Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

It's a small country that grows a lot of food!

Final answer.

Now let's read the article and sees what it says.

Edit: ah it's more about cattle.

https://hooktube.com/watch?v=x2H60ritjag

In practice, the replicating the composition of food (proteins, carbs, fats, vitamins, minerals, bacteria, fiber, etc.) is a huge feat. Especially because we don't understand enough about human diet. (See: 1 gazillion articles about dieting.)

It's like gene editing. There's a lot that theoretical possible, but the real sci-fi stuff is way out of our reach right now.

Have you read about the deforestation from palm oil, canola oil, and coconuts that feed vegans? It's not clear to me eating meat in the USA, especially local meat where I am in New England, is comparatively worse.

(Ironically I'm "deforesting" a former field of small pines to restore it to sheep grazing this year. But I do not think this ecologically destructive: ultimately it would be building soil.)

I think there are actually plenty of nutrients in soil (even many "poor" soils). The real problem is that they aren't bio-available. So you'll have lots of different mineral salts in the soil (usually one or two orders of magnitude more than you need, by weight), but it's not in a form that the plant can absorb by its roots.

I think the real problem is the kind of mono-culture cropping we do. Really you want a variety of plants pulling up nutrients out of the ground (because different varieties have different abilities to break down and convert the nutrients in the soil). Then you want those plants to break down and be reintegrated in the soil. Finally, you often want some of that happening in an anaerobic environment, so you don't bind oxygen to it.

There are some new (old? ha ha) techniques being developed to build fertility (really just making existing nutrients bio-available) in the soil. Avoiding tilling, building up micro-organisms and insects to distribute the soil, allowing a variety of plants to grow (some long roots, some short roots, etc, etc). It's pretty complicated, though and I expect that it will take us a very long time to learn how to do these things effectively.

It definitely seems easier to just add what you think the soil is missing, but there are many disadvantages to that approach as we see over time. I did some experiments in containers a while ago. My idea was to see what kind of production I could get without adding any inputs to the soil at all (just water), and harvesting as much food as I could.

I had some experience from doing planted fish tanks with really intense planting (every single space possible occupied with a plant) and knew that it was reasonable to assume that plants can grow really well being very crowded as long as nutrients are available. I planted my containers so that light was the limiting factor, but grew a lot of local weeds that grew in poor soil as well as food on the assumption that they would build fertility fastest. I ran my experiment over 5 years and was really surprised at my results -- my production increased over time. One year, I even got 5 (!) harvests of potatoes from the same container -- I've never even come close to that level of production doing it more traditionally.

It was all very unscientific and I was really doing it out of curiosity more than trying to prove anything. In the end, it seems my neighbor didn't like my container garden of weeds and he convinced my gas man to apply herbicide to it. That was the end of my experiment (I caught him in the act as I came home from work a little bit early that day -- one of the few times I've really blown my top).

Anyway, I don't think we really have to worry over much about actually depleting our soils. I think they can rebound fairly quickly with the right approach. However, I think it is possible that our current intensive farming approaches do not produce the most nutrient rich produce possible.