Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 287 posts

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#101

Post by virtuallynathan »

ericd wrote: post #98
mac01021 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine it depends on the vegetarian. And not all meats/animals are the same. I myself eat meat, but do not eat mammals. I am looking forward to the widespread availability of safe, delicious, lab-grown meats. > the healthiest way to eat I suspect that, for most people, the best plant-based diet is equal to the best omnivorous diet in terms of nutrition. Admittedly, it can take more effort to get your protein. > me…

>Show me a carbon-neutral cow. Any purely grass fed cow should be close, no? They're part of the normal carbon cycle, and that carbon is pulled back in when the grass regrows. The problem is when you bring sequestered carbon (fossil fuels) into the mix.

Cows can also sequester carbon with their Poo going into the soil.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#102

Post by sampo »

blacksmith_tb wrote: post #27
QML wrote: post #24

Don’t we already know how to do this? For example, the concept of companion planting — growing plants which behave symbiotically together — is a centuries old idea. The issue is whether we have an economic incentive to.

I am not an agronomist, but my instinct is that companion planting interferes with large-scale farming, where machines or poorly paid humans in a hurry need to easy access to a single crop to harvest, and often destroy the field as they work. I'd like to think if the yields were worth it we'd have worked around that, but possibly robotic harvesters can take us there.

> companion planting interferes with large-scale farming, where machines or poorly paid humans in a hurry need to easy access to a single crop to harvest

The current world population of 7.7 billion is projected to grow to at least 10 billion, before it might turn and start decreasing. The availability of human labor is one thing there should be no shortage of in the future.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#103

Post by ericd »

moate wrote: post #61
travisoneill1 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not interested in eating less meat so we can grow the population more. It's not a cost issue. Why do we want a population size that requires people to cut back on quality of life?

>>Why do we want a population size that requires people to cut back on quality of life? If you can show me how eating meat directly correlates to a better quality of life, I'll be gobsmacked. You may enjoy eating meat, but that doesn't mean it's making your life better/easier. Besides the nutritional side (which is complex, but let's just agree that you can make cases both for or against eating animal flesh as helpin…

I think you may not be valuing beef appropriately for people who really love burgers or good steak. And there happen to be a lot of those. It's hard to appropriately value things like that if you don't appreciate them yourself.

But sure, maybe that's not in their long term best interest. And unfortunately, humans are, on average, very bad at optimizing for their long term best interest vs. short term.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#104

Post by hinkley »

dghughes wrote: post #73

It's slightly terrifying to see the data about the loss of nutrients in plants around the world due to climate change. On YouTube there was an interesting Veritasim story about plants and their mineral levels. It seems plants have fewer minerals now compared to 100 years ago. Farmers have fertilizer and the plants grow but they don't have the same levels of nutrition even with all that help. Samples of weeds from the…

Your correlation is a bit backward there, but then you're in good company.

In living soil, not the dirt most agriculture is growing on, plants are trading sugars for water, minerals, and/or protection with symbiotic fungi and nitrogen fixing bacteria.

These microbes don't like tilling. Soil structure and the organisms break down, releasing carbon into the atmosphere. It's very hard to bring them back, especially to the middle of big square fields where everything is dead in a several mile radius.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#105

Post by beat »

dilap wrote: post #30
kieranmaine wrote: post #4

What would make people eat less beef? Since taxes seem a hard sell, would subsidizing chicken + non-meat protein help? As a vegetarian I'm trying to get my head around what would help change the behaviour of the meat eating HN members.

I have a mirror-image question: What will it take to convince vegetarians that a meat-based diet is actually the healthiest way to eat, and that meat can be raised in humane, environmentally-friendly ways? :-) Edit: This a serious question. Down voting is hardly a productive form of dialog.

Nutritional value, "healthiest way to eat", matters to very few people. Most people eat food that is actively bad for them. People eat what's available to them. That means that they can get their hands on it, and can afford it.

Last night, I found a gorgeous piece of sea bass from the Falklands - $18 for 5oz. Pan fried it and split it with my spouse. Why? Because it's available and I can afford it.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#106

Post by beat »

mac01021 wrote: post #53
dilap wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a mirror-image question: What will it take to convince vegetarians that a meat-based diet is actually the healthiest way to eat, and that meat can be raised in humane, environmentally-friendly ways? :-) Edit: This a serious question. Down voting is hardly a productive form of dialog.

