25 ms·

Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?

220 points by caprorso 8y ago

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
agumonkey 8y ago
What if we all had a green wall with aquaponics ?
- snarf21 8y ago
  I think this is what it has to eventually be. We all have a garden in our garage. We save tons on transportation costs throughout the chain. It has to be near zero work. People used to all have gardens in their backyard but stopped when they could afford the cheap produce at the store.
  - Scoundreller 8y ago
    Bush tomatoes, lettuce, basil and kale are fairly low maintenance in my experience. You can increase yields with more work, but you can often get away with only watering when it hasn’t rained for a few days.
  - mc32 8y ago
    The missing context is that people did that out of necessity. Hundred years ago 56% of Americans were rather poor. Most non-city people had outhouses in the 1940s. America’s rise to wealth has been long and hard fought. Wealth didn’t just land into our laps. The average American family had an annual income of ~$3000 (in today’s dollars), So, yeah, poor.
    - agsdfgsd 8y ago
      The average US family had an annual income of $956 in 1940. That is $17,268.43 in todays dollars, far more than $3k. And that was almost entirely earned by a single individual rather than both adults in the household working like now. Also, someone earning that little paid no income tax. The average house price in 1940 was $2938, which is $53k in today's money. Now the average family income is $70k, but that's mostly two people's income, they only get to keep $60k because of income tax, and houses are $200k. So we earn about twice as much, but houses cost about 4 times as much. It isn't nearly as clear cut a win for modern life as you make it out to be.
      - mc32 8y ago
        It’s my fault. Hundred years ago refers to previous turn of century, circa 1900, then went to 1940 about indoor plumbing for toilets. We were poor, not much above Mexican or Finnish standards (better, but hardly by much). It was anascrnt industrislization as well as WWi and WWii that catapulted us into a powerhouse.
        agsdfgsd 8y ago
        That doesn't actually change much. Average income in 1900 was $438, which is $13,186.15 in 2018 dollars. And 1900 was a low point historically more so than now is a high point. The worst of the gilded age exploitation was happening then, causing huge poverty.
  - alacombe 8y ago
    > I think this is what it has to eventually be. We all have a garden in our garage. No you won't, at least not with greens. Did you even try to do the math for the required amount of food a single person needs per-year ? Even if you go with rabbits, which are easy to raise, you can only self produce a small amount of meat per year, maybe ~150lb once you get to "scale".
    - sp332 8y ago
      You're right about the quantity, but why don't you eat it yourself? That's much more efficient.
      - weberc2 8y ago
        It's almost certainly less efficient when you account for spoilage (namely all of the crazy seasonal work you need to do every year to keep all of your surplus from spoiling so you can eat it out of season). The market is pretty efficient, it turns out.
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    Who here doesn't see it this way ? I feel as you do: local, near chemical free, food. Plus these days we'd have zigbee or sigfox sensors to ensure certain things and save time.
  - bluGill 8y ago
    Where is the energy for your garage garden coming from? Plants need a lot of light. Most buildings do not have nearly intense enough light (house plants are low light plants that grow slow so they do fine, but if you want to grow food you generally want a plant that needs a lot more light)
    - agumonkey 8y ago
      You have windows, now sunlight is irregular that's true. Also there are light concentrator pipe from large roofs that may be used.
    - bagacrap 8y ago
      From grow lights attached to a solar fed li ion battery, duh!
      - bluGill 8y ago
        There is only so much sun energy from the sub we get.
  - weberc2 8y ago
    We save tons on transportation costs, but lose many orders of magnitude more on redundant labor and economies of scale (one tractor working in a big field is a lot more economical than 1200 humans working in 1200 gardens). Maybe technological advancements will change all of that--perhaps we could have fully robotic farms, but even then I would expect one big factory farm with a handful of big, expensive robots to outperform many gardens each with a small robot.
    - naravara 8y ago
      >(one tractor working in a big field is a lot more economical than 1200 humans working in 1200 gardens). Sure. But 1200 humans working in 1200 gardens is also a lot more economical than 1200 humans sitting at home playing Fortnite all day because there are no jobs. The idea of employment guarantees as welfare policy has been getting traction, and programs like this where raw output isn't the main goal would be good candidates.
      - weberc2 8y ago
        Sorry, I’m not following. Why the gardens v fortnite dichotomy? How did you get there?
        naravara 8y ago
        Basically efficiency isn't the chief concern. If you really have a bunch of people with nothing better to do with their time (e.g. Fortnite), then we don't really need to care about allocating labor as efficiently as possible to maximize yield. We can use labor in a very inefficient (where yield is concerned) way if we think it will confer ecological, aesthetic, or sociological side-benefits, as would having lots of private gardens. Fortnite is just an example of something people fall into doing when they don't have any other productive opportunities available to them.
        weberc2 8y ago
        I'm not sure whether you're taking issue with leisure time generally or the tendency for people to participate in leisure that you believe is inefficient, but both are orthogonal to the question of which type of agricultural system is more efficient. In particular, if your solution is simply "spend less time on [your current] leisure activities!", it can be applied to either aggricultural system. In the case of specialized agriculture, it simply means spending more time on the individual's specialization or really anything with a greater opportunity value than growing one's own food (if your goal is to maximize earnings, it's tough to do worse than spending an hour per day growing your own food to save ~$5).
  - stale2002 8y ago
    This is a horribly inefficient way to grow food. The reason why food is grown by large industrial farming companies is because they can grow it ~100 times cheaper than you could. If everyone had to grow their own food, then everyone would starve to death. The idea of locally grown food in everyone's backyard is a fairy tale that just sounds nice, but would actually be horrible.
    - agumonkey 8y ago
      Isn't it partially true though ? at first true maybe but given some time they start a margin chase ending up in picking plants that will look good 1 month later on shelves even though they're not the best nutrition wise.
    - agsdfgsd 8y ago
      >The reason why food is grown by large industrial farming companies is because they can grow it ~100 times cheaper than you could. No, it is because people don't want to grow food. My tomatoes cost me 2 minutes of time. I don't know how much you want to value my time at, but lets say I am pretty awesome and deserve $100/hour. That's $3.33 cents for all the tomatoes I can eat. Where are the industrial farming companies producing tomatoes for 3.3 cents per 100 pounds? >If everyone had to grow their own food, then everyone would starve to death. If that were true, we wouldn't exist. People did grow their own food for thousands of years. If everyone had to grow their own food, we'd be fine. All mechanization did was free up people from agricultural labor to do other jobs, humans predate tractors. >The idea of locally grown food in everyone's backyard is a fairy tale that just sounds nice, but would actually be horrible. It is a reality for lots of people, and we're pretty happy about it.
      - stale2002 8y ago
        > If that were true, we wouldn't exist. People did grow their own food for thousands of years. If everyone had to grow their own food, we'd be fine. All mechanization did was free up people from agricultural labor to do other jobs, humans predate tractors. This works when everyone owns many acres of land per person, and is spending their entire life working the fields, doing hard labor, and doing very little else with their life yes. We don't live in that world anymore, though. I suspect there isn't even enough physical land on the earth to support this inefficient method of farming. We have significant evidence of how this worked out for people. That world that you are describing, where everyone spent their entire life just trying to barely feed themselves, was a horrible place, for everyone. This period of time was called "the history of the world before the industrial era". And lots and lots of people died. So no, they were not fine. > It is a reality for lots of people, and we're pretty happy about it. By "a lot" do you mean a very small percentage of the total population? > My tomatoes cost me 2 minutes of time. What you do with your tiny backyard garden is irrelevant. It is mathmatically impossible for you to be feeding yourself entirely on that, unless you have multiple acres of land, which I doubt is what you are describing. Your anecdote does not overrule physics.
