Most of the world’s grain is not eaten by humans
economist.com
economist.com
Of the important grains and/or cereals listed above, only corn (maize) is a New World native. Corn is an important member of the grass family.
Corn (Zea mays) was domesticated from a wild plant called teosinte (Zea mexicana) about 7000 years ago. This species was considered sacred and was central to Mayan creation myths. Famous Mayan images show an earth god sprouting from the corn stalk.
Corn is the most efficient of the modern cereal grains in converting water and carbon dioxide into carbohydrates. Maize formed the basis for the Mayan, Aztec, and Inca civilizations in the New World.
Corn, beans, and squash were planted together by early native Americans in companion planting to benefit all three species. There is no wild plant or evidence of one that resembles corn with giant husked ears; besides the ears, teosinte and corn look very similar.
Columbus took corn to Europe on the first voyage but it did not gain wide attention.
Native Americans had over 100 uses for the corn plant and its fruits. https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/ethnobotany/food/grains.sh...
Corn is among the most efficient natural converters of sunlight into chemical energy useful to the plant (with some left over for the farmer), but photovoltaics beat it by up to 10x. Capturing CO2 and producing glucose, starch, ethanol, and kerosene by an organic chemical process could be much more productive, by any measure, than via corn, which must anyway also grow stalk and leaves. The power could come from solar panels sharing fields with vegetable crops (e.g. tomatoes and peppers) that benefit from the shade they would provide by multiplying yield, and with wind turbines which take up very little ground footprint.
Combining solar, wind, farming, and chemical processes yields much better results than keeping them separate.
Global farmland is about 45 million square kilometers, approx 1e10 more.
Lets say the solar panels cover 10% of the field. That 10% produces 10x as much, so you've approximately doubled your fields overall productivity. We're currently a factor of 1e9 short of producing enough to do so (and it's not like PV cells are not currently produced at scale).
1e9 is an unfathomably large delta. We'd be converting most of the planet into PV factories & mines to supply them.
I think you are of by a few magnitudes as this is only 1 square kilometer? The largest solar park in India is 56 square kilometers in area (or 10 million solar panels which are at least(?) 2 square meters in size).
Installed solar grew by around 130GW in 2020 according to this https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv which implies somewhere on the order of a billion square meters so you're out by a factor of at least 1000
and there about 20TW of electricity production to replace. So we need 120x 2020's output to replace electricity.
Other uses of fuels are about an order of magnitude more
So the delta is about 100-1000 given a decade of production. Less if we start to reign in the gratuitous waste of the west.
The output of your calculation is a testament to how grossly inefficient corn ethanol is. Not an endorsement of it.
Assuming your initial numbers are correct, the approx 1e10 should be 1e7 (rounding down from 4.5e7), as 1 million sqm equals 1 sqkm (this is different from 1 kilo square meter; see cube square law etc.)
You also do not take into account that solar panels have an expected lifetime of over 20 years - your current calculation seems to want a panel produced every year for every field.
Taking these into account brings the production defecit factor down to ~ 1e5, which is still unfathomably huge but at least marginally more achievable than the 1e9 answer you got.
The global production of solar panels was 180 GW in 2020. Assuming around 200 W per square meter, you get 1 billion square meters of solar panels. So their initial number is off by a factor of 1000.
It is also nonsense.
But even using the figure from a sibling reply, 1e5: so what? There is no need to put solar panels on every square km of farmland, or even on the 1/10th of it needed to fix the same calories; nor any value in trying or discussing trying.
If civilization does not collapse immediately, or even somewhat later, we will have centuries to build out solar. Future panels will last longer than today's, and be more efficient, and cheaper and lighter. Production, transport, and deployment will be increasingly automated. Today's production rate is not any kind of limit, and panels built today will not anyway evaporate next year. Build-out is cumulative.
Meanwhile, the nutritionally most valuable crops will not be displaced. Only cereal grains fed to animals are legitimate targets.
Furthermore, as I noted originally, panels placed in crop land will not displace crops, but coexist with them.
Plus there'd need to be a massive shift in methods which tends to makemit easier for smaller, more adaptable entities
What about Buckwheat
Still though, the question is not so much about classification but about importance as a food\resource.
What about Rye?
But looks like it's only 9th within the most cultivated cereals, which was a bit surprising for me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cereal
I'm not sure what you meant to communicate with "and/or", but "and" would probably have sufficed.
https://energyskeptic.com/2021/aquifer-decline-in-california...
https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/c...
https://revealnews.org/article/9-sobering-facts-about-califo...
There's no answer except functioning government and the general eradication of solipsistic liberal/libertarian fantasies, and that's never going to happen.
Punishing the perpetrators won’t put the water back in the same way punishing a murderer won’t bring the victim back. We don’t punish to make right. We punish to deter.
2) I try to live in such a way that I'm not a wasteful glutton who misuses communal resources.
Punishment doesn't work in this context, since it's not a repeated game. Murder is punished because everyone has the chance to do murder - it's a "repeated" game. Destroying the environment isn't.
If in the future it's decided that I made my money unethically and it needs to be redistributed, I guess I'm fine with that so long as the same standard is applied to everyone's money. I think it'll be close to a great reset, but whatever. I'm not thrilled by the idea, but it might have to happen.
Moreover the spoils of doing it once make it easier to do so again.
What possible reason is there not to take those spoils and return them to the commons from whence they were stolen?
Punishment is not a sustainable measure, it only fosters more bad motives, and rules used to justify the punishment inform malicious actors on how to not get caught (a.k.a. how to follow the letter but not the spirit).
To address the root cause, work out why bad motives exist (what compels people to violate the spirit in the first place) and eliminate those.
If the powerful bear consequences when something bad happens regardless of fault, then power will be wielded to prevent those outcomes rather than enact them. Anyone who does not wish to take that risk can dispose of their power.
