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Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

nytimes.com

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Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#61

Post by moate »

travisoneill1 wrote: post #14
kieranmaine wrote: post #4

What would make people eat less beef? Since taxes seem a hard sell, would subsidizing chicken + non-meat protein help? As a vegetarian I'm trying to get my head around what would help change the behaviour of the meat eating HN members.

I'm not interested in eating less meat so we can grow the population more. It's not a cost issue. Why do we want a population size that requires people to cut back on quality of life?

>>Why do we want a population size that requires people to cut back on quality of life?

If you can show me how eating meat directly correlates to a better quality of life, I'll be gobsmacked.

You may enjoy eating meat, but that doesn't mean it's making your life better/easier. Besides the nutritional side (which is complex, but let's just agree that you can make cases both for or against eating animal flesh as helping your diet and wellness) the agriculture industry is responsible for approximately 9% of US carbon emissions and livestock account for about 3% all by themselves[1]. Changing that could possibly affect your quality of life (assuming you aren't planning on dying in the next 10-20 years before the impact of that starts mattering).

Overall, eating meat is at best likely a net-neutral on your quality of life, even including how much you love eating a burger.

1-https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#62

Post by agumonkey »

snarf21 wrote: post #31
agumonkey wrote: post #3

What if we all had a green wall with aquaponics ?

I think this is what it has to eventually be. We all have a garden in our garage. We save tons on transportation costs throughout the chain. It has to be near zero work. People used to all have gardens in their backyard but stopped when they could afford the cheap produce at the store.

Who here doesn't see it this way ?

I feel as you do: local, near chemical free, food. Plus these days we'd have zigbee or sigfox sensors to ensure certain things and save time.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#63

Post by jcranmer »

alacombe wrote: post #37
ghaff wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Continuing to improve artificial meat (e.g. Impossible Burgers) to get to the point where it's better than the real thing. You don't change people's minds by taking things away from them. You give them a better substitute.

Artificial food will always lack the bio-availabilities of real food our bodies evolved to process. For example, vitamin C artificially synthesized from glucose is more difficult to assimilate by the guts than "natural" vitamin C, especially when consumed with carbs.

That sounds surprising. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3847730/ suggests that there is no difference in bioabsorption in humans between synthetic and natural vitamin C, particularly in the cases where you're not taking straight vitamin C (i.e., supplemental vitamin C tablets).

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#64

Post by bluGill »

snarf21 wrote: post #31
agumonkey wrote: post #3

What if we all had a green wall with aquaponics ?

I think this is what it has to eventually be. We all have a garden in our garage. We save tons on transportation costs throughout the chain. It has to be near zero work. People used to all have gardens in their backyard but stopped when they could afford the cheap produce at the store.

Where is the energy for your garage garden coming from? Plants need a lot of light. Most buildings do not have nearly intense enough light (house plants are low light plants that grow slow so they do fine, but if you want to grow food you generally want a plant that needs a lot more light)

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#65

Post by agumonkey »

bluGill wrote: post #64
snarf21 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is what it has to eventually be. We all have a garden in our garage. We save tons on transportation costs throughout the chain. It has to be near zero work. People used to all have gardens in their backyard but stopped when they could afford the cheap produce at the store.

Where is the energy for your garage garden coming from? Plants need a lot of light. Most buildings do not have nearly intense enough light (house plants are low light plants that grow slow so they do fine, but if you want to grow food you generally want a plant that needs a lot more light)

You have windows, now sunlight is irregular that's true. Also there are light concentrator pipe from large roofs that may be used.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#66

Post by moate »

alacombe wrote: post #40
moate wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actual scientific data proving something that's actually scientifically untrue. Every nutritionist suddenly bribed by a the meat lobby to throw out years of data to the contrary. Proof that the animals being made into food are entirely incapable of thought or physical feeling. That would probably cover everyone.

do you mean humans are designed to digest cellulose ? That's news to me...

OP asked what it would take to convince all vegetarians that a meat based diet is healthiest, and that animals can be raised humanely with low environmental impact. Just because you can't digest the straw man you threw together, doesn't make a "meat based" diet a thing these people are going to be convinced to move to.

