Скачать или смотреть What happens when you switch farmland from livestock to crops?

What would happen to our carbon emissions if the world went vegan? The answer isn't as simple as you'd think. If falling demand for meat and dairy encourages farmers to stop farming livestock and grow crops instead, could it actually cause a net increase in greenhouse gas emissions from the soil?

Professor Andy Neal at Rothamsted Research is trying to answer that question. Working at Harpenden in Hertfordshire and North Wyke farm in Devon, one of the UK's major regions for farming cows and sheep, his team is running an experiment to see what happens to the soil when traditional grazing land is converted to growing crops. Healthy soil has an incredible ability to take carbon out of the atmosphere and store it away, so understanding how it might respond to future changes is very important as the UK aims for Net Zero emissions.