A remarkable amount of the fertilizer applied via modern industrial farming practices is just wasted:
> "According to an average of 13 global databases from 10 data sources, in 2010, 161 teragrams of nitrogen were applied to agricultural crops, but only 73 teragrams of nitrogen made it to the harvested crop. A total of 86 teragrams of nitrogen was wasted, perhaps ending up in the water, air, or soil. The new research was published in the journal Nature Food in July."
Large-area applications by mechanized systems seem to be part of the problem, but that's also necessary to escape the subsitence agriculture trap, i.e. with such systems, it's not necessary for half or more of the human population to be working in the fields to grow food, it's more like 1 in 50 or 1 in 100.
The most promising solution might be AI + robots. If a robot could crawl up and down fields inspecting individual plants for nutrient status and applying small amounts of fertilizer as needed (also weeding and checking for pest infestations), it could cut fertilizer use in half while maintaining the same level of production - and perhaps eliminate the need for most herbicides and pesticides.
There is so little organic matter in the topsoil due to modern farming practices and it gets worse every year. The result is soil that doesn't retain water, it just runs off. This means that irrigation has to be more and more frequent, and it means that fertilizer runs off (causing algal blooms etc) more than it percolates into the soil
I'm not sure why the general tone of HN seems to be that modern farming isn't changing at all.
Erosion has been on everyone's radar for decades. We went from plow -> till -> low till -> no till. Believe me, the folks who do this talk about plowing practices and cover crops. They also discuss GMO crops and the crazy legal restrictions around seed that come with it.
> Brown earth has a deep top layer where most of the nutrients are and biological activities take place. At around 20 centimetres deep
Fun fact, where I grew up there is over 10 feet of black dirt before you hit bedrock. A lot of the Midwestern US is like that. Even with all that runway those guys _still_ discuss erosion.
> I'm not sure why the general tone of HN seems to be that modern farming isn't changing at all.
Indeed. Perhaps somewhere out there is a parallel forum filled with farmers opining about computer programming, with equally inane remarks like "Have those programmers ever thought about making languages that translate into machine code instead of writing everything out as ones and zeros?"
Most of those forums (which I have visited) are in person; they’re almost always complaining about the proprietary locked down code. Frankly, farmers are a more libertarian bunch than programmers.
Farmers are well aware of water and the sustainablity of its sources. It just so happens that the equilibrium point they aim for is sustainability for them, not them & everybody else that happens to live downstream
The rate of depletion of large aquifers suggests that farmers don't care very much about sustainability of their water source. I think price is pretty much the only signal that farmers can afford to care about.
Depends where you live, but farmers around me are always monitoring everything — rainfall, water retention in the soil, aquifer levels, river and creek levels, etc.
That said, you’re right, they’re running a business. What they tend to do is use the smallest amount of water to produce good yields.
The only real thing a farmer can control are what they plant, when they water, when they fertilize and what they harvest (plus some maintenance, like weeding, but water isn’t impacted).
What farmers tend to do is water when necessary (between rain periods). They’ll also select different plants to grow based on price and watering schedule. That said; I’ve also seen farmers try to improve water retention (through tilling in cover crops and / or adding organic material). They’ve also built dams, etc to capture rain water and reduce erosion.
As far as I can tell, farmers do indeed try to conserve and utilize what they can. At the same time, water is being subsided by government and / or regulated. So places like California have a weird things like building farms in the desert. If the water prices were more free and people still build farms, I don’t see an issue frankly. They’re just using every drop before it gets to the sea. As the water depletes (ie too many farms) I imagine farmers will go elsewhere or change crops to become more efficient.
To be honest, I don’t see water management being too much of an issue at the moment. Plants have become increasingly drought resistant and we have the ability to breed and genetically modify them more so.
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.
It is more about that fact that people talking about sustainable food production do not share many goals with commodity farmers exchanging corn and soybeans for as much cash as possible.
At least farmers have the humility to not go on the internet and smear you based on their opinion of your use of a document database over a relational database.
"I've never farmed in my life, but I'm pretty sure I know more than the guy who has been doing it for decades and whose entire livelihood is based on it."
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 natural fertilizer. There's still a gap between that and current yields, but I think it's fair to point out that most advocates of these systems are actually arguing for a synthesis with modern technologies that allow them to scale rather than a complete rejection of modernity.
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.
> Are you familiar with how traditional agricultural systems tend to work?
Yes, they produced terrible yields that would starve the current population.
There is a reason farmers’ markets are for the upper middle class. Anything that isn’t done at scale can’t feed 8 billion people. If it can’t be done with combines/tractors/etc, it’s fucking useless.
Without experience, land, and modern industrial farming techniques? No, "everybody" would not start subsistence farming. There would be massive famines, billions would starve and die.
But if you ignore the labour demands per mouth fed, the education needed, the amount of land to feed current western population to sustainable replacement level, the requirement to maintain advanced defence systems to prevent land being taken or otherwise destroyed, the issues with the global climate affecting whatever you do in this agrarian society, could it be done?
Like the rest of industrial age development, farm automation has historically been built around treating everything uniformly (even distribution of seeds bred for easy harvest in evenly spaced rows evenly fertilizied with no rocks etc etc). Moving away from that introduces all kinds of complexity, mechanical problems, data problems, etc, which are not easy to solve even when you have historical existence proofs of potentially better ways to do things. It's happening though.
What I'm getting at is things like applying fertilizer based on estimated need from imaging data, using robots with lasers to kill weeds, mechanized intercropping, etc. Not something consumers will necessarily see any direct impact from but that improve the quality and economics of production.
A historical existence proof of a system or technology working has essentially nothing to do with whether it's being practiced in industry today, and whether it's being practiced today has very little to do with the product or pricing you see when you for example stop by KFC to eat a piece of chicken that's largely created out of corn, soy, and methane. That's the beauty of capitalism and commodity markets, John Deere can roll out technology for say computer-controlled planting that improves efficiency and the dividends get spread across the value chain without everyone having to know about it or change what they're doing.
We do. Perhaps you may not recognize our lingo. For example, around here we humorously refer to wheat as 'poverty grass' because there is no money in growing it but recognize it as a necessity to keep in the rotation for the ecological health benefits it provides.
Crop rotation seems to be pretty widespread. I remember as a kid learning about it and knowing I’d see different crops each year to help the soil for future harvests.
Crop diversity is great. And you also need lots of organic matter to go on top of the soil: to build life in the soil. that's much better than trying to duct tape the matter with fertilizer.
Crop rotation has been standard practice my entire life. One of the many kickers though is soybeans are the fallback crop for really wet springs. Many crops need to be planted by a certain date or the growing season will be too short. Soybeans can "make up for lost time", so to speak. If your first planting gets flooded, or if it's too wet to get any crop in, you can wait until it's dry and toss in some soy to recoup some of the cost. Thing is soybeans use a lot of nitrogen.
Many years ago one of my neighbours tried not rotating is crops. It worked out okay the first couple of years, but it wasn't long before his yields nosedived and within the five years he was bankrupt.
