The fungi guys will tell you that running out of mineral fertilizer is bullshit on roughly 95% of the arable land because all of the minerals your food needs are right there in the sand and clay. I once heard it described that conventional agriculture is essentially a hydroponics system using partially sterilized soil as the substrate.
Nearly every symbiotic relationship fungi make is based on buying sugars from plants by selling them minerals from biological weathering of rock (particles). What happens in conventional agriculture is that we murder all of the fungi.
There are a few places with strange soil compositions that are actually lacking in particular minerals. We could either elect to do something else with that land, or transition everyone but them to a post-green-revolution strategy.
Most of the nitrogen in currently living humans was captured from the atmosphere via the Haber Bosch process.
That is the primary contribution of synthetic fertilizer, and there aren't scalable natural processes to match it. Countries used to go to war over nitrogen stores (such as islands covered in bat guano).
I know farmers who grow velvet beans and other nitrogen fixers and have huge yields. They’re somewhere between permaculture and organic farmers, though, so not industrial scale. It’d be nice if we could come up with a good way to scale permaculture.
I was getting curious recently if there was a suitability for running mini Haber Bosch equipment in small batches that would serve a neighborhood or town, or a homestead. Not sure really but it was interesting to contemplate distributing that load over many folks.
It did indeed make more sense to me to go to war for a strategic, scare and faraway military resource than to go through all that effort for fertilizer.
Food to feed your troops (and workers in armament factories) is a strategic military resource.
You have to either grow it yourself or import it. Artificial fertilizer allows you stop importing nitrogen (which could be blocked by embargoes) and make it locally, which would allow you to potentially grow food locally and not import it either (again, embargoes).
Yea the way we do mass farming now is MASSively flawed. It produces huge yields but has tons of fragility - monoculture crops being a huge flaw as well.
The one that fascinates me the most is the way the Mayans did it - Chinampas. That and aquaculture growing lots of smaller fish seems like a create combo if we could get small backyard pond/farms going
I dream of having land with a pond. Properly managed, it could produce about 50 pounds of bluegills, etc from a 1/2 pond every year, with little input and infrequent work.
Maybe we are eating different fish. Stocked trout is pretty bland and somewhat mushy. I've never had truly wild trout, so maybe they are better. The bluegills here taste a lot better than farmed tilapia (do they even sell wild?) - mild, a little sweet, and flakes well. I agree bluegills are better than catfish, but depending on the catfish I prefer them over tilapia.
I hear that water quality and, to a lesser extent, water chemistry has a huge impact on taste. I've sort of noticed that in certain lakes compared to others.
That's probably a personal preference or maybe due to water quality. They're one of my favorite. There's a great TED talk our there about water quality and fish flavor, but I don't remember the person.
I agree, but I think it's hard for us non-farmers to grasp the scale of industrial agriculture. I would love it we switched over to another way of doing things, but with 8 billion people, there is no feasible way back to an earlier, organic way of life.
How are we going to feed another 2 billion people let alone those that we have without fossil fuel inputs? Maybe biotech will save us, but I am skeptical.
Stop eating cows & dairy. Immediately you've reduced the scale by 75%. If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares [https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets].
In our modern society where many people require less calories than our ancestors, because most don't do as much physically intensive labour, it's somewhat tricky to get enough protein from food _without_ taking in too many calories.
Yes, plants do contain protein. But sort the above linked table for "complete protein" and you'll see of the 9 "complete protein" foods, only 5 are plant foods. And of those 5, only Quinoa appears to have no limiting amino acid.
It seems that animals have had an important role in recent times of concentrating plant protein to levels such that humans can get enough protein without taking in more calories than they require per their lifestyles.
Let people who are used to meat/dairy diets adopt plant-based diets and I wouldn't be surprised if this leads to more of them becoming overweight.
Imo it's a good thing when people try to eat less meat/dairy but they shouldn't think it's an easy thing to do that comes without caveats.
David Raubenheimer is said to have conducted an experiment where people's behaviour showed that protein content is what disproportionately determines how much people eat until they feel saturated.
> Let people who are used to meat/dairy diets adopt plant-based diets and I wouldn't be surprised if this leads to more of them becoming overweight.
I think that the exact opposite is true. Most new vegans lose weight quickly.
There are no overweight fruitarians (imho - not my cup of tea). And not many vegans. But there are many ways how to do things - if you're eating a lot of fats, processed foods, junk food ... you'll be overweight, vegan or not.
Also, you can't replace meat/dairy with single protein source (e.g. tofu) and think that you're ok. That's not the way it works with the plants.
For me vegan diet means whole foods, minimum fats, as diverse diet as possible, almost no junk/processed food, 30-50% raw vegetables. It's not easy to gain weight this way.
> Imo it's a good thing when people try to eat less meat/dairy but they shouldn't think it's an easy thing to do that comes without caveats.
You're making it sound scary :) It is easy, certainly not hard, but you're right, new vegans have some things to learn.
The only supplement you'll certainly need is vitamin B12.
In the end what you'll want is fruits, vegetables and lentils of various kind. If you have a diverse diet, you'll have no problems.
Yes, it means trying (a lot of) new things and recipes and some learning (how to substitute meat/dairy with plant-based alternatives), but it's not hard and in the end it's very satisfying process. I'm always hunting for new recipes.
> David Raubenheimer is said to have conducted an experiment where people's behaviour showed that protein content is what disproportionately determines how much people eat until they feel saturated.
We have to learn how to use what we have (atmosphere, rhizosphere, pigs, poultry, humans), that what does not destroy forests and wildlife (cows), and avoid that that kills and poisons the nature (pesticides & herbicides). Then we have a chance.
That's interesting, but a slight oversimplication since nitrogen isn't coming from the minerals. As long as nitrogen fixation can still occur (via decomposition of something organic, etc), I think the general principle seems reasonable, though not an expert.
I'm not the one oversimplifying, it's 'modern' agronomists that are oversimplifying.
Nitrogen is 70% of our atmosphere. When you remove all other plant life in order to get the last 20% of theoretical yield from your land, you end up having to manually provide all of the services that were provided by the plants you killed. The Green Revolution is a petrochemical revolution. Cooking allows us to use lignin calories to recover more calories from our existing food supply. Livestock do the same, either by converting grasses (ungulates) or recycling unpalatable foods (pigs).
When the petrochemicals become expensive we will have to go forward and/or backward to some other solution (most likely old solutions with new twists). The sibling comment with the huge bibliography points to some of the more coherent voices in the world of polyculture agriculture, although Gabe Brown exists in a sort of grey area between aggressive crop rotation and polyculture.
Or from crop rotations of legumes with nitrogen fixing microbes. But that too would require a move away from intensive industrialized agricultural practices.
Toby Hemenway forwarded a notion that water cycles are sufficient to transport nitrogen from nitrogen-rich plants to their neighbors as a continuous basis instead of on an annual one. The model he builds from research he had read goes something like this:
After a rain, as the soil goes from waterlogged to dry, there are phases that are hostile to root hairs and ones that are conducive. So the plant roots pulse with these cycles, advancing and retreating, sometimes arriving at places vacated by other plants. By this mechanism, any plant can scavenge some of the nitrogen left in the decaying root hairs of their neighbors.
I would also warn that thinking nitrogen=legume is a potentially limiting strategic error. While something like 7% of all plants fall into the Fabaceae (legume) family, some other pockets of the Fabales order also have root nodules, in particular, alder, and up into the Rosids clade (buckthorn, ceanothus), and then a few odd stragglers like borage, which makes me wonder if it's a taxonomic problem, parallel evolution, or what.
And then there's mondo grass (asparagaceae), which nobody expects to have root nodules. I knew about that plant for about two decades before someone pointed out it's nitrogen fixing, and that's not even in the wikipedia article. And in fact I'm having a dickens of a time finding a citation for that.
"Fifty-six percent of all land used for corn, soybeans, wheat, and cotton was on farms that
used no-till/strip-till on at least part of their cropland in 2010-11: 23 percent of land was on
farms that used no-till/strip-till on all land in these crops while 33 percent was on farms that
used a mix of no-till, strip-till, and other tillage practices." (From the report summary.)
Yes. Nitrogen fixing bacteria (i.e. R. leguminasarum, s. meliloti) love the sugar exchange legumes offer. Cover cropping and inter cropping have potential to rethink the 113-year old haber-bosch solution.
I don't know if this is my theory or just heavily implied but rarely stated in the literature: chemical fertilizers are giving plants something for 'free' that they used to pay for, and the reason the crops get bigger is not strictly because of the fertilizers, but because they get to spend those calories on more fruit.
There have even been a few studies that warn that some strains of conventional crops are losing the ability to make this exchange. When we hit peak phosphorous and start taxing anhydrous ammonia production, these strains are at risk of going extinct (hopefully not enough of any crop to take us with them).
The wrong question is, "how many calories of <X> can I get out of this field in a year?" The right question is "how many calories can I get total out of this field in a year" and there are a number of people out there demonstrating that they can get about 50% of the conventional yield from an acre, but for 4 different crops, and a few other things thrown in to get over 2x the total yield.
The "problem", in scare quotes, is that these solutions take more thinking and knowing than scourging your fields every year. But since running a farm practically takes a bachelor's degree these days, that's not really a problem of lack of resource in that area. It's more a problem of perspective and focus.
> The "problem", in scare quotes, is that these solutions take more thinking and knowing than scourging your fields every year. But since running a farm practically takes a bachelor's degree these days, that's not really a problem of lack of resource in that area. It's more a problem of perspective and focus.
I agree on this point. Every successful farmer I've met has been of notably above average intelligence. However at the family farm scale it's a very fragile business. A small increase in input costs can greatly reduce or eliminate profitability. While I think permaculture, no-till, and other such techniques are great, we have to acknowledge that they require considerably more labor than running a combine harvester over corn or soy fields. The labor shortage is bad enough that even generally immigration skeptical rural areas welcome H-2A migrant workers. And while the best American farm workers are every bit as hard-working as the best Mexican seasonal workers, the average Mexican that comes to the USA in the program is considerably more reliable than the average American these days.
Gabe Brown seems to be pulling it off, but then again he’s not growing fruit. I’d be curious to see how much Shepard is spending on harvesting his fruit and nuts.
The claim that people and companies are leaving a 2x yield on the floor (well, field) just because they're stupid does not seem plausible to me, so I suspect you missed some aspect of it.
(The most obvious could be that nobody want to buy some of the other crops, so while you could get the calories out, you can't get the dollars out, and the calories would go to waste if everyone did that.)
> there are a number of people out there demonstrating that they can get about 50% of the conventional yield from an acre, but for 4 different crops, and a few other things thrown in to get over 2x the total yield.
A lot of US agriculture is done on by contract operators. Bill Gates seems to work mostly in that model.
I mention Gates because what he says suggests that he'd love to see that claim pan out on a large scale. Also, he's known for insisting on high dollar yields.
And yet, we're talking about demonstrations and not actual significant experience.
Maybe Gates is lying about his social goals AND also isn't profit-maximizing.
But, if he isn't, why aren't the demonstrators doing good and doing well (2X production is a big bucks) by doing this stuff at scale somewhere in Gates-land?
"Cover crops were in use on less than 2 percent of total cropland (for all crops) during 2010-11 (6.8 million
acres), with adoption rates higher in some regions (e.g., the Southern Seaboard and the Mississippi Portal).
Although the benefits of cover crops and no-till/strip-till are enhanced when these practices are used on the
same fields, the low cover crop adoption rate suggests that these benefits are realized on few acres." (From the report summary.)
Cover crops have come into style though since then. They are a lot more common. Not nearly as common as they should be, but they still a lot more than 10 years ago.
I think you should look at what's going on with agriculture in India right now. There was a lot of bankrupt farmers in the US in the 80's, and that's happening in India over the last decade. Graphically, some farmers are taking their lives by drinking leftover pesticides when they realize they can't afford their crops this year.
India is, by many accounts, likely to switch to a new-new form of agriculture sooner than some of the rest of us. The combination of bigger problems and a shallower 'tradition' of western farming practices makes that easier.
There was a post here about California covering its irrigation canals with solar panels. A couple of us politely pointed out that a couple of provinces in India have already been doing this for a while.
Farming in India has been perilous for centuries because it depends on the Monsoon. Improved irrigation, better seeds and yes artificial fertilizers have all significantly improved farm incomes.
Nevertheless, structural issues remain. Farmer suicides are not even remotely new and it's disingenous to suggest otherwise. And it has to be pointed out that the suicide rate amongst Indian farmers is lower than the national average.
You'll have to pry Western farming methods from the cold dead hands of Indian farmers. Even the urban intelligencia has shut up about organic/traditional farming after seeing what's happening across the Palk Strait.
> You'll have to pry Western farming methods from the cold dead hands of Indian farmers. Even the urban intelligencia has shut up about organic/traditional farming after seeing what's happening across the Palk Strait.
The indian itelligencia? I'd like to hear more about the commonalities here between equivalent folks in the uhmmm "west"
I think he means people like Vandana Shiva (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandana_Shiva). She's been on plenty of western interviews, talks, etc. advocating organic farming.
Financial viability of farming as a business is independent of yield across all farms in a market. The consequence of radical improvements in agricultural yields lower prices (as a % of unskilled labor income) and usually means that most farmers go out of business (or export most of their crop). The upside is that the society overall gets much much wealthier.
It's an interesting point, but using China as an example of rational agricultural planning is a pretty poor choice considering how recently the famines resulting from the Great Leap Forward were at that point in time.
They could prove their case by actually doing it at commercial farm scale. But as far as I know, no one has. Which, to me anyway, shows they're probably (but not certainly) wrong.
Gabe Brown manages about 5000 acres, with a skeleton crew.
On paper Mark Shepard seems to have about 106 acres around his house, which I think is a gross branding mistake, because he farms a lot more land than just his homestead. I have to find this interview again because it was kind of shocking and I'm afraid I may be misquoting it. One interviewer got him talking about all of the land he owns elsewhere, leases, or consults on and he makes some comment about he may actually be managing more farmland than anyone east of the Mississippi.
Most of us are on the internet all day regardless. We downplay the incremental cost of both doing things, bragging about it online, and getting it on people's radars, like it's simple but we mostly think about the people who are good at it and not all of the ones who quietly disappeared without most of us ever learning about it.
Farming is exhausting. Farming is remote. Farming is slow, and experiments take years to prove to be more than dumb luck. The gap between killing it and selling your audience on the notion that you are killing it is much, much wider. Talk enough, and you have to stop doing, which means you're now selling ideas that you can't back up.
Not to sound contrary... but if their techniques are better, why haven't they been replicated widely? If they can output just 20% better financial return, they will double the profits for most farmers.
Understand that it is my wish and hope that these sort of low/no fertilizer organic techniques can work better than "traditional" heavy-fertilizer/irrigation farming the west now mainly employs. It's just that vaguely recall hearing about this sort of thing 30 years ago. And 20 years ago. And 10 years ago.
There is a tremendous market of corporate interests that have a very vested interest in farming staying the way it is. From custom GMO seeds to input(fertilizer, fungicides, pesticides) producers to implement manufacturers they all want farming to stay the same. A regenerative approach removes a massive amount of those needs and profits.
Entrenched interests would be a driver as well as conventional wisdom here to date imo. That said there are indeed millions of acres in the mid-west (US) and beyond operated by commercial growers whom leverage the benefits of inoculating their acres with beneficial microbes. Ultimately mother nature dictates yield mainly thru moisture availability (acres under a pivot excluded) so growers focus on risk mitigation and nutrient efficiencies to achieve profitability. The paradigm is shifting away from heavy synthetics due to costs, generational transitions in operation management and our understanding of the rhizosphere. Beneficial microbes are not the only answer but leveraging their inherent capabilities is an effective tool and currently available.
What is harder?
Go ahead and try to convince people.
I have created fully automated systems for indoor that control everything except harvest. It is impossible to convince people due to the cost I am pretty sure.
Thusly? Money printer really does not go brr for this.
The comment farther up the thread (at this point anyhow)[1] references Gabe Brown. He is using very little to no commercial fertilizer on his farm and has been for years. I am guessing his audience among cash strapped young desperate farmers has increased a lot in the last 3 months.
There are a couple of particularly noteworthy things about Gabe. His philosophy was a baptism by fire. He ran out of money via a combination of bad decisions and getting hit by a statistical cluster of bad years where the world seemed to be saying Fuck You in Particular (there were 4 years with catastrophic hail storms, and none of his neighbors got hit by more than 3 of them).
Some of his crops are targets of opportunity. They're a cover crop and if the weather is just right and he gets it planted in time, he might be able to harvest it, or at least graze some livestock on it, but if not, then that's fine too, because the dividends still made it worth doing.
He is a very frugal farmer, both in resources and energy. Mark Shepard, in contrast, seems to be more interested in the energy side of frugality, and is so open in his disdain for people throwing good money/time after bad that it's practically his personality. In particular he likes to rant about how utterly mathematically unsound the idea of rain barrels is, and the kind of cognitive dissonance it takes to keep telling yourself otherwise.
The 55 gallon rain barrels are near useless for small plot irrigation. Larger containers can hold a meaningful amount of water to be useful during sporadic dry spells.
No, the problem is that to get half an inch of water to cover your fields takes a giant storage tank and a giant collection area. Install a hard scape big enough to provide any notable amount of water storage and lack of arable becomes your primary issue.
Rain barrels make a tiny bit of sense in a small urban lot with a large roof. They make no goddamned sense at all in most agricultural contexts.
Microbiome needs to be a more commonly known word.
I bought some property that was practically concrete at the beginning of the dry season. I hurt my hand and damaged a tool trying to take a soil sample to send to the lab. A couple years later you'd never know, except that past me was apparently smart enough to take a video that I found when trying to free up some disk space.
Plants, bacteria and fungi all manipulate soil PH for better or for worse, and you can steer that. And keeping soil covered, especially with tall plants, can drop the temperature tens of degrees Celsius. A forest floor is much closer to ground temperature, for a host of reasons.
OK, that may be, however, that doesn't change that our method of agriculture is about to come up short, and that to switch to other approaches will take time.
Food security always makes me think about food waste.
When I was 17 years old I went to Sweden as part of a cultural exchange program (I'm from South America). One of the first things that shocked me was the sheer amount of food being wasted for no reason whatsoever.
In my country, even though I come from a privileged family, you can't shield yourself away from poverty. Throughout my entire life living with my parents I've seen people ring our door to ask for food. Personally, I NEVER waste any food, if I put something on my plate, I'll eat it unless it's rotten. And that goes for pretty much everyone I know. Every time I went out to eat with my parents, if there were any significant amount of food left, we would always ponder whether or not we would want to it later. If we decided we would not, we would take it anyway and find someone on the street who would.
While in Sweden, I lived with Swedish families and attended to a traditional Swedish high school. So I'd eat lunch at school and dinner with my host families. My first day eating lunch at school I was shocked, to say the least. I mean, yeah, the food was great, it's amazing that there is such a functional high-quality school system there, and so organized too; once you're done eating, you're supposed to take your plate, put any leftovers on a big trash bin, and give your plate to the lady who puts them into a industrial washer. The amount of food kids threw away was just staggering. And it's not a one off thing. It's a behavior, they put more food than they know they'll eat, every single day. It's not like they put a ridiculous amount of food on their plate and throw most of it away. It's like they don't even bother paying attention to how hungry they are, they just put whatever amount of food they feel like putting, and then throw away the rest. That goes even for drinks, they would serve a cup full of milk or water, and throw half of it away.
