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Comment by rnk | Hacker News Reader

And nothing prevents new volcanic explosions from doing this again. How would the northern world deal with this today? Not that well.

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It might be even more bleak because we have 100X the population. I live near San Francisco and yesterday it rained more than usual which resulted in some highways literally shutting down and hours long traffic diversions. I have pretty low faith in us.

Coordination of governing bodies at the regional level is really bad in the US. A different agency manages the highways than the roadways than the waterways, each having their own incentives and budgets.

In this case the problem (other than weather) was 100% infrastructure: many of these roadways are built below grade, which means that when it rains, they flood. Floods are generally not part of the threat model for Bay Area infrastructure (though perhaps they should be), so when civil engineers trade off drainage vs. earthquake safety vs. land use vs. traffic, drainage is usually the first thing sacrificed. The mid-peninsula had 5 consecutive avenues underneath El Camino & the Caltrain tracks washed out; most of them have been recently rebuilt as grade-separated underpasses as part of the Caltrain electrification project, so that traffic would not need to cross the tracks. They probably would not have flooded as at-grade intersections.

Arguably this was the right choice, as everybody just stayed home during this storm, so real impacts were relatively light. By contrast, Bay Area traffic is a disaster every rush hour, so getting a few folks to take Caltrain instead of driving or avoiding just one collision on the tracks already puts you ahead of the cost of this weekend's storm.

Most of the northern world would not have much trouble buying its food wherever possible. For a high price, of course, but USA, Europe, Japan and even China are so extremely wealthy compared to others that they can outbid the majority of the South on the global food market without much difficulty. Thus, a decline in food production in the North would primarily affect the global South.

The rich countries are also going to be outbidding each other though. Some nations may decide not to sell it all because they need to eat themselves. This would be worse due to limited supply and no way to quickly ramp up.

Countries like the US and Canada, who are net food exporters, would basically be fine. China would face huge problems. Failed states would experience catastrophic famine.

I agree rich countries could buy food up to a point, but if the us and canada had drastically lower yields for a few years, there would be world wide shortages, countries would limit exports eventually.

I asked the question about what would northern countries do because the volcanic eruption impacts seemed to be more focused on the north in the article. But of course the world is connected, and the south is relatively poorer, and we are all connected, and there's not that much excess food. When a huge eruption does occur, or other destructive things like a CME, it will affect the world.

They are currently net food exporters, but with catastrophic harvest failures that would probably change. I'm not sure if anyone has run a detailed analysis taking all the factors in to account, but I wouldn't be so quick to assume they would "be fine".

We have electricity and insulation. We won’t starve. Will it suck? Absolutely.

You can't eat electricity or insulation. There's close to 1 billion acres of farmland in the U.S. alone. If we were to suffer a decade of volcanic winter, large parts of the midwest would become non-productive. If the reports of the sun being as dim as the moon due to the ash are true, there would be massive crop failure. One or two years like that, we might be ok. But any longer than that and our stores would be rapidly depleted. Famines can knock out huge percentages of populations and have led to the collapse of civilization on several occasions in the past few millenia.

The vast majority of that food is grown as animal feed. Only 27% is consumed directly by people. That's a huge buffer in an emergency.

No it's not. This is false. First of all, for example, WRT to soybeans, only 20% of the bean can be used to derive oil, which is the ingredient most often used in processed human foods (not the healthiest but I digress). The other 80% of the bean would have to be discarded if not used for meal to feed chickens and pigs [1]. But if the beans do not grow at all you don't get meal or oil. Same is true of corn silage. These parts of the plant are not edible by humans.

But by far the biggest fallacy in your argument is that you don't recognize that animals are eaten by humans and provide valuable nutrition and essential nutrients. If the livestock is dying off because there's not enough feed, there are humans downstream of that who will not be getting fed. Livestock and crops have symbiotic relationship with humans and with each other. A lot of wasted plant matter that humans would have to discard (not to mention grass that cows, deer and other ruminants eat) can be consumed by farm animals. And animal manure can be used as fertilizer to re-invigorate soil and improve crop yields. In addition, animals upcycle crops into higher quality proteins and essential amino acids.

Needless to say though, if our agricultural systems are producing 73% less crops and livestock there will be ~73% less humans.

1. https://ncsoy.org/wp-content/uploads/11731980513_d53ca2a99e_...

>The other 80% of the bean would have to be discarded if not used for meal to feed chickens and pigs

No. That is how it is currently used, but in an emergency you could make soy flour, tofu, etc. The calories are consumable even if it's not what we typically eat.

Or, more relevantly, the land that is used to grow soy could instead be planted with corn (or perhaps winter wheat in a post-volcanic scenario). Right now we're planting out crops to optimize for market value, which is driven by livestock feed use. If we instead optimized for human nutritional value, we could easily double output by mostly eliminating livestock (even accounting for the loss of nutrition provided by the livestock).

>Needless to say though, if our agricultural systems are producing 73% less crops and livestock there will be ~73% less humans.

An incredible oversimplification.

Yes, but our economy is flexible, demand for commodities will fluctuate widely shortly after any catastrophic event, having a likely negative cascading effect on the rest of the economy.