My family's been farming corn on corn for 20+ years. Started strip-tilling in the 80's High residue fields help trap as much moisture as we can with limited irrigation capacity. Farmers have no choice but to take care of their soils to remain viable. And more than viable, be profitable as there are many people who depend on them both for their livelihoods as well as an ever demanding population with mouths to feed.
It’s strange that the article you linked doesn’t mention no-till farming. Farmers replace the plows on their tractors (which turn over the soil) with knives that have fertilizer injectors on the tips. Rather than plow, then spray fertilizer on to the surface, they inject fertilizer into the ground. After a few years, earthworms reestablish themselves and naturally aerate the soil.
This can be combined with other (well established, commercially available) precision agriculture techniques to minimize irrigation and fertilizer waste.
The big problem is the up front cost of replacing tractor implements, and training labor.
Anyway, this is much easier than agroforestry, building glass hydroponics towers, etc.
Thanks I was looking for a youtube video that I couldn't find so I grabbed the first article I saw that explained that problem well. As for solutions, you are right no-till is a big one (the main one?) and is worth reading about elsewhere
CSAs where I live are a luxury good for a few people to feel better about themselves. You pay in much more than you get back (compared to a grocery store), and what you get is geared towards variety to make it more appealing. As such, you get enough of any particular veg for one or two meals, at a cost that is wildly expensive for most people. I tried one summer, and it was cute but replaced approximately 0% of our grocery bill.
Just to throw out some numbers, I pay $27/box for my fruit n' veg mix, which I could mostly replicate for maybe $15-20 at the grocery store. But the freshness can't be beat, and I think it's fun to see what I can do with whatever shows up. It's definitely not replacing my entire grocery bill, of course, but I do think it is worth it.
That' not bad. Where I am for $45, you get a big bad of lettuce, a couple of potatoes and an onion. Last years was so disappointed that we didn't renew. Ten years ago the same CSA was $600 for the season, 4 months, and it was a good sized bag with a pretty nice selection of produce. Granted I think every bag included some beets but by the middle of the season I really liked beets so it was a plus. Now it jut seems to be a better deal to go to the farmers market and get whatever looks good.
I guess it depends on your goals. It will never be as affordable as the grocery store as the economies of scale aren't there. The idea is to provide reliable revenue to a local farm in exchange for high quality produce produced in a sustainable way. It doesn't make me feel particularly "better about myself" to connect with the family that provides us this service, but I do like their mission, and I want them to be successful, so in my case it's worth it. Also, I would imagine pricing varies wildly from one region to the next, so we may be comparing apples to oranges (or swiss chard for that matter).
This sounds like it's begging for an article in 20 years about "Why we never should have used superabsorbent polymers in agriculture".
Won't these things get broken apart after years of working the ground? Won't they potentially contaminate other areas by traveling downstream or being blown by the wind?
> 161 teragrams of nitrogen were applied to agricultural crops, but only 73 teragrams of nitrogen made it to the harvested crop
Getting ~half of the nitrogen from the fertilizer into the harvest seems awfully impressive to me. There are so many ways for nitrogen to escape - into runoff, broken down back into the atmosphere, used to grow weeds and non-productive parts of the plant, etc.
> A remarkable amount of the fertilizer applied via modern industrial farming practices is just wasted:
Hmm, the fact that there is waste totally unsurprising given some of nitrogen deliverey methods (like anhydrous ammonia). But those numbers are really high.
> water, air, or soil
Ah, but if it's still in the soil that could probably account for a big chunk of it that would eventually get used
While it's cool and all to want to work on AI+Robots, because obviously that's where this thought is coming from because who wants to actually work in the fields am I right?\s
I think it's more important to think about market fit and margins of farming, in what world is introducing a complex, expensive machine to an already thin margin industry a practical solution?
The reason it's inefficient and wasteful isn't because "they're some hicks who need the righteous engineer to come and save them with their brilliance" its because its fast and cheap
Modern industrial-scale farming equipment is already highly engineered. Adding features that allowed for more precise care of individual plants would be an extension of existing technology, not something radically new. Take a look at modern combine harvesters, for example:
This is also a sector that would benefit from electrification, incidentally.
Of course, the fossil fuel and petrochemical sector won't like being cut out of the agriculture business to any extent, so there's that kind of resistance to such changes.
Yes, but fast and cheap is temporary (and the end result is a lot of pain).
This is a problem that requires structural investment from government (the populace) but once done, the return on investment seems very high.
How do you think the Netherlands are the second leading agricultural exporter in the world right now? Short answer - very efficient greenhouses.
To get an idea of just how efficient - they use ~4 to 9 liters of water per pound of tomatoes produced. The world average is 60 liters per pound of tomatoes. Not the high end - the AVERAGE.
In places where you have enough water, that doesn't sound like a problem.
It's not like the water is lost forever. (In those places where you have enough water, and don't take it out of an ancient non-replenishing aquifer or so.)
Sure, but water is hardly the only input they're optimizing for.
They're reducing the need for pesticides and fungicides by controlling the ambient environment around the plants.
Reducing the need for fertilizers by optimizing growing conditions and limiting runoff and waste.
Basically - the attitude there has been: "Build the right environment for the plant" followed by a focus on efficient (and therefor cost effective) inputs.
We aren't building the right environment, we're just dumping inputs (pesticides, fungicides, fertilizers, water, etc) on the growing area and calling it a day.
Which is cheap on the up front capital costs, but much more expensive over the long term, as you end up needing consistently more inputs over a long period of time.
---
Basically - I'm arguing that the up front capital costs likely are worth the returns to you get in efficiency, but farmers in the US are not incentivized to make those investments. Or perhaps more realistically - can't afford those investments on their current operating margins. Which is why we likely will want government programs focused on this.
> They're reducing the need for pesticides and fungicides by controlling the ambient environment around the plants.
Not just the ambient environment. When you go soilless through hydroponics, you eliminate a lot of soil borne disease issues. Even soil control through pots instead of direct ground contact prevents a lot of problems wiggling around.
AI robots that do companion planting with robots. There's a free idea for you. Harvesting would not work with combine harvesters. You'd have to harvest corn planted with beans like you were picking strawberries, but with robots, maybe it's doable.
Maybe, but that's a lot of degrees of freedom of movement and machine vision to use "3 sisters" farming techniques, interplanting works because of the system of moisture, structure, and nitrogen fixation that each unit provides. Not saying it's not a good system/cool project idea.
Well, that explains why our water is so high in nitrates. I've been looking into our local water supply. Out of the over 200 contaminants, the one that exceeds the EWG's limit by the most margin is nitrates which is said to come from fertilizer run off.
> A remarkable amount of the fertilizer applied via modern industrial farming practices is just wasted
You can also cut out most of the nitrogen just by using Plant Growth Promoting Bacteria (e.g. azospirillum), but most US farmers don't do that. Without PGPBs, most of the plant's energy is wasted just trying to uptake the nitrogen from the soil. Whereas the with the bacteria, not only do the bacteria produce the nitrogen themselves, but they also do all the work of feeding it to your plants so they can spend their energy growing and producing food instead.
