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Comment by mysterypie | Hacker News Reader

For me, the most surprising point in the article was this:

> Our analysis reveals that the global marine biomass pyramid contains more consumers than producers, thus an inverse food pyramid.

I didn't understand how such a thing was possible until I read the explanation further down:

> Such inverted biomass distributions can occur when primary producers have a rapid turnover of biomass [on the order of days], while consumer biomass turns over much more slowly [a few years in the case of mesopelagic fish]. Thus, the standing stock of consumers is larger, even though the productivity of producers is necessarily higher.

There's an analogy in the "human world": Farmers were 90% of labor force in the U.S. in 1790, but only 2.6% in 1990.[1] Farming has become so much more efficient that a small group can feed the whole country.

[1] https://www.agclassroom.org/gan/timeline/farmers_land.htm

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I would suspect that there's also some amount of refuse biomass from terrestrial sources that helps supply marine consumers, though it may be trivial in the grand scheme of things. I wonder how much biomass relies on sewage dumping as a food source?

Edit: And how are tide flats and their flora categorized?

I don’t know if the farmer anaolgy works. The majority of farming operations in the U.S.A are owned by corporations and use harmful farming practices. That trend needs to be reversed back to when local family farmers provided the majority of the food in their region.

Why is this being downvoted? Perhaps on its face it seems to be anti-technology and regressive, but there's plenty of data to suggest that the industrial efficiencies of modern farms have massive negative externalities in terms of depleted soil health in the form of the narrowing of both macrobiome and microbiome, depleted nutrient content in our plants, depleted health and nutrition of our animals, leading up to depleted health to those at the top of the food chain: humans.

it's being downvoted because it's not a relevant reply to the original comment, and has potential to provide a flamewar on a topic entirely different than the original article.

How do you propose feeding New York City's 8.5 million people with local family farms?

If you're willing to spend 40x+ more on labor per acre, you can vastly increase yields and entirely eliminate pesticides/non-organic fertilizer usage - potentially 20x+ yields in same area (depending on crop). But it takes a lot of expensive skilled labor to meet or exceed agroindustrial yields.

I think the biggest problem with our agricultural industry is commoditization of vegetables. We need 'celebrity/hipster' vegetable strains/growers that command significantly higher prices. If you grow vegetables that are twice as nutritious as found in the grocery store, you'd have a hard time finding a market at twice the price. Nutritional density of our vegetables has dropped something like 10% in the last 30 years as a result of agroindustrial farming methods.

Megacities are certainly problematic for the 'local' part. A city like Chicago that's more-or-less surrounded by farmland could be more plausible. Microgreens with imported seeds could be an interesting option: locally grown, fresh, short growing cycle of ~14 days, one warehouse full of growlights and you could provide greens for thousands year round.

Perennial grain research, such as Salish Blue 'Wheat', is also pretty exciting - would greatly simplify grain farming if the plant lived many years.

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