After millennia of expansion, the world has passed ‘peak agricultural land’ | Hacker News Reader

After millennia of expansion, the world has passed ‘peak agricultural land’

ourworldindata.org

308 pointssebg339 comments

The article is better than the headline.

Remember that the reason we use so much land is because that's the cheapest way to grow food. We could grow more food on less land by farming more intensively. We don't because that would make the food more expensive. At an extreme, a greenhouse can increase yields 100x but at an increase in costs of 10x.

Yields increased by 10x for costs increased by 10x sounds cheaper to me.

I assume the 10x cost increase was per-yield, 100x the yield for 1000x the price.

Ahh that makes sense. The original language was pretty confusing.

Increase yields 100x per sqft Increase costs 10x per lb

People can only eat so much food, and it can only be sold for so little.

Yield per acre 100x, yield per $, 1/10x

https://agfundernews.com/the-economics-of-local-vertical-and...

For greens, an conventional farm is $0.65/lb and a greenhouse is $2.33/lb.

> Assuming a 40-45% gross margin for a typical supermarket produce department, retail prices for greens would need to be approximately $1 a pound for conventional, $4 a pound for greenhouse, $5 a pound for vertical, and $12 a pound for container-grown. A typical head of bibb or butter lettuce weighs less than half a pound. Therefore, the lettuce can be grown in a greenhouse or vertical farm and sold at retail for $2 to $3 per head.

> Although greenhouse or vertical farming is three to five times more expensive than growing on a conventional outdoor farm, it still allows for competitive pricing to the consumer with other vegetables and sides.

The yield can go up, but the cost per unit goes up too.

What are the biggest factors that contribute to the cost? Is it mostly increased labor?

Labor and machinery.

You can't run a harvesting tractor through a greenhouse. So, a lot of produce from greenhouses or vertical farms (etc) ends up with a manual harvesting step.

This is why you pretty much see greenhouses exclusively used for foods which would require that manual step anyways.

we have AI based dancing robots now, maybe they can figure something out for this

I think it's possible the whole system could be automated. The problem really ends up being one of cost.

It's similar to the "burger flipper robot" problem. Possibility solvable, but also gonna be costly and buggy for v1 of the robot.

Its an area of active development and research - https://youtu.be/5chk9Sory88

Note that this is an area that is rather specialized - a pepper picking robot isn't good for tomato picking or lettuce picking ( https://youtu.be/EFC3OvkVKaQ ). Compare that to the incredibly versatile human ( https://youtu.be/oxbJVqfIK1U ).

>You can't run a harvesting tractor through a greenhouse.

Sure you can. Just needs to be big enough.

FTA “ improvements in crop yields, agricultural productivity, and dietary choices are so important.”

and the biggest one imo is dietary choices. Our meat consumption has lead to pasteurization of forest land to raise and feed the huge amount of livestocks needed to satisfy our meat craving.

Once upon a time everything was forest land. The line seems a bit arbitrary.

While the many types of forests (deciduous, coniferous, rain, etc) dominate a lot of land on earth, there is still many types of plains, chaparral/savannah, deserts, mountain, tundras, etc.

0 forest certainly seems bad.

There is more forest in North Dakota today than there was when Columbus landed.

> pasteurization

You mean pasturization. Pasteurization would also be unfortunate though.

Yeah, but done at that scale, it'd be quite a thing to watch :-)

> Our meat consumption has lead to pasteurization of forest land to raise and feed the huge amount of livestocks needed to satisfy our meat craving

Where? France has increased its forest surface since 1840, while increasing population and meat consumption.

> Forest replacement by cattle is most prevalent in Brazil and Paraguay

> Forest area replaced by cattle accounts for 36 percent of all agriculture-linked tree cover loss worldwide

https://research.wri.org/gfr/forest-extent-indicators/defore...

The lifecycle is more complex than this. Slash and burn agriculture is used to squeeze a few cash soybean crops out, this requires specific GMO soy, and these are 90% sold to China to fatten pigs.

When the land is only suitable for grass, it's grazed for awhile, after which it's basically desert.

South America also has some of the richest cattle land in the world in the Pampas, which has sustained beef production for hundreds of years on land which is otherwise unsuitable to food production.

Pressure on one company could stop the conversion of rainforest into soybeans. This doesn't solve the problem in a single stroke, nothing can, but it would help, and it doesn't require influence over the government of Brazil.

Imports exist, and France is a major importer of meat. Meat production has become less land intensive compared to 200 years ago, but it is by far the worst way of producing food if you compare calory intake to land use.

> Meat production has become less land intensive compared to 200 years ago, but it is by far the worst way of producing food if you compare calory intake to land use.

Most meat, at least in France, is raised on land that couldn't support other kind of agriculture. The calorie intake of that land, without cows grazing on it, would be 0.

France doesn't use feedlots? In the US, half of the meat weight is added to cattle in feedlots, using 1/2 of US corn production.

No European country does really. Nor do Australia and New Zealand to my knowledge. That’s why the beef tastes so much better. Cattle that are grass fed taste very different.

https://idele.fr/?eID=cmis_download&oID=workspace://SpacesSt...

French beef and dairy-cattle-finally-eaten-as-beef eat 2/3 grass.

Yes. You asked about feedlots. Europe pretty much doesn’t have them, as I said. Note that beef cattle are 80% grass fed according to the document. Dairy that are eventually eaten eat less grass, 2/3.

I was talking about more than feedlots, I was talking about grass-fed cattle vs. not grass-fed cattle. Do you really think it matters if a cow eats grain in a "feedlot" instead of on a "farm"? I sure don't.

The document you linked has 38.3% of "grazed grass" and 26.3% of "conserved grass". That's 64.6% of grass.

That's why I said:

> French beef and dairy-cattle-finally-eaten-as-beef eat 2/3 grass.

I doubt so, farmers in my village in France never take their cows out of the barn. They feed them with dry grass and fermented corn (ensilage) they grow.

Cow grazing is a thing of the past unless you do milk for AOP cheese or premium meat. By the way cheap beef in supermarket is actually old milk cow

Most nations are outsourcing their diets and problems, particularly in the EU.

France, for example, has been pulling a lot of their beef from south america rather than eating locally raised cattle.

https://www.thelocal.fr/20180117/french-farmers-fear-ruin-ov...

The article isn't supporting your claims:

> The source of his worry is a huge trade deal being negotiated by the European Union and the four Mercosur members Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay — an accord whose signature seems closer than ever.

> The new imports would represent just one percent of Europe's total beef production, and 4.5 percent of France's output.

So the deal hasn't been signed and wouldn't represent much.

From another article (https://www.franceagrimer.fr/fam/content/download/66996/docu...)

> Issues à près de 92 % de l’Union européenne, les importations de viande bovine chutent de 16,8 % sur un an, pour atteindre près de 283 milliers de tec en 2020

Which rougly translates to "92% of beef imports are coming from the UE. They fell by 16.8% to 283k tec in 2020".

There's a total in "tableau 2", page 3. 28.4% of the total meat is imported, 18.9% for the beef. The total non EU beef is thus 8% (100% of total beef imported - 92% of UE beef) * 18.9% (percentage of imported beef). Rounded up, it's 1.6%. I would hardly call that "outsourcing their diets and problems" and "pulling a lot of their beef from South America". More than 80% of the cattle eaten is localy raised, less than 2% comes from outside the EU.

South American beef is not a thing in France. We surely have plenty of other issues, but South American beef is not one of them.

> and the biggest one imo is dietary choices.

Yes, let's blame the consumer. First of all, the consumer has no idea how their specific spending habits contribute to an issue. For instance, an educated consumer (many consumers are not educated btw) might understand that eating meat causes deforestation, but they have no way of knowing if their specific purchase is contributing to that. Second, blaming the consumer makes any solution almost impossible because organizing a very large group of disinterested people is very hard. It would be much more effective to regulate the relatively small number of meat producers that are perpetuating deforestation and let the market work out decreasing consumption through increased costs.

> Yes, let's blame the consumer.

Yes, let's. I don't think an argument can be held against this. As a meat eater, I understand I'm the driving force of this issue. It's an inconvenient truth, but it is the truth nonetheless. I'm rooting for alternatives like lab-grown meat to thrive, but no amount of wishful thinking allows me to skirt the fact that eating less meat would probably be not only good for the planet, but specifically for my own health.

> the consumer has no idea how their specific spending habits contribute to an issue

Let me point it out: in the developed world it's almost 100% guaranteed that it contributes significantly. You have to go to pretty far edge cases to find really sustainably produced meat. A case can be made that not all industrial farms contribute to deforestation per se, but they are all part of a system that has a high cost for our environment. Deforestation is bad, but it's not –and should not be– the only issue.

> As a meat eater, I understand I'm the driving force of this issue.

How did you come to that understanding? Did you dedicate your free time to studying the impact of meat eating, or was it part of your legally mandated education? A lot of people scrape by, barely able to make ends meet. They have children that require attention, or problems that require immediate action. They may have debts to pay, and no social safety net to help. At a fundamental level, they may have poor critical thinking skills. It's not realistic to expect every consumer to take the time to understand the consequences of every purchasing decision.

> A case can be made that not all industrial farms contribute to deforestation per se, but they are all part of a system that has a high cost for our environment.

But the package says it was humanely raised by family farms? Your trips to the grocery store are going to take a very long time if you need to do a supply chain analysis of every purchase.

If a person cuts down a tree for profit, and the removal of that tree is problematic, then that person is to blame. It doesn't make sense to blame someone many steps removed from the crime just because they, in a very indirect way, provided a very small incentive to commit the crime. The impact of the individual's consumption on the entirety of the industrial farming system is so small that, even if the individual consumer were to blame, they would be guilty of nothing more than the tiniest infraction. The issue with industrial farming arrises from the collective sum of demand, and thus requires a collective solution, i.e. centralized regulation.

You're right, technically and morally.

But the parent commenter has an important point that should not be dismissed. It is far more effective to regulate/improve centrally at the producer side rather than "wait" for the goodwill of consumers.

You can't flood the world with cheap unsustainable meat (or other products), next put a far more expensive sustainable option next to it and think all of this will just magically play out.

Ideally, there should be no unsustainable goods being offered at all. The very word unsustainable pretty strongly suggests that ending the practice is a must.

In the US, at least, we could keep our meat consumption quite high while still grazing lots of cattle. There are around 90 million cows in the US right now, and pre-1800s there were around 60 million bison in the US. Land and pasture management is important, but it can be done well. Check out Alexander Family Farm in CA for a great example.

We're not going to turn marginal grasslands into crops for human consumption, but using cattle to turn inedible grass into calories for human consumption is possible while maintaining that land as it was when bison roamed through it.

I also don't think that the US, for example, has to manage its land the same ways as other countries. If the US can effectively manage pasture and raise lots of cattle to eat, then we should be able to do that, and if other countries can't, then they should manage their land in a way that is optimal for their country. The US has a lot of grass pasture land that evolved over time to support the massive number of ruminants that roamed the US in the not too distant past.

Maybe the US should stop exports of beef and dairy and just focus on feeding its own people from well-managed land. But that would not be very popular, especially with our cattle industry.

What about nutritional value?

From various reports lately, I don't have links handy but I've seen them shared here on HN, it is generally accepted that the nutritional value of the food is declining. This has been primarily attributed, from what I remember, to the condition of the soil. So, if we start producing everything in a greenhouse, won't that impact nutritional value as well.

As far as I remember from the last discussion on the matter the effect is overblown. Nutrient decline for modern techniques and soils is around 7% from baseline.

Is that 7% one-time or 7% compounding? The latter has a pretty deleterious effect over time...

One-time, or rather total decrease over time. I'll see if I can dig up a source.

EDIT - old but seems like a decent review: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-an...

To recap, there are declines up to 30% in certain nutrients for certain vegetables. This seems to be mostly down to farmers choosing varietals that grow faster and handle transport better over time.

Personally it's still my opinion that this is no big deal. Even if, say, oranges are lower-quality than a century ago, they are now cheap, easy to obtain and available year-round. You might have to eat four oranges instead of one for whatever nutrient allotment you desire but...that's a heck of a lot easier than it was for our grandparents. As long as people aren't eating mainly combinations of flour and oil, they'll be fine.

Eating more food eventually means obesity issues.

I don’t think we are at the point where it’s either nutritional deficiency or obesity, but that seems like the ultimate risk here.

My man, no one is becoming fat because they eat too many oranges for the vitamin C.

Yet, give it 100 years and see what’s going on.

I'd strongly argue against that. A lot of people somewhat mindlessly consumer fruit and fruit juice 'because it's good for you' which is a reasonable proxy for high levels of things like Vitamin C.

And fruit is in general very good for you, but of course it's also quite high in calories. A single navel orange has upwards of 70 calories [1]. So 2 oranges ~= 1 can of Coke. And fruit juice is even worse. A plain cup of orange juice has 112 calories. If somebody buys some form of it that's been sweetened or otherwise mixed, you can easily end up with your OJ having more calories than a Coke.

People can easily speed their way to obesity by eating things that they think (and are) 'good for them' without really appreciating how many calories they're consuming. Similar to how things like vegans can easily end up consuming way too many calories when doing things like using peanuts as a protein source. An 80kg man needs around 64 grams of protein a day. 64 grams of protein from peanuts (to take things to an extreme) would be more than 1400 calories. And that's from raw unseasoned peanuts, which have the best nutrition:calorie ratio.

