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I am wondering how long we will continute to use plants and animals for food production. From an energy perspective, I see food as digestible bonds and I am su

I am wondering how long we will continute to use plants and animals for food production. From an energy perspective, I see food as digestible bonds and I am sure there are much more efficient means of creating chemicals with these bonds that are safe. Fully synthetic foods will enable the next chocolate (in terms of experience), won't require nearly the amount of energy/land/labor to produce, won't harm plants or animals, and will be able to be ultra customized since they won't be derived from biological sources.

erikpukinskis 11y ago
I think in the long term many people will choose just to grow their own food, in a very conventional way, on a small scale, coached by an AI. There will probably be a bit of a fork: some foods going the way of just being 3d printed from commodity traded ingredients and sold basically at cost of ingredients, and other food that is completely made by hand by a person, in a totally unique batch. And to be honest, everything in between. Which customers will choose will depend on whether they want a food experience, or they just want some material item? Or they want a little of each.
schiffern 11y ago
Synthetic materials don't come from nothing. Following the supply chain backwards they're all[1] mined from somewhere, either as fossil fuels or minerals like potash and limestone. All the NPK fertilizers (which this system uses) come from mined materials. Far from "not harming plants or animals," this material extraction comes with huge (but externalized) ecological, social justice, and wealth concentration problems. And of course it's completely unsustainable. Now compare that to how healthy soil functions: microorganisms leach minerals directly from grains of sand/loam/clay, essentially manufacturing in-situ minerals into bioavailable form right at the root zone. Nitrogen fixation is similar, performed by leguminous plants using otherwise wasted sunlight and ISRU. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2H60ritjag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2H60ritjag [1] Since I know someone will bring it up, some do come from plants like soybeans. But mechanized soybean production is primarily either soil mining or (in areas with badly degraded soil) entirely supported by fossil fertilizers.
- mikekchar 11y ago
  Somewhere or other I heard about a guy named Masunobu Fukuoka. He's written a book called the "One Straw Revolution". He was a plant biologist who decided to research very low input farming (not "organic", actually virtually no inputs other than water). His basic premise was that if you tried to optimise how nature handled the crops rather than trying to do it yourself as the farmer, you would get good yields with very little work/cost. He famously suggested that each person should be given a quarter acre of land and that they should spend an hour or two a day using his "natural farming techniques" to feed themselves. There is some controversy over whether he really got the kinds of yields he reported with the kind of work he said he did. Part of the problem was that he got really famous and people would wander over and help him out for a while so that they could learn his techniques. However, I have a friend who studied with him and I can report that he literally does manage to feed himself and his wife all of their fruit and vegetables and only spend some of his spare time (he is a high school teacher by trade). The biggest piece of labour is cutting the rice, which takes several days (and which he does all by hand). When I visited his fields (in Japan), it had been a bad year that had been compounded by a typhoon just before harvest. My friend's field was in great shape while you could see that the neighbours had lost at least 20% of their crop. It was also really interesting to see the difference in wildlife diversity between the fields. These fields were very small (about the size of a large house lot in the US) and my friend's lot was full of frogs, snakes and spiders, while the neighbour's had nothing in them but rice. My friend said that his neighbour usually produces more rice than he does, but that his field is always much better in a bad year. I actually did a 5 year experiment trying to grow food in containers with no inputs other than water. You need fairly big containers (depth is the most important thing), but I was surprised how well it worked. At the end of the 5 years I was getting pretty good yields with virtually no work and no inputs. In the end I had to give up because while the containers grew a lot of food, they also grew a lot of weeds. The neighbours didn't understand and one day I got home to find the gas man spraying herbicide on everything. Everybody thought it was an eyesore and he was delegated to "fix" the problem. :-P In any case, my experience makes me think that there is room for some research in farming where we don't try to micro-manage everything.
  - nerdponx 11y ago

erikpukinskis 11y ago

I think in the long term many people will choose just to grow their own food, in a very conventional way, on a small scale, coached by an AI. There will probably be a bit of a fork: some foods going the way of just being 3d printed from commodity traded ingredients and sold basically at cost of ingredients, and other food that is completely made by hand by a person, in a totally unique batch. And to be honest, everything in between. Which customers will choose will depend on whether they want a food experience, or they just want some material item? Or they want a little of each.

schiffern 11y ago

Synthetic materials don't come from nothing. Following the supply chain backwards they're all[1] mined from somewhere, either as fossil fuels or minerals like potash and limestone. All the NPK fertilizers (which this system uses) come from mined materials. Far from "not harming plants or animals," this material extraction comes with huge (but externalized) ecological, social justice, and wealth concentration problems. And of course it's completely unsustainable. Now compare that to how healthy soil functions: microorganisms leach minerals directly from grains of sand/loam/clay, essentially manufacturing in-situ minerals into bioavailable form right at the root zone. Nitrogen fixation is similar, performed by leguminous plants using otherwise wasted sunlight and ISRU. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2H60ritjag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2H60ritjag [1] Since I know someone will bring it up, some do come from plants like soybeans. But mechanized soybean production is primarily either soil mining or (in areas with badly degraded soil) entirely supported by fossil fertilizers.

mikekchar 11y ago
Somewhere or other I heard about a guy named Masunobu Fukuoka. He's written a book called the "One Straw Revolution". He was a plant biologist who decided to research very low input farming (not "organic", actually virtually no inputs other than water). His basic premise was that if you tried to optimise how nature handled the crops rather than trying to do it yourself as the farmer, you would get good yields with very little work/cost. He famously suggested that each person should be given a quarter acre of land and that they should spend an hour or two a day using his "natural farming techniques" to feed themselves. There is some controversy over whether he really got the kinds of yields he reported with the kind of work he said he did. Part of the problem was that he got really famous and people would wander over and help him out for a while so that they could learn his techniques. However, I have a friend who studied with him and I can report that he literally does manage to feed himself and his wife all of their fruit and vegetables and only spend some of his spare time (he is a high school teacher by trade). The biggest piece of labour is cutting the rice, which takes several days (and which he does all by hand). When I visited his fields (in Japan), it had been a bad year that had been compounded by a typhoon just before harvest. My friend's field was in great shape while you could see that the neighbours had lost at least 20% of their crop. It was also really interesting to see the difference in wildlife diversity between the fields. These fields were very small (about the size of a large house lot in the US) and my friend's lot was full of frogs, snakes and spiders, while the neighbour's had nothing in them but rice. My friend said that his neighbour usually produces more rice than he does, but that his field is always much better in a bad year. I actually did a 5 year experiment trying to grow food in containers with no inputs other than water. You need fairly big containers (depth is the most important thing), but I was surprised how well it worked. At the end of the 5 years I was getting pretty good yields with virtually no work and no inputs. In the end I had to give up because while the containers grew a lot of food, they also grew a lot of weeds. The neighbours didn't understand and one day I got home to find the gas man spraying herbicide on everything. Everybody thought it was an eyesore and he was delegated to "fix" the problem. :-P In any case, my experience makes me think that there is room for some research in farming where we don't try to micro-manage everything.
- nerdponx 11y ago