Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Quick overview of a farmer's land that uses this method: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stABAx82TbY he harvest around 3x more cocoa per hectare than traditional methods and its one of the most valuable in the world right now.
Big producers joining to make it more scalable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE
See the work of Paul Staments using fungi to treat bee colony collapse.
For a great example of this, check out:
http://nautil.us/issue/66/clockwork/herbicide-is-whats-for-d...
If you local supermarket doesn't have a suitable stock of ecological supplies, write to them and ask for some, or start shopping at an organic shop.
Not all people have this luxury though. On one hand, I have to make the choice to eat ethically but also spend more money. When I lived up north, options were a lot more scarce, and the average income was a lot lower. The community I lived in heavily relied on the cheapest options available.
If we could instead build swarms of self-maintaining intelligent human-scale robots, perhaps working with genetically engineered work animals (monkeys?), they could hand-plant, hand-till, and hand-harvest crops at a far greater efficiency with far less disruption to the ecosystem.
Picture ten thousand dog-sized robots going individually planting and caring for and harvesting millions of plants in a big forest, or a field (with different plants shading each other). An individual dollop of manure on each plant. Weeds removed by "hand" without chemicals.
Basically an automated version of the extremely-efficient overlapping-crop style of farming that was often used in medieval Japan and other places with a lot of labor and know-how but without much flat land and without modern mechanization.
https://mdc.mo.gov/wildlife/nuisance-problem-species/invasiv...
From what I have seen, everyone who thinks there are any significant difficulties that need to be overcome is a Remainer and everyone who is a Leaver is absolutely certain that any claim of difficulty is “just project fear” — this, combined with the inherent time lag between planting and harvesting, means that what crops are around next year is entirely down to what UK farmers already believe will happen next year.
Four outcomes, for any given farm:
1. Current crops, easy access to labour: fine
2. Efficient crops, easy access to labour: fine
3. Efficient crops, no access to labour: fine
4. Current crops, no access to labour: bankruptcy
You may consider 4. to be an obvious safe bet, but when I say I think Leavers regard any talk of difficulty as total nonsense, I mean I get the impression they place it in the same mental bucket as “Satan is real and knows your online banking password”.
In outcome 4., the farms won’t be around afterwards to try it again the right way.
Given the UK is a net food importer, this is mostly separate to any question of food security, but ironically the lack of access to labour could increase unemployment.
Crops are not necessarily sun-bound, other factors/resources tend to set the growth limits.
And the cacao tree specifically is a small (under 8m) tropical tree, at such a low height it's can't have evolved as a sun-loving plant given it's only ever well below the forest's canopy.
I don't have an actual verified study to show you :/ But I believe there are a bunch of studies, as I have seeing a few universities making them, but I don't know how to find them. All I have now is my own experience on this topic.
It seems plants have fewer minerals now compared to 100 years ago. Farmers have fertilizer and the plants grow but they don't have the same levels of nutrition even with all that help. Samples of weeds from the 1800s were compared to the same weeds now and even the weeds have fewer minerals, so it's all plants not just food crops.
Larger farms growing more food may not solve the problem it's the quality of the plant not just the quantity.
It's important to note that the video asserts that food is still plenty nutritious and if you eat a well balanced diet you're fine and my own note is that there is also probably a limit to this effect.
Our understanding of what micronutrients humans need is not great. For plants, it may be even less understood.
I think there are actually plenty of nutrients in soil (even many "poor" soils). The real problem is that they aren't bio-available. So you'll have lots of different mineral salts in the soil (usually one or two orders of magnitude more than you need, by weight), but it's not in a form that the plant can absorb by its roots.
I think the real problem is the kind of mono-culture cropping we do. Really you want a variety of plants pulling up nutrients out of the ground (because different varieties have different abilities to break down and convert the nutrients in the soil). Then you want those plants to break down and be reintegrated in the soil. Finally, you often want some of that happening in an anaerobic environment, so you don't bind oxygen to it.
There are some new (old? ha ha) techniques being developed to build fertility (really just making existing nutrients bio-available) in the soil. Avoiding tilling, building up micro-organisms and insects to distribute the soil, allowing a variety of plants to grow (some long roots, some short roots, etc, etc). It's pretty complicated, though and I expect that it will take us a very long time to learn how to do these things effectively.
It definitely seems easier to just add what you think the soil is missing, but there are many disadvantages to that approach as we see over time. I did some experiments in containers a while ago. My idea was to see what kind of production I could get without adding any inputs to the soil at all (just water), and harvesting as much food as I could.
I had some experience from doing planted fish tanks with really intense planting (every single space possible occupied with a plant) and knew that it was reasonable to assume that plants can grow really well being very crowded as long as nutrients are available. I planted my containers so that light was the limiting factor, but grew a lot of local weeds that grew in poor soil as well as food on the assumption that they would build fertility fastest. I ran my experiment over 5 years and was really surprised at my results -- my production increased over time. One year, I even got 5 (!) harvests of potatoes from the same container -- I've never even come close to that level of production doing it more traditionally.
It was all very unscientific and I was really doing it out of curiosity more than trying to prove anything. In the end, it seems my neighbor didn't like my container garden of weeds and he convinced my gas man to apply herbicide to it. That was the end of my experiment (I caught him in the act as I came home from work a little bit early that day -- one of the few times I've really blown my top).
Anyway, I don't think we really have to worry over much about actually depleting our soils. I think they can rebound fairly quickly with the right approach. However, I think it is possible that our current intensive farming approaches do not produce the most nutrient rich produce possible.
That doesn't appear to be needed. The plants don't have the ability at all, the microorganisms they attract and feed do it. You can build fertility while growing a single crop year after year, Fukuoka did rice and wheat every year for decades on the same land just fine. As long as you keep the microorganisms fed and don't insist on a program of routinely killing them, they'll break down the minerals that the plants need and make them available.
>Finally, you often want some of that happening in an anaerobic environment, so you don't bind oxygen to it.
No you don't. When it happens in an anaerobic environment you get end products that hinder plant growth instead of helping it. This is the main reason soil compaction is a problem, you get pooled water in the ground creating anaerobic conditions which kill off all the good bacteria and fungi.
Fukuoka also used wild carrots and daikon to bring up nutrients from lower down (source: My friend studied with him). Also white clover to fix nitrogen (and even went so far as to say, "Don't bother experimenting with anything else. I've tried everything and white clover is the best."). Rice is a summer crop and in most places in Japan you can have a winter crop as well, which you use for nutrient migration. Fukuoka's techniques work very well around where I like (my friend's fields are fantastic), but apparently don't work very well in more temperate climes (just from what I've heard).
Not according to him he didn't. Read his books, he was very clear about everything he did. He grew vegetables to eat, in a completely different area, it had nothing to do with the grain field.
>Also white clover to fix nitrogen
Nitrogen is a non-issue precisely because you can pull it out of the air for free. You said you want a variety of plants to pull nutrients from the ground. Clover pulling nitrogen from the air is not support for that idea.
>Rice is a summer crop and in most places in Japan you can have a winter crop as well, which you use for nutrient migration.
But he didn't do that, he used it for a crop. He did rice and wheat, like I said. Both were crops, he sold the harvests. He did it for decades without any decline in yields. The idea that you need a "diverse polyculture" of plants as the current fad calls it is completely unsupported by evidence. They just need a healthy ecosystem to grow in, not necessarily different plants.
>Fukuoka's techniques work very well around where I like (my friend's fields are fantastic), but apparently don't work very well in more temperate climes
The techniques and ideas work fine, but you can't blindly copy his setup as it was. You don't have the season for two crops, so you don't do rice and wheat. You just do wheat. Marc Bonfils has grown winter wheat every year in the same field for over a decade with no inputs, no rotation, and yields increased each year as the soil was restored. If you are in a cold enough climate it might even make sense to compost your straw in the spring in order to warm your soil up earlier, but I am not sure about that yet, I'll be testing it this spring.
In living soil, not the dirt most agriculture is growing on, plants are trading sugars for water, minerals, and/or protection with symbiotic fungi and nitrogen fixing bacteria.
These microbes don't like tilling. Soil structure and the organisms break down, releasing carbon into the atmosphere. It's very hard to bring them back, especially to the middle of big square fields where everything is dead in a several mile radius.
I watched this video and she has no compelling evidence that this can work on a large scale. My family is doing farming for generations. You need fertilizers because crops consume minerals from the soil. You need chemicals because of monocultures create conditions for diseases and bugs. You need tilling because you do not have unlimited labour.
Weeds are pioneer species (species that quickly colonize damaged or degraded areas). They aren't always native. They do have their uses for soil improvement, both structurally and nutrient availability, but if you're tilling anyway, or your animals are being poisoned by the weeds, you won't be that impressed.
The soil has plenty of minerals in it. But most plants can't access them without symbiosis with fungi, which are all dead from the tilling.
Weeds are early colonizing species, frequently foreign invasives, not natives. They do not always outperform crop species, as demonstrated by the millions of acres where they are outcompeted by the crops. You create barren lifeless dirt, precisely the niche early colonizing species evolved to fill. Of course they fill it. Just because you create your own problem, doesn't mean the rest of us suffer from that problem too.
You do not want to till for other reasons, literally the entire purpose of tilling is to hinder plant growth. The fact that it hinders crop growth as well as weed growth seems to be lost on many people. There's a reason the majority of farms in the US and Canada are already no-till.
