2022/23 worldwide grain consumption will exceed production [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

2022/23 worldwide grain consumption will exceed production [pdf]

downloads.usda.library.cornell.edu

58 pointsKon-Peki61 comments

This impending disaster has got me thinking about Salish Blue, a newly developed perennial 'wheat'. The plant last ~5 years and sends out deep roots, so they require less fertilizer and water. I don't know if it ready for primetime yet, but the beer I had that was brewed with it was indistinguishable from any other beer.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-self-sustainin...

It may be useful in some areas, but other areas increase the yield using double cropping, the idea is to grow each year a second crop after the harvest of the first one. For example see the figure 7.1.4 in https://serc.carleton.edu/integrate/teaching_materials/food_... or the figure 1 in http://blog.umd.edu/agronomynews/2019/09/06/interseeding-cov...

I've talked with several soil scientists that are concerned that we may have another dust bowl. Odds are we are going to see more and more severe droughts, and our standard corn and wheat farming practices leave the soil in a wind susceptible condition during the wrong times of the year. We just don't put enough organic matter back into the soil each rotation, so we need to fertilize to offset the nutrient loss, and we end up with terrible sand-like soil that can blow away and take all the nutrients with it.

IIRC, this was the issue that Salish Blue was engineered to address. I know about double cropping, but I fear that doubling down on our current practices for short-term gain might put us in a worse place 10+ years down the road.

On a separate note, we really need to stop subsidizing corn production for fuel. 40% of our annual yields goes to ethanol.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/as-the-climate-warms-could-th...

https://www.science.org/content/article/dust-bowl-20-rising-...

I had too search dust bowl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl

I think here in Argentina we are using a lot of cover crop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_crop and no-till farming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-till_farming to avoid that problem, but I live in the city, so I'm not sure.

> On a separate note, we really need to stop subsidizing corn production for fuel. 40% of our annual yields goes to ethanol.

I agree. Agriculture subsidies are a big problem for all the other countries, it's like dumping.

Anyway, ethanol from corn is not a bad idea. Imagine the corn fields like a giant carbon capture facility. The carbon is not captured, but it's more efficient than digging a hole to extract oil to produce energy and then using more energy to store carbon in another hole.

We use(used?) ethanol from sugar cane, but corn is also a C4 plant that make photosynthesis more efficient https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C4_carbon_fixation.

Cool. Sounds ideal for garden production too. I would love a perennial patch of that. And yes, I would malt it for beer too.

Wouldn't you need quite a large patch (by garden standards) even just for a single home brew? I'm no expert but it seems to me cereals only really work at scale.

Depends on what you mean by "Garden standards". No, a single plant isn't worth harvesting by itself, and one square foot would be barely enough for a single serving, but a typical 1 acre lawn, imagine a square that's just ~200 feet/60 meters on a side, is 43 THOUSAND + 560 square feet. The linear/square relationship can be really surprising.

Wheat yields like 50 bushels/acre, if I seeded my lawn in wheat I'd have 3,000 pounds, more than I could possibly hope to brew or drink. If I instead grew sweet corn, I'd have something like 15,000 ears. That's a lot of corn on the cob, and you've got to eat it within 24 hours of harvest for best flavor, and the harvest window is only a few weeks in early August.

No, you're not going to want to grow cereals one stalk at a time in a raised bed, nor grow it like a little potted oregano on your kitchen window sill. But it doesn't take that much cultivation - say, 10 rows of sweet corn along the edge of the lawn - to get more than you can hope to consume.

>typical 1 acre law

That's not typical anywhere I've lived.

My experience growing small patches of grain is that migrating sparrows and sleeping deer will mostly wipe you out. These are relatively insignificant depradations for large fields, but if you only have 40 square meters they can destroy it all.

It increasingly looks like I need a diversified portfolio of farmland, nonperishable food, solar panels, livestock, replacement parts, Nana's recipes, basic tools, loyal dogs, diesel fuel, antibiotics, good insulation, barbed wire, warm clothes, fertilizer, bandages, a foot-pedal washing machine, surveillance drones, firewood, ammunition, bags of cement, a reliable spouse, flashlights, a Toyota Hilux, a cast-iron stove, some bicycles, a well-borer, night-vision goggles, fruit trees, popular cigarettes, rain barrels, a hardcover encyclopedia, and marriageable female relatives.

I like your comment because it's useful to consider but amusing at how dire survival amongst humans might be.

If you haven't watched Last Man On Earth (TV show), it's a good combo of the same thoughts (humorous, but easily provokes more serious thought). And for less-light fare, Alone is a good insight into survival in the wild, though without worrying about humans as a threat. Humans, of course, completely changes the game.

