Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security • Hacker News Board

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#351

Post by tastyfreeze » Mon, May 02, 2022, 5:16 PM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #326

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…

For anybody that is interested in reading more on the symbiosis of plants and fungi:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizosphere

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1906655116

https://regenerationinternational.org/why-regenerative-agric...

Some proponents of regenerative agriculture to learn from are:

Joel Salatin - https://www.polyfacefarms.com/

Ray Archuleta - https://soilhealthacademy.org/team/ray-archuleta/

Gabe Brown - http://brownsranch.us/

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#352

Post by simmanian » Mon, May 02, 2022, 5:20 PM UTC

Beached wrote: post #297

hosh wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yields for a specific crop goes down in polycropping. Yield across the entire portfolio goes up. Plus, crop failure and marker failure of any one crop doesn’t mean complete failure — the other crop still yields something. It becomes less of betting the farm. And, soil rebuilding takes time. No-till won’t really start becoming advantageous until about year 4 or 5. But like I said — the Cubans had to do this. They were…

from what I understand / have read. yields go down per acre when moving from synthetic fertilizer to organic / natural fertilization. not just in the immediate, but forever. soil health, nutrition, crop resilience all go up, input and input cost go down, but so does overall yield per acre. from all the reading I have done, and in my own experience with a shitty 3acre hobby farm, overall yield per acre never reaches a…

>3 acre hobby farm

I've been thinking about getting a hobby farm as well. Do you have any recommendations on where to start or tips? I can't even tell if I can just buy a plot of land in some unincorporated area and use it for whatever I see fit (CA).

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#353

Post by kderbyma » Mon, May 02, 2022, 5:20 PM UTC

Communities should be more designed to self sustain. they should build aquaponics into sky scrapers and have tenants split the costs and the profits.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#354

Post by db65edfc7996 » Mon, May 02, 2022, 5:21 PM UTC

throw-nocoiner wrote: post #343

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…

An interesting trivia: Dividing the available arable land by global population leaves only a 100x100m plot per person - and that's before barns, silos, houses or warehouses. That's not a whole lot - as a city dweller, I'm confident I'd starve the first winter if not earlier Modern agriculture is really impressive - farmers manage to feed around 10-20 people from such a plot

That is a super fun fact. Not that it changes the calculus, but I would be curious what percentage of human calories come from water sources (fishing, seaweed, lobster, etc).

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#355

Post by alcover » Mon, May 02, 2022, 5:21 PM UTC

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…

  >  The time/discipline tradeoff is complex

It's really not.

Here's how I do : once a week buy lots vegetables at the market. Once every two days, put a good deal of veggies + rice/lentils (+ rarely chicken) in a casserole. Add little water, cover, let cook very gently.

Now you have good food for two days. And cheap. And dead easy to make.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#356

Post by kristjansson » Mon, May 02, 2022, 5:27 PM UTC

xyzzy21 wrote: post #282

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.

The Green Revolution proved we could increase crop production through additional inputs, not magic. We moved the constraint from local soil conditions to global resource extraction.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#357

Post by pkaye » Mon, May 02, 2022, 5:28 PM UTC

nkg wrote: post #324

cerol wrote: post #107

Food security always makes me think about food waste. When I was 17 years old I went to Sweden as part of a cultural exchange program (I'm from South America). One of the first things that shocked me was the sheer amount of food being wasted for no reason whatsoever. In my country, even though I come from a privileged family, you can't shield yourself away from poverty. Throughout my entire life living with my parent…

We waste a third of what we produce. If you take into account what we burn in the process (fertilizer, fuel, water, manpower), you'll realize how bad are our consumption habits. "In the United States 30 per cent of all food, worth US$48.3 billion (€32.5 billion), is thrown away each year." "The food currently wasted in Europe could feed 200 million people (FAO, 2013)." Source: https://www.unep.org/thinkeatsave/get-in…

Its not clear if US is any worse of that other countries based on this UN study. The data is very noisy and many developing countries don't have high confidence estimates of waste. Lack of temperature controlled storage and reliable transportation infrastructure can be a big issue in developing countries for example.

https://catalogue.unccd.int/1679_FoodWaste.pdf

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#358

Post by brimble » Mon, May 02, 2022, 5:29 PM UTC

cerol wrote: post #138

scns wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My brother worked for a help organization in africa for 1,5 years. When he came back, he told me that they throw food away too. I only cook as much as i can eat.

I don't think food waste can be eliminated. I would even argue that there is threshold after which a decrease in food waste comes at the expense of quality of nutrition. Even in my university's restaurant, which feeds students on a massive industrial scale, I see food waste. But even in a much bigger scale, the amount was significantly less. Elimination of food waste is not practical and should not be a goal, you'll…

Food waste is mostly just a sign that food is very cheap. Cheap enough that it's not worth trying to save or find another use for what's wasted.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#359

Post by KarlKemp » Mon, May 02, 2022, 5:31 PM UTC

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.

Sure, but why should people‘s income decide who lives and who dies? I’d say let’s kill all the psychopaths first. Like those fantasizing about mass starvation.

On a less violent note, every country has seen birth rates decline as it became richer. Modern western societies only grow through immigration, and even many countries in, say, Africa, have seen drastic declines. Humanity doesn’t expand until it unavoidably runs out of food, that’s a 19th century idea.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#360

Post by hinkley » Mon, May 02, 2022, 5:31 PM UTC

giantg2 wrote: post #344

etrautmann wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting, but a slight oversimplication since nitrogen isn't coming from the minerals. As long as nitrogen fixation can still occur (via decomposition of something organic, etc), I think the general principle seems reasonable, though not an expert.

Or from crop rotations of legumes with nitrogen fixing microbes. But that too would require a move away from intensive industrialized agricultural practices.

Toby Hemenway forwarded a notion that water cycles are sufficient to transport nitrogen from nitrogen-rich plants to their neighbors as a continuous basis instead of on an annual one. The model he builds from research he had read goes something like this:

After a rain, as the soil goes from waterlogged to dry, there are phases that are hostile to root hairs and ones that are conducive. So the plant roots pulse with these cycles, advancing and retreating, sometimes arriving at places vacated by other plants. By this mechanism, any plant can scavenge some of the nitrogen left in the decaying root hairs of their neighbors.

I would also warn that thinking nitrogen=legume is a potentially limiting strategic error. While something like 7% of all plants fall into the Fabaceae (legume) family, some other pockets of the Fabales order also have root nodules, in particular, alder, and up into the Rosids clade (buckthorn, ceanothus), and then a few odd stragglers like borage, which makes me wonder if it's a taxonomic problem, parallel evolution, or what.

And then there's mondo grass (asparagaceae), which nobody expects to have root nodules. I knew about that plant for about two decades before someone pointed out it's nitrogen fixing, and that's not even in the wikipedia article. And in fact I'm having a dickens of a time finding a citation for that.