[HN Gopher] Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again
___________________________________________________________________
Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again
Author : colinprince
Score : 351 points
Date : 2023-04-07 13:34 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.npr.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.npr.org)
| efields wrote:
| This is really excellent news. Annual plant cultivation at the
| scale we need is pretty unsustainable long term.
|
| Yes we've been doing it for thousands of years but only 100 or so
| relying on oil for our enormous yields.
| quaintdev wrote:
| I have one concern though. What happens to nutrients content of
| this rice over time? I mean with our current practices the land
| gets enough time to produce quality rice for another year. If
| we are going perenial what happens to soil and rice quality?
| jimkoen wrote:
| Do riceplants absorb nutrients only via soil? I've always
| thought that they get at least part of their nutrients via
| the water that surrounds them. In that case controlling for
| nutrients would be much easier.
| xsmasher wrote:
| Rice is not an aquatic plant; the water is used for weed
| control. California grows rice but they don't flood the
| fields.
| tfourb wrote:
| Perennial plants are much more effective at extracting
| nutrients because of more established root systems. Not
| tilling the field also allows for complex plant/fungi
| communities to develop which will increase moisture and
| nutrient levels in the soil. Put simply: you don't need to
| fertilize a forest or other naturally occurring ecosystems
| and those are built around perennial plants. The closer you
| get back to a functioning ecosystem, the less resist you'll
| be on external inputs.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| Well, what is the answer to that question for all the other
| perennial crops we eat? Tree nuts, tree fruits, coconuts,
| berries, asparagus, artichoke...
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| As I understand it the result of monoculture soil damage is
| not in detectable nutrition of the crop but less yield due to
| reduced hardiness, slower growing, susceptibility to pests &
| pathogens.
|
| I know very little about rice cultivation but the flooded
| fields system has very different cycles and feedback from dry
| land grain cultivation. It varies a lot by region but rice
| paddies are entire ecosystems, with specific fish & eels
| introduced to control pests and enrich the fields. At least
| for the first few years iirc rice cultivation itself actually
| somewhat terraforms the land, improving it for rice
| cultivation. I'm sure there are drawbacks, caveats, and
| limits on that but I don't know what they are. I suspect
| you'd need to be a dedicated rice crop expert to have a truly
| informed understanding of it.
| realworldperson wrote:
| [dead]
| Lunatic666 wrote:
| With perennial rice you lose the option to use the field for
| something else. Also timing the sowing with the rain is
| important.
|
| (Source: my wife's family are rice farmers in the Northeast of
| Thailand)
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| We should do the same with corn
| barathr wrote:
| The Land Institute has been doing amazing work for decades, and
| it's great to see they've done it for a common grain.
|
| Their work on Kernza was fascinating but seemed unlikely to catch
| on.
|
| The question will always come back to yield loss (vs. annual
| cultivars) vs. cost savings due to perenniality.
| ledauphin wrote:
| i wish Kernza would succeed. It is a more interesting-tasting
| grain than wheat!
| kickout wrote:
| Whew, never thought I'd see TLI on HN....Work with those
| scientist on a different project. Interesting stuff. Acreage on
| Kernza has been slow to take off though.
| efitz wrote:
| My wife is from Thailand. My father in law is a rice farmer.
|
| I'm unclear about the definition of "subsistence", because you
| need more than rice to live, but he grows more than they need to
| eat and sells the rest to eke out a living.
|
| The questions in my mind are:
|
| 1. How expensive would these perennial rice strains be (patents)?
| The cost would have to be ridiculously low by western standards
| for rural Thai farmers to afford this.
|
| 2. How sustainable is it from the standpoint of soil nutrients?
| Would farmers have to fertilize since they usually plow under
| after harvest and let the field lie fallow for 6 months?
| Fertilizer would likely be a show stopper.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| You can plant the rice along with nitrogen fixers. Perennial
| plants get old and should be replanted periodically, so you can
| have a fallow period where the land is grazed to really improve
| fertility.
| anthomtb wrote:
| > 1. How expensive would these perennial rice strains be
| (patents)? The cost would have to be ridiculously low by
| western standards for rural Thai farmers to afford this.
|
| The perennial rice strain in question is developed by a non-
| profit: https://landinstitute.org/.
|
| Near as I can tell, they do not patent their crops for revenue.
| According to https://landinstitute.org/learn/frequently-asked-
| questions/, they do have one of their grains trademarked and
| extract fees from those who use the trademark. Which strikes me
| as a fair play but others opinions may differ.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| It actually helps retains soil nutrient including nitrogen.
|
| >accumulating 0.95 Mg ha-1 yr-1 organic carbon and 0.11 Mg ha-1
| yr-1 nitrogen
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| Not all rice needs to be grown in paddies. Paddies are primarily
| used for weed control as rice, as a water side plant, can
| tolerate root submersion where the competition can't. Some
| varieties do better than others as "dry land" rice. A perennial
| dry land rice would be a boon for small holders. A lawn could
| become a perennial food source.
|
| I am currently working to adapt rice varieties to my temperate
| environment in a raised bed setting. Not having to use some of my
| harvested seed to replant would be awesome. The downside is you
| lose the ability to select for traits without ripping up your
| current plot.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| If people want to grow food in lawn there are so many easier
| options than rice, such as a few large fruit trees.
|
| It's a cultural problem that lawns are just green spaces
| sprayed with 2,4-d, not a technological one.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| Rice, like most grains, is a grass. Replace lawn grass with
| grain grass and plant fruit trees. Growing food isn't a one
| size fits all solution. Grow what you can with the least
| amount of effort.
|
| Lawns as green space will last as long as food is plentiful.
| Changing a lawn to food production is the first step people
| will take if food is not available. The culture is already
| changing.
|
| https://www.foodnotlawns.com/
| twawaaay wrote:
| I know Chinese harvest their rice up to three times a year. I
| don't see how perennial rice could compete.
|
| Harvesting normal rice is just grabbing entire plants, as many as
| you can grab at a time. I may know nothing about how harvesting
| perennial rice is supposed to work, but I grew up as a farmer and
| I have imagination. You have to leave some part of the plant for
| it to keep growing crop which means you can't just grab it all.
| And I think this is a deal breaker.
|
| It just does not make sense to get even more labour intensive
| plant at a time where labour in all parts of the world that grow
| rice becomes suddenly so much more expensive.
|
| So until they figure out to build robots that can individually
| pick rice grains off of a tiny, fragile rice plant, I am not
| seeing any future for perennial rice.
| hosh wrote:
| According to this quote:
|
| > Perennial cultivars are strongly preferred by farmers;
| growing them saves 58.1% of labour and 49.2% of input costs in
| each regrowth cycle. In 2021, perennial rice was grown on
| 15,333 ha by 44,752 smallholder farmers in southern China.
|
| Seems like it makes sense to them. The increased labor in
| harvest is probably offset by the decrease in labor for
| planting.
| eYrKEC2 wrote:
| Grain combines chop the heads off the wheat plant and leave
| stubble. If it can survive that.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Don't know about point one but for point two:
|
| They got two harvests per year with slightly _increased_ yield
| per hectare per harvest.
|
| > produced grain for eight consecutive harvests over four
| years, averaging 6.8 Mg ha-1 harvest-1 versus the 6.7 Mg of
| replanted annual rice
| mataug wrote:
| In many parts of the world, planting rice is as labor intensive
| as harvesting it.
|
| If planting rice is no longer labor intensive, wouldn't
| harvesting be able to attract the labor needed ?
| pseudostem wrote:
| I have some farming experience under my belt, zero with rice.
|
| You have to look at labour as a function of season. If while
| planting, there are no competing jobs, but while harvesting,
| there are (or the other way around)... That would be your
| answer.
| [deleted]
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| Plant once, it will replicated forever.. What could go wrong?
| eminence32 wrote:
| > They then spent years breeding for the desired traits until
| they landed on three new perennial varieties to test in the real
| world
|
| Good old-fashioned genetic engineering :)
| ccooffee wrote:
| Well, they've got fancy procedures in there, too:
|
| > So what our colleague Duyan Tao did - he, at an early stage,
| around 10 days after the [by-human-hand] pollination, went in
| there and dissected out the very young embryo that was
| developing and put it in tissue culture and gave it nutrients
| to help it grow. And then he rescued one of these seedlings.
| And that was the beginning of it.
|
| Also, the "old-fashioned genetic engineering" of selective
| breeding of animals/plants is...not as old-fashioned as you may
| think. Animal husbandry has been around for millennia (or
| longer), but it was an undirected process prior to the work of
| Robert Bakewell in the 1700s. Thanks to his groundbreaking work
| (and a lot of refinements from others), humanity learned how to
| shape the trajectories of other species. I like this quote from
| Bakewell's wikipedia page[0]:
|
| > In 1700, the average weight of a bull sold for slaughter was
| 370 pounds (168 kg). By 1786, that weight had more than doubled
| to 840 pounds (381 kg).
|
| (Obviously, humanity has gone on to be much more aggressive and
| successful with selective breeding. Beef cattle are now usually
| 1200-1400 pounds at slaughter, for example. Though, personally,
| I'd say we've gone "too far" when you learn about the horrors
| of modern, industrialized animal agriculture.)
