[HN Gopher] Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security
___________________________________________________________________
Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security
Author : pantalaimon
Score : 229 points
Date : 2022-05-02 09:17 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloombergquint.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloombergquint.com)
| ryanmercer wrote:
| Well, we can feed ourselves a lot better _rapidly_ by:
|
| - Drastically reducing food waste. In the United States, food
| waste is estimated at 30-40% https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs
|
| - Shift away from animal based protein rapidly. Livestock takes
| up nearly 80% of global agricultural land, yet produces less than
| 20% of the world's supply of calories
| https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets....
| (don't get me wrong, I love meat, but I also love a habitable
| planet that can sustain the current population...)
| gruez wrote:
| >- Drastically reducing food waste. In the United States, food
| waste is estimated at 30-40%
| https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs
|
| Easier said than done. After all, if businesses are literally
| throwing their product out, it's probably for a good reason
| (ie. trying to recover it is more expensive than buying more)
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| I don't know if the US is going suffer food insecurity in the
| short term anywhere near as soon as other countries. I fear
| that with heat waves/drought in India, the Ukraine invasion,
| drought in the American west, and climate change broadly
| leading to crop failures food prices will remain elevated for
| years to come. I don't think people want to hear "give up meat"
| speaking as someone who has mostly given up meat (pork,
| poultry, and beef) for fish and mushrooms. I guess slow
| conversion is best. I've been feeding relatives mushrooms where
| they've never had them before in effort to reduce meat
| consumption to some, admittedly, limited success. I do worry
| for the future.
| slickrick216 wrote:
| If we just rate things better by calories we will enter a
| negative feedback loop where something is always better until
| we are all eating some synthetic sludge. Not saying you don't
| have a point but we should aim to have our cake and eat it or
| else the future will just be worse and leave people with
| nothing to hope for.
| yesenadam wrote:
| Vegetarian diet somehow equals synthetic sludge and nothing
| to hope for?! Sorry if that mischaracterizes your point, but
| it does seem that's the slippery slope you were going for.
| incone123 wrote:
| I regularly hear people saying the earth could support x
| billion people if we all just adopted diet y.
|
| Is it really our ambition to turn the whole world into
| residential skyscrapers just because we figured out how to
| feed 40 billion people on this one planet?
| [deleted]
| ianhawes wrote:
| It will be hard to give up my fertilizer-fed beef.
| citizenkeen wrote:
| (1) [Thing] is bad for the world
|
| (2) But I _want_ it.
|
| This is the recipe for the road we are on.
| engineer_22 wrote:
| If an impact-free human being is the goal, the only
| solution is genocide.
| krageon wrote:
| This would be a pretty interesting point to engage with
| if you elaborated a little on why you believe this is the
| case and where you believe the GP said this.
| refurb wrote:
| That's a silly argument because _you_ being alive is "bad
| for the world".
|
| But hey, I'm guessing you "want to live"?
|
| So selfish.
| mathgladiator wrote:
| (3) And im willing to pay for it.
|
| I only eat 100% grass-fed beef, and I believe the world
| would be better without corn fed abominations.
| [deleted]
| PheonixPharts wrote:
| > (3) And im willing to pay for it.
|
| If the true externalities of your consumption are not
| priced into the product then you're not really paying for
| it.
|
| As a general rule this is the problem with our entire
| lifestyle. Very few people will deny that we do _not_
| life a sustainable life style, and yet almost none
| consider what this means.
|
| The definition of unsustainable is that you are consuming
| beyond your ability to pay. If all the true future costs
| of our industrial life were factored into the products we
| consume, we could not afford any of them.
| lolsal wrote:
| > If the true externalities of your consumption are not
| priced into the product then you're not really paying for
| it.
|
| This is true, but other than showing up to the butcher
| with my money, what else can I do? Some _other thing_
| needs to motivate these externalities into the price; not
| the consumer. The only thing I could conceive of doing is
| voting with my wallet, which I do when I buy grass-fed
| meat.
| jdrc wrote:
| The order is reversed
| Asooka wrote:
| If eating meat were bad for the environment, all predators
| who eat exclusively large prey would be extinct. We can
| have a discussion about how much meat per year production
| is sustainable, but I'm not going to start eating bugs.
| fsloth wrote:
| Humans plus agricultural animals are 96% of all the
| mammalian biomass.
|
| In light of these numbers I don't understand the
| environmental rationalization based on the diets of
| predators.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| You do realize that mammals are the smallest class by
| biomass right? Well, other than Cnidaria but who counts
| them anyways.
| smcl wrote:
| And where in the comment thread was anyone saying
|
| a) all instances of meat-eating is bad for the
| environment
|
| b) you will need to start eating insects
| llanowarelves wrote:
| Why does anyone in the thread need to have said it?
|
| That's been in the news cycle for the last half-decade
| and major NGOs as well as governments now (EU approved
| bugs as food) are on board, saying it'll be necessary to
| feed everybody their protein in the future.
|
| Why do you think that's not relevant?
| smcl wrote:
| Because they were responding to a person as if they _had_
| said it. You can 't have a discussion where you just make
| up what the other person said and respond to that. And in
| fact you've done _exactly_ the same. You 've assigned a
| position to me that I haven't stated at all. It'd be like
| me ending this comment with: Why would you make such a
| inflammatory anti-muslim joke on Eid Al Fitr of all days?
| llanowarelves wrote:
| The bug comment is not saying anyone said it. It's to
| demonstrate limits.
|
| On a discussion about general religions, or future
| relevant policies, a comment like this would be normal,
| "I can respect Islam but I'm not going to stop eating
| pork".
|
| And then I guess you would say "who said you have to stop
| eating pork?".
| smcl wrote:
| We can only guess the intent. You think it's a clever
| debate strategy, I think the person just wanted to
| provoke an argument.
| llanowarelves wrote:
| Maybe. I have seen the bugs thing mentioned a lot before
| along with "pods" (increasingly small city apartments /
| tiny houses) meme.
|
| Both are critiques of the handling of current challenges
| (food and housing).
|
| To come full circle, "I support affordable housing, but I
| don't want to live in a pod"
|
| ;)
| lm28469 wrote:
| > If eating meat were bad for the environment, all
| predators who eat exclusively large prey would be
| extinct.
|
| It's not that eating meat is inherently bad, it's the
| abomination we created to make it a world wide cheap
| commodity.
|
| Just like a single car isn't a problem, the problem is
| the scale and the fact that we built our societies around
| it as if it was just an inevitable fact of life
|
| > all predators who eat exclusively large prey would be
| extinct.
|
| Lions don't have literal meat factories, don't treat
| animals like merchandise and don't use low quality
| processed meat as a filler for everything. This is such a
| low quality analogy. Look at that video and tell me it's
| just what large predators do:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWbgZQxd6J4&t=106s
|
| > I'm not going to start eating bugs.
|
| Nobody saying that, I'm 90% vegetarian and I never had a
| single bug in my life. I'm lifting weight three times a
| week and rock climbing twice a week with no issues too so
| here goes the "muh protein/energy" argument. The bug
| based food and ultra processed vegetarian/vegan options
| are just a marketing fad imho
|
| Again, eating meat is fine, eating 500gr of low quality
| meat every single isn't, it's just about scale.
| deltille wrote:
| Most predators that eat exclusively large prey don't
| number in the billions.
|
| Any reason you are averse to eating bugs specifically?
| IntrepidWorm wrote:
| I second this - cow based protein and cricket based
| protein both supply adequate value in an average human
| diet - why is there such a stigma against one versus the
| other?
| incone123 wrote:
| I ordered a cricket steak and was a little disappointed.
|
| But seriously its not stigma, its cuisine preference.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Crickets don't taste like much. But we also each chicken.
| It's all about how you prepare it.
| incone123 wrote:
| I meant it as a joke about the size of crickets but I
| didn't write it very well.
| smcl wrote:
| I liked it :)
| smcl wrote:
| I had them fried and seasoned/salted iirc, they were
| surprisingly good little snack. I think it'd take a bit
| of time for most people to not be squeamish about
| casually eating them, rather than as a little novelty
| thing at a food festival.
| IntrepidWorm wrote:
| Mmm.... .0003 oz cutlets.
| m_eiman wrote:
| It's cultural of course, but the funny thing is that
| kinda-insects are already culturally accepted food in the
| west - but only ones from the sea such as shrimp, crabs,
| etc.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| I don't think it's a matter of "ew gross bugs" it's that
| there is always a strong undertone of "we should ban beef
| and replace it with bugs" in these conversations. That
| kind of thing gets people riled up, and it should.
| WaxedChewbacca wrote:
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| Please stop repeating the falsehood that animal pastures can
| somehow be transmuted into high yield crops for the human food
| supply: about 1/3rd of farmland in the US can never be
| transformed into suitable farmland for that task, and this
| accounts for most of the land used for pasture.
|
| If we're having problems maintain soil fertility levels now,
| imagine if we needed 2-3x the fertilizer to transform
| unsuitable land into _still_ unsuitable land (but now growing
| human-edible crops) because somebody thought this was a good
| idea.
| [deleted]
| myshpa wrote:
| Not every piece of land existing should be used to feed us.
|
| We could reforest the pastures (start reducing CO2 in the
| atmosphere) and return the land to the wildlife (put a stop
| to an anthropomorphic extinction).
| jhgb wrote:
| I was under the impression that a significant percentage of
| cattle was not fed purely from pastures. Perhaps this what
| GP's comment was about?
| Aromasin wrote:
| Correct. The vast majority of US cattle are grain
| fed/finished.
|
| "If all the grain currently fed to livestock in the United
| States were consumed directly by people, the number of
| people who could be fed would be nearly 800 million," David
| Pimentel, professor of ecology in Cornell University's
| College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, reported at the
| July 24-26 meeting of the Canadian Society of Animal
| Science in Montreal. Or, if those grains were exported, it
| would boost the U.S. trade balance by $80 billion a year,
| Pimentel estimated.
|
| With only grass-fed livestock, individual Americans would
| still get more than the recommended daily allowance (RDA)
| of meat and dairy protein, according to Pimentel's report,
| "Livestock Production: Energy Inputs and the Environment."
|
| "If all the grain currently fed to livestock in the United
| States were consumed directly by people, the number of
| people who could be fed would be nearly 800 million," David
| Pimentel, professor of ecology in Cornell University's
| College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, reported at the
| July 24-26 meeting of the Canadian Society of Animal
| Science in Montreal. Or, if those grains were exported, it
| would boost the U.S. trade balance by $80 billion a year,
| Pimentel estimated.
|
| With only grass-fed livestock, individual Americans would
| still get more than the recommended daily allowance (RDA)
| of meat and dairy protein, according to Pimentel's report,
| "Livestock Production: Energy Inputs and the Environment."
|
| https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-
| feed-800-m...
|
| To add to that, the argument that animal pastures cannot be
| used for anything else has been proven demonstrably false
| time and time again. They are not usable for modern day
| agricultural monoculture cropland, which is the metric that
| the studies use and I'm sure the commenter is referring to.
| That does not mean by any stretch of the imagination that
| they cannot be rewilded or even transformed into usable
| farm land again through long term soil regeneration methods
| such as permaculture farming or effective through growing
| climate appropriate polycultures.
| bbarnett wrote:
| And I suppose the soil unsuitable for crops ( too much
| clay, etc) but OK for wild grasses, or rocky terrain
| would just magically fix itself.
|
| Maybe we should blast to level it, and make new soil
| then?
|
| Around here, Quebec Canada, few cattle are grain fed, and
| the land they graze on is rocky, hilly, non crop land.
|
| But, even more importantly, is that _there is no food
| shortage_. None. Zero. Nada.
|
| In fact, all around the world, Canada, Europe, farmers
| are paid _not to farm_.
|
| I detest it when people try to obtain goals, by using
| false narratives.
| another_story wrote:
| It doesn't need to be turned into farmland, we need to stop
| using existing farmland to grow feed for livestock, which is
| where so much of it goes.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| that only happens because the kind of crops that are farmed
| are subsidized, so it's economically advantageous to farm
| those specific crops.
|
| we should stop subsidizing crops it only incentivize
| monocultures
| the8472 wrote:
| 1/3rd of the US farmland being used for pasture and 80% of
| global crops being fed to livestock are not mutually
| exclusive on their own.
|
| Edit: Surprisingly our world in data has a breakdown of land
| uses (which includes grazing) but not of crop use. This
| study[0] says that about 40% of global crop use (by calories)
| is used to feed livestock and that it takes about 3.7 crop
| calories for 1 calorie of animal product. So yes, there's
| plenty of saving potential even if we kept all the grazing
| livestock untouched.
|
| [0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/4/
| 044...
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| > Low values of embodied crop calories are related to
| production systems for ruminants based on fodder and
| forage, while large values are usually associated with
| production systems for non-ruminants fed on crop products.
|
| Cows are ruminants.
|
| > First, we estimated country-wise feed requirements. We
| calculated feed required per grid cell for each livestock
| types in ton per year multiplying regional and livestock-
| wise daily feed requirements (Haberl et al 2007) with the
| gridded livestock counts.
|
| Honestly, I'm not very interested in their results after
| reading this. If they're just estimating based on number of
| livestock x calories required for livestock along with a
| bucket of crop yields for an area then this is just paper
| shuffling. You'll have my attention when you get real
| numbers directly from the farmers themselves rather than
| just aggregating 3rd hand information over a grid area.
|
| https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/4/04
| 4...
| ryanmercer wrote:
| Pasture, that is harvested for straw/hay to feed to cattle,
| still gets fertilized usually at a minimum with added
| nitrogen. That nitrogen could be better used in other
| fields growing crops specifically for humans, never mind
| the negative implications of the runoff that causes damage
| elsewhere.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| it can be argued that they actually are.
|
| if that farmland could be used to make human food, which is
| a lot more remunerative, they already would.
| macinjosh wrote:
| Cows are human food.
| citizenkeen wrote:
| I don't believe the argument is that the acreage for animal
| pastures would be converted, but rather the acreage for the
| crops _they_ eat would be converted. Or is that in error as
| well?
| lazyier wrote:
| Pretty much everything you hear about "solving" the food
| supply is going to be lies and misinformation.
|
| The people that know what they are talking about are
| already in the industry. You are not going to see their
| opinions because they are busy doing what they can.
|
| The people who actually understand things not politicians,
| academics, or columnists.
| 2000UltraDeluxe wrote:
| Not at all. Those fields are now fertilized with cow
| manure, though. Without the cattle, you'd need more
| artificial fertilizer for the crops you intend to feed
| humans with.
|
| Would it be good for the environment? Quite possibly. Would
| it result in more fertilizer available on the market? Not
| really.
| ryanmercer wrote:
| Most commercial cattle aren't pasture fed, they aren't
| free ranging it in a field eating whatever they forage.
| Hobby and small farms, sure, but the operations that
| raise the most heads the cattle generally spend the bulk
| of their life standing in a dirt pen (a feedlot) eating
| from a trough. They're then fed a mix of corn, soy,
| ruffage (grasses).
|
| Here is an example of a feedlot https://www.bilaterals.or
| g/IMG/jpg/33a3ab67aa6bbe3184c0441d2...
|
| The cattle come to a side and eat from troughs like this
| https://cdn.farmjournal.com/s3fs-
| public/styles/840x600/publi...
|
| It takes 2.5~ pounds of grain and 1,850~ gallons of water
| to produce 1 pound of beef.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| So why not argue for a return to pasture and grass fed
| and finished cattle then? A lot more people would be
| willing to agree with you. Intensive use of feedlots has
| only been going on since the 60s due to an increased
| demand for beef. The message should be to moderate our
| consumption of beef and give the cattle a better life at
| pasture rather than crammed into a feedlot.
| ryanmercer wrote:
| There are roughly 1 billion head of cattle in the world,
| depending on the soil and climate you need anywhere from
| 2-25 acres per head of cattle to 100% grass feed them (in
| areas where this is done, obviously 25 acres of desert
| isn't going to feed a cow).
|
| Even if we assume an average of 3 acres per head, you're
| looking at 3 billion acres of land just to keep beef
| going (never mind the 785 million pigs and 33 billion
| chickens).
|
| If you entirely pasture feed, you're going to get lower
| slaughter weights too as their weight at slaughter
| averages about 1,200 pounds compared with about 1,350
| pounds for feedlot animals, you'd end up needing
| something like 30% more cattle to get the same amount of
| meat https://awellfedworld.org/grazing/
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| I guess you just completely missed where I said we could
| moderate our beef consumption. Try again.
| brtkdotse wrote:
| The cows need to consume food which has to be grown to
| produce manure. They don't magically produce hydrogen,
| phosphorus and potassium on their own.
| jessriedel wrote:
| Pasture is not just where animals are held. It is land that
| grows plants eaten directly from the ground by animals,
| i.e., grazing. So if pasture land isnt suitable to be crop
| land, then animals fed by grazing pasture is efficient. And
| according to my reading of this industry website, nearly
| half of livestock calories come from this:
|
| https://www.sacredcow.info/blog/qz6pi6cvjowjhxsh4dqg1dogizn
| o...
|
| I think you are talking about fodder i.e., crops grown for
| animal consumption on land that could be used for crops
| eaten by people. But the above link says only 8% of
| livestock calories come from fodder. Another 14% come from
| grains and other food that could have been eaten by people.
| But altogether this less than a quarter of the calories
| livestock consume.
|
| The remaining ~30% of calories feeding livestock come from
| eating stuff generated by the agricultural industry as
| human-inedible byproducts, chiefly the crop residue left
| behind when crops are harvested.
|
| Would great appreciate corrections or clarifications if
| I've misinterpreted the above.
| ryanmercer wrote:
| >Another 14% come from grains and other food that could
| have been eaten by people. But altogether this less than
| a quarter of the calories livestock consume.
|
| Are you wholly unfamiliar with feedlots? 50% + of the
| bodyweight of the bulk of cattle in the world comes when
| they live on a feedlot, where they get 5.5 to 6.5 pounds
| of feed, via trough, to raise them from 600-900 pounds up
| to the slaughter weight of 1250-1350 pounds.
|
| Corn (dent, which is still usable for human foodstuffs
| but is mostly just grown for animal feed) is widely used
| on the feed lot because you don't need 5.5-6.5 pounds per
| pound of beef, you only need 2.07-2.24 pounds per pound
| of slaughter weight. Each pound of dent corn yields about
| 1,566 kcals so you're trading 3241+ kcal of (fertilized)
| corn crop for 800-1250 kcals of beef.
|
| So for 1 acre of corn you need 40 to 50 pounds of
| nitrogen, 1 acre of corn. For the 2020 crop year, USDA
| estimates U.S. corn yield to be 181.8 bushels per acre. 1
| bushel is 56 pounds. So to finish 1 cow to slaughter
| weight, assuming it's pasture fed to 600 pounds, you're
| looking at roughly 2.9 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer.
|
| So roughly 2.9 pounds of nitrogen, 1345 pounds of corn,
| and then factor in the water which is 1-2 gallons per 100
| pounds of of bodyweight per day times 12-36 months
| depending on what fat content is desired in the meat.
|
| Again, we can use less fertilizer, reduce water usage,
| and better use _some_ current cropland (75+ million acres
| in the United States alone) for crops intended for human
| consumption, drastically reduce the risk of new diseases
| by eliminating hundreds of millions of chronically
| stressed animal hosts, and to simply restore of them to
| native species in an area and reduce all of the negative
| environmental impacts of farming in those areas (runoff,
| soil depletion, loss of native habitats).
| jessriedel wrote:
| Are you disputing the numbers I gave above or just
| choosing to concentrate on a particular subset of cattle?
| I don't believe what you're describing is representative
| of livestock in general.
| riversflow wrote:
| What he's describing is absolutely standard practice, and
| is how beef you buy from a typical grocer is raised.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| People with little to no experience in industries with
| razor thin margins don't tend to appreciate how optimized
| for squeezing out pennies those industries are.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| I don't think the numbers you've selected are germane to
| the conversation. The point of the discussion is how much
| land substitution there is between animal feed and human
| feed. The USDA said that in 2013 48% of the US corn crop
| was used for animal feed, which translates to
| unbelievably vast acreage. Your numbers indicate that the
| corn calories are not 100% of the calories consumed by
| animals.
|
| https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/coexis
| ten...
| jessriedel wrote:
| Well, what it tells us is that corn is a large fraction
| of the crops fed to animals but a significantly smaller
| fraction of crops fed to humans.
|
| Indeed, it looks like there are 915M acres of
| agricultural land in the US, and of which 89.5M (<10%) is
| corn, which works out to 4.7% of all US ag land being
| used to grow corn fed to animals. Like, obviously that
| much land is "vast" on an absolute scale, just like any
| non-trivial fraction of a nationwide number, but it
| doesn't strike me as an obviously unreasonable
| percentage.
|
| Here's a pretty good chart:
|
| https://www.arespectfullife.com/2018/08/05/41-of-u-s-
| land-is...
|
| So if we accept that the pasture range cannot be used for
| crops, then what we are looking at is the animal feed
| area (which is both fodder and crops that could be eaten
| by humans but is eaten by animals). It's 125M acres, I
| think, or ~14% of all ag land.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| Again, I don't like the way you are using numbers. Your
| 915M acres figure lumps pasture into cropland, which you
| are using to make the corn for feed number look smaller.
|
| > So if we accept that the pasture range cannot be used
| for crops, then what we are looking at is the animal feed
| area (which is both fodder and crops that could be eaten
| by humans but is eaten by animals). It's 125M acres, I
| think, or ~14% of all ag land.
|
| The Bloomberg article that is the source for your source,
| disagrees with you and categorizes the livestock feed
| acreage as cropland. So again, you are distorting the
| picture to make the animal feed number look smaller. Your
| own source is saying that more acres of cropland are used
| to feed animals than people.
| jessriedel wrote:
| Sounds like you are misinterpreting me because I haven't
| said anything that disagrees with the Bloomberg article,
| and in particular I agree more land is used for crops
| eaten by animals than crops eaten by people.
|
| The amount of land used for pasture is definitely germane
| to the discussion we were having before you began
| commenting. See my first comment and the one I was
| replying to.
|
| If you continue to assume bad faith, I won't continue the
| discussion.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| Grass fed vs grain fed are two different things. If a cow
| is at pasture it is generally not eating any crops grown
| elsewhere, that's the point of the pasture they eat the
| grass that grows on it. I agree with the argument against
| feeding cattle a diet solely consisting of grain, this is
| usually done on a feed lot and it's not good for them or
| the environment. I'm ok with grain finished with a mixed
| diet since the animal will spend most of its life at
| pasture. Cattle do require food during the winter so hay
| and silage must be made for them but these are made from
| grasses and vetches that can grow on more marginal land
| than grain crops and they won't deplete the soil as much
| especially if they are fertilized using the manure from the
| cattle. So if you are going to make an argument it should
| be against purely grain fed cattle, you would actually find
| some traction among ranchers this way as well.
| dbatten wrote:
| The objection I've usually heard is less about farm land
| being used for pasture instead of growing crops, and more
| about the amount of crops that have to be grown to feed the
| cattle... Growing corn to feed cows to feed humans is
| massively less efficient than growing corn to feed humans, or
| at least that's how the story goes.
|
| Is there not an efficiency problem there that we could
| improve on?
|
| (Not an expert in this area, genuinely curious.)
| verve_rat wrote:
| Sure, but go back to pasture based systems. Cows are a
| fantastic way to turn grass into human edible nutrients.
| That will probably reduce the amount of meat on the market,
| but no where near the drastic levels some people talk
| about.
|
| All land is not fungible, we need to use the best tools for
| the job, and that will be a mix of a bit of everything,
| including animal meat.
| Gustomaximus wrote:
| Not expert either but from forums, I think its a bit of
| both. People treat pasture country like it would be good
| for cropping in theoretical climate discussions, and the
| more correct growing corn/grain/hay etc to feed cattle to
| feed humans.