Much better than it did back then. Modern farming is much more resilient than farming back then as is proven by how rare famnes are today when they used to be common in the past.

I think that it's more of a supply-chain thing than modern farming being inherently more resilient. We can irrigate when it's dry (as long as there's a pipe from water _somewhere_, which isn't always a given). But can't do much about floods. Certain pests can be controlled, but monocultures make for very brittle systems when a pest evolves past the known defenses (see: bananas).

Ultimately, we have transport and distribution across the entire globe, so a crop failure in one place doesn't mean a famine there as we can ship food there (unless you're a poor country, in which case the rest of the world doesn't care much).

That’s more a function of over production due to subsidies than inherent resilience.

Annual crop production still varies wildly, we just have much larger buffers and better distribution than our ancestors before starvation kicks in so a 12% drop isn’t noticeable for the average consumer. https://www.indexmundi.com/agriculture/?country=us&commodity...

I submit that there would be some initial weeping and gnashing of teeth, but then human ingenuity would kick in and we would muddle through.

Ingenuity >>> Chicken Little

To some extent I agree with you but it won't be quick. Poor people will suffer the most. That ingenuity might not come for years, people would suffer before new food arrives.

I am probably unusual because I bought 90 days dried food supply for my family in an emergency. But almost all the food I have and eat normally was bought in the last month, except for a few canned goods. I think most people in the us would run out of food in a month or two at most.

Greenhouses and vertical farms would make the famine less severe; although our population is so high that it would get complicated fast

The big backup is diverting certain animal feeds to instead feed people.

Yup. There's a reason corn subsidies are what they are, for example, and it's not (just) politics.

It's my understanding the kind of corn they grow to make ethonol isn't the kind of corn people eat. https://nebraskacorn.gov/corn-101/corn-uses/ethanol/

That is a common misconception. But! Field Corn is 100% edible by people. All varieties of corn are. We eat it as corn meal, corn syrup, corn flakes, etc.

It isn't quite a sweet as, well, sweet corn when boiled/roasted on the cob. But it's no problem at all as a food.

https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/edible/vegetables/corn/dent...

Microgreens and winter tomatoes aren't going to stave off famine.

Yeah vertical farming/hydroponics only gets you a very limited set of vegatables.

Beans beans the magical fruit

More likely Quorn style fungus fermented/grown in dark vats connected to nuclear reactors for power. Might be tricky to ramp up in time but eventually could actually lower the cost of food, if more boring food. Flavoured fungus burgers all the time, kids might actually like it...

You can't put greenhouses over entire states, which is what would be necessary to prevent mass famine.

How many of these vertical farms do we have? How long do they take to build? What do they cost to run?

Modern LED grow lights require minimum 35 watts per square foot to grow things beyond just lettuce, which is around 1.5 million watts per acre. Americans currently consume a bit over 2.5 acres of farmland produce per year, however you could get that down to 1 acre without much problem by cutting out some of the less land efficient crops likes fruit trees, especially when talking indoor grow.

So I would expect bare minimum energy requirements to be near 1.5-2 million watts per person for 12-16 hours a day for indoor food sustainability.

This is of course not accounting for fertilizer which has large energy requirements or anything more than the most simple and basic of climate control.

wow, if that is all true then vertical farming is even less relevant to this scenario than I thought. I'm not sure I'm qualified to check your figures and I suspect some of your assumptions are more pessimistic than mine, but the fundamentals pass a reality check vs. amount of energy delivered by the sun (lots).

(Just to preempt some likely replies from other people: I'm sure there is a big difference between "Americans consume" (including livestock grazing, which can't be magic-ed into anything else) and "You can get by on" (measured in hypothetical perfect-acres) - it would take esoteric casuistry to make these really comparable anyway. Nevertheless the gap is so large that AngryData's fundamental point is extremely robust: growlamp-ing everyone's basic needs is fantasy-land. I thought that, but didn't realise the case against it was as strong as I now suspect it might be)

> but the fundamentals pass a reality check vs amount of energy delivered by the sun (lots).

  Solar panels produce about 150 watts of energy per square meter since most solar panels operate at 15% efficiency this translates to 15 watts per square foot.

Which is 100 Watts solar energy per square foot, so 35 Watts certainly has the right order. (LEDs are not 100% efficient, sunlight is not 100% efficient with chlorophyll, some edible plants grow in shade).

The root scenario is if a large volcanic eruption causes prolonged limited sunlight. So solar isn't the best option in this case.

And how soon would their building be turned into yet another polarizing issue, or their building farmed out to contracting companies who would make most of the money disappear?

A global response on the scale of Covid to build vertical farms would reduce the severity of the famine dramatically.

It would be expensive, but the alternative would be burning cities and food riots. I can hardly imagine the USA avoiding a civil war considering how divisive and hostile things already have gotten

You can get hydroponics going fairly quickly, the bottleneck would be the supplies and supply chain — materials to build the with

Either {[[citation needed]]} Or {"Did you mean to post on the Things Silicon Valley Doesn't Understand About Agriculture thread?"}

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