Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

Normally it comes out of grass. But the public here seem to assume the only option is to put animals in a building and feed them corn.

In this case, you might as well stop eating animal protein, if you can't make it work for you.

The markets can't solve problems due to lack of critical resources. Market theory rests on the assumption that all needed resources are readily available. Demand can be met my using capital to create more manufacturing facilities. Remove that assumption and market theory essentially collapses.

Where market theory can still save the day is finding alternatives. If a key resource needed for the production and distribution of goods is missing then market forces will tend to produce an alternative. That works so long as an actual replacement exists and the cost of the replacement is in line with the original. Water is an irreplaceable resource - if you don't have water and you need it for production then you're pretty much screwed. The market won't "solve" that problem for you. If, as in this case, you need fertilizer then there may be an alternative but it may take several years to ramp up the production of that alternative and that alternative may be considerably more expensive than the original. This scenario leads to food shortages, food insecurity, and spiraling food costs. The market can't prevent these realities.

In short, markets are just a tool and like all tools you need to understand their usefulness and limitations.

>Another 14% come from grains and other food that could have been eaten by people. But altogether this less than a quarter of the calories livestock consume.

Are you wholly unfamiliar with feedlots? 50% + of the bodyweight of the bulk of cattle in the world comes when they live on a feedlot, where they get 5.5 to 6.5 pounds of feed, via trough, to raise them from 600-900 pounds up to the slaughter weight of 1250-1350 pounds.

Corn (dent, which is still usable for human foodstuffs but is mostly just grown for animal feed) is widely used on the feed lot because you don't need 5.5-6.5 pounds per pound of beef, you only need 2.07-2.24 pounds per pound of slaughter weight. Each pound of dent corn yields about 1,566 kcals so you're trading 3241+ kcal of (fertilized) corn crop for 800-1250 kcals of beef.

So for 1 acre of corn you need 40 to 50 pounds of nitrogen, 1 acre of corn. For the 2020 crop year, USDA estimates U.S. corn yield to be 181.8 bushels per acre. 1 bushel is 56 pounds. So to finish 1 cow to slaughter weight, assuming it's pasture fed to 600 pounds, you're looking at roughly 2.9 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer.

So roughly 2.9 pounds of nitrogen, 1345 pounds of corn, and then factor in the water which is 1-2 gallons per 100 pounds of of bodyweight per day times 12-36 months depending on what fat content is desired in the meat.

Again, we can use less fertilizer, reduce water usage, and better use some current cropland (75+ million acres in the United States alone) for crops intended for human consumption, drastically reduce the risk of new diseases by eliminating hundreds of millions of chronically stressed animal hosts, and to simply restore of them to native species in an area and reduce all of the negative environmental impacts of farming in those areas (runoff, soil depletion, loss of native habitats).

So far at posting time I don't see a whole lot of signal to gain from the noise here if I were legitimately someone who had zero agriculture experience and was trying to gain understanding.

This is the blind leading the blind, and if you gleaned much from the top comments you'd be worse informed than not reading this entire thread. Half of the posts are just political using couched language to pretend they aren't.

Ag is definitely one of HNs blind spots, usually the topics are simply amusing (e.g. urban food production startups burning millions of VC) - but this is the first actually "substantive to humanity topic" I've read through and the results are a little scary.

And heck, I'm probably contributing to this noise since I also haven't stepped foot on a farm or market garden in well over a decade.

It’s all about the money (as usual) - likely the economies of scale specifically. They technically can produce it almost everywhere, but it was cheaper to import it, and likely would still be even if local plants were started up.