More farmland is lost to desert than gained to warmth. Pastureland in particular is affected, making cattle more expensive to raise. Also farming is energy-intensive and a rise in costs of fuel will pass on to food prices.
Secondly, what evidence do you have that fuel will be more expensive? The shale revolution has made gas cheap and it will stay so for a long time. You can make methanol with gas for example. The proven reserves go up of fossil fuels as well.
There is also no limit on electrical energy, we could build nuclear plants until the cows come home if that is required. France has shown that it possible and that it is not unreasonably expensive.
Even if farmland would somehow be an issue, we could easily do factory farming. The only reason we don't is that its more expensive then using land.
Where?
As I understand it, pretty much all the good farmland is already in use for farming.
The only available farmland I'm aware of that is not being used for that is being squatted upon by McMansions in the suburbs. The land they're sitting on was formerly farmland, but it was found to be more economically valuable as land for upscale homes.
Think what it would mean for those economics to be flipped around, for farmland to become more valuable than McMansion lots. It means farming has become a very high-dollar economic activity, which means food has become really expensive, which means many fewer people would be buying McMansions.
So what then is your plan? That we put almost all the human population into arcologies like the Stephenson cyberpunk novels, so that we can free up the land to be farmland again?
In general, people has been proportional spending less money on food for each decade that has gone past. Production per acer has also gone up, while the number of people working as farmers has significant dropped.
I am pretty sure that the reason why there is not more potato farmers in the world is because the price of potatoes are not high enough to utilize all the land where potatoes can be grown.
But even if we somehow run out of land we would still not need to build arcologies. The primary reason we don't have many seaweed farms in the world is because few cultures has seaweed as an primary diet. Economics could likely change that.
There is also tons of lower quality land that could be farmed if you really needed to as well.
Around 45% of corn production is used to make transport fuel rather then food. Most of Brazilian transport fuel is also made from food.
Simply put, there is HUGE amounts of potential for increase in food production.
All of this is without using advanced things like factory food production.
Also, food is not becoming more expensive other then being more expensive because of oil and transport cost.
https://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/journal/past-issues/is...
> So what then is your point? That we put almost all the human population into arcologies like the Stephenson cyberpunk novels?
No. My point is that spreading irrational fear and false facts about food availability is wrong and you should stop scaring the uninformed people.
I don't propose anything. Human can just live where they like. Buy food and energy where they want to buy it. Most move to urban centers voluntary. Only 0.5% of land is actually paved and that's where the waste majority of people live.
My point is that we have lots of energy and we have lots of food. There is no real concern that either is gone run out. There is not even a need for government to do any gigantic policies (unless they want to fix carbon emissions, then a carbon tax would easily resolve the problem).
The future will be one of more unused land that is untouched by humans and that will happen without a conservation policy.
That's consistent with my claim that all the good farmland is already taken. The shrinkage in use of farmland could be that marginal farmland is falling away due to soil exhaustion and economic effects.
> humans are becoming more urban.
That sounds like the path towards arcologies.
You can see it now: former single-family dwellings in the large cities are being rented out to groups of yuppies, each of whom, despite being high earners, would struggle to pay the rent alone. The low earners are being forced out, but to where? Where does this road lead, if not to arcologies?
> It has nothing to do with McMansions, humans are becoming more urban.
Only if you define "urban" as identical to "metropolitan area."
Take any large US city, then include its complete metropolitan area, which I'll define here as the area of continuous land surrounded by either farmland or wasteland. I'll stretch the definition of farmland to include single-family-owned parcels of land which are large enough to support small alfalfa crops, horse pasturage, etc.
How many "cities" are in that metropolitan area? Why are they called "cities," even though there is no farmland between them? I'm fundamentally a rural sort, all my life, but I've been in such areas many times, and the only way I can tell that I've traveled from one city to another is that there's a sign situated between a laundromat and a strip mall, with the city boundary going down the alley between them. Once upon a time, they were in fact separate cities.
Take Los Angeles, California as an example. In what meaningful way is Anaheim not "L.A."? I get that its streets don't look much like those of Beverly Hills or Monrovia or Pasadena, but the whole area is one urbanized mess. You used to pass through farmland to get from each of these cities to the next. As an occasional visitor to the area, "L.A" to me extends from Ventura to the north down to San Clemente in the south, and inland almost to the Salton Sea. All that former farmland is paved over now.
