Can We Grow More Food on Less Land? • Hacker News Board

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#111

Post by analog31 » Fri, Dec 07, 2018, 11:05 PM UTC

jlawson wrote: post #108

ghthor wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love this idea, its something I've thought a lot about. Our large scale farming strategies seem fundamentally ignorant. Nature it full of complex systems of independence that we should be using directly in our farming strategies. I'm particularly interested in fungi to support the nutrient and immune systems of my farms. See the work of Paul Staments using fungi to treat bee colony collapse.

Big farm machines are dumb. If we could instead build swarms of self-maintaining intelligent human-scale robots, perhaps working with genetically engineered work animals (monkeys?), they could hand-plant, hand-till, and hand-harvest crops at a far greater efficiency with far less disruption to the ecosystem. Picture ten thousand dog-sized robots going individually planting and caring for and harvesting millions of pl…

I've read that in colonial times, people simply let pigs loose in the woods, then hunted them down later on when they were fattened up.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#112

Post by harimau777 » Fri, Dec 07, 2018, 11:07 PM UTC

kieranmaine wrote: post #4

What would make people eat less beef? Since taxes seem a hard sell, would subsidizing chicken + non-meat protein help? As a vegetarian I'm trying to get my head around what would help change the behaviour of the meat eating HN members.

I think that it would help if more vegetarian advocates focused on finding ways that non-meat diets can fit with people's lifestyles and preferences. For example, I don't like the taste of many vegan dishes and (back when I was more series about working out) I was looking for a high protein, high calorie diet. When I looked into veganism, a lot of the resources came across as dismissive of my goals or felt like they came from a perspective of "we're morally right so we don't have to find a way to work with people's preferences".

I'm not trying to say that's what the people giving advice actually thought; I'm just saying that's how I felt that it came across sometimes.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#113

Post by tiglionabbit » Fri, Dec 07, 2018, 11:13 PM UTC

nyokodo wrote: post #81

dghughes wrote: post #73

It's slightly terrifying to see the data about the loss of nutrients in plants around the world due to climate change. On YouTube there was an interesting Veritasim story about plants and their mineral levels. It seems plants have fewer minerals now compared to 100 years ago. Farmers have fertilizer and the plants grow but they don't have the same levels of nutrition even with all that help. Samples of weeds from the…

IIRC that youtube video concluded that the difference in nutrient content was because growth rates were accelerated by the increased CO2 in the atmosphere but the rate of extracting nutrients from the soil was not accelerated. This is then presumably related to the global greening phenomenon we've witnessed where the increased CO2 has lead to a large increase in forestation globally. It's important to note that the v…

Is it possible that the soil is also depleted of interesting nutrients and that the fertilizer isn't providing them either?

Our understanding of what micronutrients humans need is not great. For plants, it may be even less understood.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#114

Post by analog31 » Fri, Dec 07, 2018, 11:20 PM UTC

dilap wrote: post #30

kieranmaine wrote: post #4

What would make people eat less beef? Since taxes seem a hard sell, would subsidizing chicken + non-meat protein help? As a vegetarian I'm trying to get my head around what would help change the behaviour of the meat eating HN members.

I have a mirror-image question: What will it take to convince vegetarians that a meat-based diet is actually the healthiest way to eat, and that meat can be raised in humane, environmentally-friendly ways? :-) Edit: This a serious question. Down voting is hardly a productive form of dialog.

Doing it and proving it. Show me the meat (natural or artificial). Show me the ecological budget -- inputs and outputs. Solve the replication crisis in food science. Show me that the proposed diet is sustainable, i.e., that people can actually bring themselves to eat that way on a continual basis.

Disclosure: I'm not a vegetarian, but I eat relatively little meat.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#115

Post by phil248 » Fri, Dec 07, 2018, 11:28 PM UTC

kieranmaine wrote: post #4

What would make people eat less beef? Since taxes seem a hard sell, would subsidizing chicken + non-meat protein help? As a vegetarian I'm trying to get my head around what would help change the behaviour of the meat eating HN members.

Animal welfare standards are all it would take.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#116

Post by saalweachter » Fri, Dec 07, 2018, 11:28 PM UTC

beat wrote: post #86

saalweachter wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Isn't that exactly what we're doing, though? The essence of cheap junk calories is grain (flour), soybean oil (another plant with similar growing needs), sugar (largely from grain in the US - high fructose corn syrup - but sugarcane is also easy to grow at scale), and meat from grain-fed chickens and cows. All this stuff is shipped to factories, where it is broken down into refined materials for other factories, that…

Well, yeah. I'm just saying we should keep doing it.

People whine about high fructose corn syrup, but it's not like it's a plot or something; people really like sweet things, and HFCS is a really efficient way to produce sweet stuff. If you restricted the sale of sweet stuff to help combat obesity, it might have an impact on the corn market, but corn would still be an amazing, important, huge part of out food supply.