I know I'm talking about kids and teenagers, but they will grow up to be adults some day. And I saw that of many adults also. On of my duties as an exchange student was to connect both cultures, mine and the country I was being hosted by. I always tried to give people there a glimpse of what of poverty was and how privileged they were, and I always felt I never got the idea through. It felt sometimes they have a cartoonish idea of poverty and what it means to not have the money to pay for really basic things.
I'm not here to call anyone out. I just think there are times when the people are also part of problem, and I wanted to give a personal perspective.
I agree with eating what you acquire and prepare, but food waste is also a byproduct of adequate food supply, or of supersaturated food systems. It is not only an individual attitude toward food. It would be great if I could give my leftovers that are likely to go to waste to someone down the hall in my building, but they are not in a food scarce situation. In their calculus, it would be easier, and safer, to make their own dinner. There is perhaps only one person within five miles of me that is food scarce to the point that my leftovers would be useful or desirable to them. Within ten miles, there is perhaps an order of magnitude more; within twenty, two or three orders more. All the same, it would not make sense to rectify accidental waste by donating it in almost every instance when I produce accidental food waste. The transport required would make it unfeasible.
An abundance of food does self-perpetuate to the point that it becomes expendable. Well run family kitchens would likely have a positive effect on people's disposition towards food. I mill grains and bake bread, sourcing the grain supply from a well-run farm in my state, and this never fails to give me a moment to reflect on my relationship to food. It is, unfortunately, not commonplace for American households to engage with their consumption further up the supply chain than the supermarket shelf, where access is the most convenient.
I feel you. In my extended family environment, more food is wasted than necessary. Some relatives have a habit of buying lots of food, more than they need, because they used to be poor and now that they are no longer poor the derive happiness from buying lots of things. The fridge is always full, and they'd still come home with two huge bags packed with food. Food is regularly thrown away because it has rotted in the fridge: food comes in faster than anybody can eat it.
And meals are often bigger than what everyone can finish during that meal. This is especially so when there is visit. In Chinese culture, it's not done to ask visit whether they want more food because they are not supposed to say yes. Asking is thus equivalent to signalling that you don't want to give them more food, i.e. a lack of hospitality. Thus people make more food than necessary.
That in itself isn't a problem because one could save the leftovers in the fridge. But some refuse to eat leftover food because it's not fresh, or they refuse to eat fridge leftovers that are more than 1 day old (you can save most leftovers in the fridge for 3 days if you put them in the fridge immediately after eating). Some even believe that even frozen food is considered unfresh, or has fewer nutrients or something. Others refuse to put anything in the fridge at all because they hate colder-than-room-temperature food (why reheating is a problem eludes me, but they refuse to use reheating as a solution).
All of this pains me. I hate wasting food. The result: I'm often the only one who eats the oldest leftovers, everybody else eats fresh even though there are lots of leftovers.
This doesn't just apply to food, but also energy. Some insist on turning the heat so high that they can wear tshirts indoors during winter, because that's more comfortable than wearing more clothes. Others think I'm being weird for trying so hard to drive electric-only (driving to a public charging station can be a pain compared to parking at the most convenient location).
When food prices double/triple/quadruple in the next few years I think people will quickly adapt simply because they won't be able to afford to throw out any food.
We waste a third of what we produce. If you take into account what we burn in the process (fertilizer, fuel, water, manpower), you'll realize how bad are our consumption habits.
"In the United States 30 per cent of all food, worth US$48.3 billion (€32.5 billion), is thrown away each year."
"The food currently wasted in Europe could feed 200 million people (FAO, 2013)."
Its not clear if US is any worse of that other countries based on this UN study. The data is very noisy and many developing countries don't have high confidence estimates of waste. Lack of temperature controlled storage and reliable transportation infrastructure can be a big issue in developing countries for example.
There are 330 million people in the US so that means the waste is only worth 130 USD per person. Or to put it another way a years worth of food in the US costs only an average of 260 USD, less than a dollar a day.
That seems unlikely to me. I'm pretty sure that even poor people in the US pay more than a dollar a day for their food. So where does all the money go?
Middlemen. Farmers are paid below market rates, and below cost of production in the US.
Tax breaks and other subsidies let the farmers stay afloat, and organizations such as the Chicago Board of Trade set artificially low wholesale prices.
I'm from the U.S., and I was actually raised with a somewhat similar view of food waste. But my parents were born in the 30s. Many of my contemporaries had parents born in the 40s or 50s, and their attitudes were very different.
I was over at a friend's house a few years ago, and she had prepared lunch for her daughter. When her daughter complained she didn't like it, my friend threw the whole plate food in the trash without blinking, and made something else. I asked my friend, and she said the food is so cheap it doesn't matter. And you can't just let your child not eat.
My parents certainly didn't grow up poor. Both of my grandfathers made a good living. I don't know what conclusion to draw, but there seems to have been a huge cultural shift towards food in the post war years.
You can, most of us just don't because people think you're neglecting the kid if the kid chooses not to eat a meal you provide them. Same reason we send way more food for lunches than my kids ever eat—because the amount they will eat looks "too small" and my wife's worried what people will think.
I hate this stuff, but get the reasoning. IMO they'll eat if they're hungry. Meanwhile, we have an obesity crisis.
There are things my kid doesn’t like either. But my partner always asks if I could eat that meal if the child refuses. That’s how we don’t throw away that small meal.
Every time I hear about food waste, I'm glad about what it means for food security. Don't get me wrong, I'm not glad about the fact that food is being wasted, just the implication: If some horrible thing happens and we suddenly lose 30% of food production, nobody will have to starve. We'll have to eat older leftovers and be more careful, but we won't be fighting over food.
Suggested listening about food waste: Econtalk Rachel Laudan on Food Waste Dec 4 2017
Historian Rachel Laudan talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about food waste. Laudan argues that there are tradeoffs in preventing food waste--in reduced time for example, or a reduction in food security, and that these tradeoffs need to be measured carefully when considering policy or giving advice to individuals or organizations. She also discusses the role of food taboos and moralizing about food. Along the way, Laudan defends the virtue of individual choice and freedom in deciding what to eat.
As an African I laughed at this. Swiss kids not clearing their plates is not why people starve in my country. We produce enough food to feed ourselves but
1) poverty means people can't afford food
2) you're not reaching a great many villages by anything bigger than a land cruiser.
Distribution has always been the cause of global hunger issues, at least for the past few decades.
Despite growing up in a prosperous nation, as part of a middle-class family, this is always something I've been acutely aware of. Most likely because both of my parents came from backgrounds with their own struggles.
Every time I see a garbage can, I see money that was spent on waste. And when I see money, I see time that was spent. And time is something you can't get back, it's gone for good once you spend it. Every garbage can is a waste of life. Minutes and hours thrown away.
> And when I see money, I see time that was spent. And time is something you can't get back, it's gone for good once you spend it. Every garbage can is a waste of life. Minutes and hours thrown away.
Quite the opposite. Often food waste is the result of convenience. That garbage can full of food in the cafeteria is a prime example: People could get smaller portions, but then they'd have to queue again to get seconds if they got too little, so they get a little more to be on the safe side.
Sometimes, something in my fridge spoils because I didn't eat it fast enough. I could always shop only for the next day when I'm sure I'll eat it, but then I'd spend at least an hour extra each week on trips to the store.
Sure, some time was spent to produce it, but the low price is a good signal that that is negligible.
That reminds me of my mother telling me to eat all of what she served me because there were children starving in Africa. That was nonsense -- not that Africans were starving, but that I should eat more than I wanted or needed because of it. Avoiding food waste is more about serving what you need than about eating everything in front of you.
How would less wastage help at all? It would just translate to less production and everything would continue with the same risks as always, wouldn't it?
I don't have any food growing in my garden even though I could. Is that food waste? What if I plant some vegies and forget to eat them and they die and rot. Is that food waste? I don't see that food waste itself is a real problem, just an illusion because it's so visible.
Surely we all waste electricity by having hot showers instead of cold, or leaving our computers on when we're not using them. We can afford it, so why not? Even those poor people are wasting oxygen in the air! Imagine how scarce that is in space or a submarine.
Overproduction of food by about 20% is by design in the west, as I understand it. Because you'd rather have a bit too much (which isn't a big problem), than too little (which would quickly be an enormous problem). The problems we're facing now are not caused by that overproduction of food, so I think it isn't a good argument.
I also hate food waste, because it seems to dumb. But I think it is there for a reason - at least to some degree.
My brother worked for a help organization in africa for 1,5 years. When he came back, he told me that they throw food away too. I only cook as much as i can eat.
I don't think food waste can be eliminated. I would even argue that there is threshold after which a decrease in food waste comes at the expense of quality of nutrition.
Even in my university's restaurant, which feeds students on a massive industrial scale, I see food waste. But even in a much bigger scale, the amount was significantly less.
Elimination of food waste is not practical and should not be a goal, you'll just ultimately fail and give up on intermediary goals that might just suffice.
As with any engineering problem, the harder you push some constraints the more you'll have to pay with others. A university-scale cafeteria could greatly reduce food waste by fetching the food off of the plates the customers are done with and putting that food back into the cafeteria for the next customers. But there's reasons that's several violations of the health code. Something has to give at some point.
Onsite composting and vermicomposting is a better place to dump “food waste”.
Where the food usually goes are into landfills where they produce dangerous accumulations of methane that can explode. Some folks have tried capturing that methane to burn, but if stuff can be made into compost, you’d need less synthetic fertilizers.
I think there is some room to innovate before we get to that point. For instance, they could educate students on the economic and ecological costs of food waste, and equip them with tools to reduce it, like associating certain levels of hunger with visible portion sizes, or putting in electronic scales so students are shown how much of each food they eat.
There is an all you can eat chain in my area. Its cheap, but they do charge extra for any leftovers - that approach would likely significantly reduce the waste in places such as uni-scale cafeterias.
I mean, we have been depleting soil fertility through the use of synthetic fertilizers for decades. It’s been a self-destructive cycle.
Perhaps some farmers might switch to practices that are not so dependent upon as much to external inputs … but even switching to things like no-till or using local inputs like manure, or using soil-regenerating practices like polycropping or integrated pest-control is going to take time.
It’s doable though. The Cubans have been operating their agriculture without imported oil and fertilizers since the US shut down imports. That also meant that use of tractors became limited, as are long-distance transport for food.
Better than food security is food sovereignty, and people within a locality being able to feed themselves.
Synthetic fertilizers do not deplete soil fertility. Some agricultural practices do, with a strong emphasis on mono-culture, but it is wrong to throw everything in the same bag.
Growing without synthetic fertilizers appeals to the symbiotic Nature living, I get that. It's an ideal like any other, maybe worth of pursuit. But we first need to make peace with the fact that we'll either:
a) Be able to feed about a billion humans at most; or
b) Completely destroy many pristine ecosystems by multiplying arable land area by 5.
Synthetic fertilizer does have negative impacts, but saying they have negative food impacts borders on oxymoron.
Runoff to freshwater inducing toxicity is one major impact from over fertilization, which is not an implication of the product itself, but it's over use.
I'm told. IANA farmer but I know many and worked with ag and water quality researchers for a few years in MN, USA.
> It’s doable though. The Cubans have been operating their agriculture without imported oil and fertilizers since the US shut down imports. That also meant that use of tractors became limited, as are long-distance transport for food.
This resulted in widespread food insecurity, with the Cuban government rationing food to UN poverty levels [1]. Cuba also experienced food shortages due to COVID [2]. Cuba's agricultural experience is not a very good case for organic farming.
this is possibly, but yields go way down, in some cases by 50% or more. the amount of land that will need to be utilized for food growth will have to drastically increased.
not saying this is a bad thing. soil regeneration and more sustainable farming practices are a good thing Imo. it's just that we can't switch to that instantly. yield goes down, takes time to switch, cost likely will increase to make the same $/acre of land, etc.
Of all corn grain grown in the US, 45% is used as animal feed, and just 12% for human food (the rest is turned into ethanol for fuel) [1]. If it was just a 50% decrease in yield we could offset most of it by only having grass-fed cattle and cutting our meat consumption accordingly. Of course an instant switch would be inconvenient because we don't plant the gourmet variant when we intend to feed it to animals, but with a year of lead time it wouldn't be too bad.
But before modern farming we couldn't sustain more than a billion humans or so, and most of our advancements since then have been from better machinery, watering and most of all fertilizer. Depending on what you cut, you lose way more than 50%.
Dividing the available arable land by global population leaves only a 100x100m plot per person - and that's before barns, silos, houses or warehouses. That's not a whole lot - as a city dweller, I'm confident I'd starve the first winter if not earlier
Modern agriculture is really impressive - farmers manage to feed around 10-20 people from such a plot
It's not really as bad as you suspect. A lot of homesteaders target food self-sufficiency on a quarter acre; while there's some debate [1] over whether that's possible, pessimistic estimates for the amount of space needed to feed a skilled organic gardener's family of 4-6 top out at about an acre. A 100x100m plot is about 2.5 acres.
The bigger problems are a.) skills and b.) labor. Homesteading methods basically require full-time gardening by people who have put significant efforts into maximizing yields, intercropping, planting multiple harvests, growing vertically, etc. The advantage of our mechanized farming system is that we can feed the population with 1.4% of the population.
I was hoping your figure would be wrong and it is, but the situation is actually worse than than. 1.4 billion hectares of arable land divided by 7.9 billion people yields 0.18 hectares per individual, which is actually a 18×100m plot per person, 5 times less than your figure. And that's before conservation areas, wasting arable land to build suburbs, etc. Looking into national figures is interesting, showing that China has less than half than amount, but also shows that something is off with the figures themselves. Extremely arid and sandy Niger has more than 5 times the global average, which doesn't pass the smell test. I was personally shocked by the sheer unsuitability of the land for growing crops in the most fertile regions of that country, much unlike the lush southern areas of Mali for instance. Forested areas don't count as is clearly seen from low-ranking Brunei, which is 98% primary forest with extremely luxurious landscapes. Papua New Guinea is mostly self-sufficient and yet also extremely low, clearly demonstrating that agroforestry systems aren't accounted for at all. I'm sure other absurdities are to be found. Lies, damned lies, and statistics…
That is a super fun fact. Not that it changes the calculus, but I would be curious what percentage of human calories come from water sources (fishing, seaweed, lobster, etc).
Yields for a specific crop goes down in polycropping. Yield across the entire portfolio goes up. Plus, crop failure and marker failure of any one crop doesn’t mean complete failure — the other crop still yields something. It becomes less of betting the farm.
And, soil rebuilding takes time. No-till won’t really start becoming advantageous until about year 4 or 5.
But like I said — the Cubans had to do this. They were not given the time to switch.
from what I understand / have read. yields go down per acre when moving from synthetic fertilizer to organic / natural fertilization. not just in the immediate, but forever. soil health, nutrition, crop resilience all go up, input and input cost go down, but so does overall yield per acre.
from all the reading I have done, and in my own experience with a shitty 3acre hobby farm, overall yield per acre never reaches an equivalent to modern destructive farming practices.
> soil health, nutrition, crop resilience all go up, input and input cost go down, but so does overall yield per acre.
None of those are necessarily true. Sometimes they are, but organic prohibits some farming methods, but non-organic doesn't prohibit anything that organic does that work.
Some of the natural chemicals allowed in organic are worse for the soil than the synthetic counterpart. In some cases there isn't a natural chemical that is allowed and so the farmer resorts to plowing the soil which is a horrible thing to do to the soil, and because of the fuel used more expensive than synthetic chemicals.
Organic has found some useful things, but farmers are adopting them. Farmers have also found useful things that organic is adopting.
I've been thinking about getting a hobby farm as well. Do you have any recommendations on where to start or tips? I can't even tell if I can just buy a plot of land in some unincorporated area and use it for whatever I see fit (CA).
UC has tons of classes and workshops on farming/gardening you can take, ranging from weekend workshops to apprenticeships to online courses to hands on training. Or honestly there are tons of forums and internet communities that have lots of free resources and advice if you look for them.
Thanks for the link! I think I'm also interested in learning the logistics and legal aspect as well. I feel there are tons of resources out there on how to grow things, but not a lot on how to find land, what you need to look out for, etc. I've seen quite a lot of YouTube videos on this topic and I feel like I'm still missing quite a lot of info.
It is expensive, time consuming and very laborous. Only do it if you like the out doors, you are home 90% of the time in planting and harvest season, and half the time during the growing season.
I bought degraded land. I threw clover and mulch over everything the moment i bought it. (Bought the clover, called the local arborist to dump 30+ truckloads of mulch over the season for free) I let 90% of it sit there and do nothign the first two years, and that seemed to help rebuild the soil well.
I live in Michigan, so I cant tell you how CA works. But in michigan, you can do crops and animals pretty much anywhere you can score 3 acres.
I have a real issue with moisture, its a VERY wet lot. makes planting hard because of the mud and stuff. Whatever zone you are in, figure out what your bottle neck would be (For me its waiting for the water levels to go down enoguh to plant) and come up with a reasonable plan to solve that bottle neck before you buy the land.
Dont plan to make money. This hobby farm is definately a net loss. It would be WAY cheaper to just buy my food from the grocery store. I do this because I like gardening, I call my self a large scale gardener most of the time, because i feel like a poser calling 3 acres a Farm (1 acre of that is house, barn, garrage, a small yard, etc.
Extra thumbs-up: If you have any questions like this, check with your local state or county extension agents. They'll talk your ears off. They're lonely. :-)
They can't always help, but they'll have good suggestions to think about.
TL;DR Fertilizer is a chemical soup like the chemical soup that keeps the Henrietta Lack cancer cell line still alive to this day.
TL;DR Fertilizer dilutes the taste and nutrition of plants by making them bigger not better.
> And, soil rebuilding takes time.
So modern day farm equipment, ploughs which dig deeper cause soil erosion which in turn means more fertilizers plus an increase in the seeds grown to yield highly in certain chemical profile environments. Alot of plants classed as weeds can also be used. So the Mediterranean diet which is supposed to help you live a long life is actually based on picking wild herbs and plants, not the stuff you buy from a supermarket! You can eat dandelions and other wild plants. Wild blackberries taste so much better than any you can buy in a shop and the plants you can buy from a garden centre dont produce black berries which taste anywhere near as good as wild blackberries. Even wild strawberries although tiny like the size of a petit pois pea, have so much more flavour, although I will try a £350 Japanese strawberry (yes just 1 strawberry costs £350). https://metro.co.uk/2020/05/12/paul-hollywood-eats-japan-vie...
Japan doesnt have the land mass so couldnt compete on quantity, so they lead on quality food, thats why their food is the most expensive in the world.
When the horse and horse drawn ploughs are used, less soil erosion is seen as more white root masses are seen holding the soil together.
Not so long ago < 10-30years, it was common to spread manure on field instead of using fertilizer because the bacteria in the manure benefits the ground and crops, its also where we found/find our antibiotics.
