Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security
bloombergquint.com
bloombergquint.com
Nearly every symbiotic relationship fungi make is based on buying sugars from plants by selling them minerals from biological weathering of rock (particles). What happens in conventional agriculture is that we murder all of the fungi.
There are a few places with strange soil compositions that are actually lacking in particular minerals. We could either elect to do something else with that land, or transition everyone but them to a post-green-revolution strategy.
After a rain, as the soil goes from waterlogged to dry, there are phases that are hostile to root hairs and ones that are conducive. So the plant roots pulse with these cycles, advancing and retreating, sometimes arriving at places vacated by other plants. By this mechanism, any plant can scavenge some of the nitrogen left in the decaying root hairs of their neighbors.
I would also warn that thinking nitrogen=legume is a potentially limiting strategic error. While something like 7% of all plants fall into the Fabaceae (legume) family, some other pockets of the Fabales order also have root nodules, in particular, alder, and up into the Rosids clade (buckthorn, ceanothus), and then a few odd stragglers like borage, which makes me wonder if it's a taxonomic problem, parallel evolution, or what.
And then there's mondo grass (asparagaceae), which nobody expects to have root nodules. I knew about that plant for about two decades before someone pointed out it's nitrogen fixing, and that's not even in the wikipedia article. And in fact I'm having a dickens of a time finding a citation for that.
There have even been a few studies that warn that some strains of conventional crops are losing the ability to make this exchange. When we hit peak phosphorous and start taxing anhydrous ammonia production, these strains are at risk of going extinct (hopefully not enough of any crop to take us with them).
The wrong question is, "how many calories of <X> can I get out of this field in a year?" The right question is "how many calories can I get total out of this field in a year" and there are a number of people out there demonstrating that they can get about 50% of the conventional yield from an acre, but for 4 different crops, and a few other things thrown in to get over 2x the total yield.
The "problem", in scare quotes, is that these solutions take more thinking and knowing than scourging your fields every year. But since running a farm practically takes a bachelor's degree these days, that's not really a problem of lack of resource in that area. It's more a problem of perspective and focus.
A lot of US agriculture is done on by contract operators. Bill Gates seems to work mostly in that model.
I mention Gates because what he says suggests that he'd love to see that claim pan out on a large scale. Also, he's known for insisting on high dollar yields.
And yet, we're talking about demonstrations and not actual significant experience.
Maybe Gates is lying about his social goals AND also isn't profit-maximizing.
But, if he isn't, why aren't the demonstrators doing good and doing well (2X production is a big bucks) by doing this stuff at scale somewhere in Gates-land?
(The most obvious could be that nobody want to buy some of the other crops, so while you could get the calories out, you can't get the dollars out, and the calories would go to waste if everyone did that.)
I agree on this point. Every successful farmer I've met has been of notably above average intelligence. However at the family farm scale it's a very fragile business. A small increase in input costs can greatly reduce or eliminate profitability. While I think permaculture, no-till, and other such techniques are great, we have to acknowledge that they require considerably more labor than running a combine harvester over corn or soy fields. The labor shortage is bad enough that even generally immigration skeptical rural areas welcome H-2A migrant workers. And while the best American farm workers are every bit as hard-working as the best Mexican seasonal workers, the average Mexican that comes to the USA in the program is considerably more reliable than the average American these days.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-details/?pubid=440...
https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-details/?pubid=440...
Industrialized farming practices are capable of changing.
Nitrogen is 70% of our atmosphere. When you remove all other plant life in order to get the last 20% of theoretical yield from your land, you end up having to manually provide all of the services that were provided by the plants you killed. The Green Revolution is a petrochemical revolution. Cooking allows us to use lignin calories to recover more calories from our existing food supply. Livestock do the same, either by converting grasses (ungulates) or recycling unpalatable foods (pigs).
When the petrochemicals become expensive we will have to go forward and/or backward to some other solution (most likely old solutions with new twists). The sibling comment with the huge bibliography points to some of the more coherent voices in the world of polyculture agriculture, although Gabe Brown exists in a sort of grey area between aggressive crop rotation and polyculture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizosphere
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1906655116
https://regenerationinternational.org/why-regenerative-agric...
Some proponents of regenerative agriculture to learn from are:
Joel Salatin - https://www.polyfacefarms.com/
Ray Archuleta - https://soilhealthacademy.org/team/ray-archuleta/
Gabe Brown - http://brownsranch.us/
I assure it is not BS. without fertilizer you do not the explosive yields that we get all over th world including the United States.
And it is in fact well documented in a huge collection of science journals.
My only real point was that anything could look rational after what they went through before hand.
India is, by many accounts, likely to switch to a new-new form of agriculture sooner than some of the rest of us. The combination of bigger problems and a shallower 'tradition' of western farming practices makes that easier.
There was a post here about California covering its irrigation canals with solar panels. A couple of us politely pointed out that a couple of provinces in India have already been doing this for a while.
Nevertheless, structural issues remain. Farmer suicides are not even remotely new and it's disingenous to suggest otherwise. And it has to be pointed out that the suicide rate amongst Indian farmers is lower than the national average.
You'll have to pry Western farming methods from the cold dead hands of Indian farmers. Even the urban intelligencia has shut up about organic/traditional farming after seeing what's happening across the Palk Strait.
The indian itelligencia? I'd like to hear more about the commonalities here between equivalent folks in the uhmmm "west"
That is the primary contribution of synthetic fertilizer, and there aren't scalable natural processes to match it. Countries used to go to war over nitrogen stores (such as islands covered in bat guano).
Food to feed your troops (and workers in armament factories) is a strategic military resource.
You have to either grow it yourself or import it. Artificial fertilizer allows you stop importing nitrogen (which could be blocked by embargoes) and make it locally, which would allow you to potentially grow food locally and not import it either (again, embargoes).
pH and temperature are pretty easy and common ways for soil to keep essential minerals away from the plant life which could utilize them.
I bought some property that was practically concrete at the beginning of the dry season. I hurt my hand and damaged a tool trying to take a soil sample to send to the lab. A couple years later you'd never know, except that past me was apparently smart enough to take a video that I found when trying to free up some disk space.
Plants, bacteria and fungi all manipulate soil PH for better or for worse, and you can steer that. And keeping soil covered, especially with tall plants, can drop the temperature tens of degrees Celsius. A forest floor is much closer to ground temperature, for a host of reasons.
The one that fascinates me the most is the way the Mayans did it - Chinampas. That and aquaculture growing lots of smaller fish seems like a create combo if we could get small backyard pond/farms going
I hear that water quality and, to a lesser extent, water chemistry has a huge impact on taste. I've sort of noticed that in certain lakes compared to others.
I challenge you to a duel, thems fightin' words. Fried catfish is one of the greatest things on the planet (mind you not terribly healthy).
There's lots of FUD about China maliciously overconsuming fish, but they actually (sustainably) farm >50% of their seafood IIRC.
How are we going to feed another 2 billion people let alone those that we have without fossil fuel inputs? Maybe biotech will save us, but I am skeptical.
Stop employing people in bullshit jobs. Immediately you've got 75% workforce on basic income, and I think some of them would like to work on small scale local farms. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regenerative_agriculture] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income]
We already grow food for 10 milliard (thousand millions for our obscurant us friends) people. Problem is poverty and inequality, not scarcity. [https://www.huffpost.com/entry/world-hunger_b_1463429]
> https://www.finegardening.com/project-guides/gardening-basic...
We even have 8 milliards of humans producing manure, which we currently (mostly) flush to the sea [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_soil].
And if we do use it, we do it wrongly [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/mar/22/i-dont-k...].
We have to learn how to use what we have (atmosphere, rhizosphere, pigs, poultry, humans), that what does not destroy forests and wildlife (cows), and avoid that that kills and poisons the nature (pesticides & herbicides). Then we have a chance.
There's another thing that comes to my mind, when people suggest the adoption of a plant-based diet.
Protein quality [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_quality#Protein_source...]
Why?
In our modern society where many people require less calories than our ancestors, because most don't do as much physically intensive labour, it's somewhat tricky to get enough protein from food _without_ taking in too many calories.
Yes, plants do contain protein. But sort the above linked table for "complete protein" and you'll see of the 9 "complete protein" foods, only 5 are plant foods. And of those 5, only Quinoa appears to have no limiting amino acid.
It seems that animals have had an important role in recent times of concentrating plant protein to levels such that humans can get enough protein without taking in more calories than they require per their lifestyles.
Let people who are used to meat/dairy diets adopt plant-based diets and I wouldn't be surprised if this leads to more of them becoming overweight.
Imo it's a good thing when people try to eat less meat/dairy but they shouldn't think it's an easy thing to do that comes without caveats.
David Raubenheimer is said to have conducted an experiment where people's behaviour showed that protein content is what disproportionately determines how much people eat until they feel saturated.
Some references: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01956... https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/obr.12131
I think that the exact opposite is true. Most new vegans lose weight quickly.
There are no overweight fruitarians (imho - not my cup of tea). And not many vegans. But there are many ways how to do things - if you're eating a lot of fats, processed foods, junk food ... you'll be overweight, vegan or not.
Also, you can't replace meat/dairy with single protein source (e.g. tofu) and think that you're ok. That's not the way it works with the plants.
For me vegan diet means whole foods, minimum fats, as diverse diet as possible, almost no junk/processed food, 30-50% raw vegetables. It's not easy to gain weight this way.
> Imo it's a good thing when people try to eat less meat/dairy but they shouldn't think it's an easy thing to do that comes without caveats.
You're making it sound scary :) It is easy, certainly not hard, but you're right, new vegans have some things to learn.
The only supplement you'll certainly need is vitamin B12.
In the end what you'll want is fruits, vegetables and lentils of various kind. If you have a diverse diet, you'll have no problems.
Yes, it means trying (a lot of) new things and recipes and some learning (how to substitute meat/dairy with plant-based alternatives), but it's not hard and in the end it's very satisfying process. I'm always hunting for new recipes.
> David Raubenheimer is said to have conducted an experiment where people's behaviour showed that protein content is what disproportionately determines how much people eat until they feel saturated.
Yes, lentils & beans. Satiety guaranteed :)
Some of his crops are targets of opportunity. They're a cover crop and if the weather is just right and he gets it planted in time, he might be able to harvest it, or at least graze some livestock on it, but if not, then that's fine too, because the dividends still made it worth doing.
He is a very frugal farmer, both in resources and energy. Mark Shepard, in contrast, seems to be more interested in the energy side of frugality, and is so open in his disdain for people throwing good money/time after bad that it's practically his personality. In particular he likes to rant about how utterly mathematically unsound the idea of rain barrels is, and the kind of cognitive dissonance it takes to keep telling yourself otherwise.
Rain barrels make a tiny bit of sense in a small urban lot with a large roof. They make no goddamned sense at all in most agricultural contexts.
On paper Mark Shepard seems to have about 106 acres around his house, which I think is a gross branding mistake, because he farms a lot more land than just his homestead. I have to find this interview again because it was kind of shocking and I'm afraid I may be misquoting it. One interviewer got him talking about all of the land he owns elsewhere, leases, or consults on and he makes some comment about he may actually be managing more farmland than anyone east of the Mississippi.
Most of us are on the internet all day regardless. We downplay the incremental cost of both doing things, bragging about it online, and getting it on people's radars, like it's simple but we mostly think about the people who are good at it and not all of the ones who quietly disappeared without most of us ever learning about it.
Farming is exhausting. Farming is remote. Farming is slow, and experiments take years to prove to be more than dumb luck. The gap between killing it and selling your audience on the notion that you are killing it is much, much wider. Talk enough, and you have to stop doing, which means you're now selling ideas that you can't back up.
Understand that it is my wish and hope that these sort of low/no fertilizer organic techniques can work better than "traditional" heavy-fertilizer/irrigation farming the west now mainly employs. It's just that vaguely recall hearing about this sort of thing 30 years ago. And 20 years ago. And 10 years ago.
I have created fully automated systems for indoor that control everything except harvest. It is impossible to convince people due to the cost I am pretty sure.
Thusly? Money printer really does not go brr for this.
When I was 17 years old I went to Sweden as part of a cultural exchange program (I'm from South America). One of the first things that shocked me was the sheer amount of food being wasted for no reason whatsoever.
In my country, even though I come from a privileged family, you can't shield yourself away from poverty. Throughout my entire life living with my parents I've seen people ring our door to ask for food. Personally, I NEVER waste any food, if I put something on my plate, I'll eat it unless it's rotten. And that goes for pretty much everyone I know. Every time I went out to eat with my parents, if there were any significant amount of food left, we would always ponder whether or not we would want to it later. If we decided we would not, we would take it anyway and find someone on the street who would.
While in Sweden, I lived with Swedish families and attended to a traditional Swedish high school. So I'd eat lunch at school and dinner with my host families. My first day eating lunch at school I was shocked, to say the least. I mean, yeah, the food was great, it's amazing that there is such a functional high-quality school system there, and so organized too; once you're done eating, you're supposed to take your plate, put any leftovers on a big trash bin, and give your plate to the lady who puts them into a industrial washer. The amount of food kids threw away was just staggering. And it's not a one off thing. It's a behavior, they put more food than they know they'll eat, every single day. It's not like they put a ridiculous amount of food on their plate and throw most of it away. It's like they don't even bother paying attention to how hungry they are, they just put whatever amount of food they feel like putting, and then throw away the rest. That goes even for drinks, they would serve a cup full of milk or water, and throw half of it away.
