Absolutely love George just a shame that most of the applauding came from people challenging him. This man has spent best part of his life researching the environment and environmental science so he knows his stuff. We’ve got to stop being sentimental about past and present cultures and start to be pragmatic and forward thinking. All the things that concern people won’t be here at all to be concerned about if we carry on living this high impact low yield lifestyle. Truth is painful but it’s a healing process
He doesnt know his stuff. He knows only what he reads or is told. He isnt actually doing it. He makes his money from do what I say, not what I do. Farmers are the opposite. He has some great ideas and some idiotic ones too.
@@Forester-qs5mf Most of his and other "Green" ideas are oppressive. Human civilisation needs to increase energy expenditure to increase quality of life. Anything that suppresses that is reversing the quality of life, creates needless suffering as can already be seen and is therefore oppressive to human civilisation and must be vehemently resisted otherwise the majorities less fortunate will be forced to live in caves again. The way forward is to make more efficient energy production, not reducing it or removing it from poorer people.
@@Forester-qs5mf Well said. Farming without livestock means there would be no natural manure. Also at least 30% of land is marginal and cannot grow crops, grass is the best option, especially in countries like Ireland. Farming is evolving all the time and only best practice can survive.
Thankyou Rosie and George. Excellent questions and facilitation from Rosie, and questions from the audience, and brilliant responses from George. These are the debates we need nationally and internationally. I say this as an english new zealander where industrial agriculture runs rampant over land and fresh water systems. It emits half of our greenhouse gases and it exports masses of emissions around the planet. Lord knows, we urgently need a change of politcal-economic system including agricuture in Aotearoa one of the most corrupted climate+environment states on planet earth.
Yes, growing food for 8 billion is awful. These terrible farmers creating so much emmissions. I flight in your life is the equivalent to whole life being a vegetarian. Are you prepared to give up all your cars, phones, luxury, travel and then grow your own food.?
The last question (and the applause from many present) shows that Humanity is doomed...most people will still be claiming that there is nothing wrong with animal agriculture (because they have economic interests on it!) even when all the facts prove it to be one of the major contributors for the climate catastrophe. The planet and all the species inhabiting it will finally have a chance to recover after Humans go extinct.
As I follow the best Regen grazers, I see that with each passing year they are able and in fact almost required to increase stock density to keep up with the growth of forage. And with each year comes an increase in number and diversity of species both in the forage and in the wildlife of surrounding forests. I don’t think you can judge what is possible with stock density based on even the last five years of the best mob grazers; they are doing things that have never been done before. Also he sidestep moderators concern about relying on monocrops, even if they are a bacteria.
"Also he sidestep moderators concern about relying on monocrops, even if they are a bacteria." Where did you get the idea that the bacteria are monocrops? There are a wide variety of possibilities in precision fermentation. To suggest otherwise is as absurd as suggesting we only have one variety of cheese and one variety of beer.
Another note: Though we know that social injustice (e.g. inequality in consumption & ecological footprint) is the main problem, issues like distructive military & industrial arms races and human over-population must always be addressed in climate crisis discussions. Over-population of any species is a disease for any ecosystem.
I found this talk very troubling, especially the part about brewing our food. I think that part of our trouble now, in terms of health and growing food, is that we think that we can replicate nature. Already we have lots of companies who are making food "products," but I don't think that they are necessarily "food," and are not necessarily nutritious. Also, I'm not sure that "high yield" is what we should be aiming for - maybe just enough.
I've not read his book, I'm just using figures that he quoted in this speech. The number of deer that he's suggesting the UK needs as a maximum is less than 900k. Now, I'm pretty sure a wild eco system needs more ruminants than that. Who will prune and fertilise his wonderful wild eco system? It's the ruminants that's built all of the carbon rich top soil in the first place. I think George is cherry picking his information to suit an agenda.
There's another Aussie perennial variety that I heard Gabe Brown mention, but i forgot what it was called. That Aussie variety has much bigger wheat berries
@@REGENETARIANISM Gabe Brown grows Salish Blue - a hybrid of Asian wheat and wheatgrass - which I rather like. But it is not at all Aussie and was first created in Ukraine in 1930s, then recreated in US in 1990s
The beginning of Monbiot's speech, plants & bacteria, living soil as external gut for plants etc. is an enlightening introduction to soil ecology. About precision fermentation: He says, this is a sophisticated fermentation technology and there I see a danger: Big Money and big corporations love sophistocated technologies because they can easily be patented and monopolized. As E.F. Schumacher explains in "Small Is Beautiful", a technology must be small, simple, available and cheap enough to be useful for humanity. What technology is useful for Big Money, and what is useful for humanity, are fundamentally different things.