[1] - https://www.verywellfit.com/oranges-nutrition-facts-calories...

All other things being equal, eating more oranges (even salad) can very much result in being fatter.

Roughly speaking, 100 extra calories a day means 1 added pound of fat per month.

That article is quite odd. It does not misrepresent the studies that it references. This [1][2] is the primary one, the 2004 paper from Davis et al. But the paper makes it very clear, as does the article in its discussion of the paper, that the main culprit is believed to largely come down to breed selection. It does consider soil quality and ultimately dismisses it as the main variable:

"The apparent overall decreases for some nutrients are interesting and potentially of concern, but like Mayer and Johnson, we urge caution about their interpretation. Mineral decreases are popularly predicted for, or blamed on, mineral deficiencies in soil and fertilizer [5], but without sufficient consideration of contrary evidence and other possibilities.

[Snipping various scientific evidence they mention]

Factors other than soil mineral concentrations seem to have primary control of food mineral contents for the foods and minerals studied here. (The minerals I and Se are well known exceptions to this rule.) In the case of Fe, depletion is never an issue; instead, the issue is the ability of the plant to acquire the Fe that it needs. The fraction of soluble Fe in soils may be only about 10^-13 of total soil Fe."

In general, there seems to be an inverse relationship between nutrition and yield: higher nutrition + lower yield, or lower nutrition + higher yield. It's not hard to guess which we pick. But then the article (similar to another published in Discover magazine) focuses entirely and exclusively on soil quality as the primary issue.

[1] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15637215/

[2] (SciHubbed) - https://sci-hub.st/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15637215/

was the baseline also under monoculture?

If I remember correctly, yes. The comparison was made between normally grown vegetables from the 60s and now.

I've heard it's highly dependent on the nutrient

BBC Radio investigated it in 2019: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csz3ry

The next year they did the same for soil degradation, and found it a similarly complex topic: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08dx986

Both are <10 minute MP3 downloads

In the extreme case, this is something we’ll need to figure out for space exploration too. Hopefully people are working on it!

It's not just space, global warming could lead to a complete ecosystem collapse (think Mars). We may need to move everything into climate controlled environments.

Healthy soil can be cultivated at scale, so if quality is the top priority that's not an issue. At least two major factors are at play:

- soil usually doesn't get time to recover and gets fertilized every year, nutrition can't build back up because of worsening chemical conditions due to monoculture and salts -> simply less nutrients are available to the plants with each cycle

- plants get bred to maximize yields, leading to first and foremost bigger plants, other factors (like nutritional value) are not priority #1

See https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-an....

>Healthy soil can be cultivated at scale, so if quality is the top priority that's not an issue.

The larger issue is that consumers have no way of assessing the nutritional value of the items they're purchasing at the point of purchase. Cost is mediated on the basis of weight, which results in water-rich, nutrient poor, taste-poor produce. Saline injection into meat is another similar issue.

How do we make growing nutritional food profitable? Foods that can be sold on the basis of nutrient specific benefits, like Golden Rice or Vitamn D enriched milk can be marketed and sold on that basis, but comparing two beefsteak tomatoes grown in differing soils is not possible at present at the point of sale.

Typical food certification strategies, such as Organic, DOP, AOC, and other regional growth indicators don't seem to fit the bill. It's also unclear whether or not there is a market for inspections on the basis of nutritional value - from an organizational standpoint, it shouldn't be too difficult to have an inspector randomly audit crops and send samples to a lab to be HPLC or Mass Spec'd, but whether or not another certification mark changes buying patterns is unclear.

Taste generally tracks with nutrition in non processed foods. If that could be validated, then we have a win win— and then needs new ways of marketing/branding higher taste options

I suspect that “if” will be more difficult than just measuring the vitamin and mineral content of random samples of the produce directly, but even if it isn’t, taste would rapidly be another flawed proxy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

(I’d argue that taste is already an example of Goodhart’s law, and that this is why fast food is popular despite being objectively bad).

Saline-injected tomatoes... Coming soon!

Or tomatoes with a healthy corn syrup glaze.

It's a bit old and maybe they've learned more, but don't inject them with saline, just irrigate them with 10% sea water.

https://www.livescience.com/7194-healthier-tomatoes-grown-se...

That is interesting and relevant for me. A quick search only gave this, mainly about antioxidants. Do you know of more good literature?

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/organic-f...

What about a handheld scanner using smell to distinguish good from bad. As long as food isn't bred to smell certain ways that can't be distinguished from good, it should work fine.

In Japan they have handheld machines that measure sugar content and acidity of fruits,[1] because fruits are used as gifts and you want to make sure it's a good one. How can we get fruit manufacturers to start sorting their fruit by sweetness?

They start around $1000 because it's a niche market. They appear to be infrared spectroscopy based which isn't too complicated, I was thinking about making an open source version. Should only be like $30 in parts. Would people buy this to test their produce before they buy?

[1] Called non destructive saccharimeters

Edit: actually it looks like they measure infrared polarization, not spectral absorption

>Healthy soil can be cultivated at scale, so if quality is the top priority that's not an issue.

Healthy soil can only be cultivated at scale with the aid of petrochemical byproduct fertilizers, which are not likely to be a long-term feature of our agricultural system.

The petrochemicals can be synthesised from CO2 and water with known methods. While nobody bothers with this right now, SpaceX basically has to make this economical as one sub-goal of their Mars colony, so I expect it in a decade or two, well before we run short of natural petroleum.

I’m more concerned with the long-term need to recover the potassium and phosphorus that washes into the ocean, which, despite still being theoretically solvable, is not currently economic enough to bother with even for the gold and uranium that’s also in the seawater.

Crop rotation doesn't improve the soil at scale?

The fertilizer that is derived from fossil fuels is ammonia (and nitrate made from ammonia by partial oxidation). More precisely, it's made from hydrogen derived from steam reforming of methane. But any source of hydrogen would do, including electrolysis with renewable electricity. There is nothing essential about fossil fuels for industrial agriculture.

It should also be noted that the total energy consumed in growing food in the US (ignoring sunlight absorbed by the plants) is less than the energy used to COOK food in the US. It's roughly 1% of the total energy used by the US.

Nutritional decline of actual fruit and vegetables or the nutritional decline of food as is consumed by humans?

I don't think we are seeing the former while the later is how you use the former for the production of actual food that is consumed. Converting fruits into smoothies makes them retain mostly only sugar, while vegetables (and fruits) under thermal treatment loose a lot of nutrients like fiber and vitamins.

> Converting fruits into smoothies makes them retain mostly only sugar.

Wait. So where does the potassium go in my banana when I blend it up?!

The blender chops up potassium atoms into sucrose molecules via Nutri Bullet fission

That's why the blender motor gets hot when you run it. It's fissioning.

I always learn so much on HN!

If it's fissioning then why do I have to plug in my blender? There's something they're not telling us.

Mostly for 5g signals.

I think the parent might be slightly off the mark or simply is lacking detail.

One concern in nutrition is separating fruit juice from fruit pulp. You probably wouldn't eat three oranges in a sitting without feeling full but you can certainly drink three oranges' juice. That's the number of fruit needed to make a cup of orange juice.

If you're adding juice to a kale smoothy it's more complicated. At a certain point of extortion, refinement, and concentration that juice can become a proxy for simply adding cane sugar.

If you're blending your fruit and eating the pulp then there is no change.

Who can't eat 3 oranges without feeling full? How big are these oranges?

Is that true regarding smoothies? I mean, I get it for juicers, you lose the fiber. But smoothies?

It's never seemed to me that this whole "worse soil -> less nutrients" postulate makes sense on its face. There are, roughly, four categories of nutrients:

- organic macronutrients, which we'd definitely notice if they weren't there

- organic micronutrients, which are generally carbon compounds, but carbon doesn't come from soil, it comes from the air

- electrolytes, which do come from soil, but are always replenished with fertilizer, because plants need them too

- inorganic micronutrients, essentially transition metals plus selenium and iodine, which are present in utterly tiny quantities in food (you need about half a milligram of selenium per day), and could certainly be replaced by fertilizer if we even tried, or easily supplemented. Speculation: manure could work well.

- (extra) that wacky little devil cobalamin, which is both organic and a transition metal (cobalt), but doesn't come from plants anyway

Now, I could certainly see some kinds of farming techniques impacting the nutritional quality of plants. If you can increase the water content of your broccoli ceteris paribus, you sell more broccoli but the concentration of vitamin C goes down. I could also see impacts on the physical properties (compaction, grinding) of soil leading to worse long-term crop yields. But in order to convince me that soil changes are going to impact the vitamin C content of orange juice, when the constituents of vitamin C come entirely from water and air, you need pretty strong evidence.

Fairly easy answer to this. If I took a orange tree and only fed it water and air. Would it produce oranges with vitamin c? The answer. No. Because the plant requires far more than just water and air in order to run all the other systems within itself to make that vitamin c production happen. If you take away certain elements in your soil, your going to affect aspects of that plants health that in turn affect its production capacity. If you provide most nutrients for a plant sure it will produce fruit. Will that fruit be as good as fruit from a plant with all the nutrients? No, no it will not.

How do we square declining nutritional value with people living longer __and__ spending more years in a healthy state?

No great mystery, less nutritional value per unit produce just means you have to eat more produce, it doesn't force you to be malnourished.

More doesn’t account for nutritional deficiency. If zinc is missing in a foodstuff, it requires supplementing with other foodstuffs, not eating more of the same foodstuffs.

Antibiotics, vaccines, improved cancer treatment, and smoking bans have all done wonders.

Declining nutritional and increasing caloric value is probably one of many contributors to rising diabetes rates though.

The biggest factor is likely just reduced infant mortality. Today when we say today that somebody has a life expectancy of e.g. 80 years, then it does mean you can expect people to start dropping of various causes around that age, give or take a bit because infant mortality is approaching zero.

In the past infant mortality was extremely high, with frail infants invariably ending up as dead infants. And so in the past if you looked at somebody who was 15 years old, it's very likely that he'd live to roughly the same age as somebody today. It's not like he'd just start dropping around age 40. It was more a mix of people living to 5 years old and people living to 80 years old. Take the founding fathers as a random example:

==========

John Adams - 91

Benjamin Franklin - 84

Alexander Hamilton - 49 (killed in a duel)

John Jay - 84

Thomas Jefferson - 83

James Madison - 85

George Washington - 67 (speculation he may have been killed by a common medical practice of the time - bloodletting)

==========

Interestingly enough this goes all the way back to Ancient Greek times where you may be surprised upon some brief research to see how long any Greek you know of likely lived to, in spite of having effectively zero medical knowledge and hygienic practices such as shared butt sponges (in lieu of toilet paper) at the various public toilets. The reason I more contemporary samples is because one can reasonably argue a survivorship bias in the Ancient Greeks. Would you know of Philosophartes today if he had died when he was 40? Probably, but I can't prove that. The founding fathers though were all relatively young when their names were inscribed into history.

So how do you explain that life expectancy at for instance 50 years old keep increasing? For instance in my country (CH) life expectancy at 50 years old for a man was 26y in 1980, 29.5y in 2000 and 32.5y in 2020. People keep saying that infant mortality is the explanation but this is only valide for life expectancy at birth. Life expectancy at all ages as been increasing.

Infant life expectancy describes the huge changes. We went from life expectancies in the 30s not that long ago, to life expectancies in the 70s, largely due to it. The smaller changes since are going to be from many reasons that will also often vary heavily between regions. Unfortunately I lack the knowledge to even begin to intelligently speculate about the reasons for China's improvements.

It's the extra CO2 in the air that makes the nutritional value decline. Plants grow larger with more CO2, but the nutritional content stays the same.

>This has been primarily attributed, from what I remember, to the condition of the soil

Perhaps not

https://www.rothamsted.ac.uk/articles/fact-or-fake-news-our-...

Besides, the measured reduction in nutritional content is a fraction compared to our yield increases over the years.

If you:

live in a developed country

have a reasonable income

live near a supermarket

and eat a varied diet,

then you most likely do not have any nutrient deficiencies

"nutritional value" isn't a scientific term so you're going to have to define what you mean by that. Crops have been in fact getting more and more energy dense over time.

Density of various micronutrients per lb.

They aren’t talking about macronutrients like calorie content.

Nutritional drops have been minimal (see other comment references 7%) and considering most Americans don’t even get the minimal servicing of fruits and vegetables I’d worry about that first.

And with nutritional value, the taste.

I was astonished when I first visited California how full of flavor the vegetables are. Just a whole different level.

> the cheapest way to grow food.

Not just the cheapest, but the easiest: in many countries, and especially (though not exclusively) the US, the primary purpose of farming is landowning, so the primary incentive is limiting inconvenience.

I can see agricultural land going down even further in the future as techniques, incentives, and people dynamics change.

How much of what we farm is really just 'superficial agriculture' and not 'survival-driven agriculture'?

For example: gigantic monoculture fields of corn in the midwest US, groves of almonds and grazing crops in California, huge amounts of grasslands for beef. (I'm sure there's more examples too)

It just seems like many of the ways agriculture operates doesn't make sense from a needs-based perspective and certainly not from a nature-enhancement perspective either. Farmers just do their job of growing, and then money does its job of convincing.

Corn makes up more than 10% of global food production. A significant fraction of the world would not 'survive' if those fields of corn suddenly disappeared.

