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Comment by metalspot | Hacker News Reader

> hardly any agriculture is sustainable

humans have been doing it for 1000's of years. that is a much longer record of sustainable success than anything else we know of.

there isn't any particular reason to think that industrial agriculture will fail any time soon. the worst case scenario is that it becomes more expensive over time. we spend <5% of our GDP on food, so even a 10X increase in raw production cost would be survivable.

we massively over produce food (30% of corn burned as gasoline off the top, another large percentage of soy and corn used as animal feed, huge amounts of waste) and the biggest nutrition problem we have is obesity.

the US has huge amounts of underutilized marginal land simply because there is no reason to use it. we already have way too much food.

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Worth drawing a distinction between the farming of the past and the farming of the present. Until the agricultural revolution humans sat right up against the population ceiling- the only reason hunger wasn't the leading cause of death is that disease reliably killed us first. They left fields fallow, and when they grew too much (which they had to if they wanted to feed their families) they depleted the soil and starved. We couldn't do permanent damage because our population was partially governed by it, just like every other animal.

I don't actually disagree with you- infinite growth might not be possible but we haven't even started tapping the lightcone. Fertilizer works, negative effects can be mitigated, and honestly nothing is worth returning to the "sustainable" famine nightmare of the past.

Farming started in Fertile Crescent thousands of years ago. If you visit the region today it’s all but fertile. Sand, sand and more sand.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-jun-15-op-diamo....

> When you clear a forest in a high-rainfall tropical area, new trees grow up to a height of 15 feet within a year; in a dry area like the Fertile Crescent, regeneration is much slower. And when you add to the equation grazing by sheep and goats, new trees stand little chance. Deforestation led to soil erosion, and irrigation agriculture led to salinization, both by releasing salt buried deep in the ground and by adding salt through irrigation water. After centuries of degradation, areas of Iraq that formerly supported productive irrigation agriculture are today salt pans where nothing grows.

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