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Podcast: The Climate Question
Episode: Is it time to ditch the plough?
Description: Cities, money, roads, beef burgers and telephones, in fact pretty much all of human civilisation as we know it, would probably not exist were it not for one simple invention. The plough.
This humble yet revolutionary tool enabled us to cultivate vastly greater amounts of food than our hunter gatherer forefathers giving rise to villages, cities and empires.
But it has come at a cost. Nearly 10,000 years of cultivated agriculture have released billions of tonnes of carbon from the soil into the atmosphere. Just within the EU, it’s estimated 5% of current greenhouse gas emissions come from agricultural soils. Th...