However, there’s another big concept, and that is “do not fire an employee who just learned a big and expensive, to you, lesson”. Punishing people simply because they failed, especially in a complex environment with slow onboarding process, is unproductive.
Furthermore, it can sow fear, resentment and distrust. Take China, where a local official risks unpredictable punishment, up to losing their job (or worse), if they fail—such as by allowing COVID cases to happen in their locality. Unfortunately, the side-effect of it is that officials are incentivized to lie up, meaning the government may think the country is COVID-free and be unable to make informed decisions.
This is also why I think COVID lab leak event, if confirmed, should not lead to any repercussions for China in particular. Fear of said repercussions seems likely half of the reason the research is being obscured in the first place, as a result preventing the global community from making informed decisions.
So, if you don’t want such shenanigans to take place in your government (I wouldn’t), you have to agree that whichever human being you elected should be able to make mistakes to learn from them, and thus another measure of their performance should be used.
For example, repeat trend of malicious intent supported by concrete evidence could be a good one.
(And to be make things even trickier, they do not deserve the whole credit in case of any success either. The success or failure of a measure to large extent depends on the whole country and the larger context it exists in. There are situations where one can only win, and situations where losing the least is the best outcome.)
Incentives should be aligned, but I don’t think punishment is the instrument for that.
No state actor (other than arguably putin, but I'd characterise his power as individual and not derived from his role as a government agent) is as powerful as eg. rupert murdoch or peter thiel individually, and in aggregate (and in spite of not working together) the 0.01% are vastly more powerful than any state.
If 10% of the fortune 500 were confiscated and redistributed equally every time there's a pandemic or 5% of the amazon is burnt down or there is an unchecked oil spill, then the wealthy would ensure these things do not happen.
I suppose the main thing that makes rich powerful is the ability to influence government, which is only because power converts to money. If elected officials could not be influenced by rich malicious actors, those actors would lose much leverage.
The second thing is the ability to use money to secure popular support, which can hardly be eliminated unless people stop putting personal gain above true value… which is realistic in post-scarcity.
Yes! Enthusiastically, with vigor!
No, but it will partially compensate for impacted communities' subsequent economic precarity.
California is a very wealthy state and giving up some of these agricultural businesses to other states and maybe even to our poorer southern neighbors will be an overall good thing with minimal loss in tax revenues. These lands should be used to grow trees instead.
Cheap electricity will result in cheap desalination.
The sky is not falling.
madagascar has terrible famine right now, becauae there is no rain. In Syria, all crops that are not irigated have died.
current irrigation water is free. You cant use water from desalination, because it takes many tons of water to grow one kilo of food, and tens of tons of water to grow a kilo of beef. that would drive up prices more than 10x, which menas famine.
you people just don't understand the shitstirm that's coming one the crops fail on two important crop producing nations simultaneously
Since FDR came into office in 1933 the US federal government has actively been dealing with a serious food problem: tremendous agricultural surpluses.
Virtually every wealthy country, even Japan, has the same problem: too many farmers and too much food.
"We are running out! The sky is falling!" Hey, if that's what you want to yell and scream, that's your prerogative. But, as the adage goes, "Facts are stubborn things."
In terms of crop value, California is the largest agricultural producer in the USA. I'm almost certain if California were to produce zero food whatsoever, the USA could still easily produce massive agricultural surpluses.
Go read Frances Moore Lappé’s infamous "Diet for a Small Planet" which was a very famous bestselling book in 1971. It has been almost 100% debunked as inane wishful thinking.
She claimed meat production had a negative environmental impact, was wasteful, and contributed to global food scarcity. Sure, just like factories can pump rivers full of pollution, if not properly regulated, cattle producers will tend to do the same thing. The answer is good laws and proper enforcement: not requiring people to eat tofu as a main course for dinner.
Frances Moore Lappé was an unhinged "tree hugger." Don't be like her. Use your head: study the history, and look at the technology.
While you are at it, imagine wind turbines spinning in the empty wastelands of the American West, pumping water from Canada to California.
Kansas and Nebraska were part of what was known as the "Great American Desert." But then some engineers figured out how to pump water from what is now the "dying" Ogallala aquifer.
We aren't living in caves, my man, trying to fight off lions and bears with spears.
Doomers. Sheesh. You guys disgust me. Go spread your falsehoods elsewhere.
However, cows have the unique ability to turn grass into protein, so if all an area can grow is grass, cows are a great way to get calories out of it. Properly allowed to graze freely, cows can be a net improvement on a particular ecology as a carbon sink (manure is an improvement to the soil), but shipping the harvested grass to feedlots is indeed an ecological disaster.
If you prefer meat then chicken is worse than eating corn but still much better than cows. We eat beef because it’s delicious and that’s it’s only advantage at scale.
There is something to be said about growing animal feed on arable land to feed to animals directly although that could be used to make food that humans can digest directly instead. But you still need bio-available protein, and plants do really badly on that. If you actual compare meat to plant matter on what is actually digested and absorbed by humans to get the equivalent nutrition, you'll find that plants actually do not perform that well beyond carbs and some micro-nutrients on an efficiency basis. You still need fat, protein and the other micro-nutrients.
Animals also convert indigestible agricultural waste products from plant growing into something humans can use, meat.
The actual percentage breakdown is for land completely dependent on irrigation and land preparation. It’s not cost effective to use huge tracts of land for crops because we have such excess farmland, but maximum production would involve zero animals whatsoever.
Further, actual productivity on marginal or untended land is by definition very low. Cattle grazing on scrub that gets minimal rainfall is very expensive both in terms of effort and the energy expended by cattle to extract what little food is available while generally leading to desertification.
In terms of converting waste products, such organic material has a wide range of uses including feeding livestock. You could for example burn it for energy so calling it a waste product is very misleading.
No, it does not.
