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‘Farms are failing’ as fertilizer prices drive up cost of food

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Re: ‘Farms are failing’ as fertilizer prices drive up cost of food

#101

Post by smallerfish »

flenserboy wrote: post #91

Pastures are the future. There's a reason the US Midwest had such great soil — it's not simply a confluence of rivers & luck. The buffalo did their thing, and the grasses they fed on were fed in turn by them. Replacing corn and soy with ruminants will replenish the soil, provide excellent protein for people, and get rid of the cheap, food-like things made from corn, soy, and their chemically-coaxed out byproducts. It…

"Livestock takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land, yet produces less than 20% of the world’s supply of calories."

https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets

"So if this system is so ideal, why is it that my cow hasn’t tasted a blade of grass since October? Speed, in a word. Cows raised on grass simply take longer to reach slaughter weight than cows raised on a richer diet, and the modern meat industry has devoted itself to shortening a beef calf’s allotted time on earth."

https://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/power-steer/

Re: ‘Farms are failing’ as fertilizer prices drive up cost of food

#102

Post by freeflight »

ldiracdelta wrote: post #88
tastyfreeze wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source please. The quantity of fertilizer used on farms dwarfs that used on lawns.

The knowledge and professionalism and price sensitivity of the farmer dwarfs that of thr average home owner. How many nights of sleep does the average home owner lose each year obsessing over the amount of fertilizer and cost of that fertilizer? Meanwhile that actually happens to most farmers. They obsess and endlessly talk about how to cut their fertilizer and pesticides to the bare minimum they think they can handl…

> You think they're throwing away product by over applying fertilizer?

They need to overapply fertilizers because by now that's the only way anything grows in most places after decades of soil mismanagement, due to a wide-spread disregard of sustainable practices in favor of "fast results, fast money" over-fertilizing [0].

Rotating crops to keep the soil fertile sounds nice in theory, in capitalistic practice it's not popular because demand for different crops is not interchangeable, so rotating crops means industrial scale operations miss out on valuable growing months, labor and resources, growing a product that's not as profitable.

The "fix" is to just keep applying fertilizers to keep growing those high demand crops because industrial scale operations also think like corporations; It's all about the financial returns in the short-term, not about long-term sustainability.

[0] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/01/210112125215.h...

Re: ‘Farms are failing’ as fertilizer prices drive up cost of food

#103

Post by baxtr »

smallerfish wrote: post #101
flenserboy wrote: post #91

Pastures are the future. There's a reason the US Midwest had such great soil — it's not simply a confluence of rivers & luck. The buffalo did their thing, and the grasses they fed on were fed in turn by them. Replacing corn and soy with ruminants will replenish the soil, provide excellent protein for people, and get rid of the cheap, food-like things made from corn, soy, and their chemically-coaxed out byproducts. It…

"Livestock takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land, yet produces less than 20% of the world’s supply of calories." https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets "So if this system is so ideal, why is it that my cow hasn’t tasted a blade of grass since October? Speed, in a word. Cows raised on grass simply take longer to reach slaughter weight than cows raised on a richer diet, and the modern me…

So in summary, there is no way around higher food prices. Either through higher fertilizer prizes or a more sustainable, albeit slower, food production.

Re: ‘Farms are failing’ as fertilizer prices drive up cost of food

#104

Post by sokoloff »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #100
colordrops wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If what existed? sustainable, nutritious and humane crops and farming practices? they do exist.

The person you're responding to said "existed and were cheaper ," but you seem to have ignored the second conjunct of their claim in your response.

To be fair, that poster injected “and were cheaper” in response to a suggestion that subsidies should be moved away from substitutes and toward these practices, which probably wasn’t done in bad faith, but doesn’t exactly rebut the suggestion that subsidies would need to change to make this economically sustainable.

Re: ‘Farms are failing’ as fertilizer prices drive up cost of food

#105

Post by smallerfish »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #58
teslabox wrote: post #17

There are options besides chemical fertilizers. The nodules on legume root are a symbiotic home for nitrogen-fixing bacteria. Farmers traditionally rotate corn and soybeans to reduce their nitrogen costs. Other plants have deeper roots, which pull up nutrients... My comment about biological nitrogen fixation (15 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29829580 Saw this recently: Black eyed peas could help eli…

That vastly underestimates the size of the modern problem. I posted previously of the adage "Modern agriculture is about turning energy in fossil fuels into food we can eat." While not entirely accurate (yes, most of the energy in plants comes from the sun, but it is fossil fuels that power most of the nitrogen fixation needed to unlock that photosynthesis), it does emphasize how so much of modern agriculture is depe…

> most of the energy in plants comes from the sun, but it is fossil fuels that power most of the nitrogen fixation needed to unlock that photosynthesis

Just to build on this, we expend (at least) 7.3 calories of energy to produce 1 calorie of food (https://sustainability.emory.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/...).

