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Is the Second Farm Crisis Upon Us?

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Re: Is the Second Farm Crisis Upon Us?

#111

Post by singularity2001 »

GlenTheMachine wrote: post #42

“We’re heading to a place where we don’t have farmers; we just have food production.” This. I don't know what the solution to this is. I have a small farm, and raise meat sheep. But it's very much a hobby. The problem is, though, that almost all of the other farmers in my area, the ones I meet at the feed store or the livestock auction, they're also hobby farmers. There is exactly one “real” farmer (meaning that it's…

“We’re heading to a place where we don’t have weavers; we just have shirt production.”

Not exactly the same but as long as we have national reservoirs and get politically enforced sustainability and diversity we should be fine.

Re: Is the Second Farm Crisis Upon Us?

#112

Post by tomcam »

randomdata wrote: post #87
GlenTheMachine wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can only eat fresh corn when it's in season, and only within a week or so after it's been picked. To be a suitable year-round survival food, corn has to be processed into corn meal. This usually entails treating it with lye, drying it, and grinding it. This gets you corn meal, grits, polenta. Or hominy if you skip the grinding step. We don't have the equipment to do this at the necessary scale. Corn just isn't us…

> And of course with soybeans... they would need to be dried or canned, packaged, stored, and shipped. Doable but different from what we are currently set up to do. As a soybean farmer, and one who has focused on IP soybeans for the human market for most of my career at that, unless I am misunderstanding you, that is exactly how we do it. The beans are harvested dry, packaged, stored, and then shipped (primarily) to…

Dude... make yourself some edamame! It rocks.

Re: Is the Second Farm Crisis Upon Us?

#113

Post by tomcam »

r00fus wrote: post #67
nitwit005 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite a bit of US food production is going to produce animal feed, and some is exported. It'd take an amazing blow to cause actual starvation, given that could be diverted to feeding the population. The main threat to agriculture in time of war used to be dependence on foreign oil, but the US has largely solved that.

How has the US "solved" foreign oil dependence?

By producing more oil than anyone else on the planet.

Re: Is the Second Farm Crisis Upon Us?

#114

Post by lsc »

GlenTheMachine wrote: post #71
nitwit005 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite a bit of US food production is going to produce animal feed, and some is exported. It'd take an amazing blow to cause actual starvation, given that could be diverted to feeding the population. The main threat to agriculture in time of war used to be dependence on foreign oil, but the US has largely solved that.

“Quite a bit of US food production is going to produce animal feed, and some is exported. It'd take an amazing blow to cause actual starvation, given that could divert that back to feeding the population.” Well, not really. Yes, it's true that a substantial fraction of current US food production goes to animal feed. Yes, it's true, theoretically, that you could turn all of that into human food production instead. Of…

>humans can't survive on what is currently being grown. In other words, we can't just stop feeding all of that corn and soybeans to animals and give it to humans instead. We can't live off of a diet that is 75% field corn and industrial soybeans.

Both feed corn and industrial soybeans yield their deliciousness to the power of the chemical engineers. Both are processed into food you and I eat every day. I bet you a dollar that your last piece of chocolate had lecithin in it, and you have to go pretty far out of your way to get lecithin that isn't from soy. And corn syrup. I'd bet a fair number of dollars that you've consumed some corn sugar product today, and that can be made from feed corn.

TVP is a common ingredient in meat substitutes, and it is a pretty heavily processed food made from what's left over after you extract the soybean oil from the industrial soybeans.

My favorite preparation is the "Morningstar farms" "Grillers Prime" vegieburgers... but you can also buy tvp bits at the health-food store, and I know people who use 1/3rd ground beef, 2/3rds TVP bits in their spaghetti sauce, and it pretty much tastes like your regular beefy spaghetti sauce. My mom used to make TVP sloppy joes that were sloppy joe sauce with TVP instead of meat. (I personally think meat greatly improves that recipe... but you can add a lot of TVP in with that meat without ruining the flavor, if you ask me.)

(To be clear, I'm not actually arguing that TVP is as delicious as actual meat. It's... usually not. But it can be quite palatable, and it is unquestionably nourishing, and it is made from the soybeans you grow for oil; stuff that would otherwise be used in cattle feed.)

Re: Is the Second Farm Crisis Upon Us?

#115

Post by lsc »

r00fus wrote: post #67
nitwit005 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite a bit of US food production is going to produce animal feed, and some is exported. It'd take an amazing blow to cause actual starvation, given that could be diverted to feeding the population. The main threat to agriculture in time of war used to be dependence on foreign oil, but the US has largely solved that.

How has the US "solved" foreign oil dependence?

My understanding is that it was hydraulic fracking that made the difference.

See, the 'peak oil' people were wrong; turns out that if you are willing to pay more, there's a lot more oil you can extract (albeit at a higher cost)

I actually think it was a self-defeating prophecy in a way. The peak oil folks actually had some mindshare for a while, and there was a lot of investment in more expensive ways to get oil out of the ground that had the assumption of long term oil prices being over a hundred bucks a barrel. This, I think, caused over-investment in new ways of extracting oil, which drove up production and drove down prices. (I mean, there was also a lot of investment in renewables, and I imagine that is also putting downward pressure on oil prices.)

