I've seen a bit of confusion regarding this. First, it's 10% of Denmark's total land area, which is roughly equivalent to 15% of farmland area. Second, the conversion of farmland area into nature and forests is mainly for improving water quality, as excess nitrogen from agriculture has essentially killed the rivers and coastal waters through oxygen depletion from algae.
Regarding global warming and CO2, the area conversion of peatlands will help, but the major change here is the introduction of a carbon tax for the entire agricultural industry. And to end confusion regarding other emissions than CO2, it's actually a CO2-equivalent (CO2e) tax, which includes a range of other gasses. E.g., 1kg of methane is 25kg CO2e.
If you'd like to read more, see the two PDF documents below, which are the main official documents. They're in Danish, but upload them to Claude or ChatGPT, and you'll have a much better source of information if you'd like to know more about the specifics and how the actual implementation is planned.
I am very conflicted on a carbon tax for the agriculture industry. It is going to sidle a cost to an industry of razor thin margins. The transition from regenerative agriculture is expensive & rising food costs has a destabilizing effect.
There need to be changes, but I am not convinced that this will have the desired effects. Its quite possible this leads to a net conversion of farmland to residential or commercial property rather than nature.
Currently the public subsidizes the agriculture industry by paying for the consequences of the industry's carbon emissions. Also, that subsidy distorts industry choices in favor of carbon.
The industry might be accustomed to profiting from the subsidy, but that doesn't make them entitled to it! And certainly the industry has had plenty of time to anticipate and adjust to the problems of carbon emissions.
Governments pay to keep food at the cheapest point possible to ensure stability. a fed population doesn't kill their governments. Agriculture is not a regular industry; its a national security issue
Farming is not a profitable endeavor. There would be a lot less financial advisors in the world otherwise. A carbon tax will either drive up prices or reduce suppliers, increasing prices. Reducing farmland will require more efficient methods which will also drive up prices
The result will be the public pays more for food, not the agriculture industry makes any more or less money. It will require more imports which will come from countries with less regulation and more exploitable resources.
We've seen the story of disruptions to the food supply play out before. The reality is this is a more dangerous gamble than most people realize.
Denmark has a population of 5.8 million and currently produces enough to feed 15 million. There’s no need for imports because of 15% less farmland. Besides, all this export only contributes about 1% of GDP. So it’s not economically important either.
One can even argue that the reduction in environmental and climate impact will create room for other industries that already are carbon-taxed.
1. Agriculture is not a machine like consistent harvest giver, especially with more climate change (that’ll happen regardless of emission slowdown), it is good to have produce enough to feed 5.8(=6 million approx), a bad harvest can bring that 15 million down to 7 million very fast.
2. All produce is not of same quality, 15 million people’s produce will probably only produce 11-12 million produce that is marketable in stores after transporting it
3. Economies of scale matters, going from 15 million people’s produce to a 10 or 8 million produce doesnt just means a linear cost reduction, the price per unit for crops also rises, which can potentially make it hard to compete with other agro hubs in the Eurozone, dwindling Denmark’s independent source of food supply over time.
I am not sure how this responds to the comment you are actually responding to. You say,
> Governments pay to keep food cheap
> A carbon tax will either drive up prices or [drive up prices]
So, this is just number rearranging. The public pays either way. Ok. The comment you replied to says
> Currently the public subsidizes the agriculture industry by paying for the consequences of the industry's carbon emissions.
So the public pays in this case too. More number rearranging. Not at all clear why this makes prices increase.
So why do you think this implies prices increase? Do you think the price of carbon determined by the government is too high? Or do you just want to ignore this externality until we pay it all at once?
> So, this is just number rearranging. The public pays either way.
"The public" isn't one person. Denmark has progressive taxes; getting rid of subsidies so prices of food increases changes who among the public pays.
> Or do you just want to ignore this externality until we pay it all at once?
> So, this is just number rearranging. The public pays either way.
"The public" isn't one person. Denmark has progressive taxes; getting rid of subsidies so prices of food increases changes who among the public pays.
> Or do you just want to ignore this externality until we pay it all at once?
I'm in favor of the carbon tax. I also think that it has complicated side effects and we should try to understand those effects, and see if we need to change something else to compensate for them.
We should simply ignore the externality all together because we're all paying for it anyway.
Either the subsidies take into account the carbon tax or they don't. If they do then it's number rearranging. Government gives dollars and then immediately takes some of them back, it's a convoluted appropriations bill. If they don't then food prices go up which is contrary to the government's goal of keeping food cheap at the point of sale.
If you want to reward reducing carbon emissions by giving additional dollars or paying for more expensive but better for the environment equipment then that could potentially be effective.
Trying to reduce a negative by pumping resources into a positive rarely works out as expected and often has surprisingly distortionary effects. (see ethanol and corn production in the USA)
I’m personally of the opinion we should be doing far more tying together of revenue neutral taxes and subsidies within an industry. When you want to reduce a negative externality you tax that and then redistribute the proceeds equitably back across relevant actors. When you want to increase a positive externality, you equally tax actors and then distribute it asymmetrically according to the behavior you want to encourage. Or combine the two approaches to address both negative and positive externalities in one go.
These approaches allow you to be more targeted, while minimizing overall market distortions.
It’s not exactly number rearranging, even if the government increases subsidy payments to offset the cost. E.g. say gasoline costs twice as much per gallon due to a carbon tax, but subsidies are increased proportionally to offset the cost increase so that food prices remain constant. This still creates an incentive for farmers to use “cleaner” forms of energy as the ones that do will increase their profit margins. Ultimately the increased subsidy is a burden on the tax payer, but in a more narrow sense carbon producing farms would be subsidizing some of the costs for farms that produce less carbon.
Whether this plays out as intended remains to be seen. I think externalities need to be priced in somehow, the issue is determining the appropriate cost. If you want the market to decide the cost efficiently there needs to be some mechanism to tie the two measures together (increased environmental quality => lower carbon tax rate). I agree however that manipulating the economics of food production is dangerous and needs to be done slowly and carefully.
As you point out, there are several valid reasons to subsidise farming. But then subsidise farming, not carbon emissions! And while you are at it, use those subsidies to encourage farming that is sustainable, both for the climate as well as biodiversity.
And that can be sustained in international crisis: farming that is a house of cards highly dependent on international supply chains of fertilizer, feedstock and fuel won't help you all that much under blockade.
No-one mentions this when food security is discussed. The farmers here in NL use the security excuse too but absolutely no-one mentions that their food production is directly dependant upon the import of magnitudes higher tonnage of feedstock - soya from Brazil - than the meat / dairy it produces. Then I'm not even looking at the fertilizers / chemicals which are also imported.
Isn't that what they are doing? They subsidize the farmers separately, and charge a carbon tax separately. Even if those are initially the same amount you would think that the incentive structure would encourage farmers to shift to less c02 methods, as that improves profit?
Low carbon farms balance would be: "low carbon" profit + subsidy - small carbon tax
High carbon farms balance would be: "high carbon" profit + subsidy - high carbon tax
If ["low carbon" profit - small carbon tax] > ["high carbon" profit - high carbon tax] (e.g. if the carbon tax is high enough), farms have an incentive to lower their carbon emissions.
The subsidy is here to make sure ["low carbon" profit + subsidy - small carbon tax] > 0
The subsidy could be independent from the carbon emissions (e.g. by subsidies on the produced goods) while the carbon tax isn't, effectively creating an incentive to produce in a less carbon intensive manner.
If I can make 1 unit of food for €50 and use 50 tons of carbon, or make it for €60 and use 10 tons of carbon, a carbon tax and food subsidy would allow me to sell that €60 low carbon food for €50 and force me to sell the high carbon food for €60
This gives an economic incentive to use the lower carbon method, funded by those who use more carbon, while not changing the end price or output.
Just to provide the numbers: in 2030, a tax will be introduced of 120 DKK (~16€) / ton CO2e, which linearly increases each year until it reaches 300 DKK (~40€) / ton CO2e in 2035. However, the farmers can get subsidies for changing their practices and adopting new technologies, in order to reduce their emissions. I.e., the government will give you money to change your production, so you can minimize the carbon taxes you have to pay. There are more technicalities to how it works, but that's the gist of it. The important part is that the goal is to transition to new technologies and production methods, which reduces emissions per unit food produced.
There will be no food subsidy, however, and a rough estimate of the increase of food cost is something like 1.5%, with beef having the highest increase. Take this estimate with a grain of salt though, as it's difficult to estimate. An increase in food cost is expected though.
You tax the carbon (something you want less of) and you subsidise something else you want more of. So you might end up with the average farmer not having a change of costs, but still disincentivising stuff we don't want e.g. carbon emissions.
Specifically on reducing farmland. Denmark is intensly cultivated, and the reduction targets the lowest yield land that for various reasons were reclaimed over the last two centuries. Using the high yield land more efficiently is intended.
So, what are you proposing? Just do nothing about climate change, as we have done before, and have worse social consequences in the near future rather than now? Denmark is more at risk from rising sea levels than other countries (https://cphpost.dk/2023-02-17/news/rising-sea-levels-threate...), so they want to do something about it.
The food needs to be produced somewhere. If denmark exports, then the food will be missing somewhere. So you do not fix "climate change". You only fix local effects of agriculture. I am not saying it is good or bad. But it def makes denmark poorer.
The idea that each country must culture every product to assure the supply chain is outdated by a generation in Europe.
A lot of those vegetables are produced yet in Almeria. A lot of milk that goes to Italy is produced in France. EU has this issue checked from the first minute and created a supranational agriculture system based on quotes.
not OP, but how about some technology innovation instead of governance and taxation? the effect of taxing farmers as though they were some kind of vanity industry will be similar to what nationalizing farms has done in prior schemes like this.
it creates a national dependency on imported food from countries that do not bankrupt their farmers, and suddenly (shocked!) the entire Danish food supply crosses the borders to arrive and is then subject to federal management. this latter case is of course the purpose, and climate change is merely a pretext. I hope european farmers are able to organize a revolt.
What technological innovation do you think farming could adopt, that it hasn't already...? They don't operate with simple machinery. They regularly use some of the most complicated systems that mankind can build, such as satellite systems, chemical analyses, etc.
Governance is needed, where progress does not occur naturally.
invent, not adopt. that's the difference between government and industry, government doesn't invent anything except problems to manage.
reality is, governments want smallholding farmers out of the business and to replace them with agribusinesses because it's a process of de-kulakizing their subjects. it has nothing to do with science or environment at all. I think maybe a war over this stuff will give us the reset we need.
Governments invent things, endlessly. The infrastructure you are communicating with me was invented by a government research department. The encryption we are using to ensure we're actually communicating with HN, is a government research project.
Similarly, the solar systems on most farms, was a government research project. The satellite recon to analyse the farm - provided by the government to all farmers, including the tiniest hobby farm, is 100% government researched, deployed, and maintained.
Governments do a lot more science than you are giving them credit for.
How will converting farmland to forests help with climate change? It seems like it would have no particular impact or make the situation worse w.r.t. climate change for Denmark. If it is a good idea I'd imagine it would also be a good idea if the climate was not changing.
Denmark has no ability to impact global CO2 emissions at all. In fact nobody does except ironically the Chinese and their industrial-growth-at-any-cost coal based approach from the 90s and 00s.
Farming is very carbon emission intensive if the farmland is reclaimed wetland. Converting the farmland to forest and stopping draining (making it more wet again) can definitely reduce carbon emissions significantly.
> Denmark has no ability to impact global CO2 emissions
This is such a tiresome and logically hollow argument. Denmark has the ability to reduce a fraction of the worlds emissions. The size of the fraction is proportional to the size of their emissions. Every country has a responsibility to reduce it's per capita emissions to sustainable levels. China has lower per capita emissions than most richer countries.
Note that China has no ability to impact global CO2 emissions either.
Let’s split China population in k Denmark-sized groups, plus one smaller-than-Denmark reminder.
None of the k groups has any ability to impact global CO2 emissions (same as Denmark).
We can reasonably assume that a smaller group has even less ability to impact global CO2 emissions than a bigger group. Hence the smaller-than-Denmark reminder has no ability to impact global CO2 emissions either.
Thus China is made of groups that have no ability to impact global CO2 emissions either. And therefore China as a whole has no ability to impact global CO2 emissions. (Otherwise at least one group within China would have to impact global emissions and we just saw that it isn’t possible).
This is known as the CO2 impossibility theorem, loosely based on Arrow’s concept of “(in)decisive” set.
Your logic is wrong - a Denmark sized group of Chinese people is probably all it takes to operate their solar panel producing factories.
The reason Denmark can't do anything isn't because there are few of them, it is because Denmark isn't a significant industrial cluster for energy technology and innovation. For example, India has more people than China and they aren't in a position to do much unless there is some sort of tech breakthrough that hasn't made it to my notice.
Fair enough, but the major point still stands - Denamrk's industrial policies that enable Vestas are the only way they can have a significant impact on climate change. Farmland conversion does nothing; it isn't moving the needle on what is economic and industrially scaleable. Everyone still needs to eat.
His math is x ~ 0, hence x / 10 = 0, hence x = NaN.
The starting point is just wrong that Denmark can't play a role when it comes to climate change. Denmark can make a change. It is like saying that when voting that no individual vote or county matters, when the opposite is true: every vote matters in the same way.
Every kg CO2 saved is good... (obviously we should strive for the most economic way to save CO2).
I wouldn’t be surprised if the masses interpret these changes as “let them eat cake” given that inflation is already hammering the middle and lower classes.
in Denmark, inflation is currently running at a 1.6% annualized rate, as of the most recent reading[0]. This is the full basket inflation rate, including volatile categories (food and energy). Core inflation is even lower, with the latest reading at 1.3% (annualized) in October 2024. Food inflation is, of course, volatile. It currently sits at a moderately elevated level of 3.9% (October 2024, annualized).
Food prices declined earlier this year for two consecutive months, though that will be a minor consolation after the significant food price inflation in 2022 and persisting, though at a slower pace, through 2023.
All of that to say, "let them eat cake" mentality is unlikely in a country where they have consistently ranked at the top of a world happiness index. Additionally, while I'm not well versed in Danish politics, I am under the impression that the Social Democrats have responded much better to the mass immigration that has been an ongoing issue for many parties throughout Europe. I think this is indicative of a party that adapts rather more quickly to the consequences of their previous policies and is less ideologically stubborn - at least on some issues.
1.6% is the change in the CPI. The actual inflation is about 8%.
There was a huge change in the CPI in 2022 or 2023, mostly attributed to sharply higher cost of energy.
I don't think you understand the numbers I listed. Read what I wrote again and try to think about the parts you don't understand, look them up, then read again.
Economists look at inflation on a month/month or year/year basis. This is not an accident as it purposely ignores the destructive cumulative effect of inflation.
Individuals, by contrast look at the cumulative effect of inflation. If inflation runs hot for several years and then comes back to a moderate level, prices don’t go down regardless of what economists would have you believe. The effect of inflation has memory.
Economists look at inflation in many, many ways. I don't think anyone that's reasonably well informed, especially economists, misunderstands the cumulative impact of price changes.
Economists that make monetary policy decisions look at recent inflation trends + projected inflation because they are tasked with price stability, which requires them to often respond to shocks well outside their control (war in Ukraine, massive government spending, tax cuts, covid-19 pandemic, etc.)
I was trading and researching fixed income and inflation markets (and implementing in multi-billion dollar portfolios) years ago when you had inflationistas claiming the Fed was going to cause double digit runaway inflation. At the same time, you had people claiming the Fed was not doing enough to support markets.
No matter what monetary policy makers do, it will be pretty much universally mocked by pundits and especially anyone that wants to talk their own book.
Academic economists don't really focus much on any particular reading of inflation, unless perhaps they have their own axe to grind about how it is measured or responded to.
Monetary policy can't change the past, which is why they evaluate current and expected inflation, not what happened in two years ago. Just because prices increased dramatically in 2022 does not mean the Fed or any other central bank should aim for deflation.
Denmark is a net exporter of food. In other words a net importer of agricultural pollution. So they could refice food exports without domestic political consequences. In theory.
We can debate the role of subsidies and carbon emissions, but framing agriculture as if it's uniquely nefarious misses the critical point that we all need to eat.
The industry isn't "choosing carbon" but rather it's responding to the immense challenge of feeding billions affordably while dealing with slim margins and unpredictable conditions. Adjustments require viable, scalable alternatives, not just finger-wagging.
I think we focus on supporting innovation rather than vilifying an essential industry.
If I can spend 100k on a tractor cause 100t of pollution or 200k on a tractor causing 50t of pollution I will obviously choose the firmer tractor as the rest of the world pays the price of the extra 50t of pollution.
If the externalities of that carbon generation are priced in I end up paying more for the polluting tractor so I choose the less polluting tractor and make more money.
I can only speak to small and medium farms, but if we're talking large horsepower cultivators / row farming, It's really a choice between keep my old pre-emissions diesel/buy a pre-2006 used tractor from auctions/marketplace for 50k, or double down and lease a 250k-400k new mid-size tractor.
You make it seem like many farmers have choices, but old "dirty" tractors are the only financial options for many without signing up for indentured servitude to JD/Case/etc
I do :-) Farming 2024 is so consolidated on few big operations, that a very small number of people have an inordinate amount of influence on how the major part of our total land area is managed and used. Most people who work in the danish farming industry are reduced to wage slaves who have zero influence on how things are run. In some ways, we are back to feudalism, in terms of lack of influence from the people who do most of the work.
I think we should start doing more taxes combined with subsidies. Give everyone a $1/t carbon tax. Give everyone a ~$1/t farming subsidy based on current carbon production. Nobody loses, but everyone is incentivized to decrease carbon production and the faster ones profit more. Phase out the subsidy over X years if you like.
Otherwise, you’re right. We’re upsetting the balance of a very complex, very important system and causing a regressive tax in the form of price increases.
a combined tax and subsidy to try to drive farmers into more sustainable practices in a fiscally neutral way isn't a bad idea, but I think it is just a very risky and necessary roll of the dice.
I think inevitably, there will be price increases. The questions is just how bad and how many farms survive the transition.
You misunderstand, driving small farms out of businness so they can be taken over by Gates and other big farming monopolies is the real goal not an unwanted side effect.
a casual American perspective here -- it is easy to mistake the cause when an effect is obvious. Yes, coordinated market regulation ends up increasing consolidation (with capital). Not everyone thinks this is a bad thing. No, it is not a plot by a few powerful individuals (easy to imagine, convenient emotional target). Rather there are "policy levers" and economic forces that operate at once, and interact in complicated ways.
I disagree, carbon taxes seem to be the best way to ensure your country starts to outsource all of it's carbon producing activity to less developed countries who do a worse job containing their emissions. This has been happening in europe for quite some time with the manufacturing of their wind turbines iirc. It's a super carbon heavy emission to produce them, so the europeans have them made elsewhere to make it look like their emissions are super low, which is essentially a lie for politicians to sell environment-crazed voters.
> It is going to sidle a cost to an industry of razor thin margins.
Will it or will farmland value take a dump but remain unchanged in use?
I always thought of farmland these days as a use of last resort and if it could be marketable for buildings, it’s already not economically worth it as a farm except speculatively
In the U.K. farmland has a rental value of about £100 an acre but a purchase price over £10k an acre.
The value in the land isn’t in its use (which is getting 1% ROI), but in speculation it may be granted permission to be converted to housing, or because of tax loopholes.
The owner also get capital appreciation / depreciation of the land - ~5.7 per cent per annum over the last 100 years bring the total return to a 6.7% ROI.
Land at the edge of cities and towns where there is a reasonable chance of development happening costs orders of magnitude more than the average.
The person renting that land then farms it (presumably for a profit) for additional ROI.
Yes, this came up in the recently closed inheritance tax loophole; people were buying "family farms" purely to leave to their children while doing the minimum of farming.
It should be fine, I believe. Just in terms of land-use, livestock is several times less efficient than other kinds of agriculture for the same food output. So a shift from meat to other food crops would be a net win, even as it frees up land for other purposes.
Many farmers will receive a one-time payment on land sales and some will use this windfall to subsidise their transition from growing livestock to more environmentally-friendly food.
>Just in terms of land-use, livestock is several times less efficient than other kinds of agriculture for the same food output.
This assumes that the land is equally usable for both activities. Many times, it isn't: a lot of land that's good enough for grazing cows doesn't have enough water available for growing plants that people want to (or can) eat. People can't eat grass.
This probably isn't an issue in Denmark, but in many other places it is.
Cows still need water from somewhere in those areas you’re talking about. If the land is particularly poor it also won’t produce enough feed and will have to be supplemented with feed that requires water and energy to grow somewhere else.
Cows are extremely inefficient (2% conversion) at converting calories to meat, so putting cows on that land is also an inefficient use of that land. And land with bad yield for crops also has bad yield for cows and the grass they eat and the water they need. I don't see the proposition being made in these claims.
Cows are so inefficient that we don't need to use marginal land at all to grow food. The majority of arable land is already used for cows yet they produce a disproportionately small amount of food. Weening off cows is a good thing.
We use manure because it's coming out of the gills of the animal ag industry, not because it's necessary to enrich crop soil.
Just because plastic bags are ubiquitous doesn't mean it's the only nor best way to carry items around, nor that we'd lose the ability to transport goods if they were phased out, nor that they don't come at a cost despite perceiving them as free.
> We use manure because it's coming out of the gills of the animal ag industry, not because it's necessary to enrich crop soil
Crop soil needs fertilizer somehow
What is your alternative to manure?
Bonus points if it uses less energy to produce than animals, produces less CO2 than animals, takes up less space than animals, or also produces food at the same time
Done any farming lately?
You would not get enough yield to feed people without fertilizer.
Of course it can be produced from a source different from manure. Nitrogen-based fertilizer is produced from cheap natural gas... oh wait... that is gone,too.
Depends on the type of agriculture? If it make veggies cheaper in comparison to meat, I'm all for it. Hopefully it spurs development of sustainable nice tasting protein sources ;) (like synthetic meat etc.)
I can’t believe this is a real problem. Refineries are bombed and stay on fire for days, some places in the world light on fire rubbish all the time, plenty of inefficiencies in heating, transportation, etc.. and the problem is.. cow farts.. yes sure
"Total GHG emissions from livestock supply
chains are estimated at 7.1 gigatonnes CO2
-eq per
annum for the 2005 reference period. They repre-
sent 14.5 percent of all human-induced emissions
using the most recent IPCC estimates for total an-
thropogenic emissions (49 gigatonnes CO 2
-eq for
the year 2004; IPCC, 2007)"
Surprisingly there are fewer cows than people, but there's still a billion cows, and a billion of anything adds up quickly.
That's not to say that the other things aren't important as well. Gas flaring from refineries is a pure waste that should be drastically curtailed.
I read about the Biogenic Carbon Cycle on the UC Davis website:
"As a by-product of consuming cellulose, cattle belch out methane, there-by returning that carbon sequestered by plants back into the atmosphere. After about ten years, that methane is broken down and converted back to CO2. Once converted to CO2, plants can again perform photosynthesis and fix that carbon back into cellulose. From here, cattle can eat the plants and the cycle begins once again. In essence, the methane belched from cattle is not adding new carbon to the atmosphere. Rather it is part of the natural cycling of carbon through the biogenic carbon cycle."