I only know of one farm equipment manufacturer who is actively developing smaller farm robots/equipment (German) where as everyone else is going bigger and bigger.
I'd bet on the smaller farm equipment manufacturer because people will be looking for labour saving devices in their gardens ( & country estates) where you can have more control over the quality of the food grown, but I also understand many people live in new build estates with a tiny garden and no robots will really needed.
EU regs and their intentions mean more land has to be left wild and more hedgerows planted which means smaller fields. When fertilizers use jumped years ago many farmers started ripping up their hedgerows, now in Europe there is a trend to replace these massive plain's like fields with smaller tithe like fields which means its incompatible with large farm equipment. Protecting the wildlife is paramount.
The problem with neonicotinoids which is seeds coated with nicotine like chemicals (manmade tend to be longer lasting because they dont break down in the environment) and it messed up insects in particular bee nervous systems. Man Made Pyrethrin's are the same, they dont break down easily unlike whats found naturally in Chrysanthemum flowers. Ironically organic veg is using nicotine and nothing else which is what your grand parents used to use after the war. They used to smoke roll ups and place the used fag but's in a jam jar with water, that dark brown liquid was then sprayed onto the garden as an insecticide/pesticide. You pay a premium for this today in the super markets, but you could just buy a packet of rolling tobacco and put some baccy in a jam jar with water, let it soak and then use that liquid if you dont want to take up smoking!
>Yields for a specific crop goes down in polycropping. Yield across the entire portfolio goes up.
This is because the defensive chemicals in different plants compliment each other so instead of having a monocrop with one chemical defence, there is a range of chemicals which is enough to deter a wider range of pests.
The same mentality is seen in warfare, you dont bet on just the Airforce, you need the Navy and Army as well to really win a war.
Its also why I would invest in small robot manufacturers & AI companies which can tend to individual crops than an instrument which doesnt offer anything personal to a plant.
Its also why Bill Gates is the largest land owner in the US.
We have enormous reserves of fossil fuels. The U.S. has 1200+ years' energy needs' worth of natural gas alone. We have less _oil_, sure, but as far as energy goes, we have plenty.
The problem is government which has an incentive to "feed everyone" which means cheap food by any means necessary. Food prices must go up, let them naturally go up. That means less food for poorer people, which in turn slowly means less people (lower birth rates, poor and bigger families struggling, etc), until we reach equilibrium with our environment under the terms we accept.
I overall agree with this statement. I'm mostly disagreeing with the yield assumption. the cubins do not grow the same yield per acre as we do. they may have food security/sovereignty, but they do it at the cost of more land then otherwise could have done.
item = np.random.choice(["macroeconomics","Venezuela"])
meme_du_jour: f"tell me you don't know about {item} without telling me you don't know about {item}"
print(meme_du_jour)
>Food prices must go up, let them naturally go up. That means less food for poorer people, which in turn slowly means less people (lower birth rates, poor and bigger families struggling, etc), until we reach equilibrium with our environment under the terms we accept.
Unless there's something in it for them by their own assessment people will not make sacrifices of that magnitude.
You are ignoring the time scales, locations of the worst effects, and lots of other side effects like food protectionism and the planning that farmers have to make 9 months before the food shortages happen.
Government isn’t directly responsible for food prices, but they frequently involve themselves because social order/stability requires reasonable food prices. When store shelves are empty in a neighborhood/ region, riots break out. Riots work on the time scale of hours/days. Families having fewer kids is on the time scale of years. Farmers planning for likely yields/costs is months/years.
Your idea of “fair” suggests you would just shrug at the famines caused by Stalin and Mao regimes and blame the people because they weren’t willing to pay enough. When people are food desperate, social order, norms, and predictability break down. This is why governments have strong incentives to intervene to ensure reasonable food prices.
Sure, but why should people‘s income decide who lives and who dies? I’d say let’s kill all the psychopaths first. Like those fantasizing about mass starvation.
On a less violent note, every country has seen birth rates decline as it became richer. Modern western societies only grow through immigration, and even many countries in, say, Africa, have seen drastic declines. Humanity doesn’t expand until it unavoidably runs out of food, that’s a 19th century idea.
> Better than food security is food sovereignty, and people within a locality being able to feed themselves.
That's all well and good, but the implication is that people should live where they grow their food, or move where it can be done. Implementing it at scale would mean either billions of dead or billions of refugees.
Cubans on average lost ~6kgs during the crisis in the 90's. Sure, diabetes and heart disease dropped as a result but I would much rather have a food surplus.
From the link I posted above: "Fifty-six percent of all land used for corn, soybeans, wheat, and cotton was on farms that used no-till/strip-till on at least part of their cropland in 2010-11."
Mostly good comments in here. My take is we have at least 1-2 years of global supply of most grains. This is a completely political problem; its not like we're getting 2012 US Midwest levels of drought in back-to-back years (now THAT would be a crunch).
Food waste is a problem, yes. Animal protein is not a problem. There is plenty of land in the US only suitable for grazing. Much better than that synthetic soup of Impossible Meat.
Food system has largely run on the JIT systems for decades that crunched the chip industry. We haven't had a serious shock I'd argue and I don't think this is one either. People recognize the JIT-ness and fragility of the system though and are (slowly) trying to backstop it. Will take a combination of distributed controlled environments for high value fruits and vegetables, _proper_ land use (high value crop land for crops; high value grazing land for grazing). This, currently, is dictated by the incentive structures in place with subsidies--which can be changed in theory.
> Animal protein is not a problem. There is plenty of land in the US only suitable for grazing.
This statement is wrong. Livestock grazes early in its lifetime, but is moved to feed lots and feed corn and soy to prepare for slaughter. The US spends a quarter of its corn crop on feeding animals, whereas less than 10% is directly feed to people. Animal protein is a significant opportunity cost to US agriculture.
Nope. Go after ethanol if you want wasted corn. We like/need meat, and there is plenty of corn production or grazing land to accommodate that production.
Something like 30-50M buffalo lived and grazed in North America before they were all killed. The ecosystem can most certainly sustain 30-50M cattle grazing. They wouldn't be as _profitable_ as corn-finished cattle, but they produce meat.
And there are many price and institutional barriers to completely grass fed cattle. The primary being that slaughter is centralized to FSIS inspected facilities where most non-poultry spend their final weeks packed in eating soy and corn.
Meat is more useful than low energy density gasoline/ethanol mixes that have higher CO2 emissions than regular gasoline.
Cattle could easily be grass fed. You just wait an extra year before selling calfs at auction. However, selling calfs leads to more $/acre of grazing land, and more cows per acre as well. A week or two eating grain in a slaughterhouse (if sold as a full grown cow) is rounding error.
The big problem I see is that the availability of grazing land is plummeting in the US southwest, thanks to desertification and climate change.
That might be offset by marginal farmland being converted to grazing (due to climate change), but that'll reduce grain production.
The point is that, if the alternative is massive global starvation, we can give up on eating most meat so that that food can be more efficiently be eaten directly by humans instead. And you don't have to give up any of programming, iphones, cars, computers, boats, houses, clothes, etc., to do so.
I for one have been eating meat for less than 20 years. Lots of people (not only individually, but culturally) live mostly vegetarian. There is no problem with it.
We do if we want everyone to eat. Grazing animals are a great way to turn stuff we can't eat into stuff we can eat, and stuff we can use to grow crops that we can also eat.
The vast majority of ruminants are fed corn and soy. If they were all to eat grass we'd be able to produce much less meat than we currently do, and also use much more land
Are you trolling or is this mood affiliation? Have you even really looked into the impact of the food miles of the ingredients you're using relatively to the rest of their carbon footprint? Spoiler: your food miles aren't going to make much of a difference relatively to the rest. Obviously, you can imagine a strawman vegan eating only your proverbial plane-flown avocado and compare that to a perfect locavore eating only grass-fed meat, and sparsely so. But how about compare the real average "locavore" and "vegan" and seeing how that goes. The BBC published a nice piece [1] (n=3) that gives a few pointers to help audit the impact of your food miles. Mileage will vary but even in the UK, with its heavy reliance on imported food, food miles weren't that big a deal compared with opting to eat less meat.
>But people want them, and that's unlikely to change.
This will change when we'll have to make compromise because our current agriculture model is not sustainable (both for climate and food production).
As an aside: I stopped drinking coffee because of the environmental impact. I now drink chicory and barley coffee that's locally grown and roasted. The taste is close enough. It also makes it easier to absorb iron and vitamins (which caffeine inhibits, which does not help if you're reducing meat consumption).
But we need freedom. And in a free country, people are free to decide what their needs are (as long as they are not breaking any laws). Some people need houses of prayer. As an atheist, I can argue that they don’t. But I don’t argue that, because it’s not up to me to decide what they need or not.
We do if we want human beings at their optimal physical and mental capacity. It isn't much of a secret that increased consumption of meat led to human beings reaching their optimal physical and mental potential.
Now, excess meat consumption is a problem, but you aren't going to have optimal human beings without some meat.
Japan used to be a vegetarian society for more than a millenia. Their poor diet so terribly stunted the japanese people, physically and intellectually, that the japanese elites ended vegetarianism in favor of meat in the late 1800s.
The idea was pushed by the buddhist leadership of a buddhist country - Japan. Can't claim it was anti-buddhist when buddhists were behind it. It wasn't anti-buddhist, it was anti suboptimal diet.
It's something that is true everywhere - US, Europe, Japan, etc. As people ate a healthier diet with meat, the people grew taller and smarter on average.
Meiji leadership Buddhist? You seriously need to remove your blinkers. The "Meiji Buddhist Reform" was sweeping and extremely violent and 40,000 Buddhist temples were lost to riots or repression over the period. The new syncretic state-sponsored religion of Shinto was made to replace Buddhist and cut Japan from its Chinese cultural ties and demonstrate to the West that Japan could belong to their club.
Eating mostly polished rice or wheat is not optimal from a health perspective, so quite logically people transitioned from eating miserly diets to eating enough they started becoming taller, etc. That has very little to do with the meat itself and much more with the fact that people would previously mostly eat enough carbs to get by and children would never receive the best share in nutritional terms. Solve that and you probably can explain almost all of that effect. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/rice-disease-mystery-e... gives some insight on how primitive prescriptive dietary approaches were around the Meiji period. You can see the same magical thinking around the power of rice and meat in contemporary Madagascar and it's not pretty.
My wife needs to eat red meat, otherwise she has very low iron levels.
Note: she does not like red meat, and we spent years and years trying to get her iron levels up without it. She started to have to get iron infusions, which are no fun at all.
All that stopped when she started eating red meat twice a week.
Yes, this is a very rare case, and I can imagine a future where red meat is provided as something like medicine for those few who really need it.
> its not like we're getting 2012 US Midwest levels of drought in back-to-back years (now THAT would be a crunch).
That's very likely in the current climate change scenario. Look at what's happening in the American South West right now. Lake Mead is currently at unprecedented low levels with no evidence that this will change course any time soon. It's possible within a decade there won't be enough water to run the Hoover dam. That's something no one would have taken as a serious risk 10 years ago.
Lake Mead is so low because the Colorado River Water Compact allocates more water than has historically been in the river, based on tree ring data. There have been a number of years of historically average flow in a row, and keeping the reservoirs full requires roughly a decade of above average flow.
* Edit * For clarity the compact divides up 17 million acre/ft per year and the real average historic flow is closer to 13 million acre/ft per year. The compact also double dips in it's accounting for some return flows.
The truth is more complex than that. Most beef is mostly pastured then finished with grains. And the grains used mostly hulls and other parts of grains considered inappropriate for human consumption.
they do this because its most efficient/profitable, not because of a technical limitation. Those economic incentivizes could be changed rapidly given the proper political capital.
I don't think we're disagreeing here. I already admitted in my previous comment that it was theoretically possible. My point was that even though it's possible for animal protein to be "not a problem", that's not the case today.
They do it because it dramatically increases yield.
Feeding cows grain in a CAFO setting allows them to rapidly put on weight and turnover their herds faster. Not doing so would result in dramatically lower yields per acre of grassland.
I mean, this comment is wrong. The US has some of the world most stringent food standards in the world. FDA, USDA, OSHA etc. wield immense regulatory power. Is it perfect? No. You can't sell meat at scale in the USA without the government signing off.
It may not be up to your or mine standard, but it has proven successful at getting _quality_ meat into the mouths of millions.
Also, I would bet there aren't any cattle housed in a desert in the USA. They'd die immediately due to heat because no way anybody is paying for AC for _cattle_
> I mean, this comment is wrong. The US has some of the world most stringent food standards in the world. FDA, USDA, OSHA etc. wield immense regulatory power. Is it perfect? No. You can't sell meat at scale in the USA without the government signing off.
> It may not be up to your or mine standard, but it has proven successful at getting _quality_ meat into the mouths of millions.
The GP was maybe a little hyperbolic with "basically no food quality standards", but I don't think "regulatory agencies exist therefore you're wrong" is any better.
A lot of people would likely be alarmed at the lack of standards for cattle feed. You can't feed dead cow brains back to cows, for instance, but you can use lots of other parts of dead cows for feed for other animals, and then those animals (and their manure) can be used in feed for cows. And this distinction is almost entirely self enforced by workers whose jobs are largely only rewarded for throughput.
> Also, I would bet there aren't any cattle housed in a desert in the USA. They'd die immediately due to heat because no way anybody is paying for AC for _cattle_
You'd be wrong. There are a lot of cattle raised in the Chihuahuan Desert and surrounding arid regions, as just one example.
> There are a lot of cattle raised in the Chihuahuan Desert
The cattle in southern california (Corona) were moved en-masse to the central valley as conditions have changed. Grazing traditionally moves north against the global warming trend.
No, the most commonly consumed meats do not come from ruminants. Pigs and chickens are the most commonly eaten animals in the world by a substantial margin and they aren’t feeding on grass.
Yes, but that is an entirely separate line of discussion. Your assertion was that “pretty much all meat comes from grassland”, which is very much incorrect.
If your point here is that manure from pigs and chickens makes up for the grain inputs needed to raise them, you would also be incorrect.
> its not like we're getting 2012 US Midwest levels of drought in back-to-back years (now THAT would be a crunch).
I got a shiver down my spine just reading that sentence. Please do not tempt fate. We just had the hottest year on record. I expect we'll break that record in the next few years again. Drought is depressingly likely.
Will likely happen in our lifetime. I'm positive of it. not a damn thing we can do either. If it doesn't rain, no 'genome edited drought resistance' will matter. Crops need water period (be nice if they needed _less_ water though)
Fortunately, they do. Higher atmospheric CO2 levels mean that plants can obtain the CO2 they need more easily, with the stomata in their leaves not having to open as much. Consequently, they loose less water through the stomata, and are more drought resistant.
Of course, this only helps to a certain extent. A bad enough drought will still be very bad. And a very bad drought is bound to happen sooner or later, just from natural variability. So a robust food supply system, incorporating both a degree of local self-sufficiency in inputs, and global trade (for when crops fail in one location) is essential.
Then factor in all the havoc caused by ethanol in gas ruining seals, not working well in small engines, etc. and it’s just totally non-sensical that this fraud has been allowed to happen.
Most of "green" movement is a fraud. The majority of "green" energy comes biomass - aka cutting trees down and burning it.
Would love to see the funding behind many of these green groups. I'll bet most of it comes from oil companies, governments, etc. The past 15 years, much of the anti-coal "green" movement was funded by oil companies who wanted to take out their coal competitors and replace it with "clean" natural gas. It was all about taking market share. Nothing to do with the environment.
This is anecdotal, but just wanted to give an example that I've personally experienced.
We used to race go karts with Rotax engines, and the local series organizers decided to mandate 91 octane pump gas ("cost saving measure") as opposed to the VP racing fuel that the engine was designed to use.
The end result was that all the racers ended up having excessive carbon buildup in the cylinder, and would go through several sets of the fuel pump internals every year. The fuel pump is a pulse driven flexible element that the pump gas (containing ethanol) would just destroy.
Never had those issues with the ethanol free VP fuel.
I mean, the need for engine compatibility was part of the push for ethanol, it isn't some big secret, and there are millions of vehicles that have no issues with ethanol gasoline. Blame the organizers, not the ethanol.
All I have are my experiences of every small engine I own that worked fine for a decade or more gradually going to crap in the past few years and I need to take four different ones to the small engine repair guy right now. :)
I’ve just been phasing out every gas engine I own for battery powered. I’m done with gasoline as much as possible. A lifetime of begging this horrible Frankenstein machine we call the internal combustion engine to work is enough for me.
In defence of ethanol, producing it from plants and then burning it as fuel reduces greenhouse gas emissions vs extracting, refining and burning dino juice.
This is disputed. The GAO issued a report that cited research which claimed its worse when taking land use effects into account.
In regards to your other question about why its a bad way to produce alcohol, from an EROI perspective, a frequently cited figure is its around 1.5:1 (invest one unit of energy, get 1.5 back). Making it from Brazilian sugar cane on the other hand is 8:1.
Whatever the exact numbers are, the benefits are pretty modest if there are any. Its an agricultural subsidy program.
We’re talking about “big oil” here, you’ll forgive me if my first reaction is to imagine a pre-completed study with all the right conclusions and a big fat cheque hidden under page 3, being shopped around academia looking for someone willing to sign their name to it :-)
From a layman’s point of view the claim just smells weird.
On one hand, we take carbon out of the atmosphere over millennia, compressing it tightly under the surface of the earth for even more years until it turns to a thick sludge. Then very quickly, in comparative seconds to the millennia of oil deposits formation, we release all that into the atmosphere again.
And it’s alleged that causes less greenhouse gas emission than the other idea: extract carbon floating around in the atmosphere today (i.e. grow a plant of some sort today), process it then instead of shipping it across the world from the oil wells to the consumers, instead just distribute it locally where it is grown and processed.
The same of course goes the other way, Big Ag definitely is able to put its hand on the Department of Ag. The report I referred to is from GAO, which is much more independent than USDA.
I couldn't find the GAO report I mentioned but I found a more recent one published this year by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, one of the more prestigious journals in the world. In their abstract in addition to mentioning US ethanol raised corn prices by 30% and other crop prices by 20% they say it
> ... caused enough domestic land use change emissions such that the carbon intensity of corn ethanol produced under the RFS is no less than gasoline and likely at least 24% higher.
My understanding so far is that the corn used for ethanol isn’t the kind you eat (sweetcorn) it’s a cheaper to produce and more hardy plant but consequently can only really be used for cattle feed and ethanol production.
Ages ago i read something that said in the US, corn was the optimal source but in other parts of the world, sugar cane could result in a more energy efficient process for ethanol.
Sure fair enough. It’s more nuanced than someone will be able to write in a succinct HN comment. Without debating the merits of carbon intensity, the ethanol mandate is far too small to make any appreciable impact on emissions. But it is large enough to have a very appreciable impact on food costs.
That makes sense. It’s not something that would solve itself then if that’s true - i don’t know that my demand for fuel is driving up the cost of my corn based foods and vice versa. I’m not deciding to drive less miles or take alternative transport because i want cheaper food - because i don’t know that connection exists.
I was reading the journals of Gareth Jones about his time spent in Soviet Russia and Ukraine, and find remarkable similarities to this sort of thing.
The government took over, for example, the manufacture and maintenance of tractors, and also selected people nearly at random to maintain them.