I know I'm talking about kids and teenagers, but they will grow up to be adults some day. And I saw that of many adults also. On of my duties as an exchange student was to connect both cultures, mine and the country I was being hosted by. I always tried to give people there a glimpse of what of poverty was and how privileged they were, and I always felt I never got the idea through. It felt sometimes they have a cartoonish idea of poverty and what it means to not have the money to pay for really basic things.
I'm not here to call anyone out. I just think there are times when the people are also part of problem, and I wanted to give a personal perspective.
Even in my university's restaurant, which feeds students on a massive industrial scale, I see food waste. But even in a much bigger scale, the amount was significantly less.
Elimination of food waste is not practical and should not be a goal, you'll just ultimately fail and give up on intermediary goals that might just suffice.
Where the food usually goes are into landfills where they produce dangerous accumulations of methane that can explode. Some folks have tried capturing that methane to burn, but if stuff can be made into compost, you’d need less synthetic fertilizers.
Historian Rachel Laudan talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about food waste. Laudan argues that there are tradeoffs in preventing food waste--in reduced time for example, or a reduction in food security, and that these tradeoffs need to be measured carefully when considering policy or giving advice to individuals or organizations. She also discusses the role of food taboos and moralizing about food. Along the way, Laudan defends the virtue of individual choice and freedom in deciding what to eat.
And meals are often bigger than what everyone can finish during that meal. This is especially so when there is visit. In Chinese culture, it's not done to ask visit whether they want more food because they are not supposed to say yes. Asking is thus equivalent to signalling that you don't want to give them more food, i.e. a lack of hospitality. Thus people make more food than necessary.
That in itself isn't a problem because one could save the leftovers in the fridge. But some refuse to eat leftover food because it's not fresh, or they refuse to eat fridge leftovers that are more than 1 day old (you can save most leftovers in the fridge for 3 days if you put them in the fridge immediately after eating). Some even believe that even frozen food is considered unfresh, or has fewer nutrients or something. Others refuse to put anything in the fridge at all because they hate colder-than-room-temperature food (why reheating is a problem eludes me, but they refuse to use reheating as a solution).
All of this pains me. I hate wasting food. The result: I'm often the only one who eats the oldest leftovers, everybody else eats fresh even though there are lots of leftovers.
This doesn't just apply to food, but also energy. Some insist on turning the heat so high that they can wear tshirts indoors during winter, because that's more comfortable than wearing more clothes. Others think I'm being weird for trying so hard to drive electric-only (driving to a public charging station can be a pain compared to parking at the most convenient location).
3 days? Try a week or two.
I'm just happy if I can get my wife to put food in the fridge in under 2 hours.
"In the United States 30 per cent of all food, worth US$48.3 billion (€32.5 billion), is thrown away each year." "The food currently wasted in Europe could feed 200 million people (FAO, 2013)."
Source: https://www.unep.org/thinkeatsave/get-informed/worldwide-foo...
That seems unlikely to me. I'm pretty sure that even poor people in the US pay more than a dollar a day for their food. So where does all the money go?
Tax breaks and other subsidies let the farmers stay afloat, and organizations such as the Chicago Board of Trade set artificially low wholesale prices.
Every time I see a garbage can, I see money that was spent on waste. And when I see money, I see time that was spent. And time is something you can't get back, it's gone for good once you spend it. Every garbage can is a waste of life. Minutes and hours thrown away.
Quite the opposite. Often food waste is the result of convenience. That garbage can full of food in the cafeteria is a prime example: People could get smaller portions, but then they'd have to queue again to get seconds if they got too little, so they get a little more to be on the safe side.
Sometimes, something in my fridge spoils because I didn't eat it fast enough. I could always shop only for the next day when I'm sure I'll eat it, but then I'd spend at least an hour extra each week on trips to the store.
Sure, some time was spent to produce it, but the low price is a good signal that that is negligible.
An abundance of food does self-perpetuate to the point that it becomes expendable. Well run family kitchens would likely have a positive effect on people's disposition towards food. I mill grains and bake bread, sourcing the grain supply from a well-run farm in my state, and this never fails to give me a moment to reflect on my relationship to food. It is, unfortunately, not commonplace for American households to engage with their consumption further up the supply chain than the supermarket shelf, where access is the most convenient.
I was over at a friend's house a few years ago, and she had prepared lunch for her daughter. When her daughter complained she didn't like it, my friend threw the whole plate food in the trash without blinking, and made something else. I asked my friend, and she said the food is so cheap it doesn't matter. And you can't just let your child not eat.
My parents certainly didn't grow up poor. Both of my grandfathers made a good living. I don't know what conclusion to draw, but there seems to have been a huge cultural shift towards food in the post war years.
You can, most of us just don't because people think you're neglecting the kid if the kid chooses not to eat a meal you provide them. Same reason we send way more food for lunches than my kids ever eat—because the amount they will eat looks "too small" and my wife's worried what people will think.
I hate this stuff, but get the reasoning. IMO they'll eat if they're hungry. Meanwhile, we have an obesity crisis.
I don't have any food growing in my garden even though I could. Is that food waste? What if I plant some vegies and forget to eat them and they die and rot. Is that food waste? I don't see that food waste itself is a real problem, just an illusion because it's so visible.
Surely we all waste electricity by having hot showers instead of cold, or leaving our computers on when we're not using them. We can afford it, so why not? Even those poor people are wasting oxygen in the air! Imagine how scarce that is in space or a submarine.
I also hate food waste, because it seems to dumb. But I think it is there for a reason - at least to some degree.
1) poverty means people can't afford food
2) you're not reaching a great many villages by anything bigger than a land cruiser.
Distribution has always been the cause of global hunger issues, at least for the past few decades.
Food security is a wholly separate issue.
Perhaps some farmers might switch to practices that are not so dependent upon as much to external inputs … but even switching to things like no-till or using local inputs like manure, or using soil-regenerating practices like polycropping or integrated pest-control is going to take time.
It’s doable though. The Cubans have been operating their agriculture without imported oil and fertilizers since the US shut down imports. That also meant that use of tractors became limited, as are long-distance transport for food.
Better than food security is food sovereignty, and people within a locality being able to feed themselves.
not saying this is a bad thing. soil regeneration and more sustainable farming practices are a good thing Imo. it's just that we can't switch to that instantly. yield goes down, takes time to switch, cost likely will increase to make the same $/acre of land, etc.
And, soil rebuilding takes time. No-till won’t really start becoming advantageous until about year 4 or 5.
But like I said — the Cubans had to do this. They were not given the time to switch.
from all the reading I have done, and in my own experience with a shitty 3acre hobby farm, overall yield per acre never reaches an equivalent to modern destructive farming practices.
I've been thinking about getting a hobby farm as well. Do you have any recommendations on where to start or tips? I can't even tell if I can just buy a plot of land in some unincorporated area and use it for whatever I see fit (CA).
https://ucanr.edu/sites/UrbanAg/Resources_and_Help/Farm_Trai...
- Zoning
- Soil type
- Water availability.
Your local UC agricultural extension office can help.
They can't always help, but they'll have good suggestions to think about.
It is expensive, time consuming and very laborous. Only do it if you like the out doors, you are home 90% of the time in planting and harvest season, and half the time during the growing season.
I bought degraded land. I threw clover and mulch over everything the moment i bought it. (Bought the clover, called the local arborist to dump 30+ truckloads of mulch over the season for free) I let 90% of it sit there and do nothign the first two years, and that seemed to help rebuild the soil well.
I live in Michigan, so I cant tell you how CA works. But in michigan, you can do crops and animals pretty much anywhere you can score 3 acres.
I have a real issue with moisture, its a VERY wet lot. makes planting hard because of the mud and stuff. Whatever zone you are in, figure out what your bottle neck would be (For me its waiting for the water levels to go down enoguh to plant) and come up with a reasonable plan to solve that bottle neck before you buy the land.
Dont plan to make money. This hobby farm is definately a net loss. It would be WAY cheaper to just buy my food from the grocery store. I do this because I like gardening, I call my self a large scale gardener most of the time, because i feel like a poser calling 3 acres a Farm (1 acre of that is house, barn, garrage, a small yard, etc.
None of those are necessarily true. Sometimes they are, but organic prohibits some farming methods, but non-organic doesn't prohibit anything that organic does that work.
Some of the natural chemicals allowed in organic are worse for the soil than the synthetic counterpart. In some cases there isn't a natural chemical that is allowed and so the farmer resorts to plowing the soil which is a horrible thing to do to the soil, and because of the fuel used more expensive than synthetic chemicals.
Organic has found some useful things, but farmers are adopting them. Farmers have also found useful things that organic is adopting.
TL;DR Fertilizer dilutes the taste and nutrition of plants by making them bigger not better.
> And, soil rebuilding takes time.
So modern day farm equipment, ploughs which dig deeper cause soil erosion which in turn means more fertilizers plus an increase in the seeds grown to yield highly in certain chemical profile environments. Alot of plants classed as weeds can also be used. So the Mediterranean diet which is supposed to help you live a long life is actually based on picking wild herbs and plants, not the stuff you buy from a supermarket! You can eat dandelions and other wild plants. Wild blackberries taste so much better than any you can buy in a shop and the plants you can buy from a garden centre dont produce black berries which taste anywhere near as good as wild blackberries. Even wild strawberries although tiny like the size of a petit pois pea, have so much more flavour, although I will try a £350 Japanese strawberry (yes just 1 strawberry costs £350). https://metro.co.uk/2020/05/12/paul-hollywood-eats-japan-vie...
Japan doesnt have the land mass so couldnt compete on quantity, so they lead on quality food, thats why their food is the most expensive in the world.
When the horse and horse drawn ploughs are used, less soil erosion is seen as more white root masses are seen holding the soil together.
Not so long ago < 10-30years, it was common to spread manure on field instead of using fertilizer because the bacteria in the manure benefits the ground and crops, its also where we found/find our antibiotics.
I only know of one farm equipment manufacturer who is actively developing smaller farm robots/equipment (German) where as everyone else is going bigger and bigger.
I'd bet on the smaller farm equipment manufacturer because people will be looking for labour saving devices in their gardens ( & country estates) where you can have more control over the quality of the food grown, but I also understand many people live in new build estates with a tiny garden and no robots will really needed.
EU regs and their intentions mean more land has to be left wild and more hedgerows planted which means smaller fields. When fertilizers use jumped years ago many farmers started ripping up their hedgerows, now in Europe there is a trend to replace these massive plain's like fields with smaller tithe like fields which means its incompatible with large farm equipment. Protecting the wildlife is paramount.
The problem with neonicotinoids which is seeds coated with nicotine like chemicals (manmade tend to be longer lasting because they dont break down in the environment) and it messed up insects in particular bee nervous systems. Man Made Pyrethrin's are the same, they dont break down easily unlike whats found naturally in Chrysanthemum flowers. Ironically organic veg is using nicotine and nothing else which is what your grand parents used to use after the war. They used to smoke roll ups and place the used fag but's in a jam jar with water, that dark brown liquid was then sprayed onto the garden as an insecticide/pesticide. You pay a premium for this today in the super markets, but you could just buy a packet of rolling tobacco and put some baccy in a jam jar with water, let it soak and then use that liquid if you dont want to take up smoking!
>Yields for a specific crop goes down in polycropping. Yield across the entire portfolio goes up.
This is because the defensive chemicals in different plants compliment each other so instead of having a monocrop with one chemical defence, there is a range of chemicals which is enough to deter a wider range of pests.
The same mentality is seen in warfare, you dont bet on just the Airforce, you need the Navy and Army as well to really win a war.
Its also why I would invest in small robot manufacturers & AI companies which can tend to individual crops than an instrument which doesnt offer anything personal to a plant.
Its also why Bill Gates is the largest land owner in the US.
It's the only fair way to do it, IMO.
Unless there's something in it for them by their own assessment people will not make sacrifices of that magnitude.
Civil wars and regime changes aren't a lot of fun to live... or die through.
It is "dismal" but unnecessary through good governance. We really do have enough resources to ensure moderate standards of living.
Political upheaval would be appropriately considered a market failure.
item = np.random.choice(["macroeconomics","Venezuela"])
meme_du_jour: f"tell me you don't know about {item} without telling me you don't know about {item}"
print(meme_du_jour)On a less violent note, every country has seen birth rates decline as it became richer. Modern western societies only grow through immigration, and even many countries in, say, Africa, have seen drastic declines. Humanity doesn’t expand until it unavoidably runs out of food, that’s a 19th century idea.
Government isn’t directly responsible for food prices, but they frequently involve themselves because social order/stability requires reasonable food prices. When store shelves are empty in a neighborhood/ region, riots break out. Riots work on the time scale of hours/days. Families having fewer kids is on the time scale of years. Farmers planning for likely yields/costs is months/years.
Your idea of “fair” suggests you would just shrug at the famines caused by Stalin and Mao regimes and blame the people because they weren’t willing to pay enough. When people are food desperate, social order, norms, and predictability break down. This is why governments have strong incentives to intervene to ensure reasonable food prices.
Oh, and to paraphrase Hitchhiker's Guide, programmers will probably the first ones up against the wall when the revolution comes.
