Fellowship of Living Systems the ledger
gather.livingsys.org · run by Fellowship of Living Systems, a Colorado public benefit company
gather → ledger
What's counted. What isn't.
Anyone can aggregate what's known. This page also shows where the counting stops. Below: the primary sources we trust, the entries still in dispute (shown with the dispute attached), and the empty rows: things nobody has published real numbers on. Empty rows are assignments. Fill one and it moves up, with your name on it.
Primary sources from credible institutions, dated and free to read. Each one says who pays.
FAO · November 2024
Hidden costs of about $12 trillion a year across 156 countries, roughly 70% from unhealthy diets.
The checkout price leaves out about $12 trillion a year, mostly paid later in hospitals.
Who paysHouseholds, later, in clinics.
Food System Economics Commission · January 2024
$15 trillion a year unaccounted: $11T health, $3T environment, $1T poverty.
Food's off-book debt is larger than its sales.
Who paysTaxpayers and the sick.
Keystone Policy Center + PepsiCo · September 2026
A 14-organization roundtable found the barrier is not farmer willingness.
The farmer was willing; the financial system around the farm wasn't.
Who paysThe paper proposes that taxpayers co-invest.
USDA Economic Research Service · June 2025
Cover crops are often unprofitable in the short term; the benefits land off the farm, later.
The farmer pays for cover crops this year; downstream water users collect the benefit later.
Who paysThe farmer, up front.
Aglasan et al., American Journal of Agricultural Economics · August 2024
Cover crops reduce crop-insurance losses from extreme weather. Premiums don't reflect it. Iowa's $5-an-acre discount helped bring in over a million cover-crop acres.
The insurance pool collects a dividend that nobody books.
Who paysTaxpayer-backed crop insurance collects the dividend, uncounted.
UN Environment Programme · 2024
1.05 billion tonnes wasted in 2022. Only 21 countries count food waste in their climate plans.
One-fifth of food reaching consumers is thrown away, and most national climate plans leave it out.
Who paysEveryone downstream of the bin.
ReFED · February 2025
In the US: 73.9 million tons, $382 billion, 31% of the food supply. A $16 billion-a-year fix returns 3.8 times its cost.
Most of the waste is counted now. The fix is priced, and it pays back.
Who paysRight now, everyone. The fix pays for itself.
Soil Health Institute · 2023
Real farm ledgers from 20 states. 42% of corn farms reported yield gains.
Built from actual farm books, not models.
Who paysIt resolves toward the farmer profiting, eventually.
Entries still in dispute, shown with the dispute attached. This is how counting is supposed to work.
The claim and its strongest challenge, side by side.
Who paysIf the decline is real, households, in their health.
Different methods, same order of magnitude. Show the range, not a winner.
Who paysBoth agree: mostly people, through health, later.
The empty rows. We looked, and found no real public numbers. Each one is an assignment.
Right now the best public source on agricultural water risk is a pension fund's proxy statement.
The accountants total the bill without saying who pays it. That admission is in their own journal.
Uncounted · G5 · the vanished dataset
$3.1 billion · 135 projects · consolidated results report: pending
The program was cancelled in April 2025. No consolidated results report will be published.
An entry that was being written, then stopped. A feed can't show you this. A ledger can.
Every empty row ends with Fill this. Send a source, and once a person has reviewed it, that row lights up for everyone looking at this page, live, with your name on it if you want.
The point is servicing information to each other: links in, the commons updated, credit out.
Inclusion bar: primary data, white papers or peer-reviewed work from credible institutions; dated; free to read where possible. Our one-line framing points at the source; it never puts words in the authors' mouths. Launch edition, October 15, 2026. The cards are also an open feed: cards.json (JSON Feed, CC BY 4.0). Publish your own cards in the same shape to federate.