A quick Googling of the literature (more general terms seems to be bioinoculant and biofertilizer) suggests exactly that. There are industrial products out there for large-scale inoculation, but manufacture, packaging, shipping, and application of bioinoculants can require rather sophisticated carriers, whether in solid, liquid, or polymer form; or engineering more easily accommodated bacteria or fungus. It seems it's still very early days for industrial-scale products, notwithstanding that the research and perhaps even some products go back decades.
It doesn't walk, it flows - sometimes above ground, sometimes under - to the nearest tiny gully, creek, stream, spring, etc., with very few exceptions.
It's 14km (8.8mi) from your pinpoint to the Arkansas, from there it's about as straight of a shot toward the gulf of mexico as you can get (via the Mississippi).
Some water is pulled down (along with the half of the fertilizer that's actually used), the rest is literally washed away because the soil can't absorb the amount of water being dropped on it. All the water that's flowing over the ground ends up in rivers (it's the reason they exist in the first place).
Some of it does I am sure, where some will be consumed by soil bacteria. Lots of fertilizers are salts as well and even if it goes into the soil, rain will redissolve it where it will eventually make its way to rivers.
45% conversion to crop is actually amazing and way higher than I thought it would be.
You'd never be able to get it to 100% just based on thermodynamics alone. It takes a lot of energy to move nutrients from an area of low concentration (the soil) to an area of high concentration (the plant).
Just making up number here, but if a plant needed 10 grams of nitrogen, but the soil contained only 50 mg at any given time (but was constantly replenished), plant growth and yield would suffer considerably - despite the fact that a sufficient supply is available over time. You need to have an excess supply of nutrients available to maximize growth.
It's similar to water - many plants will die in soil that has a low level of moisture. The water is there, the plant just doesn't have the capacity to actually pull in enough to sustain life.
Idea: Take some clay, form and burn a repository for nitrogen rich water, that can be reached by roots, but not by rainwater, bury them beneath the field, resupply it via a feed line.
Now watch roots and heavy tractors ruin that brilliant plan.
Hydroponics usually measure the nutrients in the water and only add when needed. Indoor farming with soil beds can adopt water recycling too but there's no requirement to.
Few things have a single cause, but I think it's not outlandish to hypothesize that potential pending famines could be driven by a fertilizer shortage, driven by Russia's invasion and global economic issues, driven by the pandemic.
Maybe this is obvious to those smarter than I, but I'm beginning to have a sinking sense that direct deaths by SARS-COV2 will be a shockingly small minority of total deaths caused by the pandemic over the next generation. We're going to see this event loud and clear in every economic and demographic chart for the next half-century, aren't we?
For any past-3-years timespan currently, you'll get the right picture only by looking at the numbers in light of consideration from the pandemic.
It's not that rates are low now, it's that they were temporarily high for three years, during the pandemic shutdowns and backlogged demand from that.
(Same goes for the apparent recession in 2022. That was mostly an artifact of the pandemic numbers, comparing 2022 to a 2021 that was artificially high from time-shifted backlogged demand from 2020.)
>I doubt it. In as much as they are allowed to function, markets will reward people addressing the shortages with outsized profit.
Standing nuclear armies 600K+ soldiers strong enforcing blockades, embargoes, price caps, bans, sanctions etc are not the most shining indicator of a free market that will correct shortages to equilibrium...
How can you price gouge something like Sri-Lakha, that has no currency to trade with? This whole mental model just has no grasp for the moment when the rear of the car falls off..
Hire its citizens. No money means you'd benefit by sending them money.
But inequality is a different problem than getting through crises. It should be addressed while leaving the production incentives intact. For example, progressive and/or negative income taxes.
Its citizens pay top dollar (earned by others abroad) to leave en mass. The state is collapsing and taking bribes to allow this.
So the free market creates waves, that set other systems under pressure, creating a domino tsunami. Were are the models for that? The solutions for that? Runaway to mars or NZ?
I want to express how jaring this ideology-irresponsibility background noise is regardless of ideologic affiliation.
The {MAGIC_TOTEM} will fix it, and then dangling discussion, problems, you are on your own good luck. It is moments like these, that are a direct attack on democracy and a engligthened citizenry as concept, leaving the pessimistic grown ups to contemplate full scenarios, while stealing oneself out of the problem space.
MAGIC_TOTEM = FreeMarket| God | Society
Countriy need solutions:
Short-term:Food delivery. Stabilization.
Mid-term: Fertilizer on credit
Long-Term: Fertilizer, made in situ (solar), in uncorruptable form (direct material transfer to farmers).
Passivity: Amplifies the problem.
The market is voting for a explosion and to make it your problem in the long run, directly and indirectly.
I'm not sure i follow. How exactly will the people "awarded with outsized profit for addressing the shortages" help those starving due to lack of affordable food? "The market" doesn't work for goods whose demand is inelastic, such as food and medicine. Letting people starve "to allow the market to function" is cold blooded greed.
the market does work for goods whose demand is inelastic
at the cme wheat costs 8.38 dollars per bushel, 31¢ per kg, and 1 kg of wheat is roughly two person-days' worth of food, 57 dollars per person-year
(of course an actual diet needs to be more varied and therefore slightly more expensive, but even just cooked wheat will extend your survival time under famine conditions by quite a lot)
let's start by dividing the cases to consider into ① cases where people have substantially more than 57 dollars per year to spend on food, whether in the form of production, money savings, foreign aid, or salable goods, and ② cases where they don't
we can subdivide case ① into case ①ⓐ where there are price controls, so that people who sell wheat at substantially higher prices than, say, 50¢ per kg, are subject to criminal prosecution, and case ①ⓑ where they are not
in case ①ⓑ you do not have a famine, and people do not starve, because even if delivering the food is very difficult and dangerous (①ⓑⅰ), due to pirates and collapsing currencies and whatnot, it will be profitable (for somebody anyway); maybe you'll have one merchant selling wheat at 2 dollars per kilogram and making an outsized profit, while another made worse choices and would need 3 dollars per kilogram and therefore has to take a loss from competing with the first merchant. and if it is not difficult and dangerous (case ①ⓑⅱ) then someone will sell wheat at 60¢ a kilogram in the supermarkets and there will be no outsized profits but still nobody will starve
in case ①ⓐ you might get lucky, maybe getting wheat into the country and distributed will not be difficult and dangerous (①ⓑⅱ), and so there's no shortages even though there are price controls. but if shipping costs go up, or bandits steal half the wheat in transit, or supermarkets can't open because of rioting, (①ⓑⅰ) selling wheat will be unprofitable at the legal price, and so merchants will do it as little as possible, and people will starve due to lack of not only affordable food but any food. wheat will rot in silos or be fed to livestock in order to avoid prosecution
in case ②, where people have less than 100 dollars per year and so can't afford to pay for the food they need to stay alive through voluntary exchange, their only hope for survival is to seize it by force, price controls or no price controls. this is a frequent occurrence throughout human history, and of course there's a whole continuum from a hypothetical state of perfect liberty, through transparent flat tax rates, through mafia protection rackets, all the way to raiding bands of thuggees and the holodomor.
systems that are closer to the totalitarian end of this spectrum tend to have frequent famines because, again, people starve due to lack of not only affordable food but any food at all; the holodomor is one example, but other examples are the irish potato famine, the ethiopian famine caused by the derg, the frequent famines in india under the british raj, and the greatest famine in human history, the great leap forward
because the cold-blooded-greed-powered market is, generally speaking, how people get fed in the first place, if you want to reduce the number of people who starve, you will let it function
i mean, unless you have a better replacement for the cold-blooded market, already debugged and working, but the track record of the proposed alternatives so far includes many of the worst atrocities in human history
And while the demand for food in general might be somewhat inelastic, the demand for wheat is very elastic, because you can substitute.
