5 ms·

Everybody here is ignoring yield per acre. RoundUp, for all its faults, drives the yield number up. More people (and particularly more cattle) are fed per acr

Everybody here is ignoring yield per acre. RoundUp, for all its faults, drives the yield number up. More people (and particularly more cattle) are fed per acre when you use pesticides. If you banned the pesticides, it would do a lot of good, but now consider how many more acres would need to be farmed in order to keep the overall yields the same. How many acres would be cleared that would not otherwise be cleared? I agree that glyphosate (RoundUp now makes up less than half the market, which is largely Chinese-made and Chinese-consumed now) should probably be far more heavily regulated, but be aware that humans are not going to happily grow less food on the same land when yields drop. Taste the rainforest.

bad_user 8y ago
Modern agricultural practices that focus on yield per acre are also decreasing the quality of the soil. It’s a short term gain. Long term sustainability is more important. Given how much food we throw away, I really don’t think the yield per acre is a problem. It’s a race to the bottom anyway.
alehul 8y ago
> If you banned the pesticides, it would do a lot of good, but now consider how many more acres would need to be farmed in order to keep the overall yields the same. How many acres would be cleared that would not otherwise be cleared? The argument above, if I'm not mistaken, is that we should produce less food, and so if that is the objective, we can farm the same acreage with a lower yield per acre just fine. Less supply is a fundamental part of the idea, in fact, to inflate food prices and reduce waste.
- candiodari 8y ago
  What about the humans who eat that food ? Should we kill them now or just let them starve ? (there's only a few percent more food than needed, so ...)
  - alehul 8y ago
    I'm not commenting on the soundness of the above argument, merely trying to make sure its premises are correctly interpreted. :) I think other comments, however, did address the discussion of people who struggle to afford food at current prices-- additionally, in the U.S. specifically, 40% of food is wasted [1]. Maybe just a decrease in U.S. food supply would be in order? Or specifically countries where food waste is that high? [1] https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/wasted-food-IP.pdf https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/wasted-food-IP.pdf
  - bad_user 8y ago
    In first world countries, e.g. US and Europe, the amount of food wasted is massive and if there's anybody still starving in these countries, that's not because of a food shortage. Also the wasted food cannot be shipped to countries that need it, like Africa, without a high cost, unless you're talking about food low in nutrients, like sugar, flour or corn, that can be stored for months or years and that does nothing to help those populations, because they need proteins, they need nutrients. So the starvation argument makes absolutely no sense. Also I believe that in some cases a lower yield per acre should reduce the costs. If you eliminate the waste, if you make the distribution channels efficient, if you keep the soil healthy, production costs should in fact go down.
chillwaves 8y ago
Can just eat less meat and gain 10x efficiency.
- candiodari 8y ago
  Meat is made, inefficiently, true, from grass. Where grass grows, it is generally so because nothing else will grow there. So in a lot of places you can't swap out meat for, say, corn. It's meat ... or nothing (well, grass, which I guess you could make plastic from but little else). All of agriculture is also pretty inefficient btw. From the sunlight to calories (before any processing) there's ~1.8% efficiency.
xg15 8y ago
> More people (and particularly more cattle) are fed per acre when you use pesticides. This feels like saying we absolutely need multiple GB of RAM to display a website because how else would Angular work otherwise? If the increased yield per acre is used primarily to support todays industrial-scale meat production, maybe we should address the latter first. The way meat production works today seems to have almost exclusively downsides: It's a moral bankruptcy considering current state of research in animal consciousness, it's a health hazard for consumers, it's an inefficient way to consume proteins and as you note, it monopolizes vast parts of crop production.
- opportune 8y ago
  I agree we overconsume meat and that reducing meat consumption is one of the best ways to start addressing food/environmental issues, but to my knowledge the farmland producing feed or grazing material for livestock is not fungible in the sense that the land could just as easily be used to produce crops for human consumption. That is, you can’t just swap out corn/hay fields for rice and bean fields. I would love to be proven wrong though, it would help me rationalize further reducing my meat consumption
- candiodari 8y ago
  We only have a few percent more food production than humanity needs, if I remember correctly. Roundup and other pesticides combined with fertilizer increased yields ... it doubles and triples them, and it prevents famines resulting from sudden insect plagues, which were common (as in every 30 years on average) for most of human history. If these numbers are even close to accurate, eliminating roundup and modern farming would kill BILLIONS of humans. I would love to get more accurate numbers, but what do you intend to do about the little "humans need food" issue in general ?
  - heurist 8y ago
    As i understand it, there are new intensive organic farming techniques that are practically unknown to big ag and which produce similar yields with higher quality (by not destroying soil and ecosystems every year). I'd counter that the final death toll of Roundup and similar chemicals could be much higher any potential famine caused by abrupt cessation of pesticide treatments. Destruction of ecosystems is an externality which has never been accounted for, and sooner or later someone will pay that bill.
WalterSear 8y ago
It's meat that's driving the need for high yield, and large crops. Most agriculture is driven by meat production. The solution is obvious, straightforward, and would be relatively easy, but human nature makes it hard to discuss, let alone implement.