|
| Another factor is cattle feed is often poor quality human
| food, so the reject stuff. That wheat that was harvested a
| bit early to avoid storms and no good for the flour is
| great for cattle.
|
| Also, to the main topic of this thread, I wonder if its
| good for food security we grow extra crops to feed
| livestock. If there is a food supply shortage, cattle can
| go to slaughter and there is plenty of extra corn or other
| about for humans. We eat less meat for a few years while we
| fix the supply chains type thing.
|
| The way we see supply shortages from COVID, Id hope we
| never become too efficient in the food supply chain. The
| consequence of something creating lower food production is
| far worse than limited computer chips. Its not a system we
| want to be over optimised for the good times.
| kristjansson wrote:
| So many assumptions about smooth substitution in this stat.
|
| * How much of that land is pasture, and cannot be viably used
| for other purposes?
|
| * How much of the remaining arable land is suitable for growing
| plants humans will consume directly?
|
| * How much of the corn/soy/etc that can be viably grown on the
| balance would humans choose to eat?
|
| We're very, very good at growing bulk crops, but not so excited
| about eating them. Feeding the excess to animals, and eating
| the animals makes ~1/3 of that productive capacity available
| (and appetizing) to humans. Modulo environmental impacts of
| CAFOs and such (which need to be addressed) that's a pretty
| efficient use of excess productive capacity for bulk crops
| beyond demand for human consumption.
| macinjosh wrote:
| Have you ever been to a farm and ranch? A grazing pasture is
| not the same as a crop field. Pastures are on land not suitable
| for crops due to size, shape, terrain, soil etc. Sometimes
| livestock is even put on crop fields to help enrich the soil
| and to let the animals eat remnants from a harvest.
|
| Land limitations are not a problem.
| ryanmercer wrote:
| >Have you ever been to a farm and ranch?
|
| Have you ever been to a feed lot? It is not a pretty little
| hilly patch of land with cows wandering aimlessly around
| nibbling on grass. The vast majority of cattle are, at a
| minimum, finished on a feedlot. A patch of dirt, packed in as
| much as movement allows, and fed grain via a trough for half
| (or more) of their weight gain.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| That's an argument against feedlots, don't try to frame it
| as one against consuming beef or meat in general.
| Tade0 wrote:
| Thank you for the link - I needed a good source for my internet
| arguments over sustainability.
|
| Looking at the data it appears that we just need to drop beef
| and veal - totally doable I guess?
|
| I didn't read the source in full, but I wonder how would such a
| shift affect fish populations?
| thriftwy wrote:
| Animal based protein does not need fertilizer to be grown and
| it may not be carbon-intensive.
|
| Plant based protein is basically putting oil in the ground and
| getting crops back.
|
| It's intellectually disgusting how you try to put a round peg
| in a square hole.
| myshpa wrote:
| Meat and dairy needs not only a lot of land and fertilizers,
| but also a lot of pesticides/herbicides.
|
| Pesticide bioaccumulation in cattle
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7525218/
|
| Public Health Implications of Pesticide Residues in Meat http
| s://www.researchgate.net/publication/50434365_Public_Hea...
| Saanti wrote:
| What about fertilizer needed to produce food for livestock?
| lm28469 wrote:
| Do you think animal based proteins are synthesised out of
| thin air ?
| thriftwy wrote:
| Normally it comes out of grass. But the public here seem to
| assume the only option is to put animals in a building and
| feed them corn.
|
| In this case, you might as well stop eating animal protein,
| if you can't make it work for you.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Hm sounds like a bold claim, unless you consider grains
| as grass. Fully grass fed beef account for 1% of the beef
| sold in the US for example, and god knows what percentage
| of this comes from 0 fertiliser crops
|
| It's a bit disingenuous to say that animal proteins don't
| need fertiliser when in fact the extreme vast majority of
| the animals we eat are fed products or byproducts coming
| from intensive agriculture which uses fertilisers
| robonerd wrote:
| > Fully grass fed beef
|
| Typically, "grain fed" cattle are fed with grass for most
| of their life, and then "finished" in grain lots to plump
| them up before sale. They aren't raised from birth to
| steak on grain.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| 45% of US corn is used for animal feed, which uses an
| enormous amount of nitrogen fertilizer. On the other hand,
| soy is able to fix its own nitrogen thus requiring less
| fertilizer than corn.
|
| Reality is the opposite of what you said.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| > Shift away from animal based protein rapidly
|
| While this always inevitably attracts the aggressively
| emotional "you can pry my nightly organic wagyu porterhouse
| steaks from my cold dead carnivorous hands, I'm not eating
| bugs", there's certainly a middle ground for flexitarian
| things.
|
| A lot of meat consumed in the world isn't really consumed as
| meat like a steak or a lamb shank, it's "para-meat" like pink
| slime and low-grade mince, where it's really just a source of
| protein and umami to throw into ready meals, fast food and
| other industrial food where no one needs to see what it looked
| like as long as it says "chicken" on the menu. And it's only
| cheap enough to do that because it's subsidised.
|
| I'm not a vegetarian, but I still chafe when I see 500g of tofu
| (often the only one carried in a supermarket[1]) costing the
| same as 1kg of chicken, which, kilo for kilo, probably ate at
| least 10x times that much soybean as is in the tofu.
|
| And yes, I understand there's an economy of scale here, but
| it's more than just that. I think it's also that everyone from
| Nestle to supermarkets would rather, if people must shift from
| meat, that people substituted expensive alternatives like only
| organic tofu and "synthetic" meat alternatives since that's
| just more profitable.
|
| [1]: Which always seems to be a spongy watery mess compared to
| the solid blocks you get in the Chinese supermarket (which also
| cost about half the normal supermarket variety).
| kickout wrote:
| Mostly good comments in here. My take is we have at least 1-2
| years of global supply of most grains. This is a completely
| political problem; its not like we're getting 2012 US Midwest
| levels of drought in back-to-back years (now THAT would be a
| crunch).
|
| Food waste is a problem, yes. Animal protein is not a problem.
| There is plenty of land in the US only suitable for grazing. Much
| better than that synthetic soup of Impossible Meat.
|
| Food system has largely run on the JIT systems for decades that
| crunched the chip industry. We haven't had a serious shock I'd
| argue and I don't think this is one either. People recognize the
| JIT-ness and fragility of the system though and are (slowly)
| trying to backstop it. Will take a combination of distributed
| controlled environments for high value fruits and vegetables,
| _proper_ land use (high value crop land for crops; high value
| grazing land for grazing). This, currently, is dictated by the
| incentive structures in place with subsidies--which can be
| changed in theory.
| pasabagi wrote:
| > its not like we're getting 2012 US Midwest levels of drought
| in back-to-back years (now THAT would be a crunch).
|
| I got a shiver down my spine just _reading_ that sentence.
| Please do not tempt fate. We just had the hottest year on
| record. I expect we 'll break that record in the next few years
| again. Drought is depressingly likely.
| zardo wrote:
| The only thing worse than a drought year, is another 'Great
| Flood' year. When an atmospheric river turns the central
| valley into a lake.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Didn't China predict they'll have their lowest crops yields
| in modern history ?
|
| I can't find the article I remember reading but here is one:
| https://www.reuters.com/business/china-ensure-
| agricultural-p... and another: https://www.bloomberg.com/news
| /articles/2022-03-23/climate-c...
|
| Looks like everything is aligning for a pretty bad 2022 and
| 2023
| kickout wrote:
| Will likely happen in our lifetime. I'm positive of it. not a
| damn thing we can do either. If it doesn't rain, no 'genome
| edited drought resistance' will matter. Crops need water
| period (be nice if they needed _less_ water though)
| radford-neal wrote:
| "be nice if they needed _less_ water though"
|
| Fortunately, they do. Higher atmospheric CO2 levels mean
| that plants can obtain the CO2 they need more easily, with
| the stomata in their leaves not having to open as much.
| Consequently, they loose less water through the stomata,
| and are more drought resistant.
|
| Of course, this only helps to a certain extent. A bad
| enough drought will still be very bad. And a very bad
| drought is bound to happen sooner or later, just from
| natural variability. So a robust food supply system,
| incorporating both a degree of local self-sufficiency in
| inputs, and global trade (for when crops fail in one
| location) is essential.
| PheonixPharts wrote:
| > its not like we're getting 2012 US Midwest levels of drought
| in back-to-back years (now THAT would be a crunch).
|
| That's very likely in the current climate change scenario. Look
| at what's happening in the American South West right now. Lake
| Mead is currently at unprecedented low levels with no evidence
| that this will change course any time soon. It's possible
| within a decade there won't be enough water to run the Hoover
| dam. That's something no one would have taken as a serious risk
| 10 years ago.
| EricE wrote:
| It' going to be within the next year or two, not a decade....
| As I currently sit less than 5 miles from Hoover Dam.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Lake Mead is so low because the Colorado River Water Compact
| allocates more water than has historically been in the river,
| based on tree ring data. There have been a number of years of
| historically average flow in a row, and keeping the
| reservoirs full requires roughly a decade of above average
| flow.
|
| * Edit * For clarity the compact divides up 17 million
| acre/ft per year and the real average historic flow is closer
| to 13 million acre/ft per year. The compact also double dips
| in it's accounting for some return flows.
| kickout wrote:
| Correct, those long tail problems aren't so long when
| variance is high and time scales are long (50-60 years)
| downrightmike wrote:
| Even Toyota who developed the JIT system realized that you
| can't JIT everything.
| gruez wrote:
| >Animal protein is not a problem. There is plenty of land in
| the US only suitable for grazing
|
| Only in the sense that you can theoretically produce meat that
| way, but in reality most meat is produced on CAFOs that use
| grain.
| kickout wrote:
| they do this because its most efficient/profitable, not
| because of a technical limitation. Those economic
| incentivizes could be changed rapidly given the proper
| political capital.
| gruez wrote:
| I don't think we're disagreeing here. I already admitted in
| my previous comment that it was theoretically possible. My
| point was that even though it's possible for animal protein
| to be "not a problem", that's not the case today.
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| They do it because it dramatically increases yield.
|
| Feeding cows grain in a CAFO setting allows them to rapidly
| put on weight and turnover their herds faster. Not doing so
| would result in dramatically lower yields per acre of
| grassland.
| legulere wrote:
| It's done because grasslands cannot support meat
| consumption of the world.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| But they can supply the meat consumption of the areas
| with grasslands.
| m0llusk wrote:
| The truth is more complex than that. Most beef is mostly
| pastured then finished with grains. And the grains used
| mostly hulls and other parts of grains considered
| inappropriate for human consumption.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| No, pretty much all meat is produced from grazing animals.
|
| _In America_ , where there are basically no food quality
| standards, cattle are fed huge amounts of grain and raised in
| sheds in the desert, which is just stupid.
| [deleted]
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| No, the most commonly consumed meats do not come from
| ruminants. Pigs and chickens are the most commonly eaten
| animals in the world by a substantial margin and they
| aren't feeding on grass.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| You can still use pig and chicken shit to grow crops, and
| indeed that's what they use a lot of round here.
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| Yes, but that is an entirely separate line of discussion.
| Your assertion was that "pretty much all meat comes from
| grassland", which is very much incorrect.
|
| If your point here is that manure from pigs and chickens
| makes up for the grain inputs needed to raise them, you
| would also be incorrect.
| kickout wrote:
| I mean, this comment is wrong. The US has some of the world
| most stringent food standards in the world. FDA, USDA, OSHA
| etc. wield immense regulatory power. Is it perfect? No. You
| can't sell meat at scale in the USA without the government
| signing off.
|
| It may not be up to your or mine standard, but it has
| proven successful at getting _quality_ meat into the mouths
| of millions.
|
| Also, I would bet there aren't any cattle housed in a
| desert in the USA. They'd die immediately due to heat
| because no way anybody is paying for AC for _cattle_
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| > The US has some of the world most stringent food
| standards in the world. FDA, USDA, OSHA etc. wield
| immense regulatory power. I
|
| Uh-huh. That's why you can't even be in the same room as
| raw chicken or pork without wearing a hazmat suit.
| Supermancho wrote:
| The protection goes both ways, you vs the meat and meat
| vs YOU.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > The US has some of the world most stringent food
| standards in the world.
|
| I can think of at least two issues I have with US food
| standards:
|
| - Very few restrictions on pesticide use. There are nasty
| chemicals ending up on your food _and_ killing off a lot
| of the biodiversity where it grows
|
| - Antibiotics being fed to livestock. Not good for them,
| and practically begging for antibiotic-resistant
| pathogens to develop.
| magicalist wrote:
| > _I mean, this comment is wrong. The US has some of the
| world most stringent food standards in the world. FDA,
| USDA, OSHA etc. wield immense regulatory power. Is it
| perfect? No. You can 't sell meat at scale in the USA
| without the government signing off._
|
| > _It may not be up to your or mine standard, but it has
| proven successful at getting _quality_ meat into the
| mouths of millions._
|
| The GP was maybe a little hyperbolic with "basically no
| food quality standards", but I don't think "regulatory
| agencies exist therefore you're wrong" is any better.
|
| A lot of people would likely be alarmed at the lack of
| standards for cattle feed. You can't feed dead cow brains
| back to cows, for instance, but you can use lots of other
| parts of dead cows for feed for other animals, and then
| those animals (and their manure) can be used in feed for
| cows. And this distinction is almost entirely self
| enforced by workers whose jobs are largely only rewarded
| for throughput.
|
| > _Also, I would bet there aren 't any cattle housed in a
| desert in the USA. They'd die immediately due to heat
| because no way anybody is paying for AC for _cattle__
|
| You'd be wrong. There are a _lot_ of cattle raised in the
| Chihuahuan Desert and surrounding arid regions, as just
| one example.
| Supermancho wrote:
| > There are a lot of cattle raised in the Chihuahuan
| Desert
|
| The cattle in southern california (Corona) were moved en-
| masse to the central valley as conditions have changed.
| Grazing traditionally moves north against the global
| warming trend.
| vegetablepotpie wrote:
| > Animal protein is not a problem. There is plenty of land in
| the US only suitable for grazing.
|
| This statement is wrong. Livestock grazes early in its
| lifetime, but is moved to feed lots and feed corn and soy to
| prepare for slaughter. The US spends a quarter of its corn crop
| on feeding animals, whereas less than 10% is directly feed to
| people. Animal protein is a significant opportunity cost to US
| agriculture.
| kickout wrote:
| Nope. Go after ethanol if you want wasted corn. We like/need
| meat, and there is plenty of corn production or grazing land
| to accommodate that production.
|
| Something like 30-50M buffalo lived and grazed in North
| America before they were all killed. The ecosystem can most
| certainly sustain 30-50M cattle grazing. They wouldn't be as
| _profitable_ as corn-finished cattle, but they produce meat.
| thebooktocome wrote:
| The ecosystem that supported buffalo herds three centuries
| ago no longer exists.
| mauflows wrote:
| We don't need meat.
|
| And there are many price and institutional barriers to
| completely grass fed cattle. The primary being that
| slaughter is centralized to FSIS inspected facilities where
| most non-poultry spend their final weeks packed in eating
| soy and corn.
| kickout wrote:
| We don't need programming, iphones, cars, computers,
| boats, houses, clothes, etc. But we like them.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| The point is that, if the alternative is massive global
| starvation, we can give up on eating most meat so that
| that food can be more efficiently be eaten directly by
| humans instead. And you don't have to give up any of
| programming, iphones, cars, computers, boats, houses,
| clothes, etc., to do so.
| throwaway0x7E6 wrote:
| samatman wrote:
| You don't get to make decisions for me on the basis of
| what is necessary from your perspective.
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| What is meat necessary for, other than proteins and iron?
| Taste? Tradition?
|
| Also, what _decisions_ are you talking about? OP said one
| does not _need_ meat. Isn 't that a provable fact?
| Diederich wrote:
| My wife needs to eat red meat, otherwise she has very low
| iron levels.
|
| Note: she does not like red meat, and we spent years and
| years trying to get her iron levels up without it. She
| started to have to get iron infusions, which are no fun
| at all.
|
| All that stopped when she started eating red meat twice a
| week.
|
| Yes, this is a very rare case, and I can imagine a future
| where red meat is provided as something like medicine for
| those few who really need it.
|
| But some people do effectively need red meat.
| qiskit wrote:
| > We don't need meat.
|
| We do if we want human beings at their optimal physical
| and mental capacity. It isn't much of a secret that
| increased consumption of meat led to human beings
| reaching their optimal physical and mental potential.
|
| Now, excess meat consumption is a problem, but you aren't
| going to have optimal human beings without some meat.
|
| Japan used to be a vegetarian society for more than a
| millenia. Their poor diet so terribly stunted the
| japanese people, physically and intellectually, that the
| japanese elites ended vegetarianism in favor of meat in
| the late 1800s.
| goatlover wrote:
| We don't need coffee, tea, spices and a thousand other
| things you can buy at the store. But people want them,
| and that's unlikely to change.
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| >But people want them, and that's unlikely to change.
|
| This will change when we'll have to make compromise
| because our current agriculture model is not sustainable
| (both for climate and food production).
|
| As an aside: I stopped drinking coffee because of the
| environmental impact. I now drink chicory and barley
| coffee that's locally grown and roasted. The taste is
| close enough. It also makes it easier to absorb iron and
| vitamins (which caffeine inhibits, which does not help if
| you're reducing meat consumption).
| hedora wrote:
| Meat is more useful than low energy density
| gasoline/ethanol mixes that have higher CO2 emissions
| than regular gasoline.
|
| Cattle could easily be grass fed. You just wait an extra
| year before selling calfs at auction. However, selling
| calfs leads to more $/acre of grazing land, and more cows
| per acre as well. A week or two eating grain in a
| slaughterhouse (if sold as a full grown cow) is rounding
| error.
|
| The big problem I see is that the availability of grazing
| land is plummeting in the US southwest, thanks to
| desertification and climate change.
|
| That might be offset by marginal farmland being converted
| to grazing (due to climate change), but that'll reduce
| grain production.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| > We don't need meat.
|
| We do if we want everyone to eat. Grazing animals are a
| great way to turn stuff we can't eat into stuff we can
| eat, and stuff we can use to grow crops that we can also
| eat.
| mauflows wrote:
| > We do if we want everyone to eat
|
| This is not true. There is plenty of food, especially if
| we put all resources we currently feed livestock into
| feeding humans.
| usrn wrote:
| God dammit humans can't eat grass. How hard is that for
| you people to get?
| riversflow wrote:
| You know that we share the earth with every other species
| right? How about we let that stuff we cant eat be food
| for wild animals?
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| What do we eat? Food grown at tremendous ecological
| expense and shipped halfway round the world?
|
| Vegans are boiling the oceans. Eat what's on your
| doorstep.
| zqmall wrote:
| In 2012 you could feed 570 million people with the crops that go
| into the "green" ethanol scam:
|
| https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/10/01/162127460/do...
|
| I'm not opposed to farm subsidies as part of food independence
| for national security, but please do not call it "green".
| orangepurple wrote:
| > Only 1 percent of all corn grown in this country is eaten by
| humans.
|
| > The rest is No. 2 yellow field corn, which is indigestible to
| humans and used in animal feed, food supplements and ethanol.
|
| https://www.wired.com/2011/06/five-ethanol-myths-busted-2/
| mrfusion wrote:
| Could we use it as a diet food if it's indigestible?
| wrycoder wrote:
| You aren't going to get thin eating corn chips. That
| combination of fat and high glycemic carbohydrate is one of
| the worst.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| The corn in corn chips has undergone nixtamalization,
| which makes more of the nutrients available to humans.
|
| As others have commented, no. 2 yellow field corn can be
| ground into cornmeal, and even _without_ nixtamalization,
| it is certainly digestible by humans, it 's just that
| nixtamalization makes important nutrients like niacin
| available.
| wrycoder wrote:
| Sorry, it has not.[0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_chip
| twofornone wrote:
| Dietary fat does not contribute to weight gain any more
| than any other macronutrient. This long lived myth needs
| to die. Similarly dietary cholesterol also likely does
| not contribute significantly to blood levels.
| wrycoder wrote:
| Fat combined with refined carbohydrates produces a strong
| insulin reaction, which directly results in fat
| deposition. This is not a myth. [0]
|
| I agree with you in that fat, by itself, does not promote
| weight gain. It's the combination that does.
|
| [0] https://smile.amazon.com/Why-We-Get-Fat-About-
| ebook/dp/B003W...
| thinkcontext wrote:
| Sure but something else could be planted in its place or the
| acreage could go to conservation and absorb more carbon.
| kristjansson wrote:
| Digestibility of corn post-processing aside, who eats the
| animals?
| sct202 wrote:
| It is digestible post processing like after nixtamalization
| to turn it into masa. No 2 corn is used in tortillas, snack
| foods and other processed corn products. That sentence is
| misleading, because yes straight off the cob you can't eat
| it.
|
| https://agcrops.osu.edu/newsletter/corn-
| newsletter/2016-40/t...
| wrycoder wrote:
| All you have to do is dry and grind it to make cornmeal.
| It's quite digestible, and keeps very well, like wheat.
| (I've never tried eating it fresh like sweet corn, may have
| to add that to the bucket list.)
|
| A problem is it is lacking in free niacin, which can result
| in pellagra, if the diet is principally corn meal.
| Nixtamalization corrects that[0].
|
| Without nixtamalization, cornmeal doesn't form a dough. You
| can make corn bread, but not tortillas.
|
| Corn chips, e.g. Fritos, and corn bread don't use
| nixtamalized corn, but they are quite digestible!
