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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?

#261

Post by agsdfgsd »

beat wrote: post #259
agsdfgsd wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

>The last human being will eat the last cockroach

The evidence is not on your side.

>Because the only "solution" I can see to this thing that horrifies you is what the Nazis called a Final Solution.

Uh, the solution to do what the article suggests. Grow more food on less land so that population growth doesn't come at the expense of the last shreds of wilderness on the planet. How does one get to the point where you think "growing more food is hitler!!1" is a reasonable response?

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#262

Post by agsdfgsd »

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…

On one hand we have physical evidence and scientists, on the other hand we have you saying "my family has been destroying the soil for a long time and learned nothing the whole time". While you may find the latter more compelling, I do not.

Weeds are early colonizing species, frequently foreign invasives, not natives. They do not always outperform crop species, as demonstrated by the millions of acres where they are outcompeted by the crops. You create barren lifeless dirt, precisely the niche early colonizing species evolved to fill. Of course they fill it. Just because you create your own problem, doesn't mean the rest of us suffer from that problem too.

You do not want to till for other reasons, literally the entire purpose of tilling is to hinder plant growth. The fact that it hinders crop growth as well as weed growth seems to be lost on many people. There's a reason the majority of farms in the US and Canada are already no-till.

The people currently doing your job better than you are pretty compelling evidence. https://hooktube.com/watch?v=UEOVLpZrvvU

You do not need fertilizers because the dirt is made of those very minerals. You have literally tons of phosphorus sitting under your crop, but you have killed the microorganisms responsible for converting it to plant available forms.

Monocultures do not create conditions for diseases and bugs. This has been researched to death. If alternating strips of corn and soybeans lowered disease and pest rates that's what everyone would do. It doesn't help at all. The problem is not the plants, it is the soil.

I have no idea what your last point is even supposed to mean. Tilling is labor. "I don't have unlimited labor so I will use my limited labor on a process that increases my costs and lowers my yields" is pretty hard to make sense of.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#263

Post by naravara »

loeg wrote: post #147
naravara wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>if any, it is a regression in terms of feeding the world's growing population. Food security is a distribution problem, not a production problem. We're already producing far far more food than we consume or would even need to consume. Big Ag likes to pretend they need higher yields in order to feed the hungry but they're full of it. They want to produce more for cheaper and pocket the margin, but they're not going t…

Both can be problems at the same time. I think you raise a valid concern, but I don't believe it dismisses the yield/density problem in any way. I don't think there's any reason to vilify agricultural businesses in particular for being profit-seeking capitalist corporations.

>I don't think there's any reason to vilify agricultural businesses in particular for being profit-seeking capitalist corporations.

It's not about the line of business. It's about disingenuously gussying up the marketing around their own profit maximization by pretending they're being humanitarian. Sort of like "Greenwashing."

Everyone does it, but so many people depend on subsistence farming that it comes across as especially crass. Sure they're not alone, but there is plenty of scorn to go around for bottling companies taking up all the ground water, Pharma companies abusing IP law to fleece sick people, etc. There's no reason to be stingy.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#264

Post by naravara »

stale2002 wrote: post #143
naravara wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>(one tractor working in a big field is a lot more economical than 1200 humans working in 1200 gardens). Sure. But 1200 humans working in 1200 gardens is also a lot more economical than 1200 humans sitting at home playing Fortnite all day because there are no jobs. The idea of employment guarantees as welfare policy has been getting traction, and programs like this where raw output isn't the main goal would be good c…

> is also a lot more economical than 1200 humans sitting at home playing Fortnite all day because there are no jobs No it is not. I personally care about people being able to do what they want with their free time. The situation you describe is only "efficient" if you value everyone's free time and happiness at 0. I care about people's happiness, on the other hand. The main goal of society should be to provide people…

>No it is not. I personally care about people being able to do what they want with their free time.

Just tranq them all with a guaranteed supply of opiates then. Problem solved.

People's needs and wants are socially conditioned. It's not like their "wants" just sprang out of thin air. They were created by the culture and social expectations around them. And many of those social expectations make people feel obligated to feel useful.

That means they need to be provided with avenues where they can feel useful instead of doping themselves with addictions to fill the sense of purposeless anomie that they fall into when alienated from public life. Make work programs, like urban forestry or gardening, are good ways to do this as they beautify the spaces where we live and are unlikely to be done adequately without some societal coordination.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#265

Post by naravara »

weberc2 wrote: post #122
naravara wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>(one tractor working in a big field is a lot more economical than 1200 humans working in 1200 gardens). Sure. But 1200 humans working in 1200 gardens is also a lot more economical than 1200 humans sitting at home playing Fortnite all day because there are no jobs. The idea of employment guarantees as welfare policy has been getting traction, and programs like this where raw output isn't the main goal would be good c…

Sorry, I’m not following. Why the gardens v fortnite dichotomy? How did you get there?

Basically efficiency isn't the chief concern. If you really have a bunch of people with nothing better to do with their time (e.g. Fortnite), then we don't really need to care about allocating labor as efficiently as possible to maximize yield.

We can use labor in a very inefficient (where yield is concerned) way if we think it will confer ecological, aesthetic, or sociological side-benefits, as would having lots of private gardens.

Fortnite is just an example of something people fall into doing when they don't have any other productive opportunities available to them.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#266

Post by weberc2 »

naravara wrote: post #265
weberc2 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I’m not following. Why the gardens v fortnite dichotomy? How did you get there?

