It's an extractive industry little different from mining or oil drilling. In fact industrial food is largely eating oil, both in energy intensity itself and the use of oil as feedstock for fertilizers and food additives.
The transformation of farming is a direct result of corporatization and globalization, like almost every other sector of the economy. It's just more of the machine eating the world. Small, family farms, the kind that my ancestors toiled on, since unrecorded history, literally centuries, back to central Europe, were chewed up and spit out by the machine. The forests, the land, the local wildlife, now, too, the soil, all chewed up and digested in the pursuit of the one thing that the machine really craves: money.
It's the legacy of our entire economic focus on profit, growth, scale. No big conspiracy, no evil bad actors you can hate forever, just the summation of our value system expressed in the invisible hand of the market, jostled or cajoled here and there by policy, or retarded briefly by it, but always pointing in the same direction, eventually to consume all the natural resources, dipping over the threshold of sustainability to the reservoir of resources behind it, extracting and emptying it, until eventually there is nothing left.
https://www.biggestlittlefarmmovie.com/
Your dad might love it, even if just for the nostalgia.
That said, I think some of the lessons in there are awesome. Both the ones about biodiversity but also perseverance in the light of 'disaster' striking and staying strong and going on with the biodiversity path instead of just resigning and saying "yep, alright, Big Farmer is right, this doesn't work".
Others use tractors, buy fertilizers and other crop treatments like anyone else.
It's hysterical that Bitcoin is the punching bag, because when economies that are prone to hyper inflation give way, its BTC that is used in many of those same countries. Who also, resort back to subsistence or local Ag. And guess what, destroying your land is kind of antithetical to the whole farming thing...
Anyhow, regenerative Ag can now be a massive boon if the infrastructure bill gets properly allotted; I'm skeptical but this could really come to define late millennials and gen Z to ensure that the problems they inheritance from the most wasteful generation (boomers) has some chance of being remediated prior to it being depleted and ensuring famine.
I am open to wondering if CO2 emissions are also too easy a punching bag. Crops can go way nonlinear when lacking mined water, lacking fertilizer, and lacking soil/biomes etc. I was not aware that the infrastructure bill favors regenerative Ag.
It's pretty vague, to be honest; but from what I've gathered many of its proponents are using it as a phase-in from the core of the New Green Deal, and is essentially a massive works project.
As a former farmer (Biodynamic) myself and a person that did Supply Chain I think that critical infrastructure doesn't just apply to the roads upon which freight travels on, also having a horrible factory farmed centralized food system is what created shortages during COVID and were revealed for all to see. There is no denying it that this model cannot function with just the slight amount of variance, 3PL continued to work and even improved during COVID in some industries, but none of that mattered in the end.
This incidentally led to crop losses due to a lack of labour, and many unnecessary deaths of workers like at meat packing plants had a shocking enough effect that made CSA memberships (shares in the Farm that grant you boxes of vegetables) the more viable option and revealed something that I knew from experience in the aforementioned industries (also culinary): the less food travels, the more savings can be passed on to the consumer, but also the higher a premium it has to it's targeted demographic.
The reason I highlight this is because critical infrastructure, as in the stuff that is of national security, after COVID has to include manufacturing of things like PPE and medical equipment as well as farming in a far more distributed manner--ventilators were just one of the examples of how far the US had fallen.
And the truth is the Department of Ag already has a lot of sound programs to help young, first time farmers: but a concerted effort to incentivize them with low to no interest loans for farming equipment and livestock for 10+ years would be a boon for so many wanting to get into farming and revitalize so many disenfranchised communities that were displaced in the 80s when mega pharmacorps forced their way that led to this big Ag system.
Simply removing a lot of subsidies to corn, soy farmers and using that to float the low interest loans would pay for itself in added revenue, moreover many farmers markets are now obligated to accept things like WIC and foodstamp programs to be accepted so we can readily pivot a low income community's diet in a decade, as seen in Detroit.
I'd include water/desalination as well, but to be honest I'm not sure that will be explored this go around, but may at a later time.