But before modern farming we couldn't sustain more than a billion humans or so, and most of our advancements since then have been from better machinery, watering and most of all fertilizer. Depending on what you cut, you lose way more than 50%.
1: https://extension.okstate.edu/fact-sheets/corn-as-cattle-fee...
Dividing the available arable land by global population leaves only a 100x100m plot per person - and that's before barns, silos, houses or warehouses. That's not a whole lot - as a city dweller, I'm confident I'd starve the first winter if not earlier
Modern agriculture is really impressive - farmers manage to feed around 10-20 people from such a plot
The bigger problems are a.) skills and b.) labor. Homesteading methods basically require full-time gardening by people who have put significant efforts into maximizing yields, intercropping, planting multiple harvests, growing vertically, etc. The advantage of our mechanized farming system is that we can feed the population with 1.4% of the population.
[1] https://www.theseasonalhomestead.com/the-truth-about-self-su...
[1] https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Agriculture/...
Growing without synthetic fertilizers appeals to the symbiotic Nature living, I get that. It's an ideal like any other, maybe worth of pursuit. But we first need to make peace with the fact that we'll either:
a) Be able to feed about a billion humans at most; or
b) Completely destroy many pristine ecosystems by multiplying arable land area by 5.
Removal of synthetic fertilizers would induce a yield drop of 80%: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cereal-crop-yield-vs-fert...
Runoff to freshwater inducing toxicity is one major impact from over fertilization, which is not an implication of the product itself, but it's over use.
I'm told. IANA farmer but I know many and worked with ag and water quality researchers for a few years in MN, USA.
That's all well and good, but the implication is that people should live where they grow their food, or move where it can be done. Implementing it at scale would mean either billions of dead or billions of refugees.
This resulted in widespread food insecurity, with the Cuban government rationing food to UN poverty levels [1]. Cuba also experienced food shortages due to COVID [2]. Cuba's agricultural experience is not a very good case for organic farming.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Period#Caloric_intake_...
2. https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2021/07/12/cubas-f...
Food waste is a problem, yes. Animal protein is not a problem. There is plenty of land in the US only suitable for grazing. Much better than that synthetic soup of Impossible Meat.
Food system has largely run on the JIT systems for decades that crunched the chip industry. We haven't had a serious shock I'd argue and I don't think this is one either. People recognize the JIT-ness and fragility of the system though and are (slowly) trying to backstop it. Will take a combination of distributed controlled environments for high value fruits and vegetables, _proper_ land use (high value crop land for crops; high value grazing land for grazing). This, currently, is dictated by the incentive structures in place with subsidies--which can be changed in theory.
I got a shiver down my spine just reading that sentence. Please do not tempt fate. We just had the hottest year on record. I expect we'll break that record in the next few years again. Drought is depressingly likely.
I can't find the article I remember reading but here is one: https://www.reuters.com/business/china-ensure-agricultural-p... and another: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-23/climate-c...
Looks like everything is aligning for a pretty bad 2022 and 2023
Fortunately, they do. Higher atmospheric CO2 levels mean that plants can obtain the CO2 they need more easily, with the stomata in their leaves not having to open as much. Consequently, they loose less water through the stomata, and are more drought resistant.
Of course, this only helps to a certain extent. A bad enough drought will still be very bad. And a very bad drought is bound to happen sooner or later, just from natural variability. So a robust food supply system, incorporating both a degree of local self-sufficiency in inputs, and global trade (for when crops fail in one location) is essential.
That's very likely in the current climate change scenario. Look at what's happening in the American South West right now. Lake Mead is currently at unprecedented low levels with no evidence that this will change course any time soon. It's possible within a decade there won't be enough water to run the Hoover dam. That's something no one would have taken as a serious risk 10 years ago.
* Edit * For clarity the compact divides up 17 million acre/ft per year and the real average historic flow is closer to 13 million acre/ft per year. The compact also double dips in it's accounting for some return flows.
Only in the sense that you can theoretically produce meat that way, but in reality most meat is produced on CAFOs that use grain.
Feeding cows grain in a CAFO setting allows them to rapidly put on weight and turnover their herds faster. Not doing so would result in dramatically lower yields per acre of grassland.
This statement is wrong. Livestock grazes early in its lifetime, but is moved to feed lots and feed corn and soy to prepare for slaughter. The US spends a quarter of its corn crop on feeding animals, whereas less than 10% is directly feed to people. Animal protein is a significant opportunity cost to US agriculture.
Something like 30-50M buffalo lived and grazed in North America before they were all killed. The ecosystem can most certainly sustain 30-50M cattle grazing. They wouldn't be as _profitable_ as corn-finished cattle, but they produce meat.
And there are many price and institutional barriers to completely grass fed cattle. The primary being that slaughter is centralized to FSIS inspected facilities where most non-poultry spend their final weeks packed in eating soy and corn.
This will change when we'll have to make compromise because our current agriculture model is not sustainable (both for climate and food production).
As an aside: I stopped drinking coffee because of the environmental impact. I now drink chicory and barley coffee that's locally grown and roasted. The taste is close enough. It also makes it easier to absorb iron and vitamins (which caffeine inhibits, which does not help if you're reducing meat consumption).
We do if we want everyone to eat. Grazing animals are a great way to turn stuff we can't eat into stuff we can eat, and stuff we can use to grow crops that we can also eat.
Vegans are boiling the oceans. Eat what's on your doorstep.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220429-the-climate-bene...
This is not true. There is plenty of food, especially if we put all resources we currently feed livestock into feeding humans.
The vast majority of ruminants are fed corn and soy. If they were all to eat grass we'd be able to produce much less meat than we currently do, and also use much more land
Also, what decisions are you talking about? OP said one does not need meat. Isn't that a provable fact?
Note: she does not like red meat, and we spent years and years trying to get her iron levels up without it. She started to have to get iron infusions, which are no fun at all.
All that stopped when she started eating red meat twice a week.
Yes, this is a very rare case, and I can imagine a future where red meat is provided as something like medicine for those few who really need it.
But some people do effectively need red meat.
Cattle could easily be grass fed. You just wait an extra year before selling calfs at auction. However, selling calfs leads to more $/acre of grazing land, and more cows per acre as well. A week or two eating grain in a slaughterhouse (if sold as a full grown cow) is rounding error.
The big problem I see is that the availability of grazing land is plummeting in the US southwest, thanks to desertification and climate change.
That might be offset by marginal farmland being converted to grazing (due to climate change), but that'll reduce grain production.
We can grow other things, and we can eat less meat.
We do if we want human beings at their optimal physical and mental capacity. It isn't much of a secret that increased consumption of meat led to human beings reaching their optimal physical and mental potential.
Now, excess meat consumption is a problem, but you aren't going to have optimal human beings without some meat.
Japan used to be a vegetarian society for more than a millenia. Their poor diet so terribly stunted the japanese people, physically and intellectually, that the japanese elites ended vegetarianism in favor of meat in the late 1800s.
It's something that is true everywhere - US, Europe, Japan, etc. As people ate a healthier diet with meat, the people grew taller and smarter on average.
Eating mostly polished rice or wheat is not optimal from a health perspective, so quite logically people transitioned from eating miserly diets to eating enough they started becoming taller, etc. That has very little to do with the meat itself and much more with the fact that people would previously mostly eat enough carbs to get by and children would never receive the best share in nutritional terms. Solve that and you probably can explain almost all of that effect. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/rice-disease-mystery-e... gives some insight on how primitive prescriptive dietary approaches were around the Meiji period. You can see the same magical thinking around the power of rice and meat in contemporary Madagascar and it's not pretty.
But we need freedom. And in a free country, people are free to decide what their needs are (as long as they are not breaking any laws). Some people need houses of prayer. As an atheist, I can argue that they don’t. But I don’t argue that, because it’s not up to me to decide what they need or not.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/10/01/162127460/do...
I'm not opposed to farm subsidies as part of food independence for national security, but please do not call it "green".
The government took over, for example, the manufacture and maintenance of tractors, and also selected people nearly at random to maintain them.
The one guy he interviewed said something to the extent that the tractors barely last a year before breaking. The people who designed them were incompetent, the people who used them were incompetent, and the people who maintained them were incompetent. Not that it mattered, the oil they used was basically sludge.
I'm getting to the point where I'm struggling to believe Hanlon's Razor. Especially when the most extreme environmentalists seem to align with Thanos' ideas about resolution to climate issues.
It's outrageously comic-book-y, but may as well lean into the illogic.
They even teased it at the end of The Avengers: the Chitauri leader tells Thanos "to challenge [humans] is to court death", at which time Thanos grins eagerly. But with Earth-199999's Thanos dead, they're going to have to invoke some multiversal malarkey if they want to develop that storyline now.
See: Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler, ISIS, Kim Jong Un, and numerous other examples.
If they were rational they would not be despots and fanatics. Unfortunately charismatic lunatics command followings. Charisma bypasses the rational mind and shoots straight into the limbic system (as do fear, outrage, etc).
Cult leaders are good cases too: L. Ron Hubbard, Jim Jones, Charles Manson, Keith Raniere, etc. These people would be as bad as the worst despots if they actually had power over more than a few people.
Thanos' line is more rational than this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenu
The population was half of 2020 in 1973 (1). Emissions were also half of now back then (2). That’s nearly 30 years of runway that Thano’s solution would provide. With today’s technology and rapid iteration, we could definitely do something better for climate change.
I’m not endorsing the method, but merely disagreeing with your assertion.
(1) https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-populat...
(2) https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-co2-emissi...
Most of it went rotting. I remember a village school with a large yard full of half-disassembled tractors and combines. Apparently the students were supposed to learn to use all the stuff and then give the field no rest. In reality it would just rot.
I don't think you should label all that people incompetent. They were mostly very practical in solving their immediate problem while having no freedom to rethink it. The system sucked and people were just trapped in it.
Would they be happier producing 10,000 tractors that would actually last, instead? Maybe. Would they be able to do that right away? No, but with some practice it could be done. Could they produce better tractors with the constraints that they had? I don't think so.
You will undoubtedly see the same pattern all over the corporate world.
My understanding so far is that the corn used for ethanol isn’t the kind you eat (sweetcorn) it’s a cheaper to produce and more hardy plant but consequently can only really be used for cattle feed and ethanol production.
Ages ago i read something that said in the US, corn was the optimal source but in other parts of the world, sugar cane could result in a more energy efficient process for ethanol.
Spoiler: most agriculture goes to supporting industrial livestock farming.
It doesn’t change the economics. The ethanol mandate is horribly stupid.
Most people probably eat way more corn chips and similar than sweet corn.
And then there is corn syrup, but we probably shouldn't eat more of that.
Tricky problem.
In regards to your other question about why its a bad way to produce alcohol, from an EROI perspective, a frequently cited figure is its around 1.5:1 (invest one unit of energy, get 1.5 back). Making it from Brazilian sugar cane on the other hand is 8:1.
Whatever the exact numbers are, the benefits are pretty modest if there are any. Its an agricultural subsidy program.
Credibly disputed?
We’re talking about “big oil” here, you’ll forgive me if my first reaction is to imagine a pre-completed study with all the right conclusions and a big fat cheque hidden under page 3, being shopped around academia looking for someone willing to sign their name to it :-)
From a layman’s point of view the claim just smells weird.
On one hand, we take carbon out of the atmosphere over millennia, compressing it tightly under the surface of the earth for even more years until it turns to a thick sludge. Then very quickly, in comparative seconds to the millennia of oil deposits formation, we release all that into the atmosphere again.
And it’s alleged that causes less greenhouse gas emission than the other idea: extract carbon floating around in the atmosphere today (i.e. grow a plant of some sort today), process it then instead of shipping it across the world from the oil wells to the consumers, instead just distribute it locally where it is grown and processed.
I couldn't find the GAO report I mentioned but I found a more recent one published this year by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, one of the more prestigious journals in the world. In their abstract in addition to mentioning US ethanol raised corn prices by 30% and other crop prices by 20% they say it
> ... caused enough domestic land use change emissions such that the carbon intensity of corn ethanol produced under the RFS is no less than gasoline and likely at least 24% higher.
Environmental outcomes of the US Renewable Fuel Standard https://www.pnas.org/doi/suppl/10.1073/pnas.2101084119
There is something of note in the methodology behind the figures though:
“We apply our models only domestically”
Throughout the years of this study, the US imported most of its gasoline. The production emissions are excluded. It’s not comparing like with like.
Uhh what? We export more gasoline than we import.
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_sum_snd_a_epm0f_mbblpd_a_cu...
Even if you meant crude oil and not gasoline you are still wrong, we recently became a net oil exporter.
The study data is from 2008 to 2016 right? The US was (massively) an importer of gasoline in that time period, right?
We used to race go karts with Rotax engines, and the local series organizers decided to mandate 91 octane pump gas ("cost saving measure") as opposed to the VP racing fuel that the engine was designed to use.
The end result was that all the racers ended up having excessive carbon buildup in the cylinder, and would go through several sets of the fuel pump internals every year. The fuel pump is a pulse driven flexible element that the pump gas (containing ethanol) would just destroy.
Never had those issues with the ethanol free VP fuel.
I’ve just been phasing out every gas engine I own for battery powered. I’m done with gasoline as much as possible. A lifetime of begging this horrible Frankenstein machine we call the internal combustion engine to work is enough for me.
