Pongamia trees grow where citrus once flourished | Hacker News Reader

Pongamia trees grow where citrus once flourished

phys.org

76 pointsPaulHoule102 comments

>Olson said. "For the most part, the citrus industry has died in Florida."

Interesting article. It also explains why I never see ads touting Florida Orange Juice anymore.

>Disease and climate issues have also affected most of the world's top citrus-producing countries

Yet the Gov of Florida is still denying Climate Change, wonder what it is like seeing an industry FL had a lot of pride about slowly dying. I feel bad for the farmers, I doubt Pongamia Trees will replace all their lost revenue.

As a Floridian, my understanding is that disease is a much worse problem than climate. For example, nobody yet knows how to effectively control the bacteria that causes citrus greening. It is transmitted via insects, grafting, etc. and very difficult to prevent the spread of once it's in an area. So once it showed up in Florida (it originated in South China) it was basically just a matter of time before it became a widespread problem. And if a cure isn't found we could lose a lot more than oranges, and in a lot more places.

>disease is a much worse problem than climate.

But the two aren't discrete issues. Climate is the reason Malaria isn't prevalent in northern Europe and people are starting to worry about it in southern Europe.

To me this is like complaining about humidity causing slip and falls while there’s a hose on inside. Anyone who has lived in Florida as long as I have (39 years, so far) knows that it’s never really gotten that cold here in the winter to begin with. We have had snow once in my lifetime, and that was really only in my area of Northeast Florida.

Areas with severe winters are typically protected from many crop plagues and disease vectors, because their populations went through a bottleneck every year. Warmer climate tends to ease or eliminate the bottleneck, and with year-round large populations, their spread and recovery becames much faster. They will not need to start from scratch after every winter, in many places where this was typically the case.

Its primary vector is the asian citrus psyllid. But you're right, once the bacteria is present in the plant tissue it can be transmitted to other healty plants via diseased grafts.

> it originated in South China

Oops. Wonder if there was a virus research lab near that location too? /s

explain why this is funny

"/s", I thought, means "end sarcasm", which is the lowest form of humor and not every one thinks other person's funny actually is

Please refer to the happenings of 2020

Knee jerk low effort references are funny?

They definitely can be. :)

These diseases are mostly consequences of climate changes (including pollutions increases, plastics, ..), so long term, mid term, short term it's always climate change the most important challenge, at global and local scale

Isn't it more a globalisation problem? ie stuff being transported between countries all the time now, and invading species seem to be good hitchhikers?

It's both. Globalization causes the outbreak, but climate change makes the world more habitable for these microbiotics.

You also can't neatly separate disease issues from climate issues. Insects and diseases are both expanding their ranges in a warmer world.

In a normal world with enough biodiversity, it's balanced, some species can die, newer comes. In a human society whole ranges of species are killed because human have such an impact, insect mass is 10x less than 30 years ago, the problems is certainly not too much insects, it's the opposite, their lack of habitat too because we put concrete, roads everywhere, so instead of trying to fight directly and incorrectly these diseases, it's much better to fight the source issue, reducing car traffic, reducing/stopping air traffic, maritim traffic, etc..

Uh, normal ecosystems are rarely what humans would call balanced for long. There are regular die offs, population booms and busts, plagues, etc, all the time in untouched ecosystems. (Hell, just look at ‘red tides’).

Some human impacts make things worse, some make things better - depending on the criteria used.

For instance, draining swamps is a classic human behavior that dramatically decreases disease vectors. It also removes habitat for a large swath of animals, including alligators.

Overall a good thing, or a bad thing?

It’s rare that things like frequency of car or truck traffic has much bearing itself, though making roads definitely can.

> some make things better

Do you have examples where human presence help the environment?

I don't know some, obviously there are constant changes, normal ecosystems are strong due to their biodiversity, so they recover and adapt quicky. With humans there are holes, more room for strong diseases. It's like on a more local scale the health of an average rich country human, it's very weak and subject to diseases, because of a bad lifestyle. If for a decade this lifestyle is changed with more diversity, interaction with nature, the change is incredible, it's the same at larger scales

You might want to read my comment again.

Uh i get what you are saying but we still have to directly fight disease and it's vectors.

Reducing emissions to 0 right now isn't going to work fast enough.

Globalisation and lack of care are more probable reasons.