No matter how bad they screw up, in the very long run, Earth has a tendency to figure out how to recycle the raw materials. After all, Earth's ecosystems are the result of surviving cataclysm after cataclysm, from volcanism to asteroid strikes to climate change, to invasive species after invasive species. It's got a lot of experience dealing with giant debris piles left over from one shitstorm after another, be that a biological plague or the ash of an impact event.
Whether humanity will suffer a catastrophe of our own making is another question.
It is interesting that by incrementally converting the life-support system of our planet into dollar store trash, we could have similar impact on the biosphere as an ELE meteor impact! The tragedy is that, at least theoretically, this particular cause is avoidable. Or was. (Maybe science really is to blame? Wouldn't that be sad.)
To me, it implies that planet earth is as implacable as the rest of the universe. It doesn't have feelings. It doesn't care. And it will still be here for millennia yet.
This changes the conversation from:
"We're hurting mother earth."
to
"We're thinking animals and yet we're making a poor future for ourselves."
You're right that we are "thinking animals", but we've got a global animus now that is obsessed money and growth. We're infected with a greed virus that I think is fatal to its host.
And the problem, as I see it, and alluded to in my OP, is that local incentives are all wrong now. Nearly every decision that is rewarded by the markets at a local level is bad in the long term. You can teach a small fraction of people so that they may become enlightened, but greed spreads faster, and is better rewarded. In a game-theoretic view of this, it will always pay to defect from those conserving and living sustainably, as you externalize the losses onto an unseen and uncared-for future, and spread that loss among everyone else. Moral hazard, everywhere. But now, with global civilization and industrialization, and instant communication, we've become more than a diseased troop of chimps headed for a brawl in the forest; we're an insanely overpowerful superorganism driven by unquenchable lust for exponential growth and armed with millions of years of energy reserves--even nuclear weapons! There's literally nowhere on Earth that we can't or won't go in search of resources or vacation potential.
As much of an atheist as I am, I can't help but feel a pang of spirituality about this, and that pang is, unfortunately, despair for the inhabitants of this green jewel that is being ravaged. And by inhabitants, I'm broad in including all living things, regardless if they are cute or have fangs and spit venom. All those funny animals, frogs, plants, fungi. They got fucked because money.
The culprit is the scientific method, and in particular it's ability to give people repeatable, inhuman action-at-a-distance that amplified moral hazard 10000-fold.
The longer the distance between extraction and consumption the more fucked your civilization is.
As horrible as that sounds, there is a beautiful symmetry: science gives hope to spread life beyond Earth, and yet it is also provides a real path to the destruction of Earth, our only home.
Clearly Nature thinks the gamble is worth it.
Science is a good tool for getting things done. The how.
Money is the motivation for getting them done. The why.
You've both got good points.
Scientific capability enables fucked because money.
I used the word "machine" before, and also the word "superorganism". I get this creepy feeling we're part of a cybernetic superorganism more akin to a slime mold, digesting the world not with funky stomach acids, but the humming sounds of a million bulldozers, pile-drivers, hammers breaking down and building up again. And now, in the 21st century, some kind of Star Trek computer sounds as the digitized stock market whirs away at a speed incomprehensible to these little pink-gray bundles of nerves prone to chemical stimulation.
All of those learning and optimization processes are harnessed, in bulk, towards the economy--harnessing the energy and mineral resources of this planet to create "wealth" for the value system of that machine. Even as just a software person, being light-years away from a bulldozer or a harvester, everything I have done inevitably feeds into making that machine more "efficient". I am rewarded, so my little life is improved. (I guess I shouldn't complain, the machine has made me relatively wealthy so far!?)
One element of the world which is clearly already a "cybernetic organism" is the everyday "Corporation" - it is an actual fusion of humans and machines to achieve a goal. Corps have many emergent properties, none of which have their root in any individual person or machine. And note that this was true pre-information revolution! (And note: corps ALSO have a center of mass! Although this usually isn't the most useful characterization, its accurate.)
When it comes to evolution, individual organisms are needed by the thousands.
If we have one superorganism subsuming the whole planet, then what if it turns out this isn't the ideal evolutionary path?
Fermi Paradox Great filter comes to mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
But given how hard it is to predict the future, the details are : how much will it hurt?