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bakewell_(agriculturali...
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Arr we saying that cattle today are 4 times the weight of
| 400yrs ago?
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Domestic animals in the Middle Ages were definitely smaller
| than today, you can see it in illustrations that depict
| agricultural work.
|
| For people who lived in swampy areas (e.g. north of
| England), having lighter animals with longer legs was
| actually preferrable. Meat-and-fat balls of today would get
| stuck and drown in mires.
| ccooffee wrote:
| That's a very good point. I'm currently suspecting that the
| numbers quoted in Blakewell's article are the "hot carcass"
| weight (i.e. subtracting bone, head, and organs from the
| total weight). An Aurochs (wild ancestor of domesticated
| cattle) could reach 1300 lbs in the 1500s (and possibly in
| excess of 3300 lbs prior to recorded history, according to
| archaeological finds)[0].
|
| If the numbers are hot-carcass weight, we would be seeing:
|
| 1700: 370 lbs, 1789: 840 lbs, 2020: 880 lbs [1]
|
| But, uhh, that doesn't feel right either. I think that
| wikipedia page could use some additional citations, but I'm
| struggling to find useful numbers with which to update.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs
|
| [1] https://beef.unl.edu/beefwatch/2020/how-many-pounds-
| meat-can...
| colatkinson wrote:
| Ehh it's getting into pedantic territory as to what counts as
| directed vs undirected, but people figured out pretty quick
| that if you have an animal with a desirable trait you can
| breed it with others to maybe get offspring that also have
| that trait.
|
| As an illustrative example, consider the fancy pigeon (see
| [0] for some pics). One of Darwin's original areas of study
| was to prove that these birds, many of which have cool-
| looking but incredibly maladaptive traits, were actually the
| same species as the pigeons you'd see on a London street.
| Prior to that, the scientific consensus was that these were
| fully distinct species -- i.e. the artificial selection
| happened so long ago that it was lost to time. Given some
| breeds have trouble even eating (e.g. look at the beak on
| this guy [1]), I think it's a pretty safe assumption that
| this breeding did not happen without careful human
| intervention.
|
| That's not to say that the kind/degree of artificial
| selection we see in industrial agriculture isn't worlds away
| from older forms. Once you've got the basics of evolution and
| the scale of capitalist production, you're starting down the
| road to the current world of 100 pound antibiotic-riddled
| chickens in rows of 10000 cages. But humans have been
| selectively breeding animals for food, utility, or just
| because we kinda felt like it since time immemorial.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fancy_pigeon
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oriental_Frill
| chris_va wrote:
| (disclaimer that I manage a climate group, but not a rice expert)
|
| They touch on, but don't get into the details on one of the more
| interesting aspects of perennial rice.
|
| Rice fields are actually a huge emitter of methane. Depending on
| the accounting, they contribute as much to global warming as the
| aviation sector.
|
| The fields emit methane when flooded, the stagnant water gets
| oxygen depleted, and the biomass in the soil degrades. This
| flooding is mostly used to control for weeds, but weeds have a
| much more difficult time competing when a perennial canopy
| already exists.
|
| So, perennial rice may end up reduce GHG emissions substantially.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Depending on the accounting, they contribute as much to
| global warming as the aviation sector.
|
| Methane's contribution to global warming is proportional to the
| rate of change on a window of ~20 years. Emitting methane
| doesn't warm the world. What warms the world is increasing its
| emission.
|
| That focus on non-fossil fuel related methane emission is a
| huge piece of propaganda that people keep repeating. Most of
| those emissions were stable for decades. It's mostly fossil
| fuel related emissions that grew recently.
|
| (But yeah, reducing the emissions will lead to a cooling of the
| world that can compensate some amount of CO2 emissions for a
| short term.)
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| Damn is there any commodity crop that isn't an environmental
| disaster?
| hinkley wrote:
| Legumes suck less, and _fabaceae_ has an awful lot of
| perennials in the family tree.
| lm28469 wrote:
| It's all about the scale and the method. When all we care
| about is productivity and profit we end up with that
| xyzzyz wrote:
| > So, perennial rice may end up reduce GHG emissions
| substantially.
|
| Not really. These GHG emissions from rice are in steady state
| with the amount of CO2 and methane in the atmosphere. They do
| not add additional GHG to the atmosphere the way burning fossil
| fuel do.
|
| When you burn fossil fuels, the carbon atoms released into
| atmosphere have been captured from the atmosphere millions
| years ago. When weeds and other organic matter in flooded
| fields decompose, released carbon atoms have been captured only
| a couple of months or years earlier.
| dangjc wrote:
| That's reassuring we are in steady state. If perennial rice
| takes over, we will gradually drop atmospheric methane to a
| lower steady state.
| squokko wrote:
| Not true between CO2 and methane. The total amount of carbon
| is the same but in methane form is worse for greenhouse
| effect.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Methane is worse, but it again doesn't matter here, because
| the fields are in steady state not only with CO2, but with
| methane as well.
|
| Methane doesn't linger in atmosphere forever, it decomposes
| into CO2 in a decade or so. This means atoms of methane
| emitted from the fields are pretty much exactly paired with
| atoms of methane in atmosphere decaying into CO2.
|
| This means that methane emitted from the fields doesn't
| _increase_ the _total_ amount of methane in the atmosphere,
| the way burning fossil fuels does with CO2.
| crazygringo wrote:
| That doesn't make sense mathematically.
|
| Because you could start with zero methane in the
| atmosphere, just lots of CO2, but the rice would
| introduce methane.
|
| Eventually yes you can get to a steady state of methane,
| but the point is that the more rice there is, the higher
| that steady state becomes. Which is bad.
|
| So the total amount of methane would absolutely increase.
| (And if you stopped planting rice at all it would
| eventually decrease over the subsequent decades.)
