[HN Gopher] The Fertilizer Shortage Will Persist in 2023
___________________________________________________________________
The Fertilizer Shortage Will Persist in 2023
Author : DocFeind
Score : 113 points
Date : 2023-02-03 15:27 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (modernfarmer.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (modernfarmer.com)
| photochemsyn wrote:
| A remarkable amount of the fertilizer applied via modern
| industrial farming practices is just wasted:
|
| > "According to an average of 13 global databases from 10 data
| sources, in 2010, 161 teragrams of nitrogen were applied to
| agricultural crops, but only 73 teragrams of nitrogen made it to
| the harvested crop. A total of 86 teragrams of nitrogen was
| wasted, perhaps ending up in the water, air, or soil. The new
| research was published in the journal Nature Food in July."
|
| https://eos.org/articles/index-suggests-that-half-of-nitroge...
|
| Large-area applications by mechanized systems seem to be part of
| the problem, but that's also necessary to escape the subsitence
| agriculture trap, i.e. with such systems, it's not necessary for
| half or more of the human population to be working in the fields
| to grow food, it's more like 1 in 50 or 1 in 100.
|
| The most promising solution might be AI + robots. If a robot
| could crawl up and down fields inspecting individual plants for
| nutrient status and applying small amounts of fertilizer as
| needed (also weeding and checking for pest infestations), it
| could cut fertilizer use in half while maintaining the same level
| of production - and perhaps eliminate the need for most
| herbicides and pesticides.
| gjadi wrote:
| This kind of robot are already being developed and tested.
|
| See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV0cR_Nhac0 Sniper robot
| treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals |
| Challengers
| soperj wrote:
| I'd say the majority of that ends up in the sea, causing algae
| blooms and killing life for miles around. So worse than wasted.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Surely there is more farm land away from the sea than
| adjacent to it. How does for example fertilizer from here[1]
| or here[2] end up at sea?
|
| [1] https://goo.gl/maps/Pm4JGesJZ9xELrBB8 [2]
| https://goo.gl/maps/rzGttw1gMchSWXREA
| hammock wrote:
| The Mississippi and Rhine Rivers
| eru wrote:
| Might be the Danube and not the Rhine in the second
| example. (Not that it matters.)
| hammock wrote:
| Probably right, good call
| 83 wrote:
| For the US, there's a nice app where you can follow the
| watershed path: https://river-runner.samlearner.com/
|
| Edit, direct link to the pinpoint: https://river-
| runner.samlearner.com/?lng=-98.92662834458773&...
| soperj wrote:
| [1] - down the Arkansas river to the Mississippi, and right
| out to sea.
|
| [2] - down the Danube, and right out to sea.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| That still dozens, if not hundreds of kilometers the
| fertilizer somehow needs to walk.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It doesn't walk, it flows - sometimes above ground,
| sometimes under - to the nearest tiny gully, creek,
| stream, spring, etc., with very few exceptions.
|
| The network for the USA: https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/
| 2016/10/21/16/3995911F000005...
| seiferteric wrote:
| It's water soluble.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Sure, but why is it pulled sideways and not down, and why
| does it move toward the river of all directions it could
| move?
| Tyrannosaur wrote:
| For exactly the same reason the river exists in the first
| place. Why does the water flow to the ocean and not just
| sink into the ground?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| A lot of it does sink into the ground though. Thats how
| aquifiers replenish.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| Water from shallow aquifers also flows into nearby
| rivers.
| lukas099 wrote:
| I think the percentage of fertilizer in the groundwater
| would reach an equilibrium where just as much is going
| out as is coming in.
| seiferteric wrote:
| Some of it does I am sure, where some will be consumed by
| soil bacteria. Lots of fertilizers are salts as well and
| even if it goes into the soil, rain will redissolve it
| where it will eventually make its way to rivers.
| soperj wrote:
| Some water is pulled down (along with the half of the
| fertilizer that's actually used), the rest is literally
| washed away because the soil can't absorb the amount of
| water being dropped on it. All the water that's flowing
| over the ground ends up in rivers (it's the reason they
| exist in the first place).
| 83 wrote:
| It's 14km (8.8mi) from your pinpoint to the Arkansas,
| from there it's about as straight of a shot toward the
| gulf of mexico as you can get (via the Mississippi).
| contravariant wrote:
| There's very few places where water does not eventually end
| up in the sea.
|
| Though if it seeps into the groundwater it may take a
| geological amount of time.
| hammock wrote:
| There is so little organic matter in the topsoil due to modern
| farming practices and it gets worse every year. The result is
| soil that doesn't retain water, it just runs off. This means
| that irrigation has to be more and more frequent, and it means
| that fertilizer runs off (causing algal blooms etc) more than
| it percolates into the soil
|
| Lots of places to read more about this issue and here's a
| start: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/soil-degradation.html
| tmountain wrote:
| Yup, most gardening books start off talking about humus,
| "dark, organic material that forms in soil when plant and
| animal matter decays."
|
| Industrial farms are very far away from the foundations of
| healthy soil, and they need copious amounts of fertilizer and
| water to compensate.
|
| The food produced is less nutritious and less sustainable as
| a result.
|
| Consider investing in a local CSA if you have the
| opportunity. It's a fantastic way to support locally
| sustainable agriculture.
| zdragnar wrote:
| CSAs where I live are a luxury good for a few people to
| feel better about themselves. You pay in much more than you
| get back (compared to a grocery store), and what you get is
| geared towards variety to make it more appealing. As such,
| you get enough of any particular veg for one or two meals,
| at a cost that is wildly expensive for most people. I tried
| one summer, and it was cute but replaced approximately 0%
| of our grocery bill.
| Baeocystin wrote:
| Just to throw out some numbers, I pay $27/box for my
| fruit n' veg mix, which I could mostly replicate for
| maybe $15-20 at the grocery store. But the freshness
| can't be beat, and I think it's fun to see what I can do
| with whatever shows up. It's definitely not replacing my
| entire grocery bill, of course, but I do think it is
| worth it.
| tmountain wrote:
| I guess it depends on your goals. It will never be as
| affordable as the grocery store as the economies of scale
| aren't there. The idea is to provide reliable revenue to
| a local farm in exchange for high quality produce
| produced in a sustainable way. It doesn't make me feel
| particularly "better about myself" to connect with the
| family that provides us this service, but I do like their
| mission, and I want them to be successful, so in my case
| it's worth it. Also, I would imagine pricing varies
| wildly from one region to the next, so we may be
| comparing apples to oranges (or swiss chard for that
| matter).
| ulnarkressty wrote:
| Farmers mix superabsorbent polymers in the soil to improve
| water retention.
|
| https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Factory-Price-
| Wholesa...
| misterprime wrote:
| This sounds like it's begging for an article in 20 years
| about "Why we never should have used superabsorbent
| polymers in agriculture".
|
| Won't these things get broken apart after years of working
| the ground? Won't they potentially contaminate other areas
| by traveling downstream or being blown by the wind?
| mattpallissard wrote:
| I'm not sure why the general tone of HN seems to be that
| modern farming isn't changing at all.
|
| Erosion has been on everyone's radar for decades. We went
| from plow -> till -> low till -> no till. Believe me, the
| folks who do this talk about plowing practices and cover
| crops. They also discuss GMO crops and the crazy legal
| restrictions around seed that come with it.
