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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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