Raising the temperature will not made a new species materialize magically from the other coin of planet. Commerce can do and will do it. Fruit sector has been also traditionally vulnerable to sabotage. There are several old examples where a disease was introduced deliberately.

About Pongamia trees, they are legumes, so:

1) seeds will be typically toxic without processing. Toxic in a subtle but still dangerous way.

2) will alter the Nitrogen in soil probably (but will be able to grow in poor soils).

3) There is a risk to became invasive, as other legumes like Kudzu proven to be. Specially when planted at scale.

Not really. There are a huge number of invasive species that are perfectly happy taking over even without climate change. There is nothing magic about the temperature change from the bacterial perspective

> There is nothing magic about the temperature change from the bacterial perspective

I'm not sure about that, when there are insects carrying these bugs. e.g.

Malaria: https://apnews.com/article/malariaclimate-changemosquitos-48...

Zika: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33037740/

And many, many other such articles.

The first part is true enough, but most bacteria thrive in high temperatures (20-45 degrees C).

Most everyone from the north who have gone on summer vacations further south can attest to this...

I think the mean temperature change in Florida falls in that range.

The main exception to this is some locations and elevations that experience shorter winter freezes, which can have a major impact on seasonal insect population

Because they don't have enough predators, because of humans presence (birds, and more medium size insect eating animals are depleted, because humans prefer dogs, cats, cars, plastic wrapping, and laziness

It's not that. Many of these thing have no native predators on the north American continent,and easily out compete local organisms.

When it comes to things like soil bacteria and root fungus, it is even more pronounced. You can loose thousands of acres of monoculture tree to pathogens that they have evolutionary exposure to and we're not previously present in the area.

Most of the citrus growers are just selling off their land for housing developments. Florida is still experiencing high growth. A lot of that growth is older populations trying to avoid state taxes on their retirement income. These people don't need to live near industrialized areas. They just want to live near other older populations.

I am hearing from people who are interested in going there but perceiving it is "full", that is has gotten so crowded and crazy that it is better to retire in place.

I live in FL, that take is FUD from those with vested interests in taxable incomes.

FL is a great place to retire, and no state income tax is only one out of 1,000s of reasons to move to FL instead of where you're currently residing.

If you're a remote worker, or retired you just can't beat Florida's no income tax, great climate, and affordable living.

If someone is telling you different, they're trying to sell you something. We don't have to sell anyone on Florida, here, as it sells itself many times over.

Orlando resident here. Disagree with "great climate" and "affordable living."

I honestly don't understand those who say Florida has great weather. We have basically two seasons:

Wet season: Hot and humid. Being outside after ~10am feels like being in a sauna. It rains nearly every afternoon. Usable daylight hours for outdoor activities, when you subtract the hottest part of the day and the rain time is like 3-4 hours.

Dry season: Mild & less humid. Less rain.

The problem is that wet season is like 6-8 months out of the year! I wouldn't call any place that's this miserable for this much of the year a place with "great climate."

Yesterday, I took off work and went to Bok Tower Gardens with my family (neat place, btw). It was insanely hot and humid, and I was pretty miserable.

Prior to living in Orlando I lived in Austin, TX, which is also hot but felt more comfortable because it's so much drier. And perhaps I'm bitter and making an unfair comparison, but Orlando, at least, is a cultural wasteland compared to Austin. And although real estate was luckily much less expensive when we moved here in 2021, prices have risen rapidly over the last few years and aren't quite the bargain they previously were. You can find cheap housing if you want to live in one of Orlando's many soulless exurbias, but if you want to live close to downtown or in Winter Park, prices are on par with Austin.

Floridian here. I find November through May to be perfect weather. So that’s 7 beautiful months.

Then June and and October have a least a few nice days.

The summer months are brutal but I feel like it cools down faster in the evening than places like DC.

I live in the Atlantic side though. I hear it’s the cooler part. Maybe you have to get out of Orlando?

> I honestly don't understand those who say Florida has great weather.

Because a lot of those people are coming from areas where they get the 6-8 months of hell without good weather the rest of the year. Living in Miami after California, I had the same reaction to the weather but compared to Wisconsin or Kansas, Florida wins hands down.

