George Monbiot

For thousands of years, the farmer has been portrayed as our stalwart friend, our enduring hero, our selfless savior. From preschool books to endless tv shows, farmers are held up as the paragons of virtue. From low commodity prices to high debt and little or no financial benefits for themselves, farmers have our sympathy and appreciation. They are a public relations agent’s dream.

But George Monbiot is here to burst that bubble. In Regenesis, Monbiot picks apart the farmer’s role, show more status, and responsibilities in the rapid deterioration of the natural world. Farmers, he says, have an outsized responsibility for our problems. They are not the solution, at least the way things are structured today. It’s time someone exposed farming for what it really is – totally destructive.

In nine tight chapters, Monbiot explains how soil performs at its optimum, how farmers work hard to ensure it works at its worst, how crops fail, how agribusiness has mangled our foods to near worthlessness, how the rich sit on land and collect huge agriculture subsidies (where the only requirement is that the land be stripped bare), and how innovators are discovering ways to return the land to health while providing ever better results.

It’s a lot to absorb, but through it all, it’s the math that is memorable. “You would have to ship a kilo of dried peas roughly one hundred times around the world before its greenhouse gases matched those of a kilo of local beef,” Monbiot says, in one of far too many examples to list here. He says stopping farming is the single most effective move to reduce Man’s carbon footprint. More than cars, more than plastics, more than anything, farming pollutes.

Livestock is the worst. Using the UK, where he lives, and its famous focus on sheep, Monbiot has found that nearly a quarter of agricultural land has been set aside for sheep. That area is twice the areas built up for human habitation – yet results in just 1% of British food. If you consider all livestock together, it requires 51% of arable land. This includes endless acres planted solely for animal feed.

Here’s how the land grab shakes out: “To produce 100 grams of soy protein, eaten by humans in the form of tofu, requires just over two square meters of land. To raise 100 grams of egg protein requires just under six square meters. Chicken protein needs seven, and pork ten square meters. Chickens and pigs need more land than tofu does because they cannot turn everything they eat into meat, as they have to sustain themselves and build other body parts. Milk … requires an average of 27 square meters, beef 163 and lamb 185. Lamb protein, in other words, requires 84 times as much land to grow as soy protein.” Because of all the land an animal requires, it is simply not possible raise enough of them to feed the world the meat it demands more and more of. The numbers just don’t work. By dropping meat and dairy from farm production, we would reduce land requirements by 76% and greenhouse gases by 60%. Livestock is by far the biggest contributor putting Man at risk of raising the global temperature by more than 1.5°C. We cannot achieve the temperature goal as long as farming remains as is. Farming will take us all down.

But it’s worse. Only 4% of animals are wild any more – the rest are domesticated. Farming, Monbiot says, is the biggest cause of habitat destruction. Of 28,000 species at risk of extinction, 24,000 are due to farming, he found.

“I believe farmers have too many rights and freedoms: the right to build giant chicken barns without environmental permits or use vast tracts of land to produce tiny amounts of food; the freedom to trash the soil, pollute the rivers and intimidate neighbors who object. But in other countries, they have too few, and can easily be evicted by land-grabbers. While the rights of big companies are guaranteed by international treaties, local people often have no protection, and governments and businesses sometimes collude to throw them off their land.” So it’s complicated, and no one solution fits all.

It wouldn’t be so bad if the system worked, but it doesn’t. Monbiot spends the first chapter outlining how soil actually works without farmers improving it, and it can be astounding.

Soil operates much like coral reefs do in the oceans – harboring innumerable lifeforms, co-operating with others, building with still others. Monbiot says “The soil might be the most complex of all living systems. Yet we treat it like dirt.” (Yes, he said like dirt.) There is not a single soil ecology institute in the world, he maintains, and all the grant money available is for how to destroy it, not foster it.

Soil is a complex being. It has several layers we never think about. For example, the rhizosphere layer harbors the roots of annual plants. He calls it their external guts. A whole civilization of bacteria, insects, and microbes make their livings there, and nowhere else. And it is totally symbiotic. Plants attract those other beings for the benefits they offer, and the insects and microbes flourish there, while also acting as predators or nutrient providers. Trees make specific cavities for certain insects. Fungi string astoundingly long lines of communication between and along the root systems, even connecting trees which use those lines to communicate chemical changes and warnings to each other. Plowing the plants under takes all the lifeforms along to their deaths as well.
Ants make extensive and complex tunnel systems, which collect moisture and save it, preventing the soil from drying out. Same for worms. Separately, they all reinforce their tunnels and holes with homemade cements, giving the soil shape, firmness and springiness. Compare this to tilled soil, which blows away as dust. Eight hundred earthworms per square meter is a desirable achievement, not a call for pesticides. But that’s how farms operate.

