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Comment by spenrose | Hacker News Reader

A number of commenters are pointing out that natural fertilizers exist. That is true. It is also true that artificial fertilizers were invented because around 1900 humanity ran out of biologically accessible ("fixed") nitrogen that it could convert to crops. The key nitrogen atom in roughly half of the amino acids in your body was part of a nitrogen-nitrogen pair floating in the atmosphere until it was fixed in a factory. If all the factories making fertilizers shut down tomorrow, there would be mass famine.

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You are correct that your argument is a common one. There is also a common response - the invention and use of artificial fertilizers allowed us to dispense with good land use practices, hammer the land with chemicals to squeeze as much crop out of it as possible, and dramatically raise the amount of crop grown for meats and industrial outputs like corn syrup and ethanol. We have way more crop land than is required to feed our population a healthy diet, we are degrading our soil, and modern farming economics have become so dependent on industrial inputs that farmers in India have committed waves of suicide after becoming so indebted to Monsanto/Bayer that they are unable to imagine any future for themselves.

You are right that we are so dependent on artificial fertilizers that we cannot simply cease production tomorrow, but that only speaks to our dependence on them due to economic and social factors, not their inherent necessity to our ability to feed ourselves. Essentially no one is saying we should shut down all the factories tomorrow so the argument is a dead end.

What many people are saying however, is that we went very far down the wrong road, and we are paying the price today. We must figure out how to bring our farming practices back in to balance with ecology.

Is it a wrong road? Ban on chemical fertilizers in Sri Lanka resulted in famine. Rice producer became rice importer.

I am not familiar with how that was implemented, but I can imagine many ways a forced transition could go poorly.

[flagged]

> Did you read his post?

Thanks for backing me up. I am a woman tho.

>hammer the land with chemicals

Why does it matter if I'm putting syntheticly manufacturer nitrogen on my garden or if I'm putting the blood of farm animals, dried and powdered onto my crops?

The end result is the same. Blood meal is just lower yield

Excess nitrogen does run off and tend to kill the river and marine ecosystems it concentrates in. The problem is aggravated by industrial amounts of fertilizer.

But what does it matter if the nitrogen is from blood meal or from synthetic fertilizer? It's all the same amount of nitrogen

It isn’t? The blood meal is lower yield because it is less nitrogen.

Many of the nutrients in the soil in regenerative organic come from growing beneficial plants in rotation over a period of years. The practices improve soil quality to the point where additional nitrogen does not need to be added in bulk to the soil. They literally do not dump large amounts of nitrogen on the soil in a regenerative organic system. They have other ways to make sure the soil has the nutrients it needs.

A regenerative organic farming system and a chemical intensive farming process have many differences. Regenerative is not just "chemical intensive farming but with organic chemicals".

Blood has other minerals as well. Iron comes to mind.

An additional issue is that a good fraction of 'organic nitrogen fertilizer' comes in the form of fish meal. This isn't a very environmentally friendly or sustainable approach, however - e.g. at peak extraction, 2/3 of sardine fishery production on the US west coast was being converted into crop fertilizer (mid 20th century).

Note however that modern industrial agriculture uses fertilizer fairly inefficiently, and a large fraction just runs off the fields into waterways. Here is where the AI robots could make a big difference, by crawling up and down farm fields and selectively applying fertilizer to individual plants as needed (while also removing weeds and treating pest infestations). Of course, this doesn't make agrichemical producers all that happy as it could greatly reduce demand.

>Here is where the AI robots could make a big difference

Usually when someone says "AI will save the world because" it is followed by a bunch of naive hyperbole.

However, you are 100% right. A few robust robots with an AI to spot pests and poor nutrition could decimate input costs for a farm and solve several environmental issues in one go.

What are you basing that on?

The reason chemical pest control and broadly spraying fertilizer on the top of fields are a thing is that they have low labor costs. You'd get more efficacy if you walked the field and removed pests by hand or sprayed fertilizer only where you need it.

It's the simple reason why a well-tended garden produces better produce than a corporate farm. There is simply more effort per plant in a garden. Tractors are currently too dumb to treat plants individually. They require plants to emerge, grow, harvest at the same time, and in the same way. Current modalities for pests/nutrition treat plants at the field level, not at the individual level. This creates lots of waste and externalities.

