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The fertilizer shortage will persist in 2023

modernfarmer.com

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Re: The fertilizer shortage will persist in 2023

#91

Post by vikingerik »

danuker wrote: post #4
Waterluvian wrote: post #2

Few things have a single cause, but I think it's not outlandish to hypothesize that potential pending famines could be driven by a fertilizer shortage, driven by Russia's invasion and global economic issues, driven by the pandemic. Maybe this is obvious to those smarter than I, but I'm beginning to have a sinking sense that direct deaths by SARS-COV2 will be a shockingly small minority of total deaths caused by the p…

I doubt it. In as much as they are allowed to function, markets will reward people addressing the shortages with outsized profit. Same as getting through the energy crisis, we can overcome the food crisis, one obstacle at a time. The connectedness of economies is also an advantage. Shipping rates are almost at a 3-year low: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/baltic The greatest risk are policies forbidding "price…

For any past-3-years timespan currently, you'll get the right picture only by looking at the numbers in light of consideration from the pandemic.

It's not that rates are low now, it's that they were temporarily high for three years, during the pandemic shutdowns and backlogged demand from that.

(Same goes for the apparent recession in 2022. That was mostly an artifact of the pandemic numbers, comparing 2022 to a 2021 that was artificially high from time-shifted backlogged demand from 2020.)

Re: The fertilizer shortage will persist in 2023

#92

Post by marginalia_nu »

seiferteric wrote: post #77
marginalia_nu wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That still dozens, if not hundreds of kilometers the fertilizer somehow needs to walk.

It's water soluble.

Sure, but why is it pulled sideways and not down, and why does it move toward the river of all directions it could move?

Re: The fertilizer shortage will persist in 2023

#93

Post by ClumsyPilot »

danuker wrote: post #46
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I doubt it. In as much as they are allowed to function, markets will reward people addressing the shortages with outsized profit This is dangerous, fantasy thinking detached fromt the real world.v If there is shortage of food today, you plant wheat today, it will be ready to eat in 7 months. If it's not the right time to plant, it could be a year. By that time, people will be dead already. Now, we don't even have i…

How is my thinking dangerous? Not allowing profit is dangerous, because it won't attract suppliers. High prices might prompt some people elsewhere to reduce their consumption, in favor of ones more in need. You can address some of the future price uncertainties with a futures market. That way, you can see what the price you'll get in 7 months' time, and decide what you should plant. But if a place has no means of gro…

> High prices might prompt some people elsewhere to reduce their consumption

By dying. There is a famine in madagascar right now.v

> in favor of ones more in need.

Do you need 1 kg of bacon more than a poor family in madagascar needs 10kg of wheat that was used to feed your bacon?

> How is my thinking dangerous?

Because men than need to feed their children might grab torches and pitchforks

Free market does not store food hust in case of a. once in a decade famine. Free market has never been effective at disaster responce in any country on earth.

Re: The fertilizer shortage will persist in 2023

#94

Post by tengbretson »

ilostmyshoes wrote: post #73
mattpallissard wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why the general tone of HN seems to be that modern farming isn't changing at all. Erosion has been on everyone's radar for decades. We went from plow -> till -> low till -> no till. Believe me, the folks who do this talk about plowing practices and cover crops. They also discuss GMO crops and the crazy legal restrictions around seed that come with it. > Brown earth has a deep top layer where most of the…

What they don't seem to be talking about is learning from indigenous farming communities who use things like diversity in crops and rotation to keep soil quality high. These problems were solved decades ago, just not by the industrial farming community

It's like everyone who's ever watched a YouTube video about planting a 3 sisters garden has an opinion for the people actually staking their livelihood on this now.

Re: The fertilizer shortage will persist in 2023

#95

Post by knewter »

ceejayoz wrote: post #49
bryanlarsen wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This war has one primary cause: Putin. Anything else is a very distant secondary. COVID caused Putin to isolate and become paranoid, but it's still Putin's fault, not COVID's.

