[HN Gopher] After millennia of expansion, the world has passed '...
___________________________________________________________________
After millennia of expansion, the world has passed 'peak
agricultural land'
Author : sebg
Score : 254 points
Date : 2022-05-31 15:31 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ourworldindata.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (ourworldindata.org)
| alexfromapex wrote:
| Indoor vertical gardens are really cool, would love to see more
| of those
| prichino wrote:
| asdff wrote:
| This isn't concerning. In the middle ages, the vast majority of
| the isle of Britain was under the plow to feed a couple million
| people. Yields have improved dramatically in the last century, by
| orders of magnitude for many staple crops. This is due to
| utilizing hybridized species that might have favorable traits
| compared to pure species, and also by using fertilizer and modern
| irrigation. The latter was called the green revolution:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution
| nearbuy wrote:
| > This isn't concerning.
|
| Did you read past the title? It's not supposed to be
| concerning.
|
| > The world produces more food than ever, but the amount of
| land we use is now falling. This means we can feed more people
| while restoring wild habitat.
| peanut_merchant wrote:
| Did you read the article? The exact point is that it's not
| meant to be concerning.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I don't think that your statement about Great Britain is
| correct. If so much land were devoted to agriculture in the
| Middle Ages, there wouldn't have been much of the forests left
| to devote to shipbuilding during the early-middle modern
| period.
|
| It is true that some land that is now urban or used for grazing
| was more once intensively farmed (especially eg in the
| highlands where most agriculture is sheep farming). But I think
| the amount of land devoted to crops, and certainly the kind of
| intensive growing that leaves little room for wildlife is a
| more modern invention.
|
| I would guess that land devoted to agriculture (maybe except
| for some kinds of grazing) probably peaked in the 20th century,
| perhaps during or shortly after the war when food imports were
| harder to come by.
| whatshisface wrote:
| You're making an assumption about how much forest land would
| be required to support the shipbuilding that doesn't match
| what we know about Britain's history of forestation:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forestry_in_the_United_Kingdom.
| ..
| DoughnutHole wrote:
| If I remember correctly quite a lot of British lumber used
| for shipbuilding from the Elizabethan era on came from
| Ireland, which was comparatively well forested in the
| Middle Ages.
|
| You don't need natively forestry so much when you've a
| subject neighbour to pillage.
| 99_00 wrote:
| Transportation and refrigeration allow us to grow food where it
| it grows most efficiently and move it to where it is needed.
|
| The alternative is to use more land to inefficiently grow food
| locally and eat canned, pickled, and dried food off season.
| aaron695 wrote:
| FredPret wrote:
| I've always been super pumped about hydroponics and the absurd
| yields you can get from it. Hopefully it gets cheaper and cheaper
| over time.
| fredrikholm wrote:
| Hydroponics are limited to low-calorie foods such as lettuce,
| herbs, spinach etc due to constraints in the method itself.
| High calorie and/or high fiber foods require complex
| rhizospheres which is currently only found in healthy soil.
|
| To add injury, the substrate used to provide nutrients to
| hydroponic plants either require petrochemicals or other plant
| material (compost, husks, seeds...) to mimic a complete
| nutrient profile.
|
| Perhaps there are solvable problems, but given the already high
| costs and limitations, hydro is not an option if our ecosystems
| collapse.
| incomingpain wrote:
| >Hydroponics are limited to low-calorie foods such as
| lettuce, herbs, spinach etc due to constraints in the method
| itself.
|
| Why do you say that? Hydroponic setups often produce
| tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, strawberries, etc are all quite
| popular.
|
| https://www.biotecharticles.com/Agriculture-
| Article/Hydropon...
|
| >High calorie and/or high fiber foods require complex
| rhizospheres which is currently only found in healthy soil.
|
| Mainly root veggies or large things that are unruly like a
| watermelon. More of a practicality problem. I have been
| eyeing that root veg drip hydroponic system. You can
| absolutely grow all the foods hydroponically. Not sure about
| those rhizospheres.
|
| >To add injury, the substrate used to provide nutrients to
| hydroponic plants either require petrochemicals or other
| plant material (compost, husks, seeds...) to mimic a complete
| nutrient profile.
|
| This hasn't been true for decades. I think you touched on the
| real big problem "petrochemicals". Oh ya we just found the
| problem.
|
| https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19900009537/downloads/19.
| ..
|
| >Perhaps there are solvable problems, but given the already
| high costs and limitations, hydro is not an option if our
| ecosystems collapse.
|
| Did you know when you exclude the illegally seized Moroccan
| fertilizer we have about 20 years left of current day
| farming?
|
| I wonder about glyosophates eh.
| lathyrus_long wrote:
| > High calorie and/or high fiber foods require complex
| rhizospheres which is currently only found in healthy soil.
|
| What is your source for this claim? Major grains (wheat,
| corn, rice, etc.) grow fine hydroponically--I've actually
| seen modern conventional agriculture described derisively as
| a hydroponic system using the sterilized natural soil as its
| inert medium. That description seems basically correct to me,
| though I don't think it's necessarily bad. Production of
| grains in systems analogous to hydroponic vegetable
| production would certainly be possible, just currently
| uneconomic:
|
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2002655117
|
| The major benefit of hydroponics is in achieving very high
| yield per acre. This is important e.g. when growing
| perishable vegetables in expensive greenhouses near densely-
| populated areas. For grains that are readily dried, stored,
| and shipped, it's currently far cheaper to cultivate more
| acres in remote areas at lower yield per acre.
|
| The "petrochemical" claim is also confusing. The point of
| hydroponics is that the plant gets nutrients from the
| solution, not from the inert substrate. Typical hydroponic
| substrates may be plant-based (e.g. coir) or not (e.g.
| rockwool), but in neither case are they providing significant
| fertility, nor making significant use of petrochemicals.
| Obviously their energy inputs for production and
| transportation often come from petroleum; but that's true for
| almost any human activity today, including organic
| agriculture. A few niche applications do use petrochemical-
| based substrates (e.g. phenolic foam), but very rarely.
|
| The synthetic nitrogen fertilizers dissolved in the nutrient
| solution often use hydrogen from natural gas, since that's
| the cheapest source, but could use any other source of
| hydrogen (e.g., electrolysis of water) instead. Here's an
| article studying those economics:
|
| https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2021.5808.
| ..
| [deleted]
| jahnu wrote:
| Solar Foods and similar are also promising ways to massively
| reduce land use
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Foods
| bshipp wrote:
| I work in hydroponics and when I describe it to someone new I
| mention it's like creating 15 acres of agricultural land out of
| thin air. Of course that depends on the crop, but there can be
| huge advantages to covered agriculture.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Is it still mostly salads or is there hope for high-calorie
| hydroponics?
| hanniabu wrote:
| All depends on the cost of the land it's on,
| electricity/water costs, the growing apparatus, whether it
| requires artificial light, and what the market rates for
| the crop are. So yeah, there's a lot of variables as one
| could imagine.
| colechristensen wrote:
| It's still mostly salads.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| > I mention it's like creating 15 acres of agricultural land
| out of thin air.
|
| So you can just grow things hydroponically out of nothing?
| You don't need masses of petrochemical-derived fertilisers
| and plastics?
| watwut wrote:
| It is cheap way to get badly tasting vegetables. There is real,
| huge noticeable difference between tomatoes raised via
| hydroponics and not. Unless they manage to make them super
| packed with nutrients, which they are definitely not, there is
| zero reason to eat them.
| legulere wrote:
| Hydroponics only makes sense for high price crops like salad or
| vegetables which make up only small amounts of agriculture.
| It's way too expensive for the crops that provide most of the
| calories consumed by humans or animal feed: wheat, maize, soy
| jschveibinz wrote:
| Animal feed, along with fresh water and land usage is a major
| issue, as you have suggested.
|
| Less animals for human consumption = less feed, water and
| land required for animals. This opens up resources and
| agricultural land for vertical farming specifically for human
| consumption.
|
| Humans currently consume 55% of the calories from
| agriculture, with animals at 36% and the rest for biofuels.
|
| https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-
| fuel...
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| Okay, so if you get rid of livestock farming, what do you
| do with the land that is currently used for grazing and how
| do you cope with the inevitable soil depletion from not
| turning arable land over to pasture every so often?
| colechristensen wrote:
| Water usage is an exaggerated concern because people misuse
| statistics.
|
| There are places where water usage _is not a concern at
| all_. In Iowa we take rainwater and pipe it to rivers
| faster, the opposite of irrigation. A gallon of fresh water
| "saved" in agriculture in Iowa is meaningless. More than is
| necessary comes from the sky.
|
| Water usage is a problem where people are trying to grow
| things where there isn't enough water (i.e. much of
| California), in those places agriculture needs to be more
| selective about what it grows and needs to grow less as to
| not overburden water sources.
|
| In Iowa though half the state would be standing water much
| of the year if we didn't actively drain our fields, griping
| about how much water growing corn "uses" is absurd in that
| situation.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| Yes, but dumping oil based fertilizer on fields to
| produce government subsidized "biofuel" is still
| ridiculously stupid.
| paulmd wrote:
| Rainwater isn't the only form of water, farmers in Iowa
| pump groundwater too, and those aquifers are becoming
| seriously depleted in a lot of the plains states. This is
| causing pretty serious drops in groundwater levels in a
| lot of areas and won't be sustainable indefinitely.
|
| https://d9-wret.s3.us-
| west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium/...
|
| https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-
| school/sci...
| colechristensen wrote:
| Of the 26 million acres of farmland operated in Iowa,
| 152,000 acres are irrigated or 0.58% (2015). Municipal,
| industrial, etc. water is quite often groundwater, but
| the farmland is 99.5% not irrigated at all.
| hanniabu wrote:
| > Hydroponics only makes sense for high price crops like
| salad or vegetables
|
| That's only true if it's in the city or other location with
| high cost/sqft land
| tekno45 wrote:
| imagine if we can reclaim all the land that salad and veggies
| use and replace it with good grains?
|
| solutions aren't always mutually exclusive.
| kingkawn wrote:
| Ahhh, a reductionist solution that erases cultural heritage
| while solving no meaningful problem. How original!
| yuliyp wrote:
| ... that'll be a drop in the bucket. cereal grains alone
| use more than 10x [1] the amount of land used for
| vegetables. Add in other large users (coarse grain / oil
| crops) and it's over 20x, meaning you'd get like a 5%
| increase by replacing _all_ vegetable land with grains.
|
| [1] https://ourworldindata.org/land-use#land-use-by-crop
| tekno45 wrote:
| thanks for sharing, thats pretty good data.
|
| can't disagree with that. seems like even more reason to
| not use the land for things that can be grown
| vertically/hydroponically.
|
| But definitely something i'll be reading more on, thanks
| for the resource.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| It wouldn't be particularly nutritionally useful, and you'd
| be able to grow grain for a couple of years before your
| soil turned into dust.
|
| That's why America starved in the 1930s.
| fatherzine wrote:
| Hydroponics sounds great on paper. Until you see the sludge
| they feed the plants with. Given the incentive to cut costs,
| especially where it's hard to see and/or measure, not sure I
| want to get anywhere close to the resulting produce.
| FredPret wrote:
| https://daily.jstor.org/a-history-of-human-waste-as-
| fertiliz...
| lathyrus_long wrote:
| What do you mean by "sludge"? Typical hydroponic solution
| just looks like water, thus the name. The fertilizers used
| are higher purity ("greenhouse grade", "ultra-soluble", etc.)
| than those applied to soil, since impurities risk clogging
| the fertigation equipment.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| This objection baffles me. Traditional agriculture has used
| literal feces to "feed" plants since its inception, and
| frequently uses bones and blood as nutrient input. I'm eating
| the resulting food, not the rot and excrement used to feed
| it.
