Really appreciate all the great content. And constantly marveling at how in the world you manage to produce so much content. However you do it, we are grateful!
On the "feed the world" Q. , I like Joel Salatin's address of the topic in his Blog a few years ago. As for animals, it's been proven, as I think you know but many are your viewers likely don't, that herbivores can be successfully raised in similar time-frames (as far as age of harvest) & on same or less pasture & hay/winter feed acreage, on forages alone. Greg Judy, Joel, others doing it the holistic planned way with typically daily moves ( Joel wrote - in "Salad bar Beef" - that they saw the largest bump in grass- production efficiency when finally went to daily moves), have grasses coming in thicker, faster, earlier in spring, lusher ( it's a word, right 😉 ?) in summer, later into fall. Next is Ethanol's inefficiency, then the general unnecessary amount of grain products consumed in the US. From "seed oils" which are bad for us, to eating things like chips which don't fill us, on top of meals which don't nourish us enough... there's a lot we could do differently. Even kids aren't that hard to change the diets for, once you throw some cheese on it and they feel MUCH happier, eating eggs and plenty of grassfed dairy &/or meats and those fats, and the chaos of the home is abated in those and by parents being calm, fair, firm and consistent. Taking care of wild children for a relative, by day 3 they were much calmer, starting to lose to grey look, and happy to eat eggs for breakfast and cookies made with sprouted flour, coconut sugar ( a perennial btw, and not a GMO row-crop as sugar beets allegedly are, from which most sugar used in US is from, I think..) & use WAY less than recipes call for. I cut back gradually for those not used to it, but they adjusted a lot quicker than expected and liked them just fine. Texture doesn't seem neg. affected in most things I've baked so far, either.
Got a call from a farmer about 45 minutes drive from Baltimore MD and 60 minutes (on a good day) from D.C., "The food bank truck dropped off a huge load yesterday. Could you guys use some meats?" 15 minutes later I'm walking around the farm yard, mouth agape. There were tons of fresh produce, decorated cakes, so called artisan breads, frozen turkeys, beef steaks, pork chops and shank end ham portions in gaylord boxes stacked one upon another. I'm sure I didn't see everything that was dumped on the farm. I did manage to sort out 3 frozen turkeys, 2 ham ends, several beef steaks and packs of pork chops. About 70 pounds worth of meats I barely managed to cram in a small freezer which also contained 3 sheets of pork ribs and another turkey I'd picked up at the farm a day or two after Christmas. Hands on hips, the farm looked around his yard and remarked, "If I could store all this I could feed 12 families through the winter. But storage limits are why all this was dumped here. The pigs will eat a lot of this. What's left will go in the manure spreader as it rots. Such a waste."
As expected another great podcast/video. People go hungry for food and some of us were going hungry for your daily videos! Some VERY good points brought up. People think that we are crazy because how we garden. Yet they do not refuse the FREE food that we give them. It is, and always will be, a LONG slow process and how we wish to live on Earth and not Mars and saving the planet one ecological step at a time!
Thank you for including food insecurity on your take on “feeding the world”. I think it’s a really great to point out that conventional vs. organic is a moot point considering how such a large portion of the world goes hungry or underfed. Missed having the daily farmer Jesse!
You raise some very good points, and I agree it is mostly policy that stands in our way from changing our food systems. These are the sorts of things my once-upon-a-time-policy-employee brain thinks of when I am weeding my crops. It's a much larger problem than "just grow organically", which is unfortunate. One important facet of all of this is that we should remember that a good portion of the world subsists on cash crops (wheat, rice, soy, corn, beans and lentils) as the predominant part of their diet since they are cheap and easy to obtain. There is a large portion of the world's population that cannot afford meat. These populations are eating what we use as fodder. The North American diet is very much an outlier when it comes to meat consumption. When these crops are moved to an organic system, they "suddenly" cost at least double the amount for the consumer to purchase than the conventional option. A lot of this is marketing, because we've been pushing organic as the more premium option, but it also has to do with increased labour costs (as organic usually pays fair wages). This usually prices out a good portion of the world's population from being able to afford the organic or regenerative option. Organic chicken feed at my local farm store in Central Alberta (where these crops are grown) is three to four times more expensive than conventionally grown chicken feed grown in the same region. There are a lot of nuances to this and I've gone to conferences and events with these organic growers and I want to support their efforts, but I can't personally justify the switch due to cost alone. I can't sell my eggs for enough to recover the costs. I often think about things like when quinoa started being sold to North American consumers. It became so much a premium product that the farmers couldn't afford to buy quinoa and in 2012 - 2013 we started seeing news articles to this effect. Production has now shifted and quinoa is grown in more areas (US, Canada), which has lowered the price and made it more accessible again. Money has entered into the communities in South America which traditionally grew quinoa, but the wealth is not necessarily making it to the farmers and we still have issues with slave labour, lack of compensation, poor living conditions... I dunno. It's such a systemic problem to solve. Anyways, thanks for reading my novel, I'm going to go back to seed shopping and thinking about next years growing plan. Happy New Year all. May 2025 be blessed.
