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Comment by siruncledrew | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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