Inheritance Tax – Just Not The Case!

Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisc.

November 30, 2017.   Jim Goodman’s family has farmed land in Wonewoc, WI since 1889. Small farms like his don’t pay the estate tax, so why do Republicans claim ending the inheritance tax will help family farmers? Because it sounds better than cutting taxes for millionaires. Hear what Jim has to say about this >>

Just Not the Case

Jim Goodman’s family has farmed land in Wonewoc, WI since 1889. Small farms like his don’t pay the estate tax, so why do Republicans claim ending the inheritance tax will help family farmers? Because it sounds better than cutting taxes for millionaires. Hear what Jim has to say about this >>

Posted by Tammy Baldwin on Wednesday, November 29, 2017

The Week

GOP senator says tax cuts must be followed by ‘structural changes to Social Security and Medicare’

Peter Weber    November 30, 2017

Senate Republicans started the clock for a final vote on their tax plan Wednesday evening, but among the unresolved demands from GOP waverers is a provision to prevent the bill from adding up to $1.5 trillion to the federal deficit over 10 years. No serious analysis has suggested the growth from slashing taxes for corporations and other businesses would make up that shortfall, and Republicans haven’t offered any evidence. At a Politico Playbook forum on Wednesday, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said that cutting taxes needs to be followed by cutting spending on popular federal programs.

“I analyze this very differently than most,” Rubio said. “Many argue that you can’t cut taxes because it will drive up the deficit. But we have to do two things. We have to generate economic growth which generates revenue, while reducing spending. That will mean instituting structural changes to Social Security and Medicare for the future.” He suggested reducing benefits and raising the retirement age for future retirees, so people can prepare for the changes. “Tax reform is the economic component of this equation,” Rubio said. “When more people are working, there are more taxpayers and more revenue, but that alone won’t be enough. You are still going to have a debt problem in the absence of spending cuts.”

The broadly unpopular tax bill — rushed through with almost no debate or expert testimony and zero Democratic input — would have wide-ranging and uncertain effects on all Americans. As AARP noted, the legislation already includes $25 billion in automatic Medicare cuts for next year alone, along with $111 billion in other cuts to federal programs, and it would either raise taxes or keep them the same for 6.3 million Americans 65 or older in 2019 and 10.8 million by 2027. President Trump, who is pushing the legislation hard, promised during the campaign he would not change Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security. You can watch Rubio’s interview at PoliticoPeter Weber

Jim Carrey calls for removal of ‘soulless traitors’ in White House and Congress

RawStory

Jim Carrey calls for removal of ‘soulless traitors’ in White House and Congress

Travis Gettys       November 30, 2017

Jim Carrey at the Jane Fonda Hand And Foot Print Ceremony as part of the 2013 TCM Classic Film Festival (s_bukley / Shutterstock.com)

Actor Jim Carrey lashed out at congressional Republicans for their “soulless” tax reform scheme.

The actor and comedian tweeted out a call to action Wednesday to remove President Donald Trump and his GOP accomplices from office.

“The GOP and WH have become sinister conclaves of souless (sic) traitors, liars and thieves – a gangrene we must remove so democracy can live,” Carrey tweeted.

View image on Twitter

Jim Carrey, The GOP and WH have become sinister conclaves of souless traitors, liars and thieves – a gangrene we must remove so democracy can live. #killthebill   November 29, 2017

Child Hunger in America

 PBS‘s video to the group: Veterans against the G.O.P.

November 30, 2017

Is this what America has become? The party that calls themselves pro-life, spends 14 trillion per year on our war machines, but cannot feed, house, provide medical care or educate our people??? Child hunger is a REAL issue affecting real children in real life so please STOP claiming free-school meals to children provide an empty soul.

Child Hunger in America

Kaylie’s family can’t afford a refrigerator. Johnny dreams of eating meals somewhere other than a shelter. Here’s a candid look at hunger in America, explained by three kids living in “food-insecure” homes. (From FRONTLINE)

Posted by PBS on Wednesday, November 22, 2017

PBS. Kaylie’s family can’t afford a refrigerator. Johnny dreams of eating meals somewhere other than a shelter. Here’s a candid look at hunger in America, explained by three kids living in “food-insecure” homes. (From FRONTLINE)

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders: We Must Stop the Immoral Republican Tax Bill.