A better example would be specifically corn used for ethanol because driving a car is not essential for survival.

The other two examples seem valid. Replacing part of your meat consumption with corn would reduce the required agricultural land.

https://thehill.com/policy/equilibrium-sustainability/350461...

An interesting quote which echos what you're saying here:

> That means that table corn, carrots, cabbage, apples and broccoli are all examples of what is called, paradoxically, “specialty crops” — and they largely don’t get the same support as the heavily subsidized industrial crops.

The absurdity here is that "specialty" crops are what you might call "food". Most corn is "what my food eats".

If survival was important, people could switch trivially. I would take a 99% vegetarian diet in exchange for not dying. Problem is that the costs may be collectivized, and weighted towards future generations.

Lots of ways. We can live with much less sugar in our food. One example: sugarcane. According to the (UN) FAO,

"The present area of sugarcane (Saccarum officinarum) is about 13 million ha with a total commercial world production of about 1254.8 million ton/year cane or 55 million ton/year sucrose. (FAOSTAT, 2001)." [https://www.fao.org/land-water/databases-and-software/crop-i...]

That climbed to 1.9B tons by 2020. [WP ... 40% in Brazil] And 13Mha = 130,000 km^2 > 50,000 sq.mi. About the size of Iowa. And then, there's almonds.

6% of corn is used for sweeteners. That could be removed entirely and probably do the USA a world of good.

https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/coexisten...

I've read that biofuels are a waste. As in, if we replaced all the cars and trucks with electric ones, we could power them fully with solar energy deployed on the land used for the 5% biofuel... And use 90% of the reclaimed land for reforestation. The math seemed reasonable. But obviously doing this wouldn't work politically (even if we could make all those EVs and solar panels in the first place).

> even if we could make all those EVs and solar panels in the first place

Production of both is currently rising rapidly.

Only 1% of the corn grown in the US is "sweet corn", i.e. corn that's meant for direct human consumption on the cob or canned. The other 99% is "field corn", and that gets used primarily in livestock feeds and ethanol (the latter being a subsidy boondoggle of the highest order), and industrial manufacturing (base starches). A sliver also gets used for corn syrup.

The error being made is assuming that corn cultivation being significant to global food supply means that corn is being cultivated primarily for food.

Cattle raised on grasslands, and especially "organic" cattle, are an environmental horror.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31477819

George Monbiot: "[...] there is no major farm product as environmentally damaging as organic, pasture-fed beef."

The entire premise of that thread is questionable. Sustainably managed rotaional grazing pasture fed beef is a grassland ecosystem, quite similar to what much of the United States looked like when buffalo roamed before european-heritage settlers.

Destroying forests to make pastures is environmentally destructive, but a large portion of our country can be utilized as pasture while maintaining an ecosystem not unlike how the land was before capitalism transformed it.

California grazing issue is much more complex than consumer preferences for beef. Humans have basically destroyed the grazing populations that used to live there, including Buffalo. If you take the current land used for grazing and just stop, you’ll significantly increase fire risks as nothing else will eat all that brush and it’ll just collect. Go look around city borders where a lot less cattle grazing goes on - those hills have been stripped of forests and are just a pile of brush waiting for light up.

Greenhouses are amazing. One of the top agricultural exporters in the world is the Netherlands. That shocked me when I discovered it. Part of the reason is fertile soil and dependable rain. But a huge component of how they can do so much with so little land is greenhouses.

It seems like something we could stand to invest a lot more in as a global civilization. An understated benefit is making the food supply more robust to volcanoes, asteroids, and nuclear winters.

And vertical farms are set to increase the capabilities even more!

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/11/20/this-2-...

A 100x increase in yield at 10x increase in cost equates to a drop in cost of farming food of 90%.

Cost-per-unit

So a 1000x increase in total cost? That doesn't add up, it doesn't cost that much to use your own greenhouse, I can't imagine something like that wouldn't benefit from economies of scale.

The extreme isn't too important and highly dependent on the plant but it still can reach 10x the efficiency on average. There are some plants that don't do well in a greenhouse since they need a period of dormancy.

Power consumption is also a factor. Without fans the humid environment is prone to fungal infections and certain pests can spread pretty quickly too.

Overall it is a benefit since it simply allows for climate control. But you also have to heat it in winter since the plants will be very susceptible to the cold in their pots. Still, greenhouses are barely an option in the hotter climates since the power consumption would be insane.

And nobody would grow potatoes in a greenhouse because that would be extremely labor intensive.

I've visited a very advanced tomato greenhouse. They have a heliostatic solar field and tower that provides heating for the greenhouses plus fans for cooling, and desalinates water to irrigate.

The tomatoes grow in their substrate on top of big cooling/heating pipes that can be easily regulated. There's automated ventilation at the top of the greenhouses. They release wasps inside the greenhouse to control pests. Through summer, they spray the greenhouses with a chalky material to block some of the light.

Picking carts can self-drive themselves via guiding tracks embedded in the concrete flooring. It's all very clever, the plants are insanely productive and the produce tasted good to me.

Meanwhile my homegrown tomatoes are a constant battle on every front (heat, water, pests, etc).

That's not true.

I come from a family of farmers since centuries, in Southern Europe. I am the owner of several large plots of land and I helped my family when I was a kid.

Growing food in greenhouses makes food cheaper than growing food outside greenhouses. Problem is quality. E. g. a tomato grown in a greenhouse does not taste as good as a tomato grown outside. In fact, the greenhouse tomato hardly has any taste.

Another problem is organic, eco-friendliness and all of those "luxuries of the first world": when growing in greenhouse, you'll have to use pesticides and all of those things that improve yield and keep plagues at bay. But then you are no longer ecological so some markets (e. g. Germany) close for you.

Also, this whole thing about "peak agricultural land". Bullshit. Really. There's plenty of unused agricultural land. The main problem with agriculture as of today is prices of sold goods vs cost of production, and that's only because of globalization, cheap transport and cheap labor in third-world countries (Africa, South America). E. g. where I grew up, there were big extensions of almond trees. Yet already 30 years ago, it was cheaper to bring almonds from California than grow our own almonds here! That crop is almost gone now, except for people (like me) who still have some almond trees for our own consumption (not to sell).

And the actual problem will happen in a few years, one or two decades at most: most of the sons and daughters of farmers went to university or vocational school, and now they have other jobs. Not farming. What will happen if globalization reverses (like it seems to be doing since COVID-19 started)? or if transport costs so much that growing locally starts to make economical sense again? We will have lost that knowledge and skills about agriculture. My only hope is I am seeing a few of my school and university mates, who studied Economic Science, Psychology, Electric Engineering, Civil Engineering, etc and became so fed up with those jobs, that they went back to agriculture (and they are making money because they have an analytical mind and they know what to grow, when and who to sell to, and first thing they do is they have a "business plan" for their lands and crops). Something like what happened in electronics.

What would be the cost of something like wheat grown in a greenhouse? The costs would be a lot more than a 10X increase.

As a rule of thumb, you don't do extensive agriculture in a greenhouse. You don't need to because as I said, there is plenty of land available.

However, it is definitely possible and there are many studies on that since at least 20 years. The 2 big cons are: - Energy costs (artificial lightning) - Harvesting is a lot more difficult (at least with the current technology)

Wheat yield potential in controlled-environment vertical farms https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2002655117

Wheat May Be Grown Indoors, But The Cost… Potential yield in vertical farming could be up to 600 times greater per hectare than current farming methods: Study https://krishi.outlookindia.com/story/wheat-may-be-grown-ind...

BTW, one more thing I forgot in my earlier comment about why agriculture has been mostly abandoned in Western countries: phytosanitary products (e. g. pesticides). Many phytosanitary products that are no longer (or were never) allowed in the US, Canada, Europe, etc are perfectly legal in Africa, South America, Asia, etc so their yield is a lot higher, thus again contributing to smaller production cost.

You can already see this trend in the western world. In our county, we may have rezoned 1/2 of our farmland in the last few decades.

It's just a pity they all turn into housing developments. We should really be setting aside more as green space.

In many parts of the east coast and even some in the west coast of the USA, what was once pastureland or farmland has returned to a more natural state and a naive person would not know these places were one productive agricultural lands. This is why today the USA has more forest than it did at the turn of the 1900s.

But yeah, it’s sad that all the orchards from mountain view to San Jose and beyond in the San Francisco and San Pablo Bay Areas have turned into housing tracts. I also long for the peaceful orchards, vineyards and fields of corn, but alas, time marches on.

> But yeah, it’s sad that all the orchards from mountain view to San Jose and beyond in the San Francisco and San Pablo Bay Areas have turned into housing tracts. I also long for the peaceful orchards, vineyards and fields of corn, but alas, time marches on.

i was under the impression no additional housing is being built and that was a major problem.

keyword is affordable housing. Mansions/million-dollar condos are still being developed.

This is a problem, where we effectively don’t allow multi family or cheap apartments in many areas and only allow expensive single family units. However I believe California housing supply is so far behind demand that even expensive units are desirable to alleviate pressure on less expensive units, that people might otherwise compete for.

Most of the new housing I see built are 5-over-1s. Giant 6 story apartment buildings built on already busy streets.

What California needs is flexible zoning to allow mixed-use medium density development connected by safe bicycling paths and public transit.

Too much space is taken by automobile parking and there is too far of a distance between places people live and the grocery stores, shopping areas, and gyms they frequent.

There was a post on hacker news about this. Study in Finland showed it doesn't matter the type of housing, if it's luxury people move up and out of what they are currently in and the people below follow. Not surprising really, it's just supply and demand.

At some point, you run out of land with reasonable commute times.

Cities aren’t black holes that cause all job locations to collapse into a singularity. If density were allowed to grow you’d find jobs appearing in other places (and the biggest cities have this already - the jobs aren’t only in the central metro area).

We have the technology to stack dwellings on top of each other. If commute times become unreasonable we also have the technology to reduce it, with trams or rail. Even better build the commute infrastructure first and then the housing but Singapore and Manhattan show pretty clearly what’s possible. Shanghai didn’t have a metro system 20 years ago. Now it’s the world's biggest.

But that is what falls into "affordable housing" category. Comment I reacted to said it is not needed, because people move.

It doesn't all fall into affordable housing category, people are complaining in London about new luxury high rise apartments because they are high end and "not affordable".

People were moving in like crazy which is why Tracy and mountain house exist. Those were largely farmland some years ago. More people are moving in than housing is built. If it were just local pop growth it would have been fine.

Lack of new housing in urban areas pushes people out into more rural ones.

> i was under the impression no additional housing is being built and that was a major problem.

People act like it is, the reality is different. Why do people all need to live in SF?

Serious question, why?

There are small towns throughout the country within 30-45 min of a major city. If you want to go further out, you can find small towns / cities everywhere. I'm currently living a fair distance from any major city and can still get literally anything I can imagine delivered. It's cheaper, taxes are cheaper, food is cheaper, fuel is cheaper, I have more land, I can see trees / stars. Yet within a brief drive I can be in the center of a major city with all it entails.

San Francisco is fairly dystopian. I used to live there, walking over human waste, people getting head in the street. Naked women rolling around after a bender, a persons leg rotting off. This was my daily walk through SF to work. Now, I see cows, sit in the grass and still make more money and am away from the tragedy.

I think most people think building more buildings would solve the homeless problem. The reality is that dispersing production would save the city. I.e. limiting growth and having strict policing. The homeless would leave / be swept up and arrested. The housing would be expensive, but wealthy people would still live there. Then Sacramento, San Diego, Colorado, Texas, etc. is where people would move. This would help wealth inequality (spreading the wealth) and improve mental / societal health.

Many people think "idealistically" but sometimes forget to ground it in reality.

People often don't realize that the "utopia" of the Soviet Union where everyone got a guaranteed apartment, pay and a job, was in many ways behind Mexico for example (not to knock on Mexico) but in the USSR and the second world with it's then "UBI"-like system, people could afford less living space and food variety than your median person in Mexico. Often in second world economies, you were forced to live with strangers (not multi-gen families) in the same appt. You could not afford a second hand car and many luxuries were reserved for Politburo, Scientists and those in the nomenklatura.

But some "thinkers" believe that if only SF and other big cities would build complexes like the USSR, except that they would look more like SoMa mid-rises than the more utilitarian Soviet Apt blocks we could fit and satisfy everyone who wants to live in SF and other large cities.

Imagine confusing a concept like UBI that uses tax dollars skimmed off a decentralized economy with a centralized planned economy. Even funnier when you are also comparing a democracy with an authoritarian strongman regime. You do you though.

Dear future anthropologists; a collection of empty American archetypes about soviet life, found naturally in the wild

Yep sorry forgot to mention that was the good part in the tier one cities... Once you went out to the countryside and beyond the Urals, it actually got even more interesting.

I have no idea what you're thinking.

Across the world, people live happily (lots of them, anyway) in large scale apartment complexes. As long ago as the turn of the 20th century, people like Gaudi were already taking that a step further and designing beautiful apartment buildings:

https://www.lapedrera.com/en/la-pedrera

Notice how La Pedrera is surrounded by other less aesthetic yet still fully occupied apartment buildings? There are hundreds of cities worldwide filled with people living in relatively affordable non-single-family housing, nothing like the structures or experience of the Soviet Union.