According to that logic, burning fossil fuels also is not harmful for the environment, because the CO2 eventually gets consumed by plants.
> According to that logic, burning fossil fuels also is not harmful for the environment, because the CO2 eventually gets consumed by plants.
No, the difference in logic is based on the source of the CO2. Fossile fuels are burried in the ground and are not part of the carbon cycle. By removing them from the ground, we are adding new carbon to the carbon cycle rather. Coversely, if you burn wood, that carbon was (mostly) going to end back up in the carbon cycle and you've just sped up it's cycle and increased the portion of the cycling carbon that is in the atmosphere.
There are changes we can make to the cycle that do affect global warming (cutting down all the forests and killing all the kelp would greatly decrease the capacity of the cycle). Conversely, we can expand the carbon cycle by planting trees (that actually survive and form forests.)
However, you can't fix global warming by expanding the carbon cycle because you can't scale the natural cycle to match all the new carbon that is being added to it by buring fossile fuels. There are only two solutions, adding less carbon to the cycle by burning fewer fossile fuels and finding ways to remove carbon from the cycle by sequeresting it in long term ways.
Carbon taxes can fail to actually cause change if they allow fossil fuel burning to be offset by temporary bumps to the carbons cycle capacity because this doesn't really solve the problem and at best slightly delay it.
Cow "farts" (actually burps) are kinda the opposite, the methane is already part of the carbon cycle. However methane is a way more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 so by increasing amount of carbon cycle that is amospheric methane you are accelerating global warming until the methane decays into CO2.
1) Even if cows would only eat the grass that was there (and we would not have converted any forest or other vegetation into grazing lands), the methane and CO2 stays in the atmosphere for a long time before being used by plants again, contributing to the greenhouse effect in that time. The reality is, we can only cover a very small percentage of the demand with this "3 happy cows on a vast pasture" phantasy. Most cow feed is planted additionally, often in countries like Brazil, and then fed to the cows.
2) The carbon impact is not the only negative impact of the scale of livestock agriculture we run these days. As it says in the article, another big impact is eutrophication of water bodies.
So, please don't come at me with your cute comments. The reality is that we have too much livestock agriculture. It's not sustainable to feed 8 billion people like this. The scientific consesus is clear on this.
The data you present again doesn't take the lifecycle into account. Also worth pointing out that protein bioavailability and amino acid profiles are ignored.
Unrelated but since you brought the topic up, it would of course make sense that releasing vast amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere that took millions of years to bind into the earth in mere decades might be a bad idea. Then again, we're only guessing there as well. We have no clue if the world will be better or worse for us to live in 50 years, and how much of it will be attributable to CO2.
But I digress -- this comment thread was about cow farts and the utter silliness of grasping at such straws when speaking about an otherwise serious subject like the futures of our children.
Yea, I imagine you’d link some projections 50 years into the future, and I’d call you a moron for believing in such things. You’ve already branded me a climate change denier in your head so that wouldn’t serve you well in a serious discussion.
It comes with quite a lot of compensation and subsidies, so they're less angry than you might expect. Also, an important note here is that they were part of the negotiations, and as such were part of the agreement which was proposed to the parliament.
All that being said, you're right, they're not exactly thrilled with the government adding taxes and monitoring them more.
They've tried to avoid this by doing the negotiations between the government and interest organizations from all sides. The most surprising part of all this is really that these organizations, which included the main agricultural lobby organizations and the main nature preservation organizations, managed to sit down together and come to an agreement. This agreement was then proposed to the parliament, which voted it through with a broad coalition from both sides. So, that should ideally make it somewhat resilient to changing governments. Of course, that's not a guarantee, but at least it should be more solid than most of these political agreements :)
Not exactly. I'll just copy a reply I made further down: in 2030, a tax will be introduced of 120 DKK (~16€) / ton CO2e, which linearly increases each year until it reaches 300 DKK (~40€) / ton CO2e in 2035. However, the farmers can get subsidies for changing their practices and adopting new technologies, in order to reduce their emissions. I.e., the government will give you money to change your production, so you can minimize the carbon taxes you have to pay. There are more technicalities to how it works, but that's the gist of it. The important part is that the goal is to transition to new technologies and production methods, which reduces emissions per unit food produced.
Without having read the legislation, the two aren't necessarily contradictory. They only are if the subsidy mechanically increases with the tax.
A "climate income" is a good example of that. Everyone gets taxed by usage/pollution, but the collected tax gets redistributed evenly.
That way, on average there is no extra taxation, in fact it's typically a redistribution from top to bottom. And yet every individual will end up with more money the less they pollute. It's that individual incentive that makes the measure effective, but it's the redistribution that makes it socially acceptable (if implemented correctly)
It gets legislation that people in general want (better rivers and streams, healthier sea ecosystem) passed, by subsidizing the changes required for the people those changes negatively affect.
I had to look it up, Denmark is allegedly a world leader in pig farming exports. You make a really interesting point that I feel like garners more discourse.
There's a great few episodes on this in Borgen where the PMs paramour goes to the hospital because there are so many hormones pumped into Danish pigs and how powerful the industry is in the country.
This doesn't seem to be true. In 2002 it appeared to be true, but the way it was calculated was by calculating the full mass of pigs produced and subtracting the amount exported. This didn't take into account that exports tended not to include heavy bones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_meat_cons...
No. The document spells out that denmark intends to remain a "strong" producer of agricultural products by increasing the yield from other, less ecologically damaging, farming areas.
another point is: since WW2, denmark has one of the highest, if not THE highest, percentages of area under agriculture. During WW2, we temporarily allowed agriculture on very poor farmland. It was meant to cease after the war, but our strong farmer lobbyists kept extending the permission.. So it is not about giving up 'good farm land', it is about stopping abusive agriculture which is only possible with extreme chemistry. Source: am Old dane.
Nah, these policies are aimed into increasing food imports (therefore decreasing food security btw), because it's easier for politicians to steal money with off-shore businesses.
And the farmers alao get shafted in the process, farmers are always totalitarian's first target. Venezuela, Rwanda, Zimbawe, Cuba.
What percentage of output is accounted for in the lower tier (not good) farmland? If the land is truly suboptimal the additional costs will not scale with the reduction of output.
I'm sorry I'm not directly answring your question. But part of the answer is, that we are not really intending to fix the CO2 issue. A/the major point with the initiative is that we have effectively killed marine/water life in our local rivers, lakes and near coastal areas, primarily by the leakage of fertilizer from low-yield farming areas (algae remove oxygen from our water, having thus killed off marine life).
Because of this, we are no longer discussing the economics of it - once you kill off all marine life, the price is 'always' too high (the way we see it..)
So, it might help or not help CO2, but our immediate concern is making it possible to have life in our local water bodies, and more oxygen than 0%.
I'm describing it a bit crude, but this should paint the general picture. If we run out of food and starve, we can return to killing allmarine life again :-)
"Danish Crown, one of Denmark’s largest Danish meat producer, is facing significant financial challenges as pig deliveries to its processing plants have dropped in the 2023/24 financial year."
On the other hand Tican is doing pretty well and are hiring, while Danish Crown is firing. So at least some of the pigs which would normally go to Danish Crown, is being sent to Tican instead. Tican is also giving farmers a better price per pig. https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/seneste/mens-danish-crown-lider-lo...
Danish Crowns problems aren't entirely due to external factors, part of it is also that Danish Crowns is struggling to run its business properly.
Because the pigs get transported alive to Germany and Poland to get slaughtered, as wages are lower there. Denmark, with a population under six million, still produces 32 million pigs per annum.
Before I go into rage mode, I suppose I should ask, why Farmland?
Both Denmark and Netherland are big in agriculture export and they are very good at it. I am not against planting trees but it on top of farm land doesn't make any sense to me.
Haiti cut down all their trees. When a hurricane passes through it moves what little top soil they have into the ocean.[1] Haiti overfished their costal waters. Now they do not have fish to eat and worse can not participate in the single biggest economic driver in the Caribbean, scuba diving.
Planting trees on farms is incredibly important for maintaining and protecting the soil. The Americans learned that the hard way in the 1930s. [2]]
> The Americans learned that the hard way in the 1930s.
Grasses, not trees, maintained and protected the soil for what became the US Dust Bowl.
The "Great American Desert" was essentially treeless. As your [2] links points out, European agricultural methods "[exposed] the bare, over-plowed farmland. Without deep-rooted prairie grasses to hold the soil in place, it began to blow away."
> "Like all the others, he had allowed the advertisers to multiply his wants; he had learned to equate happiness with possessions, and prosperity with money to spend in a shop. Like all the others, he had abandoned any idea of subsistence farming to think exclusively in terms of a cash crop; and he had gone on thinking in those terms, even when the crop no longer gave him any cash. Then, like all the others, he had got into debt with the banks. And finally, like all the others, he had learned that what the experts had been saying for a generation was perfectly true : in a semi-arid country it is grass that holds down the soil; tear up the grass, the soil will go. In due course, it had gone.
The man from Kansas was now a peon and a pariah; and the experience was making a worse man of him."
-- Aldous Huxley, "After Many a Year Dies the Swan" -- 1939
They were warned what would happen. Yes, it was the grasses that keep the soil in place.
However, as the article you referenced says,
> "As part of Roosevelt’s New Deal, Congress established the Soil Erosion Service and the Prairie States Forestry Project in 1935. These programs put local farmers to work planting trees as windbreaks on farms across the Great Plains. The Soil Erosion Service, now called the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) developed and promoted new farming techniques to combat the problem of soil erosion." [2]
A bunch of people didn't understand this in Haiti and now they are severely doomed and suffering. Probably not something you want to be incorrect about on the global scale.
Although, it is the grasses that hold the top soil in place, it can be mitigated by planting trees.
But that was only one of many techniques developed. https://archive.org/details/bighughfatherofs0000well/page/11... mentions "if subject to wind erosion, it calls for stubble-mulch farming, wind strips and windbreaks." (That's a biography about Hugh Hammond Bennett, who led the Soil Erosion Service ... but not the Shelterbelt!)
In general (a few paragraphs earlier):
'Modern soil conservation is based on sound land use and the treatment of land with those adaptable, practical measures that keep it permanently productive while in use,” he explains. “It means terracing land that needs terracing; and it means contouring, strip cropping, and stubble-mulching the land as needed, along with supporting practices of crop rotations, cover crops, etc., wherever needed. It means gully control, stabilizing water outlets, building farm ponds, locating farm roads and fences on the contour, and planting steep, erodible lands to grass or trees.“'
"Tillage is proceeding across the slopes, rather than up and down hill. It is being done on the contour on 15,362 acres. Farmers are finding that it not only serves as a brake on running water but also reduces the cost of mule-power and tractor-power."
Oh, interesting. In 'Predicting and Controlling Wind Erosion', Lyles (1985) writes "Despite the credit the Prairie States Forestry Project has received in ending the Dust Bowl, windbreak plantings under the Project did not begin on a large scale until 1936", and says "the cardinal principle of wind erosion control is maintaining vegetative materials on the soil. ... this practice of conserving or maintaining vegetation on the surface has evolved into various forms of tillage management, which currently go under the generic name of conservation tillage and have become a major technique for erosion control." (See https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3742385.pdf )
This suggests again that trees and windbreaks in general are not the primary solution to the regions affected by the Dust Bowl, but rather grasses, including crops.
You left out the part where Haiti was destabilized and crushed by colonial debt. And I don’t think that lack of fish is what’s keeping the tourists away. But hey, weren’t we talking about Denmark ?
So is that relevant because it means that cutting down all the trees want their fault, or because it provides an alternate explanation for what mechanism is causing the soil to else?
And obviously the connection to Denmark is meant to be that a lack of trees causes problems so replacing things with trees must be good. Even if there hasn't been news about those problems happening there.
Denmark drained the only source of natural diversity it had, its marshlands, after World War I and turned the entire country into farmland. Outside the cities, it is endless fields of farmland. And now its chickens have come home to roost, having poisoned the soil and rivers. This is entirely Denmark's fault, and now they're trying to reverse some of the damage they did.
Denmarks agricultural performance is not great at all. it's way too expensive to produce stuff. if it wasn't for EU subsidies the agricultural sector in Denmark would loose over 50% of their profits. To drive the point home the agricultural sector in Denmark only makes up 3.6% of the bnp and 4.3% of exports while taking up 60% of Denmarks total area and employing around 3.9% of the working population. i think Denmark can easily let go of 10% while only having miniscule effects on the economy. Denmark is a very small country and technically has no truly wild nature.
> Denmarks agricultural performance is not great at all. it's way too expensive to produce stuff. if it wasn't for EU subsidies the agricultural sector in Denmark would loose over 50% of their profits.
Agriculture in the EU is renowned for not being financially unjustified. For decades it's been a finantial no-brainer to import the bulk of agricultural products from south America and Africa. This is not new or the result of some major epiphany, it's the natura consequence of having an advanced economy and a huge population with high population density. The EU already imports 40% of the agricultural products it consumes.
EU subsidies were created specifically to mitigate the strategic and geopolitical risk of seeing Europe blockaded. Agricultural subsidies exist to create a finantial incentive to preserve current production capacity when it makes no finantial sense, and thus mitigate a strategic vulnerability.
> Blizzards, record winds, red weather warnings and biting cold. The long winter of 2023/2024 has featured heavy precipitation and a number of extreme weather events.
> Large parts of Europe are starting the 2023-2024 winter season with an abundance of snow and cold, a stark contrast from last year, which was abnormally warm and snowless.
Interesting way to frame "Russian gas being cut off" instead of "most likely US orchestrated biggest ally to ally sabotage in history".
I'm still mad about it, yes. Germany's dependence on Russian gas was a terrible thing, but risking my livelihood for 4D geopolitics chess is much worse.
Sure it does. The goal is keep the farmland available and productive along with keeping agricultural infrastructure. The USA helped win WW2 because our car factory lines were retooled to make war machines.
That’s limited by the country’s basic requirements not the total amount of farmland available. People may prefer wine and beef in surplus resulting in an obesity epidemic, but that’s not required here. You don’t want 350 lb soldiers or recruits.
In the case of the US, we turned much of the richest farmland into subdivisions. The breadbasket of the nation is powered by an aquifer that will be depleted in my kids lifetime. Most of our green goods come from the deserts of California and Arizona, and won’t exist if the Colorado River water system breaks down.
No, if you expect farmland to produce 0 food then having extra farmland is pointless. 0 * 2 X = 0 * X = 0.
The point of extra farmland is to make up for some expected shortfall, but you’re better off stockpiling food during productive periods than have reserve capacity for use when something else is going wrong.
PS: It is common to have quite large stockpiles of food. Many crops come in once a year and then get used up over that year. But that assumes a 1:1 match between production and consumption, a little extra production = quite a large surplus in a year.
The government has all sorts of policy goals. Resilience, employment, etc.
In the US, Nixon era policy and legal thinking drives all things. Price is king, except it isn’t. Our crazy governance model means that corn is better represented than humans, so our food is more expensive, less nutritious, and our supply chains are incredibly fragile.
Let me get this right. To save the planet Denmark wants to stop producing food locally and instead import more? So those pig farts gotta go but the bunker fuel used to ship grain from a slash and burn rainforest farm in Brazil is a-ok.
Utterly brain dead. So much so that you know someone’s getting paid from these decisions.
you got it.. and grain is not the only thing we get shipped from Brazil.. to look green, we've replaced most our coal burning for energy with bio fuels, essentially wood and that gets shipped in from Brazil as well.. very green.. because fuck nuclear, because of.. checks notes.. reasons
> No, its because far lobbies are an important political block
Wrong. If you try to educate yourself, you will notice that EU's common agricultural policy even went to the extent of paying subsidies to small property owners to preserve their properties as agricultural land. This goes way beyond subsidizing production, or anything remotely related to your conspiracy theory.
Just because someone benefits from subsidy programs that does not mean that any conspiracy theory spun around the inversion of cause and effect suddenly makes sense. I recommend you invest a few minutes to learn about EU's common agricultural policy before trying to fill that void with conspiracies.
They can write all they want. The fact is, the countries wouldn't cant get rid of their farm policies because of voting. And the EU, is an outgrowth of those already existing countries. EU policy is not handed down from a white tower. Of course you can't actually say that.
Farmers and people supporting farmers are still a small minority and while they can probably swing some election in some country if they were to massively support only one party or coalition, the money comes for the strategic importance. It would be naive to think it's just "for the votes".
It was a long time ago that I have looked into this. My understanding from the political science is that countries where farmers votes aren't as important, also have far less subsidizes.
Groups that already have subsidizes are better at defending them. Even if in absolute terms their numbers aren't as big.
They are totally going to defend themselves, mainly through boycotts, barricades and varying degrees of riots.
That can totally cause a vote issue, but it's because the rest of the population is pissed off by the road blocks etc
You are posting literal propaganda from the biggest agro lobbyist. That number is about the "Danish food cluster". That is all food related business output. Enzyme production and such. They have tried for a long time to conflate the farming sector with the whole food industry to muddy their importance.
and also that this source is probably biased toward minimizing the numbers while your source might be pulling in the other direction. the true number is probably somewhere in between and depends on what you include. like, could the raw products be imported instead and the refined in Denmark without those 22% taking a hit?
3.6% of bnp seems like little but I think agriculture counts for more than, say, management consulting that goes through 5 intermediaries (does it get counted towards the bnp 5x then? I'm not sure). At the end of the day money is only an abstraction while food, you can actually eat it.
yes, but like 50-70% of the crops grown is animal feed. if Denmark really needed efficient food for the population i think the whole thing could be done more efficiently and those 10% won't be missed.
A lot of “farmland” is unproductive and kept in usage only by heavy subsidies. Additionally, I think a more important/interesting part of the article is taxation of livestock - you reduce the land needed significantly when the amount of livestock is reduced. I’m not vegan/vegetarian but it is “obvious” we should reduce meat consumption for a wide range of reasons and focus on raising livestock in ways that are beneficial to the wider environment.
Yes, the least productive 10% of land represents a much smaller percentage of food production. This is often land in areas that are most environmentally sensitive.
In the UK we pay farmers to raise lamb on marginal land yet they still aren't competitive with lamb shipped from the other side of the world. I'm not sure why we should be subsidising that, especially when there is a lot of environmental damaged associated with it.
Could food security in case of another global crisis be a good enough reason? I don't know anything about the British situation AT ALL, but I think many in Europe think slightly different about the market-based solution when it comes to both food, medicines, and other essentials after corona.
It turns out that when shit hits the fan, countries need to handle the basic needs of their population themselves.
Exactly... I find all the arguments in the style of "but we need food" extremely disingenuous when it comes to meat production. Almost without exception, more food could be produced by converting land used for animal agriculture into land used to grow food directly for human consumption.
Just having farmland be fields is not very good for the land or the eco system. Breaking up farmland with hedges, woods, wetlands or whatever nature decides it should be is often a good idea. Next best thing is to manually plant trees.
One thing I have wondered was the relative benefits of a concentrated wilderness versus distributed habitat.
The common agricultural policy set-aside distributes payments for the wilderness across many farms (for equity, one supposes), whereas a concentrated wilderness would benefit few (and probably only the landowners).
For a short period I looked into carbon stuff and while forests were good, wetlands were deemed much bigger sinks.
It feels like wetlands is a huge ignored area. If what I read at the time holds (I think it was like 6-12x sequestration rate in some regions), a simple thing like rising sea levels would have a huge impact.
And anthropogenic destruction of wetlands is also a huge issue and one that is relatively easy to reverse in a lot cases (dams, rerouted rivers). And in some cases, water can just be rerouted occasionally to create temperarly wetlands that are good ecosystems as well. Mossy Earth I think is doing some of these.
Strangely enough I have been seeing wetland creation coming up on my radar recently. Hinkley Point C nuclear power station has been proposing these as alternative to acoustic fish deterrent, but the locals who might be affected are not happy.
I do a lot of volunteering work with the Woodland Trust in the UK, negotiating with people who want to donate their land to restoration purposes. Britain is a land of fields and hedgerows (distributed). Many people fail to understand that most "wilderness" that we want to bring back is reliant on density (or concentration). I know many land owners who want to rewild parts of theirs, but are expecting temperate rainforest on a plot of land a couple acres across. It doesn't work like that.
The only way to bring back these lost or dying ecosystems is across large stretches of land, hundreds if not thousands of acres across. We have tiny pockets left in Cornwall, Wales and Scotland, but for the most part the country is ecologically baren in comparison to that a couple of thousand years ago.
Vast and continuous National Parks are one of the few viable ways to maintain or bring back our species rich ecosystems. Distributed "wilderness" between city blocks or cattle grazing land is duct tape on a leaky bucket.
Quick history lesson: After the war, with Prussia in 1864, Denmark lost about 33% of it's area. That part was some of the most suited to agriculture. To compensate for those loses Denmark started a process of turning previously unusable land in to farmland. So lakes where drained, the the moors were drained, areas with sandy soil, good for nothing but growing common heather, was heavily fertilised and forests where cut down. There where even suggestion to drain parts of the sea between Denmark and Sweden.
In some sense it was good, and basically help shape modern Denmark, but it's just not needed anymore, and has come at the cost of wildlife, native plants and sea creatures. It didn't start out like that, but when you add modern intensive farming on top of killing of most of your nature areas, then things starts to go very wrong. Denmark has almost nothing of it's original nature left.
That last bit is correct, there aren’t many places like that in Denmark. So the original question remains, where would be a better place for them specifically to plant these trees?
This isn't really true. Growing a forest is way more complicated than you might think - they don't just sprout spontaneously, as trees take a long time to grow and are easily kept down by fauna, landscape, nutrient levels, erosion, and many other factors.
I don't remember the details, but I believe it goes something like farm -> heath -> shrubland -> young forest -> mature forest, where each phase has a unique ecosystem of both plant species and animal life.
In an extremely heavily cultivated landscape like Denmark (seriously, look at a satellite photo), converting farmland back into forest is a multi-decade project requiring constant maintenance. Converting farmland into marshland (which is the "original" stone-age landscape in many areas) is a multi-century project.
Just like it was a multi-century project to convert it into farmland, by the way. Europe has been cultivated for millennia.
Exactly. It only takes a couple of decades for nature to reforest, which is an eyeblink, actually. And only a couple more decades to return to mature forest. No humans or projects needed. There is a lot more forest in New England (USA) now, than a century ago.
Eventually it returns to forest within a lifetime. In certain parts of the midwest you see fields of farmland and occasionally squares of trees in them. Chances are in the early 19th century all of what you saw was farmland and at one point not as much was actively farmed and certain fields no longer plowed. All the trees you find in that plot of what looks like the holdover of some carved up midwestern forest are actually all less than 100 years old and relatively recent growth.
the Netherlands exports so much food (and meat...) that it becomes a burden on local wildlife and milieu, mostly due to nitrogen emissions, pesticides and fertilizer.
I think it's the same for Denmark, though the mostly hold pigs in stead of cattle.
I think that there is an official and an unofficial reason. The official is that something must be returned to nature before climate change destroys everything. The unofficial is, in my opinion, that EU politicians are terrified by US elections.
In all western countries, far right groups are crawling to grab more and more power gradually. Those groups feed basically on farmer followers, ruthlessly brainwashed with fake news, antiscience and outrage, and the system has proven to work well (See US).
Until now traditional parties believed that could control the situation and appease the farmers with more money, and maybe even benefit of some votes of grateful people on return. The wake up has being brutal. Each euro given to farmers is just a victory reclaimed by this groups, that nurture a higher discontent.