Question was pretty well answered if you ask me! I find conventional is only better in a “lb per acre” metric which like you said supports the monocrop growing of feed grain for meat consumption. All other metrics put organic growing on top. We need to, like you said, design our society around farms that work and not the other way around!
about "feeding the world": decades ago we learned that geckos can cross the ceiling thanks to the millions of hair/pad structures (setae) on their feet. The interesting thing about that is that, if you combined all the setae into one big seta (?) of a corresponding dimension, they'd fall right off the ceiling---the multiplicity is an essential part of the functional success of the overall structure. I find this idea applies to so many areas of life---including whether organic agriculture can feed the world. People growing food in small ways throughout their areas can provide timely food directly to people, in some ways better than the long chain engendered by one giant Midwest farm pouring their corn into cows (which, no shade, are delicious) in feedlots that end up on grocery shelves.
Great run down of organic/regenerative farming vs conventional farming. There is so much we could change to make it better. I frustrated our system is benefiting mostly very large and factory farms while the small farmers suffer. Here in California so much farm land is being built over, we even had a billionaire buy up a bunch of farms to build a model city in one of our agricultural areas. He tried to get it re-zoned but failed but he has tons of cash so he is going to try next again next year.
Thanks Jesse, great topic! I think it is definitely possible to feed the world organically and agree that we are not currently doing that from conventional Ag. There are many things we would need to change to make that happen. It is beyond me why we waste so much arable land growing fodder for animals. I saw a video recently about growing your own fodder by sprouting barley and now it seems the obvious choice. It only takes a small percent of the land & water to grow the same amount but without any chemicals at all and the livestock gets more nutrient dense and available food. But you are right, it requires more than the farmer or Ag practice changes to make such a shift. The irony is, if you could educate the masses they would drive the decision for Washington. Unfortunately, there is so much mis-information out there, it is hard to get the majority to listen or even believe how toxic our mainstream food system has gotten. Thanks for keeping the main thing , the main thing!
The state of Sikkim in India, is completely organic since 2016. They started converting to organic agriculture in 2000, with public programs of training the growers and financing their business.
@@SlearBlaneheart It had a lot to do with the means of production. The means was the entire point. Look up the Green Revolution Wendy refers to: countries watched their crop production skyrocket to the point that they no longer had a malnutrition problem, they had a surplus problem. The Green Revolution brought lots of other serious problems, too, but it did attack a serious global public health problem at the time pretty successfully. Antibiotics are not the only reason the global population's nearly tripled since then.
Thank you for pointing out all the fallacies of "feeding the world" when it comes to talking about a theoretical amount of land use vs. the reality of what's happening in the real world , including the incredible loss of farmland and in the US in particular the amount of farmland that grows fuel, along with the many other issues that get in the way of making any claims about this issue, along with the improper analysis of conventional farming with synthetic chemicals and plowing which causes a loss of soil over a certain amount of time depending on the many variables of the ecosystem where that farmland is. This is in sharp contrast to regenerative ag. which builds soil over time but certainly requires inputs on a larger scale, at least in the beginning. Yes, govt. policy or inaction or negative actions such as being overly generous to large corporations whose main goal is to make immediate profit is a big driver. It would be interesting to see what would happen if the govt. got out of the business of farming including all the inputs that go into farming to where farmers/businesses were COMPLETELY on their own to make money, grow their business. Also, have a fixed tax rate that's low for farmland which would be any land that grows food that's sold to consumers. I think under those situations, and going around the world with the same issue for the govt. being out of the way, no subsidies, low tax on farmland, etc.... the trend would be moving to regenerative ag. And yes, it seems moot to talk about feeding the world in 2050 when you're not feeding the world now..
Personal observation......if USDA mandated cover crop planting in return for partaking in taxpayer subsidized crop insurance, soil health would dramatically improve. Hundreds of thousands of acres of ground here in commodity crop flyover country lays uncovered and bare all winter after harvest. Massive erosion issues that not even no-till practices can stop. Ditch water muddy all winter and spring.
I want to think about this question by analyzing the food that we eat community wise or world wise. These are wheat, rice, and corn. I have never seen anyone grow these crops organically. I also disagree on how much politics can influence feeding culture. Science has developed laboratory meat, could then this be the option for meats when governments finally manage to force people from eating beef, chicken and portk?
Or don't want to do it. I grow so much food in my 35'×45' bed. Even after I have preserved all all I want for the year, I still have food to give away. My friend lives in an apartment without a yard and grows greens and herbs on her patio. She rents a plot in a community garden for $15 that's pretty decent size. It's all a mindset.