> There is also tons of lower quality land that could be farmed if you really needed to as well.
Less productively, by definition.
> Around 45% of corn production is used to make transport fuel rather then food.
Sure, but that's just part of the same problem: as population and wealth rises, the wish to have personal rapid transit also rises, which leads to either:
1. Greater consumption pressure on our oil reserves.
2. A switch to biofuels of some sort, which in turn puts pressure on the rest of the bioeconomy.
3. A switch to electric vehicles, which requires massive solar cell arrays and massive distributed mines for rare earths, which stresses the environment still further.
...or some combination of the three, of course.
It's all an interdependent system. You can't move one part without affecting many other parts.
> food is not becoming more expensive other then being more expensive because of oil and transport cost.
The increasing transport costs are in part because of my original premise: cities used to have nearby farms to draw from. Now that we've pushed the boundaries of so many of our conurbanizations out to the wastelands, we've got to truck in food from much farther away than before.
In the US, some of the areas of most rapid population growth are out in the desert, places like Las Vegas and Phoenix. Why do you suppose that is?
> Most move to urban centers voluntary.
Yeah, voluntary in the same way that having children work in the coal mines was "voluntary" to our forebears. They had a choice: starve or go farming. Back then, we still had much of the West available for expansion. That's largely gone now.
At the grandparent level, my family were farmers. The land they did all of that on is now sold off for houses. My forebears made the desert bloom. The thing is, though, they did it around rivers which now run dry because the remaining farms are sucking up all of the water that isn't going into the houses or being dumped back on the desert to keep all those middle-America lawns green.
You speak of increasing productivity for our existing farmland, but all increasing curves flatten out eventually. There are no exponential curves in ecologies, only S-curves that haven't started to flatten out yet. (Or, collapsing curves!)
Well if you want to disagree with all expert assessments, then feel free.
> That sounds like the path towards arcologies.
If humans voluntary adopt this, then I don't see the problem.
If people want to get a cheap large house in Texas, they can just go ahead and do that.
> Take Los Angeles, California
California is hardly the typical case. Just because you experience this locally doesn't change global statistics.
> Sure, but that's just part of the same problem: as population and wealth rises, the wish to have personal rapid transit also rises, which leads to either:
Yes. But using ethanol never made a lot of sense in the US. It purely because of politics. We are not fundamentally energy restricted, you could easily substitute ethanol for methanol for example. Gas is actually demand constraint in the US right now.
Again, we do not have a lack of energy or land supply. My example about ethanol was more to prove that we have more then enough farm land.
I don't understand what your issue with this accepting this is.
> At the grandparent level, my family were farmers. The land they did all of that on is now sold off for houses.
Again, you continue to assert completely 100% false statistics. The waste majority of land is not covered by houses. In fact there are people who are trying to recreate the North American Step because there is so much empty land.
> You speak of increasing productivity for our existing farmland, but all increasing curves flatten out eventually. There are no exponential curves in ecologies, only S-curves that haven't started to flatten out yet. (Or, collapsing curves!)
Productivity will continue to go up. We have new technology such as GMO that can make a major difference. The reality is that most of the worlds farm land is not farmed with anywhere close that efficiency. Would could have massive amount of food production growth if we had more adoption of current technology.
I really don't understand any of your arguments. We have lots of access land. We have so much land we can use part of it for ethanol and another huge part for meat. If there were any real constraint on food production, those things would change. Its the same in other countries, Britain used to be intensively farmed and now they are talking about establishing a prehistoric forest across the whole for northern Britain because they DON'T NEED LAND TO FARM. Its the same in many countries. That is a simple fact, however much you want to invent stories about your grand parents farm. WE ARE NOT CONSTRAINT IN THE AVAILABILITY OF FARM LAND!
Even if land was the issue, we could still do very efficient factory farming where land is not a constraint at all.
Would you be able to explain why that is, or link to something that can? It's not immediately obvious to me why that would be.
Of course, human activity could speed up the transition for these areas, but soil building is a quirky technology that's hard to scale up.
Some land is lost in X, and gained in Y. That land in Y will be close to where farming currently happens and with a delay of a couple of years the farmers can extend northwards a little bit.
I can't see how such a slow process could lead to a 'shortfall'.