So now that they are coming for they political heads and the time is running out, traditional politicians feel the pressure to take some delayed unpleasant decisions before is too late, and getting rid of the fake farmers to build a market from there is a first step. If fake farmers can sell subsidized meat for a lower price, the real farmers suffer for it.
> The official is that something must be returned to nature before climate change destroys everything.
Nature is an abstraction, not a weird angry god. We need to capture GHG and stop emitting more but that’s pretty much it. That will most likely involve reforestation as it’s a good carbon sink but using the expression “returning thing to nature” is not a correct way to frame it.
There is developed areas (cities/towns/industry) and farm land.
Most of the land not suitable for farming was turned into farm land. Through extremely hard work over the past 150 years. Like straightening rivers, draining marshes, and planting up the heath.
Because it’s becoming increasingly obviously dumb to be paying farmers money to pretend like they are farming their land. What I mean is that if we removed the subsidies the farmers wouldn’t farm their land, the market just doesn’t work to support their production. So we are essentially saying “if you pretend to farm your land we’ll make sure you profit” but even at that they of cause need to try to keep the pretend farming profitable enough that the entire charade pays off, but that means dumping a ton of fertilizer on the land, which tends to run off and ruin streams and seeps into the ground water. Most recently this has led to the agricultural industry competeley and likely semi permanently destroying the fishing industry around one of the major pars of Denmark. So at this point the farmers have to stop.
There’s a natural way of doing that, which is to cut subsidies and let the market handle it. But the farmers have political power because they have a lot of money because of the policies they’ve set up back when they had political power because they had a lot of money… Anyways, so what is actually happening is that the farmers have decided that if their land is unprofitable then the government needs to pay a hefty price to them for it.
The government could just cut the subsidies which means we would use less money, then buy the land in bankruptcies, likely just with the money we spend less. Instead we’ll see a lot of additional spending to buy the land, and then down the line subsidies will increase to “make up” for all the land they “lost”.
> Because it’s becoming increasingly obviously dumb to be paying farmers money to pretend like they are farming their land.
This is a particularly ignorant and clueless opinion to have.
The whole point of Europe's common agricultural policy is to preserve the potential of agricultural production as a strategic asset. Europe's strong economy and huge population density, coupled with cheap access to agricultural production from south America and Africa, renders most agricultural activity economically unfeasible. The problem is that this means Europe is particularly vulnerable to a blockade, and in case of all out war the whole continent risks being starved in a few months.
The whole point of EU's common agricultural policy is to minimize this risk.
Owners of farmland are provided a incentive to keep their farms on standby even if they don't produce anything exactly to mitigate this risk. It would be more profitable to invest in some domains such as, say, real estate. Look at the Netherlands: they are experiencing a huge housing crisis and the whole land in Holland consists of dense urban housing bordered by farm land. It would be tempting for farmers to just cash out on real estate if they didn't had an economic upside.
You would do better if you educated yourself on a topic before commenting on it.
> It would be tempting for farmers to just cash out on real estate if they didn't had an economic upside.
That’s tempting even with subsidies. I have friend who own farming land at the outskirts of the city, they rent it to a farmer at almost net zero to themselves after taxes, but would make a small fortune if they could develop the land. The reason farmers don’t sell their land to real estate and 100x the value instantly isn’t that they don’t want to because of subsidies, it’s that they aren’t allowed to due to zoning laws, and zoning laws are what they are to protect property values, because everyone involved in designing them own at minimum one property. The only political party we have representing renters in any capacity never get any power in the governmental bodies that govern zoning laws.
> The whole point of Europe's common agricultural policy is to preserve the potential of agricultural production as a strategic asset.
Nothing about that required the current setup. Imagine if we were talking about government subsidies for private militias because we needed to maintain the much more directly important military capacity. Wouldn’t that be crazy? Why is the farming subsidies seen differently. Why must the government pay to private institutions who’s worth had disappeared. If we want governments to maintain farmable land so be it. We don’t have to finically support an artificial elite based them having owned a one profitable asset. Just let it degrade in value and buy it when it hits bottom.
> Imagine if we were talking about government subsidies for private militias because we needed to maintain the much more directly important military capacity. Wouldn’t that be crazy?
Not really? It is very protective to maintain an agricultural, energy, and industrial base; not doing so is immensely risky.
Take Germany the first winter after the Ukraine invasion as an example, a mad scramble to fill a huge hole in their energy sector. Imagine the same scenario but with food, or munitions.
You simply cannot rely solely on global supply chains for industries that are critical to survival of a nation. The ability to power, feed, and defend yourself is a primary concern of a nation state and is worth economic inefficiency.
With all that said, I have _no_ idea how Europe and Denmark specifically does subsidies for agriculture. It could be asinine. But philosophically, imo, it is uncontroversially necessary in some form or another. It is far too risky to save a penny on importing wheat from Brazil and risk famines.
With this type of argument you can demonstrate that lots of things have strategic importance. Steel? Check. Textiles? Check. Asphalt? Check. We should subsidize everything. Yet, when the military threat actually materializes and you need to manufacture 155mm shells, all the strategic planning seems quite useless.
Everything you are listing is indeed very much strategic and Europe was indeed extremely stupid to let that go. The end of your paragraph is a demonstration of that. It doesn’t go against the core idea.
Europe has a huge coastline, it's impossible to blockade. If war breaks out, it's better to shift workers from agriculture to war-related production, and import food from places that are not at war, such as South America. Food produced in Europe is basically a luxury. For every kilogram of beef produced in Denmark, you can buy 2.5 kg of Argentinian beef.
While Europe has a long coastline, there are only a given number of ports capable of the high thoroughput needed to feed Europe’s population. Blockade those and the entrance to the Baltic and Mediterranean, and most of your work is done. Moreover, in a shooting war, merchant ships from other global regions attempting to supply Europe would be targeted.
The convoys barely worked. Parts of Europe were desperately short of food for several years. And the non-Axis countries couldn't manage to defeat the blockade on their own: they needed help from the USA to accomplish anything.
It didn't work for Japan though. The US could've kept Japan impotent and hungry indefinitely without invading or nuking it. The main reason for nuking it was to get it to surrender before Stalin could enter the fight and take part of Japan.
Who is this hypothetical battle to be fought against? Surely anyone with sufficient power to mount a blockade has nuclear missiles and at that point it's kind of moot...
Note that I actually agree with your position but this is an interesting discussion on a topic I hadn't thought about deeply enough!
Let me see... Well, there was this thing in the past, called WW2, it was a WW, because well, Germany for example didn't want France buying Brazillian agricultural products, and sunk Brazillian ships using submarines. Thus making Brazil join the war.
Right now Lula wants to form a coalition with Russia, so what makes you think, in case of war, Brazil would keep selling to the EU? Maybe because USA would threathen Brazil? In that case they would focus on feeding themselves, and not the EU still.
In the entirety of human history, a base war tactic is Siege. What makes you think nobody will try it again?
To be more accurate - by removing subsidies, NZ farmers became more efficient and sell their products at the world price, which is quite often overseas.
Subsidies and/or tarrifs always distort the market and have unintended consequences.
Not sure why you say 'more accurate'. What you state is what I implied. I hope this was clear.
What removing subsidies do is unleash the potential. Lots of farming communities that live with subsidies are convinced that removing them is a dooms day scenario.
However evidence often doesn't support this. Japan used to protect its market for beef. Then this was forced to be opened by the US. Japan farmer then realized that their specialization was high quality beef. And now Japan is globally famous and exports lots of high quality beef.
Removing subsidies can lead to structural changes and consolidation, but it can also have lots of positive effects.
Does it pencil out though? You go from more farmers making less profit and getting subsidy to smooth things over and then they go ahead and spend most of that back in the economy running the business presumably.
And the other situation is no subsidy, fewer players as they have to take what little profit there is and spend it more on overhead, and presumably less money reinvested in the local economy overall because of less economic activity from fewer players as well as that subsidy no longer being available to spend back on overhead and recirculate into the economy. And profit is presumably held by fewer and wealthier people who spend even less proportionally in the local economy than someone with less means.
That's only true if you ignore that the government can spend that money on something else. And the successful farmers are actually net tax payers.
Compare subsidies to farmers, all farmers are highly inefficient farming with no exports. No great public transport system and roads with potholes.
To:
No subsidies. Highly efficient farmers that export. Fantastic bus connection and roads in the whole countryside.
> take what little profit there is
Before there was no net profit at all, it was a net lose to society. You were moving profits from other sectors to the farm sector.
> And profit is presumably held by fewer and wealthier people
If a farmer is successful, they should make money, just like people in all other sectors in the economy.
Nobody makes the argument that we should subsidize all manufacturing, so that we can have lots of small relatively poor manufacturing sites that lose money.
This if course doesn't necessarily work for every country, but the general doom and gloom about subsidy is often proven wrong.
Do you think food production has national security implications or do you think "the market" will be happy to sell you food during another global conflict while their own citizens are starving?
Farming subsidies are a national security tool, not a handout.
Anyway, it's clear that your position is political in nature otherwise you'd be just as outraged by green subsidies.
Denmark set aside DKK 53.5 billion for green subsidies in 2022. But this isn't market distortion to the same degree as farming subsidies, is it? That's the flaw in your argument. It's inconsistently applied based on politics, isn't it?
There’s a big difference between supporting food security and subsidising otherwise unviable land usage and farming practices. In the UK, there are subsidies for upland farming for sheep with produces a negligible amount of food at high cost (monetary and environmental) for next to no return for the farmers even after the subsidy.
Re. green subsidies that is better characterised as investment in technology of the future. You might also like to compare subsidies to the fossil fuel sector as well.
How does having such a large surplus that you’re an exporter of food jive with national security? It sounds like they already produce more than enough. Exposing food production entirely to market forces is, as you point out, a bad idea.
Sounds like you’ve fallen for some farmer rhetoric.. How is growning crops to feed 28 million pigs to 6 million people? We’d have to eat 5 pigs each.. If it was really about food security, we’d surely plant crops to eat ourselves, which is much more efficient in terms of calorie per m^2.
Meat has many more negative externalities than plants. Thats the argument for substituting green farming.
Of course it’s political.. anything is to some degree.
Because of animals we grow far more grain than we need, giving us a substantial amount of necessary slack. If there is a wide spread crop failure, the price of grain rises, causing ranchers to sell breeding stock they can no longer afford to feed. Then humans then eat the grain instead of the animals.
Growing x100 times the amount of food needed isn’t ‘slack’, its production for export (or feeding pigs to export). We could cut out farmland by 50% and still have more than enough to feed our own population. This food security argument would only hold if there was any possibility of us actually not being able to feed our population.
You should educate yourself. Europe imports around 40% of the agricultural production it consumes.
The "surplus" is referenced in economical value and reflects luxury exports such as wine, which is hardly what keeps Europe alive in case of all-out war.
The whole point of Europe's common agricultural policy is food security including an event of all-out war.
Your comments sound like advocating against having a first-aid kit just because you sell silk scarves.
I don’t understand why this is being downvoted but this is very true, and it’s the literal case that the fisheries around the entirety of the Bornholm region of Denmark have been completely shut down because the farming industry runoff destroyed it. Had it not been for subsidies the farming industry wouldn’t have done this. We literally paid people to deliberately destroy our environment. Is insane and everyone’s just looking to the sky like “what are we supposed to do? We’ve tried nothing at all even though there has been consistent warnings for two decades and it still happened!?”
> Anyway, it's clear that your position is political in nature otherwise you'd be just as outraged by green subsidies.
The green subsidies are also paid out to farmers… it is outrageous. Imagine if we were still paying subsidies to weavers because of their “strategic importance in case of war” and also paying them green subsidies to avoid using the toxic chemicals they would otherwise use doing the thing they are only doing in the first place because it justifies the theater that has the state maintaining their consistent income.
Well they aren’t really subsidizing based on having everything you need on shore. They still specilize into a few monocrops and have to trade to fill the rest of a balanced diet for the population. No one is calculating how much butter would be needed to last a multi year siege and dolling out subsidize to the dairy farmers on that I don’t think.
This is often the justification but in many countries agriculture systems are not oriented towards food security: they produce a large share of export crops/products and thus also rely on imports. If they were an actual national security tool, they would be more focus on not relying on imports and not helping exports, right?
We pay farmers not to plant fields in the US. Here in the Eastern half, much of this farm land setting idle receives adequate rain and sunshine. Farmers have to mow (brush hog) the fields every year or two to prevent trees and brush from naturally taking over. Economically it makes little sense.
Where this might actually make sense is around waterways to prevent erosion. And farmers have taken down a large percentage of the tree rows between fields that were planted in the dust bowl days in an effort to use every inch of their field.
Although, I am personally in favor of simple regulations instead cash handouts.
I'm of the opinion food security - even at great expense - is the primary thing a nation should be concerned with as a society. At the level where producing enough calories to feed your total population if things truly hit the fan as a hard requirement for every nation on the planet. This is not something you leave to "free trade" or whatnot. Obviously that doesn't mean every calorie need be provided in the most luxurious form - but in the end, there should be enough food produced to feed your people in the worst of times. Even at great expense and waste during the good times.
That all said - farming has gotten vastly more productive both per man hour and per acre over the past 100 years. Logically we simply do not need the same amount of land devoted to agriculture as we did before - at least in most cases.
So long as your food security is not being impacted - and I do mean under the worst possible stress model you can come up with - I don't see a problem with plans like this. Land use changes over time, and it should be expected.
Plus, it looks like a large portion of this will be simply a different form of agriculture - forestry. This will probably be more in-demand in 50-100 years with current trends, but that's a wild guess.
The argument about security comes up a lot and makes intuitive sense. Although it seems far more complex than just protecting farmland and a simple yearly statistic. Developed countries can be ridiculously dependent on centralised supply chains to process and deliver food. And many of the inputs and equipment require a complex industrial base to support. We don't just need the space to grow food. We need to feed it, protect it from pests, harvest it, process it, deliver it to people. In most countries Iit is very dependent on electricity, heavy industry and global trade for equipment.
> That all said - farming has gotten vastly more productive both per man hour and per acre over the past 100 years
We also have way more people to feed and house than 100 years ago, you cannot look at productivity increase in isolation, demand for both food and land has also risen significantly.
Denmark is not even close to jeopardizing its food supply, even less its food security. It produces way more food than is needed to feed its own population.
> Denmark is not even close to jeopardizing its food supply, even less its food security. It produces way more food than is needed to feed its own population.
Denmark is a part of the EU. Their agricultural policy follows EU's common agricultural policy. Food security is evaluated accounting for all members, not individual member-states in isolation. In case of a scenario that puts food security at risk, such as an all-out war, it's in her best interests of all member states if the whole Europe can preserve it's food security.
If we are ever in a situation where food security becomes a real issue in the EU - and that’s an almost unfathomably big if - then the first step would be to actually grow food for humans, instead of food for animals that are then exported to China as meat products.
Food security is simply not a relevant concern here.
Nitrogen emissions from farming are a big topic in the Netherlands. We have a right wing populist governments that wants to raise maximum speeds back to 130km/h but they can't because of nitrogen emissions that caused the previous government (also right leaning, pro car, etc.) to lower the limits. Intense cattle farming is a big environmental challenge in both countries and it comes at a price. Lots of farting cows in both countries.
Simple: Germany has a huge export surplus that China and the USA is unwilling to accept anymore.
Also, German economy is stagnate, based on a cheap russian gas and cooperation with china. So now, the idea is to target South America for exports while balancing it with import of South American foodstuff(EU-Mercosur agreement, that we know will not be ratified by individual countries in a democratic process, but by the Commission).
The problem Germany has to fix is the Common Agricultural Policy, that's one of the pillars of the EU.
They are using the Green Agenda to force countries to reforest their fields. Of course the whole reforestation program is designed in a way that benefits states (Germany) that have got rid of their forests long time ago, and is unfavorable for countries that developed their agriculture after the WW2 - like Denmark and Finland.
Expect a heated discussion between Germany and France, rise of right wing parties in smaller countries, and a push for stricter integration.
Denmark did get rid of its forests a long time ago, after World War I. Germany has vast forests, a magnitude larger than those in Denmark, a country which is almost entirely farmland outside the cities. You have no idea what you're talking about.
Germany has been leaching off the EU for so long through the weak Euro, they now think it will always work. They are clearly putting France on a fast track to an exit via a far right government with the whole Mercosur agreement debacle.
There is no way it's cost effective to produce food in Denmark. If people were rational about this Denmark would be 0-5% farmland. But racism/nationalism and irrational fears and entrenched political power exists so these sane changes only happen slowly. This is a country whose largest imports are (fish, animal feed, wine and cheese) and mostly from other European countries. If they were really worried about min-maxing they would be trading with other countries. They seem to be more preoccupied with keeping cash inside Europe and confusing old world status symbols with wealth.
It's as if your economic planning is based own how good it appears to a potential time traveler from 100 years ago
"The people work 30 hours a week and eat wine and cheese whenever they want! Everybody is rich!"
Indeed. A few years ago I ran across a comparison of old photographs of rural villages (early 20th century) in central Europe vs their present day appearance, taken from similar points of view.
Two things were immediately apparent from the old photographs
- less forest
- tons of fruit trees
Fitting is also this anecdote I heard when visiting a historical mill. They had a huge linden tree in their yard, and they told us that in the olden days this was a symbol of prosperity, because the original owner showed off that they could afford to plant a useless, non-fruit-bearing - a status symbol.
Coming full circle - the best thing would be if we could plant tons of trees that also produce food - something like the baobabs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adansonia_digitata . E.g. pigs were fed oak's acorns in fall.
We have to be careful here. While that's good news locally, the news is less promising globally. Deforestation is still rampant in the global south - specifically to make agricultural products for the global north. So Europe and America are still net-deforesters if you take into account their imported products.
In comparison, Denmark is currently at only 15% forest.
This is up from about 2% in the early 1800s, back when ships were built from wood, and firewood was used for heating. Funnily, the slow and steady build-up during those 200 years was partially motivated by the fact that when the British destroyed the fleet in 1807, there was simply not enough wood to build a new one.
It’s the same in America, there’s actually more trees now than at the time of European settlement. A combo of the large buffalo herds that used to roam and native land management that often involved burning entire forests.
Incidentally this is one of the approaches described in Kim Robinson's The Ministry for the Future, a novel on climate change (more about the political ramifications of it than the ecological impacts). Interesting read.
Before anyone jumps into this book I would caution against it. This book had many very cool ideas and moments. The way it played out felt very "real". However, in the end there was very little actual story and was very boring at times. I actively dislike Neal Stephenson but if you want a near-future climate story I would recommend Termination Shock over Ministry For The Future. Just a random internet person's two cents.
I also read KSR's book. It was interesting at times. However, the research on the financial topics, including the central banks and "global financiers" was quite bad.
I don't recall the glaring errors right now, however, given this is an area where I (at least once upon a time) was an expert, it was quite bad to read this and realize there are likely other serious errors in topics with which I am not at all familiar.
While this is of course a work of fiction, getting verifiable facts wrong, intentionally or not, ruins it for me.
The main thing that irked me is that the book focuses on technical solutions as if that's what we're missing (carbon coin! pumping water from under ice sheets! etc.) but completly glosses over the actual consequences.
To piggyback on the rest of this thread, people like meat and don't want to stop eating lots of meat. People are not going to like things that make them stop eating meats, whether it's governement buying out producers, a carbon tax, a carbon quota, whatever.
"Ministry of the Future" is full of stuff like "and the central bankers could reshape the economy, so they did by doing XYZ" as if "XYZ" was important but barely discusses the fact that "reshaping the economy" might upset lots of people. How were they convinced to give up air travel, cars, etc?
> People are not going to like things that make them stop eating meats, whether it's governement buying out producers, a carbon tax, a carbon quota, whatever.
I think the point of the book is that when the consequences are serious enough, it pushes significant social and behavioral change that people would not consider or accept otherwise. It's hard for us to imagine how society could actually change so drastically, but when people have been through a crisis of immense proportions, they think differently. India completely transforming its governance structure seems implausible but only because we haven't experienced 20M people dying at once from a preventable cause. These kind of events are triggers for social revolutions. We've seen this in history.
Sure, but then the story is about 1. the Indian heatwave and 2. the transformation; whether the transformation came about through carbon coins or carbon quotas or whatever is a detail. But it's the focus of the book.
I think in the book those people were convinced to give up air travel by the eco-terrorists known as the Children of Kali shooting commercial airliners out of the sky, and not shooting down cleaner alternatives like airships. A persuasive argument, to be sure.
I thought the idea of a "carbon coin" issued by central banks (the primary financial theme of the book) was on fairly solid ground. I'd be interested to know what you found implausible about it.
I had trouble with the Mars series and never got through it.
I kind of wonder if it is easier for me to enjoy fiction that requires more "suspension of disbelief" with ftl or time travel, alien races and magic.
In comparison when I don't have to suspend any disbelief, we haven't met aliens, other worlds are actually too far to get to, and physics and science is unyielding... it is harder to enjoy myself.
Since we’re here.. These are probably everyone’s top 2 eco-punk novels but the rest of an appropriate top 10 list is way more contentious, and imho sources like goodreads or whatever will always have many items that aren’t really even in the genre.
So I’ll offer the “metatropolis” anthology, which as a bonus has an audiobook version read by the Star Trek cast. Anyone got anything else?
Thanks! I'm generally not into short fiction, but I'll give this one a go.
One thing I like about The Ministry for the Future, is that it doesn't focus on the "apocalyptic" aspect (i.e., the usual fighting for survival), but rather examines the political and economic aspects.
I agree it doesn't have much of a story. It reads much more like a non-fictional recounting of events, but provides a lot of food for thought about how things might unfold. Just don't approach it like your typical novel.
I've never felt that in author is wasting my time while reading a book until him. He desperately needs a different, or any, editor. He manages to cram a 400 page story into 700 pages. Just non-stop side tangents and long passage after long passage that goes no where and means nothing to the story. It's fine to have stuff like that to build a world but this he goes overboard. If a character needs to get groceries, he'll turn one sentence about needing to go get groceries into three pages of nothing about how grocery stores work. I find it extremely boring at times, and after you read one of his books and get clued into this, it's hard to read a second book and stay interested.
That will be interesting experiment. 1) A growing population require food. 2) Their agricultural sector is a major contributor to their economy, not only farmers but everything around it involves a lot of people and businesses. 3) Many countries rely on Danish agricultural exports (it's massive) to ensure people have food.
The Danish agricultural industry accounts for 1% of GDP and almost 70% of land use, the highest in the world. The Wikipedia page on Denmark doesn't even bother to list it as a major industry (unlike Lego) and the only figures I could find put it at around 8B DKK. Lego does 66B DKK on its own.
(Dane here) - this is a major reversal on the food-security policy that drove not just innovation in intensive farming technologies in Denmark in the late nineteenth century, but also the formation of what is now the EU, post WWII, on a european scale.
Let's hope butter and bacon from Poland is going to cover our needs.
Our issues in The Netherlands are probably similar to Denmark's and the biggest issue is not all agriculture. Meat and milk production has an outweighed impact on destroying the environment. You need far more land to grow crops to feed livestock and keeping cows leads to a lot of nitrogen deposition.