@@midwestribeye7820 Or have time to do it. If you have children or someone else to take care of and a job or three and are barely hanging on, you don't have bandwidth for a productive garden as well, let alone preserving the food.
I think Organic/Regenerative is 100% possible. If farmers and growers had farms that were increasing profits due to lower inputs even with lower yields, at least the feeding the world part can make sense because yield is down. Of course, the farmer's bottom line would then need to be discussed because the farmer is still in a business so it would be another issue. While im not a farmer, I and many other gardeners practice organic and regenerative practices at home and it's funny about the claim that yield goes down with organic...when organic home gardners can clearly get a lot of yield. The question is then can it be applied to a larger scale and other farmers have already done that. In fact, many farmers can use biology over the years and cover cropping to the point where inputs overall go down and yield goes up. But also, many markets are determined by the size and quality of the product and when that also increases, you now have better quality, more yield, fewer inputs, and the farmer clearly makes more monies. Thats a W-W for everybody and i agree with you that it is soley a cultural and policy descrepency.
The air is full of nitrogen. Get air in the soil one way or the other and there you go. Calcium GSR is doing amazing things. I've used it two years. Gabe Brown doesn't have an input bill anymore.
We need to let go of this mindset that we have to feed the world. It's far more important to be able to feel our LOCAL community. The rest of the world can feed itself.
On the "feed the world" Q. , I like Joel Salatin's address of the topic in his Blog a few years ago. As for animals, it's been proven, as I think you know but many are your viewers likely don't, that herbivores can be successfully raised in similar time-frames (as far as age of harvest) & on same or less pasture & hay/winter feed acreage, on forages alone. Greg Judy, Joel, others doing it the holistic planned way with typically daily moves ( Joel wrote - in "Salad bar Beef" - that they saw the largest bump in grass- production efficiency when finally went to daily moves), have grasses coming in thicker, faster, earlier in spring, lusher ( it's a word, right 😉 ?) in summer, later into fall. Next is Ethanol's inefficiency, then the general unnecessary amount of grain products consumed in the US. From "seed oils" which are bad for us, to eating things like chips which don't fill us, on top of meals which don't nourish us enough... there's a lot we could do differently. Even kids aren't that hard to change the diets for, once you throw some cheese on it and they feel MUCH happier, eating eggs and plenty of grassfed dairy &/or meats and those fats, and the chaos of the home is abated in those and by parents being calm, fair, firm and consistent. Taking care of wild children for a relative, by day 3 they were much calmer, starting to lose to grey look, and happy to eat eggs for breakfast and cookies made with sprouted flour, coconut sugar ( a perennial btw, and not a GMO row-crop as sugar beets allegedly are, from which most sugar used in US is from, I think..) & use WAY less than recipes call for. I cut back gradually for those not used to it, but they adjusted a lot quicker than expected and liked them just fine. Texture doesn't seem neg. affected in most things I've baked so far, either.
Off topic, but I'm curious if you feel that the Neversink farm course is still a good deal at $2900!?! I was looking into courses to purchase a a gift to my daughter on the other side of the country and was just caught a little Off guard to see how much the cost has risen of the course. I've not taken it myself so just looking for some informed opinions. Thanks!
The rule is not to give a fish because they do not learn, use that across the board, sell them a fish…still no learning. Organic must be done so the earth can heal everyone must help and it can be done, use the higher power of hunger to cause all to tend the earth.
I often wonder if growing potatoes in a pot by a sunny window wouldn't help make a dent in food insecurity. I remember hearing during my schooling that the Irish could feed a family of four on a half acre.
The sad part about the studies is that for the most part they are funded by the companies trying to push their products. They don’t tell us the effects of using herbicides and pesticides for years and years. I could rant on and on about this but I won’t. My opinion the best way to feed the world organically is to grow as much of your own food as possible and shop your local farmers markets if we all start doing that policies and growers will change.
Have you ever tried grafting tomatoes tops onto potato bottoms? I’ve seen a few videos about it and wondering if it is legit? Thanks 🙏 and you’re awesome!
We throw away more food daily than the starving people can eat . Is a problem of access to food and the means to produce it, is not about "overpopulation " .
It is absolutely about overpopulation. All this surplus food you're referring to is almost entirely produced through conventional means based on finite resources. Though there may be a surplus now, there will not be in the future. I'm not even factoring in climate change. But there will be more hungry people. And the food will literally dry up and blow away. As will the synthetic ferts , the fuel, everything.
