[HN Gopher] Is Technological Progress Slowing? The Case of Ameri...
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Is Technological Progress Slowing? The Case of American Agriculture
Author : _Microft
Score : 44 points
Date : 2021-11-29 15:52 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mattsclancy.substack.com)
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| orwin wrote:
| If the premise is true, this isn't good news. I know people are
| still circumspect of `The limit to growth` since their worse
| predictions (about ressources especially) turned out to be
| "wrong" (Jury is still out on conventionnal oil tbh), but their
| optimistic models, even the "business as usual" one, all demand a
| continuous (or even growing) rate of progress.
|
| We can't really afford not to continue progressing in all fields.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Let me stop this right here; are we equating "OVERproduction of
| food that we likely don't need" to "progress?"
| FpUser wrote:
| It is strange talking about overproduction when large part of
| the world is hungry.
| amerine wrote:
| OP is spot on. There's a big reason we use corn for so much
| more than food today. We over produce it.
| goatlover wrote:
| Growing enough food isn't the problem. Distribution, which
| includes economic and political factors, is the issue. Google
| tells me that 811 million people go hungry. That's a lot of
| people, but it's not a large part of the world, since 7
| billion people presumably have enough to eat.
| FpUser wrote:
| That's the point. Instead of worrying about overproduction
| we should worry about distributing food to ones they need
| it. And 811 million is a huge number. Can't be ignored just
| because another 7B are ok. Also I suspect that there are
| more than 811 hungry. They're just not literally dying.
| koheripbal wrote:
| There are certain events in human history that are so
| destructive, that paying a regular cost to prevent them is
| wise.
|
| Famine is one of those calamities. It will absolutely destroy
| the entire economy, and get even bring down
| governments/democracies.
|
| Over-production is an absolute conscience choice we make.
|
| Do not mistake insurance for waste. Also note that US food
| surpluses are funnelled into the US Food Aid program which
| distributes excess production (which we actually used to
| outright destroy) into preventing famines abroad. This has
| significant humanitarian, as well as diplomatic value.
|
| Because of the intentional overproduction , the US has not had
| a food shortage for over 100 years, despite occasional crop
| failures that have occured.
| LeanderK wrote:
| yeah, i was also not sure whether I've missed something.
| Equating "Technological Progress" to "Increase in Agricultural
| Output" doesn't make sense...maybe we don't need that much more
| food, that's why it's slowing down. Maybe the american
| agricultural output could double in the next 10 years, but is
| it energy well spent? After all, it's a bit of a zero-sum game,
| a society has finite capacity for research and must spend its
| budget wisely.
| kiba wrote:
| Is it physically or biologically possible to double
| agricultural output in the next ten years?
|
| It doesn't matter how much you spend on R&D if we hit the
| limit of what we can do with biology.
| kickout wrote:
| Yes, it is possible. Probably just entering a new golden
| age with genomic tools and excellent metadata on the farms
| that currently do produce.
|
| Plenty of arable land, but ideally we only want the most
| efficient land in production.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| If/when we figure out how to make good tasting beef
| industrially, without the intermittent "there is a cow"
| stage, the world will change a LOT, for the better.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Probably yes.. e.g. there's a massive amount of research
| into RuBisCO. If we could speed up the primary carbon-
| fixing reaction, we could massively increase Ag output
| (also could make a dent in carbon sequestration):
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RuBisCO#Genetic_engineering
|
| There's tons about plant bio we don't fully understand and
| a lot of room for R&D. An imperfect measure, but in 2021,
| Google Scholar added over 5,000 results for the term;
|
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C23&as_y
| l...
| [deleted]
| lambdadmitry wrote:
| Agricultural output is usually per unit of land and/or
| inputs, so more output means less land, less pollution, and
| less ecological damage for a fixed amount of food produced.
| If some fields can be reforested instead, it'd pull carbon
| out of the air and increase biodiversity.
| tspike wrote:
| Most agricultural land was short grass or long grass
| prairie prior to being plowed over. Prairie is the most
| endangered ecosystem on the planet. Perhaps instead of
| "reforestation" we can look at restoring native prairie.
| xwdv wrote:
| Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have
| it.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| Corn and soybeans are better thought of as raw material for
| industry, rather than food.