We can reduce land use and have food security if people were not so intend on eating/drinking animal products every day (and there are perfectly fine vegetarian alternatives).
I believe the insistence on being a major agricultural producer in the EU despite having some of the largest population densities in the region has a lot to do with it.
That depends on how you define "perfectly fine". All of the vegetarian alternatives have a lower protein quality index, which matters if you're trying to get enough of the essential amino acid s without increasing calorie intake.
Sure, but Europe's not growing. It is purely in "shrink forever" mode. This is easily measured, any time fertility drops below 2.1 that's what happens. But ignore that a moment, what if you wanted to depopulate Europe? This might be a good policy for that. Get the timing just right, and it's not even a genocide... food shortages that don't starve anyone just encourages the last few breeders to put a lid on it, and voila! The fantasy of more than a few out there.
In case they farm carbon intensive animals like cows, yes. For the pigs farmers no so much. However those pigs farms totally destroy Denmark fishing areas which traditionally feed the population.
What kinds of forests? For nature, or for lumber? If the latter, what is quality of the timber produced, or will it spark a new wave of power stations burning wood pellets. Lots of questions, with very little detail available in the article.
The 43 billion kroner earmarked for land acquisition suggests serious commitment, but I wonder how this will impact small farmers and rural communities in the long run...
The west is engaging in managed decline and moving production to places with less regulation and much worse environmental and social impacts. Why? What sense does this make? You would rather have some Muslim slave in China make your stuff while poisoning the ocean than make it in Denmark?
There are such a thing as tariffs. I think it makes sense that we both improve our local environment and adopt a carrot/stick approach to businesses in other localities that do/don't do the same. Same environmental standards with independent audit should grant (eco) tariff-free access. Likewise, wasteful environmentally destructive exporter = heavy tariff.
This is not how tariffs are being used and the actual reality is that manufacturing and production is being transferred to places with much worse environmental and labour practices that are also antagonistic to the west. Germany "greeniefied" their economy by just outsourcing energy production to Russia and in the processes ensured 10,000 of Ukranians had to die. This needs to stop. Nobody wins from it, everyone loses.
Come on. It is not Germany's fault that Putin is a madman. Choosing cheap gas over more expensive gas, oil and dirty coal was a win-win. Until Putin was too irrational.
Btw.: more than 50.000 Ukrainian soldiers are dead by the latest estimates I have read.
They chose Russian gas over nuclear. It's not their fault Putin was a madman, but Trump warned them this would happen, and they decided they don't care and carried right on.
I guarantee you if Europe heeded Trumps warning and cut Russia off instead of outsourcing energy production to them, Ukraine would not have been invaded. Even today, there is still Russian gas flowing through Ukraine into Europe. It's unconscionable, and Europeans should be ashamed that they elected such traitors for leaders.
Putin invaded because he thought nobody would do shit, because everyone was signalling nobody would do shit. Biden said he won't do shit and stopped selling weapons to Ukraine and lifted Russian sanctions. Obama did not do shit the last time with Crimea and Donbas. Germans were laughing at Trump who warned them that Putin will start shit if they continue like this, and for the most part, Europeans just increased their dependence on Russian gas.
The moral culpability here could not be clearer. Of course Putin bears ultimate responsibility, but he was empowered and encouraged by spineless corrupt pathetic western leaders.
Southern Europe seems to be converting farmland into solar farms. And new forests seem to be all monoculture Eucalyptus, fast growing for commercial reasons, but sadly empty of wildlife.
As much as I'd love for Europe to be reforested, the reduced food security might come back to bite us.
Is there a reason you and some many commenters here are concerned about food security? Has this became a nativist rallying cry of some sort? Because by all fact-based accounts there is no problem with food production in Europe.
There have been many famines in Europe throughout the past few centuries. Perhaps we're now at the end of history and nothing like that will ever happen again but since countries aren't willing to take that bet.
Food security is not an issue at all. For example in Germany around 20% of all farmland is used for "energy plants" (biogas etc.). Even in Germany solar planels have around a 28 times higher efficiency per area than biogas plants, so there is a lot of potential to repurpose farm land without changing food production at all.
What is the planned species composition? Are the plans aimed at restoring natural habitat, or are they primarily using trees as a means to some other end?
Good luck. In the less cohesive Western countries efforts like this are met with both protest by farmers who view their providing calories as almost a sacred task, and by foreign agitprop that proposes any effort that makes it harder to farm is an attempt at subjugating the people.
> that proposes any effort that makes it harder to farm is an attempt at subjugating the people
Well, it is. More expensive food means a worse quality of life for normal people. It also means more time spent working to pay for groceries, and less time and money to do things that threaten the elites like accumulating capital or performing activism.
The problem is not production cost, but distribution. A litre of milk is paid at 20c to the producer (never has been cheaper) yet it’s 2€ at the store. The producer makes a few cents on it.
The FoodCo is the one driving price up. Them and consumer behavior.
There’s quite a lot of expensive stuff happening in between filling a tank of milk at the farm, and a consumer purchasing a single bottle at a store near them.
Farmers can get extremely attached to one piece of land and one farming method and any attempts to shift the incentives in the system and make some types of farming or locations move on is portrayed as a systemic attack on farming and the end of the world.
Everyone appreciates the farmers, some farmers just don't seem to appreciate the harms certain types of farming put on everyone else and the ecosystem, and they'll hide behind how essential calories are to protect their interests.
You're aware the farming lobby is one of the strongest in many countries right? They're not under-served politically. Farming is one of the most subsidized industries.
There are already tree harvesters that start with a standing tree and end on a ready log with waste mulched. It's only a matter of time it's AI controlled.
Oh yeah that far into the future is singularity so at that point, what we're all doing is just interfacing with the AI. :) But I think that's still a while away, most likely? Or who knows, maybe sooner lol.
Seeing a modern foresting machine in action was one of the most daunting experiences of my life. Making an AI drive it is pointless, it’s already at such high productivity that the transportation is a much more meaningful bottleneck now.
I literally passed it by while walking the dog on the morning it started, and just 10 minutes later when returning, a neat and large pile of logs stripped of branches was at the roadside and a handful of trees were gone. Two days later when taking the same route, the forest was no more, just a handful of funny trees sitting on barren mudlands surrounded by enormous piles of logs marked and tagged for transport to various destinations.
Be paranoid of how they will define 'forest'. Over here they included e.g. a middle lane divider with a small sapling every 30 meters as counting as a full 'forest'.
Even though climate-wise, the need for trees is overrated IMO – recently the list of benefits that forests provide has been extended:
- More forests protect a country against sudden supply chain crises. It's is just a small protection (and only for the commodity wood) but still
- Forests are the first line of defense in drone warfare as we've seen in the War in Ukraine, where maneuvers are often concentrating on, and gains are counted in, Tree-Lines.
Without my glasses and morning caffeine dose, I read that Denmark was going to plant 18 trees and convert 10percent of its farmland into forest. Not really knowing anything about Denmark, I briefly imagined that Denmark was either much, much smaller than I had originally supposed , or that it had very, very little agricultural density.
Sometimes these idiotic musings and the little chuckle I get internally are the brighter part of my morning. Even in fading vision there are things to appreciate.
No they won't. If they started tomorrow planting 100,000 trees a day, and never took a single day off, they would finish up in 2052. What kind of nursery can even grow 100,000 saplings of conifer a day?
It would take a couple of years at the scale Finnish forest industry is operating.
Large parts of Europe are basically forests that have been temporarily cut down. If you let the land be, the forest will often grow back with minimal effort.
I am amazed by the idea (also popular among many in California) that one can “outsource” climate change to poor, developing countries by not producing for yourself
The trees will ride through floods and reduce water flows, improve species diversity for insects, birds, small mammals, improve temperatures and ameliorate winds, provide shelter for farm animals, can enhance grazing. And there's wood to harvest in due course.
There's a lot more reasons to plant trees than direct AGW offset.
A huge amount of farmland is now surplus to production. Grasses and fields of weeds aren't always ideal. Taking land out of production can also attract offset funding for farmers (-yes, this is a secondary economic outcome and may also incur other costs)
People are healthier around trees. People like trees. Even Bill Gates may actually like trees.
If you burn the wood, sure. Forests only capture carbon if you leave that carbon alone forever.
Denmark isn't just trying to reduce their CO2 footprint, though. It's also dealing with terrible soil and water quality, both the result of many years of hyper-intensive farming. That's a local problem that needs local policy to solve.
Trees absolutely can help with climate change, although like everything in this universe, there are nuances at play, such as type of tree, location, etc.
We have done a lot of deforestation, and that absolutely has negatively impacted our climate, and we should work to reverse it.
When those trees die and then rot or burn, that CO2 will be released right back into the atmosphere. They’ll temporarily hold some, yeah, but it’s like trying to rapidly fire a squirt gun at a fire when someone else is spraying it with a firehose of gasoline.
Especially because trees plant themselves. If they want to set aside the land for forest and seed it a little to get going - great - but those large tree planting operations are a waste of time at best or carbon credit loopholes at worst.
Most global deforestation involves slash and burn. This releases the carbon stored in the trees. But I think that's OPs point. A growing tree doesn't remove carbon, it temporarily stores it until it dies or burns.
The point of planting trees in Denmark is not to cut CO2 emissions. The point is to restore biodiversity and the health of the environment. I assume the situation is similar in countries like the Netherlands.
Climate and environment are two separate things, and are in fact sometimes at odds with each other. Denmark is doing semi-alright on climate, but is absolutely terrible on environment. Aquatic ecosystems in the country are basically completely destroyed by agriculture, to the point where previously productive shallow waters are completely dead due to oxygen depletion.
He denies it, and even if he said it, it was 1981 and I doubt he meant "forever".
> Affluence does not equal wisdom.
True
Just waiting for someone to factcheck about planting trees: there must be nuance. In australia we burn em to protect people and the environment for example. We have done it for millenia.
You could plant a trillion trees tomorrow but it won't help anything so long as places like China and India pollute the oceans with millions of tones of plastic waste trash every year. That's in the thousands of tones per day region. The sheer scale of pollution there makes Denmark's measly little contribution just that, peanuts. No wonder the farmers are upset. They're destroying their own industry and people's livelihood and food security, for barely moving the needle on the altar of enviromentalism.
This is a type of fallacy. Denmark as a country is politically relatively powerless compared to China or the US, or even Germany, but each citizen has about the same or more power compared to each citizen in those larger countries.
The fallacy is to say "I, as an individual in a small country, cannot do anything because these other large countries are, collectively, much more powerful". Well, no kidding. Any Denmark-sized administrative section of a larger country (say, a US state, a Chinese province, or a German bundesland) has the same or smaller influence on the climate. Often a much smaller influence due to how international diplomacy works.
It's a category error. Whether progress is made in Denmark-sized chunks or in US/EU/China/Germany-sized chunks is irrelevant, as long as the average velocity per human is the same on a global scale. It's not high enough at the moment, but it's equally significant wherever it happens.
It’s funny how I also feel peanuts when I vote for elections but also feel very engaged and powerful with that paper holding a nano-minuscule fraction of power.
> They're destroying their own industry and people's livelihood and food security, for barely moving the needle on the altar of enviromentalism.
The environnemental impact of their AG is peanuts on a global scale but cause massive problems on their own lands and coast. Food security will still be largely fine : there’s large surpluses and you are actually safer stocking grains than livestock, especially in modern silos. For industry and livelihood I’m sure those guys are smart enough to shift to others activities. That may be quite easy when you look at the current meat industry profitability.
Let me get this right. Farmers, who are already struggling to meet ends, will have to pay CO2 tax in order to produce FOOD that we all need to SURVIVE and not starve to death? What diabolical plan is that?
I am the a huge fan of forests and spend a lot of time in the woods, but man, more trees will not feed us.
A big percentage of the land usage are to grow crops to feed animals to feed us.
If we bring back our meat consumption (especially beef) to something more balanced for our health we can free-up a massive amount of surface.
I'm not saying that everyone should be vegetarian or vegan. I'm following the notes of the IPCC and studies that says that we can, and should, reduce some of our meat consumption and get those proteines from all the many other sources (peas, tofu...).
Beef is the coal of food. Lets progress to something more efficient, dense and good for our environment and our health.
They are already massively subsidized and this will only increase their subsidies. In Denmark farmers control government similarly to the way big oil abd gunmakers control government in the US.
Denmark exports a lot of the produced food, and we are one of the most intensely farmed countries in the world, 60.4% of Denmark consists of fields, and 48% of Denmark's land area is used to grow food for animals, animals which are primarily pigs.
We also yearly import 1.8 million tons of soy from South America to feed said pigs, because we can't grow enough food for them ourselves.
It would be nice to have some nature to walk in, it's something I miss here and something there's a lot of in England, and it's great combined with their public footpath system!
Yup, and to add to this, the large majority of this meat is produced for export, and it's sold super cheap, I personally believe a good way of solving this is only giving EU support to non export farming, eg if you receive EU subsidy the good shouldn't be allowed to be exported, or those taxes would have to be repaid.
As currently we're destroying the nature, and waters due to this extremely intensive farming and as others have mentioned Denmark is producing 200-300 % of our domestic need + it requires significant import from south America where it wouldn't surprise me if this import lead to significant deforestation.
I know China is also working on increasing their domestic production[1] which is one of the primary markets that Denmark is exporting a lot to , It was 85000 tons last year[2]
this is about farmland that should never have ben cultivated to begin with, it was a temporary emergency practice from WW2 that lobbyists kept alive after the war.
Climate obsessed people are probably in it for the right reasons but are hysterically annoying from any third party perspective. Keep telling people that cow burps are what is driving bad weather and you can keep being baffled that "deniers" hate any of the solutions you come up with there after. People hate pollution across the board, people hate theoretical models of climate effects based on research divorced from reality that predict weather in 30 years to be a doomsday scenario because of something so obviously mundane while ignoring outsourcing manufacturing to china and india to bus, boat and flight. At this rate we may one day in our lifetime be able to have all the pigs and cattle raised in china and fly them on business class to europe in order to fight the weather via carbon credits.
I've seen a bit of confusion regarding this. First, it's 10% of Denmark's total land area, which is roughly equivalent to 15% of farmland area. Second, the conversion of farmland area into nature and forests is mainly for improving water quality, as excess nitrogen from agriculture has essentially killed the rivers and coastal waters through oxygen depletion from algae.
Regarding global warming and CO2, the area conversion of peatlands will help, but the major change here is the introduction of a carbon tax for the entire agricultural industry. And to end confusion regarding other emissions than CO2, it's actually a CO2-equivalent (CO2e) tax, which includes a range of other gasses. E.g., 1kg of methane is 25kg CO2e.
If you'd like to read more, see the two PDF documents below, which are the main official documents. They're in Danish, but upload them to Claude or ChatGPT, and you'll have a much better source of information if you'd like to know more about the specifics and how the actual implementation is planned.
[1] https://www.regeringen.dk/media/13261/aftale-om-et-groent-da...
[2] https://mgtp.dk/media/iinpdy3w/aftale_om_implementering_af_e...
I am very conflicted on a carbon tax for the agriculture industry. It is going to sidle a cost to an industry of razor thin margins. The transition from regenerative agriculture is expensive & rising food costs has a destabilizing effect.
There need to be changes, but I am not convinced that this will have the desired effects. Its quite possible this leads to a net conversion of farmland to residential or commercial property rather than nature.
Currently the public subsidizes the agriculture industry by paying for the consequences of the industry's carbon emissions. Also, that subsidy distorts industry choices in favor of carbon.
The industry might be accustomed to profiting from the subsidy, but that doesn't make them entitled to it! And certainly the industry has had plenty of time to anticipate and adjust to the problems of carbon emissions.
Governments pay to keep food at the cheapest point possible to ensure stability. a fed population doesn't kill their governments. Agriculture is not a regular industry; its a national security issue
Farming is not a profitable endeavor. There would be a lot less financial advisors in the world otherwise. A carbon tax will either drive up prices or reduce suppliers, increasing prices. Reducing farmland will require more efficient methods which will also drive up prices
The result will be the public pays more for food, not the agriculture industry makes any more or less money. It will require more imports which will come from countries with less regulation and more exploitable resources.
We've seen the story of disruptions to the food supply play out before. The reality is this is a more dangerous gamble than most people realize.
Denmark has a population of 5.8 million and currently produces enough to feed 15 million. There’s no need for imports because of 15% less farmland. Besides, all this export only contributes about 1% of GDP. So it’s not economically important either.
One can even argue that the reduction in environmental and climate impact will create room for other industries that already are carbon-taxed.
1. Agriculture is not a machine like consistent harvest giver, especially with more climate change (that’ll happen regardless of emission slowdown), it is good to have produce enough to feed 5.8(=6 million approx), a bad harvest can bring that 15 million down to 7 million very fast.
2. All produce is not of same quality, 15 million people’s produce will probably only produce 11-12 million produce that is marketable in stores after transporting it
3. Economies of scale matters, going from 15 million people’s produce to a 10 or 8 million produce doesnt just means a linear cost reduction, the price per unit for crops also rises, which can potentially make it hard to compete with other agro hubs in the Eurozone, dwindling Denmark’s independent source of food supply over time.
Denmark does not have to stand alone thanks to the EU.
Danmark is one of the biggest producers of Christmas trees
I am not sure how this responds to the comment you are actually responding to. You say,
> Governments pay to keep food cheap > A carbon tax will either drive up prices or [drive up prices]
So, this is just number rearranging. The public pays either way. Ok. The comment you replied to says
> Currently the public subsidizes the agriculture industry by paying for the consequences of the industry's carbon emissions.
So the public pays in this case too. More number rearranging. Not at all clear why this makes prices increase.
So why do you think this implies prices increase? Do you think the price of carbon determined by the government is too high? Or do you just want to ignore this externality until we pay it all at once?
> So, this is just number rearranging. The public pays either way.
"The public" isn't one person. Denmark has progressive taxes; getting rid of subsidies so prices of food increases changes who among the public pays.
> Or do you just want to ignore this externality until we pay it all at once?
> So, this is just number rearranging. The public pays either way.
"The public" isn't one person. Denmark has progressive taxes; getting rid of subsidies so prices of food increases changes who among the public pays.
> Or do you just want to ignore this externality until we pay it all at once?
I'm in favor of the carbon tax. I also think that it has complicated side effects and we should try to understand those effects, and see if we need to change something else to compensate for them.
We should simply ignore the externality all together because we're all paying for it anyway.
Either the subsidies take into account the carbon tax or they don't. If they do then it's number rearranging. Government gives dollars and then immediately takes some of them back, it's a convoluted appropriations bill. If they don't then food prices go up which is contrary to the government's goal of keeping food cheap at the point of sale.
If you want to reward reducing carbon emissions by giving additional dollars or paying for more expensive but better for the environment equipment then that could potentially be effective.
Trying to reduce a negative by pumping resources into a positive rarely works out as expected and often has surprisingly distortionary effects. (see ethanol and corn production in the USA)
I’m personally of the opinion we should be doing far more tying together of revenue neutral taxes and subsidies within an industry. When you want to reduce a negative externality you tax that and then redistribute the proceeds equitably back across relevant actors. When you want to increase a positive externality, you equally tax actors and then distribute it asymmetrically according to the behavior you want to encourage. Or combine the two approaches to address both negative and positive externalities in one go.
These approaches allow you to be more targeted, while minimizing overall market distortions.
It’s not exactly number rearranging, even if the government increases subsidy payments to offset the cost. E.g. say gasoline costs twice as much per gallon due to a carbon tax, but subsidies are increased proportionally to offset the cost increase so that food prices remain constant. This still creates an incentive for farmers to use “cleaner” forms of energy as the ones that do will increase their profit margins. Ultimately the increased subsidy is a burden on the tax payer, but in a more narrow sense carbon producing farms would be subsidizing some of the costs for farms that produce less carbon.
Whether this plays out as intended remains to be seen. I think externalities need to be priced in somehow, the issue is determining the appropriate cost. If you want the market to decide the cost efficiently there needs to be some mechanism to tie the two measures together (increased environmental quality => lower carbon tax rate). I agree however that manipulating the economics of food production is dangerous and needs to be done slowly and carefully.
As you point out, there are several valid reasons to subsidise farming. But then subsidise farming, not carbon emissions! And while you are at it, use those subsidies to encourage farming that is sustainable, both for the climate as well as biodiversity.
And that can be sustained in international crisis: farming that is a house of cards highly dependent on international supply chains of fertilizer, feedstock and fuel won't help you all that much under blockade.
No-one mentions this when food security is discussed. The farmers here in NL use the security excuse too but absolutely no-one mentions that their food production is directly dependant upon the import of magnitudes higher tonnage of feedstock - soya from Brazil - than the meat / dairy it produces. Then I'm not even looking at the fertilizers / chemicals which are also imported.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belaruskali comes to mind...
Isn't that what they are doing? They subsidize the farmers separately, and charge a carbon tax separately. Even if those are initially the same amount you would think that the incentive structure would encourage farmers to shift to less c02 methods, as that improves profit?
What's the point of a carbon tax if it's balanced by a government subsidy?
Edit: Genuinely curious what I'm missing..
Low carbon farms balance would be: "low carbon" profit + subsidy - small carbon tax
High carbon farms balance would be: "high carbon" profit + subsidy - high carbon tax
If ["low carbon" profit - small carbon tax] > ["high carbon" profit - high carbon tax] (e.g. if the carbon tax is high enough), farms have an incentive to lower their carbon emissions.
The subsidy is here to make sure ["low carbon" profit + subsidy - small carbon tax] > 0
That makes sense - thanks!
The subsidy could be independent from the carbon emissions (e.g. by subsidies on the produced goods) while the carbon tax isn't, effectively creating an incentive to produce in a less carbon intensive manner.
If I can make 1 unit of food for €50 and use 50 tons of carbon, or make it for €60 and use 10 tons of carbon, a carbon tax and food subsidy would allow me to sell that €60 low carbon food for €50 and force me to sell the high carbon food for €60
This gives an economic incentive to use the lower carbon method, funded by those who use more carbon, while not changing the end price or output.
Just to provide the numbers: in 2030, a tax will be introduced of 120 DKK (~16€) / ton CO2e, which linearly increases each year until it reaches 300 DKK (~40€) / ton CO2e in 2035. However, the farmers can get subsidies for changing their practices and adopting new technologies, in order to reduce their emissions. I.e., the government will give you money to change your production, so you can minimize the carbon taxes you have to pay. There are more technicalities to how it works, but that's the gist of it. The important part is that the goal is to transition to new technologies and production methods, which reduces emissions per unit food produced.
There will be no food subsidy, however, and a rough estimate of the increase of food cost is something like 1.5%, with beef having the highest increase. Take this estimate with a grain of salt though, as it's difficult to estimate. An increase in food cost is expected though.
You tax the carbon (something you want less of) and you subsidise something else you want more of. So you might end up with the average farmer not having a change of costs, but still disincentivising stuff we don't want e.g. carbon emissions.
Specifically on reducing farmland. Denmark is intensly cultivated, and the reduction targets the lowest yield land that for various reasons were reclaimed over the last two centuries. Using the high yield land more efficiently is intended.
> A carbon tax will either drive up prices or reduce suppliers, increasing prices
Of if there is an equivalent subsidy (i.e. the tax is basically redistributed) it would encourage to produce less carbon/methane intensive production
So, what are you proposing? Just do nothing about climate change, as we have done before, and have worse social consequences in the near future rather than now? Denmark is more at risk from rising sea levels than other countries (https://cphpost.dk/2023-02-17/news/rising-sea-levels-threate...), so they want to do something about it.
