Illustration: Matt Kenyon
It sounds like a miracle, but no great technological leaps were required. In a commercial lab on the outskirts of Helsinki, I watched scientists turn water into food. Through a porthole in a metal tank, I could see a yellow froth churning. It’s a primordial soup of bacteria, taken from the soil and multiplied in the laboratory, using hydrogen extracted from water as its energy source. When the froth was siphoned through a tangle of pipes and squirted on to heated rollers, it turned into a rich yellow flour.
This flour is not yet licensed for sale. But the scientists, working for a company called Solar Foods, were allowed to give me some while filming our documentary Apocalypse Cow. I asked them to make me a pancake: I would be the first person on Earth, beyond the lab staff, to eat […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
You can only get heme-iron from eating meat. Without it you will always be slightly anemic.
Although I understand and appreciate the idealism behind the movement to “get rid” of animal husbandry, there is sound science that supports the necessity for the opposite approach.
The problem with current animal husbandry lies in the use of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO) as practiced by industrial agriculture (Big AG). CAFOs are those horrifically inhumane animal concentration camps that Big AG corporations employ to bring cattle, dairy, pork and chicken to the marketplace.
CAFO practices separate farm animals for their traditional roles in farming as practiced by small farmers prior to BIG AG’s rise in the Mid-20th Century.
By disrupting the very necessary role that farm animals play in the appropriate regeneration of soil, Big AG has successfully torn the web of life. The consequences of these industrialized farming practices have been nothing short of devastating, not just to fauna and flora and soil eco-systems, they have also devastated the well-being of human communities across the planet.
The scientific research conducted by Zimbabwean ecologist Alan Savory demonstrates the flaws behind the idealistic concept that to heal the land, humans should disengage from animal husbandry.
Based on Savory’s sound and replicated science, humans need to change their relationship with farm animal and to reunite them with the land through managed pasture rotation. The results of rotational pasture management in healing the biosphere are nothing short of extraordinary and the contribution to human well-being is the same.
I encourage you to view this video about Alan Savory’s research:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7pI7IYaJLI
This is a link Alan Savory’s TED talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI&t=11s
This is a link to a video about how these practices are being implemented in the United States:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8ZOO_pRvp4&t=152s
This is a link to a video about the manner in which these practices are benefiting human well-being here in America:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoQWLK8-CYE&t=24s
Here is a link to the Savory Institute:
https://www.savory.global
I yearn for the Star Trek replicator. Tea, Earl Grey, hot.