|
| We don't need more corn to eat, but alongside the fact that
| it's an industrial input, it's a strategic export that works as
| a part of American foreign policy: other nations are dependent
| on US crop imports the way they're dependent on oil.
|
| In that way, rising output is always great, as it solidifies
| our position as an exporter, and lowers the price of the
| material which prevents competition and solidifies this
| dependence. And it's a better (more affordable) product for the
| importer countries.
| kickout wrote:
| Well stated and I mostly agree
| The_rationalist wrote:
| There are easy ways to bring major yield improvements but
| scientific knowledge is by default ignored. E.g Skq1
| time_to_smile wrote:
| > the enormous increase in agricultural output in the US has been
| sustained without any significant increase in these two inputs.
| Land use has stayed roughly flat, while labor has fallen
| dramatically. That suggests it's technology that instead accounts
| for the big upswing in production.
|
| It's mind blowing to me that I could find no reference to the
| Haber process[0] in the article at all.
|
| The missing input here is fossil fuels.
|
| Certainly mechanical automation has played a factor, but the
| number 1 contributor to increased crop yields worldwide is the
| use of nitrogen based fertilizer. We have completely disrupted
| the natural nitrogen cycle and are completely dependent on
| nitrogen fixation for modern day agriculture. The Haber process
| is an essential part of nitrogen fixation and is also completely
| dependent on natural gas as a feedstock for the process.
|
| We have had amazing growth in agricultural output in the last
| century not because of our inventive minds but because of our
| ready access to hydrocarbons.
|
| In a world increasingly at risk because of this dependence on
| hydrocarbons it's borderline irresponsible to use agricultural
| production as a proxy for "technology" and not even mention the
| relationship to fossil fuels.
|
| [0].https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
| ksdale wrote:
| A lot of the progress is due to fossil fuels/fertilizer to be
| sure, but given unlimited access to fossil fuels in 1900, a
| single person would still do a tiny fraction of the work a
| modern farmer can do thanks to modern equipment. I think it is
| a _massive_ understatement to say that the output of the last
| century isn 't due to inventive minds, ignoring the fact that
| the Haber process was invented itself.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| I feel like this is a little disingenuous.
|
| It is currently most economical to source the hydrogen for the
| Haber process from natural gas, but there are many alternative
| ways to produce hydrogen. I wouldn't call that true
| "dependence".
| time_to_smile wrote:
| "most economical" is not just some minor feature. If you were
| to switch to another means of producing hydrogen the price of
| the process would rise dramatically. The only non-fossil fuel
| hydrogen generation process is water electrolysis (well and
| biomass, but guess what's involved in efficiently producing
| large quantities of biomass).
|
| If you currently eliminated fossil fuels from the process the
| price required to maintain our current food levels would
| escalate dramatically. In practice this would mean likely
| that both food production will drop and food prices would
| rise.
|
| I don't think it's disingenuous. Maybe I should add
| "affordable" as a prefix to nitrogen fixation, but "less
| economic" fertilizer means "less economic" food which is a
| fairly big problem.
| tehjoker wrote:
| I was reading the 3rd edition of Limits to Growth (2003) and
| was very interested to see this article and its take on corn
| yields as one of their collapse scenarios relied on arithmetic
| growth in ag yield versus exponential increase in requirements.
| They did note in the book that some organic farming techniques
| were able to increase yield substantially without need for as
| much fertilizer, which itself masks soil salinization. A closer
| reading of their charts seemed to indicate that there is enough
| land and yield available for the 21st century so long as the
| land is not destroyed by pollutants or climatic events.
|
| They didn't go into depth about these topics and I don't know
| much about farming. Do you think there are non-fertilizer based
| techniques that would be sufficiently beneficial?
| barathr wrote:
| The current system (as noted above) is dependent upon fossil
| fuel inputs, and it may be a driver of a future decline as
| you note. Unfortunately we've boxed ourselves in -- we don't
| have the industrial capacity / biology for something as basic
| as cover cropping to meet estimated demand should everyone
| want/need to be sustainable/regenerative:
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-020-1022-1?proof=t
| tehjoker wrote:
| Thank you for that info. I didn't know what a cover crop
| even was.
|
| For anyone else that doesn't know this video helped me:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XTeKmccl7w
|
| EDIT: ...and so did scrolling down below the abstract in
| the linked article. ^_^;
| kickout wrote:
| Good article, although I need to digest some of the points. I
| don't necessarily agree with a few points.