| fatherzine wrote:
| That is a fault of imagination ;) Think "processed oil
| refinery sludge" or some other such industrial horror. Oh,
| sure, there is a shit ton of heavy metals and/or who knows
| what other garbage in there, but it's below the FDA limit
| (hello VW wink wink), so let's roll with it straight to
| mass human consumption.
| mlindner wrote:
| This is as false as the last time this type of nonsense was
| claimed. It causes really bad policy.
| 99_00 wrote:
| Fossil fuels are a big input into agriculture. Running machines,
| fertilizer, transportation to market.
|
| Fossil fuels are used because for the industry they are the best
| cost vs benefit. The industry doesn't pay the externalities.
|
| Moving off fossil fuels or forcing the industry to pay
| externalities increases input cost and price for consumers. If
| managed correctly (considering technological, economic, business)
| price increases can be acceptable.
|
| If managed incorrectly, it means prices skyrocket and some people
| simply in the world simply can not afford adequate nutrition.
|
| It is my opinion that sanctions, ESG, and fossil fuel divestment
| are incorrect management of transitioning off fossil fuels. And
| we are seeing the result.
| oefrha wrote:
| Tangential but I'm under the impression that "The world produces
| more food than ever" may not be true this year, and may not be
| true in the following years if the climate keeps being highly
| irregular.
| protomyth wrote:
| This year is all about fertilizer prices driven by high
| petroleum costs.
| oefrha wrote:
| I recall reading about many climate factors -- Indian crops
| scorched by heat, Chinese wheat season delayed by
| rains/floods, etc. I didn't pay enough attention to know the
| relative importance of the climate and non-climate factors.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Every year has climate factors. There's always some place
| where the season is bad for this or that reason, this is
| the nature of agriculture, not something new.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Not just oil prices, but minerals too.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| And maybe a war in a country that produces a lot of wheat
| protomyth wrote:
| True, but if the input costs were lower, the difference
| would easily be made up.
| lucozade wrote:
| Russia is the biggest fertiliser exporter in the world.
| Sanctions aren't likely to keep prices down.
| tagami wrote:
| you can't "spin up a new instance" with farming. The
| ripples are just now reaching the shore. This will be a
| longer period for recovery than most people understand.
| protomyth wrote:
| No, but they decide each planting season what to plant.
| Farmers tend to shuffle crops when needed. Haven't talked
| to anyone around here about what is in the ground.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Where I live (southern Sweden) they switched almost
| entirely to rapeseed and grains due to the shortages.
| It's expected to be pretty profitable although there are
| a lot of other factors including low rainfall...
| koheripbal wrote:
| ... and a population explosion in Africa.
| [deleted]
| legitster wrote:
| You can already see this trend in the western world. In our
| county, we may have rezoned 1/2 of our farmland in the last few
| decades.
|
| It's just a pity they all turn into housing developments. We
| should really be setting aside more as green space.
| mc32 wrote:
| In many parts of the east coast and even some in the west coast
| of the USA, what was once pastureland or farmland has returned
| to a more natural state and a naive person would not know these
| places were one productive agricultural lands. This is why
| today the USA has more forest than it did at the turn of the
| 1900s.
|
| But yeah, it's sad that all the orchards from mountain view to
| San Jose and beyond in the San Francisco and San Pablo Bay
| Areas have turned into housing tracts. I also long for the
| peaceful orchards, vineyards and fields of corn, but alas, time
| marches on.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > But yeah, it's sad that all the orchards from mountain view
| to San Jose and beyond in the San Francisco and San Pablo Bay
| Areas have turned into housing tracts. I also long for the
| peaceful orchards, vineyards and fields of corn, but alas,
| time marches on.
|
| i was under the impression no additional housing is being
| built and that was a major problem.
| citilife wrote:
| > i was under the impression no additional housing is being
| built and that was a major problem.
|
| People act like it is, the reality is different. Why do
| people all need to live in SF?
|
| Serious question, why?
|
| There are small towns throughout the country within 30-45
| min of a major city. If you want to go further out, you can
| find small towns / cities everywhere. I'm currently living
| a fair distance from any major city and can still get
| literally anything I can imagine delivered. It's cheaper,
| taxes are cheaper, food is cheaper, fuel is cheaper, I have
| more land, I can see trees / stars. Yet within a brief
| drive I can be in the center of a major city with all it
| entails.
|
| San Francisco is fairly dystopian. I used to live there,
| walking over human waste, people getting head in the
| street. Naked women rolling around after a bender, a
| persons leg rotting off. This was my daily walk through SF
| to work. Now, I see cows, sit in the grass and still make
| more money and am away from the tragedy.
|
| I think most people think building more buildings would
| solve the homeless problem. The reality is that dispersing
| production would save the city. I.e. limiting growth and
| having strict policing. The homeless would leave / be swept
| up and arrested. The housing would be expensive, but
| wealthy people would still live there. Then Sacramento, San
| Diego, Colorado, Texas, etc. is where people would move.
| This would help wealth inequality (spreading the wealth)
| and improve mental / societal health.
| deanCommie wrote:
| > Serious question, why?
|
| You're not very serious if you don't realize that this is
| an extraordinarily privileged position based on your
| position in the socioeconomic ladder.
|
| > I'm currently living a fair distance from any major
| city and can still get literally anything I can imagine
| delivered. It's cheaper, taxes are cheaper, food is
| cheaper, fuel is cheaper,
|
| It's cheaper FOR YOU based on your job that you can do
| remotely, and comparing to the lifestyle you maintained
| in San Francisco.
|
| Do you seriously believe that every janitor, parking lot
| attendant, nurse, and waiter, could move to the small
| town you are discussing and commute in for work? Here's a
| headline for you: "A 2:15 Alarm, 2 Trains and a Bus Get
| Her to Work by 7 A.M. Like many in the housing-starved
| San Francisco region, Sheila James has moved far inland,
| gaining affordable space at the price of a brutal
| commute." [0]
|
| [0]
| https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/business/economy/san-
| fran... or https://archive.ph/MNxzg
|
| > San Francisco is fairly dystopian. I used to live
| there, walking over human waste, people getting head in
| the street. Naked women rolling around after a bender, a
| persons leg rotting off. This was my daily walk through
| SF to work. Now, I see cows, sit in the grass and still
| make more money and am away from the tragedy.
|
| You're so close
|
| > taxes are cheaper
|
| But so far.
|
| The reason why your new area doesn't have any people with
| drug, mental health and poverty issue is because you
| don't pay enough taxes for the social programs that allow
| these people to survive in San Francisco. Which, like
| Seattle, Vancouver, and LA tend to concentrate human
| misery in North American not because they attract misery
| but because they're the only places on the continent
| where these human beings can SURVIVE. Homeless people
| struggle to not die in the winter in most of the East.
| The Deep south has no social programs or jobs. Once you
| get to the SouthWest, the local policies is just to put
| homeless people on the bus to California.
|
| Which is where everyone - from homeless to billionaire -
| has the best outcomes for health and life expectancy.
|
| Yes, one way of dealing with human misery, is to be able
| to afford to put it out of your sight and out of mind,
| and not deal with the structural issues that create them.
| It's great that you get to ignore them to live your best
| life.
|
| But don't think that a society can be created where those
| things don't exist, just by moving to a more
| pastoral/agrarian lifestyle. What you describe is not
| scalable to the rest of society without massive social
| programs the kind that don't exist across America (and
| likely never will)
| User23 wrote:
| > The reason why your new area doesn't have any people
| with drug, mental health and poverty issue is because you
| don't pay enough taxes for the social programs that allow
| these people to survive in San Francisco.
|
| It's a well known fact that ceteris paribus the more you
| spend on something the more you get of it. I honestly
| can't understand why people in those cities want more
| open air drug markets, feces, and crime, among other
| things, but there's no arguing with revealed preference.
| They observably want those things and vote to get more of
| them.
|
| From my point of view it's simple enabling behavior, like
| with an alcoholic. It's not like these problems are
| ordained by nature. People in cities are the ones
| enabling human misery.
| citilife wrote:
| > People in cities are the ones enabling human misery.
|
| IMO SF encourages it.
| Maursault wrote:
| > The reason why your new area doesn't have any people
| with drug, mental health and poverty issue is because you
| don't pay enough taxes for the social programs that allow
| these people to survive in San Francisco.
|
| Ah, so social programs _attract and cause_ drug, mental
| health and poverty issues? Well, I guess it is lucky for
| them providing for the general welfare is literally in
| the US Constitution _twice_ , in the Preamble and also in
| the Taxing and Spending Clause. But I guess that is what
| is wrong with this country, the Constitution and the
| government should be disbanded, so you don't have to look
| down on all those less fortunate than you, right? The
| Framers were supremely foolish not to realize that
| welfare causes poverty and drug and mental health issues.
| You should really tell someone so we can fix this
| problem.
| citilife wrote:
| > Do you seriously believe that every janitor, parking
| lot attendant, nurse, and waiter, could move to the small
| town you are discussing and commute in for work? Here's a
| headline for you: "A 2:15 Alarm, 2 Trains and a Bus Get
| Her to Work by 7 A.M. Like many in the housing-starved
| San Francisco region, Sheila James has moved far inland,
| gaining affordable space at the price of a brutal
| commute." [0]
|
| My wife literally used to do the same thing... It was a 3
| hr commute to and from work (6+hrs per day), if all the
| services were up; but they never were in SF. At least
| twice a week it would take her 4 hrs one of the ways.
|
| That's why we moved, her commute is now 10 min.
|
| You're kind of making my point, everyone where I live has
| a higher quality of life than they do in SF. They have
| more space, cheaper food, fuel, breathing less pollution,
| etc.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_ter
| rit...
|
| Just FYI you're talking a 1-3% difference in life
| expectancy between most of the states. That's probably
| within the margin of error. It appears to have more to do
| with wealth than anything, but that's neither here, nor
| there (The bottom 20 states have lower life expectancy
| and that's where smoking is more common and legal
| indoors).
|
| > Yes, one way of dealing with human misery, is to be
| able to afford to put it out of your sight and out of
| mind, and not deal with the structural issues that create
| them. It's great that you get to ignore them to live your
| best life.
|
| > But don't think that a society can be created where
| those things don't exist, just by moving to a more
| pastoral/agrarian lifestyle. What you describe is not
| scalable to the rest of society without massive social
| programs the kind that don't exist across America (and
| likely never will)
|
| I can tell you're living in a city. It's FAR easier to
| make it in the suburbs than either a city or the country.
| It's also FAR easier to purchase land than people think.
| You can get land at $4,000-$6,000/acre within 40 min of
| most cities. You can build a $180,000 house on that land
| that's larger than the vast majority of residence in
| major cities (I know because I've developed said land
| repeatedly). So we're talking what, $200,000 for a house
| and a couple acres. You can afford that on $35-40k a
| year, which you can make at walmart or Amazon.
|
| People experience misery in cities because the citizens
| of that city don't care. If they did, they'd tighten up
| the laws and encourage people to get jobs and prosper.
| That's not what SF does.
| dwallin wrote:
| > So we're talking what, $200,000 for a house and a
| couple acres. You can afford that on $35-40k a year,
| which you can make at walmart or Amazon
|
| This is misguided. When you are making that little it is
| extremely difficult to save enough money to buy a house.
| Most of your income will be going to expenses, and pray
| you don't get hit with health complications, periods of
| unemployment, broken down cars, or any number of other
| rolls of the dice that could zap any/all savings you've
| managed or drive you into debt.
|
| Not to mention, even if you manage to buy a house you can
| still get screwed by a period of bad luck making it
| impossible to keep up on your mortgage.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| different people value different amenities.
|
| > I have more land, I can see trees / stars.
|
| This could be a good amenity for you, but not for
| everyone. Me, I don't really like the idea of having to
| maintain all that land as well as having to drive
| everywhere because everything is so far apart.