Being cold down to your bones for six months of the year is a special kind of hell that we in the south are a bit ignorant of. After spending two winters in Washington I would have moved to a desert island in the middle of the Pacific to get away from it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ONQo6BmfvY

https://www.yahoo.com/news/floridas-housing-market-seeing-ni...

https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida-politics/2024/07/23/ha...

https://www.newsweek.com/florida-homeowners-desperately-tryi...

https://www.newsweek.com/florida-homeowners-relocating-insur...

https://www.redfin.com/news/florida-condo-prices-dropping/

Central Florida is "home ish" but will be moving out soon. The situation is not what you communicate it to be.

> We don't have to sell anyone on Florida

but...

> FL is a great place to retire, and no state income tax is only one out of 1,000s of reasons to move to FL instead of where you're currently residing.

> If you're a remote worker, or retired you just can't beat Florida's no income tax, great climate, and affordable living.

This is a line peddled by native Floridians who don't have the skills to earn a competitive salary that they can then use to buy a house. I can only talk about Tampa and St. Pete, but neither places are "full".

Natives displaced by rich newcomers snatching up all the land and continuously pushing life in your own homeland out of reach...seems like solid ground on which to stand and say "we're full go away".

That reasoning has never worked in the history of the world. Might makes right, whether it be denominated in currency or violence.

They literally dredge these developments out of the swamp. It’s new land they are moving to that wasn’t in play before.

I don't buy this line. I myself cannot buy a house where I grew up due to people with money moving in, but that doesn't mean that I should be able to say "we're full" simply so I can buy a house.

> Yet the Gov of Florida is still denying Climate Change, wonder what it is like seeing an industry FL had a lot of pride about slowly dying. I feel bad for the farmers, I doubt Pongamia Trees will replace all their lost revenue.

Citrus only generates about $7k per year per acre in revenue.

From a tax perspective, you're looking at about ~$100 per acre per year. You're getting 10x that from a single small house.

Citrus farming is not a good business. It's probably for the best if those people do something more productive with their land.

Pongamia, producing more fat and protein, is probably a better option.

Farmers aren't stupid. They wouldn't be switching if it wasn't a better ooption.

>Disease and climate issues have also affected most of the world's top citrus-producing countries

What evidence is there for this? The author goes on to not cite anything from the US and actually gives an example from Brazil that uses faulty logic, making the common mistake of confusing whether with climate.

I live in Asia and have seen first hand how production in China has gone up over the years, not down. This can also be proven in numbers.¹ ² China happens to be the world's top producing country btw. So what does Freida Frisaro know that the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service, private analysts and traders, as well as people living in China don't know? Does "climate change" only happen in Western countries?

Quote:

> "After several years of consistent growth[!], China’s citrus production in MY 2023/24 is expected to continue to climb and will remain the largest fruit category, outperforming other fruits (i.e., apples). With favorable weather and the recovering acreage from earlier greening disease, all citrus crops – oranges, tangerines, mandarins, grapefruits, pomelos – are expected to have strong yields. Although consumers are increasingly price conscious, demand is expected to remain strong. Incremental changes in trade flows are anticipated, as China continues to promote regional trade."²

¹ https://www.statista.com/statistics/275645/citrus-fruit-prod...

² https://apps.fas.usda.gov/newgainapi/api/Report/DownloadRepo...

According to this article from 2020 https://m.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_10041777 citrus greening caused direct economic damage upwards of 10 billion RMB per year (more than US$ 1 billion).

Professor He Yujian, profiled in the article, recently published about his approach to combating the disease https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10658-024-02835-y which seems to be producing good results.

I don't understand your line of reasoning here.

"Asia is growing more citrus, so if a state in the US is growing less citrus, a global phenomenon can't be a contributor"?

Did I get that right?

The decrease in production in Florida could be due to climate change. It could also not be. I'm pointing out that the article provides no proof and am asking what evidence there is.

Using the same logic the author used and applying it to the USDA report, do you then believe climate change has lead to an increase in production in China? Would you welcome articles praising climate change for giving us more Chinese citrus?

> Using the same logic the author used and applying it to the USDA report, do you then believe climate change has lead to an increase in production in China

That may or may not be the case. Climate change is not homogeneous, and affects different regions differently. Even if it were homogeneous, there are plenty of places on earth that would benefit, agriculturally, from a warmer climate. I dont know whether or not portions of China fall in that category.

