Do you have a link to a discussion of some of the problems?
I’ve often been suspicious of bold claims about land use that lump all the numbers together into one huge hectare or km^2 number, ignoring all of the nuance of climate, water access, soil chemistry, or other broad geographical issues that severely limit what kind of crops can be grown on the land.
One thing people ought to recognize is that large farmers can be just as greedy as any big business. If they could buy up a bunch of cheap pasture land and start growing pistachios or almonds they would. The amount of money to be made by doing that is astronomical, which should be a clue that the land is simply not available.
my issue is with the methodology. if you read the references in the poore-nemecek paper for the LCA data, they explicitly state LCA data should not be combined, since it is gathered using disparate methodologies. those studies themselves do combine LCA studies, but poore-nemecek goes on to combine multiple meta studies, and never even acknowledge the problems with this methodology.
Do you have a link to a discussion of some of the problems?
I’ve often been suspicious of bold claims about land use that lump all the numbers together into one huge hectare or km^2 number, ignoring all of the nuance of climate, water access, soil chemistry, or other broad geographical issues that severely limit what kind of crops can be grown on the land.
One thing people ought to recognize is that large farmers can be just as greedy as any big business. If they could buy up a bunch of cheap pasture land and start growing pistachios or almonds they would. The amount of money to be made by doing that is astronomical, which should be a clue that the land is simply not available.
my issue is with the methodology. if you read the references in the poore-nemecek paper for the LCA data, they explicitly state LCA data should not be combined, since it is gathered using disparate methodologies. those studies themselves do combine LCA studies, but poore-nemecek goes on to combine multiple meta studies, and never even acknowledge the problems with this methodology.