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

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#251

Post by stale2002 » Sun, Dec 09, 2018, 9:22 PM UTC

agsdfgsd wrote: post #228

stale2002 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>The reason why food is grown by large industrial farming companies is because they can grow it ~100 times cheaper than you could. No, it is because people don't want to grow food. My tomatoes cost me 2 minutes of time. I don't know how much you want to value my time at, but lets say I am pretty awesome and deserve $100/hour. That's $3.33 cents for all the tomatoes I can eat. Where are the industrial farming companie…

> If that were true, we wouldn't exist. People did grow their own food for thousands of years. If everyone had to grow their own food, we'd be fine. All mechanization did was free up people from agricultural labor to do other jobs, humans predate tractors.

This works when everyone owns many acres of land per person, and is spending their entire life working the fields, doing hard labor, and doing very little else with their life yes. We don't live in that world anymore, though.

I suspect there isn't even enough physical land on the earth to support this inefficient method of farming.

We have significant evidence of how this worked out for people. That world that you are describing, where everyone spent their entire life just trying to barely feed themselves, was a horrible place, for everyone.

This period of time was called "the history of the world before the industrial era". And lots and lots of people died. So no, they were not fine.

> It is a reality for lots of people, and we're pretty happy about it.

By "a lot" do you mean a very small percentage of the total population?

> My tomatoes cost me 2 minutes of time.

What you do with your tiny backyard garden is irrelevant. It is mathmatically impossible for you to be feeding yourself entirely on that, unless you have multiple acres of land, which I doubt is what you are describing. Your anecdote does not overrule physics.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#252

Post by agsdfgsd » Sun, Dec 09, 2018, 9:39 PM UTC

stale2002 wrote: post #251

agsdfgsd wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The reason why food is grown by large industrial farming companies is because they can grow it ~100 times cheaper than you could. No, it is because people don't want to grow food. My tomatoes cost me 2 minutes of time. I don't know how much you want to value my time at, but lets say I am pretty awesome and deserve $100/hour. That's $3.33 cents for all the tomatoes I can eat. Where are the industrial farming companie…

> If that were true, we wouldn't exist. People did grow their own food for thousands of years. If everyone had to grow their own food, we'd be fine. All mechanization did was free up people from agricultural labor to do other jobs, humans predate tractors. This works when everyone owns many acres of land per person, and is spending their entire life working the fields, doing hard labor, and doing very little else wit…

>We don't live in that world anymore, though.

Exactly, we live in a world with machines. Making it easier, not harder.

>I suspect there isn't even enough physical land on the earth to support this inefficient method of farming.

The calories produced per acre is higher, not lower. We need less land, not more. Why do you think it is inefficient?

>That world that you are describing, where everyone spent their entire life just trying to barely feed themselves, was a horrible place, for everyone.

That's a modern myth. We have detailed records of rural life in the 1500s. People worked fewer hours than they do now.

>By "a lot" do you mean a very small percentage of the total population?

Yes. It only takes one person doing it to prove your claim that is impossible is false.

>What you do with your tiny backyard garden is irrelevant

No it is not, it is the entire point.

> It is mathmatically impossible for you to be feeding yourself entirely on that, unless you have multiple acres of land

It takes less than half an acre of land to feed a person growing food for yourself.

>Your anecdote does not overrule physics.

Please point me to the law of physics which states plants don't grow if stale2002 doesn't want them to.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#253

Post by Chyzwar » Sun, Dec 09, 2018, 11:40 PM UTC

agsdfgsd wrote: post #194

Chyzwar wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either tilling or herbicides. It is not that simple to say stop tilling. No-till might become viable when we have farming robots that can deal with weeds. I think the bigger problem is moving away from crop rotation to monocultures.

Watch the video I linked. It explains how weeds thrive under bacterially dominated soils, precisely what is created by tillage and spraying. When you have a balance of bacteria and fungi, crop species out compete weeds on their own, because the environment is suited to their needs.

Weeds are just plants that are native. They will always outperform genetically modified foreign crops that are optimized for yield. Some fast-growing crops can dominate weeds but you will still want to till for other reasons.