The food needs to be produced somewhere. If denmark exports, then the food will be missing somewhere. So you do not fix "climate change". You only fix local effects of agriculture. I am not saying it is good or bad. But it def makes denmark poorer.
The idea that each country must culture every product to assure the supply chain is outdated by a generation in Europe.
A lot of those vegetables are produced yet in Almeria. A lot of milk that goes to Italy is produced in France. EU has this issue checked from the first minute and created a supranational agriculture system based on quotes.
Yes, and then somene comes and says, we produce too much beef... well yeah, somebody else will have to do it.
not OP, but how about some technology innovation instead of governance and taxation? the effect of taxing farmers as though they were some kind of vanity industry will be similar to what nationalizing farms has done in prior schemes like this.
it creates a national dependency on imported food from countries that do not bankrupt their farmers, and suddenly (shocked!) the entire Danish food supply crosses the borders to arrive and is then subject to federal management. this latter case is of course the purpose, and climate change is merely a pretext. I hope european farmers are able to organize a revolt.
> how about some technology innovation instead of governance and taxation
The history of solar, EVs, batteries etc. show these work hand in hand.
Why invent a way to capture methane from slurry, or form a business to sell that idea to farmers if they're allowed to pollute for free?
if methane were valuable, it would already exist, and there are a number of techs in development now: https://horsesport.com/magazine/farm-management/heating-with...
if you have a problem with farmers, maybe you should just eat less?
What technological innovation do you think farming could adopt, that it hasn't already...? They don't operate with simple machinery. They regularly use some of the most complicated systems that mankind can build, such as satellite systems, chemical analyses, etc.
Governance is needed, where progress does not occur naturally.
invent, not adopt. that's the difference between government and industry, government doesn't invent anything except problems to manage.
reality is, governments want smallholding farmers out of the business and to replace them with agribusinesses because it's a process of de-kulakizing their subjects. it has nothing to do with science or environment at all. I think maybe a war over this stuff will give us the reset we need.
Governments invent things, endlessly. The infrastructure you are communicating with me was invented by a government research department. The encryption we are using to ensure we're actually communicating with HN, is a government research project.
Similarly, the solar systems on most farms, was a government research project. The satellite recon to analyse the farm - provided by the government to all farmers, including the tiniest hobby farm, is 100% government researched, deployed, and maintained.
Governments do a lot more science than you are giving them credit for.
Have they stopped oil production?
How will converting farmland to forests help with climate change? It seems like it would have no particular impact or make the situation worse w.r.t. climate change for Denmark. If it is a good idea I'd imagine it would also be a good idea if the climate was not changing.
Denmark has no ability to impact global CO2 emissions at all. In fact nobody does except ironically the Chinese and their industrial-growth-at-any-cost coal based approach from the 90s and 00s.
Land use is one of the big topics covered by the IPCC:
https://www.ipcc.ch/srccl/
That isn't saying anything. Land use is a big topic covered by everyone.
> how will converting farmland to forest
Farming is very carbon emission intensive if the farmland is reclaimed wetland. Converting the farmland to forest and stopping draining (making it more wet again) can definitely reduce carbon emissions significantly.
> Denmark has no ability to impact global CO2 emissions
This is such a tiresome and logically hollow argument. Denmark has the ability to reduce a fraction of the worlds emissions. The size of the fraction is proportional to the size of their emissions. Every country has a responsibility to reduce it's per capita emissions to sustainable levels. China has lower per capita emissions than most richer countries.
Note that China has no ability to impact global CO2 emissions either.
Let’s split China population in k Denmark-sized groups, plus one smaller-than-Denmark reminder.
None of the k groups has any ability to impact global CO2 emissions (same as Denmark).
We can reasonably assume that a smaller group has even less ability to impact global CO2 emissions than a bigger group. Hence the smaller-than-Denmark reminder has no ability to impact global CO2 emissions either.
Thus China is made of groups that have no ability to impact global CO2 emissions either. And therefore China as a whole has no ability to impact global CO2 emissions. (Otherwise at least one group within China would have to impact global emissions and we just saw that it isn’t possible).
This is known as the CO2 impossibility theorem, loosely based on Arrow’s concept of “(in)decisive” set.
Your logic is wrong - a Denmark sized group of Chinese people is probably all it takes to operate their solar panel producing factories.
The reason Denmark can't do anything isn't because there are few of them, it is because Denmark isn't a significant industrial cluster for energy technology and innovation. For example, India has more people than China and they aren't in a position to do much unless there is some sort of tech breakthrough that hasn't made it to my notice.
Denmark basically invented modern wind power and still makes a big chunk of it (though China has caught up in that area recently).
Fair enough, but the major point still stands - Denamrk's industrial policies that enable Vestas are the only way they can have a significant impact on climate change. Farmland conversion does nothing; it isn't moving the needle on what is economic and industrially scaleable. Everyone still needs to eat.
Certainly you are just demonstrating the opposite. Everyone has the ability to impact global CO2 emmissions.
We certainly need international coordination or actors with a minimal set of morals to achieve it.
I think he was trying to demonstratea point with sarcasm and a group of one with him in it
> Everyone has the ability to impact global CO2 emmissions.
I'm afraid most people are smaller-than-Denmark groups, and thus unable whatsoever to impact global emissions. It's just math.
1e-10 is reeeallly close to zero, therefore 1e10 * 1e-10 is also close to zero.
That's what your math sounds like to me.
His math is x ~ 0, hence x / 10 = 0, hence x = NaN.
The starting point is just wrong that Denmark can't play a role when it comes to climate change. Denmark can make a change. It is like saying that when voting that no individual vote or county matters, when the opposite is true: every vote matters in the same way.
Every kg CO2 saved is good... (obviously we should strive for the most economic way to save CO2).
Isn't it true?
yields NaN, not 1.(So I guess Denmark is at least 1e309-sized in some metric).
No.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the masses interpret these changes as “let them eat cake” given that inflation is already hammering the middle and lower classes.
in Denmark, inflation is currently running at a 1.6% annualized rate, as of the most recent reading[0]. This is the full basket inflation rate, including volatile categories (food and energy). Core inflation is even lower, with the latest reading at 1.3% (annualized) in October 2024. Food inflation is, of course, volatile. It currently sits at a moderately elevated level of 3.9% (October 2024, annualized).
Food prices declined earlier this year for two consecutive months, though that will be a minor consolation after the significant food price inflation in 2022 and persisting, though at a slower pace, through 2023.
All of that to say, "let them eat cake" mentality is unlikely in a country where they have consistently ranked at the top of a world happiness index. Additionally, while I'm not well versed in Danish politics, I am under the impression that the Social Democrats have responded much better to the mass immigration that has been an ongoing issue for many parties throughout Europe. I think this is indicative of a party that adapts rather more quickly to the consequences of their previous policies and is less ideologically stubborn - at least on some issues.
0: https://ycharts.com/indicators/denmark_inflation_rate
1.6% is the change in the CPI. The actual inflation is about 8%. There was a huge change in the CPI in 2022 or 2023, mostly attributed to sharply higher cost of energy.
I don't think you understand the numbers I listed. Read what I wrote again and try to think about the parts you don't understand, look them up, then read again.
Economists look at inflation on a month/month or year/year basis. This is not an accident as it purposely ignores the destructive cumulative effect of inflation.
Individuals, by contrast look at the cumulative effect of inflation. If inflation runs hot for several years and then comes back to a moderate level, prices don’t go down regardless of what economists would have you believe. The effect of inflation has memory.
Economists look at inflation in many, many ways. I don't think anyone that's reasonably well informed, especially economists, misunderstands the cumulative impact of price changes.
Economists that make monetary policy decisions look at recent inflation trends + projected inflation because they are tasked with price stability, which requires them to often respond to shocks well outside their control (war in Ukraine, massive government spending, tax cuts, covid-19 pandemic, etc.)
I was trading and researching fixed income and inflation markets (and implementing in multi-billion dollar portfolios) years ago when you had inflationistas claiming the Fed was going to cause double digit runaway inflation. At the same time, you had people claiming the Fed was not doing enough to support markets.
No matter what monetary policy makers do, it will be pretty much universally mocked by pundits and especially anyone that wants to talk their own book.
Academic economists don't really focus much on any particular reading of inflation, unless perhaps they have their own axe to grind about how it is measured or responded to.
Monetary policy can't change the past, which is why they evaluate current and expected inflation, not what happened in two years ago. Just because prices increased dramatically in 2022 does not mean the Fed or any other central bank should aim for deflation.
Denmark is a net exporter of food. In other words a net importer of agricultural pollution. So they could refice food exports without domestic political consequences. In theory.
It’s also important to note that, at least in this specific situation, the effects of those hidden subsidies are extremely regressive.
That said, the transition requires thoughtful implementation
We can debate the role of subsidies and carbon emissions, but framing agriculture as if it's uniquely nefarious misses the critical point that we all need to eat.
The industry isn't "choosing carbon" but rather it's responding to the immense challenge of feeding billions affordably while dealing with slim margins and unpredictable conditions. Adjustments require viable, scalable alternatives, not just finger-wagging.
I think we focus on supporting innovation rather than vilifying an essential industry.
If I can spend 100k on a tractor cause 100t of pollution or 200k on a tractor causing 50t of pollution I will obviously choose the firmer tractor as the rest of the world pays the price of the extra 50t of pollution.
If the externalities of that carbon generation are priced in I end up paying more for the polluting tractor so I choose the less polluting tractor and make more money.
For farmers today, the choice is more stark.
I can only speak to small and medium farms, but if we're talking large horsepower cultivators / row farming, It's really a choice between keep my old pre-emissions diesel/buy a pre-2006 used tractor from auctions/marketplace for 50k, or double down and lease a 250k-400k new mid-size tractor.
You make it seem like many farmers have choices, but old "dirty" tractors are the only financial options for many without signing up for indentured servitude to JD/Case/etc
So they externalise their costs and get other people to pay?
Yes. Like you do when you then buy their produce.
Who vilified it?
I do :-) Farming 2024 is so consolidated on few big operations, that a very small number of people have an inordinate amount of influence on how the major part of our total land area is managed and used. Most people who work in the danish farming industry are reduced to wage slaves who have zero influence on how things are run. In some ways, we are back to feudalism, in terms of lack of influence from the people who do most of the work.
I think we should start doing more taxes combined with subsidies. Give everyone a $1/t carbon tax. Give everyone a ~$1/t farming subsidy based on current carbon production. Nobody loses, but everyone is incentivized to decrease carbon production and the faster ones profit more. Phase out the subsidy over X years if you like.
Otherwise, you’re right. We’re upsetting the balance of a very complex, very important system and causing a regressive tax in the form of price increases.
a combined tax and subsidy to try to drive farmers into more sustainable practices in a fiscally neutral way isn't a bad idea, but I think it is just a very risky and necessary roll of the dice.
I think inevitably, there will be price increases. The questions is just how bad and how many farms survive the transition.
You misunderstand, driving small farms out of businness so they can be taken over by Gates and other big farming monopolies is the real goal not an unwanted side effect.
a casual American perspective here -- it is easy to mistake the cause when an effect is obvious. Yes, coordinated market regulation ends up increasing consolidation (with capital). Not everyone thinks this is a bad thing. No, it is not a plot by a few powerful individuals (easy to imagine, convenient emotional target). Rather there are "policy levers" and economic forces that operate at once, and interact in complicated ways.
Carbon taxes are by far the most effective way to get down CO₂ emissions.
But I'm doubtful that implementing them only for one industry in one small country is very helpful.
I disagree, carbon taxes seem to be the best way to ensure your country starts to outsource all of it's carbon producing activity to less developed countries who do a worse job containing their emissions. This has been happening in europe for quite some time with the manufacturing of their wind turbines iirc. It's a super carbon heavy emission to produce them, so the europeans have them made elsewhere to make it look like their emissions are super low, which is essentially a lie for politicians to sell environment-crazed voters.
Right. Why not carbon tax all industries (and imports), then subsidize select essentials like pumping water and growing agricultural goods?
Meanwhile, China simply doesn't care.
Good news: we're implementing them widely and in all eu countries.
> It is going to sidle a cost to an industry of razor thin margins.
Will it or will farmland value take a dump but remain unchanged in use?
I always thought of farmland these days as a use of last resort and if it could be marketable for buildings, it’s already not economically worth it as a farm except speculatively
In the U.K. farmland has a rental value of about £100 an acre but a purchase price over £10k an acre.
The value in the land isn’t in its use (which is getting 1% ROI), but in speculation it may be granted permission to be converted to housing, or because of tax loopholes.
The owner also get capital appreciation / depreciation of the land - ~5.7 per cent per annum over the last 100 years bring the total return to a 6.7% ROI.
Land at the edge of cities and towns where there is a reasonable chance of development happening costs orders of magnitude more than the average.
The person renting that land then farms it (presumably for a profit) for additional ROI.
Yes, this came up in the recently closed inheritance tax loophole; people were buying "family farms" purely to leave to their children while doing the minimum of farming.
Yes speculation and tax avoidance. Neither of which are behaviours we want to encourage.
It should be fine, I believe. Just in terms of land-use, livestock is several times less efficient than other kinds of agriculture for the same food output. So a shift from meat to other food crops would be a net win, even as it frees up land for other purposes.
Many farmers will receive a one-time payment on land sales and some will use this windfall to subsidise their transition from growing livestock to more environmentally-friendly food.
>Just in terms of land-use, livestock is several times less efficient than other kinds of agriculture for the same food output.
This assumes that the land is equally usable for both activities. Many times, it isn't: a lot of land that's good enough for grazing cows doesn't have enough water available for growing plants that people want to (or can) eat. People can't eat grass.
This probably isn't an issue in Denmark, but in many other places it is.
Cows still need water from somewhere in those areas you’re talking about. If the land is particularly poor it also won’t produce enough feed and will have to be supplemented with feed that requires water and energy to grow somewhere else.
Cows are extremely inefficient (2% conversion) at converting calories to meat, so putting cows on that land is also an inefficient use of that land. And land with bad yield for crops also has bad yield for cows and the grass they eat and the water they need. I don't see the proposition being made in these claims.
Cows are so inefficient that we don't need to use marginal land at all to grow food. The majority of arable land is already used for cows yet they produce a disproportionately small amount of food. Weening off cows is a good thing.
You do it then. I like my beef and milk, and I don't care if they use up the land or produce methane.
Dairy cows convert calories to milk at over 24% efficiency. And you still get the meat.
It also ignores that animals produce the manure that is used to fertilize soil to grow crops in.
We use manure because it's coming out of the gills of the animal ag industry, not because it's necessary to enrich crop soil.
Just because plastic bags are ubiquitous doesn't mean it's the only nor best way to carry items around, nor that we'd lose the ability to transport goods if they were phased out, nor that they don't come at a cost despite perceiving them as free.
> We use manure because it's coming out of the gills of the animal ag industry, not because it's necessary to enrich crop soil
Crop soil needs fertilizer somehow
What is your alternative to manure?
Bonus points if it uses less energy to produce than animals, produces less CO2 than animals, takes up less space than animals, or also produces food at the same time
Done any farming lately? You would not get enough yield to feed people without fertilizer. Of course it can be produced from a source different from manure. Nitrogen-based fertilizer is produced from cheap natural gas... oh wait... that is gone,too.
Depends on the type of agriculture? If it make veggies cheaper in comparison to meat, I'm all for it. Hopefully it spurs development of sustainable nice tasting protein sources ;) (like synthetic meat etc.)
I would imagine growing vegetables could be carbon negative, literally making vegetables out of carbon from out of the air?
This is exactly what should not happen. Meat is great, especially when grass fed.
Meat from grass-fed cows emit more GHG per kg than industry-framed meat. Industry farming is efficient.
... unless the "meat" being grass-fed is actually cows, which produce lots of methane. Not so good for climate change, at least if done at scale.
It's never that easy as "Meat is great".
I can’t believe this is a real problem. Refineries are bombed and stay on fire for days, some places in the world light on fire rubbish all the time, plenty of inefficiencies in heating, transportation, etc.. and the problem is.. cow farts.. yes sure
If you actually measure it, then yes.
https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/492...
"Total GHG emissions from livestock supply chains are estimated at 7.1 gigatonnes CO2 -eq per annum for the 2005 reference period. They repre- sent 14.5 percent of all human-induced emissions using the most recent IPCC estimates for total an- thropogenic emissions (49 gigatonnes CO 2 -eq for the year 2004; IPCC, 2007)"
Surprisingly there are fewer cows than people, but there's still a billion cows, and a billion of anything adds up quickly.
That's not to say that the other things aren't important as well. Gas flaring from refineries is a pure waste that should be drastically curtailed.
Cow farts being harmful for the environment is the silliest hoax I see repeated over and over.
Spending two minutes reading about the biogenic carbon cycle destroys this misconception.
I read about the Biogenic Carbon Cycle on the UC Davis website:
"As a by-product of consuming cellulose, cattle belch out methane, there-by returning that carbon sequestered by plants back into the atmosphere. After about ten years, that methane is broken down and converted back to CO2. Once converted to CO2, plants can again perform photosynthesis and fix that carbon back into cellulose. From here, cattle can eat the plants and the cycle begins once again. In essence, the methane belched from cattle is not adding new carbon to the atmosphere. Rather it is part of the natural cycling of carbon through the biogenic carbon cycle."
According to that logic, burning fossil fuels also is not harmful for the environment, because the CO2 eventually gets consumed by plants.
This also ignores the different GHG effects of methane vs CO2.
> According to that logic, burning fossil fuels also is not harmful for the environment, because the CO2 eventually gets consumed by plants.
No, the difference in logic is based on the source of the CO2. Fossile fuels are burried in the ground and are not part of the carbon cycle. By removing them from the ground, we are adding new carbon to the carbon cycle rather. Coversely, if you burn wood, that carbon was (mostly) going to end back up in the carbon cycle and you've just sped up it's cycle and increased the portion of the cycling carbon that is in the atmosphere.
There are changes we can make to the cycle that do affect global warming (cutting down all the forests and killing all the kelp would greatly decrease the capacity of the cycle). Conversely, we can expand the carbon cycle by planting trees (that actually survive and form forests.)
However, you can't fix global warming by expanding the carbon cycle because you can't scale the natural cycle to match all the new carbon that is being added to it by buring fossile fuels. There are only two solutions, adding less carbon to the cycle by burning fewer fossile fuels and finding ways to remove carbon from the cycle by sequeresting it in long term ways.
Carbon taxes can fail to actually cause change if they allow fossil fuel burning to be offset by temporary bumps to the carbons cycle capacity because this doesn't really solve the problem and at best slightly delay it.
Cow "farts" (actually burps) are kinda the opposite, the methane is already part of the carbon cycle. However methane is a way more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 so by increasing amount of carbon cycle that is amospheric methane you are accelerating global warming until the methane decays into CO2.
Unfortunately powerplants dont graze on a field of grass
A few of things:
1) Even if cows would only eat the grass that was there (and we would not have converted any forest or other vegetation into grazing lands), the methane and CO2 stays in the atmosphere for a long time before being used by plants again, contributing to the greenhouse effect in that time. The reality is, we can only cover a very small percentage of the demand with this "3 happy cows on a vast pasture" phantasy. Most cow feed is planted additionally, often in countries like Brazil, and then fed to the cows.
2) The carbon impact is not the only negative impact of the scale of livestock agriculture we run these days. As it says in the article, another big impact is eutrophication of water bodies.
3) Just basic physics: Livestock agriculture, especially beef, is a very inefficient way of producing protein and calories. Have a look at this data: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-per-protein-poore
So, please don't come at me with your cute comments. The reality is that we have too much livestock agriculture. It's not sustainable to feed 8 billion people like this. The scientific consesus is clear on this.
The data you present again doesn't take the lifecycle into account. Also worth pointing out that protein bioavailability and amino acid profiles are ignored.
Unrelated but since you brought the topic up, it would of course make sense that releasing vast amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere that took millions of years to bind into the earth in mere decades might be a bad idea. Then again, we're only guessing there as well. We have no clue if the world will be better or worse for us to live in 50 years, and how much of it will be attributable to CO2.
But I digress -- this comment thread was about cow farts and the utter silliness of grasping at such straws when speaking about an otherwise serious subject like the futures of our children.
> Then again, we're only guessing there as well.
Umm, no, we are not guessing. But I see where this will end, so let's stop this discussion right here.
Yea, I imagine you’d link some projections 50 years into the future, and I’d call you a moron for believing in such things. You’ve already branded me a climate change denier in your head so that wouldn’t serve you well in a serious discussion.
We should slaughter everything that produces metheane to save the planet.
It’s a bold move, but like you, I’m not sure the potential consequences have been fully addressed
> it's actually a CO2-equivalent (CO2e) tax, which includes a range of other gasses. E.g., 1kg of methane is 25kg CO2e
Your pig farmers must be thrilled.
It comes with quite a lot of compensation and subsidies, so they're less angry than you might expect. Also, an important note here is that they were part of the negotiations, and as such were part of the agreement which was proposed to the parliament.
All that being said, you're right, they're not exactly thrilled with the government adding taxes and monitoring them more.
> It comes with quite a lot of compensation and subsidies, so they're less angry than you might expect.
Do people really still buy this trick?
Agriculture has been subsidized for security and stability reasons for a very long time - this isn't a trick it's the status quo ex ante.
Subsidies will be cut by a future government so it's all fine :D
They've tried to avoid this by doing the negotiations between the government and interest organizations from all sides. The most surprising part of all this is really that these organizations, which included the main agricultural lobby organizations and the main nature preservation organizations, managed to sit down together and come to an agreement. This agreement was then proposed to the parliament, which voted it through with a broad coalition from both sides. So, that should ideally make it somewhat resilient to changing governments. Of course, that's not a guarantee, but at least it should be more solid than most of these political agreements :)
So you tax them for CO2 and then subsidize them for the same reason?
How does help anyone else than salaries for tax and subsidy administrators?
Not exactly. I'll just copy a reply I made further down: in 2030, a tax will be introduced of 120 DKK (~16€) / ton CO2e, which linearly increases each year until it reaches 300 DKK (~40€) / ton CO2e in 2035. However, the farmers can get subsidies for changing their practices and adopting new technologies, in order to reduce their emissions. I.e., the government will give you money to change your production, so you can minimize the carbon taxes you have to pay. There are more technicalities to how it works, but that's the gist of it. The important part is that the goal is to transition to new technologies and production methods, which reduces emissions per unit food produced.
Without having read the legislation, the two aren't necessarily contradictory. They only are if the subsidy mechanically increases with the tax.
A "climate income" is a good example of that. Everyone gets taxed by usage/pollution, but the collected tax gets redistributed evenly.
That way, on average there is no extra taxation, in fact it's typically a redistribution from top to bottom. And yet every individual will end up with more money the less they pollute. It's that individual incentive that makes the measure effective, but it's the redistribution that makes it socially acceptable (if implemented correctly)
It gets legislation that people in general want (better rivers and streams, healthier sea ecosystem) passed, by subsidizing the changes required for the people those changes negatively affect.
Is it ideal? maybe not, but it is the real world.
Ideally, you gradually ramp down the subsidies, to give folks a gentle offramp.
