The plants use energy from the sun to turn carbon dioxide from the air into edible calories. When our animal bodies “burn” the food we eat, that turns it back to carbon dioxide, which we exhale.
The plants use energy from the sun to turn carbon dioxide from the air into edible calories. When our animal bodies “burn” the food we eat, that turns it back to carbon dioxide, which we exhale.
The energy input is the sun, and most of the calories come from the air (carbon dioxide). Given so much external input, harvesting from a plot without reducing soil fertility is totally possible. With nitrogen-fixing crops (soybeans being the poster child), even the nitrogen fertilizer comes from the air.
Not a hypothetical: Hostess folded, as did Yellow trucking. Unions can’t save a business from bad business decisions or destructive market forces.
But businesses fold all the time, union or no union. When business is good, unions make sure the employees get a fair piece of that.
Modern industrial farming is not sustainable for the next hundred years, no, but there are a lot of levers to work to transform it into something that will reliably feed future generations.
One lever is amount and kind of meat in the average diet. It takes something like seven pounds of grain to make one pound of beef. Modern chicken breeds are amazingly efficient at converting feed grain to chicken meat, but even they are something like two pounds in to one pound out. Reducing the percent of meat in our diets would make our food go significantly further.