Building denser housing does not mean that we will be living in some soviet-era world. Why on earth would you think this?

> you were forced to live with strangers

You’re describing roommates?

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want government mandated roommates either. OTOH lots of people are compelled to live with roommates in SF too, just by different forces.

Kind of, but roommates are self-selecting and you _can_ opt to move out. In the USSR, it was very difficult to opt out. If you were part of the nomenklatura, you did have some other options such as private apartments --but that was a small minority of people.

You're mixing two different eras in the USSR.

Stalinist USSR forced strangers to live in the same apartment (or, alternatively, families living in what were essentially SRO units), because the impoverished, largely rural population was force-urbanized over a very brief time period, and the living space was simply not there to support this influx into the cities. And then that thing called 'World War II' happened, which sapped a decade of economic output on building guns, and rebuilding. It also killed ~15 million young men, and invalided many, many more. [1]

Post-Stalin planning focused on solving this problem, through a massive build-out of single-family apartments. Non-relative roommates weren't much of a thing after that point.

> But some "thinkers" believe that if only SF and other big cities would build complexes like the USSR, except that they would look more like SoMa mid-rises than the more utilitarian Soviet Apt blocks we could fit and satisfy everyone who wants to live in SF and other large cities.

Given how much of an unmitigated disaster the current housing situation in SF/Seattle/etc is, buying out a hundred or so blocks and replacing them with Khrushchevkas would be an improvement for everyone[2] in the city.

[1] I hear this sort of thing does wonders for construction productivity.

[2] Except for people who paid 3 million dollars to buy the equivalent of a shed in the current insane housing market. Unfortunately, they have both political capital, and the desire to exercise it, and would rather see the city burn down around them, than lose the money they locked into their home.

If you built 100 blocks worth of Khrushchevkas we're looking at 25,000 to 100,000 people. That could be a city on its own and does not have to be in SF proper. Funnily, Khrushchevkas were affectionally known as Khrushchev slums.

The Singaporean take on this style of housing is anything but affordable coming in at ~500/sft -after gov't subsidies. Contrast that with ~150sft for most new housing in the US.

Singapore proves it'd doable in a dense city, but it's cheaper to build outside cities and if you're going to house that many people you might as well build an altogether new low-cost city.

There's ~11,000 homeless people in King County right now. Getting them out of the park, the freeway onramp, the greenspace north of my apartment, the coffeehouse bench across the street from it, the doorway across the other street from it, and into shitty SRO[1] apartments would be a god-send.

> Contrast that with ~150sft for most new housing in the US.

You're telling me that we can build a brand-new, 600 SQFT apartment in Seattle for $90,000? I didn't realize solving the housing shortage was that simple! And I must be an utter idiot for paying ~$30,000/year in rent for a one-hundred-year-old, 800 SQFT one.

[1] Or, if we really splurge[2], and build some Brezhnevkas, actual apartments.

[2] Somehow an impoverished, paranoid, hopelessly corrupt, backwards-thinking communist country that spent half of its economic output on tanks and nuclear weapons managed to afford building them...

different people value different amenities.

> I have more land, I can see trees / stars.

This could be a good amenity for you, but not for everyone. Me, I don't really like the idea of having to maintain all that land as well as having to drive everywhere because everything is so far apart.

An amenity I need that I definitely would not be able to get in a small town would be access to a Chinese grocer. As someone who is ethnic Chinese, I have recipes that need ingredients that either aren't normally found in regular US markets or are available in poor quality and at higher prices. Delivery of niche goods is astronomically expensive. That limits me to a few major cities.

> Then Sacramento, San Diego, Colorado, Texas, etc. is where people would move. This would help wealth inequality (spreading the wealth) and improve mental / societal health.

The first part is happening, the second part isn't. If anything, some of them are starting to see San Francisco type problems, and it didn't take very long for them to get there because there are so many Californians that it takes a small percentage of CA's population to go and massively disrupt a smaller city.

I think it's fair that people value different things. BUT my point is that we shouldn't assume everyone needs to live in the same location to obtain their wants.

> An amenity I need that I definitely would not be able to get in a small town would be access to a Chinese grocer. As someone who is ethnic Chinese, I have recipes that need ingredients that either aren't normally found in regular US markets or are available in poor quality and at higher prices. Delivery of niche goods is astronomically expensive. That limits me to a few major cities.

I live near a town of 15,000 people, they have a Chinese grocer, multiple Mexican grocers, an African grocer and several home style greek restaurants, thai restaurants, some great sushi, etc.

The U.S. is very diverse and there are different people everywhere. Like I said, I can drive 40 min and be in a multi-million person city while still living out in the country. When I lived in SF it would still take me 30-60 min to get to many places via public transit.

I guess if you really need "high quality" niche goods, sure... But I've never had an issue lol

Where is this place, if you don’t mind me asking?

Not going to give it particularly away, but here are some similar towns I've visited before deciding on my current town (very similar):

* Bloomington, Champaign, Morris, Charleston IL

* Kenosha, Sheboygan WI

* Hendersonville, Gatlinburg, Greeneville TN

* Milton, Concord NH

There's probably more, but these are just off the top of my head. They were fairly similar in the sense you had most amenities and what you didn't have was <1 hr away.

To your point, almost all high-visitor (winter/summer) based community will have the above amenities. Places like Burlington, VT or Truckee, CA.

I can only speak to Champaign (UIUC engineering) and Bloomington, IL, but I think your prior comment misrepresents the circumstances in these cities.

The Asian/African/(-American) populations are mostly transient (students) and while grocery options exist they are oriented toward a student’s diet: expansive in snacks and novelties, but short on staple vegetables, grains, and meats. I’ve heard of times in the past when friends of mine had to travel to Chicago, which is 3 hours away, for their haircuts because their regular stylist closes down for the summer when students leave.

Not to say this is representative of the other cities on your list, but your comparing the ones I’ve experienced to San Francisco is laughable.

> I’ve heard of times in the past when friends of mine had to travel to Chicago, which is 3 hours away, for their haircuts because their regular stylist closes down for the summer when students leave.

This sounds more like a person is doing something unnecessary / eccentric. The majority hair stylists are definitely there year round lol.

As I said, it's not a comparison directly to San Francisco in terms of all amenities - obviously a city such as SF with a massive Asian population will likely have additional options for food.

As you said, if that's all you value than sure; massive city is your best bet. You'll give up other amenities for the food selection (such as space).

I was pointing out that you can get 95+% of your wants and 100% of your needs met in a place that costs 1/4 as much with plenty of opportunity as well.

I think most students don't realize how many different grocers and what not there are either. For instance, I knew people who would travel large distances to a trader joes... why? Because the brand name / status is what they were looking for. If you weren't looking for that, you can get almost anything you wanted.

A team I managed worked in Champaign IL (why I knew about it) and all the adults I spoke with said they could make any dish they wanted (they were: American, Iranian, Vietnamese and Chinese). The Vietnamese guy in particular would bring in homemade food every day with pretty exotic produce.

> BUT my point is that we shouldn't assume everyone needs to live in the same location to obtain their wants.

Aren’t you doing the opposite, and assuming that people can just happily substitute their lives somewhere else? Or did they do that and still think SF is preferable?

If there is clearly a shortage of housing in SF, do you think that people haven’t tried looking other places?

College towns and seasonal activity towns with specialty stores tend to see the stores slow or shut down during the off-season, which is a problem if you want to be a year-round resident.

You're arguing against a strawman. Nobody is saying that everyone needs to live in SF. The argument is simply that developers should be allowed to supply housing that meets demand. The fact is that lots of people do want to live in cities, for various reasons; but they can't, because building dense housing is illegal or heavily disincentivized.

If you want to live in semi-rural America that's great, I prefer a similar situation for myself. I fail to see what that has to do with allowing or disallowing density in cities. In fact allowing density in cities preserves rural and natural areas outside of cities, so that seeing cows and hiking in forests is available for those who want it. Feels like a win-win.

> > Then Sacramento, San Diego, Colorado, Texas, etc. is where people would move.

> some of them are starting to see San Francisco type problems, and it didn't take very long for them to get there because there are so many Californians that it takes a small percentage of CA's population to go and massively disrupt a smaller city.

Yes, all those Californians moving to Sacramento and San Diego really wrecked their pre-existing way of life.

Whoops, I'm typing this from bedrest, so that made more sense in my head as I was writing it.

(What's the demonym for the Bay Area, anyways?)

> Serious question, why?

You're not very serious if you don't realize that this is an extraordinarily privileged position based on your position in the socioeconomic ladder.

> I'm currently living a fair distance from any major city and can still get literally anything I can imagine delivered. It's cheaper, taxes are cheaper, food is cheaper, fuel is cheaper,

It's cheaper FOR YOU based on your job that you can do remotely, and comparing to the lifestyle you maintained in San Francisco.

Do you seriously believe that every janitor, parking lot attendant, nurse, and waiter, could move to the small town you are discussing and commute in for work? Here's a headline for you: "A 2:15 Alarm, 2 Trains and a Bus Get Her to Work by 7 A.M. Like many in the housing-starved San Francisco region, Sheila James has moved far inland, gaining affordable space at the price of a brutal commute." [0]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/business/economy/san-fran... or https://archive.ph/MNxzg

> San Francisco is fairly dystopian. I used to live there, walking over human waste, people getting head in the street. Naked women rolling around after a bender, a persons leg rotting off. This was my daily walk through SF to work. Now, I see cows, sit in the grass and still make more money and am away from the tragedy.

You're so close

> taxes are cheaper

But so far.

The reason why your new area doesn't have any people with drug, mental health and poverty issue is because you don't pay enough taxes for the social programs that allow these people to survive in San Francisco. Which, like Seattle, Vancouver, and LA tend to concentrate human misery in North American not because they attract misery but because they're the only places on the continent where these human beings can SURVIVE. Homeless people struggle to not die in the winter in most of the East. The Deep south has no social programs or jobs. Once you get to the SouthWest, the local policies is just to put homeless people on the bus to California.

Which is where everyone - from homeless to billionaire - has the best outcomes for health and life expectancy.

Yes, one way of dealing with human misery, is to be able to afford to put it out of your sight and out of mind, and not deal with the structural issues that create them. It's great that you get to ignore them to live your best life.

But don't think that a society can be created where those things don't exist, just by moving to a more pastoral/agrarian lifestyle. What you describe is not scalable to the rest of society without massive social programs the kind that don't exist across America (and likely never will)

> The reason why your new area doesn't have any people with drug, mental health and poverty issue is because you don't pay enough taxes for the social programs that allow these people to survive in San Francisco.

It’s a well known fact that ceteris paribus the more you spend on something the more you get of it. I honestly can’t understand why people in those cities want more open air drug markets, feces, and crime, among other things, but there’s no arguing with revealed preference. They observably want those things and vote to get more of them.

From my point of view it’s simple enabling behavior, like with an alcoholic. It’s not like these problems are ordained by nature. People in cities are the ones enabling human misery.

> People in cities are the ones enabling human misery.

IMO SF encourages it.

> People in cities are the ones enabling human misery.

And people in locales that solve these problems by kicking out their problem citizens are the ones creating this human misery, but we never seem to be able to hold them to account for it, or to demand that they pull their own weight.

That’s really interesting. Can you document a single locale that is “kicking out their problem citizens?” That was the plot of Rambo and that was a great movie, but I’ve never heard of such a thing in this century. I welcome being educated so please do tell if you can point to some examples that aren’t old enough to legally drink.

The classical example is classical Athens and the practice of ostracism, which was only used against the rich.

The current version is giving undesirable people one-way bus tickets to SF or LA.

Please link me the free bus tickets to SF/LA from flyover country. I’ve done my googles and can’t find the program where I get my ticket. I don’t believe it exists without evidence.

What you're looking for are newspaper articles about this practice, which is illegal but continues to be discovered in action.

I’d be happy with a photo. Got one?

Let me help you with Google. Try

homeless bus ticket to sf illegal

You'll find that quite a few cities are mentioned: into LA, out of Seattle, etc. Not sure what you wanted a photo of?

Any actual evidence of such a program where rural areas are shipping out vagrants. I’m not talking about lateral moves from one major city to another as should be clear from the comment history. Perhaps a local newspaper ad offering free bus tickets?

> Can you document a single locale that is “kicking out their problem citizens?”

Would Bellevue, Kirkland, and Redmond dumping their homeless people into Seattle, as they NIMBY shelter/housing satisfy you?

There's fewer than 500 sheltered/unsheltered homeless people in those three cities, compared to ~11,000 in the rest of King county - yet they make up ~1/6th of the county's population.

Or, on a smaller scale, nice parts of town calling the cops to sweep the homeless into less nice parts of town? For some reason, I can't say I've seen a lot of tent cities in Magnolia...

[1] https://mynorthwest.com/3335926/fight-over-homeless-hotel-sh...

[2] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/eastside/battle-br...

> Would Bellevue, Kirkland, and Redmond dumping their homeless people into Seattle, as they NIMBY shelter/housing satisfy you?

That doesn’t sound like kicking out. That sounds like Seattle for reasons that I don’t understand inviting vagabonds from elsewhere in King County.

More to the point, I wasn’t referring to your local county politics, I was asking for specific evidence of rural communities shipping vagrants to far away cities as the person I was replying to implied is happening.

For reasons you don't understand?

You don't understand that people need a few basic needs to live, and the suburbs aren't pulling their weight in providing them?

