Higher urea prices->higher fertilizer prices->Less fertilizer demand->less food supply->more suffering via sick and hungry people->more potential for confrontation and war.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/global-farmers-f...
Oh yes. And alarm bells are ringing.
"I want to say this loud and clear right now, that we risk a very low crop in the next harvest. I'm afraid we're going to have a food crisis." — Svein Tore Holsether, CEO and president Yara International. https://fortune.com/2021/11/04/energy-crisis-food-shortage-s...
"Major fertilizer producers Yara International ASA and CF Industries Holdings Inc. said soaring energy costs are forcing them to halt some output of nutrients crucial for growing crops." https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/europe-s-energy-woes...
"In the fall, soaring electricity demand led the southwestern province of Yunnan, a key phosphate producer, to order drastic production cuts by energy-hungry industries, including fertilizer." https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/06/business/urea-fertilizer-...
"Farmers in India are desperate. Trucks in South Korea had to be idled. Food prices, already high, could rise even further." https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/06/business/urea-fertilizer-...
"Among farmers and ranchers, very few topics are being discussed as much as the skyrocketing cost of fertilizer and increasing concerns regarding availability." https://www.fb.org/market-intel/too-many-to-count-factors-dr...
"High fertilizer prices could exert inflationary pressures on food prices, compounding food security concerns at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change are making access to food more difficult." https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/soaring-fertilizer-pric...
"Higher farm input costs, expensive shipping and good demand provide for a grim combination... We are under La Niña conditions, the second such event in as many years, and the weather cannot be expected to be normal until Q2 2022 at the earliest." — Rabobank Outlook 2022: Hell in the Handbasket. https://research.rabobank.com/far/en/documents/842941_Raboba...
Hell in the handbasket here we come!
Ethereum 2.0 (uses proof of stake- doesn’t do energy intensive mining) can’t come soon enough for me.
I have an honest question that I haven't seen answered anywhere, and I'm not smart enough to answer it for myself by reading papers and whatnot.
Assume whatevercoin currently uses PoW and takes X energy to mine a single coin, but would take X/100 energy to mine it under PoS.
What stops people from simply throwing the 99/100 leftover energy from X into more mining operations, rather than just being content with the one and the leftover energy?
Or put another way, if mining a single coin suddenly costs 1/100 of what it used to, why would I not just mine 100 coins now?
It just all sounds to me like what happens when there's an increase in computational power/speed/capacity/whatever in PCs. When you can process a thing ten times as fast, you don't just do one thing ten times faster; you do ten things at once.
The current PoW system turns energy directly into miner rewards.
A PoS system does not do that. You can't just throw more energy at the problem to get more rewards.
It's like if I paid you previously for every strawberry you bring me, and now I pay you for how old you are. Previously, for 100 strawberries I gave you $20, and now for every 20 years you are old, I give you $20/hr. Now you need far fewer strawberries to make the same amount of money, but that doesn't mean you can now make more by giving me strawberries. You have no way of converting strawberries into age.
The mining effort depends simply on the reward, and the reward is calibrated to the security needed. Bitcoin is highly secure, but the security model is essentially 1:1; if the network is secured with a billion dollars of mining effort, it will cost on the order of a billion to attack it. So it's expensive.
PoS can have a better security model, maybe 1:100 against network attackers. So you can reduce mining rewards and maintain a given security level.
It's sharding that's probably never coming.
The difficulty bomb and merge is set for June 2022. Could it be delayed? Sure I guess but Bitcoin has absolutely no plans to fix its energy consumption.
We should increase the atmospheres CO2 and urea production. More food for all!
For what it's worth, no gardener or farmer is having to pump CO2 into the air because their plants are dying.
I’m asking if you can back up that claim. I guess not.
Maybe they could grow even more successfully with some kind of CO2 biodome, I don't know - but my point was that lack of CO2 is not causing problems with plants growing, but it is causing problems with our biosphere slowly dying.
If someone wants to argue "more CO2 is good for plants", they really need to provide a number for what atmospheric concentration they think is optimal, and what the costs/benefits of reaching it are. Would increasing the concentration by 10% make food 10% cheaper, for example? What sort of effects on the Earth's climate are historically associated with CO2 levels that high?
The family farm is planting a lot less corn as a result.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/even-mega-farms-are-mos...
Most farms are "family" owned but perhaps OP was trying to communicate that nowadays farm owners are rarely farm workers?
A rather small proportion of farms are singly/family owned and have a majority of the work done by that family.