(Also keep in mind that we have huge buffers because of animal husbandry. If plant matter becomes too expensive, people can switch to eating it directly instead of feeding it to livestock first.)
I absolutely agree, and admire your comprehensive explanation.
While the market may sound greedy, you can't legislate away human nature. People just won't work for free.
If you also want to address inequality, then by all means implement progressive/negative income taxes. But mess with production and distribution incentives (like implementing price controls) and you have a recipe for disaster.
yes, and even more intrusive ways of addressing inequality such as subsidizing food prices with tax money can be effective without creating a perverse incentive to restrict the food supply precisely when it's most needed
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 doubt it. In as much as they are allowed to function, markets will reward people addressing the shortages with outsized profit
This is dangerous, fantasy thinking detached fromt the real world.v
If there is shortage of food today, you plant wheat today, it will be ready to eat in 7 months.
If it's not the right time to plant, it could be a year. By that time, people will be dead already.
Now, we don't even have idle land ready to plant, and if you have to invest in greenhouses or similar to increate productivity, farmers don't have that kind of money and even if they did capacity would take years to come online.
How is my thinking dangerous? Not allowing profit is dangerous, because it won't attract suppliers.
High prices might prompt some people elsewhere to reduce their consumption, in favor of ones more in need.
You can address some of the future price uncertainties with a futures market. That way, you can see what the price you'll get in 7 months' time, and decide what you should plant.
But if a place has no means of growing food and no money, why stay there?
> High prices might prompt some people elsewhere to reduce their consumption
By dying. There is a famine in madagascar right now.v
> in favor of ones more in need.
Do you need 1 kg of bacon more than a poor family in madagascar needs 10kg of wheat that was used to feed your bacon?
> How is my thinking dangerous?
Because men than need to feed their children might grab torches and pitchforks
Free market does not store food hust in case of a. once in a decade famine. Free market has never been effective at disaster responce in any country on earth.
Let's examine this claim - currently there are 20,000 people and there is projection that it will eventually reach 100,000. Am I correct in understanding that we are talking about 0.1% of the population today and 0.5% of the population in two years?
A greater percentage of population in Britain own and ride horses - so I could write about a great opportunity of having transportation independent of governments, fuels, etc.
Having trust in the market is not a magic solution. Yes, prices will rise as they already are if there is a shortage but that's not going to make local production materialises out of thin air if there are other obstacles.
At some point, you need a concerted strategic answer at the correct level if you are facing a strategic threat like disruption of food supply. That's why China restricted exports. It remains to be seen if the USA and Europe will react fast enough and appropriately enough. What happened with Covid doesn't give me much hope.
Edit: As I am downvoted strongly (I imagine that it’s because the Covid answer is stupidly seen as political in the US - at least I hope so because if it’s about the ability of the market to solve issues it doesn’t bode well for us all), the EU took ages to secure first masks then vaccine supply and the utter stupidity of the US answer which avoided imposing wearing masks and making vaccination mandatory costed you hundred thousands of unnecessary death compared to country of equivalent development. Look at Taiwan or South Korea to see how it supposed to be done.
> The fertilizer shortage is caused by the war in Ukraine.
The war certainly exacerbated the issue, but there were already fertilizer supply issues before. I remember well purchasing my 2022 crop year fertilizer in December 2021, which is earlier than I normally get around to it, but was prompted to because the prices had already risen substantially by that time and were predicted to go even higher (which they did). War in Ukraine didn't break out for at least another month after that. Not so much COVID directly, but natural gas prices were a large component, seeing fertilizer plants go offline in the mid-2021 timeframe[1].
Arguably the war in Ukraine was influenced by the unrest against Lukanhesko after his poor handling of covid-19...and by Russians thinking that was yet another example of NATO attacks against their security.
That's... not true in any sense. Reasons are quite simple and have been explained ad nausea.
Greed of Putin while being detached from reality due to covid fears and paranoia, overconfidence in his army destroyed by his own and his friends corruption, underestimating Ukraine's resolve. He and his men really thought they could conquer Kyiv in few days.
He was trying war land grab for 8 years already and thought he could get big part if not whole country permanently.
> Greed of Putin while being detached from reality
Putin rules the largest country in the world. One of the most rich countries also (in real resources, not just printed money and inflated GDP). What do you mean by his "greed"? That he wants to take the place of USA and rule the whole world?
> being detached from reality due to covid fears and paranoia
If he's been detached from reality, how he succeeds ruling the huge country in clearly hostile environment? Don't you ever find a contradiction in this?
> overconfidence in his army
I guess (we all can only guess) that he didn't expect that all the West would supply so much weapons and soldiers of fortune to Ukraine (AFAIK, there're tens of thousands of soldiers of regular army of Poland fighting there, also France, US, and other countries). Still, Russia is prevailing, there's already no young Ukraine men left, there're only 45+ years Ukrainian men left and Western combatants.
And it's almost evident by this point in time that there's no way Ukraine would win that war. There're some scenarios like CIA would be able to organize successful coup de etat and replace Putin with traitor like Gorbachev or Yeltsin or someone of that kind who will simply sell Russia to the west.
But there's no way to win this battle any other way. Not with 45+ years old soldiers riding 100 donated western tanks because Russia already burned down 7,000+ soviet tanks donated to Ukraine during the past year.
Putin's (I'd say Russian) motivations were stated open and clear in 2021: we want NATO to stop expanding to the East. We asked West to discuss this thing and put an end to NATO expansion.
All of our demands were declined in the most obnoxious manner possible: "You mean nothing, we don't want to listen to your concerns, go away and die silently in your Siberia"
> Just like I don’t get veto power over your friendships, Russia does not get to decide who other sovereign nations get to be friends with.
NATO is an aggressive military alliance. Ukraine could be friends with EU and US and not be a part of NATO.
> The NATO excuse doesn’t explain the invasion and partial annexation of Georgia in 2008, either.
Do you really know anything about what happened in 2008? Honestly, not from the media and not from Wikipedia. Because regurgitating the easy-peasy propaganda from media is not interesting in any way.
How can you be so sure that it was Russia that "invaded" Georgia in 2008? How comes that although Russia beat the Georgian military force so easily that we could capture the whole Georgia, we didn't do it? There was nothing to stop us in 2008. How comes that "greedy Putin" didn't take Tbilisi and everything with it?
