Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security • Hacker News Board

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#281

Post by motohagiography » Mon, May 02, 2022, 4:12 PM UTC

This is an engineered problem. Fertilizer shipments were interrupted by a labour attack by rail workers unions limiting and delaying shipments during planting season, and who are co-ordinating with other groups to create scarcity as a means to impose stronger government social controls. There is an active disinformation campaign about attacks on food processing plants as a means to sow popular panic as well. Yes, fertilizer comes from Ukraine and Russia, but only in single digit percentages, and it also comes from everywhere else in the world. This whole situation has moved beyond a conspiracy to a kind of ideology that has seized western countries. There is a cadre of people who are creating chaos because they think it puts them at the center of it and sets them up to become the party who manages it.

We have the most sophisticated data collection and logistics networks in the history of the world, and you think we just accidentally run out of a fundamental economic factor at a key moment in the natural economic cycle, and that risks mass starvation? We can somehow predict macro climate impacts, but not manage how much fertilizer we're going to need for a planting season? It's just politics by people who use politics as a means to gratify an urge for power for its own end. I would be suprised if people were still acting fooled.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#282

Post by xyzzy21 » Mon, May 02, 2022, 4:15 PM UTC

The Green Revolution of the 1960s proved that we could - that Malthusian claims were BS. What we have now is those same Malthusians actively sabotaging the roots of the Green Revolution by shutting down energy and means of production. Technically mass murder.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#283

Post by tenacious_tuna » Mon, May 02, 2022, 4:15 PM UTC

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #240

tenacious_tuna wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similarly, a sure-fire way to tell someone hasn't lived in a place where you haven't needed a car for every aspect of life is when they criticize anti-car policy without engaging with the deeper reasons behind it :) I think a lot of the pushback against cars have to do with the popularization of human-centric design movements that question the assumption that cars are the pinnacle of transportation that American citi…

Cars give you freedom... yes, they're a cost, they take up space, you have to build around them, but you can move wherever you want, whenever you want. I live in a country with relatively good public transport, relatively great one in the capital and few other large cities, with public bikes and biking lanes. Then 2020 came, and due to covid, no more public transport (for some time). Want to go to work? Too bad. Want…

I would argue that the urban planning that enables the use of cars actually restricts your freedom; you can't go anywhere without your car, and god forbid if you want to go to the store across the stroad, you have to cross 5 lanes of traffic. You can't walk that--or if you do, you have to cross that, and another square mile of parking lot.

Cars are only synonymous with "independence" in the US because we've made it impossible to be independent unless you use this giant metal box to engage with the world. To me, that's the opposite of independence.

Yes, COVID is an extreme situation--but I don't think it's reasonable to plan our daily lives around extreme situations. I see this when people buy their cars--Is it reasonable to buy a pickup truck if you're only going to tow or haul something once a year with it? Is the excess spend in car payment, insurance, gas usage, consumables, and safety hazard worth that convenience? Why not just rent the truck when you need it?

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#284

Post by zo1 » Mon, May 02, 2022, 4:16 PM UTC

Beached wrote: post #263

hosh wrote: post #238

I mean, we have been depleting soil fertility through the use of synthetic fertilizers for decades. It’s been a self-destructive cycle. Perhaps some farmers might switch to practices that are not so dependent upon as much to external inputs … but even switching to things like no-till or using local inputs like manure, or using soil-regenerating practices like polycropping or integrated pest-control is going to take t…

this is possibly, but yields go way down, in some cases by 50% or more. the amount of land that will need to be utilized for food growth will have to drastically increased. not saying this is a bad thing. soil regeneration and more sustainable farming practices are a good thing Imo. it's just that we can't switch to that instantly. yield goes down, takes time to switch, cost likely will increase to make the same $/ac…

The problem is government which has an incentive to "feed everyone" which means cheap food by any means necessary. Food prices must go up, let them naturally go up. That means less food for poorer people, which in turn slowly means less people (lower birth rates, poor and bigger families struggling, etc), until we reach equilibrium with our environment under the terms we accept.

It's the only fair way to do it, IMO.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#285

Post by disambiguation » Mon, May 02, 2022, 4:17 PM UTC

tastyfreeze wrote: post #269

disambiguation wrote: post #162

This is a story about supply chains and inflation, but the real story is that we're in the century of "peak resources". Fertilizer depends on phosphorous which cannot be renewed or substituted once its gone. Without fertilizer we can't support the multi-billion person population we have today. We're not running out tomorrow, or even this decade, but we may experience peak phosphorous within our lifetimes.

