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Comment by jimrandomh | Hacker News Reader

The US used to have a policy of paying farmers to maintain unused production capacity - ie, to leave some of their fields fallow. This creates an emergency-response capability: if some event shrinks the country's or the world's food production capacity, then that capacity can be activated. This policy was politically problematic because of the conspicuous waste, and economically problematic because fallow land can't necessarily be converted into food production fast enough.

Mandating use of biodiesel seems like a better way of achieving the same goal: it ensures extra food-production capacity is maintained.

Plus, it reduces the amount of soybean oil being used in food. That stuff's unhealthy (very high omega-6 content), and apparently there's a huge amount of it being produced essentially as a byproduct of soy meal.

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I dunno. Back in the day farmers used a system called crop rotation to maintain the soil.

One year they planted crop A, the next they planted crop B, and the next they left it fallow.

This was before industrial fertilizes mind you, but leaving part of the land fallow is not a bad thing.

Farmers today still understand this - better than most non-farmers appreciate. Anybody still farming today is a decent business person, and that means making sure your land stays healthy so your farm has a future.

Industrial fertilizers have definitely changed the rules and allow farmers to shift the traditional cycles, but the same principles of caring for the land still apply. Crop rotation is still common, but some land is so much more productive for some uses than others that it makes sense to "weight" the rotation with fertilizers.

Yeah i fear that very few acknowledge, never mind appreciate, the kind of long term outlook one develops as a farmer.

Lifestock, crops, all that happens over years, not weeks or months like in most industries.

There are millions of different soil types. The right answer is different for each. Follow is just one useful technique farmers use to build soil, it works in some cases not in others.

This is a poor policy decision in order to maintain ag production readiness (or, possibly, is blatant handout to the ag industry), very much the same way corn ethanol is a net negative. Crop production should never create competition between human nutritional consumption and transportation.

You also can't give away your overproduction to less well off countries, as you cripple their ag market, preventing them from bootstrapping their own economy.

It's a moot point with transportation electrifying as quickly as it is. I don't have enough knowledge to say what crops we should be planting above and beyond what meets human consumption needs, but I can say without a doubt we should not be subsidizing crop based biofuels (only algae based fuels, only to be used for air and marine transport).

If an emergency created a huge shortage in global food supply, the policy's assumption is that the market competition for nutritional vs. transportation crops would shift (food would be more expensive and valuable to sell) so that the new nutritional needs were satisfied.

You are correct that in the current equilibrium state it is sub-optimal. Prices are settled right now where a small number of hungry poor people are out-competed by the transportation market because they can't pay more than it can.

That is bad, I completely agree. But fixing that isn't what the policy is for, the policy is for preventing starvation during World War 3.

So you have to compare the suffering of people here and now against the potential suffering expected without the policy in place multiplied by the probability that WW3 occurs.

I don't understand the implicit vision of World War III that underlies this rationale. Is it supposed to be a multi-year total war affair between major powers, but strictly non-nuclear, like WW II before August 1945? All of the world's major military powers and a few minor ones now have nuclear weapons. And even if they didn't have nuclear weapons, conventional weapons have radically improved effectiveness because of radically improved targeting. (Most of WW II's bombs were wasted destroying random patches of nothing-in-particular instead of the factory or airfield that was being targeted.) The probable timeline from initiation of total war to comprehensive devastation has been heavily compressed since 1940.

If there were total war again between major military powers I could see a brutal spasm of months of using conventional weapons followed by nuclear murder-suicide from whichever side is losing worst. Perhaps a negotiated peace if the winning side doesn't make the losing believe it has nothing left to lose. I don't see it going on for years either way. Preparing to fight the next World War as if it were going to be as protracted as the last one is strange.

Could we not discontinue the legal use of food production for biofuels, pay for those crops to continue to be harvested (readiness payments), and then gave the crops away for free to those in need within the country?

It doesn't quite just work that way. For example, the corn grown for ethanol production is really no good for people to eat.

edit (too deep to reply): I really don't think it's moving the goal posts, you asked about redirecting that food production in general, not soy. As is mentioned elsewhere, the soy oil isn't really used much for food anyway.

That said - you can't just swap corn grown for ethanol for "corn for people to eat" - the equipment involved to harvest it is completely different, as are the facilities to process it. The same concerns apply to other crops.

We're talking soybeans at the moment. This is moving the goal posts. If you can't eat corn-based ethanol corn, you grow other crops on that land.

No we could not. That subsidized introduction of available food would shift the whole demand curve.

Farmers currently produce as much food as the market demands, plus some excess capacity is converted biofuels. If the market required less, they would (eventually) produce less unsubsidized food. Then, the logic goes, WW3 takes out a lot of our food and we suffer massive shortages because there is no extra capacity to produce more.

corn ethanol is a net negative

Some amount of ethanol added to gasoline serves as a fuel oxygenator, reducing emissions of soot and carbon monoxide. A discussion of whether there is a better oxygenate than corn ethanol could be interesting, but 5% or 10% ethanol is really there for emissions, not biofuel.

Agreed that ethanol is superior to MTBE (which was phased out due to toxicity) [1], but E85 efforts [2] are misguided.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methyl_tert-butyl_ether

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E85

Right - corn ethanol offset a lot of MTBE usage in the USA, which is a good thing.

>Plus, it reduces the amount of soybean oil being used in food.

It reduces the land being used to produce food.

http://hungerreport.org/2017/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/hung...

"In 2014, Italian and U.S. researchers, examining a global dataset of large-scale land acquisitions, published a study showing that between 300 million and 550 million people could be fed by crops grown on these acquired lands. The land in these deals was in countries with some of the world’s highest rates of hunger and malnutrition. Govern-ments in fragile states, desperate to attract foreign investment, have proved all too willing to trade land to investors at bargain rates. Agri-businesses typically claim that they will reduce hunger by applying modern technologies to increase productivity on the acquired land. In fact, many of these deals are intended to produce crops for export or to produce biofuels. Reducing hunger and poverty in the host country is not a priority when crops can instead go to paying customers."

You're on the right track, but getting the wrong conclusion. Green revolution agriculture is about a move from subsistence farming to cash farming. Nobody grows soybeans at scale for subsistence; their value is as a cash crop. It's not just for biofuels. The famed Ethiopian famine of the 1980s? That was caused by the introduction of export cattle farming, fencing off "property" and breaking the traditional grazing cycle that protected the land. Public land got overgrazed, and rivers got silted. And the export cattle? They were for the European pet food market. And European financial interests were all too happy to work with Western governments to put compliant Ethiopian governments in place to do it.

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