bad_user 8y ago

Modern agricultural practices that focus on yield per acre are also decreasing the quality of the soil. It’s a short term gain. Long term sustainability is more important. Given how much food we throw away, I really don’t think the yield per acre is a problem. It’s a race to the bottom anyway.

alehul 8y ago

> If you banned the pesticides, it would do a lot of good, but now consider how many more acres would need to be farmed in order to keep the overall yields the same. How many acres would be cleared that would not otherwise be cleared? The argument above, if I'm not mistaken, is that we should produce less food, and so if that is the objective, we can farm the same acreage with a lower yield per acre just fine. Less supply is a fundamental part of the idea, in fact, to inflate food prices and reduce waste.

candiodari 8y ago
What about the humans who eat that food ? Should we kill them now or just let them starve ? (there's only a few percent more food than needed, so ...)
- alehul 8y ago
  I'm not commenting on the soundness of the above argument, merely trying to make sure its premises are correctly interpreted. :) I think other comments, however, did address the discussion of people who struggle to afford food at current prices-- additionally, in the U.S. specifically, 40% of food is wasted [1]. Maybe just a decrease in U.S. food supply would be in order? Or specifically countries where food waste is that high? [1] https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/wasted-food-IP.pdf https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/wasted-food-IP.pdf
- bad_user 8y ago
  In first world countries, e.g. US and Europe, the amount of food wasted is massive and if there's anybody still starving in these countries, that's not because of a food shortage. Also the wasted food cannot be shipped to countries that need it, like Africa, without a high cost, unless you're talking about food low in nutrients, like sugar, flour or corn, that can be stored for months or years and that does nothing to help those populations, because they need proteins, they need nutrients. So the starvation argument makes absolutely no sense. Also I believe that in some cases a lower yield per acre should reduce the costs. If you eliminate the waste, if you make the distribution channels efficient, if you keep the soil healthy, production costs should in fact go down.

chillwaves 8y ago

Can just eat less meat and gain 10x efficiency.

candiodari 8y ago
Meat is made, inefficiently, true, from grass. Where grass grows, it is generally so because nothing else will grow there. So in a lot of places you can't swap out meat for, say, corn. It's meat ... or nothing (well, grass, which I guess you could make plastic from but little else). All of agriculture is also pretty inefficient btw. From the sunlight to calories (before any processing) there's ~1.8% efficiency.

xg15 8y ago

> More people (and particularly more cattle) are fed per acre when you use pesticides. This feels like saying we absolutely need multiple GB of RAM to display a website because how else would Angular work otherwise? If the increased yield per acre is used primarily to support todays industrial-scale meat production, maybe we should address the latter first. The way meat production works today seems to have almost exclusively downsides: It's a moral bankruptcy considering current state of research in animal consciousness, it's a health hazard for consumers, it's an inefficient way to consume proteins and as you note, it monopolizes vast parts of crop production.

opportune 8y ago
I agree we overconsume meat and that reducing meat consumption is one of the best ways to start addressing food/environmental issues, but to my knowledge the farmland producing feed or grazing material for livestock is not fungible in the sense that the land could just as easily be used to produce crops for human consumption. That is, you can’t just swap out corn/hay fields for rice and bean fields. I would love to be proven wrong though, it would help me rationalize further reducing my meat consumption
candiodari 8y ago
We only have a few percent more food production than humanity needs, if I remember correctly. Roundup and other pesticides combined with fertilizer increased yields ... it doubles and triples them, and it prevents famines resulting from sudden insect plagues, which were common (as in every 30 years on average) for most of human history. If these numbers are even close to accurate, eliminating roundup and modern farming would kill BILLIONS of humans. I would love to get more accurate numbers, but what do you intend to do about the little "humans need food" issue in general ?
- heurist 8y ago
  As i understand it, there are new intensive organic farming techniques that are practically unknown to big ag and which produce similar yields with higher quality (by not destroying soil and ecosystems every year). I'd counter that the final death toll of Roundup and similar chemicals could be much higher any potential famine caused by abrupt cessation of pesticide treatments. Destruction of ecosystems is an externality which has never been accounted for, and sooner or later someone will pay that bill.

WalterSear 8y ago

It's meat that's driving the need for high yield, and large crops. Most agriculture is driven by meat production. The solution is obvious, straightforward, and would be relatively easy, but human nature makes it hard to discuss, let alone implement.