Will County Progressives and Let the Revolution Begin. Peacefully of Course.shared U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders‘s live video.

Pathetic, disgraceful, immoral. How else can I describe the Republican tax plan? It must be stopped.

We Must Stop the Immoral Republican Tax Plan

Pathetic, disgraceful, immoral. How else can I describe the Republican tax plan? It must be stopped.

Posted by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders on Wednesday, November 29, 2017

GOP Senate Pushes Tax Scam Bill

MoveOn.org

Senator Jeff Merkley: “America should rise up and make sure this bill dies.”

The vote is happening soon. Call your senator today: (855) 999-1663

Sen. Jeff Merkley shreds the Trump tax scam: “This is the art …

LIKE and SHARE if you agree with Senator Jeff Merkley: The #TrumpTaxScam is a massive bank heist for the super rich and big corporations.

Posted by CREDO Mobile on Tuesday, November 28, 2017

The Latest Republican Tax Proposal Is the Dumbest Yet

The Nation

The Latest Republican Tax Proposal Is the Dumbest Yet

Who are the tax wizards who came up with this one?

By David Dayen      November 29, 2017

McConnell Republican Tax PlanMitch McConnell holds a news conference to talk about the Republican tax plan in Washington, DC, November 28, 2017. (AP Photo / J. Scott Applewhite)

The negotiations over the Trump tax overhaul have moved from tragedy to farce. You could let monkeys bang on typewriters for several millennia and not come up with an idea as profoundly stupid as what Senate Republicans added Tuesday to appease one of their own members.

Before we get to that, let’s be clear that this astonishingly dumb notion is being scooped on top of a bill that is already economically illiterate. It’s painstakingly designed to punish people making under $75,000 a year and those who happen to live in states that didn’t vote for Donald Trump. It benefits wealthy investors and wealthy people who incorporate; basically being wealthy or being a member of the Trump family is the prerequisite. CEOs (“the most excited group out there,” according to the bill’s architect, Gary Cohn) have given away the game in earnings calls by admitting that the corporate tax cuts, easily the largest chunk of the bill, would flow out to shareholders in dividends and stock buybacks, rather than used to create jobs or raise wages. The bill is a gift to capital owners at workers’ expense.

But Senator Bob Corker and some of his colleagues, like Oklahoma’s James Lankford, are showing some residual concern about deficits. In response, GOP leaders initially limited the total cost of the tax cuts to $1.5 trillion over 10 years, and under Senate rules the bill could not raise the deficit at all after that. Republican leaders reached that number with a variety of gimmicks, like having the individual tax cuts expire after 2025 (while the corporate bounty lives on), and by assuming absurdly high economic gains from the cuts.

Corker called their bluff. He said that as long as everyone believes the tax cuts will super-charge economic growth, he wants a trigger that would automatically raise taxes if those rosy assumptions don’t come to pass. And because the bill can’t pass without the Corker bloc, Mitch McConnell gave it to him. This was enough to pass the package out of the Senate Budget Committee; Corker voted yes and was the margin of victory. Combined with some concessions to Susan Collins, the prospects for Senate passage look pretty decent.

We don’t have the specific details yet, and probably won’t until tomorrow. But just based on the concept, I can unreservedly say that this provision would make the name “Cut Cut Cut Act” seem like the work of Albert Einstein.

Creating automatic tax increases in the event of slow economic growth defies every macroeconomic impulse of the past century. It’s the kind of thinking that got us into the Great Depression, and more recently got places like Greece into a decade of suffering. When the economy slows down, government needs to serve as the spender of last resort by providing stimulus, either in the form of laying out funds or cutting taxes, or both. Either way, it would increase the deficit during a downturn, cycling that money through the economy to influence a recovery. Corker’s trigger would do the opposite. It would decrease the deficit if the economy didn’t reach certain performance targets. It would institute austerity during a time of slow growth. It would result in a tax cut bill almost certain to raise taxes at the worst possible moment.

And by the way, there are already triggers in the bill: The individual changes expire in 2025, which will raise taxes for much of the population. It’s impossible to forecast where the economy will be when that kicks in, but it’s at least plausible that the 2025 trigger and the Corker trigger will hit at the same time, when the economy is struggling, creating an almost guaranteed recession. The concept is, as Matt Yglesias calls it, an “automatic destabilizer.”