Putin's motivations predate the war, too; the invasion of Crimea was in 2014, and before that was Georgia in 2008.

I always find it interesting when people being up the 2014 Ukraine situation without referencing the call from Victoria Nuland discussing who the US was going to put in charge ("surprisingly", those ended up being the government the people elected)

https://odysee.com/@AdamFitzgerald:2/Victoria-Nuland-Phone-C...

Re: The fertilizer shortage will persist in 2023

#96

Post by kragen »

WillAdams wrote: post #72

We are currently burning (or applying as fertilizer) 10 calories of petrochemical energy to get 1 calorie of food energy --- we need to rebalance this equation somehow.

i have heard this before, so i looked at the underlying research

it is not true and has never been true for the food supply in general

it is true in a few expensive crops of low calorie content; i think lettuce and almonds were the ones i saw

Re: The fertilizer shortage will persist in 2023

#97

Post by gjadi »

photochemsyn wrote: post #19

A remarkable amount of the fertilizer applied via modern industrial farming practices is just wasted: > "According to an average of 13 global databases from 10 data sources, in 2010, 161 teragrams of nitrogen were applied to agricultural crops, but only 73 teragrams of nitrogen made it to the harvested crop. A total of 86 teragrams of nitrogen was wasted, perhaps ending up in the water, air, or soil. The new research…

This kind of robot are already being developed and tested.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV0cR_Nhac0 Sniper robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals | Challengers

Re: The fertilizer shortage will persist in 2023

#98

Post by osigurdson »

prepend wrote: post #43
Avicebron wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it's cool and all to want to work on AI+Robots, because obviously that's where this thought is coming from because who wants to actually work in the fields am I right?\s I think it's more important to think about market fit and margins of farming, in what world is introducing a complex, expensive machine to an already thin margin industry a practical solution? The reason it's inefficient and wasteful isn't beca…

> in what world is introducing a complex, expensive machine to an already thin margin industry a practical solution In the world where it is cheaper than the rising price of fertilizer.

Agree. Not sure if the OP checked the price of modern farm equipment lately. I’m pretty sure $500K for certain things is not uncommon.

Re: The fertilizer shortage will persist in 2023

#99

Post by randomdata »

ilostmyshoes wrote: post #73
mattpallissard wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why the general tone of HN seems to be that modern farming isn't changing at all. Erosion has been on everyone's radar for decades. We went from plow -> till -> low till -> no till. Believe me, the folks who do this talk about plowing practices and cover crops. They also discuss GMO crops and the crazy legal restrictions around seed that come with it. > Brown earth has a deep top layer where most of the…

What they don't seem to be talking about is learning from indigenous farming communities who use things like diversity in crops and rotation to keep soil quality high. These problems were solved decades ago, just not by the industrial farming community

We do. Perhaps you may not recognize our lingo. For example, around here we humorously refer to wheat as 'poverty grass' because there is no money in growing it but recognize it as a necessity to keep in the rotation for the ecological health benefits it provides.

Re: The fertilizer shortage will persist in 2023

#100

Post by pjc50 »

hammock wrote: post #13
Waterluvian wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then, the ignition is lost in the flame. Goosebumps from this line. It's apt and thoughtful. I'm thinking about how these events can be fractal-like. The past few years of active pandemic have felt like the "flame" but could be seen as the "ignition" for countless other, possibly even worse global events. It's like a Great Tree Shaking: all non-resilient systems began showing cracks of one size or another, cascadin…

Lost ignitions: the research being done in Wuhan, the 2014-2022 civil war in Ukraine, the Las Vegas mass shooting, etc?

Three totally unrelated things? There's no proof of the ""lab leak"" allegations (and I doubt there can ever be short of an admission by the Chinese government), the war in Ukraine was a proxy for the current invasion, and the Las Vegas mass shooting .. was just a larger incident of something that routinely happens in America that does not move the needle politically?
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