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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

#201

Post by mythrwy »

banDeveloper wrote: post #31

The real problem is majority of crops being grown for animal agriculture, which is an extremely wasteful way of producing food. We'd only need a fraction of the farmlands if we were actually eating the crops we grow. Sadly, we can't count on consumers making rational choices and politicians are not going to tank their popularity by pushing for these changes. It's the same as climate change.

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.

Re: The fertilizer shortage will persist in 2023

#202

Post by gruez »

kragen wrote: post #187
gruez wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a heads up, your usages of unicode circled characters (eg. ①) makes the comment hard to read. At least on my computer, the circled characters are the same approximate size as regular characters, but due to the circle the actual number/letter ends up being so small that they're unreadable without additional zoom.

i appreciate the heads up what platform are you using

Firefox on windows. I also checked chrome and it's better, but deciphering the glyphs is still hard due to low dpi.

Re: The fertilizer shortage will persist in 2023

#203

Post by kragen »

gruez wrote: post #202
kragen wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i appreciate the heads up what platform are you using

Firefox on windows. I also checked chrome and it's better, but deciphering the glyphs is still hard due to low dpi.

hmm, do you have a hidpi display

i wonder if it's using a bitmap fallback font that it ought to blow up by 2× or 3× because of hidpi, but isn't

Re: The fertilizer shortage will persist in 2023

#204

Post by gruez »

kragen wrote: post #203
gruez wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox on windows. I also checked chrome and it's better, but deciphering the glyphs is still hard due to low dpi.

hmm, do you have a hidpi display i wonder if it's using a bitmap fallback font that it ought to blow up by 2× or 3× because of hidpi, but isn't

> hmm, do you have a hidpi display

nope, standard DPI (ie. 100% scaling). On my phone it looks perfectly fine.

Re: The fertilizer shortage will persist in 2023

#205

Post by kortilla »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #167
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.

Not a good look to strawman things like this when you have sibling comments elsewhere in this thread saying the discussion needs more nuance. I actually did napkin math awhile back comparing a particular 16th century indigenous agricultural yields with 20th century American agriculture [0]. The indigenous system came out favorably until the second half of the 20th century despite the limitations of hand tools and nat…

It’s not a strawman and there isn’t much nuance to what you yourself said. It’s not even close to being adequate.

Claiming that people are arguing for “synthesis” is just a weasel word escape route. Indigenous farming is completely inadequate and the parts that are useful have already been incorporated into modern farming.

What is it you think is still on the table for this “synthesis”?

Re: The fertilizer shortage will persist in 2023

#206

Post by Spooky23 »

bilegeek wrote: post #166
Spooky23 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people see a sea of corn and don’t appreciate nuance. The bigger issue that farmers are ignoring is water.

Water in western states is often a "use it or lose it" system, driving overuse even if the farmer knows better. [1] https://www.propublica.org/article/killing-colorado-wasting-...

Water in the plains comes from a aquifer that will be depleted in my lifetime.

Re: The fertilizer shortage will persist in 2023

#207

Post by ilostmyshoes »

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.

Or they've read up on anthropology, this is common knowledge in the field

Re: The fertilizer shortage will persist in 2023

#208

Post by AlotOfReading »

kortilla wrote: post #205
AlotOfReading wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a good look to strawman things like this when you have sibling comments elsewhere in this thread saying the discussion needs more nuance. I actually did napkin math awhile back comparing a particular 16th century indigenous agricultural yields with 20th century American agriculture [0]. The indigenous system came out favorably until the second half of the 20th century despite the limitations of hand tools and nat…

It’s not a strawman and there isn’t much nuance to what you yourself said. It’s not even close to being adequate. Claiming that people are arguing for “synthesis” is just a weasel word escape route. Indigenous farming is completely inadequate and the parts that are useful have already been incorporated into modern farming. What is it you think is still on the table for this “synthesis”?

Are you familiar with how traditional agricultural systems tend to work? They're vastly different than modern industrial agriculture in my personal experience. You won't find average farms in Central Valley or the midwest doing intercropping (especially anything besides strip intercropping), hyperlocal heirloom varieties, terracing, and complex crop rotations.

Tractors don't like intercropping or terraces, complex rotations are logistically difficult and expensive without a meaningful market to back them. Distributors also don't want your optimized hyperlocal varietals nor do farmers want to manage seed production, so most people buy commercial varieties.

You don't need to explain why these things are true because I already get it. It's beside the point here.

Re: The fertilizer shortage will persist in 2023

#209

Post by RobbieGM »

mythrwy wrote: post #201
banDeveloper wrote: post #31

The real problem is majority of crops being grown for animal agriculture, which is an extremely wasteful way of producing food. We'd only need a fraction of the farmlands if we were actually eating the crops we grow. Sadly, we can't count on consumers making rational choices and politicians are not going to tank their popularity by pushing for these changes. It's the same as climate change.

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.
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