I always find it interesting when people being up the 2014 Ukraine situation without referencing the call from Victoria Nuland discussing who the US was going to put in charge ("surprisingly", those ended up being the government the people elected)
Likely because people who know anything about the region know that that supposedly damning call happened after three months of violent protests against the most corrupt government in recent European history.. the reference to Klitchko being made deputy PM means it was recorded after Jan 26th which was when Yanukovych was trying everything to stay in power, including bringing opposition leaders into his government (and working with Russian intelligence to bug US diplomatic phones). He was doing so because many regional offices had already been taken over by protesters and his police forces had already shot several people. The leader who the US diplomats were talking about was already a popular opposition leader, so it's entirely unsurprising that Yatsenyuk was part of government post-Maidan.
I think I'm mostly annoyed with these dumb conspiracy theories because they deny agency to the millions of people who actually cast out a criminal and democratically elected their own leadership. "hurr durr, the CIA did it"
The aggression in Georgia long predates that call, and the US expressing a preference in an election is hardly unusual. Are we to believe Putin didn't have a preference in the Ukrainian elections?
I'm always perplexed when reading such opinions: do people writing this ever tried to consider anything, just to sit and think for 1 minute instead of retranslating propaganda by media.
If you think that Putin is sick, do you think it is possible to rule the huge country with quite big population, huge territory, and a bunch of problems exacerbated by Western sanctions, quite successfully? E.g. the effect of sanctions on everyday life in Russia is negligible opposed to predicted effect. E.g. if you read comments on HN from about 1 year ago, you'll read something like "Russia would collapse in 3 days" (or 3 weeks or 3 months).
Also, is it like some God-like force makes his subordinates to listen to him although "he's clearly mad"?
It's such a primitive train of thought fueled by propaganda, that it never ceases to amaze me, especially on site like Hacker News and not reddit.
You're right, people don't think about these things from a more open perspective.
A general rule of thumb I follow is if someone who is otherwise successful, particular for a prolonged period of time, is doing something that is purportedly crazy, stupid, reckless, etc, I ask myself if maybe I haven't fully considered the situation.
Even if one falls into the camp of Putin being evil incarnate, he's been evil incarnate in power for quite a while and has presided over a Russia that by almost any metric is vastly improved relative to when he came into power. Whatever you say, Putin is not crazy and he's not stupid.
Maybe, just maybe, Russia found herself in a situation where very severe sanctions and being decoupled from the west, an area they tried tirelessly to forge ties with vis a vis energy, etc, maybe they found themselves in a situation where as bad as that outcome was, not invading Ukraine would be worse. Why might that be? They may be wrong, but more likely than not, this was a choice arrived at reluctantly and from their perspective, all the other options were _worse_ than potential war with the entirety of the collective west, deaths of tens of thousands, etc, etc.
I find that when I think of the actions of powerful nations and people as driven by a coherent thought process, I'm better able to predict their actions. I often think these entities may be wrong, that they may misunderstand some other process themselves, that they may be motivated by internal political considerations, etc, but it's never the cartoon version we hear in the media.
It's strange that people so rarely exercise this kind of thought. Do they still do those exercises in school where one has to argue both sides of a contentious issue? It's an essential skill.
Paranoia is hard to suss out between public statements that sound paranoid - "NATO is coming to get us!" style stuff - and genuine private paranoia. This one might be the hardest to prove.
"Putin's fault" is fairly hard to argue against without quite a bit of logical contortion.
Why do you think NATO was ceaselessly expanding eastward, in violation of guarantees they had made that they would not do so? Why do you think they were putting missiles, etc, in the former Warsaw pact countries?
Is it so unreasonable for a country that lost over 20 million from western aggression in WWII to be a little worried about this military buildup? I seem to remember a pretty strident response to soviet missiles in Cuba. Why so paranoid?
I don't imagine the US would respond well (and shouldn't!) to a Russian led military alliance with Mexico and other periphery countries that led to a growing mass of military arms in a military alliance that was essentially founded to combat the United States.
The psychodrama stuff is just not a very sophisticated argument here. Countries don't go to war like this because a leader like Putin is scared of COVID. This is something that was and is popular within Russia, Putin is seemingly a more moderate voice on all of this. There has been pressure for a more muscular response to the situation in Ukraine for quite a while internally to Russia.
> Why do you think NATO was ceaselessly expanding eastward…
Because countries asked to join, as is their right as sovereign nations.
> in violation of guarantees they had made that they would not do so?
No such guarantee has ever existed. The only such agreement violated in all this is the Budapest Memorandum, by the Russians.
> Is it so unreasonable for a country that lost over 20 million from western aggression in WWII to be a little worried about this military buildup?
Yes. The Nazis were defeated. Largely by that same West. The makeup of NATO is heavily weighted to “former victims of fascist aggression”, including its most powerful core nation.
One might ask this question in the other direction, given past Russian occupation of many of these countries. (Much more recently than 1945!)
> There has been pressure for a more muscular response to the situation in Ukraine for quite a while internally to Russia.
“The other guy wouldn’t have used lube when he raped you. How lucky are you to get me?!”
I don't see how that's sustained by the article. This is just another face of the energy crunch. Oil and gas are somewhat rarer more expensive, and so everything made from them is more expensive and the economy needs to seek to a new price equilibrium. In this case, that mostly means "reduced travel and air freight" and "reduced gas heating usage".
But as a side effect farmers need to scramble to match their own market. So some of this will end up meaning "more expensive fertilizer-heavy crops". But at the economic level farming is less able to tolerate volatility (you can't JustInTime a soybean, literally farmers reap what was sown months ago), so there's need for some assistance at the regulatory level. Which is what this article is about.
Basically, no. No famines. Just pricing and regulatory changes.
United Nations says it's "first climate change famine".
Why are you blaming administration? I am not sure how corrupt they are, but how do you deal with drought in a country that has GDP per capital of $520? Like you can't afford to do much with that.
Well, and also a big drought. Economies (and weather) are indeed unstable in general. But per the upthread hypothesis there's no particular instability in the food supply caused by fertilizer/energy/covid disruption that seems notable. We've been here before and we'll be here again.
Goosebumps from this line. It's apt and thoughtful. I'm thinking about how these events can be fractal-like. The past few years of active pandemic have felt like the "flame" but could be seen as the "ignition" for countless other, possibly even worse global events. It's like a Great Tree Shaking: all non-resilient systems began showing cracks of one size or another, cascading stress to other systems, many of which buckle or break.
We spent the first 50 years of the information age building systems to be as hyper-efficient as possible, with ruthless competition eliminating resiliency first in existing commercial, social, and political structures, and then in the education and life experience of the people that built those structures later. Like a Californian wilderness, we've been accumulating surface fuel load for decades.
At least in the us the first thing ruthless competition does is eliminate all competition and establish a monopoly like position. Every industry wants to consolidate to 2-4 players that split the market and don’t compete
Arguably history is the study of an ever-breaking quasi-non-resilient combination of systems and arguing that your particular causal viewpoint is the One True one.
Three totally unrelated things? There's no proof of the ""lab leak"" allegations (and I doubt there can ever be short of an admission by the Chinese government), the war in Ukraine was a proxy for the current invasion, and the Las Vegas mass shooting .. was just a larger incident of something that routinely happens in America that does not move the needle politically?