Would love to see the funding behind many of these green groups. I'll bet most of it comes from oil companies, governments, etc. The past 15 years, much of the anti-coal "green" movement was funded by oil companies who wanted to take out their coal competitors and replace it with "clean" natural gas. It was all about taking market share. Nothing to do with the environment.
> The rest is No. 2 yellow field corn, which is indigestible to humans and used in animal feed, food supplements and ethanol.
https://agcrops.osu.edu/newsletter/corn-newsletter/2016-40/t...
A problem is it is lacking in free niacin, which can result in pellagra, if the diet is principally corn meal. Nixtamalization corrects that[0].
Without nixtamalization, cornmeal doesn't form a dough. You can make corn bread, but not tortillas.
Corn chips, e.g. Fritos, and corn bread don't use nixtamalized corn, but they are quite digestible!
As others have commented, no. 2 yellow field corn can be ground into cornmeal, and even without nixtamalization, it is certainly digestible by humans, it's just that nixtamalization makes important nutrients like niacin available.
I agree with you in that fat, by itself, does not promote weight gain. It's the combination that does.
[0] https://smile.amazon.com/Why-We-Get-Fat-About-ebook/dp/B003W...
Fertilizer depends on phosphorous which cannot be renewed or substituted once its gone.
Without fertilizer we can't support the multi-billion person population we have today.
We're not running out tomorrow, or even this decade, but we may experience peak phosphorous within our lifetimes.
A lot of problems go away if we "solve" energy, but that's also challenged by the same "peak" resource scenarios.
There are already efforts in the Caribbean to turn sargassum into compost, because there's so much of it washing ashore that it's become a nuisance.
Medieval Irish farmers relied on seaweed fertilizer to turn much of the island into rich farmland.
Can you elaborate? It's not like phosphorous in fertilizer are leaving Earth after being used as fertilizer.
There is something called the "phosphorous cycle" but its a lot like oil and does not replenish anywhere near the rate we consume it.
Furthermore, soil needs to be alive, and commercial farming practices kills it every year. So instead of building up soil fertility year after year, external inputs is added year after year in a self-destructive cycle.
allowing biology to "do its thing" usually means we can't also use it to grow crops.
maybe some sustainable hybrid strategies exist, but i doubt the yields are anywhere near the mass food production we have today.
I understand being skeptical of a new way(really the old way) to farm. We have all grown up in a time dominated by artificial inputs to farms. We don't know anything else. I have been following the regenerative space for years now and have adopted many of the practices on my tiny piece of land. This is the future of farming. Outputs are higher quality and more plentiful with more variety. Inputs are minimal which increases the profit margin.
Others who have storage facilities will make money by buying now to sell later and make use of the price difference.
At a certain point, prices get too high for making bioethanol. And that gets eaten by people instead.
Basically - there is no shortage because markets will do their job and mean there is always availability of all goods.
The only time there will be a shortage is when governments do things like cap prices or restrict exports/imports.
This switch can take too long and would need to take place in an industry often already razor tin margins thanks to big chains (which can contribute to inflexibility) and then plants take time to grow and depend on the seasons, etc. Also fertilisers go into both the livestock and the corn feed.
>Basically - there is no shortage because markets will do their job and mean there is always availability of all goods.
A shortage doesn't need to mean people are starving. If prices of staple foods go up enough it too causes societal unrest. (See Arab spring where bread prices went up, governments tried to protect their peg to the dollar, etc)
>The only time there will be a shortage is when governments do things like cap prices or restrict exports/imports.
Well here we see that happening when fuels and other components for fertilisers and some things like vegetable oils are affected by war.
Where market theory can still save the day is finding alternatives. If a key resource needed for the production and distribution of goods is missing then market forces will tend to produce an alternative. That works so long as an actual replacement exists and the cost of the replacement is in line with the original. Water is an irreplaceable resource - if you don't have water and you need it for production then you're pretty much screwed. The market won't "solve" that problem for you. If, as in this case, you need fertilizer then there may be an alternative but it may take several years to ramp up the production of that alternative and that alternative may be considerably more expensive than the original. This scenario leads to food shortages, food insecurity, and spiraling food costs. The market can't prevent these realities.
In short, markets are just a tool and like all tools you need to understand their usefulness and limitations.
Food is just not like other commodities. Shortages lead not just to recessions but revolutions. Any Government and society not paying close attention and investing in either ramping up domestic production or stockpiling is going to have a really bad time.
According to TFA the causes are:
1. Back-to-back storms in the USA causing production shutdowns. OK, that one is genuinely just random natural variance.
2. Natural gas price explosion. This is due largely to sanctions on Russia. Governments don't actually have to sanction Russian natural gas. It's a choice, one that can be undone tomorrow if need be.
3. Sanctions on a major Belarusian potash producer. Same thing. Belarus isn't even Russia. This could be fixed tomorrow with the wave of a bureaucrat's pen.
4. Ongoing side effects of lockdowns. This was a major own goal. People warned at the time you can't just shut down the economy even if actually had worked, which it didn't. This one sits squarely in government footgun area.
5. China has restricted exports of phosphate to build up stockpiles at home. Once again, governments are creating the damage here.
6. "Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which effectively cut off nearly a fifth of the world’s nutrient exports". For the third time, no, governments cut off those nutrient exports. It wasn't some sort of physical law that said invasions => cut off nutrient supply. It was and is a choice.
What seems to be happening here is that comfortable and powerful politicians have decided that showing how much they care about Ukraine is more important than people eating. The poor around the world will starve, so (primarily) European countries can wave a blue and yellow flag over their bodies. It feels very wrong.
Never let a good crisis go to waste!
Yes, sanctions are wasteful of resources, which could lead to food shortages and people dying, but that's kind of the problem with war: It kills people and wastes resources. Even without sanctions, there would be many Ukrainians (and Russians) killed, and Ukraine would not be keeping up its wheat exports. Ideally, we'd like to prevent this kind of thing from happening very often, which in practice means there needs to be some kind of deterrence against strong countries invading their weaker neighbours. Since western powers can't fight directly against Russia, as it would risk nuclear war, sanctions are one of the few tools available for deterrence. Sanctions aren't about waving a blue and yellow flag or about showing how much you care. They're about preventing similar future conflicts and hopefully giving Ukraine a better negotiating position so the war can end sooner.
Also, it seems like European and North American sanctions shouldn't be a problem for most poor countries unless they're also participating in those sanctions themselves? While sanctions make sense for rich countries, the first priority should definitely be to feed your own people. So if the government of India decides that in order to feed its people, it needs to import potash from Belarus, more power to it.
Their currency is up against the Euro since the sanctions; and against the dollar, it's the same as where it was before.
The issue with sanctions and poorer countries is that commodities are liquid markets. If rich countries raise prices internally by sanctioning some sources then the higher prices draw supplies away from poorer countries. Or put another way, if you reduce supply whilst keeping demand constant then prices rise, and they rise everywhere. That's what China seems to be trying to wall itself off from, which it can probably do, but it can cause a domino effect where everyone feels they have to go protectionist.
So it boils down to whether you think the concrete pain inflicted on the poor today is worth it to avoid hypothetical pain inflicted on them by a future conflict.
Animal meat is much more bioavailable and nutrient dense. Especially when they are eating grass on land unsuitable for crops.
I don't have a major problem with meat eating when it's done sustainably and humanely. The real issue is that this is not the case for way too much of it now, and current meat production practices are yet another example of unsustainable overconsumption in general. Yet more than half the population regularly celebrates and enshrines that overconsumption, reinforcing it. This is not a good look to anyone who's really thinking long term & globally about these things.
So a truly microscopic fraction of the world's agriculture?
At a 50x loss in efficiency.
According to this guy [1], the US could feed 800 million people with the grain spent on cows today. Not grass, grain.
[1] https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-m...
Indeed. It's about availability and right to food, as articulated by Amartya Sen in his Nobel prize winning work on the Bengal (and other) famines.
https://www.prismaweb.org/nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Pove...
However, quite a lot of cattle grazing land isn't really suitable for arable farming. The American approach of raising cattle on soybeans grown on arable land may not be sustainable, but more traditional hillside grazing may be.
You cannot necessarily grow different stuff in the same field. Not all crops do well in the same kind of soil. For example, you need totally different soil for potatoes than you do for cereal crops if you want them to actually grow.
We (in the US anyway) feed a massive quantity of unspent (not brewery mash for example) grains when finishing cattle in feedlots. Corn, barley, milo, soybeans etc along with harvested forages like alfalfa and sorghum (which is often fed as silage).
People do feed brewery mash and other byproducts but that isn't most of what goes into feedlot rations nationwide.
But seriously, composting, no till, stop spraying R0undup aka glyphosate, plant trees in fields, more cover crops, more green mulch, more pollinators, more ponds, more pastureland, more aquaculture, more polyculture in general. The problem is the desert style of farming that led to the dust bowl and will lead to the next one. This comes from a very new (<3 years) farmer who has read a bunch and microfarmed for three years on 5 acres.
The problem is people got sold a bunch of lies about machines and chemicals and those lies are now coming home to roost. Organic and no till and permaculture are probably the way out of this. You can absorb nitro from the atmosphere but that's one way, nature has been doing it another way for eons.
What's your suggested next step? Line up the 'technical mass murderers' against the wall?
The Green Revolution merely raised the ceiling massively higher. It did not perform any magic to make it permanently vanish.
I don't suppose you'd like to expand on this argument or back it with any sort of substance?
ETA: Most people don't understand agriculture or where their food comes from--HN no different. Only small % of people involved in agriculture _directly_
Additionally what you're talking about sounds more like actions prompted by business 'leaders' and not IT staff making databases.
I do blame the mindset of 'every problem can be solved with enough data'
How do you know when you have the right data and how do you know you're solving the right problem and not causing others? So far confidence and hubris came with myopia.
How about when everyone else thinks they have the right data, but don't, you do, but can't scale because of institutional inertia and risk?
Q.E.D.
Farming and logistics are infuriatingly hard problems, toghtly coupled with the fundamental problems of signaling and distributed systems.
Agriculture effects the environment, uses shared resources, and is necessary for the continuation of human life. I would be really wary about going with a gut feeling to solve such a large important problem.
This is the blind leading the blind, and if you gleaned much from the top comments you'd be worse informed than not reading this entire thread. Half of the posts are just political using couched language to pretend they aren't.
Ag is definitely one of HNs blind spots, usually the topics are simply amusing (e.g. urban food production startups burning millions of VC) - but this is the first actually "substantive to humanity topic" I've read through and the results are a little scary.
And heck, I'm probably contributing to this noise since I also haven't stepped foot on a farm or market garden in well over a decade.
In a weird type of way, there's little we can do immediately. Almost like a solar flare type of event. Ag and food production systems are so massively scaled, even if we WANTED to change everything for the better, it would likely take years, if not decades. Not like software where any bug can be fixed in a week or so. Human population numbers have exploded on the back of cheap, abundant food. If anything seriously disturbed that, yikes.
HN might bristle at the idea the Farmer Joe has a more sophisticated mental model of an extremely complex and multivariate system (a field of corn or soy) which evades reduction to a dataset.
The solutions I've seen on this board is typically "well let's reduce the variables and grow lettuce in warehouses!" Or trying to build a robot that can pick strawberries. Neither of these solves food scarcity issues.
If people reading this wanted to pursue a meaningful solution via data, my advise is to look at the scaling of the farm-to-consumer market, and how to enable larger distributed networks of small independent farms to sell to customers. The food supply will be more resilient when farming gets smaller, simpler, and more distributed
are you implying a farmer's market? they exist.
Yes, I am implying farmers markets. There is not currently an effective way for these small farms to network their production in aggregate to sell at a level commensurate to an industrial farm. This is the reason big ag can sell for cheaper.
If farmers markets could achieve cost-parity with big grocery (by competing at-scale) then distributed small-scale farming could contribute to solving many issues in climate, environment, nutrition, etc
Very astute comment.
If any farmers in WA (or elsewhere) want a free consult on how to connect with your customers via the internet, please reach out!
(1) beliefs that farming is simple and farmers are inept
(2) beliefs that the technology they (our facile technologists) know (e.g., robotics, saas, ai, etc) can be shoe-horned into or sprinkled onto agriculture for revolutionary results (at best these things tend to be incremental improvements and at worse they are detrimental).
In general, technologists need to understand agriculture as a global dynamic system in order to understand the opportunities for innovation (there certainly are places where applying robotics or AI or etc can lead to revolutionary results, but it's probably not obvious to someone whose experience with agriculture was an elementary school field trip 30 years ago).
Will it? In my area the main agricultural products are apples, dairy products, beef, wheat, and potatoes, because those are the things that my area's climate and geology support. I can already buy those things cheaply and readily and they are farmed efficiently and widely by very large operations. How does farming get more resilient when individual farms get smaller? Smaller farms, by definition, have higher overheads because they benefit less from economy of scale, right? Logistics get more expensive for a zillion small actors, equipment and maintenance is a larger slice of the overall operation, smaller operations have less efficient access to capital, etc...
The current option is to use industrial farming technology until the raw inputs run out or become cost-prohibitive. Or until tillage soil for field crops becomes nutrient-depleted and barren.
Also, the comment was about using intellectual capital to work on the Markets problem of agriculture, not the act of farming itself
We can so easily grow enough food to feed everyone.
Livestock takes up >80% of land, yet produces <20% of calories.
The <20% of land that is used to grow food - only ~55% goes to feed people. The rest goes to animals and ethanol.