  - bagacrap 8y ago
    Ok great! Next problem: how do we make sure everyone on Earth owns a garage?
kieranmaine 8y ago
What would make people eat less beef? Since taxes seem a hard sell, would subsidizing chicken + non-meat protein help? As a vegetarian I'm trying to get my head around what would help change the behaviour of the meat eating HN members.
- Retric 8y ago
  A lower subsidy on corn would significantly raise beef prices relative to chicken, without being a tax. That's difficult in the US for systemic political reasons, but not necessarily a tax issue. Longer term, lab grown protean is likely to be a net win.
  - jermaustin1 8y ago
    But it would be seen as a "tax" to the corn producers, beef eaters, sugar water drinkers, car owners, and probably a load of other groups who benefit from the artificially cheap price.
    - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
      Out of that list, the corn producers can get lost. They are not entitled to our subsidy.
      - jermaustin1 8y ago
        Well sure, but there are a lot of lobbying groups relying on the subsidies. Beef, pork, ethanol, corn syrup, international food exporters. If a congressperson raises the price of the commodity they all rely on, they will piss of a LOT of money, and probably not raise enough next election cycle, and lose their seat.
      - njarboe 8y ago
        Until Iowa is not the first US primary, these corn producers will always have an an advantage in influencing American politics.
  - 8y ago
tareqak 8y ago
There is also the problem of food distribution. Ignoring future population growth, the world does produce enough food to people everyone [0] (obtained from the first sentence of [1]). If we are collectively unwilling to solve the distribution problem today, then it there is a good chance that we won't do much about the shortage tomorrow. In addition, unconsumed food waste is also problem, and probably does have some correlation with the unequal distribution. An article with the headline "Can we share food more fairly today?" does have a simple answer, but would rock the political establishment uncomfortably, so has little chance of ever being published. [0] Leathers, H., & Foster, P. (2009). The world food problem: toward ending undernutrition in the third world. Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers Inc. [1] http://12.000.scripts.mit.edu/mission2014/problems/inadequate-food-distribution-systems http://12.000.scripts.mit.edu/mission2014/problems/inadequat...
- Kalium 8y ago
  Logistics is hard. On top of that, importing food is a very political subject. Do you want to feed everyone in the world as resource-efficiently as possible, or do you want every country/region/city/neighborhood/community to be equipped to feed itself? Bear in mind that these two are very much different scenarios. Small, poor, inefficient farmers have been bankrupted by cheap imports they cannot compete with more than once in world history. Similarly, price controls on food have led to famine more than once. This is without even touching on the point that a lot of poorer countries really want to be able to export food for a profit. I get the sense that the short answer to your uncomfortable question is simple: yes. With the asterisk being all the political and economic questions that go in it and don't have simple answers.
- beat 8y ago
  Population growth is leveling off. Birth rate globally is already at/below replacement rate (there are ~2B children right now, the UN estimates that in a century, there will still be ~2B children). The growth we are seeing now is a growth of the adult population, not the child population, due to the 1-2 generation overhang between nations getting decent food and health care (especially immunizations), and the birth rate dropping in those nations from the 5-6 of backwards nations to the <2 of modern nations. (See Hans Rosling for details.) Meanwhile, in a half-century, we've doubled the population, while significantly reducing food costs and radically reducing hunger globally. I'm with Hans Rosling here... the angst about how the world is hungry and getting hungrier is just our minds telling us stories, contradicting the facts on the ground. I don't see a good reason to believe that we will have global food shortages in the future. We'll have less hunger, not more, as the population levels out over the next few decades. I'm basing that argument on past behavior, absorbing the needs of much higher population growth with less technology for decades.
ryanmercer 8y ago
Or we could stop throwing away nearly 1/3 of the food we produce...
- vram22 8y ago
  Great point. As a kid growing up in India, reading about recurring starvation / famine there, and in Africa, etc., I also read about some European countries dumping mountains of butter and other edibles into the sea, due to surpluses, and maybe to keep the price up. I mean, I understand it is about economics, supply and demand, profits, etc., but still, shudder
  - iguy 8y ago
    Instead of making the famous mountain of butter (beside a lake of milk) they now pay famers not to farm, which has its own oddities. Including discouraging of re-wilding I think, as the land has to be plausibly farm-able to get the cash. This aside, it's worth knowing that developed countries typically throw away much less food than developing ones. Basically because Tesco is much better at logistics than a million guys trying to drive into Delhi. I don't have the link to hand but there was a nice comparison US vs Mexico on this somewhere.
    - vram22 8y ago
      >Instead of making the famous mountain of butter (beside a lake of milk) they now pay famers not to farm, which has its own oddities. Crazy world we live in, where being (over-)efficient has to be subsidized. There may be a thing such as being too efficient for our own good. Also, the efficiency as measured, only relates to money / profits / maximizing use of resources in industrial (including food) production, and often does not take a holistic view, which should include sustainability of resources, quality of life (not just economic standard of living) and sustainability of the planet. I had read E. F. Schumacher's book "Small is Beautiful" when a teenager, when I was more into these sorts of things (did organic vegetable gardening and dairy farming, used a biogas plant, etc.), before I got into the software field full-time. I still recommend his ideas and book about appropriate technology to interested people - the concepts and principles have not changed, though technologies have evolved, and a hybrid model may be needed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._F._Schumacher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._F._Schumacher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appropriate_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appropriate_technology >Including discouraging of re-wilding I think, as the land has to be plausibly farm-able to get the cash. Yes, re-wilding is a good idea. >This aside, it's worth knowing that developed countries typically throw away much less food than developing ones. Basically because Tesco is much better at logistics than a million guys trying to drive into Delhi. I don't have the link to hand but there was a nice comparison US vs Mexico on this somewhere. Possibly. I do know that plenty of waste happens in India too. In fact, Schumacher's ideas are very much suited to and applicable to developing countries. IIRC he was influenced by Mahatma Gandhi some, and Gandhi also had done significant work in this area, in practice, not just talking about it, either - including hugely encouraging Indian people to do naturopathy, nature cure, small scale industry work like traditional means of spinning and weaving for khadi (a great hand-made Indian cotton textile), etc. We still have Khadi & Village Industries Emporiums here, where one can buy clothing made of khadi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khadi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khadi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khadi#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khadi#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_wheel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_wheel http://www.kvic.org.in/kvicres/index.php http://www.kvic.org.in/kvicres/index.php
crazy_monkey 8y ago
Can we pack more sardines into fewer tins? ~ Oh, wait... the airlines are doing that!
joering2 8y ago
