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The Coming Food Catastrophe

economist.com

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Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#281

Post by ncpa-cpl »

colechristensen wrote: post #70
LegitShady wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had read somewhere that the varieties of corn grown for ethanol are not the same as the varieties grown for food but can't find the article now.

There are special varieties of corn you can grow for ethanol, but you don't have to, the ethanol plants do not require it. There are required varieties and practices for growing corn intended for direct human consumption (i.e. making cornmeal or breakfast cereal). Most corn though goes to animal feed, industrial uses (corn starch, syrup, etc), or export. (source: am a 5th generation corn farmer)

Hi! Just wanted to ask, are the cultivars or varieties for corn for human food, ethanol and corn for cattle feed different?

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#282

Post by Gordonjcp »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #144

The article actually has four solutions at the bottom. Compared to the severity of the problem, all four solutions are surprisingly simple. Not necessarily easy, but simple and straightforward. 1. Stop using so much corn to make ethanol. 2. Stop using so much seed oil to make biodiesel. 3. Stop feeding so much food to livestock. Bonus: reducing the livestock population provides short term calories! 4. Break the Black…

3. If you can figure out how to eat grass, you'll be rich.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#283

Post by trhway »

corrral wrote: post #205
devit wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they can ship the food to Odessa (presumably by truck or train), it seems like they would be able to ship it to a port in a non-blockaded foreign country instead (e.g. Turkey, Greece, Italy, Poland).

It'd take a lot of trucks and train cars to move one ship's worth of grain. Consider that highways, train lines, and ports don't necessarily have a ton of extra capacity available, for reasons of economy, that upgrading those takes time, and can be hard to finance if the situation is perceived to be temporary (so, may take significant government intervention to make it happen). Plus, you go to all the effort and expe…

Russia has already struck the Zatoka bridge south/west of Odessa, the best/shortest route from Odessa to Danube river and Black Sea ports in Romania.

Most of the trains in Ukraine is electric-pulled. Russia has already struck most of the railway power transforming stations. Ukraine has very limited number of diesel trains. It can't use European ones because of different wheelbase. (correction thanks to the commenter below - gauge, not wheelbase)

Russia has already stolen about 500 000 tons of wheat from Ukraine and delivered it to Assad, its ally in Syria. Russia runs very intensive propaganda campaign representing European help to Ukraine wrt. wheat export as basically Europe stealing the wheat. Its propaganda also celebrates the food prices rising in the "collective West" countries as supposed result of the sanctions, and Russia will do anything to stimulate the rise of the prices in order to foment public push against the sanctions.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#284

Post by TaylorAlexander »

lazide wrote: post #278
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh certainly it is important to have some kind of cut-off to prevent back-feeding the power lines, but I thought that would just be part of the system design.

It is! The easiest design is to require existing grid stable power and supplement it. :) Anything else is difficult to do reliably, and would generally require some kind of smart monitoring system, electrically actuated mains rated switch (not easy, cheap or durable it turns out), additional sensors, etc. The design we're talking about just doesn't output power unless there is an existing sine wave to follow. Pretty…

That makes sense! I guess being new to this it is just counter intuitive to think that you could install a big solar panel system and still suffer power outages. But I see what you mean.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#285

Post by kazinator »

Gordonjcp wrote: post #282
bryanlarsen wrote: post #144

The article actually has four solutions at the bottom. Compared to the severity of the problem, all four solutions are surprisingly simple. Not necessarily easy, but simple and straightforward. 1. Stop using so much corn to make ethanol. 2. Stop using so much seed oil to make biodiesel. 3. Stop feeding so much food to livestock. Bonus: reducing the livestock population provides short term calories! 4. Break the Black…

3. If you can figure out how to eat grass, you'll be rich.

Surely, we must know how to do this. I mean, we know how grass-eating ruminants break down the cellulose to obtain energy with various enzymes and whatnot. We could probably invent some kind of exo-stomach to pre-digest grass into an edible state. :)

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#286

Post by sbf501 »

Scoundreller wrote: post #112
sbf501 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really hard, I had four 8x4 raised beds (all I could fit) for 5 years. The amount of space and time it takes to produce enough food to replace actual meals for more than just a few times in the summer is absolutely astonishing (unless you like squash all the time). I grew tomatoes, kale, squash, onions, lettuce and peppers. It tasted great, and got some salads and side dishes out of it, but that was about it.…

> And it only yielded from July to August Where are you? I’m near Toronto, started my seedlings indoors ~6 weeks ago, and already eating small kale leaves and lettuce that’s somehow growing in the grass. A dying apple tree gave me more than I could eat for 2-3 months last year. Gonna plant a pear tree in the front yard.

