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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

#51

Post by jelliclesfarm »

gruez wrote: post #39
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…

We would also need more land to rotate and water. We are running out of both. Esp in the developing world the article speaks about..

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

#52

Post by colordrops »

gruez wrote: post #39
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…

In the US, perhaps we could stop the obscene subsidies for petroleum, corn, and meat, and subsidize more sustainable, nutritious and humane crops and farming practices.

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

#53

Post by ashtonkem »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #50
ashtonkem wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with that metaphor is that the Irish largely went hungry because England continued to export food from the island during the famine. The crop failure was because of nature, but the famine was man made.

I've got bad news for you if you think our current crop of politicians and businessmen are going to pick lives over profits in an analogous situation.

I am absolutely too cynical to believe that, trust me. But I think we absolutely should be honest with ourselves and admit that any famine is really because our leaders valued profits over lives, rather than pinning the blame on fertilizer prices.

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

#54

Post by noduerme »

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.

These kinds of ostensibly progressive arguments come very close to crossing the line into fascist eugenics, even if they're made with the greenest of intentions.

Malthusian fears and Luddite patterns are not designed to improve the lot of humanity, only those who can afford luxuries. Deep down, they're rooted in the notion that the world would be better off without undesirable surplus humans.

More sustainable methods do exist to grow crops, and much of what the rich West eats are sustainably grown "organic" vegetables and free range meat. But the bulk of humanity lives on industrial-scale agriculture. Industrial ag is actually why there are so many people. Removing it is unnecessarily cruel. The way it shakes out when there are food shortages is not that suddenly the rich stop eating free-range chicken. It's that the poor starve. You can't expect that inequality to change just by restricting food production across the board. If a Big Mac doubles in price in America, it's still well within the reach of most Americans. If my grass-fed rib eye triples in price, I might go down from 2 to 1 a week. But if grain prices go up by 30% in Africa, there's civil war and starvation. The imbalance actually becomes more extreme as access to protein is always curtailed first in the poorest areas. The assumption that demand for animal protein would go down faster in rich nations, given a price spike in grain, is wishful thinking to say the least.

There is no real solution to the ecological damage done by industrial agriculture unless you want to kill off a lot of the people who were born and live as a direct result of industrial food production.

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

#55

Post by kspacewalk2 »

inamberclad wrote: post #35

World hunger for the first world maybe. 80% of global food is still produced in very small, un-industrial family farms.

Equally wrong in both counts. Most of the food in the world is produced by industrial farming. And it is (obviously) the poor (people and countries) who will be disproportionately affected by this, as they are by any price shocks. Your food costs will go up, people in Somalia will starve to death.

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

#56

Post by wallacoloo »

ploden wrote: post #30

Maybe we should end the government mandate to burn corn in car engines. Biden seems more pro-ethanol than Trump, I have no idea why.

i always assumed ethanol production was encouraged by the govt precisely to spur excess production of corn so as to make our food production more robust. i.e. during a bad year of food production, halt ethanol production and redirect that excess of corn back into the food supply; crisis averted. is that not the case?

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

#58

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

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…

That vastly underestimates the size of the modern problem. I posted previously of the adage "Modern agriculture is about turning energy in fossil fuels into food we can eat." While not entirely accurate (yes, most of the energy in plants comes from the sun, but it is fossil fuels that power most of the nitrogen fixation needed to unlock that photosynthesis), it does emphasize how so much of modern agriculture is dependent on extractive mining.

Saying "modern agriculture can switch to just planting legumes for nitrogen fixation" is like saying "modern transportation can switch to just using solar power." Of course, modern transportation can switch to using solar power, but most people understand how it will be a gargantuan, multi-decade, multi-trillion dollar process. Switching modern agriculture off its dependence on fossil fuels will be in the same order-of-magnitude difficulty level.

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

#60

Post by catmanjan »

colordrops wrote: post #52
gruez wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

In the US, perhaps we could stop the obscene subsidies for petroleum, corn, and meat, and subsidize more sustainable, nutritious and humane crops and farming practices.

If those existed and were cheaper, that would be done
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