In this context, 'grow' means 'in a usable fashion'.
Rocky, hilly soil isn't tillable, is impossible to harvest en mass, and results in poor outcomes. It's almost like you've never farmed, and are making statements based upon theory, instead of real world usage cases.
Whatever agenda you have, please stop trying to claim that all soil is good for corn.
Even beyond that, there are places corn cannot grow. Period. Ever. For example, in many parts of Canada, the season is too short for corn to mature!
Hay and other such things grow there, and such land is good for cattle too.
Anyway, preparing an area for cultivation is a one time cost. People actually grow crops in areas you consider impossible because someone already put the effort possibly thousands of years ago even if it’s not currently economically viable.
Terraces also work in hilly areas, though building them is expensive. Removing stones from fields is the origin of field stone houses and quite a few stone fences at property lines. The degree of effort required can be huge but at the extreme end people plant orchards in areas that are covered in boulders.
For places where none of that effort is worth it, lumber is still a viable crop as long as it gets enough rain.
Yes, you can grow crops anywhere, on the moon, in shipping containers, in your basement, and yes on terraces and if you spare no expense to change the land.
But all of that is silly and absurd, and not part of the context of this discussion. Some of it just is not possible in any sane fashion.
Some of the land you think is just "move a few rocks and it's fine, like people used to do" is not even remotely accurate or true. We're talking about hilly, rocky land, with 1" of topsoil (Canadian Shield), with poor soil. This land is what you throw a goat or cattle at. It's not something you import billions of dollars of topsoil per 100 acres, to make usable.
I honestly don't get your argument here.
I am explicitly not saying significant investment is economically viable, we have a vast surplus of farmland.
That said, historically people would improve land because they had a labor surplus and few options for long term investments. We are living in a world where thousands of years of such decisions has made some real changes to various landscapes. Much of Asia is covered in terraces because they preferred really flat areas for rice fields and had a huge labor surplus. That’s a legacy I think worth remembering rather than the focus on who was in charge over the course of history.
As to adding topsoil that’s closer to 10 million per 100 acres. Dirt’s very cheap in bulk though transportation long distances isn’t. Nowhere near viable when farmland is cheap and the Canadian Shield is that cold. But orders of magnitude better than you where suggesting.
Unless you do crazy things, there is more land suitable for grazing only, than not.
And doing crazy things makes zero sense in the context of this conversation, which was about how cattle are all some land is good for.
Your argument seems to boil down to "well, we could literally move mountains of dirt, or perform massive terraforming projects on useless soil!," well of course, and so what.
It doesn't make you correct, because this sort of discussion is senseless in the context we were discussing.
Take the soil example, yes it would be billions per 100 acres, because on that scale (the Canadian shield) you'd either have to desoil massive amounts of usable farmless, or start grinding rock and creating new topsoil from that... so current market prices are meaningless!
And if you were going to do that, why not just proclaim that the sahara is perfect farmland too, but of course you'd have to dig irrigation ditches, setup trillion dollar desalination plants, but hey I'm sure you'd chime in too, when someone says desert sand isn't good cropland too?!?!?
No buddy, desert isn't good for growing corn.
(I can hear you... But! But, you only have to...)
Your 50% benchmark in terms of land is really not a function of each individual acre of land on it’s own.
The southwest as a whole needs vastly more irrigation than is available, but which specific bit of land becomes farmland and which but is used to graze cattle is very arbitrary. The parts that do grow crops generally have more to do with water rights and which bits are federal land than the actual land it’s self.
Conversely a lot of US farmland is more sustainable for grazing, but the giant aquifer is a temporary solution.
Take the soil example, yes it would be billions per 100 acres, because on that scale (the Canadian shield) you'd either have to desoil massive amounts of usable farmless, or start grinding rock and creating new topsoil from that... so current market prices are meaningless!
Individual large river delta’s contain hundreds of cubic miles of soil. It’s not a limitless supply, but there is plenty of soil though not topsoil to cover 3 million square miles of the Canadian Shield.
Theres about 30 grams protein in 1000 calories of corn. There's about 90 grams in 1000 calories beef. This is because cows are very good at extracting protein.
Also, I can just let cows graze on Texas praire. I can't necessarily do that with corn.
https://www.nutritionix.com/food/wheat/100g
Wheat 15g of protein per 100g or 329 calories. That’s 114g on a 2,500 calorie diet.
ruminants are able to digest cellulose, it's basically what they have extra stomachs for, so they can have different chemistries that are livable for the cellulose digesting bacteria
And of course it’s a moot discussion. Directly eating the seeds is vastly more efficient than cattle eating both especially when their primarily eating seeds in the US.
Doesn't that mean "choose different plants" would be the more efficient / better approach there?
People like to shit on animal farms and say that more calories could be grown with less resources with plants. That's true, but the calorie count isn't the only factor to consider. Humans need a diverse diet.
That said, with wealth comes the desire to increase meat consumption in just about every culture. We have plenty of food and land to waste a large percentage of them on cattle, the only issue is the externalities of doing so.
And as it turns out, isocaloric (compared to meat) plant based protein sources offer enough protein for basically everybody.
https://theconversation.com/historical-photo-of-mountain-of-...
There were a lot of bisons in the americas, estimated 60 millions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_bison
"With a population in excess of 60 million in the late 18th century, the species was down to just 541 animals by 1889."
https://www.nass.usda.gov/Newsroom/2022/01-31-2022.php
"There were 91.9 million head of cattle and calves on U.S. farms as of Jan. 1, 2022"
The carbon released by the cows "emissions" is part of a carbon cycle, first captured by the grass and then released by bacteria in the cow's gut. The more grass, the more cows, the more carbon is hanging out somewhere other than the atmosphere.
I know you mentioned cows, but do some research on factory farmed pigs. They're legal toxic waste sights. We need to rethink our (Western) approach to diet.