|
| > Brown earth has a deep top layer where most of the
| nutrients are and biological activities take place. At around
| 20 centimetres deep
|
| Fun fact, where I grew up there is over 10 feet of black dirt
| before you hit bedrock. A lot of the Midwestern US is like
| that. Even with all that runway those guys _still_ discuss
| erosion.
| ilostmyshoes wrote:
| What they don't seem to be talking about is learning from
| indigenous farming communities who use things like
| diversity in crops and rotation to keep soil quality high.
| These problems were solved decades ago, just not by the
| industrial farming community
| randomdata wrote:
| We do. Perhaps you may not recognize our lingo. For
| example, around here we humorously refer to wheat as
| 'poverty grass' because there is no money in growing it
| but recognize it as a necessity to keep in the rotation
| for the ecological health benefits it provides.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| There's money in growing it, but usually where nothing
| else profitably grows, which is a lot of places.
|
| Hugely mechanized though which makes it work when you
| have enough crop land. But yeah, $/hectare yield is going
| to be low.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| peteradio wrote:
| Crop rotation is a standard practice. Sugar beats cannot
| be grown year after year on the same plot.
| tnel77 wrote:
| Crop rotation seems to be pretty widespread. I remember
| as a kid learning about it and knowing I'd see different
| crops each year to help the soil for future harvests.
| hedgehog wrote:
| Like the rest of industrial age development, farm
| automation has historically been built around treating
| everything uniformly (even distribution of seeds bred for
| easy harvest in evenly spaced rows evenly fertilizied
| with no rocks etc etc). Moving away from that introduces
| all kinds of complexity, mechanical problems, data
| problems, etc, which are not easy to solve even when you
| have historical existence proofs of potentially better
| ways to do things. It's happening though.
| sleton38234234 wrote:
| Crop diversity is great. And you also need lots of
| organic matter to go on top of the soil: to build life in
| the soil. that's much better than trying to duct tape the
| matter with fertilizer.
| mattpallissard wrote:
| > Crop diversity is great.
|
| Crop rotation has been standard practice my entire life.
| One of the many kickers though is soybeans are the
| fallback crop for really wet springs. Many crops need to
| be planted by a certain date or the growing season will
| be too short. Soybeans can "make up for lost time", so to
| speak. If your first planting gets flooded, or if it's
| too wet to get any crop in, you can wait until it's dry
| and toss in some soy to recoup some of the cost. Thing is
| soybeans use a lot of nitrogen.
|
| > And you also need lots of organic matter
|
| Manure spreaders are still a thing.
| randomdata wrote:
| Many years ago one of my neighbours tried not rotating is
| crops. It worked out okay the first couple of years, but
| it wasn't long before his yields nosedived and within the
| five years he was bankrupt.
| eru wrote:
| Why did your neighbour try?
| randomdata wrote:
| Soy on soy (on soy, on soy...). Disease soon sets in if
| not regularly rotated.
| kortilla wrote:
| Pretending indigenous communities "solved" this is a
| farce. If we switched to their methods 90% of the
| population would need to die because they don't scale.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Not a good look to strawman things like this when you
| have sibling comments elsewhere in this thread saying the
| discussion needs more nuance.
|
| I actually did napkin math awhile back comparing a
| particular 16th century indigenous agricultural yields
| with 20th century American agriculture [0]. The
| indigenous system came out favorably until the second
| half of the 20th century despite the limitations of hand
| tools and natural fertilizer. There's still a gap between
| that and current yields, but I think it's fair to point
| out that most advocates of these systems are actually
| arguing for a synthesis with modern technologies that
| allow them to scale rather than a complete rejection of
| modernity.
|
| [0] https://reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/l4do8a/az
| tec_cor...
| willcipriano wrote:
| What percentage of indigenous people were involved in
| farming? 100%? It's less than 3% today.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| So your solution is to give up your job and return to
| subsistence farming? Let us know how that works out.
| willcipriano wrote:
| No, my point is everyone would to do it that way.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| Without experience, land, and modern industrial farming
| techniques? No, "everybody" would not start subsistence
| farming. There would be massive famines, billions would
| starve and die.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Currently 1.3% of American jobs are farming.
| tengbretson wrote:
| It's like everyone who's ever watched a YouTube video
| about planting a 3 sisters garden has an opinion for the
| people actually staking their livelihood on this now.
| mattwest wrote:
| No kidding, and furthermore it's as if they don't take a
| second to consider scalability, yield, commodity-market
| efficiency, and labor-force.
| viewtransform wrote:
| I call it "Woke bike shedding" - this phenomenon afflicts
| any discussion on energy,agricuture.
| codingdave wrote:
| It is more about that fact that people talking about
| sustainable food production do not share many goals with
| commodity farmers exchanging corn and soybeans for as
| much cash as possible.
| tengbretson wrote:
| At least farmers have the humility to not go on the
| internet and smear you based on their opinion of your use
| of a document database over a relational database.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I think people see a sea of corn and don't appreciate
| nuance.
|
| The bigger issue that farmers are ignoring is water.
| bilegeek wrote:
| Water in western states is often a "use it or lose it"
| system, driving overuse even if the farmer knows better.
|
| [1]https://www.propublica.org/article/killing-colorado-
| wasting-...
| eru wrote:
| > The bigger issue that farmers are ignoring is water.
|
| Of course, whether that's an issue depends on where you
| are in the world.
|
| It's gonna be different in California vs Germany.
| tomatotomato37 wrote:
| Farmers are well aware of water and the sustainablity of
| its sources. It just so happens that the equilibrium
| point they aim for is sustainability for them, not them &
| everybody else that happens to live downstream
| kortilla wrote:
| > The bigger issue that farmers are ignoring is water.
|
| Ironically a statement without nuance. Western US farmers
| are ignoring water. This is not an issue in the East.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| > _I 'm not sure why the general tone of HN seems to be
| that modern farming isn't changing at all._
|
| Indeed. Perhaps somewhere out there is a parallel forum
| filled with farmers opining about computer programming,
| with equally inane remarks like _" Have those programmers
| ever thought about making languages that translate into
| machine code instead of writing everything out as ones and
| zeros?"_
| AA-BA-94-2A-56 wrote:
| > Sutor, ne ultra crepidam
|
| If you are a shoemaker, be careful not to pass judgement
| beyond the making of shoes.
| hedora wrote:
| It's strange that the article you linked doesn't mention no-
| till farming. Farmers replace the plows on their tractors
| (which turn over the soil) with knives that have fertilizer
| injectors on the tips. Rather than plow, then spray
| fertilizer on to the surface, they inject fertilizer into the
| ground. After a few years, earthworms reestablish themselves
| and naturally aerate the soil.
|
| This can be combined with other (well established,
| commercially available) precision agriculture techniques to
| minimize irrigation and fertilizer waste.
|
| The big problem is the up front cost of replacing tractor
| implements, and training labor.
|
| Anyway, this is much easier than agroforestry, building glass
| hydroponics towers, etc.
| hammock wrote:
| Thanks I was looking for a youtube video that I couldn't
| find so I grabbed the first article I saw that explained
| that problem well. As for solutions, you are right no-till
| is a big one (the main one?) and is worth reading about
| elsewhere
| mattpallissard wrote:
| > A remarkable amount of the fertilizer applied via modern
| industrial farming practices is just wasted:
|
| Hmm, the fact that there is waste totally unsurprising given
| some of nitrogen deliverey methods (like anhydrous ammonia).
| But those numbers are really high.
