331–340 of 575 posts
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.
What's your suggested next step? Line up the 'technical mass murderers' against the wall?
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So why not argue for a return to pasture and grass fed and finished cattle then? A lot more people would be willing to agree with you. Intensive use of feedlots has only been going on since the 60s due to an increased demand for beef. The message should be to moderate our consumption of beef and give the cattle a better life at pasture rather than crammed into a feedlot.
There are roughly 1 billion head of cattle in the world, depending on the soil and climate you need anywhere from 2-25 acres per head of cattle to 100% grass feed them (in areas where this is done, obviously 25 acres of desert isn't going to feed a cow). Even if we assume an average of 3 acres per head, you're looking at 3 billion acres of land just to keep beef going (never mind the 785 million pigs and 33 billion c…
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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 preclu…
> 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.
It's an amalgamation of a hundred years of policy decisions and private investment based around those decisions, and it would take as long to reverse it even if there was political appetite for it. And there's not much appetite for it because most people prefer the convenience and comfort of cars. To that end:
> There's absolutely no reason that kind of lifestyle is impossible here.
It's not a matter of whether that lifestyle is possible, but whether it's desirable. Most Americans find the convenience and comfort of cars to be preferable to public transit.
Global food shortage always feels like "well, I'm not concerned many other countries will be hit first". Many countries will literally have issues, but the food will _also_ be a lot more expensive for all of us. The coming years will be "fun" (and I mean bad, to be clear).
Middle East is starting to have issues. This will impact oil prices.
The fungi guys will tell you that running out of mineral fertilizer is bullshit on roughly 95% of the arable land because all of the minerals your food needs are right there in the sand and clay. I once heard it described that conventional agriculture is essentially a hydroponics system using partially sterilized soil as the substrate. Nearly every symbiotic relationship fungi make is based on buying sugars from plan…
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…
Synthetic fertilizers do not deplete soil fertility. Some agricultural practices do, with a strong emphasis on mono-culture, but it is wrong to throw everything in the same bag. Growing without synthetic fertilizers appeals to the symbiotic Nature living, I get that. It's an ideal like any other, maybe worth of pursuit. But we first need to make peace with the fact that we'll either: a) Be able to feed about a billio…
Runoff to freshwater inducing toxicity is one major impact from over fertilization, which is not an implication of the product itself, but it's over use.
I'm told. IANA farmer but I know many and worked with ag and water quality researchers for a few years in MN, USA.
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Nope. Go after ethanol if you want wasted corn. We like/need meat, and there is plenty of corn production or grazing land to accommodate that production. Something like 30-50M buffalo lived and grazed in North America before they were all killed. The ecosystem can most certainly sustain 30-50M cattle grazing. They wouldn't be as _profitable_ as corn-finished cattle, but they produce meat.
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.
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?
At the same time it also depends on what that local population really is used too - different to compare Asia, South East Asia to Africa.
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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.
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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 ne…
Yeah but thirty years ago they were all little 2WD Nissans and Toyotas with a few bales of hay in the back. The trucks you're talking about were kind of family tractors and would rarely be used for distance. They all got like 9mpg and just needed to run when something got stuck.