I'm writing this before hearing your response to the "feeding the world" question. My thought is, that phrase, "feeding the world" is essentially a misdirection. It like so many other issues makes the issue so big, but attempting to fit it all into one bucket, totally disregarding the diversity of ecosystems, populations, cultures that it is on it's face impossible. It's also creating a false dichotomy in that the assumed answer is either Yes or No. I believe this is also intentional, in that an issue that big, obviously would require an equally large effort (or organization, be that uber governmental or corporation, two things for which the lines between are increasingly blurred) to address. For my part, being from a multi-generational agriculture lineage, and about to inherit about 900 acres of conventional ag land, I have no interest in even entertaining the question. I don't want to feed the world, or the nation, or state, or county.. but, if I can feed my family and make a significant contribution to the small community I grew up in, that's a noble and achievable goal and effort. Now, I'll listen to your thoughts.
A follow up "The yields aren there".. Yields of what? Are we measuring mass (bushels, hundredweight, pounds...) or nutrients? If we can double the nutrient content, then we need only half the traditional measurement of "yield" right? I mean, this is supposed to be FOOD, not firewood, or concrete or the like. Perhaps the question steers the response in the wrong direction. We may be measuring the wrong thing. Change the metric, change the argument, change the answer.
I operate with in the garden is 100% organic, functionally organic. Realistically organic. My beds are filled with compost that’s made in house by the chickens. Seeds are started on whatever happens to be on sale. Chickens get a lice “bath” once a year as they finish their molts. I believe folks need to be more focused on harm reduction vs purity politics.
Nice comment. Yes, focusing on harm reduction and better practices sounds like a great start. What's the famous saying? "Perfection is the enemy of good" Something like that. Cheers!
Yes, organic agriculture could feed the world but only with a completely different waste processing system, regulatory system, and culture surrounding food.
how you produce food is not as important as food distribution and monopoly for this question. What is the best way to live, what examples are there to show a perfect community. where, when eg moa stalin theocracy monopoly autocracy etc.
Even if we COULD feed 8 billion people with organic agriculture (we can’t), is that desirable? I think we WILL feed the global population with organic/perma/KNS, but six billion or so will have to go first.
"Can Organic Agriculture Feed the World?". That question is backwards. It should be, "How many people can organic agriculture feed?" When oil comes to an end, we'll HAVE TO grow organic.
oil is not going to come to an end anytime soon. "can organic agriculture feed the world?". no it can't. A common sense approach through regenerative agriculture it our best bet in my opinion. Regenerative will lead to something closer to organic as farmers make the transition. i've been on organic grain farms, the soil is pounded to snot, by all the land tilling, the industrial soil is dead through the overuse of glyphosate and salt based fertilizers. As the "seed oil" debacle goes main stream, we are going to see a massive increase is grass fed meats - cattle, pork, chicken, sheep. This is how we start building back soil, as opposed to loosing 1/2 inch of topsoil every year in america.
Yeah I’m with the second part on feeding the world…. Whether it’s technically organic or not, is less concerning, it’s more whether it is building soil and biology, and not harming local ecosystems. You can use chemical fertilizers with great results and good soil growth, as long as you chop and drop, mulch, use other organic inputs, ect. So one would be using, not wasting and abusing the chemicals. Happy 2025🌱🌱🌱
According to recent data, approximately 118 million metric tons of nitrogen fertilizer are manufactured globally each year, along with 280 million pounds of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup. Roundup is applied to an average of 298 million acres of crop land in the US each year As Jesse pointed out, making these numbers go to 0 annually is a bigger question than whether it is physically possible to feed the world using strictly organic farming methods.
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
Really appreciate all the great content. And constantly marveling at how in the world you manage to produce so much content. However you do it, we are grateful!
On the "feed the world" Q. , I like Joel Salatin's address of the topic in his Blog a few years ago. As for animals, it's been proven, as I think you know but many are your viewers likely don't, that herbivores can be successfully raised in similar time-frames (as far as age of harvest) & on same or less pasture & hay/winter feed acreage, on forages alone. Greg Judy, Joel, others doing it the holistic planned way with typically daily moves ( Joel wrote - in "Salad bar Beef" - that they saw the largest bump in grass- production efficiency when finally went to daily moves), have grasses coming in thicker, faster, earlier in spring, lusher ( it's a word, right 😉 ?) in summer, later into fall.
Next is Ethanol's inefficiency, then the general unnecessary amount of grain products consumed in the US. From "seed oils" which are bad for us, to eating things like chips which don't fill us, on top of meals which don't nourish us enough... there's a lot we could do differently. Even kids aren't that hard to change the diets for, once you throw some cheese on it and they feel MUCH happier, eating eggs and plenty of grassfed dairy &/or meats and those fats, and the chaos of the home is abated in those and by parents being calm, fair, firm and consistent. Taking care of wild children for a relative, by day 3 they were much calmer, starting to lose to grey look, and happy to eat eggs for breakfast and cookies made with sprouted flour, coconut sugar ( a perennial btw, and not a GMO row-crop as sugar beets allegedly are, from which most sugar used in US is from, I think..) & use WAY less than recipes call for. I cut back gradually for those not used to it, but they adjusted a lot quicker than expected and liked them just fine. Texture doesn't seem neg. affected in most things I've baked so far, either.
