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

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#151

Post by randomdata » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 2:50 AM UTC

Retric wrote: post #5

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.

A lower subsidy on corn would significantly raise beef prices relative to chicken, without being a tax. That's difficult in the US for systemic political reasons, but not necessarily a tax issue. Longer term, lab grown protean is likely to be a net win.

I farm outside of the US, so maybe I have misunderstood something, but did the 2014 farm bill not eliminate those subsidies that people used to talk about with respect to corn? As I understand it, since 2014, the system was brought in line with the system we use in my country. There is crop insurance available to corn farmers, where the government pays a portion (65%, if I recall correctly?) of the cost, but that is not limited to corn and not really an incentive to grow corn in particular. I would not be at all surprised if corn takes the largest share of claims simply due to how much of it is grown.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#152

Post by strainer » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 2:55 AM UTC

jessriedel wrote: post #138

whitepoplar wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

These claims are not easily substantiated - that curious 45 year old report notwithstanding.

The short wikipedia article on Elemental diets, summarizes a handfull from more recent years:

> Many patients are unable to tolerate the taste, even if the diet is flavoured, and choose to receive it through intragastric administration.[2] Possible nausea and diarrhea can result from the high sugar content which can also complicate hyperglycaemia in patients with pre-existing diabetes.[2] As a result of suppression of healthy bacteria, via a loss of bacterial food source, prolonged use of an elemental diet elevates the risk of developing clostridium difficile infection/colonisation.[6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elemental_diet

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#153

Post by virtuallynathan » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 2:55 AM UTC

acjohnson55 wrote: post #117

virtuallynathan wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Only about 10-15% of US cattle heads are on feedlots at any given time.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#154

Post by brownbat » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 2:58 AM UTC

LonelyContext wrote: post #149

jessriedel wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It’s all way easier than this. Eating vegan prevents all of this as it’s basic food-web biology that as you go up the food chain you lose energy by a factor of 10. Yeah an artificial leaf is technically more efficient than a plant at making energy from sunlight but plants already operate at 1-2% so unless you plan on making a synthetic system better than 10-20% at making biomass (hint: you don’t) then just cutting me…

> just cutting meat farm subsidies

Most farm subsidies do not go directly to meat. In fact, current subsidies probably shift some land away from pastures and grazing to oversupplied field crops:

https://www.downsizinggovernment.org/agriculture/subsidies

You can absolutely be both against the farm bill and simultaneously in favor of reducing American meat consumption... But you're probably looking at corn and soy subsidies that in turn make cheaper feed, rather than something as simple and direct as cutting a meat subsidy.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#155

Post by chiefalchemist » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 3:12 AM UTC

strainer wrote: post #141

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…

> 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. Food is more complicated than this picture. So much that nutritionists have…

Absolutely. We're not only feeding ourselves, we're feeding our gut. Get either one wrong and there's going to be problems.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#156

Post by agsdfgsd » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 3:17 AM UTC

08-15 wrote: post #129

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…

Minerals (aka dirt) are not nutrients. Carbohydrates, fat and proteins are basic nutrients.

Vitamins and minerals are absolutely nutrients: http://health.gov.au/internet/publications/publishing.nsf/Co...

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#157

Post by ip26 » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 3:22 AM UTC

simonsarris wrote: post #148

ip26 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disprove the studies that show red meat increases cancer risk. Figure out how to get a cow's feed conversion efficiency below 2. Make the meat industry default humane instead of default The Jungle. Reverse global deforestation for grazing cattle, and switch to bison where appropriate in North America. If I have to spend weeks of effort to identify a quality supplier, pay ten times market rate, and do all my own butch…

> Reverse global deforestation for grazing cattle 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: ulti…

I have. I do my damndest to avoid palm oil & friends.

There's definitely local meat that's fine for the planet. As far as I'm aware, the trouble is the bulk of the market, the high-volume bottom-dollar part of the market. The industrial beef grown on soy & corn. It's the McDonalds patty, not the quarter buck in the freezer at grandma's.

As for your sheep field, pasture is not really the most carbon-rich soil. But, maybe it's not much worse than pine forest. The best are wetlands, bogs, & frequent fire areas.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#158

Post by pier25 » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 3:26 AM UTC

We can grow food in buildings with hydrophonic systems. The problem is not land but energy.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#159

Post by misterprime » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 4:10 AM 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…

Or just pay humans?

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#160

Post by gnopgnip » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 4:25 AM UTC

ghthor wrote: post #77

alisson wrote: post #20

There's a great method called Agroforestry that uses forest floors to produce more food: Quick overview of a farmer's land that uses this method: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stABAx82TbY he harvest around 3x more cocoa per hectare than traditional methods and its one of the most valuable in the world right now. Big producers joining to make it more scalable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE

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.

The cost of land(and really property tax+financing costs or opportunity cost, because land can be resold) is only a small part of the overall cost of producing food. Even if you reduce the land cost by a third, if you increase the other costs it can outweigh any gains from the new system.