The one guy he interviewed said something to the extent that the tractors barely last a year before breaking. The people who designed them were incompetent, the people who used them were incompetent, and the people who maintained them were incompetent. Not that it mattered, the oil they used was basically sludge.
I'm getting to the point where I'm struggling to believe Hanlon's Razor. Especially when the most extreme environmentalists seem to align with Thanos' ideas about resolution to climate issues.
Late Soviet regime produced so much farm hardware as if it wanted to outright lay siege to the field and storm it by having greater numbers.
Most of it went rotting. I remember a village school with a large yard full of half-disassembled tractors and combines. Apparently the students were supposed to learn to use all the stuff and then give the field no rest. In reality it would just rot.
I don't think you should label all that people incompetent. They were mostly very practical in solving their immediate problem while having no freedom to rethink it. The system sucked and people were just trapped in it.
I didn't take incompetent as an insult, but in its straightforward, descriptive sense: the people were not competent at the jobs they were assigned to (and, presumably, weren't given sufficient help in becoming competent)
I have to disagree. The tractor-builders were very competent in building 100,000 new tractors each year when operating on vastly insufficient resources with apathetic workforce; and making sure these tractors could leave the factory gates on their own. In short, they did fulfill their plan.
Would they be happier producing 10,000 tractors that would actually last, instead? Maybe. Would they be able to do that right away? No, but with some practice it could be done. Could they produce better tractors with the constraints that they had? I don't think so.
You will undoubtedly see the same pattern all over the corporate world.
Thanos’ ideas about everything were extremely silly. A halving of population would do nothing on any time scale. A small blip easily recovered by reproduction. People deserve better writing, even in comic book movies.
The original rationale for Thanos made a lot more sense: he simped for Death, like the concept of death was a woman in the Marvel universe. He thought half the universe's souls would make a perfect offering for her and would impress her enough to make her want to be with him.
It's outrageously comic-book-y, but may as well lean into the illogic.
I thought they would, considering they introduced the Goddess of Death in Thor: Ragnarok, but...NOPE. Cate Blanchett delightfully hamming it up as a supervillian only lasted one film.
Death is a separate character from Hela. So the possibility is still there.
They even teased it at the end of The Avengers: the Chitauri leader tells Thanos "to challenge [humans] is to court death", at which time Thanos grins eagerly. But with Earth-199999's Thanos dead, they're going to have to invoke some multiversal malarkey if they want to develop that storyline now.
Real life despots and fanatics are usually quite a bit crazier and less coherent than Thanos. As usual you have to tone it down to make it believable in fiction. A realistic depiction of a genocidal fanatic would be too stupid or insane to be believable.
See: Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler, ISIS, Kim Jong Un, and numerous other examples.
If they were rational they would not be despots and fanatics. Unfortunately charismatic lunatics command followings. Charisma bypasses the rational mind and shoots straight into the limbic system (as do fear, outrage, etc).
Cult leaders are good cases too: L. Ron Hubbard, Jim Jones, Charles Manson, Keith Raniere, etc. These people would be as bad as the worst despots if they actually had power over more than a few people.
Reading _Wizard's First Rule_ right now. "Charisma bypasses the rational mind and shoots straight into the limbic system (as do fear, outrage, etc)." That's pretty much the premise of the book.
> A halving of population would do nothing on any time scale. A small blip easily recovered by reproduction.
The population was half of 2020 in 1973 (1). Emissions were also half of now back then (2). That’s nearly 30 years of runway that Thano’s solution would provide. With today’s technology and rapid iteration, we could definitely do something better for climate change.
I’m not endorsing the method, but merely disagreeing with your assertion.
It is digestible post processing like after nixtamalization to turn it into masa. No 2 corn is used in tortillas, snack foods and other processed corn products. That sentence is misleading, because yes straight off the cob you can't eat it.
All you have to do is dry and grind it to make cornmeal. It's quite digestible, and keeps very well, like wheat. (I've never tried eating it fresh like sweet corn, may have to add that to the bucket list.)
A problem is it is lacking in free niacin, which can result in pellagra, if the diet is principally corn meal. Nixtamalization corrects that[0].
Without nixtamalization, cornmeal doesn't form a dough. You can make corn bread, but not tortillas.
Corn chips, e.g. Fritos, and corn bread don't use nixtamalized corn, but they are quite digestible!
This also hints that our food production is more complex than you would first expect, in a true food crunch there are likely many substitute diet options which can be made by processing inedible agriculture products or repurposing fields.
The corn in corn chips has undergone nixtamalization, which makes more of the nutrients available to humans.
As others have commented, no. 2 yellow field corn can be ground into cornmeal, and even without nixtamalization, it is certainly digestible by humans, it's just that nixtamalization makes important nutrients like niacin available.
I think it's the lack of nixtamalization that makes cornbread so nice and gritty and corn chips so nice and crunchy. Try Ottofile dent, if you can find it or grow it.
Dietary fat does not contribute to weight gain any more than any other macronutrient. This long lived myth needs to die. Similarly dietary cholesterol also likely does not contribute significantly to blood levels.
Maybe rising corn prices is all that's needed to help bring an end to ethanol in gasoline! (Except I don't want to starve people just to fix political problems, or, really, at all.)
In healthy soil phosphorous is released by fungi and bacteria from the sand, silt, and clay. Nobody fertilizes forests or native prairies and they are doing just fine on phosphorous.
agreed nature gets along just fine on its own, but if we're talking about human prosperity I don't think we can sustain ourselves on the bounty of the forest.
Foraging from the forest isn't what I meant at all. The way we farm the majority of the crop land kills every last spec of fungi and bacteria in the soil that would help improve the soil and reduce the need for inputs. The minerals are there already. We need to allow the biology to do its thing and make them available to plants.
The land use isn't singular on a regeneratively managed farm. Agroforestry and intense rotational grazing are two examples of ecosystems planned for maximum profitable output from land. An agroforestry farm may provide mushrooms, berries, nuts, wood, meat, dairy, eggs, grains, and fruit from the same plot of land that may provide 201,000 bushels of wheat (~5000 acres). The difference is management. Regenerative practices aim to work with nature.
I understand being skeptical of a new way(really the old way) to farm. We have all grown up in a time dominated by artificial inputs to farms. We don't know anything else. I have been following the regenerative space for years now and have adopted many of the practices on my tiny piece of land. This is the future of farming. Outputs are higher quality and more plentiful with more variety. Inputs are minimal which increases the profit margin.
It doesn’t leave earth, but commercial farming practices lets all those nutrients run-off to pollute the water systems instead of being retained in the soil. Where they end up is difficult to recover.
Furthermore, soil needs to be alive, and commercial farming practices kills it every year. So instead of building up soil fertility year after year, external inputs is added year after year in a self-destructive cycle.
Everyone saying 'we need to grow more crops!' needs to see that the futures markets deal with exactly this. As people see high futures prices for corn, they'll grow more corn because it's more profitable. Some farmers will switch from livestock to corn.
Others who have storage facilities will make money by buying now to sell later and make use of the price difference.
At a certain point, prices get too high for making bioethanol. And that gets eaten by people instead.
Basically - there is no shortage because markets will do their job and mean there is always availability of all goods.
The only time there will be a shortage is when governments do things like cap prices or restrict exports/imports.
The markets can't solve problems due to lack of critical resources. Market theory rests on the assumption that all needed resources are readily available. Demand can be met my using capital to create more manufacturing facilities. Remove that assumption and market theory essentially collapses.
Where market theory can still save the day is finding alternatives. If a key resource needed for the production and distribution of goods is missing then market forces will tend to produce an alternative. That works so long as an actual replacement exists and the cost of the replacement is in line with the original. Water is an irreplaceable resource - if you don't have water and you need it for production then you're pretty much screwed. The market won't "solve" that problem for you. If, as in this case, you need fertilizer then there may be an alternative but it may take several years to ramp up the production of that alternative and that alternative may be considerably more expensive than the original. This scenario leads to food shortages, food insecurity, and spiraling food costs. The market can't prevent these realities.
In short, markets are just a tool and like all tools you need to understand their usefulness and limitations.
> Some farmers will switch from livestock to corn.
This switch can take too long and would need to take place in an industry often already razor tin margins thanks to big chains (which can contribute to inflexibility) and then plants take time to grow and depend on the seasons, etc. Also fertilisers go into both the livestock and the corn feed.
>Basically - there is no shortage because markets will do their job and mean there is always availability of all goods.
A shortage doesn't need to mean people are starving. If prices of staple foods go up enough it too causes societal unrest.
(See Arab spring where bread prices went up, governments tried to protect their peg to the dollar, etc)
>The only time there will be a shortage is when governments do things like cap prices or restrict exports/imports.
Well here we see that happening when fuels and other components for fertilisers and some things like vegetable oils are affected by war.
India, the 2/3 largest producer of wheat/rice has strict controls on exports. Other countries will impose restrictions when they realize their poor will rise up in riots. One theory for arab spring is that it started because of rising food prices.
Food is just not like other commodities. Shortages lead not just to recessions but revolutions. Any Government and society not paying close attention and investing in either ramping up domestic production or stockpiling is going to have a really bad time.
I'm always bothered by stories like these that seem to do a reasonable job of listing causes of self-inflicted problems, and then try to act like it was some sort of inevitable act of God, or natural law of the universe or something.
According to TFA the causes are:
1. Back-to-back storms in the USA causing production shutdowns. OK, that one is genuinely just random natural variance.
2. Natural gas price explosion. This is due largely to sanctions on Russia. Governments don't actually have to sanction Russian natural gas. It's a choice, one that can be undone tomorrow if need be.
3. Sanctions on a major Belarusian potash producer. Same thing. Belarus isn't even Russia. This could be fixed tomorrow with the wave of a bureaucrat's pen.
4. Ongoing side effects of lockdowns. This was a major own goal. People warned at the time you can't just shut down the economy even if actually had worked, which it didn't. This one sits squarely in government footgun area.
5. China has restricted exports of phosphate to build up stockpiles at home. Once again, governments are creating the damage here.
6. "Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which effectively cut off nearly a fifth of the world’s nutrient exports". For the third time, no, governments cut off those nutrient exports. It wasn't some sort of physical law that said invasions => cut off nutrient supply. It was and is a choice.
What seems to be happening here is that comfortable and powerful politicians have decided that showing how much they care about Ukraine is more important than people eating. The poor around the world will starve, so (primarily) European countries can wave a blue and yellow flag over their bodies. It feels very wrong.
These are good points, I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. That said, I think it still makes sense for western countries to sanction Russia.
Yes, sanctions are wasteful of resources, which could lead to food shortages and people dying, but that's kind of the problem with war: It kills people and wastes resources. Even without sanctions, there would be many Ukrainians (and Russians) killed, and Ukraine would not be keeping up its wheat exports. Ideally, we'd like to prevent this kind of thing from happening very often, which in practice means there needs to be some kind of deterrence against strong countries invading their weaker neighbours. Since western powers can't fight directly against Russia, as it would risk nuclear war, sanctions are one of the few tools available for deterrence. Sanctions aren't about waving a blue and yellow flag or about showing how much you care. They're about preventing similar future conflicts and hopefully giving Ukraine a better negotiating position so the war can end sooner.
Also, it seems like European and North American sanctions shouldn't be a problem for most poor countries unless they're also participating in those sanctions themselves? While sanctions make sense for rich countries, the first priority should definitely be to feed your own people. So if the government of India decides that in order to feed its people, it needs to import potash from Belarus, more power to it.
The issue with sanctions and poorer countries is that commodities are liquid markets. If rich countries raise prices internally by sanctioning some sources then the higher prices draw supplies away from poorer countries. Or put another way, if you reduce supply whilst keeping demand constant then prices rise, and they rise everywhere. That's what China seems to be trying to wall itself off from, which it can probably do, but it can cause a domino effect where everyone feels they have to go protectionist.
So it boils down to whether you think the concrete pain inflicted on the poor today is worth it to avoid hypothetical pain inflicted on them by a future conflict.
Makes sense. Once we're talking about liquidity, though, there's a wide variety of rich country behaviour that raises food prices: Eating large amounts of grain-fed meat, turning food (or crops grown on land that could have been used to grow food) into ethanol, etc. Maybe the message should be: "Support Ukraine by eating less meat and planting a victory garden." In terms of a concrete government policy, that might look like fixing food and fertilizer imports at last year's levels (from non-Russia countries, imports from Russia would be fixed at 0 due to sanctions), and then figuring out how to feed the country on that plus whatever can be produced internally. That should more or less zero-out the effect of sanctions on global food prices. (Rich countries still contain poor people, so internally they would need to work out a subsidy for plant-based foods.) It should still be easy to feed everyone in a rich country where there's high meat-consumption, high food wastage, and only 1% of the population are farmers. Just stop eating so much meat, and have a few more people start being farmers. The government could hire a bunch of patriotic chemists and engineers to quickly spin up more Haber-Bosch reactors. Rich countries have lots of chemists and engineers. All this will cost money, sure, but think about it as just another kind of military spending. If someone came to me tomorrow saying: "we're building a bunch of Haber-Bosch reactors so we can maintain our sanctions against Russia, the pay is minimum wage, are you in?", I'd quit my current job the very same day. For some reason, our current governments aren't doing these things. Maybe they don't realize the severity of the situation. Maybe they don't care about the world's poor people. Maybe they're smarter than me, and have an even better plan. Still, it's insane to me that getting our butts in gear and making some relatively minor sacrifices in order to cover the shortfall is not being discussed as an option.
It's not an own-goal for the elites and politicians, who now have an excuse for their bad monetary policy causing inflation, and who have got and will continue to get many more dependents as things worsen.
If all the land and resource that goes into feeding cows is used for crops, a lot more people can be supported. It has never been a lack of global food shortage, it is always regional anyways.
There are an enormous number of products that cattle provide beyond beef, from cosmetics to medicine to important industrial and agricultural products, with manure, bonemeal, and bloodmeal among them.
I agree with this.
Tbh there are things that can be done to reduce it's footprint and we should collectively eat less meat.
But comparing 1 to 1 what ends up on the cows plat and what ends up in the store generally doesn't do it justice.
Absolutely everything gets used and processed.
However, there are many areas of the world where you can't grow human-edible food on the land currently being used to grow grass for feeding livestock. Of course this is not true everywhere, but a lot of area, e.g. in the UK, could only be used for grazing cows or sheep, if not left for nature.
However, quite a lot of cattle grazing land isn't really suitable for arable farming. The American approach of raising cattle on soybeans grown on arable land may not be sustainable, but more traditional hillside grazing may be.
In the US cattle start out grazing and spend a portion of their life there. Then they go to dense feedlots (CAFOs) where they are fed a grain heavy diet.
In theory, I agree. However, this is only currently true for small parts of the beef supply chain in the US. The vast majority of meat tissue growth people eat here comes from factory farms.
I don't have a major problem with meat eating when it's done sustainably and humanely. The real issue is that this is not the case for way too much of it now, and current meat production practices are yet another example of unsustainable overconsumption in general. Yet more than half the population regularly celebrates and enshrines that overconsumption, reinforcing it. This is not a good look to anyone who's really thinking long term & globally about these things.
Depends on your definition of microscopic. The USA is a world-leading producer of a number of agricultural products, including corn, soybeans, beef, and in the top 10 producers of a staggering number of other crops.
We don't have to convert cattle farms into cropland, just eat the grain we feed the cows, and if we get sick of that grain, then grow something else where we are growing that grain.
But we don't feed grain to cows, unless it's stuff like brewery mash where it's already been used to make human food.
You cannot necessarily grow different stuff in the same field. Not all crops do well in the same kind of soil. For example, you need totally different soil for potatoes than you do for cereal crops if you want them to actually grow.
We (in the US anyway) feed a massive quantity of unspent (not brewery mash for example) grains when finishing cattle in feedlots. Corn, barley, milo, soybeans etc along with harvested forages like alfalfa and sorghum (which is often fed as silage).
People do feed brewery mash and other byproducts but that isn't most of what goes into feedlot rations nationwide.
But seriously, composting, no till, stop spraying R0undup aka glyphosate, plant trees in fields, more cover crops, more green mulch, more pollinators, more ponds, more pastureland, more aquaculture, more polyculture in general. The problem is the desert style of farming that led to the dust bowl and will lead to the next one. This comes from a very new (<3 years) farmer who has read a bunch and microfarmed for three years on 5 acres.
The problem is people got sold a bunch of lies about machines and chemicals and those lies are now coming home to roost. Organic and no till and permaculture are probably the way out of this. You can absorb nitro from the atmosphere but that's one way, nature has been doing it another way for eons.
The Green Revolution of the 1960s proved that we could - that Malthusian claims were BS. What we have now is those same Malthusians actively sabotaging the roots of the Green Revolution by shutting down energy and means of production. Technically mass murder.
The Green Revolution proved we could increase crop production through additional inputs, not magic. We moved the constraint from local soil conditions to global resource extraction.
Women choosing to have less children is the other half of the failed mass starvation predictions. World’s population will peak this century and start to decline. We currently produce enough food to feed 10 billion, if waste is accounted for.
> those same Malthusians actively sabotaging the roots of the Green Revolution by shutting down energy and means of production. Technically mass murder
I don't suppose you'd like to expand on this argument or back it with any sort of substance?
It's ok though. I like these threads on HN. Hopefully helps educate people. People on HN have a lot of skills to offer agriculture they likely aren't even aware of. Every article/discussion helps spread the message, hopefully.
ETA: Most people don't understand agriculture or where their food comes from--HN no different. Only small % of people involved in agriculture _directly_
So far at posting time I don't see a whole lot of signal to gain from the noise here if I were legitimately someone who had zero agriculture experience and was trying to gain understanding.
This is the blind leading the blind, and if you gleaned much from the top comments you'd be worse informed than not reading this entire thread. Half of the posts are just political using couched language to pretend they aren't.
Ag is definitely one of HNs blind spots, usually the topics are simply amusing (e.g. urban food production startups burning millions of VC) - but this is the first actually "substantive to humanity topic" I've read through and the results are a little scary.
And heck, I'm probably contributing to this noise since I also haven't stepped foot on a farm or market garden in well over a decade.
Perhaps these issues cannot be solved from a desk and computer.
HN might bristle at the idea the Farmer Joe has a more sophisticated mental model of an extremely complex and multivariate system (a field of corn or soy) which evades reduction to a dataset.
The solutions I've seen on this board is typically "well let's reduce the variables and grow lettuce in warehouses!" Or trying to build a robot that can pick strawberries. Neither of these solves food scarcity issues.
If people reading this wanted to pursue a meaningful solution via data, my advise is to look at the scaling of the farm-to-consumer market, and how to enable larger distributed networks of small independent farms to sell to customers. The food supply will be more resilient when farming gets smaller, simpler, and more distributed
I think the specific problems would-be technologists have in approaching farmers are:
(1) beliefs that farming is simple and farmers are inept
(2) beliefs that the technology they (our facile technologists) know (e.g., robotics, saas, ai, etc) can be shoe-horned into or sprinkled onto agriculture for revolutionary results (at best these things tend to be incremental improvements and at worse they are detrimental).
