Saturday, September 10, 2022

What I have done apart from farming

This is the last of four posts giving an update of what is going on in my life.

Apart from running the farm, writing books and articles and giving lectures, I also do consultancy work. The one I am busy with at the moment is about animal welfare in the supermarkets’ private brands, commissioned by the Animal Welfare Sweden. One thing that strikes me with this job is that most people say that consumers want more information and that transparency is important. Supermarket chains and various certification schemes collect a wealth of information about the suppliers and the agriculture production, almost all of it digital. Nevertheless, there is very little of this information that reaches the consumers, and even less for products under the supermarkets own brands. The truth is that a competitive market doesn’t like transparency at all. Instead if information we get storytelling.

Before that, I spent a lot of time making a report (Koll på kolet) on the carbon cycle in the Swedish food and agriculture system for the Royal Swedish Agricultural Academy (of which I am also a member). It was a big and tedious work but the results were very interesting. To see the total flow is a useful tool for increased understanding the system. The report and data is available here, in Swedish only. One of the many interesting results was that the metabolic food waste, overeating, is as big as what is normally called food waste at the consumer level. Based on estimates of real consumption, calculations based on human metabolism and sewage data as well as calculations based on the weight of the population I came to the conclusion that approximately 2,600 kcal are actually eaten per capita and day. This means that food waste before-the-mouth and overeating are of the same order of magnitude, around 600 kcal per capita and day.

The report also gives a comprehensive overview of the livestock system. A little less than a quarter of all feed is composed of grain and pulses, things that in theory could be eaten also by humans (in reality quite a big proportion is second grade which the food industry rejects). 61% of all feed is consumed by cattle, 11% by pigs, 9% by chicken, 3% by sheep and goats, 2% by pets, reindeer, deer etc. and, probably surprising, 15% by horses (which are only used for leisure or sports).

According to my research feed (carbon) efficiency in pigs is higher than it is in poultry, which seemingly contradicts the often heard statement of highest feed conversion ratio in poultry. Feed conversion ratio is mostly measured in kg feed used per kg of product. But this is a misleading measure as it favors the use of highly concentrated feed. In salmon farming for instance, soy protein isolate is often used, but it takes 3 kg of soy to make 1 kg soy protein isolate. By using soy protein isolate the feed conversion ratio is reduced to a third (you can read more about feed conversion ratio here).

The report confirms the low rate of feed conversion for beef where only around 5% of the carbon ends up in the meat. Almost half of the carbon is going back to the fields in the form of manure though. In the grasslands cropped for hay and silage (approximately 40% of the Swedish acreage) there is net sequestration of carbon and in combination with the recirculation of manure it explains why soil organic matter and soil fertility increases in farms with cattle. Some of the “inefficiency” of the low feed conversion ratio of cattle is compensated for by improved soil fertility and carbon sequestration. One could say that cattle is extremely efficient in building fertility and sequestering carbon in the agriculture eco system. Nevertheless, I find the efficiency discussions rather meaningless as the concept of efficiency is loaded with value judgments and assumptions. It also reduces our domestic animals to machines with no other purpose than being efficient, so it is a bit ironic that so many animal rights activists use the (in)efficiency argument against cattle or other ruminants.

Another interesting study I made some time ago was about the possibilities and challenges for reducing the use of soy in the Swedish livestock production. The report was a working document for the Swedish Society for nature conservation and unfortunately not publicly available. There is a lot of confusion about the production and use of soy, and in particular how much soy is grown for livestock feed. Apart from a very small share of the soy that is used as soybeans to eat or for the production of tofu and other foods, the soybean is processed into three different product, soy meal that is used for animal feed, soy oil which is used for cooking oil, biodiesel and industrial use and lecithin and food ingredient/additive. In the processing approximately 80% becomes soy meal, 19% soy oil and 1% lecithin. For the economy of soy processing and soy cultivation all fractions need to be sold and the price of soy oil is much higher than for the cake. The claims that almost all soy is grown for animal feed is thus quite nonsensical.

Nevertheless, as soy barely can be grown in Sweden there are good reasons for Swedish livestock producers not to use imported soy. Notably, most (56%) of it is used in chicken and egg production. Pigs eat 13%, in beef production very little soy is used (4%) in Sweden, more is used in dairy (24%) and in particular in organic dairy production. The reason for the latter is that there are fewer alternative feedstuffs on the market and that organic producers produce a larger share of their feed, mainly because there are few other alternatives in the market. By producing a larger share of their feed they end up buying more soy as that is the product that they need the most to reach high production. There are, however, organic dairy producers that use no soy at all and there are those that feed grass only.

The abandonment of the use of soy in Swedish livestock production can’t be discussed solely as a replacement strategy where soy is replaces by rape seed meal or any other protein feed. I proposed a battery of actions including:

-        Use of the by-products from wheat ethanol which is currently exported

-        Increase the share of grass in the ration

-        Reducing poultry production, maintain or increase ruminants

-        Increased production of pulses (which is miniscule in Sweden)

-        Increased production of rape seed

-        Increased production of biofuels with a protein rich by product.

The last two points would not be feasible in a scenario with a large share of organic production as rape seed is very difficult to grow organically due to pest problems and there would not be capacity for increased biofuel production from farm land if the share of organic production is high.

Well, those are the kind of jobs I do.