I had to look it up, Denmark is allegedly a world leader in pig farming exports. You make a really interesting point that I feel like garners more discourse.
https://agricultureandfood.dk/danish-agriculture/agriculture....
There's a great few episodes on this in Borgen where the PMs paramour goes to the hospital because there are so many hormones pumped into Danish pigs and how powerful the industry is in the country.
Denmark is also THE world leader in pork consumption.
This doesn't seem to be true. In 2002 it appeared to be true, but the way it was calculated was by calculating the full mass of pigs produced and subtracting the amount exported. This didn't take into account that exports tended not to include heavy bones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_meat_cons...
More recent data shows thir pork consumption as nothing noteworthy, though I have no idea how good the data is https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pork-cons...
Thought cows are methane intensive
They are, but Denmark is pig-intensive
Give them seaweeds to lower their gas output.
Thank you for the links and clarification, it makes more sense now
Confusion? I skimmed the headline and saw that they were planting "eighteen" trees. We need better fonts.
It’s always better to go to the source to avoid misinterpretation
"They're in Danish, but upload them to Claude or ChatGPT, and you'll have a much better source"
Eh, people don't know that Google Translate can translate documents (PDF, Doc etc.) as well?!
So effectively offshoring carbon production to places that don’t care?
No. The document spells out that denmark intends to remain a "strong" producer of agricultural products by increasing the yield from other, less ecologically damaging, farming areas.
You should read the introduction.
They write these things all the time while continually outsourcing their carbon emissions to other countries. Follow the supply chains.
> introduction of a carbon tax for the entire agricultural industry
Polish farmers are going to eat you alive for this.
another point is: since WW2, denmark has one of the highest, if not THE highest, percentages of area under agriculture. During WW2, we temporarily allowed agriculture on very poor farmland. It was meant to cease after the war, but our strong farmer lobbyists kept extending the permission.. So it is not about giving up 'good farm land', it is about stopping abusive agriculture which is only possible with extreme chemistry. Source: am Old dane.
Nah, these policies are aimed into increasing food imports (therefore decreasing food security btw), because it's easier for politicians to steal money with off-shore businesses.
And the farmers alao get shafted in the process, farmers are always totalitarian's first target. Venezuela, Rwanda, Zimbawe, Cuba.
What percentage of output is accounted for in the lower tier (not good) farmland? If the land is truly suboptimal the additional costs will not scale with the reduction of output.
I'm sorry I'm not directly answring your question. But part of the answer is, that we are not really intending to fix the CO2 issue. A/the major point with the initiative is that we have effectively killed marine/water life in our local rivers, lakes and near coastal areas, primarily by the leakage of fertilizer from low-yield farming areas (algae remove oxygen from our water, having thus killed off marine life). Because of this, we are no longer discussing the economics of it - once you kill off all marine life, the price is 'always' too high (the way we see it..) So, it might help or not help CO2, but our immediate concern is making it possible to have life in our local water bodies, and more oxygen than 0%. I'm describing it a bit crude, but this should paint the general picture. If we run out of food and starve, we can return to killing allmarine life again :-)
Interesting historical perspective
From https://cphpost.dk/2024-11-22/news/round-up/we-are-in-crisis...
"Danish Crown, one of Denmark’s largest Danish meat producer, is facing significant financial challenges as pig deliveries to its processing plants have dropped in the 2023/24 financial year."
On the other hand Tican is doing pretty well and are hiring, while Danish Crown is firing. So at least some of the pigs which would normally go to Danish Crown, is being sent to Tican instead. Tican is also giving farmers a better price per pig. https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/seneste/mens-danish-crown-lider-lo...
Danish Crowns problems aren't entirely due to external factors, part of it is also that Danish Crowns is struggling to run its business properly.
Meat is too cheap and resource intensive. A market correction has been incoming for decades.
Because the pigs get transported alive to Germany and Poland to get slaughtered, as wages are lower there. Denmark, with a population under six million, still produces 32 million pigs per annum.
Good.
Before I go into rage mode, I suppose I should ask, why Farmland?
Both Denmark and Netherland are big in agriculture export and they are very good at it. I am not against planting trees but it on top of farm land doesn't make any sense to me.
Haiti cut down all their trees. When a hurricane passes through it moves what little top soil they have into the ocean.[1] Haiti overfished their costal waters. Now they do not have fish to eat and worse can not participate in the single biggest economic driver in the Caribbean, scuba diving.
Planting trees on farms is incredibly important for maintaining and protecting the soil. The Americans learned that the hard way in the 1930s. [2]]
[1] https://www.climatechangenews.com/2022/08/05/us-funded-trees...
[2] https://www.history.com/topics/great-depression/dust-bowl
> The Americans learned that the hard way in the 1930s.
Grasses, not trees, maintained and protected the soil for what became the US Dust Bowl.
The "Great American Desert" was essentially treeless. As your [2] links points out, European agricultural methods "[exposed] the bare, over-plowed farmland. Without deep-rooted prairie grasses to hold the soil in place, it began to blow away."
> "Like all the others, he had allowed the advertisers to multiply his wants; he had learned to equate happiness with possessions, and prosperity with money to spend in a shop. Like all the others, he had abandoned any idea of subsistence farming to think exclusively in terms of a cash crop; and he had gone on thinking in those terms, even when the crop no longer gave him any cash. Then, like all the others, he had got into debt with the banks. And finally, like all the others, he had learned that what the experts had been saying for a generation was perfectly true : in a semi-arid country it is grass that holds down the soil; tear up the grass, the soil will go. In due course, it had gone.
The man from Kansas was now a peon and a pariah; and the experience was making a worse man of him."
-- Aldous Huxley, "After Many a Year Dies the Swan" -- 1939
They were warned what would happen. Yes, it was the grasses that keep the soil in place.
However, as the article you referenced says,
> "As part of Roosevelt’s New Deal, Congress established the Soil Erosion Service and the Prairie States Forestry Project in 1935. These programs put local farmers to work planting trees as windbreaks on farms across the Great Plains. The Soil Erosion Service, now called the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) developed and promoted new farming techniques to combat the problem of soil erosion." [2]
A bunch of people didn't understand this in Haiti and now they are severely doomed and suffering. Probably not something you want to be incorrect about on the global scale.
Although, it is the grasses that hold the top soil in place, it can be mitigated by planting trees.
> They were warned what would happen.
They also believed in "rain follows the plow."
> windbreaks on farms
Sure, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plains_Shelterbelt .
But that was only one of many techniques developed. https://archive.org/details/bighughfatherofs0000well/page/11... mentions "if subject to wind erosion, it calls for stubble-mulch farming, wind strips and windbreaks." (That's a biography about Hugh Hammond Bennett, who led the Soil Erosion Service ... but not the Shelterbelt!)
In general (a few paragraphs earlier):
'Modern soil conservation is based on sound land use and the treatment of land with those adaptable, practical measures that keep it permanently productive while in use,” he explains. “It means terracing land that needs terracing; and it means contouring, strip cropping, and stubble-mulching the land as needed, along with supporting practices of crop rotations, cover crops, etc., wherever needed. It means gully control, stabilizing water outlets, building farm ponds, locating farm roads and fences on the contour, and planting steep, erodible lands to grass or trees.“'
Earlier at https://archive.org/details/bighughfatherofs0000well/page/96... you can read about the then-novel idea of contouring;
"Tillage is proceeding across the slopes, rather than up and down hill. It is being done on the contour on 15,362 acres. Farmers are finding that it not only serves as a brake on running water but also reduces the cost of mule-power and tractor-power."
Oh, interesting. In 'Predicting and Controlling Wind Erosion', Lyles (1985) writes "Despite the credit the Prairie States Forestry Project has received in ending the Dust Bowl, windbreak plantings under the Project did not begin on a large scale until 1936", and says "the cardinal principle of wind erosion control is maintaining vegetative materials on the soil. ... this practice of conserving or maintaining vegetation on the surface has evolved into various forms of tillage management, which currently go under the generic name of conservation tillage and have become a major technique for erosion control." (See https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3742385.pdf )
This suggests again that trees and windbreaks in general are not the primary solution to the regions affected by the Dust Bowl, but rather grasses, including crops.
I don't see how Haiti situation applies to Denmark.
are you being obtuse?
No. You are.
Scuba diving really? You’d think cruise ships and a large airport would be a lot more significant.
You left out the part where Haiti was destabilized and crushed by colonial debt. And I don’t think that lack of fish is what’s keeping the tourists away. But hey, weren’t we talking about Denmark ?
So is that relevant because it means that cutting down all the trees want their fault, or because it provides an alternate explanation for what mechanism is causing the soil to else?
And obviously the connection to Denmark is meant to be that a lack of trees causes problems so replacing things with trees must be good. Even if there hasn't been news about those problems happening there.
Denmark has had massive erosion problems for decades to the point there used to be signs about it when I used to go there as a kid in the 1980's.
Denmark drained the only source of natural diversity it had, its marshlands, after World War I and turned the entire country into farmland. Outside the cities, it is endless fields of farmland. And now its chickens have come home to roost, having poisoned the soil and rivers. This is entirely Denmark's fault, and now they're trying to reverse some of the damage they did.
Denmarks agricultural performance is not great at all. it's way too expensive to produce stuff. if it wasn't for EU subsidies the agricultural sector in Denmark would loose over 50% of their profits. To drive the point home the agricultural sector in Denmark only makes up 3.6% of the bnp and 4.3% of exports while taking up 60% of Denmarks total area and employing around 3.9% of the working population. i think Denmark can easily let go of 10% while only having miniscule effects on the economy. Denmark is a very small country and technically has no truly wild nature.
> Denmarks agricultural performance is not great at all. it's way too expensive to produce stuff. if it wasn't for EU subsidies the agricultural sector in Denmark would loose over 50% of their profits.
Agriculture in the EU is renowned for not being financially unjustified. For decades it's been a finantial no-brainer to import the bulk of agricultural products from south America and Africa. This is not new or the result of some major epiphany, it's the natura consequence of having an advanced economy and a huge population with high population density. The EU already imports 40% of the agricultural products it consumes.
EU subsidies were created specifically to mitigate the strategic and geopolitical risk of seeing Europe blockaded. Agricultural subsidies exist to create a finantial incentive to preserve current production capacity when it makes no finantial sense, and thus mitigate a strategic vulnerability.
You'd think that people would have realized this after Europe avoided mass death from Russian gas being cut off only because the winter was mild.
Considering that we're doing the barest of the minimum about it three years in, yeah, you'd think.
> the winter was mild.
Sure about that? I remember a cold winter.
> Blizzards, record winds, red weather warnings and biting cold. The long winter of 2023/2024 has featured heavy precipitation and a number of extreme weather events.
https://www.uu.se/en/news/2024/2024-03-04-a-researcher-expla...
And
> Large parts of Europe are starting the 2023-2024 winter season with an abundance of snow and cold, a stark contrast from last year, which was abnormally warm and snowless.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/12/04/europe-sno...
We’re off to a not-great start this year: https://gas.kyos.com/gas/eu
Interesting way to frame "Russian gas being cut off" instead of "most likely US orchestrated biggest ally to ally sabotage in history".
I'm still mad about it, yes. Germany's dependence on Russian gas was a terrible thing, but risking my livelihood for 4D geopolitics chess is much worse.
Germany's dependence on Russian gas was (failed) 4D geopolitical chess in itself. I'm mad at that.
This doesn't change the strategic need to maintain local production though.
Resistance to a blockade doesn’t require subsidies for growing flowers etc.
Subsidizing exports similarly has very different goals.
Sure it does. The goal is keep the farmland available and productive along with keeping agricultural infrastructure. The USA helped win WW2 because our car factory lines were retooled to make war machines.
Demand for war materials goes up in a war, but the population and thus food demand isn’t going to drastically spike.
There’s a reasonable argument for having a food stockpile in case of emergencies, but extra farmland is harder to justify.
The demand won't spike, but the need to switch to local production necessitates some way to locally produce.
That’s limited by the country’s basic requirements not the total amount of farmland available. People may prefer wine and beef in surplus resulting in an obesity epidemic, but that’s not required here. You don’t want 350 lb soldiers or recruits.
In the case of the US, we turned much of the richest farmland into subdivisions. The breadbasket of the nation is powered by an aquifer that will be depleted in my kids lifetime. Most of our green goods come from the deserts of California and Arizona, and won’t exist if the Colorado River water system breaks down.
That aquifer is being depleted because of farm subsidies not in spite of them.
The US’s domestic demand for food is vastly below the actual production, exports and biofuels need not be maintained in a war.
You are going to stockpile years worth of food for an entire country?
No, if you expect farmland to produce 0 food then having extra farmland is pointless. 0 * 2 X = 0 * X = 0.
The point of extra farmland is to make up for some expected shortfall, but you’re better off stockpiling food during productive periods than have reserve capacity for use when something else is going wrong.
PS: It is common to have quite large stockpiles of food. Many crops come in once a year and then get used up over that year. But that assumes a 1:1 match between production and consumption, a little extra production = quite a large surplus in a year.
The government has all sorts of policy goals. Resilience, employment, etc.
In the US, Nixon era policy and legal thinking drives all things. Price is king, except it isn’t. Our crazy governance model means that corn is better represented than humans, so our food is more expensive, less nutritious, and our supply chains are incredibly fragile.
I think you meant financial
Let me get this right. To save the planet Denmark wants to stop producing food locally and instead import more? So those pig farts gotta go but the bunker fuel used to ship grain from a slash and burn rainforest farm in Brazil is a-ok.
Utterly brain dead. So much so that you know someone’s getting paid from these decisions.
you got it.. and grain is not the only thing we get shipped from Brazil.. to look green, we've replaced most our coal burning for energy with bio fuels, essentially wood and that gets shipped in from Brazil as well.. very green.. because fuck nuclear, because of.. checks notes.. reasons
and Brazil does that while keeping 60% of its territory as native forests.
> specifically to mitigate the strategic and geopolitical risk of seeing Europe blockaded
No, its because far lobbies are an important political block
Both can be true.
Protecting your agricultural capacity is what convinces the part of the population that does not directly benefit from the subsidies.
That's just admitting that it is just justification.
Yes and? If it keeps 20% of the country alive during a twice in a century event that it's a good justification.
> No, its because far lobbies are an important political block
Wrong. If you try to educate yourself, you will notice that EU's common agricultural policy even went to the extent of paying subsidies to small property owners to preserve their properties as agricultural land. This goes way beyond subsidizing production, or anything remotely related to your conspiracy theory.
Just because someone benefits from subsidy programs that does not mean that any conspiracy theory spun around the inversion of cause and effect suddenly makes sense. I recommend you invest a few minutes to learn about EU's common agricultural policy before trying to fill that void with conspiracies.
They can write all they want. The fact is, the countries wouldn't cant get rid of their farm policies because of voting. And the EU, is an outgrowth of those already existing countries. EU policy is not handed down from a white tower. Of course you can't actually say that.
Farmers and people supporting farmers are still a small minority and while they can probably swing some election in some country if they were to massively support only one party or coalition, the money comes for the strategic importance. It would be naive to think it's just "for the votes".
It was a long time ago that I have looked into this. My understanding from the political science is that countries where farmers votes aren't as important, also have far less subsidizes.
Groups that already have subsidizes are better at defending them. Even if in absolute terms their numbers aren't as big.
They are totally going to defend themselves, mainly through boycotts, barricades and varying degrees of riots. That can totally cause a vote issue, but it's because the rest of the population is pissed off by the road blocks etc
What's your source for 4.3% of exports? This source says 22%.
https://agricultureandfood.dk/media/m1qfuuju/lf-facts-and-fi...
You are posting literal propaganda from the biggest agro lobbyist. That number is about the "Danish food cluster". That is all food related business output. Enzyme production and such. They have tried for a long time to conflate the farming sector with the whole food industry to muddy their importance.
i admit that i haven't read the sources listed here
https://www.dyrenesbeskyttelse.dk/artikler/landbrugets-bundl...
and also that this source is probably biased toward minimizing the numbers while your source might be pulling in the other direction. the true number is probably somewhere in between and depends on what you include. like, could the raw products be imported instead and the refined in Denmark without those 22% taking a hit?
3.6% of bnp seems like little but I think agriculture counts for more than, say, management consulting that goes through 5 intermediaries (does it get counted towards the bnp 5x then? I'm not sure). At the end of the day money is only an abstraction while food, you can actually eat it.
yes, but like 50-70% of the crops grown is animal feed. if Denmark really needed efficient food for the population i think the whole thing could be done more efficiently and those 10% won't be missed.
A lot of “farmland” is unproductive and kept in usage only by heavy subsidies. Additionally, I think a more important/interesting part of the article is taxation of livestock - you reduce the land needed significantly when the amount of livestock is reduced. I’m not vegan/vegetarian but it is “obvious” we should reduce meat consumption for a wide range of reasons and focus on raising livestock in ways that are beneficial to the wider environment.
Yes, the least productive 10% of land represents a much smaller percentage of food production. This is often land in areas that are most environmentally sensitive.
In the UK we pay farmers to raise lamb on marginal land yet they still aren't competitive with lamb shipped from the other side of the world. I'm not sure why we should be subsidising that, especially when there is a lot of environmental damaged associated with it.
Could food security in case of another global crisis be a good enough reason? I don't know anything about the British situation AT ALL, but I think many in Europe think slightly different about the market-based solution when it comes to both food, medicines, and other essentials after corona.
It turns out that when shit hits the fan, countries need to handle the basic needs of their population themselves.
People don't need lamb in an emergency.
Exactly... I find all the arguments in the style of "but we need food" extremely disingenuous when it comes to meat production. Almost without exception, more food could be produced by converting land used for animal agriculture into land used to grow food directly for human consumption.
governments need it to stay in power
You'd need firewood too.
Just having farmland be fields is not very good for the land or the eco system. Breaking up farmland with hedges, woods, wetlands or whatever nature decides it should be is often a good idea. Next best thing is to manually plant trees.
Edit: add planting trees
> Breaking up farmland
One thing I have wondered was the relative benefits of a concentrated wilderness versus distributed habitat.
The common agricultural policy set-aside distributes payments for the wilderness across many farms (for equity, one supposes), whereas a concentrated wilderness would benefit few (and probably only the landowners).
For a short period I looked into carbon stuff and while forests were good, wetlands were deemed much bigger sinks.
It feels like wetlands is a huge ignored area. If what I read at the time holds (I think it was like 6-12x sequestration rate in some regions), a simple thing like rising sea levels would have a huge impact.
And anthropogenic destruction of wetlands is also a huge issue and one that is relatively easy to reverse in a lot cases (dams, rerouted rivers). And in some cases, water can just be rerouted occasionally to create temperarly wetlands that are good ecosystems as well. Mossy Earth I think is doing some of these.
Strangely enough I have been seeing wetland creation coming up on my radar recently. Hinkley Point C nuclear power station has been proposing these as alternative to acoustic fish deterrent, but the locals who might be affected are not happy.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgzwrgv71no
https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2024-10-09/debates/230...I do a lot of volunteering work with the Woodland Trust in the UK, negotiating with people who want to donate their land to restoration purposes. Britain is a land of fields and hedgerows (distributed). Many people fail to understand that most "wilderness" that we want to bring back is reliant on density (or concentration). I know many land owners who want to rewild parts of theirs, but are expecting temperate rainforest on a plot of land a couple acres across. It doesn't work like that.
The only way to bring back these lost or dying ecosystems is across large stretches of land, hundreds if not thousands of acres across. We have tiny pockets left in Cornwall, Wales and Scotland, but for the most part the country is ecologically baren in comparison to that a couple of thousand years ago.
Vast and continuous National Parks are one of the few viable ways to maintain or bring back our species rich ecosystems. Distributed "wilderness" between city blocks or cattle grazing land is duct tape on a leaky bucket.
Because there's nothing else? 60% of Denmark is farmed land, most of the rest is cities, industry, or suburbs.
Where else would you like them to plant trees? Tearing up residential areas to convert to forest would be massively expensive and likely unpopular.
Places that used to be forested and are not productive farmland. There’s lots of places like this, just maybe not in Denmark.
Quick history lesson: After the war, with Prussia in 1864, Denmark lost about 33% of it's area. That part was some of the most suited to agriculture. To compensate for those loses Denmark started a process of turning previously unusable land in to farmland. So lakes where drained, the the moors were drained, areas with sandy soil, good for nothing but growing common heather, was heavily fertilised and forests where cut down. There where even suggestion to drain parts of the sea between Denmark and Sweden.
In some sense it was good, and basically help shape modern Denmark, but it's just not needed anymore, and has come at the cost of wildlife, native plants and sea creatures. It didn't start out like that, but when you add modern intensive farming on top of killing of most of your nature areas, then things starts to go very wrong. Denmark has almost nothing of it's original nature left.
> just maybe not in Denmark
exactly, and we're talking about Denmark, after all
That last bit is correct, there aren’t many places like that in Denmark. So the original question remains, where would be a better place for them specifically to plant these trees?
Not really. Trees plant themselves. If it’s not being actively used for something/mowed it’ll turn back into forest.
This isn't really true. Growing a forest is way more complicated than you might think - they don't just sprout spontaneously, as trees take a long time to grow and are easily kept down by fauna, landscape, nutrient levels, erosion, and many other factors.
I don't remember the details, but I believe it goes something like farm -> heath -> shrubland -> young forest -> mature forest, where each phase has a unique ecosystem of both plant species and animal life.
In an extremely heavily cultivated landscape like Denmark (seriously, look at a satellite photo), converting farmland back into forest is a multi-decade project requiring constant maintenance. Converting farmland into marshland (which is the "original" stone-age landscape in many areas) is a multi-century project.
Just like it was a multi-century project to convert it into farmland, by the way. Europe has been cultivated for millennia.
Exactly. It only takes a couple of decades for nature to reforest, which is an eyeblink, actually. And only a couple more decades to return to mature forest. No humans or projects needed. There is a lot more forest in New England (USA) now, than a century ago.
Tree planting in eroded/damaged ecosystems requires a helping hand - everything from site prep, germination, watering, etc.
Source: I’ve planted thousands of trees.
In the US that would be a bunch of only invasive species for a long time.
Eventually it returns to forest within a lifetime. In certain parts of the midwest you see fields of farmland and occasionally squares of trees in them. Chances are in the early 19th century all of what you saw was farmland and at one point not as much was actively farmed and certain fields no longer plowed. All the trees you find in that plot of what looks like the holdover of some carved up midwestern forest are actually all less than 100 years old and relatively recent growth.
(In the absence of grass and small tree devouring animals)
the Netherlands exports so much food (and meat...) that it becomes a burden on local wildlife and milieu, mostly due to nitrogen emissions, pesticides and fertilizer.
I think it's the same for Denmark, though the mostly hold pigs in stead of cattle.
I think that there is an official and an unofficial reason. The official is that something must be returned to nature before climate change destroys everything. The unofficial is, in my opinion, that EU politicians are terrified by US elections.
In all western countries, far right groups are crawling to grab more and more power gradually. Those groups feed basically on farmer followers, ruthlessly brainwashed with fake news, antiscience and outrage, and the system has proven to work well (See US).
Until now traditional parties believed that could control the situation and appease the farmers with more money, and maybe even benefit of some votes of grateful people on return. The wake up has being brutal. Each euro given to farmers is just a victory reclaimed by this groups, that nurture a higher discontent.