The people currently doing your job better than you are pretty compelling evidence. https://hooktube.com/watch?v=UEOVLpZrvvU
You do not need fertilizers because the dirt is made of those very minerals. You have literally tons of phosphorus sitting under your crop, but you have killed the microorganisms responsible for converting it to plant available forms.
Monocultures do not create conditions for diseases and bugs. This has been researched to death. If alternating strips of corn and soybeans lowered disease and pest rates that's what everyone would do. It doesn't help at all. The problem is not the plants, it is the soil.
I have no idea what your last point is even supposed to mean. Tilling is labor. "I don't have unlimited labor so I will use my limited labor on a process that increases my costs and lowers my yields" is pretty hard to make sense of.
I have heard this several times lately. But I grew up around tilled (sometimes double tilled) farmland, and I still see a lot of tilled earth when I'm out of town and think to look.
What do we mean by most and what definition of no-till are we using?
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2017/11/30/saving-money-time...
Wider use of crop rotation, GMO, farming robots and micro-irrigation might reduce the need for tilling but it is still very far of. Farming is heavily subsidized but still not very profitable. Margins are small and no-till methods are not economically viable for most places.
Do not underestimate farmers. They might not be smart individually but good ideas spread very quickly. If the above scientist shows me a farm that is a 100h size and makes a profit then we can talk.
> Weeds are early colonizing species, frequently foreign invasives, not natives. They do not always outperform crop species, as demonstrated by the millions of acres where they are outcompeted by the crops. You create barren lifeless dirt, precisely the niche early colonizing species evolved to fill. Of course they fill it. Just because you create your own problem, doesn't mean the rest of us to suffer from that problem too.
Cucumber/tomato/potato/radish and are not native to Europe. Not only that but most of the vegetables you eat is heavily modified by selective breeding to increase yield. Weeds, on the other hand, are aggressive plants that optimize for survival. You contradict yourself, how land be barren and lifeless when weeds grow perfectly. Weeds grow because you need have certain spacing between your crops. You either need to use chemicals or labour and tilling to ensure high yield. In some cases, you can reduce tilling when the plant is aggressive enough (corn) in others it is not possible.
> You do not want to till for other reasons, literally the entire purpose of tilling is to hinder plant growth. The fact that it hinders crop growth, as well as weed growth, seems to be lost on many people. There's a reason the majority of farms in the US and Canada are already no-till.
You will till to prepare for sowing. Even "no-till" farmers will till to some extent. There is more no-till because chemical solutions are better. My parents reduced tiling after using herbicide that can be used to target weeds in specific periods after crops are already growing.
> I have no idea what your last point is even supposed to mean. Tilling is labor. "I don't have unlimited labor so I will use my limited labor on a process that increases my costs and lowers my yields" is pretty hard to make sense of.
Because you are not a farmer. Tilling is a very quick procedure that is not labour intensive. By labour, I mean manually removing weeds before they spill seeds or outgrow crops. For many vegetable/fruits, manual weeding is still essential.
The above farm is 20 times that size and switched over specifically because it is more profitable, that's the point. Maybe instead of insisting that reality isn't real you just watch the video? We're talking about real farms, not piddly hobbyist nonsense. If I were underestimating farmers, we wouldn't be having this discussion. But since most farmers are old, stuck in their ways and borderline illiterate, lots of them keep doing the same bad things that we've known are bad for over 70 years.
>Cucumber/tomato/potato/radish and are not native to Europe. Not only that but most of the vegetables you eat is heavily modified by selective breeding to increase yield.
None of those things are relevant at all. The genetic difference between crop species and their wild ancestors is tiny, and in fact most crop species out-compete their wild ancestors when sowed together.
>Weeds, on the other hand, are aggressive plants that optimize for survival.
All plants are optimized for survival. That's a meaningless statement. The question is survival WHERE? Wolves are optimized for survival, yet if you toss one in the middle of the ocean it doesn't actually survive. Corn is optimized for survival, but if you toss it in a barren dead patch of dirt, it struggles to grow. Corn evolved to form symbiotic relationships with fungi, which your tillage has exterminated. There are plants that evolved to grow in barren dead dirt. They do well there. You call them weeds, and pretend the ecosystem doesn't matter, weeds are just magically better no matter what. Yet if you have a healthy soil with plenty of undisturbed fungi, the corn out-competes the weeds.
Take the wild ancestor of any crop you are pretending can't compete and do a test with it. They compete fine in a healthy soil with a balanced microbiology, just like their modern crop varieties do. But if the rhizosphere is gone, the only plants that can grow well are those adapted to dead barren dirt, whose entire ecological niche is to colonize such areas and gradually restore them to healthy ecosystems. So on tilled dirt, they get out-competed by weeds just like the modern crop varieties do. Again, if you simply watched the video I linked before which you said you watched, you would already have had a microbiologist explain this for you with nice diagrams and everything. Ecological succession is real. The species which thrive in barren dirt are not the same as the species that thrive in old growth forests. Are pine trees not optimized for survival? Then why do they get out-competed by weeds if I plant them in tilled dead dirt? Have we modified them by selective breeding to increase yield? This is trivially easy to test for yourself if you don't believe scientists and their silly evidence.
>Weeds grow because you need have certain spacing between your crops. You either need to use chemicals or labour and tilling to ensure high yield.
No, you leave the residue and it blocks 95% of weed seed germination. If you haven't heard of mulch, you're not even attempting to be a farmer. You are just blindly going through the motions of what your great grandparents did.
>You will till to prepare for sowing.
No I do not.
>Even "no-till" farmers will till to some extent.
No we do not. The coulters on the planter simply open the soil for the seed to be deposited. Seriously, go look at a no-till planter before pretending they don't exist. You are thinking of strip tilling, which is a form of conservation tillage. No-till is not conservation tillage, it is no tillage.
>Because you are not a farmer
Yes I am. For someone who seems to have obtained all his knowledge of farming from farm simulator 2015, it seems silly to call the person pointing to scientists, farmers and university agricultural departments "not a farmer".
>Tilling is a very quick procedure that is not labour intensive
How do you think that driving equipment, literally the only labor done on a farm, is not labor? This isn't the 1800s, all farming involves is driving slowly for hours at a time, unless you have a self-driving tractor in which case it involves playing games on your phone. Tillage is literally the slowest and most fuel burning procedure in many primitive farming operations. Only for some crops is harvesting worse. But hey what do I know, I am totally not a farmer right? I bet people who study this for a living in the biggest farming area on the planet will say something else right? Oops, they say I am right. I guess it because they are not a farmer too! https://store.extension.iastate.edu/product/4047
>By labour, I mean manually removing weeds before they spill seeds or outgrow crops
Are you high? How can you say I am not a farmer when you think people walk around 5000 acres of fields pulling weeds by hand? Driving a tractor is labor. Literally the only labor done on a farm in decades.
>For many vegetable/fruits, manual weeding is still essential.
Maybe somewhere in eastern Europe where they are still living in the 1820s, but in the 21st century literally no farms do any manual weeding. Vegetable "farms" are called market gardens, and they use mexicans to pick the vegetables, not to weed.
> None of those things are relevant at all. The genetic difference between crop species and their wild ancestors is tiny, and in fact most crop species out-compete their wild ancestors when sowed together.
Try growing tomato. It needs to 45-60 days before you can eat anything. It requires herbicides and sometimes manual weeding. Special plows are used to prepare the field. It is often chemically pollinated. For high yield, you will manually remove the lower sprouts. If you want to grow vertically you need again manually lace tomatoes. Often tomatoes will use drip irrigation that needs to be manually setup.
https://bit.ly/2zYZ9s7 https://bit.ly/2UHvZGL https://bit.ly/2UJr0VW
In EU you can have Tomato Farm. Farming is an umbrella term for food production. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farm
> How do you think that driving equipment, literally the only labor done on a farm, is not labor? This isn't the 1800s, all farming involves is driving slowly for hours at a time, unless you have a self-driving tractor in which case it involves playing games on your phone. Tillage is literally the slowest and most fuel burning procedure in many primitive farming operations. Only for some crops is harvesting worse. But hey what do I know, I am totally not a farmer right? I bet people who study this for a living in the biggest farming area on the planet will say something else right? Oops, they say I am right. I guess it because they are not a farmer too!
That your idea of farming. Compared to tomato production tilling is a low effort.
> No we do not. The coulters on the planter simply open the soil for the seed to be deposited. Seriously, go look at a no-till planter before pretending they don't exist. You are thinking of strip tilling, which is a form of conservation tillage. No-till is not conservation tillage, it is no tillage.
In Europe only like 4% farmland is zero-till. Everything else is either conservative or full till. Zero-till can only be used for very specific crops.
And that is relevant how?
>Try growing tomato.
You try. Literally nothing you said except 45-60 days is correct. And literally none of it is relevant to the discussion. What on earth does tomatoes taking 60 days to start producing fruit have to do with no-till or weeds? Pro-tip: my garden is full of tomatoes. It is not tilled, plowed, weeded, fertilized, irrigated, or sprayed with anything. Pruning tomatoes lowers the yield per plant, it only increases the yield per sq foot, which is why only greenhouse producers do it.
>Compared to tomato production tilling is a low effort.
