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Comment by davexunit | Hacker News Reader

Nothing is going to get better until we understand that "yield" isn't just the produce harvested. Synthetic fertilizer yields the most pounds of produce, but the yields of nutrient-dense food, soil microbes, insects, atmospheric carbon sequestration, etc. are all abysmal. Farmers farm right up against waterways which they then pollute with fertilizer runoff because they have to maximize output at all costs. We're systematically killing our soils because capitalism allows for nothing else.

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That's the current incentive structure for better or worse. Someone (maybe the USDA, maybe SV) needs to pony up money to compete with using that ground for cropland. In an ideal scenario, the ground surrounding waterways should be easily worth $300/acre (which enables it to compete with row crop rental prices).

Problem is people laugh at that concept and then complain we have overproduction, dwindling soil health, and poor water quality.

I do laugh at the idea that some more capitalism is the solution. In an ideal scenario, the ground surrounding waterways would be unowned wild riparian buffers that prevent erosion and provide long stretches of contiguous habitat for animals.

yeah but the people deprived of the opportunity to develop that land seem to prefer a system where they have opportunities rather than a system where entrenched interests use the power of the state to inhibit anyone from competing. In an ideal scenario agriculture would not have been discovered but once it was then it became necessary to compete or be assimilated.

Using less labor to grow food is what makes society productive enough for scientific and medical research. Those in turn address common public health issues and create more labor saving technologies allowing people to do things that they enjoy.

Yes, in essence, capitalism. But the discussion was about regulating the use of undeveloped land (“idle capital”) and that disproportionately benefits those in society who already own land (“capital”).

> Synthetic fertilizer yields the most pounds of produce, but the yields of nutrient-dense food, soil microbes, insects, atmospheric carbon sequestration, etc. are all abysmal.

Please explain how synthetic fertilizer reduces the yield of nutrient dense food. I can't find anything to support this in my cursory searches.

Along with the synthetic fertilizer comes other interests in our industrialized food system: Plant varieties are bred and grown for their shelf life, not their nutritional density or taste. Here in the US our food comes half way across the country (or all the way if it was grown in California and you live on the east coast) to get to a supermarket so it needs to stay good for a long time. And that's why we end up with cheap, flavorless iceberg lettuce that has no real nutrition in it. The greens worth eating are expensive.

It’s worth noting that the question on yields is actually pretty orthogonal to the question of taste. You can optimize for taste and yield pretty effectively, but humans generally use yield and appearance as what we pick our veggies on.

It’s also really easy to make organic and untasty things, as any struggling gardener will tell you. :)

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