Michael Pollan on solar-based agriculture, among other things
Just one day after reading that scientist James Hansen believes Earth is near the climate change tipping point, I read this interview with Michael Pollan in which he discusses farming, environmentalism, and ways to combat the current food and energy crises.
Pollan talks about the connections between, well, everything: what we eat and how it’s grown or raised and how those things are related to skyrocketing oil prices, food shortages, obesity and the increase in food prices. He outlines three things we need to do… I won’t spoil it for you but let’s just say it has to do with fewer subsidies and more solar-based agriculture.
Here’s a taste:
You can compare conventional beef production to a grass-based system of beef production, which is how we used to produce beef. Cattle are evolved to eat grass — they have rumens so they can digest it. So when they [cows] are getting grass, you have a really exquisite and sustainable food chain — where the sun feeds the grass, and the grass feeds the ruminant, and the ruminant feeds us. They are not competing with us for food, and it doesn’t take vast amounts of fossil-fuel fertilizer to produce that food. It takes none, until you start trucking the animal off of the ranch.
The problem with that system for the marketplace was that it’s a slower way to produce beef, and it takes more skill. It’s a lot easier just to put them on a feedlot, give them lots of corn, give them antibiotics so they can survive the corn, give them hormones to speed up their growth. Suddenly you take a two-year process and get it down to 13-14 months. Time is money, so we moved that way.
Wow. I think I have a little geek-environmentalist crush on Michael Pollan.
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