At our current rate, your antibiotics will be worthless in a decade or two. Who knows?

contracts but will still exceed production, that should read.

It has exceeded production since 2020/21, and also did in 2018/19, per the same graph in the submission (which isn't itself so dramatically titled).

How can consumption exceed production year after year? Do we have tons of stored grain that lasts for many years?

Yeah. A majority of grain on the market is not 'new'. It's been stored for a while, either waiting for buyer, or for the right time and the right price. Most country also have a national reserve to ensure food security. And they tend to be quite trigger happy with the slightest risk to that. I'm from a major rice producing country and when the first wave of Covid hit, they block exporting right away.

That’s very interesting. Are there any books that go into detail about this?

Not that I know of, just from personal experience. Grains kept in good condition have ridiculously long shelf life. And for commodity crops like grains, the scale of production is just so insane that it is not possible for it to be all consumed at a short time frame after it's harvested.

Also, agriculture produce's price fluctuates a lot. Farming has a long feedback time, so by the time you harvest, the state of the market is no longer the same. Anything that can be stockpiled will be stockpiled to wait for the right time. This is not normally done by the farmer themselves, but the traders. Then it's just FIFO, the oldest grains at the bottom of the silos will be taken out first.

Tangentially related, the US has the world's largest stockpile of cheese [0], coming in at 1.4 billion pounds as of 2019.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2019/01/09/683339929/nobody-is-moving-ou...

Now that is something to be proud of.

Not really. It's a government subsidy for factory dairy farming, they are being paid to overproduce and then it just sits in storage going to .

If we don't consume it, don't reward producing it.

Covid taught us (again) that efficiency is at odds with robustness.

Having nothing in inventory is perfectly efficient, but also perfectly fragile in an environment where a major wheat producer is attacked by a madman.

There has to be a balance, and cheese is easy to store and it improves with age.

Being paid to “overproduce” is equivalent to being paid to add supply chain robustness in this case.

We have been overproducing for decades, and have had many opportunities to decrease the amount of overproduction. Certainly the government should buy surplus milk when the market fluctuates to support the industry, but I think at this point the industry is overproducing on purpose and expecting the government to purchase every bit of overproduction, to increase profits.

I'm no expert, but yes it can be stored; see also the 'stocks' section in the submission. It also seems to be implied that 'consumption' includes derivative products (which makes total sense as long as it's not double-counting).

It's not continuously harvested (spring and winter crops) so there'd have to be a buffer anyway, and you wouldn't know in advance if that's going to be good bad or average.

Also I assume good stock control (not necessarily just FIFO, but also relegating the good stuff to animal feed as it ages) so really running a slight deficit for several years is the same as a big deficit for one year. (Or better even - less implied risk for the next year, doesn't seem so volatile.)

At least over here, farmers are planting a lot less than previous years, because fertilizers are so expensive.

I don't know why the markets or futures trade don't work to increase the price of grain enough to make it worthwhile.

Because of the often overlooked part of the demand/supply equation is that demand isn't just what people want, it's what people can afford. Grain futures won't go higher if people won't pay more for grain. Less grain production will simply mean at some point that the persons who don't have enough money will go hungry (or eat something else).

It's actually the effectiveness of the markets that cause this. If grain production in rich countries goes down because of expensive fertilisers, then the demand of grain by those rich countries is satisfied by the supply of poorer countries. The pain won't be felt domestically, except by the farmers.

Farmers might benefit from that too. It all depends on the exact shapes on demand and supply curves. Reduction of supply volume can result in more supplier profit, if the price also goes up appropriately.

You are, of course, correct that it will be the poorest customers that will suffer.

We're talking about grain. If people can't afford grain what simpler, cheaper food would they fall back to? Sand?

Lots of US grain goes to produce ethanol which can be cut back.

Lots more goes into livestock feed around the world. People might be able to afford grain but not meat and lots of grain is available to be reallocated to humans.

If people can't afford grain then they go without food. Aka famine is the "fallback".

From the ancient riots in Rome for the 'panem,' the cries of the Miserables storming the Bastille for the pan, the Russian revolution, the 'Arab spring,' the collapse of the Soviet Union, and other revolutions and times of trouble seem all to be coinciding with elevated grain/flour/bread prices. The poorest will have nothing to lose and will have everything to gain with a change in regime. Rich people will be fine I'm sure. Interesting times that we live in.

Modern practice is to ban food exports in these cases. The Irish potato famine was notably not caused by a lack of food production in Ireland, but by a lack of affordable food.

In a food drought it’s quite likely that rich countries would feel the pain as well as poor countries.

The obvious consequence would be to immediately stop the use of food-grade crops for producing bio-fuel, as long as this war is going on. The amount of loss is mind-blowing - every day, Europe alone is burning the equivalent of 15 million loaves of bread for wheat alone [1]!

