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“Quite a bit of US food production is going to produce animal feed, and some is exported. It'd take an amazing blow to cause actual starvation, given that could

“Quite a bit of US food production is going to produce animal feed, and some is exported. It'd take an amazing blow to cause actual starvation, given that could divert that back to feeding the population.” Well, not really. Yes, it's true that a substantial fraction of current US food production goes to animal feed. Yes, it's true, theoretically, that you could turn all of that into human food production instead. Of course, that would mean we'd all need to become vegetarians, but of course that's better than starving. But this elides two important points. First, humans can't survive on what is currently being grown. In other words, we can't just stop feeding all of that corn and soybeans to animals and give it to humans instead. We can't live off of a diet that is 75% field corn and industrial soybeans. We would have to change what is being produced, and that would be like turning a battleship. It's doable, but it would take time. And second, without animals in the loop it's very hard to have a sustainable nutrient cycle. Animals, especially ruminants like cattle, sheep, and goats, can turn otherwise inedible vegetation on unarable land into manure which can be used as fertilizer. So if we do away with the animal agriculture, and turn entirely vegetarian, then we are as a side effect reinforcing our dependence on industrial fertilizers. Of course, you can argue that that nutrient cycle is already broken in our current system, and you'd be right. But if you want to look at what a truly sustainable, environmental agricultural system would look like, it almost has to have ruminants. Look, for example, at how Amish farms work. Those guys do it right. Their crop yields are on par with the best yields in big ag. It's a sustainable model.

barry-cotter 8y ago
> We can't live off of a diet that is 75% field corn and industrial soybeans. Why not? Beans and rice, potatoes and milk, bread and peanut butter. Those are all nutritionally complete diets, as in you won’t get any deficiency diseases eating nothing else for a year. Feed corn and soybeans has carbs and protein. It might be nutritionally complete by itself. Add cabbage or some other leafy green vegetable and 100g of meat a week and you’ve got a monotonous, bland, healthy diet. I’m not saying this is pleasant, feed corn tastes pretty awful but you absolutely could live off a diet that was mostly beans and corn.
- GlenTheMachine 8y ago
  You can only eat fresh corn when it's in season, and only within a week or so after it's been picked. To be a suitable year-round survival food, corn has to be processed into corn meal. This usually entails treating it with lye, drying it, and grinding it. This gets you corn meal, grits, polenta. Or hominy if you skip the grinding step. We don't have the equipment to do this at the necessary scale. Corn just isn't used as a survival crop this way, so there's never been an economic need to invest in the machinery to do it. We probably do have the infrastructure to keep producing wheat bread in mass quantities. Do we have the peanut production and processing infrastructure to handle peanut butter becoming our primary protein source? I doubt it. And of course with soybeans... they would need to be dried or canned, packaged, stored, and shipped. Doable but different from what we are currently set up to do. And of course there's the psychological impacts of all of that, which again are probably oreferable to starving but wouldn't be good. People fight wars (or gang wars)over this kind of thing.
  - randomdata 8y ago
    > And of course with soybeans... they would need to be dried or canned, packaged, stored, and shipped. Doable but different from what we are currently set up to do. As a soybean farmer, and one who has focused on IP soybeans for the human market for most of my career at that, unless I am misunderstanding you, that is exactly how we do it. The beans are harvested dry, packaged, stored, and then shipped (primarily) to the Asian markets who are interested in such product. The trouble in North America is that few know what to do with them. To be honest, I have never even tried my own product. I also grow navy beans and have cooked with them. They are more of a common staple in these parts. But they are also a much more fickle crop. You're not going to easily replace soys with other edible beans.
    - GlenTheMachine 8y ago
      I stand corrected.
    - tomcam 8y ago
      Dude... make yourself some edamame! It rocks.
dv_dt 8y ago
It seems like our current economic system of capitalism is pretty bad at balancing slow-response externalities. Driving of short term prices below sustainable levels is just another kind of bubble. Financial bubbles become front and center because the system focuses on money, but sustainable food, sustainable wage/living quality, and a sustainable climate are all bubbles with equally or more serious consequences.
lsc 8y ago
>humans can't survive on what is currently being grown. In other words, we can't just stop feeding all of that corn and soybeans to animals and give it to humans instead. We can't live off of a diet that is 75% field corn and industrial soybeans. Both feed corn and industrial soybeans yield their deliciousness to the power of the chemical engineers. Both are processed into food you and I eat every day. I bet you a dollar that your last piece of chocolate had lecithin in it, and you have to go pretty far out of your way to get lecithin that isn't from soy. And corn syrup. I'd bet a fair number of dollars that you've consumed some corn sugar product today, and that can be made from feed corn. TVP is a common ingredient in meat substitutes, and it is a pretty heavily processed food made from what's left over after you extract the soybean oil from the industrial soybeans. My favorite preparation is the "Morningstar farms" "Grillers Prime" vegieburgers... but you can also buy tvp bits at the health-food store, and I know people who use 1/3rd ground beef, 2/3rds TVP bits in their spaghetti sauce, and it pretty much tastes like your regular beefy spaghetti sauce. My mom used to make TVP sloppy joes that were sloppy joe sauce with TVP instead of meat. (I personally think meat greatly improves that recipe... but you can add a lot of TVP in with that meat without ruining the flavor, if you ask me.) (To be clear, I'm not actually arguing that TVP is as delicious as actual meat. It's... usually not. But it can be quite palatable, and it is unquestionably nourishing, and it is made from the soybeans you grow for oil; stuff that would otherwise be used in cattle feed.)
- GlenTheMachine 8y ago
  Yes, but that's part of my point. You don't eat straight lecithin. Or high fructose corn syrup. You need a lot of other ingredients and a lot of processingto turn that corn into edible food products. That's one reason why it would be very challenging to double the number of calories we take in from corn — you would also need to double your production of all of that other stuff. I don't know all of the specifics, so I won't speculate on whether we could do that quickly, but if we were contemplating it we would need to make sure we had the infrastructure necessary to do all of that extra processing, and access to twice as many ingredients as we currently use.
  - lsc 8y ago
astralship 8y ago
Choose this as an entry point to say something. I agree with the battleship analogy to a point but I don't think it would be very hard to turn around. Not when compared to building rocket ships or many other things we do at scale. I grew up on a UK small holding sheep farm (2-400). In the 80s it was possible to raise a small family largely thanks to the benefit system. As I see it hobby farmers are all we need for sheep production. I agree that we need a degree of livestock but we need to transition to reducing our consumption of meat hugely. Much of the land currently used for livestock should be converted to forest and forest garden communities as soon as possible. There a problem with consumer awareness. If consumers cared about pesticides in their food, or food miles, or dependence on foreign imports (on an island nation) then the locally produced food would be more viable. However most consumers are so heavily hypnotised by modern consumerism there only desire what is persuasively advertised which means sexy new 'phones' and not poison free vegetables. Control of food and water gives certain control of people. Only a small percentage of the population is really aware of what it takes to make enough food to stay alive. Large corporate forces now control policy and effectively the market condition in most respects so small scale passionate farmers are best of not trying to engage with the commodity markets. If the UK leaves the EU and there is a major global conflict people will quickly start to realise the value of local food. I'm mostly interested in how we can reduce the labour overhead in the this kind of small scale farming. At EMF camp I saw an brilliant example of someone building their own open source horticultural robot. It will be at https://pretix.eu/farmhackwales2018/fhw2018/ https://pretix.eu/farmhackwales2018/fhw2018/

