Essay by Eric Worrall
“… absent severe reductions in fossil fuel emissions, some places will likely have to give up farming entirely in the near future. …”
Industrial Farming Causes Climate Change. The ‘Slow Food’ Movement Wants to Stop It
BY ARYN BAKER
SEPTEMBER 28, 2022 1:10 PM EDTAbiennial celebration of international small-scale farmers, breeders, fishers, and food producers just wrapped up in Turin, Italy. Convened by the Slow Food movement, one phrase in particular dominated the Terra Madre Salone del Gusto festival’s long roster of panel discussions and workshops: “Food is the cause of the environmental crisis, but it can also be the solution.”
…
Food production contributes approximately 37% of global greenhouse gas emissions, making farmers both contributors to, and victims of, climate change. But it doesn’t have to be that way, say proponents of Slow Food, a movement started in Italy 36 years ago that promotes “good, clean and fair food” along with a stronger connection between people and the food they eat. Adopting climate-smart farming practices, and taking a more flexible approach to what is farmed where, will make food production more resilient in the face of climate change. But even then, it may not be enough—absent severe reductions in fossil fuel emissions, some places will likely have to give up farming entirely in the near future.
…
Improving Resilience
Conventional agriculture seeks to maximize production via large scale farms that rely on monocrops fed by greenhouse gas-emitting fertilizers, protected by biodiversity-damaging pesticides and harvested by fossil fuel-spewing combines and tractors. Industrial farming may be able to produce food cheaply, but it comes with a great environmental cost, says Edward Mukiibi, Slow Food’s new president. The pursuit of profit above all else has resulted in soils so stripped of their nutrients that farmers have no choice but to add increasing amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to maintain production in a downward spiral of additive addiction.
But by focusing on soil health—by letting fields lie fallow, rotating crops, planting hedgerows, or letting cattle churn up the earth and fertilize it with their droppings, among other practices—farmers can improve the quality of their crops, with the added benefit of increased biodiversity and carbon sequestration. That’s the way smallholders used to farm, back when crops were destined for the farmer’s kitchen as much as for the market. These days the practice is called agroecology or regenerative farming, but it’s what Slow Food has been advocating for decades.
…
Read more: https://time.com/6217813/slow-food-movement-climate-change/
Aryn Baker is Time Magazine’s senior international climate and environment correspondent.
Wasn’t the Sri Lankan food catastrophe enough of a lesson on our absolute need for modern agriculture and chemical fertiliser? I used to buy Time Magazine at least a few times per year, the stories were interesting, before they went all in and embraced climate misanthropy.
I have no problem with boutique farms producing delicious food using palaeolithic agricultural techniques for wealthy customers. I’m happy to buy the occasional slice of delicious artisan cheese, or tomatoes or olives grown with love, but it would devastate my finances to have to live off such produce full time. A lot of people simply wouldn’t be able to afford to eat at all.
To feed the world of today we need agricultural mass production, fossil fuel and chemicals, not ignorant theories and disastrous policy choices.
I’ll be at CPAC Australia in Sydney this Saturday and Sunday – I look forward to meeting some of you in person.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
The movement to ban manufactured fertiliser must be called out for what it is.
It is a movement demanding the deaths of billions yes billions of people in a single generation.
It would be the ultimate crime against humanity if manufactured fertiliser was banned from use.
When these enlightened progressives talk so fondly about slow growing food production, using only natural fertilisers such as manure or bio compost systems they are referring to a time when less than 2 billion people lived on Earth.
To return to those traditional food production practices requires the loss/death of at least 6 billion living souls. That is what the progressives actually mean and what they are advocating for, when they demand the end of manufactured fertiliser.
This is so unspeakably depressing…
That so many people, everybody, can get something which is so inherently simple (how plants grow) so devastatingly wrong.
Its right up there with:
Everything is now wrong in this world
But vastly worse, folks use their (seemingly wilful) lack of knowledge & understanding to score points off anybody and everybody else.
