Agricultural input shocks affect crop yields more in the high-yielding areas | Hacker News Reader

Agricultural input shocks affect crop yields more in the high-yielding areas

nature.com

44 pointsPaulHoule35 comments

One relevant point, the most important input for corn at least is nitrogen and it can be and is often produced locally. I grew up on an Iowa farm and there was an ammonia plant about 20 minutes away.

There were price and availability shocks because of the Ukraine war and price of natural gas. Ammonia fixation requires energy, atmospheric nitrogen, and hydrogen. The hydrogen is sourced from natural gas (methane), but could just as well be sourced from electrolyzed water at higher cost.

Other fertilizers from mineral sources were significantly globally supplied by Ukraine as well, which was more of a problem.

A tangent problem for farmers is input prices scaling with commodity prices. Seed genetics companies and fertilizers, etc. tend to raise in price to what the market will bear, not particularly to the marginal cost of the product forcing the farming margins to be thin… which puts constant pressure on all but the biggest farmers. Who then advocate for agricultural policy that leads to things only being profitable and possible on very large scales, in general.

Not many small farmers hang on like my family and it just might end with my father if I don’t take it up as a sort of hobby retirement… but that’s not really doing it for real anyway.

Regenerative farming won't help immediately, but it does cut way down on the need for chemicals input while capturing massive amounts of carbon into the soil and growing livestock in the same areas.

regenerative farming couldn't be replicated [0] by anyone...

[0] https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2017-2-march-april/feature...

seriously, how do you expect land regenerating by adding thousands of cattle on it? if you roam in Brazil, you can find almost deserts in vegetation that have RICH diversity like the Pantanal, just because livestock was managed there for +25 years! and then owners stop activity for a number of years (to let flora thrive) to later raise corn or soy, which is way less aggressive and with modern practices they (the farms) have lifespans (if well managed) predicted by biologists of almost 100 years. (i worked in one for a brief period of time)

the guy who proposed the "regenerative agriculture" movement always made big money from livestock and at some point even got in-between the government with a freaking study that concluded that they had to kill ~ 40,000 elephants (and they killed) for maintaining the health of the ecosystem.......... ⟨i think if we still made billiard balls out of elephants tusks, i wouldn't be surprised if that guy had a company that made them⟩

if you want to dive in esoteric practices to thrive food and sustainability, go vegan and maybe take a look at stuff like this [which doesn't have any meaningful replication so far]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S18773... & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_G%C3%B6tsch

This is a more nuanced issue than this comment would lead you to believe. "the guy" is probably referencing Allan Savory, check out his Ted Talk about the elephant story. He gets a lot of undeserved aggression. Here's a link to some of Savory's responses to the Manbiot ("go vegan") perspective - https://savory.global/statement-on-the-allan-savory-george-m...

the person execute a poor study on ecosystem, concludes that 40,000 elephants should be killed to maintain other organisms... and he shouldn't be target of aggression? who knows if their political and military involvement didn't took part on the government liberating that shit! the guy cares _so much_ about life/sustainability that still eat meat/cheese (like mammals other than humans are really primitive creatures) and has livestock under his belt

also, have you read the first link i send? his studies on land regeneration includes areas that were recovering after expelling livestock... this guy and his practice is a joke. not even entering into other sensible topics like animal welfare, production and efficiency of the kingdom plantae/fungi vs. animalia etc.

maybe they should read a bit what science is observing and concluding after hundreds of years of research in something summarized like; https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.1201/97814200466...

edit: i mean, sure, everyone makes mistakes. sometimes they cost an entire set of thousands of mammals but the problem is after that, trying to lure consumers into a practice that not even 50 years of research on the subject concluded anything relevant [0] (to the point that we can't even differentiate efficiency between the default way of letting cattle pasture vs. holistic management), shouldn't be other motif to rant?. caring for the environment should be a black and white resolution with the best tools we have right now. life is too precious to fuck just because you want a steak at your table... and we know, for a long time that going vegan is the best way! or at least stop this freaking modern consumerism of animal products.

[0]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338777621_A_half_ce...