So because you have a garden and you waste lots of time gardening poorly, that means it makes sense to waste even more time doing more unnecessary labor to lower your yields? Tilling is labor, saying "I do lots of even dumber things" doesn't change this.
>In Europe only like 4% farmland is zero-till.
So those 4% are magic and defying the laws of physics? Or those 96% are dumbasses?
>Zero-till can only be used for very specific crops.
Nonsense. Name a single crop that you think can not be grown no-till and I will show you someone growing it no-till.
Grafting Peyote onto most cacti allow it to grow faster, but by reports doesn't increase the mescaline content since those chemical pathways are just as effective as they always are.
Reminds me of Peter Norvig's Whiskey Story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9371086
- Humans need food to live because it provides energy and nutrients.
- From a fundamental standpoint of physics and available materials, nutrients are relatively easy to get; as far as I know, most vitamins and minerals are pretty cheap to either come by naturally or manufacture, and you don't need that much of any of them to keep a person healthy, so let's assume food energy is the real limiting factor here.
- The energy in most food comes from photosynthesis (either directly, in the case of eating plants, or indirectly, in the case of feeding plants to animals for growing meat).
- Photosynthesis is an extremely inefficient way to turn solar radiation into chemical energy. Only about 3 to 6 percent of incoming solar energy is used by plants to create biomass, and not all of that biomass necessarily equates to calories we can digest and absorb.
So, while this isn't a particularly appetizing future to imagine living in, I don't know of any fundamental reason why artificially producing edible calories via solar electricity and chemical processes couldn't vastly exceed the efficiency of natural-grown food. It might be tricky getting to the point where fake food like this is healthy and tastes good...but if it saves the world from starving and stops civilization from collapsing then hey, it's not a bad fallback plan.
Besides being a big jump in efficiency, this type of tech could also enable the use of non-arable land for food production, since presumably you could set up the necessary manufacturing facilities anywhere you want.
It would be so cool if we had some mainstream open source software that could simulate chemical processes in a macro-level way, for example, to explore new ways of creating complex carbohydrates faster than in nature.
Chemical fuels like methane or ethane are far simpler, and just inputting energy and synthesising them from basic building blocks is difficult to do cheaply and at scale.
2. People have already subsisted on fully synthetic diets (aka elemental diets) in the past as part of things like space-travel research and treatments for gastrointestinal disorders. They do fine.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1410941/?page=1
Edit: It’s also not clear that the synthetic foods considered in your post are those which are less energy intensive to produce, I should note.
Most farm subsidies do not go directly to meat. In fact, current subsidies probably shift some land away from pastures and grazing to oversupplied field crops:
https://www.downsizinggovernment.org/agriculture/subsidies
You can absolutely be both against the farm bill and simultaneously in favor of reducing American meat consumption... But you're probably looking at corn and soy subsidies that in turn make cheaper feed, rather than something as simple and direct as cutting a meat subsidy.
> ...corn and soy subsidies that in turn make cheaper feed...
The short wikipedia article on Elemental diets, summarizes a handfull from more recent years:
> Many patients are unable to tolerate the taste, even if the diet is flavoured, and choose to receive it through intragastric administration.[2] Possible nausea and diarrhea can result from the high sugar content which can also complicate hyperglycaemia in patients with pre-existing diabetes.[2] As a result of suppression of healthy bacteria, via a loss of bacterial food source, prolonged use of an elemental diet elevates the risk of developing clostridium difficile infection/colonisation.[6]
Food safety should not be presumed on theoretical basis, only a long history of consumption can reliably evidence it.
My claim was "they do fine" which, in the context of the question, doesn't mean "there are no side effects".
When a family friend had to have his spleen removed, it put him at somewhat higher risk of infection for the rest of their life, but in the context of him having emergency surgery for a ruptured spleen everyone knew what "he's going to be fine" meant.
> I dont think it actually is ridiculous to worry if novel food products could "wipe out the human population".
I don't think it's ridiculous to worry about in principle. If fact, I think human extinction is super important to worry about and not enough people do it. But I do think it's basically ridiculous to worry about any particular disease or diet doing it (except possibly maliciously engineered diseases). Diseases and diet changes just never have the extreme mortality rates you'd need to threaten the species.
From intuition and lack of ever coming across news of an alternative capabilty, I strongly suspect that besides salts and water most of the materials found in medical "elemental" diets ( carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, amino acids, etc) are refined and processed extracts of natural, oops.. grown;) ingredients.
This product guide partially confirms my intuition [1] :
>" Modified cornstarch and maltodextrin derived from corn are two commonly used ingredients in elemental diets. Physicians’ Elemental Diet instead contains tapioca maltodextrin and no modified cornstarch. "
[1] http://data.integrativepro.com/product-literature/info/physi...
...
>I think human extinction is super important to worry about and not enough people do it.
Not enough influential people do for sure, or of less absolute but much less unlikely threats. Oh well, we made it this far, not all bad, at least there is much room for improvement.
> that although the ingredients come from agricultural sources, they have been purified to such a degree that it doesn't matter; they're chemically identical to synthetic ones.
Technically speaking, they are not chemically identical. They are in certain contexts chemically equivalent, subject to 'trace' contamination, bonding and structural differences which are assessed to be biologically insignificant. Synthesis can produce materials which are purer (as in simpler) than grown, but it is prohibitively difficult to achieve an exact, indistinguishable configuration of biologically generated materials.
It could be common to regard this distinction between identity and equivalence as pedantic, yet it is wrong and unscientific - the difference in meaning between these terms has categorical consequences to deduction. Loose claims of chemical identity, gloze over the theoretical component of equivalence - which is subject to change. Prions for example were easily described as chemically equivalent to their other phenotypes, until they became common knowledge around the 90s. Differentiating phenotypes in chemical terms surely involves advanced notation which I expect neither of us are familiar with. For sure homeopathy is a fanciful placebo based therapy, but even pure chemically speaking "simple" H2O carries perplexing detail at the molecular level[1] Whatever might be theoretically insignificant or not, is subject to ongoing insight and discovery.
Are there specific plausible possibilities in nutritionally required molecules that you are referring to here, or is this just a "no one knows for sure" argument?
> Prions for example were easily described as chemically equivalent to their other phenotypes
Did anyone ever actually point to a container of prions and mistakenly describe them as chemically identical? When I said "chemically identical", I did not merely mean the amino acid sequence.
Like, we have x-ray diffraction for this stuff. There is a reason vitamin supplements work to correct vitamin deficiencies. There is just not much room for unknown unknowns here.
We managed to establish that what you wrote there is wrong. That was my primary goal because it contradicted my other main comment, but I hope you can take that information in, and perhaps think about what lead you to that mistaken confidence. The elemental diet is not fully synthetic - it is mostly grown...
> they have been purified to such a degree that it doesn't matter; they're chemically identical to synthetic ones.
That object > "they" it doesnt exist yet. It's aspiration, an ideal, supposedly attainable with help from x-ray diffraction and whatever else you might think of, but its not real yet.
As an abstract concept you can talk about fully synthetic food that is chemically identical to food which can only currently be produced with essential and substantial use of non-designed, non-fully comprehended biological entities (lifeforms). What definitely "no one knows for sure" is that humans are capable of arranging that. It might be possible in a few decades time, with help from AI to take care of all of the biological intricacies which are too complicated for humans to grasp.
> Are there specific plausible possibilities
Its about recognizing the likelihood of important surprises - which can not be specified but which the situation is more than complicated enough to continue throwing up, as can be noted many times in the history of modern science. And the importance of not exaggerating the extents of current technological capabilities and understanding. Yes modern capabilities are dazzling and exciting, but still far from sufficient to get presumptuous about natures complexity.
No, we just didn't find citations.
It sounds like you're more interested in proving me wrong, and giving a well-worn lecture about scientific modesty, than in telling me something new, so I don't think there's much to be gained from continuing.
Food is more complicated than this picture. So much that nutritionists have major differences over which basic materials are beneficial in bulk and which cause health problems. Vitamins, minerals and medicines are not automatically absorbed well by our digestive system. The many biological foibles of human metabolism and our symbiotic gut flora, still confounds expectations about what food can be and can do to health.
There have been many, perhaps endless attempts to synthesize a wholesome food product - it would be worth a fortune. I am aware of zero successes to date and this shouldn't be the case if its not very difficult. We don't even synthesize sugar for consumption - maybe start there, but it is not even clear if/how much it causes diabetes or other diseases.
We might be stuck for a while longer with reliance on foods that needs to live for bit (plant or animal) before we can sustain our own lives with them - seems to be a very old system requirement of multicellular life, and one that has not been cracked yet.
There are lots of synthetic foods. The main problem is marketing. How are you going to sell your lab food when "processed" is bad and "natural" is good? The organic movement has taught people to distrust science in food, and its not something that is going to easily be reversed. The fact that most synthetic advances are used for cost reduction - not health doesn't help here either.
The only place where this has seen any adoption is synthetic meats. But I expect vegetable replacements to be many decades off - if ever.
For a real world example sugar was first synthesized in 1953 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucrose#Chemical_synthesis
Carbohydrate synthesis is also a well studied field. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbohydrate_synthesis
Many vitamin additives today are artifical. And of course artificial flavoring has vast commercial adoption. In the case of McDonald's french fries this was used to dramatically reduce the amount of saturated fat while maintaining the beef flavor - they are no longer deep fried in beef talow.