You don't understand that the suburbs keep harassing and arresting people for being homeless, and taking their things, until they fuck off to the city?

If we did that to you, until you left whichever town you live in, would you consider yourself getting kicked out of it?

You don't understand that if Seattle did the same thing, all of those suburbs would suddenly discover that they had to pull their own weight, and not just sweep their problem to the other side of lake Washington?

You're splitting hairs over semantics of what 'kicking out' means. The bottom line is that rural America gives it's problem people a choice between jail, harassment, death, or taking themselves and all their problems to urban America.

It then complains about how urban America is a cesspit that 'invites vagabonds'.

Thanks for so vividly exposing the enabler mindset.

I’m still confused though. Do you like vagrancy, violence, drug abuse, and filth? Or is your misplaced resentment of the communities that refuse to tolerate that trash some kind of extreme cognitive dissonance?

> Thanks for so vividly exposing the enabler mindset.

Aha! You have me dead to rights. I'm an enabler, because I don't think that these problems can be solved by just dumping the problem people to the next town over.

> Do you like vagrancy, violence, drug abuse, and filth?

Less than you, since you seem to think that the right thing to do is for your community to export it to its neighbours.

> Or is your misplaced resentment of the communities that refuse to tolerate that trash some kind of extreme cognitive dissonance?

Those communities create 'that trash', and then don't deal with it. If I just start dumping trash on your front lawn, because I don't want to pay the cost of garbage pickup, which one of us is the problem?

> Aha! You have me dead to rights. I'm an enabler, because I don't think that these problems can be solved by just dumping the problem people to the next town over.

Yes, I know, I'm capable of noticing clear objective truths. Big city policies demonstrably enable these social ills. You don't have to get defensive. You just observably believe that it's better to tolerate anti-social behavior than to put a stop to it. We disagree on this point, but perhaps you take some comfort from knowing that your co-urbanites also inexplicably like to live surrounded by filth.

> Less than you, since you seem to think that the right thing to do is for your community to export it to its neighbours.

I never said any such thing. I said I don't believe such a thing is even happening. You have failed to provide any evidence of a systematic push of rural undesirables to cities. Rather, all the evidence indicates that urban policies, that city-dwellers reliably vote for and thus observably want, are attracting undesirables. Furthermore, those policies are enabling people who might otherwise live with some semblance of social responsibility to fully embrace an anti-social manner of living.

> Those communities create 'that trash', and then don't deal with it. If I just start dumping trash on your front lawn, because I don't want to pay the cost of garbage pickup, which one of us is the problem?

The policies that city dwellers support are creating the trash. There is no rural conspiracy to ship undesirables to the cities. Individual vagrants may be attracted by urban enabling policies, but that's the responsibility of the vagrants and urban policymakers, not rural communities. If city people don't want more vagrants then they shouldn't support policies that enable them.

> Do you seriously believe that every janitor, parking lot attendant, nurse, and waiter, could move to the small town you are discussing and commute in for work? Here's a headline for you: "A 2:15 Alarm, 2 Trains and a Bus Get Her to Work by 7 A.M. Like many in the housing-starved San Francisco region, Sheila James has moved far inland, gaining affordable space at the price of a brutal commute." [0]

My wife literally used to do the same thing... It was a 3 hr commute to and from work (6+hrs per day), if all the services were up; but they never were in SF. At least twice a week it would take her 4 hrs one of the ways.

That's why we moved, her commute is now 10 min.

You're kind of making my point, everyone where I live has a higher quality of life than they do in SF. They have more space, cheaper food, fuel, breathing less pollution, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

Just FYI you're talking a 1-3% difference in life expectancy between most of the states. That's probably within the margin of error. It appears to have more to do with wealth than anything, but that's neither here, nor there (The bottom 20 states have lower life expectancy and that's where smoking is more common and legal indoors).

> Yes, one way of dealing with human misery, is to be able to afford to put it out of your sight and out of mind, and not deal with the structural issues that create them. It's great that you get to ignore them to live your best life.

> But don't think that a society can be created where those things don't exist, just by moving to a more pastoral/agrarian lifestyle. What you describe is not scalable to the rest of society without massive social programs the kind that don't exist across America (and likely never will)

I can tell you're living in a city. It's FAR easier to make it in the suburbs than either a city or the country. It's also FAR easier to purchase land than people think. You can get land at $4,000-$6,000/acre within 40 min of most cities. You can build a $180,000 house on that land that's larger than the vast majority of residence in major cities (I know because I've developed said land repeatedly). So we're talking what, $200,000 for a house and a couple acres. You can afford that on $35-40k a year, which you can make at walmart or Amazon.

People experience misery in cities because the citizens of that city don't care. If they did, they'd tighten up the laws and encourage people to get jobs and prosper. That's not what SF does.

> So we're talking what, $200,000 for a house and a couple acres. You can afford that on $35-40k a year, which you can make at walmart or Amazon

This is misguided. When you are making that little it is extremely difficult to save enough money to buy a house. Most of your income will be going to expenses, and pray you don’t get hit with health complications, periods of unemployment, broken down cars, or any number of other rolls of the dice that could zap any/all savings you’ve managed or drive you into debt.

Not to mention, even if you manage to buy a house you can still get screwed by a period of bad luck making it impossible to keep up on your mortgage.

The average income in my area is less than $35k / year. ~80% own homes.

I find it funny when people tell me "this is misguided" and they have no idea what they're talking about.

I've lived off <$35k / year for about a decade; really not that hard. You don't take trips, you limit purchases. It's the way most of America works.

Let me breakdown the math:

- $600 taxes / month (often get decent returns at year end, put that into emergency fund) - $600 food / month - $600 rent / month (1 - 2 bedroom) - $200 gas / month - $500 emergency fund / month - $220 house fund / month

In 2 years, you'll have $5,000 saved for a house and $12,000 in an emergency fund (assuming nothing happened). That's for one person, and I assume you can either take public transit OR you already have a beat up car (you can often get those for free, I had a couple cars for <$1000 that worked fine)

If you're married (ideally, you would), you'll have $10,000 for a house and that's enough for the 5% down on a $200,000 property. Alternatively, you can drain some of the emergency fund (provided you have some) and you can put that down.

Now, with inflation and increasing gas prices; yeah these people are going to be screwed for the time being. That means, either multiple jobs, cutting rent costs, cutting the emergency costs, what have you.

Ah, so social programs attract and cause drug, mental health and poverty issues? Well, I guess it is lucky for them providing for the general welfare is literally in the US Constitution twice, in the Preamble and also in the Taxing and Spending Clause. But I guess that is what is wrong with this country, the Constitution and the government should be disbanded, so you don't have to look down on all those less fortunate than you, right? The Framers were supremely foolish not to realize that welfare causes poverty and drug and mental health issues. You should really tell someone so we can fix this problem.

I’m a homosexual. Living in cities provides a network and security that living in more remote and rural places does not. One day (hopefully) cultural circumstances will change and I can avail myself of the benefits you mentioned, but at present living in culturally unpredictable places is simply a gamble whose return is not worth the roll.

Everyone did move further from SF. That's where all the bay area sprawl came from. That farm land got filled in with housing, so now there's not much countryside anymore.

People then moved even further away, causing the sprawl to spread out even more. We're well on our way to being a giant low density megacity as a result.

> Why do people all need to live in SF?

No, the serious question is why aren't more people living in SF, instead of the sprawl of low-density suburbs and pseudo-suburbs that surround the Bay Area?

The tiny area that makes up the City and County of San Francisco is relatively high density for its size, but the fall off in density once you leave the county (which occupies only the tip of the San Francisco peninsula) is precipitous.

> People act like it is, the reality is different.

No, people act like it is, because it really is... When you're talking about building high-density housing in the actual city (or medium-density in the suburbs with reasonable transit options)... Which is literally always what they are actually talking about. No one is talking about there being problems building low-density housing in the middle of nowhere.

> San Francisco is fairly dystopian.

If it is dystopian, it is not because of density. There are numerous higher density parts of the world that do not struggle with the issues San Francisco does. It has nothing to do with people's inability to see cows. It has to do with the US' refusal to support the things that facilitate living in cities.

> This would help wealth inequality (spreading the wealth) and improve mental / societal health.

The idea that increased suburbanization would have any positive effect on wealth inequality is completely absurd.

> The tiny area that makes up the City and County of San Francisco is relatively high density for its size,

Somewhat, but not to the extent you'd expect of an metropolitan core (which it arguably isn't, it's more just the cultural core of the Bay Area.) The City and County of San Francisco is the most dense county in California, but not the most dense city in the Bay Area, or even the densest area of similar size in the Bay Area. A similar sized slice of Santa Clara County including all of San Jose would still be higher density if the entire 50ish mi² outside of San Jose was completely depopulated. The urban core of Alameda County (the continuous strip consisting of the cities of Albany, Berkeley, Oakland, Emeryville, Alameda, Piedmont, San Leandro, San Lorenzo, and Hayward) has greater population and greater population density than San Francisco, too.

Not enough housing is built near the city center, so more people are pressured to move to formerly rural areas.

It’s more like dense housing is illegal, only single family homes are allowed.

There are some social bubble dynamics that affect the discussions you read, here and on various subreddits or other forums.

1. People believe there should more abundant affordable housing. BUT...

2. A lot of people here despise rural people, as a matter of cultural tribal affiliation. And also a lot of people here hate cars, which is 50% environmentalism and 50% about despising rural life as a matter of cultural tribal affiliation (I suspect that car hate would persist even if zero-emission solar powered vehicles became the norm).

Therefore, we need more affordable housing, but only in the "cool places" where I want to live. Basically, I just want my rent to go down, and cultures that I don't like to cease to exist. Or this seems to be the line of thought, if you distill it down.

Absolutely not. I live in a rural area. A car is a necessity but it isn't my ideology. Living in cities is a lot of fun. Living in cities built for people and not cars is life changing. No hate for anyone here or there.

My car is a tool. Full stop. If provided an alternative I would take it (and have).

> A lot of people here despise rural people, as a matter of cultural tribal affiliation.

I have seen way more city bashing then rural people bashing here.

> Therefore, we need more affordable housing, but only in the "cool places" where I want to live.

The mass is moving where the jobs are. Really. There are cool places and less cool places, but the places lacking housing are the ones where people move to have work.

The rural bashing is the underlying given; how dare anyone suggest living someplace that doesn’t vote at least 90% like I do.

> A lot of people here despise rural people, as a matter of cultural tribal affiliation.

That's a great way to shut down a reasonable conversation! Makes a great talking point for rural politicians, too.

The south bay is having a lot more housing being built. Mostly multi story apartments an condos.

I heard this recently that forestlands expanded somehow through the decades. It's too bad there were no aerial views of things long ago to see this before and after.

There aren't "many" aerial photos as testament but there are quite a few panoramic photographs of towns and their surrounds with denuded hills and meadows all being farmed one way or another and today are new growth forests and grasslands. Old abandoned railroads are among the witnesses to prior industrial activity.

> has returned to a more natural state

Well it's no longer managed as farmland and has young forests growing on it now. It's hard to say what would be "natural". The land on the east coast was being actively managed with controlled burning and cultivation of wild plants basically as soon as people arrived. Interestingly, there weren't indigenous earth worms then, so forests that weren't burned had deep beds of leaves. Before that there were glaciers and a totally different climate.

We're already short on housing even with this to the degree that real wages have stagnated or shrank since the 1970s. The only way to do that would be to almost completely stop immigration and population growth.

Or you could build up.

Even most of NYC and Paris is not THAT dense.

Apartments and houses are different things and building up never seems to really lower the pressure on the housing market.

> Apartments and houses are different things.

Sure, and so are houses with white picket fences and town houses. What's your point?

> building up never seems to really lower the pressure on the housing market.

You can't really find any examples measured in a vacuum. But I guess you've already made up your mind anyway.

I’d really like to see more Parisian style density.

I really find it hard to believe we could triple the density of major cities and magically there’d never be empty housing. At some point demand will drop off.

> We're already short on housing

The US has plenty of housing. It's just not where the jobs are. With the automation of agriculture and moving manufacturing to other countries, the employment map of the US changed rapidly in the past few decades, and our physical infrastructure hasn't caught up yet.

> The only way to do that would be to almost completely stop immigration and population growth.

Even with immigration, US population growth is nearly flat now: https://www.brookings.edu/research/u-s-population-growth-has...

Assuming current trends continue (and I see no reason they wouldn't), the US will probably be net negative relatively soon. I know so many young people who have no plans to have children because they can't afford it and don't want to bring them into a world they think will be in a worse state than the one they grew up in.

Nah. Even in rural places with no jobs you can see sheds going for half a million.

Where? Look almost anywhere east of the Rockies and you should be able to find plenty of rural housing for much less.

https://www.redfin.com/KS/Leavenworth/1218-Limit-St-66048/ho...

That house is a third of a million dollars in a rural place, that's what I'm talking about.

That house is 3,300 sq feet, with a basement, built in 1980 for only $300k. It is also only 22min from Kansas City airport and 40min from Kansas City.

I imagine rural sheds can be found for much less than $500k.

Here’s a shack for $120k

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/522-West-Maple-Street-Spo...

Even has running water and electricity!