If there were a robustly built robot smart enough to deal with plant issues in and individual way then there is a huge slice of efficiency that could be gained. A field with the productivity of a garden. People have been trying to create this for a decade now and the limiting factor is the software. Maybe with the latest round of AI advances that will change.

For example: https://carbonrobotics.com/

You don't need robots -- tractors already drive up and down the field, and the cost of the tractor is many times the annual cost of the worker, BTW -- you just need good application. Which is something farmers already attempt to do. Because why would you waste your $$ on bad deployment of expensive fertilizer? (Or pesticide, etc.)

This is my employer's bread and butter for many decades: https://www.ravenind.com/products/applications-booms

And yes, it's a lot of emphasis on autonomy now, but you'd be amazed at what just having better spray nozzles can do?

Cash crop farming is an incredibly capital intensive operation. Robots don't fix that.

Your point about spray nozzles is a great one. Not many people realize how difficult it is to make such a small and seemingly unimportant component work well and reliably.

In my hydroponics system, spray nozzles are one of the more expensive (for the size and purpose) components and they fail the most often. You’d think a brass nozzle would last years, but it’s going to need to be disassembled and cleaned before a year is up. Now imagine a huge tractor with high pressure bars that are lined with dozens of nozzles operating in a dirty environment and moving huge volumes of fluid. You’re going to get clogs, you’re going to have to clean them, and the application will be non-ideal quite often if you don’t. And that’s just the nozzles.

This stuff is so much harder and more complicated than it seems on the surface. Adding automation almost makes it harder because you really do want a human observing the system and ensuring it’s actually working.

Neither here nor there, but why are specialized nozzles needed for fertilizer? Can't that go directly on the ground with a very basic pattern?

There all sorts of things that affect coverage. These things are done by booms with nozzles at all sorts of different points, and there's variables like pressure variance at different points in the pipes, spray radius per nozzle type, turning radius / position of the tractor, relative height of the boom to the crop / ground at different points, etc.

And it's not just fertilizer, but other sprays, too.

Here, this looks thoroughly boring, but this guy is going over configuring one of our systems for fertilizer application... You can get an idea of some of the variables involved, if you can make it through :-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rQJI7zz1q4

I don’t find it boring at all, haha. I have a feeling I chose the wrong career path.

It's possible to combine an enthusiasm for spray nozzles with software development :-) https://www.ravenind.com/careers :-)

But I think we're kind of in a hiring freeze. I think I just barely squeaked in before that.

Because a basic pattern isn't easy to obtain. If there is wind it will blow your spray around. If there is dirt in the nozzle that changes your pattern (until you clean it - but now you need to check if it needs to be cleaned). Sprayer booms can be 130 feet (40 meters) long, and sprayers go over the field fairly fast: those booms are bouncing all over the place and that is changing the pattern. Which is worse - too much chemical on a given section of ground or too much - depending your answer (which will change for different chemicals!) sometimes you want the nozzles to overlap the next and other times now. What is the viscosity of the chemical - this changes the spray pattern. How much chemical do you spray - a low quantity through a high flow nozzle will just drip, while a high quantity through a low flow nozzle isn't possible. Do you want to spray the just ground, just the plants, or both - maybe you can get a nozzle focused on this. Soil is not consistent across a field, so farmers normally apply different amounts of chemical in different sections.

The above is not a complete list of all the nozzle considerations I know of (I work for John Deere, but I don't speak for them), it is what I can remember in a couple minutes.

>I work for John Deere

Mind telling your bosses to fuck off and let farmers repair their own equipment, please?

No need, farmers can repair. What they can't to is change emissions or steel parts. So long as you are doing the regular repair work farmers do there is no problem. When you do things beyond that things get hard.

Would it be possible to estimate viscosity using a calibrated pump and some kind of “time to spray” test (in which a specific amount of force is used to express the fluid through a nozzle), then use that viscosity measurement to set the pressure for the spray to get more consistent results?

Or does that make absolutely no sense? I’m not sure how you can reliably measure fluid properties in order to get consistent spray patterns. It seems like it would be useful here, though.