The apocalypse is nowhere near close.
The Earth's crust is ~2.5% potassium. A lower supply of Potash is not going to cause the end of the world.
As a percentage of all livestock land usage, there is not much chicken, goat, or pig grazing left in the world.
It is true most other livestock CAN utilize land that can't be used efficiently for other forms of agriculture. In practice, less so.
I met a young man from Missouri.. he had a large frame but was just 20 years old or so.. He was harried and furtive and was getting into some trouble here and there. Upon knowing him a little bit, he was traumatized by large, loud, dominant men giving him orders, while as an intelligent young man he had questions. Of course many of the men I refer to here are from the Ag community.
North American Ag is not solved, and with the Oklahoma Dustbowl and current crop patterns in California, it must be obvious to science that sometimes, Ag has evolved for CONTROL not INTELLIGENCE. American factory animal farming is a living nightmare in places. American treatment of topsoil, and of fresh water, and industrial placement at the Great Lakes for that matter, are a DISASTER. You defend the Ag "community" like they need defending, from urban smart-people? They are beetle-like survivors of decades of market distortion, ego and alcohol.
Disrupt the Ag sector, yes please.
ps- your elected representative William Gates already started the ball rolling with farm ownership. see any news story after his "revelation" .. first result in GS
" Today, Bill Gates owns 242,000 acres of farmland in 19 states. In addition, he owns 25,750 acres of transitional land and 1,234 acres of recreational land for total land holdings of 268,984 acres. His largest holding is in Louisiana (69,071 acres), followed by Arkansas (47,927 acres) and Arizona (25,750 acres). Aug 27, 2021"
You'll never see so many people so certain they were right despite lacking the most basic knowledge on the topic.
A shame, really. Because my skill in big data analysis stops at what Excel can do without macros. I'd love to get more data insight, simply turned out that it is hard to get.
- Where I live (The Netherlands) you don’t have to live in a city to have good PT. There are places that you cannot reach by train or bus but they are few.
- While sometimes a car is necessary, the cars many people prefer (insanely oversized “trucks”) are hardly ever necessary.
It's not what we chose[1], but there's certainly nothing about the geography the precludes it. The focus, and later dependence, on extended exurbs connected with roads for private vehicles is very much a policy decision.
[1] Actually it is what we chose, up until the 1950's, when we chose to build in different ways.
And unaffordable to the vast majority. I'd love to have plenty of walkable city options in the US, but they aren't going to appear overnight by banning cars when you need them to get around places over half of the people in the US live in.
> It's not what we chose[1], but there's certainly nothing about the geography the precludes it. The focus, and later dependence, on extended exurbs connected with roads for private vehicles is very much a policy decision.
It's an amalgamation of a hundred years of policy decisions and private investment based around those decisions, and it would take as long to reverse it even if there was political appetite for it. And there's not much appetite for it because most people prefer the convenience and comfort of cars. To that end:
> There's absolutely no reason that kind of lifestyle is impossible here.
It's not a matter of whether that lifestyle is possible, but whether it's desirable. Most Americans find the convenience and comfort of cars to be preferable to public transit.
As someone with a truck constantly having to lend it for friends to use, I disagree.
Not sure exactly what you meant by insanely oversized, but a lift kit and tires aren't abnormal, they have use for off-roading / mudding which is fairly popular.
It's both a style preference and lifestyle preference. Good luck using a car if you have a lot of outdoor hobbies or work.
Kind of strange to tell a whole population what is or isn't necessary in their life, especially without knowing their reasonings.
This is the kind of absolutist argument that these threads always fall into. You hear someone say "not everyone needs a truck!" or "there are too many trucks!", and hear "You, personally, should not own a truck". No, clearly trucks are useful vehicles and need to exist for people to use. But we also build and deploy way too many of them. Those facts can be true at the same time.
Whether they rent or borrow one, they still needed a truck.
I need mine all the time, as do most others I know. I also listed activities that people like to use them for.
> But we also build and deploy way too many of them. Those facts can be true at the same time.
How many should we allow then? Who should qualify for them? Do recreational activities not qualify? Who gets to decide this? Do we do this for other things?
Yes, but only occasionally! Again, you're thinking we're trying to "take away your truck", when we're just saying (correctly) that most people (like your friends!) don't need them except rarely and are better served by other kind of resource allocation than personal vehicles.
> How many should we allow [...] who should qualify [...] banned [...] who gets to decide
This isn't a good faith argument. No one is advocating for any of that. Please don't.
Again I use mine all the time. I'm not advocating getting rid of cars because some people don't need a truck. I don't believe there are too many trucks or cars, I feel like the people saying there are too many trucks have the obligation to explicitly give reasons as you why.
> This isn't a good faith argument. No one is advocating for any of that. Please don't.
It is in good faith, I assure you. I'm trying to make you realize that what you view as necessary isn't the same for others. You said there are too many. I would like to know what you view as necessary and what the ideal amount would be for you. What uses for trucks are deemed as necessary and what are frivolous.
https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/honda-jazz-fit-2007...
https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/bymodel/2021_Ford_F150.shtml
And 31-36 for the Fit:
https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/PowerSearch.do?action=noform...
Taking the medians (F150: 18, Fit: 33.5) your statement is true, but barely. Which is not something to rejoice in.
https://i.imgur.com/7huPvde.jpg
What does the insanely large truck have that enables you to off road and explore your hobbies, that the smaller one does not?
The smaller truck will get stuck. I guess you could try to winch yourself out every time it does.
But at that point use the bigger truck to pull a side by side and off road with that.
Even then, who is to say who can get what? I don't see why trucks are one of things people can't buy just because they prefer it.
I'm sure everyone owns something that another person would consider frivolous.
I was responding to GP who said trucks are necessary in rural areas with snow and rough roads. Obviously people can buy what they want, and other people can judge them for their choices as they want.
> I'm sure everyone owns something that another person would consider frivolous.
Definitely. I'm sure there are people who judge my purchases - I wish them well. But most frivolous purchases don't kill pedestrians at alarming rates, or guzzle absurd amounts of gas pointlessly. Pickup trucks are the pit bulls of car ownership.
Just big, uncomfortable, expensive to maintain and operate vehicles that you'd generally use for a specific purpose.
To that point, most of our streets, roads, and parking spaces are much wider than yours, and can accommodate larger vehicles. As others have noted, we have more people in remote areas, and while Netherlands is obviously an agricultural superpower, your farms are smaller than ours (larger farms require larger equipment).
Perhaps that's true in your experience, but I hear this fairly regularly including various subreddits, Twitter, and I've heard it here on HN as well (it's been a while, I don't care to dig through my comment history for links to the specific threads). Specifically, the argument takes one of two forms: either we should extend public transit and cycling infrastructure everywhere (including rural areas) or that we should implement policies that expressly accelerate urbanization and penalize rural life (or a combination).
For example, think about how many times you've seen people say they don't care about gas prices because they don't have a car: they take public transportation (which uses gas..) or walk.
The supply chain consists of things magically appearing in bodegas for their consumption, and that's why their pejoratively-named "flyover country" is and does nothing, they think.
I think a lot of the pushback against cars have to do with the popularization of human-centric design movements that question the assumption that cars are the pinnacle of transportation that American cities have operated from since about the 1950s. An easy example is the idea of "induced demand" [1] that shows even from a pure engineering perspective that the cost-benefit math for cars has long been unfairly weighted towards cars by outside forces.
We're seeing a lot of pressure around housing and energy and social policy in general which in turn is making us question decisions we've made, culturally, in history, like can we really sustain the building of less dense housing for our growing population? Does it make sense to give every family 0.75 acres of grass, 400 sqft of driveway and a 2 car garage, when those things are only used some of the time? Might there be better ways to approach the utilization of that space as a population?
I'm rambling now, but I get frustrated when people dismiss concerns like that out of hand. Can the US ever totally get rid of cars? No, not for a hundred years at least. Having a good 80 years of city planning being focused around every adult having their own vehicle is of course going to e difficult to move away from, and there are certain lifestyles (rural living, farming, regions where building trains is more impractical) that it'll just never be a great idea... but I still think it's worth interrogating these assumptions we've carried to see if there's a better way we could be living life.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand#Effect_in_trans...
A standard suburban house doesn't sit on 0.75 acres. 0.2 is typical. Though you're probably low on the driveway and garage :).
I'd like to see a better argument for why we shouldn't live this way. There are relatively large metros (e.g. Portland) that are predominantly suburban single family homes, and so far it seems to work fine. Sure, we could compress Portland into a 10 mile by 10 mile square, but why? Would it actually make our lives better? By what metric?
The real question is "what do you mean by 'it works fine'?" To me, the effects of suburban living are such that we don't treat people as people unless they're shrouded in a big rolling box of metal. Of course it'll vary from person to person and family to family. I think urban environments offer children much more freedom than corresponding suburban environments, while being safer. There's much more mobility and access to things outside of the house, which I'd argue significantly enriches childhood experience and leads to more adaptable adults.
As an adult, I'm overjoyed by the ease with which I can get to things around my city. I never have to deal with traffic, I can walk to three different grocery stores in under fifteen minutes. I have dozens of restaurants in similar distance, and I never worry about having too much to drink to safely drive home. I don't have to deal with traffic, and when friends come to visit (or when I visit them) I can take the train and enjoy a book instead of navigating roads. I feel far healthier and happier with the amount of light physical activity that's been baked into my life just by going about my normal routine. Before we moved to the city, I lived a pretty typical office worker sedentary life: I'd get up, shower, drive (sitting) to work, work (sitting, sometimes standing), then drive home. Now I walk to work and feel invigorated as I come through the door 15 minutes after I left, without the annoyance of rush hour or traffic or bad drivers. (A co-worker of mine lives out in the suburbs of our city, which are denser than most, and takes the light rail into work; half an hour on the train, 5 minute walk from the station. If he took a car, we'd need parking for him and everyone else that had one, and roads for it [see again, induced demand in my post above], and I wouldn't be able to walk to work myself). A twenty minute walk puts me at museums or bars or train stations or work or the store or like 5 friends' houses or the lake shore or a thousand other places. No parking, no navigating traffic, no having to move the car or worry about not wandering far from the car or figuring out how to navigate unfamiliar roads. Honestly the most stressful part of any of my journeys is wondering if drivers are paying attention as I go through the crosswalk, or if they're going to cut the corner to try to make their left turn.
As a citizen, my city's limited resources don't have to go to maintaining roads that the richer segments of the population get proportionally more benefit from. We can invest in more public services since we're not committed endlessly to maintaining the cost-sink of asphalt plains. [1] Public transit is an amazing economic equalizer as well: In a suburban environment, you must have a reliable car to make it to work. If you're too poor (or just starting out) to afford a car, or if it's unreliable, that's going to severely curtail your available job pool. (There's a common saying that "we don't all have the same time" when it comes to discussing class differences; my highschool girlfriend spent two hours on the bus, one way, to work, because her family only had one car, and her mother needed it for her job. That's four hours a day she can't use to cook, or study [she could try, but a bus is far from an ideal study environment], or sleep. If our town had better transit, or if our town wasn't so dense that it took two hours to travel from house to shopping district, it'd be a very different story.)
This is to say nothing of the actual health impact of cars: accidents, death, pollution, or just the amount of money we're 'required' to spend on them so we can participate in wider society. I feel like putting these at the end really undercuts their significance, but we never seem to talk about these facts. Car accidents are the eighth-leading cause of death in the US [2]. Imagine the economic savings, and the amount of medical resources, we could free up by reducing that. Imagine the value our citizens would get out of not paying $20k (at the _very low end_) every five or eight years for their cars, not to mention the maintenance.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfsCniN7Nsc [2]: https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/global-road-safety/index...
This is just unhelpful, tired rhetoric. Everyone has the same rights whether they're in a car or not. Moreover, public transit literally depends on much larger "metal boxes".
It sounds like you live in a magical city.
In Chicago, it's much faster to get around by car than it is to take the train or bus. In general, if you're taking the bus or train anywhere, it's almost always a 45 minute trip one-way and it can easily be double that if you have a transfer.
I like that I can walk to a few grocery stores and restaurants, but if I want to go to a specialty shop or visit a restaurant in a different neighborhood or even just make a big trip in inclimate weather I can do so much more quickly/easily with a car than without. Of course, rideshare is a thing, but a round trip to another neighborhood can easily run anywhere from $60-120 and even then you have to wait for drivers and even then they might blow you off (maybe I'm just unlucky here, but it seems like 5-10% of drivers blow me off, especially if I ordered a ride just before a price surge).
> I never worry about having too much to drink to safely drive home
This isn't much of a problem for me--if I want more than a couple of drinks (rare), I just make arrangements in advance (DD or walking or rideshare or public transit). If I don't make arrangements, I don't drink. I don't know what could be more convenient than this (I see the logic in doing the inconvenient-but-safe thing all the time, but it means missing out on a lot of convenience unnecessarily).
> I don't have to deal with traffic, and when friends come to visit (or when I visit them) I can take the train and enjoy a book instead of navigating roads.