|
| The highlight for me is one of the last graphs showing a sharp
| deviation in private sector ag R&D and public sector R&D. Private
| sector agriculture corporations are dominated by legacy
| multinationals that are very much in the rent-seeking stage of
| their existence. Because of onerous regulations (that aren't
| necessarily wrong) it is difficult for start-ups to disrupt these
| legacy players.
|
| However Ag3.0 (yes I am stealing a web3.0 reference) will change
| this dynamic significantly when this current 'chemical era' in
| worldwide agriculture burns itself out due to unsustainability.
| See website in bio for my thoughts.
|
| ETA: The 'cheat code' used to get that insane efficiency on corn
| yields is well known and well understood. Single-cross hybrids.
| Once scientists/breeders perfected the seed production mechanism,
| we reap those insane gains in the early 1940s. It was a
| transcendent change and IMO needs to be analyzed through a
| different lens that the slow grind of mechanization improvements,
| fertility improvements, etc.
|
| ETA2: this link has a graphic that shows a _different_ measure of
| efficiency, one that shows steady growth over the past ~50 years.
| https://thinkingagriculture.io/what-agriculture-has-and-does...
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| We're about to see a huge "Green" revolution (renewables,
| battery, etc) in the next 10 years as well as huge advancements
| in medicine. Tbh, I think we're just about to get started with
| this next wave.
| brighton36 wrote:
| I'm very skeptical that these technologies will be more
| efficient than incumbent solutions. These products seem to be
| designed to comport with well intended political goals, rather
| than consumer preferences.
|
| It may be that these products are taxes-by-another-name, as
| consumers either shell out more money for inferior solutions
| (ebikes, I guess), or, turn to the secondary market instead
| (for gas leafblowers, say).
|
| After seeing what we did with recycling, I would not be so
| naive going forward, on the claims of environmentalists. (I
| still have yet to see the research on the electric car co2
| implications of producing batteries and offloading co2 output
| to power plants, when compared to the incumbent solution)
| Hokusai wrote:
| > I still have yet to see the research on the electric car
| co2 implications of producing batteries and offloading co2
| output to power plants, when compared to the incumbent
| solution
|
| - https://www.transportenvironment.org/discover/does-
| electric-...
|
| This numbers take into account that countries like Poland use
| coal to produce electricity. And even that is improving fast.
| brighton36 wrote:
| Thank-you. Candidly, I think 'no car' is what we should be
| promoting. I got rid of mine earlier in the year. I may
| find out this plan is wishful thinking. We'll see.
| pnathan wrote:
| Suggestion: go sell something new to people. figure out what they
| will buy, won't buy, what they are paid for, what they believe.
|
| I've worked in ag-tech and I think that long-term sustained
| contact with decision makers for growing operations will be much
| more revealing than R&D budgets.
| kickout wrote:
| Correct, but that data is hard to enumerate and quantify.
|
| Long-term sustained contact with decision makers are also a
| relatively small cabal and notoriously fickle (IMO).
|
| It's hard to sell people something new when their margins are
| very small and the risk of failure is high even when you do
| _everything_ right (weather). Thus, these decision makers
| usually go with what has worked in past and are extremely
| cautious to try something new. That mindset contributes to some
| serious moats in ag (tractors, seed, chemical, fert companies).
| gtsop wrote:
| IMHO the answer to the question is quite simple and doesn't need
| any stats from a particular buisness sector of a particular
| country and 50 paragraphs.
|
| Technological progress is not slowing, but it is being slowed
| down, like accelerating a car while having the handbrake slightly
| engaged.
|
| On one hand we have the constant need to do more with less,
| building on top of our evergrowing pile of collective knowledge
| and wisdom.
|
| On the other hand we have economic forces that drag down tech
| progress: Patents, trade secrets, conflicting corporate
| interests, planned obsolesence etc...
| pawelmurias wrote:
| Wouldn't planned obsolescence actually speed up tech progress?
| Old things lasting forever are taking places for new things.
| gtsop wrote:
| My thought was that it is a waste of resources: - R&D
| resources towards making things last less instead of more -
| If you are a technologist/researcher and you have to
| constantly pay for more equipment then it is harder to spend
| those funds in research.