Speaking of which: Hop Over to Kangaroo Meat: The More Sustainable Choice https://biodiversityconservationblog.wordpress.com/2013/05/1...
Technically, from what I understand, it's enough to limit alfaalfa in arid climates. The location of cow farms does not matter much after that, in terms of water usage.
What's also good is that enforcing alfaalfa regional restrictions is super easy - a satellite photo would be enough to spot a field, and there's not enough margin to have any organized crime to fight back.
This isn't a pro-animal talking point. It's a pro-humam and pro-ecology fact.
Gluttony is the cardinal sin more to blame.
Whether or not you believe the religion whose followers came up with this list, it does provide a handy way to categorize human behavior.
Its the same as if i go and rip apart public street furniture and sell them as metal scrap for profit.
There's still plenty of boosters who will use fallacious arguments defending it that were just as tired hundreds of years ago.
Some people let their aspirations of greed blind them from what's clearly happening
In long term, we should understand and alleviate the origin of that chronic desire to win while others lose—however, replacing capitalism with X, depending on the degree of autocracy in X, may just obscure them instead, which seems counter to that goal.
Let's take Natchez, Mississippi. In 1850, half of America's millionaires lived there. It was the wealthiest city in the country because we richly rewarded and encouraged human enslavement.
The brightest minds had very lucrative careers in slave economics and slave labor studies and there was lots of focus on optimizing human enslavement for maximum profit.
It was the silicon valley of the 19th century and you'd have a bright and successful career if you pursued working in the slavery industry. Slave technology, slave accounting, slave management - you don't even need to directly interact, you can just make the tools.
In fact speaking of silicon valley let's talk about the first rush of San Francisco. It wasn't gold, it was whale oil in the 1830s-1850s. San Francisco was the perhaps the largest whaling port in the world as people were highly encouraged through aggressive economic incentives to go and wipe out every species of whale off the planet. And they were well on their way to success when cheaper substitutes, by pure chance, became available.
This is the problem. There's nothing "natural" about these things - they are human created systems that we have constantly redefined and had to because the base driving force is one of negligent exploitation and extraction.
We have other systems, driven by hate and violence for example, such as racism and war. We don't make peace with richly rewarding and encouraging them. We instead seek to minimize these human tendencies. We don't look kindly on war profiteers or race-baiting crowd agitators.
These things existing are as inevitable as any other human behavior, there's an angel and devil inside all of us, what we choose to reward and structure things around is a choice we can make.
We can do better than total war, we can do better than Jim Crow, and we can do better than cooking the planet with capitalism. We have to. There's no choice.
As an analogy and an extreme example, pretend there is an evolutionary biologist among a group that believes in creationism.
The creationist has a very simple narrative, only takes a few words. The evolutionary biologist has a much bigger task at hand. They're starting not from an ideology but from a discipline of analysis.
That's the struggle. The neoliberal models are extremely simple to explain, they are taught to elementary school children who all understand the logic of it.
But the anthropologists and economic historians of the world have a different story to tell and they cannot be similarly summarized.
They require careful study and reflection like learning any type of discipline, such as a new programming paradigm or the implications of a new kind of data structure.
And that's my true takeaway here, the answers to your questions are as deep and rich as any other modern school of thought and like any other accurate depiction of reality, say modern physics, chemistry, or biology, there's simply no way to stuff it into 1-2 minutes of casual reading on a social news site.
I guess that's it actually. Instead of starting from an ideology we start from a discipline of analysis. Any summary I can give here will only be totalling ideology, which is what we need to get away from. People presume that any critique of the system have an alternative sweeping simplistic all-encompassing dogmatic ideology.
So this is a bad form for that kind of learning.
---
As an aside that's a major breakthrough in a problem I've been struggling with for over a decade. "this is a bad form for that kind of learning." I'm going to print that out to remember it.
You’d be amazed how far the medium of written conversation can get you. Pretty involved concepts in the sciences you mention had been explained and discussed here before.
> People presume that any critique of the system have an alternative sweeping simplistic all-encompassing dogmatic ideology.
You have so far not made an attempt to even hint at an alternative, after so many words.
Yes, in a free society with capitalism people have more opportunities to behave this way. Yes, that’s why regulation is needed (as a stop-gap measure, not root cause treatment).
While you don’t seem to be suggesting an alternative to capitalism for some reason, I’m reasonably sure that in any of them the society would suffer from the same issues, just less visible or more localised to ruling elites (which, by the way, doesn’t mean the scale of exploitation itself would be smaller).
As abolition of slavery showed, ethical standards are evolving—and freedom is necessary for this evolution. Without freedom you are treated as an ignorant child, with decisions made for you. Made by humans who are just as fallible, with imperfect ethics, power-hungry and insecure, happy to use their positions of authority to benefit themselves, whom you’d be deemed not wise enough to elect.
capitalism is a term so vague its meaningless in a policy discussion
Neoliberalism, on the other hand, is spesifically responsible for many of the problems we are facing now.
the fact that people worship it is also a problem, we have media hosts calling large scale landlord "weath creators"
for some reason people who make ground breaking discoveries are not called wealth creators and do not become billionaires.
you have to consider who the system rewards, and who the system protects.
shumpeterianism, for exanole, is a spesific alternative that rewards those that create new technologies and where government has an active role in shaping a sustainable industrial strategy
But I also disagree with you. “The system” should not reward anyone. People create value, and people reward those who they think provide value by becoming their customers or by investing into their business.
Problems arise when this basic mechanic is abused: e.g., market participants lie about the value they create, including through concealment of side-effects (let’s drain the aquifers or dump PFAS into the river and pretend we didn’t know), use other measures than actual value when investing (line goes up so who cares if business is unethical or its business model is fundamentally flawed), etc.