Traffic is tedious, but I mostly just avoid traveling during rush hour (not usually a big deal since I can leave later and still get there at the same time as I would if I took the train during rush hour). It wouldn't be a problem at all if I didn't live in a city. Anyway, I don't know what your city's public transit system is like, but in Chicago it's uncommon to get a seat on a train (if you get one, there will usually be someone who needs it more), and the etiquette is to hold your bag rather than wearing it on your back (so we can squeeze an extra 1/4 of a person into the train car). Since your other hand is holding a strap or railing, there's no free hand to hold the book and anyway it's too distracting to me with the pan handlers trying to get my attention or the guys who blast their portable speakers or are trying to start shit with other riders (or straight up smoking weed/cigarettes). Buses are a little nicer, but they are subject to traffic just like cars. Instead, I just drive and listen to a podcast or audiobook; navigation has been a solved problem for a decade thanks to pervasive GPS.
> I feel far healthier and happier with the amount of light physical activity that's been baked into my life just by going about my normal routine. Before we moved to the city, I lived a pretty typical office worker sedentary life: I'd get up, shower, drive (sitting) to work, work (sitting, sometimes standing), then drive home. Now I walk to work and feel invigorated as I come through the door 15 minutes after I left, without the annoyance of rush hour or traffic or bad drivers.
I liked walking to work when the weather was nice, but that's pretty rare in Chicago and anyway there are only so many different routes you can take after which it gets dull. I'm really glad I got a remote gig. I have a ton of time left over, and my wife and I will load up the dog and go to a park or even rent a lake house for a week outside of the city for a nature fix. If we didn't have cars, we would probably stay in our neighborhood rather than spend the extra $100/day on a car rental, but since we have a car anyway the difference is marginal. And the car is convenient for other things too--we can take our dog to the vet or to friends' houses without having to pay an exorbitant rideshare cost, for example. Parking is really only inconvenient downtown during the work week and a few other places (e.g., around the zoo during summer weekends, etc). Otherwise it's like $5-10 for a few hours.
> A twenty minute walk puts me at museums or bars or train stations or work or the store or like 5 friends' houses or the lake shore or a thousand other places. No parking, no navigating traffic, no having to move the car or worry about not wandering far from the car or figuring out how to navigate unfamiliar roads
Seems a little silly that you're willing to walk 20 minutes but not "wander far from the car". :)
> Honestly the most stressful part of any of my journeys is wondering if drivers are paying attention as I go through the crosswalk, or if they're going to cut the corner to try to make their left turn.
Yeah, this is definitely one of the more stressful aspects of walking around Chicago.
> As a citizen, my city's limited resources don't have to go to maintaining roads that the richer segments of the population get proportionally more benefit from.
In Chicago, the nicer neighborhoods not only have better roads but also much better public transit options. It turns out the same forces that operate on streets operate on public transit.
> There's a common saying that "we don't all have the same time" when it comes to discussing class differences
This favors cars, which waste less time than public transit in the general case.
> This is to say nothing of the actual health impact of cars: accidents, death, pollution, or just the amount of money we're 'required' to spend on them so we can participate in wider society.
Accidents are the best argument against cars, IMO. I think we can sharply curtail this with better city planning and more safety features (especially with advancements in self-driving technology). Regarding pollution and maintainability, EVs emit less per person than a diesel city bus (this will continue to improve over time as our energy grid becomes cleaner) and they're also inherently more maintainable (no transmission, engine, exhaust system, etc). Once the high end of the market is saturated, we'll start to see more, simpler models on the low-end, and these will eventually hit the used car market. Fuel will also be cheaper because electricity is cheaper than gasoline.
> Imagine the value our citizens would get out of not paying $20k (at the _very low end_) every five or eight years for their cars, not to mention the maintenance.
I'm not sure what that $20k figure is meant to represent. You can get a reliable car for $10k these days, drive it for 5-10 years and turn around and sell it for $2-4k. Of course, you'll have to insure it and pay for gas and maintenance, but that's probably quite a lot less than most couples spend on public transit, rideshare, and car rentals.
Portland has been around for almost 180 years, and people still seem to think it is an attractive place to live. The last couple years have been pretty terrible, but that doesn't seem to be unique to this area, and if anything is more of an urban problem than a suburban one.
I won't tell you what you should like, or what your definition of good is. But for me, I enjoy suburban living more. For example, I drove into downtown Portland a few days ago and watched Hamilton, it's only 20 minutes away. We go to museums, art shows, etc. But, I can turn away from Portland and in less than 20 minutes be in an entirely rural area enjoying nature. 20 minutes farther and I'm approaching Mt. Hood. When I get home, I have my own little square of paradise: no shared walls with strangers, a place for the kids to play, a nice community where everyone sorta knows everyone else. City living is the right answer for some people, but definitely not all of us.
That's not the issue. It's the externalities, the downstream effects, of trying to scale up suburban living to huge numbers of people.
At a small scale, a little town of a few hundred or couple thousand people, things remain walkable. There could be a corner grocery store, one gas station, a few stores clustered together in the town square, courthouse, playground, park, school, church....all nice and wonderful.
But all that disappears when you scale suburbs up to tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, then millions of people. The amount of land area gets enormous. Traffic gets enormous. It scales like O(n^2). You get bigger and bigger streets. Bigger and bigger courthouses. Bigger and bigger stores, parking lots, huge shopping malls, and everything keeps getting pushed out by the pressure of it all. It sprawls. The city tries to transform itself into something medium density, as housing prices go up. Office and commercial real estate go up. People want white collar, nice, high-paying jobs. They don't want to be plumbers and electricians and house painters, but executives and managers and have their own businesses.
But suburban sprawl really doesn't support those things very well. People get pushed miles and miles from their jobs. Traffic becomes a nightmare. The prices go off the charts. Tradespeople get pushed out. Culture takes a dive. No more walking or biking when those freeways go up.
Bad examples of sprawl are places like Houston and Los Angeles, even the Bay Area now. I spent 4 years in LA, 5 in the Bay Area. LA is truly mind-blowing. The entire basin is just one big grid of endless permutations of the same concrete jungle, here or there less dense or more dense, a few bright spots, but OMG and endless labyrinth of Stapleses, Starbuckses, McD's and strip malls...
But LA in the 1930s wasn't that. It was just a few towns here and there and some downtown. It was literally a few spots in the desert where people had little nuclei of the small-town living. It just grew without real direction and was completely powered by oil and cars.
With respect to prices, these are self-regulating. If prices go up, things either get denser and/or people move elsewhere.
> Culture takes a dive.
Again, suburbs aren't my thing, but it seems really offensive/chauvinistic to imply that suburban culture is lesser than urban culture. I'm sure I'm misunderstanding, and in the spirit of charity I want to give you the opportunity to set the record straight.
> No more walking or biking when those freeways go up.
Is this intrinsic to suburbs, or is it an artifact of how suburbs were planned at the time that suburbs exploded in popularity? Can suburbs be designed to be more walkable/bikeable (I would actually be surprised if they aren't already)?
No, I meant that culture takes a dive from small-town culture, where you know your neighbors and shop owners.
Here's another video [2] that discusses how city tax revenue is primarily earned in their dense downtown regions, and spent on their more distributed suburban environments.
Others in the comments have discussed this, but the issues with towns being walkable and cyclist friendly tend to intersect directly with anti-goals if car design. Places aren't walkable if there's huge roads and parking lots that people have to traverse in order to get to them. Similarly, cars are quite hazardous to pedestrians and cyclists. If we're optimizing for human-scale environments, we're inherently car-hostile. Similarly, if we're optimizing for efficiency of cars, then we're hostile to human-scale design. The ideas are largely antithetical.
You can get some hybridization--metra trains from city cores to the suburbs, street cars or trams along main suburban drags alongside with automobiles, but one system constrains the other.
Historically, highway systems have segregated neighborhoods whose citizens were poorer, and relied disproportionately on public transit or bikes and walking. If you have to go half a mile out of your way to find an overpass over the highway to get to the nearest grocery, and that overpass has a litter-covered sidewalk barely two feet wide, we definitely aren't building our suburbs to be walkable or bikable.
[1]: https://youtu.be/UX4KklvCDmg [2]: https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI
I'm not sure if this is really clear to people who don't live here, but I think it's important to note that 'suburbs' doesn't really mean just one thing. Portland is mostly suburbs, for example. I think it's tempting to think suburbia must be endless miles of tract housing with no business, no retail. While that happens, it's not at all universal.
> Can suburbs be designed to be more walkable/bikeable (I would actually be surprised if they aren't already)?
Can't speak for everywhere in the US, but in the places I've lived, this is standard. Part of the cost of building a house is putting sidewalks in. So the problem isn't walkability. The problem, where it exists, is a lack of anything to walk to. But that shouldn't be that hard to address -- knock down some houses and zone for commercial. Build small cities out of suburbs. (I expect that already happens, it certainly happened decades ago in places with long established suburbs).
I live in a country with relatively good public transport, relatively great one in the capital and few other large cities, with public bikes and biking lanes.
Then 2020 came, and due to covid, no more public transport (for some time). Want to go to work? Too bad. Want to go to the larger (and cheaper) store... nope. Order food delivery from a large supermarket chain? Good luck, people don't want to go to crowded stores, and delivery slots are full 2 minutes after midnight.
I know it's an extreme situation, but it made people rethink what they need for their independece, and cars came high on the list.
Cars are only synonymous with "independence" in the US because we've made it impossible to be independent unless you use this giant metal box to engage with the world. To me, that's the opposite of independence.
Yes, COVID is an extreme situation--but I don't think it's reasonable to plan our daily lives around extreme situations. I see this when people buy their cars--Is it reasonable to buy a pickup truck if you're only going to tow or haul something once a year with it? Is the excess spend in car payment, insurance, gas usage, consumables, and safety hazard worth that convenience? Why not just rent the truck when you need it?
On the other hand, even in my urban environment, I can get to another neighborhood in less than half the time it would take me to get there by train or bus (especially if there is a transfer involved). It's also a lot more comfortable than waiting on a platform/bus stop exposed to the elements only to squeeze myself into a small box (that smells at once of urine, vomit, BO, and cigarette smoke) with dozens of strangers, some of whom are panhandling, blasting music, threatening other commuters, etc.
Moreover, my wife and I share a car, and we spend quite a lot less on it (all in: maintenance, fuel, parking, insurance, etc) than we did on public transit + rideshare + car rentals even without amortizing the car payment over the useful lifetime of the car. And of course our time and comfort are also valuable to us.
> Cars are only synonymous with "independence" in the US because we've made it impossible to be independent unless you use this giant metal box to engage with the world. To me, that's the opposite of independence.
This is a feature of the new world (not just the US), and it's a consequence of our post-car development. If Europe had the bulk of its development in the post-car era, it would've turned out the same way. Also, if you're getting around by public transit you need even bigger metal boxes and you need more of them and you have to wait for them and they are often late and you will be packed onto them like cattle and you're limited by where they go (hence the "independence" of the car).
A huge portion of Europe was destroyed.(and consequently rebuilt) in WWI and WWII, which are both firmly in the post-car era. They rebuilt with an emphasis on trains. Where they didn't, or in later years when they chose instead to invest in car development, some of them are now turning back to human-centric development [1].
> ... Need even bigger metal boxes and you need more of them and you have to wait for them and they are often late...
In terms of space-occupation in cars vs buses (or trains), mass transit absolutely wins. This is a trivial argument. There's a dozen versions of this picture [2] that shows the difference between like 80 people commuting via bike, bus, or car. The amount of redundant space taken up by cars is bonkers to me.
"Packed into them like cattle", I'll grant you rush hour gets crowded, but you'll spend less time on the trains than you would trying to cram that many people through the highway. See also the "induced demand" problem of highways.
Moreover, while you're not using your car, it's taking up space doing nothing. While I'm not using the subway, it's working to shuttle the other 1.6 million people who use it (that number varies wildly depending on your city, notably).
To the point of transit times and the, ah, atmosphere of transit: Of course travel time will vary according to how big the transit network is. You see this a lot in sub-urban downtowns. A bus system will exist, but it'll be painfully slow to get from one point to another when compared to a car. I argue this is because the externalities of the disproportionately wealthy-benefiting poor-subsidized road system. Similarly, why is it when we have traffic issues the argument is always "build more lanes! Improve the roads!" But when transit has throughout problems we say "Look, this is why transit never works, and we should invest in roads instead!" You haven't done this overtly, but that idea underlies your argument: cars are better, we shouldn't waste our money on transit.
As for being uncomfortable or dealing with less-than-savory people on mass transi, you're absolutely right that those are unpleasant experiences, and being able to use a car does help avoid them... Just like moving to a wealthier part of town or building a highway to keep the riffraff out would help avoid them, but none of those solve the underlying problem. It is not a fault of the underlying public system that it is so used by people of poorer means or those with mental disorders or simialrt, it is a flaw of the private wealthy systems that it allows people to avoid examples of their fellow citizens whose society has failed them. We shouldn't avoid using transit, or not have transit, because it accidentally functions as a haven for the homeless or mentally unwell or destitute. We should address those failings of our society by providing for those people, the better to enable our public systems to fulfill their original designed function. Importantly though, the public resource is still serving the public. You being able to escape the flawed public systems and escape to your private spaces (car, house, etc) because you have the money to do so is not an indictment of that systems failings, but of your empathy for your fellow citizens.
Put another way, it sounds almost like you're saying "I don't like going to the community doctor, and don't believe we should invest in it more, because it's always full of sick people."
[1]: https://youtu.be/sI-1YNAmWlk [2]: https://humantransit.org/2012/09/the-photo-that-explains-alm...