That being said, I think the longer summers are exacerbating the problem with the disease that is the core driver of collapse of citrus in Florida, but climate change itself is probably not a direct contributor.

Citrus fruit are native to Southern China, it's fair to assume they are adopted to the climate here. "Summers" are almost the entire year with the exception of maybe three months when it gets cooler. It's subtropical climate. I have not been to Florida but Wikipedia describes it as "humid subtropical", which would be exactly identical to places like Guangdong.

>Climate change is not homogeneous, and affects different regions differently.

That's true. So has it gotten cooler or hotter in Southern China over recent decades? We should look at that: Temperatures have increased here also. So what leads to an increase in production in one place leads to a collapse in the other? All I'm asking is have you considered the possibility that it may not be related to climate at all, not even indirectly? Because disease can be caused by other factors, if that's the actual culprit. Another user has suggested simple economics, which is more often the real cause for abandoned farms.

> So what leads to an increase in production in one place leads to a collapse in the other?

As noted, the disease benefits from warmer weather. Plants probably do as well, but that's moot when a disease is killing them.

It took three strikes to knock out Florida's citrus kingdom, the orchards that stretched across central Florida. There were hard freezes in the 80s all the way down to Lake Okeechobee. Then there was Medfly. Now this citrus greening is going to take the rest of them out.

I had no idea the Florida citrus industry died. That’s disturbing.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2019/11/0...

I read the whole article. Doesn’t sound like it’s dead (actually production was up recently) but it’s a race to survive and most small farmers are being wiped out as they don’t have the means to raze all their trees and start over. So the outcome is still uncertain.

That's because the article was from 2019.

Here's a more recent article from May 2024, with graphs. It looks dire:

https://citrusindustry.net/2024/05/07/florida-orange-product...

Good point. I hadn't checked the date on the article.

Wow, that is dire indeed.

Man this tree seems to have so many useful properties, why isn't already a crop then?

> Its disagreeable taste and odor are due to bitter flavonoid constituents, including karanjin, pongamol, tannin, and karanjachromene.[11] These compounds induce nausea and vomiting if ingested in its natural form

Wikipedia on the beans it produces.

Interestingly enough this is also true of a fair number of staple food stocks, especially other legumes. Lima beans contain linamarin, lentils and chickpeas contain lectins, as do pretty much all the other beans you’ve heard of in their uncooked form.

Those, of course, you just cook in order to make them delicious. With these, this Terviva firm seems to have developed and patented a treatment process involving a solvent-based extraction under sonication. I’m only skimming a patent from a field that’s not my own, but it looks like they’re able to do it by mashing it up and washing it with either a methylated ketone like acetone (00120) or ethanol (00141) [0].

Apparently the wash works just as well for the protein-rich seedcake as it does for the oil you express [1].

[0] https://patents.google.com/patent/US20230148638A1/en

[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/AU2020358833A1/en

Yes, indeed, a lot of plants and fungi aren't edible until cooked, but that's a pretty direct and simple process from e.g. raw bean to whole bean in your stomach, which has a lot of nutritional value. Best case scenarios here are cooking oil and protein isolate.

It takes a lot to turn a crop into an industry. There's plenty of "miracle" crops out there.

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/nutrition/articles/10.3...

A lot of times the issue is just logistics. Many of these are tropical and don't fruit at a predictable, narrow time of the year. Making it hard to time when you hire a bunch of labor and do your harvest.

Then ofc there's always the marketing problem of convincing people to use this new plant

All very valid points. I live in the dessert, and we have mesquite trees here everywhere. They also produce a bean in a pod which I learned several years ago is edible!

I ordered some flour and put it in bread and other things. It’s a sweet flour that tastes like a very interesting chocolate.

It’s just hard to harvest, and to mill, and not a lot of people are willing to eat different things.

But the tree thrives on less then 8 inches of rain a year.

I love mesquite! It's a staple crop of indigenous people there.

It's also got some of the deepest roots of any plant ever and can spread rhizomatically. It was introduced into the old world to hopefully fight desertification but has ended up being one of the worst invasive plants ever introduced. You'd basically need an excavator to get rid of one once established

I am neutral as I have no idea about this but what was in the linked article, but in the linked article, they claim that they have a process for removing the natural “biopesticides” that result in it tasting so awful.