Which, again, ultimately comes down to humans trying to secure themselves at the expense of others and the environment.
Could be feudalism, could be technocracy, could be replacing all limited companies with coops, could be getting rid of publically traded companies and allowing only partnerships.
> But I also disagree with you. “The system” should not reward anyone. People create value, and people reward those who they think provide value by becoming their customers or by investing into their business.
This is exactly the fantasy-land neoliberalism that got us in the shit to begin with.
It anwers none of the important questions of the day - what can be owned as intellectual property, who does it belong to, how long does it last, why is it that academic reseach is paid for by the tax payer but belong to private journals, why is it that when a company accuses someone of theft that the police investigates it at no cost to the company, but if you accuse the company of breaking the law you have to file a lawsuit at your expence.
Can you claim compensation when a company sells you a product that is 'environmentally friendly' but turns out they lied? What law breaking puts you in jail, and what law breaking just looses you money. What law breaking is prosecuted by the sate, and what lawbreaking is prosecuted in civil court by claimants.
Why is it that stock buybacks were illegal before 1982? Should they be illegal?
All of that is 'the system' and absolutely does determine who are the winners and losers.
All of your questions basically reduce to “what to do if people abuse this mechanic by disguising bad stuff as good, violating trust, hurting the environment, or such?”
Well, you can either alleviate the symptom or treat the cause.
The only way of treating the cause is working on deep-seated insecurities and psychological trauma that make humans feel motivated to secure themselves at the expense of others and the environment-to abuse this mechanic or facilitate its abuse.
The measures that prevent the abuse by restricting the agency of market participants only alleviate symptoms.
I don’t know what exactly you mean by “system”. If you are saying the current measures are insufficient, I don’t argue, they could (should) be improved. Still, any set of these measures is never the end in itself, as it doesn’t treat the root cause.
If you think restricting agency is the ultimate solution, then we will have to agree to strongly disagree on fundamentals.
Outlawing alfalfa growth in California from allocated water would not conflict with anybody's "rights". They can grow something else there that uses less water. Or (and this is something being done, in the Sacramento River delta) flood the land and collect carbon credits for sinking swamp vegetation.
Much of the farmland in the Sacramento River delta is well below river and, indeed, sea level, some over 20 feet below, behind dikes (called there "levees") which threaten to collapse in the next big earthquake, pulling in a toxic load of salt water from the bay. (This has happened more than once; the dikes are not in better shape today.) Flooding fields gradually is hoped to lead to a sustainable future for the river. Erstwhile farmers could also float solar panels and collect more revenue. Raise freshwater fish and shrimp, besides.
California agriculture north of Bakersfield does not use up quite so much water as allocation seems to indicate; the water evaporates and is blown to the Sierra Nevada mountains where much of it precipitates, and ends up in rivers again.
if there is no rain, they have no property. the idea that you can own something beyong laws of physics is amazing. it's like owning thoughts and ideas
You might be interested in the book Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott. I have it sitting on my desk and have watched some talks by the author, but I haven't gotten to the book yet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QO__r8Q0bmU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVwrUsib4vU
They are a bit dry, as he is an academic through and through, but he is an academic that has spent a large amount of time in the field.
"Humans and their livestock represent 96% of all mammals on earth in terms of biomass, whereas all wild mammals represent only 4%"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomass_%28ecology%29#/media/F...
"The standing biomass of domesticated poultry, mostly chickens, has been calculated as 5 Mt C, about three times higher than the total biomass of all wild bird species combined"
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.180...
and the rate at which we deforest and destroy grassland to make grazing land is ever-increasing.
1. The graphs appear to be showing that 29% of the Earth's land surface is "barren land", i.e. deserts, glaciers, rocky terrain, etc. In 1900, 48% of the NON barren land was forests, so 34% of the Earth's total land was forested.
2. In 2018 the percentage of forested non-barren land was down to 38%, or 27% of Earth's total land.
34% to 27% of total land area from 1900 to 2018 is a major difference from the parent commenter's assertion of "In 70 something years we went from 60% forest coverage of earth's land mass to 30%".
Edit: highly recommend the documentary though.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets#more-plant-based-d...
The article that I linked above looks at how much cropland we'd need to feed the entire world population if we gave up on farming animals completely. It turns out that we would end up with about the same amount of cropland, but that's only to match the current production in calories (and nothing else). Assuming the human population continued to grow, we'd have to use even more land to grow crops.
There is of course a lot of pasture that could be turned back to forest, or left to turn back to forest, on its own. But not all pasture is ancient forests. I have no idea how much forest we would regain by ceasing to feed animals on pature.
We're really really good at efficiently producing grain -- especially field corn (which is not super desirable as human food without significant processing), and we grow lots of animals of all sorts. Naturally, when we can, we feed those animals on field corn -- they don't complain, and it's the cheapest food we can produce for them.
In the US we also subsidize corn pretty heavily, which has biased us towards maximizing efficiency on this crop rather than on some other grain. It's unclear to me whether we would have become more efficient with some other grain (in terms of food calories out per unit of resources/land in) had we produced as durable of an economic incentive to do so -- but regardless, it would still be a grain of some sort that ended up being the caloric efficiency maximum product, and therefore what animal feed would end up being.
I see this repeated all the time. Is making cornmeal or cornflour really that much more involved than wheat flour, semolina, or rolled oats?
Mesoamerican civilizations built on top of corn had a specific corn processing step called nixtamalization, which avoided the issue altogether, but unfortunately wasn't imported along with corn during the colonizations of the Americas.
But as long as you can get enough tryptophan and vitamin b3 otherwise, corn is completely fine as a main source of energy.
Best use of maize, IMO, is fermentation. Let the yeast have it first, take off the volatiles, then feed the mash leftovers to tasty critters.
