A tale of flunked science and the pre-eminent importance of ruminants
When US scientists were challenged by the then president to study and report on climate change, they chose to study carbon dioxide emissions and global warming. They chose to study carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because they could model it — not because it was the most important thing about climate change to study. This type of failure is endemic in the power/science nexus: providing a plausible narrative is always more important than solving the problem.
The foremost alternative to studying the mechanisms that warm the planet is to study the mechanisms that cool the planet. The chief among these is the water cycle. Are we damaging the ways in which the planet has always cooled itself? Too fiendishly complex to model back in the day but holding the key to practical ways to modify climate change. Perhaps the key to why it still doesn’t suit political people to pay attention to cooling is that it is local and can only be local.
When another US president had a heart attack, powerful white men in the US had hysteria about their grip on power. Public health scientists were challenged to come up with a public health answer to a problem that didn’t really exist. What they came up with as a narrative was about saturated fats clogging peoples’ arteries. The science was poor to vanishingly non-existent and the effect of the narrative has been to make public health infinitely worse. Sins of omission and sins of commission: sugar was the culprit that went off scot-free and saturated fats turn out to be foundational to health.
When my brother studied agriculture at university nearly fifty years ago, he was taught that tilling damaged soil structure. Since then, we have had fifty years of soil structure destruction by heavier and heavier machinery and more and more potent agrichemicals. Soil now requires escalating amounts of fertiliser to grow crops: so much that it may not be possible to dial back without serious food shortages and so much that water pollution is endemic. This is a story that took hold of farmers imaginations in the teeth of all the good science.
How these three epochal and epic mistakes interact in the present challenges is the subject of this blog.
The water cycle
In a rainforest it rains. Yes, really. We sort of assume because we have the wrong narrative that the rainforest is there because it rains, but it is largely the other way round. Walter Jehne started a rainforest on semi-arid land outside Canberra and without adding water it maintains itself as a rainforest. And when you clear a patch of rainforest in the Amazon, it quickly becomes desert.
Between the cooling effect of evaporating and transpiring water at ground level and the heat loss effect of water vapour condensing high in the atmosphere and the effect of clouds reflecting the sun’s radiation, considerable cooling occurs locally. Local temperature under tree cover is typically six degrees below that on open ground.
These are the mechanisms that big science chose not to study. Now no-one says that land use plans reflect a further reduction in the cooling effect of the water cycle, even in places like California where this is crucial.
The mantra of people who work practically with these effects is that we should keep (rain)water on the land as long as possible. Streams should be slow and winding and full of ponds — bring back the beaver! The soil should be a capacious sponge capable of storing vast volumes of water. Trees should bring up deep water and produce recycling via rainfall. There should be zero surface runoff: all rain should soak in. There should be no bare soil to lose water from.
There is also a water quality argument, that streams that do eventually flow from a water-catchment area should be clean and free from excessive nutrients. The prevalence of agricultural chemical fertilisers such as nitrogen as river pollution proves that the water cycle is not working as it should.
Human nutrition, beyond propaganda and fairly tales
It is not so easy to escape human evolution. Why would we want to escape our origins? You tell me but there isn’t a field of endeavour which does not have strands of human exceptionalism, does not hold out the possibility that we are NOT part of a beautifully complex set of living interconnections.
The simplest, cleanest starting point is this: what did we evolve eating? By sheer mass of numbers, the answer has to be ruminants. Deer and antelope, sheep and goats, cattle and bison. These animals provide everything you need to be healthy because we evolved eating them. They graze a wide range of plants and trees and provide us with a single point of balanced nutrition.
We can ask the question the other way round. What is the single complete food that we can eat without any deficiencies? What is the single food that will correct the major macronutrient and micronutrient deficiencies we see in modern populations? Ruminants. Why is this not understood in the halls of dieticians and nutritionists? Well, that is a long and political story in which Seventh Day Adventists feature more prominently that scientists.
As an aside, there are other valid foods in other climes. An American nutritionist who went to dwell with Inuit for a year and live on seal meat and blubber (no vegetables at all) was told by his colleagues he would die. He thrived: a stunning disconnect.
What is the fashionable/propaganda target for telling people what not to eat? Red meat: ruminants. This cannot be an accident, that the very food that can remove our dependency on supplement and pharmaceuticals is demonised.
Soil restoration
Soil has been damaged, eroded, throttled, starved almost to the point of killing it. In most places round the world, perhaps especially in places like Australia and New Zealand where rapid colonisation led to farming practices totally unsuited to the land. So how do you start reversing some of that damage?
