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Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

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Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#41

Post by incone123 »

yesenadam wrote: post #10
slickrick216 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we just rate things better by calories we will enter a negative feedback loop where something is always better until we are all eating some synthetic sludge. Not saying you don’t have a point but we should aim to have our cake and eat it or else the future will just be worse and leave people with nothing to hope for.

Vegetarian diet somehow equals synthetic sludge and nothing to hope for?! Sorry if that mischaracterizes your point, but it does seem that's the slippery slope you were going for.

I regularly hear people saying the earth could support x billion people if we all just adopted diet y.

Is it really our ambition to turn the whole world into residential skyscrapers just because we figured out how to feed 40 billion people on this one planet?

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#42

Post by IntrepidWorm »

incone123 wrote: post #34
IntrepidWorm wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I second this - cow based protein and cricket based protein both supply adequate value in an average human diet - why is there such a stigma against one versus the other?

I ordered a cricket steak and was a little disappointed. But seriously its not stigma, its cuisine preference.

Mmm.... .0003 oz cutlets.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#43

Post by m_eiman »

IntrepidWorm wrote: post #25
deltille wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most predators that eat exclusively large prey don't number in the billions. Any reason you are averse to eating bugs specifically?

I second this - cow based protein and cricket based protein both supply adequate value in an average human diet - why is there such a stigma against one versus the other?

It's cultural of course, but the funny thing is that kinda-insects are already culturally accepted food in the west – but only ones from the sea such as shrimp, crabs, etc.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#44

Post by JohnJamesRambo »

bjt2n3904 wrote: post #37
zqmall wrote: post #20

In 2012 you could feed 570 million people with the crops that go into the "green" ethanol scam: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/10/01/162127460/do... I'm not opposed to farm subsidies as part of food independence for national security, but please do not call it "green".

I was reading the journals of Gareth Jones about his time spent in Soviet Russia and Ukraine, and find remarkable similarities to this sort of thing. The government took over, for example, the manufacture and maintenance of tractors, and also selected people nearly at random to maintain them. The one guy he interviewed said something to the extent that the tractors barely last a year before breaking. The people who d…

Thanos’ ideas about everything were extremely silly. A halving of population would do nothing on any time scale. A small blip easily recovered by reproduction. People deserve better writing, even in comic book movies.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#45

Post by adhesive_wombat »

ryanmercer wrote: post #2

Well, we can feed ourselves a lot better rapidly by: - Drastically reducing food waste. In the United States, food waste is estimated at 30-40% https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs - Shift away from animal based protein rapidly. Livestock takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land, yet produces less than 20% of the world's supply of calories https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets... . (don't…

> Shift away from animal based protein rapidly

While this always inevitably attracts the aggressively emotional "you can pry my nightly organic wagyu porterhouse steaks from my cold dead carnivorous hands, I'm not eating bugs", there's certainly a middle ground for flexitarian things.

A lot of meat consumed in the world isn't really consumed as meat like a steak or a lamb shank, it's "para-meat" like pink slime and low-grade mince, where it's really just a source of protein and umami to throw into ready meals, fast food and other industrial food where no one needs to see what it looked like as long as it says "chicken" on the menu. And it's only cheap enough to do that because it's subsidised.

I'm not a vegetarian, but I still chafe when I see 500g of tofu (often the only one carried in a supermarket[1]) costing the same as 1kg of chicken, which, kilo for kilo, probably ate at least 10x times that much soybean as is in the tofu.

And yes, I understand there's an economy of scale here, but it's more than just that. I think it's also that everyone from Nestle to supermarkets would rather, if people must shift from meat, that people substituted expensive alternatives like only organic tofu and "synthetic" meat alternatives since that's just more profitable.

[1]: Which always seems to be a spongy watery mess compared to the solid blocks you get in the Chinese supermarket (which also cost about half the normal supermarket variety).

