Reddit reviews Will Bonsall's Essential Guide to Radical, Self-Reliant Gardening: Innovative Techniques for Growing Vegetables, Grains, and Perennial Food Crops with Minimal Fossil Fuel and Animal Inputs

Check out this book:

It's the best resource I've found, with deeply detailed instructions on everything from layout to composting and more.

Will Bonsall's Essential Guide to Radical, Self-Reliant Gardening

Will Bonsall's Essential Guide to Radical, Self-Reliant Gardening

Responses to articles, part one

As an aside, I do recognize that the greatest challenge facing veganic farming is the need for fertilizer and, ideally, a closed nitrogen cycle. Many (but not all) veganic alternatives to manure require the direct mining of the relevant minerals, which is terrible for the environment and workers. I think the strongest case for the use of animal products is crop fertilizer. There are some vegan agricultural practices that do away with fertilizer entirely, but these are difficult to scale up and only work withing certain ecosystems.

I don't think this justifies killing animals before they can live our their natural lifespan, but it might suggest that until the requisite paradigms are in place, (in the developed world) animals be kept in sanctuaries or reserves so we can utilize their manure. That, or increase our use of human waste for these purposes.

That said, I didn't find much in the articles you linked that support the idea that exploiting animals is necessary to feed the world in a sustainable way. In general, the sources you are pointing to support, at best, the idea that the use of animals is some ways can help with making agriculture more sustainable; I have not yet encountered an argument in these sources that it is necessary. And many articles fails to show even that.

> The use of agricultural resources for global food supply. Understanding its dynamics and regional diversity - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303445365\_The\_use\_of\_agricultural\_resources\_for\_global\_food\_supply\_Understanding\_its\_dynamics\_and\_regional\_diversity)

This is a thesis, so I won't have time to read the entire thing. However, the abstract does not seem to support the necessity of livestock in agriculture. The primary findings are about the need for nitrogen-rich fertilizer in developing countries with poor soil. The other findings are about the differential resource requirements for affleunt and poor diets, which didn't have much to do with meat at all. (In fact, meat is mentioned as a "luxury" element of the former).

The most relevant point I could find is this:

>some regions have traditional vegetarian diets with dairy products which do not necessarily use fewer resources than diets with large consumption of meat.

But this is extremely inconclusive. For one, the diet is vegetarian, not vegan. Two, the claim is that these diets do not "necessarily" use fewer resources than a meat-based diet; the relevant claim for your purposes would have to be "diets with large consumption of meat necessarily (or often) use fewer resources than a plant-based diet."

>The future of food and agriculture. Trends and Challenges - http://www.fao.org/3/a-i6583e.pdf

Initial skepticism: The FAO is an arm of the UN, but part of its stated mission is to support sustainable animal agriculture and fisheries. So again, I would not consider this a great source.

Anyway, this is another massive document that covers lots of things irrelevant to our discussion. In the future, it would be nice if you could point to the relevant sections rather than have be look through hundreds of pages.

The report is about how to feed the growing population sustainably. Skimming through it, I did not kind much that showed that we need animals in order to do this.

The report does mention the important of agroecology and changes to farming practices to reduce the need to import nutrients:

>Recent years have seen a growing trend towards the adoption of conservation agriculture. This approach seeks to reduce soil disturbance by mechanical tillage, maintain a protective organic cover on the soil surface, and cultivate a wider range of plant species – both annuals and perennials – in associations, sequences and rotations that may include trees, shrubs, pastures and crops. It promotes, for example, the integration into cropping systems of pulses and legumes that help build up and maintain soil nitrogen levels.

None of this essentially has to do with livestock. If there are parts of the report that do argue this, I am happy to have them pointed out to me.

The report does assert that " Healthy livestock is crucial for achieving the sustainable production of nutritious and accessible food for everyone." But is just that; an assertion. It's not part of the data, nor is it backed up by any of the data presented in the report.

It is undeniable that many people in poorer countries now require livestock to survive. I am not arguing that we should take the livestock of these people away. Vegans are mostly focused on the developed world, and this report does nothing to suggest that the developed world needs to either consume meat or use animals in others ways in agricultural practice in order to sustainably survive.