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Yes, I discuss this in my comment here
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35483780
|
| The point is, though, that the amount of methane that
| currently have in atmosphere, is only barely relevant
| when it comes to how it affects climate from human
| perspective. If all methane disappeared tomorrow, our
| climate would be back to 2010, which is hardy a
| significant change. Nobody would even notice other than
| climate scientists. Similarly, if we increase the rice
| cultivation, the amount of methane will increase in the
| steady state, but the increase will be wholly immaterial,
| so that it does not affect us in any real way. This is
| not really "bad".
| billiam wrote:
| >our climate would be back to 2010, which is hardy a
| significant change.
|
| Uh, no. It is quite significant, and a mountain of
| evidence says that the climate changes from
| concentrations in the last decade are very significant.
| You appear to be a denier of anthropogenic climate change
| who is willing to make silly straw men arguments.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| I do happen to remember what the climate looked like in
| 2010, and I very much do not believe that enormous social
| and economic projects are warranted to revert the state
| of climate by 10 years.
|
| > You appear to be a denier of anthropogenic climate
| change who is willing to make silly straw men arguments.
|
| You appear to be unable to discuss the issue on merits,
| but this doesn't necessitate resorting to ad hominem. You
| can do better than that.
| fwip wrote:
| Actually describing the beliefs that you hold is not an
| ad hominem.
|
| You, however, are claiming that they are unable to
| discuss the issue - that is.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think they are right.
|
| Yes, the more rice there is, the higher the steady state
| would be.
|
| However, we aren't planting more rice. The ammount of
| rice grown and methane released is already in steady
| state.
|
| This is a seperate point than if atmospheric methane
| would _go down_ if we grew less rice than today.
| hinkley wrote:
| If you grow more people, we will have more rice. If
| perennial rice is more profitable, then corn acreage will
| shrink in favor of rice acreage.
| hinkley wrote:
| Methane is 20x worse, so if you capture 95% of the carbon
| and emit the rest as methane, you've broken even on GHG.
| But nothing I'm aware of captures 95% of carbon. Terra
| Preta might lock up the captured carbon for 100's of
| years, but producing charcoal is 50% efficient if you
| optimize for emissions, which most people do not.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| This reasoning is completely wrong: there's an input and
| an progressive decay as output, the amount of methane in
| the atmosphere at any given point is directly related to
| the input.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Yes, this is exactly what I say in my comment. The amount
| of methane in the atmosphere is directly proportional to
| the input _rate_. That's why, as I said, in _steady
| state_ , when the we keep steady the amount of rice under
| cultivation, the amount of methane in atmosphere is not
| changing over time.
|
| Can you point to which part exactly is "completely
| wrong"?
| twic wrote:
| Your assumption of steady state is incorrect. The carbon
| that is being released as methane would otherwise be
| accumulated in the soil.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Can you elaborate on this?
|
| Do you mean that rice plants are actually absorbing methane
| earlier on, so they're just releasing the same amount?
|
| Or are they actually producing methane from other molecules,
| like water and carbon dioxide?
|
| Because yes, methane breaks down in the atmosphere into H2O
| and CO2 so you could view it as a cycle, but the more rice
| there is the higher the steady state methane in the
| atmosphere is, so it's still a problem.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Yes, the whole point is that it is a cycle. The fields
| don't affect by much the total number of carbon _atoms_ in
| the atmosphere. Without the fields, other plants would grow
| there, then die, decay, and release carbon into atmosphere.
|
| At best, growing rice and flooding fields might affect the
| balance between the amount of methane and amount of CO2 in
| the steady state, but this is of no practical consequence,
| because the methane _will not accumulate_ year over year,
| like the emissions from fossil fuels do.
|
| Suppose we grow twice as much rice as we do now. This means
| that the steady state will have twice as much methane
| coming from the fields as it has now. Hell, let's actually
| assume that _all_ existing methane in atmosphere is from
| rice fields, and actually increase amount of methane in
| atmosphere by a factor of 2. What is the impact to the
| climate, according to our current models? Well, this is
| equivalent to less than 10% increase in total CO2 in the
| atmosphere. That's like a difference between 2000 and 2020,
| which is to say, almost unobservable -- and remember I
| assumed we increase total methane by factor of 2, not just
| methane from the fields.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _but this is of no practical consequence, because the
| methane will not accumulate year over year, like the
| emissions from fossil fuels do._
|
| Methane still takes 12 years to break down in the
| atmosphere, and it's more than 25 times as potent of a
| greenhouse gas than CO2.
|
| CO2 concentrations are currently ~420 ppm, while methane
| is ~1866 ppb, or 1.9 ppm. If we assume methane is 25
| times worse than CO2, that 1.9 ppm is the equivalent of
| 48 ppm CO2. Which is _gigantic_.
|
| Doubling steady-state methane levels in the atmosphere
| would be a _major_ problem. It would be like CO2 levels
| going from 468 to 516, yes a 10% increase. I don 't know
| how you can call that "almost unobservable" when we're
| doing our absolute best to stop _any_ increases. The fact
| that it 's steady state doesn't really matter if it's
| still a major contributor, and/or if that steady state is
| increasing.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Thank you for redoing the math I did, and confirming I
| was exactly correct with figures.
|
| The increase in concentration is observable, but the
| impact on climate is not. Again: this increase is similar
| to increase between 2000 and 2020. Without extremely
| careful and precise measurements, nobody would really be
| able to perceive any difference in climate between these
| two dates.
|
| This matters, because it is the perceived effect of
| climate change that is worrying, not the measured one.
| Modern science can measure many things with very high
| accuracy, but these changes only matter if they affect
| our lives in a way we can perceive. If the change is only
| seen on accurate scientific instrument, why should the
| society care much about it?
| lm28469 wrote:
| > this increase is similar to increase between 2000 and
| 2020. Without extremely careful and precise measurements,
| nobody would really be able to perceive any difference in
| climate between these two dates.
|
| If that's how you work then nothing has any impact
| whatsoever, cars, planes, cattle, over twenty years if
| you split everything in sub categories they're all
| negligible
|
| Meanwhile we clearly already can measure the effect of it
| all.
|
| With your logic you're the proverbial boiled frog my
| friend...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _If the change is only seen on accurate scientific
| instrument, why should the society care much about it?_
|
| It's difficult to perceive this as anything but elaborate
| climate denial, given it works for any incremental
| progress towards lower emissions.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| No, you missed the point: there is an enormous difference
| between methane emissions from fresh organic matter, and
| emission from fossil fuels. The latter _accumulate_ ,
| while the former do not. That's why as we continue
| incrementally burning fossil fuels, the effects
| accumulate and affect climate over decades or centuries,
| but decaying weeds or (fashionable to discuss a couple of
| years back) cattle burps and farts do not.
|
| The point is that even if it continues over the
| centuries, the effect of cattle farts and weeds decaying
| on rice fields will _only ever be observable using
| precise scientific instruments_ , whereas effect of
| burning fossil fuels for centuries will be very readily
| perceivable with very crude techniques.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _the effect of cattle farts and weeds decaying on rice
| fields will only ever be observable using precise
| scientific instruments, whereas effect of burning fossil
| fuels for centuries will be very readily perceivable with
| very crude techniques_
|
| It's a fine distinction, and I'm glad you made it, but
| the arguments for why it doesn't matter don't stick.
| Gross imperceptibility _does_ work for any small amount
| of any emission--there is no way to feel the effect of
| _that_ emission _per se_. There is also the case that
| raising the planet's steady-state temperature is exactly
| what existing fossil fuel emissions have done. They're a
| problem even if they're already there.
| t-3 wrote:
| The rice plants don't absorb or release methane, the
| breakdown of organic matter in the flooded ricefields
| causes the release of methane. In dry/unflooded fields, the
| decay would be much slower. The flooded fields possibly
| emit more methane and less CO2 than unflooded due to
| anaerobic conditions, but I'm just guessing.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| Methane and CO2 are very different things. The former has a
| massively greater warming effect than the latter, and takes
| long enough to degrade in the atmosphere that it can
| significantly affect warming times. If you aren't paying
| attention to the rising methane levels in our atmosphere (and
| possible evidence of a feedback loop) with serious
| trepidation, you're a lucky person who probably sleeps well
| at night.
| lettergram wrote:
| I want a warmer atmosphere.
|
| All the UN data points to a warmer atmosphere equating to
| more food and higher quality of life.
|
| I concede some concern about potential feedback loops, but
| the reality is that earth was and still is in an ice age.
| Ice ages are not the norm on earth, I think it's okay if we
| exit an ice age. Yes things will change, but it'll be over
| decades to millennia. We're working on carbon capture right
| now -- 150 years after the start of the Industrial
| Revolution.
|
| By even the most imo insane estimates we are 50-70 years
| from even minor discomfort. I'm fairly confident we can fix
| the problem when it becomes a problem
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > All the UN data points to a warmer atmosphere equating
| to more food and higher quality of life
|
| All data point to countries warmer than Spain having
| significant drops in life expectancy. Human body is less
| healthy in a tropical climate than it is in continental
| climate.