|
| > water, air, or soil
|
| Ah, but if it's still in the soil that could probably account
| for a big chunk of it that would eventually get used
| sleton38234234 wrote:
| Well, that explains why our water is so high in nitrates. I've
| been looking into our local water supply. Out of the over 200
| contaminants, the one that exceeds the EWG's limit by the most
| margin is nitrates which is said to come from fertilizer run
| off.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| A lot of that can be from intensive animal farming.
|
| Really bad in New Zealand with all the dairy production.
| Avicebron wrote:
| While it's cool and all to want to work on AI+Robots, because
| obviously that's where this thought is coming from because who
| wants to actually work in the fields am I right?\s I think it's
| more important to think about market fit and margins of
| farming, in what world is introducing a complex, expensive
| machine to an already thin margin industry a practical
| solution? The reason it's inefficient and wasteful isn't
| because "they're some hicks who need the righteous engineer to
| come and save them with their brilliance" its because its fast
| and cheap
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Yes, but fast and cheap is temporary (and the end result is a
| lot of pain).
|
| This is a problem that requires structural investment from
| government (the populace) but once done, the return on
| investment seems very high.
|
| How do you think the Netherlands are the second leading
| agricultural exporter in the world right now? Short answer -
| very efficient greenhouses.
|
| To get an idea of just how efficient - they use ~4 to 9
| liters of water per pound of tomatoes produced. The world
| average is _60_ liters per pound of tomatoes. Not the high
| end - the AVERAGE.
| slackify wrote:
| Wow that is astounding.
| [deleted]
| eru wrote:
| In places where you have enough water, that doesn't sound
| like a problem.
|
| It's not like the water is lost forever. (In those places
| where you have enough water, and don't take it out of an
| ancient non-replenishing aquifer or so.)
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Sure, but water is hardly the only input they're
| optimizing for.
|
| They're reducing the need for pesticides and fungicides
| by controlling the ambient environment around the plants.
|
| Reducing the need for fertilizers by optimizing growing
| conditions and limiting runoff and waste.
|
| Basically - the attitude there has been: "Build the right
| environment for the plant" followed by a focus on
| efficient (and therefor cost effective) inputs.
|
| We aren't building the right environment, we're just
| dumping inputs (pesticides, fungicides, fertilizers,
| water, etc) on the growing area and calling it a day.
|
| Which is cheap on the up front capital costs, but much
| more expensive over the long term, as you end up needing
| consistently more inputs over a long period of time.
|
| ---
|
| Basically - I'm arguing that the up front capital costs
| likely are worth the returns to you get in efficiency,
| but farmers in the US are not incentivized to make those
| investments. Or perhaps more realistically - can't afford
| those investments on their current operating margins.
| Which is why we likely will want government programs
| focused on this.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > They're reducing the need for pesticides and fungicides
| by controlling the ambient environment around the plants.
|
| Not just the ambient environment. When you go soilless
| through hydroponics, you eliminate a lot of soil borne
| disease issues. Even soil control through pots instead of
| direct ground contact prevents a lot of problems wiggling
| around.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Modern industrial-scale farming equipment is already highly
| engineered. Adding features that allowed for more precise
| care of individual plants would be an extension of existing
| technology, not something radically new. Take a look at
| modern combine harvesters, for example:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2LnkKgwpOE
|
| This is also a sector that would benefit from
| electrification, incidentally.
|
| Of course, the fossil fuel and petrochemical sector won't
| like being cut out of the agriculture business to any extent,
| so there's that kind of resistance to such changes.
| narrator wrote:
| AI robots that do companion planting with robots. There's a
| free idea for you. Harvesting would not work with combine
| harvesters. You'd have to harvest corn planted with beans
| like you were picking strawberries, but with robots, maybe
| it's doable.
| Avicebron wrote:
| Maybe, but that's a lot of degrees of freedom of movement
| and machine vision to use "3 sisters" farming techniques,
| interplanting works because of the system of moisture,
| structure, and nitrogen fixation that each unit provides.
| Not saying it's not a good system/cool project idea.
| prepend wrote:
| > in what world is introducing a complex, expensive machine
| to an already thin margin industry a practical solution
|
| In the world where it is cheaper than the rising price of
| fertilizer.
| osigurdson wrote:
| Agree. Not sure if the OP checked the price of modern farm
| equipment lately. I'm pretty sure $500K for certain things
| is not uncommon.
| hedora wrote:
| The robots (including maintenance) would also have to be
| cheaper than sensors and existing automated tractors.
|
| I'm not willing to say it is impossible, but it would be
| extremely difficult to achieve.
| Overtonwindow wrote:
| Is this a problem exclusive to outdoor farms, or would
| vertical/indoor farming help this?
| undersuit wrote:
| Hydroponics usually measure the nutrients in the water and
| only add when needed. Indoor farming with soil beds can adopt
| water recycling too but there's no requirement to.
| eru wrote:
| If you do greenhouse farming, the problem is more explicit.
|
| (Though in theory you could still just let your wastewater
| drain into the ground, and have the same problem.)
| londons_explore wrote:
| > 161 teragrams of nitrogen were applied to agricultural crops,
| but only 73 teragrams of nitrogen made it to the harvested crop
|
| Getting ~half of the nitrogen from the fertilizer into the
| harvest seems awfully impressive to me. There are so many ways
| for nitrogen to escape - into runoff, broken down back into the
| atmosphere, used to grow weeds and non-productive parts of the
| plant, etc.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| > A remarkable amount of the fertilizer applied via modern
| industrial farming practices is just wasted
|
| You can also cut out most of the nitrogen just by using Plant
| Growth Promoting Bacteria (e.g. azospirillum), but most US
| farmers don't do that. Without PGPBs, most of the plant's
| energy is wasted just trying to uptake the nitrogen from the
| soil. Whereas the with the bacteria, not only do the bacteria
| produce the nitrogen themselves, but they also do all the work
| of feeding it to your plants so they can spend their energy
| growing and producing food instead.
| csdvrx wrote:
| > but most US farmers don't do that
|
| Why?
|
| Is it not cost-effective?
| wahern wrote:
| > Is it not cost-effective?
|
| A quick Googling of the literature (more general terms
| seems to be bioinoculant and biofertilizer) suggests
| exactly that. There are industrial products out there for
| large-scale inoculation, but manufacture, packaging,
| shipping, and application of bioinoculants can require
| rather sophisticated carriers, whether in solid, liquid, or
| polymer form; or engineering more easily accommodated
| bacteria or fungus. It seems it's still very early days for
| industrial-scale products, notwithstanding that the
| research and perhaps even some products go back decades.
| WillAdams wrote:
| We are currently burning (or applying as fertilizer) 10 calories
| of petrochemical energy to get 1 calorie of food energy --- we
| need to rebalance this equation somehow.
| lukas099 wrote:
| Is this even physically possible to significantly improve? How
| many calories of sunlight energy do plants use to create 1
| calorie of chemical bonds?
| eru wrote:
| Even if this was true, why do you think we need to rebalance?
|
| We could also just find another source of cheap energy.
| kragen wrote:
| i have heard this before, so i looked at the underlying
| research
|
| it is not true and has never been true for the food supply in
| general
|
| it is true in a few expensive crops of low calorie content; i
| think lettuce and almonds were the ones i saw
| [deleted]
| fredgrott wrote:
| The context is China imports 90% from Russia and India is at 40%
| imports from Russia and the deep sea ports Russia uses shippers
| will not ship from as they are north of Black Sea for obvious
| reasons.