How much of humanity will survive? How much biological diversity will we lose?
Aside, I don't think atheism/religion enables or precludes empathy for the living things in the world. 'Tis a sad future in many ways.
I guess the dead rock ball will still be fine.
As soon as they paid off the loans for the land, they rented the farms out to someone else to work and moved to town to get easier jobs.
I love the smell of capitalism in the morning. Smells like...better than pig shit.
The two groups have almost no philosophy and practices in common. Different worlds.
this is it right here. we're extracting all nutrients from a concentrated area and sending the yields far away. There's no replenishment.
Even the water shortages in California is not as simple as "farmers are using all the water". It's the demand for food far, far away.
[0]: Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari (2011)
I worked on a farm in my teens in 90s upstate ny that was like the last dying breath of the traditional family farm. It was a property that was intact since a land grant from a Dutch patroon and continuously farmed until around 2000. Today the family still owns it, and boards a few horses to pay the taxes.
The farmer was an old-school conservative farmer. He was a local Republican Party leader for awhile, a conservationist and just overall hardworking guy. The modern farm is more like an oil company. I think that 75 years from now, when we lament the fate of the impoverished Midwest Desert and will see the 1970s/1980s as a watershed moment where we flipped our entire governance philosophy to short term P&L, despite then obvious and already learned lessons of the past.
The treatment of the soil as if it is infinite and something purely to be extract is exactly like oil and mineral mining no matter the scale...
Regardless of the dust bowl and the types of farmers that caused it, the hopes are that we learned how to farm within the ecology of the region(s) we live in and how those regions may vary from one another and we should build adaptive farms that work in harmony...
The land in the US is fertile. The prairies were incredibly fertile.
The wikipedia article on crop rotation[1] explains quite plainly that this has been evolving over eight thousand years, with a recent development pre-WW2 being in the southern US, and the most recent one being a shift to stopping crop rotation and instead switching to chemicals. That last particular update should be setting the alarm bells ringing.
The evidence doesn't really support your claim unless you think the entirety of Northern America had no concept of farming until colonialism arrived a few hundred years ago.
Instead, they did everything in their power to force their farming practices onto the land where they occupied.
Native Americans farmed. They farmed different crops that were actually suited to the local biome.
> Native Americans farmed. They farmed different crops that were actually suited to the local biome.
But many didn't. and those that did were often captured and conquered by those that didn't. The Comanche were the best known ones, but their were others. [0] That omission alone is what allows for many people to romanticize the horrible warfare and slavery that took place amongst the native people's perpetual state of warfare.
Also, it's kind of hard to learn from a people who once exposed to European diseases were wiped out in absurd numbers long before the settlers and colonizers would actually arrive.
Colonialism happens in waves, and can span long periods; it's worth reminding that the the first wave were people not interested in establishing a homestead lifestyle and a family farm but abject conquest, for that required the more disenfranchised and honestly peasant/pleb classes to be able to get to the 'New World' much later.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nomadic_peoples#Americ...
The practices of 100 or 200 years ago were much more sustainable than what we have now. They had no pesticides or fertilizers, and they couldn't till the soil so thoroughly. Farms were smaller and the increased biodiversity of "pests" was actually better for the soils, if not for yields.
What has really tipped the balance is the "amazing" 4x crop yield increase over the last century. It came at the expense of literally every other living thing associated with the land: pests, grasses, trees, animals, birds, you name it. And it required juicing everything up on steroids, genetically modifying and breeding different crop varieties, and carpet-bombing an entire phylum of life with chemical warfare.
I think a farm being a vital business since the 1670s qualifies as adapted to the local climate.
In my region of the country, water and topsoil is abundant. But you can’t compete with massive western operations.
>Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold. And all of them were caught in something larger than themselves. Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, and some were afraid, and some worshiped the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling.
>You know the land’s getting poorer. You know what cotton does to the land; robs it, sucks all the blood out of it.
The squatters nodded—they knew, God knew. If they could only rotate the crops they might pump blood back into the land.
Disposal of the extracted salt is a serious issue. You can’t just inject brackish water back into he ocean as it screws up the ecology of the near shore environment (or wherever else you’re willing to squirt it.
