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

301–310 of 575 posts

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#301

Post by maxerickson »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #136
raverbashing wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but corn is one of the worse sources for alcohol production

I don’t know the story, what’s bad about it? My understanding so far is that the corn used for ethanol isn’t the kind you eat (sweetcorn) it’s a cheaper to produce and more hardy plant but consequently can only really be used for cattle feed and ethanol production. Ages ago i read something that said in the US, corn was the optimal source but in other parts of the world, sugar cane could result in a more energy effic…

Field corn is used to make corn flour.

Most people probably eat way more corn chips and similar than sweet corn.

And then there is corn syrup, but we probably shouldn't eat more of that.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#302

Post by downrightmike »

_8j50 wrote: post #26

If all the land and resource that goes into feeding cows is used for crops, a lot more people can be supported. It has never been a lack of global food shortage, it is always regional anyways.

WE already feed so much of the world, we have a responsibility to the animals we adopted thousands of years ago to keep them thriving.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#303

Post by [deleted] »

jimbokun wrote: post #292
bob1029 wrote: post #288

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 sh…

How about the majority of the world's people who are not first world citizens?

[deleted]

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#304

Post by salawat »

cinntaile wrote: post #194
jiveturkey42 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't blame the individual IT staff or engineers for being foot soldiers of corporate mandate. I do blame the mindset of 'every problem can be solved with enough data'

If you have the right data, I don't see why not?

What heppens when you think you have the right data but don't?

How about when everyone else thinks they have the right data, but don't, you do, but can't scale because of institutional inertia and risk?

Q.E.D.

Farming and logistics are infuriatingly hard problems, toghtly coupled with the fundamental problems of signaling and distributed systems.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#305

Post by throwaway894345 »

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.

As others have pointed out, the US is much less dense than the Netherlands and also the bulk of our development happened in a post-car context--the US literally evolved around the car, and consequently doing away with cars is a much less realistic proposition for the US than it is for the Netherlands.

To that point, most of our streets, roads, and parking spaces are much wider than yours, and can accommodate larger vehicles. As others have noted, we have more people in remote areas, and while Netherlands is obviously an agricultural superpower, your farms are smaller than ours (larger farms require larger equipment).

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#306

Post by Beached »

zo1 wrote: post #284
Beached wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I overall agree with this statement. I'm mostly disagreeing with the yield assumption. the cubins do not grow the same yield per acre as we do. they may have food security/sovereignty, but they do it at the cost of more land then otherwise could have done.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#307

Post by empiricus »

PTOB wrote: post #236
api wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real life despots and fanatics are usually quite a bit crazier and less coherent than Thanos. As usual you have to tone it down to make it believable in fiction. A realistic depiction of a genocidal fanatic would be too stupid or insane to be believable. See: Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler, ISIS, Kim Jong Un, and numerous other examples. If they were rational they would not be despots and fanatics. Unfortunately charismatic l…

Reading _Wizard's First Rule_ right now. "Charisma bypasses the rational mind and shoots straight into the limbic system (as do fear, outrage, etc)." That's pretty much the premise of the book.

Like it best from the series. In a way, each whole volume of the series is to describe one sentence.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#308

Post by bob1029 »

jimbokun wrote: post #292
bob1029 wrote: post #288

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 sh…

How about the majority of the world's people who are not first world citizens?

A shifted American perspective on what food is actually for might help the rest of the world as well.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#309

Post by kristjansson »

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.

Who eats the animals?

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#310

Post by riversflow »

Gordonjcp wrote: post #248
mauflows wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't need meat. And there are many price and institutional barriers to completely grass fed cattle. The primary being that slaughter is centralized to FSIS inspected facilities where most non-poultry spend their final weeks packed in eating soy and corn.

> We don't need meat. We do if we want everyone to eat. Grazing animals are a great way to turn stuff we can't eat into stuff we can eat, and stuff we can use to grow crops that we can also eat.

You know that we share the earth with every other species right? How about we let that stuff we cant eat be food for wild animals?
Post reply on HN