|
| An amenity I need that I definitely would not be able to
| get in a small town would be access to a Chinese grocer.
| As someone who is ethnic Chinese, I have recipes that
| need ingredients that either aren't normally found in
| regular US markets or are available in poor quality and
| at higher prices. Delivery of niche goods is
| astronomically expensive. That limits me to a few major
| cities.
|
| > Then Sacramento, San Diego, Colorado, Texas, etc. is
| where people would move. This would help wealth
| inequality (spreading the wealth) and improve mental /
| societal health.
|
| The first part is happening, the second part isn't. If
| anything, some of them are starting to see San Francisco
| type problems, and it didn't take very long for them to
| get there because there are so many Californians that it
| takes a small percentage of CA's population to go and
| massively disrupt a smaller city.
| citilife wrote:
| I think it's fair that people value different things. BUT
| my point is that we shouldn't assume everyone needs to
| live in the same location to obtain their wants.
|
| > An amenity I need that I definitely would not be able
| to get in a small town would be access to a Chinese
| grocer. As someone who is ethnic Chinese, I have recipes
| that need ingredients that either aren't normally found
| in regular US markets or are available in poor quality
| and at higher prices. Delivery of niche goods is
| astronomically expensive. That limits me to a few major
| cities.
|
| I live near a town of 15,000 people, they have a Chinese
| grocer, multiple Mexican grocers, an African grocer and
| several home style greek restaurants, thai restaurants,
| some great sushi, etc.
|
| The U.S. is very diverse and there are different people
| everywhere. Like I said, I can drive 40 min and be in a
| multi-million person city while still living out in the
| country. When I lived in SF it would still take me 30-60
| min to get to many places via public transit.
|
| I guess if you really _need_ "high quality" niche goods,
| sure... But I've never had an issue lol
| fleetwoodsnack wrote:
| Where is this place, if you don't mind me asking?
| citilife wrote:
| Not going to give it particularly away, but here are some
| similar towns I've visited before deciding on my current
| town (very similar):
|
| * Bloomington, Champaign, Morris, Charleston IL
|
| * Kenosha, Sheboygan WI
|
| * Hendersonville, Gatlinburg, Greeneville TN
|
| * Milton, Concord NH
|
| There's probably more, but these are just off the top of
| my head. They were fairly similar in the sense you had
| most amenities and what you didn't have was <1 hr away.
| mc32 wrote:
| To your point, almost all high-visitor (winter/summer)
| based community will have the above amenities. Places
| like Burlington, VT or Truckee, CA.
| fleetwoodsnack wrote:
| I can only speak to Champaign (UIUC engineering) and
| Bloomington, IL, but I think your prior comment
| misrepresents the circumstances in these cities.
|
| The Asian/African/(-American) populations are mostly
| transient (students) and while grocery options exist they
| are oriented toward a student's diet: expansive in snacks
| and novelties, but short on staple vegetables, grains,
| and meats. I've heard of times in the past when friends
| of mine had to travel to Chicago, which is 3 hours away,
| for their haircuts because their regular stylist closes
| down for the summer when students leave.
|
| Not to say this is representative of the other cities on
| your list, but your comparing the ones I've experienced
| to San Francisco is laughable.
| mactrey wrote:
| You're arguing against a strawman. Nobody is saying that
| everyone needs to live in SF. The argument is simply that
| developers should be allowed to supply housing that meets
| demand. The fact is that lots of people do want to live
| in cities, for various reasons; but they can't, because
| building dense housing is illegal or heavily
| disincentivized.
|
| If you want to live in semi-rural America that's great, I
| prefer a similar situation for myself. I fail to see what
| that has to do with allowing or disallowing density in
| cities. In fact allowing density in cities preserves
| rural and natural areas outside of cities, so that seeing
| cows and hiking in forests is available for those who
| want it. Feels like a win-win.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| > BUT my point is that we shouldn't assume everyone needs
| to live in the same location to obtain their wants.
|
| Aren't you doing the opposite, and assuming that people
| can just happily substitute their lives somewhere else?
| Or did they do that and still think SF is preferable?
|
| If there is clearly a shortage of housing in SF, do you
| think that people haven't tried looking other places?
|
| College towns and seasonal activity towns with specialty
| stores tend to see the stores slow or shut down during
| the off-season, which is a problem if you want to be a
| year-round resident.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| Everyone did move further from SF. That's where all the
| bay area sprawl came from. That farm land got filled in
| with housing, so now there's not much countryside
| anymore.
|
| People then moved even further away, causing the sprawl
| to spread out even more. We're well on our way to being a
| giant low density megacity as a result.
| ravitation wrote:
| > Why do people all need to live in SF?
|
| No, the serious question is why aren't more people living
| in SF, instead of the sprawl of low-density suburbs and
| pseudo-suburbs that surround the Bay Area?
|
| The tiny area that makes up the City and County of San
| Francisco is relatively high density for its size, but
| the fall off in density once you leave the county (which
| occupies only the tip of the San Francisco peninsula) is
| precipitous.
|
| > People act like it is, the reality is different.
|
| No, people act like it is, because it really is... When
| you're talking about building high-density housing in the
| actual city (or medium-density in the suburbs with
| reasonable transit options)... Which is literally always
| what they are actually talking about. No one is talking
| about there being problems building low-density housing
| in the middle of nowhere.
|
| > San Francisco is fairly dystopian.
|
| If it is dystopian, it is not because of density. There
| are numerous higher density parts of the world that do
| not struggle with the issues San Francisco does. It has
| nothing to do with people's inability to see cows. It has
| to do with the US' refusal to support the things that
| facilitate living in cities.
|
| > This would help wealth inequality (spreading the
| wealth) and improve mental / societal health.
|
| The idea that increased suburbanization would have any
| positive effect on wealth inequality is completely
| absurd.
| mc32 wrote:
| Many people think "idealistically" but sometimes forget
| to ground it in reality.
|
| People often don't realize that the "utopia" of the
| Soviet Union where everyone got a guaranteed apartment,
| pay and a job, was in many ways behind Mexico for example
| (not to knock on Mexico) but in the USSR and the second
| world with it's then "UBI"-like system, people could
| afford less living space and food variety than your
| median person in Mexico. Often in second world economies,
| you were forced to live with strangers (not multi-gen
| families) in the same appt. You could not afford a second
| hand car and many luxuries were reserved for Politburo,
| Scientists and those in the nomenklatura.
|
| But some "thinkers" believe that if only SF and other big
| cities would build complexes like the USSR, except that
| they would look more like SoMa mid-rises than the more
| utilitarian Soviet Apt blocks we could fit and satisfy
| everyone who wants to live in SF and other large cities.
| sophacles wrote:
| Imagine confusing a concept like UBI that uses tax
| dollars skimmed off a decentralized economy with a
| centralized planned economy. Even funnier when you are
| also comparing a democracy with an authoritarian
| strongman regime. You do you though.
| mc32 wrote:
| What's the problem? They taxed (nearly) everyone at the
| 100% tax rate and then "gave" them what they thought they
| should have.
|
| Ah, yes, demonize and extol your political and economic
| systems to fit the argument. That's not what Bernie and
| many others were saying about communism in the 80s and
| 90s.
| sophacles wrote:
| Strange, I'm not Bernie. I don't know why you would try
| to gotcha my statements based on someone else's,
| different statements from decades ago. Would you mind
| telling me how some people talking 30-40 years ago has
| anything to do with me and my observation?
| vkou wrote:
| You're mixing two different eras in the USSR.
|
| Stalinist USSR forced strangers to live in the same
| apartment (or, alternatively, families living in what
| were essentially SRO units), because the impoverished,
| largely rural population was force-urbanized over a very
| brief time period, and the living space was simply not
| there to support this influx into the cities. And then
| that thing called 'World War II' happened, which sapped a
| decade of economic output on building guns, and
| rebuilding. It also killed ~15 million young men, and
| invalided many, many more. [1]
|
| Post-Stalin planning focused on solving this problem,
| through a massive build-out of single-family apartments.
| Non-relative roommates weren't much of a thing after that
| point.
|
| > But some "thinkers" believe that if only SF and other
| big cities would build complexes like the USSR, except
| that they would look more like SoMa mid-rises than the
| more utilitarian Soviet Apt blocks we could fit and
| satisfy everyone who wants to live in SF and other large
| cities.
|
| Given how much of an unmitigated disaster the current
| housing situation in SF/Seattle/etc is, buying out a
| hundred or so blocks and replacing them with
| Khrushchevkas would be an improvement for _everyone_ [2]
| in the city.
|
| [1] I hear this sort of thing does wonders for
| construction productivity.
|
| [2] Except for people who paid 3 million dollars to buy
| the equivalent of a shed in the current insane housing
| market. Unfortunately, they have both political capital,
| and the desire to exercise it, and would rather see the
| city burn down around them, than lose the money they
| locked into their home.
| mc32 wrote:
| If you built 100 blocks worth of Khrushchevkas we're
| looking at 25,000 to 100,000 people. That could be a city
| on its own and does not have to be in SF proper. Funnily,
| Khrushchevkas were affectionally known as Khrushchev
| slums.
|
| The Singaporean take on this style of housing is anything
| but affordable coming in at ~500/sft -after gov't
| subsidies. Contrast that with ~150sft for most new
| housing in the US.
|
| Singapore proves it'd doable in a dense city, but it's
| cheaper to build outside cities and if you're going to
| house that many people you might as well build an
| altogether new low-cost city.
| vkou wrote:
| There's ~11,000 homeless people in King County right now.
| Getting them out of the park, the freeway onramp, the
| greenspace north of my apartment, the coffeehouse bench
| across the street from it, the doorway across the other
| street from it, and into shitty SRO[1] apartments would
| be a god-send.
|
| > Contrast that with ~150sft for most new housing in the
| US.
|
| You're telling me that we can build a brand-new, 600 SQFT
| apartment in Seattle for $90,000? I didn't realize
| solving the housing shortage was that simple! And I must
| be an utter idiot for paying ~$30,000/year in rent for a
| one-hundred-year-old, 800 SQFT one.
|
| [1] Or, if we really splurge[2], and build some
| Brezhnevkas, _actual_ apartments.
|
| [2] Somehow an impoverished, paranoid, hopelessly
| corrupt, backwards-thinking communist country that spent
| half of its economic output on tanks and nuclear weapons
| managed to afford building them...
| kingkawn wrote:
| Dear future anthropologists; a collection of empty
| American archetypes about soviet life, found naturally in
| the wild
| mc32 wrote:
| Yep sorry forgot to mention that was the good part in the
| tier one cities... Once you went out to the countryside
| and beyond the Urals, it actually got even more
| interesting.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I have no idea what you're thinking.
|
| Across the world, people live happily (lots of them,
| anyway) in large scale apartment complexes. As long ago
| as the turn of the 20th century, people like Gaudi were
| already taking that a step further and designing
| _beautiful_ apartment buildings:
|
| https://www.lapedrera.com/en/la-pedrera
|
| Notice how La Pedrera is surrounded by other less
| aesthetic yet still fully occupied apartment buildings?
| There are hundreds of cities worldwide filled with people
| living in relatively affordable non-single-family
| housing, nothing like the structures or experience of the
| Soviet Union.
|
| Building denser housing does not mean that we will be
| living in some soviet-era world. Why on earth would you
| think this?
| kristjansson wrote:
| > you were forced to live with strangers
|
| You're describing roommates?
|
| Don't get me wrong, I don't want government mandated
| roommates either. OTOH lots of people are compelled to
| live with roommates in SF too, just by different forces.
| mc32 wrote:
| Kind of, but roommates are self-selecting and you _can_
| opt to move out. In the USSR, it was very difficult to
| opt out. If you were part of the nomenklatura, you did
| have some other options such as private apartments --but
| that was a small minority of people.