|
| To complicate matters Russia currently is using all available
| train cars and thus has no compacity to increase rail traffic to
| ship fertilizer.
| amts wrote:
| "Each hour 430 quintillion Joules of energy from the sun hits the
| Earth. That's 430 with 18 zeroes after it. In comparison, the
| total amount of energy that all humans use in a year is 410
| quintillion Joules." [1]
|
| "The 70 percent of solar energy the Earth absorbs per year equals
| roughly 3.85 million exajoules. In other words, the amount of
| solar energy hitting the earth in one hour is more than enough to
| power the world for one year." [2]
|
| "The total solar power hitting Earth is about 173,000 terawatts,
| or 1.73x10^17 joules per second. That's roughly equivalent to the
| energy of 41 Megatons of TNT exploding... every second. It's hard
| for us to comprehend how much energy a joule is (or even what
| energy is in the first place). But energy can be converted into
| mass, and we do understand what mass is." [3]
|
| Thus, equatorial and semi-equatorial regions should be energy
| magnats of the world and be able to get nitrogen, phosphorus,
| water, etc for their food from thin air and sand. Yet, the
| relevant world has still to feed the majority of these regions,
| including the solar tech etc.
|
| [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/this-is-the-potential-of-
| sol...
|
| [2] https://www.ucdavis.edu/climate/definitions/how-is-solar-
| pow...
|
| [3] https://www.quora.com/How-much-energy-from-the-Sun-hits-
| the-...
| iceTA wrote:
| Two things.
|
| 1. I hate how everything has to have a financialised solution:
| To achieve this, the report suggests "mobilizing international
| financial support" and implementing tools such as "fertilizer
| contract swaps" to keep farmer costs manageable.
|
| 2. I read articles like this and wonder, will the world ditch
| meat, or will will the richer countries continue to eat
| ridiculous amounts of the stuff, using up all the land that could
| grow food for a plant based diet? Something will have ti give at
| some point.
| debacle wrote:
| Regenerative agriculture _relies on_ poultry and livestock to
| restore the topsoil layer.
|
| Meat isn't going away. In fact, we may wind up eating more, not
| less, of it, over time.
| eru wrote:
| > Regenerative agriculture relies on poultry and livestock to
| restore the topsoil layer.
|
| Why not use human excrement instead?
| debacle wrote:
| "The use of untreated human feces in agriculture poses
| significant health risks and has contributed to widespread
| infection with parasitic worms--a disease called
| helminthiasis, affecting over 1.5 billion people in
| developing countries."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_feces
| another_story wrote:
| It's the same for using animal feces. There are ways to
| mitigate risk.
|
| https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.7b02811
| LesZedCB wrote:
| you don't have to consume the animals that contribute the the
| cycling of a healthy ecosystem...
|
| frame it as you like, but eating meat is literally only
| necessary because people want to.
| mattwest wrote:
| Demand for meat is rising due to incomes level rising in
| developing nations. Developing nations also outnumber developed
| nations, so whatever climate-saving diet related behaviors the
| West decides to take is still going to face pressure from an
| even larger group of people who want to spend their growing
| paycheck on goods like meat.
| DevX101 wrote:
| Nitrogen fertilizers are directly responsible for keeping about
| 3-4 billion people alive today. Any persistent shortage or supply
| chain disruption should be considered a global security issue.
| mattwest wrote:
| This is a key insight and unfortunately not enough people make
| it to this cold hard fact before they begin preaching about
| food system transformation.
|
| Nat gas + Haber Bosch is the foundational structure of our food
| system and its ability to feed our current population. Perhaps
| a new innovation will replace it, but so far much of the
| proposed methods are complete fairy tale nonsense which will
| result in mass starvation without appropriate due diligence.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| read wendell berry https://www.counterpointpress.com/books/the-
| unsettling-of-am...
| bjt2n3904 wrote:
| Man. Whenever I see these threads, I see a ton of people hopping
| in with their ideas on how to optimize a critical resource. It's
| the "heat people, not homes" mantra.
|
| I mean, I get it. Every programmer salivates at the idea of
| writing a super efficient hand crafted assembly routine that
| blows the doors off of what's on the market right now, and that's
| good.
|
| But I can't help but think... If I wanted to drastically change
| people's behavior, it can be done easily.
|
| Step one: Cause a supply chain issue, creating artificial
| scarcity.
|
| Step two: Lecture everyone on how they need to be less wasteful,
| caution them about how painful life will be if "we aren't all in
| this together".
|
| Step three: Find every day Joe's and make an example of them in
| the public sphere for selfishly squandering precious resources.
| The public will gladly be your enforcers, thinking that if they
| all try hard enough the artificially created problem will go
| away.
|
| This technique always results in artificially created human
| suffering, and waste. The old joke about economic systems and
| cows was something to the tune of, "you have two cows. The
| communist milks your cows, and pours the milk down the drain".
|
| It's fascinating to read what Gareth Jones wrote about tractors
| in the Soviet Union -- how meddlesome people who didn't know how
| to farm / engineer inserted themselves into the process to tell
| everyone how to do their jobs, and royally screwed everything up.
|
| Edit: Link for the curious. Day thirty.
|
| https://www.garethjones.org/soviet_articles/experiences_in_r...
| Chris2048 wrote:
| The one(s) I heard where:
|
| COMMUNISM: You have two cows. The government takes both and
| gives you the milk it thinks you need.
|
| BUREAUCRACY: You have two cows. At first the government
| regulates what you can feed them and when you can milk them.
| Then it pays you not to milk them. Then it takes both, shoots
| one, milks the other and pours the milk down the drain. Then it
| requires you to fill out forms accounting for the missing cows.
| banDeveloper wrote:
| The real problem is majority of crops being grown for animal
| agriculture, which is an extremely wasteful way of producing
| food. We'd only need a fraction of the farmlands if we were
| actually eating the crops we grow. Sadly, we can't count on
| consumers making rational choices and politicians are not going
| to tank their popularity by pushing for these changes. It's the
| same as climate change.
| jacooper wrote:
| They should actually focus on things that have the biggest
| impact on climate change, and that's certainly not Meat
| production, but Oil and gas.
|
| Stop chasing that most visible way to fight climate change
| rather than the most effective one.
| mythrwy wrote:
| As a meat eater (with no intention of changing) I fully agree.
|
| How we produce meat is an extremely wasteful way of producing
| food. Changing this would free up tons of farm ground, water
| and fertilizer.
| jethro_tell wrote:
| It is climate change.
| eru wrote:
| I'm not sure what you mean by not making rational choices?
|
| People have a preference for meat. Rationality doesn't say what
| your preferences should be, it just helps you satisfy them.
| occz wrote:
| People have a preference for meat post huge subsidies, which
| essentially makes the preference mean nothing whatsoever. If
| people prefer meat when it's not subsidised, then sure, what
| the hell, let them have it.
| banDeveloper wrote:
| I mean thinking about long term consequences of their actions
| and making a choice that leads to the best outcome for the
| society at large. You're right in saying people have a
| preference, but the way you say it makes it seem like that's
| all their is to it, as if people's dietary choices have no
| broader impact.
| debacle wrote:
| Recently, I have seen a short-sighted push to allow human waste
| to fertilize crops.
|
| That is absolutely 100% not the solution to anything for probably
| a dozen very good reasons. The impact of this kind of "recycling"
| is well studied and the negatives outweigh the positives.