Tangentially, I am amazed at the data in your source about how fast population growth is leveling off in the US. In 2020, the census projected US population to continue growing and cross 400 million by 2058 [1]. This projection accounts for the observed trends in falling fertility rate and assumes relatively constant rate of immigration:

>By 2030, immigration is projected to become the primary driver of population >growth: more people are projected to be added to the population through net >international migration than from natural increase. The projected shift to net >international immigration as the primary driver of population growth is the >result of falling fertility rates and the rising number of deaths in an aging >population, not because of a projected increase in international migration.

I guess the pandemic broke a lot of those assumptions. We will see if they hold in the long run though.

[1]: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...

This is promising, but it does basically rely on human populations stabilizing fairly soon. Interestingly the most solid factors for that is women's education and rights and children's health care, that correlates most closely with reduced population growth (I mean, not many people would really want to pump out ten kids and watch six to eight of them die of childhood diseases, which was about the pre-industrial norm, given the choice - having two kids is the basic replacement number assuming they survive to adulthood).

Hydroponics plus desalination is kind of interesting, as then you could grow some crops on seriously non-arable land, although I don't recall ever seeing high-protein crops (such as legumes with associated nitrogen-fixing bacteria) grown hydroponically. In terms of total calories per land area IIRC potatoes are the big winners there, never seen hydroponic potatoes either.

>not many people would really want to pump out ten kids and watch six to eight of them die of childhood diseases, which was about the pre-industrial norm

Wasn't something like 50% childhood mortality more typical?

Probably with a lot of variance, this would happen to some people. IIRC Darwin.

I think child mortality is counted as deaths before age five; I think it's lower if you count survival to adulthood and then having children. For population to remain constant each couple has to have two children survive to that point (on average; if some people have larger families and some have none it would balance out). Regardless, having half your children die as the norm is a pretty unpleasant reality.

You need a bit more than each couple having two kids because of people who never marry, etc.

But I suspect we’re headed toward a world where many have zero or at most one kid - and a small few have many. Arguably more efficient, too.

At this point population decline is a bigger risk than population growth.

Risk for what? Sure, that poses demographic challenges, but having fewer people would make fighting climate change and ecosystem collapse much easier.

Risk of a shortage of subsistence laborers creating wealth for capital owners.

If you think supply shortages were bad when some shifts had to stay home due to covid exposure just wait until those workers don't even exist anymore.

Labor Force Participation Rate: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART

There is a LOT of slack in the participation rate. Those workers exist and many of them will likely move back to the workforce if the wages adjust upward to be a more lucrative job due to scarcity.

Sure, it's not going to look the same in 2050, but the economy will just run at 80% participation rate then, rather than 62% now.

There are some problems with using the LFPR, it's calculated as a percent of the civilian non-institutional population[0] (everyone over 16 that isn't locked up) for one which is very different from considering what percent of prime age[1] (25 - 54) workers are employed which is currently at around 82%. What you're saying should happen would mean that pretty much everyone who isn't dead or incapacitated would have to work, so abolish retirement and get grandma back to work at the grocery store until she drops dead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_noninstitutional_popu...

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060

> bigger risk

Only if the economic system is a giant ponzi scheme that depends on continuous, infinite growth.

Really, high population is the source of an enormous amount of problems. We should absolutely be focused on decreasing our population. The planet can support us at our current (and higher) populations, but to be frank, liberal democracies and capitalist markets at-scale are incapable of organizing production in a way that doesn't destroy the earth.

It's funny, there was a post recently about "unsolved problems in economics." Nowhere was there a mention of the biggest economic problem in existence: externalities. Why? Because capitalism is incapable of solving the problem, and the economists know this, so they don't bother talking about it. They pretend it's an issue of state, when the profit mechanism itself is the cause for most externalities.

If we want to preserve our current precious economic order, we need lower populations.

“Capitalism can’t solve externalities”

Blanket statements like that are so clearly false and I’m not sure what you’re implying. What is communism’s record on environmental protection? Well, we can go to China or Russia for some clues.

HUMANS aren’t good at understanding externalities. Of course this isn’t some new realization, we’ve known about the tragedy of the commons for some time which is why we have regulation.

> when the profit mechanism itself is the cause for most externalities.

I was pretty clear.

I'll break it down for you though! I have costs, and I have sales. sales - costs = margin (or, profit). If my sales are steady, what's a good method of increasing margin? Reducing costs! How is this generally accomplished? By making some other sap pay for them: externalizing my costs.

The profit mechanism actively incentivizes externalities. This is plain fact, and there's nothing "clearly false" about it. Our economic system encourages externalities, and then builds enormous state apparatuses to quell the effects. You're free to ignore the facts, though.

> What is communism’s record on environmental protection?

How is this relevant? And why is state planning the only solution in people's minds to replacing capitalist markets? There's more than either/or here.

> HUMANS aren’t good at understanding externalities.

We understand them fine. We're being literally paid to create them, though.

> which is why we have regulation.

Yeah, that's working great so far!

I think the problem with 'externalities' is that they're little more than convenient fictions that fly in the face of basic physical concepts like conservation of mass and energy. Any economic theory that relies on excluding 'externalities' to measure economic growth is purely nonsensical.

Fundamentally, economics needs to adopt realistic system-level concepts, such as 'primary production' (gross photosynthetic input to a system like a lake). Then you can actually start to calculate how productive a hectare of land can be. This also clearly explains why concepts like 'infinite growth in a closed system' are so nonsensical.

As far as capitalism, it's important to note the huge differences between 'investment capitalism' (Wall Street) and 'commodity capitalism' (Main Street). The latter is much more rationale, as it's not based on fairy dust, but actual real things, like farmers growing potatoes. Similarly, there are many areas of the economy that are best managed without any market influence, but rather by state-managed tax-financed programs (basic infrastructure development for example).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea

Humans understand externalities just fine, they just don't care about them because the more convenient option is to ignore them and optimize for the short term, which seems a key feature of our species.

That short term bias keeps one alive for another day in our original biological state as hunter-gatherers, which we still are. But it's a pretty crappy quality at planetary scale.

Pure market thinkers say that when you pollute a river, it will create a new market to clean up the river. That makes no sense as you might as well not pollute the river in the first place, so you can't claim efficiency. More importantly, this market to clean up the river does not spontaneously come into existence, as nobody is going to place an order for a clean river. It requires political will, which is easily corrupted, just like regulation.

I would agree that communism would not solve this problem either.

We, as citizens, are equally guilty of this outcome. The politician that plans for the cleaning up of the river will lose from the politician that builds a new sports stadium.

“Pure market thinkers say that when you pollute a river, it will create a new market to clean up the river.”

Surely there is no one this naive.

Terms like "capitalism", "socialism", etc. don't really come up in serious economic discussion. They're fuzzy words that no one can seem to agree on the meaning of and they don't describe any real economies. At best they should be relegated to philosophy. Please clarify what exactly you mean when you say "capitalism".

> Only if the economic system is a giant ponzi scheme that depends on continuous, infinite growth.

Just because growth is good for a system doesn't make it a Ponzi scheme (or some other type of scam). Population decrease _obviously_ harms economies because it leads to fewer young people willing to take on entry-level jobs and more elderly people who aren't working anymore. That's not to say it can't be managed - economic growth is also driven by technological advancements which aren't directly dependent on population growth. But a decline in population would inarguably have _some_ kind of negative impact which would need to be handled correctly.

> liberal democracies and capitalist markets at-scale are incapable of organizing production in a way that doesn't destroy the earth

That's an incredibly bold claim with absolutely no evidence supporting it. And you seem to imply that there exists some other system distinct from whatever you call "capitalism" which can organize production in a less harmful way - again with no evidence.

In general, recent growth of rich "capitalist" countries has significantly outstripped their energy use (an imperfect metric of environmental harm, I know, but it's what I could find) https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.GDP.PUSE.KO.PP?locat....

> It's funny, there was a post recently about "unsolved problems in economics."

IIRC that post was only kind of accurate at best. Popular culture's understanding of economics is hilariously bad.

> Because capitalism is incapable of solving the problem, and the economists know this, so they don't bother talking about it. They pretend it's an issue of state, when the profit mechanism itself is the cause for most externalities.

From where are you pulling the notion that "capitalism" (for some definition of that word) is incompatible with managing externalities? Or that economists somehow just ignore the existence of externalities?

This kind of attitude is distressingly common online and to me it seems no different from the mentality of anti-vaxxers. Just because a field of science is imperfect and distorted to some extent by government/corporate agendas doesn't give you carte blanche to throw out every bit of research ever done and substitute your own reality.

> Please clarify what exactly you mean when you say "capitalism".

Privately-owned productive instruments using a profit-based, moneyed system of distributed production (necessarily with state-based control mechanisms).

> That's an incredibly bold claim with absolutely no evidence supporting it.

Besides the planet we live on? Are you suggesting that if we do everything the same as we have been for the past 100 years, that everything will be fine? Why haven't markets started incorporating the known costs of fossil fuel usage at-scale? What about the countries made of plastic floating in the oceans? Why is the price of single-use plastics still low? Why is planned obsolescence cheaper even though the long-term shared costs are much higher?

Why are we still using an economic system where the price of something and the known cost has such an enormous differential?

> And you seem to imply that there exists some other system distinct from whatever you call "capitalism" which can organize production in a less harmful way - again with no evidence.

Capitalism is just a protocol. There are other protocols available to us (that are distinct from state planning) that can organize production. As far as evidence of them, how would that work? Capitalism is the dominant economic system and actively stamps out any other economic systems. There's fun little experiments like Rojova or EZLN, but nothing at-scale.

If you want an example of such a protocol, you can look at one that I'm developing: https://basisproject.net/

> From where are you pulling the notion that "capitalism" (for some definition of that word) is incompatible with managing externalities? Or that economists somehow just ignore the existence of externalities?

Capitalism, at least in its current form, is incapable of managing externalities because it ignores their existence. It operates on the principles of determining the differential between supply and demand via pricing and profit...this is an overly simplistic mechanism which provides no other information inputs for managing known externalities. It delegates this as a matter of the state. As an economic system, it is incomplete and externalizes its own "simplicity" to other systems.

> This kind of attitude is distressingly common online and to me it seems no different from the mentality of anti-vaxxers. Just because a field of science is imperfect and distorted to some extent by government/corporate agendas doesn't give you carte blanche to throw out every bit of research ever done and substitute your own reality.

I'm not substituting my own reality, and frankly that's fairly insulting. I believe I've described the mechanism at play several times, yet it feels like I'm screaming into the void.

Do you or do you not agree that the profit mechanism incentivizes externalities? If so, do you agree that if a productive system using profit as the organizational lynchpin is scaled, the externalities will scale with it? If so, do you agree that there is a threshold beyond which many externalities cannot be absorbed by the system at large (eg, CO2 output)? If so, then you've reached the same conclusion that I have. This isn't rocket science.

Economists talk a lot about externalities. After all, they invented the term.

They also have many ways for dealing with them.

Its time to move on from the woman education and children health care cliche talking points. Its very 2000.

Its no longer a interesting question for the world at large. Africa and a few others are the only hold outs, and while they deserve those things, it shouldn't be the go to talking points w.r.t. world population.

The vast majority of places is by all measures destined for a population collapse.

In many places there is a bump in the population pyramid around child bearing age as we speak. That bump isn't even close to replacement fertility, and in 10 years the people in that age brackets are so few that their fertility won't be significant for total population numbers.

Population stabilization is a subject for 30 years from now. First we're getting a population collapse and we should be talking about it.

World population is growing 1% a year. If you go back a century, world population never grew that fast in human history (except perhaps the dawn of human history). There is no global population collapse happening or on the horizon, this past century has had the fastest human growth rate in history, including now (the peak was the world baby boom in the 1960s).

There are countries where population is falling, and policy has to account for it, but there is not a global population collapse right now at all. Only if you measure against the peak baby boom of the 1960s does it seem less.

most of the developed world is experiencing population decline if you exclude immigration.

I wonder how up to date that 1% number is? From what I understand China has recently passed the zero to now be in negative population growth territory in 2022. Other countries have led the way. From my understanding, India is still in the positive territory but it is trending towards the negative as is the growing global trend it seems.

> never seen hydroponic potatoes either

https://youtu.be/9ck5iEP03g4

Aeroponic potatoes. They don't even need any substrate.

I think that's seed potato production, where the consistency and lack of pathogens justifies the extra cost. Here's a manual:

https://cipotato.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/005447.pdf

It would be possible to grow potatoes for human consumption with a similar system, but I don't think it's currently economic.

It's happening

"Fertility rate: 'Jaw-dropping' global crash in children being born" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53409521

Combine land use with yield improvements - 10X - 20X per acre since the 1950's.

So the land-use graph, multiplied by this rising yield line, shows a very different curve. A shocking rise in crop consumption that exceeds world population growth by some factor. For industrial uses presumably (cotton, oil-seed and so on).

Make of that what you will.

More of our food crops have been funneled into livestock as feed as well

That's complicated. I'd imagine animal husbandry would scale well with population growth. What use is a cow, but for somebody to eat it? If that were the case, then the animal-feed component might match population growth (and not acres under cultivation).

Also, biofuel.

I’ve always been super pumped about hydroponics and the absurd yields you can get from it. Hopefully it gets cheaper and cheaper over time.

Solar Foods and similar are also promising ways to massively reduce land use

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Foods

I work in hydroponics and when I describe it to someone new I mention it's like creating 15 acres of agricultural land out of thin air. Of course that depends on the crop, but there can be huge advantages to covered agriculture.