Re: Is the Second Farm Crisis Upon Us?

#116

Post by lsc »

singularity2001 wrote: post #111
GlenTheMachine wrote: post #42

“We’re heading to a place where we don’t have farmers; we just have food production.” This. I don't know what the solution to this is. I have a small farm, and raise meat sheep. But it's very much a hobby. The problem is, though, that almost all of the other farmers in my area, the ones I meet at the feed store or the livestock auction, they're also hobby farmers. There is exactly one “real” farmer (meaning that it's…

“We’re heading to a place where we don’t have weavers; we just have shirt production.” Not exactly the same but as long as we have national reservoirs and get politically enforced sustainability and diversity we should be fine.

>politically enforced sustainability and diversity

This is important, and politically difficult. I mean, we subsidize farms to farm in America because it makes us much more secure against all sorts of potential problems. I, for one, think farm subsidies, if well done, are a very good use of my defense tax dollar.

But it's important that we see those subsidies as a defense subsidy and not, you know, just a handout to a particular class of people; This means that we need sustainable farming practices and we need crop diversity, as those are the only way to defend against some of the threats we face.

(I mean, I personally see it as "you don't want a subsidy? do what you like. But if you want a subsidy? you have to follow these best practices." then you set the subsidy numbers based on how many acres you think we need for that sort of thing.)

Re: Is the Second Farm Crisis Upon Us?

#117

Post by tarsinge »

GlenTheMachine wrote: post #42

“We’re heading to a place where we don’t have farmers; we just have food production.” This. I don't know what the solution to this is. I have a small farm, and raise meat sheep. But it's very much a hobby. The problem is, though, that almost all of the other farmers in my area, the ones I meet at the feed store or the livestock auction, they're also hobby farmers. There is exactly one “real” farmer (meaning that it's…

> And people understandably don't want to double their grocery bills just to buy local

I think that could be the root cause. People are used to food not costing enough, a living animal should be costly. I don’t understand why food should not be important in a budget.

And since we need to eat less and better, it could even help making transformed products uneconomical and we would mostly stick to raw products, and get back some consideration for what we eat.

Re: Is the Second Farm Crisis Upon Us?

#118

Post by heavenlyhash »

lsc wrote: post #115
r00fus wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How has the US "solved" foreign oil dependence?

My understanding is that it was hydraulic fracking that made the difference. See, the 'peak oil' people were wrong; turns out that if you are willing to pay more, there's a lot more oil you can extract (albeit at a higher cost) I actually think it was a self-defeating prophecy in a way. The peak oil folks actually had some mindshare for a while, and there was a lot of investment in more expensive ways to get oil out…

> turns out that if you are willing to pay more,

I don't think that actually refutes "peak oil" suggestions that there's a price curvature that's going to keep going up.

Re: Is the Second Farm Crisis Upon Us?

#119

Post by heavenlyhash »

BariumBlue wrote: post #109
mac01021 wrote: post #105

The article illustrates the crisis, producing an example of how farmers fail to make ends meet: >A gallon of milk costs a farmer approximately $1.90 to produce, but in the last year, farmers have been receiving as little as $1.35 per gallon. But they don't explain the underlying economic forces. The only possible reason (I think) that a farmer can't charge more than $1.35 for a gallon of milk is that some other farme…

> the only possible reason that a farmer can't charge more than $1.35 for a gallon of milk is that some other farmer is able to produce a gallon of milk for less than $1.35 Not necessarily - if you have demand for 300 units of milk and there are enough producers to match, then when demand halves, the producers are still producing 300 units of milk and paying for the costs to produce that amount of milk. To offset tho…

Oh boy. If you and GP think there's a purely unregulated Laissez-faire market for dairy products in the U.S., you've got some fun reading to catchup on.

A sibling comment lower down the page provides some links: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17996881

Re: Is the Second Farm Crisis Upon Us?

#120

Post by lsc »

heavenlyhash wrote: post #118
lsc wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that it was hydraulic fracking that made the difference. See, the 'peak oil' people were wrong; turns out that if you are willing to pay more, there's a lot more oil you can extract (albeit at a higher cost) I actually think it was a self-defeating prophecy in a way. The peak oil folks actually had some mindshare for a while, and there was a lot of investment in more expensive ways to get oil out…

> turns out that if you are willing to pay more, I don't think that actually refutes "peak oil" suggestions that there's a price curvature that's going to keep going up.

I don't think anyone disagrees with the idea that oil is a limited resource and will become more rare and thus assuming continued demand, more expensive as time goes on? That's not what 'peak oil' was about.

Peak oil was this idea that both supply and demand were largely inelastic. In that case, when those curves crossed, you'd have the figurative unstoppable force and the immovable object; the price of oil would climb out of control, the economy would grind to a halt.

The primary thesis of 'peak oil' was that we couldn't extract more oil from the ground than we already were extracting. Through fracking and the exploitation of oil shale and oil sands... we did, in fact, extract more oil.

Turns out, the supply of oil is, to some extent, elastic. Yeah, we're going to run out some day, but with our current tech... it's starting to look like we might have trouble dealing with the atmospheric carbon output before we have serious trouble with the supply of hydrocarbons.

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