Basically efficiency isn't the chief concern. If you really have a bunch of people with nothing better to do with their time (e.g. Fortnite), then we don't really need to care about allocating labor as efficiently as possible to maximize yield. We can use labor in a very inefficient (where yield is concerned) way if we think it will confer ecological, aesthetic, or sociological side-benefits, as would having lots of…

I'm not sure whether you're taking issue with leisure time generally or the tendency for people to participate in leisure that you believe is inefficient, but both are orthogonal to the question of which type of agricultural system is more efficient.

In particular, if your solution is simply "spend less time on [your current] leisure activities!", it can be applied to either aggricultural system. In the case of specialized agriculture, it simply means spending more time on the individual's specialization or really anything with a greater opportunity value than growing one's own food (if your goal is to maximize earnings, it's tough to do worse than spending an hour per day growing your own food to save ~$5).

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#267

Post by hinkley »

agsdfgsd wrote: post #262
Chyzwar wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On one hand we have physical evidence and scientists, on the other hand we have you saying "my family has been destroying the soil for a long time and learned nothing the whole time". While you may find the latter more compelling, I do not. Weeds are early colonizing species, frequently foreign invasives, not natives. They do not always outperform crop species, as demonstrated by the millions of acres where they are…

> There's a reason the majority of farms in the US and Canada are already no-till.

I have heard this several times lately. But I grew up around tilled (sometimes double tilled) farmland, and I still see a lot of tilled earth when I'm out of town and think to look.

What do we mean by most and what definition of no-till are we using?

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#268

Post by jessriedel »

strainer wrote: post #248
jessriedel wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, that's a fine criticism to keep in mind. However, I believe the idea is that although the ingredients come from agricultural sources, they have been purified to such a degree that it doesn't matter; they're chemically identical to synthetic ones. (The key question was whether truly synthetic diets are nutritially satisfactory, not whether they are economically efficient to produce now...which they are not .) Of…

We didnt find any reference to a "truly synthetic diet", so it remains a conceptual talking point which is of unknown economy and unknown capability to produce, yet it has been too easy to confuse the medical diet as evidence of the concept. > that although the ingredients come from agricultural sources, they have been purified to such a degree that it doesn't matter; they're chemically identical to synthetic ones. T…

> bonding and structural differences which are assessed to be biologically insignificant.

Are there specific plausible possibilities in nutritionally required molecules that you are referring to here, or is this just a "no one knows for sure" argument?

> Prions for example were easily described as chemically equivalent to their other phenotypes

Did anyone ever actually point to a container of prions and mistakenly describe them as chemically identical? When I said "chemically identical", I did not merely mean the amino acid sequence.

Like, we have x-ray diffraction for this stuff. There is a reason vitamin supplements work to correct vitamin deficiencies. There is just not much room for unknown unknowns here.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#269

Post by strainer »

jessriedel wrote: post #268
strainer wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We didnt find any reference to a "truly synthetic diet", so it remains a conceptual talking point which is of unknown economy and unknown capability to produce, yet it has been too easy to confuse the medical diet as evidence of the concept. > that although the ingredients come from agricultural sources, they have been purified to such a degree that it doesn't matter; they're chemically identical to synthetic ones. T…

> bonding and structural differences which are assessed to be biologically insignificant. Are there specific plausible possibilities in nutritionally required molecules that you are referring to here, or is this just a "no one knows for sure" argument? > Prions for example were easily described as chemically equivalent to their other phenotypes Did anyone ever actually point to a container of prions and mistakenly de…

> People have already subsisted on fully synthetic diets (aka elemental diets) in the past ... they do fine.

We managed to establish that what you wrote there is wrong. That was my primary goal because it contradicted my other main comment, but I hope you can take that information in, and perhaps think about what lead you to that mistaken confidence. The elemental diet is not fully synthetic - it is mostly grown...

> they have been purified to such a degree that it doesn't matter; they're chemically identical to synthetic ones.

That object > "they" it doesnt exist yet. It's aspiration, an ideal, supposedly attainable with help from x-ray diffraction and whatever else you might think of, but its not real yet.

As an abstract concept you can talk about fully synthetic food that is chemically identical to food which can only currently be produced with essential and substantial use of non-designed, non-fully comprehended biological entities (lifeforms). What definitely "no one knows for sure" is that humans are capable of arranging that. It might be possible in a few decades time, with help from AI to take care of all of the biological intricacies which are too complicated for humans to grasp.

> Are there specific plausible possibilities

Its about recognizing the likelihood of important surprises - which can not be specified but which the situation is more than complicated enough to continue throwing up, as can be noted many times in the history of modern science. And the importance of not exaggerating the extents of current technological capabilities and understanding. Yes modern capabilities are dazzling and exciting, but still far from sufficient to get presumptuous about natures complexity.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#270

Post by baldfat »

1/4 of the worlds for ends up spoiled.

198 million: The number of hectares used to produce food that is lost or wasted each year. This is about the size of Mexico

$1,600: The annual amount the average American family of four spends on food that doesn’t get eaten

53 percent: The amount of all food lost or wasted that is comprised of cereals, such as wheat, maize, and rice

64 percent: The share of loss or waste in the developing world that occurs before the food is even processed or sent to market

https://www.wri.org/blog/2013/06/numbers-reducing-food-loss-...

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