Gene banks aren’t enough to save the world’s food

How much did you process? What is the maximum amount you think you would have been willing to process with that method?

If you are growing grains and harvesting by hand eat the seeds from shorter plants. Taller plants are easier to handle. And give more straw for animal bedding. Taller grains have been mostly bred out of the seed stock. Machines are more efficient on shorter plants.

That’s perhaps overstating things, but remove biofuels and we would have an even larger surplus even as everyone gets fat from excess production. Western farming has no real need for increased efficiency unless we get rid of a lot of farmland.

Let's not forget that the world's largest famine was only 60 some years ago and was due to someone persuading a country that food yield should be a lower priority. GMOs and factory farming are the tech that moved humanity forward, the tech that people dreamed, worked and sacrificed for. People no longer starve because some locusts ate all their crops or there wasn't enough rainfall, and that's a pretty big deal.

There's zero nuance in this article, it is heavily biased and has no consideration for the negative externalities such as the lower and less predictable yields, the increased difficulty in farming and processing all the different grains, the cost and risk that the farmers are taking on by planting them.

We almost caused a famine in Sri Lanka recently by pressuring the government into banning chemical fertilizers, causing an economic crash (not the only reason but a significant one). I'm all for progress, but how about we be careful with all the "dreams" that have a decent chance of causing mass starvation.

Aren't we still those people? Aren't stone tools, and tools made of wood, bone, and other plant & animal parts, enough? They don't require smelting (though I wouldn't be surprised if someone(s) 10,000 years ago got curious about the metal bits in their fire and traced it back to iron deposits in the sediment stuck to the wood gathered from a dry riverbed), and are far less environmentally damaging than a lot of the stuff we make these days.

Numerous other animals make and use tools, and plenty others don't seem to, and they get by okay- a meaningful life can be lived without the technological trappings we've cocooned ourselves in.

I take neither this phone nor reading and writing for granted; it's all wonderful and unnecessary technology. Who needs to read & write when you are part of a tight-knit, mutually-supportive community with a rich oral tradition going back millennia?

Maybe because I grew up on a farm and this is returning, but also because I do expect about 4 billion people to die in the coming climate decline? collapse? and would like to leave better more resilient bones (buildings, good soil, lumber trees, good game, maybe some tools, landrace seeds etc), the skeleton of a more sustainable life to those who come after.

Actually, I love farm work. I grew up in the country and did quite a bit of farm work when I was younger. It felt great to be outdoors, and not have the constant massive stress I now have as a knowledge worker with ADHD. But it pays poorly and is hard on your body.

I've both done that, and I sit in an office chair 8 hours a day. Anyone who prefers the latter has a different set of maladaptive personality defects than I do.

> This is likely not an answer. Small-scale sustenance farming is not enough to support humanity at scale.

It's ok. No one really needs to think about that anymore. When fertility rates went sub-replacement, humanity became functionally extinct, at least in those regions. Everyone's planning a future for their species which it no longer has.

> I know "I'm gonna have a farm" is a popular escapist things for many folks in tech - it is for me as well, the fantasy is great

Not a fantasy. I'm a few weeks/months away from buying a combine. I have a particular model in mind (John Deere model 42), but the used market is a little difficult to deal with. I may end up paying a few thousand to have it shipped from out of state (or even Canada), but no one can tell me if it's narrow enough to fit on a flatbed trailer.

I have less of a clear idea about what tractor to pull it with, I really need something up around 100hp, something gen ii probably. A 4230 with a cab sounds nice, but it's like 9 gallons of diesel an hour. I'd grow sunflowers for the fuel, and I'm experimenting with a chloralkali machine for the soda lye (there are places not far away with salt springs, so I'm looking for real estate like that for salt). Currently assembling a larger machine I've got half-designed. Would use butanol instead of methanol.

Not sure I could survive in a place where all I can do and hope for is "a balcony with some houseplants". Sounds soul-crushing.

It's called a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_nursery and many specialized in native and obscure cultivars.

Then that needs to be placed into a cell with valid RNAs, compatible chloroplasts and mitochondria, compatible proteins in a compatible configuration, etc.

Creating all of that de novo for a plant is well beyond current capabilities.

This is why when we clone e.g. a sheep, we transfer a nucleus from the cell of one individual into the cell of a different individual. It is much easier to mix and match pieces of different cells from the same species, than to create those pieces from raw materials.

And then consider that life is always built by other life, there is no bootstrapping from source code happening. Compare with Ken Thompson's "Reflections on Trusting Trust", and realize that the most important bits about life may not even be encoded in the DNA, but rather in the runtime state that's passed "out of band" from generation to generation.

The comparison is apt, and highlights a relevant difference.