@@C.Hawkshaw Of course it can. The science may be in the bacteria and yeast management but Governments and industry are so resistant to creating community-based knowledge and skill enterprises. The corporate and central government approaches are making a problem out of wind and solar farming that doesn't need to be there. Because as the saying goes, "you shouldn't put new wine in old wineskins'.
George has some good ideas and seems to have a grasp on how plants and soil function. However he seems to not understand the benefits of animal integration into farmland though and some of the statements he made as 'facts' are clearly wrong. Such as that growing animals on land are a 'low yield system' and that Regen Grazing doesnt work. Anyone who works in this field as a farmer or who takes an interest in the revolution taking place around Regenerative Grazing and the huge improvements with soil and carbon sequestration knows this to be the case. Even the Australian Government has now set up a system to pay farmers for the carbon they sequester in their soils through regenerative grazing. I think its a case of just that the science George is reading hasnt kept up with the innovation, but that will change. He also competely overlooked the some important points as often discussed by Dr Christine Jones that the future of farming is in multispiecies cropping and integration of animals to provide a much more productive and profitable farming system that is also much less relient on inputs and as such has much more resilience. The whole rewilding thing is a fantasy as is the idea that technology will save us, something that has been proven wrong consitantly through history. Farming in Nature's image is the answer. Complexity and diversity are the key. George will come around eventually I'm sure but we cant wait for that and need to forge ahead with Regenerative Agriculture which is at its most efficient with the full integration of animals into our food system.
Wow, he’s really out of touch with what Regen ranchers- lamb and beef, are doing these days. He talks about subsidies- that old style of ranching is far, far from what is going on with Regen ranchers of today. He clearly has not researched the facts about modern Regen ranchers-I’m talking about the cutting edge practices of Greg Judy, Ian Mitchell-Innes, etc. Actually there are hundreds of them, with new people starting every year. These guys and women make money without subsidies, herbicides, pesticides, and synthetic fertilizers by building the soil and improving the ecosystem. He’s really behind the times.
There is plenty of peer-reviewed evidence on AMP grazing reversing desertification but George seems to be too invested into pulses and fermentation to read them
At last, at last. The world is getting back to nature. Maybe we'll get rid of Kellogg's as well in the end. Sorry fellas but I've no time for the likes of that sort.
Precision fermentation is to food production what nuclear fusion is to power generation. It holds the answer to all our problems. Well that's what fusion has promised for decades but failed to deliver.
The food tech Monbiot cheer-leads for is capital intensive & funded by VC's. It won't be open sourced. The IP will be patent protected, so he's pushing for more corporate control of the food supply.
Nuclear fusion has been doing well for all your life, and has been responsible for keeping you alive, it's just that the best fusion reactor we currently have access to is outside the Earth.
He seems confused about regenerative farming. I presume he means intensive grazing techniques. Well proven as the best cost-benefit and soils restoration farming around. But not the only one. Broadly eco-agriculture is about optimising soils and therefore yield and the nutrition of food. These farming systems can be bespoke to the natural regional ecosystem although not limited to native plants and animals. MOST farming land worldwide is performing very poorly that when initially carved out of the natural ecosystem. On carbon sequestration. Agriculture is a recycled system and because we eat a lot of the carbon involved, has a limited sequestration ceiling. Nonetheless, best soils are best sequestering ag systems. Long lived trees and undisturbed wetlands, kelp forests, are the really big sequesterers and if we optimise ecosystems we also optimise hydrology, flora and fauna, and our own human interactivity with our ecology - and that is very health for us. But not without food. The big money should be on family farmer intensive eco-agriculture systems including agroforestry. And that is only big money in the sense of $1 per person per year in Africa in strategic training and local appropriate technologies, guided by the local community, can transform a community to a flourishing economic system over 10 years. Well that's the ball park I'm operating on in my work with refugees in Africa. If I'm short-changing by a $ per head it is still a very cheap system. And, yes there's not a lot of grazing animals in the mix but not because they shouldn't be - they are just very capital and maintenance expensive. On the issue of climate solutions. Carbon removal from the atmosphere is now well established. And the four or five promising areas will be scaled up by 2030 or so, and will restore CO2 levels to pre-industrial by 2050 - 2060. One of these are the ecosystem restoration, although until we get farming oils and consumerism in hand we are fighting a receding tide. And until we get a cap and begin to reduce the greenhouse, we will keep doubling on GHG by release of ecosystem stored methane. We are in a bind and we need all areas of life in strategic effort. George is certainly a bit of a devotee, like Alan Savory, and I will take each their best practice advise and leave any bickering to themselves, as worthless to me.