|
| A numbwr of cities will exceed 36 degrees C Wet Bulb
| Temperature in the summmer. Do you understand what that
| means? Over heating to death. Sweating does not work any
| more.
|
| Everyone living in those areas will become refugees.
|
| We are also losing all snowpack. No snowpack means
| droughts in summer and floods in winter.
|
| Lastly, we expect climate change to cause food shortages.
| It will not bw just poor countries that suffer. Nations
| will respond by banning food exports. Britain depends on
| imported food, it has not been self-sufficient for 100
| years
|
| We have no crops that handle high heat well. We neber
| domesticated perrenial plants properly, they give much
| lower yields. Perrenial wheatgrass has half the yoeld of
| wheat.
|
| Potato planta shut down in high heat even if you provide
| them with water. You can turn the entire field i to soup,
| at 40 degrees potatoss don't grow.
|
| It is sad that most people do not comprehens the huge
| cost we will have to deal with this problem.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > I want a warmer atmosphere.
|
| > All the UN data points to a warmer atmosphere equating
| to more food and higher quality of life.
|
| Globally and to a point, maybe. But that's not taking
| into account local effects and the millions (billion?)
| who'll be displaced and what comes with it
|
| Then you have ocean acidification, postivie and negative
| feedback that we won't be able to stop, &c.
|
| > I'm fairly confident we can fix the problem when it
| becomes a problem
|
| I'm fairly confident that the same UN data points, and
| basically the entire corpus of text about climate
| science, will show you that it's absolutely not how it
| works because the inertia is way too strong to only care
| about it when it's in front of you
| tfourb wrote:
| Also, it is already a problem for billions of people
| every year and we haven't found a fix except emitting
| less CO2.
| kbelder wrote:
| I somewhat agree. A climate several degrees warmer than
| recent history seems like it would be beneficial; in the
| past, warmer periods coincided with a lush and rich
| biosphere. More energy is available to life.
|
| Like you, long-term, I'm more worried about the upcoming
| ice age than runaway global warming. We know how to fix
| global warming, and will in the next hundred years:
| Nuclear and solar.
|
| But... warming can still be very disruptive in the short
| term. Coastlines moving a few hundred feet might be
| disastrous for entire regions. Staple crops failing in
| one nation and blooming in another may cause refugees,
| famine, and war. Politics is local.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| Last summer we had heat waves and droughts on three
| continents simultaneously, plus massive unprecedented
| floods in Pakistan. It doesn't take much to destroy a
| year's worth of crops, and the IPCC modeling doesn't
| really come to grips with what we're seeing.
| unaindz wrote:
| I live in northern Spain and I notice the summers and the
| winters getting hotter.
|
| This winter I didn't turn on the heat once and it was
| uncomfortable cold inside the house for like three days
| tops. It's normally uncomfortable at least for one or two
| months.
|
| On december it's freezing outside at night, this december
| we had flowers blossoming. What an issue right? Energy
| and money savings on all that gas and it's more
| comfortable outside.
|
| Well we beat the last hot temperature record last summer
| with 450C, that's "kills your grandpa temperature" or
| 113F if you prefer. I'm scared of this summer, I don't
| have AC.
| Retric wrote:
| That was actually part of early models of climate change,
| but we've already crossed the point where the negatives
| from increased CO2 outweigh the positives.
|
| The problem is there are just so many small negatives
| such as extremely warm weather negatively impacting plant
| growth. But also less talked about problems like the
| increase in outdoor CO2 requiring more building
| ventilation to avoid indoor CO2 levels from giving people
| headaches. That's right, global warming actually makes
| meetings inside air conditioned buildings worse.
| Retric wrote:
| That's very misleading because Methane is extremely front
| loaded in its effects. Year 0 is very bad year 50 is only
| equal to the amount of carbon in that methane. As rice
| farming is very consistent year to year, and rice removes
| carbon as it grows the net effect on future warming is
| ~zero because all the previous years have already been
| baked in to current conditions.
|
| The great news is reducing Methane from existing sources is
| one of the fastest ways to reverse climate change after we
| reach net zero.
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| > Serious people panic when I do.
|
| But you didn't address why you panic.
| cyrusatjam wrote:
| wrong thread?
| drak0n1c wrote:
| Comment was edited.
| [deleted]
| ccooffee wrote:
| I hadn't heard about rice fields emitting methane before. I was
| able to quickly find an article, "Methane emissions from global
| rice fields: Magnitude, spatiotemporal patterns, and
| environmental controls"[0], which states:
|
| > Our study estimated that CH4 emissions from global rice
| fields varied from 18.3 +- 0.1 Tg CH4/yr (Avg. +-1 SD) under
| intermittent irrigation to 38.8 +- 1.0 Tg CH4/yr under
| continuous flooding in the 2000s, indicating that the magnitude
| of CH4 emissions from global rice fields is largely dependent
| on different water schemes.
|
| At 18.3-38.8 Tg CH4/yr, this estimate comes out to about
| 500-1500 million tons of CO2-equivalent per year according to
| an EPA GHG-equivalence calculator[1]. Global emissions are
| estimated at north of 34 billion tons of CO2-equivalent per
| year[2], putting the total CO2-equivalent from rice fields
| throughout the world at 1-3% of total global emissions.
|
| Wow.
|
| [0]
| https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/201...
|
| [1] https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-
| calc...
|
| [2] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
| ericpauley wrote:
| To be fair, rice also provides ~20% of global caloric needs,
| so this isn't necessarily an outsized contribution.
| Aromasin wrote:
| To put this into context, animal agriculture is responsible
| for 18% of the worlds CO2 emissions, uses 83% of the
| world's farmland, but only produces 18% of our calories and
| 37% of our protein.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > responsible for 18% of the worlds CO2 emissions, uses
| 83% of the world's farmland
|
| And ~40% of methane emissions as far as I can tell
| mardifoufs wrote:
| What % of farmland used for meat production is actually
| usable for something else? I don't think cattle grazes on
| prime land, or even mildly productive land.
| tfourb wrote:
| It really depends on what you define as "usable". I am
| currently looking out of a window in the Bavarian Forest
| and see nice lush green meadows which would be perfectly
| productive under many different types of crops, but which
| are mostly used as pasture and meadow for hay production,
| because the landscape is hilly, which isn't well suited
| to be farmed with the heavy equipment that has become
| standard in i.e. corn and wheat production. This type of
| heavy, industrialized equipment in turn has been a type
| of farming heavily supported and subsidized by current
| agricultural policies. You could change the incentives
| and bring a lot of the farmland currently considered
| "marginal" into crop production again.
| hcurtiss wrote:
| Yes, with humans working hoes. I do not call that
| progress.
| tfourb wrote:
| Currently less than 1% of the population in many
| industrialized countries are working in agriculture. That
| is laughably few people and there is no reason why it
| couldn't be a greater share of the population. Guess
| what: many people are actually enjoying this kind of work
| when it isn't presented in a context of total
| exploitation.
|
| And no, while agriculture certainly tends to be
| physically demanding, it is not unreasonably so, even
| when done at small scale and with smaller machines. Small
| scale agriculture has been mechanized to a large degree
| and mechanized solutions have even been developed for
| very sustainable approaches to agriculture like
| agroforestry and syntropic agriculture.
| gregwebs wrote:
| A lot of grazing is done on marginal farming land. For
| example land that is very dry or land that is very steep.
| So generally a statistic like 83% of the world's farmland
| doesn't make any sense.
|
| Not sure if it is possible to count factory farming
| properly- that takes really good farmland and sends the
| production to animals.
| aaronblohowiak wrote:
| a lot of rainforest deforestation is for cattle
| robocat wrote:
| > A lot of grazing is done on marginal farming land.
|
| For example, New Zealand: ~55% is being used for sheep
| and cattle, and only ~2% of NZ is arable (see
| https://youtu.be/F_g6-4swJ_s at 14:45) with a major part
| of the reason why explained near the 10:00 mark (weather
| in South Island).
| scns wrote:
| By goat and sheep, not cattle.
