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Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

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Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#391

Post by Supermancho »

Gordonjcp wrote: post #296
kickout wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, this comment is wrong. The US has some of the world most stringent food standards in the world. FDA, USDA, OSHA etc. wield immense regulatory power. Is it perfect? No. You can't sell meat at scale in the USA without the government signing off. It may not be up to your or mine standard, but it has proven successful at getting _quality_ meat into the mouths of millions. Also, I would bet there aren't any cattle…

Quoted post unavailable.

The protection goes both ways, you vs the meat and meat vs YOU.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#392

Post by hedora »

mauflows wrote: post #217
kickout wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Meat is more useful than low energy density gasoline/ethanol mixes that have higher CO2 emissions than regular gasoline.

Cattle could easily be grass fed. You just wait an extra year before selling calfs at auction. However, selling calfs leads to more $/acre of grazing land, and more cows per acre as well. A week or two eating grain in a slaughterhouse (if sold as a full grown cow) is rounding error.

The big problem I see is that the availability of grazing land is plummeting in the US southwest, thanks to desertification and climate change.

That might be offset by marginal farmland being converted to grazing (due to climate change), but that'll reduce grain production.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#393

Post by Supermancho »

magicalist wrote: post #314
kickout wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, this comment is wrong. The US has some of the world most stringent food standards in the world. FDA, USDA, OSHA etc. wield immense regulatory power. Is it perfect? No. You can't sell meat at scale in the USA without the government signing off. It may not be up to your or mine standard, but it has proven successful at getting _quality_ meat into the mouths of millions. Also, I would bet there aren't any cattle…

> I mean, this comment is wrong. The US has some of the world most stringent food standards in the world. FDA, USDA, OSHA etc. wield immense regulatory power. Is it perfect? No. You can't sell meat at scale in the USA without the government signing off. > It may not be up to your or mine standard, but it has proven successful at getting _quality_ meat into the mouths of millions. The GP was maybe a little hyperbolic…

> There are a lot of cattle raised in the Chihuahuan Desert

The cattle in southern california (Corona) were moved en-masse to the central valley as conditions have changed. Grazing traditionally moves north against the global warming trend.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#394

Post by hinkley »

oasisbob wrote: post #375
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…

> 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.

Microbiome needs to be a more commonly known word.

I bought some property that was practically concrete at the beginning of the dry season. I hurt my hand and damaged a tool trying to take a soil sample to send to the lab. A couple years later you'd never know, except that past me was apparently smart enough to take a video that I found when trying to free up some disk space.

Plants, bacteria and fungi all manipulate soil PH for better or for worse, and you can steer that. And keeping soil covered, especially with tall plants, can drop the temperature tens of degrees Celsius. A forest floor is much closer to ground temperature, for a host of reasons.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#395

Post by causasui »

downrightmike wrote: post #302
_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.

Slashing the throats of 55 billion animals every year after only a fraction of their natural lifespan is a very interesting definition of "thriving".

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#396

Post by rmah »

hinkley wrote: post #386
fredgrott wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you familiar of why India and China move to fertilizer in them 1980s saved the from starving? I assure it is not BS. without fertilizer you do not the explosive yields that we get all over th world including the United States. And it is in fact well documented in a huge collection of science journals.

I think you should look at what's going on with agriculture in India right now. There was a lot of bankrupt farmers in the US in the 80's, and that's happening in India over the last decade. Graphically, some farmers are taking their lives by drinking leftover pesticides when they realize they can't afford their crops this year. India is, by many accounts, likely to switch to a new-new form of agriculture sooner than…

Financial viability of farming as a business is independent of yield across all farms in a market. The consequence of radical improvements in agricultural yields lower prices (as a % of unskilled labor income) and usually means that most farmers go out of business (or export most of their crop). The upside is that the society overall gets much much wealthier.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#397

Post by rmah »

zdragnar wrote: post #382
fredgrott wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you familiar of why India and China move to fertilizer in them 1980s saved the from starving? I assure it is not BS. without fertilizer you do not the explosive yields that we get all over th world including the United States. And it is in fact well documented in a huge collection of science journals.

It's an interesting point, but using China as an example of rational agricultural planning is a pretty poor choice considering how recently the famines resulting from the Great Leap Forward were at that point in time.

The famines were from before the rational agricultural planning.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#398

Post by thinkcontext »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #364
thinkcontext wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is disputed. The GAO issued a report that cited research which claimed its worse when taking land use effects into account. In regards to your other question about why its a bad way to produce alcohol, from an EROI perspective, a frequently cited figure is its around 1.5:1 (invest one unit of energy, get 1.5 back). Making it from Brazilian sugar cane on the other hand is 8:1. Whatever the exact numbers are, the…

>> This is disputed Credibly disputed? We’re talking about “big oil” here, you’ll forgive me if my first reaction is to imagine a pre-completed study with all the right conclusions and a big fat cheque hidden under page 3, being shopped around academia looking for someone willing to sign their name to it :-) From a layman’s point of view the claim just smells weird. On one hand, we take carbon out of the atmosphere o…

The same of course goes the other way, Big Ag definitely is able to put its hand on the Department of Ag. The report I referred to is from GAO, which is much more independent than USDA.

I couldn't find the GAO report I mentioned but I found a more recent one published this year by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, one of the more prestigious journals in the world. In their abstract in addition to mentioning US ethanol raised corn prices by 30% and other crop prices by 20% they say it

> ... caused enough domestic land use change emissions such that the carbon intensity of corn ethanol produced under the RFS is no less than gasoline and likely at least 24% higher.

Environmental outcomes of the US Renewable Fuel Standard https://www.pnas.org/doi/suppl/10.1073/pnas.2101084119

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#399

Post by mcguire »

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.

"Fifty-six percent of all land used for corn, soybeans, wheat, and cotton was on farms that used no-till/strip-till on at least part of their cropland in 2010-11: 23 percent of land was on farms that used no-till/strip-till on all land in these crops while 33 percent was on farms that used a mix of no-till, strip-till, and other tillage practices." (From the report summary.)

https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-details/?pubid=440...

Industrialized farming practices are capable of changing.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#400

Post by tomrod »

vkou wrote: post #379
treeman79 wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's basically what I'm hearing too!

    item = np.random.choice(["macroeconomics","Venezuela"])
 
    meme_du_jour: f"tell me you don't know about {item} without telling me you don't know about {item}" 

    print(meme_du_jour)
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