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Comment by 1234fdsazxcv | Hacker News Reader

There's a reason we had to switch away from that. The crop rotation cycle isn't an efficient use of land. Synthetic fertilizers exist for a reason -- the human race wants and needs an excess of food. No one wants to switch to a model of food scarcity.

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citation needed.

This is an all too easy narrative. Synthetic fertilisers might simply have caused an arms race for short term, higher efficiency which destroyed less efficient production techniques.

That does not make it long term efficient, see research on sustainable farming[0].

[0] https://rodaleinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/RI-FST-Brochu...

The point is that if the food is not meat we need like up to 75% less crops, which is completely attainable without synthetic fertilizer.

Claiming it does not make it so.

Every addition of a new consumer in a food chain brings with it a high rate of energy loss. The cow will need to use its energy to live, only a small portion of the energy is left in the steak you eat. 75% is a good approximation.

In general, the shorter the food chain, the more efficient it is. This is a universally known fact. I will drop some helpful links for you if you doubt this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_flow_(ecology) https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/z2m39j6/revision/6 https://scienceaid.net/biology/ecology/food.html#ecological_...

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use

The figure given is 77% of agricultural land is used for livestock

That land use figure includes grazing areas, not just crop fields.

Please define "efficient". Most arguments I've seen against crop rotation hinge on manual labour-type efficiency, not land yield-type efficiency.

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