Got a call from a farmer about 45 minutes drive from Baltimore MD and 60 minutes (on a good day) from D.C., "The food bank truck dropped off a huge load yesterday. Could you guys use some meats?"
15 minutes later I'm walking around the farm yard, mouth agape. There were tons of fresh produce, decorated cakes, so called artisan breads, frozen turkeys, beef steaks, pork chops and shank end ham portions in gaylord boxes stacked one upon another. I'm sure I didn't see everything that was dumped on the farm. I did manage to sort out 3 frozen turkeys, 2 ham ends, several beef steaks and packs of pork chops. About 70 pounds worth of meats I barely managed to cram in a small freezer which also contained 3 sheets of pork ribs and another turkey I'd picked up at the farm a day or two after Christmas.
Hands on hips, the farm looked around his yard and remarked, "If I could store all this I could feed 12 families through the winter. But storage limits are why all this was dumped here. The pigs will eat a lot of this. What's left will go in the manure spreader as it rots. Such a waste."
As expected another great podcast/video. People go hungry for food and some of us were going hungry for your daily videos! Some VERY good points brought up. People think that we are crazy because how we garden. Yet they do not refuse the FREE food that we give them. It is, and always will be, a LONG slow process and how we wish to live on Earth and not Mars and saving the planet one ecological step at a time!
When SHTF don't feed those neighbors!
Thank you for including food insecurity on your take on “feeding the world”. I think it’s a really great to point out that conventional vs. organic is a moot point considering how such a large portion of the world goes hungry or underfed. Missed having the daily farmer Jesse!
i appreciate the practical, non-dogmatic take on feeding the world.
You raise some very good points, and I agree it is mostly policy that stands in our way from changing our food systems. These are the sorts of things my once-upon-a-time-policy-employee brain thinks of when I am weeding my crops. It's a much larger problem than "just grow organically", which is unfortunate.
One important facet of all of this is that we should remember that a good portion of the world subsists on cash crops (wheat, rice, soy, corn, beans and lentils) as the predominant part of their diet since they are cheap and easy to obtain. There is a large portion of the world's population that cannot afford meat. These populations are eating what we use as fodder. The North American diet is very much an outlier when it comes to meat consumption. When these crops are moved to an organic system, they "suddenly" cost at least double the amount for the consumer to purchase than the conventional option. A lot of this is marketing, because we've been pushing organic as the more premium option, but it also has to do with increased labour costs (as organic usually pays fair wages). This usually prices out a good portion of the world's population from being able to afford the organic or regenerative option. Organic chicken feed at my local farm store in Central Alberta (where these crops are grown) is three to four times more expensive than conventionally grown chicken feed grown in the same region. There are a lot of nuances to this and I've gone to conferences and events with these organic growers and I want to support their efforts, but I can't personally justify the switch due to cost alone. I can't sell my eggs for enough to recover the costs.
I often think about things like when quinoa started being sold to North American consumers. It became so much a premium product that the farmers couldn't afford to buy quinoa and in 2012 - 2013 we started seeing news articles to this effect. Production has now shifted and quinoa is grown in more areas (US, Canada), which has lowered the price and made it more accessible again. Money has entered into the communities in South America which traditionally grew quinoa, but the wealth is not necessarily making it to the farmers and we still have issues with slave labour, lack of compensation, poor living conditions... I dunno. It's such a systemic problem to solve.
Anyways, thanks for reading my novel, I'm going to go back to seed shopping and thinking about next years growing plan. Happy New Year all. May 2025 be blessed.
Question was pretty well answered if you ask me!
I find conventional is only better in a “lb per acre” metric which like you said supports the monocrop growing of feed grain for meat consumption.
All other metrics put organic growing on top. We need to, like you said, design our society around farms that work and not the other way around!
about "feeding the world": decades ago we learned that geckos can cross the ceiling thanks to the millions of hair/pad structures (setae) on their feet. The interesting thing about that is that, if you combined all the setae into one big seta (?) of a corresponding dimension, they'd fall right off the ceiling---the multiplicity is an essential part of the functional success of the overall structure. I find this idea applies to so many areas of life---including whether organic agriculture can feed the world. People growing food in small ways throughout their areas can provide timely food directly to people, in some ways better than the long chain engendered by one giant Midwest farm pouring their corn into cows (which, no shade, are delicious) in feedlots that end up on grocery shelves.