Soil is an incredibly complex ecosystem, and it rests on fungi and bacteria and other micro-organisms that can mine the bedrock for minerals to support life. This is what a soil is and how it evolved. There are critical micronutrients that need to be present, and I believe present in the right sequence, to allow the ecosystem to build itself. I think the first in the sequence is Boron.
Here is how we handle this in upland Wales. We have a home-made mineral lick for the sheep that is largely seaweed. The sheep know to consume small quantities of mineral lick, thus acquiring micronutrients for their own health. Their excrement which they deposit at the tops of slopes thus contains necessary micronutrients in an organic matrix, ready to be used by soil micro-organisms.
If we don’t treat our sheep for intestinal worms, then the excrement is dealt with in short order (three days) by dung beetles which bury it deep in the soil. The burial is important to get the minerals where they are needed and to interrupt the lifecycle of the intestinal worms.
The various soil micro-organisms, but especially the fungi, create soil structure and pore space in the soil. As ever, life creates the conditions for life to flourish. The pore spaces contain air and water and the organisms supply minerals and water to plant roots in exchange for sugars which are their food. There is a ridiculously simple and cheap experiment where you can kick-start soil life and greatly increase soil fertility by watering with a very, very dilute sugar solution.
Ruminants are thus the answer to soil restoration, to the extent that I don’t know another anything like as effective. And note this is evolutionarily specific. The guru of all things dung beetle, Sally Ann Spence, was trying to bring back a species of dung beetle from possible extinction, used a local traditional breed of sheep on their traditional pastures to do so, successfully.
If we do not prevent the processes involved, ruminants will restore and build soil, the way they always have. Eight feet of amazingly fertile soil on the Great Prairies are largely the result of the huge herds of buffalo that roamed there. Yes, the farts and burps that are credited with destroying our planet come from the only engine that can save us.
Soil and cooling
Good control of the water cycle implies soil development and vice versa. There are cases where wildfires bypassed particular properties because the soil held enough moisture and was cool enough. Ruminants tend to like shade and the mixture of trees and pasture seems to work as a pattern in many ways.
Remember, the whole ecosystem needs the right amount of water and the plants that ruminants browse create particles to nucleate rainfall, as well as transpiring water into the air. The windbreak action of trees and hedges is important in keeping water cycle functions local.
Obviously building roads and car parks destroys those localities’ ability to cool themselves and we have all experienced their heat. Ploughing a field and/or leaving it bare gives a measurable loss in cooling too. It is just not what we model and not what campaigners fight for.
Ruminants
Ruminants are herd or flock animals. They really do pine away without their friends. They bunch together for protection from predators, and this makes the predators important in maintaining this behaviour. A typical farmer thinks he is better off without wolves, bears, and mountain lions, but this is just wrong. The ecosystem function of ruminants depends on them being a herd on the move.
Given a chance, ruminants will browse grass and herbs, bushes and leaves, tree bark and even thistles. They eat a wide spectrum of plants to gain minerals from different plant sources. Some plants have deeper roots to bring up water and minerals, some grow at different seasons to provide continuity. Traditionally, a goatherd will take his charges on a circuit to visit different ecosystems to increase diversity.
Part of the demonisation is that for instance cows use too much water. Again, this is the opposite of the science which is that managed herds of cows will keep more water on the land, and that water will be cleaner.
Since ruminants are going to increase soil fertility, the number that can be supported on a given area of land will be greater if they are managed to allow their ecosystem role. But these is a limit when density becomes too high due to disease processes taking hold. In the wild, predators and diseases limit population.
Land use planning
I can’t see how land use can be planned without understanding the central role of ruminants. They are indispensable to soil fertility, to human nutrition and to cooling the planet. There is no nutritious food without healthy soil. It is not too challenging to work the number of ruminants we need to bring the agricultural land we have into condition. And the amount of prime food that operation implies can be set against the nutritional deficiencies of the population.
As an example of where things go, there is a huge imbalance between animal agriculture in the west of the UK and arable farming in the east, losing the benefits of both.
There is much worthy work going on to try and reform the food chain and to understand what incentives will allow farming to deliver what the population want and need. But this work does not understand that our place in the ecosystem is a given, not a choice. We cannot modify who we are in the biochemical and evolutionary scheme of things. First regain a foothold on soil health and human health and then see what is possible. Don’t allow more flaky science and political turpitude to take us down a road which is failing faster than we can even recognise.
Since I wrote this, I notice a new book on a closely allied theme: why the industrial route to food cannot ever work. Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future by Chris Smaje.
