Bill McKibben

[@alexdash4958]

Great video, thank you! But let's not forget the promises and perils of GE foods -

[@FredBauder]

The agricultural produces a great deal of food. People can't live on hot air.

[@andrewwhite2755]

Also here Bill's talking about crop-based agriculture rather than livestock farming, which is even worse, of course.

[@senselocke]

Julian Warmington Not exactly. He's talking about small farms that do both, contrasted with corporate farms that specialize. Using the fertilizer from the livestock to fertilize the fields, and feeding the livestock with crops grown nearby. This kind of system uses its own waste and produces far less useless product. Contrasted to a corporate farms--they use synthetic or purchased fertilizer and machines to till massive quantities of land, and produce a lot of crops they cannot sell, cannot replant (GM branding), and don't have animals to feed it to. Corporate livestock farms produce insane quantities of fertilizer they can't sell, don't spread on crops, and because of massive concentrations of animals require far more energy, heating, and disposal, not to mention air and groundwater pollution not produced by smaller, balanced farms--and sometimes having to use synthetic/unhealthy feed. The issue with corporate farms is they do one or the other--agriculture or livestock. In small farms, the waste from one is supply for the other, leading to a much more sustainable, much lower carbon-producing system. When you separate, you get massive pig farms that stink to high heaven, bubbling muck in the cesspool where they attempt to dispose of all the feces which pollute the air and can seep into groundwater too, and sicker animals requiring more antibiotics and filthy living conditions. Or you get massive crop fields that don't rotate out, and have to import fertilizer and cannot use rejected produce--they literally cannot replant the GM-stamped seed they produce--all non-sellable crops must be disposed of. This non-sellable yield would instead be used to feed livestock on a smaller farm. The factorization of process is good for a lot of things--cars, electronics, books, clothing, etc. Farming, however, is not one of them. Hyper-specializing is always going to be more wasteful, and at the volume these farms have to produce, become astronomical. Instead of taking waste from one as source for another, we spend energy and carbon manufacturing fake fertilizer for one type and produce methane attempting to dispose of fertilizer from the other, adding both sums instead of them canceling out. There is no balance. It seems to me that this is what Bill is talking about.