Well, 20.8% of goal potash production comes from Russia and another 18% from Belarus. It's a key ingredients in making fertilizer. There is your single cause.
After the US (which I’m assuming imports from Canada, the largest exporter), the next 6 largest importers aren’t western countries (if you exclude Brazil in that):
It's not really the conflict directly so much as the sanctions campaigns that followed.
Russia and Belarus are the number one and two suppliers of a basic fertilizer component, but now Western aligned nation cannot import from them and the Brits have gone further by making it harder to insure the shipments which affects the ability for Russia (and by extension Belarus) to export to anyone by sea.
The Germans _could_ have helped make up the difference since they can make some amount of fertilizer using natural gas, but some terrorist state (we still don't know exactly who) blew up NS1 and NS2 which makes this basically impossible. Germany now needs to preserve all its gas just to keep some manufacturing going, heat people's homes, and run the lights.
The pandemic has had some effect, but a lot of the fertilizer being sold internationally goes to Egypt, the Middle East, and North Africa. It doesn't actually have to go all that far in the global scheme of things.
The conflict itself affects wheat prices, since Ukraine is a major wheat exporter (as is Russia), but the fertilizer issues are due primarily to Western sanctions and Kremlin counter-sanctions.
That's not what the study's abstract said. It said heart attack deaths increased during the pandemic. It could be due to covid itself, fear of covid while seeking treatment, worse quality treatment, lifestyle chances, social isolation, others, or some combination.
One of the study's authors did say there's a link, but I have to wonder why it wasn't in the abstract.
First, this content is locked in my region so I don't know exactly what you linked to.
Second, if you are linking to a news article about that one University guy who said young people shouldn't take the vaccine, it is my understanding that his study was flawed. But again, I can't read the article so take this with a grain of salt.
Sooner or later energy prices will increase and fertilizer will get more expensive. Step functions and impulses are useful ways to probe the inner working of a system and in this case helped to highlight the dominant role energy plays everywhere. We re-learned what we forgot or ignored since the last energy aka. oil price shock in the '70. In the long run the situation for food security is challenging unless we switch to a different paradigm of farming and population control.
This is such a weird comment. For much of the world, food security is an ever present problem that is heavily affected by energy prices (among other things). Fertilizer prices are already up significantly. This isn't something we have to wait for. It's already been happening for the past decade and it's going to keep getting worse.
You're fortunate that you live in a country where food security on a population level isn't a constantly relevant concern.
energy prices are decreasing, not increasing; solar power is half as expensive as coal power in most of the world already, and it's likely to get even cheaper over time as pv production scales up
(of course in northern europe this year that is not the case because they were relying on russian gas, but that's not 'sooner or later', that's just right now)
The big lesson from the 1918 flu pandemic was that lockdowns didn’t really work.
The scientific consensus after that was to isolate the highest risk populations, and let it run through the rest of the population. That way, it hits herd immunity / becomes endemic without infecting people that are likely to die from it. For COVID, the conventional approach would be to lock down nursing homes and provide shelter in place orders / resources for the top 1-5% risk groups for 3 months while otherwise ignoring the pandemic.
If it were not for RNA vaccines, that approach certainly would have been better than what we did with COVID. Economic disruption would be minimal, per case fatality would be cut significantly, and the tripledemic / avian flu / 2021 famine / rebound of malaria, etc. probably would not have happened.
With the vaccines, it is unclear if the lockdowns helped or hurt average life expectancies. We will know in a few more years.
In retrospect, herd immunity for COVID doesn't seem like it ever was possible. It's a ridiculously infectious disease, basically everyone has to get infected and even then herd immunity is not guaranteed.
The most likely outcome without lockdowns, even if you isolate the 1-5% most vulnerable, would be catastrophic failure of the healthcare system. Plenty of countries really did try not to use lockdowns, but invariably all countries that didn't have extremely young demographics and tried not using lockdowns were at the brink at least once.
The approach you suggest would have been disastrous without RNA vaccines and from what happened in most countries which lifted restrictions too early, would also have been disastrous with them. The government where I live is one of them and they had to flip-flop on the issue about 7 times as the system got close to the breaking point. Increasing capacity wasn't feasible either because trained personnel was the bottleneck, and even if you could train three times faster, no one would want to do the job anyways.
The problem with health system breakdown is that at some point it's not even COVID that kills people. If that happens, even just a broken bone can be genuinely life threatening. People will start dying of a plethora of things they'd normally be able to easily deal with.
I think you missed the part of the guidance where you lock down the 1-5% of the population that is most vulnerable, but only for 1-3 months.
For Covid, that would have greatly reduced peak health care loads, and had a much more modest economic impact, and fewer secondary effects (RSV wouldn’t have been a issue, for example.)
Locking down 1-5% is not nearly enough, though. Hospitalisation rate just for nauve people above 60, which are a quarter of the population, was above 5%. No healthcare system can handle the hospitalization of over 1% of the population in a few weeks.
> If it were not for RNA vaccines, that approach certainly would have been better than what we did with COVID.
I know that 'flatten the curve' largely left the public consciousness, but wouldn't letting the virus run largely unrestricted have overwhelmed the health care system?
The curve flattening was initially proposed for a short period of time. Maybe weeks or a few months, I forget.
I think some initial panic is forgivable, even if it led to actions that were counter to previous guidance. We were ventilating patients early on, for instance, and we later learned that this causes more harm than good for many patients and should be deferred if at all possible. I think it's arguable that a short term lockdown was the right call. It's arguable it wasn't, but in my opinion it wasn't crazy.
During that initial period we were supposed to be increasing capacity and learning treatment. Encouraging people to lose weight and improve their health during this time would probably help with outcomes as well.
Capacity was increased to some extent. Remember the tents and the medical ship in NYC? I think neither were used at all. We don't seem to be having conversations now about more long-term increases in health care capacity. It's just like nothing was learned. It all just became political and like all things political in the US, incredibly stupid and tribal.
For what it's worth, when DeSantis started relaxing Florida lockdowns I thought the death toll in Florida was going to be sobering and it was reckless. I now think it was the right thing to do. DeSantis seemed to be following the pre-COVID playbook. I was scared and clung on too much to the status quo procedure on COVID.
>Capacity was increased to some extent. Remember the tents and the medical ship in NYC? I think neither were used at all.
They were not. Even in NYC, which really did see overloaded hospitals briefly in March-April 2020, USNS Comfort treated a *total* (not at one time; from start to finish) of 182 patients <https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-05-01/navy-h...>. USNS Mercy, with 1000 beds, treated a total of 77 patients in LA.
Same elsewhere. In Wales, Millennium Stadium was converted into a temporary field hospital with 300 beds and capacity to expand to 2000 beds. It was such a big deal that a public contest was held to name it. However, the newly dubbed Dragon's Heart Hospital <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Heart_Hospital> never had more than 46 patients at one time, and was closed in six weeks for lack of use.