| fleetwoodsnack wrote:
| I'm a homosexual. Living in cities provides a network and
| security that living in more remote and rural places does
| not. One day (hopefully) cultural circumstances will
| change and I can avail myself of the benefits you
| mentioned, but at present living in culturally
| unpredictable places is simply a gamble whose return is
| not worth the roll.
| Aunche wrote:
| Not enough housing is built near the city center, so more
| people are pressured to move to formerly rural areas.
| pkaye wrote:
| The south bay is having a lot more housing being built.
| Mostly multi story apartments an condos.
| RationPhantoms wrote:
| keyword is affordable housing. Mansions/million-dollar
| condos are still being developed.
| mattnewton wrote:
| This is a problem, where we effectively don't allow multi
| family or cheap apartments in many areas and only allow
| expensive single family units. However I believe
| California housing supply is so far behind demand that
| even expensive units are desirable to alleviate pressure
| on less expensive units, that people might otherwise
| compete for.
| x3iv130f wrote:
| Most of the new housing I see built are 5-over-1s. Giant
| 6 story apartment buildings built on already busy
| streets.
|
| What California needs is flexible zoning to allow mixed-
| use medium density development connected by safe
| bicycling paths and public transit.
|
| Too much space is taken by automobile parking and there
| is too far of a distance between places people live and
| the grocery stores, shopping areas, and gyms they
| frequent.
| bennysomething wrote:
| There was a post on hacker news about this. Study in
| Finland showed it doesn't matter the type of housing, if
| it's luxury people move up and out of what they are
| currently in and the people below follow. Not surprising
| really, it's just supply and demand.
| watwut wrote:
| At some point, you run out of land with reasonable
| commute times.
| graeme wrote:
| It's more like dense housing is illegal, only single family
| homes are allowed.
| mc32 wrote:
| People were moving in like crazy which is why Tracy and
| mountain house exist. Those were largely farmland some
| years ago. More people are moving in than housing is built.
| If it were just local pop growth it would have been fine.
| StevePerkins wrote:
| There are some social bubble dynamics that affect the
| discussions you read, here and on various subreddits or
| other forums.
|
| 1. People believe there should more abundant affordable
| housing. BUT...
|
| 2. A lot of people here despise rural people, as a matter
| of cultural tribal affiliation. And also a lot of people
| here hate cars, which is 50% environmentalism and 50% about
| despising rural life as a matter of cultural tribal
| affiliation (I suspect that car hate would persist even if
| zero-emission solar powered vehicles became the norm).
|
| Therefore, we need more affordable housing, but only in the
| "cool places" where I want to live. Basically, I just want
| my rent to go down, and cultures that I don't like to cease
| to exist. Or this seems to be the line of thought, if you
| distill it down.
| stickyricky wrote:
| Absolutely not. I live in a rural area. A car is a
| necessity but it isn't my ideology. Living in cities is a
| lot of fun. Living in cities built for people and not
| cars is life changing. No hate for anyone here or there.
|
| My car is a tool. Full stop. If provided an alternative I
| would take it (and have).
| watwut wrote:
| > A lot of people here despise rural people, as a matter
| of cultural tribal affiliation.
|
| I have seen way more city bashing then rural people
| bashing here.
|
| > Therefore, we need more affordable housing, but only in
| the "cool places" where I want to live.
|
| The mass is moving where the jobs are. Really. There are
| cool places and less cool places, but the places lacking
| housing are the ones where people move to have work.
| legitster wrote:
| Lack of new housing in urban areas pushes people out into
| more rural ones.
| jxramos wrote:
| I heard this recently that forestlands expanded somehow
| through the decades. It's too bad there were no aerial views
| of things long ago to see this before and after.
| mc32 wrote:
| There aren't "many" aerial photos as testament but there
| are quite a few panoramic photographs of towns and their
| surrounds with denuded hills and meadows all being farmed
| one way or another and today are new growth forests and
| grasslands. Old abandoned railroads are among the witnesses
| to prior industrial activity.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| > has returned to a more natural state
|
| Well it's no longer managed as farmland and has young forests
| growing on it now. It's hard to say what would be "natural".
| The land on the east coast was being actively managed with
| controlled burning and cultivation of wild plants basically
| as soon as people arrived. Interestingly, there weren't
| indigenous earth worms then, so forests that weren't burned
| had deep beds of leaves. Before that there were glaciers and
| a totally different climate.
| usrn wrote:
| We're already short on housing even with this to the degree
| that real wages have stagnated or shrank since the 1970s. The
| only way to do that would be to almost completely stop
| immigration and population growth.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Or you could build up.
|
| Even most of NYC and Paris is not THAT dense.
| usrn wrote:
| Apartments and houses are different things and building up
| never seems to really lower the pressure on the housing
| market.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > Apartments and houses are different things.
|
| Sure, and so are houses with white picket fences and town
| houses. What's your point?
|
| > building up never seems to really lower the pressure on
| the housing market.
|
| You can't really find any examples measured in a vacuum.
| But I guess you've already made up your mind anyway.
| munificent wrote:
| _> We 're already short on housing_
|
| The US has plenty of housing. It's just not where the jobs
| are. With the automation of agriculture and moving
| manufacturing to other countries, the employment map of the
| US changed rapidly in the past few decades, and our physical
| infrastructure hasn't caught up yet.
|
| _> The only way to do that would be to almost completely
| stop immigration and population growth._
|
| Even with immigration, US population growth is nearly flat
| now: https://www.brookings.edu/research/u-s-population-
| growth-has...
|
| Assuming current trends continue (and I see no reason they
| wouldn't), the US will probably be net negative relatively
| soon. I know so many young people who have no plans to have
| children because they can't afford it and don't want to bring
| them into a world they think will be in a worse state than
| the one they grew up in.
| benstrumental wrote:
| Tangentially, I am amazed at the data in your source about
| how fast population growth is leveling off in the US. In
| 2020, the census projected US population to continue
| growing and cross 400 million by 2058 [1]. This projection
| accounts for the observed trends in falling fertility rate
| and assumes relatively constant rate of immigration:
|
| >By 2030, immigration is projected to become the primary
| driver of population >growth: more people are projected to
| be added to the population through net >international
| migration than from natural increase. The projected shift
| to net >international immigration as the primary driver of
| population growth is the >result of falling fertility rates
| and the rising number of deaths in an aging >population,
| not because of a projected increase in international
| migration.
|
| I guess the pandemic broke a lot of those assumptions. We
| will see if they hold in the long run though.
|
| [1]: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publ
| icatio...
| usrn wrote:
| Nah. Even in rural places with no jobs you can see sheds
| going for half a million.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Where? Look almost anywhere east of the Rockies and you
| should be able to find plenty of rural housing for much
| less.
|
| https://www.redfin.com/KS/Leavenworth/1218-Limit-
| St-66048/ho...
| usrn wrote:
| That house is a third of a million dollars in a rural
| place, that's what I'm talking about.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| That house is 3,300 sq feet, with a basement, built in
| 1980 for only $300k. It is also only 22min from Kansas
| City airport and 40min from Kansas City.
|
| I imagine rural sheds can be found for much less than
| $500k.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Not worried because the bigger problem will be population
| decline, once the boomers start dying on mass. The US will be
| more like Japan. You won't be able to import enough immigrants to
| offset this, since the lowering standards of living in the US is
| increasing to trend to the world average. Less people, less
| agricultural land needed. Too many people are having abortions,
| or choosing to not to have kids, and not enough kids are born to
| replace the dying.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| In 2019 there were 3,747,540 natural births in the US.
|
| There were 2,854,838 natural deaths.
|
| There were 31% more births than deaths.
|
| The natural population growth isn't declining yet.
|
| And even if it was - as long productivity increases - that's
| all that really matters. Population can decrease like in Japan
| while GDP increases due to productivity growth.
|
| Population growth != better living standards. See the
| Malthusian Trap that was the popular way of thinking prior to
| the industrial revolution. Population kept increases - yet
| people just kept getting more miserable lives.
| beiller wrote:
| May I ask what is a natural death? The numbers given don't
| align with other metrics I was able to look up like the
| "fertility rate" which is 1.70 births per woman (2019) making
| the growth negative (you need >2.0 right?)
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Moore's law for agriculture.
|
| We haven't begun to explore the 3rd dimension. A skyscraper per
| city providing all the food for that city is one possible
| future...
| koheripbal wrote:
| It takes about an acre of land to feed one person for the year,
| and that is with modern yield efficiencies.
|
| Even if you assume a 10x increase in yield efficiency, you
| would still need about 200 skyscrapers growing food, for every
| skyscraper holding people.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| That's gonna need to be an awfully big skyscraper.
|
| You'd need about 680,000 km2 of land to grow the food to feed
| NYC (more than the entirety of New York State).
|
| If you assume that yields could be 100x better in-doors (a
| strong assumption) - you'd still need a building with about 10x
| the floor space of the entire city's land area.
| contingencies wrote:
| Fundamentally large-scale monocultures are inefficient because
| they require large scale external inputs. When the overall cost
| of these inputs (transportation, source-site damage, energy
| inputs, requisite equipment, etc.) are considered in aggregate,
| the approach does not make sense economically. Obviously, it is
| also unsustainable.
|
| I believe a sustainable, long-term agriculture would include in
| its design the following features: multi-crop/intercrop by design
| (ecosystem vs. monoculture), reduction of emphasis on uniformity,
| iterative rather than total harvesting.
|
| Perhaps the main issue with such an approach is currently
| harvesting technology. Densely interplanted crops may be hard to
| access and thus hard to harvest. And yet, because they should
| tend to require less external inputs, be more resistant to
| pathogens, and provide healthier soils, improved water retention,
| reduced wind exposure, and multiple crops on the same land, there
| should be a budget for this.
| bmmayer1 wrote:
| Is this like when we reached peak oil 10 times in the last 50
| years?
| eth0up wrote:
| From my perspective, in Florida (and elsewhere), we've been
| aiming for peak _madness_ for decades. Things grow in Florida,
| and by choice, many of the wrong things. The focus here is
| primarily on impressionism and more often than not, a sub-
| mediocre version. The cult of Saint Augustine grass and soulless
| sub-developments has, in fear of creative alternatives and
| erosion, paved the state with this alien blight. We have a
| perennial swarm of whining 2-stroke engines thrashing, blowing
| and mangling countless tons of shrubbery and alien blight, most
| of which is never composted with intent for reuse. The whine of
| the blower is our State Anthem. The average home, if not
| encompassed by a mote of cement, grows nothing useful. A
| vegetable garden is a rare sight, and a community allotment even
| more so. In the 1920s, Florida produced more celery than any
| place in the world, and certain areas, through means of
| agriculture, thrived during the Depression. For many years, Polk
| County alone, produced more citrus than the entire state of
| California, although politics, land repurposing and ' citrus
| greening' have changed this. Amaranth grows everywhere here, on
| farms, roadsides and in yards. It's typically weeded, sprayed or
| fought. I wonder how easy it would be to grow crops of it. If
| that's a bad plan, many other useful things grow here, despite
| our objections. Even if we only grew conventional produce, we
| could grow far more than we do, and in a relatively harmonious
| manner. And this could be done without additional deforestation.
|
| Currently, a thousand people each day are relocating from New
| York to Florida (and many more from elsewhere), with the general
| intent to make things here resemble New York (or elsewhere) as
| much as they can afford. Our wetlands, which once comprised the
| majority of our territory, is replaced with retention ponds that
| are politically qualified as restoration of... wetlands. It took
| vicious battles to spare our keystone Everglades of airports,
| damming and concrete jungles, but we sort of did it. Sort of. The
| prevailing psyche, however, is generally hostile to anything
| indigenous here but the winter weather and surface image of the
| coastline.
