I just finished listening to this book after a couple of days (I found a free audiobook on an app linked to my library). It was decent. Judith Schwartz’s thesis is basically that a large part of our environmental crises is humans wrecking the soil throwing the water cycle, carbon cycle, and biodiversity out of wack. The only solution is agriculture based on how nature evolved with herd animals (including often condemned cows), diverse plants, and lots of micro-organisms. There’s a lot of random slight anti-communism, but if you remember the book’s about science not politics it’s bearable. She often mentions her sources being out of the mainstream and hated by corporations and universities, but it made me happy in the second half when she started actually condemning the commodification of food, and capitalism as a whole. When she slams Monsanto it’s reminiscent of the stuff at r/fucknestle from my Reddit days. Near the end she criticizes money in general and financialized economy divorced from real consequences and production. I don’t think she has a feasible alternative to capitalism or a way to get there, but the book still has value. I think it’s weird that in most of her positive examples people got some inspiration from native peoples but they don’t actually get to work the land the way they have for millennia, but again, I guess it’s not this short book’s job to outline decolonization. Overall worth the read, as it only took me six and a half hours (11 at 1.7 speed).
I haven’t read this particular book before but I’ve definitely encounter this concept. Yeah sure you can offset a portion of carbon emissions with this method but grazing actually produces MORE methane emissions than the current system and increases nitrous oxide emissions from the fertilizer required to grow the grasslands to be able to feed enough cattle to meet demand. Methane is 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide is 265 more potent than carbon dioxide so we really don’t want to introduce more of this just to sequester a portion of the carbon. At our current projection, beef consumption is expected to double by 2050. I’m not sure the amount of carbon sequestration will be anywhere near enough to offset the other greenhouse gases that are produced.
Another problem I have is that there is no way to massage to math to have this method be more effective at carbon sequestration than forests. And what happens when we want more cattle and need more land to feed these cattle?
This is a pretty good report that goes into more detail about the shortcomings of this method specifically in regards to climate change.
Obviously this is a very complex problem so no one is going to have The One Answer and like there’s a lot of room for dialogue so I think it’s good to investigate different solutions.
if you remember the book’s about science not politics it’s bearable
Garik: My dear doctor, everything is political.
Bashir: Even science?
Garik: Especially science.
I understand your concerns, but the book is still worth reading and considering. Traditional cattle farming is terrible. Most ranching is far more damaging than the method described, and factory farming is horrendous. I do not deny that we will have to drastically bring down meat production to save the planet, but we can’t make everyone be a full vegan (I say that as a vegan myself). She lays out how carbon is primarily stored in soil and therefore we need to build back the soil that is being rapidly depleted. You mention fertilizer, and the book is extremely anti-fertilizer. Shit and decaying plants are the fertilizer. Environmentalists are right that we need to end fossil fuel use ASAP, but we need a way to sequester the carbon that’s already there. That can be done through the method layed out. I know everything’s political. The book is explicitly anti-capitalist. All I meant is don’t let the casual anti-communism put you off too much. Please read the book before you act like you can debunk everything.
You mention fertilizer, and the book is extremely anti-fertilizer. Shit and decaying plants are the fertilizer.
The book isn’t anti-fertilizer then. Whether the fertilizer is organic or inorganic doesn’t matter because both can release N2O. In fact manure releases more N2O than NKP so it fixes one problem and creates another. This would happen with any fertilizer (whose primary purpose is to provide nitrogen) and nitrogen is essential for plant growth; we can’t really go without it.
So to continue to use fertilizers (organic or not) and combat N2O and nitrate leaching, we use chemicals called nitrification inhibitors (NI). I thought you might be interested in this study from China which, while not about cows specifically, is still concerned with manure as a fertilizer for CO2 sequestration and methods for N2O emission mitigation. Here, DMPP (an NI) is used to mitigate the main problem of manure as a fertilizer. (Also NKP is suggested to increase maize yield, though I don’t know how necessary that would be for grass fields.) On the other hand, DMPP harmed beneficial bacteria in a study from Italy. There’s a lot of recent research on DMPP, and it seems that the effectiveness varies between locations and crops, so even this is not a complete solution.
Anyway, the intention behind this comment and my other comment was to illustrate of how complex these problems are, and that every solution we’ve come up with also tends to introduce new problems. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with reading the book and wanting to learn more about potential solutions to our most pressing problems. I’m just wary of magic bullet narratives and science that’s been cherry-picked to support it.
I don’t know too much about the science, but I still think the book is worth reading. I get what you’re saying about this not being a magic bullet, and I think the author may be a bit of a capitalist realist, but this method seems like it could be valuable in a multifaceted approach to environmental problems. Again, surely native herd animals would be better than cows, and I don’t get why they settle on being pro-cow. In North America it would surely do some good to promote Buffalos, and other native animals. I don’t think nitrate leaking is a problem in the model the author endorses. It promotes healthier soil that has stronger water and carbon retention. The bacteria are better equipped to decompose chemicals. Also, the method has animals one spot for a short time and then they won’t be there for a while. This gives the land time to rest and regrow. If you actually get the book you can check their sources and have a more accurate critique.