Why is food grow not stuck up vertically? I mean let's go 3D, since at least majority of vegetables and most fruits do not need more than height of 2 feet of space. It also surprised me how old school modern farming still remains. Look at the first picture from this article: a bunch of modern tractors unnecessarily burning oil, unnecessarily operated by humans. By now this should be three times the size field with 15 levels up, run by 3D seeds/soil/water/plants/etc sampling throw out from automatically replaceable cartridge/dispenser. We have long way to go, but certainly we don't need more land to grow; we need more technology in place! Edit: should have mentioned it - even going vertical you can still use natural light! Its a matter of setting up bunch of mirrors reflecting sunlight. Of course you need sun to grow.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  Because sunlight ? I do feel the same about the mechanical side of farming. I'm sure there's room for different tools and structure.
- darkmighty 8y ago
  If you don't expose your plants to the sun, you're going to need a lot of energy to power their illumination. I'm not sure solar panels-> tuned led illumination is any more efficient than direct exposure, nor could it be any cheaper (and because solar irradiation on Earth is finite of course the amount of food you can grow is also finite). Then there's the profit per m^2 of agriculture isn't that high -- how much does a structure cost? I'd say at least $400/m^2. If your profit is <$10/m^2, you'd need decades to recoup costs (not a viable investment currently) -- that's only for the structure discounting all the other necessary additional infrastructure, lightning, irrigation, etc. Unless we switch to radically different/more efficient food growing than plants (say direct cell cultivation, or direct nutrient synthesis), then the current approach is probably the best (still with room for some automation and significant genetic improvements on crops, I'd say). I think direct nutrient synthesis probably has potential, but it will take a very long time to understand nutrition and synthesis of organic mollecules -- not an expert by any means, but I'd be surprised if it took less than several decades to develop the necessary tech/science. Even then the gains in efficiency will probably not be that large -- plants/life in general have been optimizing synthesis for billions of years, they're already quite efficient. What we would gain is minimizing to its limit parts of the plant we don't consume, and concentrate on the essentials/optimal nutrients.
vram22 8y ago
Recently posted on HN, under the thread "A remote UK community living off-grid (bbc.co.uk)": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18498110 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18498110 Excerpt from the comment: [ A political science graduate of Yale University, Jeavons worked for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and Stanford University before launching his career in small-scale agriculture education. He is the author of the best-selling sustainable farming handbook How to Grow More Vegetables, Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible On Less Land Than You Can Imagine, now in its 8th edition in eight languages ]
- agsdfgsd 8y ago
  I wouldn't consider the market gardener to be in the same area as grow biointensive. Jeavons has a strong focus on self-sufficiency and sustainability in his system and goals. Fortier does not, he's only interested in organic as gimmick to make money. Also his book is pretty deceptive compared to what he really does on his "farm", which wasn't actually profitable until after he released the book and got "famous", which is what sell the overpriced lettuce that finally got him profitable. I think the biointensive system Jeavons promotes gives you a pretty good starting place, but it does promote a bit of needless work. Skip the composting and just use the compost crops as a mulch. There's no need to build piles and turn them and then spread the compost, you can just let it compost in place on the garden where it will end up. You can skip growing the compost crops too if you have trees to collect leaves from in the fall. And save your back and skip the double digging, or any digging at all for that matter. All it does is set you back in your first couple of years for no reason.
loeg 8y ago
This is touched on in Pinker's "Enlightenment Now." The current trendy "organic" label requires more land to grow the same amount of food. Whatever benefits of so-called organic farming you perceive, if any, it is a regression in terms of feeding the world's growing population.
- naravara 8y ago
  >if any, it is a regression in terms of feeding the world's growing population. Food security is a distribution problem, not a production problem. We're already producing far far more food than we consume or would even need to consume. Big Ag likes to pretend they need higher yields in order to feed the hungry but they're full of it. They want to produce more for cheaper and pocket the margin, but they're not going to do jack squat to get that production out to the people who need it.
  - loeg 8y ago
    Both can be problems at the same time. I think you raise a valid concern, but I don't believe it dismisses the yield/density problem in any way. I don't think there's any reason to vilify agricultural businesses in particular for being profit-seeking capitalist corporations.
    - naravara 8y ago
      >I don't think there's any reason to vilify agricultural businesses in particular for being profit-seeking capitalist corporations. It's not about the line of business. It's about disingenuously gussying up the marketing around their own profit maximization by pretending they're being humanitarian. Sort of like "Greenwashing." Everyone does it, but so many people depend on subsistence farming that it comes across as especially crass. Sure they're not alone, but there is plenty of scorn to go around for bottling companies taking up all the ground water, Pharma companies abusing IP law to fleece sick people, etc. There's no reason to be stingy.
alisson 8y ago
There's a great method called Agroforestry that uses forest floors to produce more food: Quick overview of a farmer's land that uses this method: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stABAx82TbY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stABAx82TbY he harvest around 3x more cocoa per hectare than traditional methods and its one of the most valuable in the world right now. Big producers joining to make it more scalable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE
- ghthor 8y ago
  I love this idea, its something I've thought a lot about. Our large scale farming strategies seem fundamentally ignorant. Nature it full of complex systems of independence that we should be using directly in our farming strategies. I'm particularly interested in fungi to support the nutrient and immune systems of my farms. See the work of Paul Staments using fungi to treat bee colony collapse.
  - flavor8 8y ago
    > Our large scale farming strategies seem fundamentally ignorant. For a great example of this, check out: http://nautil.us/issue/66/clockwork/herbicide-is-whats-for-dinner http://nautil.us/issue/66/clockwork/herbicide-is-whats-for-d...
    - ghthor 8y ago
      Wow, that is such an anti earth practice. How can we change this type of insanity? How can we protect our own guts?
      - fyfy18 8y ago
        Voting with your wallet is a good start. In the EU there are strict requirements on what can be labeled ecological, including the use of the EU ecolabel. I believe the US has similar labelling. If you local supermarket doesn't have a suitable stock of ecological supplies, write to them and ask for some, or start shopping at an organic shop.
QML 8y ago
Don’t we already know how to do this? For example, the concept of companion planting — growing plants which behave symbiotically together — is a centuries old idea. The issue is whether we have an economic incentive to.
- blacksmith_tb 8y ago
  I am not an agronomist, but my instinct is that companion planting interferes with large-scale farming, where machines or poorly paid humans in a hurry need to easy access to a single crop to harvest, and often destroy the field as they work. I'd like to think if the yields were worth it we'd have worked around that, but possibly robotic harvesters can take us there.
  - maerF0x0 8y ago
    And that is the crux of the entire question. You get what you incentivize. Current US Farming practices are extremely incentivized towards singular homogenous products using an absolute minimum of human labor.
    - saalweachter 8y ago