So now that they are coming for they political heads and the time is running out, traditional politicians feel the pressure to take some delayed unpleasant decisions before is too late, and getting rid of the fake farmers to build a market from there is a first step. If fake farmers can sell subsidized meat for a lower price, the real farmers suffer for it.
> The official is that something must be returned to nature before climate change destroys everything.
Nature is an abstraction, not a weird angry god. We need to capture GHG and stop emitting more but that’s pretty much it. That will most likely involve reforestation as it’s a good carbon sink but using the expression “returning thing to nature” is not a correct way to frame it.
> why Farmland?
Because trees don't grow well in the ocean? :)
There is developed areas (cities/towns/industry) and farm land.
Most of the land not suitable for farming was turned into farm land. Through extremely hard work over the past 150 years. Like straightening rivers, draining marshes, and planting up the heath.
Because it’s becoming increasingly obviously dumb to be paying farmers money to pretend like they are farming their land. What I mean is that if we removed the subsidies the farmers wouldn’t farm their land, the market just doesn’t work to support their production. So we are essentially saying “if you pretend to farm your land we’ll make sure you profit” but even at that they of cause need to try to keep the pretend farming profitable enough that the entire charade pays off, but that means dumping a ton of fertilizer on the land, which tends to run off and ruin streams and seeps into the ground water. Most recently this has led to the agricultural industry competeley and likely semi permanently destroying the fishing industry around one of the major pars of Denmark. So at this point the farmers have to stop.
There’s a natural way of doing that, which is to cut subsidies and let the market handle it. But the farmers have political power because they have a lot of money because of the policies they’ve set up back when they had political power because they had a lot of money… Anyways, so what is actually happening is that the farmers have decided that if their land is unprofitable then the government needs to pay a hefty price to them for it.
The government could just cut the subsidies which means we would use less money, then buy the land in bankruptcies, likely just with the money we spend less. Instead we’ll see a lot of additional spending to buy the land, and then down the line subsidies will increase to “make up” for all the land they “lost”.
> Because it’s becoming increasingly obviously dumb to be paying farmers money to pretend like they are farming their land.
This is a particularly ignorant and clueless opinion to have.
The whole point of Europe's common agricultural policy is to preserve the potential of agricultural production as a strategic asset. Europe's strong economy and huge population density, coupled with cheap access to agricultural production from south America and Africa, renders most agricultural activity economically unfeasible. The problem is that this means Europe is particularly vulnerable to a blockade, and in case of all out war the whole continent risks being starved in a few months.
The whole point of EU's common agricultural policy is to minimize this risk.
Owners of farmland are provided a incentive to keep their farms on standby even if they don't produce anything exactly to mitigate this risk. It would be more profitable to invest in some domains such as, say, real estate. Look at the Netherlands: they are experiencing a huge housing crisis and the whole land in Holland consists of dense urban housing bordered by farm land. It would be tempting for farmers to just cash out on real estate if they didn't had an economic upside.
You would do better if you educated yourself on a topic before commenting on it.
> It would be tempting for farmers to just cash out on real estate if they didn't had an economic upside.
That’s tempting even with subsidies. I have friend who own farming land at the outskirts of the city, they rent it to a farmer at almost net zero to themselves after taxes, but would make a small fortune if they could develop the land. The reason farmers don’t sell their land to real estate and 100x the value instantly isn’t that they don’t want to because of subsidies, it’s that they aren’t allowed to due to zoning laws, and zoning laws are what they are to protect property values, because everyone involved in designing them own at minimum one property. The only political party we have representing renters in any capacity never get any power in the governmental bodies that govern zoning laws.
> The whole point of Europe's common agricultural policy is to preserve the potential of agricultural production as a strategic asset.
Nothing about that required the current setup. Imagine if we were talking about government subsidies for private militias because we needed to maintain the much more directly important military capacity. Wouldn’t that be crazy? Why is the farming subsidies seen differently. Why must the government pay to private institutions who’s worth had disappeared. If we want governments to maintain farmable land so be it. We don’t have to finically support an artificial elite based them having owned a one profitable asset. Just let it degrade in value and buy it when it hits bottom.
> Imagine if we were talking about government subsidies for private militias because we needed to maintain the much more directly important military capacity. Wouldn’t that be crazy?
Not really? It is very protective to maintain an agricultural, energy, and industrial base; not doing so is immensely risky.
Take Germany the first winter after the Ukraine invasion as an example, a mad scramble to fill a huge hole in their energy sector. Imagine the same scenario but with food, or munitions.
You simply cannot rely solely on global supply chains for industries that are critical to survival of a nation. The ability to power, feed, and defend yourself is a primary concern of a nation state and is worth economic inefficiency.
With all that said, I have _no_ idea how Europe and Denmark specifically does subsidies for agriculture. It could be asinine. But philosophically, imo, it is uncontroversially necessary in some form or another. It is far too risky to save a penny on importing wheat from Brazil and risk famines.
> Why is the farming subsidies seen differently
Because you can live without private militias but you can't live without food?
With this type of argument you can demonstrate that lots of things have strategic importance. Steel? Check. Textiles? Check. Asphalt? Check. We should subsidize everything. Yet, when the military threat actually materializes and you need to manufacture 155mm shells, all the strategic planning seems quite useless.
Everything you are listing is indeed very much strategic and Europe was indeed extremely stupid to let that go. The end of your paragraph is a demonstration of that. It doesn’t go against the core idea.
In the US, we have sextupled 155mm shell production.
If war breaks out, you need to feed people, maintain roads, build vehicles, etc.
Europe has a huge coastline, it's impossible to blockade. If war breaks out, it's better to shift workers from agriculture to war-related production, and import food from places that are not at war, such as South America. Food produced in Europe is basically a luxury. For every kilogram of beef produced in Denmark, you can buy 2.5 kg of Argentinian beef.
While Europe has a long coastline, there are only a given number of ports capable of the high thoroughput needed to feed Europe’s population. Blockade those and the entrance to the Baltic and Mediterranean, and most of your work is done. Moreover, in a shooting war, merchant ships from other global regions attempting to supply Europe would be targeted.
> Moreover, in a shooting war, merchant ships from other global regions attempting to supply Europe would be targeted.
This happened before, twice. The solution was convoys, it worked both times.
The convoys barely worked. Parts of Europe were desperately short of food for several years. And the non-Axis countries couldn't manage to defeat the blockade on their own: they needed help from the USA to accomplish anything.
It didn't work for Japan though. The US could've kept Japan impotent and hungry indefinitely without invading or nuking it. The main reason for nuking it was to get it to surrender before Stalin could enter the fight and take part of Japan.
Who is this hypothetical battle to be fought against? Surely anyone with sufficient power to mount a blockade has nuclear missiles and at that point it's kind of moot...
Note that I actually agree with your position but this is an interesting discussion on a topic I hadn't thought about deeply enough!
Let me see... Well, there was this thing in the past, called WW2, it was a WW, because well, Germany for example didn't want France buying Brazillian agricultural products, and sunk Brazillian ships using submarines. Thus making Brazil join the war.
Right now Lula wants to form a coalition with Russia, so what makes you think, in case of war, Brazil would keep selling to the EU? Maybe because USA would threathen Brazil? In that case they would focus on feeding themselves, and not the EU still.
In the entirety of human history, a base war tactic is Siege. What makes you think nobody will try it again?
In New Zealand the believe that if they removed farm subsidizes, their farmers would quite. Now they are a massive farm product exporter.
To be more accurate - by removing subsidies, NZ farmers became more efficient and sell their products at the world price, which is quite often overseas.
Subsidies and/or tarrifs always distort the market and have unintended consequences.
Not sure why you say 'more accurate'. What you state is what I implied. I hope this was clear.
What removing subsidies do is unleash the potential. Lots of farming communities that live with subsidies are convinced that removing them is a dooms day scenario.
However evidence often doesn't support this. Japan used to protect its market for beef. Then this was forced to be opened by the US. Japan farmer then realized that their specialization was high quality beef. And now Japan is globally famous and exports lots of high quality beef.
Removing subsidies can lead to structural changes and consolidation, but it can also have lots of positive effects.
Does it pencil out though? You go from more farmers making less profit and getting subsidy to smooth things over and then they go ahead and spend most of that back in the economy running the business presumably.
And the other situation is no subsidy, fewer players as they have to take what little profit there is and spend it more on overhead, and presumably less money reinvested in the local economy overall because of less economic activity from fewer players as well as that subsidy no longer being available to spend back on overhead and recirculate into the economy. And profit is presumably held by fewer and wealthier people who spend even less proportionally in the local economy than someone with less means.
That's only true if you ignore that the government can spend that money on something else. And the successful farmers are actually net tax payers.
Compare subsidies to farmers, all farmers are highly inefficient farming with no exports. No great public transport system and roads with potholes.
To:
No subsidies. Highly efficient farmers that export. Fantastic bus connection and roads in the whole countryside.
> take what little profit there is
Before there was no net profit at all, it was a net lose to society. You were moving profits from other sectors to the farm sector.
> And profit is presumably held by fewer and wealthier people
If a farmer is successful, they should make money, just like people in all other sectors in the economy.
Nobody makes the argument that we should subsidize all manufacturing, so that we can have lots of small relatively poor manufacturing sites that lose money.
This if course doesn't necessarily work for every country, but the general doom and gloom about subsidy is often proven wrong.
So the public gives them their hard-earned money via taxes, and the farmers reap more money from exporting?
No, the public gives them no money and they make money for the country by exporting.
Do you think food production has national security implications or do you think "the market" will be happy to sell you food during another global conflict while their own citizens are starving?
Farming subsidies are a national security tool, not a handout.
Anyway, it's clear that your position is political in nature otherwise you'd be just as outraged by green subsidies.
Denmark set aside DKK 53.5 billion for green subsidies in 2022. But this isn't market distortion to the same degree as farming subsidies, is it? That's the flaw in your argument. It's inconsistently applied based on politics, isn't it?
There’s a big difference between supporting food security and subsidising otherwise unviable land usage and farming practices. In the UK, there are subsidies for upland farming for sheep with produces a negligible amount of food at high cost (monetary and environmental) for next to no return for the farmers even after the subsidy.
Re. green subsidies that is better characterised as investment in technology of the future. You might also like to compare subsidies to the fossil fuel sector as well.
How does having such a large surplus that you’re an exporter of food jive with national security? It sounds like they already produce more than enough. Exposing food production entirely to market forces is, as you point out, a bad idea.
Sounds like you’ve fallen for some farmer rhetoric.. How is growning crops to feed 28 million pigs to 6 million people? We’d have to eat 5 pigs each.. If it was really about food security, we’d surely plant crops to eat ourselves, which is much more efficient in terms of calorie per m^2.
Meat has many more negative externalities than plants. Thats the argument for substituting green farming.
Of course it’s political.. anything is to some degree.
Because of animals we grow far more grain than we need, giving us a substantial amount of necessary slack. If there is a wide spread crop failure, the price of grain rises, causing ranchers to sell breeding stock they can no longer afford to feed. Then humans then eat the grain instead of the animals.
Growing x100 times the amount of food needed isn’t ‘slack’, its production for export (or feeding pigs to export). We could cut out farmland by 50% and still have more than enough to feed our own population. This food security argument would only hold if there was any possibility of us actually not being able to feed our population.
100X? A chicken is 1.8x and a pig is 3X. A cow is 12X, but that'd only be a relevant figure if humans could eat grass.
> How does having such a large surplus (...)
You should educate yourself. Europe imports around 40% of the agricultural production it consumes.
The "surplus" is referenced in economical value and reflects luxury exports such as wine, which is hardly what keeps Europe alive in case of all-out war.
The whole point of Europe's common agricultural policy is food security including an event of all-out war.
Your comments sound like advocating against having a first-aid kit just because you sell silk scarves.
Please provide some sources, because I think your 40% is also based on monetary and not nutritional value.
Destroying fisheries goes directly against food security. Fishes are more efficient as source of food by energetic reasons.
I don’t understand why this is being downvoted but this is very true, and it’s the literal case that the fisheries around the entirety of the Bornholm region of Denmark have been completely shut down because the farming industry runoff destroyed it. Had it not been for subsidies the farming industry wouldn’t have done this. We literally paid people to deliberately destroy our environment. Is insane and everyone’s just looking to the sky like “what are we supposed to do? We’ve tried nothing at all even though there has been consistent warnings for two decades and it still happened!?”
> Anyway, it's clear that your position is political in nature otherwise you'd be just as outraged by green subsidies.
The green subsidies are also paid out to farmers… it is outrageous. Imagine if we were still paying subsidies to weavers because of their “strategic importance in case of war” and also paying them green subsidies to avoid using the toxic chemicals they would otherwise use doing the thing they are only doing in the first place because it justifies the theater that has the state maintaining their consistent income.
Well they aren’t really subsidizing based on having everything you need on shore. They still specilize into a few monocrops and have to trade to fill the rest of a balanced diet for the population. No one is calculating how much butter would be needed to last a multi year siege and dolling out subsidize to the dairy farmers on that I don’t think.
> Farming subsidies are a national security tool, not a handout.
It's absurd to not acknowledge they are both.
This is often the justification but in many countries agriculture systems are not oriented towards food security: they produce a large share of export crops/products and thus also rely on imports. If they were an actual national security tool, they would be more focus on not relying on imports and not helping exports, right?
Rage mode over more forest? Are you a psycho?
> Both Denmark and Netherland are big in agriculture export and they are very good at it.
And both are tiny and being swarmed by sustainability issues.
We pay farmers not to plant fields in the US. Here in the Eastern half, much of this farm land setting idle receives adequate rain and sunshine. Farmers have to mow (brush hog) the fields every year or two to prevent trees and brush from naturally taking over. Economically it makes little sense.
Where this might actually make sense is around waterways to prevent erosion. And farmers have taken down a large percentage of the tree rows between fields that were planted in the dust bowl days in an effort to use every inch of their field.
Although, I am personally in favor of simple regulations instead cash handouts.
Because Denmark is almost entirely cities and farmland?
There’s already a housing crisis…
I'm of the opinion food security - even at great expense - is the primary thing a nation should be concerned with as a society. At the level where producing enough calories to feed your total population if things truly hit the fan as a hard requirement for every nation on the planet. This is not something you leave to "free trade" or whatnot. Obviously that doesn't mean every calorie need be provided in the most luxurious form - but in the end, there should be enough food produced to feed your people in the worst of times. Even at great expense and waste during the good times.
That all said - farming has gotten vastly more productive both per man hour and per acre over the past 100 years. Logically we simply do not need the same amount of land devoted to agriculture as we did before - at least in most cases.
So long as your food security is not being impacted - and I do mean under the worst possible stress model you can come up with - I don't see a problem with plans like this. Land use changes over time, and it should be expected.
Plus, it looks like a large portion of this will be simply a different form of agriculture - forestry. This will probably be more in-demand in 50-100 years with current trends, but that's a wild guess.
Read the post by gklitz: Agricultural practices are ruining the water supply. It's nice to have food security, but you also need drinkable water.
Groundwater in Denmark is drinkable and most people wanna keep it that way. But unfortunately, fertilizer has killed of huge areas of sealife.
The argument about security comes up a lot and makes intuitive sense. Although it seems far more complex than just protecting farmland and a simple yearly statistic. Developed countries can be ridiculously dependent on centralised supply chains to process and deliver food. And many of the inputs and equipment require a complex industrial base to support. We don't just need the space to grow food. We need to feed it, protect it from pests, harvest it, process it, deliver it to people. In most countries Iit is very dependent on electricity, heavy industry and global trade for equipment.
> That all said - farming has gotten vastly more productive both per man hour and per acre over the past 100 years
We also have way more people to feed and house than 100 years ago, you cannot look at productivity increase in isolation, demand for both food and land has also risen significantly.
Denmark is not even close to jeopardizing its food supply, even less its food security. It produces way more food than is needed to feed its own population.
> Denmark is not even close to jeopardizing its food supply, even less its food security. It produces way more food than is needed to feed its own population.
Denmark is a part of the EU. Their agricultural policy follows EU's common agricultural policy. Food security is evaluated accounting for all members, not individual member-states in isolation. In case of a scenario that puts food security at risk, such as an all-out war, it's in her best interests of all member states if the whole Europe can preserve it's food security.
If we are ever in a situation where food security becomes a real issue in the EU - and that’s an almost unfathomably big if - then the first step would be to actually grow food for humans, instead of food for animals that are then exported to China as meat products.
Food security is simply not a relevant concern here.
Nitrogen emissions from farming are a big topic in the Netherlands. We have a right wing populist governments that wants to raise maximum speeds back to 130km/h but they can't because of nitrogen emissions that caused the previous government (also right leaning, pro car, etc.) to lower the limits. Intense cattle farming is a big environmental challenge in both countries and it comes at a price. Lots of farting cows in both countries.
Simple: Germany has a huge export surplus that China and the USA is unwilling to accept anymore.
Also, German economy is stagnate, based on a cheap russian gas and cooperation with china. So now, the idea is to target South America for exports while balancing it with import of South American foodstuff(EU-Mercosur agreement, that we know will not be ratified by individual countries in a democratic process, but by the Commission).
The problem Germany has to fix is the Common Agricultural Policy, that's one of the pillars of the EU. They are using the Green Agenda to force countries to reforest their fields. Of course the whole reforestation program is designed in a way that benefits states (Germany) that have got rid of their forests long time ago, and is unfavorable for countries that developed their agriculture after the WW2 - like Denmark and Finland.
Expect a heated discussion between Germany and France, rise of right wing parties in smaller countries, and a push for stricter integration.
https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/11/19/eu-mercosur-tra...
https://forest.fi/article/whos-to-pay-the-cost-of-eus-nature...
https://hir.harvard.edu/germanys-energy-crisis-europes-leadi...
Denmark did get rid of its forests a long time ago, after World War I. Germany has vast forests, a magnitude larger than those in Denmark, a country which is almost entirely farmland outside the cities. You have no idea what you're talking about.
Germany has been leaching off the EU for so long through the weak Euro, they now think it will always work. They are clearly putting France on a fast track to an exit via a far right government with the whole Mercosur agreement debacle.
I presume the EU has an excess. A lot of land is 'set aside' where you get an EU subsidy for not farming it so we don't end up with too much food.
Not all farm land is productive, so converting it back to forests and uncultivated land is better overall for the country.
Farmland is not some natural balanced healthy state for the land to exist in.
Because the EU wants its member countries to care about the climate, even though it's completely overshadowed by the US and China not giving a shit
There is no way it's cost effective to produce food in Denmark. If people were rational about this Denmark would be 0-5% farmland. But racism/nationalism and irrational fears and entrenched political power exists so these sane changes only happen slowly. This is a country whose largest imports are (fish, animal feed, wine and cheese) and mostly from other European countries. If they were really worried about min-maxing they would be trading with other countries. They seem to be more preoccupied with keeping cash inside Europe and confusing old world status symbols with wealth.
It's as if your economic planning is based own how good it appears to a potential time traveler from 100 years ago
"The people work 30 hours a week and eat wine and cheese whenever they want! Everybody is rich!"
This is a very strange statement. Being able to produce the food needed for your own survival is about the most core national security issue there is.
And having people living healthy, well-fed, lives of leisure seems like a pretty good definition of rich to me. What’s the better one?
In many parts of Europe, forested areas have actually grown since the 20th and especially the 19th century.
People no longer use wood as a fuel, or in very small amounts compared to the past, and some former pastures have been re-colonized by trees.
Czechia is currently 34 per cent forest. Used to be less than 20 per cent in the Theresian cadastre (mid 18-th century).
Indeed. A few years ago I ran across a comparison of old photographs of rural villages (early 20th century) in central Europe vs their present day appearance, taken from similar points of view.
Two things were immediately apparent from the old photographs - less forest - tons of fruit trees
Fitting is also this anecdote I heard when visiting a historical mill. They had a huge linden tree in their yard, and they told us that in the olden days this was a symbol of prosperity, because the original owner showed off that they could afford to plant a useless, non-fruit-bearing - a status symbol.
Coming full circle - the best thing would be if we could plant tons of trees that also produce food - something like the baobabs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adansonia_digitata . E.g. pigs were fed oak's acorns in fall.
We have to be careful here. While that's good news locally, the news is less promising globally. Deforestation is still rampant in the global south - specifically to make agricultural products for the global north. So Europe and America are still net-deforesters if you take into account their imported products.
In comparison, Denmark is currently at only 15% forest.
This is up from about 2% in the early 1800s, back when ships were built from wood, and firewood was used for heating. Funnily, the slow and steady build-up during those 200 years was partially motivated by the fact that when the British destroyed the fleet in 1807, there was simply not enough wood to build a new one.
It’s the same in America, there’s actually more trees now than at the time of European settlement. A combo of the large buffalo herds that used to roam and native land management that often involved burning entire forests.
Climate getting milder has also meant the tree line, and thus forest line, has moved up quite a lot[1].
[1]: https://www.forskning.no/norges-forskningsrad-partner-miljoo...
Just open google maps and take a stroll across europe...
Incidentally this is one of the approaches described in Kim Robinson's The Ministry for the Future, a novel on climate change (more about the political ramifications of it than the ecological impacts). Interesting read.
Before anyone jumps into this book I would caution against it. This book had many very cool ideas and moments. The way it played out felt very "real". However, in the end there was very little actual story and was very boring at times. I actively dislike Neal Stephenson but if you want a near-future climate story I would recommend Termination Shock over Ministry For The Future. Just a random internet person's two cents.
I also read KSR's book. It was interesting at times. However, the research on the financial topics, including the central banks and "global financiers" was quite bad.
I don't recall the glaring errors right now, however, given this is an area where I (at least once upon a time) was an expert, it was quite bad to read this and realize there are likely other serious errors in topics with which I am not at all familiar.
While this is of course a work of fiction, getting verifiable facts wrong, intentionally or not, ruins it for me.
The main thing that irked me is that the book focuses on technical solutions as if that's what we're missing (carbon coin! pumping water from under ice sheets! etc.) but completly glosses over the actual consequences.
To piggyback on the rest of this thread, people like meat and don't want to stop eating lots of meat. People are not going to like things that make them stop eating meats, whether it's governement buying out producers, a carbon tax, a carbon quota, whatever.
"Ministry of the Future" is full of stuff like "and the central bankers could reshape the economy, so they did by doing XYZ" as if "XYZ" was important but barely discusses the fact that "reshaping the economy" might upset lots of people. How were they convinced to give up air travel, cars, etc?
> People are not going to like things that make them stop eating meats, whether it's governement buying out producers, a carbon tax, a carbon quota, whatever.
I think the point of the book is that when the consequences are serious enough, it pushes significant social and behavioral change that people would not consider or accept otherwise. It's hard for us to imagine how society could actually change so drastically, but when people have been through a crisis of immense proportions, they think differently. India completely transforming its governance structure seems implausible but only because we haven't experienced 20M people dying at once from a preventable cause. These kind of events are triggers for social revolutions. We've seen this in history.
Sure, but then the story is about 1. the Indian heatwave and 2. the transformation; whether the transformation came about through carbon coins or carbon quotas or whatever is a detail. But it's the focus of the book.