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization
| Aperocky wrote:
| To add to that I'm sure this country eat more tortillas
| than actual corn...
| lumost wrote:
| This also hints that our food production is more complex
| than you would first expect, in a true food crunch there
| are likely many substitute diet options which can be made
| by processing inedible agriculture products or repurposing
| fields.
| bjt2n3904 wrote:
| I was reading the journals of Gareth Jones about his time spent
| in Soviet Russia and Ukraine, and find remarkable similarities
| to this sort of thing.
|
| The government took over, for example, the manufacture and
| maintenance of tractors, and also selected people nearly at
| random to maintain them.
|
| The one guy he interviewed said something to the extent that
| the tractors barely last a year before breaking. The people who
| designed them were incompetent, the people who used them were
| incompetent, and the people who maintained them were
| incompetent. Not that it mattered, the oil they used was
| basically sludge.
|
| I'm getting to the point where I'm struggling to believe
| Hanlon's Razor. Especially when the most extreme
| environmentalists seem to align with Thanos' ideas about
| resolution to climate issues.
| goatlover wrote:
| And how would you go about halving the population? Who should
| die?
| thriftwy wrote:
| Late Soviet regime produced so much farm hardware as if it
| wanted to outright lay siege to the field and storm it by
| having greater numbers.
|
| Most of it went rotting. I remember a village school with a
| large yard full of half-disassembled tractors and combines.
| Apparently the students were supposed to learn to use all the
| stuff and then give the field no rest. In reality it would
| just rot.
|
| I don't think you should label all that people incompetent.
| They were mostly very practical in solving their immediate
| problem while having no freedom to rethink it. The system
| sucked and people were just trapped in it.
| brimble wrote:
| I didn't take incompetent as an insult, but in its
| straightforward, descriptive sense: the people were not
| competent at the jobs they were assigned to (and,
| presumably, weren't given sufficient help in _becoming_
| competent)
| thriftwy wrote:
| I have to disagree. The tractor-builders were very
| competent in building 100,000 new tractors each year when
| operating on vastly insufficient resources with apathetic
| workforce; and making sure these tractors could leave the
| factory gates on their own. In short, they did fulfill
| their plan.
|
| Would they be happier producing 10,000 tractors that
| would actually last, instead? Maybe. Would they be able
| to do that right away? No, but with some practice it
| could be done. Could they produce better tractors with
| the constraints that they had? I don't think so.
|
| You will undoubtedly see the same pattern all over the
| corporate world.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| Thanos' ideas about everything were extremely silly. A
| halving of population would do nothing on any time scale. A
| small blip easily recovered by reproduction. People deserve
| better writing, even in comic book movies.
| bitwize wrote:
| The original rationale for Thanos made a lot more sense: he
| simped for Death, like the concept of death was a woman in
| the Marvel universe. He thought half the universe's souls
| would make a perfect offering for her and would impress her
| enough to make her want to be with him.
|
| It's outrageously comic-book-y, but may as well lean into
| the illogic.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| That makes much more sense, I wish they had stuck with
| that.
| CapricornNoble wrote:
| I thought they would, considering they introduced the
| Goddess of Death in Thor: Ragnarok, but...NOPE. Cate
| Blanchett delightfully hamming it up as a supervillian
| only lasted one film.
| bitwize wrote:
| Death is a separate character from Hela. So the
| possibility is still there.
|
| They even teased it at the end of _The Avengers_ : the
| Chitauri leader tells Thanos "to challenge [humans] is to
| court death", at which time Thanos grins eagerly. But
| with Earth-199999's Thanos dead, they're going to have to
| invoke some multiversal malarkey if they want to develop
| that storyline now.
| api wrote:
| Real life despots and fanatics are usually quite a bit
| crazier and less coherent than Thanos. As usual you have to
| tone it down to make it believable in fiction. A realistic
| depiction of a genocidal fanatic would be too stupid or
| insane to be believable.
|
| See: Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler, ISIS, Kim Jong Un, and numerous
| other examples.
|
| If they were rational they would not be despots and
| fanatics. Unfortunately charismatic lunatics command
| followings. Charisma bypasses the rational mind and shoots
| straight into the limbic system (as do fear, outrage, etc).
|
| Cult leaders are good cases too: L. Ron Hubbard, Jim Jones,
| Charles Manson, Keith Raniere, etc. These people would be
| as bad as the worst despots if they actually had power over
| more than a few people.
|
| Thanos' line is more rational than this:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenu
| PTOB wrote:
| Reading _Wizard's First Rule_ right now. "Charisma
| bypasses the rational mind and shoots straight into the
| limbic system (as do fear, outrage, etc)." That's pretty
| much the premise of the book.
| empiricus wrote:
| Like it best from the series. In a way, each whole volume
| of the series is to describe one sentence.
| yunohn wrote:
| > A halving of population would do nothing on any time
| scale. A small blip easily recovered by reproduction.
|
| The population was half of 2020 in 1973 (1). Emissions were
| also half of now back then (2). That's nearly 30 years of
| runway that Thano's solution would provide. With today's
| technology and rapid iteration, we could definitely do
| something better for climate change.
|
| I'm not endorsing the method, but merely disagreeing with
| your assertion.
|
| (1) https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-
| populat...
|
| (2) https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-
| co2-emissi...
| adrianN wrote:
| Halving the emissions today would buy us only a couple of
| years until 2deg warming becomes completely
| unpreventable.
| salmonfamine wrote:
| This is simply not true.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| Then factor in all the havoc caused by ethanol in gas ruining
| seals, not working well in small engines, etc. and it's just
| totally non-sensical that this fraud has been allowed to
| happen.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| I've heard of the seal issue but never seen any numbers on
| how widespread the damage is. Got any numbers?
| marklubi wrote:
| This is anecdotal, but just wanted to give an example that
| I've personally experienced.
|
| We used to race go karts with Rotax engines, and the local
| series organizers decided to mandate 91 octane pump gas
| ("cost saving measure") as opposed to the VP racing fuel
| that the engine was designed to use.
|
| The end result was that all the racers ended up having
| excessive carbon buildup in the cylinder, and would go
| through several sets of the fuel pump internals every year.
| The fuel pump is a pulse driven flexible element that the
| pump gas (containing ethanol) would just destroy.
|
| Never had those issues with the ethanol free VP fuel.
| bluedino wrote:
| Hot rodders love it - they build their fuel systems for
| it, though.
| maxerickson wrote:
| I mean, the need for engine compatibility was part of the
| push for ethanol, it isn't some big secret, and there are
| millions of vehicles that have no issues with ethanol
| gasoline. Blame the organizers, not the ethanol.
| qiskit wrote:
| Most of "green" movement is a fraud. The majority of "green"
| energy comes biomass - aka cutting trees down and burning it.
|
| Would love to see the funding behind many of these green
| groups. I'll bet most of it comes from oil companies,
| governments, etc. The past 15 years, much of the anti-coal
| "green" movement was funded by oil companies who wanted to
| take out their coal competitors and replace it with "clean"
| natural gas. It was all about taking market share. Nothing to
| do with the environment.
| CraigJPerry wrote:
| In defence of ethanol, producing it from plants and then
| burning it as fuel reduces greenhouse gas emissions vs
| extracting, refining and burning dino juice.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| This is disputed. The GAO issued a report that cited
| research which claimed its worse when taking land use
| effects into account.
|
| In regards to your other question about why its a bad way
| to produce alcohol, from an EROI perspective, a frequently
| cited figure is its around 1.5:1 (invest one unit of
| energy, get 1.5 back). Making it from Brazilian sugar cane
| on the other hand is 8:1.
|
| Whatever the exact numbers are, the benefits are pretty
| modest if there are any. Its an agricultural subsidy
| program.
| CraigJPerry wrote:
| >> This is disputed
|
| Credibly disputed?
|
| We're talking about "big oil" here, you'll forgive me if
| my first reaction is to imagine a pre-completed study
| with all the right conclusions and a big fat cheque
| hidden under page 3, being shopped around academia
| looking for someone willing to sign their name to it :-)
|
| From a layman's point of view the claim just smells
| weird.
|
| On one hand, we take carbon out of the atmosphere over
| millennia, compressing it tightly under the surface of
| the earth for even more years until it turns to a thick
| sludge. Then very quickly, in comparative seconds to the
| millennia of oil deposits formation, we release all that
| into the atmosphere again.
|
| And it's alleged that causes less greenhouse gas emission
| than the other idea: extract carbon floating around in
| the atmosphere today (i.e. grow a plant of some sort
| today), process it then instead of shipping it across the
| world from the oil wells to the consumers, instead just
| distribute it locally where it is grown and processed.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| The same of course goes the other way, Big Ag definitely
| is able to put its hand on the Department of Ag. The
| report I referred to is from GAO, which is much more
| independent than USDA.
|
| I couldn't find the GAO report I mentioned but I found a
| more recent one published this year by the Proceedings of
| the National Academy of Sciences, one of the more
| prestigious journals in the world. In their abstract in
| addition to mentioning US ethanol raised corn prices by
| 30% and other crop prices by 20% they say it
|
| > ... caused enough domestic land use change emissions
| such that the carbon intensity of corn ethanol produced
| under the RFS is no less than gasoline and likely at
| least 24% higher.
|
| Environmental outcomes of the US Renewable Fuel Standard
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/suppl/10.1073/pnas.2101084119
| CraigJPerry wrote:
| That was a good link, it seems like replacing corn with
| an alternative crop really is the sensible direction.
|
| There is something of note in the methodology behind the
| figures though:
|
| "We apply our models only domestically"
|
| Throughout the years of this study, the US imported most
| of its gasoline. The production emissions are excluded.
| It's not comparing like with like.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| > Throughout the years of this study, the US imported
| most of its gasoline.
|
| Uhh what? We export more gasoline than we import.
|
| https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_sum_snd_a_epm0f_mbblpd_a
| _cu...
|
| Even if you meant crude oil and not gasoline you are
| still wrong, we recently became a net oil exporter.
| CraigJPerry wrote:
| >> Uhh what? We export more gasoline than we import.
|
| The study data is from 2008 to 2016 right? The US was
| (massively) an importer of gasoline in that time period,
| right?
| raverbashing wrote:
| Yes but corn is one of the worse sources for alcohol
| production
| CraigJPerry wrote:
| I don't know the story, what's bad about it?
|
| My understanding so far is that the corn used for ethanol
| isn't the kind you eat (sweetcorn) it's a cheaper to
| produce and more hardy plant but consequently can only
| really be used for cattle feed and ethanol production.
|
| Ages ago i read something that said in the US, corn was
| the optimal source but in other parts of the world, sugar
| cane could result in a more energy efficient process for
| ethanol.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Field corn is used to make corn flour.
|
| Most people probably eat way more corn chips and similar
| than sweet corn.
|
| And then there is corn syrup, but we probably shouldn't
| eat more of that.
| CraigJPerry wrote:
| That makes sense. It's not something that would solve
| itself then if that's true - i don't know that my demand
| for fuel is driving up the cost of my corn based foods
| and vice versa. I'm not deciding to drive less miles or
| take alternative transport because i want cheaper food -
| because i don't know that connection exists.
|
| Tricky problem.
| qeternity wrote:
| > but consequently can only really be used for cattle
| feed
|
| Spoiler: most agriculture goes to supporting industrial
| livestock farming.
|
| It doesn't change the economics. The ethanol mandate is
| horribly stupid.
| CraigJPerry wrote:
| I'm open to that, I was looking for more information
| rather than a pre-determined opinion though :-)
| qeternity wrote:
| Sure fair enough. It's more nuanced than someone will be
| able to write in a succinct HN comment. Without debating
| the merits of carbon intensity, the ethanol mandate is
| far too small to make any appreciable impact on
| emissions. But it is large enough to have a very
| appreciable impact on food costs.
| [deleted]
| bob1029 wrote:
| I feel like the economics will sort this out automatically, at
| least for the average first-world citizen.
|
| Most consume way more than they actually utilize for nutritional
| value. In America, food is entertainment more than anything else.
| Once the price of this "entertainment" becomes prohibitive,
| people will start looking at it with the proper perspective.
|
| Simply switching from daily takeout to weekly meal prep can shave
| $500-1000 off someone's monthly food budget. The time/discipline
| tradeoff is complex, but ultimately a hungry person will figure
| something out.
| MadSudaca wrote:
| While people try to figure out how to feed themselves, it'd be
| a good opportunity to blame you for their problems and get some
| political capital :)
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Meat normally fixes the fluctuations on agriculture output.
|
| When it's very plentiful, meat producers switch into more
| grains and grow more cattle. When it's scarce, meat producers
| slaughter their cattle earlier, and do as much as possible to
| substitute grains for grass.
|
| AFAIK, the second largest stabilizer is on stockpiles. But some
| countries do almost none of it.
| jimbokun wrote:
| How about the majority of the world's people who are not first
| world citizens?
| rootsudo wrote:
| Ironically it would be easier, food costs in "first world"
| are the most expensive, while emerging economies have much
| more potential to stablize and finally use their local
| resources to grow "cheap" food.
|
| At the same time it also depends on what that local
| population really is used too - different to compare Asia,
| South East Asia to Africa.
| [deleted]
| bob1029 wrote:
| A shifted American perspective on what food is actually for
| might help the rest of the world as well.
| alcover wrote:
| > The time/discipline tradeoff is complex
|
| It's really not.
|
| Here's how I do : once a week buy lots vegetables at the
| market. Once every two days, put a good deal of veggies +
| rice/lentils (+ rarely chicken) in a casserole. Add little
| water, cover, let cook very gently.
|
| Now you have good food for two days. And cheap. And dead easy
| to make.
| aenis wrote:
| Not sure why are you getting the downvotes. Food prep is not
| rocket science. My wife is a proper foodie, and cooks gourmet
| food every day - and she is not spending more than 45 mins
| each day doing this. Thats what she does to unwind after
| work. When I lived alone I used your strategy and with a slow
| cooker it would not take more than 20 mins per day to make
| quality, tasty food.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| Prices going up doesn't mean everyone can continue to consume
| as much as before if they are willing to pay for it. Nor is
| food perfectly fungible across continents. Your American family
| may just be able to outspend someone in Senegal, even if they
| waste half of the food while the other guy is starving. And
| even if they somehow buy less, they may just buy less beef,
| which is still to expensive for the world's poor to buy, may
| not even be raised, and a;l that's saved is some animal feed
| unfit for human consumption, rotting in Iowa.
|
| Sure, it'll all adjust, just not at the timescale necessary.
| deelowe wrote:
| Aren't calorie dense (nutrient poor) foods already the cheapest
| because they are the easiest to produce?
| EricE wrote:
| We've been doing stupid crap - like subsidizing corn production
| for ethanol - that seriously needs to end. The amount of
| government/market mismanagement and interference driven by
| special interests is beyond ridiculous. The rubber band is
| beginning to snap!
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Doesn't that mean we have extra corn that can be used for
| human/animal consumption if shit hits the fan? Right now we're
| growing a bunch of crops that don't feed anyone, but it would
| not be hard at all to have that be the case. Much easier than
| the whole process of starting from scratch to get new farmland
| ready for growing corn.
| jonhohle wrote:
| Ethanol corn can be digested by animals but not humans.
| giantrobot wrote:
| It can be turned into corn meal and can definitely be
| digested by humans. It just can't be eaten directly off the
| cob.
| [deleted]
| simonsarris wrote:
| Excess agricultural capacity is generally a good idea. If we
| have _zero_ excess in the system, then when a hiccup occurred
| we might find ourselves in famine.
|
| With corn-for-ethanol, the US gov is paying to keep farmland
| productive that has no human-or-livestock feed value. But you
| could imagine a situation where more human or livestock feed is
| needed (massive disruption of cropland, say), and in those or
| subsequent years we could convert basically-for-ethanol fields
| to consumption fields.
|
| Or if you are running out of fertilizer instead of running out
| of food, then you can divert expected and stored fertilizer for
| ethanol fields onto human-and-livestock feed fields. Once again
| the excess capacity acts in your favor. (Or ought to)
|
| This is assuming that governing bodies and farmers are making
| coherent rational decisions _and in addition_ responding to
| local conditions. I have no opinion on that. Just explaining
| why subsidizing what looks like superfluous excess capacity is
| not necessarily a dumb thing to do.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Can't this corn-for-ethanol be used directly as livestock
| feed or even human food if needed?
|
| Also, I have no idea where i heard it, but i remember from
| somewhere, that pretty much all of the pet food has to be
| edible by humans too, "just in case" shit hits the fan..
| kickout wrote:
| Most field corn is not directly palatable for humans.
| Livestock feed, yes. There is lots of stuff we could eat to
| get nutrition from when shit hits fan. Most of us don't
| haven't tried though, lol
| mfer wrote:
| Can the world feed itself is also a matter of asking, which
| model of food production do we use and are we even able to
| realistically consider?
|
| A lot of the mismanagement comes from big AG and profit/growth
| goals.
|
| For example, people in the United States eat about 5 times the
| amount of meat per person as people did 100 years ago. The
| population has grown, too. The amount of food grown to produce
| the calories/nutrients needed to feed the animals which people
| then eat is far more than for when people eat the produce. It
| we're talking economies of scale, here.
|
| Big AG has a mass influence on subsidies, regulations, and even
| recommendations that come out of governments on diet.
|
| If you look at what healthiest for us as individuals and
| societies with economies of scale taken into account... it's
| not what Big AG is guiding. Not according to the scientists who
| study this stuff, anyway.
|
| Big AG is influencing a lot of mismanagement to help with their
| profits. So far, it's worked well for their bottom lines.
| pedro2 wrote:
| God another doomsday scenario?
|
| I'll take "ignore" for 50 please.
|
| This only contributes for my anxiety levels. I'll outsource the
| worries for the big government, TYVM.
| lvl102 wrote:
| We produce 3-4x the food needed.
| supertofu wrote:
| Ok, so we have all these enormous factory farms full of animals
| who produce fertilizer quite naturally. All we have to do is give
| them nutritious feed and better lives so they are spared disease.
| Why can't Big Agriculture pivot to actually using the poop that
| these animals produce?
| voakbasda wrote:
| Small farmer here. Most of my fertilizer comes from the rear
| end of my animals. They choose where to apply it, and my free
| range birds spread it around a bit. I would not try to spread
| it any other way. I try to avoid man made inputs, but the land
| is still far less productive than the few times I have applied
| synthetic fertilizers.
|
| Big Ag invests in machines that each cost hundreds of thousands
| to millions of dollars. Those machines are tuned to spread
| powdered/pelletized fertilizer that comes from a factory. It
| would be prohibitively expensive to pivot to machines that can
| collect and spread manure, and the results would be suboptimal
| compared to their usual inputs. It is simply not worth the
| cost, as it would put them at a disadvantage to those who do
| not switch over. The shortage will pass long before they could
| pay off the investment.
| [deleted]
| mike_hearn wrote:
| I'm always bothered by stories like these that seem to do a
| reasonable job of listing causes of self-inflicted problems, and
| then try to act like it was some sort of inevitable act of God,
| or natural law of the universe or something.
|
| According to TFA the causes are:
|
| 1. Back-to-back storms in the USA causing production shutdowns.
| OK, that one is genuinely just random natural variance.
|
| 2. Natural gas price explosion. This is due largely to sanctions
| on Russia. Governments don't actually have to sanction Russian
| natural gas. It's a choice, one that can be undone tomorrow if
| need be.
|
| 3. Sanctions on a major Belarusian potash producer. Same thing.
| Belarus isn't even Russia. This could be fixed tomorrow with the
| wave of a bureaucrat's pen.
|
| 4. Ongoing side effects of lockdowns. This was a major own goal.
| People warned at the time you can't just shut down the economy
| even if actually _had_ worked, which it didn 't. This one sits
| squarely in government footgun area.
|
| 5. China has restricted exports of phosphate to build up
| stockpiles at home. Once again, governments are creating the
| damage here.
|
| 6. "Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which effectively cut off
| nearly a fifth of the world's nutrient exports". For the third
| time, no, _governments_ cut off those nutrient exports. It wasn
| 't some sort of physical law that said invasions => cut off
| nutrient supply. It was and is a choice.
|
| What seems to be happening here is that comfortable and powerful
| politicians have decided that showing how much they care about
| Ukraine is more important than people eating. The poor around the
| world will starve, so (primarily) European countries can wave a
| blue and yellow flag over their bodies. It feels very wrong.
| llanowarelves wrote:
| It's not an own-goal for the elites and politicians, who now
| have an excuse for their bad monetary policy causing inflation,
| and who have got and will continue to get many more dependents
| as things worsen.
|
| Never let a good crisis go to waste!
| c1ccccc1 wrote:
| These are good points, I'm not sure why you're being downvoted.
| That said, I think it still makes sense for western countries
| to sanction Russia.
|
| Yes, sanctions are wasteful of resources, which could lead to
| food shortages and people dying, but that's kind of the problem
| with war: It kills people and wastes resources. Even without
| sanctions, there would be many Ukrainians (and Russians)
| killed, and Ukraine would not be keeping up its wheat exports.
| Ideally, we'd like to prevent this kind of thing from happening
| very often, which in practice means there needs to be some kind
| of deterrence against strong countries invading their weaker
| neighbours. Since western powers can't fight directly against
| Russia, as it would risk nuclear war, sanctions are one of the
| few tools available for deterrence. Sanctions aren't about
| waving a blue and yellow flag or about showing how much you
| care. They're about preventing similar future conflicts and
| hopefully giving Ukraine a better negotiating position so the
| war can end sooner.
|
| Also, it seems like European and North American sanctions
| shouldn't be a problem for most poor countries unless they're
| also participating in those sanctions themselves? While
| sanctions make sense for rich countries, the first priority
| should definitely be to feed your own people. So if the
| government of India decides that in order to feed its people,
| it needs to import potash from Belarus, more power to it.
| llanowarelves wrote:
| Is it really hurting Russia?
|
| Their currency is up against the Euro since the sanctions;
| and against the dollar, it's the same as where it was before.
| badrabbit wrote:
| If all the land and resource that goes into feeding cows is used
| for crops, a lot more people can be supported. It has never been
| a lack of global food shortage, it is always regional anyways.
| xioxox wrote:
| However, there are many areas of the world where you can't grow
| human-edible food on the land currently being used to grow
| grass for feeding livestock. Of course this is not true
| everywhere, but a lot of area, e.g. in the UK, could only be
| used for grazing cows or sheep, if not left for nature.
| godmode2019 wrote:
| When you feed a cow you are essentially trading up.
|
| Animal meat is much more bioavailable and nutrient dense.
| Especially when they are eating grass on land unsuitable for
| crops.
| anthonypasq wrote:
| I dont think so... It takes way more than 1 calorie of plant
| matter to generate 1 calorie of beef
| nemo44x wrote:
| Plant matter that we can't eat and grows in areas we can't
| farm.
| pm90 wrote:
| The Amazon? Yeah sure but not sure thats a good trade: ht
| tps://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2022/amazo
| n...
| slfnflctd wrote:
| In theory, I agree. However, this is only currently true
| for small parts of the beef supply chain in the US. The
| vast majority of meat tissue growth people eat here comes
| from factory farms.
|
| I don't have a major problem with meat eating when it's
| done sustainably and humanely. The real issue is that
| this is not the case for way too much of it now, and
| current meat production practices are yet another example
| of unsustainable overconsumption in general. Yet more
| than half the population regularly celebrates and
| enshrines that overconsumption, reinforcing it. This is
| not a good look to anyone who's really thinking long term
| & globally about these things.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| > in the US
|
| So a truly _microscopic_ fraction of the world 's
| agriculture?
| mywittyname wrote:
| Depends on your definition of microscopic. The USA is a
| world-leading producer of a number of agricultural
| products, including corn, soybeans, beef, and in the top
| 10 producers of a staggering number of other crops.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| The US produces 12 million metric tonnes out of the
| world's 60 million metric tonnes of beef[1] or 20%.
| Hardly microscopic.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beef#Global_statistics
| px43 wrote:
| That would be pretty interesting if the opposite was true.
| Perpetual motion cows.
| titzer wrote:
| > When you feed a cow you are essentially trading up.
|
| At a 50x loss in efficiency.
|
| According to this guy [1], the US could feed 800 million
| people with the _grain_ spent on cows today. Not grass,
| _grain_.
|
| [1] https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-
| feed-800-m...
