Comment by ch4s3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ch4s3 | Hacker News Reader

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> the cost to our health

This seems highly debatable. Sure cheap calories and cheap corn based sugars make it easy to develop so called lifestyle diseases, but on the other hand we've essentially eliminated famine and in most parts of the world malnutrition.

In terms of ecosystem loss, it seems to me that concentrating most calorie production onto the smallest amount of land makes sense.

> And the labor issue is also complex

You're right of course, but I don't see how the manually intense process of regenerative and/or organic ag makes this better. Every small farm like this that I'm aware of makes heavy use of children, unpaid interns, and extremely low wage workers. It's not exactly comparable to migrant workers picking strawberries en-masse, but that's more of an issue of sacle and where these boutique farms find their labor IMO. I say this as someone whose parents and grandparents were all farmers, and my sister-in-law worked for a few years on a regenerative/organic farm.

> But a lot of the ideas from more fringe communities like permaculturists are becoming more and more integrated into the mainstream

This is the part that's actually really interesting to me. Finding ways to scale up and integrate ideas about soil health, water use, etc into mechanized, large scale agriculture is really great. People seem to be doing cool things with no-till and drip irrigation right now.

> alternative methods like agroforestry

My concern with this is that it definitely require LOADS of labor, and isn't likely to produce that much food. It also may put pressure on forest land may not be sustainable long term. On a small scale on you your own farm, it's probably great. But I have trouble imagining how it could ever make up a significant portion of overall fruit and nut consumption.

>Sure cheap calories and cheap corn based sugars make it easy to develop so called lifestyle diseases, but on the other hand we've essentially eliminated famine and in most parts of the world malnutrition.

I think this is letting the good be the enemy of the perfect (a rare construction, to be sure). Yes, we've solved a very bad 1st order problem. That frees us up to work on 2nd order problems that we've never had to deal with before. This is a thalidomide-style problem in that the side-effects of the "cure" are a disease in their own right.

I'd rather have diabetes than be dead, certainly, but wouldn't it better to not risk diabetes just to stay alive?

I'm substantially in agreement with you though. The less land we use on food production, the better. The less labor we can expend growing and harvesting that food, the better.

All of that said, the parameter space of agriculture has a complicated shape, so optimizing for any one parameter will be at the expense of other parameters.

> I think this is letting the good be the enemy of the perfect (a rare construction, to be sure). Yes, we've solved a very bad 1st order problem. That frees us up to work on 2nd order problems that we've never had to deal with before. This is a thalidomide-style problem in that the side-effects of the "cure" are a disease in their own right.

I actually agree with you.

> I'd rather have diabetes than be dead, certainly, but wouldn't it better to not risk diabetes just to stay alive?

Again I agree, but I also think there's a huge cultural component to food/eating that is often missed in these discussions.

> wouldn't it better to not risk diabetes just to stay alive?

This is a mischaracterisation. If you have any choice in what you eat, you risk diabetes just to stay alive.

There is so much food that far fewer people are dying of malnutrition than in the past. As part of there being lots of food available, it's also possible to eat yourself into heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Great availability requires some responsibility.

Type 2 diabetes is solved with low carb and you can use the cheap food. See virtahealth.com if you want professional help.

Thanks. I appreciate you assuming that I need the help./s

Since I reached the "can afford to shop at whole foods if I wanted to" stage of my life, the combination of lifestyle, genetics, and diet means I'm pretty far from diabetes at the moment.

But when I was a lot worse off, I bought the food I could afford, which tended to be the low-cost, high-calorie stuff that leads to health problems. Maybe (and I'm just spitballing here) we should find a way to lower the cost of higher-quality food. The decision for huge swaths of the world should not be "afford enough food to not starve, but the food is of such low quality that it leads to long-term health problems" vs "starve while eating food that, if eaten in sufficient quantity, would not lead to long-term health problems". Optimizing for dollars per calorie means you end up picking high carb options.

Telling people in Somalia or wherever "have you just tried keto?" is a pretty problematic stance.

Most people with D2T can afford keto though.

> In terms of ecosystem loss, it seems to me that concentrating most calorie production onto the smallest amount of land makes sense.

Incorrect. Agroforestry is the practice of integrating livestock and orchards. The orchard is designed to serve as the basis for an extended ecosystem. Trees provide shade for fowl, sheep and small cows and help limit swale evaporation. Fallen fruits attract a wide variety of animals and birds, providing prey for cats, hawks and owls. Systems like this sustainably produce a high quantity and quality of food per acre while encouraging diversity and natural beauty, at the cost of being less accessible to automated farm machinery. The best case scenario for sustainability and diversity would be if everyone lived in small communities with shared food forests, eating mostly locally grown food.