We can't yet recreate the texture of a pepper, but we can certainly create a synthetic smoothie with the necessities of life. Organic chemistry is a rich field of study.
Of course there are a few simple compounds which are edible, but most artificial additives are extracted and processed from grown inputs, and this is susceptible to unexpected health problems as happened with exposure to trans fats for decades - now banned.
> we can certainly create a synthetic smoothie with the necessities of life
That is a low bar - being capable at any cost to synthesis a smoothie with 'the necessities of life' including growth? good health? You didnt even reference that.
The food landscape is filled with pseudoscience, and whether a compound is synthesized or extracted is more of an economic decision not a scientific one.
Small amounts of almost anything can be synthesized at great expense, but you should have provided an example of a wholesome food which would not be completely uneconomical to synthesize (and purify) in bulk, to support a claim that there exists such a potential economic possibility. Even how much for example, it costs to synthesize food grade sugars would be a start on showing your advice on this subject is grounded in reality.
In practice, the replicating the composition of food (proteins, carbs, fats, vitamins, minerals, bacteria, fiber, etc.) is a huge feat. Especially because we don't understand enough about human diet. (See: 1 gazillion articles about dieting.)
It's like gene editing. There's a lot that theoretical possible, but the real sci-fi stuff is way out of our reach right now.
a biologist sees that and thinks "wow, a plant only needs 3-6% of the solar energy available to them to thrive!" #perspectives
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18498110
Excerpt from the comment:
[ A political science graduate of Yale University, Jeavons worked for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and Stanford University before launching his career in small-scale agriculture education. He is the author of the best-selling sustainable farming handbook How to Grow More Vegetables, Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible On Less Land Than You Can Imagine, now in its 8th edition in eight languages ]
I think the biointensive system Jeavons promotes gives you a pretty good starting place, but it does promote a bit of needless work. Skip the composting and just use the compost crops as a mulch. There's no need to build piles and turn them and then spread the compost, you can just let it compost in place on the garden where it will end up. You can skip growing the compost crops too if you have trees to collect leaves from in the fall. And save your back and skip the double digging, or any digging at all for that matter. All it does is set you back in your first couple of years for no reason.
[1] https://www.wur.nl/nl/nieuws/Nieuwe-onderzoekskas-in-Riyad-m... (in Dutch only)
An article with the headline "Can we share food more fairly today?" does have a simple answer, but would rock the political establishment uncomfortably, so has little chance of ever being published.
[0] Leathers, H., & Foster, P. (2009). The world food problem: toward ending undernutrition in the third world. Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers Inc.
[1] http://12.000.scripts.mit.edu/mission2014/problems/inadequat...
This is without even touching on the point that a lot of poorer countries really want to be able to export food for a profit.
I get the sense that the short answer to your uncomfortable question is simple: yes. With the asterisk being all the political and economic questions that go in it and don't have simple answers.
Meanwhile, in a half-century, we've doubled the population, while significantly reducing food costs and radically reducing hunger globally. I'm with Hans Rosling here... the angst about how the world is hungry and getting hungrier is just our minds telling us stories, contradicting the facts on the ground.
I don't see a good reason to believe that we will have global food shortages in the future. We'll have less hunger, not more, as the population levels out over the next few decades. I'm basing that argument on past behavior, absorbing the needs of much higher population growth with less technology for decades.
No it is not. Current RNI is 1.06% and projections do not suggest it getting down to replacement levels in the next 50 years unless mortality increases substantially.
>Meanwhile, in a half-century, we've doubled the population, while significantly reducing food costs and radically reducing hunger globally.
By destroying vast portions of the natural world and wiping out thousands of species and even putting the future survival of our own species at risk. The "angst" is entirely valid. Destroying the planet to prop up obscenely inflated population levels for absolutely no benefit is horrifyingly evil. The expected population growth in Africa is enough to finish destroying every last spec of natural ecosystem on the planet that is capable of being used for food production. Yes, we absolutely need to address this problem.
"Future survival of our own species"? Nah. The last human being will eat the last cockroach. We have made technology to adapt to living on the moon. We might make things painful for humanity in general, might even break civilization (although I think that's unlikely). But survival of the species? We haven't yet invented technology that can wipe out humans.
As for our "evil", "obscenely inflated population levels"... well, what do you think we should do about it? Because the only "solution" I can see to this thing that horrifies you is what the Nazis called a Final Solution. The global population is what it is, whether you like it or not. If you had Thanos' infinity glove, would you use it? Would you use it, knowing you're just knocking the population back to 1965 levels?
The evidence is not on your side.
>Because the only "solution" I can see to this thing that horrifies you is what the Nazis called a Final Solution.
Uh, the solution to do what the article suggests. Grow more food on less land so that population growth doesn't come at the expense of the last shreds of wilderness on the planet. How does one get to the point where you think "growing more food is hitler!!1" is a reasonable response?
"The last shreds of wilderness" is an absurd hyperbole. There's still a lot of wilderness left, and I think we're approaching maximum land under cultivation. (checks google) As a matter of fact... in 1970, 4.48B hectares were cultivated. in 2008, it was 4.83B, a <10% increase over almost 40 years and a near-doubling of the population. What happened? Incredible increases in yield starting post-WWII, greatly increasing the amount of food per acre.
So where does this leave the original study? Does it assume there will be no improvement in yield? Is farming more land the only solution being tried? Obviously not. What they're breathlessly recommending is exactly what we've been doing for over half a century now (really, about two centuries) - improving yield.
What are you talking about? We're doing it using the increased atmospheric CO2. Slash and burn is what is destroying the planet, and it has terrible long term productivity. That's why they have to keep slashing and burning.
>There's still a lot of wilderness left, and I think we're approaching maximum land under cultivation.
The acres currently under cultivation is entirely irrelevant. If I burn down 100 acres of rainforest every year and cultivate it, its always 100 acres of cultivated land. But I am destroying 100 acres of wilderness every year. The land that is now a barren wasteland still matters, even though I am no longer cultivating it.
>What they're breathlessly recommending is exactly what we've been doing for over half a century now (really, about two centuries) - improving yield.
Except we're not doing that, which is the point. We accidentally did that with CO2 emissions, but we're reaching the limits of what increased atmospheric CO2 can do. Once CO2 is no longer the limiting factor for growth, no amount of extra CO2 will help. Agricultural science is not interested in producing more food with less, it is interested in producing more profit.
I heard some advice years ago that one of the better things you can do as an environmentalist is teach your kids about the seasonality of foods. Make a big deal about it being orange or pear or cherry season, cut back on buying these fruits the rest of the year, even if you can afford it. Eat something else instead of making the world bend to your craving.
Pears, berries, melons, leafy greens, stone fruit, etc are a different story!
1. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/07/climate/world...
2. https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...
From the wikipedia: 4 Common practices 4.1 Agroforestry 4.2 Hügelkultur 4.3 Natural building 4.4 Rainwater harvesting 4.5 Sheet mulching 4.6 Intensive rotational grazing 4.7 Keyline design 4.8 Fruit tree management
We can produce just staggering amounts of grain on a per-acre basis, and we can ship them without refrigeration and store them for long periods of time without any significant loss of nutritional value. The carbon, energy and monetary cost of shipping huge quantities of grain from the center of the US to the coasts where people live is negligible.
You don't have the complex social issues of migrant and immigrant labor with grain production; I mean, it wouldn't surprise me if there's some, but it's definitely not a necessary component the way it is in current vegetable production and in meat processing.
There's some potential problems in water usage in some places grains are produced, you can have some good conversations about fertilizer and pesticide production, and about soil maintenance, and we continually want to be working to improve the resiliency and productivity of the crop varieties, but grains are in pretty good shape and there's a clear road map for future work, with lots of incremental progress being made every day.
Produce and meat production is where the big gains are to be had, for the environment, food security, and improving the conditions of working people. Just bank on having half our calories coming from massive grain farms located at great distance from the population centers and try to figure out how to fix the rest, and then maybe it will be time to revisit grains.
I would also argue that concerns over crops taking up too much land are somewhat misplaced until we reach a point where we at risk of not having enough farmland to feed the population. When we reach that point, only food that can be grown in ultra-dense (calories per acre) ways will be affordable, and other foods will be luxuries with a high premium.
Until then we are enjoying our relative luxury of plentiful land, and can enjoy luxury crops and meat for cheap.
Although this harms the environment, nobody starves to death because of this current practice- all those who currently starve to death do so because of distribution problems /abject poverty.
Like obviously meat production is too. But did you consider that wiping out insects might have as much to do with grain pesticides as produce pesticides?
It would be smarter if you just said the truth, which is “It’s hard to tell if the economic costs of grain production (like environmental damage) line up with the accounting costs (what shows up in a price per metric ton), because our framework for accounting for environmental damage has basically never slowed down production in a single market before lower prices has.”
Really, even nuclear power plants still make money right? Name one market where accounting for environmental damage reduces supply before a decline in prices did.
It should be obvious that what I’m saying isn’t an oxymoron. Organic produce is supposed to “account” for environmental costs, and it’s oftentimes more profitable to make. So the same land will be induced into making whatever is most profitable per acre. Obviously the problem is that people are incentivized to make the accounting costs of environmental impact as small as possible, even when selling organic produce. And that’s the problem.
All this stuff is shipped to factories, where it is broken down into refined materials for other factories, that make the junk food - burgers, sliced bread, candy bars, whatever - that are sealed or frozen for portability and shelf stability.