Now, none of this should matter to conservatives, not just because they don’t believe in Keynesian fiscal policy. They think it’s axiomatic that tax cuts pay for themselves with economic growth, so the triggers would never come into play. And that’s where the reaction to the triggers gets interesting. All the major conservative groups—the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, Grover Norquist’s American’s for Tax Reform, the US Chamber of Commerce—have come out sharply against the triggers. If anything has let the slip show about the intellectual bankruptcy of conservative ideas, this is it. They don’t actually believe their own bullshit about tax cuts and economic growth, at least not enough to gamble on it.

The bigger problem for Republicans is that members of the Senate seem as opposed to the triggers as the conservative K Street establishment. Chuck Grassley was sharply negative about the idea yesterday; so was Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey and John Kennedy of Louisiana, until adding later that he was “keeping an open mind.” The banging from the Norquists and Kochs of the world is bound to flip some more votes.

There’s perhaps a solution of a pretend, convoluted trigger designed to never fire, which would somehow satisfy the Corker bloc while reassuring conservative anti-taxers. And to be sure, there’s a ton of momentum to get to yes here. Republicans have organized themselves, almost unilaterally, around tax cuts for the past several decades, and they appear determined not to let details or unpopularity get in the way. And if the deficit is a problem, that’s when they implement phase two: cut social spending to the bone, balancing the budget on the backs of the vulnerable while the rich get a windfall.

So maybe that’s the way out, and the Corker bloc folds with a fake trigger and a promise to eat the poor. But if anything close to the original concept makes it into law, Republicans will have accomplished a signature feat: They’ll have created a kind of economic Hamburger Helper that makes recessions into depressions, instantly.

David Dayen is the author of Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud, which won the Studs and Ida Terkel Prize.

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GOP refuses to learn the lessons of Kansas’ failed tax experiment

MSNBC                                                           

The Rachel Maddow Show / The Maddow Blog

GOP refuses to learn the lessons of Kansas’ failed tax experiment

In this Jan. 12, 2016 file photo, Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback speaks to the legislature in Topeka, Kan. (Photo by Orlin Wagner/AP)In this Jan. 12, 2016 file photo, Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback speaks to the legislature in Topeka, Kan.    Photo by Orlin Wagner/AP

By Steve Benen    November 29, 2017

Shortly after the 2012 elections, with Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback’s (R) radical economic experiment already underway, then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said of his former colleague’s plan, “This is exactly the sort of thing we want to do here, in Washington, but can’t, at least for now.”

At the time, McConnell’s ambitions were largely irrelevant. Barack Obama was in the White House, a Democratic majority controlled the Senate, and there was simply no way Democrats would consider “the sort of thing” Brownback created in Kansas.

But five years later, McConnell and his GOP allies have all the power they need to impose a Kansas-style experiment on the nation. Many who saw Kansas’ failures first hand have some advice to Republican policymakers: Stop.

The Kansas City Star published a piece over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend from Steve Rose, who described himself as a “Bob Dole Republican,” and who lamented the fact that Kansas’ failed tax plan and the current GOP tax plan “are twins.”

Republicans at the federal level are claiming, just like Brownback did, that there will not be a resulting massive deficit if taxes are slashed. Most independent, non-partisan researchers predict a $1.5 trillion deficit will be the result of the tax cuts that have been proposed.

Blinded Republicans claim these huge tax cuts for businesses and the wealthy will stimulate the economy enough that overall revenue will grow, not shrink. Revenue growth is supposed to trickle down to the middle-class taxpayers.

Sound familiar? That is exactly what was sold to Kansans, who saw their state’s budget hemorrhage. Nothing trickled down except cuts in services for the middle class.

The Kansas City Star’s editorial board published a related piece this morning, asking Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), “Why take this failed experiment nationwide?”

Moran endorsed his party’s regressive tax plan yesterday. Perhaps he hasn’t paid close enough attention to what happened in his own state this decade.

To be sure, there are some differences between Kansas’ disastrous plan and the proposal Donald Trump is pushing now. The current plan, for example, goes further to hurt working families’ health security.

But as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities recently explained, “[T]he GOP leaders’ federal tax-cut plan closely follows Kansas’ failed experiment. And many of the same salesmen who touted the Kansas plan in 2012 now are making the same type of outsized claims that the proposed federal tax cuts will ignite remarkable economic growth.”

