‘Farms are failing’ as fertilizer prices drive up cost of food
wsj.com
wsj.com
My comment about biological nitrogen fixation (15 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29829580
Saw this recently: Black eyed peas could help eliminate need for fertilizer: Popular legume attracts beneficial nitrogen-fixing bacteria - https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2022/01/20/black-eyed-peas-cou...
One of the problems with holistic agriculture is you have to understand more about what plants actually need to grow, and think more to figure out how to work with what you've got. I used to have a local farm that made a great mulch with wood chips and feathers from their turkey operation. Blood meal [1] (nitrogen) and bone meal [2] (calcium, phosphorous) are also good fertilizers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_meal [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_meal
Saying "modern agriculture can switch to just planting legumes for nitrogen fixation" is like saying "modern transportation can switch to just using solar power." Of course, modern transportation can switch to using solar power, but most people understand how it will be a gargantuan, multi-decade, multi-trillion dollar process. Switching modern agriculture off its dependence on fossil fuels will be in the same order-of-magnitude difficulty level.
Just to build on this, we expend (at least) 7.3 calories of energy to produce 1 calorie of food (https://sustainability.emory.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/...).
Are we really in disagreement then? Where pray tell do you think electricity comes from? In the US, 60% comes from fossil fuels, about 20% from nuclear. Solar, wind, biomass and geothermal combined is < 12%
My point is that most folks understand that moving our electric infrastructure to renewables is an enormous, long term, extremely expensive undertaking. Whether the hydrogen used in nitrogen fixation comes from natural gas directly, or from electrolysis, it's at its core an energy problem, and transitioning our energy use needed for nitrogen fixation on a global scale is a lot more expensive/complicated than planting some alfalfa.
And then you've a) freed up lots of a storable fuel that you can use to supplement renewables if you really need it (and can be kept and used as a chemical feedstock otherwise), b) created a whole new market for responsively using all the cheap new renewables that we need to build.
So, yeah, I think we still disagree. Fossil fuels are not particularly necessary, useful or cheap, not for transport and not for fertilizer. They have some uses, but they generally get given way more credit than they deserve for political reasons. Generally the faster we replace them, the better off we will all be in many ways. It's "expensive" to do this in the same way that moving to socialized health is "expensive", it'll costs billions, but it'll also save billions, because the alternative costs even more.
I'm not sure why one would think that, the exact opposite is true. Going to electrolysis is only desirable if the energy source is a renewable.
This article has a very good overview of the challenges with moving ammonia production to sustainable energy sources:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2021.5808...
And like the "EVs burn coal" analogy, I'm suggesting we shift to renewables as quickly as we can, and there's no need to wait for the grid to be 100% renewable before electrifying as much as we can.
The union of concerned scientists has a map that compares the efficiency of an EV to ICE. It's lower in fossil fuel powered areas, but It's better than ICE everywhere today, even if you ignore the future greening of the grid. If you include that it completely demolishes the alternative.
So your document appears to support my point, why do you think it doesn't?
But as it relates to this problem (ie. food getting more expensive), your suggestion doesn't make any sense. Considering that the methods you described aren't widely used, I think it's safe to say that they're more expensive than using synthetic fertilizers. Therefore if we implemented that suggestion we wouldn't have higher food prices... because the food prices would be high to start with, probably much higher than it ever be with synthetic fertilizers.
I'm guessing that "more natural" processes could still feed us all but the game is rigged so that it's not economical for to do that (directly, as it's effectively subsidized for the "economical" side).
This is just one example of a larger realization, which is that humanity can no longer sustain itself without a complex and sophisticated technological society.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016719871...
https://denvergazette.com/news/environment/one-global-warmin...
But that cellulose "waste" part of the corn is a feedstock for other industries. Keeping those inputs constant means growing more of some other crop and increasing net nitrogen usage. Producing nitrogen fertilizer takes energy, currently from fossil fuels.
https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets
"So if this system is so ideal, why is it that my cow hasn’t tasted a blade of grass since October? Speed, in a word. Cows raised on grass simply take longer to reach slaughter weight than cows raised on a richer diet, and the modern meat industry has devoted itself to shortening a beef calf’s allotted time on earth."
What they dont mention is the large part livestock (especially cows an chicken) will have to play in producing soil from the dirt left behind after industrial agriculture. Regenerative agriculture is the term here, with rotating cows and chickens on degraded dirt patches to build top soil.