| [deleted]
| rr888 wrote:
| I thought it was actually a pretty good solution for two
| problems. Maybe for crops like wheat which are processed,
| rather than lettuce. Trees seem good too.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I wish we normalized taking a piss on the footprint of my
| backyard Apple tree or where my tomato garden will be.
|
| Supposedly one person is capable of providing enough fertilizer
| through urine for a few hundred square meters of crop per year.
| undersuit wrote:
| I watched a video on YT about a man in Arizona or New Mexico
| who put in a piping system to his backyard fruit trees that
| is fed by his outdoor urinal. He lives in the middle of a
| standard urban neighborhood.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Human waste can be composted and leached out into aquaculture
| systems or the irrigation system for livestock crops.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Well, if you have a modern sewage treatment plant it is
| possible to recover phosphate and ammonium (NH4+) as relatively
| pure chemicals at the end of the process prior to releasing the
| treated water back into the environment. It's a bit cost-
| intensive to do this however, but it might make economic sense
| as fertilizer scarcity grows, especially for the phosphorous
| fraction.
|
| But yes, applying untreated human feces to agricultural fields
| is a very bad idea from the infectious disease and parasite
| transfer perspective. Also, many sewage streams have additional
| contaminants (heavy metals etc.) from industrial sources, and
| varying levels of pharmaceuticals of all kinds.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Pharmaceutical contamination seems like the biggest problem,
| but I guess heating to kill pathogens makes the energy math
| unfavorable as well.
| debacle wrote:
| You can kill the pathogens through curing the compost, but
| that takes time, space, and equipment. In the meantime you'd
| be dealing with hazardous waste.
| dyndos wrote:
| Care to elaborate? What did those studies show? As far as I
| know, properly handled humanure is quite effective. And it's
| better than letting excess nitrogen seep into the waterways.
| GalenErso wrote:
| North Korea uses human waste as a fertilizer.
|
| Which causes this: North Korean defector found to have
| 'enormous parasites'
|
| https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-420...
|
| > "I've never seen anything like this in my 20 years as a
| physician," South Korean doctor Lee Cook-jong told journalists,
| explaining that the longest worm removed from the patient's
| intestines was 27cm (11in) long.
|
| > In 2015 South Korean researchers studied the health records
| of North Korean defectors who had visited a hospital in Cheonan
| between 2006 and 2014.
|
| > They found that they showed higher rates of chronic hepatitis
| B, chronic hepatitis C, tuberculosis and parasite infections,
| compared to South Koreans.
|
| > The soldier's food may have been contaminated because the
| North still uses human faeces as fertiliser, known as "night
| soil".
|
| > Lee Min-bok, a North Korean agriculture expert, told Reuters:
| "Chemical fertiliser was supplied by the state until the 1970s.
| By the 1990s, the state could not supply it any more, so
| farmers started to use a lot of night soil instead."
| bigbillheck wrote:
| I've stopped believing sensational stories about North Korea
| after one too many stories about someone official getting
| executed only for them to show up alive and well a few weeks
| later.
|
| Hepatitis B is a STD; presumably they meant Hepatitis A?
| There was an outbreak of that just last year in the US:
| https://www.cdc.gov/hepatitis/outbreaks/2022/hav-
| contaminate... that appear to have come from Mexican
| strawberries; 'the Mexicans must be using night soil' is not
| the first conclusion I would have jumped to. Same for
| Hepatitis C, in 2020 there were 107k newly identified chronic
| infections in the US.
|
| Regarding the worm, a quick google suggests that the largest
| roundworm parasite of humans is Ascaris lumbercoides, about
| which wiki tells me that males are up to 12 inches long and
| females up to 19 inches long; an 11 incher doesn't seem that
| remarkable in comparison.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > North Korea uses human waste as a fertilizer. Which causes
| this: North Korean defector found to have 'enormous
| parasites'
|
| Using _untreated_ human waste causes that.
| hgsgm wrote:
| Do human parasites in human poop spread to more humans
| animals fed on plants fed on human poop, or only of humans
| eat the plants fed on human poop?
|
| Can the parasites be filtered away?
|
| Also, couldn't NK parasites be explained by a general lack of
| health and hygiene technology in NK? Parasites are a major
| problem in large parts of Africa too, but are controlled when
| medications are deployed.
| toast0 wrote:
| Some parasites are human specific, but a lot of them will
| manage just fine in many mammals. Health and hygiene is
| likely a major factor, but managing human waste in a
| sanitary way is one of the big jobs of community health and
| hygiene efforts; that and access to clean water. Proper
| health protocols wouldn't allow for untreated night soil to
| be used as fertilizer, but maybe they don't have access to
| treatment or other fertilizer, so there you go.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| Living in borderline survivable conditions makes the body
| much more susceptible to infection. Add to that a virtually
| non-existent medical system and people are going to be
| overall less healthy. Using "night soil" is likely low on the
| list of causes for higher infection rates in North Korea.
|
| Comparing the health of North Koreans and South Koreans is
| not a fare comparison. One nation has medical infrastructure,
| a good food supply, and a functioning economy. The other is a
| black hole with people regularly starving, no legal economy,
| and medical care only for the politically connected.
| qualudeheart wrote:
| Is anyone using ML to optimize fertilizer production?
| iceTA wrote:
| This is the most HN possible response to this article, I love
| it.
| qualudeheart wrote:
| You'll like my other comments then. I have some spicy ideas.
| TurkishPoptart wrote:
| Russia was a net exporter of fertilizer, and China is a net
| importer. if Peter Zeihan is right, this will cause food
| shortages in China.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| China has the money to pay the increased costs. Brazil is
| likely the most fucked by the fertilizer shortage since their
| massive soy farms are all on desert soil which requires loads
| of fertilizer which they can no longer afford.
| eru wrote:
| Why? China can buy fertilizer on the world market. Prices might
| rise a bit, but China is a solidly middle income country.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Few things have a single cause, but I think it's not outlandish
| to hypothesize that potential pending famines could be driven by
| a fertilizer shortage, driven by Russia's invasion and global
| economic issues, driven by the pandemic.
|
| Maybe this is obvious to those smarter than I, but I'm beginning
| to have a sinking sense that direct deaths by SARS-COV2 will be a
| shockingly small minority of total deaths caused by the pandemic
| over the next generation. We're going to see this event loud and
| clear in every economic and demographic chart for the next half-
| century, aren't we?
| xadhominemx wrote:
| That seems very outlandish actually
| djbusby wrote:
| Assuming this is the only loud event for the next 50 years.
|
| Or, this past three years event is the start of a longer,
| bigger event. Then, the ignition is lost in the flame.
| [deleted]
| Waterluvian wrote:
| > Then, the ignition is lost in the flame.
|
| Goosebumps from this line. It's apt and thoughtful. I'm
| thinking about how these events can be fractal-like. The past
| few years of active pandemic have felt like the "flame" but
| could be seen as the "ignition" for countless other, possibly
| even worse global events. It's like a Great Tree Shaking: all
| non-resilient systems began showing cracks of one size or
| another, cascading stress to other systems, many of which
| buckle or break.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| We spent the first 50 years of the information age building
| systems to be as hyper-efficient as possible, with ruthless
| competition eliminating resiliency first in existing
| commercial, social, and political structures, and then in
| the education and life experience of the people that built
| those structures later. Like a Californian wilderness,
| we've been accumulating surface fuel load for decades.
| eru wrote:
| If you ban 'price-gouging', you remove incentives for
| suppliers to be resilient.
