Think Sustainability Is Simple? This Sheep Farmer Would Like a Word | Hacker News Reader

Think Sustainability Is Simple? This Sheep Farmer Would Like a Word

nytimes.com

43 pointsmooreds35 comments

The article specifically mentions competition from New Zealand lamb and talks about food miles. Food miles are not necessarily a good comparison for total carbon footprint.

UK lamb production is very energy intensive.

From the paper's abstract:

This paper assesses, using the same methodology, whether this is the case by comparing NZ production shipped to the UK with a UK source. The study found that due to the different production systems even when shipping was accounted for NZ dairy products used half the energy of their UK counterpart and in the case of lamb a quarter of the energy. In the case of apples the NZ source was 10 per cent more energy efficient. In case of onions whilst NZ used slightly more energy in production the energy cost of shipping was less than the cost of storage in the UK making NZ onions more energy efficient overall.

https://researcharchive.lincoln.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10182...

The elephant in the room is that the West consumes too much resource intensive food. There's lots of opportunity to improve on that, but still no incentive apparently. There is also profitability in bespoke organic food, but that's not going to feed the world.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...

It seems to be that in order to support sustainable farming one must decidedly be OK with supporting a less efficient and more expensive system.

Would it be better for the environment if this guy just went out of business and the goods were produced as efficiently as possible on as little land as possible in order to satisfy the demand?

Im curious if anyone has ever studied or modelled what the environmental impact of agriculture would look like if it wasn’t highly mechanized intensive farming and was instead decentralized and sustainable. Would we even be able to feed everyone? Would the land use for agriculture increase?

I could be wrong on this but I remember reading somewhere that the total amount of land used for food production in Europe and North America has actually decreased as things have become more efficient. This seems like a good thing vs using more land less efficiently?

Yes, and studies of agricultural efficiency and environmental impact consistently point to one thing that has the most positive effect: eat less meat.

The impact of local production, or reducing "food miles" as it's sometimes branded, is typically small, and in many cases the locally grown food is more energy intensive to transport to consumers than food grown at great distances:

https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2012/09/04/how-green-is-lo...

I would argue the greatest benefit of locally produced food is not necessarily reduced transportation expenses, but instead the consumer's visibility into the supply chain. It has been my experience that people are better stewards when they can see directly what impacts their behaviors have on the environment around them.

This is a really good point. Maybe naively, I want to believe a lot of people would eat healthier and waste less if they saw first hand what it takes to feed us, particularly the impact of food production on the workers that bring that food to market, and the impact on the animals we use for food.

This short article makes it sound like James Rebanks is merely a small farmer, but he's really much much more. He's an Oxford educated evangelist for small farms, which he advocates not just for sustainability, but also to preserve the culture of pastoral farming, and a connection to historical knowledge and methods of feeding people.

For almost a decade he's served at UNESCO as Expert Advisor to the World Heritage Sustainable Tourism Programme.

He runs a consultancy described in his linkedin bio:

> We help individuals, organisations and communities to make good things happen. We work at the meeting point between economics and culture (particularly natural and cultural heritage).

And he's a writer. This is a busy guy.

>> What would that better system look like, for his farm and others like it? He believes it would require consumers to favor food grown nearby, so they can understand and engage with it, see it, participate in it, question and challenge it when needed.

I’m not unsympathetic to the issue, but what does this even mean?

If I want to just get some yogurt, how do I “participate in it”. I “engage” with it when I eat it, but I gather that’s not what they’re mean.

Everybody, in every field of work or hobby, insists that the public needs to understand and connect with it better.

If every part of your life got the attention it supposedly deserves, it would be a full time job, and I've already got one of those.

I'm a vegetarian because I wanted to be more ethical about food in the laziest way possible. So I'm the target audience for "thinking about ethical food". But no, I will not be participating in Jack squat.

I agree with you that it's arrogant for someone in a specialty to expect everyone else to invest into their specialty. I see this all the time from business initiatives saying that we need to integrate time tracking into the culture to make one teams job easier, everyone should learn security, accessibility, performance, compliance, internationalization. We should design for all of these things from the start and also deliver an MVP by the date that the sales person sold it for.

If software forced all instances of object lifetimes which weren't a tree with unique owners to be painfully against the grain, then you'd make a good deal of progress.

If your primitives acted on whole data structures rather than individual elements, you'd made a good deal of progress. E.g. 1. Partition this set of http requests by method. 2. What capabilities are available to this group of credentials? 3. Give me the set of k different fields which have the newest timestamp on their relevant keys but aren't in this blacklist.

If we made our password requirements to start with not being crackable with some basic software, you might not need rotation policies and strength requirements.

The easy answer is to say that everyone should participate and that many hands make light work. And it's tempting because performance certainly can hit a state where you have to make an architectural change to meet your requirements. (Presumably for other specialties as well) Having an expert do it also doesn't work because that can be adversarial.

It doesn't need to go that far, necessarily. Sometimes I get really into reading about a certain topic for a month or two, joining hobby forums, etc. to the extent that I feel "connected" to it for a long time afterwards. Suddenly I start noticing articles, videos, etc. about the topic that I wouldn't have clicked on before, and thinking about how it relates to my life.

