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‘Farms are failing’ as fertilizer prices drive up cost of food

wsj.com

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Re: ‘Farms are failing’ as fertilizer prices drive up cost of food

#31

Post by Robotbeat »

halpert wrote: post #10
Bostonian wrote: post #2

The climate change activists who want to cut oil and natural gas production should consider the consequences: "The price-increases stem partly from global energy costs, with the average natural-gas price in Europe for the October-December quarter 10 times as much as that for the year of 2020, according to World Bank data. Nitrogen production facilities rely heavily on natural gas to convert chemical raw materials int…

Methane is needed to make hydrogen, which you can easily make from electricity and water. It’s just cheaper to make from methane so there aren’t facilities to make it using green energy.

But it depends on location. Natural gas in Europe is so expensive that if you were to make hydrogen in Chile from solar, it’d be cheaper

Re: ‘Farms are failing’ as fertilizer prices drive up cost of food

#32

Post by octoberfranklin »

rr808 wrote: post #11

This is a good thing, fertilizer is heavily overused, poisoning waterways. Yes the cost of food may go up as a result but the current farming practices are unsustainable.

You're talking about the death of half the world's population:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_sup...

Re: ‘Farms are failing’ as fertilizer prices drive up cost of food

#33

Post by beerandt »

gruez wrote: post #20
colechristensen wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s particularly ridiculous is an enormous amount of methane is just burned into the atmosphere as a waste product in oil fields and more is leaked into the atmosphere due to shoddy maintenance. The source material that is making fertilizer so expensive is free for the taking in some places but being wasted. Heat + pressure + atmospheric nitrogen + catalysts + methane is being used to produce ammonia and urea whic…

> The source material that is making fertilizer so expensive is free for the taking in some places but being wasted. The key detail you neglect to mention is that those oil wells are in the middle of nowhere with no pipeline infrastructure. If the value of the natural gas being leaked was more than the cost of the infrastructure required to bring it to market, companies would have already built it.

It's not just value, it's also about embedded energy.

Spending $1000 in additional infrastructure to recover $1001 additional methane could make financial sense. But what if manufacturing that infrastructure utilized more btus of cheaper or cleaner energy than what gets recovered?

Then you're still better off not recovering it, financially and from an embedded net energy/ greenhouse gas perspective.

Re: ‘Farms are failing’ as fertilizer prices drive up cost of food

#34

Post by Turing_Machine »

SEJeff wrote: post #21

There is also a slightly different way to grow food using a less intense fertilizer called "square foot gardening". https://squarefootgardening.org/ There is a best selling book about it and it works surprisingly well. The secret fertilizer for this, affectionately known as "Mel's Mix" recipe is available for anyone to make their own. It's not even terribly hard if you're willing to do a bit of composting outside on…

Edit: "wheat" -> "corn"

"Square foot gardening" with hand labor isn't going to replace the 772 million metric tons of wheat and 1 billion metric tons of corn produced annually. Sorry, it just isn't.

Given that it's January, why not try the experiment of producing all the food you personally consume this year using the techniques in this book?

Growing a few tomatoes and a bit of lettuce is pretty easy, and is a fun and rewarding hobby. Producing every single calorie you consume using only hand labor and no chemical fertilizer is an entirely different kettle of fish.

We actually ran that experiment for several millennia. It produced societies in which 90+% of the population were slaves, serfs, or other unfree agricultural laborers.

I'd rather we not go back to that, personally.

Re: ‘Farms are failing’ as fertilizer prices drive up cost of food

#37

Post by beebmam »

teslabox wrote: post #17

There are options besides chemical fertilizers. The nodules on legume root are a symbiotic home for nitrogen-fixing bacteria. Farmers traditionally rotate corn and soybeans to reduce their nitrogen costs. Other plants have deeper roots, which pull up nutrients... My comment about biological nitrogen fixation (15 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29829580 Saw this recently: Black eyed peas could help eli…

We could all benefit from eating more legumes in our diets, well most of us at least

Re: ‘Farms are failing’ as fertilizer prices drive up cost of food

#38

Post by ch4s3 »

rr808 wrote: post #11

This is a good thing, fertilizer is heavily overused, poisoning waterways. Yes the cost of food may go up as a result but the current farming practices are unsustainable.

> poisoning waterways

This hasn't been true for years. Most algal blooms around the US at least are caused by lawn runoff.

Re: ‘Farms are failing’ as fertilizer prices drive up cost of food

#39

Post by gruez »

teslabox wrote: post #17

There are options besides chemical fertilizers. The nodules on legume root are a symbiotic home for nitrogen-fixing bacteria. Farmers traditionally rotate corn and soybeans to reduce their nitrogen costs. Other plants have deeper roots, which pull up nutrients... My comment about biological nitrogen fixation (15 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29829580 Saw this recently: Black eyed peas could help eli…

>There are options besides chemical fertilizers.

But as it relates to this problem (ie. food getting more expensive), your suggestion doesn't make any sense. Considering that the methods you described aren't widely used, I think it's safe to say that they're more expensive than using synthetic fertilizers. Therefore if we implemented that suggestion we wouldn't have higher food prices... because the food prices would be high to start with, probably much higher than it ever be with synthetic fertilizers.

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