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| I thought most beef, pound-for-pound, was factory-farmed, not
| grazed?
| thinkcontext wrote:
| In the US cattle start out grazing and spend a portion of
| their life there. Then they go to dense feedlots (CAFOs)
| where they are fed a grain heavy diet.
| downrightmike wrote:
| WE already feed so much of the world, we have a responsibility
| to the animals we adopted thousands of years ago to keep them
| thriving.
| causasui wrote:
| Slashing the throats of 55 billion animals every year after
| only a fraction of their natural lifespan is a very
| interesting definition of "thriving".
| pjc50 wrote:
| > It has never been a lack of global food shortage
|
| Indeed. It's about availability and right to food, as
| articulated by Amartya Sen in his Nobel prize winning work on
| the Bengal (and other) famines.
|
| https://www.prismaweb.org/nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Pove...
|
| However, quite a lot of cattle grazing land isn't really
| suitable for arable farming. The American approach of raising
| cattle on soybeans grown on arable land may not be sustainable,
| but more traditional hillside grazing may be.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| Only if that land can be used for growing crops. Nearly all of
| it can't be used for growing crops.
| titzer wrote:
| We don't have to convert cattle farms into cropland, just eat
| the grain we feed the cows, and if we get sick of that grain,
| then grow something else where we _are_ growing that grain.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| But we don't feed grain to cows, unless it's stuff like
| brewery mash where it's already been used to make human
| food.
|
| You cannot necessarily grow different stuff in the same
| field. Not all crops do well in the same kind of soil. For
| example, you need totally different soil for potatoes than
| you do for cereal crops if you want them to actually grow.
| simonsarris wrote:
| There are an enormous number of products that cattle provide
| beyond beef, from cosmetics to medicine to important industrial
| and agricultural products, with manure, bonemeal, and bloodmeal
| among them.
| modo_mario wrote:
| I agree with this. Tbh there are things that can be done to
| reduce it's footprint and we should collectively eat less
| meat. But comparing 1 to 1 what ends up on the cows plat and
| what ends up in the store generally doesn't do it justice.
| Absolutely everything gets used and processed.
| dghughes wrote:
| Not just fertilizer but politics. In my Canadian province there
| was a bumper crop of potatoes in 2021 but one field had one
| section with a potato virus. Shipments stopped and it took months
| of deals to get back to selling them. Even Puerto Rico with no
| potato fields and willing to take shipments was not allowed to
| receive any.
|
| Millions of pounds of perfectly good potatoes had to be
| destroyed. The US FDA declared the potato virus a threat to human
| health but no other country made that determination. Politics
| ruined a lot of food.
| jiveturkey42 wrote:
| Threads like these reminds me that HN is an overwhelmingly urban
| community with almost zero exposure to the agriculture sector
| mateo1 wrote:
| Not only that, but most of HN, even the professional
| programmers who've been here for a decade, have absolutely no
| clue about anything regarding the physical world. Chemical
| equilibriums, enthalpy of formation, basic irradiance
| calculations etc. That's perfectly fine, as long as you don't
| make really bold statements about things you don't understand.
| This thread reminds me of reddit. A ton of highly upvoted
| comments that are completely wrong. You don't need to live in
| the countryside to understand the basic economics surrounding
| agriculture, and no, "artificial" fertilizers aren't a scam nor
| a big corp trick. If you think you can replace them with fungi,
| good luck.
| refurb wrote:
| As someone who works in healthcare, it must be like a
| healthcare/medicine/biology thread popping up for me.
|
| You'll never see so many people so _certain_ they were right
| despite lacking the most basic knowledge on the topic.
| ziml77 wrote:
| I've found that you need come into HN comments with a
| baseline amount of skepticism and then increase skepticism
| the further the topic strays from being purely about software
| development.
| agentultra wrote:
| Even then, the things software developers believe about
| their own profession should be taken with a grain of salt.
| jiveturkey42 wrote:
| It conflating data with knowledge. "Because I deal with X
| industry data, I understand X industry"
| hef19898 wrote:
| That attitude is the main beef I have with highly
| qualified, up to PhD level, data scientists. they could
| bring so much to the table, in any domain, by working
| _with_ the domain experts. Instead of doing that, and
| trying to learn, most (basically all I encountered so far)
| try to understand any domain they encounter based on their
| data sets and some first principle. Kind of re-discovering
| gravity, and then expecting praise for being geniuses for
| doing so.
|
| A shame, really. Because my skill in big data analysis
| stops at what Excel can do without macros. I'd love to get
| more data insight, simply turned out that it is hard to
| get.
| [deleted]
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| HN is a bubble like Reddit, Twitter...etc.
|
| all are Bigly disconnected from the real world
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| My favorite are the threads about how we need to get rid of
| cars and switch everyone to public transit and cycling. :)
| jiveturkey42 wrote:
| A sure-fire indicator that someone exists in a purely urban
| mental-model of reality
| krzyk wrote:
| The alernative view is also freqently purely US-centric
| suburban/rural one. In many densely populated countries,
| rural areas have quite good public transport.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Yeah, but the US isn't one of those densely populated
| countries.
| typest wrote:
| As someone who is strongly wants to "get rid of cars and
| switch everyone to public transit and cycling" -- no one is
| talking about doing this in rural areas. Should we decrease
| reliance on cars in cities and focus more on alternative
| forms of transport? Yes. Will this work in rural areas? No,
| of course not.
| goatlover wrote:
| Will it work in suburbs and medium-sized cities,
| particularly in the US? There's around 280 US cities
| between 100,000 and 500,000 people.
| llanowarelves wrote:
| People who live in cities tend to look down on people who
| don't and wouldn't really care about what happens there,
| despite the fact that they rely on them for food.
|
| For example, think about how many times you've seen people
| say they don't care about gas prices because they don't
| have a car: they take public transportation (which uses
| gas..) or walk.
|
| The supply chain consists of things magically appearing in
| bodegas for their consumption, and that's why their
| pejoratively-named "flyover country" is and does nothing,
| they think.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > no one is talking about doing this in rural areas.
|
| Perhaps that's true in your experience, but I hear this
| fairly regularly including various subreddits, Twitter, and
| I've heard it here on HN as well (it's been a while, I
| don't care to dig through my comment history for links to
| the specific threads). Specifically, the argument takes one
| of two forms: either we should extend public transit and
| cycling infrastructure everywhere (including rural areas)
| or that we should implement policies that expressly
| accelerate urbanization and penalize rural life (or a
| combination).
| tenacious_tuna wrote:
| Similarly, a sure-fire way to tell someone hasn't lived in a
| place where you haven't needed a car for every aspect of life
| is when they criticize anti-car policy without engaging with
| the deeper reasons behind it :)
|
| I think a lot of the pushback against cars have to do with
| the popularization of human-centric design movements that
| question the assumption that cars are the pinnacle of
| transportation that American cities have operated from since
| about the 1950s. An easy example is the idea of "induced
| demand" [1] that shows even from a pure engineering
| perspective that the cost-benefit math for cars has long been
| unfairly weighted towards cars by outside forces.
|
| We're seeing a lot of pressure around housing and energy and
| social policy in general which in turn is making us question
| decisions we've made, culturally, in history, like can we
| really sustain the building of less dense housing for our
| growing population? Does it make sense to give every family
| 0.75 acres of grass, 400 sqft of driveway and a 2 car garage,
| when those things are only used some of the time? Might there
| be better ways to approach the utilization of that space as a
| population?
|
| I'm rambling now, but I get frustrated when people dismiss
| concerns like that out of hand. Can the US ever totally get
| rid of cars? No, not for a hundred years at least. Having a
| good 80 years of city planning being focused around every
| adult having their own vehicle is of course going to e
| difficult to move away from, and there are certain lifestyles
| (rural living, farming, regions where building trains is more
| impractical) that it'll just never be a great idea... but I
| still think it's worth interrogating these assumptions we've
| carried to see if there's a better way we could be living
| life.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand#Effect_in_t
| rans...
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > Does it make sense to give every family 0.75 acres of
| grass, 400 sqft of driveway and a 2 car garage
|
| A standard suburban house doesn't sit on 0.75 acres. 0.2 is
| typical. Though you're probably low on the driveway and
| garage :).
|
| I'd like to see a better argument for why we shouldn't live
| this way. There are relatively large metros (e.g. Portland)
| that are predominantly suburban single family homes, and so
| far it seems to work fine. Sure, we could compress Portland
| into a 10 mile by 10 mile square, but why? Would it
| actually make our lives better? By what metric?
| tenacious_tuna wrote:
| I'm hopping on a plane in a minute, but I'll do my best
| to at least start an example :)
|
| The real question is "what do you mean by 'it works
| fine'?" To me, the effects of suburban living are such
| that we don't treat people as people unless they're
| shrouded in a big rolling box of metal. Of course it'll
| vary from person to person and family to family. I think
| urban environments offer children much more freedom than
| corresponding suburban environments, while being safer.
| There's much more mobility and access to things outside
| of the house, which I'd argue significantly enriches
| childhood experience and leads to more adaptable adults.
|
| As an adult, I'm overjoyed by the ease with which I can
| get to things around my city. I never have to deal with
| traffic, I can walk to three different grocery stores in
| under fifteen minutes. I have dozens of restaurants in
| similar distance, and I never worry about having too much
| to drink to safely drive home. I don't have to deal with
| traffic, and when friends come to visit (or when I visit
| them) I can take the train and enjoy a book instead of
| navigating roads. I feel far healthier and happier with
| the amount of light physical activity that's been baked
| into my life just by going about my normal routine.
| Before we moved to the city, I lived a pretty typical
| office worker sedentary life: I'd get up, shower, drive
| (sitting) to work, work (sitting, sometimes standing),
| then drive home. Now I walk to work and feel invigorated
| as I come through the door 15 minutes after I left,
| without the annoyance of rush hour or traffic or bad
| drivers. (A co-worker of mine lives out in the suburbs of
| our city, which are denser than most, and takes the light
| rail into work; half an hour on the train, 5 minute walk
| from the station. If he took a car, we'd need parking for
| him and everyone else that had one, and roads for it [see
| again, induced demand in my post above], and I wouldn't
| be able to walk to work myself). A twenty minute walk
| puts me at museums or bars or train stations or work or
| the store or like 5 friends' houses or the lake shore or
| a thousand other places. No parking, no navigating
| traffic, no having to move the car or worry about not
| wandering far from the car or figuring out how to
| navigate unfamiliar roads. Honestly the most stressful
| part of any of my journeys is wondering if drivers are
| paying attention as I go through the crosswalk, or if
| they're going to cut the corner to try to make their left
| turn.
|
| As a citizen, my city's limited resources don't have to
| go to maintaining roads that the richer segments of the
| population get proportionally more benefit from. We can
| invest in more public services since we're not committed
| endlessly to maintaining the cost-sink of asphalt plains.
| [1] Public transit is an amazing economic equalizer as
| well: In a suburban environment, you _must_ have a
| reliable car to make it to work. If you 're too poor (or
| just starting out) to afford a car, or if it's
| unreliable, that's going to severely curtail your
| available job pool. (There's a common saying that "we
| don't all have the same time" when it comes to discussing
| class differences; my highschool girlfriend spent two
| hours on the bus, one way, to work, because her family
| only had one car, and her mother needed it for _her_ job.
| That 's four hours a day she can't use to cook, or study
| [she could try, but a bus is far from an ideal study
| environment], or sleep. If our town had better transit,
| or if our town wasn't so dense that it took two hours to
| travel from house to shopping district, it'd be a very
| different story.)
|
| This is to say nothing of the actual health impact of
| cars: accidents, death, pollution, or just the amount of
| money we're 'required' to spend on them so we can
| participate in wider society. I feel like putting these
| at the end really undercuts their significance, but we
| never seem to talk about these facts. Car accidents are
| the eighth-leading cause of death in the US [2]. Imagine
| the economic savings, and the amount of medical
| resources, we could free up by reducing that. Imagine the
| value our citizens would get out of not paying $20k (at
| the _very low end_) every five or eight years for their
| cars, not to mention the maintenance.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfsCniN7Nsc [2]:
| https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/global-road-
| safety/index...
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > The real question is "what do you mean by 'it works
| fine'?"
|
| Portland has been around for almost 180 years, and people
| still seem to think it is an attractive place to live.
| The last couple years have been pretty terrible, but that
| doesn't seem to be unique to this area, and if anything
| is more of an urban problem than a suburban one.
|
| I won't tell you what _you_ should like, or what your
| definition of good is. But for me, I enjoy suburban
| living more. For example, I drove into downtown Portland
| a few days ago and watched Hamilton, it 's only 20
| minutes away. We go to museums, art shows, etc. But, I
| can turn away from Portland and in less than 20 minutes
| be in an entirely rural area enjoying nature. 20 minutes
| farther and I'm approaching Mt. Hood. When I get home, I
| have my own little square of paradise: no shared walls
| with strangers, a place for the kids to play, a nice
| community where everyone sorta knows everyone else. City
| living is the right answer for some people, but
| definitely not all of us.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > The real question is "what do you mean by 'it works
| fine'?" To me, the effects of suburban living are such
| that we don't treat people as people unless they're
| shrouded in a big rolling box of metal.
|
| This is just unhelpful, tired rhetoric. Everyone has the
| same rights whether they're in a car or not. Moreover,
| public transit literally depends on much larger "metal
| boxes".
|
| It sounds like you live in a magical city.
|
| In Chicago, it's much faster to get around by car than it
| is to take the train or bus. In general, if you're taking
| the bus or train anywhere, it's almost always a 45 minute
| trip one-way and it can easily be double that if you have
| a transfer.
|
| I like that I can walk to a few grocery stores and
| restaurants, but if I want to go to a specialty shop or
| visit a restaurant in a different neighborhood or even
| just make a big trip in inclimate weather I can do so
| much more quickly/easily with a car than without. Of
| course, rideshare is a thing, but a round trip to another
| neighborhood can easily run anywhere from $60-120 and
| even then you have to wait for drivers and even then they
| might blow you off (maybe I'm just unlucky here, but it
| seems like 5-10% of drivers blow me off, especially if I
| ordered a ride just before a price surge).
|
| > I never worry about having too much to drink to safely
| drive home
|
| This isn't much of a problem for me--if I want more than
| a couple of drinks (rare), I just make arrangements in
| advance (DD or walking or rideshare or public transit).
| If I don't make arrangements, I don't drink. I don't know
| what could be more convenient than this (I see the logic
| in doing the inconvenient-but-safe thing all the time,
| but it means missing out on a lot of convenience
| unnecessarily).
|
| > I don't have to deal with traffic, and when friends
| come to visit (or when I visit them) I can take the train
| and enjoy a book instead of navigating roads.
|
| Traffic is tedious, but I mostly just avoid traveling
| during rush hour (not usually a big deal since I can
| leave later and still get there at the same time as I
| would if I took the train during rush hour). It wouldn't
| be a problem at all if I didn't live in a city. Anyway, I
| don't know what your city's public transit system is
| like, but in Chicago it's uncommon to get a seat on a
| train (if you get one, there will usually be someone who
| needs it more), and the etiquette is to hold your bag
| rather than wearing it on your back (so we can squeeze an
| extra 1/4 of a person into the train car). Since your
| other hand is holding a strap or railing, there's no free
| hand to hold the book and anyway it's too distracting to
| me with the pan handlers trying to get my attention or
| the guys who blast their portable speakers or are trying
| to start shit with other riders (or straight up smoking
| weed/cigarettes). Buses are a little nicer, but they are
| subject to traffic just like cars. Instead, I just drive
| and listen to a podcast or audiobook; navigation has been
| a solved problem for a decade thanks to pervasive GPS.
|
| > I feel far healthier and happier with the amount of
| light physical activity that's been baked into my life
| just by going about my normal routine. Before we moved to
| the city, I lived a pretty typical office worker
| sedentary life: I'd get up, shower, drive (sitting) to
| work, work (sitting, sometimes standing), then drive
| home. Now I walk to work and feel invigorated as I come
| through the door 15 minutes after I left, without the
| annoyance of rush hour or traffic or bad drivers.
|
| I liked walking to work when the weather was nice, but
| that's pretty rare in Chicago and anyway there are only
| so many different routes you can take after which it gets
| dull. I'm really glad I got a remote gig. I have a ton of
| time left over, and my wife and I will load up the dog
| and go to a park or even rent a lake house for a week
| outside of the city for a nature fix. If we didn't have
| cars, we would probably stay in our neighborhood rather
| than spend the extra $100/day on a car rental, but since
| we have a car anyway the difference is marginal. And the
| car is convenient for other things too--we can take our
| dog to the vet or to friends' houses without having to
| pay an exorbitant rideshare cost, for example. Parking is
| really only inconvenient downtown during the work week
| and a few other places (e.g., around the zoo during
| summer weekends, etc). Otherwise it's like $5-10 for a
| few hours.
|
| > A twenty minute walk puts me at museums or bars or
| train stations or work or the store or like 5 friends'
| houses or the lake shore or a thousand other places. No
| parking, no navigating traffic, no having to move the car
| or worry about not wandering far from the car or figuring
| out how to navigate unfamiliar roads
|
| Seems a little silly that you're willing to walk 20
| minutes but not "wander far from the car". :)
|
| > Honestly the most stressful part of any of my journeys
| is wondering if drivers are paying attention as I go
| through the crosswalk, or if they're going to cut the
| corner to try to make their left turn.
|
| Yeah, this is definitely one of the more stressful
| aspects of walking around Chicago.
|
| > As a citizen, my city's limited resources don't have to
| go to maintaining roads that the richer segments of the
| population get proportionally more benefit from.
|
| In Chicago, the nicer neighborhoods not only have better
| roads but also much better public transit options. It
| turns out the same forces that operate on streets operate
| on public transit.
|
| > There's a common saying that "we don't all have the
| same time" when it comes to discussing class differences
|
| This favors cars, which waste less time than public
| transit in the general case.
|
| > This is to say nothing of the actual health impact of
| cars: accidents, death, pollution, or just the amount of
| money we're 'required' to spend on them so we can
| participate in wider society.
|
| Accidents are the best argument against cars, IMO. I
| think we can sharply curtail this with better city
| planning and more safety features (especially with
| advancements in self-driving technology). Regarding
| pollution and maintainability, EVs emit less per person
| than a diesel city bus (this will continue to improve
| over time as our energy grid becomes cleaner) and they're
| also inherently more maintainable (no transmission,
| engine, exhaust system, etc). Once the high end of the
| market is saturated, we'll start to see more, simpler
| models on the low-end, and these will eventually hit the
| used car market. Fuel will also be cheaper because
| electricity is cheaper than gasoline.
|
| > Imagine the value our citizens would get out of not
| paying $20k (at the _very low end_) every five or eight
| years for their cars, not to mention the maintenance.
|
| I'm not sure what that $20k figure is meant to represent.
| You can get a reliable car for $10k these days, drive it
| for 5-10 years and turn around and sell it for $2-4k. Of
| course, you'll have to insure it and pay for gas and
| maintenance, but that's probably quite a lot less than
| most couples spend on public transit, rideshare, and car
| rentals.
| titzer wrote:
| It's not the first-order (i.e. direct) effects of
| suburban life. In fact, TBH, suburban life can be
| downright cozy--you got your own decent-sized home, a
| little patch of grass, maybe a patio, barbecue, deck,
| maybe even a garden.
|
| That's not the issue. It's the _externalities_ , the
| downstream effects, of trying to scale up suburban living
| to huge numbers of people.
|
| At a small scale, a little town of a few hundred or
| couple thousand people, things remain walkable. There
| could be a corner grocery store, one gas station, a few
| stores clustered together in the town square, courthouse,
| playground, park, school, church....all nice and
| wonderful.
|
| But all that disappears when you scale suburbs up to tens
| of thousands, hundreds of thousands, then millions of
| people. The amount of land area gets enormous. Traffic
| gets enormous. It scales like O(n^2). You get bigger and
| bigger streets. Bigger and bigger courthouses. Bigger and
| bigger stores, parking lots, huge shopping malls, and
| everything keeps getting pushed out by the _pressure_ of
| it all. It _sprawls_. The city tries to transform itself
| into something medium density, as housing prices go up.
| Office and commercial real estate go up. People want
| white collar, nice, high-paying jobs. They don 't want to
| be plumbers and electricians and house painters, but
| executives and managers and have their own businesses.
|
| But suburban sprawl really doesn't support those things
| very well. People get pushed miles and miles from their
| jobs. Traffic becomes a nightmare. The prices go off the
| charts. Tradespeople get pushed out. Culture takes a
| dive. No more walking or biking when those freeways go
| up.
|
| Bad examples of sprawl are places like Houston and Los
| Angeles, even the Bay Area now. I spent 4 years in LA, 5
| in the Bay Area. LA is truly mind-blowing. The entire
| basin is just one big grid of endless permutations of the
| same concrete jungle, here or there less dense or more
| dense, a few bright spots, but OMG and endless labyrinth
| of Stapleses, Starbuckses, McD's and strip malls...
|
| But LA in the 1930s wasn't that. It was just a few towns
| here and there and some downtown. It was literally a few
| spots in the desert where people had little nuclei of the
| small-town living. It just grew without real direction
| and was completely powered by oil and cars.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I don't like American suburbs for me personally, but the
| US has tons of space and I don't understand how traffic
| would be better if we pushed more people into less space
| (with fewer streets and so on). Indeed, most big cities
| are famous for their congestion.
|
| With respect to prices, these are self-regulating. If
| prices go up, things either get denser and/or people move
| elsewhere.
|
| > Culture takes a dive.
|
| Again, suburbs aren't my thing, but it seems _really_
| offensive /chauvinistic to imply that suburban culture is
| lesser than urban culture. I'm sure I'm misunderstanding,
| and in the spirit of charity I want to give you the
| opportunity to set the record straight.
|
| > No more walking or biking when those freeways go up.
|
| Is this intrinsic to suburbs, or is it an artifact of how
| suburbs were planned at the time that suburbs exploded in
| popularity? Can suburbs be designed to be more
| walkable/bikeable (I would actually be surprised if they
| aren't already)?
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > I don't like American suburbs for me personally
|
| I'm not sure if this is really clear to people who don't
| live here, but I think it's important to note that
| 'suburbs' doesn't really mean just one thing. Portland is
| mostly suburbs, for example. I think it's tempting to
| think suburbia must be endless miles of tract housing
| with no business, no retail. While that happens, it's not
| at all universal.
|
| > Can suburbs be designed to be more walkable/bikeable (I
| would actually be surprised if they aren't already)?
|
| Can't speak for everywhere in the US, but in the places
| I've lived, this is standard. Part of the cost of
| building a house is putting sidewalks in. So the problem
| isn't walkability. The problem, where it exists, is a
| lack of anything to walk to. But that shouldn't be that
| hard to address -- knock down some houses and zone for
| commercial. Build small cities out of suburbs. (I expect
| that already happens, it certainly happened decades ago
| in places with long established suburbs).
| titzer wrote:
| > Again, suburbs aren't my thing, but it seems really
| offensive/chauvinistic to imply that suburban culture is
| lesser than urban culture. I'm sure I'm misunderstanding,
| and in the spirit of charity I want to give you the
| opportunity to set the record straight.
|
| No, I meant that culture takes a dive _from small-town
| culture_ , where you know your neighbors and shop owners.
| tenacious_tuna wrote:
| On the points of culture, there's a video [1] that talks
| about how common US zoning pressures towns to all build
| very similarly, to the point where they look almost
| indistinguishable from one another. There's similar
| videos done by City Beautiful and Not Just Bikes, but I'm
| having a harder time searching my history for them on my
| phone. (I'll try to post them once I'm back at a real
| computer.)
|
| Here's another video [2] that discusses how city tax
| revenue is primarily earned in their dense downtown
| regions, and spent on their more distributed suburban
| environments.
|
| Others in the comments have discussed this, but the
| issues with towns being walkable and cyclist friendly
| tend to intersect directly with anti-goals if car design.
| Places aren't walkable if there's huge roads and parking
| lots that people have to traverse in order to get to
| them. Similarly, cars are quite hazardous to pedestrians
| and cyclists. If we're optimizing for human-scale
| environments, we're inherently car-hostile. Similarly, if
| we're optimizing for efficiency of cars, then we're
| hostile to human-scale design. The ideas are largely
| antithetical.
|
| You can get some hybridization--metra trains from city
| cores to the suburbs, street cars or trams along main
| suburban drags alongside with automobiles, but one system
| constrains the other.
|
| Historically, highway systems have segregated
| neighborhoods whose citizens were poorer, and relied
| disproportionately on public transit or bikes and
| walking. If you have to go half a mile out of your way to
| find an overpass over the highway to get to the nearest
| grocery, and that overpass has a litter-covered sidewalk
| barely two feet wide, we definitely aren't building our
| suburbs to be walkable or bikable.
|
| [1]: https://youtu.be/UX4KklvCDmg [2]:
| https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > Similarly, a sure-fire way to tell someone hasn't lived
| in a place where you haven't needed a car for every aspect
| of life is when they criticize anti-car policy without
| engaging with the deeper reasons behind it :)
|
| I think this is mostly a straw man or nut picking. From
| what I can tell, there aren't many rural people arguing
| that rural transit policy should be imposed on urban areas,
| but rather the debate is about whether or not policies that
| arguably make sense in an urban environment should be
| imposed on the rest of the country. Notably, rural people
| have enough exposure to urban environments that they
| understand that urban environments differ from rural
| environments, but not so much the other way around: e.g.,
| everyone watches the same entertainment media that is
| almost invariably set in urban environments and most people
| have traveled to an urban area for business or pleasure,
| but there's very little media set in a rural environment
| and "rural tourism" isn't exactly a popular pastime of
| urbanites.
|
| > I think a lot of the pushback against cars have to do
| with the popularization of human-centric design movements
| that question the assumption that cars are the pinnacle of
| transportation that American cities have operated from
| since about the 1950s. An easy example is the idea of
| "induced demand" [1] that shows even from a pure
| engineering perspective that the cost-benefit math for cars
| has long been unfairly weighted towards cars by outside
| forces.
|
| Sure, I actually agree with a lot of this. I would like to
| see American cities and suburbs become more walkable, and
| I'm sure the car industry lobbied for car-centric planning,
| jay-walking laws, etc. My criticism isn't that anti-car
| policies are unfounded or they don't make sense anywhere,
| but that the anti-car movement is generally ignorant (in a
| literal sense, not pejoratively) of the non-urban world.
|
| > We're seeing a lot of pressure around housing and energy
| and social policy in general which in turn is making us
| question decisions we've made, culturally, in history, like
| can we really sustain the building of less dense housing
| for our growing population?
|
| Yes, outside of urban areas we certainly can do this for
| the foreseeable future. Most of America isn't constrained
| by space.
|
| > I'm rambling now, but I get frustrated when people
| dismiss concerns like that out of hand.
|
| No one is dismissing these concerns out of hand--I'm only
| arguing that the policies that policies which assume a high
| degree of density don't make sense in areas where that
| assumption is incorrect. This seems almost tautological.
|
| > but I still think it's worth interrogating these
| assumptions we've carried to see if there's a better way we
| could be living life.
|
| Fully agree. I think we could have a lot more productive
| conversations if we started by reimagining collectively
| rather than asserting how others should live their lives
| (without demonstrating any understanding of their
| concerns).
