It is not meat, but omega-6 rich meat that contributes to heart diseases and other maladies.
Diets that replace meat with grains also add too much omega-6 to the human system, setting up an omega-3 deficiency, which in turn leads to a host of nerve system problems, including early declines in mental functioning, and are implicated in arthritis and other joint complaints, as well as declining brain-body communication. Leaky gut syndrome is also implicated, with all that means for ill-health.
When our omega-6 to omega-3 ratio is out of balance, we get that persistent “empty” feeling in our guts, even when we’re physically full. That’s one factor that leads people to constant snacking; the other is that we get incomplete nutrition from foods that are grown “conventionally” rather than in soil that is rich in organic matter, and from eating nutrient-poor hybrid vegetables, grains, and grasses rather than nutrient-dense heritage versions. That persistent low-level hunger, despite eating so much we gain weight, is the body signalling an incomplete or out of balance nutrient profile. Eating more of the same foods that set up the problem does not solve the need, but perpetuates it. And so, we are overfed but undernourished and chronically ill and depressed as a nation.
The amount of land that has to be converted to grain production to offset the protein found in greater concentration in grass-raised animals is truly astonishing - and environmentally unsustainable. It also requires the plant equivalent of CAFO farming: monocrop strip mining of the soil that is demonstrably destroying the remaining agricultural land at such a pace that experts are now saying the world has about 50 crop seasons left before the situation become disastrous. It’s already critical. This is one reason aquaponics is getting so much of a pass despite its heavy reliance on petrochemicals and petro-fuels to operate. The energy consumption for energy yield is increasingly off balance because of our declining understanding of how to nurture both people and planet.
This is all unnecessary. Regenerative agriculture is demonstrating how possible it is to feed the world on the remaining agricultural land. The data and techniques exist; it is a matter of conversion: Conversion of minds and of practices. Regenerative doesn’t only rebuild currently depleted soil by increasing SOM (soil organic matter) while producing annual yields that, when pursued in a mixed polyculture system - and especially when incorporating animals into the design - produces more nutrition per acre than “conventional” agriculture; it does so without the petro inputs or environmental destruction “conventional” ag demands.
Furthermore, regenerative ag has successfully reclaimed partially desertified former agricultural land, which means it is a method for expanding arable land. That way leads to more food production for a growing population. There have even been successful projects to naturally desalinate desert sands in Jordan, by Geoff Lawton of the Permaculture Institute (headquartered in Australia).
Not of least consideration is this: grass raised animals produce more nutrient-dense food. Heritage vegetables and fruits grown on truly organic, high-SOM soil also provide nutrient-dense food. And organically-grown food provides the human gut with a much richer microbial biology, which does two important things: first, it makes our guts work better, so we thoroughly digest a greater range of foods, and it naturally ends leaky gut syndrome (a significant cause of ill health). As a result, we get more nutritional benefit from consuming less food, and benefit more fully from more nutrient-dense food. Since our bodies are after complete nutrient profiles, we can actually eat less and be better fed when we eat nutrient-dense, microbe-rich foods.
Second, it turns out our bodies borrow DNA from the microbes in our guts in order to operate our organs: heart, brain, liver, nerve system, kidneys, etc. We simply don’t have all the DNA resident in our own bodies to effectively and healthily run our own system, but are truly symbiotic with the microbial life that exists in and on us (!). The more we deplete the number and diversity of microbial life in us the less resources we have to draw on to maximize our health and vitality. For a rich life we need a rich microbial biome. In turn, that means we need microbe-rich food. And that means we need food grown in microbe-rich soil.
Yet another fact: it’s impossible to build soil organic matter without sequestering carbon from the atmosphere. (Some experts point to high rates of recent rapid desertification of once-living soil as at least as much a cause of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration as increased fossil fuel consumption; perhaps larger.) Every critter in the soil needs carbon to live and thrive. Dead soil (that is, “dirt”) is, by definition, earth with very low ratios of carbon, hence it’s functionally dead of organic life. The process of regenerating agricultural land (or even your suburban yard) is the process of using plants to convert atmospheric carbon dioxide into root and plant structure, which is incorporated into the soil where it serves as the building blocks for a rich and diverse soil biology. That in turn makes it possible for healthy plant growth, healthy plants naturally reduce pest and weed pressure (hence greatly reduce or eliminate the need for pesticides and herbicides that kill indiscriminately the beneficial with the malevolent). Animals roaming and grazing on fields is a core element of such a program - imitating how nature worked it all out to begin with - and food animals grazing on plants filled with the nutrients of a rich soil produce the nutrient-dense meat and fat humans need in order to thrive.
When we have all of that going for us, we naturally eat (considerably) less in a day and experience much more energy and well-being for it. Our agricultural footprint shrinks. Imagine a world in which the richest humans - we of the First World - eat a third or a quarter of what we collectively consume now: that world is not a world short of food. Nor is it a world of such excessive consumption of medical supplies, equipment, and energy - which itself would dramatically reduce the carbon footprint of the North and West. Add in the carbon sequestration that building healthy soil requires, and we’re a long way toward a better future for all humankind, according to a regime that makes for a future much kinder to all earthly life.
Simply replacing meat with vegetables can reduce the cruelty of CAFO production, but it does not resolve the monocropping problem - rather, it exacerbates it, and therefore worsens the agriculture dilemma. Nor does it address the human nutrition needs that only meat and fat can fulfill efficiently. It is, at best, a partial response to a comprehensive problem, a response that cannot approach the benefit of revamping the entire way we think about the interconnected system that produces healthy soil, healthy plant life, healthy animals, healthy humans, and a healthy environment. We work on it all at once, or we emphasize some aspect(s) at the cost of worsening other(s).