The Mayans got their cooking water from out of cenotes, skylights of limestone cave systems, which might have made it naturally nixtamalizing. Were their grinding stones of limestone? (The grinding platform, the metate, was not.) Don't know what the Navaho did or do.
If it's basically the same level of involvement as as bleached flour, then the only real relevant issues are how to source a balanced protein so you don't have to eat half a kilo of carbs when you don't need the energy and how distructive other micronutrient sources are.
Of course if you spend extra time, money and energy turning your relatively ordinarily healthy grain (which is admittedly a low bar) into sugar you spend more time, money and energy and wind up with sugar. It's no different from wheat in that regard other than you should maybe add a bit more fiber to the meal.
For the majority, sure. In our immediate family I have to disagree, after many months of (undiagnosed) illness, and after several trips to hospital, my son was recently diagnosed with Coeliac[0].
Now corn products are now a key component of his diet.
[0] https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/digestive-disea...
Evidently.
It's like when, talking about how there are too many cars, they make a separation between "cars" and "humans", as if cars weren't driven by humans. It's very basic manipulation.
This seems really obvious. How is it manipulation?
Both in terms of land, water and energy usage.
It's more complicated than that, but corn yields are so high that they can overpower the otherwise inefficiency of meat production.
Potatoes are as good as corn, and rice nearly so, but just from a land usage perspective chicken is no worse than eating wheat bread.
Second, you have to consider the conversion rate for each nutrients including calories and proteins and chickens are much less efficient than that.
Also, the environmental impact needs to account for water usage, pollution from the plant and animal farming and energy usage.
Please provide evidence sources if you want to claim otherwise.
I mean, it compares what it compares. From a land usage and calorie perspective chicken is approximately equivalent to wheat.
> Also, the environmental impact needs to account for water usage, pollution from the plant and animal farming and energy usage.
Yes, I am not accounting for those. The first reason is that I am lazy, and this is a comment on the internet; the second reason is that once you are trying to optimize for land usage, water usage, energy usage, fertilizer usage, human labor, capital costs, run-off pollution, CO2, and everything else, you now need to decide how to weight each factor.
Rice produces almost 3 times as many calories per acre as wheat, but uses more than 3 times as much water (449 gallons / lb vs 132). Which is better?
> Second, you have to consider the conversion rate for each nutrients including calories and proteins and chickens are much less efficient than that.
This is actually where chicken excels.
I should really be comparing chicken to soy, not wheat, because soy is a great source of complete protein.
If you plant 3 acres of soybeans, you'll get 18 million calories worth of soybeans.
If you plant 2 acres of corn and 1 acre of soybeans, you'll get 36 million calories of grains, and if you feed them to chickens, you'll get 12 million calories of chicken.
On a calories-per-acre basis, soy is beating chicken 3:2. But soy only gives you about 0.1 grams of protein per calorie, while chicken gives you more like 0.2 grams of protein per calorie.
So your 3 acres of soybeans give you 1.8 million grams of protein, while your 3 acres of corn+soy->chickens give you 2.4 million grams of protein. So chickens beat soy on protein per acre by 4:3.
> Please provide evidence sources if you want to claim otherwise.
I've stated all the numbers I'm using; if there's one you want to call bullshit on in particular let me know.
From a pure land usage standpoint, you're still better off if we're getting most of our calories from corn, potatoes and rice directly. Once you start adding in necessary protein, you can either subsist on soy, or feed that soy with corn to chickens and pigs (which have a worse feed ratio compared to chickens, but can supplement on food waste to reclaim calories that would otherwise go to waste) for roughly similar food-per-acre footprints.
Over centuries, we have become increasingly efficient at producing beef, and are extremely efficient at it. It is probably not possible to be much more efficient using whole-plant crops and growing whole-animal beef.
When crop failures lead to rising grain prices, ranchers respond by not buying as much grain for their animals. The result is less Prime-grade beef and a whole lot more grain available.
I'm totally aware that vegans consistently invade this kind of thread on HN to promulgate their vegan propaganda, like little prophets of malnutrition sent into the world by a god of famine, but this time, what was the lie? I can't see it.
As far as I can tell it's true that meat production and consumption is very unevenly distributed: the USA and Argentina produce almost double as much beeef as anybody else:
https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production#beef-and-buffalo-...
https://www.mekkographics.com/meat-consumption-by-country-an...
I understand that the point of the article is about reallocating and tightening up the belts of consumption, so to speak. However, how about exerting more pressure onto the aggressor which russia openly is?
The world needs to recognize russia's actions as deliberate and premeditated steps to cause the collapses in food supply chains. This is not opportunistic, but rather a calculated policy, just as it is with gas and oil supply.
It's not about the cattle, it's about the "humans" in charge of the kremlin!
Every attempt to exert pressure has put the west in a less favourable position. More pressure has built an energy crisis in Europe; rivals in Asia awash with cheap gas and contributed to a global food shortage. This was a series of own-goals.
The US should have taken a few deep breaths over the last few years and dialled back the anti-Russia sentiment rather than burning relations with Russia in an attempt to inconvenience Trump. Unless the plan is to trigger World War III the West's strategies can only be said to be failing. This could have been a 2nd Iraq invasion instead of becoming the mega-crisis that is unfolding.
There's a largest war started by russia (8 years ago!) and going on in the middle of Europe with a threat of use of nuclear weapons.
As evident by now, russia is uncapable of maintaining any trustworthy agreements with any other nation, let alone its neighbors. It openly laughs at any civilized rule of law principles and considers this a weakness.
It may not seem that way on a distance, but this war is against the West, against its values, its societies, and its economies. The whole world already feels the blows.
Russia is increasingly acting as a rabid dog. The 'anti-russian sentiment' is a product of its own making, not for the first time in its imperial history.
How does one deal with a rabid dog that brought itself to your yard? Asking the dog to deescalate? Abandoning your yard? Letting the dog into the house?
