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Comment by anon84873628 | Hacker News Reader

People seem to take for granted that since agriculture is one of the oldest technologies, it must be a "solved problem" and our modern approach is optimal.

When in reality, modern industrial agriculture is one of the most ham fisted and naive approached to the problem: just bulldoze, fertilize, irrigate, and spray everything into submission. With many negative consequences of course, which we generally refer to as "unsustainable".

Because understanding all the complex relationships within an ecosystem, and then how to engineer it to yield surplus material for human use without intolerable negative consequences, is in fact a cutting edge and poorly grasped science.

The "biocultural legacy" is an empirical approach to this problem refined over milenia, which we would do well to understand and appreciate.

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I'd hardly call the solution to Malthusian traps "ham fisted". Modern industrial agriculture, or at least fertilizer use, has let us escape from constant famine.

If you believe in Malthusian traps then at best we've just kicked the can down the road and set ourselves up for an even greater collapse. When it's not just that humans are starving, but the topsoil is gone, the pollinators are dead, the oceans have warmed and the ice caps melted, etc etc.

The "green revolution" (a misnomer with our current use of the word) sure was effective; the point is that it was also unsustainable.

Of course the land has a finite carrying capacity. And I'm not anti-ag-tech either. In fact I believe higher precision and intelligence is the answer. We need to create highly diverse and cohesive ecosystems tailored to the local environment, which requires lots of observation and iteration.

You’re missing a critical step in your analysis, birth rates.

The exit for Malthusian traps is to temporarily have enough abundance to reduce the birth rate dramatically not simply to steadily increase food production. Being unsustainable isn’t actually a problem if the total population starts dropping.

I'm not claiming we need indefinite growth or really even care about the hypothetical traps - that was a response to the parent and the history of the green revolution.

"Unsustainable" isn't about matching rates; I mean we are washing away the topsoil, polluting the ocean, and releasing greenhouse gases (via fertilizer production from fossil fuels) that cause widespread climate change -- things that will make industrial agriculture itself impossible.

Yes you can imagine an amount of degrowth that allows us to keep using these technologies without as much broad negative impact, but that doesn't seem as likely. Or even necessary, if we get our act together on clean energy and "regenerative" agriculture.

Wealthy societies can change their practices rather than seeking maximum short term efficiency that’s ultimately the solution not any one set of practices.

Regenerative agriculture doesn’t produces nearly as much food from the same resources so that’s only an option if you’ve escaped the trap.

Similarly there’s plenty of nitrogen in the atmosphere genetic engineering is a viable solution as long as you’re willing to take a slight hit to productivity as plants need energy to use atmospheric nitrogen.

Alternatively we can spend more energy to capture atmospheric nitrogen, but again only if we can avoid maximize output while minimizing inputs. And so fort across every issue you’re talking about.

> things that will make industrial agriculture itself impossible

You can continue to do all of those things across geological timeframes. Industrial agriculture doesn’t need healthy oceans, natural topsoil, or current levels of CO2. Carbon capture to produce chemical feedstocks or even fuels isn’t an efficient process, but it’s a proven technology. If batteries weren’t an option for example, we wouldn’t just give up.

In what way does that counter the claim it's ham fisted? Modern agriculture is a solution to malthusian traps because of its scale, not its precision. Shifting from small scale, artisanal farming to large, standardized operations was one of the key components of massively increasing food production.

Yeah, it's a weird catch-22 for modern ag: don't use aggressive chemical herbicide and pesticides, but mechanical weed control has it's downsides too: with compacting that ground or erosion or use too much fuel.

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