The Coming Food Catastrophe

In Saskatchewan (where I grew up on a farm), when the grain bins get full, some farmers put their grain in shops or sheds normally used for storing farm machinery. Others put it in long giant plastic bags out in their fields. Others build makeshift plywood cylinders on some bare land (such as an already-harvested field). In short, farmers will do what they can to protect their harvests.

Those units are not remotely fungible.

Protein quality of plant protein (as measured by PER or other metrics not explicitly designed to favor soy) is horrendous compared to beef.

Much of the plant material fed to cows is also not even slightly edible to humans, like soy meal.

I would rather have 1lb beef than 10lb nominally edible soy extractives (or wheat, or grass, or inedible soy meal, or other inputs to cattle production).

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-02/war-choki...

> A subsidized flatbread loaf in Egypt sells for the equivalent of about 1 U.S. cent. The country allocates five loaves a day to people in the program and uses the public treasury to compensate bakers for their losses.

> An attempt in the late 1970s by then-President Anwar Sadat to end subsidies on basic foodstuffs triggered riots that left more than 80 people dead, so the government since has resorted to workarounds such as shrinking the size of loaves.

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/egypt-eyes-bread-s...

> CAIRO, Feb 1 (Reuters) - Egypt is considering replacing a popular bread subsidy with cash payments for the poor to protect the budget from soaring global wheat prices, but domestic inflation and a history of protests could make the government opt for a less ambitious reform.

> Under the existing program, more than 60 million Egyptians, or nearly two thirds of the population, get 5 loaves of round bread daily for 50 cents a month, little changed since countrywide "bread riots" prevented a price hike in the 1970s.

So I read this book called "How Asia Works" which documented the economic transformations of a few different Asian countries.

I was shocked to learn that in a lot of cases, the industrial farming not the huge boon that was expected efficiently a few people can grow things with intensely you can plant small plot farms.

Countries that promoted small-scale household farming instead of moving too soon to large scale farming were more successful, but this was largely because the labor pool can't transition that fast to going from farmers being everyone one in ten overnight.

We live at a time where very few people work in farming, the smallest amount in history. Why can't it slide back the other way?