This dog is driven by a violent agony and the violence will eventually tear it apart. But meanwhile someone needs to fend it off and contain.
Ukraine so far is fending the rabid russia with its own flesh and blood.
The war is on. Can the world exert more pressure? Not dragging feet with delivering the offered weapons. Not diluting the sanctions. Not agreeing to buy the stolen grains or harboring the russian assets. Consolidating and be decisive against the aggressor instead of making this Yankees' business or, worse, let the rabies take over Ukraine...
It's grimly amusing that you think the thing that happened in 2014 was that Russia started a war. [1]
1. We already produce way more food than the entire world can eat, even if it were distributed equally
2. When population begins butting up against the limits of food production, demand for cheaper plant based food will rise. Most will be unable to afford meat, making the meat market naturally shrink itself for economic reasons. Likewise if meat becomes too expensive due to resource constraints.
3. At the point where population exceeds food supply, there will be at worst 1 generation of starvation, and then population will stabilize to have enough food
3a. Infinite growth of the population is not sustainable or desirable. Even if meat were banned, this same story will eventually happen again with any vegetable that is less calorie efficient to grow. Do we want 30 billion people eating literally one food, or 25 billion eating a varied, though less land efficient diet? At some point, the world will have to accept that there isn't enough food to have 3 children. At that point, when the 2 child policy is global, what kind of diet should be possible? We can stretch it so that we're all eating literally one crop and there's absolutely nothing more we can do to feed the world, but hopefully we stop breeding a bit earlier than that, to end with one where people can still enjoy meat.
From Wikipedia:
> Globally 70% of barley production is used as animal fodder,[4] while 30% as a source of fermentable material for beer and certain distilled beverages, and as a component of various foods. It is used in soups and stews, and in barley bread of various cultures. Barley grains are commonly made into malt in a traditional and ancient method of preparation.
I decided probably 20 years ago that the simplest thing I could do was to eat multigrain bread, based on the observation that it's not just acres of alternative grain that matter in a situation like this, it's experience with grains that matter. A farmer who has grown 5 acres of millet for a decade can easily ramp that to 50, 100, and his neighbors can impose upon him for advice to do the same (probably the next year or the year after since farmers gonna farm).
But if you don't know anyone who grows millet or sorghum or chia or whatever, it's going to take you years to sort that out, and if you're older you might just decide to try to avoid having to change at all.
https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector#sector-by-sec...
Please don't spread dangerous lies! By saying that meat is destroying the planet you're distracting from the true source of climate change: oil.
Not a good wording. Climate change is a major driver of biodiversity loss.
In general, there isn't any problem we're facing right now that's worse than climate change any way you look at it.
That we also destroy ecosystems directly must also be stressed as you say. And the two are indeed interlinked, for example habitat destruction causes both biodiversity loss and decreased ability to bind carbon. This "land use change" is a major source of emissions from agriculture and industrial farming is the main reason for it, for example rainforests razed to make space to grow soya to feed to cows. So yeah. I think we agree more than we disagree on that.
in any case if most of the grain production isnt going for feeding humans, it is quite ridiculous.
I haven't watched it but from what I've read about it, it seems like ideologically driven propaganda rather than a documentary.
> in any case if most of the grain production isnt going for feeding humans, it is quite ridiculous.
Why? The title of the article is misleading. If you look at the second graph, it's obvious that the amount of grain that is eaten directly by humans (1337 tonnes) is greater than the amount that goes to any another single use (the next highest is animal feed at 987).
In fact if you sum all the other uses up from that graph they come to 1570 tonnes, where 245 of that is "processing & losses", and another 73 is "seeds". Those are categories that overlap with grains used to feed humans directly (and other uses also) so it's not clear they should be counted separately . In short, only 1252 tonnes are definitely used to do other things than to directly feed us (namely, they become feed and fuel). So despite what the article says, most of the grain we produce seems to go to feed humans directly.
And as the article points out, it's not "grain" in general that's not fed to humans, but corn ("maize"). Most wheat and rice does go to feed humans directly and only a tiny amount of wheat or rice goes to other uses.
So, misleading title.
How is this done? Is the journalist manually CSS-positioning the text? Is there a library? An internal Economist tool?
As soon as that happens, the reproduction rate falls below the replacement rate.
The problem is that global society is actually not ready for a population that shrinks instead of grows. Many of our institutions are effectively pyramid schemes that rely on more people entering the bottom and paying for them than pull out money and exit from the top.
(Side note: I believe China is actually falling. There have been significant programs attempting to get women to have more children. Between education and "one child" (which is no longer in force) China has some demographic issues ahead.)
Women also need reproductive rights -- something that just took a hit in the US -- and the ability to support themselves. I'm not remembering/finding the rest of that list of 4 or 5 items.
Since men are physically more powerful, you also need a society with laws and people that will protect women and women’s rights. Women’s rights to mate with who they want, when they want, how they want, and earn income and be financially independent to be able to make those decisions independently.
To enlighten yourself, consider reading Federici's "Revolution at Point Zero" and Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed."
What is it, I ask you, that makes a population difficult to oppress?
Second, a woman with a PhD would have more opportunities to avoid marrying you.
Why would we need to reduce world population?
Add slaughterhouse workers and PTSD to the mix.
Btw, congratulations for sneaking real problems like B12 and other nutrient deficiencies suffered by vegans in with all the straw men:
> Most vegans show adequate B12 levels to make clinical deficiency unlikely but nonetheless show restricted activity of B12 related enzymes, leading to elevated homocysteine levels. Strong evidence has been gathered over the past decade that even slightly elevated homocysteine levels increase risk of heart disease and stroke and pregnancy complications.
https://www.vegansociety.com/resources/nutrition-and-health/...
My bingo card says: "Typical irresponsible dismissal of the health risks of a vegan diet".