All of this of course doesnt take away from the madness that is industrial meat production. But nothing has ever been solved by oversimplified narratives and action-ism.
Not sure what you mean with actually works. There is soil erosion (it determines the value of any farmland you buy) and methods to create new topsoil. Same with different levels at which you deplete ground water. Which part do you think to be quackery? Searching a bit it seems Alan Savory made some outlandish claims about carbon dioxide?
Do also keep in mind that there are wide swaths of land which can usefully be occupied by ruminants that cannot be farmed without piping in almost all the water and dumping fertilizer on it. Such marginal land is counted as arable so as to further attack animal husbandry.
I don't disagree with this part. My point is just that a) livestock are an enormously inefficient way of raising calories and b) that's taking into consideration the horrendous industrial meat system. The US raised 33 million cows to slaughter in 2019 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/194357/total-cattle-slau...). Converting those to be pasture raised would use a vast amount of land (1), a huge reduction of calories already being produced (unsustainably) from corn and soy, and require a lot of additional labor.
(1) https://www.omnicalculator.com/biology/cattle-per-acre -- I don't know if the defaults are generally applicable for the US, but let's say 0.33 cows per acre (which may be optimistic - see e.g. https://www.outdoorhappens.com/how-many-cows-per-acre-in-you...).
A cow raised fully on grass requires around 24 months. So, if the US wants to keep slaughtering 33 million cows per year, 66 million cows need to be alive at any one time. (https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/08/13/746576239/is...)
So, minimum land use would be 3 x 66 million = 198,000,000. That's equivalent to the total land used right now for soy, corn AND cotton combined (https://www.nass.usda.gov/Newsroom/2021/06-30-2021.php).
That’s the core reason we are feeding cattle with farmed corn, you simply get more beef from the same land.
But I think the broader point is true -- there's nothing wrong/unsustainable/unnatural about having a bunch of ruminants running around. That's how it used to be!
What's unnatural, and, I think, unsustainable, is vast fields of intensively-grown monocrops, propped up by petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides.
A newborn 80lb calf doesn’t its self need that many calories directly, but it both grows very rapidly gets its calories from it’s mother which turns grass calories to turn into milk calories at about 3:1 efficiency.
I'm sure the anti-indigenous Army leaders at the time were pleased with the side effect, but the reality is that firearms + slow moving bison + horses + railroad shipping = profit. And so people kept doing it until bison were almost eradicated.
They hype up the Army aspect a lot in the first part of the article, but readering further it becomes clear that commerical hunting really was the main driver.
If we don’t change this, we’re dooming ourselves.
Yep. In the discourse surrounding this there's a call to reduce or eliminate meat consumption, but simultaneously we have market incentives for meat consumption through legislation. This is untenable.
Substitute grass for vegetables and I think this applies to humans as well.
You're not wrong, but IMHO it should be noted that humans don't need a lot of meat to meet their dietary needs. There has probably been excess cultural focusing on it in recent decades.
The necessary daily portions one needs—unless doing body building—isn't a lot to get the required protein and amino acids.
If we were really trying to optimize, we might look at tradeoffs WRT locally raised meats vs grains and beans that have to be shipped around due to growing season type issues. But really what we're doing now is shipping meat all over the world, which is like the worse of both worlds.
Anyway, we can get by with a little meat. I'm under the impression that our current diets are pretty weird historically. You don't need meat with every dinner.
We should go back to a point where growing seasons are more of an issue, due to environment and sustainability.
Keep in mind this is absolutely not true in even the rest of the Western world. American-style cattle factory farms are almost unheard of in the UK, and practically all beef here would count as grass-fed, because that's just how we raise cattle. There is some supplementation over winter when grass doesn't grow (and even that depends on location), but otherwise pasture is the standard.
Now, UK pork on the other hand is tremendous.
Edit: the poor and I. I also want healthier bioreactor food. Food fraud is a problem that’s getting worse with inflation and avoiding it is getting expensive.
There is more to plant-based food than grains. Seeds and legumes are full of nutrients. People can and do survive on way less meat.
You have to be careful about how much are consumed raw [0]. But most people are going to cook beans and grains as they aren't very good uncooked.
[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7600777/ In their whole and cooked form, there is currently no strong evidence from human trials to support the claim that lectin-rich foods consistently cause inflammation, intestinal permeability, or nutrient absorption issues in the general population.