Do we not need the light from the sun to maintain health... as in the sunlight that is now become food. Essentially consuming sunlight & fully Incoded information that we have recieved from small celled existence...?
@@bluecloudsailing If so, so are published studies based on proven science and fairly basic understanding of photosynthesis. perhaps looking either at direct literature on the subject or listen to Dr. Zach Bush nutritional lectures would give perspective.
Absolutely love George just a shame that most of the applauding came from people challenging him. This man has spent best part of his life researching the environment and environmental science so he knows his stuff. We’ve got to stop being sentimental about past and present cultures and start to be pragmatic and forward thinking. All the things that concern people won’t be here at all to be concerned about if we carry on living this high impact low yield lifestyle. Truth is painful but it’s a healing process
So brilliantly expressed!
He's a looney...
He doesnt know his stuff. He knows only what he reads or is told. He isnt actually doing it. He makes his money from do what I say, not what I do. Farmers are the opposite. He has some great ideas and some idiotic ones too.
@@Forester-qs5mf Most of his and other "Green" ideas are oppressive. Human civilisation needs to increase energy expenditure to increase quality of life. Anything that suppresses that is reversing the quality of life, creates needless suffering as can already be seen and is therefore oppressive to human civilisation and must be vehemently resisted otherwise the majorities less fortunate will be forced to live in caves again. The way forward is to make more efficient energy production, not reducing it or removing it from poorer people.
@@Forester-qs5mf Well said. Farming without livestock means there would be no natural manure. Also at least 30% of land is marginal and cannot grow crops, grass is the best option, especially in countries like Ireland.
Farming is evolving all the time and only best practice can survive.
Thankyou Rosie and George. Excellent questions and facilitation from Rosie, and questions from the audience, and brilliant responses from George. These are the debates we need nationally and internationally. I say this as an english new zealander where industrial agriculture runs rampant over land and fresh water systems. It emits half of our greenhouse gases and it exports masses of emissions around the planet. Lord knows, we urgently need a change of politcal-economic system including agricuture in Aotearoa one of the most corrupted climate+environment states on planet earth.
Yes, growing food for 8 billion is awful. These terrible farmers creating so much emmissions.
I flight in your life is the equivalent to whole life being a vegetarian.
Are you prepared to give up all your cars, phones, luxury, travel and then grow your own food.?
Thanks for your tenacity, I’ve given up, I don’t think the human race understands how critical the climate crisis is. Barb
It's not critical at all you fool.... go an take some valium...
Such an important debate, thank you Rosie and George!
My crystal ball tells me, ole George will be a senior advisor to a post revolution government.
The last question (and the applause from many present) shows that Humanity is doomed...most people will still be claiming that there is nothing wrong with animal agriculture (because they have economic interests on it!) even when all the facts prove it to be one of the major contributors for the climate catastrophe.
The planet and all the species inhabiting it will finally have a chance to recover after Humans go extinct.
As I follow the best Regen grazers, I see that with each passing year they are able and in fact almost required to increase stock density to keep up with the growth of forage. And with each year comes an increase in number and diversity of species both in the forage and in the wildlife of surrounding forests. I don’t think you can judge what is possible with stock density based on even the last five years of the best mob grazers; they are doing things that have never been done before.
Also he sidestep moderators concern about relying on monocrops, even if they are a bacteria.
"Also he sidestep moderators concern about relying on monocrops, even if they are a bacteria." Where did you get the idea that the bacteria are monocrops? There are a wide variety of possibilities in precision fermentation. To suggest otherwise is as absurd as suggesting we only have one variety of cheese and one variety of beer.