Aggressive farming messes with the environment a bit. There is just so much land, we can't possibly deplete all of it.
Did you see how much air we have? Yeah burning dirty stuff pollutes it, but then the wind blows and it's clean again.
Given that we are currently using 40% of the world's land area for agriculture, and that we are using ~0.0003% of the world's water, I don't think this is a fair criticism of my post. Only a fool would think that former isn't something to keep an eye on.
> I love this comment :) Messing a bit with drops in the ocean is how we got here in the first place.
No, we got here in the first place by messing with carbon and water and nutrient cycles that take tens of millions and hundreds of thousands of years to cycle through.
The atmospheric water cycle, on the other hand, operates on a scale of weeks. Seawater gets separated into brine and fresh water, fresh water irrigates crops, fresh water evaporates into clouds, clouds precipitate over the ocean. All of humanity's historic water consumption is quite literally a drop in the ocean. [1]
The volume of the oceans is 1.3 * 10^18 m^3. Humanity's annual consumption of fresh water is 4 * 10^12 m^3. Annual worldwide precipitation is ~5 * 10^14 m^3.
> Did you see how much air we have? Yeah burning dirty stuff pollutes it, but then the wind blows and it's clean again.
[1] Meanwhile, all of humanity's carbon emissions dwarf the ability of natural carbon sinks to absorb - because in hundreds of years, we have released carbon that took tens of millions of years to accumulate. The atmospheric water cycle operates on an entirely different scale. [2]
[2] The orders of magnitude between the unsustainability of <carbon use>, <land use>, <freshwater use>, and <seawater use> are each ~two orders of magnitude removed from eachother.
> without any environmental externalities
doesn't sound quite right to me. In particular I think there are reasonable concerns regarding lifetime energy and environmental costs of solar panels, mining of and disposal (or recycling) of the rare materials used in the panels, etc.
TANSTAFL
All in all, considered merely in economic terms, desalination is a perfectly viable solution to the water crisis in developed countries and would incur at most a relatively minor economic impact by this analysis. Note that this does not necessarily apply to developing countries where a $40/yr expenditure increase could be catastrophic. I am also not making any statement about non-economic considerations such as possible effects on the environment that may occur as a result of the need for increased power generation for mass desalination.
[1] https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2020/05/27/203950...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/263156/water-consumption...
That is remarkable.
With the currently degraded soil, farmers worry about a couple inches of rain causing washouts or flash floods. Water runs over the top of the soil into surface waterways. Healthy soil can infiltrate many inches of rain an hour.
Infiltration example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggDY35gGBkA
Longer soil health vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBnsgzeNIng
http://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/m2016/finalwebsite/solutions/p...
(actually, I'm worried about the water and the soil too)
It is hard to talk about soil life without sounding like a kook to most people. But, our practices of using synthetic fertilizers and spraying fungicides, herbicides, and pesticides are literally killing the soil's capacity to feed plants.
Then quite frankly,m you only understand half of the problem; water will always be an issue even in times of abundance, the fact that when California goes from drought to deluge conditions nothing has been done to try and build infrastructure to replenish the aquifers that have been drained for decades.
The best we get, for all the taxes and myopic city planning is black ping pong balls, and then diverting the water into the Pacific Ocean. In my entire lifetime I will never understand how infinitely stupid this state has been about water despite Central Valley being such a vital to not just the US' food supply chain, but also for a lot out the rest of the World.
Desalination was always thought to be untenable until the preiumus could justify it, but the truth is I forsee some very affluent communities in SoCal (Carlsbad) will be the biggest benefactors of a near monopoly for reliable water sources.
Worth noting is that many Pharma megacoprs are in Carlsbad and the greater San Diego area who have learned from Nestle's business model to water rights in the developing world.
In the US, Iowa is the largest producer of corn [1] (producing nearly 40% more than the next, Illinois,) and thus the greatest beneficiary of those corn subsidies. Could we reduce those corn subsidies? No, it's politically nonviable, in part because Iowa has enshrined in its laws that it must have the first primaries in the US [2][3]. No candidate that has ever said anything against corn subsidies has won a primary.