| lettergram wrote:
| "Our protein" isn't exactly fair. Depending on the
| culture meat can account for as much as 90%+ of protein.
| slily wrote:
| [dead]
| _dark_matter_ wrote:
| or as little as 0%. The point stands.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Or near zero percent.
|
| Why isn't this stat fair?
| ericpauley wrote:
| I imagine they're using "our" in the global sense.
| Virtually no one is truly dependent on meat for protein;
| the food the livestock eat are probably mostly human-
| edible and offer sufficient protein on their own. There's
| minimal nutritional value added by the meat production
| process.
| wolfgangK wrote:
| I really wish there was a name (that I knew of) for this
| logical fallacy of using precise quantities of
| meaninglessly confused categories. What do you think
| "farmland" is ? Our ancestors who knew how to raise
| cattle and farm cereals for millennia were surviving on
| the verge of starvation : why do you think that was ?
| Were they so dumb they'd rather die of hunger than
| convert some of their grazing pastures to cereal
| agriculture ? Or some "farmland" can be used for grazing
| but not for agriculture, maybe ? Same for proteins : all
| amino acids are not equal, a a pound of soy protein won't
| have the same effect on your body as a pound of meat
| proteins. And don't get me started on nutrients and their
| bio availability (e.g. iron and B12). As far as CO2
| emissions from cattle, where do your think the C comes
| from ? The grass/food that cattle eat, what would happen
| to it if let to decompose ?
| scns wrote:
| > a pound of soy protein won't have the same effect on
| your body as a pound of meat proteins.
|
| True. Eating meat will raise your inflammation markers by
| 70%.
|
| > nutrients and their bio availability (e.g. iron and
| B12)
|
| Fe3 from animal sources has a better uptake by the body.
| Fe2 from plants is good enough if you combine it with
| Vitamin C. Parsley contains both.
|
| Animals in conventional agriculture have to be fed B12,
| for them to stay healthy and their meat to contain any.
| The B12 producing bacteria in the soil get killed by
| pesticides.
|
| The 83% of farmland which is used to feed and raise
| animals taken together is the size of Africa.
|
| Source: Game Changers, the movie [0]. Highly recommended,
| stopped cooking wirh organic meat, i take B12 directly
| instead. If someone else cooks for me, i still eat meat
| and enjoy it. Knowing full well that it damages my body,
| like alcohol and sugar. Completly banning fun sounds
| awful.
| UberFly wrote:
| "Game Changers" is a terrible place to plant your fact-
| flag. Like all documentaries of its type, there is no
| balanced fact-checking, questionable "experts" basing
| their opinions on small inconclusive studies, etc, etc.
| arghwhat wrote:
| Yes, some land is not suitable for agriculture. No, this
| does mean that having cattle is a neutral usage as each
| cattle requires agriculture to feed for 3-4 years before
| they are slaughtered.
|
| Yes, cattle emissions are largely from the food. No, this
| is not just grass that was already there and would
| decompose anyway - the majority of agricultural
| production is to feed cattle and would not be necessary
| without (the efficiency of raising an animal for years to
| get a few steaks is horrible), and even if fed naturally
| it significantly increases the rate of plant turnover.
|
| Yes, meat protein is a great source of nutrition. No, it
| is not magically better than equivalent vegetarian
| nutrition. Both have diets ranging from super healthy to
| obesity inducing. Being carnivorous or vegetarian is
| itself not a significant health factor - chips and crisps
| are often vegan, and Big Macs contain meat.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > Our ancestors who knew how to raise cattle and farm
| cereals for millennia were surviving on the verge of
| starvation : why do you think that was ? Were they so
| dumb they'd rather die of hunger than convert some of
| their grazing pastures to cereal agriculture ?
|
| This is one of those "not even wrong" kind of things. The
| conditions that led to famine-cycles plaguing the Old
| World until the arrival of New World crops, and later the
| Green Revolution, have nothing at all to do with modern
| farming or land use, not even in the way you're trying to
| make the connection. This is all just completely
| irrelevant to the point you're trying to use it to make.
|
| "Were pre-contact old-world farmers just too dumb to kill
| their cows so they could plant more wheat and stop
| starving every few years?", asked rhetorically to imply
| that reducing meat farming can't possibly help with any
| modern problems. I mean... it's just a nonsense question,
| the context they were operating in, the global population
| size, and their farming practices are so far removed from
| what we do now that it doesn't make any sense to frame it
| this way. No, they weren't too dumb to think of that, and
| no, it wouldn't have helped if they had tried it, but
| neither of those things are relevant to the modern
| situation, at all.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Certainly some cattle are grazed on land that would be
| too hilly / rocky etc. to farm. And that's not a terrible
| use of land, but enormous numbers of cattle are raised in
| feedlots, and fed cereal crops like corn (maize) which
| have to farmed on the better farmland, which is far less
| reasonable.
| richardw wrote:
| "The grass/food that cattle eat, what would happen to it
| if let to decompose ?"
|
| It would decompose (once) and then natural habitat would
| return because we need less of that land, capturing
| carbon more permanently because it's released more
| slowly. In Brazil, exactly the opposite is happening:
| deforestation to feed cattle. Are you arguing _for_ that
| deforestation?
| hinkley wrote:
| It's a similar problem with hydroelectric dams. If you drown
| a biosphere, then methane is a product of anaerobic decay. So
| it's a question of how much material is there to decay, and
| what fraction of that decay is oxygen deprived, so that it
| can't fully oxidize the C-C, C=C, and C-H bonds to water and
| carbon dioxide.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| This is a bit overblown. The methane being emitted is sourced
| originally from atmospheric CO2 via photosynthesis, and while
| there is some anaerobic production of methane in rice paddies,
| the methane gets converted back to CO2 in the atmosphere with a
| half-life of 10-20 years IIRC.
|
| This is fundamentally different from natural gas emissions, in
| which carbon atoms are being transferred from stable geological
| reservoirs into the atmosphere, where they increase the CO2
| levels after the methane is oxidized.
|
| There are also other risks to switching to this cultivation
| method:
|
| > "Researchers note potential risks. Because PR23 enables
| farmers to till less, fungi and other pathogens can build up in
| the fields. Insects can persist in the stubble after harvest,
| because it's not plowed under, then transmit viruses when they
| feed on the regenerating sprouts in the spring. And without
| tilling, weeds can flourish; the researchers found that fields
| with PR23 needed one to two more herbicide treatments than
| regular rice. They also note that it's more work to resow the
| perennial rice when its yield falters, because its larger and
| deeper roots need to be killed."
|
| https://www.science.org/content/article/perennial-rice-saves...
| CrazyStat wrote:
| > and while there is some anaerobic production of methane in
| rice paddies, the methane gets converted back to CO2 in the
| atmosphere with a half-life of 10-20 years IIRC.
|
| Methane is a far, far worse greenhouse gas than CO2, even
| accounting for the fact that it eventually decays back to
| CO2.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Methane is something like 25 times as effective at
| absorbing outgoing infrared radiation in the Earth's
| atmosphere relative to carbon dioxide, but there is > 200
| times as much CO2 in the atmosphere as methane (1.9 ppm vs
| 420 ppm).
|
| https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/increase-in-atmospheric-
| me...
|
| So the net effect of all the methane is about 50 ppm. About
| 30% comes from fossil fuels. This leaves a big burp
| relative to preindustrial levels (comparable to 20 ppm
| CO2), likely from the expansion of human agriculture, more
| cows, maybe forest removal.
|
| We're locked into it now due to permafrost melt and
| increased rainfall in to the tropical belt, swapping out
| one strain of rice for another will have marginal effects
| at best.
|
| > "NOAA scientists are concerned that the increase in
| biological methane may be the first signal of a feedback
| loop caused in part by more rain over tropical wetlands
| that would largely be beyond humans' ability to control."
|
| The tipping point has come and gone, we're heading for the
| Pliocene. Plan accordingly.
| hinkley wrote:
| And melting permafrost.
| thfuran wrote:
| Atmospheric methane has a half-life of about 10 years and is
| well over 10x as greenhouse effecting as CO2. Converting
| atmospheric CO2 to atmospheric methane is less bad than
| releasing sequestered methane into the atmosphere but still
| terrible.
| yunohn wrote:
| Just for context, rice is nearly on the bottom of the list of
| methane polluters - orders of magnitude lower than meat and
| even things like coffee.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-footprint-food-methane
| philipkglass wrote:
| That chart shows emissions per kilogram of food product. The
| absolute numbers are higher for rice because the world
| produces much more rice than coffee - about 10 million tons
| for coffee and 500 million tons for rice. That would put the
| absolute emissions from rice about 8 times higher than coffee
| (225 vs. 29 including methane emissions).
| yunohn wrote:
| Sure, but I would rate rice as way more important than
| coffee. 8x isn't bad at all!