I'm not sure this has anything to do with science. It's turned into a religion, but is there evidence to suggest it is affecting the science of health?
>I eat meat to help cover gaps in understanding, and by careful measurement I can tell that I’m healthier when I eat it, or specifically less healthy when I don’t.
What measurements are those? Anecdotally, eating no animal products for the last year, my blood pressure has gone down, I've lost weight but maintained strength, and I don't have this weird gut pain I used to have. Certainly the qualitative aspects aren't reliably measurable, but I feel that the decrease in blood pressure and weight are directly relatable to these changes.
>If the science can be improved then maybe we could then shift away from meat.
What about the science now do you find untrustworthy? Is it the fact that it's usually funded by companies who have an agenda, or what?
>bioreactor food which typically isn’t enjoyable to eat
This is fermentation right? Like kimchi? Honestly, kimchi smells pretty bad but I like the way it tastes a lot.
I have a genetic disorder (one of the genetic anxiety disorders) that requires careful monitoring. I monitor strength, endurance, and a panel of blood work every 3 months. Everyday day I play a competitive ranked FPS game to see how my cognitive functions are going. Drops in ranks clearly correspond to changes in diet and behavior.
Yeah, yeast is a good bioreactor also Cyanobacteria. Promite is pretty good. Cyanobacteria taste like fish food. I’d like to see more options here.
Plant proteins are always going to win in terms of cost efficiency over meat. There is always going to be a cost for the increased protein density of meat.
To add diseases, Ustilago maydis [1]: likes warm, moderatly dry, seeds spore-forming from and over wind transport, ya'll know fast driving cars on motorhighways or even the mechanic tail-spinning of modern 200m wind turbines, now i am not someone who may collect (realy) every physical fact (or the political ones) in a modell (hobbyist), but it sounds -financially-rewarding-(crossed out) -interesting-looking- interesting for me...
Even cattle raised on grass do best for steaks if they’ve been fed grain the last few months before slaughter.
Replacing the cheap processed food production with grazing land will not do much to increase the amount of animal protein available to the population. If our goal is to have more pasture, it would make more sense to eliminate ethanol production, reduce the amount of corn we feed to animals, and reduce the amount of corn we send to the world.
How long has it been? Oh, right around 650,000 years..........
Population of US in 1780 was 3 million. Today it’s 300 million.
With low natural gas prices and heavily subsidised food, the poor of the US should hopefully come out relatively unharmed.
It's going to be worse in the EU and its periphery:
- High dependence on Russian natural gas.
- Lots of fertiliser depends on Belarussian potash here.
- The natural gas crisis is halting lots of energy intensive processes all over Europe already.
Some anecdotal evidence that might sound extreme, but actually isn't.
I know an old lady over 80 from Latvia. She worked all her life as a university trained economist. Like almost all people her age, her savings were eaten by the socio-economic chaos of the '90s. She has a <400€/month net pension (considered high locally!) and owns her apartment. She mainly pays for utilities, medical care and food. Without her vegetable garden and her family's financial support, she'd be living in abject poverty. What do you think happens when her utilities double, and her food becomes >10% more expensive?
Reality is much bleaker than that for the majority of Latvian pensioners. Not all have a "high" pension of almost 400€. Not all are in good health. Not all have financial support from younger generations. Some of them are going to go hungry.
https://squarefootgardening.org/
There is a best selling book about it and it works surprisingly well. The secret fertilizer for this, affectionately known as "Mel's Mix" recipe is available for anyone to make their own. It's not even terribly hard if you're willing to do a bit of composting outside on your own.
"Square foot gardening" with hand labor isn't going to replace the 772 million metric tons of wheat and 1 billion metric tons of corn produced annually. Sorry, it just isn't.
Given that it's January, why not try the experiment of producing all the food you personally consume this year using the techniques in this book?
Growing a few tomatoes and a bit of lettuce is pretty easy, and is a fun and rewarding hobby. Producing every single calorie you consume using only hand labor and no chemical fertilizer is an entirely different kettle of fish.
We actually ran that experiment for several millennia. It produced societies in which 90+% of the population were slaves, serfs, or other unfree agricultural laborers.
I'd rather we not go back to that, personally.
Also, you're just shining off the fact that they were serfs. I wouldn't want to be a serf even if I had to work only 10 hours per week. Would you? Not free to leave the land on which you were born, living in a hovel with no running water, toilet facilities, or central heating, maybe one change of clothes, fully subject to your master in all aspects of your life, including who (and even if) you were allowed to marry...
