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Comment by hosh | Hacker News Reader

I mean, we have been depleting soil fertility through the use of synthetic fertilizers for decades. It’s been a self-destructive cycle.

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.

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Synthetic fertilizers do not deplete soil fertility. Some agricultural practices do, with a strong emphasis on mono-culture, but it is wrong to throw everything in the same bag.

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...

Synthetic fertilizer does have negative impacts, but saying they have negative food impacts borders on oxymoron.

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.

Not just overuse, but use on land that is too close to bodies of water without riparian buffers.

And also wrong dispersal. All the fertilizer that gets on the water is wasted and does nothing but increase the farmer expenses.

> 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.

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...

this is possibly, but yields go way down, in some cases by 50% or more. the amount of land that will need to be utilized for food growth will have to drastically increased.

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.

Yields for a specific crop goes down in polycropping. Yield across the entire portfolio goes up. Plus, crop failure and marker failure of any one crop doesn’t mean complete failure — the other crop still yields something. It becomes less of betting the farm.

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 what I understand / have read. yields go down per acre when moving from synthetic fertilizer to organic / natural fertilization. not just in the immediate, but forever. soil health, nutrition, crop resilience all go up, input and input cost go down, but so does overall yield per acre.

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.

>3 acre hobby farm

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).

UC has tons of classes and workshops on farming/gardening you can take, ranging from weekend workshops to apprenticeships to online courses to hands on training. Or honestly there are tons of forums and internet communities that have lots of free resources and advice if you look for them.

https://ucanr.edu/sites/UrbanAg/Resources_and_Help/Farm_Trai...

Thanks for the link! I think I'm also interested in learning the logistics and legal aspect as well. I feel there are tons of resources out there on how to grow things, but not a lot on how to find land, what you need to look out for, etc. I've seen quite a lot of YouTube videos on this topic and I feel like I'm still missing quite a lot of info.

Check these three things, at a minimum:

- Zoning

- Soil type

- Water availability.

Your local UC agricultural extension office can help.

Extra thumbs-up: If you have any questions like this, check with your local state or county extension agents. They'll talk your ears off. They're lonely. :-)

They can't always help, but they'll have good suggestions to think about.

My land used to be a traditionally farmed plot.

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.

> soil health, nutrition, crop resilience all go up, input and input cost go down, but so does overall yield per acre.

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 is a chemical soup like the chemical soup that keeps the Henrietta Lack cancer cell line still alive to this day.

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.

The problem is government which has an incentive to "feed everyone" which means cheap food by any means necessary. Food prices must go up, let them naturally go up. That means less food for poorer people, which in turn slowly means less people (lower birth rates, poor and bigger families struggling, etc), until we reach equilibrium with our environment under the terms we accept.

It's the only fair way to do it, IMO.

I overall agree with this statement. I'm mostly disagreeing with the yield assumption. the cubins do not grow the same yield per acre as we do. they may have food security/sovereignty, but they do it at the cost of more land then otherwise could have done.

>Food prices must go up, let them naturally go up. That means less food for poorer people, which in turn slowly means less people (lower birth rates, poor and bigger families struggling, etc), until we reach equilibrium with our environment under the terms we accept.

Unless there's something in it for them by their own assessment people will not make sacrifices of that magnitude.

Unlike you, neither I, nor the government are keen on seeing bread riots.

Civil wars and regime changes aren't a lot of fun to live... or die through.

Do you support social Darwinism?

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.

With enough effort all counties could be like Venezuela!

What, a petrostate that mismanaged its major industry, that was later sanctioned and embargoed by its biggest trading partner for political reasons?

That's basically what I'm hearing too!

    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)

Sure, but why should people‘s income decide who lives and who dies? I’d say let’s kill all the psychopaths first. Like those fantasizing about mass starvation.

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.

You are ignoring the time scales, locations of the worst effects, and lots of other side effects like food protectionism and the planning that farmers have to make 9 months before the food shortages happen.

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.

One interesting thing about the green revolution was that food went from 1/3 of the average American household budget to 1/6.

Oh, and to paraphrase Hitchhiker's Guide, programmers will probably the first ones up against the wall when the revolution comes.

Of all corn grain grown in the US, 45% is used as animal feed, and just 12% for human food (the rest is turned into ethanol for fuel) [1]. If it was just a 50% decrease in yield we could offset most of it by only having grass-fed cattle and cutting our meat consumption accordingly. Of course an instant switch would be inconvenient because we don't plant the gourmet variant when we intend to feed it to animals, but with a year of lead time it wouldn't be too bad.

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...

A lot of the grain fed to cattle is actually spent mash from the ethanol production. I wonder how those overlap numbers are accounted for.

An interesting trivia:

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

That is a super fun fact. Not that it changes the calculus, but I would be curious what percentage of human calories come from water sources (fishing, seaweed, lobster, etc).

Luckily ruminants do not need crop-suitable land to thrive.

It's not really as bad as you suspect. A lot of homesteaders target food self-sufficiency on a quarter acre; while there's some debate [1] over whether that's possible, pessimistic estimates for the amount of space needed to feed a skilled organic gardener's family of 4-6 top out at about an acre. A 100x100m plot is about 2.5 acres.

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...

I was hoping your figure would be wrong and it is, but the situation is actually worse than than. 1.4 billion hectares of arable land divided by 7.9 billion people yields 0.18 hectares per individual, which is actually a 18×100m plot per person, 5 times less than your figure. And that's before conservation areas, wasting arable land to build suburbs, etc. Looking into national figures is interesting, showing that China has less than half than amount, but also shows that something is off with the figures themselves. Extremely arid and sandy Niger has more than 5 times the global average, which doesn't pass the smell test. I was personally shocked by the sheer unsuitability of the land for growing crops in the most fertile regions of that country, much unlike the lush southern areas of Mali for instance. Forested areas don't count as is clearly seen from low-ranking Brunei, which is 98% primary forest with extremely luxurious landscapes. Papua New Guinea is mostly self-sufficient and yet also extremely low, clearly demonstrating that agroforestry systems aren't accounted for at all. I'm sure other absurdities are to be found. Lies, damned lies, and statistics…

[1] https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Agriculture/...

this is the same challenge we have with fossil fuels. It will only get more difficult the longer we delay

We have enormous reserves of fossil fuels. The U.S. has 1200+ years' energy needs' worth of natural gas alone. We have less _oil_, sure, but as far as energy goes, we have plenty.

> Better than food security is food sovereignty, and people within a locality being able to feed themselves.

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.

Cubans on average lost ~6kgs during the crisis in the 90's. Sure, diabetes and heart disease dropped as a result but I would much rather have a food surplus.

Most manure is already spread on fields and probably mostly contains nitrogen that came from industrial fertilizer.

From the link I posted above: "Fifty-six percent of all land used for corn, soybeans, wheat, and cotton was on farms that used no-till/strip-till on at least part of their cropland in 2010-11."

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