The next step would be to tighten meat consumption to further improve the amount of wheat available to feed humans and outright ban Brazilian meat imports when we're at it to stop further devastation of the Amazon rain forest.

And the final step would be to sanction China to hell and beyond for their hoarding [2] which was a major price driver even before the Russians invaded. One might be inclined to believe China fully knew what was about to go down and decided to profiteer.

[1] https://www.euractiv.com/section/biofuels/news/biofuels-impa...

[2] https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Datawatch/China-hoards-ove...

> And the final step would be to sanction China to hell and beyond for their hoarding [2] which was a major price driver even before the Russians invaded. One might be inclined to believe China fully knew what was about to go down and decided to profiteer.

Why does any country have an obligation to export? I get that other countries might like them to, but sanctioning a country for not selling you something seems wrong. I get that sanctions are coercive, but usually not like that?

I think the implication is that China had previously imported much of their reserves and is now reselling at an opportunistic time. The argument for sanctions would be similar to the argument against price-gouging or scalping.

> reselling at an opportunistic time

Are they reselling? I don't think China is really exporting any grain at all in any major amounts. They can't satisfy domestic demand and prices are soaring. To then sanction a country for not selling to you is kind of bonkers in my mind.

It’s not about exporting, China can’t feed itself. Dependency on food imports doubled within like 3-4 years recently.

Sanctioning a country that can't feed itself for importing food seems even worse?

Without any additional context, of course. It’s the effect on global markets x when/how they’ve been stocking on reserves that can be questioned.

Chinese food (in)security is world food (in)security.

How much of Europe's biofuel crop is food grade?

My understanding (which might be wrong) is that much of the US's biofuel crop is "animal grade," or is otherwise not human-consumable without additional processing (nixtamalization). The latter makes it consumable but limits its cooking uses (again, to my understanding).

Then feed the animal grade crops to cows and pigs, should still free up a sizable load of human-quality grain to ease market pressure. We need drastic and quick action before famines hit Africa.

Many of the crops are not human edible without extra processing. We can do the extra processing, it’s not big deal if the alternative is actual hunger.

On the plus side I recently learned I’ve got a wheat & gluten intolerance so I shall be doing my bit to fix the imbalance by not eating any

Sorry and welcome to the club!

Unsolicited referral: America’s Test Kitchen has a cook book series called “How Can It be Gluten Free Cookbook”. We have 2 of them, I think there’s only 2. Literally everything we’ve tried has been outstanding! And the lessons they teach about what makes things work are really interesting.

>Sorry and welcome to the club!

haha indeed. Though frankly I seem to be more in the sensitivity camp so very reluctant to invoke gluten anything given that it isn't comparable to actual celiac sufferers

You might simply be sensitive to Roundup, which is found as residue in bread in North America, since it is used as a pre-harvest desiccant.

https://inhabitat.com/roundup-bread-the-real-reason-american...

Try consuming organic wheat products only.

>You might simply be sensitive to Roundup,

This was from blood IgE anti-body screening so I'd imagine it wouldn't confuse wheat and roundup...

Far from me the idea to dictate what you should eat, but now is the time to reduce meat consumption. Once every three meals should reduce it enough in developped country to add a lot of grain on the market.

But once every two meals is good too. I'm not dictating anything, just think about it and how hard is would be for you.

Did the US stop dumping subsidized grain into the ocean?

I don’t think they ever did. The main source of this seems to be papers in Iran. https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/16971/does-the-...

To the best of my knowledge, the US has never done that. What they have done is dump dairy, which is both directly subsidized and indirectly subsidized (by grain subsidies).

Malthus called, says he wants his idea back

Malthus doesn't get a lot of love around here, but looking around it kind of seems like he was more right than wrong. We're overfishing the oceans leading to huge declines in large fish. Insect populations seem to be crashing. And there's also climate change, etc.

The techno-optimists will counter that there are technical solutions for all of of our problems, but it seems that a lot of these issues actually require political will that just isn't there; humans generally don't have the longterm outlook required to fix many of these things on a global scale. Politicians who try to get us to take a longer view don't seem to last long in our political systems.

So yeah, I guess the earth could probably handle more people, but that's only if those people take a much longer view and intentionally try to live much more lightly on the earth - I don't see that happening so I have to conclude that Malthus' thesis seems to (unfortunately) be correct given the reality of human nature. Changing human nature isn't something technology is going to be able to do.

Malthus was wrong from a thermodynamic standpoint (we are still living within a conservation of mass framework), but he may have been accidentally right from a ‘what happens when you have a madman with 10,000 nukes?’ standpoint.

some folks gonna get that summer body whether they want to or not

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