Middle of Washington state, off I5.

The last few years I planted I got my starts going real early in my basement and we had an early spring and I was over the moon. But I had a few cold springs that didn't warm up until June and had to replant multiple times. Rookie mistakes and bad luck. :)

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#287

Post by Johnny555 »

toolz wrote: post #241
gcheong wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was she griping about with the garden? Chickens I can understand if there are smell complaints. In San Francisco you are allowed to keep them but there are rules about the number you can have and the minimum distance their enclosure can be to any neighbors window, etc. But squash? That’s really an odd thing to complain about.

backyard chickens don't have a smell, that's only once you start mass producing them in a factory. The same way yours or your neighbors dogs, that produce substantially more feces than a chicken, don't cause neighborhood wide odor.

My biggest problem with my neighbor's chickens was that they kept getting out an coming over to my property and he'd have to ask me to let him in the back yard so he could take them back home. Never noticed any smells near their coop which was near the property line.

Never really bothered me since they mostly just hung out around the back fence far from my house, but finally another neighbor complained to the city and they had to get rid of the chickens. Chickens are allowed here (up to 10 per property), but have to be kept confined and on your own property.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#288

Post by corrral »

giantg2 wrote: post #272
corrral wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd expect a couple years at least. A quick Google gives common wisdom that you still want anti-weevil measures (bay leaves in the bag, the aforementioned diatomaceous earth) with that method. My point with that part was just that you have to do the vacuum sealing (unless you're buying a product with all this taken care of, which I'd assume is expensive) and such, at least, which means more equipment and material tha…

"What they were into, big time, was canning vegetables, and gardening (to grow stuff to put in the cans). Man, were they ever into canning vegetables." Ditto

I became aware of the world just as seasonal food availability was becoming a thing of the past—I remember significantly more seasonal variation, but only when I was pretty young—so this really stuck with me growing up. All those colorful jars lined up on shelves, all the gardening, all the boiling-of-jars, et c. All that work, and a can of the same thing was $0.29 at the store.

So I assume they all developed these super-similar habits for really great reasons. And since the ~1960s and earlier were just normally pretty similar to what a significant food shortage would probably look like now (at least in countries that will almost certainly be able to maintain adequate supplies of staples, like the US) it seems to me that might be a good first place to look. Stock up on canned veggies, worry less about the rest of it. Maybe get some chickens and plant some berry bushes (they also all loved keeping a line or two of berry bushes, and it seems like in their generations you just alway kept chickens, if you weren't smack in the middle of town)

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#289

Post by sbf501 »

wott wrote: post #246
sbf501 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really hard, I had four 8x4 raised beds (all I could fit) for 5 years. The amount of space and time it takes to produce enough food to replace actual meals for more than just a few times in the summer is absolutely astonishing (unless you like squash all the time). I grew tomatoes, kale, squash, onions, lettuce and peppers. It tasted great, and got some salads and side dishes out of it, but that was about it.…

You don't need a community effort or astonishingly vast land to grow potatoes :-) What I mean by that is that the choice of stuff you grow matters. Lettuce, peppers (and one might add tomatoes) won't feed you much indeed. They are however indeed interesting in small spaces when you don't expect them to feed you but to provide you nice, fresh extras. I mean, I produce about 800 lbs of vegetables by spending 20 mn a da…

Agreed! I was just getting into it and trying various things. If I had grown up with family that did it I probably would have had better odds. Also, I've always wanted to try a root cellar, too, but alas, no space for that.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#290

Post by Gordonjcp »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #254
postalrat wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Triggering world war 3 would also help reduce the population which could reduce co2 emissions and food requirements. Killing a few birds with one stone.

This doesn't really make any sense though. It changes nothing about the geopolitical reality of what's going on. If the US sends a merchant ship and a cruiser, what is russia going to do exactly? Try to bomb the ships? They will lose, and get shot down. Why would it suddenly be WWIII? Is russia really going to say "Well, they shot down our plane so its global thermonuclear war time".

> Why would it suddenly be WWIII? Is russia really going to say "Well, they shot down our plane so its global thermonuclear war time".

Because Vladimir Putin is currently very very defective.

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