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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

#221

Post by pas »

Retric wrote: post #143
dilap wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funnily enough, there used to be about 60 million wild buffalo roaming north america. We killed them off & have devoted vast tracts of land to monocrop agriculture fueled by petrochemical fertilizers.

Those 60 million Bison lived ~15 years on average. Cattle on the other hand rarely make it past adulthood, so those 33 million cattle slaughtered every year requires significantly more food. That’s the core reason we are feeding cattle with farmed corn, you simply get more beef from the same land.

Why do slaughtered cattle require more food? Naively I'd guess that the big adult bison eat at least as much as the young cows in the same timeframe.

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

#222

Post by pas »

Incipient wrote: post #217

Does anyone have a clue why we've suddenly run into fertiliser shortages? I feel like fertiliser and food demands should be fairly slow-moving? Not going up 3x in the space of 18mo.

Price of inputs increased. Logistic network efficiency fell, delays, ports, trucks, COVID increased labor and other costs.

That said, who knows. It's a complex system, cascading failures are common. Maybe the demand shock of the pandemic (restaurants cancelled orders, farmers cut back demand for fertilizer, factories predicted big demand decrease, but that was successfully "worked around" by government intervention, now the demand is higer than estimated, plus the aforementioned other factors.)

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

#223

Post by Retric »

pas wrote: post #221
Retric wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those 60 million Bison lived ~15 years on average. Cattle on the other hand rarely make it past adulthood, so those 33 million cattle slaughtered every year requires significantly more food. That’s the core reason we are feeding cattle with farmed corn, you simply get more beef from the same land.

Why do slaughtered cattle require more food? Naively I'd guess that the big adult bison eat at least as much as the young cows in the same timeframe.

It’s the same reason eating to much makes you gain weight. Roughly speaking a 1300 pound adult cow needs ~9,700 calories per day to maintain it’s weight. Where a 770 lb calf only needs 6,230 calories per day to maintain body weight, but growing 2.2 lb per day, requires an additional 4,130 calories per day. So, 6,230 + 4,130 = 10,360. Thus between around 700 lb and full body weight they need more calories than an adult. With feedlot cattle being both close to adult body weight and adding more pounds per day.

A newborn 80lb calf doesn’t its self need that many calories directly, but it both grows very rapidly gets its calories from it’s mother which turns grass calories to turn into milk calories at about 3:1 efficiency.

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

#224

Post by adrianN »

teeray wrote: post #180
adrianN wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully EVs will put a natural end to that madness. We could satisfy much of our primary energy demand simply by replacing energy crops with PV.

EVs are wonderful in certain places: cities, suburbs, etc. Where I sit it’s -10F, and everyone with an EV either can’t start it at all or has to ride in it with no heat—-which can be life-threatening. EVs will reduce our demand, but never eliminate it due to such edge cases.

I'm pretty sure we don't need millions of hectares for Ethanol to satisfy the demand of the five people living in the frozen tundra.

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

#225

Post by yossarian1408 »

dundarious wrote: post #140
nostromo wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inflation is never evenly distributed. That doesn’t dispute the cause for widespread inflation. Inflation is higher than it’s been in 40 years, and that timeframe includes several energy cost spikes, many of which were worse than the current spike.

For this specific discussion, why focus on inflation (price increases in a broad basket of goods) at all, when it's a specific subset that is causing the issue, and the reasons for price increases in that subset is dominated by specific causation, disconnected from the purported reasons for the broader basket. Because any fixes for the broader inflation problem would have relatively little effect on this specific sub…

...can you completely discount that rising energy prices may be due to inflationary monetary policy? A higher money supply means more competition for less resources, and if the ultimate resource in nearly every supply chain is energy than it would be sensible to think this could be the starting point of a vicious cycle, rather than sanctions on Belarus or floods in Texas.

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

#227

Post by ZeroGravitas »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #219
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, similar to the "EVs just burn coal" thing, it seems likely that burning the gas to make electricity and then using that electricity to make hydrogen would be more efficient, so doing it that way would reduce demand, save money, and just generally be better than what we do now. And then you've a) freed up lots of a storable fuel that you can use to supplement renewables if you really need it (and can be kept and…

> it seems likely that burning the gas to make electricity and then using that electricity to make hydrogen would be more efficient I'm not sure why one would think that, the exact opposite is true. Going to electrolysis is only desirable if the energy source is a renewable. This article has a very good overview of the challenges with moving ammonia production to sustainable energy sources: https://www.frontiersin.or…

"challenges" and yet it reports the results of multiple studies saying our current options for green hydrogen are better than what we do now with fossil fuels, on multiple metrics and overall.

And like the "EVs burn coal" analogy, I'm suggesting we shift to renewables as quickly as we can, and there's no need to wait for the grid to be 100% renewable before electrifying as much as we can.

The union of concerned scientists has a map that compares the efficiency of an EV to ICE. It's lower in fossil fuel powered areas, but It's better than ICE everywhere today, even if you ignore the future greening of the grid. If you include that it completely demolishes the alternative.

So your document appears to support my point, why do you think it doesn't?

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

#228

Post by dilap »

ethbr0 wrote: post #215
dilap wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely multifactorial, but the US army really did have a policy of killing buffalo w/ the aim of depriving the indians they were fighting of their primary food source.

Do you have a citation? Because Wikipedia explicitly mentioned 'This was said, but it's not clear if implementation went beyond someone dreaming out loud.'

My apologies, I think you are correct! At least per Atlantic.

https://archive.is/WeFj2

They hype up the Army aspect a lot in the first part of the article, but readering further it becomes clear that commerical hunting really was the main driver.

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

#229

Post by throw0101a »

xyzzyz wrote: post #151
lancesells wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And this speed is making both them and the land sick — cows are meant to eat grass, not the grains used to fatten them quickly. Substitute grass for vegetables and I think this applies to humans as well.

No, we evolved to consume prepared food, including meat. Our mouths, jaws, and digestive system have been coevolving for past few tens-to-hundreds of thousands of years with our diets and food preparation methods. Certainly, vegetables have not been a major source of calories for humans in many tens of thousands of years now (because they don’t have a lot of calories in them in the first place, but also because they…

> No, we evolved to consume prepared food, including meat.

You're not wrong, but IMHO it should be noted that humans don't need a lot of meat to meet their dietary needs. There has probably been excess cultural focusing on it in recent decades.

The necessary daily portions one needs—unless doing body building—isn't a lot to get the required protein and amino acids.

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

#230

Post by dundarious »

yossarian1408 wrote: post #225
dundarious wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For this specific discussion, why focus on inflation (price increases in a broad basket of goods) at all, when it's a specific subset that is causing the issue, and the reasons for price increases in that subset is dominated by specific causation, disconnected from the purported reasons for the broader basket. Because any fixes for the broader inflation problem would have relatively little effect on this specific sub…

...can you completely discount that rising energy prices may be due to inflationary monetary policy? A higher money supply means more competition for less resources, and if the ultimate resource in nearly every supply chain is energy than it would be sensible to think this could be the starting point of a vicious cycle, rather than sanctions on Belarus or floods in Texas.

To be clear, I don't completely discount it, but I think there are clear and large non-monetary influences that dominate.
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