Tilled soil is dead, sterile and useless as is. It loses all its nutrient value as the same crops are replanted year after year, draining it of its variety and attractiveness to other life. Which leads to terrific over-fertilizing, almost all of which is wasted: “There is no correlation between agrochemical use and productivity or profitability,” Monbiot cites in a 2019 paper in Scientific Reports. It also pollutes rivers on the way to polluting the oceans, as most forms of life cannot withstand the amounts of nitrogen choking the waters. So farm roadkill include all kinds of fish and crustaceans downstream, a thousand miles away. For example, the USFDA specifies no one should eat more than four Gulf (of Mexico) shrimp in any 30 day period (a shrimp cocktail contains five), as they have become toxic to humans from runoff in the cornfields of the Midwest. Ask a farmer in Iowa and he will tell you: “Not my problem.”

Monbiot can also be colorful. Farmers are not who you think they are. To make this point, he took a mirror image of his own principles. It’s worth citing in full, because this is the state of the art:

“Let’s shut down the food factories. Let’s replace the food they make by catching some wild animals—aurochs, wild boar, jungle fowl and a woolly ruminant from Mesopotamia would do—modifying them drastically and breeding them in stupendous numbers. Let’s separate the young from their mothers, castrate them, dock their tails, clip their beaks, teeth and horns without anesthesia, herd them into barns and cages, subject them to extreme boredom and sensory deprivation for their short, distressing lives, then corral them into giant factories where we stun them, cut their throats, skin, pluck and hack their bloody flesh into chunks that you, the lucky customer, will want to eat (oh yes you will!). I’ve done the sums—we’d need to slaughter only 75 billion animals a year.

“Let’s kill the baby aurochs, extract a chemical from the lining of their fourth stomachs and mix it with milk from lactating mothers of the same species, to create a wobbly mass of fat and protein. We’ll stir in some live bacteria to digest this mass, then let their excrements sit till they go hard and yellow and start to stink. You’re really going to want this!

“Let’s fell the forests, drain the wetlands, seize the wild grasslands, expel the indigenous people, kill the large predators, exclude the wild herbivores, trigger the global collapse of wildlife, climate breakdown and the destruction of the habitable planet. Let’s fence most of this land for our captive animals to graze, and plant the rest with crops to make them fat. Let’s spray the crops with biocidal toxins and minerals that’ll leach into the soil and water. Let’s divert the rivers and drain the aquifers. Let’s pour billions of tons of shit into the sea. Let’s trigger repeated plagues, transmitted to humans by the animals we’ve captured, and destroy the efficacy of our most important medicines.

“Sure, it will trash everything after a while, but think of the fun we’ll have. Come on, you know you want this.”

The last half of the book deals with people discovering ways around the mess. Monbiot details examples of land management that works. Using predators to control pests (if you have aphids, you have a predator problem, not an aphid problem, he discovers. Spraying for aphids is the wrong response). And most promising: a perennial version of wheat called kernza, whose roots grow to over three feet (as far down as the plant is tall) as they participate in the underground society of shared strength and resistance. Nor do they need to be replanted, or refertilized annually, and they fight off pests themselves. Also taste better. Imagine that.

And yet, the innovators get stymied. Big Ag doesn’t want innovation. It wants uniformity and consistency. It specifies plants, seeds, pesticides, warehousing and husbandry. It forces farmers to buy specific goods and services, and finances them, keeping farmers on the hook, disabled from making improvements that might make them different.

There is some movement. In recent years, more and more plant-based meats have become not so much an oddity, but highly sought grocery products. Monbiot found scientists who employ microbes to substitute for meats. They can be grown in hours instead of years, in what amount to breweries. And again, this meat not only tastes as good, but better.

He says milk is almost entirely water, and its key ingredients can be made right now without resorting to cows. Plant-based cheeses and milks are very hot items. He said if he was in the dairy farm business, he’d get out right now. Dairy farms are an anachronism. We can already do this much better than dairy farms do. Meat is next.

But the pressure is on from the old school. Trade associations sue to prevent the new products from using words like milk, butter or cheese, burgers, sausages or hotdogs. Governments award subsidies to traditional farmers and giant agribusinesses, not to innovators. Land clearing is considered a valuable act and is rewarded, while rewilding gets nothing. The incentives are all perfectly wrong, to the tune of half a trillion dollars’ worth, every year.

It’s a complex story with lots backs and forths, ups and downs, thanks to an entrenched industry that has had a chokehold on mankind for 3000 years. And just as most people don’t know where food comes from, they also don’t know this ugly backstory. Regenesis makes up for a lot of that, in a very personal, hopeful and engaging way. Just know that farming is not benign.