      Eh, grains are never the problem. Essentially none of the problems you hear about in agriculture apply to grains. We can produce just staggering amounts of grain on a per-acre basis, and we can ship them without refrigeration and store them for long periods of time without any significant loss of nutritional value. The carbon, energy and monetary cost of shipping huge quantities of grain from the center of the US to the coasts where people live is negligible. You don't have the complex social issues of migrant and immigrant labor with grain production; I mean, it wouldn't surprise me if there's some, but it's definitely not a necessary component the way it is in current vegetable production and in meat processing. There's some potential problems in water usage in some places grains are produced, you can have some good conversations about fertilizer and pesticide production, and about soil maintenance, and we continually want to be working to improve the resiliency and productivity of the crop varieties, but grains are in pretty good shape and there's a clear road map for future work, with lots of incremental progress being made every day. Produce and meat production is where the big gains are to be had, for the environment, food security, and improving the conditions of working people. Just bank on having half our calories coming from massive grain farms located at great distance from the population centers and try to figure out how to fix the rest, and then maybe it will be time to revisit grains.
meggar 8y ago
Maybe Boring Co and Square Roots can do some underground vertical farming so we don't keep running out of romaine.
- rohit2412 8y ago
  Topsoil is needed for plants, which won't grow underground without it. And if you're going to carry soil underground, might as well do it in an above ground building. Or try hydro ponics
  - meggar 8y ago
    I was thinking more like a 10 foot wide hole, 1 mile deep.
truculent 8y ago
if not we're fucked, no?
dghughes 8y ago
It's slightly terrifying to see the data about the loss of nutrients in plants around the world due to climate change. On YouTube there was an interesting Veritasim story about plants and their mineral levels. It seems plants have fewer minerals now compared to 100 years ago. Farmers have fertilizer and the plants grow but they don't have the same levels of nutrition even with all that help. Samples of weeds from the 1800s were compared to the same weeds now and even the weeds have fewer minerals, so it's all plants not just food crops. Larger farms growing more food may not solve the problem it's the quality of the plant not just the quantity.
- nyokodo 8y ago
  IIRC that youtube video concluded that the difference in nutrient content was because growth rates were accelerated by the increased CO2 in the atmosphere but the rate of extracting nutrients from the soil was not accelerated. This is then presumably related to the global greening phenomenon we've witnessed where the increased CO2 has lead to a large increase in forestation globally. It's important to note that the video asserts that food is still plenty nutritious and if you eat a well balanced diet you're fine and my own note is that there is also probably a limit to this effect.
  - tiglionabbit 8y ago
    Is it possible that the soil is also depleted of interesting nutrients and that the fertilizer isn't providing them either? Our understanding of what micronutrients humans need is not great. For plants, it may be even less understood.
    - mikekchar 8y ago
      Depending on what you mean, either yes or no :-) This is based on my poor understanding of the situation. Someone who is knowledgeable will hopefully be able to correct me. I think there are actually plenty of nutrients in soil (even many "poor" soils). The real problem is that they aren't bio-available. So you'll have lots of different mineral salts in the soil (usually one or two orders of magnitude more than you need, by weight), but it's not in a form that the plant can absorb by its roots. I think the real problem is the kind of mono-culture cropping we do. Really you want a variety of plants pulling up nutrients out of the ground (because different varieties have different abilities to break down and convert the nutrients in the soil). Then you want those plants to break down and be reintegrated in the soil. Finally, you often want some of that happening in an anaerobic environment, so you don't bind oxygen to it. There are some new (old? ha ha) techniques being developed to build fertility (really just making existing nutrients bio-available) in the soil. Avoiding tilling, building up micro-organisms and insects to distribute the soil, allowing a variety of plants to grow (some long roots, some short roots, etc, etc). It's pretty complicated, though and I expect that it will take us a very long time to learn how to do these things effectively. It definitely seems easier to just add what you think the soil is missing, but there are many disadvantages to that approach as we see over time. I did some experiments in containers a while ago. My idea was to see what kind of production I could get without adding any inputs to the soil at all (just water), and harvesting as much food as I could. I had some experience from doing planted fish tanks with really intense planting (every single space possible occupied with a plant) and knew that it was reasonable to assume that plants can grow really well being very crowded as long as nutrients are available. I planted my containers so that light was the limiting factor, but grew a lot of local weeds that grew in poor soil as well as food on the assumption that they would build fertility fastest. I ran my experiment over 5 years and was really surprised at my results -- my production increased over time. One year, I even got 5 (!) harvests of potatoes from the same container -- I've never even come close to that level of production doing it more traditionally. It was all very unscientific and I was really doing it out of curiosity more than trying to prove anything. In the end, it seems my neighbor didn't like my container garden of weeds and he convinced my gas man to apply herbicide to it. That was the end of my experiment (I caught him in the act as I came home from work a little bit early that day -- one of the few times I've really blown my top). Anyway, I don't think we really have to worry over much about actually depleting our soils. I think they can rebound fairly quickly with the right approach. However, I think it is possible that our current intensive farming approaches do not produce the most nutrient rich produce possible.
pg_bot 8y ago
Luckily we have already solved this problem, we just need to distribute the solution to the developing world. Better crops and machinery result in much higher yields. If you are a small farmer and you are using livestock for labor something like 40% of your land has to be devoted to growing food for the animals to do the work. We must continue to innovate for that is the only way that everyone can win.
smcameron 8y ago
Didn't Mao Tse Tung have some sort of failed high density agriculture experiment leading to famine? Let's not repeat that particular bit of history.
NickM 8y ago
Let's try to break this problem down to first principles: - Humans need food to live because it provides energy and nutrients. - From a fundamental standpoint of physics and available materials, nutrients are relatively easy to get; as far as I know, most vitamins and minerals are pretty cheap to either come by naturally or manufacture, and you don't need that much of any of them to keep a person healthy, so let's assume food energy is the real limiting factor here. - The energy in most food comes from photosynthesis (either directly, in the case of eating plants, or indirectly, in the case of feeding plants to animals for growing meat). - Photosynthesis is an extremely inefficient way to turn solar radiation into chemical energy. Only about 3 to 6 percent of incoming solar energy is used by plants to create biomass, and not all of that biomass necessarily equates to calories we can digest and absorb. So, while this isn't a particularly appetizing future to imagine living in, I don't know of any fundamental reason why artificially producing edible calories via solar electricity and chemical processes couldn't vastly exceed the efficiency of natural-grown food. It might be tricky getting to the point where fake food like this is healthy and tastes good...but if it saves the world from starving and stops civilization from collapsing then hey, it's not a bad fallback plan. Besides being a big jump in efficiency, this type of tech could also enable the use of non-arable land for food production, since presumably you could set up the necessary manufacturing facilities anywhere you want.
- daenz 8y ago
  I have no expertise in this area, but everything you said seems to make sense. If you're an expert (or if anyone else reading this is), can you shed some light on why using artificial processes to create "food" would be difficult? It would be so cool if we had some mainstream open source software that could simulate chemical processes in a macro-level way, for example, to explore new ways of creating complex carbohydrates faster than in nature.
  - Brakenshire 8y ago
    A carbohydrate is not a simple organic structure, the synthesis of molecules like that is quite complicated, and involves a lot of inefficiencies and filtering out of by-products. Chemical fuels like methane or ethane are far simpler, and just inputting energy and synthesising them from basic building blocks is difficult to do cheaply and at scale.
maccam94 8y ago
