Viewpoint: Why two sacred cows of organic farming, grass-fed beef and biofuels, are hurting the planet

Anne Kim: [M]ost of us aren’t farmers, we’re eaters. Can you drill down a little bit about the specific practices that are having the devastating impacts you’re talking about?  

Michael Grunwald: [W]e need to make more food with less land. That means that more efficient farming ….

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Better beef is generally not the kind of local grass-fed, know, organic, twee beef that you can get at the farmers market. [T]hat’s usually worse for the planet and the climate because it uses more land ….

You see what happened in Sri Lanka where they banned agrochemicals, they banned fertilizers, they banned pesticides, they went all organic. And within a few months, their farm yields crashed. 

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Anne Kim: I want to ask about one more sacred cow or rather in this case, sacred corn. And that is biofuels. 

Michael Grunwald: [W]hen you took into account the land use, the indirect land use change that these biofuels were going to induce … biofuels were twice as bad as gasoline for the climate.  

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here