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Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

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Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#151

Post by lolsal »

PheonixPharts wrote: post #71
mathgladiator wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(3) And im willing to pay for it. I only eat 100% grass-fed beef, and I believe the world would be better without corn fed abominations.

> (3) And im willing to pay for it. If the true externalities of your consumption are not priced into the product then you're not really paying for it. As a general rule this is the problem with our entire lifestyle. Very few people will deny that we do not life a sustainable life style, and yet almost none consider what this means. The definition of unsustainable is that you are consuming beyond your ability to pay.…

> If the true externalities of your consumption are not priced into the product then you're not really paying for it.

This is true, but other than showing up to the butcher with my money, what else can I do? Some _other thing_ needs to motivate these externalities into the price; not the consumer. The only thing I could conceive of doing is voting with my wallet, which I do when I buy grass-fed meat.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#152

Post by jiveturkey42 »

chasd00 wrote: post #148
jiveturkey42 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps these issues cannot be solved from a desk and computer. HN might bristle at the idea the Farmer Joe has a more sophisticated mental model of an extremely complex and multivariate system (a field of corn or soy) which evades reduction to a dataset. The solutions I've seen on this board is typically "well let's reduce the variables and grow lettuce in warehouses!" Or trying to build a robot that can pick strawb…

>If people reading this wanted to pursue a meaningful solution via data, my advise is to look at the scaling of the farm-to-consumer market, and how to enable larger distributed networks of small independent farms to sell to customers. are you implying a farmer's market? they exist.

Thank you for the helpful sarcasm.

Yes, I am implying farmers markets. There is not currently an effective way for these small farms to network their production in aggregate to sell at a level commensurate to an industrial farm. This is the reason big ag can sell for cheaper.

If farmers markets could achieve cost-parity with big grocery (by competing at-scale) then distributed small-scale farming could contribute to solving many issues in climate, environment, nutrition, etc

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#153

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

phil21 wrote: post #118
kickout wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's ok though. I like these threads on HN. Hopefully helps educate people. People on HN have a lot of skills to offer agriculture they likely aren't even aware of. Every article/discussion helps spread the message, hopefully. ETA: Most people don't understand agriculture or where their food comes from--HN no different. Only small % of people involved in agriculture _directly_

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…

Comments like this show how out of touch the average person is with how much waste is involved in animal products - particularly beef.

We can so easily grow enough food to feed everyone.

Livestock takes up >80% of land, yet produces The The apocalypse is nowhere near close.

The Earth's crust is ~2.5% potassium. A lower supply of Potash is not going to cause the end of the world.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#154

Post by jessriedel »

ryanmercer wrote: post #116
jessriedel wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pasture is not just where animals are held. It is land that grows plants eaten directly from the ground by animals, i.e., grazing. So if pasture land isnt suitable to be crop land, then animals fed by grazing pasture is efficient. And according to my reading of this industry website, nearly half of livestock calories come from this: https://www.sacredcow.info/blog/qz6pi6cvjowjhxsh4dqg1dogizno... I think you are talki…

>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…

Are you disputing the numbers I gave above or just choosing to concentrate on a particular subset of cattle? I don’t believe what you’re describing is representative of livestock in general.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#155

Post by CapricornNoble »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #66
bitwize wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original rationale for Thanos made a lot more sense: he simped for Death, like the concept of death was a woman in the Marvel universe. He thought half the universe's souls would make a perfect offering for her and would impress her enough to make her want to be with him. It's outrageously comic-book-y, but may as well lean into the illogic.

That makes much more sense, I wish they had stuck with that.

I thought they would, considering they introduced the Goddess of Death in Thor: Ragnarok, but...NOPE. Cate Blanchett delightfully hamming it up as a supervillian only lasted one film.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#156

Post by voakbasda »

supertofu wrote: post #146

Ok, so we have all these enormous factory farms full of animals who produce fertilizer quite naturally. All we have to do is give them nutritious feed and better lives so they are spared disease. Why can't Big Agriculture pivot to actually using the poop that these animals produce?