| hd95489 wrote:
| At least in the us the first thing ruthless competition
| does is eliminate all competition and establish a
| monopoly like position. Every industry wants to
| consolidate to 2-4 players that split the market and
| don't compete
| bombcar wrote:
| Arguably history is the study of an ever-breaking quasi-
| non-resilient combination of systems and arguing that your
| particular causal viewpoint is the One True one.
| hammock wrote:
| Lost ignitions: the research being done in Wuhan, the
| 2014-2022 civil war in Ukraine, the Las Vegas mass
| shooting, etc?
| pjc50 wrote:
| Three totally unrelated things? There's no proof of the
| ""lab leak"" allegations (and I doubt there can ever be
| short of an admission by the Chinese government), the war
| in Ukraine was a proxy for the current invasion, and the
| Las Vegas mass shooting .. was just a larger incident of
| something that routinely happens in America that does not
| move the needle politically?
| danuker wrote:
| I doubt it. In as much as they are allowed to function, markets
| will reward people addressing the shortages with outsized
| profit.
|
| Same as getting through the energy crisis, we can overcome the
| food crisis, one obstacle at a time.
|
| The connectedness of economies is also an advantage. Shipping
| rates are almost at a 3-year low:
| https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/baltic
|
| The greatest risk are policies forbidding "price gouging" going
| haywire and actually forbidding disaster response.
| brmgb wrote:
| Having trust in the market is not a magic solution. Yes,
| prices will rise as they already are if there is a shortage
| but that's not going to make local production materialises
| out of thin air if there are other obstacles.
|
| At some point, you need a concerted strategic answer at the
| correct level if you are facing a strategic threat like
| disruption of food supply. That's why China restricted
| exports. It remains to be seen if the USA and Europe will
| react fast enough and appropriately enough. What happened
| with Covid doesn't give me much hope.
|
| Edit: As I am downvoted strongly (I imagine that it's because
| the Covid answer is stupidly seen as political in the US - at
| least I hope so because if it's about the ability of the
| market to solve issues it doesn't bode well for us all), the
| EU took ages to secure first masks then vaccine supply and
| the utter stupidity of the US answer which avoided imposing
| wearing masks and making vaccination mandatory costed you
| hundred thousands of unnecessary death compared to country of
| equivalent development. Look at Taiwan or South Korea to see
| how it supposed to be done.
| qikInNdOutReply wrote:
| How can you price gouge something like Sri-Lakha, that has no
| currency to trade with? This whole mental model just has no
| grasp for the moment when the rear of the car falls off..
| danuker wrote:
| Hire its citizens. No money means you'd benefit by sending
| them money.
|
| But inequality is a different problem than getting through
| crises. It should be addressed while leaving the production
| incentives intact. For example, progressive and/or negative
| income taxes.
| qikInNdOutReply wrote:
| Its citizens pay top dollar (earned by others abroad) to
| leave en mass. The state is collapsing and taking bribes
| to allow this.
|
| So the free market creates waves, that set other systems
| under pressure, creating a domino tsunami. Were are the
| models for that? The solutions for that? Runaway to mars
| or NZ?
|
| I want to express how jaring this ideology-
| irresponsibility background noise is regardless of
| ideologic affiliation.
|
| The {MAGIC_TOTEM} will fix it, and then dangling
| discussion, problems, you are on your own good luck. It
| is moments like these, that are a direct attack on
| democracy and a engligthened citizenry as concept,
| leaving the pessimistic grown ups to contemplate full
| scenarios, while stealing oneself out of the problem
| space.
|
| MAGIC_TOTEM = FreeMarket| God | Society
|
| Countriy need solutions:
|
| Short-term:Food delivery. Stabilization.
|
| Mid-term: Fertilizer on credit
|
| Long-Term: Fertilizer, made in situ (solar), in
| uncorruptable form (direct material transfer to farmers).
|
| Passivity: Amplifies the problem.
|
| The market is voting for a explosion and to make it your
| problem in the long run, directly and indirectly.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Same as getting through the energy crisis, we can overcome
| the food crisis, one obstacle at a time.
|
| Aboriginal Tasmanians survived crisis after crisis for tens
| of thousands of years, until one arrived they weren't
| equipped to deal with.
|
| Iain Banks would call it an Excession or "out of context
| problem".
| sofixa wrote:
| I'm not sure i follow. How exactly will the people "awarded
| with outsized profit for addressing the shortages" help those
| starving due to lack of affordable food? "The market" doesn't
| work for goods whose demand is inelastic, such as food and
| medicine. Letting people starve "to allow the market to
| function" is cold blooded greed.
| kragen wrote:
| the market does work for goods whose demand is inelastic
|
| at the cme wheat costs 8.38 dollars per bushel, 31C/ per
| kg, and 1 kg of wheat is roughly two person-days' worth of
| food, 57 dollars per person-year
|
| (of course an actual diet needs to be more varied and
| therefore slightly more expensive, but even just cooked
| wheat will extend your survival time under famine
| conditions by quite a lot)
|
| let's start by dividing the cases to consider into 1 cases
| where people have substantially more than 57 dollars per
| year to spend on food, whether in the form of production,
| money savings, foreign aid, or salable goods, and 2 cases
| where they don't
|
| we can subdivide case 1 into case 1a where there are price
| controls, so that people who sell wheat at substantially
| higher prices than, say, 50C/ per kg, are subject to
| criminal prosecution, and case 1b where they are not
|
| in case 1b you do not have a famine, and people do not
| starve, because even if delivering the food is very
| difficult and dangerous (1bi), due to pirates and
| collapsing currencies and whatnot, it will be profitable
| (for somebody anyway); maybe you'll have one merchant
| selling wheat at 2 dollars per kilogram and making an
| outsized profit, while another made worse choices and would
| need 3 dollars per kilogram and therefore has to take a
| loss from competing with the first merchant. and if it is
| not difficult and dangerous (case 1bii) then someone will
| sell wheat at 60C/ a kilogram in the supermarkets and there
| will be no outsized profits but still nobody will starve
|
| in case 1a you might get lucky, maybe getting wheat into
| the country and distributed will not be difficult and
| dangerous (1bii), and so there's no shortages even though
| there are price controls. but if shipping costs go up, or
| bandits steal half the wheat in transit, or supermarkets
| can't open because of rioting, (1bi) selling wheat will be
| unprofitable at the legal price, and so merchants will do
| it as little as possible, and people will starve due to
| lack of not only _affordable_ food but _any_ food. wheat
| will rot in silos or be fed to livestock in order to avoid
| prosecution
|
| in case 2, where people have less than 100 dollars per year
| and so can't afford to pay for the food they need to stay
| alive through voluntary exchange, their only hope for
| survival is to seize it by force, price controls or no
| price controls. this is a frequent occurrence throughout
| human history, and of course there's a whole continuum from
| a hypothetical state of perfect liberty, through
| transparent flat tax rates, through mafia protection
| rackets, all the way to raiding bands of thuggees and the
| holodomor.