On the other hand, consider grain-fed chickens. Factory farmed chicken is fantastic from an environmental and a dietary standpoint, it is extremely space efficient; even when the land used to grow the grains is considered, it is still competitive with plant sources of protein, and it's a lean, versatile meat. It's even a major source of organic fertilizer.

Meanwhile, it's pretty bad from an animal welfare perspective, and it is just awful from a labor standpoint. Meat processing at scale is one of the greatest cesspools of human misery in the US, and has been for over a century. A huge number of people make a pittance of a wage doing unpleasant, dangerous, body-breaking work, and it is a big consumer of illegal immigration as a source of cheap, exploitable labor.

Fixing meat processing, through technology, regulation or labor organization, would be HUGE.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#117

Post by acjohnson55 » Fri, Dec 07, 2018, 11:29 PM UTC

virtuallynathan wrote: post #91

kieranmaine wrote: post #4

What would make people eat less beef? Since taxes seem a hard sell, would subsidizing chicken + non-meat protein help? As a vegetarian I'm trying to get my head around what would help change the behaviour of the meat eating HN members.

Ruminant animals have an important place in Agriculture. They add nutrients back to the soil, and can be raised in land unfit for growing crops. For example, in the UK only 36% of agricultural land is croppable. The rest of the land is perfect for raising cattle and other ruminants. In the USA, 44% of land is for agriculture, but only 17% is arable, 27% serves as pasture land. Only around 10% of a cow's lifetime feed…

But how much of our meat is raised on pasture versus in meat factories?

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#118

Post by wrycoder » Fri, Dec 07, 2018, 11:30 PM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #107

tareqak wrote: post #6

There is also the problem of food distribution. Ignoring future population growth, the world does produce enough food to people everyone [0] (obtained from the first sentence of [1]). If we are collectively unwilling to solve the distribution problem today, then it there is a good chance that we won't do much about the shortage tomorrow. In addition, unconsumed food waste is also problem, and probably does have some…

We are missing a bit of humility. Just because an apple can be gotten in February doesn't mean you should. It stretches, complicates, and reduces the efficiency of the supply chain immensely. I heard some advice years ago that one of the better things you can do as an environmentalist is teach your kids about the seasonality of foods. Make a big deal about it being orange or pear or cherry season, cut back on buying…

By March in 18th century New Hampshire, the pickings were getting pretty lean. You might be able to go down into the cellar and get a soft apple or a potato out of a barrel, and you would have wheat, oats, and barley. Maybe there was still some kale under the snow in the garden. Beyond that, you killed a chicken or went out to hunt some game. So when the raspberries came into season, it was indeed a treat.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#119

Post by saalweachter » Fri, Dec 07, 2018, 11:31 PM UTC

doctorpangloss wrote: post #85

saalweachter wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, but aren’t you worried you’re going to really eat crow when you find out that the industrial features of grains are decisively harmful for the environment? Like obviously meat production is too. But did you consider that wiping out insects might have as much to do with grain pesticides as produce pesticides? It would be smarter if you just said the truth, which is “It’s hard to tell if the economic costs of gra…

There is always room for improvement, but there are clear paths to improving grain production and reducing the environmental that are not particularly revolutionary and are actively being developed and implemented. We don't need a Next Big Idea for grain production, there's like 20 Next Little Ideas already in the pipeline.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#120

Post by NickM » Fri, Dec 07, 2018, 11:33 PM UTC

Let's try to break this problem down to first principles:

- Humans need food to live because it provides energy and nutrients.

- From a fundamental standpoint of physics and available materials, nutrients are relatively easy to get; as far as I know, most vitamins and minerals are pretty cheap to either come by naturally or manufacture, and you don't need that much of any of them to keep a person healthy, so let's assume food energy is the real limiting factor here.

- The energy in most food comes from photosynthesis (either directly, in the case of eating plants, or indirectly, in the case of feeding plants to animals for growing meat).

- Photosynthesis is an extremely inefficient way to turn solar radiation into chemical energy. Only about 3 to 6 percent of incoming solar energy is used by plants to create biomass, and not all of that biomass necessarily equates to calories we can digest and absorb.

So, while this isn't a particularly appetizing future to imagine living in, I don't know of any fundamental reason why artificially producing edible calories via solar electricity and chemical processes couldn't vastly exceed the efficiency of natural-grown food. It might be tricky getting to the point where fake food like this is healthy and tastes good...but if it saves the world from starving and stops civilization from collapsing then hey, it's not a bad fallback plan.

Besides being a big jump in efficiency, this type of tech could also enable the use of non-arable land for food production, since presumably you could set up the necessary manufacturing facilities anywhere you want.