Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

bloombergquint.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 575 posts

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#221

Post by jiveturkey42 »

phpnode wrote: post #190
jiveturkey42 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To make this work there would need to be a big social push towards eating in line with the seasons again (which was obviously the norm for 99.99% of the history of humanity). I think this might be a hard sell, people are now very used to being able to buy whatever they want whenever they want, e.g. strawberries in january

Seasonal eating of farm-fresh foods would certainly make free public healthcare a more reasonable proposal in the US. It would surely cut into the bottom line of the pharma industry

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#222

Post by ajross »

wincy wrote: post #206
leokennis wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two counter points. - Where I live (The Netherlands) you don’t have to live in a city to have good PT. There are places that you cannot reach by train or bus but they are few. - While sometimes a car is necessary, the cars many people prefer (insanely oversized “trucks”) are hardly ever necessary.

The United States is 200x larger in size (excluding Alaska) but has only 20x as many people as the Netherlands.

The urban cores of New York and Boston are denser than any city in Europe! I mean, yes, it's true that the "empty" spaces are much bigger in the Americas. But you don't need a personal automobile to reach places you go only occasionally, and often for leisure. There's absolutely no reason that kind of lifestyle is impossible here.

It's not what we chose[1], but there's certainly nothing about the geography the precludes it. The focus, and later dependence, on extended exurbs connected with roads for private vehicles is very much a policy decision.

[1] Actually it is what we chose, up until the 1950's, when we chose to build in different ways.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#223

Post by goatlover »

typest wrote: post #207
throwaway894345 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite are the threads about how we need to get rid of cars and switch everyone to public transit and cycling. :)

As someone who is strongly wants to "get rid of cars and switch everyone to public transit and cycling" -- no one is talking about doing this in rural areas. Should we decrease reliance on cars in cities and focus more on alternative forms of transport? Yes. Will this work in rural areas? No, of course not.

Will it work in suburbs and medium-sized cities, particularly in the US? There's around 280 US cities between 100,000 and 500,000 people.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#224

Post by honkdaddy »

leokennis wrote: post #201
throwaway894345 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite are the threads about how we need to get rid of cars and switch everyone to public transit and cycling. :)

Two counter points. - Where I live (The Netherlands) you don’t have to live in a city to have good PT. There are places that you cannot reach by train or bus but they are few. - While sometimes a car is necessary, the cars many people prefer (insanely oversized “trucks”) are hardly ever necessary.

The 'insanely oversized "trucks"' are necessary for reasons probably not evident if you grew up in a country like NT. I'm from a small town in rural Ontario, Canada where most people drive a 4WD vehicle largely because they'd never get out of their snow-filled driveway in a tiny European style car. Lots of country roads are literally impassable without a large machine; having a truck of some kind is more or less a necessity for plenty of rural folks.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#225

Post by ajross »

hunterb123 wrote: post #212
leokennis wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two counter points. - Where I live (The Netherlands) you don’t have to live in a city to have good PT. There are places that you cannot reach by train or bus but they are few. - While sometimes a car is necessary, the cars many people prefer (insanely oversized “trucks”) are hardly ever necessary.

> (insanely oversized “trucks”) are hardly ever necessary. As someone with a truck constantly having to lend it for friends to use, I disagree. Not sure exactly what you meant by insanely oversized, but a lift kit and tires aren't abnormal, they have use for off-roading / mudding which is fairly popular. It's both a style preference and lifestyle preference. Good luck using a car if you have a lot of outdoor hobbies…

Isn't the fact that your friends don't need a truck because they can borrow one occasionally evidence against your point? I mean, yes, it's true that it would be nicer if they'd rent one instead of impose on you. But clearly they don't "need" trucks of their own, because they have access to shared resources.

This is the kind of absolutist argument that these threads always fall into. You hear someone say "not everyone needs a truck!" or "there are too many trucks!", and hear "You, personally, should not own a truck". No, clearly trucks are useful vehicles and need to exist for people to use. But we also build and deploy way too many of them. Those facts can be true at the same time.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#226

Post by robonerd »

lm28469 wrote: post #139
thriftwy wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hm sounds like a bold claim, unless you consider grains as grass. Fully grass fed beef account for 1% of the beef sold in the US for example, and god knows what percentage of this comes from 0 fertiliser crops It's a bit disingenuous to say that animal proteins don't need fertiliser when in fact the extreme vast majority of the animals we eat are fed products or byproducts coming from intensive agriculture which uses…

> Fully grass fed beef

Typically, "grain fed" cattle are fed with grass for most of their life, and then "finished" in grain lots to plump them up before sale. They aren't raised from birth to steak on grain.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#227

Post by jonhohle »

oh_sigh wrote: post #214
EricE wrote: post #184

We've been doing stupid crap - like subsidizing corn production for ethanol - that seriously needs to end. The amount of government/market mismanagement and interference driven by special interests is beyond ridiculous. The rubber band is beginning to snap!

Doesn't that mean we have extra corn that can be used for human/animal consumption if shit hits the fan? Right now we're growing a bunch of crops that don't feed anyone, but it would not be hard at all to have that be the case. Much easier than the whole process of starting from scratch to get new farmland ready for growing corn.

Ethanol corn can be digested by animals but not humans.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#228

Post by ajsnigrutin »

simonsarris wrote: post #215
EricE wrote: post #184

We've been doing stupid crap - like subsidizing corn production for ethanol - that seriously needs to end. The amount of government/market mismanagement and interference driven by special interests is beyond ridiculous. The rubber band is beginning to snap!

Excess agricultural capacity is generally a good idea. If we have zero excess in the system, then when a hiccup occurred we might find ourselves in famine. With corn-for-ethanol, the US gov is paying to keep farmland productive that has no human-or-livestock feed value. But you could imagine a situation where more human or livestock feed is needed (massive disruption of cropland, say), and in those or subsequent year…

Can't this corn-for-ethanol be used directly as livestock feed or even human food if needed?

Also, I have no idea where i heard it, but i remember from somewhere, that pretty much all of the pet food has to be edible by humans too, "just in case" shit hits the fan..

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#229

Post by MerelyMortal »

pjc50 wrote: post #134
catchclose8919 wrote: post #109

Quoted post unavailable.

> Hope we at least go for number (1) and do the trimming at the top where it needs to happen. Do not advocate for mass murder on HN. > Why don't we have more, spread around the world, and capable of slight over-production just in case? Because we don't have global centralized economic planning, and overcapacity costs money? Besides, only one of the three NPK is really "produced" in a plant, the other two are mined. (…

I don't think OP is advocating for mass murder.

OP is saying that when presented with two terrible things, they hope for the one which reduces overall deathes and concentrates it with the people that most likely caused the situation to happen.

Post reply on HN