As regular readers probably know, the scope of Kansas’ failed experiment is not in doubt. Brownback working with a GOP-led legislature, cut taxes far beyond what the state could afford, slashed public investments, and waited for prosperity to flourish across every corner of the state.

None of that happened. Not only have Kansas’ job growth and economic growth rates lagged behind neighboring states, but the state’s budget is in shambles, and Kansas’ debt rating has been downgraded multiple times.

The state has since decided to go in a different direction, though local officials realize it will take many years to undo the damage. Willfully ignorant Republicans at the national level seem desperate to repeat the same mistakes.

These Cutting-Edge Farms Are Pioneering Ways To Reduce Their Water

FaSTCoMPANY

These Cutting-Edge Farms Are Pioneering Ways To Reduce Their Water

In Kansas, “water-technology farms” are developing farming methods and technology to help cut water use by massive amounts. But it might not be enough for the local aquifer to recover.

[Photo: Jonathan Brinkhorst/Unsplash]

By Adele Peters       November 29, 2017

When farmers in Kansas began drilling wells to tap into groundwater in the 1940s and 1950s, they initially thought the water–coming from the massive Ogallala Aquifer, which sprawls over 174,000 square miles in eight states–was an inexhaustible source. Now, studies suggest that the aquifer will be 70% depleted in less than 50 years. So some farmers in the area are now testing technology to help preserve water, and agriculture, as long as possible.

“With the Ogallala Aquifer in decline, it’s not a matter of if it’s going to go dry, it’s when,” says Tom Willis, who owns a farm near Garden City in southwestern Kansas, as well as two ethanol plants in the state. “That puts a severe hardship on my company here.”

Willis wants the farm to last well into the future for his son, and the ethanol plants also rely on local crops to be economically viable. So he decided to participate in a three-year pilot project that the state calls water-technology farms. “I had a very much vested interest in saying, are there technologies out there that allow farmers to be just as productive as they have been, and yet reduce the strain on the aquifer?”

On his farm, sensors now measure how quickly water is drawn from wells, and sensors deep in the soil measure moisture. “To the eye, it may seem like you need to water, but the moisture probe will say you don’t need water yet,” he says. That technology is combined with a precision drip irrigation system that can use as much as 50% less water than standard irrigation. A weather system on the farm measures precipitation, humidity, and wind. He is also experimenting with planting different crops with lower water requirements–wheat, for example, uses far less water than corn.

[Photo: Henry Be/Unsplash]The farm also uses traditional low-spray nozzles, so Willis and advisors from Kansas State Extension can study how much the shift in technology helps. Willis’s farm is one of 15 water-technology farms in the state.

Farming is responsible for more than 90% of the water that comes from the aquifer. The water in it accumulated slowly over time, and agriculture has sucked it dry much more quickly. “It accumulated over hundreds of thousands of years,” says Keith Gido, a professor at Kansas State University. “So once we have the technology to pump that water out, once it’s applied to crops and it evaporates, then it’s lost. That pool of water that’s underground becomes depleted. Just normal rainfall is not enough to recharge the system.”

That affects not only agriculture, but ecology. In a recent paper, Gido and coauthors documented that across one part of the region above the aquifer, 346 miles of streams have already gone dry, and fish habitat has disappeared.

The challenge is large: the states that can access the aquifer have no coordinated plan to save it. And even if farmers implement state of the art technology to save water, they’re prolonging the inevitable: Wells will eventually run dry–many already have.

Still, the water-technology farms can help. “We’re seeing some real farmer champions,” says Daniel Devlin, director of the Kansas Water Resources Institute. “I think that’s leading to a wide discussion there in some areas where they’ve either voluntarily reduced their water consumption, or they’re trying to plan on how to do that. So I’m pretty encouraged. I’m really seeing action out there.”

In one county, he says, farmers voted to reduce water use 20% over a five year period. They ended up exceeding their goal, while maintaining profitability. And new technology, including remote sensing from drones, has yet to be implemented.

“There’s a bunch of stuff that’s going to be available,” says Devlin, who has decades of experience in the field. “I’m frankly surprised. I’m much more encouraged today than I would have ever thought I was five years ago, for example. I see many, many irrigators that really see the problem and they’re trying to make changes, trying to make the water last for more generations than we predicted it would.”