> And he needed to feed both own family and his master.
His master had to have 9 or 10 serfs doing that to produce enough surplus to support him. That was rather the point.
- power tools
- solar/wind/battery for power independence
- internet for entertainment
- running water in the house
- cheap goods (clothes, etc are WAY MORE cheap and efficient to make now)
So I'd say the day-to-day job is theoretically even easier.
No, that was ten serfs each working 30 hours a week to in aggregate grow enough food to subsist on and generate the master's demanded surplus. That was also only true in good years. In bad years a portion of serfs just died.
A serf's life sucked in every dimension. Even if they only "worked" 30 hours they spent the rest of their time in squalor. If you think working in a field is so attractive there's lots of farms looking for day labor. Try it out.
Hand-Grow some herbs and tomatoes on the other hand and now you’re making dough.
Could you explain what this means? Does this imply animal husbandry was necessary for agriculture?
Industrial agriculture, with the help of chemical fertilizers, has only been a thing since the early 19th century.
I find it hard to believe that agriculture, in all the centuries before that, was negative in return. How did sedentary humans feed themselves for these thousands of years before that if not with manual agriculture?
Such societies typically also had famines every few years. We don't have famines in developed countries any more.
//wiki/Ignis_sacer
hope this may help... (-:
https://squarefootgardening.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/S...
None of those are significant sources of fat or protein, and a few are at best moderate sources of carbs.
And no, you're not going to produce enough potatoes in a "local garden" to feed our cities, much less all of the people in the rest of the world who are fed by our croplands.
My grandmother told me that during WWII in Belarus many people in villages for 3 years eat pretty much only potatoes plus few berries/mushrooms and little fish. It was pointless to keep any animals as those would be taken either by Germans, local police folks or partisans. And all potatoes were grown with pure manual labor as the were no horses and petrol for any kind of machinery was simply not available.
Despite such diet people were not malnourished or underweight and even sold potato to get money for other stuff.
And nearly a kg of potatoes at a meal? While that might be possible, I'm not sure I could manage it.
Also, I've noticed that the stories of the hardships that one's grandparents faced do not become less impressive as the years go by. :-)
The prices are higher due energy prices rising in Europe and China, natural gas supply disruptions in Texas due to hurricanes and floods, and sanctions on Belarus. They are a driver of inflation, not caused by inflation.
Inflation is higher than it’s been in 40 years, and that timeframe includes several energy cost spikes, many of which were worse than the current spike.
Because any fixes for the broader inflation problem would have relatively little effect on this specific subset.
Is that ridiculous? Hmm. Maybe try again. We can afford to be generous, after all! Let's say that it's 10% due to monetary policy, and 265% due to other factors.
... Nope, we're still not really there.
Food purchases are way up since Covid.
Their "Net sales of US Foods from 2012 to 2020" wasn't, but it also said sales were down in 2020.
What makes comparisons tricky is people didn't eat out as much, so that cuts spending on some metrics. On others, commercial kitchens are more efficient and buy from wholesalers, so that lowers a different metric. But people consume fewer calories when cooking for themselves.
My main point is that for everyone but the lower 5%, I'd be surprised if they got a stimulus check and ate more calories because of it. I work in tech and make decent money. Maybe I buy the organic berries instead of the regular ones, but I'm not buying twice as many baskets because I have more money. I still only needed 3.
Granted, yields will be lower. But instead of growing seed corn and soy beans, farmers need to diversify and bring back species that are unique to their regions- that were carefully selected and bred to grow best in that area. Did you know one in the early 20th century, one of the greatest exporters of apples was the state of Iowa? Not now.
An unfortunate side effect has been the overuse of insecticide, pesticides and fertilizers, and poor planning in the choice of crops leading to excessive depletion of groundwater for water hungry crops like rice (which is a staple food for half the country) - https://eos.org/articles/indias-food-bowl-heads-toward-deser... ... Due to this, the fertile soils are being damaged, and farmers are blindly overcompensating with even more fertilizers. The second problem that has now come up is that we are producing so much, that sometimes huge quantities of grain just rot in government storages.