Re: ‘Farms are failing’ as fertilizer prices drive up cost of food

#106

Post by freeflight »

octoberfranklin wrote: post #32
rr808 wrote: post #11

This is a good thing, fertilizer is heavily overused, poisoning waterways. Yes the cost of food may go up as a result but the current farming practices are unsustainable.

You're talking about the death of half the world's population: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_sup...

As cynical as it might sound; Maybe that much population, at increasingly higher living standards, was never sustainable to begin with.

Re: ‘Farms are failing’ as fertilizer prices drive up cost of food

#107

Post by flenserboy »

smallerfish wrote: post #101
flenserboy wrote: post #91

Pastures are the future. There's a reason the US Midwest had such great soil — it's not simply a confluence of rivers & luck. The buffalo did their thing, and the grasses they fed on were fed in turn by them. Replacing corn and soy with ruminants will replenish the soil, provide excellent protein for people, and get rid of the cheap, food-like things made from corn, soy, and their chemically-coaxed out byproducts. It…

"Livestock takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land, yet produces less than 20% of the world’s supply of calories." https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets "So if this system is so ideal, why is it that my cow hasn’t tasted a blade of grass since October? Speed, in a word. Cows raised on grass simply take longer to reach slaughter weight than cows raised on a richer diet, and the modern me…

And this speed is making both them and the land sick — cows are meant to eat grass, not the grains used to fatten them quickly.

Do also keep in mind that there are wide swaths of land which can usefully be occupied by ruminants that cannot be farmed without piping in almost all the water and dumping fertilizer on it. Such marginal land is counted as arable so as to further attack animal husbandry.

Re: ‘Farms are failing’ as fertilizer prices drive up cost of food

#108

Post by vegetablepotpie »

flenserboy wrote: post #91

Pastures are the future. There's a reason the US Midwest had such great soil — it's not simply a confluence of rivers & luck. The buffalo did their thing, and the grasses they fed on were fed in turn by them. Replacing corn and soy with ruminants will replenish the soil, provide excellent protein for people, and get rid of the cheap, food-like things made from corn, soy, and their chemically-coaxed out byproducts. It…

Only about ~10% of corn is used to make food consumed by people. Of the remainder, roughly ~30% is used for animal feed, ~30% for export, and ~30% for fuel ethanol.

Replacing the cheap processed food production with grazing land will not do much to increase the amount of animal protein available to the population. If our goal is to have more pasture, it would make more sense to eliminate ethanol production, reduce the amount of corn we feed to animals, and reduce the amount of corn we send to the world.

Re: ‘Farms are failing’ as fertilizer prices drive up cost of food

#109

Post by rowanajmarshall »

smallerfish wrote: post #101
flenserboy wrote: post #91

Pastures are the future. There's a reason the US Midwest had such great soil — it's not simply a confluence of rivers & luck. The buffalo did their thing, and the grasses they fed on were fed in turn by them. Replacing corn and soy with ruminants will replenish the soil, provide excellent protein for people, and get rid of the cheap, food-like things made from corn, soy, and their chemically-coaxed out byproducts. It…

"Livestock takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land, yet produces less than 20% of the world’s supply of calories." https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets "So if this system is so ideal, why is it that my cow hasn’t tasted a blade of grass since October? Speed, in a word. Cows raised on grass simply take longer to reach slaughter weight than cows raised on a richer diet, and the modern me…

> So if this system is so ideal, why is it that my cow hasn’t tasted a blade of grass since October?

Keep in mind this is absolutely not true in even the rest of the Western world. American-style cattle factory farms are almost unheard of in the UK, and practically all beef here would count as grass-fed, because that's just how we raise cattle. There is some supplementation over winter when grass doesn't grow (and even that depends on location), but otherwise pasture is the standard.

Re: ‘Farms are failing’ as fertilizer prices drive up cost of food

#110

Post by flenserboy »

vegetablepotpie wrote: post #108
flenserboy wrote: post #91

Pastures are the future. There's a reason the US Midwest had such great soil — it's not simply a confluence of rivers & luck. The buffalo did their thing, and the grasses they fed on were fed in turn by them. Replacing corn and soy with ruminants will replenish the soil, provide excellent protein for people, and get rid of the cheap, food-like things made from corn, soy, and their chemically-coaxed out byproducts. It…

Only about ~10% of corn is used to make food consumed by people. Of the remainder, roughly ~30% is used for animal feed, ~30% for export, and ~30% for fuel ethanol. Replacing the cheap processed food production with grazing land will not do much to increase the amount of animal protein available to the population. If our goal is to have more pasture, it would make more sense to eliminate ethanol production, reduce th…

Yes. Replace the corn with cows.
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