Saturday, September 3, 2022

On my mind

This is the third of four posts giving an update of what’s going on in my life and mind.

From a communications perspective I ponder over how I can improve my efforts to explain why profit, competition and increased labor productivity, essential parts of capitalism, are the main factors driving increased resource use, and that economic value (not financial value) is created by the use of resources including human labor. With a constant population there can’t be economic growth without increased resource use.

Linked to that is also the need to debunk the consumerist perspective of markets, the notion that markets are “consumer-driven” and thus that the key to any change is consumer behavior. For me, it is apparent that markets and production methods are not consumer driven even if it is equally apparent that if no consumer buy a product it will cease to be produced.  The myth of that the consumer is in command is an essential part of the justification of capitalism. It portrays the market as a democratic institution which people can control by “voting with their wallets”. And, as markets are democratic the best is to let markets take care of as much as possible – so the story goes. Regardless of the fact that some people have many more dollars in their wallet than others, it gives a distorted view of how markets work. Steve Jobs said “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them” and proved it with the iPhone. It is true also on a much larger scale in time and place.

The food and agriculture system, where my main area of expertise is, provides ample evidence for that production methods, competition and government policies are all much more important than consumer choice. Almost everything people eat are made from a limited number of commodities that our ancestors domesticated, an individual consumer can’t change that, she can just refuse to eat some of them. That people eat enormous quantities of chicken and almost no magpies or starlings is not the result of consumer preferences but of the fact the hens were domesticated many thousand years ago and that from the 1930s and onwards industrial processes of chicken production were developed. In addition the food industry and restaurants like chicken as it is always tender and tasteless so you can give it any taste you want. All this together has transformed chicken from luxury food to a poor man’s staple food.

Even on a mega scale in time and space it is apparent that population growth is a result of increased production rather than the other way round – something I am busy studying at the moment. This matters quite a lot as the dominating narrative in agriculture is that “we have to produce more to feed a growing population”, but in my view it is rather “the population is growing because we exploit more and more resources”. Of course it is slightly simplistic, there are underlying factors - energy and capitalism – driving both agriculture production and population.

Two other technical matters I contemplate are the net emissions from man-made landscapes and mapping the main flows in the biological carbon cycles.

Today, all emissions of CO2, methane and nitrous oxide from agriculture (or other man made landscapes) are classified as anthropogenic as opposed to natural in IPCC terminology. But also natural landscapes emit carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. Wetlands, for example, emit more methane than all the anthropogenic sources together. If we drain a wet land and grow rice in it, all methane emissions from the rice production is classified as anthropogenic despite the fact that the land emitted methane also before (this could be more or less depending on the conditions). Equally, when a wet land is drained for dryland farming, the land normally will lose carbon as well as nitrous oxide. These emissions will be called anthropogenic but the reduction of methane will not be counted as a reduction in emissions. It seems to me that it would be more fair and accurate to contrast agriculture’s emissions to the emissions of the same land in its more pristine form. Does it matter? Well for the climate it doesn’t as it is not our categories of classifications that are changing the climate. But for climate policy and all the incentives and disincentives which are now developed, it can make a lot of difference.

To some extent, this is linked to the second matter, the flows of the biological carbon cycle. There are many proposals about tree planting or restoration of eco-systems as means to mitigate climate change. But people tend to look at these things in isolation and not from a system’s perspective. The total flow of carbon in the biological systems surpass the emissions from fossil fuels and the stocks in the biosphere are huge. Most of the carbon in the annual flow just circulates in the biosphere and the speed of the circulation can be very rapid, even plants themselves exhale carbon dioxide at night time.  Some of the circulation is slow, like the one tied up in tree trunks or other long lived organisms (whales and humans). But even for trees a substantial part of the carbon that is assimilated is not bound into the wood itself but is exchanged with fungi, or falling to the ground as leafs or needles, or eaten by insects. Some of the wood burns and the carbon is released rapidly. The average Swede eats 100 kg of carbon each year while the body contains some 12 kg, the stock (the body) is therefore much smaller than the flow.

But there is no good overview or flow chart of the paths that all this carbon takes.  I am convinced that such a mapping would be useful. I guess most of you have seen the graph that shows that 70% of all mammals on the planet are domestic livestock and most of the rest are humans, with only 4% wild mammals. It is of course a sad fact that we have killed or destroyed the habitat of so many wild mammals. I believe that the rest of the same research is even more interesting, but unfortunately little publicized. To realize that there is much more fish in the ocean than all mammals together and that arthropods (insects etc.) weigh more than 10 times all the cattle and that all the bacteria weigh 35 times more than all animals taken together. And that there are 200 times more fungi than humans. Plants dwarfs everything and make up some 90% of the biomass. It makes you feel a lot less important, doesn't it?

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1711842115

This also leads to another topic – rewilding. We explore that to some extent in The hippos of Pablo Escobar. These days we continue to dig a bit deeper into the topic and realize that rewilding is not so well defined and encompass very different approaches. There are many conflicts also for rewilding and humans have to manage rewilding to a very large extent, which is a bit contradictory. Rewilding sounds like primitivism, leading us back to a pure past of foraging, but in reality most of the pundits are ecomodernists (some are just rich people seeking a playground) who put humans outside of nature instead of being nature.

Most of the topics mentioned above will be discussed in some post later on, when the ground is covered in snow....