Not super hot on replacing food crops for what's a raw material for frying oil, cattle feed and maybe protein bars, to be frank. It was kind of a bad thing in sci fi media when working class people were living off that kind of stuff rather than proper meals.

Kudzu plant has some nice properties too. And it too, was deemed to be an useful plant in the american south-west, until it wasn't. And now nearly 70 years after it has overstayed it's welcome, it's still spreading uncontrollably. Outdoor plants have this rather unpleasant tendency of not ceasing to exist whenever it's convenient for people.

70 years and there still isn't any particularly viable way to deal with this slow moving ecological apocalypse known as Kudzu.

  These compounds induce nausea and vomiting if ingested in its natural form

In other words it's toxic.

Lactose does that to me, but it isn't toxic.

I think toxicity is a relative concept, not absolute. I mean you can die from drinking too much water (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication) yet at the same time you need to drink plenty of water to survive. People have been making this point better than I ever could for hundreds of years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dose_makes_the_poison

Heh, I grew up in a small town in Southern India. One of the summertime activities for kids was to go shake these trees (they are everywhere), extract kernels and make a few bucks at the local markets.

They were quite bitter. And the bitterness transferred to anything you touch after handling them unless you wash your hands thoroughly. IIRC, the oil was used in the soap industry.

Having said that, isn't any kind of monoculture bad? Traditional farming always had crop rotation and/or mixed cultivation. Any "magical" and "hardy" crop is gonna ruin the soil if planted over and over for years.

> isn't any kind of monoculture bad

Hence the previous destruction of citrus...

What is it called in Tamil?

Kannada.

It is called "Honge mara" in Kannada.

Whenever I hear about biofuels, I’m always very skeptical. For instance, our massive boondoggle of planting corn to turn into ethanol for automotive fuel is very provably pointless, since more energy needs to be consumed in the cultivation of the corn than will be extracted from the ethanol.

One part of shifting from fossil fuels to, well, anything else is that the energy math looks worse because we’ve gotta account for all the stuff that we got for free before by burying the raw materials for a million years.

Realistically, though, transportation fuels have two sets of criteria for viability - the net energy produced, yes, but also then everything that makes a transportation fuel useable: density, transportability, safety, ease of loading, ease of getting the energy out, etc. They’re really closer to a battery than an energy source: how much energy did we put into this system, and how much can we get back out. You want that ratio to be as close to 100% as possible, but the fact that it takes more energy to produce than what you get back doesn’t automatically make it a bad transportation energy source if it has a variety of other useful factors.

Granted that Corn generally is particularly bad for this (I once heard a joke that the only thing corn was especially good for producing was lobbyists), but biofuels generally can still be viable even if the energy net is negative if they meet our other needs.

I could be persuaded if the corn was grown using energy that was free or at least not portable, but given the corn is grown literally using petroleum though (fertilizers, fuel for machinery), can we just skip the pork for Iowa voters and just burn the petroleum as the fuel? We’d come out ahead, including both in terms of basic economic math, and by carbon emissions.

The Brazilian ethanol from sugarcane program is better both economically and ecologically than US ethanol from corn. The program has not been replicated elsewhere in the global south.

There are a few breakthroughs that the industry wants:

(1) biodiesel production products large amounts of glycerine since the biodiesel process basically breaks off the three hydrocarbon chains attached to a triglyceride. If people figure out how to make some valuable from glycerine the industry could grow to a larger scale. (e.g. a big picture book about Brazil's agriculture industry boasts that thanks to biodiesel everybody can afford high-quality soap)

(2) Ethanol from cellulosic biomass is second only to the fast breeder reactor (and maybe pyrolysis) as an energy El Dorado. You can break down cellulose into sugar with enzymes or harsh chemicals. Trouble is the enzymes cost more than the fuel is worth and it's been that way for 100 years

On #1, biodiesel competes directly with food, so I'm not sure it's a good thing to grow the industry into a much larger scale.

There is the idea of growing algae that produce non-edible fats.

(1) Maybe nitrate it and sell it to the arms industry?

It's not really competitive with modern explosives as a shell filling in terms of explosive power, ease of handling, etc.

That seems hard to believe.

Are you thinking of the refining process?

https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/us-corn-based-e...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7320919/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_ethanol#Greenhouse_gas_em...

