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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

>There are options besides chemical fertilizers.

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.

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In the US, perhaps we could stop the obscene subsidies for petroleum, corn, and meat, and subsidize more sustainable, nutritious and humane crops and farming practices.

If those existed and were cheaper, that would be done

That presumes that those subsidies are for solely practical reasons, when in reality they're at least partially a political tool.

Of course they're not cheaper - they're not subsidized.

If what existed? sustainable, nutritious and humane crops and farming practices? they do exist.

The person you're responding to said "existed and were cheaper," but you seem to have ignored the second conjunct of their claim in your response.

To be fair, that poster injected “and were cheaper” in response to a suggestion that subsidies should be moved away from substitutes and toward these practices, which probably wasn’t done in bad faith, but doesn’t exactly rebut the suggestion that subsidies would need to change to make this economically sustainable.

We would also need more land to rotate and water. We are running out of both. Esp in the developing world the article speaks about..

There are techniques to cut down water consumption by quite a lot. As for the land; we'll have to invest quite a bit more in ecosystem restoration in the future.

Can we start now

A no till rotational cover crop system with grazing is better in pretty much every way than monocropping with fertilizer, with the main downside being required knowledge of animal husbandry, along with some additional expenses in terms of fencing and some time investment in care of the animals.

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