Communities should be more designed to self sustain. they should build aquaponics into sky scrapers and have tenants split the costs and the profits.
How are ten ants supposed to afford a sky scraper?
Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security
371–380 of 575 posts
Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security
#372The 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…
Most of the nitrogen in currently living humans was captured from the atmosphere via the Haber Bosch process.
That is the primary contribution of synthetic fertilizer, and there aren't scalable natural processes to match it. Countries used to go to war over nitrogen stores (such as islands covered in bat guano).
Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security
#373The 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.
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Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security
#374The 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…
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.
I'm not the one oversimplifying, it's 'modern' agronomists that are oversimplifying.
Nitrogen is 70% of our atmosphere. When you remove all other plant life in order to get the last 20% of theoretical yield from your land, you end up having to manually provide all of the services that were provided by the plants you killed. The Green Revolution is a petrochemical revolution. Cooking allows us to use lignin calories to recover more calories from our existing food supply. Livestock do the same, either by converting grasses (ungulates) or recycling unpalatable foods (pigs).
When the petrochemicals become expensive we will have to go forward and/or backward to some other solution (most likely old solutions with new twists). The sibling comment with the huge bibliography points to some of the more coherent voices in the world of polyculture agriculture, although Gabe Brown exists in a sort of grey area between aggressive crop rotation and polyculture.
Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security
#375The 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…
> There are a few places with strange soil compositions that are actually lacking in particular minerals.
pH and temperature are pretty easy and common ways for soil to keep essential minerals away from the plant life which could utilize them.
Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Do you support social Darwinism? It is "dismal" but unnecessary through good governance. We really do have enough resources to ensure moderate standards of living. Political upheaval would be appropriately considered a market failure.
With enough effort all counties could be like Venezuela!
Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
UC has tons of classes and workshops on farming/gardening you can take, ranging from weekend workshops to apprenticeships to online courses to hands on training. Or honestly there are tons of forums and internet communities that have lots of free resources and advice if you look for them.
https://ucanr.edu/sites/UrbanAg/Resources_and_Help/Farm_Trai...
Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security
#378I 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…
Aren't calorie dense (nutrient poor) foods already the cheapest because they are the easiest to produce?
Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you support social Darwinism? It is "dismal" but unnecessary through good governance. We really do have enough resources to ensure moderate standards of living. Political upheaval would be appropriately considered a market failure.
With enough effort all counties could be like Venezuela!
What, a petrostate that mismanaged its major industry, that was later sanctioned and embargoed by its biggest trading partner for political reasons?
Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security
#380The 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…
Yea the way we do mass farming now is MASSively flawed. It produces huge yields but has tons of fragility - monoculture crops being a huge flaw as well.
The one that fascinates me the most is the way the Mayans did it - Chinampas. That and aquaculture growing lots of smaller fish seems like a create combo if we could get small backyard pond/farms going