Is it still mostly salads or is there hope for high-calorie hydroponics?

All depends on the cost of the land it's on, electricity/water costs, the growing apparatus, whether it requires artificial light, and what the market rates for the crop are. So yeah, there's a lot of variables as one could imagine.

It's still mostly salads.

> I mention it's like creating 15 acres of agricultural land out of thin air.

So you can just grow things hydroponically out of nothing? You don't need masses of petrochemical-derived fertilisers and plastics?

Hydroponics are starting to sound like perpetual motion machines, where you can get more calories out than you put in.

It kinda works for farmland because it’s basically solar panels as plants.

I know, right? And if you've got farmland you can't easily put plants on you can put animals on that instead, and eat the animals and use the stuff the animals leave behind to grow plants.

It's almost like an ecosystem that has worked for hundreds of thousands of years is actually a pretty solid idea.

Modern hydroponics are certainly not perpetual motion machines. The difference is that you can collect all of the unused nutrients below the plant and recycle them back into the input stream. Secondly, you can elevate the carbon dioxide levels because it's an enclosed system and encourage plants to grow faster. Finally, the enclosed nature more easily permits integrated pest management, which reduces total pesticide requirements...of course, herbicides are not required at all because of the way hydroponics grow.

It's not perfect, but it's exceptionally more productive than field agriculture.

Hydroponics only makes sense for high price crops like salad or vegetables which make up only small amounts of agriculture. It’s way too expensive for the crops that provide most of the calories consumed by humans or animal feed: wheat, maize, soy

> Hydroponics only makes sense for high price crops like salad or vegetables

That's only true if it's in the city or other location with high cost/sqft land

imagine if we can reclaim all the land that salad and veggies use and replace it with good grains?

solutions aren't always mutually exclusive.

... that'll be a drop in the bucket. cereal grains alone use more than 10x [1] the amount of land used for vegetables. Add in other large users (coarse grain / oil crops) and it's over 20x, meaning you'd get like a 5% increase by replacing all vegetable land with grains.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/land-use#land-use-by-crop

thanks for sharing, thats pretty good data.

can't disagree with that. seems like even more reason to not use the land for things that can be grown vertically/hydroponically.

But definitely something i'll be reading more on, thanks for the resource.

It wouldn't be particularly nutritionally useful, and you'd be able to grow grain for a couple of years before your soil turned into dust.

That's why America starved in the 1930s.

Ahhh, a reductionist solution that erases cultural heritage while solving no meaningful problem. How original!

Animal feed, along with fresh water and land usage is a major issue, as you have suggested.

Less animals for human consumption = less feed, water and land required for animals. This opens up resources and agricultural land for vertical farming specifically for human consumption.

Humans currently consume 55% of the calories from agriculture, with animals at 36% and the rest for biofuels.

https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel...

Water usage is an exaggerated concern because people misuse statistics.

There are places where water usage _is not a concern at all_. In Iowa we take rainwater and pipe it to rivers faster, the opposite of irrigation. A gallon of fresh water "saved" in agriculture in Iowa is meaningless. More than is necessary comes from the sky.

Water usage is a problem where people are trying to grow things where there isn't enough water (i.e. much of California), in those places agriculture needs to be more selective about what it grows and needs to grow less as to not overburden water sources.

In Iowa though half the state would be standing water much of the year if we didn't actively drain our fields, griping about how much water growing corn "uses" is absurd in that situation.

Yes, but dumping oil based fertilizer on fields to produce government subsidized "biofuel" is still ridiculously stupid.

Rainwater isn't the only form of water, farmers in Iowa pump groundwater too, and those aquifers are becoming seriously depleted in a lot of the plains states. This is causing pretty serious drops in groundwater levels in a lot of areas and won't be sustainable indefinitely.

https://d9-wret.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium/...

https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/sci...

Of the 26 million acres of farmland operated in Iowa, 152,000 acres are irrigated or 0.58% (2015). Municipal, industrial, etc. water is quite often groundwater, but the farmland is 99.5% not irrigated at all.

Okay, so if you get rid of livestock farming, what do you do with the land that is currently used for grazing and how do you cope with the inevitable soil depletion from not turning arable land over to pasture every so often?

Hydroponics are limited to low-calorie foods such as lettuce, herbs, spinach etc due to constraints in the method itself. High calorie and/or high fiber foods require complex rhizospheres which is currently only found in healthy soil.

To add injury, the substrate used to provide nutrients to hydroponic plants either require petrochemicals or other plant material (compost, husks, seeds...) to mimic a complete nutrient profile.

Perhaps there are solvable problems, but given the already high costs and limitations, hydro is not an option if our ecosystems collapse.

> High calorie and/or high fiber foods require complex rhizospheres which is currently only found in healthy soil.

What is your source for this claim? Major grains (wheat, corn, rice, etc.) grow fine hydroponically--I've actually seen modern conventional agriculture described derisively as a hydroponic system using the sterilized natural soil as its inert medium. That description seems basically correct to me, though I don't think it's necessarily bad. Production of grains in systems analogous to hydroponic vegetable production would certainly be possible, just currently uneconomic:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2002655117

The major benefit of hydroponics is in achieving very high yield per acre. This is important e.g. when growing perishable vegetables in expensive greenhouses near densely-populated areas. For grains that are readily dried, stored, and shipped, it's currently far cheaper to cultivate more acres in remote areas at lower yield per acre.

The "petrochemical" claim is also confusing. The point of hydroponics is that the plant gets nutrients from the solution, not from the inert substrate. Typical hydroponic substrates may be plant-based (e.g. coir) or not (e.g. rockwool), but in neither case are they providing significant fertility, nor making significant use of petrochemicals. Obviously their energy inputs for production and transportation often come from petroleum; but that's true for almost any human activity today, including organic agriculture. A few niche applications do use petrochemical-based substrates (e.g. phenolic foam), but very rarely.

The synthetic nitrogen fertilizers dissolved in the nutrient solution often use hydrogen from natural gas, since that's the cheapest source, but could use any other source of hydrogen (e.g., electrolysis of water) instead. Here's an article studying those economics:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2021.5808...

>Hydroponics are limited to low-calorie foods such as lettuce, herbs, spinach etc due to constraints in the method itself.

Why do you say that? Hydroponic setups often produce tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, strawberries, etc are all quite popular.

https://www.biotecharticles.com/Agriculture-Article/Hydropon...

>High calorie and/or high fiber foods require complex rhizospheres which is currently only found in healthy soil.

Mainly root veggies or large things that are unruly like a watermelon. More of a practicality problem. I have been eyeing that root veg drip hydroponic system. You can absolutely grow all the foods hydroponically. Not sure about those rhizospheres.

>To add injury, the substrate used to provide nutrients to hydroponic plants either require petrochemicals or other plant material (compost, husks, seeds...) to mimic a complete nutrient profile.

This hasn't been true for decades. I think you touched on the real big problem "petrochemicals". Oh ya we just found the problem.

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19900009537/downloads/19...

>Perhaps there are solvable problems, but given the already high costs and limitations, hydro is not an option if our ecosystems collapse.

Did you know when you exclude the illegally seized Moroccan fertilizer we have about 20 years left of current day farming?

I wonder about glyosophates eh.

Hydroponics sounds great on paper. Until you see the sludge they feed the plants with. Given the incentive to cut costs, especially where it's hard to see and/or measure, not sure I want to get anywhere close to the resulting produce.

https://daily.jstor.org/a-history-of-human-waste-as-fertiliz...

This objection baffles me. Traditional agriculture has used literal feces to "feed" plants since its inception, and frequently uses bones and blood as nutrient input. I'm eating the resulting food, not the rot and excrement used to feed it.

That is a fault of imagination ;) Think "processed oil refinery sludge" or some other such industrial horror. Oh, sure, there is a shit ton of heavy metals and/or who knows what other garbage in there, but it's below the FDA limit (hello VW wink wink), so let's roll with it straight to mass human consumption.

What do you mean by "sludge"? Typical hydroponic solution just looks like water, thus the name. The fertilizers used are higher purity ("greenhouse grade", "ultra-soluble", etc.) than those applied to soil, since impurities risk clogging the fertigation equipment.

It is cheap way to get badly tasting vegetables. There is real, huge noticeable difference between tomatoes raised via hydroponics and not. Unless they manage to make them super packed with nutrients, which they are definitely not, there is zero reason to eat them.

Tangential but I’m under the impression that “The world produces more food than ever” may not be true this year, and may not be true in the following years if the climate keeps being highly irregular.

This year is all about fertilizer prices driven by high petroleum costs.

And maybe a war in a country that produces a lot of wheat

True, but if the input costs were lower, the difference would easily be made up.

Russia is the biggest fertiliser exporter in the world. Sanctions aren't likely to keep prices down.

you can't "spin up a new instance" with farming. The ripples are just now reaching the shore. This will be a longer period for recovery than most people understand.

No, but they decide each planting season what to plant. Farmers tend to shuffle crops when needed. Haven't talked to anyone around here about what is in the ground.

Where I live (southern Sweden) they switched almost entirely to rapeseed and grains due to the shortages. It's expected to be pretty profitable although there are a lot of other factors including low rainfall...

... and a population explosion in Africa.

I recall reading about many climate factors — Indian crops scorched by heat, Chinese wheat season delayed by rains/floods, etc. I didn’t pay enough attention to know the relative importance of the climate and non-climate factors.

Every year has climate factors. There's always some place where the season is bad for this or that reason, this is the nature of agriculture, not something new.

Not just oil prices, but minerals too.

Fossil fuels are a big input into agriculture. Running machines, fertilizer, transportation to market.

Fossil fuels are used because for the industry they are the best cost vs benefit. The industry doesn't pay the externalities.

Moving off fossil fuels or forcing the industry to pay externalities increases input cost and price for consumers. If managed correctly (considering technological, economic, business) price increases can be acceptable.

If managed incorrectly, it means prices skyrocket and some people simply in the world simply can not afford adequate nutrition.

It is my opinion that sanctions, ESG, and fossil fuel divestment are incorrect management of transitioning off fossil fuels. And we are seeing the result.

This isn't concerning. In the middle ages, the vast majority of the isle of Britain was under the plow to feed a couple million people. Yields have improved dramatically in the last century, by orders of magnitude for many staple crops. This is due to utilizing hybridized species that might have favorable traits compared to pure species, and also by using fertilizer and modern irrigation. The latter was called the green revolution:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution

I don’t think that your statement about Great Britain is correct. If so much land were devoted to agriculture in the Middle Ages, there wouldn’t have been much of the forests left to devote to shipbuilding during the early–middle modern period.

It is true that some land that is now urban or used for grazing was more once intensively farmed (especially eg in the highlands where most agriculture is sheep farming). But I think the amount of land devoted to crops, and certainly the kind of intensive growing that leaves little room for wildlife is a more modern invention.

I would guess that land devoted to agriculture (maybe except for some kinds of grazing) probably peaked in the 20th century, perhaps during or shortly after the war when food imports were harder to come by.

You're making an assumption about how much forest land would be required to support the shipbuilding that doesn't match what we know about Britain's history of forestation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forestry_in_the_United_Kingdom...

If I remember correctly quite a lot of British lumber used for shipbuilding from the Elizabethan era on came from Ireland, which was comparatively well forested in the Middle Ages.

You don't need natively forestry so much when you've a subject neighbour to pillage.

Reliance on Baltic timber was also why England was so keen to ensure no one power controlled the entrance to the Baltic.

> This isn't concerning.

Did you read past the title? It's not supposed to be concerning.

> The world produces more food than ever, but the amount of land we use is now falling. This means we can feed more people while restoring wild habitat.

Did you read the article? The exact point is that it's not meant to be concerning.

we also consume more food than required and US alone wastes about 30-40% of food. https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs. Hypothetically if we eliminate the waste effectively we need 40% less land + reduced consumption of other resources

To me it seems super sized farms and corporate land is the main trend. Massive farms in easily farmed locations and the death of small family owned operations. If you try to run a small farm in marginal land it just doesn't pay any more. The new generations aren't interested either. I know my Wife's grand mothers old farm is abandoned, the land behind my holiday house used to be farm now its reverting to forest, meanwhile my Uncle's farm was merged with 4 others so is still family owned but a mega operation with low wage workers.

It has been the main trend in recent decades, but current farming practices aren't sustainable, deplete the soil, and depend heavily on oil-derived external inputs (e.g. ammonia fertiliser). It may well be that crop-mixing makes a big come back in the decades to come, and that may not be as suitable for mega-farms.

There are actually a ton of small farms being run around the US at least. i learned of this site from the Omivore's Dilemma: http://www.eatwild.com/products/

This kind of farming is doable, and can be profitable if run well. But it's labor intensive and doesn't scale as well as conventional farming operations. Running a small farm properly is a hell of a lot of work. A modern farm can allow farmers more off time and less effort.

What you are describing is an unprofitable business. You can make equilibrium money in it but you must supply the labour and get no time off. If you instead substituted yourself out and bought the labour there would be nothing left over.

In general I believe small-time farmers should provide at least some of rhe labor. Otherwise you end up with gentleman farmers just paying low wages to the actual labor.

How/why is this different from other businesses?

The main point is that farm labor lacks the wage protections of almost any other business (except tip-driven ones).