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Cars give you freedom... yes, they're a cost, they take up
| space, you have to build around them, but you can move
| wherever you want, whenever you want.
|
| I live in a country with relatively good public transport,
| relatively great one in the capital and few other large
| cities, with public bikes and biking lanes.
|
| Then 2020 came, and due to covid, no more public transport
| (for some time). Want to go to work? Too bad. Want to go to
| the larger (and cheaper) store... nope. Order food delivery
| from a large supermarket chain? Good luck, people don't
| want to go to crowded stores, and delivery slots are full 2
| minutes after midnight.
|
| I know it's an extreme situation, but it made people
| rethink what they need for their independece, and cars came
| high on the list.
| tenacious_tuna wrote:
| I would argue that the urban planning that enables the
| use of cars actually restricts your freedom; you can't go
| anywhere without your car, and god forbid if you want to
| go to the store across the stroad, you have to cross 5
| lanes of traffic. You can't walk that--or if you do, you
| have to cross that, and another square mile of parking
| lot.
|
| Cars are only synonymous with "independence" in the US
| because we've made it impossible to be independent unless
| you use this giant metal box to engage with the world. To
| me, that's the opposite of independence.
|
| Yes, COVID is an extreme situation--but I don't think
| it's reasonable to plan our daily lives around extreme
| situations. I see this when people buy their cars--Is it
| reasonable to buy a pickup truck if you're only going to
| tow or haul something once a year with it? Is the excess
| spend in car payment, insurance, gas usage, consumables,
| and safety hazard worth that convenience? Why not just
| rent the truck when you need it?
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > I would argue that the urban planning that enables the
| use of cars actually restricts your freedom; you can't go
| anywhere without your car, and god forbid if you want to
| go to the store across the stroad, you have to cross 5
| lanes of traffic. You can't walk that--or if you do, you
| have to cross that, and another square mile of parking
| lot.
|
| On the other hand, even in my urban environment, I can
| get to another neighborhood in less than half the time it
| would take me to get there by train or bus (especially if
| there is a transfer involved). It's also a lot more
| comfortable than waiting on a platform/bus stop exposed
| to the elements only to squeeze myself into a small box
| (that smells at once of urine, vomit, BO, and cigarette
| smoke) with dozens of strangers, some of whom are
| panhandling, blasting music, threatening other commuters,
| etc.
|
| Moreover, my wife and I share a car, and we spend quite a
| lot less on it (all in: maintenance, fuel, parking,
| insurance, etc) than we did on public transit + rideshare
| + car rentals even without amortizing the car payment
| over the useful lifetime of the car. And of course our
| time and comfort are also valuable to us.
|
| > Cars are only synonymous with "independence" in the US
| because we've made it impossible to be independent unless
| you use this giant metal box to engage with the world. To
| me, that's the opposite of independence.
|
| This is a feature of the new world (not just the US), and
| it's a consequence of our post-car development. If Europe
| had the bulk of its development in the post-car era, it
| would've turned out the same way. Also, if you're getting
| around by public transit you need _even bigger_ metal
| boxes and you need more of them and you have to wait for
| them and they are often late and you will be packed onto
| them like cattle and you 're limited by where they go
| (hence the "independence" of the car).
| tenacious_tuna wrote:
| > [Cars] are a feature of the new world, just not the US.
| If Europe had the bulk of it's development in the post-
| car era, it would've turned out the same way.
|
| A huge portion of Europe was destroyed.(and consequently
| rebuilt) in WWI and WWII, which are both firmly in the
| post-car era. They rebuilt with an emphasis on trains.
| Where they didn't, or in later years when they chose
| instead to invest in car development, some of them are
| now turning back to human-centric development [1].
|
| > ... Need even bigger metal boxes and you need more of
| them and you have to wait for them and they are often
| late...
|
| In terms of space-occupation in cars vs buses (or
| trains), mass transit absolutely wins. This is a trivial
| argument. There's a dozen versions of this picture [2]
| that shows the difference between like 80 people
| commuting via bike, bus, or car. The amount of redundant
| space taken up by cars is bonkers to me.
|
| "Packed into them like cattle", I'll grant you rush hour
| gets crowded, but you'll spend less time on the trains
| than you would trying to cram that many people through
| the highway. See also the "induced demand" problem of
| highways.
|
| Moreover, while you're not using your car, it's taking up
| space doing nothing. While I'm not using the subway, it's
| working to shuttle the other 1.6 million people who use
| it (that number varies wildly depending on your city,
| notably).
|
| To the point of transit times and the, ah, atmosphere of
| transit: Of course travel time will vary according to how
| big the transit network is. You see this a lot in sub-
| urban downtowns. A bus system will exist, but it'll be
| painfully slow to get from one point to another when
| compared to a car. I argue this is because the
| externalities of the disproportionately wealthy-
| benefiting poor-subsidized road system. Similarly, why is
| it when we have traffic issues the argument is always
| "build more lanes! Improve the roads!" But when transit
| has throughout problems we say "Look, this is why transit
| never works, and we should invest in roads instead!" You
| haven't done this overtly, but that idea underlies your
| argument: cars are better, we shouldn't waste our money
| on transit.
|
| As for being uncomfortable or dealing with less-than-
| savory people on mass transi, you're absolutely right
| that those are unpleasant experiences, and being able to
| use a car does help avoid them... Just like moving to a
| wealthier part of town or building a highway to keep the
| riffraff out would help avoid them, but none of those
| solve the underlying problem. It is not a fault of the
| underlying public system that it is so used by people of
| poorer means or those with mental disorders or simialrt,
| it is a flaw of the private wealthy systems that it
| allows people to avoid examples of their fellow citizens
| whose society has failed them. We shouldn't avoid using
| transit, or not have transit, because it accidentally
| functions as a haven for the homeless or mentally unwell
| or destitute. We should address those failings of our
| society by providing for those people, the better to
| enable our public systems to fulfill their original
| designed function. Importantly though, the public
| resource is still serving the public. You being able to
| escape the flawed public systems and escape to your
| private spaces (car, house, etc) because you have the
| money to do so is not an indictment of that systems
| failings, but of your empathy for your fellow citizens.
|
| Put another way, it sounds almost like you're saying "I
| don't like going to the community doctor, and don't
| believe we should invest in it more, because it's always
| full of sick people."
|
| [1]: https://youtu.be/sI-1YNAmWlk [2]:
| https://humantransit.org/2012/09/the-photo-that-explains-
| alm...
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > A huge portion of Europe was destroyed.(and
| consequently rebuilt) in WWI and WWII, which are both
| firmly in the post-car era. They rebuilt with an emphasis
| on trains. Where they didn't, or in later years when they
| chose instead to invest in car development, some of them
| are now turning back to human-centric development [1].
|
| The cities were already established. They weren't
| repopulating the continent from scratch.
|
| > In terms of space-occupation in cars vs buses (or
| trains), mass transit absolutely wins. This is a trivial
| argument.
|
| Yes, but space-occupation is a foolish thing to optimize
| for in an environment that isn't constrained by space.
| _This_ is a trivial argument.
|
| > "Packed into them like cattle", I'll grant you rush
| hour gets crowded, but you'll spend less time on the
| trains than you would trying to cram that many people
| through the highway. See also the "induced demand"
| problem of highways.
|
| I spend quite a lot less time driving than I would if I
| took the trains. This is true virtually everywhere in
| Chicago, and Chicago only has only 3-4 main highways
| (which is to say it's not an especially car-friendly city
| and it's 5th ranked for public transit). Most of the
| time, it's twice as fast to drive as to take public
| transit, but if you have a transfer it can easily be 4
| times slower than driving.
|
| > Moreover, while you're not using your car, it's taking
| up space doing nothing. While I'm not using the subway,
| it's working to shuttle the other 1.6 million people who
| use it (that number varies wildly depending on your city,
| notably).
|
| Agreed that cars are less space-efficient, disagree that
| space-efficiency is the paramount variable.
|
| > Similarly, why is it when we have traffic issues the
| argument is always "build more lanes! Improve the roads!"
| But when transit has throughout problems we say "Look,
| this is why transit never works, and we should invest in
| roads instead!" You haven't done this overtly, but that
| idea underlies your argument: cars are better, we
| shouldn't waste our money on transit.
|
| This isn't my argument at all. I'm not universally
| against public transit--it makes sense in some places and
| in those places it should be improved and expanded. My
| whole thesis is that different places have different
| constraints and thus we shouldn't expect "public transit"
| to be a panacea.
|
| > As for being uncomfortable or dealing with less-than-
| savory people on mass transi, you're absolutely right
| that those are unpleasant experiences, and being able to
| use a car does help avoid them... Just like moving to a
| wealthier part of town or building a highway to keep the
| riffraff out would help avoid them, but none of those
| solve the underlying problem.
|
| I didn't claim that driving solves social problems, only
| that it lets people control their own environments. I
| can't get my city to police or clean public transit
| appropriately, and I certainly can't get them to fix the
| underlying social problems; however, I can control my
| commuting environment by opting to drive. I'm happy to
| revisit public transit if/when we can solve poverty and
| mental healthcare, but until that utopia arrives, driving
| is a nice alternative.
|
| > We shouldn't avoid using transit, or not have transit,
| because it accidentally functions as a haven for the
| homeless or mentally unwell or destitute. We should
| address those failings of our society by providing for
| those people, the better to enable our public systems to
| fulfill their original designed function.
|
| These are orthogonal issues. Me driving (or not) doesn't
| stop my society from addressing its issues. I appreciate
| that people are more likely to advocate for issues that
| are visible to them, but that will probably look like
| cracking down on these people rather than solving
| ultimate causes (and anyway, our cities have a whole lot
| of people taking public transit already and yet these
| issues persist while other parts of the country have
| fewer problems).
|
| > You being able to escape the flawed public systems and
| escape to your private spaces (car, house, etc) because
| you have the money to do so is not an indictment of that
| systems failings, but of your empathy for your fellow
| citizens.
|
| I grew up working class, and it doesn't take a lot of
| money to escape the burden of public transit. We should
| absolutely expand the franchise to more people, however.
| Moreover, whether I take public transit or not has no
| bearing on my willingness to improve society. Please
| don't make assumptions about my motives, it's rude and
| unnecessary, and it violates site guidelines.
| leokennis wrote:
| Two counter points.
|
| - Where I live (The Netherlands) you don't have to live in a
| city to have good PT. There are places that you cannot reach
| by train or bus but they are few.
|
| - While sometimes a car is necessary, the cars many people
| prefer (insanely oversized "trucks") are hardly ever
| necessary.
| honkdaddy wrote:
| The 'insanely oversized "trucks"' are necessary for reasons
| probably not evident if you grew up in a country like NT.
| I'm from a small town in rural Ontario, Canada where most
| people drive a 4WD vehicle largely because they'd never get
| out of their snow-filled driveway in a tiny European style
| car. Lots of country roads are literally impassable without
| a large machine; having a truck of some kind is more or
| less a necessity for plenty of rural folks.
| gopher_space wrote:
| Yeah but thirty years ago they were all little 2WD
| Nissans and Toyotas with a few bales of hay in the back.
| The trucks you're talking about were kind of family
| tractors and would rarely be used for distance. They all
| got like 9mpg and just needed to run when something got
| stuck.
| yissp wrote:
| Hardly anyone is making compact pickups anymore. Even
| models that used to be in that class (e.g. Tacoma,
| Ranger) seem to have gotten a lot bigger over the past 10
| years. I find it disappointing, I always thought they
| were a great compromise between fuel efficiency while
| still retaining most of the utility of a regular truck.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Huh? 30 years ago Nissans and Toyotas had negligible
| pickup marketshare (at least in the US, not sure about
| Canada?). Anyway, the average retail price of gas back
| then was ~$1/gallon, so 9mpg wasn't a major deal
| (considerably cheaper than a 30mpg sedan today).
| triceratops wrote:
| What explains the abundance of trucks that I see here in
| suburbia? Or in places like the Bay Area, where there's
| never, ever any snow.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| Outdoor activities? Labor jobs? I don't think you can
| judge without knowing their lifestyle.
|
| Even then, who is to say who can get what? I don't see
| why trucks are one of things people can't buy just
| because they prefer it.
|
| I'm sure everyone owns something that another person
| would consider frivolous.
| wincy wrote:
| The United States is 200x larger in size (excluding Alaska)
| but has only 20x as many people as the Netherlands.
| ajross wrote:
| The urban cores of New York and Boston are denser than
| any city in Europe! I mean, yes, it's true that the
| "empty" spaces are much bigger in the Americas. But you
| don't need a personal automobile to reach places you go
| only occasionally, and often for leisure. There's
| absolutely no reason that kind of lifestyle is impossible
| here.
|
| It's not what we chose[1], but there's certainly nothing
| about the geography the precludes it. The focus, and
| later dependence, on extended exurbs connected with roads
| for private vehicles is very much a policy decision.
|
| [1] Actually it is what we chose, up until the 1950's,
| when we chose to build in different ways.
| animal_spirits wrote:
| People also forget that Europe has had continuous non-
| nomadic people living in most places for thousands of
| years already, while the US has only had that for a few
| hundred years. Many things that have already been figured
| out in Europe for centuries (roads, dams, levies) are
| still in progress developments in the US
| goatlover wrote:
| The US has tons of smaller cities and towns. New York and
| Massachusetts included. There might be trains going into
| Boston and NY, but you still need to get around the
| smaller population centers if you live or visit there.
| The Northeast has a big mix of highly urban areas and
| countryside.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| > The urban cores of New York and Boston are denser than
| any city in Europe!
|
| And unaffordable to the vast majority. I'd love to have
| plenty of walkable city options in the US, but they
| aren't going to appear overnight by banning cars when you
| need them to get around places over half of the people in
| the US live in.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| The whole point of the thread is that there's a lot of
| variance in density within the US, and we shouldn't
| regulate the rural midwest like we regulate NYC.
|
| > It's not what we chose[1], but there's certainly
| nothing about the geography the precludes it. The focus,
| and later dependence, on extended exurbs connected with
| roads for private vehicles is very much a policy
| decision.
|
| It's an amalgamation of a hundred years of policy
| decisions and private investment based around those
| decisions, and it would take as long to reverse it even
| if there was political appetite for it. And there's not
| much appetite for it because most people prefer the
| convenience and comfort of cars. To that end:
|
| > There's absolutely no reason that kind of lifestyle is
| impossible here.
|
| It's not a matter of whether that lifestyle is possible,
| but whether it's desirable. Most Americans find the
| convenience and comfort of cars to be preferable to
| public transit.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| > (insanely oversized "trucks") are hardly ever necessary.
|
| As someone with a truck constantly having to lend it for
| friends to use, I disagree.
|
| Not sure exactly what you meant by insanely oversized, but
| a lift kit and tires aren't abnormal, they have use for
| off-roading / mudding which is fairly popular.
|
| It's both a style preference and lifestyle preference. Good
| luck using a car if you have a lot of outdoor hobbies or
| work.
|
| Kind of strange to tell a whole population what is or isn't
| necessary in their life, especially without knowing their
| reasonings.
| ajross wrote:
| Isn't the fact that your friends don't need a truck
| because they can borrow one occasionally evidence
| _against_ your point? I mean, yes, it 's true that it
| would be nicer if they'd rent one instead of impose on
| you. But clearly they don't "need" trucks of their own,
| because they have access to shared resources.
|
| This is the kind of absolutist argument that these
| threads always fall into. You hear someone say "not
| everyone needs a truck!" or "there are too many trucks!",
| and hear "You, personally, should not own a truck". No,
| clearly trucks are useful vehicles and need to exist for
| people to use. But we also build and deploy way too many
| of them. Those facts can be true at the same time.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| > I mean, yes, it's true that it would be nicer if they'd
| rent one instead of impose on you.
|
| Whether they rent or borrow one, they still needed a
| truck.
|
| I need mine all the time, as do most others I know. I
| also listed activities that people like to use them for.
|
| > But we also build and deploy way too many of them.
| Those facts can be true at the same time.
|
| How many should we allow then? Who should qualify for
| them? Do recreational activities not qualify? Who gets to
| decide this? Do we do this for other things?
| ajross wrote:
| > Whether they rent or borrow one, they still needed a
| truck.
|
| Yes, but only occasionally! Again, you're thinking we're
| trying to "take away your truck", when we're just saying
| (correctly) that most people (like your friends!) don't
| need them except rarely and are better served by other
| kind of resource allocation than personal vehicles.
|
| > How many should we allow [...] who should qualify [...]
| banned [...] who gets to decide
|
| This isn't a good faith argument. No one is advocating
| for any of that. Please don't.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| > Yes, but only occasionally!
|
| Again I use mine all the time. I'm not advocating getting
| rid of cars because some people don't need a truck. I
| don't believe there are too many trucks or cars, I feel
| like the people saying there are too many trucks have the
| obligation to explicitly give reasons as you why.
|
| > This isn't a good faith argument. No one is advocating
| for any of that. Please don't.
|
| It is in good faith, I assure you. I'm trying to make you
| realize that what you view as necessary isn't the same
| for others. You said there are too many. I would like to
| know what you view as necessary and what the ideal amount
| would be for you. What uses for trucks are deemed as
| necessary and what are frivolous.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| It seems like a needlessly divisive conversation, every
| time it comes up. My guess is that 99% of all the people
| who complain that they see people driving pickups not
| hauling anything are themselves usually driving a 5
| passenger car as the sole occupant.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| As others have pointed out, the US is much less dense than
| the Netherlands and also the bulk of our development
| happened in a post-car context--the US literally evolved
| around the car, and consequently doing away with cars is a
| much less realistic proposition for the US than it is for
| the Netherlands.
|
| To that point, most of our streets, roads, and parking
| spaces are much wider than yours, and can accommodate
| larger vehicles. As others have noted, we have more people
| in remote areas, and while Netherlands is obviously an
| agricultural superpower, your farms are smaller than ours
| (larger farms require larger equipment).
| User23 wrote:
| It always amuses me when Europeans are confused by the lack
| of good public transit in much of the USA. Come visit here
| and use our public transit and you'll see why we like cars.
| incomingpain wrote:
| jiveturkey42 wrote:
| What in tarnation are you rambling about?
| incomingpain wrote:
| >What in tarnation are you rambling about?
|
| I apologize for my poor reply, I am being downvoted even
| got flagged, which I don't feel is fair.
| https://imgur.com/Fsz6rdb
|
| I was trying to explain that it's not about expertise on
| the subject. It's about finding a mind to change. What if
| perhaps there's some HN user who reads this and is like
| screw it I'm going into industrial scale fully automated
| aquaponics. They become huge and we feed the world.
| kickout wrote:
| It's ok though. I like these threads on HN. Hopefully helps
| educate people. People on HN have a lot of skills to offer
| agriculture they likely aren't even aware of. Every
| article/discussion helps spread the message, hopefully.
|
| ETA: Most people don't understand agriculture or where their
| food comes from--HN no different. Only small % of people
| involved in agriculture _directly_
| phil21 wrote:
| So far at posting time I don't see a whole lot of signal to
| gain from the noise here if I were legitimately someone who
| had zero agriculture experience and was trying to gain
| understanding.
|
| This is the blind leading the blind, and if you gleaned much
| from the top comments you'd be worse informed than not
| reading this entire thread. Half of the posts are just
| political using couched language to pretend they aren't.
|
| Ag is definitely one of HNs blind spots, usually the topics
| are simply amusing (e.g. urban food production startups
| burning millions of VC) - but this is the first actually
| "substantive to humanity topic" I've read through and the
| results are a little scary.
|
| And heck, I'm probably contributing to this noise since I
| also haven't stepped foot on a farm or market garden in well
| over a decade.
| tagami wrote:
| for the hardware/software interest, the signal is precision
| agriculture. Using sensors and data to optimize yields.
| kickout wrote:
| Usually I shill my blog (in bio) where I _hope_ i'm sharing
| signal.
|
| In a weird type of way, there's little we can do
| immediately. Almost like a solar flare type of event. Ag
| and food production systems are so massively scaled, even
| if we WANTED to change everything for the better, it would
| likely take years, if not decades. Not like software where
| any bug can be fixed in a week or so. Human population
| numbers have exploded on the back of cheap, abundant food.
| If anything seriously disturbed that, yikes.
| jiveturkey42 wrote:
| Perhaps these issues cannot be solved from a desk and
| computer.
|
| HN might bristle at the idea the Farmer Joe has a more
| sophisticated mental model of an extremely complex and
| multivariate system (a field of corn or soy) which evades
| reduction to a dataset.
|
| The solutions I've seen on this board is typically "well
| let's reduce the variables and grow lettuce in warehouses!"
| Or trying to build a robot that can pick strawberries.
| Neither of these solves food scarcity issues.
|
| If people reading this wanted to pursue a meaningful
| solution via data, my advise is to look at the scaling of
| the farm-to-consumer market, and how to enable larger
| distributed networks of small independent farms to sell to
| customers. The food supply will be more resilient when
| farming gets smaller, simpler, and more distributed
| chasd00 wrote:
| >If people reading this wanted to pursue a meaningful
| solution via data, my advise is to look at the scaling of
| the farm-to-consumer market, and how to enable larger
| distributed networks of small independent farms to sell
| to customers.
|
| are you implying a farmer's market? they exist.
| jiveturkey42 wrote:
| Thank you for the helpful sarcasm.
|
| Yes, I am implying farmers markets. There is not
| currently an effective way for these small farms to
| network their production in aggregate to sell at a level
| commensurate to an industrial farm. This is the reason
| big ag can sell for cheaper.
|
| If farmers markets could achieve cost-parity with big
| grocery (by competing at-scale) then distributed small-
| scale farming could contribute to solving many issues in
| climate, environment, nutrition, etc
| phpnode wrote:
| To make this work there would need to be a big social
| push towards eating in line with the seasons again (which
| was obviously the norm for 99.99% of the history of
| humanity). I think this might be a hard sell, people are
| now very used to being able to buy whatever they want
| whenever they want, e.g. strawberries in january
| jiveturkey42 wrote:
| Seasonal eating of farm-fresh foods would certainly make
| free public healthcare a more reasonable proposal in the
| US. It would surely cut into the bottom line of the
| pharma industry
| tagami wrote:
| the reliance on the cold chain in distribution is a large
| inhibitor to this.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| > my advise is to look at the scaling of the farm-to-
| consumer market, and how to enable larger distributed
| networks of small independent farms to sell to customers.
| The food supply will be more resilient when farming gets
| smaller, simpler, and more distributed
|
| Very astute comment.
|
| If any farmers in WA (or elsewhere) want a free consult
| on how to connect with your customers via the internet,
| please reach out!