I imagine it depends on the vegetarian. And not all meats/animals are the same. I myself eat meat, but do not eat mammals. I am looking forward to the widespread availability of safe, delicious, lab-grown meats. > the healthiest way to eat I suspect that, for most people, the best plant-based diet is equal to the best omnivorous diet in terms of nutrition. Admittedly, it can take more effort to get your protein. > me…

Free range cattle are only really a thing in land that isn't good for plant farming, usually because it's too arid. Cattle open up massive amounts of otherwise-unfarmable land to agriculture.

The number of cattle in the US has been steady for decades now (suggesting something of a drop in intake). For purely grass-fed cattle, they're carbon-neutral at this point, because the life of methane in the atmosphere is about 9 years, as opposed to CO2, which is 100 years.

Corn-feeding is really the only carbon footprint problem associated with beef.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#107

Post by hinkley »

tareqak wrote: post #6

There is also the problem of food distribution. Ignoring future population growth, the world does produce enough food to people everyone [0] (obtained from the first sentence of [1]). If we are collectively unwilling to solve the distribution problem today, then it there is a good chance that we won't do much about the shortage tomorrow. In addition, unconsumed food waste is also problem, and probably does have some…

We are missing a bit of humility. Just because an apple can be gotten in February doesn't mean you should. It stretches, complicates, and reduces the efficiency of the supply chain immensely.

I heard some advice years ago that one of the better things you can do as an environmentalist is teach your kids about the seasonality of foods. Make a big deal about it being orange or pear or cherry season, cut back on buying these fruits the rest of the year, even if you can afford it. Eat something else instead of making the world bend to your craving.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#108

Post by jlawson »

ghthor wrote: post #77
alisson wrote: post #20

There's a great method called Agroforestry that uses forest floors to produce more food: Quick overview of a farmer's land that uses this method: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stABAx82TbY he harvest around 3x more cocoa per hectare than traditional methods and its one of the most valuable in the world right now. Big producers joining to make it more scalable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE

I love this idea, its something I've thought a lot about. Our large scale farming strategies seem fundamentally ignorant. Nature it full of complex systems of independence that we should be using directly in our farming strategies. I'm particularly interested in fungi to support the nutrient and immune systems of my farms. See the work of Paul Staments using fungi to treat bee colony collapse.

Big farm machines are dumb.

If we could instead build swarms of self-maintaining intelligent human-scale robots, perhaps working with genetically engineered work animals (monkeys?), they could hand-plant, hand-till, and hand-harvest crops at a far greater efficiency with far less disruption to the ecosystem.

Picture ten thousand dog-sized robots going individually planting and caring for and harvesting millions of plants in a big forest, or a field (with different plants shading each other). An individual dollop of manure on each plant. Weeds removed by "hand" without chemicals.

Basically an automated version of the extremely-efficient overlapping-crop style of farming that was often used in medieval Japan and other places with a lot of labor and know-how but without much flat land and without modern mechanization.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#109

Post by hinkley »

virtuallynathan wrote: post #91
kieranmaine wrote: post #4

What would make people eat less beef? Since taxes seem a hard sell, would subsidizing chicken + non-meat protein help? As a vegetarian I'm trying to get my head around what would help change the behaviour of the meat eating HN members.

Ruminant animals have an important place in Agriculture. They add nutrients back to the soil, and can be raised in land unfit for growing crops. For example, in the UK only 36% of agricultural land is croppable. The rest of the land is perfect for raising cattle and other ruminants. In the USA, 44% of land is for agriculture, but only 17% is arable, 27% serves as pasture land. Only around 10% of a cow's lifetime feed…

As one particularly loud farmer I'm familiar with is fond of saying, there are certain foods that should only be eaten if you have a gizzard.

Gizzards can't process all of the things a ruminant can, but there's some overlap.

The thing is chickens aren't vegetarians. They're omnivores. We'd be better off if we processed the leftovers through invertibrates (worms, soldier flies) and then fed the invertibrates to the chickens. Same for pigs. And both pathways would still be more efficient than cows.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#110

Post by omegaworks »

tareqak wrote: post #6

There is also the problem of food distribution. Ignoring future population growth, the world does produce enough food to people everyone [0] (obtained from the first sentence of [1]). If we are collectively unwilling to solve the distribution problem today, then it there is a good chance that we won't do much about the shortage tomorrow. In addition, unconsumed food waste is also problem, and probably does have some…

On that note, NYTimes seems to be pushing many climate articles today[1] with an urgent framing but casually neglecting to mention the relatively small number of corporations responsible for most greenhouse emissions[2].

1. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/07/climate/world...

2. https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...

Post reply on HN