Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ericson2314 | Hacker News Reader

Pastoralism is brain rot, we should not romanticize "small farms". The romanticization of farming probably has a lot to do with bad agricultural policy. (In the US we can blame the senate, but what about in Europe?)

Also, are there any agricultural billionaires? I kind of doubt it: usually they are rich but not that rich.

View on HN

Would you count Cargill[0]? Cause they are privately held, all in on the farming world, and have net income in the billions annually

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargill

In my view that absolutely counts and multiple members of the family are billionaires.

ah good point. Screw em; nationalize it.

It doesn’t have to be romanticized. A local-first, decentralized food system can be more resilient and provide fresher, more nutritious foods.

doubt [0]

0: see Sri Lanka’s attempted shift to local, small scale agriculture and how that went.

Counter example: Cuba, during the sanctions.

Cuba imports 80%+ of its food. It received extensive soviet industrial agriculture consults. It is not a counter example.

I don’t know which era you are talking about. I was talking about the decade after 1989, about when the Soviets were collapsing, before the recent economic downturn. They were not importing food, nor were there oil available to run trucks, tractors or make fertilizer - https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/cubas-urban-farm...

Cubans were literally starving and caloric intake is estimate to have been reduced by 38% in the period you are talking about before food imports resurged. [0]

Another great example case, thank you for pointing that out.

0: https://s3.amazonaws.com/oxfam-us/static/oa4/OA-CubaGoingAga...

> A local-first, decentralized food system

What does that even mean? Sounds like depopulating most of the entire US West

The way i see it is that we can do it intentionally, or it can be done to us via infrastructure failure, societal breakdown and other factors.

Sorry but real-life climate scenarios and models do not support the level of apocalyptic prediction I have been seeing from people recently.

Climate change is bad enough, but it is not going to render agriculture untenable in the next hundred years or so.

Start with neighborhood level farms and household gardens. Use permaculture designs.

Show your work.

Show how the productivity per acre of arable land times the amount of land available produces enough calories to keep the current population of the world from starting. If you can't produce enough calories, vitamin content doesn't matter.

(hint: the productivity of small-scale farming is often << 10% of the productivity of large-scale farming and the productivity of garden-scale farming is typically < 1%)

Those are some overly broad assumptions with using calories. Not all calories are the same — some foods take more calories to digest, and others, like MCT takes very little to get absorbed by cells. It really depends upon the food being consumed.

Nutritionally-dense food can also change gut biome. I have no idea if anyone ever did a study on long term effects, but it would be interesting to see if the body ends up needing less overall calories if the food quality went up, along with changes in the gut biome.

As far as productivity goes, I don’t think the figures you are quoting takes into account methods other than monocropping. Industrial scale famers who went to polycropping, for example, find smaller yields on individual crops but their overall yield and profit were better. No-till, as another example, underperforms until about five years in.

And then there are losses during transport.

The closest I have seen was someone attempting 100% of his diet from gardens he has planted for a year or harvested himself. It was rough, in a tropical climate (Florida), but was possible. He had to use three gardens, though the deal he made with the residential landowners gave them the right to harvest anything at anytime in exchange for using their front yard. According to him, 80% was doable. I don’t know if he had integrated livestock.

As I mentioned in other comments, post-Soviet Cuba, under sanctions, were forced into developing this because of the lack of oil (trucks, tractors, fertilizer, and pesticides) and other imports.

doubtful. It is sure proven to increase land use and therefore leave less space for untouched nature, though!

If we use farming methods such as monocropping, it is doubtful. But there are other farming methods better suited for the small scale.

> Also, are there any agricultural billionaires?

Many. But maybe you mean only those getting their hands dirty in the field? Howard Buffet, perhaps. Some sources claim he is a billionaire.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com