He says bacteria takes carbon from manure and take it back to the soil but that cannot be more than was present in the grass that the cow ate right? It can put some small amount of carbon back but it will be net positive, not negative.
Maybe, but with much less animals and a mix of animals (not just cows, but ducks, chicken, ..) and mostly vegetable, that's how it's meant to be in nature
Currently animal farms are disastrous: https://www.google.com/search?q=why+is+animal+farm+impact+on... total weight of farm animals is 10 times the one of wild animals, which itself is about the same as pets, this is nonsensical
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/797805.Tending_the_Wi...
I think you should read the book. Or, you know, stay flippant. It’s your circus not mine.
We certainly know the Yucatán had at one point been basically stripped of trees for slash and burn agriculture.
The forest agronomy that may have been practiced in the eastern woodlands probably relied heavily on both burning vast swaths of the land periodically and low population density. I’m not sure what that really does for us.
Supporting really small numbers of people with vast swaths of highly fertile land has never really been a big problem.
After that, I was talking about the equilibirum in nature or permaculture farms between animals and vegetals, which looks nothing like current intensive farming, which produce poor quality anyway. We don't need to eat meat once a day, even once a week isn't needed, more than half people are overweight in rich countries
So it'd make sense to do those 2 changes
Rich topsoil is that which has lots of organic matter in it, i.e. carbon.
There are people who say the great plains were built by roaming buffalo herds, grazing on the grasses growing there.
So if that natural system was able to sequester carbon it stands to reason that humans could mimic it and in doing so also sequester carbon.
Obviously, if you graze sheep / cattle / goats on marginal land, or even relatively arable land (jumping ahead to your op-cost comments) you don't have to transport food to them.
Transporting grain to feed grass-eating animals is not uniquely a north-American strategy, but is much less common in other parts of the world.
> Considering eating beef is much more energy intensive then eating the equivalent vegetarian diet, there's simply no way cattle farm is energy negative just from bacteria taking carbon from the manure
Eating beef, or raising beef? Again, if you focus on large tracts of relatively non-arable land to run cattle, the numbers are quite different than if you look only at land that can support nutrient- or calorific- dense crops.
I'd suggest Simon Fairlie's excellent 2010 book 'Meat - a Benign Extravagance' for some deeper examination of the logistics / numbers here.
Thinking about this a little more, I had it a somewhat wrong above. Most of the carbon that makes up the animal comes from the air in the form of photosynthesis. So if it's re-released back into the atmosphere, that's not a net gain. So I suppose to be completely neutral there would need to be an equal amount of carbon being sequestered in the soil to offset the factors already mentioned, like transport and processing. That does actually seem conceptually possible.
A decent well managed meadow will be carbon negative. but turning forest into meadow isn't normally carbon negative.