Great run down of organic/regenerative farming vs conventional farming. There is so much we could change to make it better. I frustrated our system is benefiting mostly very large and factory farms while the small farmers suffer. Here in California so much farm land is being built over, we even had a billionaire buy up a bunch of farms to build a model city in one of our agricultural areas. He tried to get it re-zoned but failed but he has tons of cash so he is going to try next again next year.
Thanks Jesse, great topic! I think it is definitely possible to feed the world organically and agree that we are not currently doing that from conventional Ag. There are many things we would need to change to make that happen. It is beyond me why we waste so much arable land growing fodder for animals. I saw a video recently about growing your own fodder by sprouting barley and now it seems the obvious choice. It only takes a small percent of the land & water to grow the same amount but without any chemicals at all and the livestock gets more nutrient dense and available food. But you are right, it requires more than the farmer or Ag practice changes to make such a shift. The irony is, if you could educate the masses they would drive the decision for Washington. Unfortunately, there is so much mis-information out there, it is hard to get the majority to listen or even believe how toxic our mainstream food system has gotten.
Thanks for keeping the main thing , the main thing!
I love ALL No-Till Growers videos!
The state of Sikkim in India, is completely organic since 2016. They started converting to organic agriculture in 2000, with public programs of training the growers and financing their business.
I find that question interesting considering that before the 20th century, what fed the world was nothing but organic.
There was also a lot more starvation (before the green revolution)
Many fewer people back then, and many still died of starvation. In the US as well -- long before there were federal food programs.
@@wendyeames5758That had nothing to do with the means of production, and still doesn't. Look at the Potato Famine in Ireland.
@@SlearBlaneheart It had a lot to do with the means of production. The means was the entire point. Look up the Green Revolution Wendy refers to: countries watched their crop production skyrocket to the point that they no longer had a malnutrition problem, they had a surplus problem. The Green Revolution brought lots of other serious problems, too, but it did attack a serious global public health problem at the time pretty successfully. Antibiotics are not the only reason the global population's nearly tripled since then.
Thank you for pointing out all the fallacies of "feeding the world" when it comes to talking about a theoretical amount of land use vs. the reality of what's happening in the real world , including the incredible loss of farmland and in the US in particular the amount of farmland that grows fuel, along with the many other issues that get in the way of making any claims about this issue, along with the improper analysis of conventional farming with synthetic chemicals and plowing which causes a loss of soil over a certain amount of time depending on the many variables of the ecosystem where that farmland is. This is in sharp contrast to regenerative ag. which builds soil over time but certainly requires inputs on a larger scale, at least in the beginning.
Yes, govt. policy or inaction or negative actions such as being overly generous to large corporations whose main goal is to make immediate profit is a big driver.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if the govt. got out of the business of farming including all the inputs that go into farming to where farmers/businesses were COMPLETELY on their own to make money, grow their business. Also, have a fixed tax rate that's low for farmland which would be any land that grows food that's sold to consumers. I think under those situations, and going around the world with the same issue for the govt. being out of the way, no subsidies, low tax on farmland, etc.... the trend would be moving to regenerative ag.
And yes, it seems moot to talk about feeding the world in 2050 when you're not feeding the world now..
Happy New Year Happy Anniversary!!!!!!!
Personal observation......if USDA mandated cover crop planting in return for partaking in taxpayer subsidized crop insurance, soil health would dramatically improve.
Hundreds of thousands of acres of ground here in commodity crop flyover country lays uncovered and bare all winter after harvest. Massive erosion issues that not even no-till practices can stop.
Ditch water muddy all winter and spring.
And not just cover cropping but effective land stewardship and improvement. Sen. Tom Harkin tried for many years to get that baked into the Farm Bill.
Thank you for all your fun & informative videos :-)
Yay! I was going into withdrawal without my daily farmer dose!
Great podcast. IMO: agree with you. Feeding the world wouldnt be necessary if people followed those facts.
I want to think about this question by analyzing the food that we eat community wise or world wise. These are wheat, rice, and corn. I have never seen anyone grow these crops organically. I also disagree on how much politics can influence feeding culture. Science has developed laboratory meat, could then this be the option for meats when governments finally manage to force people from eating beef, chicken and portk?
Yes, organic agriculture can feed the world - when people swap their grass for gardens. People who say it can't be done probably have grass yards.
or concrete
Or don't want to do it. I grow so much food in my 35'×45' bed. Even after I have preserved all all I want for the year, I still have food to give away. My friend lives in an apartment without a yard and grows greens and herbs on her patio. She rents a plot in a community garden for $15 that's pretty decent size. It's all a mindset.
Over half the world's population lives in cities. Most people don't have gardens or enough land to do any serious gardening.
@@midwestribeye7820 Or have time to do it. If you have children or someone else to take care of and a job or three and are barely hanging on, you don't have bandwidth for a productive garden as well, let alone preserving the food.
