Hacker News Reader

Comment by KennyBlanken | Hacker News Reader

In Europe where GMOs are banned and pesticide use is lower...yields are higher than in the US.

"We need to use poison to grow food to feed everyone" is bunch of false-dilemma poppycock.

If it were truly a matter of "we need to feed everyone", we wouldn't be wasting massive amounts of grain on raising cattle, which is one of most wasteful ways of generating food there is. 80% of agricultural land is used for cattle, but they only represent 20% of the calories in food consumed.

We also wouldn't be growing corn just to turn it into ethanol, a net-energy-negative process.

We also wouldn't be controlling the price of sugar, thus creating a huge demand for corn to turn into corn syrup.

Corn is also an incredibly resource-intensive crop all on its own, and the monocropping is terrible for the soil. But corn is where the money is..

View on HN

> pesticide use is lower...

It's not. Europe uses somewhat lower amount of pesticides because it has more land that regularly freezes which helps to control insects.

When corrected for that, Europe uses more pesticides for similar climates.

> yields are higher than in the US.

They aren't, when corrected for the land area.

What do you mean by "corrected for the land area"? According to this study, in the period 2016-2020 wheat yields per acre were more than twice as high in Germany than in North Dakota or Kansas.

https://ag.purdue.edu/commercialag/home/resource/2022/05/int...

North Dakota and Kansas are deserts or near desert. Germany gets 2 to 7 times more rain per year (depending on which part of Germany you look at)

That is probably a major reason for the higher yields in Germany, but the person I replied to claimed that yields aren't really higher in Europe than in the US.

According to data from the UN, in 2020 North America used 2.77 kg pesticiedes per hectare cropland and Europe used 1.69 kg/ha, and yet Europe has higher yields per hectare. So clearly Europe uses less pesticedes per produced amount of food.

https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/RP

I'm sorry, I was a bit unclear. Instead of:

> They aren't, when corrected for the land area.

I should have said "for the geographical area". You need to compare yields in similar climates and soils.

A better comparison would be ND and Ukraine in terms of climate.

Maybe, but both are large enough and have enough regional variation that it isn't safe to compare like that. The worst regionsare much worse in ND, and the best much better in Ukraine.

You need to compare yields for the land in similar climatic conditions. This is complicated, because most of the US is to the south of most of the European landmass. New York is on the same latitude as Madrid.

Anecdotally, I think pesticides become 'necessary' when a specific farm desires greater than a particular density of crop. Sure, the collective can achieve sufficient production with less use of these chemicals however when a farm is at a point where their plants are touching each other then serious pesticides are required if they wish to increase their yield further without pests becoming a catastrophic risk to the entire operation. If only we could all agree to just grow 'enough' instead of growing as much as science allows...

Once we started expecting farmers to be specialists instead of generalists. If you only know apples you want as many of them as you can fit. Which means pathogens have a buffet laid out.

> In Europe where GMOs are banned and pesticide use is lower...yields are higher than in the US.

While this may be causal, agriculture is incredibly complex, and I would hesitate to come to any conclusions about causality from this bit of data alone.

one major point is that you need to use the soil substainable

and as far as I know the US did do exact the opposite en mass

GMO by itself isn't bad, but a lot of GMO is made in a way which is harmful to the soil on the long term (and sometimes even short term)

Similar much higher limits for the amount of fertilizers used allow you to use approaches to growing crops which short and mid term have more yield but also drain the soil in a non-substainable way leading to a death spiral of needing increasingly more and more fertilizers, insecticides and at some point GMO modified crops.

While most EU countries had for a long time (but not necessary still have) laws which require a more sustainable ground usage and having a larger movement of people buying food which even more stricter constraints wrt. fertilizers and pesticides.

> 80% of agricultural land is used for cattle

I don't think this is true. Did you mean livestock?

On top of that, much land cattle graze on is entirely unsuitable for growing crops.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com