Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

if not we're fucked, no?

Instead of making the famous mountain of butter (beside a lake of milk) they now pay famers not to farm, which has its own oddities. Including discouraging of re-wilding I think, as the land has to be plausibly farm-able to get the cash.

This aside, it's worth knowing that developed countries typically throw away much less food than developing ones. Basically because Tesco is much better at logistics than a million guys trying to drive into Delhi. I don't have the link to hand but there was a nice comparison US vs Mexico on this somewhere.

Eh, grains are never the problem. Essentially none of the problems you hear about in agriculture apply to grains.

We can produce just staggering amounts of grain on a per-acre basis, and we can ship them without refrigeration and store them for long periods of time without any significant loss of nutritional value. The carbon, energy and monetary cost of shipping huge quantities of grain from the center of the US to the coasts where people live is negligible.

You don't have the complex social issues of migrant and immigrant labor with grain production; I mean, it wouldn't surprise me if there's some, but it's definitely not a necessary component the way it is in current vegetable production and in meat processing.

There's some potential problems in water usage in some places grains are produced, you can have some good conversations about fertilizer and pesticide production, and about soil maintenance, and we continually want to be working to improve the resiliency and productivity of the crop varieties, but grains are in pretty good shape and there's a clear road map for future work, with lots of incremental progress being made every day.

Produce and meat production is where the big gains are to be had, for the environment, food security, and improving the conditions of working people. Just bank on having half our calories coming from massive grain farms located at great distance from the population centers and try to figure out how to fix the rest, and then maybe it will be time to revisit grains.

“Its a matter of setting up bunch of mirrors reflecting sunlight. Of course you need sun to grow.”

Doesn’t work > see thermodynamics.

The mirror you’d be setting up would have to set up away from the building where the food is grown and therefore occupy space.

In agronomy there is a concept that the rate of growth is set by whichever one necessary nutrient is limited. Since we fertilize and pump water, the limiting factor is sunlight.

EDIT: 1. This is why Brazil gasohol is the only net positive bio-fuel

2. Manual picking of produce is far superior to mechanized harvest. Tomatoes in the US are large and tasteless because they’ve been bread to be easily picked by machine. ( A lot of thought goes into picking a ripe fruit. It’s not obvious AI can do that. Or that the robots can ever grab fruit with dexterity and w/out crushing)

3.What energy source do you want to run your automatic tractors off of? Diesel for agriculture is arguably the segment that should be given the most slack when transitioning to “green” alternatives.

Well said.

I would also argue that concerns over crops taking up too much land are somewhat misplaced until we reach a point where we at risk of not having enough farmland to feed the population. When we reach that point, only food that can be grown in ultra-dense (calories per acre) ways will be affordable, and other foods will be luxuries with a high premium.

Until then we are enjoying our relative luxury of plentiful land, and can enjoy luxury crops and meat for cheap.

Although this harms the environment, nobody starves to death because of this current practice- all those who currently starve to death do so because of distribution problems /abject poverty.