Hacker News Reader

Comment by aussiegreenie | Hacker News Reader

Living a more sustainable life is the key to human survival. If you can grown your own food and produce local cleaner energy, humanity MAY survive. The existing American-model life guarantees human civilisation will not live past 2040.

View on HN

In the year 1975 I was told the same thing about the year 2000.

Heh. Ok, can I have all your money in 2039?

Australia is a well developed country and an analogue to your "the American-model". I'd call it the "Developed Industrial Nation"-model to be more precise.

Not implying this with you, but I think it must be a trend of Australians to consider Americans "elitist"-- that the rich, obese Americans are the greedy ones ruining everything.

It's just funny to me, since Australians follow the same model of western-european-derived economics & western-european-derived government.

Why? Wouldn’t centralized larger farms be more efficient?

You can't actually compare them very well because commercial food production uses fossil fuel derived fertilizer to feed its yields. Small subsidence farms often don't use any fossil fuel derived fertilizer, and is thus infinity sustainable, but also low yield. Big commercial farms rely almost entirely on fossil fuel derived fertilizer, which is unsustainable unless we pull ass tons of clean renewable energy out of our butts to replace it, but have extreme yields.

We can make artificial fertilizer without fossil fuels, but the energy cost is atleast 10x what our current usage is for fertilizer and is already over 1% of global power. And we are still a ways off of producing an extra 10% of global energy output via completely clean power.

> Small subsidence farms often don't use any fossil fuel derived fertilizer

Where are you getting this from? I mean, chickenshit, etc., can be good fertilizer, but the stuff in a bag is far more predictable.

Depends on what efficiency your measuring and if you have any other factors to consider. Larger farms tend to be more economically efficient (at least for basic commodities, or because the margins are to low to support a farm under a specific size). But it's not a one to one comparison because the models and practices differ. You could say that a COFO is more efficient than a small ranch because they produce more beef on fewer acres and utilize brewer's grain from ethanol production. It's possible that a small farm raising organic wagyu might actually be more economically efficient since it's a higher margin product.

No, they would just be more profitable but not more efficient. Large farms select the most profitable crop but that can often mean a lot of ecological harm for a crop that isn't being used to feed the local area, as it might be exported to markets where it fetches a higher price. Like cotton grown in water scarce california since water is very cheap for these large farmers, which is used to build mattresses in mexico. Smaller scale farmers who might show up at a farmers market grow a variety of different vegetables. There are still these sort of farmers in southern california in santa barbara county, out by san luis obispo, or in ventura or east of the redlands past san bernardino. They grow all sorts of produce on their land and bring in to sell in local markets, as these heirloom varieties are usually too fragile for mass export. Not sure about the central valley.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com