This is how we've doubled the population of the planet in 50 years, while bringing per-capita food cost to the lowest point in human history.
People whine about high fructose corn syrup, but it's not like it's a plot or something; people really like sweet things, and HFCS is a really efficient way to produce sweet stuff. If you restricted the sale of sweet stuff to help combat obesity, it might have an impact on the corn market, but corn would still be an amazing, important, huge part of out food supply.
On the other hand, consider grain-fed chickens. Factory farmed chicken is fantastic from an environmental and a dietary standpoint, it is extremely space efficient; even when the land used to grow the grains is considered, it is still competitive with plant sources of protein, and it's a lean, versatile meat. It's even a major source of organic fertilizer.
Meanwhile, it's pretty bad from an animal welfare perspective, and it is just awful from a labor standpoint. Meat processing at scale is one of the greatest cesspools of human misery in the US, and has been for over a century. A huge number of people make a pittance of a wage doing unpleasant, dangerous, body-breaking work, and it is a big consumer of illegal immigration as a source of cheap, exploitable labor.
Fixing meat processing, through technology, regulation or labor organization, would be HUGE.
Nowhere near as efficient as sugarcane. HFCS would not be produced, sold or consumed at anything approaching current levels without tariffs preventing the import of sugarcane.
Sliced bread?!
What isn't junk food in your estimation?
The current world population of 7.7 billion is projected to grow to at least 10 billion, before it might turn and start decreasing. The availability of human labor is one thing there should be no shortage of in the future.
Longer term, lab grown protean is likely to be a net win.
If a congressperson raises the price of the commodity they all rely on, they will piss of a LOT of money, and probably not raise enough next election cycle, and lose their seat.
We export roughly 40% of our corn in the US, it wouldn't increase beef prices prices much, it'd reduce exports though.
Vitamin C also breaks down fairly easily when cooked (necessary or common with a lot of foods).
Iron is a bigger issue where non-absorption of non-organic sources can cause some GI upset.
It's a simple compound, comprising just 20 atoms: six carbon, six oxygen and eight hydrogen. It's related to glucose (and manufactured commercially from it). Also, it's water soluble, and I don't believe that there's an associated carrier.
It already is better than much of the fast-food/cafeteria grade meat people use. Taco Bell's taco meat, for example, was mostly soy protein with other fillers and additives as it is. Swapping it out for lab-meat would actually make it more meaty. The barrier right now is cost, not quality.
You don't need to 100% replace everything. You can have a situation where people eat real meat on special occasions or offered as gifts, but rely on cheaper fake stuff for their everyday meals.
But part of it is also just food-culture. Eating meat used to be a status symbol so once meat got cheap enough to be a staple people insist on having it with every meal. Consequently they've forgotten how to eat and enjoy mostly plant based diets. India, though, has plenty of great and satisfying vegetarian dishes as part of its food culture because meals without meat aren't believed to be any kind of special niche.
People have been socially/culturally conditioned to think that meat that's not all meat is inferior (because it often is/was). If you can get over the culture/perception hurdle most people won't really care that ground beef is only beef so long as their taco or McDouble tastes the way they want. The health angle is probably the best way to go about doing this.
Your animal suffering point has merit. But what the article is talking about is simply growing enough food to feed more people, so that's what I am addressing. However, I think that this is just another symptom of the same thing. Factory farming is only necessary if we need to feed multiple billions.
Many environmentalists say that even the current world population can't afford Western middle-class quality of life.
Efforts to limit population growth are already in place but it's mostly occurring in parts of the world too poor to do anything about it. We don't "want" higher population but short of some kind of massive neo-colonial invasion there's no way to stop it.
What makes you think we (we as in those of us who see reduction as a focus on environmentalism) disagree with this? We are, indeed, already too many, meaning that we should reduce further, and further, and not just be content with our current numbers, and certainly not allow those numbers to keep growing.
The city I was born in, Montpellier, grew from 100k inhabitants in 1960 to 270k in 2018. It turned from beautiful Haussmann style architecture surrounded by crops of vines and wild countryside land to a nightmare of concrete towers, oppressive modern architecture ( https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/Pierres_... can you look at this and not feel overly disgusted?), overgrowth of suburbs around it to the point where we need to travel much further to see any wildland and a homeless problem ala san francisco that keeps getting worse and worse as we fail to build as much as necessary to fulfill the need of our constant growth and and rents and property costs keep growing beyond more and more out of reach of the average french man living there.
It is not just about CO2 emissions like what people on the left side focus on so much. It is about quality of life itself. Or lack thereof induced by letting things go on like this.
You are right, current numbers are horrendous and more than the earth could withstand if everyone had western middle class style economy, as even western countries have too much population. It isn't solely poor countries that should reduce their numbers. Encouraging people to sterilize in France would be a great thing too.
If you can show me how eating meat directly correlates to a better quality of life, I'll be gobsmacked.
You may enjoy eating meat, but that doesn't mean it's making your life better/easier. Besides the nutritional side (which is complex, but let's just agree that you can make cases both for or against eating animal flesh as helping your diet and wellness) the agriculture industry is responsible for approximately 9% of US carbon emissions and livestock account for about 3% all by themselves[1]. Changing that could possibly affect your quality of life (assuming you aren't planning on dying in the next 10-20 years before the impact of that starts mattering).
Overall, eating meat is at best likely a net-neutral on your quality of life, even including how much you love eating a burger.
1-https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
But sure, maybe that's not in their long term best interest. And unfortunately, humans are, on average, very bad at optimizing for their long term best interest vs. short term.
Group A, who just like the taste and texture of meat. For them, a variety of substitutes that adequately matched would suffice. As of today, we have many fake meats that do a good job of matching the taste/texture of HEAVILY PROCESSED meats (e.g. turkey loaf), but not matching more straightforward meats. Likely vat-grown meat will be the only reasonably quick way to match both demands for the general population. Outside of that as more research is done into faux meats to match tastes and textures we will presumably get there, and as meat alternatives become more popular there is a feedback loop where research gets more widespread and has a better ROI, so maybe it's not so far off, but I personally wouldn't bet on it. Expense is a big deal to this group, as they basically want to be content (food-wise) with minimal effort, so meat alternatives that are familiar and not expensive is not a difficult transition, particularly if meat becomes more expensive. Making it low-effort to know what you are getting also helps. Currently meat alternatives are completely separate from meats in the store, and the delivery very different. (a box of burgers or a bag of crumble, for example, vs the pile of ground beef).
Group B, who are invested into the particulars of meat. These are the ones who will debate for hours the precise way to grill the perfect steak. Like with audiophiles who complain of qualities I can't hear, I have to assume they aren't delusional, but it doesn't really matter for the purpose of your question. This group is unlikely to be satisfied by vat-grown meat, outside of random luck. I don't see this group changing within their lifetimes, though they can be swayed to alter portion sizes. Honestly, the best way to REDUCE meat consumption is to avoid angering this group - they can take meat becoming a bit more expensive and more of a luxury without a fuss, but if it looks like meat were to be banned or too expensive they would react with all the furor you can expect from someone losing something they are passionate about. And their message would resonate with Group A, because Group A is just looking to be content like they currently are, so change represents risk, not benefit. This means the goals of REDUCING meat consumption and REMOVING meat consumption are at odds with one another.
If you have ethical motivations, none of the above is fast and vat-grown meat research has its own ethical questions, but I don't see a realistic fast alternative that doesn't involve mass suffering (to more than humans) due to uncontrolled events.
In fact, I'd probably start there, since it's probably the first type of meat that could be made cheaper than the real thing, and it's a total luxury good that most people never get to experience, so it's not really competing with the real thing in most peoples' minds. Similar to the Tesla business model, start with the high margin stuff and move down as you ramp up volume and start getting efficiencies of scale and more R&D.
What will it take to convince vegetarians that a meat-based diet is actually the healthiest way to eat, and that meat can be raised in humane, environmentally-friendly ways?
:-)
Edit: This a serious question. Down voting is hardly a productive form of dialog.
Let's ignore the health. That's a minefield of BS pseudo-science and people claiming their "body hack" would work for the world at large, and I'm not even going to get there. (personally- meat is fine, plants are great, most people probably eat too many carbs and fats and don't exercise enough. Organic is because all food is organic material and the name is just a marketing for a style of farming).
How would you convince a vegan that meat is the best choice? Answer: prove that animals can't think or feel. Otherwise, someone will say that there's a moral wrong being committed. It doesn't matter if you agree with that or not (FWIW: I have a butcher's chart of a pig tattoo'd on my arm, so my stance is literally worn on my sleeve here), we're talking about convincing someone else.
You might be able to convince 80% with "but evolution!!1!" type arguments, but when you get to a moral vegetarian, they don't think killing animals is morally correct, and that's the 20% you're never convincing. OP put up a dumb hypothetical "how do you", my answer is "you can't because reasons".
I'm sure we could produce more meat, raised in more sustainable ways, but that would involve people taking a major decrease in the amount of meat they eat. Modern levels of meat intake are at their highest levels in history. We can easily afford to lower are intake.
I'm also not a vegetarian, just know quite a few and have been around when the arguments come up.
There are 3 motivations why people follow such a diet or lifestyle: environment, animal welfare, and health. It is important to realise the interests of these motivations aren't always aligned.