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I think the specific problems would-be technologists have
| in approaching farmers are:
|
| (1) beliefs that farming is simple and farmers are inept
|
| (2) beliefs that the technology they (our facile
| technologists) know (e.g., robotics, saas, ai, etc) can
| be shoe-horned into or sprinkled onto agriculture for
| revolutionary results (at best these things tend to be
| incremental improvements and at worse they are
| detrimental).
|
| In general, technologists need to understand agriculture
| as a global dynamic system in order to understand the
| opportunities for innovation (there certainly _are_
| places where applying robotics or AI or etc can lead to
| revolutionary results, but it 's probably not obvious to
| someone whose experience with agriculture was an
| elementary school field trip 30 years ago).
| idiotsecant wrote:
| > The food supply will be more resilient when farming
| gets smaller, simpler, and more distributed
|
| Will it? In my area the main agricultural products are
| apples, dairy products, beef, wheat, and potatoes,
| because those are the things that my area's climate and
| geology support. I can already buy those things cheaply
| and readily and they are farmed efficiently and widely by
| very large operations. How does farming get more
| resilient when individual farms get smaller? Smaller
| farms, by definition, have higher overheads because they
| benefit less from economy of scale, right? Logistics get
| more expensive for a zillion small actors, equipment and
| maintenance is a larger slice of the overall operation,
| smaller operations have less efficient access to capital,
| etc...
| jiveturkey42 wrote:
| Smaller and _simpler_ was the comment.
|
| The current option is to use industrial farming
| technology until the raw inputs run out or become cost-
| prohibitive. Or until tillage soil for field crops
| becomes nutrient-depleted and barren.
|
| Also, the comment was about using intellectual capital to
| work on the _Markets_ problem of agriculture, not the act
| of farming itself
| mistrial9 wrote:
| > Ag is definitely one of HNs blind spots
|
| I met a young man from Missouri.. he had a large frame but
| was just 20 years old or so.. He was harried and furtive
| and was getting into some trouble here and there. Upon
| knowing him a little bit, he was traumatized by large,
| loud, dominant men giving him orders, while as an
| intelligent young man he had questions. Of course many of
| the men I refer to here are from the Ag community.
|
| North American Ag is not solved, and with the Oklahoma
| Dustbowl and current crop patterns in California, it must
| be obvious to science that sometimes, Ag has evolved for
| CONTROL not INTELLIGENCE. American factory animal farming
| is a living nightmare in places. American treatment of
| topsoil, and of fresh water, and industrial placement at
| the Great Lakes for that matter, are a DISASTER. You defend
| the Ag "community" like they need defending, from urban
| smart-people? They are beetle-like survivors of decades of
| market distortion, ego and alcohol.
|
| Disrupt the Ag sector, yes please.
|
| ps- your elected representative William Gates already
| started the ball rolling with farm ownership. see any news
| story after his "revelation" .. first result in GS
|
| " Today, Bill Gates owns 242,000 acres of farmland in 19
| states. In addition, he owns 25,750 acres of transitional
| land and 1,234 acres of recreational land for total land
| holdings of 268,984 acres. His largest holding is in
| Louisiana (69,071 acres), followed by Arkansas (47,927
| acres) and Arizona (25,750 acres). Aug 27, 2021"
| [deleted]
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Comments like this show how out of touch the average person
| is with how much waste is involved in animal products -
| particularly beef.
|
| We can so easily grow enough food to feed everyone.
|
| Livestock takes up >80% of land, yet produces <20% of
| calories.
|
| The <20% of land that is used to grow food - only ~55% goes
| to feed people. The rest goes to animals and ethanol.
|
| The apocalypse is nowhere near close.
|
| The Earth's crust is ~2.5% potassium. A lower supply of
| Potash is not going to cause the end of the world.
| kristjansson wrote:
| Who eats the animals?
| jiveturkey42 wrote:
| How much _arable_ land does livestock take up?
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Nearly everywhere cattle can graze, you can grow other
| crops.
|
| As a percentage of all livestock land usage, there is not
| much chicken, goat, or pig grazing left in the world.
|
| It is true most other livestock CAN utilize land that
| can't be used efficiently for other forms of agriculture.
| In practice, less so.
| User23 wrote:
| There's not much use for the heaths in western England
| besides grazing sheep.
| kickout wrote:
| Not much, most of that land literally has no use besides
| animal grazing.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| The majority of animals doesn't "graze", they're locked
| in factory farms. And you're ignoring the land needed to
| grow the feed, which makes a major difference.
| goatlover wrote:
| Speaking of beef, there's a lot of cows that graze in the
| US West on a lot of pasture.
| legulere wrote:
| At least here in Europe most meat is produced with animal
| feed grown on arable land (mostly in South America).
| jiveturkey42 wrote:
| Alternatively, I would argue that much harm has been done to
| agriculture by the 'information' sector in general.
| Commoditizing and industrializing food production (a
| reduction to data and numbers) has caused most of the issues
| collectively known as the 'modern American diet'
| kickout wrote:
| Kind of agree. I don't think ag was malicious in that
| regard. No different than any business trying to maximize
| profits by any* means necessary (tm). Just so happens it
| affects human health.
| true_religion wrote:
| Okay, but I don't think anyone of us are part of the
| information sector that's commoditizing food production. OP
| said we are unaware of agriculture, and I mostly agree
| unless you're in an agrarian area or country, you simply
| won't learn about these things.
|
| Additionally what you're talking about sounds more like
| actions prompted by business 'leaders' and not IT staff
| making databases.
| jiveturkey42 wrote:
| I don't blame the individual IT staff or engineers for
| being foot soldiers of corporate mandate.
|
| I do blame the mindset of 'every problem can be solved
| with enough data'
| true_religion wrote:
| It seems you have a broader compliant, so let me ask you:
| What's the alternative to using scientific process to
| solve problems?
|
| Agriculture effects the environment, uses shared
| resources, and is necessary for the continuation of human
| life. I would be really wary about going with a gut
| feeling to solve such a large important problem.
| cinntaile wrote:
| If you have the right data, I don't see why not?
| salawat wrote:
| What heppens when you think you have the right data but
| don't?
|
| How about when everyone else thinks they have the right
| data, but don't, you do, but can't scale because of
| institutional inertia and risk?
|
| Q.E.D.
|
| Farming and logistics are infuriatingly hard problems,
| toghtly coupled with the fundamental problems of
| signaling and distributed systems.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| In theory yes but..
|
| How do you know when you have the right data and how do
| you know you're solving the right problem and not causing
| others? So far confidence and hubris came with myopia.
| cinntaile wrote:
| That's a problem you have even when not relying on
| "enough" right data to base your decisions off of. With
| data you can at least have a more scientific approach to
| it all. It is correct that science and data gets hijacked
| for political goals as well, so it's not necessarily a
| road to success.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| I don't get this whole fertilizer crunch thing. If you look at
| the price of Osmocote on Amazon, it's basically not much
| different than it's always been:
|
| https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B00GTDGMHC
|
| So basically the cost of enough fertilizer to feed an entire
| family for a year has gone up by, what, $20? $100?
|
| And that's at retail prices; the cost (and cost increase) would
| obviously be much smaller when purchased in bulk. And that's also
| for the name brand product, obviously generics are much cheaper.
|
| I'm not a farmer but I did fertilize ~20 fruit trees with weekend
| with Plant-tone, Peters 20-20-20, Garden Lime, and Fish & Kelp.
| My cost of doing that for the entire year will be maybe $60, and
| that's only because I'm trying to maximize fruit quality and tree
| health rather than minimize costs.
| tagami wrote:
| That looks like a 50% increase over the average price according
| to the link you sent.
| n00j wrote:
| It takes a bit of time for old stock to sell out. If you pay
| attention, you can see a pattern in a lot of items that
| retailers tend to only increase the prices when their old stick
| sells out and new stock come in, and then there is a dramatic
| rise in the price of the item.
| hinkley wrote:
| The fungi guys will tell you that running out of mineral
| fertilizer is bullshit on roughly 95% of the arable land because
| all of the minerals your food needs are right there in the sand
| and clay. I once heard it described that conventional agriculture
| is essentially a hydroponics system using partially sterilized
| soil as the substrate.
|
| Nearly every symbiotic relationship fungi make is based on buying
| sugars from plants by selling them minerals from biological
| weathering of rock (particles). What happens in conventional
| agriculture is that we murder all of the fungi.
|
| There are a few places with strange soil compositions that are
| actually lacking in particular minerals. We could either elect to
| do something else with that land, or transition everyone but them
| to a post-green-revolution strategy.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Yea the way we do mass farming now is MASSively flawed. It
| produces huge yields but has tons of fragility - monoculture
| crops being a huge flaw as well.
|
| The one that fascinates me the most is the way the Mayans did
| it - Chinampas. That and aquaculture growing lots of smaller
| fish seems like a create combo if we could get small backyard
| pond/farms going
| giantg2 wrote:
| I dream of having land with a pond. Properly managed, it
| could produce about 50 pounds of bluegills, etc from a 1/2
| pond every year, with little input and infrequent work.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| Do bluegills taste any good?
| psychlops wrote:
| lol, good question. Blackened bluegill if not. You could
| always do tilapia or catfish.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| Tilapia has always been pretty tasteless in various
| dishes I've tried so not really a big fan. Catfish can be
| ok sometimes
| benji-york wrote:
| There are better-tasting fish, but yes.
| giantg2 wrote:
| That's probably a personal preference or maybe due to
| water quality. They're one of my favorite. There's a
| great TED talk our there about water quality and fish
| flavor, but I don't remember the person.
| nwallin wrote:
| It's not dissimilar from tilapia; mild flavored
| whitefish. It's not as flavorful or tender as trout, but
| better than catfish.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Maybe we are eating different fish. Stocked trout is
| pretty bland and somewhat mushy. I've never had truly
| wild trout, so maybe they are better. The bluegills here
| taste a lot better than farmed tilapia (do they even sell
| wild?) - mild, a little sweet, and flakes well. I agree
| bluegills are better than catfish, but depending on the
| catfish I prefer them over tilapia.
|
| I hear that water quality and, to a lesser extent, water
| chemistry has a huge impact on taste. I've sort of
| noticed that in certain lakes compared to others.
| etrautmann wrote:
| That's interesting, but a slight oversimplication since
| nitrogen isn't coming from the minerals. As long as nitrogen
| fixation can still occur (via decomposition of something
| organic, etc), I think the general principle seems reasonable,
| though not an expert.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Or from crop rotations of legumes with nitrogen fixing
| microbes. But that too would require a move away from
| intensive industrialized agricultural practices.
| hinkley wrote:
| Toby Hemenway forwarded a notion that water cycles are
| sufficient to transport nitrogen from nitrogen-rich plants
| to their neighbors as a continuous basis instead of on an
| annual one. The model he builds from research he had read
| goes something like this:
|
| After a rain, as the soil goes from waterlogged to dry,
| there are phases that are hostile to root hairs and ones
| that are conducive. So the plant roots pulse with these
| cycles, advancing and retreating, sometimes arriving at
| places vacated by other plants. By this mechanism, any
| plant can scavenge some of the nitrogen left in the
| decaying root hairs of their neighbors.
|
| I would also warn that thinking nitrogen=legume is a
| potentially limiting strategic error. While something like
| 7% of all plants fall into the _Fabaceae_ (legume) family,
| some other pockets of the _Fabales_ order also have root
| nodules, in particular, alder, and up into the _Rosids_
| clade (buckthorn, ceanothus), and then a few odd stragglers
| like borage, which makes me wonder if it 's a taxonomic
| problem, parallel evolution, or what.
|
| And then there's mondo grass (asparagaceae), which nobody
| expects to have root nodules. I knew about that plant for
| about two decades before someone pointed out it's nitrogen
| fixing, and that's not even in the wikipedia article. And
| in fact I'm having a dickens of a time finding a citation
| for that.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _Fifty-six percent of all land used for corn, soybeans,
| wheat, and cotton was on farms that used no-till /strip-
| till on at least part of their cropland in 2010-11: 23
| percent of land was on farms that used no-till/strip-till
| on all land in these crops while 33 percent was on farms
| that used a mix of no-till, strip-till, and other tillage
| practices._" (From the report summary.)
|
| https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-
| details/?pubid=440...
|
| Industrialized farming practices are capable of changing.
| tagami wrote:
| Yes. Nitrogen fixing bacteria (i.e. R. leguminasarum, s.
| meliloti) love the sugar exchange legumes offer. Cover
| cropping and inter cropping have potential to rethink the
| 113-year old haber-bosch solution.
| hinkley wrote:
| I don't know if this is my theory or just heavily implied
| but rarely stated in the literature: chemical fertilizers
| are giving plants something for 'free' that they used to
| pay for, and the reason the crops get bigger is not
| strictly because of the fertilizers, but because they get
| to spend those calories on more fruit.
|
| There have even been a few studies that warn that some
| strains of conventional crops are losing the ability to
| make this exchange. When we hit peak phosphorous and
| start taxing anhydrous ammonia production, these strains
| are at risk of going extinct (hopefully not enough of any
| crop to take us with them).
|
| The wrong question is, "how many calories of <X> can I
| get out of this field in a year?" The right question is
| "how many calories can I get _total_ out of this field in
| a year " and there are a number of people out there
| demonstrating that they can get about 50% of the
| conventional yield from an acre, but for 4 different
| crops, and a few other things thrown in to get over 2x
| the total yield.
|
| The "problem", in scare quotes, is that these solutions
| take more thinking and knowing than scourging your fields
| every year. But since running a farm practically takes a
| bachelor's degree these days, that's not really a problem
| of lack of resource in that area. It's more a problem of
| perspective and focus.
| anamax wrote:
| > there are a number of people out there demonstrating
| that they can get about 50% of the conventional yield
| from an acre, but for 4 different crops, and a few other
| things thrown in to get over 2x the total yield.
|
| A lot of US agriculture is done on by contract operators.
| Bill Gates seems to work mostly in that model.
|
| I mention Gates because what he says suggests that he'd
| love to see that claim pan out on a large scale. Also,
| he's known for insisting on high dollar yields.
|
| And yet, we're talking about demonstrations and not
| actual significant experience.
|
| Maybe Gates is lying about his social goals AND also
| isn't profit-maximizing.
|
| But, if he isn't, why aren't the demonstrators doing good
| and doing well (2X production is a big bucks) by doing
| this stuff at scale somewhere in Gates-land?
| mcguire wrote:
| " _Cover crops were in use on less than 2 percent of
| total cropland (for all crops) during 2010-11 (6.8
| million acres), with adoption rates higher in some
| regions (e.g., the Southern Seaboard and the Mississippi
| Portal). Although the benefits of cover crops and no-till
| /strip-till are enhanced when these practices are used on
| the same fields, the low cover crop adoption rate
| suggests that these benefits are realized on few acres._"
| (From the report summary.)
|
| https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-
| details/?pubid=440...
| bluGill wrote:
| Cover crops have come into style though since then. They
| are a lot more common. Not nearly as common as they
| should be, but they still a lot more than 10 years ago.
| hinkley wrote:
| I'm not the one oversimplifying, it's 'modern' agronomists
| that are oversimplifying.
|
| Nitrogen is 70% of our atmosphere. When you remove all other
| plant life in order to get the last 20% of theoretical yield
| from your land, you end up having to manually provide all of
| the services that were provided by the plants you killed. The
| Green Revolution is a petrochemical revolution. Cooking
| allows us to use lignin calories to recover more calories
| from our existing food supply. Livestock do the same, either
| by converting grasses (ungulates) or recycling unpalatable
| foods (pigs).
|
| When the petrochemicals become expensive we will have to go
| forward and/or backward to some other solution (most likely
| old solutions with new twists). The sibling comment with the
| huge bibliography points to some of the more coherent voices
| in the world of polyculture agriculture, although Gabe Brown
| exists in a sort of grey area between aggressive crop
| rotation and polyculture.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| For anybody that is interested in reading more on the symbiosis
| of plants and fungi:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizosphere
|
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1906655116
|
| https://regenerationinternational.org/why-regenerative-agric...
|
| Some proponents of regenerative agriculture to learn from are:
|
| Joel Salatin - https://www.polyfacefarms.com/
|
| Ray Archuleta - https://soilhealthacademy.org/team/ray-
| archuleta/
|
| Gabe Brown - http://brownsranch.us/
| triyambakam wrote:
| And Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake (also available on
| Audible) for a more pop science overview.
| fredgrott wrote:
| Are you familiar of why India and China move to fertilizer in
| them 1980s saved the from starving?
|
| I assure it is not BS. without fertilizer you do not the
| explosive yields that we get all over th world including the
| United States.
|
| And it is in fact well documented in a huge collection of
| science journals.
| zdragnar wrote:
| It's an interesting point, but using China as an example of
| rational agricultural planning is a pretty poor choice
| considering how recently the famines resulting from the Great
| Leap Forward were at that point in time.
| rmah wrote:
| The famines were from _before_ the rational agricultural
| planning.
| zdragnar wrote:
| I thought it was clear that was obvious, sorry.
|
| My only real point was that _anything_ could look
| rational after what they went through before hand.
| hinkley wrote:
| I think you should look at what's going on with agriculture
| in India right now. There was a lot of bankrupt farmers in
| the US in the 80's, and that's happening in India over the
| last decade. Graphically, some farmers are taking their lives
| by drinking leftover pesticides when they realize they can't
| afford their crops this year.
|
| India is, by many accounts, likely to switch to a new-new
| form of agriculture sooner than some of the rest of us. The
| combination of bigger problems and a shallower 'tradition' of
| western farming practices makes that easier.
|
| There was a post here about California covering its
| irrigation canals with solar panels. A couple of us politely
| pointed out that a couple of provinces in India have already
| been doing this for a while.
| rmah wrote:
| Financial viability of farming as a business is independent
| of yield across all farms in a market. The consequence of
| radical improvements in agricultural yields lower prices
| (as a % of unskilled labor income) and usually means that
| _most_ farmers go out of business (or export most of their
| crop). The upside is that the society overall gets much
| much wealthier.
| unmole wrote:
| Farming in India has been perilous for centuries because it
| depends on the Monsoon. Improved irrigation, better seeds
| and yes artificial fertilizers have all significantly
| improved farm incomes.
|
| Nevertheless, structural issues remain. Farmer suicides are
| not even remotely new and it's disingenous to suggest
| otherwise. And it has to be pointed out that the suicide
| rate amongst Indian farmers is lower than the national
| average.
|
| You'll have to pry _Western_ farming methods from the cold
| dead hands of Indian farmers. Even the urban
| _intelligencia_ has shut up about organic /traditional
| farming after seeing what's happening across the Palk
| Strait.
| rmah wrote:
| They could prove their case by actually doing it at commercial
| farm scale. But as far as I know, no one has. Which, to me
| anyway, shows they're probably (but not certainly) wrong.
| hinkley wrote:
| Gabe Brown manages about 5000 acres, with a skeleton crew.
|
| On paper Mark Shepard seems to have about 106 acres around
| his house, which I think is a gross branding mistake, because
| he farms a lot more land than just his homestead. I have to
| find this interview again because it was kind of shocking and
| I'm afraid I may be misquoting it. One interviewer got him
| talking about all of the land he owns elsewhere, leases, or
| consults on and he makes some comment about he may actually
| be managing more farmland than anyone east of the
| Mississippi.
|
| Most of us are on the internet all day regardless. We
| downplay the incremental cost of both doing things, bragging
| about it online, and getting it on people's radars, like it's
| simple but we mostly think about the people who are good at
| it and not all of the ones who quietly disappeared without
| most of us ever learning about it.
|
| Farming is exhausting. Farming is remote. Farming is slow,
| and experiments take years to prove to be more than dumb
| luck. The gap between killing it and selling your audience on
| the notion that you are killing it is much, much wider. Talk
| enough, and you have to stop doing, which means you're now
| selling ideas that you can't back up.
| rmah wrote:
| Not to sound contrary... but if their techniques are
| better, why haven't they been replicated widely? If they
| can output just 20% better financial return, they will
| double the profits for most farmers.
|
| Understand that it is my wish and hope that these sort of
| low/no fertilizer organic techniques can work better than
| "traditional" heavy-fertilizer/irrigation farming the west
| now mainly employs. It's just that vaguely recall hearing
| about this sort of thing 30 years ago. And 20 years ago.
| And 10 years ago.
| m_coder wrote:
| The comment farther up the thread (at this point anyhow)[1]
| references Gabe Brown. He is using very little to no
| commercial fertilizer on his farm and has been for years. I
| am guessing his audience among cash strapped young desperate
| farmers has increased a lot in the last 3 months.
|
| 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31237965
| hinkley wrote:
| There are a couple of particularly noteworthy things about
| Gabe. His philosophy was a baptism by fire. He ran out of
| money via a combination of bad decisions and getting hit by
| a statistical cluster of bad years where the world seemed
| to be saying Fuck You in Particular (there were 4 years
| with catastrophic hail storms, and none of his neighbors
| got hit by more than 3 of them).
|
| Some of his crops are targets of opportunity. They're a
| cover crop and if the weather is just right and he gets it
| planted in time, he might be able to harvest it, or at
| least graze some livestock on it, but if not, then that's
| fine too, because the dividends still made it worth doing.
|
| He is a very frugal farmer, both in resources and energy.
| Mark Shepard, in contrast, seems to be more interested in
| the energy side of frugality, and is so open in his disdain
| for people throwing good money/time after bad that it's
| practically his personality. In particular he likes to rant
| about how utterly mathematically unsound the idea of rain
| barrels is, and the kind of cognitive dissonance it takes
| to keep telling yourself otherwise.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| The 55 gallon rain barrels are near useless for small
| plot irrigation. Larger containers can hold a meaningful
| amount of water to be useful during sporadic dry spells.
| hedora wrote:
| Most of the nitrogen in currently living humans was captured
| from the atmosphere via the Haber Bosch process.
|
| That is the primary contribution of synthetic fertilizer, and
| there aren't scalable natural processes to match it. Countries
| used to go to war over nitrogen stores (such as islands covered
| in bat guano).
| jxramos wrote:
| I was getting curious recently if there was a suitability for
| running mini Haber Bosch equipment in small batches that
| would serve a neighborhood or town, or a homestead. Not sure
| really but it was interesting to contemplate distributing
| that load over many folks.
| lasc4r wrote:
| Based on playing Civ I just assumed they were mostly valuable
| for their use in making gunpowder.
| bluGill wrote:
| You seem surprised that a game simplified the mechanics of
| the real world until they are unrecognizable.
| lasc4r wrote:
| It did indeed make more sense to me to go to war for a
| strategic, scare and faraway military resource than to go
| through all that effort for fertilizer.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > [...] _all that effort for fertilizer._
|
| Food to feed your troops (and workers in armament
| factories) is a strategic military resource.
|
| You have to either grow it yourself or import it.
| Artificial fertilizer allows you stop importing nitrogen
| (which could be blocked by embargoes) and make it
| locally, which would allow you to potentially grow food
| locally and not import it either (again, embargoes).
| oasisbob wrote:
| > There are a few places with strange soil compositions that
| are actually lacking in particular minerals.
