Physical laws don’t care about good intentions. Expect more “surprises”.
‘Farms are failing’ as fertilizer prices drive up cost of food
131–140 of 235 posts
Re: ‘Farms are failing’ as fertilizer prices drive up cost of food
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. I don't disagree with this part. My point is just that a) livestock are an enormously inefficient way of raising calories and b) that's taking into consideration the horrendous industrial meat system. The US raised 33 million cows to slaughter in 2019 ( https://www.statista.com/statistics/…
It’s only inefficient if you continue to ignore the points being raised by the parent post.
The only point I see that wasn't addressed was that we can use land unsuitable for agriculture for grazing, but in that case all the supposed top-soil benefits are going to the wrong place anyway.
Re: ‘Farms are failing’ as fertilizer prices drive up cost of food
#133Pastures 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…
I’d add “fuel ethanol” to the list of things worse than Bitcoin.
Re: ‘Farms are failing’ as fertilizer prices drive up cost of food
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Potato and sweet potato can be produced in a local garden and provide enough calories and nutrients. For example, if one eats enough potatoes to get 2500 kilocalories (about 6 pounds), one get more than enough protein.
6 pounds ? I'm skeptical that anyone can sit down and eat 6 pounds of potatoes. You should probably check your arithmetic here. And no, you're not going to produce enough potatoes in a "local garden" to feed our cities, much less all of the people in the rest of the world who are fed by our croplands.
For one serving sure it is not trivial to eat that, but spread it over 3 meals and it is very OK
My grandmother told me that during WWII in Belarus many people in villages for 3 years eat pretty much only potatoes plus few berries/mushrooms and little fish. It was pointless to keep any animals as those would be taken either by Germans, local police folks or partisans. And all potatoes were grown with pure manual labor as the were no horses and petrol for any kind of machinery was simply not available.
Despite such diet people were not malnourished or underweight and even sold potato to get money for other stuff.
Re: ‘Farms are failing’ as fertilizer prices drive up cost of food
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
What is the export percent used for? I don't think it's true, but if that export 30% were all used for food for people then it'd be disingenuous to say only 10% is used for human food.
I don't know, but maybe it is being exported for use as cattle feed like the alfalfa in California:
Re: ‘Farms are failing’ as fertilizer prices drive up cost of food
#136Something that bugs me: How much human poop is generated worldwide every day and where does it go??
Why isn’t some of it used as fertilizer, or is it?
Re: ‘Farms are failing’ as fertilizer prices drive up cost of food
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
When historians looked into details, it turned out a serf worked less than 40 hours per week on average in the Middle Ages in France, less than modern workers. And he needed to feed both own family and his master.
Umm... hours worked isn't the only metric for quality of life. I'm pretty sure that 40 hours spent in agricultural stoop labor is not the same thing as 40 hours sitting in a comfy chair in front of a computer. Also, you're just shining off the fact that they were serfs . I wouldn't want to be a serf even if I had to work only 10 hours per week. Would you? Not free to leave the land on which you were born, living in a…
I am not arguing about quality of life. The point is that less than 40 hours per week (it can be in fact close to 30 as less than 40 is a conservative estimate) was enough for a single person to feed a family and have some extra using manual labor.
Re: ‘Farms are failing’ as fertilizer prices drive up cost of food
#138There 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…
How readily would this be deployed to coffee farms in Brazil, staple foods in sub-Saharan Africa, watermelon farms in Colombia, coconut groves in Sumatra, palm oil in Malaysia, and rice paddies in the Ivory Coast? (All examples from the article.)
Crop rotation, livestock integration and guild planting can be applied in all of those cases.
Re: ‘Farms are failing’ as fertilizer prices drive up cost of food
#139Pastures 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…
Flavor too. Corn fed beef is preferred in many applications. You’d never smoke a grass fed brisket for example.
Even cattle raised on grass do best for steaks if they’ve been fed grain the last few months before slaughter.
Re: ‘Farms are failing’ as fertilizer prices drive up cost of food
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hello! Urea fertilizer has jumped from $400/ton to $1100/ton in a year. This is not consistent with the price jump being caused by inflation, which remains at much more modest rates. The prices are higher due energy prices rising in Europe and China, natural gas supply disruptions in Texas due to hurricanes and floods, and sanctions on Belarus. They are a driver of inflation, not caused by inflation.
Inflation is never evenly distributed. That doesn’t dispute the cause for widespread inflation. Inflation is higher than it’s been in 40 years, and that timeframe includes several energy cost spikes, many of which were worse than the current spike.
For this specific discussion, why focus on inflation (price increases in a broad basket of goods) at all, when it's a specific subset that is causing the issue, and the reasons for price increases in that subset is dominated by specific causation, disconnected from the purported reasons for the broader basket.
Because any fixes for the broader inflation problem would have relatively little effect on this specific subset.