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This bullsh*t might save the world | Thomas Rippel | TEDxZurich

Jun 01, 2021
Translator: Thomas Rippel Reviewer: Denise RQ This is shit (Laughs) or rather cow manure. A cow produces 25 tons of manure per year. And that's great because manure is a fantastic organic fertilizer. It is packed with nutrients to grow our grains and vegetables. Man has been using animal manure as fertilizer for 10,000 years. Without it, agriculture would never have been possible. And that was true until about 100 years ago, when we started using petrochemical fertilizers such as nitrogen. Soon after, manure as fertilizer began to lose a lot of value. Nowadays, manure looks more like

this

: it's a manure pit in Switzerland, or like

this

: a manure lagoon in the United States.
this bullsh t might save the world thomas rippel tedxzurich
Now, many of these farms or, let me call them what they are, animal feed factories, no longer grow the feed for their animals themselves. So for them, manure is not a valuable fertilizer, but simply a problem that needs to be managed. This is just one of the many aspects of how our current industrialized agriculture has become so broken that many believe our only ethical response may be to go vegan. I'm here to tell you: please keep eating meat and cheese. We need animals for sustainable agriculture, but please stop eating meat and cheese from animals that were fed human foods like grains, corn and soy.
this bullsh t might save the world thomas rippel tedxzurich

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this bullsh t might save the world thomas rippel tedxzurich...

Instead, eat only meat and cheese from cows that were grass-fed as they should be. I'm going to tell you how that choice will allow us to address some of the biggest challenges we face today: climate change, global land degradation, and

world

hunger. In Switzerland, farmers still try to use manure as organic fertilizer as best they can. But in winter, the pastures are covered with snow, so the cows are kept indoors. Therefore, the farmer has to store the manure in a manure pit until he can remove it in spring. The problem is that, after a while, the manure starts to rot and all those precious nutrients start to turn into toxic substances like ammonia and evaporate.
this bullsh t might save the world thomas rippel tedxzurich
Blew it! And all those precious nutrients are gone. In Germany alone, 600,000 tons of ammonia evaporate every year. Standing next to one of those manure puddles can feel like you're inhaling acid. And, in fact, ammonia causes acid rain. And when taken to the fields, that manure seeps into our groundwater and rivers and causes massive greenhouse gas emissions. Let me take a step back and tell you how I got into all this shit. I originally studied economics in China, where I lived for three years until I became seriously ill from the food I ate there. I had to take a time out and was getting very paranoid about food, so I decided to move from a country with probably the lowest food safety standards to... well, here, Switzerland.
this bullsh t might save the world thomas rippel tedxzurich
I went to work on an organic farm near Bern and it was the first time I heard about this problem: the organic fields were being sprayed with half-rotted manure. I always assumed that organic farming equals sustainable farming. But spraying fields with half-rotted manure didn't fit into my idea of ​​sustainable agriculture. And in fact, this whole manure thing is not sustainable at all. Let's leave aside the fact that I came home smelling like shit and that taking a shower wasn't enough to get rid of that smell. That manure, when taken to the field, is so aggressive that it literally burns the plants, and the soil takes a real beating too.
Earthworms, which are the backbone of healthy and fertile soil, come to the surface asphyxiated and are caught by birds. I thought there had to be a better way to do this, a better way than spraying our organic fields with half-rotted manure, so I did some research and found an interesting master's thesis where I really thought this is something we should try. . Oktoberfest has just ended, so I'm sure you've all had the chance to eat some good sauerkraut. But have you ever wondered why everything in your refrigerator goes bad at some point, but sauerkraut stays good basically forever? (Laughter) Well, the reason is these fantastic bacteria called lactic acid bacteria.
They take the sugar from sauerkraut and convert it into lactic acid, which sours the sauerkraut and thus stops all the other rotting bacteria. In the production of sauerkraut we are left with these leftover juices, the sauerkraut juice, which is full of lactic acid bacteria. Some people like to drink that. It's supposed to be great for digestion, but let me tell you, I've tried it and prefer a cold beer, as do most people, so this juice ends up as a waste product. Millions of liters in Switzerland alone. So I thought, why don't we take that sauerkraut juice and put it in the manure to preserve it and prevent all the nutrients from being lost?
I told some friends about this idea and got them all excited. We met with some of the best scientists in Switzerland and came up with a concept to implement. So I called the CEO of the largest sauerkraut factory in Switzerland and told him this idea, and he was actually quite open to it. Now I just need to find a farmer who is willing to join us in this. I ended up receiving an invitation to give a presentation at the annual meeting of the Swiss Organic Shepherd's Meat Association. I was very excited and told the group of farmers more or less what I had just told them, and asked if anyone would be willing to join me in this.
And the room was silent. Nobody raised their hand. It wasn't encouraging at all. But after almost everyone had left, a brave farmer from the alpine region of St. Gallen, Mr. Pirmin Koller, came to me and said: "You know what? Now that no one else listens to me" (Laughter) . I'll try it with you." So, together with the Zurich University of Applied Sciences, we put together some research parameters and within a few weeks we poured thousands of liters of sauerkraut juice into the Pirmin manure. And you know what? It worked! That one The manure no longer smelled, and all those precious nutrients no longer turned into toxic substances like ammonia and evaporated.
And Pirmin's grass also got a little greener, which made his neighbor a little jealous. I guess Sometimes the grass really is greener on the other side of the fence. (Laughter) So suddenly, this wasn't just a crazy idea anymore. A lot of people got really excited about this. The World Wildlife Foundation gave us a grant and At the Falling Walls conference in Berlin we won first prize out of 1,000 projects. And that caused quite a bit of media attention; Swiss and German television did segments on us and we also got a lot of coverage in Swiss and German newspapers.
And that was great because after that, farmers from all over Switzerland, as far as the United States and Australia, contacted me and within three months we had six pilot projects up and running. But as the results started coming in, we realized that manure has a much greater buffering capacity than we had originally anticipated. We needed about ten times the amount of sauerkraut juice to preserve the manure over a six-month period. Instead of a few thousand liters, we now needed tens of thousands of liters. And that's not great news because it's not Oktoberfest every day, so we don't have enough sauerkraut juice available to really scale this idea.
I realized that if I want to tackle this manure problem, I will have to understand farming from scratch, so I decided to become a farmer. I am now in my third year of a four-year vocational training program to become a dynamic organic farmer who lives and works on a farm. But not just any farm. I work on an organic livestock farm where they do something very special with their manure. They convert their manure into pure and fertile fertilizer. Now let me quickly explain how that happens and how it will help save our climate and soils and help make the most disadvantaged regions of the