1. I hate how everything has to have a financialised solution:
To achieve this, the report suggests “mobilizing international financial support” and implementing tools such as “fertilizer contract swaps” to keep farmer costs manageable.
2. I read articles like this and wonder, will the world ditch meat, or will will the richer countries continue to eat ridiculous amounts of the stuff, using up all the land that could grow food for a plant based diet? Something will have ti give at some point.
Demand for meat is rising due to incomes level rising in developing nations. Developing nations also outnumber developed nations, so whatever climate-saving diet related behaviors the West decides to take is still going to face pressure from an even larger group of people who want to spend their growing paycheck on goods like meat.
"The use of untreated human feces in agriculture poses significant health risks and has contributed to widespread infection with parasitic worms—a disease called helminthiasis, affecting over 1.5 billion people in developing countries."
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.
> which is an extremely wasteful way of producing food.
Depends on what you are optimizing for.
As a farmer, I can make more money growing crops for human consumption. It is the most logical business model. But the real world is a harsh mistress and the nature of... nature means that is isn't realistic to grow the same crops over and over and over again. Disease, soil health, etc. requires crop rotation to sustain a viable farm.
Now the problem of equipment and markets. While I could theoretically introduce more human foods into the rotation, those human foods aren't compatible with the equipment I have. Nor is there a local market for them. This means more heavy iron, more trucking, more fuel, more fertilizer (no animals to help provide it), etc. Is that not a waste?
I primary grow food for humans, but every 2-4 years (depending on the quality of the farmland) in my rotation a field will get a crop destined for animal consumption to address soil health and disease/pest control most particularly. If there is a way to avoid this without simply trading for waste somewhere else, I'm all ears. I'd be happy to grow nothing but human food.
Agriculture is already excessively optimized to a fault, so it seems likely that we have already found what is least wasteful overall. Of course, if you want to minimize a specific waste to the detriment of others then no doubt the calculus changes.
Thanks for making food. I'm a fan. Like Bloomberg's statement about how easy it is to grow crops, you spend enough time in a city and you're prone to start thinking food grows on trees, pun intended.
One of the things I've realized as I've gotten older is that parts of the economy I don't understand are rarely as wasteful as they might appear. Waste is super expensive and no one likes wasting money. The people growing alfalfa know exactly why they're doing it. It's pretty great we can regenerate the soil and feed some cattle at the same time, isn't that kind of sustainable thing the goal?
I mean thinking about long term consequences of their actions and making a choice that leads to the best outcome for the society at large. You're right in saying people have a preference, but the way you say it makes it seem like that's all their is to it, as if people's dietary choices have no broader impact.
People have a preference for meat post huge subsidies, which essentially makes the preference mean nothing whatsoever. If people prefer meat when it's not subsidised, then sure, what the hell, let them have it.
Farming and subsidies go hand in hand. I'm from the midwest. Whether it's growing food in the first place or leaving a field fallow in another, a subsidy is probably involved.
This is a good thing. Farming is very tough business and I would rather keep these guys in business because I like eating quite a bit.
First: they are growing some crops now already that are not subsidised.
Second: a general drop in subsidies will mostly just result in lower land rents. The reward for farm labour will stay roughly the same, because it's mostly set by the general equilibrium in the wider labour market.
Beyond patronage, one of the primary goals of ag subsidies is to prevent farm land from being converted to non-farmland. This effectively increases the ability to comparatively quickly put more crop acres there if for some reason (e.g., weather, war, etc) we need to increase supply. Without subsidies it's likely that the lower land rent would cause more fields to be converted to other purposes and we'd run this a bit leaner (i.e., more in accordance to the market on some shorter time horizon). There's also always an element of keeping more expensive ag in country than relying solely on imports.
I don't know how strong this effect would be, but I've heard these arguments a lot. A good deal of early EU politics were measures to make sure that liberalized trade didn't just result in the French agricultural industry vanishing.
Yes, that argument is common, but it doesn't mean that it holds water.
If you actually wanted to ensure a steady food supply, you'd use subsidies that directly target that.
Eg instead of subsidising actual production of a few specific crops, you'd have subsidies that reward being able to produce eg lots of calories in a field on short notice. (And every year, you'd challenge a random selection of recipients to produce the promised calories on short notice. Of course, if you use that land for already for actual production, that's fine.)
You'd also reward people to stockpile lots of canned food, I guess?
> A good deal of early EU politics were measures to make sure that liberalized trade didn't just result in the French agricultural industry vanishing.
Yes, but that's more of a function of the power of the agricultural lobby, than any rational policy.
We can do multiple things to address climate change at the same time. My proposition is to slowly redirect all the animal agriculture subsidies elsewhere. Animal products going up in price by 3 - 10 fold would surely decrease consumption.
The questions is do people actually want less meat? If they don't then we simply shouldn't do it
You shouldn't aim to make people life's worse, rather one should fix climate change in the least disruptive way possible, which is basically focusing on the infrastructure.
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.
If I had an easy way I'd be a hero and likely pretty rich.
I'm excited about vat grown protein (not plant based) over the long term, but in the short term I think we would get some traction from eating less feedlot grain fed meat and more free range grazed meat that could use less desirable land to produce.
Nitrogen fertilizers are directly responsible for keeping about 3-4 billion people alive today. Any persistent shortage or supply chain disruption should be considered a global security issue.
This is a key insight and unfortunately not enough people make it to this cold hard fact before they begin preaching about food system transformation.
Nat gas + Haber Bosch is the foundational structure of our food system and its ability to feed our current population. Perhaps a new innovation will replace it, but so far much of the proposed methods are complete fairy tale nonsense which will result in mass starvation without appropriate due diligence.
"Each hour 430 quintillion Joules of energy from the sun hits the Earth. That's 430 with 18 zeroes after it.
In comparison, the total amount of energy that all humans use in a year is 410 quintillion Joules." [1]
"The 70 percent of solar energy the Earth absorbs per year equals roughly 3.85 million exajoules. In other words, the amount of solar energy hitting the earth in one hour is more than enough to power the world for one year." [2]
"The total solar power hitting Earth is about 173,000 terawatts, or 1.73×10^17
joules per second. That’s roughly equivalent to the energy of 41 Megatons of TNT exploding… every second.
It’s hard for us to comprehend how much energy a joule is (or even what energy is in the first place). But energy can be converted into mass, and we do understand what mass is." [3]
Thus, equatorial and semi-equatorial regions should be energy magnats of the world and be able to get nitrogen, phosphorus, water, etc for their food from thin air and sand.
Yet, the relevant world has still to feed the majority of these regions,
including the solar tech etc.
This article doesn’t really have any content and the comments don’t reflect any particular amount of practical knowledge but just vague things heard and repeated.
First issue “fertilizer” is not one thing but a class of things produced in very different ways. The article doesn’t even mention which things are going to have supply problems and why.
The context is China imports 90% from Russia and India is at 40% imports from Russia and the deep sea ports Russia uses shippers will not ship from as they are north of Black Sea for obvious reasons.
To complicate matters Russia currently is using all available train cars and thus has no compacity to increase rail traffic to ship fertilizer.