[1] https://www.cropprophet.com/what-state-produces-the-most-cor...
[2] https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/why-iowa-and-new-hampshi...
[3] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2004/01/why-the-iowa-cau...
So is oil. So farming corn is actually subsidized at-least twice!
I'm confused, how can a single state unilaterally require that its primary is the earliest in the nation? What's to prevent another state from passing a law that its primary must be one day before Iowa's?
It would be super fun if another state passed a similar law.
[edit] apparently corecursion isn't the correct term for when two functions call each other recursively? I thought there was a term for it
It can’t, it requires cooperation of the other states.
Corn isn't really subsidized, and iowa corn farmers are not the benefactors of the agricultural bills. Cattle producers and chemical corporations are subsidized, and the way they're subsidized is by a myriad set of policies which encourage grain prices to stay very low. This makes cattle feed cheap and corn and soy inputs to chemical plants cheap.
If the price of corn doubled, farmers could afford to pay their mortgage and taxes without trying to extract every bit of possible yield. But then the price of beef would go up and the profits of 3M and Dupont would go down, and that's a far more powerful force than farmers in Iowa.
Is that not a direct subsidy? Are they wrong? (genuinely curious - your post is interesting enough that I felt I had to do some research to clarify my own thinking)
https://www.cato.org/commentary/examining-americas-farm-subs...
https://farm.ewg.org/progdetail.php?fips=00000&progcode=corn
One thing that it does get right, is the section "they induce overproduction, inflate land prices, and harm the environment" which is absolutely true. My point in my previous post was that this systemic overproduction is to the benefit of corn buyers (cattle production, food processors, etc) and the detriment of corn producers.
In essence, the aggregate result of the myriad laws and programs impacting agricultural production is that grain producing farmers are left sitting helpless on a knife's edge. The only way to avoid bankruptcy is to pump your land full of petrochemicals to maximize yield. ARC is based on revenue, not profitability- it's encouraging high-cost, high-yield farming practices to guarantee plentiful grain supply to buyers. PLC is even more brazen- after completely distorting the true market price for animal feed by forcing grain growers to overproduce, we let them buy corn for less than it costs to grow and then force the farmers to rely on an insurance payment that's just enough to cover their debt & tax payments.
Basically, the grain producers are pawns in the ag subsidy game and the grain buyers are the kings.
I don't know where the romanticized idea of farming life came from because it was never that great. Historically, it was just a way to provide food for your family and maybe make a profit on the side if you're lucky.
The most important oil consumption is for driving farm implements, but that can easily be changed to rapeseed oil in the short term and other green energy in the long term.
So no cause for panic.
I think water loss (especially from aquifers but also just drought and river diversion in California), soil erosion, habitat loss, and homogenisation are big worries. We’ve seen big problems from soil loss before in America where the prairie grass with its deep root systems holding the soil together was replaced by cereal crops with short roots and plowing exposing the soil. The result was the dust bowl.
Rapeseed oil maybe isn't a perfect solution. But whining about everything that makes headway just because it isn't perfect yet also holds us back.
You've been brainwashed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
The nitrogen is easily separated from air. The hydrogen is the energetically expensive input. Most hydrogen is presently made by steam reforming fossil fuels. Hydrogen can also be produced from water and electricity via electrolysis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water
In the 20th century, surplus hydroelectric power from dams was used to electrolyze water for making ammonia. More direct demand for electricity and cheaper processes for making hydrogen from fossil fuels gradually eliminated it. Now people are planning to bring back large scale electrolytic hydrogen for fossil-free hydrogen from renewables:
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/19/canada-is-set-to-have-one-th...
https://www.chemengonline.com/uniper-unveils-plans-for-germa...
And there are a few plants in operation that produce without any fossil inputs, but most of them aren't switched over yet, mostly because green hydrogen production isn't at the necessary scale yet and will probably be used for steel making first.
The path you say has "no cause for panic" is a path to cyclical famine in 50-100 years.
Mark Shepard also complains from time to time that dairy supply is outstripping demand to the point where farmers can't make money off of it. That's dumb in it's own right but if you consider the ecological footprint, then we have a problem.