The same way plenty of farm animals are supplemented with b12 for later human consumption, it's mindlessly easy to get the adequate amount of b12 in a vegan diet. Tons of vegan food come fortified, and if not, a 1000mg supplement once a week couldn't be simpler.
Both the American Dietetic Association[0] and British Dietetic Association[1] confirm that a well-planned vegan diet is healthy for all stages of life.
_My_ bingo card says: someone whose entire life and identity has been in animal agriculture takes personal umbrage to the notion that their lifestyle is immoral and destroying the planet.
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19562864/ [1] https://www.bda.uk.com/resource/vegetarian-vegan-plant-based...
btw, when did I say anything about "cow overpopulation"? I don't even know what that is?
Oh, wait. Of course. It's a straw man. Nevermind.
> Both the American Dietetic Association[0] and British Dietetic Association[1] confirm that a well-planned vegan diet is healthy for all stages of life.
The key words being "well-planned". As the Vegan Society says, most vegans have low homocysteine levels which is a clear indication that their diets are not "well planned" and put them in danger of heart disease, stroke and pregnancy complications, at least.
That is "most" vegans, in the words of the Vegan Society.
Then of course there's the vegans who feed their kids vegan diets without any planning at all and end up damaging their kids' health, or killing them:
> In 2002, a vegan couple from New Zealand was accused of child abuse after ‘failing to provide the necessities of life’ for their six-month-old child. Their son died of medical complications due to vitamin B12 deficiency after the parents left the hospital against medical advice to treat their son with herbal remedies (23). In addition, seven infants exclusively breastfed by vegan mothers developed nutritional vitamin B12 deficiency. Most of these children presented with hypotonia, lengths and weights below the third percentile, and psychomotor retardation that improved with the appropriate nutritional supplementation (24).
> As recently as 2005, despite the significant available literature on the potential risks of alternate diets, strict vegan parents were taken to court and charged with neglect after one of their children died of malnutrition (25). Their other four children were all found to be below the lowest appropriate percentile for height and weight for their age. These parents avoided taking their children to see physicians and the children were not immunized.
https://europepmc.org/article/PMC/2528709
So, well-planned diets, my foot. Most vegans have no idea what to do to stay healthy while eating their preferred diet. And do you know why? Because irresponsible internet vegans like you try very hard to hide the fact that a vegan diet is a health risk. The Vegan Society at least is honest about that:
> The risk to these groups alone is reason enough to call on all vegans to give a consistent message as to the importance of B12 and to set a positive example. Every case of B12 deficiency in a vegan infant or an ill informed adult is a tragedy and brings veganism into disrepute.
https://www.vegansociety.com/resources/nutrition-and-health/...
My guess is that this is because those folks care deeply about their principles and don't just use them as a bludgeon to win internet arguments, like you guys.
Agreed. 100%. What straw man?
You get all the supposed benefits.
Because from what I understand, most vegans do eat at least some meat and animal products once in a while. "Breaking vegan" they call it. And it's OK to do it as long as you're vegan, otherwise it's not right and you're a murderer.
Because only being vegan is an ethical stance. Where being vegan of course means posting vegan memes on twitter and stuff like that.
But we don't only need calories. In fact we already produce and eat many more calories than we need (but we distribute them unevenly so that a third of the world eats too many and 2/3s not enough). The reason we feed all this grain to animals is so that they turn it into nutrient-dense meat, dairy and eggs. Those are rich in micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) that we can't get as well from grains (or not at all like B12 vitamin).
So maybe farming looks "inefficient" if you consider only calories, but when you consider nutrients in general, meat (including seafood), dairy and eggs are actually the most efficient source of those we need to stay healthy and thrive.
But even if we only count calories, the amount of cropland that we would free for rewilding if we stopped farming meat completely and produced no meat from ruminants, no pork or poultry, no dairy, and no eggs, is miniscule:
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets#more-plant-based-d...
In short, we'd go from 1.17 billion ha of cropland for farming animals and growing crops, to using 1 billion ha of cropland.
That's a tiny change and it would most likely quickly need to grow as the global population increases. And it's such a tiny change because most of the land used to farm animals, or grow grains for animal feed, is not cropland, but pasture, which is for the most part not suitable for growing crops.
Iron is probably the only nutrient I can immediately think of where there’s a significant (~2x) bioavailability difference between plants and animals. Not big enough to make the animal source "more efficient" from a resource use perspective considering the feed conversion still.
OK, same line of reasoning as above, I guess. Answer me this question please: how did we get the B12 we needed to stay helahty before we knew about B12, or any other vitamin, or were capable of creating in bioreactors?
I've had this conversation many times before: maybe animals need to be supplemented with B12 where you live, but not where I live and I'm pretty sure not in most of the world, either. If we couldn't get enough B12 from meat and animal products we'd have been in real trouble a very long time ago. Like a couple hundred thousand years ago, at least.
But I should not use the word "efficiency" in this kind of context because it's really so vague what "efficiency" means that it can be used to mean anything at all and justify any kind of conclusion at all, even completely contradictory conclusions. For example: are chickens "efficient"? Sure, because you can pack a hundred of them in a square meter! Aren't chickens really "inefficient"? Obviously, since you need one chicken to lay one egg a day!
Mea maxima culpa. Animals are not "efficient" producers of B12. Instead, eating the meat of animals is how we naturally acquire our B12. Regardless of who actually makes it. How does that sound? Better I hope.
People need to take up protein. If the protein comes with significantly more calories than they burn, they're more likely to gain weight.
Maybe because it can be read as if I were arguing in favor of eating more meat.
I am not. I am just pointing out why primitive advice such as "Just replace the meat in your diet with grain" might lead to new problems.
People should stop reducing this discussion to the matter of calories.
As far as I know people who eat too little protein, overeat on stuff like grains for this very reason. The body wants the protein.