There is almost no chance that people who run small farms are evaluating on the same terms as you.

They have found a sustaining lifestyle that lets them spend time outside, work at home, teach their kids to work, eat local, work with their neighbors, have seasonal variation in their lives, transact with their neighbors, have fun toys (seriously, if you've never driven a tractor...), have privacy, and on and on. It's a totally different path than a salaried job, and not because they couldn't how to code for big tech or work for a bank. It's a dedicated version of the FIRE idea that so many people with highly paid jobs aspire to.

yeah it's a living. I'm sure there's some free time in the winter but you aren't exactly going to retire early.

I don't think you took away quite what I meant. The farming becomes a passion project or slow lifestyle or healthy living, or some other idea of all the stuff FIRE types are finally going to do after they reach their number. But instead of starting with a theoretically infinite runway, they launch right into the lives they want to live.

The small farmers are willing to take the bet on themselves in exchange for not delaying the dream for 10+ years.

Also, I'm really skeptical about the retire part of FIRE. It's less retire and more 'stop being the mythical human money optimizer machine of economics, which I show an uncommon knack for approximating.'

As society continues approaching cyberpunk dystopia, I wouldn't be surprised if office workers would start paying to stay and work on farms to reconnect with land/nature.

Pick-yourself farms are big here - feels like the first step in that direction.

> I wouldn't be surprised if office workers would start paying to stay and work on farms to reconnect with land/nature.

This started long ago. Look it up. There's also WWOOF.

Sounds like it's a living, but in the work months it's a lot of manual work. You're not exactly getting rich quick. People will pay up for excellent produce/meat.

Most small farms require at least one spouse working an off-farm job for the benefits.

It's pretty disgusting how little small-time farmers make (and general farm labor). There's a huge fight for $15/hr minimum wage, but this doesn't include farm labor. The people growing everyone's food can't even afford benefits without taking on a second full time job.

> It's pretty disgusting how little small-time farmers make

As a small farmer, I think it's amazing how much I can make. For approximately a month's worth of work, I make more than my wife does working all year long. And I have 11 other months free to work in the tech industry.

What do you do? It seems incredible that you can farm for only one month of the year with no related work the rest of it.

Grain farmer. It is not one consecutive month, for what it is worth. The work is spread out over the year, but the total time spent each year is equivalent to about a month of work.

Is this an unusual year? It seems the small grain farmers I know make just ok money in the past. Certainly not enough to pay for benefits and stuff. Or maybe your small farm is much larger than the small farms I know (~100ac).

This year is indeed unusual. If Mother Nature plays nice the farm might pay more than my tech job, but don't count your grain before its in the bin. A lot can go wrong quickly.

Ultimately, profitability is entirely dependent on your debt load. You need to be a huge farmer if most of your profits are going to pay the bank, which is how a lot of farmers want to do it. I've been able to leverage my tech job income to keep my debts to a minimum, so I can make a lot more per acre. The downside is that, by not taking on many acres, my wealth will be much less in the end than another farmer in my cohort who is buying up everything while taking little to no income.

It's a tradeoff. You have to decide what's more important: Wealth or income.

> Or maybe your small farm is much larger than the small farms I know (~100ac).

I think we have a similar definition. I'm at ~120 acres.

Shouldn't 120 ac of something like wheat only gross about $50k?

At today's prices? Soft white, which is what I normally grow, is currently selling for around $15 per bushel. I typically expect around 100 bushels per acre. So $180,000 if you had 120 acres of it. But in a normal year, yeah, that's not too far off. Corn and soys are where you make the money. Wheat is normally grown around here just to keep the soil healthy.

Ah, maybe your area or land is better. I was hearing around 60 bushel/acre.

Was the tech job money a one-time purchase of capital assets for the farm? Or, if you're injecting tech job income on a regular basis, are you considering those as costs when you're calculating how much money the farm is making?

Both. It allowed me to get the business off the ground through capital asset purchases and it provides an operating loan, so to speak, to afford inputs. The figures I speak of are net income, so the "operating loan" is paid back before reaching those figures. As farming is, by definition, an investment, not a job, it is implied that the income is the ROI on the capital investment.

How big is your land?

While I don't know what the definition of a small-time farmer is to you, but I live in a farm heavy area and their income level is huge for the amount of time they put in. My friend has a business that sells "power equipment," and he's entirely sustained by farmers buying the latest and greatest every year.

Think about it this way - 5 years ago farming land in the area was worth $10,000 an acre. It's probably more now. So if you just have 100 acres, that's easily worth a million. To make sense farming it instead of selling it and investing (or renting the land to another farmer) you'd need to make more than $50k-$100k after expenses for it to be worth it.

And it is. Most have significantly more than 100 acres. There's maybe 8 weeks out of the year where they need to work hard. The downside? You more or less need to be born in to it because even if you could afford to buy the land you'd have a hard time finding any to buy.

Note: I'm talking about crop farmers here. Animals are another matter, and I don't understand the type of people that would decide to get in to that line of work.

I'm not sure I follow your logic.

But many times the land is worth more than they make. A 100 ac farm growing wheat would gross about $40k, right?

As for power equipment. Some of that can be bought with grants or subsidies, right? Or on debt.

Sure, and I maybe worded that poorly. They get to make that money and keep the land to either eventually sell, pass down, or rent. The point is it's rare for farmers to sell what's usually millions of dollars of land - usually that happens when inheritance comes in to play.

The power equipment is mostly stuff for fun more than for work, such as side by sides. They still get to deduct it, of course. It was just an example of how much money they make.

For what it's worth I believe the soil in southwest Minnesota is supposed to be among the best in the country, and they do corn & soybeans.

The book describes a pretty nice small farm arrangement. Basically the guy has a field of grass and has some cows and chickens. The cows graze on the grass and poop, the chickens pick apart the poop and eat insects and he's basically just moving around fencing once every day or two. Since it's not mass farming of animals he doesn't have to deal with as much waste at scale, and he sells high end meat in addition to some produce he works on separately.

Doesn't sound that bad once you get it going but I'm sure there's a lot of day to day work.

> If you try to run a small farm in marginal land it just doesn't pay any more

This tells us something profound about the world. Due to enclosure of the commons, everyone is forced to be a worker and/or capitalist. (I realize there are many parts of the world not like that yet, but we're on our way there.)

great examples... as farms are being abandoned in other places, maybe farming is undergoing consolidation to bigger farms that are growing by cutting into sensitive and more valuable forests, justifying the net effect that farmed land is going down. Surely some forests have to be more valuable than others.

I was surprised to learn recently how little farming is done by large corporations. Small family farms are vanishing, but unlike basically every other sector, they're largely being consolidated into mid-sized family owned operations, rather then into big mega-corps. Non-family owned corporations only make up 4% of farmland ownership

I don't know how much this amounts to, but my parents have farmland for fun, and someone comes to cut the hay twice a year so that it qualifies as agricultural use. They're not alone.

We have some close friends that are farmers. Both have 200+ acres. Each of them employ about as many workers as a midsize restaurant.

But farming is really hard work - none of their kids want to take on the business. As they retire, the people actually set to take over the farm work are all immigrants (who do not have the capital to acquire the huge farms). So we'll probably see a trend where the farmland goes to capital management firms while most of the work will be managed and performed by the same group of immigrants.

Thinking out of the box on this, I would like to see more zoning exceptions and subsidies for home owners who have enough land for small scale farming at a hyper local level. I’ve seen people do this for specific crops in mixed use areas (residential and industry) and it’s been very successful and helps feed the community.

Fundamentally large-scale monocultures are inefficient because they require large scale external inputs. When the overall cost of these inputs (transportation, source-site damage, energy inputs, requisite equipment, etc.) are considered in aggregate, the approach does not make sense economically. Obviously, it is also unsustainable.

I believe a sustainable, long-term agriculture would include in its design the following features: multi-crop/intercrop by design (ecosystem vs. monoculture), reduction of emphasis on uniformity, iterative rather than total harvesting.

Perhaps the main issue with such an approach is currently harvesting technology. Densely interplanted crops may be hard to access and thus hard to harvest. And yet, because they should tend to require less external inputs, be more resistant to pathogens, and provide healthier soils, improved water retention, reduced wind exposure, and multiple crops on the same land, there should be a budget for this.

Transportation and refrigeration allow us to grow food where it it grows most efficiently and move it to where it is needed.

The alternative is to use more land to inefficiently grow food locally and eat canned, pickled, and dried food off season.

From my perspective, in Florida (and elsewhere), we've been aiming for peak madness for decades. Things grow in Florida, and by choice, many of the wrong things. The focus here is primarily on impressionism and more often than not, a sub-mediocre version. The cult of Saint Augustine grass and soulless sub-developments has, in fear of creative alternatives and erosion, paved the state with this alien blight. We have a perennial swarm of whining 2-stroke engines thrashing, blowing and mangling countless tons of shrubbery and alien blight, most of which is never composted with intent for reuse. The whine of the blower is our State Anthem. The average home, if not encompassed by a mote of cement, grows nothing useful. A vegetable garden is a rare sight, and a community allotment even more so. In the 1920s, Florida produced more celery than any place in the world, and certain areas, through means of agriculture, thrived during the Depression. For many years, Polk County alone, produced more citrus than the entire state of California, although politics, land repurposing and ' citrus greening' have changed this. Amaranth grows everywhere here, on farms, roadsides and in yards. It's typically weeded, sprayed or fought. I wonder how easy it would be to grow crops of it. If that's a bad plan, many other useful things grow here, despite our objections. Even if we only grew conventional produce, we could grow far more than we do, and in a relatively harmonious manner. And this could be done without additional deforestation.

Currently, a thousand people each day are relocating from New York to Florida (and many more from elsewhere), with the general intent to make things here resemble New York (or elsewhere) as much as they can afford. Our wetlands, which once comprised the majority of our territory, is replaced with retention ponds that are politically qualified as restoration of... wetlands. It took vicious battles to spare our keystone Everglades of airports, damming and concrete jungles, but we sort of did it. Sort of. The prevailing psyche, however, is generally hostile to anything indigenous here but the winter weather and surface image of the coastline.

And then there's Sludge, the PFAS saturated, miraculously marketed product of repurposed sewage, which is sometimes forced on ranchers and others. I once spoke to a rancher who told me he's seen his cows chewing on condoms. When I asked him why he used the stuff, he said there's enough coercion to do so that he has little choice.

My point is that rather than thinking exclusively in terms of carbon, stolid convention and zero self reflection, we might contemplate the many opportunities right in front of us, to do things differently, or do different things. It may seem extreme now, but without a paradigm shift (in an actually realistic and very potentially amenable direction), things will become extreme in a less amenable and less manageable way. Yes, if we continue being myopic maniacs, food production will be a problem. We may have other options though. I frequently read comments on HN hostile to small-scale and organic farming. Citations abound, illustrating the impracticality and futility of small, especially organic operations. Yet, in my direct experience, I've seen a 5 acre farm not only remain the sole (and successful) business of a small family for decades and produce enough to sell, consume and compost, but no worker there has ever made minimum wage.

I'm convinced we can do things differently and better.

Should we start to measure in volume akin to transistor count and process node?

Indoor vertical gardens are really cool, would love to see more of those

Moore’s law for agriculture.

We haven’t begun to explore the 3rd dimension. A skyscraper per city providing all the food for that city is one possible future…

It takes about an acre of land to feed one person for the year, and that is with modern yield efficiencies.

Even if you assume a 10x increase in yield efficiency, you would still need about 200 skyscrapers growing food, for every skyscraper holding people.

That's gonna need to be an awfully big skyscraper.

You'd need about 680,000 km² of land to grow the food to feed NYC (more than the entirety of New York State).

If you assume that yields could be 100x better in-doors (a strong assumption) - you'd still need a building with about 10x the floor space of the entire city's land area.

This is as false as the last time this type of nonsense was claimed. It causes really bad policy.

Is this like when we reached peak oil 10 times in the last 50 years?

Not worried because the bigger problem will be population decline, once the boomers start dying on mass. The US will be more like Japan. You won't be able to import enough immigrants to offset this, since the lowering standards of living in the US is increasing to trend to the world average. Less people, less agricultural land needed. Too many people are having abortions, or choosing to not to have kids, and not enough kids are born to replace the dying.

In 2019 there were 3,747,540 natural births in the US.

There were 2,854,838 natural deaths.

There were 31% more births than deaths.

The natural population growth isn't declining yet.

And even if it was - as long productivity increases - that's all that really matters. Population can decrease like in Japan while GDP increases due to productivity growth.

Population growth != better living standards. See the Malthusian Trap that was the popular way of thinking prior to the industrial revolution. Population kept increases - yet people just kept getting more miserable lives.

May I ask what is a natural death? The numbers given don't align with other metrics I was able to look up like the "fertility rate" which is 1.70 births per woman (2019) making the growth negative (you need >2.0 right?)

Waiting eagerly for the world to pass peak peak.

Yes - and 640kb is all we'll ever need.

Global cooling will kill us all and Al Gore will save the world.

Focus on pollution and think about before buying the iphone 4na1° because the most likely problem for the problems in this world is you (and me) over consuming.

Not Brazilian farmer trying to make an honest living.

You realize a good chunk of those Brazilian farmers are trying to make an honest living explicitly by providing the products you're over-consuming?

Fair point. I need a diet.

Still have my iPhone 7 though :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com