|
| And then there's Sludge, the PFAS saturated, miraculously
| marketed product of repurposed sewage, which is sometimes forced
| on ranchers and others. I once spoke to a rancher who told me
| he's seen his cows chewing on condoms. When I asked him why he
| used the stuff, he said there's enough coercion to do so that he
| has little choice.
|
| My point is that rather than thinking exclusively in terms of
| carbon, stolid convention and zero self reflection, we might
| contemplate the many opportunities right in front of us, to do
| things differently, or do different things. It may seem extreme
| now, but without a paradigm shift (in an actually realistic and
| very potentially amenable direction), things will become extreme
| in a less amenable and less manageable way. Yes, if we continue
| being myopic maniacs, food production will be a problem. We may
| have other options though. I frequently read comments on HN
| hostile to small-scale and organic farming. Citations abound,
| illustrating the impracticality and futility of small, especially
| organic operations. Yet, in my direct experience, I've seen a 5
| acre farm not only remain the sole (and successful) business of a
| small family for decades and produce enough to sell, consume and
| compost, but no worker there has ever made minimum wage.
|
| I'm convinced we can do things differently and better.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| This is promising, but it does basically rely on human
| populations stabilizing fairly soon. Interestingly the most solid
| factors for that is women's education and rights and children's
| health care, that correlates most closely with reduced population
| growth (I mean, not many people would really want to pump out ten
| kids and watch six to eight of them die of childhood diseases,
| which was about the pre-industrial norm, given the choice -
| having two kids is the basic replacement number assuming they
| survive to adulthood).
|
| Hydroponics plus desalination is kind of interesting, as then you
| could grow some crops on seriously non-arable land, although I
| don't recall ever seeing high-protein crops (such as legumes with
| associated nitrogen-fixing bacteria) grown hydroponically. In
| terms of total calories per land area IIRC potatoes are the big
| winners there, never seen hydroponic potatoes either.
| mgfist wrote:
| At this point population decline is a bigger risk than
| population growth.
| empyrrhicist wrote:
| Risk for what? Sure, that poses demographic challenges, but
| having fewer people would make fighting climate change and
| ecosystem collapse much easier.
| lupire wrote:
| Risk of a shortage of subsistence laborers creating wealth
| for capital owners.
| prichino wrote:
| empyrrhicist wrote:
| What, by not having kids? Already there.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| If you think supply shortages were bad when some shifts had
| to stay home due to covid exposure just wait until those
| workers don't even exist anymore.
| antisthenes wrote:
| Labor Force Participation Rate:
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
|
| There is a LOT of slack in the participation rate. Those
| workers exist and many of them will likely move back to
| the workforce if the wages adjust upward to be a more
| lucrative job due to scarcity.
|
| Sure, it's not going to look the same in 2050, but the
| economy will just run at 80% participation rate then,
| rather than 62% now.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| > bigger risk
|
| Only if the economic system is a giant ponzi scheme that
| depends on continuous, infinite growth.
|
| Really, high population is the source of an enormous amount
| of problems. We should absolutely be focused on decreasing
| our population. The planet can support us at our current (and
| higher) populations, but to be frank, liberal democracies and
| capitalist markets at-scale are incapable of organizing
| production in a way that doesn't destroy the earth.
|
| It's funny, there was a post recently about "unsolved
| problems in economics." Nowhere was there a mention of the
| biggest economic problem in existence: externalities. Why?
| Because capitalism is incapable of solving the problem, and
| the economists know this, so they don't bother talking about
| it. They pretend it's an issue of state, when the profit
| mechanism itself is the cause for most externalities.
|
| If we want to preserve our current precious economic order,
| we need lower populations.
| bequanna wrote:
| "Capitalism can't solve externalities"
|
| Blanket statements like that are so clearly false and I'm
| not sure what you're implying. What is communism's record
| on environmental protection? Well, we can go to China or
| Russia for some clues.
|
| HUMANS aren't good at understanding externalities. Of
| course this isn't some new realization, we've known about
| the tragedy of the commons for some time which is why we
| have regulation.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| I think the problem with 'externalities' is that they're
| little more than convenient fictions that fly in the face
| of basic physical concepts like conservation of mass and
| energy. Any economic theory that relies on excluding
| 'externalities' to measure economic growth is purely
| nonsensical.
|
| Fundamentally, economics needs to adopt realistic system-
| level concepts, such as 'primary production' (gross
| photosynthetic input to a system like a lake). Then you
| can actually start to calculate how productive a hectare
| of land can be. This also clearly explains why concepts
| like 'infinite growth in a closed system' are so
| nonsensical.
|
| As far as capitalism, it's important to note the huge
| differences between 'investment capitalism' (Wall Street)
| and 'commodity capitalism' (Main Street). The latter is
| much more rationale, as it's not based on fairy dust, but
| actual real things, like farmers growing potatoes.
| Similarly, there are many areas of the economy that are
| best managed without any market influence, but rather by
| state-managed tax-financed programs (basic infrastructure
| development for example).
| orthecreedence wrote:
| > when the profit mechanism itself is the cause for most
| externalities.
|
| I was pretty clear.
|
| I'll break it down for you though! I have costs, and I
| have sales. sales - costs = margin (or, profit). If my
| sales are steady, what's a good method of increasing
| margin? Reducing costs! How is this generally
| accomplished? By making some other sap pay for them:
| externalizing my costs.
|
| The profit mechanism actively incentivizes externalities.
| This is plain fact, and there's nothing "clearly false"
| about it. Our economic system encourages externalities,
| and then builds enormous state apparatuses to quell the
| effects. You're free to ignore the facts, though.
|
| > What is communism's record on environmental protection?
|
| How is this relevant? And why is state planning the only
| solution in people's minds to replacing capitalist
| markets? There's more than either/or here.
|
| > HUMANS aren't good at understanding externalities.
|
| We understand them fine. We're being literally paid to
| create them, though.
|
| > which is why we have regulation.
|
| Yeah, that's working great so far!
| lizknope wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea
| thfuran wrote:
| >not many people would really want to pump out ten kids and
| watch six to eight of them die of childhood diseases, which was
| about the pre-industrial norm
|
| Wasn't something like 50% childhood mortality more typical?
| lordnacho wrote:
| Probably with a lot of variance, this would happen to some
| people. IIRC Darwin.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| I think child mortality is counted as deaths before age five;
| I think it's lower if you count survival to adulthood and
| then having children. For population to remain constant each
| couple has to have two children survive to that point (on
| average; if some people have larger families and some have
| none it would balance out). Regardless, having half your
| children die as the norm is a pretty unpleasant reality.
| ls15 wrote:
| > never seen hydroponic potatoes either
|
| https://youtu.be/9ck5iEP03g4
|
| Aeroponic potatoes. They don't even need any substrate.
| lathyrus_long wrote:
| I think that's seed potato production, where the consistency
| and lack of pathogens justifies the extra cost. Here's a
| manual:
|
| https://cipotato.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/005447.pdf
|
| It would be possible to grow potatoes for human consumption
| with a similar system, but I don't think it's currently
| economic.
| athrowaway3z wrote:
| Its time to move on from the woman education and children
| health care cliche talking points. Its very 2000.
|
| Its no longer a interesting question for the world at large.
| Africa and a few others are the only hold outs, and while they
| deserve those things, it shouldn't be the go to talking points
| w.r.t. world population.
|
| The vast majority of places is by all measures destined for a
| population collapse.
|
| In many places there is a bump in the population pyramid around
| child bearing age as we speak. That bump isn't even close to
| replacement fertility, and in 10 years the people in that age
| brackets are so few that their fertility won't be significant
| for total population numbers.
|
| Population stabilization is a subject for 30 years from now.
| First we're getting a population collapse and we should be
| talking about it.
| VictorPath wrote:
| World population is growing 1% a year. If you go back a
| century, world population never grew that fast in human
| history (except perhaps the dawn of human history). There is
| no global population collapse happening or on the horizon,
| this past century has had the fastest human growth rate in
| history, including now (the peak was the world baby boom in
| the 1960s).
|
| There are countries where population is falling, and policy
| has to account for it, but there is not a global population
| collapse right now at all. Only if you measure against the
| peak baby boom of the 1960s does it seem less.
| anthonypasq wrote:
| most of the developed world is experiencing population
| decline if you exclude immigration.
| beiller wrote:
| I wonder how up to date that 1% number is? From what I
| understand China has recently passed the zero to now be in
| negative population growth territory in 2022. Other
| countries have led the way. From my understanding, India is
| still in the positive territory but it is trending towards
| the negative as is the growing global trend it seems.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| The article is better than the headline.
|
| Remember that the reason we use so much land is because that's
| the cheapest way to grow food. We could grow more food on less
| land by farming more intensively. We don't because that would
| make the food more expensive. At an extreme, a greenhouse can
| increase yields 100x but at an increase in costs of 10x.
| [deleted]
| twox2 wrote:
| Yields increased by 10x for costs increased by 10x sounds
| cheaper to me.
| dtech wrote:
| I assume the 10x cost increase was per-yield, 100x the yield
| for 1000x the price.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| Ahh that makes sense. The original language was pretty
| confusing.
|
| Increase yields 100x per sqft Increase costs 10x per lb
| shagie wrote:
| https://agfundernews.com/the-economics-of-local-vertical-
| and...
|
| For greens, an conventional farm is $0.65/lb and a greenhouse
| is $2.33/lb.
|
| > Assuming a 40-45% gross margin for a typical supermarket
| produce department, retail prices for greens would need to be
| approximately $1 a pound for conventional, $4 a pound for
| greenhouse, $5 a pound for vertical, and $12 a pound for
| container-grown. A typical head of bibb or butter lettuce
| weighs less than half a pound. Therefore, the lettuce can be
| grown in a greenhouse or vertical farm and sold at retail for
| $2 to $3 per head.
|
| > Although greenhouse or vertical farming is three to five
| times more expensive than growing on a conventional outdoor
| farm, it still allows for competitive pricing to the consumer
| with other vegetables and sides.
|
| The yield can go up, but the cost per unit goes up too.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| What are the biggest factors that contribute to the cost?
| Is it mostly increased labor?
| cogman10 wrote:
| Labor and machinery.
|
| You can't run a harvesting tractor through a greenhouse.
| So, a lot of produce from greenhouses or vertical farms
| (etc) ends up with a manual harvesting step.
|
| This is why you pretty much see greenhouses exclusively
| used for foods which would require that manual step
| anyways.
| cupofpython wrote:
| we have AI based dancing robots now, maybe they can
| figure something out for this
| shagie wrote:
| Its an area of active development and research -
| https://youtu.be/5chk9Sory88
|
| Note that this is an area that is rather specialized - a
| pepper picking robot isn't good for tomato picking or
| lettuce picking ( https://youtu.be/EFC3OvkVKaQ ). Compare
| that to the incredibly versatile human (
| https://youtu.be/oxbJVqfIK1U ).
| cogman10 wrote:
| I think it's possible the whole system could be
| automated. The problem really ends up being one of cost.
|
| It's similar to the "burger flipper robot" problem.
| Possibility solvable, but also gonna be costly and buggy
| for v1 of the robot.
| DarylZero wrote:
| >You can't run a harvesting tractor through a greenhouse.
|
| Sure you can. Just needs to be big enough.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| People can only eat so much food, and it can only be sold for
| so little.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| Yield per acre 100x, yield per $, 1/10x
| la6472 wrote:
| FTA " improvements in crop yields, agricultural productivity,
| and dietary choices are so important."
|
| and the biggest one imo is dietary choices. Our meat
| consumption has lead to pasteurization of forest land to raise
| and feed the huge amount of livestocks needed to satisfy our
| meat craving.
| jahewson wrote:
| Once upon a time everything was forest land. The line seems a
| bit arbitrary.
| criley2 wrote:
| While the many types of forests (deciduous, coniferous,
| rain, etc) dominate a lot of land on earth, there is still
| many types of plains, chaparral/savannah, deserts,
| mountain, tundras, etc.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| There is more forest in North Dakota today than there was
| when Columbus landed.