I watched this video and she has no compelling evidence that this can work on a large scale. My family is doing farming for generations. You need fertilizers because crops consume minerals from the soil. You need chemicals because of monocultures create conditions for diseases and bugs. You need tilling because you do not have unlimited labour.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#254

Post by maccam94 » Mon, Dec 10, 2018, 4:54 AM UTC

maccam94 wrote: post #230

tomjakubowski wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Oh yeah, I"m not suggesting that the pasture could be converted to cropland. I think we just aren't pricing in a bunch of externalities for beef production that would otherwise raise the price and shift consumption to poultry. The fees to access that land are very low ($1.70/cow/month)[1]. Maybe those lands would have more ecological value if they weren't being grazed, so add a charge for the environmental burden. A…

Also I totally forgot about water usage as well. Most of the time it is much cheaper to use water than it should be, and cattle consume huge amounts of it.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#255

Post by fyfy18 » Mon, Dec 10, 2018, 11:41 AM UTC

black-tea wrote: post #183

fyfy18 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voting with your wallet is a good start. In the EU there are strict requirements on what can be labeled ecological, including the use of the EU ecolabel. I believe the US has similar labelling. If you local supermarket doesn't have a suitable stock of ecological supplies, write to them and ask for some, or start shopping at an organic shop.

Oh yeah? And what about restaurants takeaways, canteens etc. which people consume about as much as they do home cooked food? Those places will always be buying the cheapest, most unethical food possible.

Not sure why you were down voted as you make a very good point, at least in the UK that is very much the case. You can find organic food restaurants if you look hard, but almost all high street brands have very limited or no organic food - even brands that advertise themselves as healthy such as Pret or EAT.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#256

Post by bluGill » Mon, Dec 10, 2018, 2:21 PM UTC

bagacrap wrote: post #201

bluGill wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is the energy for your garage garden coming from? Plants need a lot of light. Most buildings do not have nearly intense enough light (house plants are low light plants that grow slow so they do fine, but if you want to grow food you generally want a plant that needs a lot more light)

From grow lights attached to a solar fed li ion battery, duh!

There is only so much sun energy from the sub we get.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#257

Post by ceras » Mon, Dec 10, 2018, 5:27 PM UTC

ericd wrote: post #238

ceras wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are, but while intelligence does likely have a correlation with capacity for suffering, it isn't the same thing. For example, a human infant is much less intelligent than an adult, but we do not typically believe their capacity for suffering is lower than an adult. Cross-species capacity for suffering is still under heavy research, but the general consensus is that birds (including chickens) have a comparable ca…

I suppose I care less about the suffering of less intelligent animals than I do about more intelligent ones. All else being equal, I’d like chickens to be raised better, to the point where I pay a lot extra for it (though this is partly pure selfishness, I think chickens who’ve gotten a lot of exercise taste much better), and I think that sadism against chickens is still sadistic and evil, but even if they can suffer…

It is plausible chickens have less moral weight than whales. But it's not exactly because of intelligence -- it's their capacity to suffer. I know intelligence is very tempting to use because it's a very good proxy in the extreme cases (e.g. a sponge vs. a human), so it's usually our first intuition.

But if you probe into it, I believe you'll find it's an artificial distinction that rather quickly falls apart. If your moral values ascribe negative value to the suffering of, say, both a human and a dog, then the only consistent viewpoint is to ascribe negative value to any suffering of a materially similar quality -- i.e. what matters on a moral level is the capacity of suffering for the species or individual.

There's a few uncomfortable thought experiments you can think through on this topic. E.g. you can imagine genetically engineering a human as dumb as a chicken, or perhaps a traumatic brain injury causing that, but with their mental capacity for suffering just as intact as yours or mine. Would their suffering count for less? Why would it?

As for chicken vs. whale, it may be the case that a chicken suffers less than a whale. More primitive intelligence may imply more primitive suffering. But what if it doesn't for this case? How confident can you be it does imply that, given both how chickens react to pain and stress and the neurological research that's been done on them? And even if it less, by how much? A factor of two, ten, forty, a thousand?

