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Comment by CuriouslyC | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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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