barry-cotter 8y ago

> We can't live off of a diet that is 75% field corn and industrial soybeans. Why not? Beans and rice, potatoes and milk, bread and peanut butter. Those are all nutritionally complete diets, as in you won’t get any deficiency diseases eating nothing else for a year. Feed corn and soybeans has carbs and protein. It might be nutritionally complete by itself. Add cabbage or some other leafy green vegetable and 100g of meat a week and you’ve got a monotonous, bland, healthy diet. I’m not saying this is pleasant, feed corn tastes pretty awful but you absolutely could live off a diet that was mostly beans and corn.

GlenTheMachine 8y ago
You can only eat fresh corn when it's in season, and only within a week or so after it's been picked. To be a suitable year-round survival food, corn has to be processed into corn meal. This usually entails treating it with lye, drying it, and grinding it. This gets you corn meal, grits, polenta. Or hominy if you skip the grinding step. We don't have the equipment to do this at the necessary scale. Corn just isn't used as a survival crop this way, so there's never been an economic need to invest in the machinery to do it. We probably do have the infrastructure to keep producing wheat bread in mass quantities. Do we have the peanut production and processing infrastructure to handle peanut butter becoming our primary protein source? I doubt it. And of course with soybeans... they would need to be dried or canned, packaged, stored, and shipped. Doable but different from what we are currently set up to do. And of course there's the psychological impacts of all of that, which again are probably oreferable to starving but wouldn't be good. People fight wars (or gang wars)over this kind of thing.
- randomdata 8y ago
  > And of course with soybeans... they would need to be dried or canned, packaged, stored, and shipped. Doable but different from what we are currently set up to do. As a soybean farmer, and one who has focused on IP soybeans for the human market for most of my career at that, unless I am misunderstanding you, that is exactly how we do it. The beans are harvested dry, packaged, stored, and then shipped (primarily) to the Asian markets who are interested in such product. The trouble in North America is that few know what to do with them. To be honest, I have never even tried my own product. I also grow navy beans and have cooked with them. They are more of a common staple in these parts. But they are also a much more fickle crop. You're not going to easily replace soys with other edible beans.
  - GlenTheMachine 8y ago
    I stand corrected.
  - tomcam 8y ago
    Dude... make yourself some edamame! It rocks.