Ethanol replaced MTBE, which was good (MTBE is terrible comparitively), but now it's turned into a 43 million acre per year ag subsidy program. There is no political will to remove the subsidy, due to the folks who receive these subsidies having outsized political influence, so demand destruction will be a function of EV uptake (destroying overall blended gasoline demand over time). Agrivoltaics would also be a great alternative if you could convince enough folks to buy in.

From the last time the "ethanol is worse than gasoline" story did the rounds, I seem to remember that the entire argument boiled down to a gigantic one-time land use adjustment term that swamped the benefits. What was that about?

Anyone know if gasoline demand in the US is still rising?

https://www.eia.gov/petroleum/weekly/gasoline.php

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/bumpy-road-ahead-us-...

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/weak-us-gasoline-dem...

https://wolfstreet.com/2024/03/07/gasoline-demand-has-a-long...

https://electrek.co/2024/03/02/1-in-5-new-car-sales-globally...

https://www.coxautoinc.com/market-insights/q2-2024-ev-sales/

https://www.energy.ca.gov/news/2024-05/zero-emission-vehicle...

The fuel used for turning the soil, planting the seeds, spraying harvesting, drying. The energy used to make the fertilizer. Water and energy to irrigate. Then the refining and transportation of the alchohol.

Corn takes a lot of input energy. I believe that sugarcane is closer to break even as it requires less upkeep.

See https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/84069

The US once had flourishing sugar cane plantations. There is some research (I think in North Carolina?) about how to bring it back.

Hawaii got rid of all their sugar cane, replacing it with coffee and other higher-value crops.

Large swaths of the south aren't really good for growing much. Very poor soil quality.

The memory of digging post holes in red clay still haunts me.

Please don't, until burning of fields is strictly outlawed.

Burning of sugarcane to make it easier to harvest is a huge contributor to air pollution in SE Asia. And I believe some places in the US still allow it.

It still does. It lives in and between Palm Beach county through south of Lake Okeechobee.

1. Has there really been no progress in fending off the canker and the greening, somehow?

2. "What about biofuel?" <- Is that even legit, climate-wise? I mean, are they not always just neglecting to account some of the overheads of biofuel productin and use, and their energy and carbon emissions?

Speaking as a layman but an interested one:

1) the progress really has seemed underwhelming [0], to the point that some minor uncertainties still seem to linger about the specific mechanisms of infection. I’ve heard more about greening than canker. As far as I’ve heard there is no “curing” these, just preventing the trees from getting sick, and in the case of canker, burning an huge radius around infected groves to keep it from spreading further. Gold-standard prevention measures involve things like covering the young trees with plastic bags to try and keep the bugs off [1]. Miracle of modern medicine this is not.

As to 2), pretty sure that’s the kind of thing that lends itself to concrete calculation. Turning corn into ethanol, which Americans do on a massive scale, had a reputation of being super energy-intensive (as well as an ethically dubious use of arable land), although more recent official studies seem to estimate that corn ethanol produced with modern techniques results in 34% more energy than is input to make it [2].

The “squeeze the Pongamia beans and take the oil” method seems considerably less energy-intensive than “ferment the corn and distill it,” and the crop seems to have form: thriving in poor conditions with minimal inputs, easy to mechanically harvest, and a traditional role as a fuel oil source in its home countries. No idea how it performs compared to the alternatives though.

[0] https://www.wlrn.org/environment/2023-05-08/the-20-year-figh...

[1] https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/topics/citrus_greening

[2] https://www1.eere.energy.gov/bioenergy/pdfs/energy_balance_o...

Let's introduce more foreign fauna into already messed up ecosystem instead of fixing the existing ecosystem-threatening problems, what could possibly go wrong again?

oh a new seed oil that can be produced via industrial processes at a price point cheap enough to supplant already existing seed oils with already established maladaptive effects on our health only with zero data on what those effects will be once they inevitably enter our supply chain for processed and refined foods...

what could possibly go wrong?

Seed oils are a bit of a boogieman, though. Omega 6 is associated with better longevity/cardiovascular health and though linolenic acid has a known inflammatory function in large quantities it's not present enough in a "normal diet" to cause inflammation[1]. Rather than worrying about Omega 6 fatty acids, we should make sure we're getting enough Omega 3.

Your mileage may vary, particularly if you already have inflammation issues or use TikTok for more than 5 minutes.