From a recent Bloomberg article[1] The last two graphs show that 41% of the land in the contiguous 48 states is used for feeding livestock. More than 33% of the 48 states is just pasture, most of which I believe is used by cattle. What would it take to shift protein consumption from beef (3% efficient) to products like poultry (21%) and eggs (31%)? [2] I think we have to take a hard look at taxes, fees, and subsidies for land use and agricultural products, but there's not much political pressure to do so right now. 1: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/ 2: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/105002 http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/10...
- randyrand 8y ago
  wow. those numbers are so cool. never knew poultry was so efficient. No wonder it’s so much cheaper. What would it take to make beef production more efficient? genetic engineering perhaps. People wil naturally switch to more efficient food as population goes up and food resources become more scarce.
  - bagacrap 8y ago
    It's not exactly surprising, is it? Besides efficiency, what would increase the price of a piece of food? (In the long run I assume supply would match demand so a mismatch there wouldn't be the cause.) So I think the answer to your question about increasing efficiency is probably pretty difficult. There's already a huge profit motive to increase efficiency, so if a few labcoats could easily solve the problem I'm sure they would have by now. I think the answer is to eat animals who reach maturity faster (or just grow more per unit time?). Like insects :-)
  - agsdfgsd 8y ago
    >What would it take to make beef production more efficient? Nothing. Large animals that live long lives are inefficient by their very nature. The bigger an animal is, the more of its energy consumption goes to maintenance rather than growth. And the longer it lives before reaching slaughter weight, the more that inefficiency compounds. If you somehow turned cattle into 5 pound animals that mature in 6 weeks, they would be efficient, but they also wouldn't really qualify as cattle any more and their meat would likely be noticeably different than beef.
mettamage 8y ago
The Netherlands! It's a small country that grows a lot of food! Final answer. Now let's read the article and sees what it says. Edit: ah it's more about cattle.
- agsdfgsd 8y ago
  Not really. The Netherlands has a high dollar value of "agricultural exports" which includes flowers at 10% of that value and equipment and machinery at another 10%. Of the 80% that is actually food, a lot of it is high value low calorie food. And the methods used to produce that food are horribly destructive, not sustainable, and will cost future generations untold hardship to deal with: https://www.dutchnews.nl/features/2018/03/dutch-agriculture-is-not-a-beacon-of-good-farming-practice-to-the-world/ https://www.dutchnews.nl/features/2018/03/dutch-agriculture-...
pier25 8y ago
We can grow food in buildings with hydrophonic systems. The problem is not land but energy.
fouc 8y ago
This is called Permaculture, it maximizes yield using natural methods (i.e. avoid tiling the soil, herbicides, etc) and results in an "edible forest" From the wikipedia: 4 Common practices 4.1 Agroforestry 4.2 Hügelkultur 4.3 Natural building 4.4 Rainwater harvesting 4.5 Sheet mulching 4.6 Intensive rotational grazing 4.7 Keyline design 4.8 Fruit tree management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture
- agsdfgsd 8y ago
  Permaculture doesn't mean food forest. A food forest is one form of permaculture, but it is by no means the only form, or even the ideal one. The hype about food forests comes from how effective they are in tropical climates. But it isn't actually very efficient in temperate climates. Temperate climates do need to rely heavily on annual crops. Those crops can be grown using permaculture, we don't have to trade our potatoes for chestnuts.
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Fnoord 8y ago
I recently conducted a report and presentation about reducetarianism (though in my own language). There are 3 main reasons why people go vegetarian, vegan, or reducetarian (the former 2 are a subset of reducetarianism): environment, animal welfare, and health. Re: "Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?". My conclusion to based on the research I performed is: Yeah, we can, and not only that we can also reduce the Co2 footprint by avoiding eating cattle. Alternatives which are size efficient are chicken and insects (such as grasshoppers and mealworms). However, chicken have a CNS, and if you grow more chicken, more chicken suffer, so this is a pro environment yet anti animal welfare argument. What is going to be good for the environment is using solar energy, using electric cars (to go to the grocery store). Because the transport from (very efficient, huge) transport ships has less impact on environment than you going to/from grocery store by (conventional) car. What is going to be good for animal welfare is growing & consuming less animals with a CNS. Alternatives such as insects or lab meat.
- Joe-Z 8y ago
  Would you care to explain what 'CNS' is?
  - Fnoord 8y ago
    In this context, it stands for Central Nervous System [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_nervous_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_nervous_system
    - Joe-Z 8y ago
      Thank you!
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jillesvangurp 8y ago
There is a lot of innovation around high tech farming in places other than than the country side. With hydroponics, you can grow all sorts of stuff anywhere you can supply water, energy, and the right nutrients. People are growing herbs in underground abandoned subway stations, old industrial facilities, on roofs, deserts, etc. The reason is that it works really well and you can get great yields if you can micromanage the conditions in which plants grow. Food production is fundamentally an energy problem; not a land problem. Using cheap electricity, you can desalinate water, pump nutrients around, generate light and control the temperature. Eating meat is a problem given the vast resources needed to produce it. However, there's a lot of innovation in developing synthetic meats. Lab grown meat is becoming a thing. I'm talking about actual muscle tissue grown in labs. There are also many plant and mushroom based meat alternatives that are getting better and more popular. In short, we might eat a proper steak for nostalgic reasons once in a while in a few decades but we'll have plenty of alternative protein sources to supplement our diet with on a day to day basis. And making out-competing popular meat products like a big mac isn't exactly rocket science. The whole point of stuff like that is that it is industrialized low quality stuff. Most of the meat we're eat isn't exactly high quality stuff.
dajonker 8y ago
Growing vegetables in greenhouses can be done very efficiently. The Wageningen University researched high-tech greenhouses in Riyad (Saudi Arabia) and found that it only required 5 liter fresh water per kg tomatoes, compared to 168 liters in a low-tech greenhouse [1]. This is possible using a closed system that recycles the water that evaporates in the greenhouse. The low-tech example is a plastic tunnel without such facilities (the most commonly used type of Greenhouse in the Middle East). The yield per square meter was also 50% higher for the high-tech greenhouse compared to the low-tech greenhouse. [1] https://www.wur.nl/nl/nieuws/Nieuwe-onderzoekskas-in-Riyad-maakt-30-90-waterbesparing-mogelijk.htm https://www.wur.nl/nl/nieuws/Nieuwe-onderzoekskas-in-Riyad-m... (in Dutch only)
sametmax 8y ago
We don't need to. - The part of the world that consumes the most eats too much. A balanced diet would reduce greatly the food consumption. - The part of the world that consumes the most wastes a huge quantity of the food it produces. - Human don't need to eat meat to be healthy and we are past the need for hunting for survival. We can even produce non animal b12 supplements if we ever need to. Since most food are grown to be fed to cattle, if we stop eating meat, we suddently multiply our food flow by a huge amount while diminushing the water consumption, pollution, and a lot of public health issues. Food is not a production problem anymore. It's a social and political one.
- greedo 8y ago
  There is no shortage of food. Even with the Western world eating a rich, meat based diet, there's plenty of food; no need for everyone to go vegan. What there is, is a problem with distribution.
chrisscastaneda 8y ago
We could just grow plants instead of animals, then problem solved.
baldfat 8y ago
1/4 of the worlds for ends up spoiled. 198 million: The number of hectares used to produce food that is lost or wasted each year. This is about the size of Mexico $1,600: The annual amount the average American family of four spends on food that doesn’t get eaten 53 percent: The amount of all food lost or wasted that is comprised of cereals, such as wheat, maize, and rice 64 percent: The share of loss or waste in the developing world that occurs before the food is even processed or sent to market https://www.wri.org/blog/2013/06/numbers-reducing-food-loss-and-waste https://www.wri.org/blog/2013/06/numbers-reducing-food-loss-...

