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Comment by rr808 | Hacker News Reader

This is a good thing, fertilizer is heavily overused, poisoning waterways. Yes the cost of food may go up as a result but the current farming practices are unsustainable.

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These kinds of ostensibly progressive arguments come very close to crossing the line into fascist eugenics, even if they're made with the greenest of intentions.

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.

This would be rather like telling the Irish in 1847 that “This is a good thing because it will make you less dependant on a single crop”.

A somewhat callous attitude.

Indeed. They might as well celebrate power blackouts because that reduces carbon emissions --never mid the emergency services which can't be rendered and affect lives --but hey they avoided carbon emissions! That's ideology.

The problem with that metaphor is that the Irish largely went hungry because England continued to export food from the island during the famine. The crop failure was because of nature, but the famine was man made.

I've got bad news for you if you think our current crop of politicians and businessmen are going to pick lives over profits in an analogous situation.

I am absolutely too cynical to believe that, trust me. But I think we absolutely should be honest with ourselves and admit that any famine is really because our leaders valued profits over lives, rather than pinning the blame on fertilizer prices.

It means poor people will suffer. Overpopulated paces may suffer more. Places experiencing bad crops as well…. It’s not something to celebrate in detachment. [the market, and thus price of food staples, is global]

More production will be moved from grain for cattle to growing food for humans. We can massively scale up our food production if we remove beef from the average diet.

It means everything will get more expensive. Poor people also eat meats. Their staple grains will go up, and if the feed for chickens and cows goes up, so will their meat.

I think the person you’re responding to is saying that it’s good that we’ll all be eating less meat. There’s an important point to be made about inequity and the decline of commodity meat, but that point doesn’t detract from the fact that it’s probably good for everyone involved and the planet for us to be eating less meat.

Yes, over time, that would be fine, but not a shock induced by the high prices of fertilizer that immediately affect prices --inducing glee in some because they don't see the immediate detrimental effects.

I agree that shocks generally aren't good. I'm also a meat eater, and I don't like paying more for meat. But I do simultaneously recognize that (1) meat should be more expensive than it is, and (2) that the "real" price of food is completely divorced from the actual price.

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.

Most agricultural land can't support food crops but can support ruminants.

That’s not an argument against dedicating existing cropland to human food production. The GP isn’t talking about pasture and rangeland. Just the huge amount of cropland used to grow feed for animal ag. And while we’re at it, let’s reform the ~40M acres [0] cropland used for grazing back to growing human feed. Then we can take the 127M acres of crops used to grow animal feed [1] and also dedicate that to human feed. All while reducing the animal populations and helping with the overgrazing happening on ~50% of range and pasture [2]. And to pre-empt the argument that food animals are fed the byproducts of human-consumption crops, go back to [1]. But yes feel free to feed them the byproducts… it’s just not going to be very much of their calories.

[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

> poisoning waterways

This hasn't been true for years. Most algal blooms around the US at least are caused by lawn runoff.

Source please. The quantity of fertilizer used on farms dwarfs that used on lawns.

The knowledge and professionalism and price sensitivity of the farmer dwarfs that of thr average home owner. How many nights of sleep does the average home owner lose each year obsessing over the amount of fertilizer and cost of that fertilizer? Meanwhile that actually happens to most farmers. They obsess and endlessly talk about how to cut their fertilizer and pesticides to the bare minimum they think they can handle so they can maybe own their farms for the next generation. You think they're throwing away product by over applying fertilizer? These guys walk their fields once a week and some once a day. They notice things like soil and fertilizer runoff.

> You think they're throwing away product by over applying 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...

This is still very much true according to NOAA [0]

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-...

I went back and revisited what I read and realized I was overstating the case on gains in fertilization efficiency. It's unfortunately too late to edit my original comment.

You're talking about the death of half the world's population:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_sup...

Cheap synthetic fertilizer is one of the single greatest inventions of the 20th century, and is singlehandedly responsible for an enormous increase in our productive capacity and quality of life.

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.

But this presupposes that the inefficient diversion to animal feed would work itself out in favor of keeping everyone fed if less grain were available. Since the inefficient systems of production and consumption are already deeply entrenched in areas with the highest savings and the most buffer against instability, there's no reason to think they would be the first thing to collapse, or even that the economics might not favor keeping livestock fed over reallocating grain to humans.

I don't think there's any supposition of this sort in my comment: I haven't committed to any particular opinion on how we would (or whether it's politically feasible to) distribute the agricultural products that normally go into animal feed. Contemporary economic pressures, as you've correctly noted, don't help!

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.

Fair enough, but we could only do that if there were some master plan to reallocate the land used for animal feed, the processing, the innumerable distribution systems that get food to people. Saying this is like saying there's enough energy from the sun, wind and hydro to let us go off fossil fuels. It would be true if you could wave a wand and redesign the whole system from scratch. But that observation doesn't make it any less of a crisis if the system as-is begins to break down. The trouble with a lot of these idealistic proclamations that "we have the ability ...if" is that they don't take into account the messy realities, and so the only purpose they serve is virtue-signaling. Tl;dr the only useful solutions in this will involve ways to produce or more efficiently distribute more fertilizer, not to say that we could or should get along without it.

As cynical as it might sound; Maybe that much population, at increasingly higher living standards, was never sustainable to begin with.

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