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| The Economist had an article this week about rice and global
| warming: https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/03/28/the-global-
| rice-cr...
| twawaaay wrote:
| I am not convinced (I grew up on a farm).
|
| It is usually harder to get rid of any weeds when your crop is
| growing on the field. After harvest, you just get rid of
| everything, turn the soil (but I don't know anything about rice
| farming) and you kinda get a fresh start.
|
| ON THE OTHER HAND, we already have robots that can easily
| identify weeds with a camera and zap them with lasers or other
| shit. Which just seems so much more reasonable in the near
| future than trying to harvest individual rice grains off of a
| perennial plant that cannot be damaged so that the plant can
| provide sun cover to prevent weeds... just not seeing it.
|
| Also, Chinese harvests rice up to three times a year. And the
| harvest itself is much easier if you can grab entire plants. So
| I am not convinced anybody is going to get interested in it.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Industrial farming of the sort you describe is destroying
| arable land, and relying on petrochemicals and strip mines to
| keep marginal land on life support. Properly managing the
| land using a mix of perennial crops and occasional rotation
| to pasture restores the soil, builds fertility, and requires
| very little in the way of inputs. Healthy plants in a
| polyculture setup where niches have been pre-filled also
| resist weed invasion better than monocultures.
|
| We do a lot of stupid shit in farming for the sole reason
| that farm machinery is specialized, and proper land
| management costs more (in the short run, in the long run the
| land is much more productive).
| maxerickson wrote:
| It seems they are not gently collecting the individual grains
| of rice.
|
| http://en.people.cn/n3/2021/1025/c90000-9911067.html
| hinkley wrote:
| You should see how they harvest lavender. If I were an
| anthropomorphic plant I'd probably loose my lunch after
| seeing one of those videos.
|
| This is my impression of why we can get away with this.
| Annuals tend to gamble with weather conditions. There's
| enough seed bank stored up from previous years that if a
| scouring windstorm breaks all of the stalks in an area,
| then the seed bank can help recover next year, and if
| that's not enough then some seeds will blow in from the
| edges eventually, and ten years from now you can't tell.
|
| Perennial plants have to be sturdier. Only some, such as
| alpine species, are adapted to drop damaged limbs. They are
| used to being jostled by hail, storms, and herd animals, so
| the insult is less permanent.
|
| I don't know how that translates to perennial grasses,
| except that most such grasses can and sometimes do burn to
| the ground, and regrow each year from rhizomes. Half the
| plant survives each growing season, and the other half is
| sacrificial.
| contingencies wrote:
| With typical rice farming in Asia, you see manual
| transplanting of each seedling in to small fields by women
| and children. This is back-breaking work and extremely slow.
| I can't think of another crop both this widely cultivated and
| painstaking. Therefore, not having to do this is a huge win.
|
| China has a multitude of climatic areas. Some harvest rice
| once per year, others two or three times per year. Even
| within Yunnan, the province in which tests are being made,
| all such areas exist.
|
| Many rice farms are small scale and on inaccessible land at
| the bottom of river valleys, terraced up hillsides, or
| otherwise inaccessible locations which would provide
| substantial scale-related and physical challenges to ease of
| automation. Try running an automated robot over this
| topography: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/
| 70/Terrace_...
| hinkley wrote:
| It might be dated information, but I'd heard 3 crops per
| year going back at least as far as 1900 (Farmers of Forty
| Centuries), but not that it was three rice crops per year.
| Instead a rotation of different crops in the same field.
|
| One of the tricks with rice is you can germinate it in one
| field, then transplant it to something like 4-6 times the
| same space to grow to maturity.
| JamisonM wrote:
| I am a farmer.
|
| It is quite close to impossible for weeds to establish once
| many crops reach a certain stage, this is pretty consistent
| with the perennial idea.
|
| Stripper headers are quote commonly used all over the world:
|
| https://youtu.be/nppu5OfjisQ?t=90
|
| The assertion that a perennial plant "cannot be damaged" is
| also incorrect, many perennial crops benefit agronomically
| from a "trim", even non-perennials have economic
| circumstances where it makes sense to "damage" the crop, e.g.
| grazing winter crops in the late fall.
|
| https://extension.okstate.edu/fact-sheets/dual-purpose-
| wheat...).
| hinkley wrote:
| Permaculturist here.
|
| With the exception of trees, most plants that establish
| after their taller peers do not try to dominate the canopy.
| They have already lost that fight. Instead they either stay
| low and work with the limited light available, or they
| aggressively grow in the spring to complete their entire
| lifecycle before the deciduous canopy closes at the
| beginning of summer. They might steal a little fertilizer,
| and some water, but the jury is still out on whether some
| plants conserve as much water as they use. It's a fuzzy
| enough area that you can find people who claim that some
| plants increase total available water.
|
| We are just beginning to fully appreciate all of the ways
| trees have to ladder up from the forest floor to the
| canopy, and some of the things we perceive as competition
| may be a misunderstanding.
| TSiege wrote:
| This is also true in nature. Weeds (or think invasives in
| an ecological) tend to be plants that do best in disturbed
| contexts like fires, landslides, after logging, or in the
| agricultural sense, tilled soil. Invasives tend to struggle
| to gain a foothold in established healthy ecosystems
| hosh wrote:
| What about the people practicing permaculture and
| regenerative agriculture? There's been a big movement there
| to perennialize crops, and there are well-known patterns and
| practices from there to work with perennials.
| sdwr wrote:
| I believe that flooding rice fields has a substantial positive
| impact on yields, and not just by combating weeds. Controlled
| flooding creates the perfect moisture + nutrient environment.
| samstave wrote:
| "Rice is the national dish of the Philippines"
|
| --
|
| A relative who worked in the Philippine government on RICE
| specifically
|
| His other quote was "we have this department because Rice needs
| to be on every plate, every meal"
|
| The flooding isnt to prevent weeds, its to prevent INSECTS, and
| rice is very water tolerant.
|
| ---
|
| So, wouldnt it be sane to say that perennial rice in a small
| growing area would be good.... also, have you ever seen rice
| drying on tarps on the side of the road?
|
| So in addition to this you also need to account for how the
| rice is harvested and dried...
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| You could just give the rice a haircut. Plants do pretty well
| getting reasonably mowed.
| samstave wrote:
| It is well known that grass does much better for Bees, when
| allowed to grow further than where Humans prefer their
| lawns.
|
| Anyone that actively kills nature is my enemy.
| melling wrote:
| The aviation sector is about 2%.
|
| Sounds like another premature optimization problem, as applied
| to climate change.
|
| "Premature optimization is the root of all evil"
|
| https://wiki.c2.com/?PrematureOptimization=
|
| What about coal?
|
| What about coal?