Thus: If someone says anything that runs contra to their personal beliefs, formulated via Magical Thinking, Tribalism, Cherry Picking, Consensus and all other variations of brainwashing – they panic.
They go into instant fight or flight.
Nowadays, because they are physically & mentally lazy & bloated (those things are inextricably linked) – they go into Fight Mode.
As exactly we see here
If this continues, Humanity is perfectly fugged – it’s happening a lot faster than anyone dares imagine.
Ever increasingly accelerated in a positive feedback loop by computers, social and main stream media.
Especially in the ‘Authority’ that computers are now empowered with = exactly what their creators intended. Computers are **never** wrong.
And what are ‘computers’
I’ll tellya: “Devices created and engineered by socially dysfunctional and sexually awkward young men (Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg etc) oft referred to as “Geeks”
That dysfunction permeates everything that computers touch.
Oh yeah you ask: How do I know that?
Ans. = a question in return, “Where are the girls in these discussions”
The girls are not in these discussions because they are in lawyers’ offices, (not least but ‘most everywhere else) cross-legged and sucking on lemons, levelling charges of Unreasonable Behaviour
This essay and the responses are = that. Unreasonable Behaviour
The admission of same is sweet, in the UK at least.
…..seemingly now or soon in the future, to obtain a divorce it won’t be necessary to apportion fault or blame.
i.e. The Boys don’t like being told they’re being unreasonable so they’ve simultaneously covered their ears and silenced the girls. Neat huh.
The End is well advanced, in that over 50% of all kids in the UK are now born ‘out of wedlock’ but even and infinitely more horrible:
……by year 2050 all the kids born will, following a (as much beloved) trend-line, all those kids will be mentally wrecked from the very instant they’re born
The wrongness, the denial and the wilful ignorance is galling there also:
Official Government Figures tell of 1-in-40 kids being autistic. Or ‘On the Spectrum‘
Once you have experience of The Spectrum and recognise the symptoms, that number is easily 1-in-4
And the cause of that damage:
Fast Agriculture, as opposed to Slow Food
And once Glyphosate gets into the mix, the pedal really does hit the metal.
There Are No Free Lunches
Everything comes at a cost. Cheap Food is Nasty Food and you pay via mentally (and physically) destroyed children.
You pay financially right now, $4 Trillion annually in the US to treat the 88% of the population with a long-term metabolic disorder = any number of disorders caused by eating Nasty Food
(Fatness & Obesity basically)
But somehow, in the crazed world of Magical Thinkers, that means ‘Everything Has Never Been Better‘
as we’re told here.
Yet the solution is so painfully simple, so cheap and readily available almost everywhere on this Earth.
THAT is what is so depressing. Even more so in that the proponents of Slow Food and Regenerative Agriculture don’t seem to recognise it.
They know it exists, in places they call Blue Zones but even there, it hasn’t dawned on them what’s actually going on. Cause & Effect errors rule. OK.
Even the Slow Fooders don’t know how plants work, so eager are they to throw CO2 brickbats at people they call Deniers. And the deniers oblige by returning fire whenever they can – the very definition of unreasonable (i.e without thought or very good reason)
Such is the problem with Big Things. Sometimes they are sooooo verrrrry biiiiiig, you cannot see them
PS You will NOT find it by looking up into the sky. It’s not there.
Try somewhere else
Does this mean no food should be grown for energy production like bio diesel or corn ethanol unless “Slow Food” methods are used?
Well, they said they wanted to reduce the global population. I suppose starving them is one way.
This seems to be a theme:
Step one: Create carbon emissions reduction scheme that disincentivizes forest management.
Step two: Blame wildfires on climate change.
Step three: Increase carbon emissions reduction incentives. Repeat step two.
“ That changed over much of the country – however – with the Kyoto protocol. Maintenance of open woodland was discouraged. Prescribed burning was included in emissions – wildfires were not.”