Truthfully, as someone who has done a lot small scale growing between over the last few years, using everything from soil to hydroponics, I find it hard to believe that natural techniques will ever come close to mechanization and artificial means. Pesticides and chemical fertilization are so extremely effective. You get hand over fist yield with them.

A world with shared food forests and locally grown food is probably a world with far fewer people.

I think high population and natural farming are mutually exclusive.

Well in the western world, we're going to have a pretty marked decrease in population pretty soon. That also means fewer people to work the land (among other serious challenges), but it appears overpopulation will not be one of those problems to the same degree.

And the state of industrial AG isn't static, robotic micro pesticides are interesting for example. Not that I'm a fan of them, but it would be great to see us move away from showering everything in loads of agent orange and have more targeted application.

You can get more yield/acre with a food forest, because you have multiple canopy layers so you can have multiple heights of trees, bushes and low ground plants all capturing light and being productive together, in addition to the animal productivity. Soy/corn monocultures only capture light in one layer, so even with all the other stuff you do to try and push fertility they're never going to be able to be as productive. Even worse, pesticides and chemical fertilizers come with a lot of externalities and are clearly not sustainable.

It's ironic to note that high population and sustainable farming are mutually exclusive. When we can no longer sustain our current system of agriculture due to resource exhaustion, environmental destruction and climate change, a lot of people are going to die. Even worse, if we wait until the 11th hour to adopt sustainable agriculture there will be a lot of avoidable suffering and death that will occur during the transition.

There is an alternative - gradually adopt sustainable farming now and let food prices rise. That will signal to people to have fewer children, and also encourage people to grow some of their own food or otherwise get involved in agriculture. That way, our population will move towards a level that can be sustainable fed as our agriculture system moves towards sustainability, and we won't have an "oh shit" moment where human civilization collapses because the rich are hoarding food in the face of mass starvation.

This is straight Malthusian nonsense. What you're talking about in effect is slowly starving people to death in the developing world, particularly as weather patterns change and some traditional bread baskets undergo aridification.

I can't express enough how morally reprehensible I find your position of "let food prices rise. That will signal to people to have fewer children".

Since it seems like you just don't get it, let me give you an analogy that might be more accessible.

We are in a car rocketing towards a brick wall at 100 miles an hour. We can slow down gradually (controlled population decline) or we can slam into the wall (unsustainable agriculture practices turn the earth into a toilet, sudden mass starvation, civil unrest leading to the collapse of civilization).

You seem to be under the enchanted fairy tail notion that there's an exponential curve of infinite resources just awaiting the power of human cleverness to save us from this grim fate, but I'm sorry to inform you that's delusional. You can see clearly that most areas of human technology are already in the logarithmic portion of the (sigmoidal, not exponential) progress curve, and those areas that are still in the exponential phase like AI aren't going to magically transform agriculture.

The shear volume of food that is left to rot in fields, in storehouses, in American pantries, suggests to me that there's a lot of slack in the resource chain before we actually face mass starvation. People are starving to death in places like Somalia or Haiti right now specifically because there's no profit to be made selling them food that's already grown and been harvested. We could afford to cut back food production, switch to less productive (but less destructive) farming practices if we were just willing to ship the food to where its needed, irrespective of profit. I don't disagree, we're heading towards a resource cliff, but I do not think even for a second, that the Earth is incapable of supporting 10+ billion people, even with much more constrained growing capability. The constraint on the food supply is that there are huge swaths of the global population that are unprofitable to feed. And that's really where you're catching flack. We don't need population control policies. We need to stop deciding that selling food at a loss is worse than letting children starve.

If you're concerned about overpopulation being a drain on food resources, then you should be agitating for overall better living conditions, better access to healthcare, better access to education in the global south. We have seen repeatedly that a healthier, happier, better educated society has a lower birth rate.

I get your argument, it's just morally reprehensible. Your analogy about a car is not related and shows weak reasoning.

> You seem to be under the enchanted fairy tail notion that there's an exponential curve of infinite resources

Resources are definitionally raw materials coupled with human ingenuity.

> You can see clearly that most areas of human technology are already in the logarithmic portion of the (sigmoidal, not exponential) progress curve

I don't see this at all. This is just your opinion.

You're essentially talking about starving people on purpose, "controlled population decline" is eugenics and you should take that nonsense somewhere else. Seriously your ideas are disgusting.

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