In general, technologists need to understand agriculture as a global dynamic system in order to understand the opportunities for innovation (there certainly are places where applying robotics or AI or etc can lead to revolutionary results, but it's probably not obvious to someone whose experience with agriculture was an elementary school field trip 30 years ago).
> my advise is to look at the scaling of the farm-to-consumer market, and how to enable larger distributed networks of small independent farms to sell to customers. The food supply will be more resilient when farming gets smaller, simpler, and more distributed
Very astute comment.
If any farmers in WA (or elsewhere) want a free consult on how to connect with your customers via the internet, please reach out!
> The food supply will be more resilient when farming gets smaller, simpler, and more distributed
Will it? In my area the main agricultural products are apples, dairy products, beef, wheat, and potatoes, because those are the things that my area's climate and geology support. I can already buy those things cheaply and readily and they are farmed efficiently and widely by very large operations. How does farming get more resilient when individual farms get smaller? Smaller farms, by definition, have higher overheads because they benefit less from economy of scale, right? Logistics get more expensive for a zillion small actors, equipment and maintenance is a larger slice of the overall operation, smaller operations have less efficient access to capital, etc...
The current option is to use industrial farming technology until the raw inputs run out or become cost-prohibitive. Or until tillage soil for field crops becomes nutrient-depleted and barren.
Also, the comment was about using intellectual capital to work on the Markets problem of agriculture, not the act of farming itself
>If people reading this wanted to pursue a meaningful solution via data, my advise is to look at the scaling of the farm-to-consumer market, and how to enable larger distributed networks of small independent farms to sell to customers.
Yes, I am implying farmers markets. There is not currently an effective way for these small farms to network their production in aggregate to sell at a level commensurate to an industrial farm. This is the reason big ag can sell for cheaper.
If farmers markets could achieve cost-parity with big grocery (by competing at-scale) then distributed small-scale farming could contribute to solving many issues in climate, environment, nutrition, etc
To make this work there would need to be a big social push towards eating in line with the seasons again (which was obviously the norm for 99.99% of the history of humanity). I think this might be a hard sell, people are now very used to being able to buy whatever they want whenever they want, e.g. strawberries in january
Seasonal eating of farm-fresh foods would certainly make free public healthcare a more reasonable proposal in the US. It would surely cut into the bottom line of the pharma industry
Usually I shill my blog (in bio) where I _hope_ i'm sharing signal.
In a weird type of way, there's little we can do immediately. Almost like a solar flare type of event. Ag and food production systems are so massively scaled, even if we WANTED to change everything for the better, it would likely take years, if not decades. Not like software where any bug can be fixed in a week or so. Human population numbers have exploded on the back of cheap, abundant food. If anything seriously disturbed that, yikes.
I met a young man from Missouri.. he had a large frame but was just 20 years old or so.. He was harried and furtive and was getting into some trouble here and there. Upon knowing him a little bit, he was traumatized by large, loud, dominant men giving him orders, while as an intelligent young man he had questions. Of course many of the men I refer to here are from the Ag community.
North American Ag is not solved, and with the Oklahoma Dustbowl and current crop patterns in California, it must be obvious to science that sometimes, Ag has evolved for CONTROL not INTELLIGENCE. American factory animal farming is a living nightmare in places. American treatment of topsoil, and of fresh water, and industrial placement at the Great Lakes for that matter, are a DISASTER. You defend the Ag "community" like they need defending, from urban smart-people? They are beetle-like survivors of decades of market distortion, ego and alcohol.
Disrupt the Ag sector, yes please.
ps- your elected representative William Gates already started the ball rolling with farm ownership. see any news story after his "revelation" .. first result in GS
" Today, Bill Gates owns 242,000 acres of farmland in 19 states. In addition, he owns 25,750 acres of transitional land and 1,234 acres of recreational land for total land holdings of 268,984 acres. His largest holding is in Louisiana (69,071 acres), followed by Arkansas (47,927 acres) and Arizona (25,750 acres). Aug 27, 2021"
The majority of animals doesn't "graze", they're locked in factory farms. And you're ignoring the land needed to grow the feed, which makes a major difference.
Alternatively, I would argue that much harm has been done to agriculture by the 'information' sector in general. Commoditizing and industrializing food production (a reduction to data and numbers) has caused most of the issues collectively known as the 'modern American diet'
Okay, but I don't think anyone of us are part of the information sector that's commoditizing food production. OP said we are unaware of agriculture, and I mostly agree unless you're in an agrarian area or country, you simply won't learn about these things.
Additionally what you're talking about sounds more like actions prompted by business 'leaders' and not IT staff making databases.
It seems you have a broader compliant, so let me ask you: What's the alternative to using scientific process to solve problems?
Agriculture effects the environment, uses shared resources, and is necessary for the continuation of human life. I would be really wary about going with a gut feeling to solve such a large important problem.
How do you know when you have the right data and how do you know you're solving the right problem and not causing others? So far confidence and hubris came with myopia.
That's a problem you have even when not relying on "enough" right data to base your decisions off of. With data you can at least have a more scientific approach to it all. It is correct that science and data gets hijacked for political goals as well, so it's not necessarily a road to success.
Kind of agree. I don't think ag was malicious in that regard. No different than any business trying to maximize profits by any* means necessary (tm). Just so happens it affects human health.
Similarly, a sure-fire way to tell someone hasn't lived in a place where you haven't needed a car for every aspect of life is when they criticize anti-car policy without engaging with the deeper reasons behind it :)
I think a lot of the pushback against cars have to do with the popularization of human-centric design movements that question the assumption that cars are the pinnacle of transportation that American cities have operated from since about the 1950s. An easy example is the idea of "induced demand" [1] that shows even from a pure engineering perspective that the cost-benefit math for cars has long been unfairly weighted towards cars by outside forces.
We're seeing a lot of pressure around housing and energy and social policy in general which in turn is making us question decisions we've made, culturally, in history, like can we really sustain the building of less dense housing for our growing population? Does it make sense to give every family 0.75 acres of grass, 400 sqft of driveway and a 2 car garage, when those things are only used some of the time? Might there be better ways to approach the utilization of that space as a population?
I'm rambling now, but I get frustrated when people dismiss concerns like that out of hand. Can the US ever totally get rid of cars? No, not for a hundred years at least. Having a good 80 years of city planning being focused around every adult having their own vehicle is of course going to e difficult to move away from, and there are certain lifestyles (rural living, farming, regions where building trains is more impractical) that it'll just never be a great idea... but I still think it's worth interrogating these assumptions we've carried to see if there's a better way we could be living life.
> Does it make sense to give every family 0.75 acres of grass, 400 sqft of driveway and a 2 car garage
A standard suburban house doesn't sit on 0.75 acres. 0.2 is typical. Though you're probably low on the driveway and garage :).
I'd like to see a better argument for why we shouldn't live this way. There are relatively large metros (e.g. Portland) that are predominantly suburban single family homes, and so far it seems to work fine. Sure, we could compress Portland into a 10 mile by 10 mile square, but why? Would it actually make our lives better? By what metric?
It's not the first-order (i.e. direct) effects of suburban life. In fact, TBH, suburban life can be downright cozy--you got your own decent-sized home, a little patch of grass, maybe a patio, barbecue, deck, maybe even a garden.
That's not the issue. It's the externalities, the downstream effects, of trying to scale up suburban living to huge numbers of people.
At a small scale, a little town of a few hundred or couple thousand people, things remain walkable. There could be a corner grocery store, one gas station, a few stores clustered together in the town square, courthouse, playground, park, school, church....all nice and wonderful.
But all that disappears when you scale suburbs up to tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, then millions of people. The amount of land area gets enormous. Traffic gets enormous. It scales like O(n^2). You get bigger and bigger streets. Bigger and bigger courthouses. Bigger and bigger stores, parking lots, huge shopping malls, and everything keeps getting pushed out by the pressure of it all. It sprawls. The city tries to transform itself into something medium density, as housing prices go up. Office and commercial real estate go up. People want white collar, nice, high-paying jobs. They don't want to be plumbers and electricians and house painters, but executives and managers and have their own businesses.
But suburban sprawl really doesn't support those things very well. People get pushed miles and miles from their jobs. Traffic becomes a nightmare. The prices go off the charts. Tradespeople get pushed out. Culture takes a dive. No more walking or biking when those freeways go up.
Bad examples of sprawl are places like Houston and Los Angeles, even the Bay Area now. I spent 4 years in LA, 5 in the Bay Area. LA is truly mind-blowing. The entire basin is just one big grid of endless permutations of the same concrete jungle, here or there less dense or more dense, a few bright spots, but OMG and endless labyrinth of Stapleses, Starbuckses, McD's and strip malls...
But LA in the 1930s wasn't that. It was just a few towns here and there and some downtown. It was literally a few spots in the desert where people had little nuclei of the small-town living. It just grew without real direction and was completely powered by oil and cars.
I don't like American suburbs for me personally, but the US has tons of space and I don't understand how traffic would be better if we pushed more people into less space (with fewer streets and so on). Indeed, most big cities are famous for their congestion.
With respect to prices, these are self-regulating. If prices go up, things either get denser and/or people move elsewhere.
> Culture takes a dive.
Again, suburbs aren't my thing, but it seems really offensive/chauvinistic to imply that suburban culture is lesser than urban culture. I'm sure I'm misunderstanding, and in the spirit of charity I want to give you the opportunity to set the record straight.
> No more walking or biking when those freeways go up.
Is this intrinsic to suburbs, or is it an artifact of how suburbs were planned at the time that suburbs exploded in popularity? Can suburbs be designed to be more walkable/bikeable (I would actually be surprised if they aren't already)?
I'm not sure if this is really clear to people who don't live here, but I think it's important to note that 'suburbs' doesn't really mean just one thing. Portland is mostly suburbs, for example. I think it's tempting to think suburbia must be endless miles of tract housing with no business, no retail. While that happens, it's not at all universal.
> Can suburbs be designed to be more walkable/bikeable (I would actually be surprised if they aren't already)?
Can't speak for everywhere in the US, but in the places I've lived, this is standard. Part of the cost of building a house is putting sidewalks in. So the problem isn't walkability. The problem, where it exists, is a lack of anything to walk to. But that shouldn't be that hard to address -- knock down some houses and zone for commercial. Build small cities out of suburbs. (I expect that already happens, it certainly happened decades ago in places with long established suburbs).
On the points of culture, there's a video [1] that talks about how common US zoning pressures towns to all build very similarly, to the point where they look almost indistinguishable from one another. There's similar videos done by City Beautiful and Not Just Bikes, but I'm having a harder time searching my history for them on my phone. (I'll try to post them once I'm back at a real computer.)
Here's another video [2] that discusses how city tax revenue is primarily earned in their dense downtown regions, and spent on their more distributed suburban environments.
Others in the comments have discussed this, but the issues with towns being walkable and cyclist friendly tend to intersect directly with anti-goals if car design. Places aren't walkable if there's huge roads and parking lots that people have to traverse in order to get to them. Similarly, cars are quite hazardous to pedestrians and cyclists. If we're optimizing for human-scale environments, we're inherently car-hostile. Similarly, if we're optimizing for efficiency of cars, then we're hostile to human-scale design. The ideas are largely antithetical.
You can get some hybridization--metra trains from city cores to the suburbs, street cars or trams along main suburban drags alongside with automobiles, but one system constrains the other.
Historically, highway systems have segregated neighborhoods whose citizens were poorer, and relied disproportionately on public transit or bikes and walking. If you have to go half a mile out of your way to find an overpass over the highway to get to the nearest grocery, and that overpass has a litter-covered sidewalk barely two feet wide, we definitely aren't building our suburbs to be walkable or bikable.
> Again, suburbs aren't my thing, but it seems really offensive/chauvinistic to imply that suburban culture is lesser than urban culture. I'm sure I'm misunderstanding, and in the spirit of charity I want to give you the opportunity to set the record straight.
No, I meant that culture takes a dive from small-town culture, where you know your neighbors and shop owners.
I'm hopping on a plane in a minute, but I'll do my best to at least start an example :)
The real question is "what do you mean by 'it works fine'?" To me, the effects of suburban living are such that we don't treat people as people unless they're shrouded in a big rolling box of metal. Of course it'll vary from person to person and family to family. I think urban environments offer children much more freedom than corresponding suburban environments, while being safer. There's much more mobility and access to things outside of the house, which I'd argue significantly enriches childhood experience and leads to more adaptable adults.
As an adult, I'm overjoyed by the ease with which I can get to things around my city. I never have to deal with traffic, I can walk to three different grocery stores in under fifteen minutes. I have dozens of restaurants in similar distance, and I never worry about having too much to drink to safely drive home. I don't have to deal with traffic, and when friends come to visit (or when I visit them) I can take the train and enjoy a book instead of navigating roads. I feel far healthier and happier with the amount of light physical activity that's been baked into my life just by going about my normal routine. Before we moved to the city, I lived a pretty typical office worker sedentary life: I'd get up, shower, drive (sitting) to work, work (sitting, sometimes standing), then drive home. Now I walk to work and feel invigorated as I come through the door 15 minutes after I left, without the annoyance of rush hour or traffic or bad drivers. (A co-worker of mine lives out in the suburbs of our city, which are denser than most, and takes the light rail into work; half an hour on the train, 5 minute walk from the station. If he took a car, we'd need parking for him and everyone else that had one, and roads for it [see again, induced demand in my post above], and I wouldn't be able to walk to work myself). A twenty minute walk puts me at museums or bars or train stations or work or the store or like 5 friends' houses or the lake shore or a thousand other places. No parking, no navigating traffic, no having to move the car or worry about not wandering far from the car or figuring out how to navigate unfamiliar roads. Honestly the most stressful part of any of my journeys is wondering if drivers are paying attention as I go through the crosswalk, or if they're going to cut the corner to try to make their left turn.
As a citizen, my city's limited resources don't have to go to maintaining roads that the richer segments of the population get proportionally more benefit from. We can invest in more public services since we're not committed endlessly to maintaining the cost-sink of asphalt plains. [1] Public transit is an amazing economic equalizer as well: In a suburban environment, you must have a reliable car to make it to work. If you're too poor (or just starting out) to afford a car, or if it's unreliable, that's going to severely curtail your available job pool. (There's a common saying that "we don't all have the same time" when it comes to discussing class differences; my highschool girlfriend spent two hours on the bus, one way, to work, because her family only had one car, and her mother needed it for her job. That's four hours a day she can't use to cook, or study [she could try, but a bus is far from an ideal study environment], or sleep. If our town had better transit, or if our town wasn't so dense that it took two hours to travel from house to shopping district, it'd be a very different story.)
This is to say nothing of the actual health impact of cars: accidents, death, pollution, or just the amount of money we're 'required' to spend on them so we can participate in wider society. I feel like putting these at the end really undercuts their significance, but we never seem to talk about these facts. Car accidents are the eighth-leading cause of death in the US [2]. Imagine the economic savings, and the amount of medical resources, we could free up by reducing that. Imagine the value our citizens would get out of not paying $20k (at the _very low end_) every five or eight years for their cars, not to mention the maintenance.
> The real question is "what do you mean by 'it works fine'?"
Portland has been around for almost 180 years, and people still seem to think it is an attractive place to live. The last couple years have been pretty terrible, but that doesn't seem to be unique to this area, and if anything is more of an urban problem than a suburban one.
I won't tell you what you should like, or what your definition of good is. But for me, I enjoy suburban living more. For example, I drove into downtown Portland a few days ago and watched Hamilton, it's only 20 minutes away. We go to museums, art shows, etc. But, I can turn away from Portland and in less than 20 minutes be in an entirely rural area enjoying nature. 20 minutes farther and I'm approaching Mt. Hood. When I get home, I have my own little square of paradise: no shared walls with strangers, a place for the kids to play, a nice community where everyone sorta knows everyone else. City living is the right answer for some people, but definitely not all of us.
> The real question is "what do you mean by 'it works fine'?" To me, the effects of suburban living are such that we don't treat people as people unless they're shrouded in a big rolling box of metal.
This is just unhelpful, tired rhetoric. Everyone has the same rights whether they're in a car or not. Moreover, public transit literally depends on much larger "metal boxes".
It sounds like you live in a magical city.
In Chicago, it's much faster to get around by car than it is to take the train or bus. In general, if you're taking the bus or train anywhere, it's almost always a 45 minute trip one-way and it can easily be double that if you have a transfer.
I like that I can walk to a few grocery stores and restaurants, but if I want to go to a specialty shop or visit a restaurant in a different neighborhood or even just make a big trip in inclimate weather I can do so much more quickly/easily with a car than without. Of course, rideshare is a thing, but a round trip to another neighborhood can easily run anywhere from $60-120 and even then you have to wait for drivers and even then they might blow you off (maybe I'm just unlucky here, but it seems like 5-10% of drivers blow me off, especially if I ordered a ride just before a price surge).
> I never worry about having too much to drink to safely drive home
This isn't much of a problem for me--if I want more than a couple of drinks (rare), I just make arrangements in advance (DD or walking or rideshare or public transit). If I don't make arrangements, I don't drink. I don't know what could be more convenient than this (I see the logic in doing the inconvenient-but-safe thing all the time, but it means missing out on a lot of convenience unnecessarily).
> I don't have to deal with traffic, and when friends come to visit (or when I visit them) I can take the train and enjoy a book instead of navigating roads.
Traffic is tedious, but I mostly just avoid traveling during rush hour (not usually a big deal since I can leave later and still get there at the same time as I would if I took the train during rush hour). It wouldn't be a problem at all if I didn't live in a city. Anyway, I don't know what your city's public transit system is like, but in Chicago it's uncommon to get a seat on a train (if you get one, there will usually be someone who needs it more), and the etiquette is to hold your bag rather than wearing it on your back (so we can squeeze an extra 1/4 of a person into the train car). Since your other hand is holding a strap or railing, there's no free hand to hold the book and anyway it's too distracting to me with the pan handlers trying to get my attention or the guys who blast their portable speakers or are trying to start shit with other riders (or straight up smoking weed/cigarettes). Buses are a little nicer, but they are subject to traffic just like cars. Instead, I just drive and listen to a podcast or audiobook; navigation has been a solved problem for a decade thanks to pervasive GPS.
> I feel far healthier and happier with the amount of light physical activity that's been baked into my life just by going about my normal routine. Before we moved to the city, I lived a pretty typical office worker sedentary life: I'd get up, shower, drive (sitting) to work, work (sitting, sometimes standing), then drive home. Now I walk to work and feel invigorated as I come through the door 15 minutes after I left, without the annoyance of rush hour or traffic or bad drivers.
I liked walking to work when the weather was nice, but that's pretty rare in Chicago and anyway there are only so many different routes you can take after which it gets dull. I'm really glad I got a remote gig. I have a ton of time left over, and my wife and I will load up the dog and go to a park or even rent a lake house for a week outside of the city for a nature fix. If we didn't have cars, we would probably stay in our neighborhood rather than spend the extra $100/day on a car rental, but since we have a car anyway the difference is marginal. And the car is convenient for other things too--we can take our dog to the vet or to friends' houses without having to pay an exorbitant rideshare cost, for example. Parking is really only inconvenient downtown during the work week and a few other places (e.g., around the zoo during summer weekends, etc). Otherwise it's like $5-10 for a few hours.