I think, in an ideal world, we'd all have the time and interest to go on several of these short-term deep-dives per year. And ideally, local communities would serve as a funnel to get people engaged in a meaningful but time-efficient way.

Perhaps buying at a farmers' market from local suppliers if available in your area?

I live in Texas. We do not have variety in our farms. There is not enough local produce for engagement here.

https://www.texasrealfood.com/community-supported-agricultur...

The local farmers' markets are only open at limited times when I have other commitments. It's just not realistic for a lot of people.

Fair. I'm certainly not suggesting it's a realistic solution for many communities and people.

Depending on the market's rules, farmer's market vendors are buying their produce from the same place the grocery stores are:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/farmers-markets-lies-market...

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/local/gray-matters/article/...

Although it looks like some of the Bay Area markets might be Producer Markets?

List of "Certified Farmer's Markets"

https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/is/i_&_c/cfm.html

That means “being willing to pay more” by understanding what goes into it (or just because it’s local).

Many of the “hardships” that local farms encounter stem from working to make their product nearly indistinguishable from the mass produced stuff. If you’re willing to take farm output that looks are tastes a bit different, it can make their life much easier.

Visiting the farm, meeting the people, understanding what they do, and buying from them directly.

Consider this: eating an animal is a sacred act, like marriage. This animal has been raised and cared for—think of all that goes into raising a child—in order to be slaughtered and consumed in a ritual "meal." That animal came into this world, opened its eyes for the first time, took its first steps, learned to eat, play and love its family. Farmers have taken on this sacred task of ushering the animal through its life and delivering it to you. They have held onto a dark secret: that the meaning of this animal's life has been to nourish and sustain you. Nevertheless, they've done their best to support a dignified life for the animal, treating it with respect and ending its life with grace. All for your benefit.

How would you like to treat people who raise and then kill living beings for you? And how would you like to treat things that live their entire lives in order to die for you?

If it were people instead of animals, would you prefer to remain uninvolved, or would you want to somehow participate in the ritual?

Well, that's one way to look at it, but as for me, I'm looking for a less sacramental approach to the morning bacon.

Who exactly are you talking about? Like, name someone who actually does this shit?

I've been a vegetarian for twenty years, but shit like like makes me want to go vegan.

What do you suppose a chimpanzee is thinking about when it devours a bushbaby alive?

>Visiting the farm, meeting the people, understanding what they do, and buying from them directly. Consider this: eating an animal is a sacred act, like marriage.

Yeah, it's not about that. It's more about knowing your local producers, what they feed the animals, the quality of meet, cheese, etc, they make, etc.

Not about checking whether the animals were loved and had massages...

That too, I agree

It’s a good question. I don’t think these are good answers. I think the real answer is that you need to elect governments that are going to seriously regulate agriculture, and then you need to continue to support those policies when the price of food inevitably increases. And you need to somehow convince everyone else to do the same.

>If I want to just get some yogurt, how do I “participate in it”. I “engage” with it when I eat it, but I gather that’s not what they’re mean.

Well, if you were from e.g. France, Italy, or heck, even the rural US, you'd know (and probably in tons of other places too, just some I know of).

You can get to know your local producers, talk to them, know the quality of their meat, cheese, yoghurt, etc., know which varieties this or that producer deals with and so on.

It's pretty common in many places to know the producers of at least some of the local stuff you buy.

Now, if you live in e.g. NY, well, good luck with that...

Think I’m gonna read that behind a paywall?

iOS reader mode works fine for me.

Thanks for the protip, seriously. Didnt know that could be a work around

It doesn't take that long to go to - and then use - archive.is, if your browser's reader mode doesn't work with the site (or if it doesn't have one).

Think sustainable news is simple? This news reporter would like a word.

Meat is not sustainable, kids. Old news.

Meat for everyone, at all meals all of the time isn’t sustainable. Demand for meat is among the things that drives farmers to produce meat and supermarkets to stock their shelves with it.

Many people want to eat meat at every meal when that is not necessary. There are more sustainable ways to produce meat for consumption and a more sustainable amount of consumption of meat that people could do. Would producing meat more sustainably drive the price up causing people to eat meat less?

Anyways, eat more vegetables, kids.

https://archive.is/5yzoD

This is just a short review (almost a plug really) of the book “Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey” by James Rebanks, who runs a small farm that rather resembles a petting zoo by modern standards.

It should not be taken as a serious proposal for food production at scale, and the writer comes close to stating that at the end:

> These ideas could use more development, but Rebanks shows clearly that hope hinges on who exactly is willing to pay the real price of food and good farming.

> he and his family graze his beloved Herdwick sheep plus a new herd of Belted Galloway cattle, without forcing them to produce beyond their reasonable limits, and leaving room at the margins of the farm for nature. As a result, the birds come back to his fields, wild animals fill their old niches and a botanical census counts nearly 200 species of flora on his 185 acres, where an intensively farmed field of the same size might hold three or four.

I don’t mean to sound glib, but it sounds like he should be in the business of tours and bed-and-breakfast stays for a select target group of environmentalists.

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