@@litsci1877 you can still grow in pots on roofs in all sorts of other creative ways🤷♂️ even if you grew a tiny wee bit of what you need is a start
I think Organic/Regenerative is 100% possible. If farmers and growers had farms that were increasing profits due to lower inputs even with lower yields, at least the feeding the world part can make sense because yield is down. Of course, the farmer's bottom line would then need to be discussed because the farmer is still in a business so it would be another issue.
While im not a farmer, I and many other gardeners practice organic and regenerative practices at home and it's funny about the claim that yield goes down with organic...when organic home gardners can clearly get a lot of yield. The question is then can it be applied to a larger scale and other farmers have already done that.
In fact, many farmers can use biology over the years and cover cropping to the point where inputs overall go down and yield goes up. But also, many markets are determined by the size and quality of the product and when that also increases, you now have better quality, more yield, fewer inputs, and the farmer clearly makes more monies. Thats a W-W for everybody and i agree with you that it is soley a cultural and policy descrepency.
The air is full of nitrogen. Get air in the soil one way or the other and there you go. Calcium GSR is doing amazing things. I've used it two years. Gabe Brown doesn't have an input bill anymore.
We need to let go of this mindset that we have to feed the world. It's far more important to be able to feel our LOCAL community. The rest of the world can feed itself.
Plus, if we successfully feed our local community, every local community will then feed itself....We feed the world.
I agree.
Some areas will have issues with the climate they live in.
If you want to survive you will find away.
It's easy to feed the world , the problem is feeding the cows
Organic farming doesn’t need to feed the world
@@iowaviking actually people tend to just die if they can't get enough food. Or start riots and wars.
Before the 1920s it was all organic.
On the "feed the world" Q. , I like Joel Salatin's address of the topic in his Blog a few years ago. As for animals, it's been proven, as I think you know but many are your viewers likely don't, that herbivores can be successfully raised in similar time-frames (as far as age of harvest) & on same or less pasture & hay/winter feed acreage, on forages alone. Greg Judy, Joel, others doing it the holistic planned way with typically daily moves ( Joel wrote - in "Salad bar Beef" - that they saw the largest bump in grass- production efficiency when finally went to daily moves), have grasses coming in thicker, faster, earlier in spring, lusher ( it's a word, right 😉 ?) in summer, later into fall.
Next is Ethanol's inefficiency, then the general unnecessary amount of grain products consumed in the US. From "seed oils" which are bad for us, to eating things like chips which don't fill us, on top of meals which don't nourish us enough... there's a lot we could do differently. Even kids aren't that hard to change the diets for, once you throw some cheese on it and they feel MUCH happier, eating eggs and plenty of grassfed dairy &/or meats and those fats, and the chaos of the home is abated in those and by parents being calm, fair, firm and consistent. Taking care of wild children for a relative, by day 3 they were much calmer, starting to lose to grey look, and happy to eat eggs for breakfast and cookies made with sprouted flour, coconut sugar ( a perennial btw, and not a GMO row-crop as sugar beets allegedly are, from which most sugar used in US is from, I think..) & use WAY less than recipes call for. I cut back gradually for those not used to it, but they adjusted a lot quicker than expected and liked them just fine. Texture doesn't seem neg. affected in most things I've baked so far, either.
Most of us could/should be eating and wasting dramatically less food. Like....a lot. Not to mention the imperfect food that is discarded.
Off topic, but I'm curious if you feel that the Neversink farm course is still a good deal at $2900!?! I was looking into courses to purchase a a gift to my daughter on the other side of the country and was just caught a little Off guard to see how much the cost has risen of the course. I've not taken it myself so just looking for some informed opinions. Thanks!
The rule is not to give a fish because they do not learn, use that across the board, sell them a fish…still no learning. Organic must be done so the earth can heal everyone must help and it can be done, use the higher power of hunger to cause all to tend the earth.
I often wonder if growing potatoes in a pot by a sunny window wouldn't help make a dent in food insecurity. I remember hearing during my schooling that the Irish could feed a family of four on a half acre.
Do you use drip irrigation?
The sad part about the studies is that for the most part they are funded by the companies trying to push their products. They don’t tell us the effects of using herbicides and pesticides for years and years. I could rant on and on about this but I won’t. My opinion the best way to feed the world organically is to grow as much of your own food as possible and shop your local farmers markets if we all start doing that policies and growers will change.
Have you ever tried grafting tomatoes tops onto potato bottoms?
I’ve seen a few videos about it and wondering if it is legit? Thanks 🙏 and you’re awesome!
Recently watched Fantastic Mr. Fox. I didn't know Farmer Jesse did voice over for animation movies!!! (the credits are wrong..).
We throw away more food daily than the starving people can eat .
Is a problem of access to food and the means to produce it, is not about "overpopulation " .