Excellent! Thank you! So true!
Another note: Though we know that social injustice (e.g. inequality in consumption & ecological footprint) is the main problem, issues like distructive military & industrial arms races and human over-population must always be addressed in climate crisis discussions. Over-population of any species is a disease for any ecosystem.
I found this talk very troubling, especially the part about brewing our food. I think that part of our trouble now, in terms of health and growing food, is that we think that we can replicate nature. Already we have lots of companies who are making food "products," but I don't think that they are necessarily "food," and are not necessarily nutritious. Also, I'm not sure that "high yield" is what we should be aiming for - maybe just enough.
Once they add in the cockroaches, they will be very nutritious, so don't worry about it too much....
Really sad that 3 months later this only has 150 likes.
Well nobody likes a smart arse.
This guy needs to look into Greg Judy and polyface farms because we don't need to live wild, management is important in producing food
What a complex world George lives in.
...when compared to the superficial world the other 99.99% of the population live in....
A complete spoofer. Never fed one person in his life but spends a good deal of his time trying to make life hard for real farmers.
I've not read his book, I'm just using figures that he quoted in this speech.
The number of deer that he's suggesting the UK needs as a maximum is less than 900k.
Now, I'm pretty sure a wild eco system needs more ruminants than that.
Who will prune and fertilise his wonderful wild eco system?
It's the ruminants that's built all of the carbon rich top soil in the first place.
I think George is cherry picking his information to suit an agenda.
You should read his books and explore the thousands of references each contain
10 000 yrs of successfully growing annual crops ?
Except that is being supported by fossils.
Kernza has low yields and is prone to crop failure - just ask General Mills.
There's another Aussie perennial variety that I heard Gabe Brown mention, but i forgot what it was called. That Aussie variety has much bigger wheat berries
@@REGENETARIANISM Gabe Brown grows Salish Blue - a hybrid of Asian wheat and wheatgrass - which I rather like. But it is not at all Aussie and was first created in Ukraine in 1930s, then recreated in US in 1990s
The beginning of Monbiot's speech, plants & bacteria, living soil as external gut for plants etc. is an enlightening introduction to soil ecology. About precision fermentation: He says, this is a sophisticated fermentation technology and there I see a danger: Big Money and big corporations love sophistocated technologies because they can easily be patented and monopolized. As E.F. Schumacher explains in "Small Is Beautiful", a technology must be small, simple, available and cheap enough to be useful for humanity. What technology is useful for Big Money, and what is useful for humanity, are fundamentally different things.
Right, on one hand it ccan be local and open source, but still sophisticated. Maybe they can dumb it down so anyone can brew at home.
@@C.Hawkshaw Of course it can. The science may be in the bacteria and yeast management but Governments and industry are so resistant to creating community-based knowledge and skill enterprises. The corporate and central government approaches are making a problem out of wind and solar farming that doesn't need to be there. Because as the saying goes, "you shouldn't put new wine in old wineskins'.
If you can brew beer, then you can do precision fermentation.
George has some good ideas and seems to have a grasp on how plants and soil function. However he seems to not understand the benefits of animal integration into farmland though and some of the statements he made as 'facts' are clearly wrong. Such as that growing animals on land are a 'low yield system' and that Regen Grazing doesnt work. Anyone who works in this field as a farmer or who takes an interest in the revolution taking place around Regenerative Grazing and the huge improvements with soil and carbon sequestration knows this to be the case. Even the Australian Government has now set up a system to pay farmers for the carbon they sequester in their soils through regenerative grazing. I think its a case of just that the science George is reading hasnt kept up with the innovation, but that will change. He also competely overlooked the some important points as often discussed by Dr Christine Jones that the future of farming is in multispiecies cropping and integration of animals to provide a much more productive and profitable farming system that is also much less relient on inputs and as such has much more resilience. The whole rewilding thing is a fantasy as is the idea that technology will save us, something that has been proven wrong consitantly through history. Farming in Nature's image is the answer. Complexity and diversity are the key. George will come around eventually I'm sure but we cant wait for that and need to forge ahead with Regenerative Agriculture which is at its most efficient with the full integration of animals into our food system.