|
| pH and temperature are pretty easy and common ways for soil to
| keep essential minerals away from the plant life which could
| utilize them.
| hinkley wrote:
| Microbiome needs to be a more commonly known word.
|
| I bought some property that was practically concrete at the
| beginning of the dry season. I hurt my hand and damaged a
| tool trying to take a soil sample to send to the lab. A
| couple years later you'd never know, except that past me was
| apparently smart enough to take a video that I found when
| trying to free up some disk space.
|
| Plants, bacteria and fungi all manipulate soil PH for better
| or for worse, and you can steer that. And keeping soil
| covered, especially with tall plants, can drop the
| temperature tens of degrees Celsius. A forest floor is much
| closer to ground temperature, for a host of reasons.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| Honestly yes. In WW2 the food situation for poor people in
| England actually improved when they introduced the distribution
| system.
|
| Of course for those of us in the West "feeding" means buying
| strawberries in September just because we can.
| kderbyma wrote:
| Communities should be more designed to self sustain. they should
| build aquaponics into sky scrapers and have tenants split the
| costs and the profits.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| How are ten ants supposed to afford a sky scraper?
| hosh wrote:
| I mean, we have been depleting soil fertility through the use of
| synthetic fertilizers for decades. It's been a self-destructive
| cycle.
|
| Perhaps some farmers might switch to practices that are not so
| dependent upon as much to external inputs ... but even switching
| to things like no-till or using local inputs like manure, or
| using soil-regenerating practices like polycropping or integrated
| pest-control is going to take time.
|
| It's doable though. The Cubans have been operating their
| agriculture without imported oil and fertilizers since the US
| shut down imports. That also meant that use of tractors became
| limited, as are long-distance transport for food.
|
| Better than food security is food sovereignty, and people within
| a locality being able to feed themselves.
| Beached wrote:
| this is possibly, but yields go way down, in some cases by 50%
| or more. the amount of land that will need to be utilized for
| food growth will have to drastically increased.
|
| not saying this is a bad thing. soil regeneration and more
| sustainable farming practices are a good thing Imo. it's just
| that we can't switch to that instantly. yield goes down, takes
| time to switch, cost likely will increase to make the same
| $/acre of land, etc.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Of all corn grain grown in the US, 45% is used as animal
| feed, and just 12% for human food (the rest is turned into
| ethanol for fuel) [1]. If it was just a 50% decrease in yield
| we could offset most of it by only having grass-fed cattle
| and cutting our meat consumption accordingly. Of course an
| instant switch would be inconvenient because we don't plant
| the gourmet variant when we intend to feed it to animals, but
| with a year of lead time it wouldn't be too bad.
|
| But before modern farming we couldn't sustain more than a
| billion humans or so, and most of our advancements since then
| have been from better machinery, watering and most of all
| fertilizer. Depending on what you cut, you lose way more than
| 50%.
|
| 1: https://extension.okstate.edu/fact-sheets/corn-as-cattle-
| fee...
| giantg2 wrote:
| A lot of the grain fed to cattle is actually spent mash
| from the ethanol production. I wonder how those overlap
| numbers are accounted for.
| tagami wrote:
| this is the same challenge we have with fossil fuels. It will
| only get more difficult the longer we delay
| hosh wrote:
| Yields for a specific crop goes down in polycropping. Yield
| across the entire portfolio goes up. Plus, crop failure and
| marker failure of any one crop doesn't mean complete failure
| -- the other crop still yields something. It becomes less of
| betting the farm.
|
| And, soil rebuilding takes time. No-till won't really start
| becoming advantageous until about year 4 or 5.
|
| But like I said -- the Cubans had to do this. They were not
| given the time to switch.
| Beached wrote:
| from what I understand / have read. yields go down per acre
| when moving from synthetic fertilizer to organic / natural
| fertilization. not just in the immediate, but forever. soil
| health, nutrition, crop resilience all go up, input and
| input cost go down, but so does overall yield per acre.
|
| from all the reading I have done, and in my own experience
| with a shitty 3acre hobby farm, overall yield per acre
| never reaches an equivalent to modern destructive farming
| practices.
| simmanian wrote:
| >3 acre hobby farm
|
| I've been thinking about getting a hobby farm as well. Do
| you have any recommendations on where to start or tips? I
| can't even tell if I can just buy a plot of land in some
| unincorporated area and use it for whatever I see fit
| (CA).
| hedora wrote:
| Check these three things, at a minimum:
|
| - Zoning
|
| - Soil type
|
| - Water availability.
|
| Your local UC agricultural extension office can help.
| mcguire wrote:
| Extra thumbs-up: If you have any questions like this,
| check with your local state or county extension agents.
| They'll talk your ears off. They're lonely. :-)
|
| They can't always help, but they'll have good suggestions
| to think about.
| harpersealtako wrote:
| UC has tons of classes and workshops on farming/gardening
| you can take, ranging from weekend workshops to
| apprenticeships to online courses to hands on training.
| Or honestly there are tons of forums and internet
| communities that have lots of free resources and advice
| if you look for them.
|
| https://ucanr.edu/sites/UrbanAg/Resources_and_Help/Farm_T
| rai...
| bluGill wrote:
| > soil health, nutrition, crop resilience all go up,
| input and input cost go down, but so does overall yield
| per acre.
|
| None of those are necessarily true. Sometimes they are,
| but organic prohibits some farming methods, but non-
| organic doesn't prohibit anything that organic does that
| work.
|
| Some of the natural chemicals allowed in organic are
| worse for the soil than the synthetic counterpart. In
| some cases there isn't a natural chemical that is allowed
| and so the farmer resorts to plowing the soil which is a
| horrible thing to do to the soil, and because of the fuel
| used more expensive than synthetic chemicals.
|
| Organic has found some useful things, but farmers are
| adopting them. Farmers have also found useful things that
| organic is adopting.
| Terry_Roll wrote:
| TL;DR Fertilizer is a chemical soup like the chemical soup
| that keeps the Henrietta Lack cancer cell line still alive
| to this day.
|
| TL;DR Fertilizer dilutes the taste and nutrition of plants
| by making them bigger not better.
|
| > And, soil rebuilding takes time.
|
| So modern day farm equipment, ploughs which dig deeper
| cause soil erosion which in turn means more fertilizers
| plus an increase in the seeds grown to yield highly in
| certain chemical profile environments. Alot of plants
| classed as weeds can also be used. So the Mediterranean
| diet which is supposed to help you live a long life is
| actually based on picking wild herbs and plants, not the
| stuff you buy from a supermarket! You can eat dandelions
| and other wild plants. Wild blackberries taste so much
| better than any you can buy in a shop and the plants you
| can buy from a garden centre dont produce black berries
| which taste anywhere near as good as wild blackberries.
| Even wild strawberries although tiny like the size of a
| petit pois pea, have so much more flavour, although I will
| try a PS350 Japanese strawberry (yes just 1 strawberry
| costs PS350). https://metro.co.uk/2020/05/12/paul-
| hollywood-eats-japan-vie...
|
| Japan doesnt have the land mass so couldnt compete on
| quantity, so they lead on quality food, thats why their
| food is the most expensive in the world.
|
| When the horse and horse drawn ploughs are used, less soil
| erosion is seen as more white root masses are seen holding
| the soil together.
|
| Not so long ago < 10-30years, it was common to spread
| manure on field instead of using fertilizer because the
| bacteria in the manure benefits the ground and crops, its
| also where we found/find our antibiotics.
|
| I only know of one farm equipment manufacturer who is
| actively developing smaller farm robots/equipment (German)
| where as everyone else is going bigger and bigger.
|
| I'd bet on the smaller farm equipment manufacturer because
| people will be looking for labour saving devices in their
| gardens ( & country estates) where you can have more
| control over the quality of the food grown, but I also
| understand many people live in new build estates with a
| tiny garden and no robots will really needed.
|
| EU regs and their intentions mean more land has to be left
| wild and more hedgerows planted which means smaller fields.
| When fertilizers use jumped years ago many farmers started
| ripping up their hedgerows, now in Europe there is a trend
| to replace these massive plain's like fields with smaller
| tithe like fields which means its incompatible with large
| farm equipment. Protecting the wildlife is paramount.
|
| The problem with neonicotinoids which is seeds coated with
| nicotine like chemicals (manmade tend to be longer lasting
| because they dont break down in the environment) and it
| messed up insects in particular bee nervous systems. Man
| Made Pyrethrin's are the same, they dont break down easily
| unlike whats found naturally in Chrysanthemum flowers.
| Ironically organic veg is using nicotine and nothing else
| which is what your grand parents used to use after the war.
| They used to smoke roll ups and place the used fag but's in
| a jam jar with water, that dark brown liquid was then
| sprayed onto the garden as an insecticide/pesticide. You
| pay a premium for this today in the super markets, but you
| could just buy a packet of rolling tobacco and put some
| baccy in a jam jar with water, let it soak and then use
| that liquid if you dont want to take up smoking!
|
| >Yields for a specific crop goes down in polycropping.
| Yield across the entire portfolio goes up.
|
| This is because the defensive chemicals in different plants
| compliment each other so instead of having a monocrop with
| one chemical defence, there is a range of chemicals which
| is enough to deter a wider range of pests.
|
| The same mentality is seen in warfare, you dont bet on just
| the Airforce, you need the Navy and Army as well to really
| win a war.
|
| Its also why I would invest in small robot manufacturers &
| AI companies which can tend to individual crops than an
| instrument which doesnt offer anything personal to a plant.
|
| Its also why Bill Gates is the largest land owner in the
| US.
| throw-nocoiner wrote:
| An interesting trivia:
|
| Dividing the available arable land by global population
| leaves only a 100x100m plot per person - and that's before
| barns, silos, houses or warehouses. That's not a whole lot -
| as a city dweller, I'm confident I'd starve the first winter
| if not earlier
|
| Modern agriculture is really impressive - farmers manage to
| feed around 10-20 people from such a plot
| db65edfc7996 wrote:
| That is a super fun fact. Not that it changes the calculus,
| but I would be curious what percentage of human calories
| come from water sources (fishing, seaweed, lobster, etc).
| whiddershins wrote:
| Luckily ruminants do not need crop-suitable land to thrive.
| zo1 wrote:
| The problem is government which has an incentive to "feed
| everyone" which means cheap food by any means necessary. Food
| prices must go up, let them naturally go up. That means less
| food for poorer people, which in turn slowly means less
| people (lower birth rates, poor and bigger families
| struggling, etc), until we reach equilibrium with our
| environment under the terms we accept.
|
| It's the only fair way to do it, IMO.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| Sure, but why should people's income decide who lives and
| who dies? I'd say let's kill all the psychopaths first.
| Like those fantasizing about mass starvation.
|
| On a less violent note, every country has seen birth rates
| decline as it became richer. Modern western societies only
| grow through immigration, and even many countries in, say,
| Africa, have seen drastic declines. Humanity doesn't expand
| until it unavoidably runs out of food, that's a 19th
| century idea.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >Food prices must go up, let them naturally go up. That
| means less food for poorer people, which in turn slowly
| means less people (lower birth rates, poor and bigger
| families struggling, etc), until we reach equilibrium with
| our environment under the terms we accept.
|
| Unless there's something in it for them by their own
| assessment people will not make sacrifices of that
| magnitude.
| thephyber wrote:
| You are ignoring the time scales, locations of the worst
| effects, and lots of other side effects like food
| protectionism and the planning that farmers have to make 9
| months before the food shortages happen.
|
| Government isn't directly responsible for food prices, but
| they frequently involve themselves because social
| order/stability requires reasonable food prices. When store
| shelves are empty in a neighborhood/ region, riots break
| out. Riots work on the time scale of hours/days. Families
| having fewer kids is on the time scale of years. Farmers
| planning for likely yields/costs is months/years.
|
| Your idea of "fair" suggests you would just shrug at the
| famines caused by Stalin and Mao regimes and blame the
| people because they weren't willing to pay enough. When
| people are food desperate, social order, norms, and
| predictability break down. This is why governments have
| strong incentives to intervene to ensure reasonable food
| prices.
| mcguire wrote:
| One interesting thing about the green revolution was that
| food went from 1/3 of the average American household budget
| to 1/6.
|
| Oh, and to paraphrase Hitchhiker's Guide, programmers will
| probably the first ones up against the wall when the
| revolution comes.
| Beached wrote:
| I overall agree with this statement. I'm mostly disagreeing
| with the yield assumption. the cubins do not grow the same
| yield per acre as we do. they may have food
| security/sovereignty, but they do it at the cost of more
| land then otherwise could have done.
| vkou wrote:
| Unlike you, neither I, nor the government are keen on
| seeing bread riots.
|
| Civil wars and regime changes aren't a lot of fun to
| live... or die through.
| tomrod wrote:
| Do you support social Darwinism?
|
| It is "dismal" but unnecessary through good governance. We
| really do have enough resources to ensure moderate
| standards of living.
|
| Political upheaval would be appropriately considered a
| market failure.
| treeman79 wrote:
| With enough effort all counties could be like Venezuela!
| vkou wrote:
| What, a petrostate that mismanaged its major industry,
| that was later sanctioned and embargoed by its biggest
| trading partner for political reasons?
| tomrod wrote:
| That's basically what I'm hearing too!
| item = np.random.choice(["macroeconomics","Venezuela"])
| meme_du_jour: f"tell me you don't know about {item}
| without telling me you don't know about {item}"
| print(meme_du_jour)
| unmole wrote:
| Cubans on average lost ~6kgs during the crisis in the 90's.
| Sure, diabetes and heart disease dropped as a result but I
| would much rather have a food surplus.
| sergiosgc wrote:
| Synthetic fertilizers do not deplete soil fertility. Some
| agricultural practices do, with a strong emphasis on mono-
| culture, but it is wrong to throw everything in the same bag.
|
| Growing without synthetic fertilizers appeals to the symbiotic
| Nature living, I get that. It's an ideal like any other, maybe
| worth of pursuit. But we first need to make peace with the fact
| that we'll either:
|
| a) Be able to feed about a billion humans at most; or
|
| b) Completely destroy many pristine ecosystems by multiplying
| arable land area by 5.
|
| Removal of synthetic fertilizers would induce a yield drop of
| 80%: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cereal-crop-yield-vs-
| fert...
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Synthetic fertilizer does have negative impacts, but saying
| they have negative _food_ impacts borders on oxymoron.
|
| Runoff to freshwater inducing toxicity is one major impact
| from _over_ fertilization, which is not an implication of the
| product itself, but it 's over use.
|
| I'm told. IANA farmer but I know many and worked with ag and
| water quality researchers for a few years in MN, USA.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Not just overuse, but use on land that is too close to
| bodies of water without riparian buffers.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| And also wrong dispersal. All the fertilizer that gets on
| the water is wasted and does nothing but increase the
| farmer expenses.
| Bayart wrote:
| > Better than food security is food sovereignty, and people
| within a locality being able to feed themselves.
|
| That's all well and good, but the implication is that people
| should live where they grow their food, or move where it can be
| done. Implementing it at scale would mean either billions of
| dead or billions of refugees.
| mcguire wrote:
| From the link I posted above: " _Fifty-six percent of all land
| used for corn, soybeans, wheat, and cotton was on farms that
| used no-till /strip-till on at least part of their cropland in
| 2010-11._"
| maxerickson wrote:
| Most manure is already spread on fields and probably mostly
| contains nitrogen that came from industrial fertilizer.
| bkland wrote:
| It is fascinating that we have recessions, food crises etc. all
| because NATO wanted to expand and Donbass cannot be allowed to be
| independent.
|
| While we are at it, should we liberate Northern Ireland? What
| exactly is the difference, except that in the case of Northern
| Ireland less than 50% wants to be British and in Donbass more
| than 50% wants to be Russian.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| Ukraine is a contributing factor but so was COVID. Governments
| printed trillions of dollars and messed with the economy while
| millions of people stayed inside and didn't work for weeks or
| months. What did everyone think was going to happen?
| modo_mario wrote:
| Weird how this Donbas includes parts that are very much pro
| Ukrainian. Russia doesn't leave room for neutrality on it's
| border. Especially not if you can't leverage another power like
| China or aren't willing to militarise completely.
|
| Also I'd suggest you don't use independent. They went away from
| claiming that and it's not like the veneer of it in
| Transnistria and South-Ossetia was much better. The ethnic
| cleansing projects there went a lot smoother for Putin tho. Do
| they care so much about Armenia independence too?
|
| And yeah let northern Ireland have it's independence if a vote
| goes that way imo.
| [deleted]
| disambiguation wrote:
| This is a story about supply chains and inflation, but the real
| story is that we're in the century of "peak resources".
|
| Fertilizer depends on phosphorous which cannot be renewed or
| substituted once its gone.
|
| Without fertilizer we can't support the multi-billion person
| population we have today.
|
| We're not running out tomorrow, or even this decade, but we may
| experience peak phosphorous within our lifetimes.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| In healthy soil phosphorous is released by fungi and bacteria
| from the sand, silt, and clay. Nobody fertilizes forests or
| native prairies and they are doing just fine on phosphorous.
| disambiguation wrote:
| agreed nature gets along just fine on its own, but if we're
| talking about human prosperity I don't think we can sustain
| ourselves on the bounty of the forest.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| Foraging from the forest isn't what I meant at all. The way
| we farm the majority of the crop land kills every last spec
| of fungi and bacteria in the soil that would help improve
| the soil and reduce the need for inputs. The minerals are
| there already. We need to allow the biology to do its thing
| and make them available to plants.
| disambiguation wrote:
| sorry i didnt mean to misrepresent your point. i wanted
| to emphasize (and i think we agree here) that the land is
| single use.
|
| allowing biology to "do its thing" usually means we can't
| also use it to grow crops.
|
| maybe some sustainable hybrid strategies exist, but i
| doubt the yields are anywhere near the mass food
| production we have today.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| The land use isn't singular on a regeneratively managed
| farm. Agroforestry and intense rotational grazing are two
| examples of ecosystems planned for maximum profitable
| output from land. An agroforestry farm may provide
| mushrooms, berries, nuts, wood, meat, dairy, eggs,
| grains, and fruit from the same plot of land that may
| provide 201,000 bushels of wheat (~5000 acres). The
| difference is management. Regenerative practices aim to
| work with nature.
|
| I understand being skeptical of a new way(really the old
| way) to farm. We have all grown up in a time dominated by
| artificial inputs to farms. We don't know anything else.
| I have been following the regenerative space for years
| now and have adopted many of the practices on my tiny
| piece of land. This is the future of farming. Outputs are
| higher quality and more plentiful with more variety.
| Inputs are minimal which increases the profit margin.
| usrn wrote:
| Short of a nuclear reaction it isn't "gone" and some organisms
| are known to concentrate it when it's scattered.
| disambiguation wrote:
| Sure there is some level of recovery, likewise we can pull
| CO2 out of the atmosphere and stick it back in the ground.
|
| A lot of problems go away if we "solve" energy, but that's
| also challenged by the same "peak" resource scenarios.
| blacksqr wrote:
| For example, sargassum seaweed, which floats freely in the
| ocean, is rich in both phosphorus and ammonium.
|
| There are already efforts in the Caribbean to turn sargassum
| into compost, because there's so much of it washing ashore
| that it's become a nuisance.
|
| Medieval Irish farmers relied on seaweed fertilizer to turn
| much of the island into rich farmland.
| Aperocky wrote:
| > Fertilizer depends on phosphorous which cannot be renewed or
| substituted once its gone.
|
| Can you elaborate? It's not like phosphorous in fertilizer are
| leaving Earth after being used as fertilizer.
| disambiguation wrote:
| See my other comment about CO2, with enough energy all things
| are possible.
|
| There is something called the "phosphorous cycle" but its a
| lot like oil and does not replenish anywhere near the rate we
| consume it.
| hosh wrote:
| It doesn't leave earth, but commercial farming practices lets
| all those nutrients run-off to pollute the water systems
| instead of being retained in the soil. Where they end up is
| difficult to recover.
|
| Furthermore, soil needs to be alive, and commercial farming
| practices kills it every year. So instead of building up soil
| fertility year after year, external inputs is added year
| after year in a self-destructive cycle.
| Wolfenstein98k wrote:
| One of the few topics that makes me genuinely question my
| Pinkerian "you can't stop progress" tendency.
| motohagiography wrote:
| This is an engineered problem. Fertilizer shipments were
| interrupted by a labour attack by rail workers unions limiting
| and delaying shipments during planting season, and who are co-
| ordinating with other groups to create scarcity as a means to
| impose stronger government social controls. There is an active
| disinformation campaign about attacks on food processing plants
| as a means to sow popular panic as well. Yes, fertilizer comes
| from Ukraine and Russia, but only in single digit percentages,
| and it also comes from everywhere else in the world. This whole
| situation has moved beyond a conspiracy to a kind of ideology
| that has seized western countries. There is a cadre of people who
| are creating chaos because they think it puts them at the center
| of it and sets them up to become the party who manages it.
|
| We have the most sophisticated data collection and logistics
| networks in the history of the world, and you think we just
| accidentally run out of a fundamental economic factor at a key
| moment in the natural economic cycle, and that risks mass
| starvation? We can somehow predict macro climate impacts, but not
| manage how much fertilizer we're going to need for a planting
| season? It's just politics by people who use politics as a means
| to gratify an urge for power for its own end. I would be suprised
| if people were still acting fooled.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > We have the most sophisticated data collection and logistics
| networks in the history of the world, and you think we just
| accidentally run out of a fundamental economic factor at a key
| moment in the natural economic cycle, and that risks mass
| starvation?
|
| Absolutely.
|
| There is no omniscient Illuminati pulling the strings for the
| entire planet. Just people, corporations, governments, and
| other corporate entities making decisions based on what they
| perceive to be their best interest. And all of them are limited
| and fallible.
|
| Also, wars and pandemics tend to throw a wrench into the
| quality of planning forecasts.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Maybe you're right, it's probably nothing. Of course there is
| no omniscient illuminati, as even just for the omniscience
| part, first you would have to somehow subordinate all the
| principled thinkers working at companies like google and
| facebook, of which there are at least dozens. This is after
| stacking entire sectors of academia and their appendant
| policy arms with what would essentially be intellectual
| zombies who did nothing to resist the agenda of said plot.
|
| That's hundreds of fellowships and thousands of adjunct jobs.
| Even if you funded most of them, it would take several
| millions of dollars. Journalists are far too curious, and we
| can rely on them to object to any falsehood and propaganda
| such a scheme would require to survive. Really, all 6 or 7
| media conglomerates working together to push the same
| messages or to kill stories that would expose said plot seems
| pretty far fetched. The logistics alone would be baffling.
|
| The only plausible way that could happen would be through a
| kind of religious hysteria of people who imagine themselves
| as enlightened through an awakening, and on a path to
| redemption that requires them to efface themselves, dismantle
| their formerly sinful lives and prevent others from sinning
| in a similar way. It's absurd in a modern era. It would have
| to be wrapped in a political agenda, which educated people
| are basically immune to, especially ones who are largely
| agnostic. The amount of effort they would need just to
| suppress naturally occuring logical questions that would
| imply a conspiracy which would unravel under the most minor
| scrutiny would be so immense as to not be in the realm of
| serious consideration.
|
| There are however, movements and ideologues reading from the
| same script that do things like creating a rail workers
| strike during planting season. It doesn't take a conspiracy,
| just the logic of an idea.
| jlengrand wrote:
| Global food shortage always feels like "well, I'm not concerned
| many other countries will be hit first". Many countries will
| literally have issues, but the food will _also_ be a lot more
| expensive for all of us.
|
| The coming years will be "fun" (and I mean bad, to be clear).
| alecco wrote:
| Middle East is starting to have issues. This will impact oil
| prices.
| px43 wrote:
| I don't think that the people experiencing poverty and hunger
| in the middle east have any relation to anyone in the oil
| industry there.
| orwin wrote:
| History doesn't agree with you. Last time the middle-east
| and Maghreb got hungry, it was 2011. The Arab spring
| wouldn't have come if it weren't for food riots.
| px43 wrote:
| In what way was Arab spring correlated with oil prices?