Australian Hydrologist Robert I Ellison
Cheer up. It’s not all doom and gloom as the kiddies will all get one net zero carbon wish-
Greta Thunberg has a new job: What does the climate activist actually do? (msn.com)
Interesting link, and the next link from that one saying St. Greta is worth $1,000,000 is even more interesting.
Where did I go wrong when I was 19?
‘Saint’ Greta writes activist childrens books, is employed by the Greta Thunberg charity, gets paid for appearances and now works for another charity. That she gives a percentage of what she rakes in to other charities is good but probably doesn’t detract from her personal fortune. When you sell lies and disinformation the living is good – just ask Attenborough!
You mean like they do in Idaho right now?
The warmists are like teenagers who think they’re the first people to discover sex. They don’t know how things happen, so they imagine how it works and define their flights of fancy as “SCIENCE!”.
” planting hedgerows”
Helps shield from weather , but suck water away from crops . Which is why so many hedgerows are being removed .
“stronger connection between people and the food they eat”…if they’re not careful, there won’t be a difference between the people and the food they eat…
“To feed the world of today we need agricultural mass production, fossil fuel and chemicals, not ignorant theories and disastrous policy choices.”
Eric, with all due respect, these are not “ignorant theories.” The ones promoting them know full well that if implemented, their theories will lead to mass starvation. Mass starvation is a feature of their policies, not a bug.
The people promoting this nonsense are not stupid. They are evil psychopaths who know full well exactly what they are doing.
In modern times we divide the labour and expertise. I do something I am better at and use the magic resource tokens earned (money) to exchange for agricultural products that a farmer has produced. Both of us use out time more productively than if we were each producing a small amount of food each. The system self-regulates to supply and demand, in spite of natural variations in farm production, as long as the communists stay well away.
Wasn’t the Sri Lankan food catastrophe enough of a lesson
Worldwide mass starvation wouldn’t be enough of a lesson, they’re too caught up in their delusion.
I don’t think these fools have a clue about how much land and work it is to grow and process enough food to feed themselves for a year. Outside of the tropics, crops don’t grow year round. That means you have to plant enough in the summer to last the other 9 months of the year. How do you preserve this much food at harvest time to last until the next crop? Does anyone remember 40 acres and a mule? Who do these folks think are going to plant, hoe, and harvest their 40 acres of crops?
Jim
They don’t. I have seen some claim that they can grow enough to feed a family on a high-rise apartment balcony, and if they farmed the roof they could feed the entire building.
There are delusions, then there are dangerous delusions. Wish they’d just keep them to themselves!
One step closer to mass murder through starvation by the green zealots. When will the point be reached when enough people realise that it is kill or be killed?
The real “privilege” today; Living so comfortably and blissfully ignorant and only caring about phony crisis when there are people elsewhere living real ones. Or about to.
“… a movement started in Italy 36 years ago that promotes “good, clean and fair food”
36 years ago they were calling for ‘fair’ food. And, still to this day, we have a hazardous proliferation of discriminatory (maybe even racist) system of rutabaga production & distribution.
It is a sad world when we can’t even get a fair rutabaga.
STILL more credible than CAGW.
They yearn for the “good old days” of their Messiahs – Lenin and Stalin – and intend to reprise the Holodomr. On a GLOBAL basis!
French former university economy teacher, former univ (vice?) president and elected green politician Sandrine Rousseau say we need less economic productivity less agriculture productivity and less working days.
(Yes, she is our national AOC. Even crazier as she promotes female witches over male engineers. Each and every of her media stunts is nuttier than the previous one. Yikes.)
Fun fact: Sandrine Rousseau was promoted as a joke by Damien Rieu, well known member of the former (now legally dissolved – for troubling the peace or something) Europe borders activist group.
Interesting that the elites propose a system of agriculture that could probably only feed the elected and no one else. There won’t be anyone let to sew the crops, tend the fields and harvest the biodynamic, vegan, organic and climate friendly foods as I am sure the elites won’t be getting their hands dirty (except when counting other people’s money).
At any rate, after we are all starving to death we can at least be comforted in knowing the lites will be dropping like the flies they are in no time flat.