Most nitrogen fertiliser is supplied via natural gas formation (Haber-Bosch process). I'm not sure if urea is HB-formulated nitrogen or comes from other sources, but this wouldn't much matter as HB-formulated ammonia is near-exact substitute for urea and would follow similar pricing patterns.
Reading at Wikipedia iforms me that:
- Urea is CO2(NH2)2.
- Production is from ammonia + carbon dioxide.
Given that natural gas prices are presently spiking, my presumption would be that urea prices are following natural gas.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/07/why-we-need-to-give-i...
Thesis -> Antithesis -> Synthesis
The difference is historical and cultural inertia. Buttered cockroach could be the next big thing in Brooklyn.
I'm not going to buy bug burgers nor rent my stuff.
What we should do is more population control. As a first step stop incentives for having children (Inn the Netherlands you get more child benefit per child the more you have!). It's tough for the people that want big families but we can't continue growing humanity like this.
So we shouldn't be worrying about "big families", we should be worried about voluntary self-extinction. What do you think the correct population should be for the Netherlands or Europe, and what do you suggest we do when we reach it? Obviously the current level of government benefits per child aren't enough to keep the population level stable.
[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/NLD/netherlands/fertil...
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/EUR/europe/population-...
We have to stop viewing world problems as national issues. Just like the climate problem, we can be 'green' because we externalise a lot of our carbon problems to other countries. That's not helpful at all. It's just smart bookkeeping to keep behaving as we are.
Well, that's not what's going on in the market.
This crisis is caused by a reduced supply of inputs, mostly natural gas and energy. One of the direct causes is Hurricane Ida, which had a massive impact on natural gas supplies. China has also experienced a coal shortage, and also a drought that reduced hydropower generation. Europe has done a lot to switch to renewables, but they've suffered low winds.
So no, the people who are going to hurt aren't rich Westerners, who are best positioned to ride this out. It's the poor people (mostly in the "global south") who already spend massive portions of their income on food, who will bear the brunt of this crisis.
Right now, even before this fertiliser crisis materialises, there's already been a sizeable increase in food prices there, the pandemic pushed a new wave of homelessness and food insecurity after already some bad years before Bolsonaro came to power. Coupled with higher unemployment and overall loss of competitivity of Brazilian industry there just seems nowhere to go for society... If there is another food price hike it'll very likely cause massive social strife, I really don't see a way out if this crisis materialises in next year or so.
It will be brutal for the global south.
Given US economic policy directly caused this, wrapping it in climate narrative merely post-hoc justifies that the humans who will suffer from this deserve it because of climate change, and that the humans who are positioned to weather it deserve to have their resources and land redistributed to said victims because of climate change. If I had to guess who makes those redistribution decisions, because their divine authority comes from climate change, I would say committees of appointed politically aligned experts.
On this inflationary policy issue, the climate emperor is naked.
I mean, can you really disagree with the logic of this? The richest are likely to be the ones who have consumed the most and who have thus contributed most to climate change, and also they have the most resources available to help mitigate the problems they've caused. Given that they've benefited most from society, and have the most to lose if society collapses, they should be keen to pay their fair share (i.e. in proportion to their net wealth).
You may not like "committees of appointed politically aligned experts", but if they are appointed by democratically elected representatives (and unless you can point to some experts that are free from any political alignment), I'm not sure who would be better at making decisions for how resources are distributed to solve societal problems.
(For what it's worth, I thought your earlier comment about "controlled demolition of western economies" was thought-provoking, so I upvoted it).
What started with, "hey, maybe we shouldn't litter, and maybe we should stop companies from poisoning watersheds and wrecking land," has become, "we must centrally plan all economic activity according to political exigencies," and I'm saying this has precedents that ended terribly and I don't see it working this time either.
The issue of fertilizer prices is the effect of these policies designed to orchestrate a controlled demolition of the economy, which is a necessary step to disenfranchise the specific class of smallholders and business owners who naturally resist living under the regime of a planned economy, which operates on hallucinatory narratives designed to atomize and subjugate people. It's called "de-kulakization," and it's straight playbook.
The kaleidescope of absurd narratives we see right now are designed to "neutralize" people, that is, to make them believe nothing is true and trust nothing enough to resist what this cadre of terrible people are creating. It's a trip to watch it happen in real time after only having read about it in history, and to have the opportunity to provide commentary while it's happening, but this goes so badly, if a few more people can see wtf is happening, maybe we can mitigate the consequences.
Could you give some examples of popular Western politicians currently advocating for centrally planning all economic activity?
If you stretch "all direct CO2 emissions" to mean the same as "all economic activity", and "taxing after the fact" to mean same as "centrally planning", then maybe 10% of Western politicians and voters would support what you're afraid of.