world

food independent again.
I'm going to have to go back 3,000 years, to the Indians of South America. South and Central America was home to some very advanced civilizations, with cities of up to 300,000 inhabitants. When we Europeans were still shitting in our backyards and dying from the plague, they had already discovered an intricate healthcare system. They used clay pots as toilets. When they finished relieving themselves in the pot, they sprinkled charcoal in the pot. Now, this charcoal (today we call it biochar) is extremely absorbent. Like a sponge, it absorbs all the nutrients, preventing them from being lost. So when that pot was full, they didn't just end up with a pot of poop, but an extremely fertile pot of poop.
They would probably take it to their fields and plant some beans or corn and get fantastic yields. But what the Indians probably didn't know was that biochar has a negative carbon balance and remains in the soil for thousands of years. So they ended up creating the most fertile soils in the world: Terra Preta. And we marvel at them even today, years later. So, at the farm job I'm in, the farmer has been implementing a system for the last 15 years that mimics the Indian's clay pot toilet. He would make a clean bedding of wood chips and biochar for his cows during the winter, rather than storing the manure in a manure pond.
Those cows would live and sleep there every day, and every other day I would add a new layer of wood chips and biochar, thus preserving the manure. In the spring, we would take all that wood chip, biochar and manure manure out of the stables and turn it into compost. Now, composting is a bit like baking. You have to take the right ingredients in the right amounts and mix them the right way. So we take that wood chip manure, biochar and add a layer of freshly cut grass, a little finished compost and a little clay, we mix it all together and that's when the magic happens: A whole army of microorganisms starts breaking down everything. that organic matter devouring it.
That composting process gets very hot (over 70 degrees for three weeks) and those microorganisms break down all the organic matter, including antibiotics and growth hormones, and any other chemicals that

might

be in there. And the heat disinfects the manure from pathogenic bacteria. When all that organic matter is broken down into its chemical components, a new army of microorganisms takes those components and unites them to form pure, fertile soil. This way, all the nutrients are safely locked in and none of them evaporate or leach into the groundwater. I am now involved in an EU project where we are applying this concept on a large scale on a farm with 1,500 cows.
So this concept is applicable at all scales. From the clay toilets of El Indio, to the large livestock farms. With this method we can make desolate soils fertile again. People can go back to growing food locally where they have become dependent on food aid or multinational fertilizer companies. And by making soils fertile again, we can lock up billions of tons of carbon in the soil, reducing atmospheric CO2 and therefore global warming. Grass and clover grow on billions of hectares of land around the world that would otherwise be unusable for agriculture. These wonderful animals: cows, goats and sheep, can unlock this abundant resource for us, and on the land where we grow grains and vegetables for ourselves, those crops need a lot of nutrients, so we cannot grow them on the same land. of land each year.
The soil needs time to recover. Growing grass and clover replenishes nutrients in the soil, so growing grains and vegetables for humans, and grass and clover for animals on the same plot of land is part of a sustainable cycle. This is called crop rotation. But growing animal grains in monocultures can never be sustainable because it continually depletes soil nutrients, making us dependent on petrochemical fertilizers. That's why I envision a world where cows only eat grass and clover from a sustainable crop and pasture rotation. I imagine a world where the number of cows on this planet is determined not by our appetite for meat but by the amount of grass and clover we have available through this wonderful symbiosis.
I imagine a world where every farmer composts his manure with biochar, giving us all the organic fertilizer we need to grow our grains and vegetables without the need for petrochemical fertilizers. And this vision has already begun. And maybe one day we will be able to increase soil fertility to such a point that we can lock up in the soil all the CO2 we have pumped into the atmosphere by burning fuel.fossil fuels. So I have a message for you: please make buying meat and cheese a conscious activity. There are few choices in our daily lives that can have such a profound positive impact.
Please only buy locally grown, grass-fed beef and cheese! Thank you. (Applause)

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