> caring for the environment should be a black and white resolution

I've been thinking on that since I was a wee lad. The best tools are impossible to find, it is hard to explain why we shouldn't to X any more since we now know that Y is the better tool and X makes Y impossible. I still think we should try X and Y, it's just a really hard communication issue. It is not helped by using ambivalent words like "the environment".

Skimmed the paper you cite and it mentions that it is hard to talk about this since flame wars make people very careful.

impossible to find? we even have suggestions from nutrition orgs. that moving to a plant based diet can save us billions of dollars because health will improve!

apart from health, we already know that plants are more efficient than meat by an order of magnitude, any day, any time & don't cite "places that we can't raise crops" because that doesn't cut our consumption rate... unless you are living at and like a rural Kazakhstan citizen. there are 20,000 edibles plants so far, why do we need meat and cheese?

and i can't see much of a flame wars regarding this. the only people defending its practice are those using it. bad science is everywhere and taking down conclusions by playing the victim of a flame wars is to support absurd practices. like the 21st century psychoanalysis (which couldn't prove itself better than placebo), homeopathy dissolving doses of medicine in bazillions of liters (seriously?) etc.

it feels that socially we are dumb enough (to not know even how to communicate) that less than 100 years ago we throw 2 nuclear bombs on human settlements, we made propaganda of cigarettes with Tour de France cyclists and so on. ~ 500 years ago we reached America rapping people and building churches to talk about heaven

I don't know what weird tangent the Sierra Club went off into, but here's Wikipedia on the subject[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regenerative_agriculture

>while capturing massive amounts of carbon into the soil

Whats the mechanism for this and how much is "massive"?

>and growing livestock in the same areas.

Isn't this canceled out by the lower yields you're getting on the crops, to the extent that the overall yield is lower than if you used normal farming practices for the crops and dedicated pasture areas?

> Whats the mechanism for this and how much is "massive"?

Take a (hand) shovel. Put it into a corn field, and have a look at the soil.

Now go to a forest, and do the same.

Compare, and you will understand the mechanism, and the extent. Hint: in natural ecosystems, a good portion (if not majority) of all carbon is in the soil not above it. And much of that carbon stays in the soil for a looooong time.

I.have done that, the.forest was unfertile sand just a few cm down while corn fields arw black dirt for as deep as I can dig. The real lesson above is location, I did the above in locations 1000km apart with very different soil profiles.

Modern corn farming is mostly done in former tall grass prairie. (Corn is a grass) forests are mostly in former forests you cannot compare anything about them.

True: location is important. Tropical vs. temperate, elevation, rainfall, etc. And of course its composition.

The other lesson is that soils can take a long time to build up (on the order of ~1 cm. per year iirc, if that). Modern agriculture mostly takes from that, tending to leave degraded soils behind.

Some agriculture 'breadbasket' areas are only that because soils there had centuries of relatively little disturbance to build up into a thick, fertile mass.

Modern agriculture.build soil at the rate of about 1mm per year. Up until the 1930s it was really bad, but science has been looking at soil since then and that has gotten out to progressive farmers. Even the typical farmer who is more traditional has learned a lot and maintains existing soil.

I doubt there is anything that will build soil at 1cm per year that us sustainable (you can maybe do that rate by taking good soil and moving it)

The mechanism is building soil out of dirt. If we were to adopt regenerative agriculture worldwide, it could take about 1/5 of all the Carbon out of the atmosphere. (assuming my math is right)

The basic problem is one of non-closed loops:

Each harvest takes minerals out of the soil (as well as some soil). Regenerative farming may help the soil to replenish some of those minerals by freeing them from the rock portion of soils. But not at the rate harvest-after-harvest removes those.

So you need to replace minerals taken out. Industrialized farming does this through minerals mined elsewhere. Which is hardly sustainable or eco-friendly.

A solution would be to recover minerals from poop & urine. Probably this is done in the case of animals (their poop & urine back onto fields). But not in the case of human food.

Human excrements are processed in wastewater facilities, and -due to a variety of reasons- minerals may be recovered, but rarely end up back on fields.

Small substinence farmers can close those loops. Modern industrialized society can't (or at least, doesn't have good ways to do so).