220 points by caprorso 8y ago

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agumonkey 8y ago

What if we all had a green wall with aquaponics ?

snarf21 8y ago
I think this is what it has to eventually be. We all have a garden in our garage. We save tons on transportation costs throughout the chain. It has to be near zero work. People used to all have gardens in their backyard but stopped when they could afford the cheap produce at the store.
- Scoundreller 8y ago
  Bush tomatoes, lettuce, basil and kale are fairly low maintenance in my experience. You can increase yields with more work, but you can often get away with only watering when it hasn’t rained for a few days.
- mc32 8y ago
  The missing context is that people did that out of necessity. Hundred years ago 56% of Americans were rather poor. Most non-city people had outhouses in the 1940s. America’s rise to wealth has been long and hard fought. Wealth didn’t just land into our laps. The average American family had an annual income of ~$3000 (in today’s dollars), So, yeah, poor.
  - agsdfgsd 8y ago
    The average US family had an annual income of $956 in 1940. That is $17,268.43 in todays dollars, far more than $3k. And that was almost entirely earned by a single individual rather than both adults in the household working like now. Also, someone earning that little paid no income tax. The average house price in 1940 was $2938, which is $53k in today's money. Now the average family income is $70k, but that's mostly two people's income, they only get to keep $60k because of income tax, and houses are $200k. So we earn about twice as much, but houses cost about 4 times as much. It isn't nearly as clear cut a win for modern life as you make it out to be.
    - mc32 8y ago
      It’s my fault. Hundred years ago refers to previous turn of century, circa 1900, then went to 1940 about indoor plumbing for toilets. We were poor, not much above Mexican or Finnish standards (better, but hardly by much). It was anascrnt industrislization as well as WWi and WWii that catapulted us into a powerhouse.
      - agsdfgsd 8y ago
        That doesn't actually change much. Average income in 1900 was $438, which is $13,186.15 in 2018 dollars. And 1900 was a low point historically more so than now is a high point. The worst of the gilded age exploitation was happening then, causing huge poverty.
- alacombe 8y ago
  > I think this is what it has to eventually be. We all have a garden in our garage. No you won't, at least not with greens. Did you even try to do the math for the required amount of food a single person needs per-year ? Even if you go with rabbits, which are easy to raise, you can only self produce a small amount of meat per year, maybe ~150lb once you get to "scale".
  - sp332 8y ago
    You're right about the quantity, but why don't you eat it yourself? That's much more efficient.
    - weberc2 8y ago
      It's almost certainly less efficient when you account for spoilage (namely all of the crazy seasonal work you need to do every year to keep all of your surplus from spoiling so you can eat it out of season). The market is pretty efficient, it turns out.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  Who here doesn't see it this way ? I feel as you do: local, near chemical free, food. Plus these days we'd have zigbee or sigfox sensors to ensure certain things and save time.
- bluGill 8y ago
  Where is the energy for your garage garden coming from? Plants need a lot of light. Most buildings do not have nearly intense enough light (house plants are low light plants that grow slow so they do fine, but if you want to grow food you generally want a plant that needs a lot more light)
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    You have windows, now sunlight is irregular that's true. Also there are light concentrator pipe from large roofs that may be used.
  - bagacrap 8y ago
    From grow lights attached to a solar fed li ion battery, duh!
    - bluGill 8y ago
      There is only so much sun energy from the sub we get.
- weberc2 8y ago
  We save tons on transportation costs, but lose many orders of magnitude more on redundant labor and economies of scale (one tractor working in a big field is a lot more economical than 1200 humans working in 1200 gardens). Maybe technological advancements will change all of that--perhaps we could have fully robotic farms, but even then I would expect one big factory farm with a handful of big, expensive robots to outperform many gardens each with a small robot.
  - naravara 8y ago
    >(one tractor working in a big field is a lot more economical than 1200 humans working in 1200 gardens). Sure. But 1200 humans working in 1200 gardens is also a lot more economical than 1200 humans sitting at home playing Fortnite all day because there are no jobs. The idea of employment guarantees as welfare policy has been getting traction, and programs like this where raw output isn't the main goal would be good candidates.
    - weberc2 8y ago
      Sorry, I’m not following. Why the gardens v fortnite dichotomy? How did you get there?
      - naravara 8y ago
        Basically efficiency isn't the chief concern. If you really have a bunch of people with nothing better to do with their time (e.g. Fortnite), then we don't really need to care about allocating labor as efficiently as possible to maximize yield. We can use labor in a very inefficient (where yield is concerned) way if we think it will confer ecological, aesthetic, or sociological side-benefits, as would having lots of private gardens. Fortnite is just an example of something people fall into doing when they don't have any other productive opportunities available to them.
        weberc2 8y ago