So the new Chief Minister of Punjab had suggested a novel idea - if the central government were to increase their procurement price (the government is the largest buyer in India), a large number of farmers could shift to organic farming that would be more sustainable in the long run. While the produce output would be less by 25% to 40% with organic farming (hence the need of increase in the procurement price) less production can address the wastage that happens. Moreover, organic produce is said to be safer and healthier due to the very limited use of insecticides / pesticides and fertilizers, and that would make India healthier.
That said, who knows. It's a complex system, cascading failures are common. Maybe the demand shock of the pandemic (restaurants cancelled orders, farmers cut back demand for fertilizer, factories predicted big demand decrease, but that was successfully "worked around" by government intervention, now the demand is higer than estimated, plus the aforementioned other factors.)
Why isn’t some of it used as fertilizer, or is it?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/02/sewage-s...
Corn and ag subsidies have as much or more to do with govt "buying" surplus and "selling" it to foreign countries as part of aid packages. And dominating the world grain market, which gives the US even more indirect control over foreign grain growing capabilities, making others reliant on the US. (Bc investing in local production is risky when the US can just flood the market.)
Separately, most corn grown for ethanol or animal feed isn't going to directly be rerouted to food supply, unless we approach a full collapse type situation (and even then, it would be more market and regulation collapse and black market emergence than due to policy changes).
But keeping those farmers in business and capable of growing table corn next season (with minimal capital investment or changes to practices required) accomplishes roughly the same thing.
In my worldview, a political issue that Biden and the EU agree on, and Trump is less enthusiastic about is probably a good thing.
I don't know all the ins and outs, and would generally prefer moving to EVs, but you didn't actually mention why you're not a fan of this policy?
(Might have been a different ethanol. There are many things that can be turned into ethanol, and it matters if some are worth it and others are not).
Sure there are the backward, resistant type of farmers too. But they're not the majority because such farms are much more prone to failure. It doesn't matter if the stereotype is that farmers are all backwards, they adapt to economic pressures regardless.
From: https://pure.coventry.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/11930738/1...
"The price-increases stem partly from global energy costs, with the average natural-gas price in Europe for the October-December quarter 10 times as much as that for the year of 2020, according to World Bank data. Nitrogen production facilities rely heavily on natural gas to convert chemical raw materials into finished products, so rises in the natural-gas price often flow through into fertilizer costs. Major fertilizer producers including China, Turkey, Egypt and Russia also curbed exports in the second half of 2021, further pushing up global prices."
The cause-and-effect graph is much, much more complicated than you might assume.
For example, having to compete with cheap renewable energy would force fossil fuel prices down to match, making fertiliser costs cheaper.
If fossil fuels no longer needed to be used to make gasolene, then the unused production could be redirected into chemical feedstocks instead, including industrial and agricultural chemicals.
Costs are probably rising because of reduced exports, not the other way around. This can happen for all sorts of reasons, but is usually OPEC countries price-gouging because they can. If they have to compete with non-fossil-fuel energy sources, they can't unilaterally set energy prices by reducing production or exports.
Etc, etc...
- the energy situation in China, suffering coal shortages, leading to shortfalls in the production of fertilizer, and
- hurricanes in Texas which shut down natural gas production, leading to shortages of ammonia and urea as inputs to fertilizer production, and
- all sorts of COVID stuff impacting production in lots of ways, and
- sanctions against Belarus, a major potash producer, and
- yes, the energy situation in Europe, where the renewables had a few problems and weren't quite cutting it yet, such that gas is in short supply, while Russia is saber-rattling.
It's a one-among-many thing.
One possibly better form of this argument would be to suggest this threat to global food security is a representative of the situation which would occur if activists' stated goals were met, but in this case an argument that does not clearly state words to this effect is an argument that is undermined by the fact this is much more coincidence rather than design.
1/4 of Canada’s natgas consumption is from Alberta’s oil sands industry.
https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/ma...
Heat + pressure + atmospheric nitrogen + catalysts + methane is being used to produce ammonia and urea which are either used directly or further reacted to produce other nitrogen compounds for fertilizer and so much more.
The key detail you neglect to mention is that those oil wells are in the middle of nowhere with no pipeline infrastructure. If the value of the natural gas being leaked was more than the cost of the infrastructure required to bring it to market, companies would have already built it.
Spending $1000 in additional infrastructure to recover $1001 additional methane could make financial sense. But what if manufacturing that infrastructure utilized more btus of cheaper or cleaner energy than what gets recovered?
Then you're still better off not recovering it, financially and from an embedded net energy/ greenhouse gas perspective.