Recently, I have seen a short-sighted push to allow human waste to fertilize crops.
That is absolutely 100% not the solution to anything for probably a dozen very good reasons. The impact of this kind of "recycling" is well studied and the negatives outweigh the positives.
Well, if you have a modern sewage treatment plant it is possible to recover phosphate and ammonium (NH4+) as relatively pure chemicals at the end of the process prior to releasing the treated water back into the environment. It's a bit cost-intensive to do this however, but it might make economic sense as fertilizer scarcity grows, especially for the phosphorous fraction.
But yes, applying untreated human feces to agricultural fields is a very bad idea from the infectious disease and parasite transfer perspective. Also, many sewage streams have additional contaminants (heavy metals etc.) from industrial sources, and varying levels of pharmaceuticals of all kinds.
> "I've never seen anything like this in my 20 years as a physician," South Korean doctor Lee Cook-jong told journalists, explaining that the longest worm removed from the patient's intestines was 27cm (11in) long.
> In 2015 South Korean researchers studied the health records of North Korean defectors who had visited a hospital in Cheonan between 2006 and 2014.
> They found that they showed higher rates of chronic hepatitis B, chronic hepatitis C, tuberculosis and parasite infections, compared to South Koreans.
> The soldier's food may have been contaminated because the North still uses human faeces as fertiliser, known as "night soil".
> Lee Min-bok, a North Korean agriculture expert, told Reuters: "Chemical fertiliser was supplied by the state until the 1970s. By the 1990s, the state could not supply it any more, so farmers started to use a lot of night soil instead."
Living in borderline survivable conditions makes the body much more susceptible to infection. Add to that a virtually non-existent medical system and people are going to be overall less healthy. Using "night soil" is likely low on the list of causes for higher infection rates in North Korea.
Comparing the health of North Koreans and South Koreans is not a fare comparison. One nation has medical infrastructure, a good food supply, and a functioning economy. The other is a black hole with people regularly starving, no legal economy, and medical care only for the politically connected.
I've stopped believing sensational stories about North Korea after one too many stories about someone official getting executed only for them to show up alive and well a few weeks later.
Hepatitis B is a STD; presumably they meant Hepatitis A? There was an outbreak of that just last year in the US: https://www.cdc.gov/hepatitis/outbreaks/2022/hav-contaminate... that appear to have come from Mexican strawberries; 'the Mexicans must be using night soil' is not the first conclusion I would have jumped to. Same for Hepatitis C, in 2020 there were 107k newly identified chronic infections in the US.
Regarding the worm, a quick google suggests that the largest roundworm parasite of humans is Ascaris lumbercoides, about which wiki tells me that males are up to 12 inches long and females up to 19 inches long; an 11 incher doesn't seem that remarkable in comparison.
Do human parasites in human poop spread to more humans animals fed on plants fed on human poop, or only of humans eat the plants fed on human poop?
Can the parasites be filtered away?
Also, couldn't NK parasites be explained by a general lack of health and hygiene technology in NK? Parasites are a major problem in large parts of Africa too, but are controlled when medications are deployed.
Some parasites are human specific, but a lot of them will manage just fine in many mammals. Health and hygiene is likely a major factor, but managing human waste in a sanitary way is one of the big jobs of community health and hygiene efforts; that and access to clean water. Proper health protocols wouldn't allow for untreated night soil to be used as fertilizer, but maybe they don't have access to treatment or other fertilizer, so there you go.
You can kill the pathogens through curing the compost, but that takes time, space, and equipment. In the meantime you'd be dealing with hazardous waste.
Care to elaborate? What did those studies show? As far as I know, properly handled humanure is quite effective. And it's better than letting excess nitrogen seep into the waterways.
I thought it was actually a pretty good solution for two problems. Maybe for crops like wheat which are processed, rather than lettuce. Trees seem good too.
I watched a video on YT about a man in Arizona or New Mexico who put in a piping system to his backyard fruit trees that is fed by his outdoor urinal. He lives in the middle of a standard urban neighborhood.
We are currently burning (or applying as fertilizer) 10 calories of petrochemical energy to get 1 calorie of food energy --- we need to rebalance this equation somehow.
A tiny percentage of sunlight energy actually makes it into the agricultural product’s chemical energy.
Is it possible to actually improve?
Corn yields between 1940 and present went up an enormous amount, averaging 25ish bushels per acre in 1940 and before to 180ish today. 7x increase with the same sun, but improved plants and agricultural practices.
Look up C3 and C4 photosynthesis to see differences in energy capture. There are plenty of axes on which agricultural productivity can be increased.
China has the money to pay the increased costs. Brazil is likely the most fucked by the fertilizer shortage since their massive soy farms are all on desert soil which requires loads of fertilizer which they can no longer afford.
Man. Whenever I see these threads, I see a ton of people hopping in with their ideas on how to optimize a critical resource. It's the "heat people, not homes" mantra.
I mean, I get it. Every programmer salivates at the idea of writing a super efficient hand crafted assembly routine that blows the doors off of what's on the market right now, and that's good.
But I can't help but think... If I wanted to drastically change people's behavior, it can be done easily.
Step one: Cause a supply chain issue, creating artificial scarcity.
Step two: Lecture everyone on how they need to be less wasteful, caution them about how painful life will be if "we aren't all in this together".
Step three: Find every day Joe's and make an example of them in the public sphere for selfishly squandering precious resources. The public will gladly be your enforcers, thinking that if they all try hard enough the artificially created problem will go away.
This technique always results in artificially created human suffering, and waste. The old joke about economic systems and cows was something to the tune of, "you have two cows. The communist milks your cows, and pours the milk down the drain".
It's fascinating to read what Gareth Jones wrote about tractors in the Soviet Union -- how meddlesome people who didn't know how to farm / engineer inserted themselves into the process to tell everyone how to do their jobs, and royally screwed everything up.
COMMUNISM: You have two cows. The government takes both and gives you the
milk it thinks you need.
BUREAUCRACY: You have two cows. At first the government regulates what you can feed them and when you can milk them. Then it pays you not to milk them. Then it takes both, shoots one, milks the other and pours the milk down the drain. Then it requires you to fill out forms accounting for the missing cows.
> "According to an average of 13 global databases from 10 data sources, in 2010, 161 teragrams of nitrogen were applied to agricultural crops, but only 73 teragrams of nitrogen made it to the harvested crop. A total of 86 teragrams of nitrogen was wasted, perhaps ending up in the water, air, or soil. The new research was published in the journal Nature Food in July."
https://eos.org/articles/index-suggests-that-half-of-nitroge...
Large-area applications by mechanized systems seem to be part of the problem, but that's also necessary to escape the subsitence agriculture trap, i.e. with such systems, it's not necessary for half or more of the human population to be working in the fields to grow food, it's more like 1 in 50 or 1 in 100.
The most promising solution might be AI + robots. If a robot could crawl up and down fields inspecting individual plants for nutrient status and applying small amounts of fertilizer as needed (also weeding and checking for pest infestations), it could cut fertilizer use in half while maintaining the same level of production - and perhaps eliminate the need for most herbicides and pesticides.