It is absolutely about overpopulation. All this surplus food you're referring to is almost entirely produced through conventional means based on finite resources. Though there may be a surplus now, there will not be in the future. I'm not even factoring in climate change. But there will be more hungry people. And the food will literally dry up and blow away. As will the synthetic ferts , the fuel, everything.
I'm writing this before hearing your response to the "feeding the world" question. My thought is, that phrase, "feeding the world" is essentially a misdirection. It like so many other issues makes the issue so big, but attempting to fit it all into one bucket, totally disregarding the diversity of ecosystems, populations, cultures that it is on it's face impossible. It's also creating a false dichotomy in that the assumed answer is either Yes or No. I believe this is also intentional, in that an issue that big, obviously would require an equally large effort (or organization, be that uber governmental or corporation, two things for which the lines between are increasingly blurred) to address. For my part, being from a multi-generational agriculture lineage, and about to inherit about 900 acres of conventional ag land, I have no interest in even entertaining the question. I don't want to feed the world, or the nation, or state, or county.. but, if I can feed my family and make a significant contribution to the small community I grew up in, that's a noble and achievable goal and effort. Now, I'll listen to your thoughts.
A follow up "The yields aren there".. Yields of what? Are we measuring mass (bushels, hundredweight, pounds...) or nutrients? If we can double the nutrient content, then we need only half the traditional measurement of "yield" right? I mean, this is supposed to be FOOD, not firewood, or concrete or the like. Perhaps the question steers the response in the wrong direction. We may be measuring the wrong thing. Change the metric, change the argument, change the answer.
Indiana isn't too cold in April still ?
He's in Kentucky. Greenhouse or tunnel production. Tomatoes outside for me in early Apr but I'm in SC
Can’t the soil pull nitrogen from the air if we fixed compaction?
Leguminous plants pull the N from the atmosphere and root attached Rhizobium fixes some of that N in root nodules
I operate with in the garden is 100% organic, functionally organic. Realistically organic. My beds are filled with compost that’s made in house by the chickens. Seeds are started on whatever happens to be on sale. Chickens get a lice “bath” once a year as they finish their molts. I believe folks need to be more focused on harm reduction vs purity politics.
Nice comment. Yes, focusing on harm reduction and better practices sounds like a great start.
What's the famous saying? "Perfection is the enemy of good" Something like that. Cheers!
Yes, organic agriculture could feed the world but only with a completely different waste processing system, regulatory system, and culture surrounding food.
Have you tried to graft tomatoes on potato plants?
how you produce food is not as important as food distribution and monopoly for this question. What is the best way to live, what examples are there to show a perfect community. where, when eg moa stalin theocracy monopoly autocracy etc.
are you deleting my comments? or is youtube?
Hi friend, we don’t delete comments. I think RUclips may moderate but I am not sure know how it works
Even if we COULD feed 8 billion people with organic agriculture (we can’t), is that desirable? I think we WILL feed the global population with organic/perma/KNS, but six billion or so will have to go first.
"Can Organic Agriculture Feed the World?". That question is backwards. It should be, "How many people can organic agriculture feed?"
When oil comes to an end, we'll HAVE TO grow organic.
oil is not going to come to an end anytime soon. "can organic agriculture feed the world?". no it can't. A common sense approach through regenerative agriculture it our best bet in my opinion. Regenerative will lead to something closer to organic as farmers make the transition. i've been on organic grain farms, the soil is pounded to snot, by all the land tilling, the industrial soil is dead through the overuse of glyphosate and salt based fertilizers. As the "seed oil" debacle goes main stream, we are going to see a massive increase is grass fed meats - cattle, pork, chicken, sheep. This is how we start building back soil, as opposed to loosing 1/2 inch of topsoil every year in america.
Oil is a renewable resource. There is no end
@@jarredkushnerd13 If we took 4 million years to use what we used in the last 200 years, yes.
@@jarredkushnerd13 Explain please???
@ecocentrichomestead6783 so you're saying you believe the same people that coined the term fossil fuels when they cry scarcity?
i love your channel but i find the music really annoying (sorry)
Yeah I’m with the second part on feeding the world…. Whether it’s technically organic or not, is less concerning, it’s more whether it is building soil and biology, and not harming local ecosystems. You can use chemical fertilizers with great results and good soil growth, as long as you chop and drop, mulch, use other organic inputs, ect. So one would be using, not wasting and abusing the chemicals. Happy 2025🌱🌱🌱
The world NEED to grow their own food instead of trying to hold someone accountable for THEIR own food choices and decisions
According to recent data, approximately 118 million metric tons of nitrogen fertilizer are manufactured globally each year, along with 280 million pounds of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup.
Roundup is applied to an average of 298 million acres of crop land in the US each year
As Jesse pointed out, making these numbers go to 0 annually is a bigger question than whether it is physically possible to feed the world using strictly organic farming methods.