Most climate change activists are aware that they're making tough choices. They've probably been living their lives in less comfort and more expenditure than the average person for years trying to give the right example.
That neighbour you know, that installed solar panels on the roof of his house 15 years ago? He probably could have taken his family to Hawaii 3 times for the money they spent on that. And he's probably only recovered his initial investment a couple years ago if you live in a northern climate, if at all.
If we tried to solve the energy problem at any sizable scale (nuclear or renewable, some of the low-hanging efficiencies available), so many other needs for oil & gas would taper. Prices could be stable or ideally decrease, while production is cut.
We've seen too many instances of electricity getting expensive, gas being a better alternative. We need to do better. I'm not even starting in on engaging what I think is the more contemporary geopolitical influence, the reduction in exports you cite.
Malthusian fears and Luddite patterns are not designed to improve the lot of humanity, only those who can afford luxuries. Deep down, they're rooted in the notion that the world would be better off without undesirable surplus humans.
More sustainable methods do exist to grow crops, and much of what the rich West eats are sustainably grown "organic" vegetables and free range meat. But the bulk of humanity lives on industrial-scale agriculture. Industrial ag is actually why there are so many people. Removing it is unnecessarily cruel. The way it shakes out when there are food shortages is not that suddenly the rich stop eating free-range chicken. It's that the poor starve. You can't expect that inequality to change just by restricting food production across the board. If a Big Mac doubles in price in America, it's still well within the reach of most Americans. If my grass-fed rib eye triples in price, I might go down from 2 to 1 a week. But if grain prices go up by 30% in Africa, there's civil war and starvation. The imbalance actually becomes more extreme as access to protein is always curtailed first in the poorest areas. The assumption that demand for animal protein would go down faster in rich nations, given a price spike in grain, is wishful thinking to say the least.
There is no real solution to the ecological damage done by industrial agriculture unless you want to kill off a lot of the people who were born and live as a direct result of industrial food production.
A somewhat callous attitude.
In terms of our agricultural mean, there is no reason why every single American can't have cheap, healthy produce without having to devastate the environment. Our current pricing scheme is a product of the better part of a century of (good-intentioned) subsidies and stupendously wasteful distribution practices.
[0]: https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2012/march/data-feature...
[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/
[2]: https://www.nrdc.org/resources/grazing-operations-journey-be... unfortunately an ad for grass fed beef, but I think it says something that beef producers see the writing on the wall for the current methods affecting the environment
This hasn't been true for years. Most algal blooms around the US at least are caused by lawn runoff.
A bit weird to make such a definitive statement about the, allegedly singular, culprit with "lawn runoff".
It's really difficult, to nearly impossible, to trace back where the nitrogen and phosphorus originated from that results in oceanic dead zones thousands of miles away [1].
A good start would simply be to look at the biggest consumers of these fertilizers, and those ain't homeowners fertilizing lawns, those are industrial scale agricultural operations [2] for whom fertilizer use directly correlates with their financial bottom line [3].
[0] https://oceantoday.noaa.gov/happenowdeadzone/
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4216153/
[2] https://www.epa.gov/agriculture/agriculture-nutrient-managem...
[3] https://investigatemidwest.org/2021/11/30/excess-fertilizer-...
They need to overapply fertilizers because by now that's the only way anything grows in most places after decades of soil mismanagement, due to a wide-spread disregard of sustainable practices in favor of "fast results, fast money" over-fertilizing [0].
Rotating crops to keep the soil fertile sounds nice in theory, in capitalistic practice it's not popular because demand for different crops is not interchangeable, so rotating crops means industrial scale operations miss out on valuable growing months, labor and resources, growing a product that's not as profitable.
The "fix" is to just keep applying fertilizers to keep growing those high demand crops because industrial scale operations also think like corporations; It's all about the financial returns in the short-term, not about long-term sustainability.
[0] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/01/210112125215.h...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_sup...
At the same time, I think this chart is misleading: it shows our ability to support the current population as it currently consumes, which includes an extraordinary amount of crop diversion towards animal feed. The GP is describing a world in which we all eat radically less meat, which is also one in which we need to use less synthetic fertilizer for all that meat's food.
All I've observed is that the GP's conclusion doesn't necessarily extend from the data they've presented: it's just not the case that 3.5 billion humans would have to die if we didn't use as much synthetic fertilizer as we do. We can feed the entire world with much less indirection than we currently go through.