David Wineberg show less

This is the first book of George Monbiot's I have read but I am familiar with his newspaper columns so expected this to be well researched, and it is. The end of the book comes more quickly than you expect because of the around 100 pages of bibliography and index. The bursts of humour were unexpected and made this a book written on a human scale. The science is never overwhelming and it is always fascinating. I learnt a lot about soil ecology and growing plants. This is therefore a book you show more can different things from. The big picture about why avoiding meat and dairy is better for the planet is here. The hopeful examples of growers doing things differently are here. The future of farmfree 'meat' substitutes is explained. I found the concept of agricultural sprawl enlightening and something that I have taken so much for granted. The realisation that it doesn't have to be like this was an eye opener. '... over many years as an environmental campaigner, I've slowly reached an outrageous conclusion. One of the greatest threats to life on Earth is poetry.' George Monbiot backs up this flippant statement with many examples of bucolic herders. The subtitle is feeding the world without devouring the planet and he constantly refers back to this as his focus. Locally grown this and grass-fed that are all very well but they will only feed the rich, not the world. His call for UK subsidies to consumers for fruit and veg, rather than farm subsidies, is compelling and surprisingly cheap! To readers from other countries the book might feel UK-centric but it does refer to farming in other countries but he writes about what he knows. The book is hopeful and life changing. show less

Great Britain remains a self-confessed and highly proud land for being widely open to business and finance. It can make for Kafkaesque situations, such as when the mounted branch of the London Metropolitan police displayed the HSBC logo on its stirrups, or when the queen, during the Millennium, lighted up a firework starting by the giant letters 'BRITISH GAS' illuminating the sky. Such situations, highly ridiculous, can be funny. The journalist George Monbiot, though, starkly reminds us here show more that there really is nothing to laugh about.

Such silly facts, far from being isolated, reflect indeed for him the massive takeover exerted by corporates now invading even the pillars of our democracy. Here's the burning question, then: whose interests, exactly, are serving our governments? That of the citizens electing them? Or that of private and powerful companies snaking their way even into our laws? The multiple examples he offers leave us wondering, to say the least...

To clearly illustrate his point, he delves in here upon this very peculiar British way, radical and original, to finance most of our public services -the Private Finance Initiative (PFI). Set up by the Tories and gone mad under the New Labour, such delegating of costs to private companies has had indeed a terrible impact from public transports to infrastructures, education, the NHS, the prison system, and, even, the development of public spaces, all fields and sectors where private interest (the race for profits) now dominate over public ones, to the point of clashing with them dangerously at times.

It's a worrying picture, yet George Monbiot refuses to be pessimistic. In fact, he claims that if such corporate became so powerful in the first place is because we, citizens, have too often let them and the politicians serving them get away with it all. All is not lost -political engagement and participation coupled with active pressuring campaigns to fight the issue can still make an impact. He, in fact, gives the example the massive protests which happened during the World Trade Organisation conference back in Seattle in 1999, and those results had even impacted the conference itself. Well...

It's a great eye-opener, and the pictures it offers are quite bleak despite the optimism of the author. Do we really have any said in the decisions concerning us all? Published in 2000, so before the 2008 financial crash, such optimism might have been relevant back then. From our vantage point, though, I believe it's quite clear by now that it has been dashed. It doesn't mean this book is irrelevant. In fact, if anything, it shows that the writing was on the wall long ago already. Tories, Labour: who cares? It's the same establishment, with the same interests, and run by oligarchs trapped in the same bubble away from the reality most of the rest of us experience. With public services on their knees, I don't think there's much left to save... Kafkaesque it was back then; Kafkaesque it will remains, then. show less

An in-depth look at the way we grow our food, focusing on an oft overlooked part of the system: the soil in which plants grow and animals tread. Rather than mere "dirt", it is a fascinating and complex ecosystem, with myriad little critters and delicate balances of chemistry and biology. If this system is thrown out of whack (as in modern farming methods), then ever more drastic measures are required to compensate (fertilizers, pesticides, etc.)

But rather than a call to revert to medieval show more farming, the author embraces modern technology, and clearly describes the pros and cons of various alternatives to the factory farm. Although underpinned by environmental ideology, the approach is results driven - how can we sustainably grow enough food to feed the world's population with the minimal impact. This means looking at yields and economic implications, not just quality. Making political and societal changes to reduce subsidies that encourage damaging practices and promote better eating habits.

The main takeaway is that even the lowest impact organic farming is still highly damaging, and that the best way to protect nature is to reduce the physical footprint of the land we farm. Which of course means to reduce wasteful meat production, and alter our diets to rely more on consuming legumes for protein, rather than feeding to animals which we then eat.

He also brilliantly debunks one of Michael Pollan's tenets [that I've complained about previously] that we avoid eating things that our great-grandparents would not recognize as food or be able to pronounce. Using his own grandmother (born in 1911) as an example, he lists the staples of her diet (canned peas, fresh produce only a few weeks a year in season, lots and lots of salt and sugar, mass produced white bread, etc.) compared to his modern vegan diet with whole grains, fresh vegetables year round, high protein yeast/bacteria products, etc. Most of which she'd deign to serve to the pigs, let alone eat herself.

Although he focuses mostly on the UK, most of the content is relevant to the rest of the world too. show less