• FishFace@piefed.social
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    6 days ago

    Shit, is ploughing a girl less environmentally friendly?

    I guess there’s a serious risk of a baby which is like the least environmentally friendly thing possible

  • anton@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    6 days ago

    The main problem is that, not ploughing increases the need for pesticides, currently around 8% of energy used and reduces yield. While not ploughing increasing requiring 3x the pesticides might not be the case, a 20% reduction in yield seems plausible.

    The main energy consumption in farming is fertilizer at around 50%, but more importantly half the emissions are related to animal agriculture. Cutting back on that would actually make a difference.

    • psud@aussie.zone
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      1 day ago

      I don’t believe you could save the emissions from animal agriculture. Most animal ag is on land that isn’t suitable for growing crops, if it was ended, the land would become useless and left to go wild where it would support just as many just as polluting animals, but with no possibility of treating the pollution problem as no one would be managing the wild animals

      • anton@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        21 hours ago

        I don’t believe you could save the emissions from animal agriculture.

        The easiest is to stop converting more land to animals use.

        Most animal ag is on land that isn’t suitable for growing crops,

        But 6% of global emissions are from feeding crops to animals.

        if it was ended, the land would become useless

        Aside from reducing our emissions by 16%, meaning it would be about as useful as removing all emissions from the transport sector.

        and left to go wild where it would support just as many just as polluting animals,

        Laughable, but if if it where true it could easily be solved with reintroducing predators and rewilding the artificial grass lands.

        but with no possibility of treating the pollution problem as no one would be managing the wild animals

        What is more polluting? Animals shiting in the forrest every day at a different place or month worth of stored manure deposited on one field in a day, with barely any plant at the moment? Which of those will naturally break down and which will be washed into the ground water?

        Where are the huge amounts of biomass fermenting into methane? Some swamps and every farm.

    • MotoAsh@piefed.social
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      5 days ago

      and moving away from monoculture mass farming would remove the need for fertilizer. There are many solutions that capitalism doesn’t want.

    • anton@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      5 days ago

      I had the same question a few hours ago, but I found some science.
      Tldr: 30% of energy use is in diesel, and about half of that is for tilling fields.

      Rant:
      Note that this is energy use, so only CO2 emissions are counted, while methan is ignored. If we stopped farming animals, the effective emissions of the sector would be cut in half. Even if we are unwilling to change out diet, maybe we should look at reducing the amount of fertilizer instead.