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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?

#81

Post by nyokodo »

dghughes wrote: post #73

It's slightly terrifying to see the data about the loss of nutrients in plants around the world due to climate change. On YouTube there was an interesting Veritasim story about plants and their mineral levels. It seems plants have fewer minerals now compared to 100 years ago. Farmers have fertilizer and the plants grow but they don't have the same levels of nutrition even with all that help. Samples of weeds from the…

IIRC that youtube video concluded that the difference in nutrient content was because growth rates were accelerated by the increased CO2 in the atmosphere but the rate of extracting nutrients from the soil was not accelerated. This is then presumably related to the global greening phenomenon we've witnessed where the increased CO2 has lead to a large increase in forestation globally.

It's important to note that the video asserts that food is still plenty nutritious and if you eat a well balanced diet you're fine and my own note is that there is also probably a limit to this effect.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#82

Post by pg_bot »

Luckily we have already solved this problem, we just need to distribute the solution to the developing world. Better crops and machinery result in much higher yields. If you are a small farmer and you are using livestock for labor something like 40% of your land has to be devoted to growing food for the animals to do the work. We must continue to innovate for that is the only way that everyone can win.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#83

Post by sp332 »

alacombe wrote: post #43
ryanmercer wrote: post #10

Or we could stop throwing away nearly 1/3 of the food we produce...

We don't. There is pretty much 0 loss in meat once you take into account derivative products (including both pet food and the chemical industry).

A UN study from 2013 showed that 1/3 of all food made worldwide is discarded as waste, about 1.3 billion pounds per year. http://www.fao.org/docrep/018/i3347e/i3347e.pdf

A recent survey of US households shows that they throw away an average for 250 pounds of food per year. http://ada.multimedia-newsroom.com/index.php/2018/11/26/surv...

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#84

Post by weberc2 »

sp332 wrote: post #75
alacombe wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think this is what it has to eventually be. We all have a garden in our garage. No you won't, at least not with greens. Did you even try to do the math for the required amount of food a single person needs per-year ? Even if you go with rabbits, which are easy to raise, you can only self produce a small amount of meat per year, maybe ~150lb once you get to "scale".

You're right about the quantity, but why don't you eat it yourself? That's much more efficient.

It's almost certainly less efficient when you account for spoilage (namely all of the crazy seasonal work you need to do every year to keep all of your surplus from spoiling so you can eat it out of season). The market is pretty efficient, it turns out.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#85

Post by doctorpangloss »

saalweachter wrote: post #56
maerF0x0 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that is the crux of the entire question. You get what you incentivize. Current US Farming practices are extremely incentivized towards singular homogenous products using an absolute minimum of human labor.

Eh, grains are never the problem. Essentially none of the problems you hear about in agriculture apply to grains. We can produce just staggering amounts of grain on a per-acre basis, and we can ship them without refrigeration and store them for long periods of time without any significant loss of nutritional value. The carbon, energy and monetary cost of shipping huge quantities of grain from the center of the US to…

Yeah, but aren’t you worried you’re going to really eat crow when you find out that the industrial features of grains are decisively harmful for the environment?

Like obviously meat production is too. But did you consider that wiping out insects might have as much to do with grain pesticides as produce pesticides?

It would be smarter if you just said the truth, which is “It’s hard to tell if the economic costs of grain production (like environmental damage) line up with the accounting costs (what shows up in a price per metric ton), because our framework for accounting for environmental damage has basically never slowed down production in a single market before lower prices has.”

Really, even nuclear power plants still make money right? Name one market where accounting for environmental damage reduces supply before a decline in prices did.

It should be obvious that what I’m saying isn’t an oxymoron. Organic produce is supposed to “account” for environmental costs, and it’s oftentimes more profitable to make. So the same land will be induced into making whatever is most profitable per acre. Obviously the problem is that people are incentivized to make the accounting costs of environmental impact as small as possible, even when selling organic produce. And that’s the problem.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#86

Post by beat »

saalweachter wrote: post #56
maerF0x0 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that is the crux of the entire question. You get what you incentivize. Current US Farming practices are extremely incentivized towards singular homogenous products using an absolute minimum of human labor.

Eh, grains are never the problem. Essentially none of the problems you hear about in agriculture apply to grains. We can produce just staggering amounts of grain on a per-acre basis, and we can ship them without refrigeration and store them for long periods of time without any significant loss of nutritional value. The carbon, energy and monetary cost of shipping huge quantities of grain from the center of the US to…

Isn't that exactly what we're doing, though? The essence of cheap junk calories is grain (flour), soybean oil (another plant with similar growing needs), sugar (largely from grain in the US - high fructose corn syrup - but sugarcane is also easy to grow at scale), and meat from grain-fed chickens and cows.

All this stuff is shipped to factories, where it is broken down into refined materials for other factories, that make the junk food - burgers, sliced bread, candy bars, whatever - that are sealed or frozen for portability and shelf stability.

This is how we've doubled the population of the planet in 50 years, while bringing per-capita food cost to the lowest point in human history.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#87

Post by naravara »

weberc2 wrote: post #80
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.

We save tons on transportation costs, but lose many orders of magnitude more on redundant labor and economies of scale (one tractor working in a big field is a lot more economical than 1200 humans working in 1200 gardens). Maybe technological advancements will change all of that--perhaps we could have fully robotic farms, but even then I would expect one big factory farm with a handful of big, expensive robots to out…

>(one tractor working in a big field is a lot more economical than 1200 humans working in 1200 gardens).

Sure. But 1200 humans working in 1200 gardens is also a lot more economical than 1200 humans sitting at home playing Fortnite all day because there are no jobs.

The idea of employment guarantees as welfare policy has been getting traction, and programs like this where raw output isn't the main goal would be good candidates.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#88

Post by naravara »

loeg wrote: post #17

This is touched on in Pinker's "Enlightenment Now." The current trendy "organic" label requires more land to grow the same amount of food. Whatever benefits of so-called organic farming you perceive, if any, it is a regression in terms of feeding the world's growing population.

>if any, it is a regression in terms of feeding the world's growing population.

Food security is a distribution problem, not a production problem. We're already producing far far more food than we consume or would even need to consume. Big Ag likes to pretend they need higher yields in order to feed the hungry but they're full of it. They want to produce more for cheaper and pocket the margin, but they're not going to do jack squat to get that production out to the people who need it.

Re: Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

#89

Post by meggar »

rohit2412 wrote: post #76
meggar wrote: post #41

Maybe Boring Co and Square Roots can do some underground vertical farming so we don't keep running out of romaine.

Topsoil is needed for plants, which won't grow underground without it. And if you're going to carry soil underground, might as well do it in an above ground building. Or try hydro ponics

I was thinking more like a 10 foot wide hole, 1 mile deep.
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