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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

#211

Post by alar44 »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #126
_0w8t wrote: post #124

Earlier 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.

I checked the math, they are correct.

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

#212

Post by Turing_Machine »

_0w8t wrote: post #137
Turing_Machine wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The number of hours per week wasn't even a factor in the original statement. You're trying to drag the conversation off on a tangent.

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

#213

Post by Turing_Machine »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #178
Turing_Machine wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Come on, a "modern serf" would have access to (Civil liberties discussion aside): - power tools - solar/wind/battery for power independence - internet for entertainment - running water in the house - cheap goods (clothes, etc are WAY MORE cheap and efficient to make now) So I'd say the day-to-day job is theoretically even easier.

I don't think a modern serf would have any of those things, because a society in which 90% of the available human capital is devoted to manual agriculture does not have the available labor to produce any of those things. At least, not for anyone other than the 10% of "lords".

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

#214

Post by coldtea »

bee_rider wrote: post #182
xyzzyz wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, we evolved to consume prepared food, including meat. Our mouths, jaws, and digestive system have been coevolving for past few tens-to-hundreds of thousands of years with our diets and food preparation methods. Certainly, vegetables have not been a major source of calories for humans in many tens of thousands of years now (because they don’t have a lot of calories in them in the first place, but also because they…

You are essentially right that prepared meat played a big role in our evolution, but we're at a point now where growing seasons are less of an issue due to the global economy, and things like incomplete proteins from eating a single type of locally growing bean can be handled through more diverse sourcing. If we were really trying to optimize, we might look at tradeoffs WRT locally raised meats vs grains and beans th…

>but we're at a point now where growing seasons are less of an issue due to the global economy,

We should go back to a point where growing seasons are more of an issue, due to environment and sustainability.

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

#215

Post by ethbr0 »

dilap wrote: post #201
ethbr0 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's difficult to organize, fund, & perpetrate evil at scale, to the exclusion of a financial motive, so it rarely happens. I'm sure the anti-indigenous Army leaders at the time were pleased with the side effect, but the reality is that firearms + slow moving bison + horses + railroad shipping = profit. And so people kept doing it until bison were almost eradicated.

Definitely multifactorial, but the US army really did have a policy of killing buffalo w/ the aim of depriving the indians they were fighting of their primary food source.

Do you have a citation? Because Wikipedia explicitly mentioned 'This was said, but it's not clear if implementation went beyond someone dreaming out loud.'

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

#216

Post by Incipient »

LatteLazy wrote: post #179

The problem with farms is they are small businesses. But instead of having entrepreneurs or managers, or some other competent people, they have farmers in charge. And farmers absolutely refuse to do things like accounts or business plans or learning about farming.

While you may be right in some cases, or in other countries, here in Australia, farming in general is a highly developed industry with both very modern business models, and a rapidly digitising business platform.

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

#218

Post by OJFord »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #138
fennecfoxen wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Crop rotation? Of perennials?

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

#219

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #177
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They only use fossil fuels to make the hydrogen. Which can be made more efficiently with electricity. Are we really in disagreement then? Where pray tell do you think electricity comes from? In the US, 60% comes from fossil fuels, about 20% from nuclear. Solar, wind, biomass and geothermal combined is My point is that most folks understand that moving our electric infrastructure to renewables is an enormous, long t…

Well, similar to the "EVs just burn coal" thing, it seems likely that burning the gas to make electricity and then using that electricity to make hydrogen would be more efficient, so doing it that way would reduce demand, save money, and just generally be better than what we do now. And then you've a) freed up lots of a storable fuel that you can use to supplement renewables if you really need it (and can be kept and…

> it seems likely that burning the gas to make electricity and then using that electricity to make hydrogen would be more efficient

I'm not sure why one would think that, the exact opposite is true. Going to electrolysis is only desirable if the energy source is a renewable.

This article has a very good overview of the challenges with moving ammonia production to sustainable energy sources:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2021.5808...

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

#220

Post by pas »

cf141q5325 wrote: post #173
smallerfish wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Thats a simplification for a feel good narrative. Your source lists all land that grows anything but forest as agriculture land. Yet on large parts of those areas you cant do anything but pastures. Also, much of the cow feed isnt calories humans can process. Think byproducts of soy production. The youtube channel "What I've Learned" has a great video on it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGG-A80Tl5g What they dont m…

Is regenerative agriculture the new name for holistic planned grazing? (Pushed by Alan Savory) Or it's different and actually works?
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