| lupire wrote:
| 0 forest certainly seems bad.
| Zababa wrote:
| > Our meat consumption has lead to pasteurization of forest
| land to raise and feed the huge amount of livestocks needed
| to satisfy our meat craving
|
| Where? France has increased its forest surface since 1840,
| while increasing population and meat consumption.
| dotsam wrote:
| > Forest replacement by cattle is most prevalent in Brazil
| and Paraguay
|
| > Forest area replaced by cattle accounts for 36 percent of
| all agriculture-linked tree cover loss worldwide
|
| https://research.wri.org/gfr/forest-extent-
| indicators/defore...
| samatman wrote:
| The lifecycle is more complex than this. Slash and burn
| agriculture is used to squeeze a few cash soybean crops
| out, this requires specific GMO soy, and these are 90%
| sold to China to fatten pigs.
|
| When the land is only suitable for grass, it's grazed for
| awhile, after which it's basically desert.
|
| South America also has some of the richest cattle land in
| the world in the Pampas, which has sustained beef
| production for hundreds of years on land which is
| otherwise unsuitable to food production.
|
| Pressure on one company could stop the conversion of
| rainforest into soybeans. This doesn't solve the problem
| in a single stroke, nothing can, but it would help, and
| it doesn't require influence over the government of
| Brazil.
| bakuninsbart wrote:
| Imports exist, and France is a major importer of meat. Meat
| production has become less land intensive compared to 200
| years ago, but it is by far the worst way of producing food
| if you compare calory intake to land use.
| Zababa wrote:
| > Meat production has become less land intensive compared
| to 200 years ago, but it is by far the worst way of
| producing food if you compare calory intake to land use.
|
| Most meat, at least in France, is raised on land that
| couldn't support other kind of agriculture. The calorie
| intake of that land, without cows grazing on it, would be
| 0.
| wumpus wrote:
| France doesn't use feedlots? In the US, half of the meat
| weight is added to cattle in feedlots, using 1/2 of US
| corn production.
| Glawen wrote:
| I doubt so, farmers in my village in France never take
| their cows out of the barn. They feed them with dry grass
| and fermented corn (ensilage) they grow.
|
| Cow grazing is a thing of the past unless you do milk for
| AOP cheese or premium meat. By the way cheap beef in
| supermarket is actually old milk cow
| cogman10 wrote:
| Most nations are outsourcing their diets and problems,
| particularly in the EU.
|
| France, for example, has been pulling a lot of their beef
| from south america rather than eating locally raised
| cattle.
|
| https://www.thelocal.fr/20180117/french-farmers-fear-ruin-
| ov...
| Zababa wrote:
| The article isn't supporting your claims:
|
| > The source of his worry is a huge trade deal being
| negotiated by the European Union and the four Mercosur
| members Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay -- an
| accord whose signature seems closer than ever.
|
| > The new imports would represent just one percent of
| Europe's total beef production, and 4.5 percent of
| France's output.
|
| So the deal hasn't been signed and wouldn't represent
| much.
|
| From another article (https://www.franceagrimer.fr/fam/co
| ntent/download/66996/docu...)
|
| > Issues a pres de 92 % de l'Union europeenne, les
| importations de viande bovine chutent de 16,8 % sur un
| an, pour atteindre pres de 283 milliers de tec en 2020
|
| Which rougly translates to "92% of beef imports are
| coming from the UE. They fell by 16.8% to 283k tec in
| 2020".
|
| There's a total in "tableau 2", page 3. 28.4% of the
| total meat is imported, 18.9% for the beef. The total non
| EU beef is thus 8% (100% of total beef imported - 92% of
| UE beef) * 18.9% (percentage of imported beef). Rounded
| up, it's 1.6%. I would hardly call that "outsourcing
| their diets and problems" and "pulling a lot of their
| beef from South America". More than 80% of the cattle
| eaten is localy raised, less than 2% comes from outside
| the EU.
|
| South American beef is not a thing in France. We surely
| have plenty of other issues, but South American beef is
| not one of them.
| smallerfish wrote:
| > pasteurization
|
| You mean pasturization. Pasteurization would also be
| unfortunate though.
| wiz21c wrote:
| Yeah, but done at that scale, it'd be quite a thing to
| watch :-)
| skrbjc wrote:
| In the US, at least, we could keep our meat consumption quite
| high while still grazing lots of cattle. There are around 90
| million cows in the US right now, and pre-1800s there were
| around 60 million bison in the US. Land and pasture
| management is important, but it can be done well. Check out
| Alexander Family Farm in CA for a great example.
|
| We're not going to turn marginal grasslands into crops for
| human consumption, but using cattle to turn inedible grass
| into calories for human consumption is possible while
| maintaining that land as it was when bison roamed through it.
|
| I also don't think that the US, for example, has to manage
| its land the same ways as other countries. If the US can
| effectively manage pasture and raise lots of cattle to eat,
| then we should be able to do that, and if other countries
| can't, then they should manage their land in a way that is
| optimal for their country. The US has a lot of grass pasture
| land that evolved over time to support the massive number of
| ruminants that roamed the US in the not too distant past.
|
| Maybe the US should stop exports of beef and dairy and just
| focus on feeding its own people from well-managed land. But
| that would not be very popular, especially with our cattle
| industry.
| DANK_YACHT wrote:
| > and the biggest one imo is dietary choices.
|
| Yes, let's blame the consumer. First of all, the consumer has
| no idea how their specific spending habits contribute to an
| issue. For instance, an educated consumer (many consumers are
| not educated btw) might understand that eating meat causes
| deforestation, but they have no way of knowing if their
| specific purchase is contributing to that. Second, blaming
| the consumer makes any solution almost impossible because
| organizing a very large group of disinterested people is very
| hard. It would be much more effective to regulate the
| relatively small number of meat producers that are
| perpetuating deforestation and let the market work out
| decreasing consumption through increased costs.
| wklauss wrote:
| > Yes, let's blame the consumer.
|
| Yes, let's. I don't think an argument can be held against
| this. As a meat eater, I understand I'm the driving force
| of this issue. It's an inconvenient truth, but it is the
| truth nonetheless. I'm rooting for alternatives like lab-
| grown meat to thrive, but no amount of wishful thinking
| allows me to skirt the fact that eating less meat would
| probably be not only good for the planet, but specifically
| for my own health.
|
| > the consumer has no idea how their specific spending
| habits contribute to an issue
|
| Let me point it out: in the developed world it's almost
| 100% guaranteed that it contributes significantly. You have
| to go to pretty far edge cases to find really sustainably
| produced meat. A case can be made that not all industrial
| farms contribute to deforestation per se, but they are all
| part of a system that has a high cost for our environment.
| Deforestation is bad, but it's not -and should not be- the
| only issue.
| DANK_YACHT wrote:
| > As a meat eater, I understand I'm the driving force of
| this issue.
|
| How did you come to that understanding? Did you dedicate
| your free time to studying the impact of meat eating, or
| was it part of your legally mandated education? A lot of
| people scrape by, barely able to make ends meet. They
| have children that require attention, or problems that
| require immediate action. They may have debts to pay, and
| no social safety net to help. At a fundamental level,
| they may have poor critical thinking skills. It's not
| realistic to expect every consumer to take the time to
| understand the consequences of every purchasing decision.
|
| > A case can be made that not all industrial farms
| contribute to deforestation per se, but they are all part
| of a system that has a high cost for our environment.
|
| But the package says it was humanely raised by family
| farms? Your trips to the grocery store are going to take
| a very long time if you need to do a supply chain
| analysis of every purchase.
|
| If a person cuts down a tree for profit, and the removal
| of that tree is problematic, then that person is to
| blame. It doesn't make sense to blame someone many steps
| removed from the crime just because they, in a very
| indirect way, provided a very small incentive to commit
| the crime. The impact of the individual's consumption on
| the entirety of the industrial farming system is so small
| that, even if the individual consumer were to blame, they
| would be guilty of nothing more than the tiniest
| infraction. The issue with industrial farming arrises
| from the collective sum of demand, and thus requires a
| collective solution, i.e. centralized regulation.
| eloff wrote:
| Greenhouses are amazing. One of the top agricultural exporters
| in the world is the Netherlands. That shocked me when I
| discovered it. Part of the reason is fertile soil and
| dependable rain. But a huge component of how they can do so
| much with so little land is greenhouses.
|
| It seems like something we could stand to invest a lot more in
| as a global civilization. An understated benefit is making the
| food supply more robust to volcanoes, asteroids, and nuclear
| winters.
| siruncledrew wrote:
| I can see agricultural land going down even further in the
| future as techniques, incentives, and people dynamics change.
|
| How much of what we farm is really just 'superficial
| agriculture' and not 'survival-driven agriculture'?
|
| For example: gigantic monoculture fields of corn in the midwest
| US, groves of almonds and grazing crops in California, huge
| amounts of grasslands for beef. (I'm sure there's more examples
| too)
|
| It just seems like many of the ways agriculture operates
| doesn't make sense from a needs-based perspective and certainly
| not from a nature-enhancement perspective either. Farmers just
| do their job of growing, and then money does its job of
| convincing.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Cattle raised on grasslands, and especially "organic" cattle,
| are an environmental horror.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31477819
|
| George Monbiot: "[...] there is no major farm product as
| environmentally damaging as organic, pasture-fed beef."
| cwkoss wrote:
| The entire premise of that thread is questionable.
| Sustainably managed rotaional grazing pasture fed beef _is_
| a grassland ecosystem, quite similar to what much of the
| United States looked like when buffalo roamed before
| european-heritage settlers.
|
| Destroying forests to make pastures is environmentally
| destructive, but a large portion of our country can be
| utilized as pasture while maintaining an ecosystem not
| unlike how the land was before capitalism transformed it.
| peteey wrote:
| Corn makes up more than 10% of global food production. A
| significant fraction of the world would not 'survive' if
| those fields of corn suddenly disappeared.
|
| A better example would be specifically corn used for ethanol
| because driving a car is not essential for survival.
|
| The other two examples seem valid. Replacing part of your
| meat consumption with corn would reduce the required
| agricultural land.
| lrem wrote:
| I've read that biofuels are a waste. As in, if we replaced
| all the cars and trucks with electric ones, we could power
| them fully with solar energy deployed on the land used for
| the 5% biofuel... And use 90% of the reclaimed land for
| reforestation. The math seemed reasonable. But obviously
| doing this wouldn't work politically (even if we could make
| all those EVs and solar panels in the first place).
| wumpus wrote:
| > even if we could make all those EVs and solar panels in
| the first place
|
| Production of both is currently rising rapidly.
| elgenie wrote:
| Only 1% of the corn grown in the US is "sweet corn", i.e.
| corn that's meant for direct human consumption on the cob
| or canned. The other 99% is "field corn", and that gets
| used primarily in livestock feeds and ethanol (the latter
| being a subsidy boondoggle of the highest order), and
| industrial manufacturing (base starches). A sliver also
| gets used for corn syrup.
|
| The error being made is assuming that corn cultivation
| being significant to global food supply means that corn is
| being cultivated primarily for food.
| AlanSE wrote:
| https://thehill.com/policy/equilibrium-
| sustainability/350461...
|
| An interesting quote which echos what you're saying here:
|
| > That means that table corn, carrots, cabbage, apples and
| broccoli are all examples of what is called, paradoxically,
| "specialty crops" -- and they largely don't get the same
| support as the heavily subsidized industrial crops.
|
| The absurdity here is that "specialty" crops are what you
| might call "food". Most corn is "what my food eats".
|
| If survival was important, people could switch trivially. I
| would take a 99% vegetarian diet in exchange for not dying.
