ASH CLOUD

Of the 25 countries that are least able to adapt to the impacts of climate change about 14 of those countries or 56% are currently affected by armed conflict. The intersection of conflict and food insecurity is an area of series concern in many of the places where the International Committee of the Red Cross works. The 2023 global report of food crises reported that around 250 million people globa...

Currently over 50% of the world’s population is undernourished. There is generally not a shortage of food calories but a shortage of nutrients. This issue exists in rich countries, middle income countries, and poor countries. The traditional solution that has provided these nutrients to human populations for thousands of years is animals, both farmed livestock and hunted wild species. In recent de...

Everyday choices are made about the food we eat by all 8 billion people on the planet. These choices impact our health and the health of the environment and climate. But what drives us to make the decisions we do and what would need to be done to change our decision making to improve both our health and reduce the environmental impact of food production.  I recently caught up with Prof. Barbara Mu...

Creating a win win for farmers/ranchers and the environment would be game changing across the whole livestock climate space. The key is to understand the kinetics of methane production by the rumen microbiome and identify opportunities to capture that energy within the animal for production. This approach mitigates methane emissions and decreases feed costs. Plus, creating this win win overcomes t...

Management is the greatest limitation to reducing the environmental impact of livestock systems. Farming is managing an ecosystem. When we work with nature to manage that ecosystem, then nature works with us to improve the water cycle, improve the nutrient cycle, and to sequester more carbon in the soil. The challenge is, how do we improve every individual farmer understanding of their landscapes,...

In East Africa, what we are now calling regenerative agriculture is basically kitchen gardening for food security, without the reliance on inputs, which is the traditional method of growing food. How do we evaluate the sustainability of  production systems in the Global South and how do these compare to those in the Global North? Comparisons are challenging. In the Global South most animals are mu...

Microbes communicate, they make decisions, they collaborate, and they fight. Sometimes they are good guys and other times they are bad guys. Understanding the importance of individual species withing the ecosystem and how species interact is critical for navigating our food sustainability challenges. The good news is that animals with higher feed efficiency produce less methane. However, our under...

Humans are the cause of climate change.  Climate change is also biodiversity loss, desertification, mega fires and climate change that are all feeding off each other and spiralling out of control. The way humans manage fossil fuels, livestock, and the the environment is what is leading to the continual degradation of the natural world. In the 1960's Allan initiated an elephant culling program...

The question of what is a good microbiome all depends on the perspective you are asking. The answer differs if your lens from the perspective of the animal, humans, the microbes, or the climate. The relationships are complex. Microbes produce vital energy and nutrients for the animal. They allow our grazing animals to transform fibrous herbs, shrubs, and grasses into nutrient dense food. They recy...

Climate policy has been weaponised in Australia over recent decades. The situation in other countries is frequently not dissimilar. The lack of real action on climate change resulted in over one third of Australian voters rejecting the major parties in preference of environmentally progressive ‘Teal’ independents at the 2022 federal election. Zoe Daniel is one of seven Teal Independent who are now...

We are always going to have emissions from growing food. There is no way agriculture can get to zero emissions. More than any other industry climate change affects agriculture and agriculture effects climate change. Britt Groosman leads efforts to decrease the environmental footprint of food production at the Environmental defense Fund (https://www.edf.org/). The initial focus are the world’s larg...

There is arguably more land under the management of people producing beef, sheep, and goats than under any other industry. Having access to all these people and the land they manage provides an opportunity to impact a significant percentage of the world’s land area. Creating the incentives to encourage and reward climate friendly and nature positive livestock management practices is both one of th...

When Lance Baumgard first started working with the Arizona dairy industry, he quickly noticed the existing dogma around metabolic disease, inflammatory disease, and animal productivity didn’t stack up. Questioning why the aggressive attempts to treat metabolic disease over the previous 30 years had led to no reduction in disease incidence he concluded that the industry could be focusing on the sym...

The concern is not just climate change itself but how climate change relates to other parts of our society. Our current political and societal system is not able to deal with the complex interactions between all the issues. Population growth, climate change, the pandemic, economic crisis, energy transition, supply chain disruption, and the conflict in Eastern Europe are all being dealt with reacti...

When a delegate stood up and said to the audience “I just can’t understand why a strategy of cheap food could ever be wrong,” at a 1995 Common Agricultural Policy conference no one questioned the wisdom of this statement.  Almost 30 years later, this and other well ingrained paradigms are being re-evaluated. The big questions are whether cheap food is sufficiently valued by our society and how muc...

There’s a battle going on in the rumen of all cattle over hydrogen. When the methanogens are winning, livestock methane emissions rise, and milk and meat production decrease. When the acetogens win, milk and meat production increase, and methane emissions decline. The best opportunity available to limit the climate impact of our food systems and provide highly nutritious food to the world’s popula...

High tech production systems can produce highly nutrient dense foods. Food processing is a technology, it’s an enabler. It’s the formulations that are usually the conundrum.   Every component in food has an important role to play. There are thousands of biologically active compounds above and beyond the few dozen essential nutrients, vitamins, and minerals. These all work together to impact our he...

One or two healthy chickens can significantly improve the health and prosperity of marginalized communities. Poultry recycle food scraps and garden waste, forage insects and worms to produce eggs which provide much needed protein and income. The Kyeema Foundation ( https://kyeemafoundation.org/ ) is working with some of the world’s poorest communities to protect household poultry from disease. Kye...

Food, movement, social engagements, play, and stress.  These are all key drivers of how well our brain’s function and how cognitive function declines with age. It’s also the same for our dogs and cats. At a cellular level its largely about maintaining mitochondrial function, managing inflammation, and managing oxidative stress. What that means for the less technical of us is that exercise, social...

The effects of antibiotic use in livestock are far greater than the human health impacts of antimicrobial resistance. It is estimated that 90% of the antibiotics given to livestock end up in the soil. Despite these antibiotics no longer being detectable in manure they still significantly impact the soil microbiome. Research shows that these antibiotics reduce the ability of the soil to capture and...

Agriculture impacts climate change and climate change impacts agriculture. Dr Richard Eckard from the University of Melbourne has spent the last 20 years working on better understanding these interactions. In conversation, with Ash Sweeting, Richard discusses how today, changes in management practices can reduce livestock emissions by 10-15% and the potential for new products in development to red...

Joe McFadden Discusses – Collaboration, the value of existing research, innovative ways of leveraging the energy and passion of students to get the most of Cornell’s new respiratory chambers.   Livestock sustainability is a much more complex issue than inhibiting methane production. Holistic solutions are needed that also maintain nutrient digestibility, reduce nitrogen pollution, maintain efficie...

We don’t understand what it is we are eating! Our health is directly connected to the soil health in which our food is grown. Research is showing that the nutrient composition of foods can vary over 100 times between two identical looking food items. A tomato is not a tomato and an apple is not an apple. The research is showing that the greatest determinant  of nutrient density is cover cropping a...

Anastasia Volkova discusses sustainable farming, incentives for behavioural change, and  the importance of understanding the farming system when implementing regenerative agriculture.  When it comes to sustainable food production, we are all responsible.  The world forced farming to be this way because we wanted to support growth that is not sustainable.  Regrow is the infrastructure for decision...

With $500 billion how would you design a completely new city and food system from scratch, to feed and house 3 million residents? The city of NEOM is being built on the Red Sea coast in Saudi Arabia. There are no legacy systems to deal with, no existing infrastructure that needs considering and maintaining. The city is literally rising out of the desert and you have an open book when it comes to p...