As an example, consider the difference of impact with regards to eating less cow or eating less chicken. If we'd eat less cow, the Co2 footprint would be lower compared to chicken due to required more land and more methane gas from cows however it'd be good for animal welfare since less cows suffer since one cow provides far more meat than a chicken. Conversely, the bio industry's chicken farm's are very efficient regarding space and size however many more animals per human meal are required so more chicken suffer.
Another example I like is rennet and gelatine. Gelatine is by-product. Not one animal less is going to get killed because you eat a gelatine pudding because there's an excess of gelatine. So avoiding gelatine in order to increase animal welfare is inefficient. Rennet, per whole cheese, very little is required from the stomach of the (male) calve, and males are pretty much useless anyway since you need females for the milk. If you eat cheese with rennet regularly then a very low amount of calves die due to that. However technically, it isn't vegan nor is it vegetarian.
On the other hand:
(1) "meat-based diet is actually the healthiest way to eat"
Position of the American Dietetic Association: vegetarian diets, (2009): "It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes."
Health effects of vegan diets, Craig, W., The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, (2009) From the summary: “Vegans are thinner, have lower serum cholesterol and blood pressure, and enjoy a lower risk of CVD. BMD and the risk of bone fracture may be a concern when there is an inadequate intake of calcium and vitamin D. Where available, calcium- and vitamin D–fortified foods should be regularly consumed. … Vegans generally have an adequate iron intake and do not experience anemia more frequently than others. Typically, vegans can avoid nutritional problems if appropriate food choices are made. Their health status appears to be at least as good as other vegetarians, such as lactoovovegetarians.”
(2) meat can be raised in humane, environmentally-friendly ways
Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers. Poore J. and Nemecek T. Science, (2018). Example conclusion: meat and dairy provide 18% of calories and 37% of protein, but uses 83% of farmland and produces 60% of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Analysis and valuation of the health and climate change cobenefits of dietary change. Springmann M. et al. PNAS (2016) “The food system is responsible for more than a quarter of all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, of which up to 80% are associated with livestock production. Reductions in meat consumption and other dietary changes would ease pressure on land use and reduce GHG emissions. Transitioning toward more plant-based diets that are in line with standard dietary guidelines could reduce global mortality by 6–10% and food-related greenhouse gas emissions by 29–70% compared with a reference scenario in 2050.”
And well, I'm not sure if humane slaughter matters to conscious animals. I certainly wouldn't appreciate if someone humanely slaughtered me. And as for the consciousness aspect: The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness 2012. A group of prominent neuroscientists created The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, in which they state their support for the idea that animals are conscious and aware in a similar way as humans. “The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”
EDIT: these points are cribbed from a blog post I wrote on this subject: https://medium.com/@colorado.j.reed/veganism-from-an-enginee...
And not all meats/animals are the same. I myself eat meat, but do not eat mammals. I am looking forward to the widespread availability of safe, delicious, lab-grown meats.
> the healthiest way to eat
I suspect that, for most people, the best plant-based diet is equal to the best omnivorous diet in terms of nutrition. Admittedly, it can take more effort to get your protein.
> meat can be raised in humane ways
"Humane" is a vague word. Some will tell you that slaughtering an animal at all in not humane.
> can be raised in environmentally-friendly ways
This would be really hard for many animals. Show me a carbon-neutral cow.
The ones that live in tiny spaces and eat corn have high carbon footprints because of all the farming that has to happen to feed them and all the land that is prevented from being forest to serve that need.
We don't spend nearly as much energy feeding the free-range ones, but the land-footprint needed to serve them is even greater.
That land likely can't be used for anything else, only a small % of land can be used for growing crops.
> The ones that live in tiny spaces and eat corn have high carbon footprints because of all the farming that has to happen to feed them and all the land that is prevented from being forest to serve that need.
Only about 10-15% of US cattle heads are on feedlots at any given time. The food at feedlots doesn't always compete with human edible food, and only represents about 10% of their lifetime food.
Any purely grass fed cow should be close, no? They're part of the normal carbon cycle, and that carbon is pulled back in when the grass regrows. The problem is when you bring sequestered carbon (fossil fuels) into the mix.
The number of cattle in the US has been steady for decades now (suggesting something of a drop in intake). For purely grass-fed cattle, they're carbon-neutral at this point, because the life of methane in the atmosphere is about 9 years, as opposed to CO2, which is 100 years.
Corn-feeding is really the only carbon footprint problem associated with beef.
Last night, I found a gorgeous piece of sea bass from the Falklands - $18 for 5oz. Pan fried it and split it with my spouse. Why? Because it's available and I can afford it.
Disclosure: I'm not a vegetarian, but I eat relatively little meat.
If I have to spend weeks of effort to identify a quality supplier, pay ten times market rate, and do all my own butchering it's just not worth it.
Have you read about the deforestation from palm oil, canola oil, and coconuts that feed vegans? It's not clear to me eating meat in the USA, especially local meat where I am in New England, is comparatively worse.
(Ironically I'm "deforesting" a former field of small pines to restore it to sheep grazing this year. But I do not think this ecologically destructive: ultimately it would be building soil.)
There's definitely local meat that's fine for the planet. As far as I'm aware, the trouble is the bulk of the market, the high-volume bottom-dollar part of the market. The industrial beef grown on soy & corn. It's the McDonalds patty, not the quarter buck in the freezer at grandma's.
As for your sheep field, pasture is not really the most carbon-rich soil. But, maybe it's not much worse than pine forest. The best are wetlands, bogs, & frequent fire areas.
Carcinogenicity of consumption of red and processed meat
> On the basis of the large amount of data and the consistent associations of colorectal cancer with consumption of processed meat across studies in different populations, which make chance, bias, and confounding unlikely as explanations, the majority of the Working Group concluded that there is sufficient evidence in human beings for the carcinogenicity of the consumption of processed meat. Chance, bias, and confounding could not be ruled out with the same degree of confidence for the data on red meat consumption, since no clear association was seen in several of the high quality studies and residual confounding from other diet and lifestyle risk is difficult to exclude. The Working Group concluded that there is limited evidence in human beings for the carcinogenicity of the consumption of red meat.
Bouvard, V., Loomis, D., Guyton, K.Z., Grosse, Y., El Ghissassi, F., Benbrahim-Tallaa, L., Guha, N., Mattock, H. and Straif, K., 2015. Carcinogenicity of consumption of red and processed meat. The Lancet Oncology, 16(16), pp.1599-1600.
My thoughts on a few of the points raised:
• Does meat cause cancer? I don't think so; I find the arguments unconvincing, and the rebuttals, convincing. In particular see:
- https://academic.oup.com/af/article/8/3/5/5048762
- http://peakhuman.libsyn.com/dr-david-klurfeld-on-meat-not-ca...
• Cow feed efficiency, clearing out forests, etc: Yeah, these forms of raising cattle are bad. I get my beef from here:
The cows eat grass and live in harmony with their environment.
• Humane treatment: If you think killing an animal is inhumane, full stop, then sure, from that perspective, it is always inhumane to eat animals. I respect if you have that belief and are a vegetarian as a result.
But it's not a belief I hold.
Everything that lives is going to die; that's the game. The best we can hope for is to live well and to die well. We can give this to the animals we eat.
(I sometimes think of it like this: If all of Earth were some sort of human farm for aliens, would I want them to go vegetarian, replacing humans with vast fields of grain and synthetic labs growing human-like meat? No, I would not. I'd rather be a farm animal than not exist at all.)
• Demonstrate it works: Well, so far so good for me! I've tried eating vegan, vegetarian, the standard "well-balanced diet" (veggies, fruits, rice, potatoes, a little meat, a little fish), low-carb (veggies, meat), and now, pretty much just meat, with a little of fruit now and then. So far, the meat diet is _by far_ the most amazing for me.
I don't get sleepy after I eat, my stomach feels great, I'm getting stronger and leaner, and I'm still just as excited to eat a piece of meat as I was two months ago. We'll see how it works out with time!
I came to this way of eating because I was experiencing (1) frequent stomach aches (2) tiredness after eating (3) slowly but ever-increasing fatness. So I did a bunch of Googling around and looked at a bunch of accounts on twitter. The stuff I found the most compelling ended up being:
- https://twitter.com/tednaiman
- https://humanperformanceoutliers.libsyn.com
Check 'em out!
I think the possible benefits of this approach might be exaggerated. The uniquely "large" environmental impact of beef cattle results from methane emissions, but methane is not the big challenge; land use is. While methane is a potent greenhouse gas, it also has a shorter atmospheric lifetime than CO2/N2O, which, to me, suggests that it should be addressed after the other gases; the impact of a reduction in methane emissions will be felt quickly, and the risk of methane accumulation is lower.
Land use -- with 40% of the world's land devoted to agriculture -- is much more of a problem and I see less indication that it will be addressed by changing the relevant animal. A little, sure, but a lot of the land currently used for pasturing cattle isn't appropriate for chickens anyway, and I'm not convinced that it takes 8x as much land to raise a pound of beef vs. chicken.
Lab-grown meat is/will be a huge net win for the environment and hopefully our wallets, and I think it will be the final compromise on this front, at least for the next few hundred years. A few decades of lead time doesn't bother me for reasons discussed above.