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-
| cha...
| unmole wrote:
| If anything, high oil prices will allow governments in the
| region to subsidise food. Saudis have already started to help
| out Egypt. They definitely don't want the regime collapsing.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >The coming years will be fun
|
| I wouldn't call the impending cognitive dissonance "fun" unless
| one likes being a spectator of ideologically driven mental
| gymnastics.
|
| We've done weird stuff to low levels of our economies. That's
| gonna have marginal consequences across the board. And a little
| bit across the board adds up to a lot of hardship.
| jlengrand wrote:
| Good point, I corrected. I didn't mean fun of course. I
| really feel for all of the folks who are already today barely
| making ends meet :s.
| px43 wrote:
| 40% of all food that is purchased in the US is thrown in the
| garbage. It's so heavily subsidized here that people just
| consider it disposable. They buy way more than they need so
| they can just eat whatever they're in the mood for, and throw
| out the rest. Maybe food _should_ be a lot more expensive.
| codefreeordie wrote:
| Unlike factory output, agricultural output is highly
| variable.
|
| If you produce only just enough in good years, then people
| die in bad years. If you produce double demand in good years
| then bad years are fine.
|
| The fact that we can usually afford to waste lots of food is
| a really really good thing.
| cerol wrote:
| Food security always makes me think about food waste.
|
| When I was 17 years old I went to Sweden as part of a cultural
| exchange program (I'm from South America). One of the first
| things that shocked me was the sheer amount of food being wasted
| for no reason whatsoever.
|
| In my country, even though I come from a privileged family, you
| can't shield yourself away from poverty. Throughout my entire
| life living with my parents I've seen people ring our door to ask
| for food. Personally, I NEVER waste any food, if I put something
| on my plate, I'll eat it unless it's rotten. And that goes for
| pretty much everyone I know. Every time I went out to eat with my
| parents, if there were any significant amount of food left, we
| would always ponder whether or not we would want to it later. If
| we decided we would not, we would take it anyway and find someone
| on the street who would.
|
| While in Sweden, I lived with Swedish families and attended to a
| traditional Swedish high school. So I'd eat lunch at school and
| dinner with my host families. My first day eating lunch at school
| I was shocked, to say the least. I mean, yeah, the food was
| great, it's amazing that there is such a functional high-quality
| school system there, and so organized too; once you're done
| eating, you're supposed to take your plate, put any leftovers on
| a big trash bin, and give your plate to the lady who puts them
| into a industrial washer. The amount of food kids threw away was
| just staggering. And it's not a one off thing. It's a behavior,
| they put more food than they know they'll eat, every single day.
| It's not like they put a ridiculous amount of food on their plate
| and throw most of it away. It's like they don't even bother
| paying attention to how hungry they are, they just put whatever
| amount of food they feel like putting, and then throw away the
| rest. That goes even for drinks, they would serve a cup full of
| milk or water, and throw half of it away.
|
| I know I'm talking about kids and teenagers, but they will grow
| up to be adults some day. And I saw that of many adults also. On
| of my duties as an exchange student was to connect both cultures,
| mine and the country I was being hosted by. I always tried to
| give people there a glimpse of what of poverty was and how
| privileged they were, and I always felt I never got the idea
| through. It felt sometimes they have a cartoonish idea of poverty
| and what it means to not have the money to pay for really basic
| things.
|
| I'm not here to call anyone out. I just think there are times
| when the people are also part of problem, and I wanted to give a
| personal perspective.
| sacrosancty wrote:
| How would less wastage help at all? It would just translate to
| less production and everything would continue with the same
| risks as always, wouldn't it?
|
| I don't have any food growing in my garden even though I could.
| Is that food waste? What if I plant some vegies and forget to
| eat them and they die and rot. Is that food waste? I don't see
| that food waste itself is a real problem, just an illusion
| because it's so visible.
|
| Surely we all waste electricity by having hot showers instead
| of cold, or leaving our computers on when we're not using them.
| We can afford it, so why not? Even those poor people are
| wasting oxygen in the air! Imagine how scarce that is in space
| or a submarine.
| PakistaniDenzel wrote:
| When food prices double/triple/quadruple in the next few years
| I think people will quickly adapt simply because they won't be
| able to afford to throw out any food.
| yabones wrote:
| Despite growing up in a prosperous nation, as part of a middle-
| class family, this is always something I've been acutely aware
| of. Most likely because both of my parents came from
| backgrounds with their own struggles.
|
| Every time I see a garbage can, I see money that was spent on
| waste. And when I see money, I see time that was spent. And
| time is something you can't get back, it's gone for good once
| you spend it. Every garbage can is a waste of life. Minutes and
| hours thrown away.
| nkg wrote:
| We waste a third of what we produce. If you take into account
| what we burn in the process (fertilizer, fuel, water,
| manpower), you'll realize how bad are our consumption habits.
|
| "In the United States 30 per cent of all food, worth US$48.3
| billion (EUR32.5 billion), is thrown away each year." "The food
| currently wasted in Europe could feed 200 million people (FAO,
| 2013)."
|
| Source: https://www.unep.org/thinkeatsave/get-
| informed/worldwide-foo...
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| There are 330 million people in the US so that means the
| waste is only worth 130 USD per person. Or to put it another
| way a years worth of food in the US costs only an average of
| 260 USD, less than a dollar a day.
|
| That seems unlikely to me. I'm pretty sure that even poor
| people in the US pay more than a dollar a day for their food.
| So where does all the money go?
| hedora wrote:
| Middlemen. Farmers are paid below market rates, and below
| cost of production in the US.
|
| Tax breaks and other subsidies let the farmers stay afloat,
| and organizations such as the Chicago Board of Trade set
| artificially low wholesale prices.
| pkaye wrote:
| Its not clear if US is any worse of that other countries
| based on this UN study. The data is very noisy and many
| developing countries don't have high confidence estimates of
| waste. Lack of temperature controlled storage and reliable
| transportation infrastructure can be a big issue in
| developing countries for example.
|
| https://catalogue.unccd.int/1679_FoodWaste.pdf
| pm90 wrote:
| theres some really simple solutions to food waste
| https://youtu.be/6RlxySFrkIM
| sva_ wrote:
| Overproduction of food by about 20% is by design in the west,
| as I understand it. Because you'd rather have a bit too much
| (which isn't a big problem), than too little (which would
| quickly be an enormous problem). The problems we're facing now
| are not caused by that overproduction of food, so I think it
| isn't a good argument.
|
| I also hate food waste, because it seems to dumb. But I think
| it is there for a reason - at least to some degree.
| blockwriter wrote:
| I agree with eating what you acquire and prepare, but food
| waste is also a byproduct of adequate food supply, or of
| supersaturated food systems. It is not only an individual
| attitude toward food. It would be great if I could give my
| leftovers that are likely to go to waste to someone down the
| hall in my building, but they are not in a food scarce
| situation. In their calculus, it would be easier, and safer, to
| make their own dinner. There is perhaps only one person within
| five miles of me that is food scarce to the point that my
| leftovers would be useful or desirable to them. Within ten
| miles, there is perhaps an order of magnitude more; within
| twenty, two or three orders more. All the same, it would not
| make sense to rectify accidental waste by donating it in almost
| every instance when I produce accidental food waste. The
| transport required would make it unfeasible.
|
| An abundance of food does self-perpetuate to the point that it
| becomes expendable. Well run family kitchens would likely have
| a positive effect on people's disposition towards food. I mill
| grains and bake bread, sourcing the grain supply from a well-
| run farm in my state, and this never fails to give me a moment
| to reflect on my relationship to food. It is, unfortunately,
| not commonplace for American households to engage with their
| consumption further up the supply chain than the supermarket
| shelf, where access is the most convenient.
| golemiprague wrote:
| adolph wrote:
| Suggested listening about food waste: Econtalk Rachel Laudan on
| Food Waste Dec 4 2017
|
| _Historian Rachel Laudan talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts
| about food waste. Laudan argues that there are tradeoffs in
| preventing food waste--in reduced time for example, or a
| reduction in food security, and that these tradeoffs need to be
| measured carefully when considering policy or giving advice to
| individuals or organizations. She also discusses the role of
| food taboos and moralizing about food. Along the way, Laudan
| defends the virtue of individual choice and freedom in deciding
| what to eat._
|
| https://www.econtalk.org/rachel-laudan-on-food-waste/
| aqme28 wrote:
| I was shocked at my first uni cafeteria dishwashing job. Plates
| coming back literally full, untouched.
| mordechai9000 wrote:
| I'm from the U.S., and I was actually raised with a somewhat
| similar view of food waste. But my parents were born in the
| 30s. Many of my contemporaries had parents born in the 40s or
| 50s, and their attitudes were very different.
|
| I was over at a friend's house a few years ago, and she had
| prepared lunch for her daughter. When her daughter complained
| she didn't like it, my friend threw the whole plate food in the
| trash without blinking, and made something else. I asked my
| friend, and she said the food is so cheap it doesn't matter.
| And you can't just let your child not eat.
|
| My parents certainly didn't grow up poor. Both of my
| grandfathers made a good living. I don't know what conclusion
| to draw, but there seems to have been a huge cultural shift
| towards food in the post war years.
| exolymph wrote:
| Your friend's kid sounds spoiled tbh.
| lnsru wrote:
| There are things my kid doesn't like either. But my partner
| always asks if I could eat that meal if the child refuses.
| That's how we don't throw away that small meal.
| brimble wrote:
| > And you can't just let your child not eat.
|
| You can, most of us just don't because people think you're
| neglecting the kid if the kid _chooses_ not to eat a meal you
| provide them. Same reason we send way more food for lunches
| than my kids ever eat--because the amount they will eat looks
| "too small" and my wife's worried what people will think.
|
| I hate this stuff, but get the reasoning. IMO they'll eat if
| they're hungry. Meanwhile, we have an obesity crisis.
| scns wrote:
| My brother worked for a help organization in africa for 1,5
| years. When he came back, he told me that they throw food away
| too. I only cook as much as i can eat.
| cerol wrote:
| I don't think food waste can be eliminated. I would even
| argue that there is threshold after which a decrease in food
| waste comes at the expense of quality of nutrition.
|
| Even in my university's restaurant, which feeds students on a
| massive industrial scale, I see food waste. But even in a
| much bigger scale, the amount was significantly less.
|
| Elimination of food waste is not practical and should not be
| a goal, you'll just ultimately fail and give up on
| intermediary goals that might just suffice.
| EricE wrote:
| Food waste may always be a thing, but it can be handled a
| lot smarter than we do. We need more of this:
| https://www.porkbusiness.com/news/hog-production/famed-
| dirty...
| brimble wrote:
| Food waste is mostly just a sign that food is very cheap.
| Cheap enough that it's not worth trying to save or find
| another use for what's wasted.
| jerf wrote:
| As with any engineering problem, the harder you push some
| constraints the more you'll have to pay with others. A
| university-scale cafeteria could greatly reduce food waste
| by fetching the food off of the plates the customers are
| done with and putting that food back into the cafeteria for
| the next customers. But there's reasons that's several
| violations of the health code. Something has to give at
| some point.
| notduncansmith wrote:
| I think there is some room to innovate before we get to
| that point. For instance, they could educate students on
| the economic and ecological costs of food waste, and
| equip them with tools to reduce it, like associating
| certain levels of hunger with visible portion sizes, or
| putting in electronic scales so students are shown how
| much of each food they eat.
| aenis wrote:
| There is an all you can eat chain in my area. Its cheap,
| but they do charge extra for any leftovers - that
| approach would likely significantly reduce the waste in
| places such as uni-scale cafeterias.
| hosh wrote:
| Onsite composting and vermicomposting is a better place
| to dump "food waste".
|
| Where the food usually goes are into landfills where they
| produce dangerous accumulations of methane that can
| explode. Some folks have tried capturing that methane to
| burn, but if stuff can be made into compost, you'd need
| less synthetic fertilizers.
| FooBarWidget wrote:
| I feel you. In my extended family environment, more food is
| wasted than necessary. Some relatives have a habit of buying
| lots of food, more than they need, because they used to be poor
| and now that they are no longer poor the derive happiness from
| buying lots of things. The fridge is always full, and they'd
| _still_ come home with two huge bags packed with food. Food is
| regularly thrown away because it has rotted in the fridge: food
| comes in faster than anybody can eat it.
|
| And meals are often bigger than what everyone can finish during
| that meal. This is especially so when there is visit. In
| Chinese culture, it's not done to ask visit whether they want
| more food because they are not supposed to say yes. Asking is
| thus equivalent to signalling that you don't want to give them
| more food, i.e. a lack of hospitality. Thus people make more
| food than necessary.
|
| That in itself isn't a problem because one could save the
| leftovers in the fridge. But some refuse to eat leftover food
| because it's not fresh, or they refuse to eat fridge leftovers
| that are more than 1 day old (you can save most leftovers in
| the fridge for 3 days if you put them in the fridge immediately
| after eating). Some even believe that even frozen food is
| considered unfresh, or has fewer nutrients or something. Others
| refuse to put anything in the fridge at all because they hate
| colder-than-room-temperature food (why reheating is a problem
| eludes me, but they refuse to use reheating as a solution).
|
| All of this pains me. I _hate_ wasting food. The result: I 'm
| often the only one who eats the oldest leftovers, everybody
| else eats fresh even though there are lots of leftovers.
|
| This doesn't just apply to food, but also energy. Some insist
| on turning the heat so high that they can wear tshirts indoors
| during winter, because that's more comfortable than wearing
| more clothes. Others think I'm being weird for trying so hard
| to drive electric-only (driving to a public charging station
| can be a pain compared to parking at the most convenient
| location).
| idontpost wrote:
| > you can save most leftovers in the fridge for 3 days if you
| put them in the fridge immediately after eating
|
| 3 days? Try a week or two.
|
| I'm just happy if I can get my wife to put food in the fridge
| in under 2 hours.
| ZealousForJesus wrote:
| How about brokering a peace deal? Which is more important,
| American pride or feeding your family?
| catchclose8919 wrote:
| Wtf happened with the chemical industry in general? Aren't
| fertilizer plants old-and-known tech? Why don't we have more,
| spread around the world, and capable of slight over-production
| just in case? Or we're all just "green" and "bio" and stuff now,
| willing to let poorer people just suffer hunger? You know what
| comes after poor people get hungry: (1) it's this _if you 're
| lucky:_ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillotine, and (2) wide
| spread WARS if you're not so lucky. Hope we at least go for
| number (1) and do the trimming at the top where it needs to
| happen.
|
| While we're it, I still can't wrap my head of the stupidity of
| all those charities that work to "solve hunger" in Africa and
| places but can't ever bother _to help them pool investment for
| stuff like local and locally controlled chemical plants for stuff
| like fertilizer and insecticide_ and maybe _specially-engineered
| GMOs for higher yields in the local conditions_ etc. ...bc you
| know, all sorts of problems get easier to solve once you 're not
| hungry and slightly healthier. And for _" those people"_: ffs
| it's better to just mass sterilize x% of people even chosen by
| lotter (to no do eugenics) than barbarically using hunger as
| population control tool.
|
| _...the "wonderful" curse of just-in-time logistics and pursuing
| "efficiency" and global-supply-chains at all costs :)_
|
| I'm all for globalization, of culture, of knowledge etc. ...but
| not of _basic-foods production tech and supply chains ffs!_
| pjc50 wrote:
| > Hope we at least go for number (1) and do the trimming at the
| top where it needs to happen.
|
| Do not advocate for mass murder on HN.
|
| > Why don't we have more, spread around the world, and capable
| of slight over-production just in case?
|
| Because we don't have global centralized economic planning, and
| overcapacity costs money?
|
| Besides, only one of the three NPK is really "produced" in a
| plant, the other two are mined. (You can in theory extract the
| elements from seawater, like gold and uranium, but it's very
| energy-expensive)
|
| > local and locally controlled chemical plants
|
| Doesn't actually help unless you can also get the feedstock -
| natural gas - locally. Otherwise you're still exposed to world
| prices and world availability issues.
|
| Really this is all fallout from cutting Russia out of the
| market and the invasion of Ukraine itself.
| MerelyMortal wrote:
| I don't think OP is advocating for mass murder.
|
| OP is saying that when presented with two terrible things,
| they hope for the one which reduces overall deathes and
| concentrates it with the people that most likely caused the
| situation to happen.
| falcolas wrote:
| It's all about the money (as usual) - likely the economies of
| scale specifically. They technically can produce it almost
| everywhere, but it was cheaper to import it, and likely would
| still be even if local plants were started up.
| rightbyte wrote:
| That sounds like a problem due to the current lack of
| protectionism for strategic assets? I.e. it is not viable to
| do domestic base industry in a lot of areas.
|
| COVID showed us that governments are quick to stop exports if
| they feel there is a need to.
| kristjansson wrote:
| Per TFA, the story is not really about an insufficient
| production capacity, but an increase in the cost of the inputs.
| The product is (literally in some cases) on the shelves, but at
| a price that impairs or breaks the farmer's unit economics.
|
| Nitrogen fertilizers are, basically, a fossil fuel product. The
| dramatic increase in price reflects the increase in the price
| of natural gas. Agricultural phosphate is competing with more
| profitable application in LFP batteries [1], so prices are
| rising.
|
| More resilient production for agricultural inputs and support
| of farming that builds on local conditions to require fewer
| inputs would be nice.
|
| [1]: https://www.producer.com/news/china-cuts-phosphate-
| exports-t...
| phil21 wrote:
| > Wtf happened with the chemical industry in general?
|
| Don't look now, but the same thing that happened to quite
| literally every single important industry critical to human
| survival. It's all incredibly centralized and fragile, to a
| degree I don't think many even begin to realize.
|
| > Why don't we have more, spread around the world, and capable
| of slight over-production just in case?
|
| Money.
|
| > or we're all just "green" and "bio" and stuff now, willing to
| let poorer people just suffer hunger?
|
| Nope, just money. Would have been far "greener" and "bio" and
| stuff if we had actually invested in such infrastructure, even
| if more expensive.
|
| This ironically enables the current historically cheap food
| situation we're currently in. In no time in human history has
| less labor or wealth per capita been put into food production.
|
| > While we're it, I still can't wrap my head of the stupidity
| of all those charities that work to "solve hunger" in Africa
| and places but can't ever bother to help them pool investment
|
| This is definitely one of my pet peeve rants as well. I've
| always said these organizations are likely to cause more death
| and human suffering than anything that has come before it. As
| soon as the ships of grain stop sailing whenever a moderate
| disruption finally happens (60-70 years of peace is really just
| a minor blip on the radar), people very rapidly will starve
| with little local recourse or knowledge to fall back on.
|
| Teach a man to fish and all that.
| SemanticStrengh wrote:
| As a reminder Skq1 solves world hunger however like most
| scientific revolutions, nobody will use it. It multiply by two
| plants growth rate.
|
| https://www.dissercat.com/content/biotekhnologicheskie-osnov...
| https://patents.google.com/patent/EP2095713A1/en Ah yes downvote
| because key knowledge nobody knows should keep being ignored
| otherwise it could.. save life's? Imagine the horror!
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| The Green Revolution of the 1960s proved that we could - that
| Malthusian claims were BS. What we have now is those same
| Malthusians actively sabotaging the roots of the Green Revolution
| by shutting down energy and means of production. Technically mass
| murder.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| > those same Malthusians actively sabotaging the roots of the
| Green Revolution by shutting down energy and means of
| production. Technically mass murder
|
| I don't suppose you'd like to expand on this argument or back
| it with any sort of substance?
| vkou wrote:
| Do we also get to describe carbon-polluting energy generation
| in the same terms? As 'technically mass murder'?
|
| What's your suggested next step? Line up the 'technical mass
| murderers' against the wall?
| kristjansson wrote:
| The Green Revolution proved we could increase crop production
| through additional inputs, not magic. We moved the constraint
| from local soil conditions to global resource extraction.
| [deleted]
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > Malthusian claims were BS
|
| The Green Revolution merely raised the ceiling massively
| higher. It did not perform any magic to make it permanently
| vanish.
| goatlover wrote:
| Women choosing to have less children is the other half of the
| failed mass starvation predictions. World's population will
| peak this century and start to decline. We currently produce
| enough food to feed 10 billion, if waste is accounted for.
| netmonk wrote:
| When you understand that human and animals organic dejections are
| alternative fertiliser and that most aerial virus spreads through
| shit you can understand the main way how covid 19 was spread
| accross the world with very high correlation between biosolid
| (shit based fertiliser) spray on fields and covid 19 infection in
| US for exemple (https://theethicalskeptic.com/2021/11/15/chinas-
| ccp-conceale...)
| mrtweetyhack wrote:
| twa999 wrote:
| we are again at the narrow window between "it's not happening"
| and "it's good actually"
| londons_explore wrote:
| Everyone saying 'we need to grow more crops!' needs to see that
| the futures markets deal with exactly this. As people see high
| futures prices for corn, they'll grow more corn because it's more
| profitable. Some farmers will switch from livestock to corn.
|
| Others who have storage facilities will make money by buying now
| to sell later and make use of the price difference.
|
| At a certain point, prices get too high for making bioethanol.
| And that gets eaten by people instead.
|
| Basically - there is no shortage because markets will do their
| job and mean there is always availability of all goods.
|
| The only time there will be a shortage is when governments do
| things like cap prices or restrict exports/imports.
| modo_mario wrote:
| > Some farmers will switch from livestock to corn.
|
| This switch can take too long and would need to take place in
| an industry often already razor tin margins thanks to big
| chains (which can contribute to inflexibility) and then plants
| take time to grow and depend on the seasons, etc. Also
| fertilisers go into both the livestock and the corn feed.
|
| >Basically - there is no shortage because markets will do their
| job and mean there is always availability of all goods.
|
| A shortage doesn't need to mean people are starving. If prices
| of staple foods go up enough it too causes societal unrest.
| (See Arab spring where bread prices went up, governments tried
| to protect their peg to the dollar, etc)
|
| >The only time there will be a shortage is when governments do
| things like cap prices or restrict exports/imports.
|
| Well here we see that happening when fuels and other components
| for fertilisers and some things like vegetable oils are
| affected by war.
| pm90 wrote:
| India, the 2/3 largest producer of wheat/rice has strict
| controls on exports. Other countries will impose restrictions
| when they realize their poor will rise up in riots. One theory
| for arab spring is that it started because of rising food
| prices.
|
| Food is just not like other commodities. Shortages lead not
| just to recessions but revolutions. Any Government and society
| not paying close attention and investing in either ramping up
| domestic production or stockpiling is going to have a really
| bad time.
| taylodl wrote:
| The markets can't solve problems due to lack of critical
| resources. Market theory rests on the assumption that all
| needed resources are readily available. Demand can be met my
| using capital to create more manufacturing facilities. Remove
| that assumption and market theory essentially collapses.
|
| Where market theory can still save the day is finding
| alternatives. If a key resource needed for the production and
| distribution of goods is missing then market forces will tend
| to produce an alternative. That works so long as an actual
| replacement exists and the cost of the replacement is in line
| with the original. Water is an irreplaceable resource - if you
| don't have water and you need it for production then you're
| pretty much screwed. The market won't "solve" that problem for
| you. If, as in this case, you need fertilizer then there may be
| an alternative but it may take several years to ramp up the
| production of that alternative and that alternative may be
| considerably more expensive than the original. This scenario
| leads to food shortages, food insecurity, and spiraling food
| costs. The market can't prevent these realities.
|
| In short, markets are just a tool and like all tools you need
| to understand their usefulness and limitations.
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