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| The need to eliminate coal emissions does not preclude the
| need to eliminate emissions from other sources.
| melling wrote:
| I suppose if we didn't wait decades to eliminate the big
| problems, we'd have more time to worry about the smaller
| problems.
|
| A 100 years of coal emissions is 1000 years of rice.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| So ... all agriculture scientists should stop what
| they're doing and become clean energy scientists?
| lkbm wrote:
| Did the people working on rice hamper the work on coal?
| Or is the issue that they're wasting their time by doing
| anything but trying to get rid of coal? As best I can
| tell, neither you nor I are working on coal either.
| throwaway2190 wrote:
| + while there are still people starving, this is helping
| to solve a big problem, it wasn't done for climate
| change, it's just nice that it might help there too.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Why do people keep pretending that we can only focus on one
| industry at a time? News flash: WE CAN ADDRESS MORE THAN ONE
| AT A TIME.
|
| What about coal? You tell me, what part of fixing rice
| production interferes with shutting down coal mining? Because
| as far as anyone can tell, the answer is not a single part.
| hinkley wrote:
| I could fill a book on the rationalizations about
| sequential prioritization just in the software industry.
| Our politics are chump change compared to geopolitical
| issues.
| replygirl wrote:
| we've been proving since before the kyoto protocol that we
| really aren't capable of addressing much at once. the first
| clean air act was 60 years ago, while the paris agreement's
| net-zero horizon is 27 years out. i don't trust a many-
| pronged approach because i already live with the
| consequences of its failure
| dylan604 wrote:
| As a devil's advocate (I too believe we can make
| simultaneous changes), what about the concept of "don't
| change more than one thing" during testing so you know
| exactly what change had what effect? What if we stop using
| coal and change agriculture only to find out that the
| effect was/is too much? To find out that the changes to
| agriculture caused side effects elsewhere. Mashing all the
| buttons at once rarely plays out as the correct method.
| melling wrote:
| We already are seeing climate issues. We could have been
| off coal by now.
|
| "A 100 years of coal emissions is 1000 years of rice"
|
| By not addressing the big problems sooner, we have
| shortened the window to seeing significant problems.
|
| We'd have more time to solve the smaller problems, or they
| may take of themselves. For example, the population in
| China will drop significantly in this century.
|
| Unfortunately, it sounds like we are lining up our miracles
| so by 2050, we'll be at net zero.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| You are aware that there are eight billion humans on the
| planet, right? If everyone helped, we'd already be done:
| they're not. But conversely, it's not like we have ten
| people and we can _either_ put them on coal, _or_ on
| rice. We have millions of people actively involved at all
| levels, and the folks tackling rice have zero
| qualifications to solve coal, and vice versa.
|
| It's like complaining that the folks making bicycles
| aren't making office buildings: _stop being part of the
| problem_ by pretending these are mutually exclusive
| problems to solve and that people should stop trying to
| solve entire percentage values. 2% is not "a drop in the
| bucket", 2% is a _huge number_.
|
| We can have different people work on different problems
| _at the same time_. By insisting we don 't do something
| in parallel, all you're doing is telling folks to stop
| solving problems they _can_ solve at an industrial scale.
| Are _you_ solving coal, right now? No? Why are you
| wasting time and not solving coal? Oh you 're doing
| something else atm? Why aren't you dropping that on the
| spot and solving coal? This is not a constructive
| attitude, it's flat out being part of the problem.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| Nothing you're saying here responds to the question.
| Everyone knows we're seeing climate issues.
|
| Why does making agricultural improvements prevent dealing
| with coal?
|
| > By not addressing the big problems sooner, we have
| shortened the window to seeing significant problems.
|
| This is true of all problems, not just the big ones.
|
| > We'd have more time to solve the smaller problems, or
| they may take of themselves.
|
| If we dealt with all of the smaller problems, we'd have
| more time to solve the larger problems, or they make take
| care of themselves. For example, the population in China
| will drop significantly this century, reducing the need
| for power consumption from coal plants.
| mikeytown2 wrote:
| Emissions reduction isn't the goal, it's a nice side effect
| of this. Not needing to replant every year is the reason for
| using this rice.
| lars_francke wrote:
| This is not an either/or thing.
|
| Germany emits 2% of all CO2, not worth us doing anything
| then?
| quonn wrote:
| Depends on the action. Gluing oneself to the street in
| order to prevent 5% of 2% of an industry that is rapidly
| shifting to EVs is questionable, for example.
| lucb1e wrote:
| Heard about someone who glued themselves to rails before
| a coal plant. Allegedly that prevented the equivalent of
| 800 years of average western european lifestyle
| emissions. Here I'm trying to get my own climate warming
| impact to be at least close to zero (and failing), and
| this dude has a 10x impact by doing nothing but sitting
| on rail for a bit. The cost is losing 9 months of their
| life on jail time. (Definitely an interesting proposition
| were it not for (1) the likely reality that some other
| coal/gas plant just spun harder during that time, and (2)
| that I'd likely get more jail time because I did it
| knowingly and found it worth it and as such it's not a
| sufficient deterrent.)
| explaininjs wrote:
| Is the idea that downstream consumers had an easier time
| retooling their processes to an entirely different power
| source than buying from a different coal plant?
| Questionable, at best.
| hinkley wrote:
| I'm trying to rehab a 10th of an acre of prairie that
| used to be temperate rainforest.
|
| That won't even offset my own impact on the rest of the
| world. But I'm showing up to meetings with other people,
| giving advice, hopefully some inspiration, as well as
| plants to make the process a little more accessible to
| other people.
|
| Best case at the end of this, I've helped dozens of
| people reduce their carbon footprint, and they've helped
| hundreds do the same, and so on. All of us will still
| have a positive carbon footprint, but we've called into
| question what the average footprint should look like. Us
| and a hundred other people who think about things like
| transportation or building standards or entertainment.
|
| The end goal is that becoming a giver instead of a taker
| represents sacrificing 10% of your lifestyle instead of
| 75%. It's very hard to peer pressure people into giving
| up 75% of what makes life worth living.
| hinkley wrote:
| I'll tell you the same thing I tell the average knob who
| spews "premature optimization is the root of all evil" at me
| as a way to get out of having to think about anything
| uncomfortable, or ever accept culpability for any problems:
|
| You don't balance a budget by only looking at the tallest
| tent pole.
|
| You have to ask yourself what proportion of the overall
| budget a particular concern is 'worth' and figure out how to
| get there. Until that total is reduced to < 100% you will
| always be in debt. Starbucks or no Starbucks.
|
| From there you chip away at each element as the opportunity
| arises, balancing opportunity against cost (both of action
| and inaction). If something proves to be too hard to change,
| you have to compromise elsewhere. And in the long run, order
| only matters if you go bankrupt in the middle of the process.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Are you enjoying your whataboutism?
| knodi123 wrote:
| I litter frequently. Some people criticize me for it, but I
| rightly point out that my own litter is a tiny fraction of
| city-wide litter, and if I stopped, no one would even notice
| the difference.
|
| I'm not even the biggest contributor! Mechanized recycling
| trucks hoist the bins high in the air and let stuff fall into
| a hopper on the back, and on a windy day, every single bin
| they pick up produces a few pieces of litter. I don't know
| why I should change my lifestyle while trucks like that still
| exist.
| eulgro wrote:
| I kill people frequently. Some people criticize me for it,
| but I rightly point out that my own murders is a tiny
| fraction of city-wide deaths, and if I stopped, no one
| would even notice the difference.
|
| I'm not even the biggest contributor! Fast-food restaurants
| and soft drink companies keep promoting unhealthy diets
| from which people develop diseases which eventually leads
| to thousands deaths per year. Plus, most people conciously
| make awful lifestyle choices which will eventually
| contribute to their deaths. I don't know why I should
| change my lifestyle while people like that exist.
| replygirl wrote:
| littering is not on the same moral plane as murder though
| melling wrote:
| Nice meaningless analogy.
|
| Let me fix it for you.
|
| "You litter frequently in your neighborhood, while 200
| people litter in the park across town. What problem should
| the town address sooner?"
|
| We are at the brink of too late.
|
| Where did you go wrong?
|
| https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/20/ipcc-
| cli...
|
| Times up.
| baxtr wrote:
| I don't know where you live, but listen: "Don't mess with
| Texas!"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2qIF3PL7lQ
| mcdonje wrote:
| I have mixed feelings about this comment. It's good satire.
| But that's something I expect on reddit. Over here, it
| seems like we're running afoul of the forum norms, and
| Poe's Law.