> A twenty minute walk puts me at museums or bars or train stations or work or the store or like 5 friends' houses or the lake shore or a thousand other places. No parking, no navigating traffic, no having to move the car or worry about not wandering far from the car or figuring out how to navigate unfamiliar roads
Seems a little silly that you're willing to walk 20 minutes but not "wander far from the car". :)
> Honestly the most stressful part of any of my journeys is wondering if drivers are paying attention as I go through the crosswalk, or if they're going to cut the corner to try to make their left turn.
Yeah, this is definitely one of the more stressful aspects of walking around Chicago.
> As a citizen, my city's limited resources don't have to go to maintaining roads that the richer segments of the population get proportionally more benefit from.
In Chicago, the nicer neighborhoods not only have better roads but also much better public transit options. It turns out the same forces that operate on streets operate on public transit.
> There's a common saying that "we don't all have the same time" when it comes to discussing class differences
This favors cars, which waste less time than public transit in the general case.
> This is to say nothing of the actual health impact of cars: accidents, death, pollution, or just the amount of money we're 'required' to spend on them so we can participate in wider society.
Accidents are the best argument against cars, IMO. I think we can sharply curtail this with better city planning and more safety features (especially with advancements in self-driving technology). Regarding pollution and maintainability, EVs emit less per person than a diesel city bus (this will continue to improve over time as our energy grid becomes cleaner) and they're also inherently more maintainable (no transmission, engine, exhaust system, etc). Once the high end of the market is saturated, we'll start to see more, simpler models on the low-end, and these will eventually hit the used car market. Fuel will also be cheaper because electricity is cheaper than gasoline.
> Imagine the value our citizens would get out of not paying $20k (at the _very low end_) every five or eight years for their cars, not to mention the maintenance.
I'm not sure what that $20k figure is meant to represent. You can get a reliable car for $10k these days, drive it for 5-10 years and turn around and sell it for $2-4k. Of course, you'll have to insure it and pay for gas and maintenance, but that's probably quite a lot less than most couples spend on public transit, rideshare, and car rentals.
Cars give you freedom... yes, they're a cost, they take up space, you have to build around them, but you can move wherever you want, whenever you want.
I live in a country with relatively good public transport, relatively great one in the capital and few other large cities, with public bikes and biking lanes.
Then 2020 came, and due to covid, no more public transport (for some time). Want to go to work? Too bad. Want to go to the larger (and cheaper) store... nope. Order food delivery from a large supermarket chain? Good luck, people don't want to go to crowded stores, and delivery slots are full 2 minutes after midnight.
I know it's an extreme situation, but it made people rethink what they need for their independece, and cars came high on the list.
I would argue that the urban planning that enables the use of cars actually restricts your freedom; you can't go anywhere without your car, and god forbid if you want to go to the store across the stroad, you have to cross 5 lanes of traffic. You can't walk that--or if you do, you have to cross that, and another square mile of parking lot.
Cars are only synonymous with "independence" in the US because we've made it impossible to be independent unless you use this giant metal box to engage with the world. To me, that's the opposite of independence.
Yes, COVID is an extreme situation--but I don't think it's reasonable to plan our daily lives around extreme situations. I see this when people buy their cars--Is it reasonable to buy a pickup truck if you're only going to tow or haul something once a year with it? Is the excess spend in car payment, insurance, gas usage, consumables, and safety hazard worth that convenience? Why not just rent the truck when you need it?
> I would argue that the urban planning that enables the use of cars actually restricts your freedom; you can't go anywhere without your car, and god forbid if you want to go to the store across the stroad, you have to cross 5 lanes of traffic. You can't walk that--or if you do, you have to cross that, and another square mile of parking lot.
On the other hand, even in my urban environment, I can get to another neighborhood in less than half the time it would take me to get there by train or bus (especially if there is a transfer involved). It's also a lot more comfortable than waiting on a platform/bus stop exposed to the elements only to squeeze myself into a small box (that smells at once of urine, vomit, BO, and cigarette smoke) with dozens of strangers, some of whom are panhandling, blasting music, threatening other commuters, etc.
Moreover, my wife and I share a car, and we spend quite a lot less on it (all in: maintenance, fuel, parking, insurance, etc) than we did on public transit + rideshare + car rentals even without amortizing the car payment over the useful lifetime of the car. And of course our time and comfort are also valuable to us.
> Cars are only synonymous with "independence" in the US because we've made it impossible to be independent unless you use this giant metal box to engage with the world. To me, that's the opposite of independence.
This is a feature of the new world (not just the US), and it's a consequence of our post-car development. If Europe had the bulk of its development in the post-car era, it would've turned out the same way. Also, if you're getting around by public transit you need even bigger metal boxes and you need more of them and you have to wait for them and they are often late and you will be packed onto them like cattle and you're limited by where they go (hence the "independence" of the car).
> [Cars] are a feature of the new world, just not the US. If Europe had the bulk of it's development in the post-car era, it would've turned out the same way.
A huge portion of Europe was destroyed.(and consequently rebuilt) in WWI and WWII, which are both firmly in the post-car era. They rebuilt with an emphasis on trains. Where they didn't, or in later years when they chose instead to invest in car development, some of them are now turning back to human-centric development [1].
> ... Need even bigger metal boxes and you need more of them and you have to wait for them and they are often late...
In terms of space-occupation in cars vs buses (or trains), mass transit absolutely wins. This is a trivial argument. There's a dozen versions of this picture [2] that shows the difference between like 80 people commuting via bike, bus, or car. The amount of redundant space taken up by cars is bonkers to me.
"Packed into them like cattle", I'll grant you rush hour gets crowded, but you'll spend less time on the trains than you would trying to cram that many people through the highway. See also the "induced demand" problem of highways.
Moreover, while you're not using your car, it's taking up space doing nothing. While I'm not using the subway, it's working to shuttle the other 1.6 million people who use it (that number varies wildly depending on your city, notably).
To the point of transit times and the, ah, atmosphere of transit: Of course travel time will vary according to how big the transit network is. You see this a lot in sub-urban downtowns. A bus system will exist, but it'll be painfully slow to get from one point to another when compared to a car. I argue this is because the externalities of the disproportionately wealthy-benefiting poor-subsidized road system. Similarly, why is it when we have traffic issues the argument is always "build more lanes! Improve the roads!" But when transit has throughout problems we say "Look, this is why transit never works, and we should invest in roads instead!" You haven't done this overtly, but that idea underlies your argument: cars are better, we shouldn't waste our money on transit.
As for being uncomfortable or dealing with less-than-savory people on mass transi, you're absolutely right that those are unpleasant experiences, and being able to use a car does help avoid them... Just like moving to a wealthier part of town or building a highway to keep the riffraff out would help avoid them, but none of those solve the underlying problem. It is not a fault of the underlying public system that it is so used by people of poorer means or those with mental disorders or simialrt, it is a flaw of the private wealthy systems that it allows people to avoid examples of their fellow citizens whose society has failed them. We shouldn't avoid using transit, or not have transit, because it accidentally functions as a haven for the homeless or mentally unwell or destitute. We should address those failings of our society by providing for those people, the better to enable our public systems to fulfill their original designed function. Importantly though, the public resource is still serving the public. You being able to escape the flawed public systems and escape to your private spaces (car, house, etc) because you have the money to do so is not an indictment of that systems failings, but of your empathy for your fellow citizens.
Put another way, it sounds almost like you're saying "I don't like going to the community doctor, and don't believe we should invest in it more, because it's always full of sick people."
> A huge portion of Europe was destroyed.(and consequently rebuilt) in WWI and WWII, which are both firmly in the post-car era. They rebuilt with an emphasis on trains. Where they didn't, or in later years when they chose instead to invest in car development, some of them are now turning back to human-centric development [1].
The cities were already established. They weren't repopulating the continent from scratch.
> In terms of space-occupation in cars vs buses (or trains), mass transit absolutely wins. This is a trivial argument.
Yes, but space-occupation is a foolish thing to optimize for in an environment that isn't constrained by space. This is a trivial argument.
> "Packed into them like cattle", I'll grant you rush hour gets crowded, but you'll spend less time on the trains than you would trying to cram that many people through the highway. See also the "induced demand" problem of highways.
I spend quite a lot less time driving than I would if I took the trains. This is true virtually everywhere in Chicago, and Chicago only has only 3-4 main highways (which is to say it's not an especially car-friendly city and it's 5th ranked for public transit). Most of the time, it's twice as fast to drive as to take public transit, but if you have a transfer it can easily be 4 times slower than driving.
> Moreover, while you're not using your car, it's taking up space doing nothing. While I'm not using the subway, it's working to shuttle the other 1.6 million people who use it (that number varies wildly depending on your city, notably).
Agreed that cars are less space-efficient, disagree that space-efficiency is the paramount variable.
> Similarly, why is it when we have traffic issues the argument is always "build more lanes! Improve the roads!" But when transit has throughout problems we say "Look, this is why transit never works, and we should invest in roads instead!" You haven't done this overtly, but that idea underlies your argument: cars are better, we shouldn't waste our money on transit.
This isn't my argument at all. I'm not universally against public transit--it makes sense in some places and in those places it should be improved and expanded. My whole thesis is that different places have different constraints and thus we shouldn't expect "public transit" to be a panacea.
> As for being uncomfortable or dealing with less-than-savory people on mass transi, you're absolutely right that those are unpleasant experiences, and being able to use a car does help avoid them... Just like moving to a wealthier part of town or building a highway to keep the riffraff out would help avoid them, but none of those solve the underlying problem.
I didn't claim that driving solves social problems, only that it lets people control their own environments. I can't get my city to police or clean public transit appropriately, and I certainly can't get them to fix the underlying social problems; however, I can control my commuting environment by opting to drive. I'm happy to revisit public transit if/when we can solve poverty and mental healthcare, but until that utopia arrives, driving is a nice alternative.
> We shouldn't avoid using transit, or not have transit, because it accidentally functions as a haven for the homeless or mentally unwell or destitute. We should address those failings of our society by providing for those people, the better to enable our public systems to fulfill their original designed function.
These are orthogonal issues. Me driving (or not) doesn't stop my society from addressing its issues. I appreciate that people are more likely to advocate for issues that are visible to them, but that will probably look like cracking down on these people rather than solving ultimate causes (and anyway, our cities have a whole lot of people taking public transit already and yet these issues persist while other parts of the country have fewer problems).
> You being able to escape the flawed public systems and escape to your private spaces (car, house, etc) because you have the money to do so is not an indictment of that systems failings, but of your empathy for your fellow citizens.
I grew up working class, and it doesn't take a lot of money to escape the burden of public transit. We should absolutely expand the franchise to more people, however. Moreover, whether I take public transit or not has no bearing on my willingness to improve society. Please don't make assumptions about my motives, it's rude and unnecessary, and it violates site guidelines.
> Similarly, a sure-fire way to tell someone hasn't lived in a place where you haven't needed a car for every aspect of life is when they criticize anti-car policy without engaging with the deeper reasons behind it :)
I think this is mostly a straw man or nut picking. From what I can tell, there aren't many rural people arguing that rural transit policy should be imposed on urban areas, but rather the debate is about whether or not policies that arguably make sense in an urban environment should be imposed on the rest of the country. Notably, rural people have enough exposure to urban environments that they understand that urban environments differ from rural environments, but not so much the other way around: e.g., everyone watches the same entertainment media that is almost invariably set in urban environments and most people have traveled to an urban area for business or pleasure, but there's very little media set in a rural environment and "rural tourism" isn't exactly a popular pastime of urbanites.
> I think a lot of the pushback against cars have to do with the popularization of human-centric design movements that question the assumption that cars are the pinnacle of transportation that American cities have operated from since about the 1950s. An easy example is the idea of "induced demand" [1] that shows even from a pure engineering perspective that the cost-benefit math for cars has long been unfairly weighted towards cars by outside forces.
Sure, I actually agree with a lot of this. I would like to see American cities and suburbs become more walkable, and I'm sure the car industry lobbied for car-centric planning, jay-walking laws, etc. My criticism isn't that anti-car policies are unfounded or they don't make sense anywhere, but that the anti-car movement is generally ignorant (in a literal sense, not pejoratively) of the non-urban world.
> We're seeing a lot of pressure around housing and energy and social policy in general which in turn is making us question decisions we've made, culturally, in history, like can we really sustain the building of less dense housing for our growing population?
Yes, outside of urban areas we certainly can do this for the foreseeable future. Most of America isn't constrained by space.
> I'm rambling now, but I get frustrated when people dismiss concerns like that out of hand.
No one is dismissing these concerns out of hand--I'm only arguing that the policies that policies which assume a high degree of density don't make sense in areas where that assumption is incorrect. This seems almost tautological.
> but I still think it's worth interrogating these assumptions we've carried to see if there's a better way we could be living life.
Fully agree. I think we could have a lot more productive conversations if we started by reimagining collectively rather than asserting how others should live their lives (without demonstrating any understanding of their concerns).
- Where I live (The Netherlands) you don’t have to live in a city to have good PT. There are places that you cannot reach by train or bus but they are few.
- While sometimes a car is necessary, the cars many people prefer (insanely oversized “trucks”) are hardly ever necessary.
The 'insanely oversized "trucks"' are necessary for reasons probably not evident if you grew up in a country like NT. I'm from a small town in rural Ontario, Canada where most people drive a 4WD vehicle largely because they'd never get out of their snow-filled driveway in a tiny European style car. Lots of country roads are literally impassable without a large machine; having a truck of some kind is more or less a necessity for plenty of rural folks.
Yeah but thirty years ago they were all little 2WD Nissans and Toyotas with a few bales of hay in the back. The trucks you're talking about were kind of family tractors and would rarely be used for distance. They all got like 9mpg and just needed to run when something got stuck.
Hardly anyone is making compact pickups anymore. Even models that used to be in that class (e.g. Tacoma, Ranger) seem to have gotten a lot bigger over the past 10 years. I find it disappointing, I always thought they were a great compromise between fuel efficiency while still retaining most of the utility of a regular truck.
Huh? 30 years ago Nissans and Toyotas had negligible pickup marketshare (at least in the US, not sure about Canada?). Anyway, the average retail price of gas back then was ~$1/gallon, so 9mpg wasn't a major deal (considerably cheaper than a 30mpg sedan today).
This was soon enough after the oil embargo that mpg was still on everyone's mind, and people didn't really use 4WD vehicles for general transportation at that point.
Just big, uncomfortable, expensive to maintain and operate vehicles that you'd generally use for a specific purpose.
> I don't see why trucks are one of things people can't buy just because they prefer it.
I was responding to GP who said trucks are necessary in rural areas with snow and rough roads. Obviously people can buy what they want, and other people can judge them for their choices as they want.
> I'm sure everyone owns something that another person would consider frivolous.
Definitely. I'm sure there are people who judge my purchases - I wish them well. But most frivolous purchases don't kill pedestrians at alarming rates, or guzzle absurd amounts of gas pointlessly. Pickup trucks are the pit bulls of car ownership.
The urban cores of New York and Boston are denser than any city in Europe! I mean, yes, it's true that the "empty" spaces are much bigger in the Americas. But you don't need a personal automobile to reach places you go only occasionally, and often for leisure. There's absolutely no reason that kind of lifestyle is impossible here.
It's not what we chose[1], but there's certainly nothing about the geography the precludes it. The focus, and later dependence, on extended exurbs connected with roads for private vehicles is very much a policy decision.
[1] Actually it is what we chose, up until the 1950's, when we chose to build in different ways.
The whole point of the thread is that there's a lot of variance in density within the US, and we shouldn't regulate the rural midwest like we regulate NYC.
> It's not what we chose[1], but there's certainly nothing about the geography the precludes it. The focus, and later dependence, on extended exurbs connected with roads for private vehicles is very much a policy decision.
It's an amalgamation of a hundred years of policy decisions and private investment based around those decisions, and it would take as long to reverse it even if there was political appetite for it. And there's not much appetite for it because most people prefer the convenience and comfort of cars. To that end:
> There's absolutely no reason that kind of lifestyle is impossible here.
It's not a matter of whether that lifestyle is possible, but whether it's desirable. Most Americans find the convenience and comfort of cars to be preferable to public transit.
People also forget that Europe has had continuous non-nomadic people living in most places for thousands of years already, while the US has only had that for a few hundred years. Many things that have already been figured out in Europe for centuries (roads, dams, levies) are still in progress developments in the US
> The urban cores of New York and Boston are denser than any city in Europe!
And unaffordable to the vast majority. I'd love to have plenty of walkable city options in the US, but they aren't going to appear overnight by banning cars when you need them to get around places over half of the people in the US live in.
The US has tons of smaller cities and towns. New York and Massachusetts included. There might be trains going into Boston and NY, but you still need to get around the smaller population centers if you live or visit there. The Northeast has a big mix of highly urban areas and countryside.
As others have pointed out, the US is much less dense than the Netherlands and also the bulk of our development happened in a post-car context--the US literally evolved around the car, and consequently doing away with cars is a much less realistic proposition for the US than it is for the Netherlands.
To that point, most of our streets, roads, and parking spaces are much wider than yours, and can accommodate larger vehicles. As others have noted, we have more people in remote areas, and while Netherlands is obviously an agricultural superpower, your farms are smaller than ours (larger farms require larger equipment).
> (insanely oversized “trucks”) are hardly ever necessary.
As someone with a truck constantly having to lend it for friends to use, I disagree.
Not sure exactly what you meant by insanely oversized, but a lift kit and tires aren't abnormal, they have use for off-roading / mudding which is fairly popular.
It's both a style preference and lifestyle preference. Good luck using a car if you have a lot of outdoor hobbies or work.
Kind of strange to tell a whole population what is or isn't necessary in their life, especially without knowing their reasonings.
Isn't the fact that your friends don't need a truck because they can borrow one occasionally evidence against your point? I mean, yes, it's true that it would be nicer if they'd rent one instead of impose on you. But clearly they don't "need" trucks of their own, because they have access to shared resources.
This is the kind of absolutist argument that these threads always fall into. You hear someone say "not everyone needs a truck!" or "there are too many trucks!", and hear "You, personally, should not own a truck". No, clearly trucks are useful vehicles and need to exist for people to use. But we also build and deploy way too many of them. Those facts can be true at the same time.
It seems like a needlessly divisive conversation, every time it comes up. My guess is that 99% of all the people who complain that they see people driving pickups not hauling anything are themselves usually driving a 5 passenger car as the sole occupant.
That's a pretty straightforward calculation that leads to unsurprising results. An F150 with just two passengers burns less fuel per person than a Honda Fit carrying one passenger.
> I mean, yes, it's true that it would be nicer if they'd rent one instead of impose on you.
Whether they rent or borrow one, they still needed a truck.
I need mine all the time, as do most others I know. I also listed activities that people like to use them for.
> But we also build and deploy way too many of them. Those facts can be true at the same time.
How many should we allow then? Who should qualify for them? Do recreational activities not qualify? Who gets to decide this? Do we do this for other things?
> Whether they rent or borrow one, they still needed a truck.
Yes, but only occasionally! Again, you're thinking we're trying to "take away your truck", when we're just saying (correctly) that most people (like your friends!) don't need them except rarely and are better served by other kind of resource allocation than personal vehicles.
