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The Coming Food Catastrophe

economist.com

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Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#361

Post by Scoundreller »

timst4 wrote: post #185
bell-cot wrote: post #28

Tip from an old geezer: Plant Your Victory Garden Now! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden

Here’s another tip: Grow a Biointensive Garden -Use raised beds or Hugelkulture to increase yields. -Use sq foot gardening to plant more in less space -Develop a three stage compost pile. Import food waste from others in your neighborhood if needs be. -Grow year round with cold frames -Use cover crops to enrich soil over winter Thats how you garden to eat my friends https://www.amazon.com/How-Grow-More-Vegetables-Pos…

> Use sq foot gardening to plant more in less space

5gal buckets my friend. Cheap or free if you keep a lookout or have winemaking friends. Free-$2 per bucket for food grade. Pretty much the cheapest you’ll get per gallon of plant space. But I use ours to increase our garden space onto valueless concrete surfaces.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#362

Post by ceejayoz »

psd1 wrote: post #357
ceejayoz wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get 100-ish watt solar panels on Amazon surprisingly cheaply, and they're small enough to take car-camping. https://www.amazon.com/PROGENY-Portable-Kickstand-Flashfish-... https://www.amazon.com/Jackery-SolarSaga-Portable-Explorer-F...

I've just specced up a system to deliver 1-2 KWh per day off-grid, and there are a lot more parts in the system than just the panels. Apart from anything else, if you save on costs by sticking at 12v, you run quite high current. That 100w panel can fuck you up.

Sure, but the parent poster just wanted 50-100 watts to charge a phone. This just has a USB hub on the back you plug into.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#363

Post by exploding_water »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #144

The article actually has four solutions at the bottom. Compared to the severity of the problem, all four solutions are surprisingly simple. Not necessarily easy, but simple and straightforward. 1. Stop using so much corn to make ethanol. 2. Stop using so much seed oil to make biodiesel. 3. Stop feeding so much food to livestock. Bonus: reducing the livestock population provides short term calories! 4. Break the Black…

The third solution doesn’t make much sense since livestock consumption is mostly made up of inedible foods that we can’t eat like husks, stems, leaves, etc. of plants. Livestock is effective for up-cycling foods we can’t digest and turning it into foods that we can such as meat and dairy.

Also there is a lot of food waste in the US. Good food that is suitable for livestock…

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#364

Post by LordDragonfang »

einpoklum wrote: post #354
AussieWog93 wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>1. Stop using so much corn to make ethanol. >2. Stop using so much seed oil to make biodiesel. Easier said than done when there's a global fuel shortage too!

So, 5. Stop using private vehicles so much in favor of public transport + bicycles. Et voila, no more fuel shortage. ... of course, this is even more easier-said-than-done for the US :-(

Ironically, favoring public transport (which includes a good deal of walking) and bicycling is negatively impacted by the global calorie shortage, bringing us full circle.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#365

Post by atchoo »

tmaly wrote: post #315
bryanlarsen wrote: post #144

The article actually has four solutions at the bottom. Compared to the severity of the problem, all four solutions are surprisingly simple. Not necessarily easy, but simple and straightforward. 1. Stop using so much corn to make ethanol. 2. Stop using so much seed oil to make biodiesel. 3. Stop feeding so much food to livestock. Bonus: reducing the livestock population provides short term calories! 4. Break the Black…

I am surprised there are not more calls to end the corn to ethanol subsidies given the cost of food.

This makes me think of The West Wing back in 2005 with Josh and Santos arguing about whether to pander to Iowa about ethanol subsidies. Josh won, Santos pandered.

I guess if you want this to change, you've first got to stop Iowa being so ludicrously influential in the presidential election cycle.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#366

Post by rc_mob »

tmaly wrote: post #315
bryanlarsen wrote: post #144

The article actually has four solutions at the bottom. Compared to the severity of the problem, all four solutions are surprisingly simple. Not necessarily easy, but simple and straightforward. 1. Stop using so much corn to make ethanol. 2. Stop using so much seed oil to make biodiesel. 3. Stop feeding so much food to livestock. Bonus: reducing the livestock population provides short term calories! 4. Break the Black…

I am surprised there are not more calls to end the corn to ethanol subsidies given the cost of food.

studies have shown ethanol doesn't help the environment at all. at this point its just silly those subsidies exist

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#367

Post by AYBABTME »

All of this makes "World3" / "The Limits to Growth" unpleasantly too prophetic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth

> The simplest useful view of this system is that land and fertilizer are used for farming, and more of either will produce more food. In the context of the model, since land is finite, and industrial output required to produce fertilizer and other agricultural inputs can not keep up with demand, there necessarily will be a food collapse at some point in the future.

Another French academic (can't recall his name) gave a recent presentation explaining that our ability to harvest energy is growing slower than our development of new energy resource. This would also inevitably lead to food collapse.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#368

Post by Scoundreller »

wyager wrote: post #195
bell-cot wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try talking to some older folks - who at least heard many first-hand accounts from relatives who both had WWII Victory Gardens, and also gardened food during the Great Depression, out of economic necessity. With a few years' experience doing that, sharing tips and seeds with neighbors also doing it, and memories of being pretty hungry at times in the winter...ordinary people can get pretty damn good at growing a lot…

Getting good at gardening doesn't allow you to exceed agribusiness land efficiency levels, so we can put a pretty tight cap on how much small home gardens actually helped.

Agribusiness will happily choose lower yields in exchange for improved mechanization. Or resistance to disease (higher risk thereof from aggressive monoculture). Or better shelf life/transportability. Or marketability (yellow tomatoes don’t sell as well).

The backyard gardener doesn’t quite have those worries and could get higher land efficiency.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#369

Post by thghtihadanacct »

Gordonjcp wrote: post #305
bequanna wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. and 3. are the same thing: Corn. The trouble is that it is pretty damn tough to pivot from corn to some crop meant for direct human consumption. The machinery and infrastructure we have in place to grow, transport, and process corn is almost unimaginable in size. A pivot like this would require incredible gov't subsidies and take decades.

Yes, but feeding cows corn is silly. They can't digest it and you end up with bland greasy inedible meat, and corn is quite hard to grow.

100% on the cows, wrong on hard to grow. Growing in mass quantities is hard on the local environment (global if you count the affects from usage). Corn fed beef is bad.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#370

Post by hanoz »

Scoundreller wrote: post #211
throwaway821909 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose it gets more complicated though because in at least some cases, we could plant human-edible food where the grass is and still come out ahead (after taking into account that it's harder to grow pretty much anything than grass)

Iunno, I really don’t do anything to the apple tree other than trim branches (which I sell or give away to bbqers depending on my mood). Every couple years it yields a huge crop (and some years gets completely defoliated by disease, but I’m lazy and just let nature take its course). People love non-commercial applewood.

What!? Who's buying apple tree branches off you? I've chucked loads out in recent years.
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