Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security • Hacker News Board

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#521

Post by hinkley » Tue, May 03, 2022, 4:05 AM UTC

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #456

hinkley wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a couple of particularly noteworthy things about Gabe. His philosophy was a baptism by fire. He ran out of money via a combination of bad decisions and getting hit by a statistical cluster of bad years where the world seemed to be saying Fuck You in Particular (there were 4 years with catastrophic hail storms, and none of his neighbors got hit by more than 3 of them). Some of his crops are targets of opport…

The 55 gallon rain barrels are near useless for small plot irrigation. Larger containers can hold a meaningful amount of water to be useful during sporadic dry spells.

No, the problem is that to get half an inch of water to cover your fields takes a giant storage tank and a giant collection area. Install a hard scape big enough to provide any notable amount of water storage and lack of arable becomes your primary issue.

Rain barrels make a tiny bit of sense in a small urban lot with a large roof. They make no goddamned sense at all in most agricultural contexts.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#522

Post by hinkley » Tue, May 03, 2022, 4:11 AM UTC

User23 wrote: post #514

hinkley wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if this is my theory or just heavily implied but rarely stated in the literature: chemical fertilizers are giving plants something for 'free' that they used to pay for, and the reason the crops get bigger is not strictly because of the fertilizers, but because they get to spend those calories on more fruit. There have even been a few studies that warn that some strains of conventional crops are losing th…

> The "problem", in scare quotes, is that these solutions take more thinking and knowing than scourging your fields every year. But since running a farm practically takes a bachelor's degree these days, that's not really a problem of lack of resource in that area. It's more a problem of perspective and focus. I agree on this point. Every successful farmer I've met has been of notably above average intelligence. Howev…

Gabe Brown seems to be pulling it off, but then again he’s not growing fruit. I’d be curious to see how much Shepard is spending on harvesting his fruit and nuts.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#523

Post by WhyKill » Tue, May 03, 2022, 4:38 AM UTC

It's called compost honey, look it up.

But seriously, composting, no till, stop spraying R0undup aka glyphosate, plant trees in fields, more cover crops, more green mulch, more pollinators, more ponds, more pastureland, more aquaculture, more polyculture in general. The problem is the desert style of farming that led to the dust bowl and will lead to the next one. This comes from a very new (The problem is people got sold a bunch of lies about machines and chemicals and those lies are now coming home to roost. Organic and no till and permaculture are probably the way out of this. You can absorb nitro from the atmosphere but that's one way, nature has been doing it another way for eons.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#524

Post by artificial » Tue, May 03, 2022, 4:42 AM UTC

pphysch wrote: post #501

Melatonic wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Aquaculture is a huge industry in East/SE Asia. There's lots of FUD about China maliciously overconsuming fish, but they actually (sustainably) farm >50% of their seafood IIRC.

The quantity is vast they can be seen from space at night. https://youtu.be/xB6-bAF9B8A

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#525

Post by cinntaile » Tue, May 03, 2022, 5:45 AM UTC

salawat wrote: post #304

cinntaile wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can't ask 2 questions and then claim it's been proven?

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#526

Post by qart » Tue, May 03, 2022, 6:14 AM UTC

johnny22 wrote: post #517

unmole wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Farming in India has been perilous for centuries because it depends on the Monsoon. Improved irrigation, better seeds and yes artificial fertilizers have all significantly improved farm incomes. Nevertheless, structural issues remain. Farmer suicides are not even remotely new and it's disingenous to suggest otherwise. And it has to be pointed out that the suicide rate amongst Indian farmers is lower than the national…

> You'll have to pry Western farming methods from the cold dead hands of Indian farmers. Even the urban intelligencia has shut up about organic/traditional farming after seeing what's happening across the Palk Strait. The indian itelligencia? I'd like to hear more about the commonalities here between equivalent folks in the uhmmm "west"

I think he means people like Vandana Shiva (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandana_Shiva). She's been on plenty of western interviews, talks, etc. advocating organic farming.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#527

Post by r00fus » Tue, May 03, 2022, 6:27 AM UTC

hedora wrote: post #392

mauflows wrote: post #217

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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…

Ethanol is a straw man argument. The option is a) not to produce so much corn and b) not to feed it to animals for slaughter.

We can grow other things, and we can eat less meat.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#528

Post by fsloth » Tue, May 03, 2022, 6:58 AM UTC

throwaway4aday wrote: post #325

fsloth wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans plus agricultural animals are 96% of all the mammalian biomass. In light of these numbers I don't understand the environmental rationalization based on the diets of predators.

You do realize that mammals are the smallest class by biomass right? Well, other than Cnidaria but who counts them anyways.

Of course! But I felt the argument was mostly about mammals (how it's different to talk about predators meat and mans meat eating habits). Pointing out the scale of biomass is of course relevant to this discussion - there is so much of it, it's quite uninnovative humans should fixate on only few species.

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#529

Post by nostrademons » Tue, May 03, 2022, 7:09 AM 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

It's not really as bad as you suspect. A lot of homesteaders target food self-sufficiency on a quarter acre; while there's some debate [1] over whether that's possible, pessimistic estimates for the amount of space needed to feed a skilled organic gardener's family of 4-6 top out at about an acre. A 100x100m plot is about 2.5 acres.

The bigger problems are a.) skills and b.) labor. Homesteading methods basically require full-time gardening by people who have put significant efforts into maximizing yields, intercropping, planting multiple harvests, growing vertically, etc. The advantage of our mechanized farming system is that we can feed the population with 1.4% of the population.

[1] https://www.theseasonalhomestead.com/the-truth-about-self-su...

Re: Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

#530

Post by rdevsrex » Tue, May 03, 2022, 7:30 AM UTC

Melatonic wrote: post #380

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…

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

I agree, but I think it's hard for us non-farmers to grasp the scale of industrial agriculture. I would love it we switched over to another way of doing things, but with 8 billion people, there is no feasible way back to an earlier, organic way of life.

How are we going to feed another 2 billion people let alone those that we have without fossil fuel inputs? Maybe biotech will save us, but I am skeptical.