On another front, the densest sources of plant protein after soy are hempseed, lentils and pumpkin seeds. These rarely make it into our diets, though. You need more than mere tax incentives -- the strong flavors of those seeds need to be managed somehow. I made a "curry" with a hemp-milk base once. The only thing that corrected the smell was a lot of Worcestershire sauce. Ironically, it's vegetarians who won't eat fermented anchovies.
I don't think thats true - I've known a number of strict vegetarians (vegans?) and they've often problems with low B12 and iron. Eggs/fish a bit of chicken and a bit of meat make it way easier, but the amount required is way less than the amount of meat most people eat. As in many things the answers in the middle imho.
In the USA, 44% of land is for agriculture, but only 17% is arable, 27% serves as pasture land.
Only around 10% of a cow's lifetime feed comes from grain, and very little of what they are fed is human consumable. Think leftovers from corn (stalks, etc), leftovers from brewing (malt, oats, all that kind of stuff).
Beef is also very nutrient dense, and provides a large % of bioavailable nutrients and amino acids per gram.
Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arable_land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_United_King... https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8791215 https://downloads.usda.library.cornell.edu/usda-esmis/files/... https://www.beefresearch.org/CMDocs/BeefResearch/Sustainabil... https://medium.com/@beefitsfordinner/fao-affirms-cattles-cri... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_value#Typical_value...
Gizzards can't process all of the things a ruminant can, but there's some overlap.
The thing is chickens aren't vegetarians. They're omnivores. We'd be better off if we processed the leftovers through invertibrates (worms, soldier flies) and then fed the invertibrates to the chickens. Same for pigs. And both pathways would still be more efficient than cows.
A good book on how various animals are treated is Compassion by the Pound[1], authored by agricultural economists. The short of it is that chickens bred for meat are treated very poorly throughout their lives, whereas beef cows are treated reasonably well (with the possible exception of slaughter). Not only that, but you also have to raise far more chickens per pound of meat compared to cows as they're so much smaller, amplifying the effect. It's a far more extreme difference compared than the environmental impact differences.
[0] Some animal welfare activists do so explicitly, whereas others do so implicitly by strictly focusing on chickens. Latter examples are 88% Campaign (https://88percentcampaign.com/) and One Step for Animals (https://www.onestepforanimals.org/). [1] https://www.amazon.com/Compassion-Pound-Economics-Animal-Wel...
Cross-species capacity for suffering is still under heavy research, but the general consensus is that birds (including chickens) have a comparable capacity of suffering to mammals. This is considered likely true or at least plausibly true for fish as well, though their brains are sufficiently different from mammals and birds that there's still more research going on to understand it more. Animals that likely have no capacity for suffering are bivalves, for example.
It'll take a lot more research to figure out the concrete answer for those in between (e.g. insects, where the latest I've heard is that the most they can suffer is similar to an annoyance or mild pain from a human perspective).
And babies past a few months of age are pretty remarkably intelligent, albeit still a bit uncalibrated.
But if you probe into it, I believe you'll find it's an artificial distinction that rather quickly falls apart. If your moral values ascribe negative value to the suffering of, say, both a human and a dog, then the only consistent viewpoint is to ascribe negative value to any suffering of a materially similar quality -- i.e. what matters on a moral level is the capacity of suffering for the species or individual.
There's a few uncomfortable thought experiments you can think through on this topic. E.g. you can imagine genetically engineering a human as dumb as a chicken, or perhaps a traumatic brain injury causing that, but with their mental capacity for suffering just as intact as yours or mine. Would their suffering count for less? Why would it?
As for chicken vs. whale, it may be the case that a chicken suffers less than a whale. More primitive intelligence may imply more primitive suffering. But what if it doesn't for this case? How confident can you be it does imply that, given both how chickens react to pain and stress and the neurological research that's been done on them? And even if it less, by how much? A factor of two, ten, forty, a thousand?
Those questions may seem too philosophical, but they can't be ignored in the face of a recommendation to eat 40 extremely-poorly-raised chickens per year instead of 1 reasonably-well-raised cow. And given all we know of animal cognition, it's reasonably to assume chickens have a lower capacity to suffer (and also to assume it's the same -- there's still uncertainty), but not so much lower that that calculus is anywhere close to being worthwhile.
I'm not trying to say that's what the people giving advice actually thought; I'm just saying that's how I felt that it came across sometimes.
The last two graphs show that 41% of the land in the contiguous 48 states is used for feeding livestock. More than 33% of the 48 states is just pasture, most of which I believe is used by cattle.
What would it take to shift protein consumption from beef (3% efficient) to products like poultry (21%) and eggs (31%)? [2]
I think we have to take a hard look at taxes, fees, and subsidies for land use and agricultural products, but there's not much political pressure to do so right now.
1: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/
2: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/10...
What would it take to make beef production more efficient? genetic engineering perhaps.
People wil naturally switch to more efficient food as population goes up and food resources become more scarce.
So I think the answer to your question about increasing efficiency is probably pretty difficult. There's already a huge profit motive to increase efficiency, so if a few labcoats could easily solve the problem I'm sure they would have by now. I think the answer is to eat animals who reach maturity faster (or just grow more per unit time?). Like insects :-)
Nothing. Large animals that live long lives are inefficient by their very nature. The bigger an animal is, the more of its energy consumption goes to maintenance rather than growth. And the longer it lives before reaching slaughter weight, the more that inefficiency compounds. If you somehow turned cattle into 5 pound animals that mature in 6 weeks, they would be efficient, but they also wouldn't really qualify as cattle any more and their meat would likely be noticeably different than beef.
> For example, US NRCS statistics indicate that about 59 percent of US non-federal pasture and unforested rangeland is unsuitable for cultivation, yet such land has value for grazing of livestock.
The fees to access that land are very low ($1.70/cow/month)[1]. Maybe those lands would have more ecological value if they weren't being grazed, so add a charge for the environmental burden. A tax on bovine methane emissions is also necessary.
You can increase yields with more work, but you can often get away with only watering when it hasn’t rained for a few days.
The average American family had an annual income of ~$3000 (in today’s dollars), So, yeah, poor.
No you won't, at least not with greens. Did you even try to do the math for the required amount of food a single person needs per-year ? Even if you go with rabbits, which are easy to raise, you can only self produce a small amount of meat per year, maybe ~150lb once you get to "scale".
I feel as you do: local, near chemical free, food. Plus these days we'd have zigbee or sigfox sensors to ensure certain things and save time.
Sure. But 1200 humans working in 1200 gardens is also a lot more economical than 1200 humans sitting at home playing Fortnite all day because there are no jobs.
The idea of employment guarantees as welfare policy has been getting traction, and programs like this where raw output isn't the main goal would be good candidates.
We can use labor in a very inefficient (where yield is concerned) way if we think it will confer ecological, aesthetic, or sociological side-benefits, as would having lots of private gardens.
Fortnite is just an example of something people fall into doing when they don't have any other productive opportunities available to them.
In particular, if your solution is simply "spend less time on [your current] leisure activities!", it can be applied to either aggricultural system. In the case of specialized agriculture, it simply means spending more time on the individual's specialization or really anything with a greater opportunity value than growing one's own food (if your goal is to maximize earnings, it's tough to do worse than spending an hour per day growing your own food to save ~$5).
No it is not. I personally care about people being able to do what they want with their free time.
The situation you describe is only "efficient" if you value everyone's free time and happiness at 0. I care about people's happiness, on the other hand.
The main goal of society should be to provide people with things that they want, and that includes leisure time.
I personally want people to have a choice of what to do with their time, and not have values forced on them.
Just tranq them all with a guaranteed supply of opiates then. Problem solved.
People's needs and wants are socially conditioned. It's not like their "wants" just sprang out of thin air. They were created by the culture and social expectations around them. And many of those social expectations make people feel obligated to feel useful.
That means they need to be provided with avenues where they can feel useful instead of doping themselves with addictions to fill the sense of purposeless anomie that they fall into when alienated from public life. Make work programs, like urban forestry or gardening, are good ways to do this as they beautify the spaces where we live and are unlikely to be done adequately without some societal coordination.
That said I think it's rather naive to assume that everyone in the world has a garage or other indoor space to spare, the resources to climate control it, etc. The world's hungry don't live in single family homes in California.
The reason why food is grown by large industrial farming companies is because they can grow it ~100 times cheaper than you could.
If everyone had to grow their own food, then everyone would starve to death.
The idea of locally grown food in everyone's backyard is a fairy tale that just sounds nice, but would actually be horrible.
No, it is because people don't want to grow food. My tomatoes cost me 2 minutes of time. I don't know how much you want to value my time at, but lets say I am pretty awesome and deserve $100/hour. That's $3.33 cents for all the tomatoes I can eat. Where are the industrial farming companies producing tomatoes for 3.3 cents per 100 pounds?
>If everyone had to grow their own food, then everyone would starve to death.
If that were true, we wouldn't exist. People did grow their own food for thousands of years. If everyone had to grow their own food, we'd be fine. All mechanization did was free up people from agricultural labor to do other jobs, humans predate tractors.
>The idea of locally grown food in everyone's backyard is a fairy tale that just sounds nice, but would actually be horrible.
It is a reality for lots of people, and we're pretty happy about it.
This works when everyone owns many acres of land per person, and is spending their entire life working the fields, doing hard labor, and doing very little else with their life yes. We don't live in that world anymore, though.
I suspect there isn't even enough physical land on the earth to support this inefficient method of farming.