| Problem is that the costs may be collectivized, and
| weighted towards future generations.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| Lots of ways. We can live with much less sugar in our
| food. One example: sugarcane. According to the (UN) FAO,
|
| "The present area of sugarcane (Saccarum officinarum) is
| about 13 million ha with a total commercial world
| production of about 1254.8 million ton/year cane or 55
| million ton/year sucrose. (FAOSTAT, 2001)."
| [https://www.fao.org/land-water/databases-and-
| software/crop-i...]
|
| That climbed to 1.9B tons by 2020. [WP ... 40% in Brazil]
| And 13Mha = 130,000 km^2 > 50,000 sq.mi. About the size
| of Iowa. And then, there's almonds.
| sologoub wrote:
| California grazing issue is much more complex than consumer
| preferences for beef. Humans have basically destroyed the
| grazing populations that used to live there, including
| Buffalo. If you take the current land used for grazing and
| just stop, you'll significantly increase fire risks as
| nothing else will eat all that brush and it'll just collect.
| Go look around city borders where a lot less cattle grazing
| goes on - those hills have been stripped of forests and are
| just a pile of brush waiting for light up.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| A 100x increase in yield at 10x increase in cost equates to a
| drop in cost of farming food of 90%.
| ball_of_lint wrote:
| Cost-per-unit
| yumraj wrote:
| What about nutritional value?
|
| From various reports lately, I don't have links handy but I've
| seen them shared here on HN, it is generally accepted that the
| nutritional value of the food is declining. This has been
| primarily attributed, from what I remember, to the condition of
| the soil. So, if we start producing everything in a greenhouse,
| won't that impact nutritional value as well.
| hans1729 wrote:
| Healthy soil can be cultivated at scale, so if quality is the
| top priority that's not an issue. At least two major factors
| are at play:
|
| - soil usually doesn't get time to recover and gets
| fertilized every year, nutrition can't build back up because
| of worsening chemical conditions due to monoculture and salts
| -> simply less nutrients are available to the plants with
| each cycle
|
| - plants get bred to maximize yields, leading to first and
| foremost _bigger_ plants, other factors (like nutritional
| value) are not priority #1
|
| See https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-
| depletion-an....
| idiotsecant wrote:
| >Healthy soil can be cultivated at scale, so if quality is
| the top priority that's not an issue.
|
| Healthy soil can only be cultivated at scale with the aid
| of petrochemical byproduct fertilizers, which are not
| likely to be a long-term feature of our agricultural
| system.
| ben_w wrote:
| The petrochemicals can be synthesised from CO2 and water
| with known methods. While nobody bothers with this right
| now, SpaceX basically has to make this economical as one
| sub-goal of their Mars colony, so I expect it in a decade
| or two, well before we run short of natural petroleum.
|
| I'm more concerned with the long-term need to recover the
| potassium and phosphorus that washes into the ocean,
| which, despite still being _theoretically_ solvable, is
| not currently economic enough to bother with even for the
| gold and uranium that's also in the seawater.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The fertilizer that is derived from fossil fuels is
| ammonia (and nitrate made from ammonia by partial
| oxidation). More precisely, it's made from hydrogen
| derived from steam reforming of methane. But any source
| of hydrogen would do, including electrolysis with
| renewable electricity. There is nothing essential about
| fossil fuels for industrial agriculture.
|
| It should also be noted that the total energy consumed in
| growing food in the US (ignoring sunlight absorbed by the
| plants) is less than the energy used to COOK food in the
| US. It's roughly 1% of the total energy used by the US.
| wumpus wrote:
| Crop rotation doesn't improve the soil at scale?
| ABCLAW wrote:
| >Healthy soil can be cultivated at scale, so if quality is
| the top priority that's not an issue.
|
| The larger issue is that consumers have no way of assessing
| the nutritional value of the items they're purchasing at
| the point of purchase. Cost is mediated on the basis of
| weight, which results in water-rich, nutrient poor, taste-
| poor produce. Saline injection into meat is another similar
| issue.
|
| How do we make growing nutritional food profitable? Foods
| that can be sold on the basis of nutrient specific
| benefits, like Golden Rice or Vitamn D enriched milk can be
| marketed and sold on that basis, but comparing two
| beefsteak tomatoes grown in differing soils is not possible
| at present at the point of sale.
|
| Typical food certification strategies, such as Organic,
| DOP, AOC, and other regional growth indicators don't seem
| to fit the bill. It's also unclear whether or not there is
| a market for inspections on the basis of nutritional value
| - from an organizational standpoint, it shouldn't be too
| difficult to have an inspector randomly audit crops and
| send samples to a lab to be HPLC or Mass Spec'd, but
| whether or not another certification mark changes buying
| patterns is unclear.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Taste generally tracks with nutrition in non processed
| foods. If that could be validated, then we have a win
| win-- and then needs new ways of marketing/branding
| higher taste options
| bjelkeman-again wrote:
| That is interesting and relevant for me. A quick search
| only gave this, mainly about antioxidants. Do you know of
| more good literature?
|
| https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/organi
| c-f...
| ben_w wrote:
| I suspect that "if" will be more difficult than just
| measuring the vitamin and mineral content of random
| samples of the produce directly, but even if it isn't,
| taste would rapidly be another flawed proxy:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
|
| (I'd argue that taste is _already_ an example of
| Goodhart's law, and that this is why fast food is popular
| despite being objectively bad).
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Saline-injected tomatoes... Coming soon!
| munk-a wrote:
| Or tomatoes with a healthy corn syrup glaze.
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| As far as I remember from the last discussion on the matter
| the effect is overblown. Nutrient decline for modern
| techniques and soils is around 7% from baseline.
| lambertsimnel wrote:
| I've heard it's highly dependent on the nutrient
|
| BBC Radio investigated it in 2019:
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csz3ry
|
| The next year they did the same for soil degradation, and
| found it a similarly complex topic:
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08dx986
|
| Both are <10 minute MP3 downloads
| [deleted]
| beambot wrote:
| Is that 7% one-time or 7% compounding? The latter has a
| pretty deleterious effect over time...
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| One-time, or rather total decrease over time. I'll see if
| I can dig up a source.
|
| EDIT - old but seems like a decent review:
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-
| depletion-an...
|
| To recap, there are declines up to 30% in certain
| nutrients for certain vegetables. This seems to be mostly
| down to farmers choosing varietals that grow faster and
| handle transport better over time.
|
| Personally it's still my opinion that this is no big
| deal. Even if, say, oranges are lower-quality than a
| century ago, they are now cheap, easy to obtain and
| available year-round. You might have to eat four oranges
| instead of one for whatever nutrient allotment you desire
| but...that's a heck of a lot easier than it was for our
| grandparents. As long as people aren't eating mainly
| combinations of flour and oil, they'll be fine.
| Retric wrote:
| Eating more food eventually means obesity issues.
|
| I don't think we are at the point where it's either
| nutritional deficiency or obesity, but that seems like
| the ultimate risk here.
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| My man, no one is becoming fat because they eat too many
| oranges for the vitamin C.
| Retric wrote:
| Yet, give it 100 years and see what's going on.
| nwienert wrote:
| My man, if you have to eat 30% more to get the same
| nutrients, you gonna be fat
| asfasdf111 wrote:
| was the baseline also under monoculture?
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| If I remember correctly, yes. The comparison was made
| between normally grown vegetables from the 60s and now.
| mlindner wrote:
| "nutritional value" isn't a scientific term so you're going
| to have to define what you mean by that. Crops have been in
| fact getting more and more energy dense over time.
| cjsawyer wrote:
| In the extreme case, this is something we'll need to figure
| out for space exploration too. Hopefully people are working
| on it!
| snarfy wrote:
| It's the extra CO2 in the air that makes the nutritional
| value decline. Plants grow larger with more CO2, but the
| nutritional content stays the same.
| mattwest wrote:
| >This has been primarily attributed, from what I remember, to
| the condition of the soil
|
| Perhaps not
|
| https://www.rothamsted.ac.uk/articles/fact-or-fake-news-
| our-...
|
| Besides, the measured reduction in nutritional content is a
| fraction compared to our yield increases over the years.
|
| If you:
|
| live in a developed country
|
| have a reasonable income
|
| live near a supermarket
|
| and eat a varied diet,
|
| then you most likely do not have any nutrient deficiencies
| DeWilde wrote:
| Nutritional decline of actual fruit and vegetables or the
| nutritional decline of food as is consumed by humans?
|
| I don't think we are seeing the former while the later is how
| you use the former for the production of actual food that is
| consumed. Converting fruits into smoothies makes them retain
| mostly only sugar, while vegetables (and fruits) under
| thermal treatment loose a lot of nutrients like fiber and
| vitamins.
| tunesmith wrote:
| Is that true regarding smoothies? I mean, I get it for
| juicers, you lose the fiber. But smoothies?
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > Converting fruits into smoothies makes them retain mostly
| only sugar.
|
| Wait. So where does the potassium go in my banana when I
| blend it up?!
| candiddevmike wrote:
| The blender chops up potassium atoms into sucrose
| molecules via Nutri Bullet fission
| cogman10 wrote:
| That's why the blender motor gets hot when you run it.
| It's fissioning.
| WithinReason wrote:
| I always learn so much on HN!
| creaturemachine wrote:
| If it's fissioning then why do I have to plug in my
| blender? There's something they're not telling us.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Mostly for 5g signals.
| Moto7451 wrote:
| I think the parent might be slightly off the mark or
| simply is lacking detail.
|
| One concern in nutrition is separating fruit juice from
| fruit pulp. You probably wouldn't eat three oranges in a
| sitting without feeling full but you can certainly drink
| three oranges' juice. That's the number of fruit needed
| to make a cup of orange juice.
|
| If you're adding juice to a kale smoothy it's more
| complicated. At a certain point of extortion, refinement,
| and concentration that juice can become a proxy for
| simply adding cane sugar.
|
| If you're blending your fruit and eating the pulp then
| there is no change.
| soperj wrote:
| Who can't eat 3 oranges without feeling full? How big are
| these oranges?
| scythe wrote:
| It's never seemed to me that this whole "worse soil -> less
| nutrients" postulate makes sense on its face. There are,
| roughly, four categories of nutrients:
|
| - organic macronutrients, which we'd _definitely_ notice if
| they weren 't there
|
| - organic micronutrients, which are generally carbon
| compounds, but carbon doesn't come from soil, it comes from
| the air
|
| - electrolytes, which do come from soil, but are always
| replenished with fertilizer, because plants need them too
|
| - inorganic micronutrients, essentially transition metals
| plus selenium and iodine, which are present in utterly _tiny_
| quantities in food (you need about half a milligram of
| selenium per day), and could certainly be replaced by
| fertilizer if we even tried, or easily supplemented.
| Speculation: manure could work well.
|
| - (extra) that wacky little devil cobalamin, which is both
| organic and a transition metal (cobalt), but doesn't come
| from plants anyway
|
| Now, I could certainly see some kinds of farming techniques
| impacting the nutritional quality of plants. If you can
| increase the water content of your broccoli _ceteris paribus_
| , you sell more broccoli but the concentration of vitamin C
| goes down. I could also see impacts on the physical
| properties (compaction, grinding) of soil leading to worse
| long-term crop yields. But in order to convince me that soil
| changes are going to impact the vitamin C content of orange
| juice, when the constituents of vitamin C come entirely from
| water and air, you need _pretty strong_ evidence.
| gtvwill wrote:
| Fairly easy answer to this. If I took a orange tree and
| only fed it water and air. Would it produce oranges with
| vitamin c? The answer. No. Because the plant requires far
| more than just water and air in order to run all the other
| systems within itself to make that vitamin c production
| happen. If you take away certain elements in your soil,
| your going to affect aspects of that plants health that in
| turn affect its production capacity. If you provide most
| nutrients for a plant sure it will produce fruit. Will that
| fruit be as good as fruit from a plant with all the
| nutrients? No, no it will not.
| glitchc wrote:
| How do we square declining nutritional value with people
| living longer __and__ spending more years in a healthy state?