Wow, he’s really out of touch with what Regen ranchers- lamb and beef, are doing these days. He talks about subsidies- that old style of ranching is far, far from what is going on with Regen ranchers of today. He clearly has not researched the facts about modern Regen ranchers-I’m talking about the cutting edge practices of Greg Judy, Ian Mitchell-Innes, etc. Actually there are hundreds of them, with new people starting every year. These guys and women make money without subsidies, herbicides, pesticides, and synthetic fertilizers by building the soil and improving the ecosystem.
He’s really behind the times.
There is plenty of peer-reviewed evidence on AMP grazing reversing desertification but George seems to be too invested into pulses and fermentation to read them
Have you read his book?
Have you read any of his books, or hundreds of Guardian articles.
Have you read any of his books, or hundreds of Guardian articles.
Have you read any of his books, or hundreds of Guardian articles.
Have you read any of his books, or hundreds of Guardian articles.
At last, at last. The world is getting back to nature. Maybe we'll get rid of Kellogg's as well in the end. Sorry fellas but I've no time for the likes of that sort.
Precision fermentation is to food production what nuclear fusion is to power generation. It holds the answer to all our problems. Well that's what fusion has promised for decades but failed to deliver.
Soylent Green much? We already produce enough food to feed 14 billion people. It's the distribution we suck at
The food tech Monbiot cheer-leads for is capital intensive & funded by VC's. It won't be open sourced. The IP will be patent protected, so he's pushing for more corporate control of the food supply.
Read Regensis.
Nuclear fusion has been doing well for all your life, and has been responsible for keeping you alive, it's just that the best fusion reactor we currently have access to is outside the Earth.
Precision fermentation is to agriculture what quartz watches were to Swiss watch industry
He seems confused about regenerative farming. I presume he means intensive grazing techniques. Well proven as the best cost-benefit and soils restoration farming around. But not the only one. Broadly eco-agriculture is about optimising soils and therefore yield and the nutrition of food. These farming systems can be bespoke to the natural regional ecosystem although not limited to native plants and animals. MOST farming land worldwide is performing very poorly that when initially carved out of the natural ecosystem. On carbon sequestration. Agriculture is a recycled system and because we eat a lot of the carbon involved, has a limited sequestration ceiling. Nonetheless, best soils are best sequestering ag systems. Long lived trees and undisturbed wetlands, kelp forests, are the really big sequesterers and if we optimise ecosystems we also optimise hydrology, flora and fauna, and our own human interactivity with our ecology - and that is very health for us. But not without food. The big money should be on family farmer intensive eco-agriculture systems including agroforestry. And that is only big money in the sense of $1 per person per year in Africa in strategic training and local appropriate technologies, guided by the local community, can transform a community to a flourishing economic system over 10 years. Well that's the ball park I'm operating on in my work with refugees in Africa. If I'm short-changing by a $ per head it is still a very cheap system. And, yes there's not a lot of grazing animals in the mix but not because they shouldn't be - they are just very capital and maintenance expensive. On the issue of climate solutions. Carbon removal from the atmosphere is now well established. And the four or five promising areas will be scaled up by 2030 or so, and will restore CO2 levels to pre-industrial by 2050 - 2060. One of these are the ecosystem restoration, although until we get farming oils and consumerism in hand we are fighting a receding tide. And until we get a cap and begin to reduce the greenhouse, we will keep doubling on GHG by release of ecosystem stored methane. We are in a bind and we need all areas of life in strategic effort. George is certainly a bit of a devotee, like Alan Savory, and I will take each their best practice advise and leave any bickering to themselves, as worthless to me.
Opps "farming soils" , not "oils"
A tidal wave of intellectual langauge.
A tidal wave of bullshit more like...
Too many deer? Eat the deer. Sorted :)
...wisdom from Planet Shorttermsolution, yeah?
Do we not need the light from the sun to maintain health... as in the sunlight that is now become food. Essentially consuming sunlight & fully Incoded information that we have recieved from small celled existence...?
You seem confused.
@@bluecloudsailing You seem condescending
@@bluecloudsailing If so, so are published studies based on proven science and fairly basic understanding of photosynthesis. perhaps looking either at direct literature on the subject or listen to Dr. Zach Bush nutritional lectures would give perspective.