> How many should we allow [...] who should qualify [...] banned [...] who gets to decide
This isn't a good faith argument. No one is advocating for any of that. Please don't.
Again I use mine all the time. I'm not advocating getting rid of cars because some people don't need a truck. I don't believe there are too many trucks or cars, I feel like the people saying there are too many trucks have the obligation to explicitly give reasons as you why.
> This isn't a good faith argument. No one is advocating for any of that. Please don't.
It is in good faith, I assure you. I'm trying to make you realize that what you view as necessary isn't the same for others. You said there are too many. I would like to know what you view as necessary and what the ideal amount would be for you. What uses for trucks are deemed as necessary and what are frivolous.
It always amuses me when Europeans are confused by the lack of good public transit in much of the USA. Come visit here and use our public transit and you'll see why we like cars.
As someone who is strongly wants to "get rid of cars and switch everyone to public transit and cycling" -- no one is talking about doing this in rural areas. Should we decrease reliance on cars in cities and focus more on alternative forms of transport? Yes. Will this work in rural areas? No, of course not.
People who live in cities tend to look down on people who don't and wouldn't really care about what happens there, despite the fact that they rely on them for food.
For example, think about how many times you've seen people say they don't care about gas prices because they don't have a car: they take public transportation (which uses gas..) or walk.
The supply chain consists of things magically appearing in bodegas for their consumption, and that's why their pejoratively-named "flyover country" is and does nothing, they think.
> no one is talking about doing this in rural areas.
Perhaps that's true in your experience, but I hear this fairly regularly including various subreddits, Twitter, and I've heard it here on HN as well (it's been a while, I don't care to dig through my comment history for links to the specific threads). Specifically, the argument takes one of two forms: either we should extend public transit and cycling infrastructure everywhere (including rural areas) or that we should implement policies that expressly accelerate urbanization and penalize rural life (or a combination).
The alernative view is also freqently purely US-centric suburban/rural one.
In many densely populated countries, rural areas have quite good public transport.
I've found that you need come into HN comments with a baseline amount of skepticism and then increase skepticism the further the topic strays from being purely about software development.
That attitude is the main beef I have with highly qualified, up to PhD level, data scientists. they could bring so much to the table, in any domain, by working with the domain experts. Instead of doing that, and trying to learn, most (basically all I encountered so far) try to understand any domain they encounter based on their data sets and some first principle. Kind of re-discovering gravity, and then expecting praise for being geniuses for doing so.
A shame, really. Because my skill in big data analysis stops at what Excel can do without macros. I'd love to get more data insight, simply turned out that it is hard to get.
Not only that, but most of HN, even the professional programmers who've been here for a decade, have absolutely no clue about anything regarding the physical world. Chemical equilibriums, enthalpy of formation, basic irradiance calculations etc.
That's perfectly fine, as long as you don't make really bold statements about things you don't understand. This thread reminds me of reddit. A ton of highly upvoted comments that are completely wrong. You don't need to live in the countryside to understand the basic economics surrounding agriculture, and no, "artificial" fertilizers aren't a scam nor a big corp trick. If you think you can replace them with fungi, good luck.
I apologize for my poor reply, I am being downvoted even got flagged, which I don't feel is fair. https://imgur.com/Fsz6rdb
I was trying to explain that it's not about expertise on the subject. It's about finding a mind to change. What if perhaps there's some HN user who reads this and is like screw it I'm going into industrial scale fully automated aquaponics. They become huge and we feed the world.
I feel like the economics will sort this out automatically, at least for the average first-world citizen.
Most consume way more than they actually utilize for nutritional value. In America, food is entertainment more than anything else. Once the price of this "entertainment" becomes prohibitive, people will start looking at it with the proper perspective.
Simply switching from daily takeout to weekly meal prep can shave $500-1000 off someone's monthly food budget. The time/discipline tradeoff is complex, but ultimately a hungry person will figure something out.
Meat normally fixes the fluctuations on agriculture output.
When it's very plentiful, meat producers switch into more grains and grow more cattle. When it's scarce, meat producers slaughter their cattle earlier, and do as much as possible to substitute grains for grass.
AFAIK, the second largest stabilizer is on stockpiles. But some countries do almost none of it.
Here's how I do : once a week buy lots vegetables at the market. Once every two days, put a good deal of veggies + rice/lentils (+ rarely chicken) in a casserole. Add little water, cover, let cook very gently.
Now you have good food for two days. And cheap. And dead easy to make.
Not sure why are you getting the downvotes. Food prep is not rocket science. My wife is a proper foodie, and cooks gourmet food every day - and she is not spending more than 45 mins each day doing this. Thats what she does to unwind after work. When I lived alone I used your strategy and with a slow cooker it would not take more than 20 mins per day to make quality, tasty food.
Ironically it would be easier, food costs in "first world" are the most expensive, while emerging economies have much more potential to stablize and finally use their local resources to grow "cheap" food.
At the same time it also depends on what that local population really is used too - different to compare Asia, South East Asia to Africa.
Prices going up doesn’t mean everyone can continue to consume as much as before if they are willing to pay for it. Nor is food perfectly fungible across continents. Your American family may just be able to outspend someone in Senegal, even if they waste half of the food while the other guy is starving. And even if they somehow buy less, they may just buy less beef, which is still to expensive for the world’s poor to buy, may not even be raised, and a;l that’s saved is some animal feed unfit for human consumption, rotting in Iowa.
Sure, it’ll all adjust, just not at the timescale necessary.
I don't get this whole fertilizer crunch thing. If you look at the price of Osmocote on Amazon, it's basically not much different than it's always been:
So basically the cost of enough fertilizer to feed an entire family for a year has gone up by, what, $20? $100?
And that's at retail prices; the cost (and cost increase) would obviously be much smaller when purchased in bulk. And that's also for the name brand product, obviously generics are much cheaper.
I'm not a farmer but I did fertilize ~20 fruit trees with weekend with Plant-tone, Peters 20-20-20, Garden Lime, and Fish & Kelp. My cost of doing that for the entire year will be maybe $60, and that's only because I'm trying to maximize fruit quality and tree health rather than minimize costs.
It takes a bit of time for old stock to sell out. If you pay attention, you can see a pattern in a lot of items that retailers tend to only increase the prices when their old stick sells out and new stock come in, and then there is a dramatic rise in the price of the item.
- Shift away from animal based protein rapidly. Livestock takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land, yet produces less than 20% of the world's supply of calories https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets.... (don't get me wrong, I love meat, but I also love a habitable planet that can sustain the current population...)
Please stop repeating the falsehood that animal pastures can somehow be transmuted into high yield crops for the human food supply: about 1/3rd of farmland in the US can never be transformed into suitable farmland for that task, and this accounts for most of the land used for pasture.
If we're having problems maintain soil fertility levels now, imagine if we needed 2-3x the fertilizer to transform unsuitable land into still unsuitable land (but now growing human-edible crops) because somebody thought this was a good idea.
I don't believe the argument is that the acreage for animal pastures would be converted, but rather the acreage for the crops they eat would be converted. Or is that in error as well?
Grass fed vs grain fed are two different things. If a cow is at pasture it is generally not eating any crops grown elsewhere, that's the point of the pasture they eat the grass that grows on it. I agree with the argument against feeding cattle a diet solely consisting of grain, this is usually done on a feed lot and it's not good for them or the environment. I'm ok with grain finished with a mixed diet since the animal will spend most of its life at pasture. Cattle do require food during the winter so hay and silage must be made for them but these are made from grasses and vetches that can grow on more marginal land than grain crops and they won't deplete the soil as much especially if they are fertilized using the manure from the cattle. So if you are going to make an argument it should be against purely grain fed cattle, you would actually find some traction among ranchers this way as well.
Pasture is not just where animals are held. It is land that grows plants eaten directly from the ground by animals, i.e., grazing. So if pasture land isnt suitable to be crop land, then animals fed by grazing pasture is efficient. And according to my reading of this industry website, nearly half of livestock calories come from this:
I think you are talking about fodder i.e., crops grown for animal consumption on land that could be used for crops eaten by people. But the above link says only 8% of livestock calories come from fodder. Another 14% come from grains and other food that could have been eaten by people. But altogether this less than a quarter of the calories livestock consume.
The remaining ~30% of calories feeding livestock come from eating stuff generated by the agricultural industry as human-inedible byproducts, chiefly the crop residue left behind when crops are harvested.
Would great appreciate corrections or clarifications if I’ve misinterpreted the above.
>Another 14% come from grains and other food that could have been eaten by people. But altogether this less than a quarter of the calories livestock consume.
Are you wholly unfamiliar with feedlots? 50% + of the bodyweight of the bulk of cattle in the world comes when they live on a feedlot, where they get 5.5 to 6.5 pounds of feed, via trough, to raise them from 600-900 pounds up to the slaughter weight of 1250-1350 pounds.
Corn (dent, which is still usable for human foodstuffs but is mostly just grown for animal feed) is widely used on the feed lot because you don't need 5.5-6.5 pounds per pound of beef, you only need 2.07-2.24 pounds per pound of slaughter weight. Each pound of dent corn yields about 1,566 kcals so you're trading 3241+ kcal of (fertilized) corn crop for 800-1250 kcals of beef.
So for 1 acre of corn you need 40 to 50 pounds of nitrogen, 1 acre of corn. For the 2020 crop year, USDA estimates U.S. corn yield to be 181.8 bushels per acre. 1 bushel is 56 pounds. So to finish 1 cow to slaughter weight, assuming it's pasture fed to 600 pounds, you're looking at roughly 2.9 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer.
So roughly 2.9 pounds of nitrogen, 1345 pounds of corn, and then factor in the water which is 1-2 gallons per 100 pounds of of bodyweight per day times 12-36 months depending on what fat content is desired in the meat.
Again, we can use less fertilizer, reduce water usage, and better use some current cropland (75+ million acres in the United States alone) for crops intended for human consumption, drastically reduce the risk of new diseases by eliminating hundreds of millions of chronically stressed animal hosts, and to simply restore of them to native species in an area and reduce all of the negative environmental impacts of farming in those areas (runoff, soil depletion, loss of native habitats).
Are you disputing the numbers I gave above or just choosing to concentrate on a particular subset of cattle? I don’t believe what you’re describing is representative of livestock in general.
I don't think the numbers you've selected are germane to the conversation. The point of the discussion is how much land substitution there is between animal feed and human feed. The USDA said that in 2013 48% of the US corn crop was used for animal feed, which translates to unbelievably vast acreage. Your numbers indicate that the corn calories are not 100% of the calories consumed by animals.
Well, what it tells us is that corn is a large fraction of the crops fed to animals but a significantly smaller fraction of crops fed to humans.
Indeed, it looks like there are 915M acres of agricultural land in the US, and of which 89.5M (<10%) is corn, which works out to 4.7% of all US ag land being used to grow corn fed to animals. Like, obviously that much land is “vast” on an absolute scale, just like any non-trivial fraction of a nationwide number, but it doesn’t strike me as an obviously unreasonable percentage.
So if we accept that the pasture range cannot be used for crops, then what we are looking at is the animal feed area (which is both fodder and crops that could be eaten by humans but is eaten by animals). It’s 125M acres, I think, or ~14% of all ag land.
Again, I don't like the way you are using numbers. Your 915M acres figure lumps pasture into cropland, which you are using to make the corn for feed number look smaller.
> So if we accept that the pasture range cannot be used for crops, then what we are looking at is the animal feed area (which is both fodder and crops that could be eaten by humans but is eaten by animals). It’s 125M acres, I think, or ~14% of all ag land.
The Bloomberg article that is the source for your source, disagrees with you and categorizes the livestock feed acreage as cropland. So again, you are distorting the picture to make the animal feed number look smaller. Your own source is saying that more acres of cropland are used to feed animals than people.
Sounds like you are misinterpreting me because I haven’t said anything that disagrees with the Bloomberg article, and in particular I agree more land is used for crops eaten by animals than crops eaten by people.
The amount of land used for pasture is definitely germane to the discussion we were having before you began commenting. See my first comment and the one I was replying to.
If you continue to assume bad faith, I won’t continue the discussion.
People with little to no experience in industries with razor thin margins don't tend to appreciate how optimized for squeezing out pennies those industries are.
Not at all. Those fields are now fertilized with cow manure, though. Without the cattle, you'd need more artificial fertilizer for the crops you intend to feed humans with.
Would it be good for the environment? Quite possibly. Would it result in more fertilizer available on the market? Not really.
Most commercial cattle aren't pasture fed, they aren't free ranging it in a field eating whatever they forage. Hobby and small farms, sure, but the operations that raise the most heads the cattle generally spend the bulk of their life standing in a dirt pen (a feedlot) eating from a trough. They're then fed a mix of corn, soy, ruffage (grasses).
So why not argue for a return to pasture and grass fed and finished cattle then? A lot more people would be willing to agree with you. Intensive use of feedlots has only been going on since the 60s due to an increased demand for beef. The message should be to moderate our consumption of beef and give the cattle a better life at pasture rather than crammed into a feedlot.
There are roughly 1 billion head of cattle in the world, depending on the soil and climate you need anywhere from 2-25 acres per head of cattle to 100% grass feed them (in areas where this is done, obviously 25 acres of desert isn't going to feed a cow).
Even if we assume an average of 3 acres per head, you're looking at 3 billion acres of land just to keep beef going (never mind the 785 million pigs and 33 billion chickens).
If you entirely pasture feed, you're going to get lower slaughter weights too as their weight at slaughter averages about 1,200 pounds compared with about 1,350 pounds for feedlot animals, you'd end up needing something like 30% more cattle to get the same amount of meat https://awellfedworld.org/grazing/
Pretty much everything you hear about "solving" the food supply is going to be lies and misinformation.
The people that know what they are talking about are already in the industry. You are not going to see their opinions because they are busy doing what they can.
The people who actually understand things not politicians, academics, or columnists.
1/3rd of the US farmland being used for pasture and 80% of global crops being fed to livestock are not mutually exclusive on their own.
Edit: Surprisingly our world in data has a breakdown of land uses (which includes grazing) but not of crop use. This study[0] says that about 40% of global crop use (by calories) is used to feed livestock and that it takes about 3.7 crop calories for 1 calorie of animal product. So yes, there's plenty of saving potential even if we kept all the grazing livestock untouched.
> Low values of embodied crop calories are related to production systems for ruminants based on fodder and forage, while large values are usually associated with production systems for non-ruminants fed on crop products.
Cows are ruminants.
> First, we estimated country-wise feed requirements. We calculated feed required per grid cell for each livestock types in ton per year multiplying regional and livestock-wise daily feed requirements (Haberl et al 2007) with the gridded livestock counts.
Honestly, I'm not very interested in their results after reading this. If they're just estimating based on number of livestock x calories required for livestock along with a bucket of crop yields for an area then this is just paper shuffling. You'll have my attention when you get real numbers directly from the farmers themselves rather than just aggregating 3rd hand information over a grid area.
Pasture, that is harvested for straw/hay to feed to cattle, still gets fertilized usually at a minimum with added nitrogen. That nitrogen could be better used in other fields growing crops specifically for humans, never mind the negative implications of the runoff that causes damage elsewhere.
The objection I've usually heard is less about farm land being used for pasture instead of growing crops, and more about the amount of crops that have to be grown to feed the cattle... Growing corn to feed cows to feed humans is massively less efficient than growing corn to feed humans, or at least that's how the story goes.
Is there not an efficiency problem there that we could improve on?
Not expert either but from forums, I think its a bit of both. People treat pasture country like it would be good for cropping in theoretical climate discussions, and the more correct growing corn/grain/hay etc to feed cattle to feed humans.
Another factor is cattle feed is often poor quality human food, so the reject stuff. That wheat that was harvested a bit early to avoid storms and no good for the flour is great for cattle.
Also, to the main topic of this thread, I wonder if its good for food security we grow extra crops to feed livestock. If there is a food supply shortage, cattle can go to slaughter and there is plenty of extra corn or other about for humans. We eat less meat for a few years while we fix the supply chains type thing.
The way we see supply shortages from COVID, Id hope we never become too efficient in the food supply chain. The consequence of something creating lower food production is far worse than limited computer chips. Its not a system we want to be over optimised for the good times.
Sure, but go back to pasture based systems. Cows are a fantastic way to turn grass into human edible nutrients. That will probably reduce the amount of meat on the market, but no where near the drastic levels some people talk about.
All land is not fungible, we need to use the best tools for the job, and that will be a mix of a bit of everything, including animal meat.
Correct. The vast majority of US cattle are grain fed/finished.
"If all the grain currently fed to livestock in the United States were consumed directly by people, the number of people who could be fed would be nearly 800 million," David Pimentel, professor of ecology in Cornell University's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, reported at the July 24-26 meeting of the Canadian Society of Animal Science in Montreal. Or, if those grains were exported, it would boost the U.S. trade balance by $80 billion a year, Pimentel estimated.
With only grass-fed livestock, individual Americans would still get more than the recommended daily allowance (RDA) of meat and dairy protein, according to Pimentel's report, "Livestock Production: Energy Inputs and the Environment."
"If all the grain currently fed to livestock in the United States were consumed directly by people, the number of people who could be fed would be nearly 800 million," David Pimentel, professor of ecology in Cornell University's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, reported at the July 24-26 meeting of the Canadian Society of Animal Science in Montreal. Or, if those grains were exported, it would boost the U.S. trade balance by $80 billion a year, Pimentel estimated.
With only grass-fed livestock, individual Americans would still get more than the recommended daily allowance (RDA) of meat and dairy protein, according to Pimentel's report, "Livestock Production: Energy Inputs and the Environment."
To add to that, the argument that animal pastures cannot be used for anything else has been proven demonstrably false time and time again. They are not usable for modern day agricultural monoculture cropland, which is the metric that the studies use and I'm sure the commenter is referring to. That does not mean by any stretch of the imagination that they cannot be rewilded or even transformed into usable farm land again through long term soil regeneration methods such as permaculture farming or effective through growing climate appropriate polycultures.
Frankly, yes, they do fix themselves. You'd be utterly shocked at what landscapes look like if we leave them. Having been part of forest regeneration efforts across the UK for the past 8 years - from southern heathlands to rocky Welsh and Scottish outcrops, good for "nothing but sheep" - I can say with all certainty that every part of the country except the most extreme alpine regions is suitable for reforestation or some form of plantation dense rewilding, mooring, wild flower meadow, etcetera. The same can be said of much of Canada and America, with my peers over there having the same results when grazing stops. Hell, the Mongolian steppes are turning to results of goat herding, and the Gobi desert is though to have been cause by the same.
In the UK for example, people are completely ignorant to how the place looked before we levelled it for grazing, viewing the 70% ecologically barren agricultural land (of which 80% of that is used for grazing or agriculture to feed cattle) as the norm and the 2.5% old growth forest as a more novelty, and something strangely "unique to that area". The country was 60-80% temperate rainforest before human habitation, depending on what research you go by.
Not every piece of land existing should be used to feed us.
We could reforest the pastures (start reducing CO2 in the atmosphere) and return the land to the wildlife (put a stop to an anthropomorphic extinction).
If we just rate things better by calories we will enter a negative feedback loop where something is always better until we are all eating some synthetic sludge. Not saying you don’t have a point but we should aim to have our cake and eat it or else the future will just be worse and leave people with nothing to hope for.