In healthy soil phosphorous is released by fungi and bacteria from the sand, silt, and clay. Nobody fertilizes forests or native prairies and they are doing just fine on phosphorous.

agreed nature gets along just fine on its own, but if we're talking about human prosperity I don't think we can sustain ourselves on the bounty of the forest.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#286

Post by incone123 » Mon, May 02, 2022, 4:17 PM UTC

wongarsu wrote: post #51

incone123 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Crickets don't taste like much. But we also each chicken. It's all about how you prepare it.

I meant it as a joke about the size of crickets but I didn't write it very well.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#287

Post by wongarsu » Mon, May 02, 2022, 4:17 PM UTC

Beached wrote: post #263

hosh wrote: post #238

I mean, we have been depleting soil fertility through the use of synthetic fertilizers for decades. It’s been a self-destructive cycle. Perhaps some farmers might switch to practices that are not so dependent upon as much to external inputs … but even switching to things like no-till or using local inputs like manure, or using soil-regenerating practices like polycropping or integrated pest-control is going to take t…

this is possibly, but yields go way down, in some cases by 50% or more. the amount of land that will need to be utilized for food growth will have to drastically increased. not saying this is a bad thing. soil regeneration and more sustainable farming practices are a good thing Imo. it's just that we can't switch to that instantly. yield goes down, takes time to switch, cost likely will increase to make the same $/ac…

Of all corn grain grown in the US, 45% is used as animal feed, and just 12% for human food (the rest is turned into ethanol for fuel) [1]. If it was just a 50% decrease in yield we could offset most of it by only having grass-fed cattle and cutting our meat consumption accordingly. Of course an instant switch would be inconvenient because we don't plant the gourmet variant when we intend to feed it to animals, but with a year of lead time it wouldn't be too bad.

But before modern farming we couldn't sustain more than a billion humans or so, and most of our advancements since then have been from better machinery, watering and most of all fertilizer. Depending on what you cut, you lose way more than 50%.

1: https://extension.okstate.edu/fact-sheets/corn-as-cattle-fee...

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#288

Post by bob1029 » Mon, May 02, 2022, 4:18 PM UTC

I feel like the economics will sort this out automatically, at least for the average first-world citizen.

Most consume way more than they actually utilize for nutritional value. In America, food is entertainment more than anything else. Once the price of this "entertainment" becomes prohibitive, people will start looking at it with the proper perspective.

Simply switching from daily takeout to weekly meal prep can shave $500-1000 off someone's monthly food budget. The time/discipline tradeoff is complex, but ultimately a hungry person will figure something out.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#289

Post by bluedino » Mon, May 02, 2022, 4:18 PM UTC

marklubi wrote: post #257

thinkcontext wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard of the seal issue but never seen any numbers on how widespread the damage is. Got any numbers?

This is anecdotal, but just wanted to give an example that I've personally experienced. We used to race go karts with Rotax engines, and the local series organizers decided to mandate 91 octane pump gas ("cost saving measure") as opposed to the VP racing fuel that the engine was designed to use. The end result was that all the racers ended up having excessive carbon buildup in the cylinder, and would go through sever…

Hot rodders love it - they build their fuel systems for it, though.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#290

Post by jessriedel » Mon, May 02, 2022, 4:19 PM UTC

thinkcontext wrote: post #166

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…

I don't think the numbers you've selected are germane to the conversation. The point of the discussion is how much land substitution there is between animal feed and human feed. The USDA said that in 2013 48% of the US corn crop was used for animal feed, which translates to unbelievably vast acreage. Your numbers indicate that the corn calories are not 100% of the calories consumed by animals. https://www.usda.gov/si…

Well, what it tells us is that corn is a large fraction of the crops fed to animals but a significantly smaller fraction of crops fed to humans.

Indeed, it looks like there are 915M acres of agricultural land in the US, and of which 89.5M (Here’s a pretty good chart:

https://www.arespectfullife.com/2018/08/05/41-of-u-s-land-is...

So if we accept that the pasture range cannot be used for crops, then what we are looking at is the animal feed area (which is both fodder and crops that could be eaten by humans but is eaten by animals). It’s 125M acres, I think, or ~14% of all ag land.