The cities were already established. They weren't repopulating the continent from scratch.
> In terms of space-occupation in cars vs buses (or trains), mass transit absolutely wins. This is a trivial argument.
Yes, but space-occupation is a foolish thing to optimize for in an environment that isn't constrained by space. This is a trivial argument.
> "Packed into them like cattle", I'll grant you rush hour gets crowded, but you'll spend less time on the trains than you would trying to cram that many people through the highway. See also the "induced demand" problem of highways.
I spend quite a lot less time driving than I would if I took the trains. This is true virtually everywhere in Chicago, and Chicago only has only 3-4 main highways (which is to say it's not an especially car-friendly city and it's 5th ranked for public transit). Most of the time, it's twice as fast to drive as to take public transit, but if you have a transfer it can easily be 4 times slower than driving.
> Moreover, while you're not using your car, it's taking up space doing nothing. While I'm not using the subway, it's working to shuttle the other 1.6 million people who use it (that number varies wildly depending on your city, notably).
Agreed that cars are less space-efficient, disagree that space-efficiency is the paramount variable.
> Similarly, why is it when we have traffic issues the argument is always "build more lanes! Improve the roads!" But when transit has throughout problems we say "Look, this is why transit never works, and we should invest in roads instead!" You haven't done this overtly, but that idea underlies your argument: cars are better, we shouldn't waste our money on transit.
This isn't my argument at all. I'm not universally against public transit--it makes sense in some places and in those places it should be improved and expanded. My whole thesis is that different places have different constraints and thus we shouldn't expect "public transit" to be a panacea.
> As for being uncomfortable or dealing with less-than-savory people on mass transi, you're absolutely right that those are unpleasant experiences, and being able to use a car does help avoid them... Just like moving to a wealthier part of town or building a highway to keep the riffraff out would help avoid them, but none of those solve the underlying problem.
I didn't claim that driving solves social problems, only that it lets people control their own environments. I can't get my city to police or clean public transit appropriately, and I certainly can't get them to fix the underlying social problems; however, I can control my commuting environment by opting to drive. I'm happy to revisit public transit if/when we can solve poverty and mental healthcare, but until that utopia arrives, driving is a nice alternative.
> We shouldn't avoid using transit, or not have transit, because it accidentally functions as a haven for the homeless or mentally unwell or destitute. We should address those failings of our society by providing for those people, the better to enable our public systems to fulfill their original designed function.
These are orthogonal issues. Me driving (or not) doesn't stop my society from addressing its issues. I appreciate that people are more likely to advocate for issues that are visible to them, but that will probably look like cracking down on these people rather than solving ultimate causes (and anyway, our cities have a whole lot of people taking public transit already and yet these issues persist while other parts of the country have fewer problems).
> You being able to escape the flawed public systems and escape to your private spaces (car, house, etc) because you have the money to do so is not an indictment of that systems failings, but of your empathy for your fellow citizens.
I grew up working class, and it doesn't take a lot of money to escape the burden of public transit. We should absolutely expand the franchise to more people, however. Moreover, whether I take public transit or not has no bearing on my willingness to improve society. Please don't make assumptions about my motives, it's rude and unnecessary, and it violates site guidelines.
I think this is mostly a straw man or nut picking. From what I can tell, there aren't many rural people arguing that rural transit policy should be imposed on urban areas, but rather the debate is about whether or not policies that arguably make sense in an urban environment should be imposed on the rest of the country. Notably, rural people have enough exposure to urban environments that they understand that urban environments differ from rural environments, but not so much the other way around: e.g., everyone watches the same entertainment media that is almost invariably set in urban environments and most people have traveled to an urban area for business or pleasure, but there's very little media set in a rural environment and "rural tourism" isn't exactly a popular pastime of urbanites.
> I think a lot of the pushback against cars have to do with the popularization of human-centric design movements that question the assumption that cars are the pinnacle of transportation that American cities have operated from since about the 1950s. An easy example is the idea of "induced demand" [1] that shows even from a pure engineering perspective that the cost-benefit math for cars has long been unfairly weighted towards cars by outside forces.
Sure, I actually agree with a lot of this. I would like to see American cities and suburbs become more walkable, and I'm sure the car industry lobbied for car-centric planning, jay-walking laws, etc. My criticism isn't that anti-car policies are unfounded or they don't make sense anywhere, but that the anti-car movement is generally ignorant (in a literal sense, not pejoratively) of the non-urban world.
> We're seeing a lot of pressure around housing and energy and social policy in general which in turn is making us question decisions we've made, culturally, in history, like can we really sustain the building of less dense housing for our growing population?
Yes, outside of urban areas we certainly can do this for the foreseeable future. Most of America isn't constrained by space.
> I'm rambling now, but I get frustrated when people dismiss concerns like that out of hand.
No one is dismissing these concerns out of hand--I'm only arguing that the policies that policies which assume a high degree of density don't make sense in areas where that assumption is incorrect. This seems almost tautological.
> but I still think it's worth interrogating these assumptions we've carried to see if there's a better way we could be living life.
Fully agree. I think we could have a lot more productive conversations if we started by reimagining collectively rather than asserting how others should live their lives (without demonstrating any understanding of their concerns).
all are Bigly disconnected from the real world
Most consume way more than they actually utilize for nutritional value. In America, food is entertainment more than anything else. Once the price of this "entertainment" becomes prohibitive, people will start looking at it with the proper perspective.
Simply switching from daily takeout to weekly meal prep can shave $500-1000 off someone's monthly food budget. The time/discipline tradeoff is complex, but ultimately a hungry person will figure something out.
At the same time it also depends on what that local population really is used too - different to compare Asia, South East Asia to Africa.
Ethanol Mandates == Higher Food Prices == Arab Spring Scenarios.
> The time/discipline tradeoff is complex
Here's how I do : once a week buy lots vegetables at the market. Once every two days, put a good deal of veggies + rice/lentils (+ rarely chicken) in a casserole. Add little water, cover, let cook very gently.
Now you have good food for two days. And cheap. And dead easy to make.
Sure, it’ll all adjust, just not at the timescale necessary.
When it's very plentiful, meat producers switch into more grains and grow more cattle. When it's scarce, meat producers slaughter their cattle earlier, and do as much as possible to substitute grains for grass.
AFAIK, the second largest stabilizer is on stockpiles. But some countries do almost none of it.
https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B00GTDGMHC
So basically the cost of enough fertilizer to feed an entire family for a year has gone up by, what, $20? $100?
And that's at retail prices; the cost (and cost increase) would obviously be much smaller when purchased in bulk. And that's also for the name brand product, obviously generics are much cheaper.
I'm not a farmer but I did fertilize ~20 fruit trees with weekend with Plant-tone, Peters 20-20-20, Garden Lime, and Fish & Kelp. My cost of doing that for the entire year will be maybe $60, and that's only because I'm trying to maximize fruit quality and tree health rather than minimize costs.
- Drastically reducing food waste. In the United States, food waste is estimated at 30-40% https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs
- Shift away from animal based protein rapidly. Livestock takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land, yet produces less than 20% of the world's supply of calories https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets.... (don't get me wrong, I love meat, but I also love a habitable planet that can sustain the current population...)
Is it really our ambition to turn the whole world into residential skyscrapers just because we figured out how to feed 40 billion people on this one planet?
(2) But I want it.
This is the recipe for the road we are on.
Any reason you are averse to eating bugs specifically?
But seriously its not stigma, its cuisine preference.
In light of these numbers I don't understand the environmental rationalization based on the diets of predators.
a) all instances of meat-eating is bad for the environment
b) you will need to start eating insects
That's been in the news cycle for the last half-decade and major NGOs as well as governments now (EU approved bugs as food) are on board, saying it'll be necessary to feed everybody their protein in the future.
Why do you think that's not relevant?
On a discussion about general religions, or future relevant policies, a comment like this would be normal, "I can respect Islam but I'm not going to stop eating pork".
And then I guess you would say "who said you have to stop eating pork?".
Both are critiques of the handling of current challenges (food and housing).
To come full circle, "I support affordable housing, but I don't want to live in a pod"
;)
It's not that eating meat is inherently bad, it's the abomination we created to make it a world wide cheap commodity.
Just like a single car isn't a problem, the problem is the scale and the fact that we built our societies around it as if it was just an inevitable fact of life
> all predators who eat exclusively large prey would be extinct.
Lions don't have literal meat factories, don't treat animals like merchandise and don't use low quality processed meat as a filler for everything. This is such a low quality analogy. Look at that video and tell me it's just what large predators do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWbgZQxd6J4&t=106s
> I'm not going to start eating bugs.
Nobody saying that, I'm 90% vegetarian and I never had a single bug in my life. I'm lifting weight three times a week and rock climbing twice a week with no issues too so here goes the "muh protein/energy" argument. The bug based food and ultra processed vegetarian/vegan options are just a marketing fad imho
Again, eating meat is fine, eating 500gr of low quality meat every single isn't, it's just about scale.
I only eat 100% grass-fed beef, and I believe the world would be better without corn fed abominations.
If the true externalities of your consumption are not priced into the product then you're not really paying for it.
As a general rule this is the problem with our entire lifestyle. Very few people will deny that we do not life a sustainable life style, and yet almost none consider what this means.
The definition of unsustainable is that you are consuming beyond your ability to pay. If all the true future costs of our industrial life were factored into the products we consume, we could not afford any of them.
This is true, but other than showing up to the butcher with my money, what else can I do? Some _other thing_ needs to motivate these externalities into the price; not the consumer. The only thing I could conceive of doing is voting with my wallet, which I do when I buy grass-fed meat.
But hey, I'm guessing you "want to live"?
So selfish.
If we're having problems maintain soil fertility levels now, imagine if we needed 2-3x the fertilizer to transform unsuitable land into still unsuitable land (but now growing human-edible crops) because somebody thought this was a good idea.
"If all the grain currently fed to livestock in the United States were consumed directly by people, the number of people who could be fed would be nearly 800 million," David Pimentel, professor of ecology in Cornell University's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, reported at the July 24-26 meeting of the Canadian Society of Animal Science in Montreal. Or, if those grains were exported, it would boost the U.S. trade balance by $80 billion a year, Pimentel estimated.
With only grass-fed livestock, individual Americans would still get more than the recommended daily allowance (RDA) of meat and dairy protein, according to Pimentel's report, "Livestock Production: Energy Inputs and the Environment."
"If all the grain currently fed to livestock in the United States were consumed directly by people, the number of people who could be fed would be nearly 800 million," David Pimentel, professor of ecology in Cornell University's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, reported at the July 24-26 meeting of the Canadian Society of Animal Science in Montreal. Or, if those grains were exported, it would boost the U.S. trade balance by $80 billion a year, Pimentel estimated.
With only grass-fed livestock, individual Americans would still get more than the recommended daily allowance (RDA) of meat and dairy protein, according to Pimentel's report, "Livestock Production: Energy Inputs and the Environment."
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-m...
To add to that, the argument that animal pastures cannot be used for anything else has been proven demonstrably false time and time again. They are not usable for modern day agricultural monoculture cropland, which is the metric that the studies use and I'm sure the commenter is referring to. That does not mean by any stretch of the imagination that they cannot be rewilded or even transformed into usable farm land again through long term soil regeneration methods such as permaculture farming or effective through growing climate appropriate polycultures.
Maybe we should blast to level it, and make new soil then?
Around here, Quebec Canada, few cattle are grain fed, and the land they graze on is rocky, hilly, non crop land.
But, even more importantly, is that there is no food shortage. None. Zero. Nada.
In fact, all around the world, Canada, Europe, farmers are paid not to farm.
I detest it when people try to obtain goals, by using false narratives.
In the UK for example, people are completely ignorant to how the place looked before we levelled it for grazing, viewing the 70% ecologically barren agricultural land (of which 80% of that is used for grazing or agriculture to feed cattle) as the norm and the 2.5% old growth forest as a more novelty, and something strangely "unique to that area". The country was 60-80% temperate rainforest before human habitation, depending on what research you go by.
This video is especially poignant, and really shows the dramatic impact simply doing nothing has: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VZSJKbzyMc
we should stop subsidizing crops it only incentivize monocultures
Edit: Surprisingly our world in data has a breakdown of land uses (which includes grazing) but not of crop use. This study[0] says that about 40% of global crop use (by calories) is used to feed livestock and that it takes about 3.7 crop calories for 1 calorie of animal product. So yes, there's plenty of saving potential even if we kept all the grazing livestock untouched.
[0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/4/044...
if that farmland could be used to make human food, which is a lot more remunerative, they already would.
makes sense.
Cows are ruminants.
> First, we estimated country-wise feed requirements. We calculated feed required per grid cell for each livestock types in ton per year multiplying regional and livestock-wise daily feed requirements (Haberl et al 2007) with the gridded livestock counts.
Honestly, I'm not very interested in their results after reading this. If they're just estimating based on number of livestock x calories required for livestock along with a bucket of crop yields for an area then this is just paper shuffling. You'll have my attention when you get real numbers directly from the farmers themselves rather than just aggregating 3rd hand information over a grid area.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/4/044...
Would it be good for the environment? Quite possibly. Would it result in more fertilizer available on the market? Not really.
Here is an example of a feedlot https://www.bilaterals.org/IMG/jpg/33a3ab67aa6bbe3184c0441d2...
