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Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

nytimes.com

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Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#131

Post by Brakenshire »

daenz wrote: post #124
NickM wrote: post #120

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 as…

I have no expertise in this area, but everything you said seems to make sense. If you're an expert (or if anyone else reading this is), can you shed some light on why using artificial processes to create "food" would be difficult? It would be so cool if we had some mainstream open source software that could simulate chemical processes in a macro-level way, for example, to explore new ways of creating complex carbohyd…

A carbohydrate is not a simple organic structure, the synthesis of molecules like that is quite complicated, and involves a lot of inefficiencies and filtering out of by-products.

Chemical fuels like methane or ethane are far simpler, and just inputting energy and synthesising them from basic building blocks is difficult to do cheaply and at scale.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#132

Post by maccam94 »

From a recent Bloomberg article[1]

The last two graphs show that 41% of the land in the contiguous 48 states is used for feeding livestock. More than 33% of the 48 states is just pasture, most of which I believe is used by cattle.

What would it take to shift protein consumption from beef (3% efficient) to products like poultry (21%) and eggs (31%)? [2]

I think we have to take a hard look at taxes, fees, and subsidies for land use and agricultural products, but there's not much political pressure to do so right now.

1: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/

2: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/10...

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#133

Post by whitepoplar »

NickM wrote: post #120

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 as…

This sounds good in theory, but I don't think it would work given our limited knowledge of food and nutrition. Nutritional scientists have been wrong many times in the past--who's to say a rollout of synthetic "food" couldn't wipe out the human population in the future? I'd cite the Precautionary Principle (http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf) when dealing with global ruin problems.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#134

Post by randyrand »

maccam94 wrote: post #132

From a recent Bloomberg article[1] The last two graphs show that 41% of the land in the contiguous 48 states is used for feeding livestock. More than 33% of the 48 states is just pasture, most of which I believe is used by cattle. What would it take to shift protein consumption from beef (3% efficient) to products like poultry (21%) and eggs (31%)? [2] I think we have to take a hard look at taxes, fees, and subsidies…

wow. those numbers are so cool. never knew poultry was so efficient. No wonder it’s so much cheaper.

What would it take to make beef production more efficient? genetic engineering perhaps.

People wil naturally switch to more efficient food as population goes up and food resources become more scarce.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#135

Post by cjrd »

harimau777 wrote: post #112
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…

Totally understand your point, and the veg lifestyle is becoming much more mainstream in athletics. e.g. check out Nimai Delgado's (IFBB bodybuilder) instagram posts on simple, high protein, high calorie foods for bodybuilding: https://www.instagram.com/veganbodybuildingfood

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#136

Post by tomjakubowski »

maccam94 wrote: post #132

From a recent Bloomberg article[1] The last two graphs show that 41% of the land in the contiguous 48 states is used for feeding livestock. More than 33% of the 48 states is just pasture, most of which I believe is used by cattle. What would it take to shift protein consumption from beef (3% efficient) to products like poultry (21%) and eggs (31%)? [2] I think we have to take a hard look at taxes, fees, and subsidies…

Land used for grazing livestock is often no good for growing crops.

> For example, US NRCS statistics indicate that about 59 percent of US non-federal pasture and unforested rangeland is unsuitable for cultivation, yet such land has value for grazing of livestock.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arable_land#Non-arable_land

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#137

Post by geekagirl »

analog31 wrote: post #111
jlawson wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People still do that but it’s generally not a good idea for many reasons. Feral hogs destroy crops, are dangerous to people, and eat foods that native species rely on to survive. In colonial times, it made a lot of sense to do that, but not so much now.

https://mdc.mo.gov/wildlife/nuisance-problem-species/invasiv...

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#138

Post by jessriedel »

whitepoplar wrote: post #133
NickM wrote: post #120

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 as…

This sounds good in theory, but I don't think it would work given our limited knowledge of food and nutrition. Nutritional scientists have been wrong many times in the past--who's to say a rollout of synthetic "food" couldn't wipe out the human population in the future? I'd cite the Precautionary Principle ( http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf ) when dealing with global ruin problems.

1. Any transition to synthetic foods would be gradual.

2. People have already subsisted on fully synthetic diets (aka elemental diets) in the past as part of things like space-travel research and treatments for gastrointestinal disorders. They do fine.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1410941/?page=1

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#139

Post by jessriedel »

daenz wrote: post #124
NickM wrote: post #120

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 as…

I have no expertise in this area, but everything you said seems to make sense. If you're an expert (or if anyone else reading this is), can you shed some light on why using artificial processes to create "food" would be difficult? It would be so cool if we had some mainstream open source software that could simulate chemical processes in a macro-level way, for example, to explore new ways of creating complex carbohyd…

It's expensive and it tastes awful. It's hard to give an easy answer to "why is this super complicated thing expensive?", and I'm no expert, but you essentially have to replicate the specialized microbiological machinery of multiple plant species.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#140

Post by stale2002 »

snarf21 wrote: post #31
agumonkey wrote: post #3

What if we all had a green wall with aquaponics ?

I think this is what it has to eventually be. We all have a garden in our garage. We save tons on transportation costs throughout the chain. It has to be near zero work. People used to all have gardens in their backyard but stopped when they could afford the cheap produce at the store.

This is a horribly inefficient way to grow food.

The reason why food is grown by large industrial farming companies is because they can grow it ~100 times cheaper than you could.

If everyone had to grow their own food, then everyone would starve to death.

The idea of locally grown food in everyone's backyard is a fairy tale that just sounds nice, but would actually be horrible.

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