Small farmer here. Most of my fertilizer comes from the rear end of my animals. They choose where to apply it, and my free range birds spread it around a bit. I would not try to spread it any other way. I try to avoid man made inputs, but the land is still far less productive than the few times I have applied synthetic fertilizers.

Big Ag invests in machines that each cost hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. Those machines are tuned to spread powdered/pelletized fertilizer that comes from a factory. It would be prohibitively expensive to pivot to machines that can collect and spread manure, and the results would be suboptimal compared to their usual inputs. It is simply not worth the cost, as it would put them at a disadvantage to those who do not switch over. The shortage will pass long before they could pay off the investment.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#157

Post by jiveturkey42 »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #153
phil21 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Comments like this show how out of touch the average person is with how much waste is involved in animal products - particularly beef. We can so easily grow enough food to feed everyone. Livestock takes up >80% of land, yet produces The The apocalypse is nowhere near close. The Earth's crust is ~2.5% potassium. A lower supply of Potash is not going to cause the end of the world.

How much arable land does livestock take up?

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#158

Post by thinkcontext »

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #83
godmode2019 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you feed a cow you are essentially trading up. Animal meat is much more bioavailable and nutrient dense. Especially when they are eating grass on land unsuitable for crops.

I thought most beef, pound-for-pound, was factory-farmed, not grazed?

In the US cattle start out grazing and spend a portion of their life there. Then they go to dense feedlots (CAFOs) where they are fed a grain heavy diet.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#159

Post by mike_hearn »

I'm always bothered by stories like these that seem to do a reasonable job of listing causes of self-inflicted problems, and then try to act like it was some sort of inevitable act of God, or natural law of the universe or something.

According to TFA the causes are:

1. Back-to-back storms in the USA causing production shutdowns. OK, that one is genuinely just random natural variance.

2. Natural gas price explosion. This is due largely to sanctions on Russia. Governments don't actually have to sanction Russian natural gas. It's a choice, one that can be undone tomorrow if need be.

3. Sanctions on a major Belarusian potash producer. Same thing. Belarus isn't even Russia. This could be fixed tomorrow with the wave of a bureaucrat's pen.

4. Ongoing side effects of lockdowns. This was a major own goal. People warned at the time you can't just shut down the economy even if actually had worked, which it didn't. This one sits squarely in government footgun area.

5. China has restricted exports of phosphate to build up stockpiles at home. Once again, governments are creating the damage here.

6. "Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which effectively cut off nearly a fifth of the world’s nutrient exports". For the third time, no, governments cut off those nutrient exports. It wasn't some sort of physical law that said invasions => cut off nutrient supply. It was and is a choice.

What seems to be happening here is that comfortable and powerful politicians have decided that showing how much they care about Ukraine is more important than people eating. The poor around the world will starve, so (primarily) European countries can wave a blue and yellow flag over their bodies. It feels very wrong.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#160

Post by wrycoder »

sct202 wrote: post #113
orangepurple wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only 1 percent of all corn grown in this country is eaten by humans. > The rest is No. 2 yellow field corn, which is indigestible to humans and used in animal feed, food supplements and ethanol. https://www.wired.com/2011/06/five-ethanol-myths-busted-2/

It is digestible post processing like after nixtamalization to turn it into masa. No 2 corn is used in tortillas, snack foods and other processed corn products. That sentence is misleading, because yes straight off the cob you can't eat it. https://agcrops.osu.edu/newsletter/corn-newsletter/2016-40/t...

All you have to do is dry and grind it to make cornmeal. It's quite digestible, and keeps very well, like wheat. (I've never tried eating it fresh like sweet corn, may have to add that to the bucket list.)

A problem is it is lacking in free niacin, which can result in pellagra, if the diet is principally corn meal. Nixtamalization corrects that[0].

Without nixtamalization, cornmeal doesn't form a dough. You can make corn bread, but not tortillas.

Corn chips, e.g. Fritos, and corn bread don't use nixtamalized corn, but they are quite digestible!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization

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