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#46

Post by peoplefromibiza »

another_story wrote: post #9
DiabloD3 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please stop repeating the falsehood that animal pastures can somehow be transmuted into high yield crops for the human food supply: about 1/3rd of farmland in the US can never be transformed into suitable farmland for that task, and this accounts for most of the land used for pasture. If we're having problems maintain soil fertility levels now, imagine if we needed 2-3x the fertilizer to transform unsuitable land int…

It doesn't need to be turned into farmland, we need to stop using existing farmland to grow feed for livestock, which is where so much of it goes.

that only happens because the kind of crops that are farmed are subsidized, so it's economically advantageous to farm those specific crops.

we should stop subsidizing crops it only incentivize monocultures

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#47

Post by myshpa »

thriftwy wrote: post #15
ryanmercer wrote: post #2

Well, we can feed ourselves a lot better rapidly by: - Drastically reducing food waste. In the United States, food waste is estimated at 30-40% https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs - Shift away from animal based protein rapidly. Livestock takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land, yet produces less than 20% of the world's supply of calories https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets... . (don't…

Animal based protein does not need fertilizer to be grown and it may not be carbon-intensive. Plant based protein is basically putting oil in the ground and getting crops back. It's intellectually disgusting how you try to put a round peg in a square hole.

Meat and dairy needs not only a lot of land and fertilizers, but also a lot of pesticides/herbicides.

Pesticide bioaccumulation in cattle https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7525218/

Public Health Implications of Pesticide Residues in Meat https://www.researchgate.net/publication/50434365_Public_Hea...

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#48

Post by b112 »

Aromasin wrote: post #27
jhgb wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was under the impression that a significant percentage of cattle was not fed purely from pastures. Perhaps this what GP's comment was about?

Correct. The vast majority of US cattle are grain fed/finished. "If all the grain currently fed to livestock in the United States were consumed directly by people, the number of people who could be fed would be nearly 800 million," David Pimentel, professor of ecology in Cornell University's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, reported at the July 24-26 meeting of the Canadian Society of Animal Science in Montr…

And I suppose the soil unsuitable for crops ( too much clay, etc) but OK for wild grasses, or rocky terrain would just magically fix itself.

Maybe we should blast to level it, and make new soil then?

Around here, Quebec Canada, few cattle are grain fed, and the land they graze on is rocky, hilly, non crop land.

But, even more importantly, is that there is no food shortage. None. Zero. Nada.

In fact, all around the world, Canada, Europe, farmers are paid not to farm.

I detest it when people try to obtain goals, by using false narratives.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#49

Post by lazyier »

citizenkeen wrote: post #12
DiabloD3 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please stop repeating the falsehood that animal pastures can somehow be transmuted into high yield crops for the human food supply: about 1/3rd of farmland in the US can never be transformed into suitable farmland for that task, and this accounts for most of the land used for pasture. If we're having problems maintain soil fertility levels now, imagine if we needed 2-3x the fertilizer to transform unsuitable land int…

I don't believe the argument is that the acreage for animal pastures would be converted, but rather the acreage for the crops they eat would be converted. Or is that in error as well?

Pretty much everything you hear about "solving" the food supply is going to be lies and misinformation.

The people that know what they are talking about are already in the industry. You are not going to see their opinions because they are busy doing what they can.

The people who actually understand things not politicians, academics, or columnists.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#50

Post by kickout »

Mostly good comments in here. My take is we have at least 1-2 years of global supply of most grains. This is a completely political problem; its not like we're getting 2012 US Midwest levels of drought in back-to-back years (now THAT would be a crunch).

Food waste is a problem, yes. Animal protein is not a problem. There is plenty of land in the US only suitable for grazing. Much better than that synthetic soup of Impossible Meat.

Food system has largely run on the JIT systems for decades that crunched the chip industry. We haven't had a serious shock I'd argue and I don't think this is one either. People recognize the JIT-ness and fragility of the system though and are (slowly) trying to backstop it. Will take a combination of distributed controlled environments for high value fruits and vegetables, _proper_ land use (high value crop land for crops; high value grazing land for grazing). This, currently, is dictated by the incentive structures in place with subsidies--which can be changed in theory.

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