| knodi123 wrote:
| That's fair. I meant it to be taken as an invitation to
| explain why (or why not) personal responsibility should
| matter in a world where the problems are complex and have
| a thousand sources. But I didn't do a good enough job of
| couching it that way, and it certainly pissed off the
| person I was replying to. I guess the responsible thing
| to do at this point is bail.
| [deleted]
| throwthrowuknow wrote:
| But what does it taste like?
| iExploder wrote:
| probably better than a bug sandwitch
| pigsty wrote:
| There are loads of societies that eat rice and bugs together
| and have for centuries. It's a well-rounded meal.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| depends on the bug.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| And the mayonnaise.
| smnrchrds wrote:
| probably better than a race condition sandwich
| danrocks wrote:
| probably sandwich race a than better
| hnmullany wrote:
| "It was incredibly fragrant and super tasty."
|
| https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1165680024
| giantg2 wrote:
| Would love to have perennial corn or wheat. I think someone is
| working on wheat, but I don't remember.
| Cerium wrote:
| Wheat: https://landinstitute.org/our-work/perennial-
| crops/perennial...
| giantg2 wrote:
| Thanks! Looks like perrenial corn exists too.
|
| https://sites.psu.edu/futureoffood/2016/02/21/annual-to-
| pere...
| sampo wrote:
| In one of his videos in Youtube, permaculture farmer Richard
| Perkins said that mankind has 6000 years of agriculture, but has
| mostly concentrated plant breeding efforts to annual plants. We
| mostly eat annuals. (Plants that grow and die in one year.)
|
| But, he said, imagine what kind of perennial (plants that live
| multiple years) food plants we could have, if we invested similar
| 6000 years of effort to perfecting perennial food plants. Like
| fruit trees and nut trees and whatever.
|
| The benefits of perennials being, you don't need to plat then
| anew every year. And because the plants and especially their root
| systems are not killed off at the end of every summer, the soil
| is not vulnerable to erosion, because the plant roots stay in the
| soil and hold it together.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > But, he said, imagine what kind of perennial (plants that
| live multiple years) food plants we could have, if we invested
| similar 6000 years of effort to perfecting perennial food
| plants. Like fruit trees and nut trees and whatever.
|
| Well, that's something we've already done. So I'd say we'd end
| up with the fruits and nuts that we have right now. What are we
| supposed to be imagining?
| lkbm wrote:
| I was recently thinking about the possibility of
| GMOing/selectively breeding better hardwood. (Turns out we have
| done this with walnut.)
|
| I believe the main issue is that the lifecycle of tree is much
| longer. Each year I can select the best corn from last harvest
| and plant it for this harvest. Trees generally take several
| years to start producing, so iterating through generations is
| slow.
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| Won't yields go down eventually as the soil becomes more and more
| degraded as the same nutrients are extracted?
|
| I'm assuming you need to find a way to make up for that.
| Something that's hard to do if you think about how grain is
| planted. Can't really drive over it with a tractor once it has a
| certain height. Even if you take off only the parts you need and
| leave the rest in place.
| tfourb wrote:
| Perennial plants are much more effective at extracting
| nutrients because of more established root systems. Not tilling
| the field also allows for complex plant/fungi communities to
| develop which will increase moisture and nutrient levels in the
| soil. Put simply: you don't need to fertilize a forest or other
| naturally occurring ecosystems and those are built around
| perennial plants. The closer you get back to a functioning
| ecosystem, the less reliant you'll be on external inputs.
| hnmullany wrote:
| You still need to add fertilizers that's not what this is
| about. (And you absolutely drive over crops with tractors)
| seifertca wrote:
| Perennials are such an intuitively appealing idea but a plant
| expends _a lot_ of energy ensuring it can make it through the
| fallow /winter season successfully. Thus perennial cereals only
| make sense where the cost of seed and planting exceeds the impact
| on yield. My understanding is even at the theoretical minimum
| energy needed for most cereals in most growing regions to have a
| 90% chance of surviving perennially you need a huge cash subsidy
| for lost grain yield or for seed and planting costs to rise many-
| fold. More likely to work in rice than wheat/kernza but never
| likely to work at all unless we as a species change how we think
| of the objectives of agriculture. Happy to be proven wrong
| though.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > make it through the fallow/winter season successfully
|
| most rice grown by substance farmers is in tropical areas
| anthomtb wrote:
| I think that's why they used "fallow". Tropical climates do
| not have cold winters but may have dry seasons where, I would
| assume, a plant would enter a dormant state.
| nn3 wrote:
| They explain in the interview that the rice is still sub
| tropical, so this only works in places without significant
| winters. With that the investment of the plant is likely much
| lower.
| colechristensen wrote:
| It's hard to generalize but seed costs in the ballpark of 20%
| of revenue. That's not counting tillage in preparation for
| planting, the cost of planting, or weed management which will
| be more difficult without established crops.
|
| In other words you can take a significant hit to yields and
| still come out ahead.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Without yearly tillage (or herbicide spray in case of no-
| till), weed mgmt is going to be tricky for perennial cash
| crops. It's certainly tricky for e.g. vineyards and orchards.
|
| I suppose with rice (or kernza wheat) you could use a
| selective broadleaf herbicide. Doesn't help with invasive
| grasses.
| hnmullany wrote:
| Abstract from the Nature Sustainability paper:
|
| From a single planting, irrigated perennial rice produced grain
| for eight consecutive harvests over four years, averaging 6.8 Mg
| ha-1 harvest-1 versus the 6.7 Mg of replanted annual rice, which
| required additional labour and seed. Four years of cropping with
| perennial rice resulted in soils accumulating 0.95 Mg ha-1 yr-1
| organic carbon and 0.11 Mg ha-1 yr-1 nitrogen, along with
| increases in soil pH (0.3-0.4) and plant-available water capacity
| (7.2 mm). Perennial cultivars are strongly preferred by farmers;
| growing them saves 58.1% of labour and 49.2% of input costs in
| each regrowth cycle. In 2021, perennial rice was grown on 15,333
| ha by 44,752 smallholder farmers in southern China. Suited to a
| broad range of frost-free environments between 40deg N and 40deg
| S, perennial rice is a step change with potential to improve
| livelihoods, enhance soil quality and inspire research on other
| perennial grains.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > accumulating 0.95 Mg ha-1 yr-1 organic carbon and 0.11 Mg
| ha-1 yr-1 nitrogen
|
| importantly, this should reduce the need for fertilizer to
| replenish soil nitrogen
| onemiketwelve wrote:
| there's this perennial green onion mutant that I found out about
| from people growing it in China. Usually if you want scallions
| you have to harvest them very quickly, then the plant is kinda
| useless. But these ones, instead of flowering, they immediately
| offshoot new plants from where the flower would have been.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_onion
| whyenot wrote:
| Some of the wild corn (maize) relatives are also perennial, for
| example _Zea diploperennis_. I wonder if there are efforts to
| also create perennial corn. I 'm not sure how advantageous
| perennial corn would really be because of increased pest and
| disease problems.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| There are a surprising number of perennial food plants. Not just
| bushes and trees; vegetable crops too! I recently saw a
| Gardeners' World episode which showcased a lady with 220+
| perennial vegetables in her garden. Including a variety of
| broccoli, and one of chard! A surprise to me.
|
| A benefit to her is, she could have all that without dealing with
| every plant, every year. But she had plenty of rain and land. Not
| everybody would find that solution beneficial.
| efields wrote:
| Certain crops we grow annually will perennialuse just fine in
| the right environment. We bought a perennial kale last year
| only to have it completely die, meanwhile a kale I didn't pull
| at the end of the fall is shooting new leaves.
|
| Right plant, right place. We're still working on it, thousands
| of years later.
| tfourb wrote:
| Well-designed food forests and agroforestry systems can exceed
| the calorie production per acre of heavily mechanized and
| fertilized annual crops like corn, while providing tons more
| actual nutrition and additional services like wood, good
| quality soil, etc. with little or no fossil-fuel-based inputs.
| Check out i.e. Mark Shepard (New Forest Farm) and Martin
| Crawford (Agroforestry Research Trust) for examples.
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