Those questions may seem too philosophical, but they can't be ignored in the face of a recommendation to eat 40 extremely-poorly-raised chickens per year instead of 1 reasonably-well-raised cow. And given all we know of animal cognition, it's reasonably to assume chickens have a lower capacity to suffer (and also to assume it's the same -- there's still uncertainty), but not so much lower that that calculus is anywhere close to being worthwhile.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#258

Post by hinkley » Mon, Dec 10, 2018, 6:22 PM UTC

Chyzwar wrote: post #253

agsdfgsd wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watch the video I linked. It explains how weeds thrive under bacterially dominated soils, precisely what is created by tillage and spraying. When you have a balance of bacteria and fungi, crop species out compete weeds on their own, because the environment is suited to their needs.

Weeds are just plants that are native. They will always outperform genetically modified foreign crops that are optimized for yield. Some fast-growing crops can dominate weeds but you will still want to till for other reasons. I watched this video and she has no compelling evidence that this can work on a large scale. My family is doing farming for generations. You need fertilizers because crops consume minerals from…

That's a bit inaccurate.

Weeds are pioneer species (species that quickly colonize damaged or degraded areas). They aren't always native. They do have their uses for soil improvement, both structurally and nutrient availability, but if you're tilling anyway, or your animals are being poisoned by the weeds, you won't be that impressed.

The soil has plenty of minerals in it. But most plants can't access them without symbiosis with fungi, which are all dead from the tilling.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#259

Post by beat » Mon, Dec 10, 2018, 6:29 PM UTC

agsdfgsd wrote: post #233

beat wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Population growth is leveling off. Birth rate globally is already at/below replacement rate (there are ~2B children right now, the UN estimates that in a century, there will still be ~2B children). The growth we are seeing now is a growth of the adult population, not the child population, due to the 1-2 generation overhang between nations getting decent food and health care (especially immunizations), and the birth r…

>Birth rate globally is already at/below replacement rate No it is not. Current RNI is 1.06% and projections do not suggest it getting down to replacement levels in the next 50 years unless mortality increases substantially. >Meanwhile, in a half-century, we've doubled the population, while significantly reducing food costs and radically reducing hunger globally. By destroying vast portions of the natural world and w…

You seem very certain.

"Future survival of our own species"? Nah. The last human being will eat the last cockroach. We have made technology to adapt to living on the moon. We might make things painful for humanity in general, might even break civilization (although I think that's unlikely). But survival of the species? We haven't yet invented technology that can wipe out humans.

As for our "evil", "obscenely inflated population levels"... well, what do you think we should do about it? Because the only "solution" I can see to this thing that horrifies you is what the Nazis called a Final Solution. The global population is what it is, whether you like it or not. If you had Thanos' infinity glove, would you use it? Would you use it, knowing you're just knocking the population back to 1965 levels?

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#260

Post by weberc2 » Mon, Dec 10, 2018, 7:25 PM UTC

bagacrap wrote: post #202

weberc2 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We save tons on transportation costs, but lose many orders of magnitude more on redundant labor and economies of scale (one tractor working in a big field is a lot more economical than 1200 humans working in 1200 gardens). Maybe technological advancements will change all of that--perhaps we could have fully robotic farms, but even then I would expect one big factory farm with a handful of big, expensive robots to out…

Somehow it doesn't seem likely to be less efficient when my food grows a few feet away from my dinner table. How much extra labor is involved in logistics (field to silo to warehouse to grocery to home)? That said I think it's rather naive to assume that everyone in the world has a garage or other indoor space to spare, the resources to climate control it, etc. The world's hungry don't live in single family homes in…

If it were cheaper, the market would very likely have sussed that out by now (unless you're proposing some recent game-changing technological advancement). In all likelihood, the cost of all of that extra labor is well under $100/week/family, and the time cost alone of managing a greenhouse (maintenance and repairs, cultivating the crops, preserving the food, managing the whole operation, etc) exceed that amount pretty handily (for most families).