Let's ignore the health. That's a minefield of BS pseudo-science and people claiming their "body hack" would work for the world at large, and I'm not even going to get there. (personally- meat is fine, plants are great, most people probably eat too many carbs and fats and don't exercise enough. Organic is because all food is organic material and the name is just a marketing for a style of farming).

How would you convince a vegan that meat is the best choice? Answer: prove that animals can't think or feel. Otherwise, someone will say that there's a moral wrong being committed. It doesn't matter if you agree with that or not (FWIW: I have a butcher's chart of a pig tattoo'd on my arm, so my stance is literally worn on my sleeve here), we're talking about convincing someone else.

You might be able to convince 80% with "but evolution!!1!" type arguments, but when you get to a moral vegetarian, they don't think killing animals is morally correct, and that's the 20% you're never convincing. OP put up a dumb hypothetical "how do you", my answer is "you can't because reasons".

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#67

Post by bane »

kieranmaine wrote: post #4

What would make people eat less beef? Since taxes seem a hard sell, would subsidizing chicken + non-meat protein help? As a vegetarian I'm trying to get my head around what would help change the behaviour of the meat eating HN members.

Make it more expensive than other protein sources. That's it.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#68

Post by chadcmulligan »

kieranmaine wrote: post #4

What would make people eat less beef? Since taxes seem a hard sell, would subsidizing chicken + non-meat protein help? As a vegetarian I'm trying to get my head around what would help change the behaviour of the meat eating HN members.

Eating meat is way easier than eating balanced vegetarian imho. I've cut down on my meat lately and it does require more time and involvement to eat vegetarian. E.g. an easy dinner is bbq a steak and chuck out some salad, done. Our entire society is based on convenience of eating meat, to get the same from a vegetarian diet is a lot harder to learn, you really have to want to. I still eat fish and eggs for this reason, I'm not really sure how to go full vegetarian, I know its possible but its another level of work for me. There's probably a bit of FUD thrown around by the meat industry that you need protein and iron from red meat as well.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#69

Post by saalweachter »

dovvdkc wrote: post #58
joering2 wrote: post #15

Why is food grow not stuck up vertically? I mean let's go 3D, since at least majority of vegetables and most fruits do not need more than height of 2 feet of space. It also surprised me how old school modern farming still remains. Look at the first picture from this article: a bunch of modern tractors unnecessarily burning oil, unnecessarily operated by humans. By now this should be three times the size field with 15…

“Its a matter of setting up bunch of mirrors reflecting sunlight. Of course you need sun to grow.” Doesn’t work > see thermodynamics. The mirror you’d be setting up would have to set up away from the building where the food is grown and therefore occupy space. In agronomy there is a concept that the rate of growth is set by whichever one necessary nutrient is limited. Since we fertilize and pump water, the limiting f…

As an aside, while we're still a ways off from battery-electric farm vehicles (cost/weight of batteries is still just too high to meet the same parameters as diesel tractors, even with very generous assumptions the last time I ran the numbers), I still like the idea of electric farm equipment hardwired to the grid and dragging giant electric cords behind them like really boring EVAs.

(Sure, you'd still want batteries to drive the machinery between fields, and you'd need a way to keep the cords from damaging crops or disrupting the plowing when you're dragging them around, and you'd need to put a huge "tractor electric outlet" by every cluster of fields you're working with, but these are all engineering challenges that could be met with current technology.)

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#70

Post by Kalium »

tareqak wrote: post #6

There is also the problem of food distribution. Ignoring future population growth, the world does produce enough food to people everyone [0] (obtained from the first sentence of [1]). If we are collectively unwilling to solve the distribution problem today, then it there is a good chance that we won't do much about the shortage tomorrow. In addition, unconsumed food waste is also problem, and probably does have some…

Logistics is hard. On top of that, importing food is a very political subject. Do you want to feed everyone in the world as resource-efficiently as possible, or do you want every country/region/city/neighborhood/community to be equipped to feed itself? Bear in mind that these two are very much different scenarios. Small, poor, inefficient farmers have been bankrupted by cheap imports they cannot compete with more than once in world history. Similarly, price controls on food have led to famine more than once.

This is without even touching on the point that a lot of poorer countries really want to be able to export food for a profit.

I get the sense that the short answer to your uncomfortable question is simple: yes. With the asterisk being all the political and economic questions that go in it and don't have simple answers.

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