The cattle come to a side and eat from troughs like this https://cdn.farmjournal.com/s3fs-public/styles/840x600/publi...
It takes 2.5~ pounds of grain and 1,850~ gallons of water to produce 1 pound of beef.
Even if we assume an average of 3 acres per head, you're looking at 3 billion acres of land just to keep beef going (never mind the 785 million pigs and 33 billion chickens).
If you entirely pasture feed, you're going to get lower slaughter weights too as their weight at slaughter averages about 1,200 pounds compared with about 1,350 pounds for feedlot animals, you'd end up needing something like 30% more cattle to get the same amount of meat https://awellfedworld.org/grazing/
The people that know what they are talking about are already in the industry. You are not going to see their opinions because they are busy doing what they can.
The people who actually understand things not politicians, academics, or columnists.
https://www.sacredcow.info/blog/qz6pi6cvjowjhxsh4dqg1dogizno...
I think you are talking about fodder i.e., crops grown for animal consumption on land that could be used for crops eaten by people. But the above link says only 8% of livestock calories come from fodder. Another 14% come from grains and other food that could have been eaten by people. But altogether this less than a quarter of the calories livestock consume.
The remaining ~30% of calories feeding livestock come from eating stuff generated by the agricultural industry as human-inedible byproducts, chiefly the crop residue left behind when crops are harvested.
Would great appreciate corrections or clarifications if I’ve misinterpreted the above.
Are you wholly unfamiliar with feedlots? 50% + of the bodyweight of the bulk of cattle in the world comes when they live on a feedlot, where they get 5.5 to 6.5 pounds of feed, via trough, to raise them from 600-900 pounds up to the slaughter weight of 1250-1350 pounds.
Corn (dent, which is still usable for human foodstuffs but is mostly just grown for animal feed) is widely used on the feed lot because you don't need 5.5-6.5 pounds per pound of beef, you only need 2.07-2.24 pounds per pound of slaughter weight. Each pound of dent corn yields about 1,566 kcals so you're trading 3241+ kcal of (fertilized) corn crop for 800-1250 kcals of beef.
So for 1 acre of corn you need 40 to 50 pounds of nitrogen, 1 acre of corn. For the 2020 crop year, USDA estimates U.S. corn yield to be 181.8 bushels per acre. 1 bushel is 56 pounds. So to finish 1 cow to slaughter weight, assuming it's pasture fed to 600 pounds, you're looking at roughly 2.9 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer.
So roughly 2.9 pounds of nitrogen, 1345 pounds of corn, and then factor in the water which is 1-2 gallons per 100 pounds of of bodyweight per day times 12-36 months depending on what fat content is desired in the meat.
Again, we can use less fertilizer, reduce water usage, and better use some current cropland (75+ million acres in the United States alone) for crops intended for human consumption, drastically reduce the risk of new diseases by eliminating hundreds of millions of chronically stressed animal hosts, and to simply restore of them to native species in an area and reduce all of the negative environmental impacts of farming in those areas (runoff, soil depletion, loss of native habitats).
https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/coexisten...
Indeed, it looks like there are 915M acres of agricultural land in the US, and of which 89.5M (<10%) is corn, which works out to 4.7% of all US ag land being used to grow corn fed to animals. Like, obviously that much land is “vast” on an absolute scale, just like any non-trivial fraction of a nationwide number, but it doesn’t strike me as an obviously unreasonable percentage.
Here’s a pretty good chart:
https://www.arespectfullife.com/2018/08/05/41-of-u-s-land-is...
So if we accept that the pasture range cannot be used for crops, then what we are looking at is the animal feed area (which is both fodder and crops that could be eaten by humans but is eaten by animals). It’s 125M acres, I think, or ~14% of all ag land.
> So if we accept that the pasture range cannot be used for crops, then what we are looking at is the animal feed area (which is both fodder and crops that could be eaten by humans but is eaten by animals). It’s 125M acres, I think, or ~14% of all ag land.
The Bloomberg article that is the source for your source, disagrees with you and categorizes the livestock feed acreage as cropland. So again, you are distorting the picture to make the animal feed number look smaller. Your own source is saying that more acres of cropland are used to feed animals than people.
The amount of land used for pasture is definitely germane to the discussion we were having before you began commenting. See my first comment and the one I was replying to.
If you continue to assume bad faith, I won’t continue the discussion.
Is there not an efficiency problem there that we could improve on?
(Not an expert in this area, genuinely curious.)
All land is not fungible, we need to use the best tools for the job, and that will be a mix of a bit of everything, including animal meat.
Another factor is cattle feed is often poor quality human food, so the reject stuff. That wheat that was harvested a bit early to avoid storms and no good for the flour is great for cattle.
Also, to the main topic of this thread, I wonder if its good for food security we grow extra crops to feed livestock. If there is a food supply shortage, cattle can go to slaughter and there is plenty of extra corn or other about for humans. We eat less meat for a few years while we fix the supply chains type thing.
The way we see supply shortages from COVID, Id hope we never become too efficient in the food supply chain. The consequence of something creating lower food production is far worse than limited computer chips. Its not a system we want to be over optimised for the good times.
We could reforest the pastures (start reducing CO2 in the atmosphere) and return the land to the wildlife (put a stop to an anthropomorphic extinction).
Looking at the data it appears that we just need to drop beef and veal - totally doable I guess?
I didn't read the source in full, but I wonder how would such a shift affect fish populations?
Plant based protein is basically putting oil in the ground and getting crops back.
It's intellectually disgusting how you try to put a round peg in a square hole.
Reality is the opposite of what you said.
Pesticide bioaccumulation in cattle https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7525218/
Public Health Implications of Pesticide Residues in Meat https://www.researchgate.net/publication/50434365_Public_Hea...
In this case, you might as well stop eating animal protein, if you can't make it work for you.
It's a bit disingenuous to say that animal proteins don't need fertiliser when in fact the extreme vast majority of the animals we eat are fed products or byproducts coming from intensive agriculture which uses fertilisers
Typically, "grain fed" cattle are fed with grass for most of their life, and then "finished" in grain lots to plump them up before sale. They aren't raised from birth to steak on grain.
While this always inevitably attracts the aggressively emotional "you can pry my nightly organic wagyu porterhouse steaks from my cold dead carnivorous hands, I'm not eating bugs", there's certainly a middle ground for flexitarian things.
A lot of meat consumed in the world isn't really consumed as meat like a steak or a lamb shank, it's "para-meat" like pink slime and low-grade mince, where it's really just a source of protein and umami to throw into ready meals, fast food and other industrial food where no one needs to see what it looked like as long as it says "chicken" on the menu. And it's only cheap enough to do that because it's subsidised.
I'm not a vegetarian, but I still chafe when I see 500g of tofu (often the only one carried in a supermarket[1]) costing the same as 1kg of chicken, which, kilo for kilo, probably ate at least 10x times that much soybean as is in the tofu.
And yes, I understand there's an economy of scale here, but it's more than just that. I think it's also that everyone from Nestle to supermarkets would rather, if people must shift from meat, that people substituted expensive alternatives like only organic tofu and "synthetic" meat alternatives since that's just more profitable.
[1]: Which always seems to be a spongy watery mess compared to the solid blocks you get in the Chinese supermarket (which also cost about half the normal supermarket variety).
Land limitations are not a problem.
Have you ever been to a feed lot? It is not a pretty little hilly patch of land with cows wandering aimlessly around nibbling on grass. The vast majority of cattle are, at a minimum, finished on a feedlot. A patch of dirt, packed in as much as movement allows, and fed grain via a trough for half (or more) of their weight gain.
Easier said than done. After all, if businesses are literally throwing their product out, it's probably for a good reason (ie. trying to recover it is more expensive than buying more)
* How much of that land is pasture, and cannot be viably used for other purposes?
* How much of the remaining arable land is suitable for growing plants humans will consume directly?
* How much of the corn/soy/etc that can be viably grown on the balance would humans choose to eat?
We're very, very good at growing bulk crops, but not so excited about eating them. Feeding the excess to animals, and eating the animals makes ~1/3 of that productive capacity available (and appetizing) to humans. Modulo environmental impacts of CAFOs and such (which need to be addressed) that's a pretty efficient use of excess productive capacity for bulk crops beyond demand for human consumption.
Of course for those of us in the West "feeding" means buying strawberries in September just because we can.
If that's the case people might be able to make a quick buck locally sourcing and making fertilizer, which previously might've been beaten by economies of scale.
With corn-for-ethanol, the US gov is paying to keep farmland productive that has no human-or-livestock feed value. But you could imagine a situation where more human or livestock feed is needed (massive disruption of cropland, say), and in those or subsequent years we could convert basically-for-ethanol fields to consumption fields.
Or if you are running out of fertilizer instead of running out of food, then you can divert expected and stored fertilizer for ethanol fields onto human-and-livestock feed fields. Once again the excess capacity acts in your favor. (Or ought to)
This is assuming that governing bodies and farmers are making coherent rational decisions and in addition responding to local conditions. I have no opinion on that. Just explaining why subsidizing what looks like superfluous excess capacity is not necessarily a dumb thing to do.
Also, I have no idea where i heard it, but i remember from somewhere, that pretty much all of the pet food has to be edible by humans too, "just in case" shit hits the fan..
A lot of the mismanagement comes from big AG and profit/growth goals.
For example, people in the United States eat about 5 times the amount of meat per person as people did 100 years ago. The population has grown, too. The amount of food grown to produce the calories/nutrients needed to feed the animals which people then eat is far more than for when people eat the produce. It we're talking economies of scale, here.
Big AG has a mass influence on subsidies, regulations, and even recommendations that come out of governments on diet.
If you look at what healthiest for us as individuals and societies with economies of scale taken into account... it's not what Big AG is guiding. Not according to the scientists who study this stuff, anyway.
Big AG is influencing a lot of mismanagement to help with their profits. So far, it's worked well for their bottom lines.
Big Ag invests in machines that each cost hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. Those machines are tuned to spread powdered/pelletized fertilizer that comes from a factory. It would be prohibitively expensive to pivot to machines that can collect and spread manure, and the results would be suboptimal compared to their usual inputs. It is simply not worth the cost, as it would put them at a disadvantage to those who do not switch over. The shortage will pass long before they could pay off the investment.
The coming years will be "fun" (and I mean bad, to be clear).
https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-cha...
I wouldn't call the impending cognitive dissonance "fun" unless one likes being a spectator of ideologically driven mental gymnastics.
We've done weird stuff to low levels of our economies. That's gonna have marginal consequences across the board. And a little bit across the board adds up to a lot of hardship.
If you produce only just enough in good years, then people die in bad years. If you produce double demand in good years then bad years are fine.
The fact that we can usually afford to waste lots of food is a really really good thing.
Millions of pounds of perfectly good potatoes had to be destroyed. The US FDA declared the potato virus a threat to human health but no other country made that determination. Politics ruined a lot of food.
We have the most sophisticated data collection and logistics networks in the history of the world, and you think we just accidentally run out of a fundamental economic factor at a key moment in the natural economic cycle, and that risks mass starvation? We can somehow predict macro climate impacts, but not manage how much fertilizer we're going to need for a planting season? It's just politics by people who use politics as a means to gratify an urge for power for its own end. I would be suprised if people were still acting fooled.
Absolutely.
There is no omniscient Illuminati pulling the strings for the entire planet. Just people, corporations, governments, and other corporate entities making decisions based on what they perceive to be their best interest. And all of them are limited and fallible.
Also, wars and pandemics tend to throw a wrench into the quality of planning forecasts.
That's hundreds of fellowships and thousands of adjunct jobs. Even if you funded most of them, it would take several millions of dollars. Journalists are far too curious, and we can rely on them to object to any falsehood and propaganda such a scheme would require to survive. Really, all 6 or 7 media conglomerates working together to push the same messages or to kill stories that would expose said plot seems pretty far fetched. The logistics alone would be baffling.
The only plausible way that could happen would be through a kind of religious hysteria of people who imagine themselves as enlightened through an awakening, and on a path to redemption that requires them to efface themselves, dismantle their formerly sinful lives and prevent others from sinning in a similar way. It's absurd in a modern era. It would have to be wrapped in a political agenda, which educated people are basically immune to, especially ones who are largely agnostic. The amount of effort they would need just to suppress naturally occuring logical questions that would imply a conspiracy which would unravel under the most minor scrutiny would be so immense as to not be in the realm of serious consideration.
There are however, movements and ideologues reading from the same script that do things like creating a rail workers strike during planting season. It doesn't take a conspiracy, just the logic of an idea.
I'll take "ignore" for 50 please.
This only contributes for my anxiety levels. I'll outsource the worries for the big government, TYVM.
https://www.dissercat.com/content/biotekhnologicheskie-osnov... https://patents.google.com/patent/EP2095713A1/en Ah yes downvote because key knowledge nobody knows should keep being ignored otherwise it could.. save life's? Imagine the horror!
While we are at it, should we liberate Northern Ireland? What exactly is the difference, except that in the case of Northern Ireland less than 50% wants to be British and in Donbass more than 50% wants to be Russian.
Also I'd suggest you don't use independent. They went away from claiming that and it's not like the veneer of it in Transnistria and South-Ossetia was much better. The ethnic cleansing projects there went a lot smoother for Putin tho. Do they care so much about Armenia independence too?
And yeah let northern Ireland have it's independence if a vote goes that way imo.