Right; that was my takeaway.
the eco-terrorism was an interesting aspect that I hadn't thought of before, but actually seems quite plausible
I think in the book those people were convinced to give up air travel by the eco-terrorists known as the Children of Kali shooting commercial airliners out of the sky, and not shooting down cleaner alternatives like airships. A persuasive argument, to be sure.
I thought the idea of a "carbon coin" issued by central banks (the primary financial theme of the book) was on fairly solid ground. I'd be interested to know what you found implausible about it.
I had trouble with the Mars series and never got through it.
I kind of wonder if it is easier for me to enjoy fiction that requires more "suspension of disbelief" with ftl or time travel, alien races and magic.
In comparison when I don't have to suspend any disbelief, we haven't met aliens, other worlds are actually too far to get to, and physics and science is unyielding... it is harder to enjoy myself.
Since we’re here.. These are probably everyone’s top 2 eco-punk novels but the rest of an appropriate top 10 list is way more contentious, and imho sources like goodreads or whatever will always have many items that aren’t really even in the genre.
So I’ll offer the “metatropolis” anthology, which as a bonus has an audiobook version read by the Star Trek cast. Anyone got anything else?
Thanks! I'm generally not into short fiction, but I'll give this one a go.
One thing I like about The Ministry for the Future, is that it doesn't focus on the "apocalyptic" aspect (i.e., the usual fighting for survival), but rather examines the political and economic aspects.
I agree it doesn't have much of a story. It reads much more like a non-fictional recounting of events, but provides a lot of food for thought about how things might unfold. Just don't approach it like your typical novel.
Sounds a bit like The Silmarillion by JRR Tolkein. If you finish reading LotR and then try to read this book, you'll be in for a rude awakening.
> I actively dislike Neal Stephenson
Why is that?
I really liked Snow Crash and Anathem. Reamde was okay. I don't remember much about Diamond Age or Cryptonomicon.
I've never felt that in author is wasting my time while reading a book until him. He desperately needs a different, or any, editor. He manages to cram a 400 page story into 700 pages. Just non-stop side tangents and long passage after long passage that goes no where and means nothing to the story. It's fine to have stuff like that to build a world but this he goes overboard. If a character needs to get groceries, he'll turn one sentence about needing to go get groceries into three pages of nothing about how grocery stores work. I find it extremely boring at times, and after you read one of his books and get clued into this, it's hard to read a second book and stay interested.
I think I started having trouble getting through his stuff with the baroque cycle.
IIRC in Ministry for the Future it was 50% of all land was reserved. 10% is a good start though for conservation efforts.
Shifting production to less regulated countries like China is not going to fix climate change.
That will be interesting experiment. 1) A growing population require food. 2) Their agricultural sector is a major contributor to their economy, not only farmers but everything around it involves a lot of people and businesses. 3) Many countries rely on Danish agricultural exports (it's massive) to ensure people have food.
The Danish agricultural industry accounts for 1% of GDP and almost 70% of land use, the highest in the world. The Wikipedia page on Denmark doesn't even bother to list it as a major industry (unlike Lego) and the only figures I could find put it at around 8B DKK. Lego does 66B DKK on its own.
What criteria are you using?
Lego is not edible. they'll need food in the coming war.
By the last metric I saw, Denmark produces food for about 12 million people, and that's mainly animal products. Denmark has a population of 6 million.
Cutting food production in half would not jeopardize food security. Switching focus to plant-based food production would more than double it again.
Jesus, what war are you talking about?
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/11/25/d...
Its a special military operation, right?
In all earnesty, what does it change to send troops to Ukraine? What did any of these red lines we European were afraid of help?
Should not send tanks, it could start a war.
Should not send planes, it could start a war.
Should not allow Ukraine to attack inside Russia, it could start a war.
I'm all for defending Ukraine, it's just that it would have been good to have the USA on side.
(Dane here) - this is a major reversal on the food-security policy that drove not just innovation in intensive farming technologies in Denmark in the late nineteenth century, but also the formation of what is now the EU, post WWII, on a european scale.
Let's hope butter and bacon from Poland is going to cover our needs.
> Let's hope butter and bacon from Poland is going to cover our needs.
Pole here - Poland switched form being a pork exporter to an importer over the course of the last few decades.
Top external suppliers are...
Denmark (53kt)
Belgium (50kt)
Germany (44kt)
The Netherlands (24.5kt)
Spain (24.5kt)
Our issues in The Netherlands are probably similar to Denmark's and the biggest issue is not all agriculture. Meat and milk production has an outweighed impact on destroying the environment. You need far more land to grow crops to feed livestock and keeping cows leads to a lot of nitrogen deposition.
We can reduce land use and have food security if people were not so intend on eating/drinking animal products every day (and there are perfectly fine vegetarian alternatives).
I believe the insistence on being a major agricultural producer in the EU despite having some of the largest population densities in the region has a lot to do with it.
A huge chunk of that output is purely for export.
That depends on how you define "perfectly fine". All of the vegetarian alternatives have a lower protein quality index, which matters if you're trying to get enough of the essential amino acid s without increasing calorie intake.
https://doi.org/10.3389/fnut.2024.1406618
> Let's hope butter and bacon from Poland is going to cover our needs.
That's really hilarious: Poland imports it's pork from Denmark.
(ASF and almost no piglets breeding)
If we end up going hungry (or food prices spiking), then this policy might be adjusted.
It's not like this will happen overnight anyways.
> A growing population require food.
Sure, but Europe's not growing. It is purely in "shrink forever" mode. This is easily measured, any time fertility drops below 2.1 that's what happens. But ignore that a moment, what if you wanted to depopulate Europe? This might be a good policy for that. Get the timing just right, and it's not even a genocide... food shortages that don't starve anyone just encourages the last few breeders to put a lid on it, and voila! The fantasy of more than a few out there.
It's not exactly true
the government will offer to buy the land from farmers etc.
but they can just say 'no'
And in case they choose "no", that carbon tax for farm animals help to think second time.
In case they farm carbon intensive animals like cows, yes. For the pigs farmers no so much. However those pigs farms totally destroy Denmark fishing areas which traditionally feed the population.
Yeah, it's much better for farming to be moved to countries with less labour and environmental regulations.
They are further off shoring the economy now using the excuse of climate change.
As if farmers in Cambodia aren't draining his tractor's oil into the river passing through their land.
Bonus points the politicians can then import the food using a shell company in Singapore and steal tax dollars.
That concern has already been discussed https://www.regeringen.dk/media/13261/aftale-om-et-groent-da...
The Uyghurs slaves making your iPhone are grateful that you discussed how much better off the world is.
Some serious "but who will pick the cotton vibes".
I think you're replying to the wrong comment? The article linked talks about how less area is needed for farming due to higher crop yields
I think a good chart to keep in mind about this discusion is this one: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-per-protein-poore
Beef emits 49.89 kg CO2 eq. per 100 grams of protein. Tofu 1.98 kg.
Anyone know if they plan to chop down the trees when they grow and use the wood somehow, so they can capture more carbon through growing new trees?
Yes, some of the forests will be untouched nature but a good chunk of it will be for timber production.
Awesome, thanks!
What kinds of forests? For nature, or for lumber? If the latter, what is quality of the timber produced, or will it spark a new wave of power stations burning wood pellets. Lots of questions, with very little detail available in the article.
Sort of related:
IIRC, I had read somewhere a while ago that Denmark was going to convert to fully organic farming.
So, just now, I googled for a relevant phrase and found this as one of the results:
https://ecobnb.com/blog/2017/07/denmark-organic/
This was the search I used:
https://www.google.com/search?q=Denmark+doing+fully+organic+...
Planting orchards would seem an interesting compromise
The 43 billion kroner earmarked for land acquisition suggests serious commitment, but I wonder how this will impact small farmers and rural communities in the long run...
The west is engaging in managed decline and moving production to places with less regulation and much worse environmental and social impacts. Why? What sense does this make? You would rather have some Muslim slave in China make your stuff while poisoning the ocean than make it in Denmark?
There are such a thing as tariffs. I think it makes sense that we both improve our local environment and adopt a carrot/stick approach to businesses in other localities that do/don't do the same. Same environmental standards with independent audit should grant (eco) tariff-free access. Likewise, wasteful environmentally destructive exporter = heavy tariff.
This is not how tariffs are being used and the actual reality is that manufacturing and production is being transferred to places with much worse environmental and labour practices that are also antagonistic to the west. Germany "greeniefied" their economy by just outsourcing energy production to Russia and in the processes ensured 10,000 of Ukranians had to die. This needs to stop. Nobody wins from it, everyone loses.
Come on. It is not Germany's fault that Putin is a madman. Choosing cheap gas over more expensive gas, oil and dirty coal was a win-win. Until Putin was too irrational.
Btw.: more than 50.000 Ukrainian soldiers are dead by the latest estimates I have read.
They chose Russian gas over nuclear. It's not their fault Putin was a madman, but Trump warned them this would happen, and they decided they don't care and carried right on.
I guarantee you if Europe heeded Trumps warning and cut Russia off instead of outsourcing energy production to them, Ukraine would not have been invaded. Even today, there is still Russian gas flowing through Ukraine into Europe. It's unconscionable, and Europeans should be ashamed that they elected such traitors for leaders.
Putin invaded because he thought nobody would do shit, because everyone was signalling nobody would do shit. Biden said he won't do shit and stopped selling weapons to Ukraine and lifted Russian sanctions. Obama did not do shit the last time with Crimea and Donbas. Germans were laughing at Trump who warned them that Putin will start shit if they continue like this, and for the most part, Europeans just increased their dependence on Russian gas.
The moral culpability here could not be clearer. Of course Putin bears ultimate responsibility, but he was empowered and encouraged by spineless corrupt pathetic western leaders.
Corruption and stealing is easier with off-shore business.
Southern Europe seems to be converting farmland into solar farms. And new forests seem to be all monoculture Eucalyptus, fast growing for commercial reasons, but sadly empty of wildlife.
As much as I'd love for Europe to be reforested, the reduced food security might come back to bite us.
Is there a reason you and some many commenters here are concerned about food security? Has this became a nativist rallying cry of some sort? Because by all fact-based accounts there is no problem with food production in Europe.
And if food security became an issue we could reverse policies.
This won't be implemented overnight.
We could also just make less bio fuel, or eat more plants less animals, etc.
Lots of options, sure we need some food security, but there are limits to how much overproduction we need.
There have been many famines in Europe throughout the past few centuries. Perhaps we're now at the end of history and nothing like that will ever happen again but since countries aren't willing to take that bet.
Food security is not an issue at all. For example in Germany around 20% of all farmland is used for "energy plants" (biogas etc.). Even in Germany solar planels have around a 28 times higher efficiency per area than biogas plants, so there is a lot of potential to repurpose farm land without changing food production at all.
>there is a lot of potential to repurpose farm land without changing food production at all
This takes years, which isn't enough in the case of a major food security event, i.e. war.
Farmer here. Attacks on agriculture have historically lead to famines.
What is the planned species composition? Are the plans aimed at restoring natural habitat, or are they primarily using trees as a means to some other end?
America should learn from this
This upcoming administration won't though.
Will the forests be open to the public for hiking, fishing, hunting, etc?
i read 1B and my mind immediately went to llama. i have a problem
Good luck. In the less cohesive Western countries efforts like this are met with both protest by farmers who view their providing calories as almost a sacred task, and by foreign agitprop that proposes any effort that makes it harder to farm is an attempt at subjugating the people.
> that proposes any effort that makes it harder to farm is an attempt at subjugating the people
Well, it is. More expensive food means a worse quality of life for normal people. It also means more time spent working to pay for groceries, and less time and money to do things that threaten the elites like accumulating capital or performing activism.
The problem is not production cost, but distribution. A litre of milk is paid at 20c to the producer (never has been cheaper) yet it’s 2€ at the store. The producer makes a few cents on it.
The FoodCo is the one driving price up. Them and consumer behavior.
There’s quite a lot of expensive stuff happening in between filling a tank of milk at the farm, and a consumer purchasing a single bottle at a store near them.
Multiple private jets for the CEO being one of them.
Feeding people is a sacred task. Food is literally the base pillar of various human needs pyramids.
Making it harder to grow your own food /is/ subjugating.
shitlibs' contempt for farmers of all people is a real mask off moment
Farmers can get extremely attached to one piece of land and one farming method and any attempts to shift the incentives in the system and make some types of farming or locations move on is portrayed as a systemic attack on farming and the end of the world.
Everyone appreciates the farmers, some farmers just don't seem to appreciate the harms certain types of farming put on everyone else and the ecosystem, and they'll hide behind how essential calories are to protect their interests.
You're aware the farming lobby is one of the strongest in many countries right? They're not under-served politically. Farming is one of the most subsidized industries.
> powerful
Wheres the billionare farmers in the cover of Forbers?
Where?
Believe me the farmers have been doing their best to buck this.
What will the united states do? Keep shitting out CO2 with no regard to the climate?
Tree logging is one of my favorite new jobs that will exist in the future.
There are already tree harvesters that start with a standing tree and end on a ready log with waste mulched. It's only a matter of time it's AI controlled.
The future has no jobs.
Oh yeah that far into the future is singularity so at that point, what we're all doing is just interfacing with the AI. :) But I think that's still a while away, most likely? Or who knows, maybe sooner lol.
Seeing a modern foresting machine in action was one of the most daunting experiences of my life. Making an AI drive it is pointless, it’s already at such high productivity that the transportation is a much more meaningful bottleneck now.
I literally passed it by while walking the dog on the morning it started, and just 10 minutes later when returning, a neat and large pile of logs stripped of branches was at the roadside and a handful of trees were gone. Two days later when taking the same route, the forest was no more, just a handful of funny trees sitting on barren mudlands surrounded by enormous piles of logs marked and tagged for transport to various destinations.
Be paranoid of how they will define 'forest'. Over here they included e.g. a middle lane divider with a small sapling every 30 meters as counting as a full 'forest'.
How will it impact food supply ?
I can not emphasize this enough, we need more and better trees.
Even though climate-wise, the need for trees is overrated IMO – recently the list of benefits that forests provide has been extended:
- More forests protect a country against sudden supply chain crises. It's is just a small protection (and only for the commodity wood) but still
- Forests are the first line of defense in drone warfare as we've seen in the War in Ukraine, where maneuvers are often concentrating on, and gains are counted in, Tree-Lines.
Most of europe agreed to do this. I eagerly hope all of the EU immediately follows through with these commitments.
Lucky denmark for being able to just be anti-farmer. France and other countries have to choose a major city to demolish to meet their commitments.
Without my glasses and morning caffeine dose, I read that Denmark was going to plant 18 trees and convert 10percent of its farmland into forest. Not really knowing anything about Denmark, I briefly imagined that Denmark was either much, much smaller than I had originally supposed , or that it had very, very little agricultural density.
Sometimes these idiotic musings and the little chuckle I get internally are the brighter part of my morning. Even in fading vision there are things to appreciate.
No they won't. If they started tomorrow planting 100,000 trees a day, and never took a single day off, they would finish up in 2052. What kind of nursery can even grow 100,000 saplings of conifer a day?
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-climate-deniers-pl...
Using seedballs, you could conceivably plant 1B trees in just a couple months by dropping the seedballs from airplanes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBbU4MQftc8
It would take a couple of years at the scale Finnish forest industry is operating.
Large parts of Europe are basically forests that have been temporarily cut down. If you let the land be, the forest will often grow back with minimal effort.
Saplings? Wouldn't it be easier to seed? Or you could plant a few more mature trees sparsely and rely on them to seed?
I am amazed by the idea (also popular among many in California) that one can “outsource” climate change to poor, developing countries by not producing for yourself
Google says: “California is the largest agricultural exporter in the United States”
California imports about 30% of its energy from other states. [1]
More importantly, most of the gas Californias consume is imported as well.
I guess its OK to drill and build coal electric plants as well as it is elsewhere. /s
[1] https://www.perplexity.ai/search/how-much-energy-california-...
The greyed out downvoted comments in this thread makes it look like that dreaded echo chamber that must not be named here.
HN threads are usually much better quality than this ( anyone with opposed ideas are downvoted to oblivion ).
Rubbish thread. Nothing to learn here.
Didn't Bill Gates once say that planting trees has no impact on global warming?
The trees will ride through floods and reduce water flows, improve species diversity for insects, birds, small mammals, improve temperatures and ameliorate winds, provide shelter for farm animals, can enhance grazing. And there's wood to harvest in due course.
There's a lot more reasons to plant trees than direct AGW offset.
A huge amount of farmland is now surplus to production. Grasses and fields of weeds aren't always ideal. Taking land out of production can also attract offset funding for farmers (-yes, this is a secondary economic outcome and may also incur other costs)
People are healthier around trees. People like trees. Even Bill Gates may actually like trees.
If you burn the wood, sure. Forests only capture carbon if you leave that carbon alone forever.
Denmark isn't just trying to reduce their CO2 footprint, though. It's also dealing with terrible soil and water quality, both the result of many years of hyper-intensive farming. That's a local problem that needs local policy to solve.
Trees absolutely can help with climate change, although like everything in this universe, there are nuances at play, such as type of tree, location, etc.
We have done a lot of deforestation, and that absolutely has negatively impacted our climate, and we should work to reverse it.
And he’d be right.
When those trees die and then rot or burn, that CO2 will be released right back into the atmosphere. They’ll temporarily hold some, yeah, but it’s like trying to rapidly fire a squirt gun at a fire when someone else is spraying it with a firehose of gasoline.
Especially because trees plant themselves. If they want to set aside the land for forest and seed it a little to get going - great - but those large tree planting operations are a waste of time at best or carbon credit loopholes at worst.
The corollary to this would be that deforestation hasn't make climate change worse, and a simple Google search tells me that:
> Deforestation plays a significant role in climate change, contributing 12–20% of global greenhouse gas emissions
Most global deforestation involves slash and burn. This releases the carbon stored in the trees. But I think that's OPs point. A growing tree doesn't remove carbon, it temporarily stores it until it dies or burns.
Trees do pull carbon out of the atmosphere, which can be stored in the form of "wood", and it doesn't re-enter the atmosphere until burnt.
or dies and decays
The point of planting trees in Denmark is not to cut CO2 emissions. The point is to restore biodiversity and the health of the environment. I assume the situation is similar in countries like the Netherlands.
Climate and environment are two separate things, and are in fact sometimes at odds with each other. Denmark is doing semi-alright on climate, but is absolutely terrible on environment. Aquatic ecosystems in the country are basically completely destroyed by agriculture, to the point where previously productive shallow waters are completely dead due to oxygen depletion.
He also once said that 640KB should be enough for anyone, so ... let's take his opinion with a grain of salt. Affluence does not equal wisdom.
He denies it, and even if he said it, it was 1981 and I doubt he meant "forever".
> Affluence does not equal wisdom.
True
Just waiting for someone to factcheck about planting trees: there must be nuance. In australia we burn em to protect people and the environment for example. We have done it for millenia.
You could plant a trillion trees tomorrow but it won't help anything so long as places like China and India pollute the oceans with millions of tones of plastic waste trash every year. That's in the thousands of tones per day region. The sheer scale of pollution there makes Denmark's measly little contribution just that, peanuts. No wonder the farmers are upset. They're destroying their own industry and people's livelihood and food security, for barely moving the needle on the altar of enviromentalism.
This is a type of fallacy. Denmark as a country is politically relatively powerless compared to China or the US, or even Germany, but each citizen has about the same or more power compared to each citizen in those larger countries.
The fallacy is to say "I, as an individual in a small country, cannot do anything because these other large countries are, collectively, much more powerful". Well, no kidding. Any Denmark-sized administrative section of a larger country (say, a US state, a Chinese province, or a German bundesland) has the same or smaller influence on the climate. Often a much smaller influence due to how international diplomacy works.
It's a category error. Whether progress is made in Denmark-sized chunks or in US/EU/China/Germany-sized chunks is irrelevant, as long as the average velocity per human is the same on a global scale. It's not high enough at the moment, but it's equally significant wherever it happens.
It’s funny how I also feel peanuts when I vote for elections but also feel very engaged and powerful with that paper holding a nano-minuscule fraction of power.
> They're destroying their own industry and people's livelihood and food security, for barely moving the needle on the altar of enviromentalism.
The environnemental impact of their AG is peanuts on a global scale but cause massive problems on their own lands and coast. Food security will still be largely fine : there’s large surpluses and you are actually safer stocking grains than livestock, especially in modern silos. For industry and livelihood I’m sure those guys are smart enough to shift to others activities. That may be quite easy when you look at the current meat industry profitability.
Plastic pollution in the oceans has nothing to do with climate change.
Let me get this right. Farmers, who are already struggling to meet ends, will have to pay CO2 tax in order to produce FOOD that we all need to SURVIVE and not starve to death? What diabolical plan is that?
I am the a huge fan of forests and spend a lot of time in the woods, but man, more trees will not feed us.
A big percentage of the land usage are to grow crops to feed animals to feed us.
If we bring back our meat consumption (especially beef) to something more balanced for our health we can free-up a massive amount of surface.
I'm not saying that everyone should be vegetarian or vegan. I'm following the notes of the IPCC and studies that says that we can, and should, reduce some of our meat consumption and get those proteines from all the many other sources (peas, tofu...).
Beef is the coal of food. Lets progress to something more efficient, dense and good for our environment and our health.
They are already massively subsidized and this will only increase their subsidies. In Denmark farmers control government similarly to the way big oil abd gunmakers control government in the US.
This is ghoulish - farmland should directly be benefit the endemic population as much as possible! That's what it's there for!
I love green tech like solar etc, made my home even more efficient etc but we need fresh food to LIVE!
Denmark exports a lot of the produced food, and we are one of the most intensely farmed countries in the world, 60.4% of Denmark consists of fields, and 48% of Denmark's land area is used to grow food for animals, animals which are primarily pigs.
We also yearly import 1.8 million tons of soy from South America to feed said pigs, because we can't grow enough food for them ourselves.
It would be nice to have some nature to walk in, it's something I miss here and something there's a lot of in England, and it's great combined with their public footpath system!
Yup, and to add to this, the large majority of this meat is produced for export, and it's sold super cheap, I personally believe a good way of solving this is only giving EU support to non export farming, eg if you receive EU subsidy the good shouldn't be allowed to be exported, or those taxes would have to be repaid.
As currently we're destroying the nature, and waters due to this extremely intensive farming and as others have mentioned Denmark is producing 200-300 % of our domestic need + it requires significant import from south America where it wouldn't surprise me if this import lead to significant deforestation.
I know China is also working on increasing their domestic production[1] which is one of the primary markets that Denmark is exporting a lot to , It was 85000 tons last year[2]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/08/business/china-pork-farms... [2]https://effektivtlandbrug.landbrugnet.dk/artikler/marked/103...
this is about farmland that should never have ben cultivated to begin with, it was a temporary emergency practice from WW2 that lobbyists kept alive after the war.
Climate obsessed people are probably in it for the right reasons but are hysterically annoying from any third party perspective. Keep telling people that cow burps are what is driving bad weather and you can keep being baffled that "deniers" hate any of the solutions you come up with there after. People hate pollution across the board, people hate theoretical models of climate effects based on research divorced from reality that predict weather in 30 years to be a doomsday scenario because of something so obviously mundane while ignoring outsourcing manufacturing to china and india to bus, boat and flight. At this rate we may one day in our lifetime be able to have all the pigs and cattle raised in china and fly them on business class to europe in order to fight the weather via carbon credits.