Agricultural input shocks affect crop yields more in the high-yielding areas • Hacker News Board

Re: Agricultural input shocks affect crop yields more in the high-yielding areas

#31

Post by whatshisface » Sun, Nov 26, 2023, 7:50 PM UTC

Waterluvian wrote: post #21

RetroTechie wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The basic problem is one of non-closed loops: Each harvest takes minerals out of the soil (as well as some soil). Regenerative farming may help the soil to replenish some of those minerals by freeing them from the rock portion of soils. But not at the rate harvest-after-harvest removes those. So you need to replace minerals taken out. Industrialized farming does this through minerals mined elsewhere. Which is hardly…

Made me curious so I went looking for information. Incredibly frustrating that almost every high-level source focuses on how the water is cleaned and solids are removed. Removed where? Doesn’t say. Eventually I found one local source that says it’s incinerated. So the human biological cycle doesn’t return the solids to the earth but puts it into the atmosphere? That’s pretty crappy.

The heavier elements would be in the ash.

Re: Agricultural input shocks affect crop yields more in the high-yielding areas

#32

Post by emj » Sun, Nov 26, 2023, 9:48 PM UTC

_c3ag wrote: post #29

alfred_wram wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a more nuanced issue than this comment would lead you to believe. "the guy" is probably referencing Allan Savory, check out his Ted Talk about the elephant story. He gets a lot of undeserved aggression. Here's a link to some of Savory's responses to the Manbiot ("go vegan") perspective - https://savory.global/statement-on-the-allan-savory-george-m...

the person execute a poor study on ecosystem, concludes that 40,000 elephants should be killed to maintain other organisms... and he shouldn't be target of aggression? who knows if their political and military involvement didn't took part on the government liberating that shit! the guy cares _so much_ about life/sustainability that still eat meat/cheese (like mammals other than humans are really primitive creatures)…

> caring for the environment should be a black and white resolution

I've been thinking on that since I was a wee lad. The best tools are impossible to find, it is hard to explain why we shouldn't to X any more since we now know that Y is the better tool and X makes Y impossible. I still think we should try X and Y, it's just a really hard communication issue. It is not helped by using ambivalent words like "the environment".

Skimmed the paper you cite and it mentions that it is hard to talk about this since flame wars make people very careful.

Re: Agricultural input shocks affect crop yields more in the high-yielding areas

#33

Post by nradov » Sun, Nov 26, 2023, 9:56 PM UTC

11235813213455 wrote: post #15

3seashells wrote: post #8

How is Sri Lanka doing without fertilizer?

Fertilizer is not something we can lack of, it's coming out of all living beings for free

Nope. When we relied on "organic" fertilizer, crop yields were much lower (even accounting for other farming changes) and famines were common. It is impossible to feed the world without extensive use of synthetic fertilizer for most staple crops.

Re: Agricultural input shocks affect crop yields more in the high-yielding areas

#34

Post by _c3ag » Sun, Nov 26, 2023, 10:17 PM UTC

emj wrote: post #32

_c3ag wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the person execute a poor study on ecosystem, concludes that 40,000 elephants should be killed to maintain other organisms... and he shouldn't be target of aggression? who knows if their political and military involvement didn't took part on the government liberating that shit! the guy cares _so much_ about life/sustainability that still eat meat/cheese (like mammals other than humans are really primitive creatures)…

> caring for the environment should be a black and white resolution I've been thinking on that since I was a wee lad. The best tools are impossible to find, it is hard to explain why we shouldn't to X any more since we now know that Y is the better tool and X makes Y impossible. I still think we should try X and Y, it's just a really hard communication issue. It is not helped by using ambivalent words like "the envir…

impossible to find? we even have suggestions from nutrition orgs. that moving to a plant based diet can save us billions of dollars because health will improve!

apart from health, we already know that plants are more efficient than meat by an order of magnitude, any day, any time & don't cite "places that we can't raise crops" because that doesn't cut our consumption rate... unless you are living at and like a rural Kazakhstan citizen. there are 20,000 edibles plants so far, why do we need meat and cheese?

and i can't see much of a flame wars regarding this. the only people defending its practice are those using it. bad science is everywhere and taking down conclusions by playing the victim of a flame wars is to support absurd practices. like the 21st century psychoanalysis (which couldn't prove itself better than placebo), homeopathy dissolving doses of medicine in bazillions of liters (seriously?) etc.

it feels that socially we are dumb enough (to not know even how to communicate) that less than 100 years ago we throw 2 nuclear bombs on human settlements, we made propaganda of cigarettes with Tour de France cyclists and so on. ~ 500 years ago we reached America rapping people and building churches to talk about heaven

Re: Agricultural input shocks affect crop yields more in the high-yielding areas

#35

Post by 3seashells » Mon, Nov 27, 2023, 2:36 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #33

11235813213455 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fertilizer is not something we can lack of, it's coming out of all living beings for free

Nope. When we relied on "organic" fertilizer, crop yields were much lower (even accounting for other farming changes) and famines were common. It is impossible to feed the world without extensive use of synthetic fertilizer for most staple crops.

It was tried on a large scale.. They called that carbon independent experiment : Lebensraum

Re: Agricultural input shocks affect crop yields more in the high-yielding areas

#36

Post by mikewarot » Mon, Nov 27, 2023, 3:39 PM UTC

_c3ag wrote: post #22

mikewarot wrote: post #6

Regenerative farming won't help immediately, but it does cut way down on the need for chemicals input while capturing massive amounts of carbon into the soil and growing livestock in the same areas.

regenerative farming couldn't be replicated [0] by anyone... [0] https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2017-2-march-april/feature... seriously, how do you expect land regenerating by adding thousands of cattle on it? if you roam in Brazil, you can find almost deserts in vegetation that have RICH diversity like the Pantanal, just because livestock was managed there for +25 years! and then owners stop activity for a number…

I don't know what weird tangent the Sierra Club went off into, but here's Wikipedia on the subject[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regenerative_agriculture

Re: Agricultural input shocks affect crop yields more in the high-yielding areas

#37

Post by mikewarot » Tue, Nov 28, 2023, 3:38 AM UTC

gruez wrote: post #16

mikewarot wrote: post #6

Regenerative farming won't help immediately, but it does cut way down on the need for chemicals input while capturing massive amounts of carbon into the soil and growing livestock in the same areas.

>while capturing massive amounts of carbon into the soil Whats the mechanism for this and how much is "massive"? >and growing livestock in the same areas. Isn't this canceled out by the lower yields you're getting on the crops, to the extent that the overall yield is lower than if you used normal farming practices for the crops and dedicated pasture areas?

The mechanism is building soil out of dirt. If we were to adopt regenerative agriculture worldwide, it could take about 1/5 of all the Carbon out of the atmosphere. (assuming my math is right)

Re: Agricultural input shocks affect crop yields more in the high-yielding areas

#38

Post by balderdash » Tue, Nov 28, 2023, 5:35 PM UTC

colechristensen wrote: post #27

balderdash wrote: post #13

Isn’t this fairly intuitive? Wouldn’t this be somewhat akin to being surprised that the most productive workers are most affected by power/fuel disruptions?

That it happens, sure. You do a study like this to get the magnitude of the effect to enable folks to make models of this kind of thing which helps pricing and planning for shocks.

Thanks - I hadn’t thought about that