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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

#241

Post by TMWNN »

arghnoname wrote: post #234
lukas099 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it were not for RNA vaccines, that approach certainly would have been better than what we did with COVID. I know that 'flatten the curve' largely left the public consciousness, but wouldn't letting the virus run largely unrestricted have overwhelmed the health care system?

The curve flattening was initially proposed for a short period of time. Maybe weeks or a few months, I forget. I think some initial panic is forgivable, even if it led to actions that were counter to previous guidance. We were ventilating patients early on, for instance, and we later learned that this causes more harm than good for many patients and should be deferred if at all possible. I think it's arguable that a…

>Capacity was increased to some extent. Remember the tents and the medical ship in NYC? I think neither were used at all.

They were not. Even in NYC, which really did see overloaded hospitals briefly in March-April 2020, USNS Comfort treated a *total* (not at one time; from start to finish) of 182 patients https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-05-01/navy-h...>. USNS Mercy, with 1000 beds, treated a total of 77 patients in LA.

Same elsewhere. In Wales, Millennium Stadium was converted into a temporary field hospital with 300 beds and capacity to expand to 2000 beds. It was such a big deal that a public contest was held to name it. However, the newly dubbed Dragon's Heart Hospital https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Heart_Hospital> never had more than 46 patients at one time, and was closed in six weeks for lack of use.

Re: The fertilizer shortage will persist in 2023

#242

Post by refurb »

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…

45% conversion to crop is actually amazing and way higher than I thought it would be.

You'd never be able to get it to 100% just based on thermodynamics alone. It takes a lot of energy to move nutrients from an area of low concentration (the soil) to an area of high concentration (the plant).

Just making up number here, but if a plant needed 10 grams of nitrogen, but the soil contained only 50 mg at any given time (but was constantly replenished), plant growth and yield would suffer considerably - despite the fact that a sufficient supply is available over time. You need to have an excess supply of nutrients available to maximize growth.

It's similar to water - many plants will die in soil that has a low level of moisture. The water is there, the plant just doesn't have the capacity to actually pull in enough to sustain life.

Re: The fertilizer shortage will persist in 2023

#243

Post by refurb »

tengbretson wrote: post #94
ilostmyshoes wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"I've never farmed in my life, but I'm pretty sure I know more than the guy who has been doing it for decades and whose entire livelihood is based on it."

Re: The fertilizer shortage will persist in 2023

#244

Post by jacooper »

banDeveloper wrote: post #233
jacooper wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should actually focus on things that have the biggest impact on climate change, and that's certainly not Meat production, but Oil and gas. Stop chasing that most visible way to fight climate change rather than the most effective one.

We can do multiple things to address climate change at the same time. My proposition is to slowly redirect all the animal agriculture subsidies elsewhere. Animal products going up in price by 3 - 10 fold would surely decrease consumption.

The questions is do people actually want less meat? If they don't then we simply shouldn't do it

You shouldn't aim to make people life's worse, rather one should fix climate change in the least disruptive way possible, which is basically focusing on the infrastructure.

Re: The fertilizer shortage will persist in 2023

#245

Post by ceejayoz »

arghnoname wrote: post #231
ceejayoz wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are three claims in that, which are you contesting? Isolation has clear evidence; https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/10/02/thanks-to-covid-... . Paranoia is hard to suss out between public statements that sound paranoid - "NATO is coming to get us!" style stuff - and genuine private paranoia. This one might be the hardest to prove. "Putin's fault" is fairly hard to argue against without quite a bit of logica…

Why do you think NATO was ceaselessly expanding eastward, in violation of guarantees they had made that they would not do so? Why do you think they were putting missiles, etc, in the former Warsaw pact countries? Is it so unreasonable for a country that lost over 20 million from western aggression in WWII to be a little worried about this military buildup? I seem to remember a pretty strident response to soviet missi…

> Why do you think NATO was ceaselessly expanding eastward…

Because countries asked to join, as is their right as sovereign nations.

> in violation of guarantees they had made that they would not do so?

No such guarantee has ever existed. The only such agreement violated in all this is the Budapest Memorandum, by the Russians.

> Is it so unreasonable for a country that lost over 20 million from western aggression in WWII to be a little worried about this military buildup?

Yes. The Nazis were defeated. Largely by that same West. The makeup of NATO is heavily weighted to “former victims of fascist aggression”, including its most powerful core nation.

One might ask this question in the other direction, given past Russian occupation of many of these countries. (Much more recently than 1945!)

> There has been pressure for a more muscular response to the situation in Ukraine for quite a while internally to Russia.

“The other guy wouldn’t have used lube when he raped you. How lucky are you to get me?!”

Re: The fertilizer shortage will persist in 2023

#246

Post by zo1 »

willcipriano wrote: post #158
kortilla wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretending indigenous communities “solved” this is a farce. If we switched to their methods 90% of the population would need to die because they don’t scale.

What percentage of indigenous people were involved in farming? 100%? It's less than 3% today.

Interesting, coming just now from the thread talking about AGI, AI eliminating most jobs and thus necessitating UBI as a result.

Re: The fertilizer shortage will persist in 2023

#247

Post by PicassoCTs »

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…

Idea: Take some clay, form and burn a repository for nitrogen rich water, that can be reached by roots, but not by rainwater, bury them beneath the field, resupply it via a feed line.

Now watch roots and heavy tractors ruin that brilliant plan.

Re: The fertilizer shortage will persist in 2023

#248

Post by lotsofpulp »

hedgehog wrote: post #82
ilostmyshoes wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Like the rest of industrial age development, farm automation has historically been built around treating everything uniformly (even distribution of seeds bred for easy harvest in evenly spaced rows evenly fertilizied with no rocks etc etc). Moving away from that introduces all kinds of complexity, mechanical problems, data problems, etc, which are not easy to solve even when you have historical existence proofs of po…

It introduces trying to sell your crops for 5x what your competitor is and no buyer is going to pay 5x for “sustainable” produce.

Re: The fertilizer shortage will persist in 2023

#249

Post by mythrwy »

RobbieGM wrote: post #209
mythrwy wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a meat eater (with no intention of changing) I fully agree. How we produce meat is an extremely wasteful way of producing food. Changing this would free up tons of farm ground, water and fertilizer.

Do you have a more sustainable way to produce meat in mind? Ethics aside, the addition of another trophic level makes meat production necessarily less efficient than that of an equivalent amount of plants.

If I had an easy way I'd be a hero and likely pretty rich.

I'm excited about vat grown protein (not plant based) over the long term, but in the short term I think we would get some traction from eating less feedlot grain fed meat and more free range grazed meat that could use less desirable land to produce.

Re: The fertilizer shortage will persist in 2023

#250

Post by eru »

arghnoname wrote: post #235
occz wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have a preference for meat post huge subsidies, which essentially makes the preference mean nothing whatsoever. If people prefer meat when it's not subsidised, then sure, what the hell, let them have it.

Farming and subsidies go hand in hand. I'm from the midwest. Whether it's growing food in the first place or leaving a field fallow in another, a subsidy is probably involved. This is a good thing. Farming is very tough business and I would rather keep these guys in business because I like eating quite a bit.

People would still farm without subsidies.

First: they are growing some crops now already that are not subsidised.

Second: a general drop in subsidies will mostly just result in lower land rents. The reward for farm labour will stay roughly the same, because it's mostly set by the general equilibrium in the wider labour market.

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