|
| Also, I wouldn't agree much with the argument that new things
| take up space from new things. New and old can co-exist, the
| issue is that you are buying the same tech over and over
| again slightly revamped
| teddyh wrote:
| Planned obsolescence increases products being bought and
| sold, but I would guess that it actually decreases
| innovation, since customers (of a product which breaks or
| stops being supported) are going to need a new product no
| matter what - innovation will not increase their need, so
| innovation is not necessary.
| throw8383833jj wrote:
| the washing machine and drier we just purchased was much
| worse than the older model, this was due to planned
| obsolescene would be my guess. the salesman was quite honest
| about it: "they don't build em like they used to, nowadays
| they only last about 8 years". the older models could last
| more than 10 or even 20 years.
|
| this newer model wasn't better in any way that i could
| appreciate. sure it had a bunch of useless apps attached to
| it and the brochure was filled to the brim with lists of
| shiny technologies, that didn't make a ounce of difference in
| the power usage or water use (at least not compared to our 10
| year old model). Driers haven't improved in power usage at
| all in the last 30 years.
| tspike wrote:
| "Progress" needs to be defined. What is the goal here?
|
| Neither diversity nor soil was mentioned once in TFA.
|
| Is yield the only relevant metric? What about quantity/impact of
| pesticides? Amount of fertilizer required? Sustainability of
| local communities? Negative externalities?
| kickout wrote:
| For farmers, yes, yield is the only goal.
|
| All of those things you mentioned are intangible at this point
| and are not incentivized. We need to restructure the incentives
| around farming away from a commodity perspective (yield) and
| more around quality (sustainability and all that good stuff).
|
| I often say, don't make farmers out to be the bad guys anymore
| than airplanes, cars, ihpones, etc. that similarly don't price
| in externalities.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| Farmers are reluctant to change their ways though.
| tspike wrote:
| I'm a small-scale farmer. Yield is a secondary goal. Primary
| goals for me are the health of my land, the quality of life
| for my animals, and the ability to provide for my family.
| kickout wrote:
| Correct, and not to sound too obtuse, but your production
| 'doesn't really matter' in a supply chain sense. Most
| agriculture production comes from highly scaled, large
| operations.
|
| My goal is to accept this fact, and try to bring those
| sustainability qualities to the big guys instead of
| chopping the big guys up in 1,000 smaller players that
| _would_ care.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| For a farmer, at least those who own the farmland, the
| sustainability of their land is far more important than the
| yield this year.
| nickff wrote:
| > _" For a farmer, at least those who own the farmland, the
| sustainability of their land is far more important than the
| yield this year. "_
|
| Sustainability only matters if they can make the mortgage
| payments this year.
| tspike wrote:
| That's part of sustainability. You have to balance
| hundreds of competing factors to do it correctly.
| nickff wrote:
| I was replying to a comment that says "sustainability of
| their land is far more important than the yield"; I
| wasn't arguing for or against the premise of the dilemma.
| kickout wrote:
| As another comment stated, short term and long term goals
| need to be balanced. Unfortunately, the margins in ag (USA)
| are razor thin, so it is difficult (not impossible) to
| adapt sustainable practices while maintaining top yields.
|
| Many sustainable practices require a learning curve and
| there is a high risk of losing yield if not done correctly.
|
| I think many farmers and landowners _want_ to be
| sustainable, but the current state of economics makes it
| challenging except for the top x% of producers.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Even if this is true, which I doubt, those marginal farms
| will soon be bankrupt, and their lands will be taken over
| by someone with the means to plan long term.
|
| Short sighted practices only remain in the short run.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| "Technological progress" is "greater output with fewer inputs".
|
| Economists typically measure inputs either in terms of total
| financial costs, or specific types of inputs, typically capital
| and labour. As is being discussed elsewhere in this thread,
| energy is also a principle input, and there's a strong argument
| that it should be considered on its own terms.
| tspike wrote:
| If you measure ecological degradation as an output in those
| terms, then progress is proceeding swimmingly.
| aiscapehumanity wrote:
| Author discovers technic distribution has diverged from
| anthropometric spheres, resultingly thinks its declining overall
| ddimond wrote:
| A potential alternate theory: worsening soil?
|
| The 1940-70s productivity boon seems to correlate (to my
| knowledge) with increased chemical input usage. Perhaps these
| were short-term wins at the cost of long-term damage.
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