Even in this case, the farmer who are farming on their own land are under no obligation to change their way of life or farming process. Even though we know that the methods they are using may be sub-optimal and a net-negative in the long run, we simply cannot make them change it, and certainly never by labelling them negative. We can make them see the benefits, or how it plays out in the long run and help them choose a better solution but ultimately, it's them doing the choosing.
At the end, if something is really really required, then it must be the Governments making regulation. This is how it generally works (I'm not saying I like it).
Can the bad farmers continue to farm debt (primarily)? Sure, but if they're doing it to themselves we shouldn't feel bad for them, or bail them out.
People only do what a) They are taught in the first place (programming classes, reliable blogs etc.), b) Their work environment imposes on them (organizations having coding practices or standards), c) They, through some personal experiences, find out that it makes their job easier down the line, or d) It is the right thing to do.
Expecting everyone to follow (d) is out of the question and in my experience all "good" work happens via (b) i.e. rules, regulations and standards that have been enforced. If some sub-optimal choice minimizes effort while maximizing rewards, then that is not sub-optimal, at least for the individual, even though it clearly could be a sub-optimal for the collective.
Crops prices have priced in the increased fertilizer cost already, so it is what it is. We're used to it.
If you want to see a profitable, productive mid sized farm, check out Polyface. Joel makes a good living while treating his land and animals well.
I'd argue that our mega-ag model is a big part of the problem, it's given us stupidly cheap corn/soy while causing a lot of health and pollution problems, and basically ruining farming as an actual profession.
The economics of farming are all fucked up, because our current farming practices have a lot of externalities that aren't priced into conventional produce, and producers who try to improve things to remove these externalities either have to take a loss versus the producers who say "fuck the future, fuck everyone who isn't me" or create new markets for their goods (which is where the whole farmer's market movement and the local food guilt thing come from).
You don't really need to be able to compete if you aren't looking for a massive exit, though. My ~150 acres (most of it rented, no less) of corn/soy/wheat provides enough for me to live off of comfortably enough. For about a month's work a year, that's wonderful in my mind.
It seems you're just getting caught up in the capital building frenzy that I talked about earlier. If you want to have the huge payday when you sell then you take on huge debt, grow to massive scale, use all of your income to service the debt and then you're sitting on a fortune at retirement. This is what attracts most people to farming, seemingly you included, which is fair.
If you are content to stay small you can avoid the debt and what the big guy is giving to the bank you can pocket and live well off of. That's where I've settled and it works fine. I won't have the huge payday later, however. It's a tradeoff.
For rent? $265-275/acre, depending on the landlord.
> Also, I assume you're not selling to a coop or other large scale buyer?
No, that's where it all goes. There is a co-op grain elevator. All of my IP soybeans go there as they pay a nice little premium. Pretty much everything else, including crusher soys, is sold to the closer-to-home commercial grain elevator.
In 2007 I invested $12,000 in a small parcel of land I found to rent, rent for the equipment I needed to do the job (along with hiring some customer operators), and lost money doing it! But then 2008 happened, sending commodity prices through the roof. I was able to turn a small profit the following year and used the proceeds to start to buy some equipment, and slowly started to grow from there.
So, some definite luck, an investment, and most importantly having family to answer questions. I think it would have been impossible for me without that wealth of knowledge to draw on.
Now myself, I like hobbyist diversions that involve growing food, but farmers don't farm because they want to have fun. They farm so they can make money. If they stop making money, or if they don't make enough, they have to go into some other line of work, and typically sell the farm to someone who does make money.
And when you're not just selling gourmet vegetables to HN hackers making $200k+ a year, you're selling generic commodities like corn and grain and soy, where the competition is fierce.
And you're selling it to a world where the poor have a hard time affording food as it is. If this can't compete with conventional fertilizer, then even if everyone switched, people would starve.
Joel is the best known example of informed, conscientious farming paying the bills, but certainly not the only one.
>as long as you're not financially dependent on planting your entire acreage every growing season.
which to me suggests that it isn't "lazy/ignorant" farmers, but rather farmers who are economically entangled in the current system.
Maybe the place to start would be objecting to i.e. Monsanto, or to producer demands such as McDonalds who require only a certain kind of potato grown under certain kinds of conditions (so all the fries look the same).
What's the befit if fertilizer helps?
That it looks more natural?
It does require letting some land lie fallow to regeneration, so you need to devote more total land to agriculture, and it also requires fencing and for someone to go move the livestock to a new paddock every few days (though you save on tilling/herbicide application costs). On the plus side the unit cost of everything you produce is lower, and meat is typically much more profitable than vegetables so you've diversified.