Journalist Mike Grunwald speaks with Shayle Kann about the risks of abandoning synthetic agricultural chemicals, pointing to Sri Lanka's 2021 nationwide ban.
Opinion
Grunwald: Extreme Land Efficiency Justifies Supporting Industrial Agriculture
“There are many, many reasons to not like industrial agriculture, but there's one really good reason to like it, and it's that it makes food extremely efficiency, efficiently, and we need efficiency.”
Insight
Grunwald: Less Intensive Farming Requires More Land and Harms Biodiversity
“First of all, to the extent that regenerative or organic or basically more natural Kinder and gentler forms of agriculture make less food per acre. They're gonna need more acres to make food. You know, land agriculture that is less intensive needs to be more e…”
Prediction Held up
Grunwald: Feeding 2050 Population Needs Two Indias' Worth of New Land
“If, even if we continue to increase farm yields at the same rate they've increased throughout the Green Revolution we're gonna need another two India's worth of land, which essentially means, you know, gonna bye-bye Amazon and Congo rainforests, you know, very…”
Assertion Supported
Grunwald: Going vegetarian is climate-equivalent to only cutting beef due to dairy
“Going vegetarian is usually about the same as just cutting out beef, because vegetarians tend to eat more dairy.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Grunwald: Halving Beef and Waste Won't Eliminate Yield Gap by 2050
“Even if we Reduced our beef consumption 50% in rich countries, and reduced food waste 50% in the entire world, we would still need, you know, the numbers are so bad that we would still need to jack up our yields significantly to feed ten billion people by twen…”
Opinion
Grunwald: Improving ranch land efficiency matters more than cattle feed additives
“It turns out it's not that hard to triple the efficiency, or sometimes even quadruple the efficiency of those cattle ranches, and that moves the needle a lot more than, you know, giving cattle, you know, feedlot cattle, you know, and remember, they're only in …”