You can tell I’m not an engineer :)

Yes, and there is manual calibration to do that sometimes. (Iirc for sprayers most chemicals are 99% water so the factory does that, but planters often do have a process where you dump seed for a minute and then measure what came out). However you still need different nozzles for different fluid rates.

yes, however now, we have soil turned to sand and really aggressive nitrogen run off because it doesn't pay to manage the soil properly.

In the Netherlands, they have so much shit, that its limiting how much cattle they can produce (because of laws about nitrogen runoff.)

Now the soil is fucked, it doesn't absorb water. That means that not only does it dry out quicker, it means that it can't generate rain as much, which means more drought, and higher temperatures. Worse still, because it can't absorb as much water, you get worse flooding.

Farming needs swales, ground cover, mixed planting and shite. lots of shite.

I'm not sure I understand, you're saying in the Netherlands they have a lot of it, but then for farming you need a lot of it - so is it bad or good?

You can absolutely have too much of it in one place even though it is useful. Large hog farms produce so much manure that they have problems getting rid of it all. The big problem is that it costs too much to haul and the feed is trucked in. Ideally the feed trucks would leave with manure to take back to where the feed comes from to use as fertilizer but of course that isn't in any way economical. It does work in some situations though like a lot of dairies where they pump the storage pits into tanks and spray or inject it back into the feedstock fields.

Manure is a hazardous material and must not be hauled in the same trailer that hauls animal food. You can truck manure around, but it can't use the same trucks and trailers as was used to get the food to the animal.

It's useful, but at some point it becomes dangerously high and contaminates drinking water.

It’s not nearly so dire because the majority of farmland isn’t raising crops for direct human consumption. 40% of US corn is turned into ethanol and the majority of the remainder is used to feed livestock who burn calories by exiting.

In the event of a major disaster most of the existing livestock would be slaughtered and a significant percentage of biofuel/animal feed would be converted for human consumption. It’s less palatable than sweet corn, but vastly better than starvation.

Longer term you get different crops and even a return to things like crop rotation. Meanwhile people would be extremely motivating to get alternatives working.

Livestock feed is part of food's supply chain (and ou literal food chain).

Yes, we can eat eat a lot of this feed... but that doesn't mean that the world will neatly respond to a shortage of quantity with a slight tweak to quality. A shortage is still a shortage, with all the dynamics of any other shortage.

Yes, the world did not respond neatly to a shortage of toilet paper. In the event of a shortage of animal-based protein, I would expect the response would be worse than the toilet paper wars.

The TP shortage was most definitely exacerbated by some people buying 1000x as much just to be able to resell it at a profit. So I agree, if meats were in shortage you would see similar attempts (even though it's illegal) and worse - the hoarding would result in spoilage exacerbating it even further.

A large percentage of the TP shortage was a change in form factor as offices/restaurants generally used a different supply chain than people do. I saw plenty of stores stacking “office” style giant roles of TP in random cardboard packages which made a real impact in aggregate.

I expect people would do similar things in a real food shortage. If your starving buying a 5 gallon bucket of feed corn from the back of some guy’s truck suddenly looks appealing as do dog biscuits etc.

>Longer term you get different crops and even a return to things like crop rotation.

Farmers never stopped doing crop rotation.

Yes, though the rotation in most of the midwest etc is mainly just corn -> soy -> corn -> soy with the exception of some places that might toss in sorghum or wheat in there, too, depending on climate.

Somewhat, with modern agriculture you only get ~9-15% boost in total yields from a corn/soy rotation long term, but that’s often offset by differences in commodity prices.

Without fertilizers and especially pesticides the gains can be much larger though it forces investments into a wider range of equipment.

They're just annual crops and already on a rotation. Nobody would be eating livestock field corn or soy. It'd just get plowed under and replaced with wheat or flour corn or something else. Likely whatever worked with existing equipment and supply chains in the area.

Yes but...

Some of the famines in the 1940s werent natural famines, they were due to war and colonizing forces, see:

https://nitter.net/i/status/1210635179221348352 (linking to Winston Churchill associates with Indian famine deaths: https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/03/29/asia/churchill-bengal-fam... )

The other part of our predicament is that excess nitrogen impacts water supplies (see http://e360.yale.edu/features/the-nitrogen-problem-why-globa... ) and creates ocean dead zones ( see https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/deadzone.html , https://oceantoday.noaa.gov/happenowdeadzone/ )

I think the point was without artificial fertilizer there would be famine everywhere all the time. But it is absolutely true that while necessary a nitrogen source fertilizer isn’t sufficient to produce food.