Willis is currently analyzing some of the data from the farm, and says that he–and other farmers–want to see proof that the technology works on large-scale farms like his. That’s one reason that more farmers haven’t already switched to systems like drip irrigation. “With margins out there, they can’t afford a crop failure,” he says. “They can’t afford the capital investment without knowing for sure that it works.”

About The Author

Adele Peters is a staff writer at Fast Company who focuses on solutions to some of the world’s largest problems, from climate change to homelessness. Previously, she worked with GOOD, BioLite, and the Sustainable Products and Solutions program at UC Berkeley.

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Organic Agriculture for 10 Billion People

Resilience

Building a world of resilient communities

Organic Agriculture for 10 Billion People

By Adrian Muller, from Food Climate Research Network            November 27, 2017 

This post is written by Adrian Muller, FCRN member and senior researcher at FiBL (Research Institute of Organic Agriculture) and ETH Zurich, Switzerland. His post is based on the paper Strategies for feeding the world more sustainably with organic agriculture,(link is external) published in Nature Communications earlier in November. 

Organic agriculture can feed the world. The only question thereby being what “feeding the world” may mean. Today, it basically means high shares of animal products in diets and that a third of production is wasted. Projections for 2050 look similar. Does this make sense? No. And this is the entry point for organic agriculture to play a role in sustainable food systems and for contributing to food security.

How can we feed 10 billion people in 2050 while at the same time reducing negative environmental impacts of the food system, such as biodiversity loss and greenhouse gas emissions? Today, we produce about 2850 kcal per capita per day on average globally, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization FAO. These calories come with a high share of animal products. In the FAO projections for 2050, this value is even higher, at well over 3000 kcal per capita and day, and this is supplied for a population that is 30 percent larger than today. Without further changes in food production, this would result in correspondingly higher environmental impacts as well.

Scenarios for future food systems

These values are absurdly high, but there is much room for improvement: imagine, which changes in feeding the world would be possible if we would not produce a third of agricultural output for the garbage can and if we would not use 40 percent of all croplands to grow feed for animals to meet our high demand in animal products. We definitely have enough to eat and there are clearly problems with distribution and access, but I will leave these considerations aside in this short blogpost.

We have to make use of this room for improvements if we want to feed the global population sustainably in 2050. Which role can organic agriculture play in this? Research has shown that it has advantages regarding soil fertility and lower environmental impacts when it comes to nitrogen surplus and eco-toxicity from pesticide use, but the commonly discussed downside is its lower yields.

Figure 1: Organic agriculture improves soil quality: soils under conventional (left) and organic management (right) after heavy rain (from the long-term systems comparison trial DOK; Photo: Research Institute of Organic Agriculture FiBL, Switzerland).

Another interesting question is what role grass-fed animal production may play, where there is no competition for cropland to produce feed or food, while greenhouse gas emissions per kilogram product are higher than for animals that eat concentrate feed.

Such questions can be explored with mass- and nutrient flow models. Such models provide insights into the bio-physical and agronomic feasibility of different scenarios of future food systems. Thereby, economic and social aspects are not addressed albeit they are clearly central as well. It is however legitimate to first focus on the bio-physical and agronomic feasibility and to understand those in detail.

Unavoidable trade-offs

We analyzed the role that organic agriculture may play in sustainable food systems by creating and deploying such a mass and nutrient flow model. The results of this work have recently been published in Nature Communication(link is external). We find that more cropland would be needed than in the conventional reference scenario, to supply the production as projected by the FAO for 2050. We also find, however, that the nitrogen surplus would be reduced significantly, with corresponding positive environmental effects. Furthermore, pesticide use would clearly be reduced as well and even greenhouse gas emissions would be somewhat lower than in the reference scenario.   This is the case for a food system with high shares of animal products in diets, and high wastage volumes.  This would change if we would feed animals with less concentrate feed and more grassland-based forage, and if we would reduce food waste and loss.

In a food system with, for example, 50% less concentrate feed, 50% less food wastage and 100% conversion to organic agriculture, land use would also be lower than in the reference scenario.  Further and more detailed results can be found in the paper linked at the end of this blogpost.

