Tonnes per hectare
lies propaganda and metrics
« Soybean photosynthesis and crop yield are improved by accelerating recovery from photoprotection » https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adc9831
Big headlines all over the place #guardian #bbcnews, linking this « advance » to being able to feed the estimated 10 % of the global population (2021 UN) who are going hungry.
The increase in yield was accomplished through bio-engineering, which sounds better than genetic engineering, a term which now has certain negative connotations for the public in general.
The newspaper articles that link this sort of applied research and hunger/famine assume that the latter are a quantity problem. This promotes a sort of myth and ignores completely the supply chain, and food waste problems. The journalists also seem to continually assume that any agricultural production is for human consumption. I have calculated that we could feed around 250 million people on the agricultural land that is used to grow resources for pet food.
This brings me to the point, which we are having trouble getting across, that quantity is NOT the same thing as quality.
Crude tonnes per hectare or tons per acre figures hide a lot of crucial information :
How the crop is eventually used, turning soya into agro-fuel is not the same thing as using soya to feed people. « Only about 6% of soybeans grown worldwide are turned directly into food products for human consumption. The rest either enter the food chain indirectly as animal feed, or are used to make vegetable oil or non-food products such as biodiesel. 70-75% of the world's soy ends up as feed for chickens, pigs, cows, and farmed fish. » Union of concerned scientists. The principal use of soya beans for Nestlé is in the production of pet food.
The nutritive quality of the crop when used as human food. For example « we have shown that a diet enriched in SO similar to the American diet causes a global dysregulation of hundreds of genes in the liver compared to an isocaloric coconut oil » If a crop is used as an ingredient in ultra-processed foods then it is likely that it will have a negative nutritional impact.
The negative externalities for example the ecological impact of shipping soya around the world.
The so-called ghost acres where a livestock farm has a certain physical size, X ha’s plus Y ha’s in another country, or the same, from which animal feed is imported. This corrupts as the figures tonnes of beef per hectare from the homeland farm doesn’t include the ghost hectares used to produce the imported feedstock
We can also note that a lot of researchers and journalists seem to have forgotten the old adage (here updated!) « one person’s meat another person’s poison » Most people know that a certain percentage of the population can easily digest milk. Less well known is that a percentage of the population doesn’t easily digest beans. We are not all the same, after eating beans some people will bloat more than others. That said, fermenting beans beforehand can help with this.
To get back to the theme of this article it is now more important than ever that we STOP talking in terms of tonnes per hectare/tons per acre. These figures are frankly totally misleading and unreliable for the reasons noted above, and start using « number of people fed per hectare » as a metric.
The metric « number of people fed per hectare » also implies that those people are well nourished by the crops because the food made from them is nutritious. By the way, « nutritious » doesn’t mean « contains nutrients » (ref MacDonalds), dog shit contains nutrients but isn’t particularly nutritious for humans. It is surely better to eat less of a good quality/higher product priced than more of a low quality one/lower price one ? We have been sold the myth of “low cost food”/”eat as much as you want” for too long now. Take meat eaters as an example, meat consumption, for both historical and modern marketing reasons, is seen as something to aspire to, a massive industry has grown up to provide cheap meat to this market. Now the consumers are told that they are planet destroyers and must “stop eating meat”, spreading this type of message in this particular way is such a bad strategy that one wonders if it is being done by the big industrial farm meat producers. Telling people not to do something isn’t very wise. Would it not be better to promote good quality, locally and sustainably produce food with the “Eat less because you eat quality” message? Despite the rhetoric of people like George #Monbiot we don’t need lab produced fake meat and we don’t need more experiments beng blindly carried out on the general population. “We tested it on rats, mice, and young fit students, so it’s ok for all humans" is a completely debunked approach.
In an ideal world the metric would also include the negative or positive externalities of a farm’s production. Intensive livestock production, imported feedstocks etc has a long list of negative extermalities. Soil destruction due to excessive slurry applications, eutrophication of nearby water bodies and rivers due to slurry runoff etc etc. Antibiotic use as a growth promoter and prophylactic infection inhibitor, causing antibiotic resistance etc. The meat produced is cheap but low quality. On the other hand free range pasture based production with stocking levels within the ecological carrying capacity of the landholding in a agro-sylvo-pasturalist system can have a range of positive externalities such as carbon capture.
As a final point this sort of research often reminds me of that old chestnut about NASA spending billions to produce a pen that works in space and the Soviets using a pencil. In the case of the Soya beans the genetic manipulation was to reduce the following effect : « Crop leaves in full sunlight dissipate damaging excess absorbed light energy as heat. This protective dissipation continues after the leaf transitions to shade, reducing crop photosynthesis. »
Haven’t they heard about trees and agroforestry ?
#permaculture #agroforestry #health #food #agriculture #agroecology #permaculture #georgemonbiot #ecology
Lyn avoids soya cos one of her cancers was hormone dependent and soya contains eostrogen but it is difficult to avoid as its almost everywhere- most bread, fish paste (! Why?) and a score of other products. Is it just because so much gets grown now that they have to get rid of it somehow? Like palm oil?