|
| systems that are closer to the totalitarian end of this
| spectrum tend to have frequent famines because, again,
| people starve due to lack of not only affordable food but
| any food at all; the holodomor is one example, but other
| examples are the irish potato famine, the ethiopian famine
| caused by the derg, the frequent famines in india under the
| british raj, and the greatest famine in human history, the
| great leap forward
|
| because the cold-blooded-greed-powered market is, generally
| speaking, how people get fed in the first place, if you
| want to reduce the number of people who starve, you will
| let it function
|
| i mean, unless you have a better replacement for the cold-
| blooded market, already debugged and working, but the track
| record of the proposed alternatives so far includes many of
| the worst atrocities in human history
| gruez wrote:
| Just a heads up, your usages of unicode circled
| characters (eg. 1) makes the comment hard to read. At
| least on my computer, the circled characters are the same
| approximate size as regular characters, but due to the
| circle the actual number/letter ends up being so small
| that they're unreadable without additional zoom.
| kragen wrote:
| i appreciate the heads up
|
| what platform are you using
| eru wrote:
| And while the demand for food in general might be
| somewhat inelastic, the demand for wheat is very elastic,
| because you can substitute.
|
| (Also keep in mind that we have huge buffers because of
| animal husbandry. If plant matter becomes too expensive,
| people can switch to eating it directly instead of
| feeding it to livestock first.)
| danuker wrote:
| I absolutely agree, and admire your comprehensive
| explanation.
|
| While the market may sound greedy, you can't legislate
| away human nature. People just won't work for free.
|
| If you also want to address inequality, then by all means
| implement progressive/negative income taxes. But mess
| with production and distribution incentives (like
| implementing price controls) and you have a recipe for
| disaster.
| kragen wrote:
| yes, and even more intrusive ways of addressing
| inequality such as subsidizing food prices with tax money
| can be effective without creating a perverse incentive to
| restrict the food supply precisely when it's most needed
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > Letting people starve "to allow the market to function"
| is cold blooded greed.
|
| It's no better than human sacrafice practiced thousands of
| years ago - entirely self destructive. This con just has
| more layers of indirection.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > I doubt it. In as much as they are allowed to function,
| markets will reward people addressing the shortages with
| outsized profit
|
| This is dangerous, fantasy thinking detached fromt the real
| world.v
|
| If there is shortage of food today, you plant wheat today, it
| will be ready to eat in 7 months.
|
| If it's not the right time to plant, it could be a year. By
| that time, people will be dead already.
|
| Now, we don't even have idle land ready to plant, and if you
| have to invest in greenhouses or similar to increate
| productivity, farmers don't have that kind of money and even
| if they did capacity would take years to come online.
| danuker wrote:
| How is my thinking dangerous? Not allowing profit is
| dangerous, because it won't attract suppliers.
|
| High prices might prompt some people elsewhere to reduce
| their consumption, in favor of ones more in need.
|
| You can address some of the future price uncertainties with
| a futures market. That way, you can see what the price
| you'll get in 7 months' time, and decide what you should
| plant.
|
| But if a place has no means of growing food and no money,
| why stay there?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > High prices might prompt some people elsewhere to
| reduce their consumption
|
| By dying. There is a famine in madagascar right now.v
|
| > in favor of ones more in need.
|
| Do you need 1 kg of bacon more than a poor family in
| madagascar needs 10kg of wheat that was used to feed your
| bacon?
|
| > How is my thinking dangerous?
|
| Because men than need to feed their children might grab
| torches and pitchforks
|
| Free market does not store food hust in case of a. once
| in a decade famine. Free market has never been effective
| at disaster responce in any country on earth.
| kragen wrote:
| there is a famine in madagascar right now because the
| government imposed price ceilings on rice, flour, sugar,
| cooking oil, gas and cement last april
|
| http://country.eiu.com/article.aspx?articleid=662033449&C
| oun...
|
| predictably this resulted in widespread food shortages
|
| by contrast, all other poor countries are not
| experiencing famines right now
| eru wrote:
| > by contrast, all other poor countries are not
| experiencing famines right now
|
| Well, apart from basket cases like North Korea perhaps.
| But that fits right into your explanation.
| danuker wrote:
| In Romania, there is a wave of people installing their
| own electricity production in response to the higher
| prices.
|
| This will reduce electricity demand, and therefore
| prices, including for other countries.
|
| This is an example of government getting out of the way
| (and deciding against the former oligopoly of energy
| suppliers).
|
| https://www.energynomics.ro/en/anre-the-number-of-
| prosumers-...
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Let's examine this claim - currently there are 20,000
| people and there is projection that it will eventually
| reach 100,000. Am I correct in understanding that we are
| talking about 0.1% of the population today and 0.5% of
| the population in two years?
|
| A greater percentage of population in Britain own and
| ride horses - so I could write about a great opportunity
| of having transportation independent of governments,
| fuels, etc.
| hammock wrote:
| >I doubt it. In as much as they are allowed to function,
| markets will reward people addressing the shortages with
| outsized profit.
|
| Standing nuclear armies 600K+ soldiers strong enforcing
| blockades, embargoes, price caps, bans, sanctions etc are not
| the most shining indicator of a free market that will correct
| shortages to equilibrium...
| vikingerik wrote:
| For any past-3-years timespan currently, you'll get the right
| picture only by looking at the numbers in light of
| consideration from the pandemic.
|
| It's not that rates are low now, it's that they were
| temporarily high for three years, during the pandemic
| shutdowns and backlogged demand from that.
|
| (Same goes for the apparent recession in 2022. That was
| mostly an artifact of the pandemic numbers, comparing 2022 to
| a 2021 that was artificially high from time-shifted
| backlogged demand from 2020.)
| heisenbit wrote:
| Sooner or later energy prices will increase and fertilizer will
| get more expensive. Step functions and impulses are useful ways
| to probe the inner working of a system and in this case helped
| to highlight the dominant role energy plays everywhere. We re-
| learned what we forgot or ignored since the last energy aka.
| oil price shock in the '70. In the long run the situation for
| food security is challenging unless we switch to a different
| paradigm of farming and population control.
| kragen wrote:
| energy prices are decreasing, not increasing; solar power is
| half as expensive as coal power in most of the world already,
| and it's likely to get even cheaper over time as pv
| production scales up
|
| (of course in northern europe this year that is not the case
| because they were relying on russian gas, but that's not
| 'sooner or later', that's just right now)
| Sakos wrote:
| This is such a weird comment. For much of the world, food
| security is an ever present problem that is heavily affected
| by energy prices (among other things). Fertilizer prices are
| already up significantly. This isn't something we have to
| wait for. It's already been happening for the past decade and
| it's going to keep getting worse.
|
| You're fortunate that you live in a country where food
| security on a population level isn't a constantly relevant
| concern.
| hedora wrote:
| The big lesson from the 1918 flu pandemic was that lockdowns
| didn't really work.
|
| The scientific consensus after that was to isolate the highest
| risk populations, and let it run through the rest of the
| population. That way, it hits herd immunity / becomes endemic
| without infecting people that are likely to die from it. For
| COVID, the conventional approach would be to lock down nursing
| homes and provide shelter in place orders / resources for the
| top 1-5% risk groups for 3 months while otherwise ignoring the
| pandemic.
|
| If it were not for RNA vaccines, that approach certainly would
| have been better than what we did with COVID. Economic
| disruption would be minimal, per case fatality would be cut
| significantly, and the tripledemic / avian flu / 2021 famine /
| rebound of malaria, etc. probably would not have happened.
|
| With the vaccines, it is unclear if the lockdowns helped or
| hurt average life expectancies. We will know in a few more
| years.
| lukas099 wrote:
| > If it were not for RNA vaccines, that approach certainly
| would have been better than what we did with COVID.
|
| I know that 'flatten the curve' largely left the public
| consciousness, but wouldn't letting the virus run largely
| unrestricted have overwhelmed the health care system?