dv_dt 8y ago

It seems like our current economic system of capitalism is pretty bad at balancing slow-response externalities. Driving of short term prices below sustainable levels is just another kind of bubble. Financial bubbles become front and center because the system focuses on money, but sustainable food, sustainable wage/living quality, and a sustainable climate are all bubbles with equally or more serious consequences.

lsc 8y ago

>humans can't survive on what is currently being grown. In other words, we can't just stop feeding all of that corn and soybeans to animals and give it to humans instead. We can't live off of a diet that is 75% field corn and industrial soybeans. Both feed corn and industrial soybeans yield their deliciousness to the power of the chemical engineers. Both are processed into food you and I eat every day. I bet you a dollar that your last piece of chocolate had lecithin in it, and you have to go pretty far out of your way to get lecithin that isn't from soy. And corn syrup. I'd bet a fair number of dollars that you've consumed some corn sugar product today, and that can be made from feed corn. TVP is a common ingredient in meat substitutes, and it is a pretty heavily processed food made from what's left over after you extract the soybean oil from the industrial soybeans. My favorite preparation is the "Morningstar farms" "Grillers Prime" vegieburgers... but you can also buy tvp bits at the health-food store, and I know people who use 1/3rd ground beef, 2/3rds TVP bits in their spaghetti sauce, and it pretty much tastes like your regular beefy spaghetti sauce. My mom used to make TVP sloppy joes that were sloppy joe sauce with TVP instead of meat. (I personally think meat greatly improves that recipe... but you can add a lot of TVP in with that meat without ruining the flavor, if you ask me.) (To be clear, I'm not actually arguing that TVP is as delicious as actual meat. It's... usually not. But it can be quite palatable, and it is unquestionably nourishing, and it is made from the soybeans you grow for oil; stuff that would otherwise be used in cattle feed.)

GlenTheMachine 8y ago
Yes, but that's part of my point. You don't eat straight lecithin. Or high fructose corn syrup. You need a lot of other ingredients and a lot of processingto turn that corn into edible food products. That's one reason why it would be very challenging to double the number of calories we take in from corn — you would also need to double your production of all of that other stuff. I don't know all of the specifics, so I won't speculate on whether we could do that quickly, but if we were contemplating it we would need to make sure we had the infrastructure necessary to do all of that extra processing, and access to twice as many ingredients as we currently use.
- lsc 8y ago

astralship 8y ago

Choose this as an entry point to say something. I agree with the battleship analogy to a point but I don't think it would be very hard to turn around. Not when compared to building rocket ships or many other things we do at scale. I grew up on a UK small holding sheep farm (2-400). In the 80s it was possible to raise a small family largely thanks to the benefit system. As I see it hobby farmers are all we need for sheep production. I agree that we need a degree of livestock but we need to transition to reducing our consumption of meat hugely. Much of the land currently used for livestock should be converted to forest and forest garden communities as soon as possible. There a problem with consumer awareness. If consumers cared about pesticides in their food, or food miles, or dependence on foreign imports (on an island nation) then the locally produced food would be more viable. However most consumers are so heavily hypnotised by modern consumerism there only desire what is persuasively advertised which means sexy new 'phones' and not poison free vegetables. Control of food and water gives certain control of people. Only a small percentage of the population is really aware of what it takes to make enough food to stay alive. Large corporate forces now control policy and effectively the market condition in most respects so small scale passionate farmers are best of not trying to engage with the commodity markets. If the UK leaves the EU and there is a major global conflict people will quickly start to realise the value of local food. I'm mostly interested in how we can reduce the labour overhead in the this kind of small scale farming. At EMF camp I saw an brilliant example of someone building their own open source horticultural robot. It will be at https://pretix.eu/farmhackwales2018/fhw2018/ https://pretix.eu/farmhackwales2018/fhw2018/