        I'm not sure whether you're taking issue with leisure time generally or the tendency for people to participate in leisure that you believe is inefficient, but both are orthogonal to the question of which type of agricultural system is more efficient. In particular, if your solution is simply "spend less time on [your current] leisure activities!", it can be applied to either aggricultural system. In the case of specialized agriculture, it simply means spending more time on the individual's specialization or really anything with a greater opportunity value than growing one's own food (if your goal is to maximize earnings, it's tough to do worse than spending an hour per day growing your own food to save ~$5).
- stale2002 8y ago
  This is a horribly inefficient way to grow food. The reason why food is grown by large industrial farming companies is because they can grow it ~100 times cheaper than you could. If everyone had to grow their own food, then everyone would starve to death. The idea of locally grown food in everyone's backyard is a fairy tale that just sounds nice, but would actually be horrible.
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    Isn't it partially true though ? at first true maybe but given some time they start a margin chase ending up in picking plants that will look good 1 month later on shelves even though they're not the best nutrition wise.
  - agsdfgsd 8y ago
    >The reason why food is grown by large industrial farming companies is because they can grow it ~100 times cheaper than you could. No, it is because people don't want to grow food. My tomatoes cost me 2 minutes of time. I don't know how much you want to value my time at, but lets say I am pretty awesome and deserve $100/hour. That's $3.33 cents for all the tomatoes I can eat. Where are the industrial farming companies producing tomatoes for 3.3 cents per 100 pounds? >If everyone had to grow their own food, then everyone would starve to death. If that were true, we wouldn't exist. People did grow their own food for thousands of years. If everyone had to grow their own food, we'd be fine. All mechanization did was free up people from agricultural labor to do other jobs, humans predate tractors. >The idea of locally grown food in everyone's backyard is a fairy tale that just sounds nice, but would actually be horrible. It is a reality for lots of people, and we're pretty happy about it.
    - stale2002 8y ago
      > If that were true, we wouldn't exist. People did grow their own food for thousands of years. If everyone had to grow their own food, we'd be fine. All mechanization did was free up people from agricultural labor to do other jobs, humans predate tractors. This works when everyone owns many acres of land per person, and is spending their entire life working the fields, doing hard labor, and doing very little else with their life yes. We don't live in that world anymore, though. I suspect there isn't even enough physical land on the earth to support this inefficient method of farming. We have significant evidence of how this worked out for people. That world that you are describing, where everyone spent their entire life just trying to barely feed themselves, was a horrible place, for everyone. This period of time was called "the history of the world before the industrial era". And lots and lots of people died. So no, they were not fine. > It is a reality for lots of people, and we're pretty happy about it. By "a lot" do you mean a very small percentage of the total population? > My tomatoes cost me 2 minutes of time. What you do with your tiny backyard garden is irrelevant. It is mathmatically impossible for you to be feeding yourself entirely on that, unless you have multiple acres of land, which I doubt is what you are describing. Your anecdote does not overrule physics.
- bagacrap 8y ago
  Ok great! Next problem: how do we make sure everyone on Earth owns a garage?

kieranmaine 8y ago

What would make people eat less beef? Since taxes seem a hard sell, would subsidizing chicken + non-meat protein help? As a vegetarian I'm trying to get my head around what would help change the behaviour of the meat eating HN members.

Retric 8y ago
A lower subsidy on corn would significantly raise beef prices relative to chicken, without being a tax. That's difficult in the US for systemic political reasons, but not necessarily a tax issue. Longer term, lab grown protean is likely to be a net win.
- jermaustin1 8y ago
  But it would be seen as a "tax" to the corn producers, beef eaters, sugar water drinkers, car owners, and probably a load of other groups who benefit from the artificially cheap price.
  - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
    Out of that list, the corn producers can get lost. They are not entitled to our subsidy.
    - jermaustin1 8y ago
      Well sure, but there are a lot of lobbying groups relying on the subsidies. Beef, pork, ethanol, corn syrup, international food exporters. If a congressperson raises the price of the commodity they all rely on, they will piss of a LOT of money, and probably not raise enough next election cycle, and lose their seat.
    - njarboe 8y ago
      Until Iowa is not the first US primary, these corn producers will always have an an advantage in influencing American politics.
- 8y ago

tareqak 8y ago

There is also the problem of food distribution. Ignoring future population growth, the world does produce enough food to people everyone [0] (obtained from the first sentence of [1]). If we are collectively unwilling to solve the distribution problem today, then it there is a good chance that we won't do much about the shortage tomorrow. In addition, unconsumed food waste is also problem, and probably does have some correlation with the unequal distribution. An article with the headline "Can we share food more fairly today?" does have a simple answer, but would rock the political establishment uncomfortably, so has little chance of ever being published. [0] Leathers, H., & Foster, P. (2009). The world food problem: toward ending undernutrition in the third world. Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers Inc. [1] http://12.000.scripts.mit.edu/mission2014/problems/inadequate-food-distribution-systems http://12.000.scripts.mit.edu/mission2014/problems/inadequat...