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| No great mystery, less nutritional value per unit produce
| just means you have to eat more produce, it doesn't force
| you to be malnourished.
| glitchc wrote:
| More doesn't account for nutritional deficiency. If zinc
| is missing in a foodstuff, it requires supplementing with
| other foodstuffs, not eating more of the same foodstuffs.
| masklinn wrote:
| > the cheapest way to grow food.
|
| Not just the cheapest, but the easiest: in many countries, and
| especially (though not exclusively) the US, the primary purpose
| of farming is landowning, so the primary incentive is limiting
| inconvenience.
| eastern wrote:
| Waiting eagerly for the world to pass peak peak.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Combine land use with yield improvements - 10X - 20X per acre
| since the 1950's.
|
| So the land-use graph, multiplied by this rising yield line,
| shows a very different curve. A shocking rise in crop consumption
| that exceeds world population growth by some factor. For
| industrial uses presumably (cotton, oil-seed and so on).
|
| Make of that what you will.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| Also, biofuel.
| mattwest wrote:
| More of our food crops have been funneled into livestock as
| feed as well
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| That's complicated. I'd imagine animal husbandry would scale
| well with population growth. What use is a cow, but for
| somebody to eat it? If that were the case, then the animal-
| feed component might match population growth (and not acres
| under cultivation).
| rr808 wrote:
| To me it seems super sized farms and corporate land is the main
| trend. Massive farms in easily farmed locations and the death of
| small family owned operations. If you try to run a small farm in
| marginal land it just doesn't pay any more. The new generations
| aren't interested either. I know my Wife's grand mothers old farm
| is abandoned, the land behind my holiday house used to be farm
| now its reverting to forest, meanwhile my Uncle's farm was merged
| with 4 others so is still family owned but a mega operation with
| low wage workers.
| simplicio wrote:
| I was surprised to learn recently how little farming is done by
| large corporations. _Small_ family farms are vanishing, but
| unlike basically every other sector, they 're largely being
| consolidated into mid-sized family owned operations, rather
| then into big mega-corps. Non-family owned corporations only
| make up 4% of farmland ownership
| tbihl wrote:
| I don't know how much this amounts to, but my parents have
| farmland for fun, and someone comes to cut the hay twice a
| year so that it qualifies as agricultural use. They're not
| alone.
| nicoburns wrote:
| It has been the main trend in recent decades, but current
| farming practices aren't sustainable, deplete the soil, and
| depend heavily on oil-derived external inputs (e.g. ammonia
| fertiliser). It may well be that crop-mixing makes a big come
| back in the decades to come, and that may not be as suitable
| for mega-farms.
| wollsmoth wrote:
| There are actually a ton of small farms being run around the US
| at least. i learned of this site from the Omivore's Dilemma:
| http://www.eatwild.com/products/
|
| This kind of farming is doable, and can be profitable if run
| well. But it's labor intensive and doesn't scale as well as
| conventional farming operations. Running a small farm properly
| is a hell of a lot of work. A modern farm can allow farmers
| more off time and less effort.
| piker wrote:
| What you are describing is an unprofitable business. You can
| make equilibrium money in it but you must supply the labour
| and get no time off. If you instead substituted yourself out
| and bought the labour there would be nothing left over.
| tbihl wrote:
| There is almost no chance that people who run small farms
| are evaluating on the same terms as you.
|
| They have found a sustaining lifestyle that lets them spend
| time outside, work at home, teach their kids to work, eat
| local, work with their neighbors, have seasonal variation
| in their lives, transact with their neighbors, have fun
| toys (seriously, if you've never driven a tractor...), have
| privacy, and on and on. It's a totally different path than
| a salaried job, and not because they couldn't how to code
| for big tech or work for a bank. It's a dedicated version
| of the FIRE idea that so many people with highly paid jobs
| aspire to.
| wollsmoth wrote:
| yeah it's a living. I'm sure there's some free time in
| the winter but you aren't exactly going to retire early.
| cwkoss wrote:
| As society continues approaching cyberpunk dystopia, I
| wouldn't be surprised if office workers would start
| paying to stay and work on farms to reconnect with
| land/nature.
|
| Pick-yourself farms are big here - feels like the first
| step in that direction.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > I wouldn't be surprised if office workers would start
| paying to stay and work on farms to reconnect with
| land/nature.
|
| This started long ago. Look it up. There's also WWOOF.
| wollsmoth wrote:
| Sounds like it's a living, but in the work months it's a
| lot of manual work. You're not exactly getting rich quick.
| People will pay up for excellent produce/meat.
| giantg2 wrote:
| In general I believe small-time farmers should provide at
| least some of rhe labor. Otherwise you end up with
| gentleman farmers just paying low wages to the actual
| labor.
| [deleted]
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| How/why is this different from other businesses?
| giantg2 wrote:
| The main point is that farm labor lacks the wage
| protections of almost any other business (except tip-
| driven ones).
| giantg2 wrote:
| Most small farms require at least one spouse working an off-
| farm job for the benefits.
|
| It's pretty disgusting how little small-time farmers make
| (and general farm labor). There's a huge fight for $15/hr
| minimum wage, but this doesn't include farm labor. The people
| growing everyone's food can't even afford benefits without
| taking on a second full time job.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| While I don't know what the definition of a small-time
| farmer is to you, but I live in a farm heavy area and their
| income level is huge for the amount of time they put in. My
| friend has a business that sells "power equipment," and
| he's entirely sustained by farmers buying the latest and
| greatest every year.
|
| Think about it this way - 5 years ago farming land in the
| area was worth $10,000 an acre. It's probably more now. So
| if you just have 100 acres, that's easily worth a million.
| To make sense farming it instead of selling it and
| investing (or renting the land to another farmer) you'd
| need to make more than $50k-$100k after expenses for it to
| be worth it.
|
| And it is. Most have significantly more than 100 acres.
| There's maybe 8 weeks out of the year where they need to
| work hard. The downside? You more or less need to be born
| in to it because even if you could afford to buy the land
| you'd have a hard time finding any to buy.
|
| Note: I'm talking about crop farmers here. Animals are
| another matter, and I don't understand the type of people
| that would decide to get in to that line of work.
| wollsmoth wrote:
| The book describes a pretty nice small farm arrangement.
| Basically the guy has a field of grass and has some cows
| and chickens. The cows graze on the grass and poop, the
| chickens pick apart the poop and eat insects and he's
| basically just moving around fencing once every day or
| two. Since it's not mass farming of animals he doesn't
| have to deal with as much waste at scale, and he sells
| high end meat in addition to some produce he works on
| separately.
|
| Doesn't sound that bad once you get it going but I'm sure
| there's a lot of day to day work.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I'm not sure I follow your logic.
|
| Think about it this way - 5 years ago farming land in the
| area was worth $10,000 an acre. It's probably more now.
| So if you just have 100 acres, that's easily worth a
| million. To make sense farming it instead of selling it
| and investing (or renting the land to another farmer)
| you'd need to make more than $50k-$100k after expenses
| for it to be worth it."
|
| But many times the land is worth more than they make. A
| 100 ac farm growing wheat would gross about $40k, right?
|
| As for power equipment. Some of that can be bought with
| grants or subsidies, right? Or on debt.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| Sure, and I maybe worded that poorly. They get to make
| that money _and_ keep the land to either eventually sell,
| pass down, or rent. The point is it 's rare for farmers
| to sell what's usually millions of dollars of land -
| usually that happens when inheritance comes in to play.
|
| The power equipment is mostly stuff for fun more than for
| work, such as side by sides. They still get to deduct it,
| of course. It was just an example of how much money they
| make.
|
| For what it's worth I believe the soil in southwest
| Minnesota is supposed to be among the best in the
| country, and they do corn & soybeans.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> It 's pretty disgusting how little small-time farmers
| make_
|
| As a small farmer, I think it's amazing how much I can
| make. For approximately a month's worth of work, I make
| more than my wife does working all year long. And I have 11
| other months free to work in the tech industry.
| giantg2 wrote:
| What do you do? It seems incredible that you can farm for
| only one month of the year with no related work the rest
| of it.
| randomdata wrote:
| Grain farmer. It is not one consecutive month, for what
| it is worth. The work is spread out over the year, but
| the total time spent each year is equivalent to about a
| month of work.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Is this an unusual year? It seems the small grain farmers
| I know make just ok money in the past. Certainly not
| enough to pay for benefits and stuff. Or maybe your small
| farm is much larger than the small farms I know (~100ac).
| randomdata wrote:
| This year is indeed unusual. If Mother Nature plays nice
| the farm might pay more than my tech job, but don't count
| your grain before its in the bin. A lot can go wrong
| quickly.
|
| Ultimately, profitability is entirely dependent on your
| debt load. You need to be a huge farmer if most of your
| profits are going to pay the bank, which is how a lot of
| farmers want to do it. I've been able to leverage my tech
| job income to keep my debts to a minimum, so I can make a
| lot more per acre. The downside is that, by not taking on
| many acres, my wealth will be much less in the end than
| another farmer in my cohort who is buying up everything
| while taking little to no income.
|
| It's a tradeoff. You have to decide what's more
| important: Wealth or income.
|
| _> Or maybe your small farm is much larger than the
| small farms I know (~100ac)._
|
| I think we have a similar definition. I'm at ~120 acres.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Shouldn't 120 ac of something like wheat only gross about
| $50k?
| randomdata wrote:
| At today's prices? Soft white, which is what I normally
| grow, is currently selling for around $15 per bushel. I
| typically expect around 100 bushels per acre. So $180,000
| if you had 120 acres of it. But in a normal year, yeah,
| that's not too far off. Corn and soys are where you make
| the money. Wheat is normally grown around here just to
| keep the soil healthy.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Ah, maybe your area or land is better. I was hearing
| around 60 bushel/acre.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Was the tech job money a one-time purchase of capital
| assets for the farm? Or, if you're injecting tech job
| income on a regular basis, are you considering those as
| costs when you're calculating how much money the farm is
| making?
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| How big is your land?
| [deleted]
| legitster wrote:
| We have some close friends that are farmers. Both have 200+
| acres. Each of them employ about as many workers as a midsize
| restaurant.
|
| But farming is really hard work - none of their kids want to
| take on the business. As they retire, the people actually set
| to take over the farm work are all immigrants (who do not have
| the capital to acquire the huge farms). So we'll probably see a
| trend where the farmland goes to capital management firms while
| most of the work will be managed and performed by the same
| group of immigrants.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > If you try to run a small farm in marginal land it just
| doesn't pay any more
|
| This tells us something profound about the world. Due to
| enclosure of the commons, everyone is forced to be a worker
| and/or capitalist. (I realize there are many parts of the world
| not like that yet, but we're on our way there.)
| balaji1 wrote:
| great examples... as farms are being abandoned in other places,
| maybe farming is undergoing consolidation to bigger farms that
| are growing by cutting into sensitive and more valuable
| forests, justifying the net effect that farmed land is going
| down. Surely some forests have to be more valuable than others.
| [deleted]
| soorya3 wrote:
| we also consume more food than required and US alone wastes about
| 30-40% of food. https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs.
| Hypothetically if we eliminate the waste effectively we need 40%
| less land + reduced consumption of other resources
| carvking wrote:
| Yes - and 640kb is all we'll ever need.
|
| Global cooling will kill us all and Al Gore will save the world.
|
| Focus on pollution and think about before buying the iphone
| 4na1deg because the most likely problem for the problems in this
| world is you (and me) over consuming.
|
| Not Brazilian farmer trying to make an honest living.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| You realize a good chunk of those Brazilian farmers are trying
| to make an honest living explicitly by providing the products
| you're over-consuming?
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