We have significant evidence of how this worked out for people. That world that you are describing, where everyone spent their entire life just trying to barely feed themselves, was a horrible place, for everyone.
This period of time was called "the history of the world before the industrial era". And lots and lots of people died. So no, they were not fine.
> It is a reality for lots of people, and we're pretty happy about it.
By "a lot" do you mean a very small percentage of the total population?
> My tomatoes cost me 2 minutes of time.
What you do with your tiny backyard garden is irrelevant. It is mathmatically impossible for you to be feeding yourself entirely on that, unless you have multiple acres of land, which I doubt is what you are describing. Your anecdote does not overrule physics.
Exactly, we live in a world with machines. Making it easier, not harder.
>I suspect there isn't even enough physical land on the earth to support this inefficient method of farming.
The calories produced per acre is higher, not lower. We need less land, not more. Why do you think it is inefficient?
>That world that you are describing, where everyone spent their entire life just trying to barely feed themselves, was a horrible place, for everyone.
That's a modern myth. We have detailed records of rural life in the 1500s. People worked fewer hours than they do now.
>By "a lot" do you mean a very small percentage of the total population?
Yes. It only takes one person doing it to prove your claim that is impossible is false.
>What you do with your tiny backyard garden is irrelevant
No it is not, it is the entire point.
> It is mathmatically impossible for you to be feeding yourself entirely on that, unless you have multiple acres of land
It takes less than half an acre of land to feed a person growing food for yourself.
>Your anecdote does not overrule physics.
Please point me to the law of physics which states plants don't grow if stale2002 doesn't want them to.
Food production is fundamentally an energy problem; not a land problem. Using cheap electricity, you can desalinate water, pump nutrients around, generate light and control the temperature.
Eating meat is a problem given the vast resources needed to produce it. However, there's a lot of innovation in developing synthetic meats. Lab grown meat is becoming a thing. I'm talking about actual muscle tissue grown in labs. There are also many plant and mushroom based meat alternatives that are getting better and more popular. In short, we might eat a proper steak for nostalgic reasons once in a while in a few decades but we'll have plenty of alternative protein sources to supplement our diet with on a day to day basis. And making out-competing popular meat products like a big mac isn't exactly rocket science. The whole point of stuff like that is that it is industrialized low quality stuff. Most of the meat we're eat isn't exactly high quality stuff.
I mean, I understand it is about economics, supply and demand, profits, etc., but still,
shudder
This aside, it's worth knowing that developed countries typically throw away much less food than developing ones. Basically because Tesco is much better at logistics than a million guys trying to drive into Delhi. I don't have the link to hand but there was a nice comparison US vs Mexico on this somewhere.
Crazy world we live in, where being (over-)efficient has to be subsidized. There may be a thing such as being too efficient for our own good. Also, the efficiency as measured, only relates to money / profits / maximizing use of resources in industrial (including food) production, and often does not take a holistic view, which should include sustainability of resources, quality of life (not just economic standard of living) and sustainability of the planet.
I had read E. F. Schumacher's book "Small is Beautiful" when a teenager, when I was more into these sorts of things (did organic vegetable gardening and dairy farming, used a biogas plant, etc.), before I got into the software field full-time. I still recommend his ideas and book about appropriate technology to interested people - the concepts and principles have not changed, though technologies have evolved, and a hybrid model may be needed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._F._Schumacher
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appropriate_technology
>Including discouraging of re-wilding I think, as the land has to be plausibly farm-able to get the cash.
Yes, re-wilding is a good idea.
>This aside, it's worth knowing that developed countries typically throw away much less food than developing ones. Basically because Tesco is much better at logistics than a million guys trying to drive into Delhi. I don't have the link to hand but there was a nice comparison US vs Mexico on this somewhere.
Possibly. I do know that plenty of waste happens in India too. In fact, Schumacher's ideas are very much suited to and applicable to developing countries. IIRC he was influenced by Mahatma Gandhi some, and Gandhi also had done significant work in this area, in practice, not just talking about it, either - including hugely encouraging Indian people to do naturopathy, nature cure, small scale industry work like traditional means of spinning and weaving for khadi (a great hand-made Indian cotton textile), etc. We still have Khadi & Village Industries Emporiums here, where one can buy clothing made of khadi:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khadi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khadi#History
A recent survey of US households shows that they throw away an average for 250 pounds of food per year. http://ada.multimedia-newsroom.com/index.php/2018/11/26/surv...
198 million: The number of hectares used to produce food that is lost or wasted each year. This is about the size of Mexico
$1,600: The annual amount the average American family of four spends on food that doesn’t get eaten
53 percent: The amount of all food lost or wasted that is comprised of cereals, such as wheat, maize, and rice
64 percent: The share of loss or waste in the developing world that occurs before the food is even processed or sent to market
https://www.wri.org/blog/2013/06/numbers-reducing-food-loss-...
- The part of the world that consumes the most eats too much. A balanced diet would reduce greatly the food consumption.
- The part of the world that consumes the most wastes a huge quantity of the food it produces.
- Human don't need to eat meat to be healthy and we are past the need for hunting for survival. We can even produce non animal b12 supplements if we ever need to. Since most food are grown to be fed to cattle, if we stop eating meat, we suddently multiply our food flow by a huge amount while diminushing the water consumption, pollution, and a lot of public health issues.
Food is not a production problem anymore. It's a social and political one.
What there is, is a problem with distribution.
There are 3 main reasons why people go vegetarian, vegan, or reducetarian (the former 2 are a subset of reducetarianism): environment, animal welfare, and health.
Re: "Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?". My conclusion to based on the research I performed is:
Yeah, we can, and not only that we can also reduce the Co2 footprint by avoiding eating cattle. Alternatives which are size efficient are chicken and insects (such as grasshoppers and mealworms). However, chicken have a CNS, and if you grow more chicken, more chicken suffer, so this is a pro environment yet anti animal welfare argument.
What is going to be good for the environment is using solar energy, using electric cars (to go to the grocery store). Because the transport from (very efficient, huge) transport ships has less impact on environment than you going to/from grocery store by (conventional) car.
What is going to be good for animal welfare is growing & consuming less animals with a CNS. Alternatives such as insects or lab meat.
It also surprised me how old school modern farming still remains. Look at the first picture from this article: a bunch of modern tractors unnecessarily burning oil, unnecessarily operated by humans. By now this should be three times the size field with 15 levels up, run by 3D seeds/soil/water/plants/etc sampling throw out from automatically replaceable cartridge/dispenser.
We have long way to go, but certainly we don't need more land to grow; we need more technology in place!
Edit: should have mentioned it - even going vertical you can still use natural light! Its a matter of setting up bunch of mirrors reflecting sunlight. Of course you need sun to grow.
I do feel the same about the mechanical side of farming. I'm sure there's room for different tools and structure.
I think direct nutrient synthesis probably has potential, but it will take a very long time to understand nutrition and synthesis of organic mollecules -- not an expert by any means, but I'd be surprised if it took less than several decades to develop the necessary tech/science. Even then the gains in efficiency will probably not be that large -- plants/life in general have been optimizing synthesis for billions of years, they're already quite efficient. What we would gain is minimizing to its limit parts of the plant we don't consume, and concentrate on the essentials/optimal nutrients.
Doesn’t work > see thermodynamics.
The mirror you’d be setting up would have to set up away from the building where the food is grown and therefore occupy space.
In agronomy there is a concept that the rate of growth is set by whichever one necessary nutrient is limited. Since we fertilize and pump water, the limiting factor is sunlight.
EDIT: 1. This is why Brazil gasohol is the only net positive bio-fuel
2. Manual picking of produce is far superior to mechanized harvest. Tomatoes in the US are large and tasteless because they’ve been bread to be easily picked by machine. ( A lot of thought goes into picking a ripe fruit. It’s not obvious AI can do that. Or that the robots can ever grab fruit with dexterity and w/out crushing)
3.What energy source do you want to run your automatic tractors off of? Diesel for agriculture is arguably the segment that should be given the most slack when transitioning to “green” alternatives.
(Sure, you'd still want batteries to drive the machinery between fields, and you'd need a way to keep the cords from damaging crops or disrupting the plowing when you're dragging them around, and you'd need to put a huge "tractor electric outlet" by every cluster of fields you're working with, but these are all engineering challenges that could be met with current technology.)
Vertical farming is unsustainable because then you will have to cover 10x the land in solar panels or use fossil fuels.
It's a small country that grows a lot of food!
Final answer.
Now let's read the article and sees what it says.
Edit: ah it's more about cattle.
Food security is a distribution problem, not a production problem. We're already producing far far more food than we consume or would even need to consume. Big Ag likes to pretend they need higher yields in order to feed the hungry but they're full of it. They want to produce more for cheaper and pocket the margin, but they're not going to do jack squat to get that production out to the people who need it.
I don't think there's any reason to vilify agricultural businesses in particular for being profit-seeking capitalist corporations.
It's not about the line of business. It's about disingenuously gussying up the marketing around their own profit maximization by pretending they're being humanitarian. Sort of like "Greenwashing."
Everyone does it, but so many people depend on subsistence farming that it comes across as especially crass. Sure they're not alone, but there is plenty of scorn to go around for bottling companies taking up all the ground water, Pharma companies abusing IP law to fleece sick people, etc. There's no reason to be stingy.