10
Two simple questions reveal how much land we could save by eating plants. Almost everyone guesses wrong
(veganhorizon.substack.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2026
10 points (100.0% liked)
Vegan
3663 readers
4 users here now
An online space for the vegans of Lemmy.
Rules and miscellaneous:
- We take for granted that if you engage in this community, you understand that veganism is about the animals. You either are vegan for the animals, or you are not (this is not to say that discussions about climate/environment/health are not allowed, of course)
- No omni/carnist apologists. This is not a place where to ask to be hand-holded into veganims. Omnis coddling/backpatting is not tolerated, nor are /r/DebateAVegan-like threads
- Use content warnings and NSFW tags for triggering content
- Circlejerking belongs to /c/vegancirclejerk
- All posts should abide by Lemmy's Code of Conduct
founded 7 years ago
MODERATORS
I mean, I hope you understand that vegans will not be experts in non-vegan solutions. I'm certainly not an expert.
But generally speaking: The only thing that produces calories on this planet are plants. Everything else is always just reusing those calories and therefore using up some of those calories to sustain its own life.
Yes, in principle there can be situations where introducing a middleman can make more calories available to us. Animals grazing on land where farming isn't viable is the classic example.
Having insects eat plant waste could be viable, although turning plant waste into compost as an alternative to fertilizer is also already quite useful.
But then you run into the other problem, which is that the scalability of plants is hard to beat. For the most part, you throw seeds onto barren land and the magic happens. You don't need VATs, you don't need personnel most of the time, you don't need electricity.
I could see certain processes being useful for certain niche situations, but so long as we can just sidestep that situation by growing plants in the next town over and transporting the food to where it's needed, I don't think, it's worth the investment.
Uh... no. As someone who has actually grown plants myself for food this is not accurate. Agriculture is hard. Soil nutritional content, acidity levels, too much or too little water depending on the plant, temperature and planting times matter, amount of sun varies by plant, some plants can be grown together and some cant, pests are a huge problem and need to be managed properly, etc. I really do encourage you to get some experience growing your own food from seed if you have the land to try it out available. It's 100% viable to do, but it's not nearly as simple as you made it sound there. Tonight part of my dinner will be a butternut squash I grew myself. It's quite fufilling.
A great example of how complex and fragile our agriculture currently is: That Haber-Bosch Process I mentioned? 40% of Global calories are made possible by it is the typical estimate. It's part of the Natural Gas -> Fertilizer supply chain.
50% of the nitrogen found in human tissues originated from the Haber-Bosch process.
Yeah it's kinda crazy when you think about it. Imagine what would happen if natural gas ran out. But luckily that's an infinite resource that... uh... oh, right. lol
If you aren't familiar with it, I suggest checking out Bill Reese's talks on overshoot. Nice to see an actual intelligent person talk about how fucked we are as a species lol.
I'll have to give it a look. It's pretty bad yeah lol. I even saw something on here recently talking about how we're farming so much that the nutrition in our food is plummeting from low soil nutrient levels. Makes me wonder about that whole "Great Filter" question. Things are extremely bleak.
Oh man. It's way worse than you think, lol. Don't start deep diving unless you're ready to feel existential grief and probably anxiety.
The soil on the great plains used to be 12 feet thick on average, now its roughly 6 inches lol
Oh yeah if you go back further it's way worse. I was just talking about a specific study comparing soil now to like the 90s or something I think? But if you go back and read like personal journals of the colonizers who came to the Americas they'll talk about things like "You can throw a spear at a river blindly and hit 2 fish". Then them and their ancestors went on to ruin that very environment lol. Then like the Buffalo herds that used to number in the millions. It's such a shame.
Yeah we've replaced almost every large mammal with a human being in like 250 years. It's fucked lol.
Yes, I am aware that there is more to agriculture, that's why I prefaced it and followed it up with my actual point, which is that this complexity pales in comparison to the complexity of any more 'engineered' processes.
And yes, agriculture may be fragile, but we're not gonna replace it anytime soon, because we need something that scales.
Reducing the amount of plants we need to grow by going for a plant-based diet is already a step in the right direction. I don't remember the exact numbers, but we might even be able to cut out Haber-Bosch.
In particular maybe also interesting for you is that legumes can help to reduce the need for fertilizer, because they fixate nitrogen into the ground. And well, plant-based diets involve a lot of legumes.
That's why they were often part of crop rotation and also the Three Sisters.
Holy shit. Are you serious?
I was simplifying under the assumption that you guys aren't dumb and get the general point without me spelling out the exact differences.
I mean, if by simplifying you mean being wrong, sure.
Sure, @Nonconfrontational.
😘