Hacker News Reader

Comment by dauertewigkeit | Hacker News Reader

Pesticides scale really well. The alternative would be to control the environment more, but that does not scale so well. Maybe with increased automation we could do some inroads in this direction.

Consumers are to blame too. They won't accept blemished produce, but a potato with some insect larvae in it, is really not that much of an issue. You just remove around the larvae and cook as per usual, and that is much healthier than dosing your produce with pesticides, that cannot easily be washed off.

View on HN

It is actually possible to produce healthier food from healthy plants in good soils, getting good yields with reduced costs. A plant that is healthy has a functioning immune system and is capable of warding of most, if not all pests (except for mammals and birds). You can only do this without pesticides, because the pesticides and fungicides are (mostly) what creates bad soils. And contrary to what a lot of people assume, this can be scaled as well.

Why is not everybody doing this at scale? Mostly I think because it requires advanced, state of the art knowledge and goes against current practice in some ways. We are only just finding out how plants actually take up nutrition (which is wild to me), and barely have uncovered the life in the soil. A lot of farmers are old, and their teachers espoused the view that soil life is literally irrelevant to farming and everything comes down to soluble fertilizers + pesticides, herbicides, fungicides. Crudely simplified it is the agricultural equivalent of putting someone on an intensive care bed, feeding them liquid food with a tube and killing every germ with antibiotics. It works and is not too hard, but the results aren't that good actually. Now try becoming a healthy person overcoming illness in the wild, its a bit more complex than feeding through a tube and taking antibiotics.

Creating healthy food in a healthy way requires much more knowledge and sometimes (not always) a bit more labor, and a lot of it is going against what people know. Agriculture doesn't like to take risks. A lot of money depends on things staying as they are. A couple of big failures and you are out. Its not as easily disrupted as software.

Take a look at the work of John Kempf if you want to find out more: https://advancingecoag.com/

hell yeah, permaculture is what i'm talkin about!

some of plant-produced toxins are more toxic than the stuff we use - I don't know where I read it, but the indigenous ppl somewhere said to only eat stuff that has insect on it, because Insects know when the plant is less toxic - made sense to me

The opposite is actually true. Insects only eat dead, dying plants and low quality plants. Its an indicator of crops that are lacking in nutrition. For example, once a plant reaches a certain level of photosynthesis, it produces so much sugars that aphids can't digest it. I've seen it myself, its fun they just fall of the plant and die. You can measure this with a 20 dollar device.

There's research being done, for example by the bionutrient institute, that tells us nutritional values vary a lot. The exact same crop can have a 5 to 300 times difference in some nutrients (like vitamines) between lowest and highest performing crop.

The chemicals plants use specifically to repel insects, (secondary metabolites), are especially important and healthy for us to consume.

sure, when your gut is intact and you've got a diverse microbiome.

here's a list of stuff that's in/on food nowadays, you're probably an outlier if your gut is undamaged at 40

Herbicides https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/high-rates-of-sui...

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39383739 Chlormequat in food and urine from adults in the United States from 2017 to 2023

Rodenticides

Fungicides

Insecticides

    https://usrtk.org/pesticides/chlorpyrifos/

- Chlorpyrifos: Pesticide tied to brain damage in children - banned in EU in 2020, the EU imports from countries that use it, some in some US-states it's still legal, in some it's banned.

nematicides

Ripening agents https://extension.umd.edu/resource/ethylene-and-regulation-f...

    https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/csem/ethylene-propylene-glycol/toxicological_effects.html

    from the atsdr article: ethylene glycol can be converted into oxolate, which is an Anti Nutrient that binds to calcium

Mould in rice an peanuts, see Page9 of this PDF, it's from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations homepage

https://www.fao.org/fileadmin/user_upload/agns/pdf/CXS_193e....

I have a friend who farms organic walnuts, and who turned me on to all of these ideas. I agree with you (and him) that all of this should be done at scale. The obstacle, as I understand it, is that yields aren't as high as "conventional" farming, so while it is possible to scale perma-culture ag, meeting world food requirements will require more land under cultivation. Food prices will rise. That's probably still not enough to grow enough for everyone, so we'd have to significantly reduce food waste, and / or reduce meat production and consumption, as well.

Those are all good ideas! If I had a magic wand to wave to create that world, I would. But, in the world as it exists, it's really, really difficult to persuade enough people to change behavior (and legislation) enough to make all that happen quickly.

Barring disaster, of course. Which may be where "conventional" agriculture is taking us.

I find the whole subject, and many others of modernity, depressing: we know what has to be done, but see no way of achieving it.

Anyone have anything cheerful to tell me?

Yeah I have something, I think its basically not true that yields are lower when you implement the cutting edge stuff AEA is doing.

Current legislation and politics doesn't help, but true regenerative ag (not greenwashed) will also outperform conventional ag in the free market eventually. This is beyond just organic, making use of the latest scientific insights, on plant sap analysis and being data driven.

Yields are higher than they need to be already for many crops and subsidies have long distorted the market and arguably have incentivized the wrong things. We could stand a bit of inefficiency if we gain a lot of resilience and other nth order beneficial effects to the ecosystem as a result.

Not sure if I am a harbinger of cheerfulness exactly, but I believe I can see hope in the long-term trajectory. The idea that everything needs to be sustainable is slowly gaining traction. Too slowly, obviously, but the momentum is there nonetheless.

The notion that we need to have a fraction cheaper foodstuffs at the expense of poisoning the environment and ourselves is already dead, the job now is primarily to document the havoc and point to viable solutions.

> A lot of money depends on things staying as they are.

Not just for the farmers, but also for the agrochemical industry, which has a lot of cash flow and invested capital to lose from the success of regenerative farming techniques.

Permaculture may require more in certain forms of labor costs, but it's offset by a reduction in costs spent on crop treatment. Money that would go to labor instead of capital, that reduces negative externalities (and in fact exudes positive externalities, because it has the potential to make farms a carbon sink) should be seen as a win, societally. Unfortunately, those varieties of reversal are often presented as a technological step "backwards" – be wary.

A plant will not ward off pests like insects all by itself. A garden or farm is a big pile of food on one end of an unbalanced equation, where entropy favors pest populations growing to consume that excess. Natural gardening therefore puts a big point of focus in developing an entire ecosystem, such that when you do get these inevitable surges in prey population its balanced by predation. There are certain cover crops you can plant that will help attract predatory insects to your garden.

Aigen is a robotics company working on scalable, clean, farming.

https://www.aigen.io/

We need these things to be 10x cheaper, abundant, as effective or better, and easy to acquire for this to replace what’s currently done.

I really hope this happens.

Aren’t many insect larvae are not bad for you containing proteins, fats, and other beneficial nutrients?

So as long as the potato isn’t rotted you wouldn’t even have to remove it.

Biggest risk might be, ironically, if the insect contained pesticides.

Yuck, ignoring all parasites and pathogens...

can't eat potato raw anyways

You can’t kill those without turning the potato to charcoal.

I feel like in part it's an education issue. I don't have the slightest clue - was never taught - what is ok to eat and what is risky. I rely entirely on gut feelings and Google.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com