That running out was also the reason for ww2. As empires could not be trusted on free trade and thus any non empire was one trade crisis away from starvation with haber Bosch. Thus the various "economic independence" aka autarky movements by non colonial powers that became monstrous programs for medieval like farming.

To add to this: livestock make up 62% of the world's mammal biomass; humans account for 34%; and wild mammals are just 4%.

Humanity, and especially the meat eating subspecies, is just a side effect of the Haber-Bosch reaction.

“Subspecies” feels a bit othering. Humans have been eating meat since Homo erectus (about 2M years).

No sustained increase in zooarchaeological evidence for carnivory after the appearance of Homo erectus [1].

[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2115540119

> The evolution of these traits is commonly linked to a major dietary shift involving increased consumption of animal tissues.

I've never heard of this linkage. I've always heard it was on account of cooking the meat, rather than eating more of it.

Yep, 2MM years of eating meat - it's definitely weird to suggest meat eating humans are a new "subspecies" rather than the historical norm.

I'd argue that the increase occurred earlier. Everything we're learning about other human species is showing they also had intelligence and were around before Erectus came to be.

Hundreds of millions of people in India and around the world are just fine without meat, it’s not like we have to eat it. Could even be better for us not to.

There is an extremely high correlation between eating meat and poorer health outcomes. You can find studies where meat is better or being vegan or vegetarian looks worse, but on balance, it appears that limiting meat intake (little to none) points to better health outcomes.

Nutrition is complicated. It could be that impulsive eaters or people who make poor eating decisions rarely exclude meat from their diet, and the issue isn’t the meat so much as the rest of their diet or the sheer volume of what they eat.

In any case, there isn’t any compelling data to eat meat other than “it tastes good”. Unless you live on subsistence farming and a goat eating grass you can’t eat is an essential source of food for you.

The northern native Americans mostly lived from meat. They seem to have not suffered any malnutrition?

Another thing.. Non fungicide treated plant based food seems to cause a amount of cancer. https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/s...

> Nutrition is complicated.

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Defense_of_Food

Might be simplifying things too much in general, but for the layperson it's not horrible advice - just a bit of everything, without going into excess. Some grains, veggies, fruits and berries, probably some dairy products, eggs/fish/meat occasionally too, at least for the folks for whom a vegetarian/vegan lifestyle would be be difficult.

Personally, I have both lactose free milk and plant based alternatives sometimes (there's a rice drink that I like, but oat/almond varieties are okay), some cheese (also the cottage variety) and meat sometimes, though mostly chicken instead of something like beef. In equal measure if not more, I also choose plant based alternatives too, like bean/pea/spinach burger patties, or just dishes without meat sometimes. A bit of fat, a bit of sugar, albeit limiting sugary drinks and processed foods somewhat.

Bloodwork seems fine so far, also losing a little bit of weight gradually to improve BMI, maybe should slightly lower cholesterol because it's towards the upper end of a healthy reference interval. Although I will say that sometimes there's definitely a pronounced sense of hunger, even though I've had enough food, which is annoying.

Even if hundreds of millions of people in India do not eat meat, ghee and milk – both animal products – are a key part of the Indian diet. Moreover, quite a lot of those Indians eschewing meat will still eat eggs, such that restaurants have to use the term "pure vegetarian" to disambiguate.

Even a large amount of lacto-ovo-vegetarian vs. omnivore will reduce the amount of farm animals (and feed/land use) by a vast amount.

offtopic: I disagree with the "subspecies" comment from GP - it was a bit inflammatory.

Pretty sure that when we're discussing the othering of certain humans by classifying them as "subspecies", India is not a good topic to bring to the table.

Not exactly a subspecies, but lots of evidence to suggest poor health and malnutrition after the switch from hunter-gatherer to sedentary grain eaters

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2106743119

What exactly were the hunters from Hunter-Gatherer's hunting if it was not meat?

Isn't the poor health with the switch explained by the lack of food diversity? Also, wouldn't there be less meat availability after the switch from hunter-gatherer as your population grows and your crop/planting efforts grow but animal husbandry did not scale at the same pace.

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