This is ignoring nitrogen. Which can be produced on-site if needed (eg. by rotation with nitrogen-fixating crops). Or specific trace minerals that may require a different approach.

Made me curious so I went looking for information. Incredibly frustrating that almost every high-level source focuses on how the water is cleaned and solids are removed. Removed where? Doesn’t say. Eventually I found one local source that says it’s incinerated. So the human biological cycle doesn’t return the solids to the earth but puts it into the atmosphere? That’s pretty crappy.

The heavier elements would be in the ash.

Isn’t this fairly intuitive? Wouldn’t this be somewhat akin to being surprised that the most productive workers are most affected by power/fuel disruptions?

The high yields are reached because of those inputs. So without them yields go lower. The lower yields likely have much less of these inputs thus are not impacted as much by them.

Compare sustenance or near to highly industrialized farming. The first might use some inputs, but the later will almost certainly use them and in much efficient manner.

That it happens, sure. You do a study like this to get the magnitude of the effect to enable folks to make models of this kind of thing which helps pricing and planning for shocks.

Thanks - I hadn’t thought about that

The worst thing is that many countries fail to produce staple food of the population instead depend on other countries and blame them when they fail to secure the produce.

Unlike the economy, food is a zero sum game. Most produce has a limited lifespan, unless you opt to freeze everything, which is not something all consumers desire or buy. This means that most food that leaves the farm must be consumed within a narrow window. Only exporting and importing food from diverse regions will allow you to minimise food waste and therefore have an efficient low-cost market. This also creates countries that are great net exporters.

That is a narrow view. A lot of foodstuff gets processed into stable products with a shelf life, and grain can be stored for years.

Even in the hypothetical scenario where all vegetables and meat have shelf lives of a year, it still wouldn't make that much of a difference when it comes to food security. Products with long shelf life are sold with that long shelf life. This does mean that any kind of failed harvest means that those products will either disappear out of the selection or a different formula is used to maintain availability. Companies dont store anything, governments only store rice and grains at most since they are the only economically feasable types. Citicens will actively induce food shortage once there is one.

All you're left with is figuring out how much food is between the harvest and the supermarket. And that's not alot. Demand matches the consumption of citizens and time to market is optimised to be short. This is before considering how unhealthy the most durable foods are since sugar is the main ingredient in all of them, from chips and chocolate to processed cans.

Food security != food choice. If there’s zero avocado’s worldwide people can still cheaply eat a healthy diet. However, what normally happens is prices rise in one food and people then substitute something else.

There’s also huge food stockpiles worldwide simply because crops like North American corn get harvested in the fall and then supplied over the next year. At which point we can cut biofuel production should an actual shortage occur.

Most calories that most people eat come from grains which can be stored for years. This article is about that. The economics of produce are much different.

Assigning responsibility and agency to state policies for agriculture and targeting self-sufficiency would work quite poorly in today's world. The modern world is fed by growing stuff in places where it grows best, and trading food for other stuff. This also provides robustness against localized crop failures. (And sadly feeding most of that to badly treated farm animals...)

How is Sri Lanka doing without fertilizer?

some background regarding the sri lanka fertilizer f**up: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/7/15/23218969/sri-la...

Fertilizer is not something we can lack of, it's coming out of all living beings for free

Nope. When we relied on "organic" fertilizer, crop yields were much lower (even accounting for other farming changes) and famines were common. It is impossible to feed the world without extensive use of synthetic fertilizer for most staple crops.

It was tried on a large scale.. They called that carbon independent experiment : Lebensraum

The only lesson here is having a local source of nitrogen, which is natural gas and a way to process it for national security.

Or the alternative, bulldozer more ecosystems.

This is the modus operandi of the CO2 disciples. Zero respect for the environment and people and only the worship of a future rapture ~ a century away.

It's also why food waste is feature not a bug. Only in real extremes people starve.

Not sure how this report is anything more than grass is green.

>This is the modus operandi of the CO2 disciples. Zero respect for the environment and people

And what is "showing reflect"? letting animals, plants and humans be displaced because of climate change?

> only the worship of a future rapture ~ a century away.

So to be clear, you are saying climate change is real, but it's fine because it's "~ a century away"? What are we going to do in a century then?

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