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| What does COVID have to do with this? The fertilizer shortage
| is caused by the war in Ukraine.
|
| This war will cause more deaths indirectly than it does
| directly, just like almost all large wars.
| afarrell wrote:
| Arguably the war in Ukraine was influenced by the unrest
| against Lukanhesko after his poor handling of covid-19...and
| by Russians thinking that was yet another example of NATO
| attacks against their security.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| That's... not true in any sense. Reasons are quite simple
| and have been explained ad nausea.
|
| Greed of Putin while being detached from reality due to
| covid fears and paranoia, overconfidence in his army
| destroyed by his own and his friends corruption,
| underestimating Ukraine's resolve. He and his men really
| thought they could conquer Kyiv in few days.
|
| He was trying war land grab for 8 years already and thought
| he could get big part if not whole country permanently.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| This war has one primary cause: Putin. Anything else is a
| very distant secondary.
|
| COVID caused Putin to isolate and become paranoid, but it's
| still Putin's fault, not COVID's.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Putin's motivations predate the war, too; the invasion of
| Crimea was in 2014, and before that was Georgia in 2008.
| knewter wrote:
| I always find it interesting when people being up the
| 2014 Ukraine situation without referencing the call from
| Victoria Nuland discussing who the US was going to put in
| charge ("surprisingly", those ended up being the
| government the people elected)
|
| https://odysee.com/@AdamFitzgerald:2/Victoria-Nuland-
| Phone-C...
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Likely because people who know anything about the region
| know that that supposedly damning call happened after
| three months of violent protests against the most corrupt
| government in recent European history.. the reference to
| Klitchko being made deputy PM means it was recorded after
| Jan 26th which was when Yanukovych was trying everything
| to stay in power, including bringing opposition leaders
| into his government (and working with Russian
| intelligence to bug US diplomatic phones). He was doing
| so because many regional offices had already been taken
| over by protesters and his police forces had already shot
| several people. The leader who the US diplomats were
| talking about was already a popular opposition leader, so
| it's entirely unsurprising that Yatsenyuk was part of
| government post-Maidan.
|
| I think I'm mostly annoyed with these dumb conspiracy
| theories because they deny agency to the millions of
| people who actually cast out a criminal and
| democratically elected their own leadership. "hurr durr,
| the CIA did it"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Euromaidan_regional_st
| ate...
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The aggression in Georgia long predates that call, and
| the US expressing a preference in an election is hardly
| unusual. Are we to believe Putin didn't have a preference
| in the Ukrainian elections?
|
| Nothing in the call transcript
| (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957) strikes
| me as unusual in this scenario. The "fuck the EU" caused
| a few tut-tut waves.
| debacle wrote:
| > COVID caused Putin to isolate and become paranoid, but
| it's still Putin's fault
|
| I don't see anyone still claiming this besides neocon
| warhawks, and they don't really have a source besides
| other neocon warhawks.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| There are three claims in that, which are you contesting?
|
| Isolation has clear evidence;
| https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/10/02/thanks-to-
| covid-....
|
| Paranoia is hard to suss out between public statements
| that _sound_ paranoid - "NATO is coming to get us!"
| style stuff - and genuine private paranoia. This one
| might be the hardest to prove.
|
| "Putin's fault" is fairly hard to argue against without
| quite a bit of logical contortion.
| [deleted]
| officialjunk wrote:
| probably. heart attacks on the rise for covid survivors aged
| 25-44 https://www.khon2.com/local-news/heart-attacks-on-
| dramatic-r...
| probably_wrong wrote:
| First, this content is locked in my region so I don't know
| exactly what you linked to.
|
| Second, if you are linking to a news article about that one
| University guy who said young people shouldn't take the
| vaccine, it is my understanding that his study was flawed.
| But again, I can't read the article so take this with a grain
| of salt.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Here's the academic article immediately linked to in the
| above news page:
| https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jmv.28187
| [deleted]
| ajross wrote:
| I don't see how that's sustained by the article. This is just
| another face of the energy crunch. Oil and gas are somewhat
| rarer more expensive, and so everything made from them is more
| expensive and the economy needs to seek to a new price
| equilibrium. In this case, that mostly means "reduced travel
| and air freight" and "reduced gas heating usage".
|
| But as a side effect farmers need to scramble to match their
| own market. So some of this will end up meaning "more expensive
| fertilizer-heavy crops". But at the economic level farming is
| less able to tolerate volatility (you can't JustInTime a
| soybean, literally farmers reap what was sown months ago), so
| there's need for some assistance at the regulatory level. Which
| is what this article is about.
|
| Basically, no. No famines. Just pricing and regulatory changes.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| There is a famine in Madagascar now, although not related to
| fertiliser. The system is fragile
| eru wrote:
| That's entirely the fault of their inept and corrupt
| administration there.
| ajross wrote:
| Well, and also a big drought. Economies (and weather) are
| indeed unstable in general. But per the upthread
| hypothesis there's no particular instability in the food
| supply caused by fertilizer/energy/covid disruption that
| seems notable. We've been here before and we'll be here
| again.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| United Nations says it's "first climate change famine".
|
| Why are you blaming administration? I am not sure how
| corrupt they are, but how do you deal with drought in a
| country that has GDP per capital of $520? Like you can't
| afford to do much with that.
|
| https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/10/1103712
| bruiseralmighty wrote:
| It's not really the conflict directly so much as the sanctions
| campaigns that followed.
|
| Russia and Belarus are the number one and two suppliers of a
| basic fertilizer component, but now Western aligned nation
| cannot import from them and the Brits have gone further by
| making it harder to insure the shipments which affects the
| ability for Russia (and by extension Belarus) to export to
| anyone by sea.
|
| The Germans _could_ have helped make up the difference since
| they can make some amount of fertilizer using natural gas, but
| some terrorist state (we still don't know exactly who) blew up
| NS1 and NS2 which makes this basically impossible. Germany now
| needs to preserve all its gas just to keep some manufacturing
| going, heat people's homes, and run the lights.
|
| The pandemic has had some effect, but a lot of the fertilizer
| being sold internationally goes to Egypt, the Middle East, and
| North Africa. It doesn't actually have to go all that far in
| the global scheme of things.
|
| The conflict itself affects wheat prices, since Ukraine is a
| major wheat exporter (as is Russia), but the fertilizer issues
| are due primarily to Western sanctions and Kremlin counter-
| sanctions.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Well, 20.8% of goal potash production comes from Russia and
| another 18% from Belarus. It's a key ingredients in making
| fertilizer. There is your single cause.
|
| Source: https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/our-natural-resources/minerals-
| minin...
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Have they stopped producing?
|
| Don't think any of the big buyers are resisting purchase from
| those two countries.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| They've stopped exporting to western countries.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| After the US (which I'm assuming imports from Canada, the
| largest exporter), the next 6 largest importers aren't
| western countries (if you exclude Brazil in that):
|
| https://www.nationmaster.com/nmx/ranking/potash-
| fertilizer-i...
|
| https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/our-natural-resources/minerals-
| minin...
|
| The biggest issue is that Belarus has restricted access
| to euro seaports, but Belarus and Russia have extensive
| rail networks.
| Tokkemon wrote:
| What if we raid some more islands for bird poop?
| amriksohata wrote:
| The indore method (used in india for centuries by hindu farmers)
| would mean there would be no need for chemical fertilizer.
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