It is important to emphasize that these results clearly depend on a number of central assumptions such as the yield gap between organic and conventional agriculture, the impact of climate change on yield projections, the share of nitrogen fixing legumes in organic crop rotations, or the yields of grass-fed ruminants and from pigs and poultry fed without food-competing concentrates but fed on by-products from food production only. For our main results, we primarily adopted conservative values using higher yield gaps, for example. Results for lower yield gaps and results of sensitivity analyses regarding other key assumptions are reported in the supplementary material to the paper linked below.

In any case, trade-offs are thus always central when assessing the sustainability of agricultural production systems. The negative impacts from high nitrogen surplus and pesticide use can be reduced, if we are prepared to crop relatively more land (but this in turn would have negative impacts). Thus, which indicator may be the most important one?

Efficiency, consistency and sufficiency

Here, another result becomes relevant. Organic agriculture can play a central role if we refrain from focusing on agricultural production alone and adopt a food systems perspective instead. If we also address the consumption level, e.g. via the sustainability potential of reduced concentrate feed use and reduced food wastage, we can achieve improvements along all sustainability indicators and none of them needs to be judged as being more important than any other. In a food system with these changes regarding animal feed and wastage, dietary composition would clearly look very different, as the share of animal products would drop considerably. This would be so in particular for pigs and poultry that are predominantly fed on concentrate feed, and less so for ruminants that can eat grass. We emphasize that these statements refer to the global average and reductions are relevant in particular for high-income countries and future projections; in certain regions, increasing shares of animal source food in diets clearly still makes sense.

The food systems approach can be captured by three central concepts; efficiency, consistency and sufficiency. First, sustainable agriculture is often assessed with a focus on “efficiency”: how to produce more with as low as possible inputs and environmental impacts. This concept puts environmental impacts in relation to production volumes and gives guidance on improvements of single farm processes and production practices. It is however blind for aspects that become effective on an aggregate level only, such as in relation to the carrying capacity of ecosystems or cropland and water scarcity. Therefore, we also need to work with “consistency”. This concept stands for optimal resource use in a systemic context and for closed nutrient cycles. An example are ruminants that feed on grass.

Figure 2: Ruminants utilize grasslands and turn them into a source for food (Photo: Flickr (https://www.flickr.com/photos/justanotherhuman/14564836544/(link is external)), Creative Commons).

Like this, it is possible to utilize these areas for food production, which would otherwise not be possible. Furthermore, these animals are then fed without competition on cropland areas for food or feed production. On the other and, such grass-fed animals are less efficient regarding greenhouse gas emissions per kilogram meat and milk. Thus, we also need “sufficiency”. This concept relates to the overall size of the system and its impacts. Sufficiency opens up the space for producing with lower yields or higher emissions per unit product while harvesting the benefits such as from reduced nitrogen surplus or pesticide applications, without increasing total land use or total greenhouse gas emissions. Sufficiency is often explained via “consumption reduction”, in our case here, this is the reduction of animal source food that is produced with concentrate feed inputs and also behavioral change resulting in the reduction of food waste and loss.

Conclusions

When working on and discussing sustainable agriculture, we need to address the whole food system including consumption and not only production. On the food systems level, we have to open up the needed space to deal with the unavoidable trade-offs. We do not have to rely on extreme solutions for this, but a wise combination of different promising complementary strategies is already able to deliver a more sustainable food future. In such a setting, organic agriculture can play a central role as one of these complementary strategies to move towards more sustainable food systems.

References:

This is a blog post based on the paper “Muller, A., Schader, C., El-Hage Scialabba, N., Brüggemann, J., Isensee, A., Erb, K.-H., Smith, P., Klocke, K., Leiber, F., Stolze, M. and Niggli, U., 2017, Strategies for feeding the world more sustainably with organic agriculture, Nature Communications”.

The paper is open-access and can be found here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-01410-w(link is external)  and you can see a video by lead author Muller here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4daLqmureU(link is external)

A discussion of the Nature paper is posted on the FCRN website here.

For further discussion of the ‘livestock on leftovers’ approach, see Section 5.4.1 (pp 105-116) of the FCRN Grazed and Confusedreport.

See also the report Lean mean green obscene…? What is efficiency and is it sustainable? which explores and critiques different understandings of the concept of ‘environmental efficiency’ and as part of this discusses some of the ideas raised in Adrian’s blog and paper.