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His book, Dirt To Soil, is what convinced me. It was the first time in a while that I felt optimism about the future of the planet. It also changed how I viewed the morals of meat consumption.

Do you have sources for this?

I used to think similarly, but now I’m not so sure. Gabe Brown, the author of Dirt to Soil, changed my outlook on animals place in a healthy ecosystem.

On his farmland he puts about 700k lbs of cattle on 1acre of land at a time, rotating those cattle frequently across 40 acres. He claims this practice has been an integral part of his regenerative ag method.

http://brownsranch.us/grazing/

I think these numbers are from the more traditional way of farming.

At least one practitioner of regenerative agriculture, Gabe Brown, uses super dense grazing and frequent movement of the cattle to actually restore his soil health.

http://brownsranch.us/grazing/

If this sort of stuff interest you, I highly suggest his book, Dirt To Soil. It’s a light read with a lot of great information on regen ag.

I used to feel similarly, but now, I'm not so sure. What worries me is that lab-grown meat will allow big ag practices to continue, which will do more harm to our co2 emissions and world's soil health.

To expand on this further, there is active research and practices into sustainable farming practices that show diverse crop rotations along dense but short grazing across the land has the ability to rebuild top soil 10x than previously thought. Most importantly this top soil serves as a MASSIVE CARBON SINK.

Using this proven methods, we can leverage the world's farmland to sequester carbon while improving the health of our soil and the nurtition density of our food.

The catch is that we need the animals to restore soil health and presumably we need the business model of selling the meat to make this practice sustainable.

Further Reading:

Dirt to Soil - Gabe Brown

Alan Savory's Holistic Management Practices - https://youtu.be/q7pI7IYaJLI

https://www.marincarbonproject.org/

The kicker for me was reading the very consumable Dirt to Soil [1], written by a farmer who's applying regenerative ag techniques on a large scale, and very profitably. Transitioning from input-dependent, technology-sucking financially-overextended traditional monocropping IS POSSIBLE. This isn't just your backyard garden anymore. Something needs to change in mainstream ag. I'm moving onto a small farm to do something about it, in my small corner of the world.

Thanks for your great comment, it's helping further the discussion and my own understanding.

> but it would be a huge shift to grow everything that way, and it's far from clear that it's even workable for the volumes needed for the big staple crops like corn, wheat, and soy.

Agree completely. But I think a huge shift is very much needed, and this shift may decrease our dependencies on staples like corn, much of which goes to cattle feed and fuel uses when we have other, more ecological methods like pastured beef, solar etc. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/time-to-rethink-c...

RE 2nd paragraph, also totally agree with, minus the "100x labor inputs". If done properly, bio-mimicry in Ag should decrease labor inputs as you leverage the advantages of natural plant/soil nutrient cycling, reduced watering and tillage from cover cropping and soil development, reduction of pesticide application by attracting animal/insect diversity etc.

From my understanding, "conventional" farming (I say ironically as we've really only been practicing these methods for ~60-70 years vs millennia of small scale farming that is the real "conventional"methods lol) has forced us to increase labor inputs - adding fertilizers, pesticides, annual tillage, managing irrigation systems - these are all things that can be eliminated, if the proper systems are put in place.

Gabe Browns book, Dirt to Soil was an eye opening read. Cheers.

Yes, somewhat at least. Gabe Brown's Dirt To Soil book
(haven't read it, but seen some of his videos (~1 and 2 hours length), and my guess is the main points of the book should be roughly the same as the videos. You can see them too, on YouTube). I have mentioned his work a few times in HN comments linked below[1].

Others have, too. Search for those comments by searching for his name in the search box at the bottom of HN thread pages, powered by Algolia, or directly do it at hn.algolia.com.

[1]:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24996445

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24827234

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24669509

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24669458

Make sure to watch some of his videos too, not missing Treating The Farm as an Ecosystem", a 3-part series by Living Web Farms on YouTube.

As a related aside, Living Web has other good videos too, including one called "Ferment Everything" (or "Anything") or such name, by Meredith Leigh.