Vegetarian diet somehow equals synthetic sludge and nothing to hope for?! Sorry if that mischaracterizes your point, but it does seem that's the slippery slope you were going for.
I regularly hear people saying the earth could support x billion people if we all just adopted diet y.
Is it really our ambition to turn the whole world into residential skyscrapers just because we figured out how to feed 40 billion people on this one planet?
While this always inevitably attracts the aggressively emotional "you can pry my nightly organic wagyu porterhouse steaks from my cold dead carnivorous hands, I'm not eating bugs", there's certainly a middle ground for flexitarian things.
A lot of meat consumed in the world isn't really consumed as meat like a steak or a lamb shank, it's "para-meat" like pink slime and low-grade mince, where it's really just a source of protein and umami to throw into ready meals, fast food and other industrial food where no one needs to see what it looked like as long as it says "chicken" on the menu. And it's only cheap enough to do that because it's subsidised.
I'm not a vegetarian, but I still chafe when I see 500g of tofu (often the only one carried in a supermarket[1]) costing the same as 1kg of chicken, which, kilo for kilo, probably ate at least 10x times that much soybean as is in the tofu.
And yes, I understand there's an economy of scale here, but it's more than just that. I think it's also that everyone from Nestle to supermarkets would rather, if people must shift from meat, that people substituted expensive alternatives like only organic tofu and "synthetic" meat alternatives since that's just more profitable.
[1]: Which always seems to be a spongy watery mess compared to the solid blocks you get in the Chinese supermarket (which also cost about half the normal supermarket variety).
I don't know if the US is going suffer food insecurity in the short term anywhere near as soon as other countries. I fear that with heat waves/drought in India, the Ukraine invasion, drought in the American west, and climate change broadly leading to crop failures food prices will remain elevated for years to come. I don't think people want to hear "give up meat" speaking as someone who has mostly given up meat (pork, poultry, and beef) for fish and mushrooms. I guess slow conversion is best. I've been feeding relatives mushrooms where they've never had them before in effort to reduce meat consumption to some, admittedly, limited success. I do worry for the future.
So many assumptions about smooth substitution in this stat.
* How much of that land is pasture, and cannot be viably used for other purposes?
* How much of the remaining arable land is suitable for growing plants humans will consume directly?
* How much of the corn/soy/etc that can be viably grown on the balance would humans choose to eat?
We're very, very good at growing bulk crops, but not so excited about eating them. Feeding the excess to animals, and eating the animals makes ~1/3 of that productive capacity available (and appetizing) to humans. Modulo environmental impacts of CAFOs and such (which need to be addressed) that's a pretty efficient use of excess productive capacity for bulk crops beyond demand for human consumption.
Easier said than done. After all, if businesses are literally throwing their product out, it's probably for a good reason (ie. trying to recover it is more expensive than buying more)
If the true externalities of your consumption are not priced into the product then you're not really paying for it.
As a general rule this is the problem with our entire lifestyle. Very few people will deny that we do not life a sustainable life style, and yet almost none consider what this means.
The definition of unsustainable is that you are consuming beyond your ability to pay. If all the true future costs of our industrial life were factored into the products we consume, we could not afford any of them.
> If the true externalities of your consumption are not priced into the product then you're not really paying for it.
This is true, but other than showing up to the butcher with my money, what else can I do? Some _other thing_ needs to motivate these externalities into the price; not the consumer. The only thing I could conceive of doing is voting with my wallet, which I do when I buy grass-fed meat.
This would be a pretty interesting point to engage with if you elaborated a little on why you believe this is the case and where you believe the GP said this.
If eating meat were bad for the environment, all predators who eat exclusively large prey would be extinct. We can have a discussion about how much meat per year production is sustainable, but I'm not going to start eating bugs.
Of course! But I felt the argument was mostly about mammals (how it's different to talk about predators meat and mans meat eating habits). Pointing out the scale of biomass is of course relevant to this discussion - there is so much of it, it's quite uninnovative humans should fixate on only few species.
> If eating meat were bad for the environment, all predators who eat exclusively large prey would be extinct.
It's not that eating meat is inherently bad, it's the abomination we created to make it a world wide cheap commodity.
Just like a single car isn't a problem, the problem is the scale and the fact that we built our societies around it as if it was just an inevitable fact of life
> all predators who eat exclusively large prey would be extinct.
Lions don't have literal meat factories, don't treat animals like merchandise and don't use low quality processed meat as a filler for everything. This is such a low quality analogy. Look at that video and tell me it's just what large predators do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWbgZQxd6J4&t=106s
> I'm not going to start eating bugs.
Nobody saying that, I'm 90% vegetarian and I never had a single bug in my life. I'm lifting weight three times a week and rock climbing twice a week with no issues too so here goes the "muh protein/energy" argument. The bug based food and ultra processed vegetarian/vegan options are just a marketing fad imho
Again, eating meat is fine, eating 500gr of low quality meat every single isn't, it's just about scale.
I second this - cow based protein and cricket based protein both supply adequate value in an average human diet - why is there such a stigma against one versus the other?
It's cultural of course, but the funny thing is that kinda-insects are already culturally accepted food in the west – but only ones from the sea such as shrimp, crabs, etc.
I had them fried and seasoned/salted iirc, they were surprisingly good little snack. I think it'd take a bit of time for most people to not be squeamish about casually eating them, rather than as a little novelty thing at a food festival.
I don't think it's a matter of "ew gross bugs" it's that there is always a strong undertone of "we should ban beef and replace it with bugs" in these conversations. That kind of thing gets people riled up, and it should.
Why does anyone in the thread need to have said it?
That's been in the news cycle for the last half-decade and major NGOs as well as governments now (EU approved bugs as food) are on board, saying it'll be necessary to feed everybody their protein in the future.
Because they were responding to a person as if they had said it. You can't have a discussion where you just make up what the other person said and respond to that. And in fact you've done exactly the same. You've assigned a position to me that I haven't stated at all. It'd be like me ending this comment with: Why would you make such a inflammatory anti-muslim joke on Eid Al Fitr of all days?
The bug comment is not saying anyone said it. It's to demonstrate limits.
On a discussion about general religions, or future relevant policies, a comment like this would be normal, "I can respect Islam but I'm not going to stop eating pork".
And then I guess you would say "who said you have to stop eating pork?".
Have you ever been to a farm and ranch? A grazing pasture is not the same as a crop field. Pastures are on land not suitable for crops due to size, shape, terrain, soil etc. Sometimes livestock is even put on crop fields to help enrich the soil and to let the animals eat remnants from a harvest.
Have you ever been to a feed lot? It is not a pretty little hilly patch of land with cows wandering aimlessly around nibbling on grass. The vast majority of cattle are, at a minimum, finished on a feedlot. A patch of dirt, packed in as much as movement allows, and fed grain via a trough for half (or more) of their weight gain.
45% of US corn is used for animal feed, which uses an enormous amount of nitrogen fertilizer. On the other hand, soy is able to fix its own nitrogen thus requiring less fertilizer than corn.
Hm sounds like a bold claim, unless you consider grains as grass. Fully grass fed beef account for 1% of the beef sold in the US for example, and god knows what percentage of this comes from 0 fertiliser crops
It's a bit disingenuous to say that animal proteins don't need fertiliser when in fact the extreme vast majority of the animals we eat are fed products or byproducts coming from intensive agriculture which uses fertilisers
Typically, "grain fed" cattle are fed with grass for most of their life, and then "finished" in grain lots to plump them up before sale. They aren't raised from birth to steak on grain.
If that's the case people might be able to make a quick buck locally sourcing and making fertilizer, which previously might've been beaten by economies of scale.
We've been doing stupid crap - like subsidizing corn production for ethanol - that seriously needs to end. The amount of government/market mismanagement and interference driven by special interests is beyond ridiculous. The rubber band is beginning to snap!
Excess agricultural capacity is generally a good idea. If we have zero excess in the system, then when a hiccup occurred we might find ourselves in famine.
With corn-for-ethanol, the US gov is paying to keep farmland productive that has no human-or-livestock feed value. But you could imagine a situation where more human or livestock feed is needed (massive disruption of cropland, say), and in those or subsequent years we could convert basically-for-ethanol fields to consumption fields.
Or if you are running out of fertilizer instead of running out of food, then you can divert expected and stored fertilizer for ethanol fields onto human-and-livestock feed fields. Once again the excess capacity acts in your favor. (Or ought to)
This is assuming that governing bodies and farmers are making coherent rational decisions and in addition responding to local conditions. I have no opinion on that. Just explaining why subsidizing what looks like superfluous excess capacity is not necessarily a dumb thing to do.
Can't this corn-for-ethanol be used directly as livestock feed or even human food if needed?
Also, I have no idea where i heard it, but i remember from somewhere, that pretty much all of the pet food has to be edible by humans too, "just in case" shit hits the fan..
Most field corn is not directly palatable for humans. Livestock feed, yes. There is lots of stuff we could eat to get nutrition from when shit hits fan. Most of us don't haven't tried though, lol
Can the world feed itself is also a matter of asking, which model of food production do we use and are we even able to realistically consider?
A lot of the mismanagement comes from big AG and profit/growth goals.
For example, people in the United States eat about 5 times the amount of meat per person as people did 100 years ago. The population has grown, too. The amount of food grown to produce the calories/nutrients needed to feed the animals which people then eat is far more than for when people eat the produce. It we're talking economies of scale, here.
Big AG has a mass influence on subsidies, regulations, and even recommendations that come out of governments on diet.
If you look at what healthiest for us as individuals and societies with economies of scale taken into account... it's not what Big AG is guiding. Not according to the scientists who study this stuff, anyway.
Big AG is influencing a lot of mismanagement to help with their profits. So far, it's worked well for their bottom lines.
Doesn't that mean we have extra corn that can be used for human/animal consumption if shit hits the fan? Right now we're growing a bunch of crops that don't feed anyone, but it would not be hard at all to have that be the case. Much easier than the whole process of starting from scratch to get new farmland ready for growing corn.
Ok, so we have all these enormous factory farms full of animals who produce fertilizer quite naturally. All we have to do is give them nutritious feed and better lives so they are spared disease. Why can't Big Agriculture pivot to actually using the poop that these animals produce?
Small farmer here. Most of my fertilizer comes from the rear end of my animals. They choose where to apply it, and my free range birds spread it around a bit. I would not try to spread it any other way. I try to avoid man made inputs, but the land is still far less productive than the few times I have applied synthetic fertilizers.
Big Ag invests in machines that each cost hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. Those machines are tuned to spread powdered/pelletized fertilizer that comes from a factory. It would be prohibitively expensive to pivot to machines that can collect and spread manure, and the results would be suboptimal compared to their usual inputs. It is simply not worth the cost, as it would put them at a disadvantage to those who do not switch over. The shortage will pass long before they could pay off the investment.
Global food shortage always feels like "well, I'm not concerned many other countries will be hit first".
Many countries will literally have issues, but the food will _also_ be a lot more expensive for all of us.
The coming years will be "fun" (and I mean bad, to be clear).
40% of all food that is purchased in the US is thrown in the garbage. It's so heavily subsidized here that people just consider it disposable. They buy way more than they need so they can just eat whatever they're in the mood for, and throw out the rest. Maybe food should be a lot more expensive.
I wouldn't call the impending cognitive dissonance "fun" unless one likes being a spectator of ideologically driven mental gymnastics.
We've done weird stuff to low levels of our economies. That's gonna have marginal consequences across the board. And a little bit across the board adds up to a lot of hardship.
If anything, high oil prices will allow governments in the region to subsidise food. Saudis have already started to help out Egypt. They definitely don't want the regime collapsing.
History doesn't agree with you. Last time the middle-east and Maghreb got hungry, it was 2011. The Arab spring wouldn't have come if it weren't for food riots.
Not just fertilizer but politics. In my Canadian province there was a bumper crop of potatoes in 2021 but one field had one section with a potato virus. Shipments stopped and it took months of deals to get back to selling them. Even Puerto Rico with no potato fields and willing to take shipments was not allowed to receive any.
Millions of pounds of perfectly good potatoes had to be destroyed. The US FDA declared the potato virus a threat to human health but no other country made that determination. Politics ruined a lot of food.
> Hope we at least go for number (1) and do the trimming at the top where it needs to happen.
Do not advocate for mass murder on HN.
> Why don't we have more, spread around the world, and capable of slight over-production just in case?
Because we don't have global centralized economic planning, and overcapacity costs money?
Besides, only one of the three NPK is really "produced" in a plant, the other two are mined. (You can in theory extract the elements from seawater, like gold and uranium, but it's very energy-expensive)
> local and locally controlled chemical plants
Doesn't actually help unless you can also get the feedstock - natural gas - locally. Otherwise you're still exposed to world prices and world availability issues.
Really this is all fallout from cutting Russia out of the market and the invasion of Ukraine itself.
OP is saying that when presented with two terrible things, they hope for the one which reduces overall deathes and concentrates it with the people that most likely caused the situation to happen.
Per TFA, the story is not really about an insufficient production capacity, but an increase in the cost of the inputs. The product is (literally in some cases) on the shelves, but at a price that impairs or breaks the farmer's unit economics.
Nitrogen fertilizers are, basically, a fossil fuel product. The dramatic increase in price reflects the increase in the price of natural gas. Agricultural phosphate is competing with more profitable application in LFP batteries [1], so prices are rising.
More resilient production for agricultural inputs and support of farming that builds on local conditions to require fewer inputs would be nice.
> Wtf happened with the chemical industry in general?
Don't look now, but the same thing that happened to quite literally every single important industry critical to human survival. It's all incredibly centralized and fragile, to a degree I don't think many even begin to realize.
> Why don't we have more, spread around the world, and capable of slight over-production just in case?
Money.
> or we're all just "green" and "bio" and stuff now, willing to let poorer people just suffer hunger?
Nope, just money. Would have been far "greener" and "bio" and stuff if we had actually invested in such infrastructure, even if more expensive.
This ironically enables the current historically cheap food situation we're currently in. In no time in human history has less labor or wealth per capita been put into food production.
> While we're it, I still can't wrap my head of the stupidity of all those charities that work to "solve hunger" in Africa and places but can't ever bother to help them pool investment
This is definitely one of my pet peeve rants as well. I've always said these organizations are likely to cause more death and human suffering than anything that has come before it. As soon as the ships of grain stop sailing whenever a moderate disruption finally happens (60-70 years of peace is really just a minor blip on the radar), people very rapidly will starve with little local recourse or knowledge to fall back on.
It’s all about the money (as usual) - likely the economies of scale specifically. They technically can produce it almost everywhere, but it was cheaper to import it, and likely would still be even if local plants were started up.
That sounds like a problem due to the current lack of protectionism for strategic assets? I.e. it is not viable to do domestic base industry in a lot of areas.
COVID showed us that governments are quick to stop exports if they feel there is a need to.
This is an engineered problem. Fertilizer shipments were interrupted by a labour attack by rail workers unions limiting and delaying shipments during planting season, and who are co-ordinating with other groups to create scarcity as a means to impose stronger government social controls. There is an active disinformation campaign about attacks on food processing plants as a means to sow popular panic as well. Yes, fertilizer comes from Ukraine and Russia, but only in single digit percentages, and it also comes from everywhere else in the world. This whole situation has moved beyond a conspiracy to a kind of ideology that has seized western countries. There is a cadre of people who are creating chaos because they think it puts them at the center of it and sets them up to become the party who manages it.
We have the most sophisticated data collection and logistics networks in the history of the world, and you think we just accidentally run out of a fundamental economic factor at a key moment in the natural economic cycle, and that risks mass starvation? We can somehow predict macro climate impacts, but not manage how much fertilizer we're going to need for a planting season? It's just politics by people who use politics as a means to gratify an urge for power for its own end. I would be suprised if people were still acting fooled.
> We have the most sophisticated data collection and logistics networks in the history of the world, and you think we just accidentally run out of a fundamental economic factor at a key moment in the natural economic cycle, and that risks mass starvation?
Absolutely.
There is no omniscient Illuminati pulling the strings for the entire planet. Just people, corporations, governments, and other corporate entities making decisions based on what they perceive to be their best interest. And all of them are limited and fallible.
Also, wars and pandemics tend to throw a wrench into the quality of planning forecasts.
Maybe you're right, it's probably nothing. Of course there is no omniscient illuminati, as even just for the omniscience part, first you would have to somehow subordinate all the principled thinkers working at companies like google and facebook, of which there are at least dozens. This is after stacking entire sectors of academia and their appendant policy arms with what would essentially be intellectual zombies who did nothing to resist the agenda of said plot.
That's hundreds of fellowships and thousands of adjunct jobs. Even if you funded most of them, it would take several millions of dollars. Journalists are far too curious, and we can rely on them to object to any falsehood and propaganda such a scheme would require to survive. Really, all 6 or 7 media conglomerates working together to push the same messages or to kill stories that would expose said plot seems pretty far fetched. The logistics alone would be baffling.
The only plausible way that could happen would be through a kind of religious hysteria of people who imagine themselves as enlightened through an awakening, and on a path to redemption that requires them to efface themselves, dismantle their formerly sinful lives and prevent others from sinning in a similar way. It's absurd in a modern era. It would have to be wrapped in a political agenda, which educated people are basically immune to, especially ones who are largely agnostic. The amount of effort they would need just to suppress naturally occuring logical questions that would imply a conspiracy which would unravel under the most minor scrutiny would be so immense as to not be in the realm of serious consideration.
There are however, movements and ideologues reading from the same script that do things like creating a rail workers strike during planting season. It doesn't take a conspiracy, just the logic of an idea.
When you understand that human and animals organic dejections are alternative fertiliser and that most aerial virus spreads through shit you can understand the main way how covid 19 was spread accross the world with very high correlation between biosolid (shit based fertiliser) spray on fields and covid 19 infection in US for exemple (https://theethicalskeptic.com/2021/11/15/chinas-ccp-conceale...)
It is fascinating that we have recessions, food crises etc. all because NATO wanted to expand and Donbass cannot be allowed to be independent.
While we are at it, should we liberate Northern Ireland? What exactly is the difference, except that in the case of Northern Ireland less than 50% wants to be British and in Donbass more than 50% wants to be Russian.
Ukraine is a contributing factor but so was COVID. Governments printed trillions of dollars and messed with the economy while millions of people stayed inside and didn’t work for weeks or months. What did everyone think was going to happen?
Weird how this Donbas includes parts that are very much pro Ukrainian. Russia doesn't leave room for neutrality on it's border. Especially not if you can't leverage another power like China or aren't willing to militarise completely.
Also I'd suggest you don't use independent. They went away from claiming that and it's not like the veneer of it in Transnistria and South-Ossetia was much better. The ethnic cleansing projects there went a lot smoother for Putin tho. Do they care so much about Armenia independence too?
And yeah let northern Ireland have it's independence if a vote goes that way imo.
Nearly every symbiotic relationship fungi make is based on buying sugars from plants by selling them minerals from biological weathering of rock (particles). What happens in conventional agriculture is that we murder all of the fungi.
There are a few places with strange soil compositions that are actually lacking in particular minerals. We could either elect to do something else with that land, or transition everyone but them to a post-green-revolution strategy.