[1] https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/no-need-to...

traditionally we got plenty of omega 3 from consuming grass fed cows and wild caught fish. with the introduction of corn to our livestock feed, omega six has climbed in our diet with omega 3 sources dropping. cows and fish get ALA from their wild diets and convert it to easier to absorb stuff DHA.

In other words, cheaper omega 6 rich oil + protein means they will inevitably use this for livestock feed which will make it even harder for people to get omega 3 in their diets.

Many oils are bogeymen.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/the-false-promis...

Optimizing among edible fats sometimes seems like optimizing among which brand’s cotton sock design makes us run faster. The sock companies and sock researchers are very confident there are critical differences.

Funny but for me fish oil acts like a drug. My triglycerides would be sky high if I didn't take a rather large dose prescribed by my doc.

The article linked by you is extremely weak. It is not clear what exactly it wants to say and all its arguments are logically flawed.

It should be obvious for anyone that taking some fish oil capsules is quite unlikely to have by itself any significant health effects, unless by accident it happens to complete exactly what was missing from an otherwise healthy diet.

So the article fights a straw man.

On the other hand, having a correct fatty acid profile of the entire amount of fatty substances that is ingested every day has an overwhelming importance for health, as has been demonstrated by a very large number of cases documented in the medical literature.

This has been confirmed by my personal experience. A few years ago I have been scared by a diagnostic of incipient atherosclerosis. At that time I was eating large quantities of dairy, so saturated fatty acids formed the majority of my daily fat intake. I have made some radical changes in my diet, in order to ensure a correct fatty acid profile, i.e. a minimal proportion of saturated fatty acids and a majority of oleic acid, complemented by small, but appropriate quantities of linoleic acid, long-chain omega-3 fatty acids (DHA+EPA) and liposoluble vitamins. After a year, the symptoms of atherosclerosis have disappeared and also other older cardio-vascular problems have disappeared. Since then, I feel much better than before.

Regarding the part of the article about how to get enough omega-3 acids, that theory is just BS that is based on some kind of flawed vegan philosophy (i.e. automatically ALA from plants => good, DHA+EPA from non-plants => not good) instead of being based on scientific facts and on market prices.

For some people it may be enough to eat plant-based food rich in ALA (alpha linolenic acid), but that is certainly not applicable to anyone. The efficiency of conversion of ALA into DHA and EPA is very low and it varies a lot from human to human. The efficiency is lower for men than for women and it is lower for old people than for young people.

Therefore it may happen to be OK for young women to eat only plant-based food rich in ALA, but for old men it is very likely that they must eat some food rich in DHA+EPA. In theory, with enough money one could pay for a medical study to determine whether one's own body can produce enough long-chain omega-3 fatty acids from ALA, to discover thus whether one can be content with eating plant-based food, without omega-3 supplements. Nevertheless, it is much cheaper and much easier to just take a DHA+EPA supplement, even if it may happen with a rather low probability to be useless.

Even for the people who can produce enough DHA+EPA from ALA, eating large enough quantities of flax seeds, walnuts etc. may be much more expensive than eating a very small amount of fish oil and/or less pleasant. There exists a vegan alternative for fish oil, the Schizochytrium oil (from a fungus-like organism and which is improperly sold as "algae oil"). Even if the price of Schizochytrium oil has decreased by a few times during the recent years, it remains at least 3 to 4 times more expensive than fish oil, which makes it unaffordable for many. However there is hope that its price will continue to decrease until it will become competitive with fish oil.

The cheapest vegetable source of omega-3 acids are the flax seeds. From 1 kg of seeds, a young healthy human might produce 18 grams of long-chain omega-3 fatty acids. Where I live, in Europe, 1 kg of flax seeds is a little more than $5. This results in a price much higher than the price of fish oil and in the same ballpark with Schizochytrium oil. However, because of the uncertainty about the personal conversion factor, one would have to eat a few times more than the minimum, which would raise the price well above that of Schizochytrium oil and one would have to eat a lot of seeds. With other seeds or nuts the price would be much higher.

What a coincidence! I was literally looking this up two days ago for a soil remediation project of a very arid place with red soil in South India.

I am in California and I came across this tidbit that it was used in Florida where citrus orchards used to be..

It is leguminous and does the same thing as fava and vetch do as short term cover crops.

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