Kalium 8y ago
Logistics is hard. On top of that, importing food is a very political subject. Do you want to feed everyone in the world as resource-efficiently as possible, or do you want every country/region/city/neighborhood/community to be equipped to feed itself? Bear in mind that these two are very much different scenarios. Small, poor, inefficient farmers have been bankrupted by cheap imports they cannot compete with more than once in world history. Similarly, price controls on food have led to famine more than once. This is without even touching on the point that a lot of poorer countries really want to be able to export food for a profit. I get the sense that the short answer to your uncomfortable question is simple: yes. With the asterisk being all the political and economic questions that go in it and don't have simple answers.
beat 8y ago
Population growth is leveling off. Birth rate globally is already at/below replacement rate (there are ~2B children right now, the UN estimates that in a century, there will still be ~2B children). The growth we are seeing now is a growth of the adult population, not the child population, due to the 1-2 generation overhang between nations getting decent food and health care (especially immunizations), and the birth rate dropping in those nations from the 5-6 of backwards nations to the <2 of modern nations. (See Hans Rosling for details.) Meanwhile, in a half-century, we've doubled the population, while significantly reducing food costs and radically reducing hunger globally. I'm with Hans Rosling here... the angst about how the world is hungry and getting hungrier is just our minds telling us stories, contradicting the facts on the ground. I don't see a good reason to believe that we will have global food shortages in the future. We'll have less hunger, not more, as the population levels out over the next few decades. I'm basing that argument on past behavior, absorbing the needs of much higher population growth with less technology for decades.

ryanmercer 8y ago

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

vram22 8y ago
Great point. As a kid growing up in India, reading about recurring starvation / famine there, and in Africa, etc., I also read about some European countries dumping mountains of butter and other edibles into the sea, due to surpluses, and maybe to keep the price up. I mean, I understand it is about economics, supply and demand, profits, etc., but still, shudder
- iguy 8y ago
  Instead of making the famous mountain of butter (beside a lake of milk) they now pay famers not to farm, which has its own oddities. Including discouraging of re-wilding I think, as the land has to be plausibly farm-able to get the cash. This aside, it's worth knowing that developed countries typically throw away much less food than developing ones. Basically because Tesco is much better at logistics than a million guys trying to drive into Delhi. I don't have the link to hand but there was a nice comparison US vs Mexico on this somewhere.
  - vram22 8y ago
    >Instead of making the famous mountain of butter (beside a lake of milk) they now pay famers not to farm, which has its own oddities. Crazy world we live in, where being (over-)efficient has to be subsidized. There may be a thing such as being too efficient for our own good. Also, the efficiency as measured, only relates to money / profits / maximizing use of resources in industrial (including food) production, and often does not take a holistic view, which should include sustainability of resources, quality of life (not just economic standard of living) and sustainability of the planet. I had read E. F. Schumacher's book "Small is Beautiful" when a teenager, when I was more into these sorts of things (did organic vegetable gardening and dairy farming, used a biogas plant, etc.), before I got into the software field full-time. I still recommend his ideas and book about appropriate technology to interested people - the concepts and principles have not changed, though technologies have evolved, and a hybrid model may be needed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._F._Schumacher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._F._Schumacher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appropriate_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appropriate_technology >Including discouraging of re-wilding I think, as the land has to be plausibly farm-able to get the cash. Yes, re-wilding is a good idea. >This aside, it's worth knowing that developed countries typically throw away much less food than developing ones. Basically because Tesco is much better at logistics than a million guys trying to drive into Delhi. I don't have the link to hand but there was a nice comparison US vs Mexico on this somewhere. Possibly. I do know that plenty of waste happens in India too. In fact, Schumacher's ideas are very much suited to and applicable to developing countries. IIRC he was influenced by Mahatma Gandhi some, and Gandhi also had done significant work in this area, in practice, not just talking about it, either - including hugely encouraging Indian people to do naturopathy, nature cure, small scale industry work like traditional means of spinning and weaving for khadi (a great hand-made Indian cotton textile), etc. We still have Khadi & Village Industries Emporiums here, where one can buy clothing made of khadi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khadi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khadi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khadi#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khadi#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_wheel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_wheel http://www.kvic.org.in/kvicres/index.php http://www.kvic.org.in/kvicres/index.php

crazy_monkey 8y ago

Can we pack more sardines into fewer tins? ~ Oh, wait... the airlines are doing that!

joering2 8y ago

Why is food grow not stuck up vertically? I mean let's go 3D, since at least majority of vegetables and most fruits do not need more than height of 2 feet of space. It also surprised me how old school modern farming still remains. Look at the first picture from this article: a bunch of modern tractors unnecessarily burning oil, unnecessarily operated by humans. By now this should be three times the size field with 15 levels up, run by 3D seeds/soil/water/plants/etc sampling throw out from automatically replaceable cartridge/dispenser. We have long way to go, but certainly we don't need more land to grow; we need more technology in place! Edit: should have mentioned it - even going vertical you can still use natural light! Its a matter of setting up bunch of mirrors reflecting sunlight. Of course you need sun to grow.

agumonkey 8y ago
Because sunlight ? I do feel the same about the mechanical side of farming. I'm sure there's room for different tools and structure.
darkmighty 8y ago
If you don't expose your plants to the sun, you're going to need a lot of energy to power their illumination. I'm not sure solar panels-> tuned led illumination is any more efficient than direct exposure, nor could it be any cheaper (and because solar irradiation on Earth is finite of course the amount of food you can grow is also finite). Then there's the profit per m^2 of agriculture isn't that high -- how much does a structure cost? I'd say at least $400/m^2. If your profit is <$10/m^2, you'd need decades to recoup costs (not a viable investment currently) -- that's only for the structure discounting all the other necessary additional infrastructure, lightning, irrigation, etc. Unless we switch to radically different/more efficient food growing than plants (say direct cell cultivation, or direct nutrient synthesis), then the current approach is probably the best (still with room for some automation and significant genetic improvements on crops, I'd say). I think direct nutrient synthesis probably has potential, but it will take a very long time to understand nutrition and synthesis of organic mollecules -- not an expert by any means, but I'd be surprised if it took less than several decades to develop the necessary tech/science. Even then the gains in efficiency will probably not be that large -- plants/life in general have been optimizing synthesis for billions of years, they're already quite efficient. What we would gain is minimizing to its limit parts of the plant we don't consume, and concentrate on the essentials/optimal nutrients.

vram22 8y ago

Recently posted on HN, under the thread "A remote UK community living off-grid (bbc.co.uk)": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18498110 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18498110 Excerpt from the comment: [ A political science graduate of Yale University, Jeavons worked for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and Stanford University before launching his career in small-scale agriculture education. He is the author of the best-selling sustainable farming handbook How to Grow More Vegetables, Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible On Less Land Than You Can Imagine, now in its 8th edition in eight languages ]

agsdfgsd 8y ago
I wouldn't consider the market gardener to be in the same area as grow biointensive. Jeavons has a strong focus on self-sufficiency and sustainability in his system and goals. Fortier does not, he's only interested in organic as gimmick to make money. Also his book is pretty deceptive compared to what he really does on his "farm", which wasn't actually profitable until after he released the book and got "famous", which is what sell the overpriced lettuce that finally got him profitable. I think the biointensive system Jeavons promotes gives you a pretty good starting place, but it does promote a bit of needless work. Skip the composting and just use the compost crops as a mulch. There's no need to build piles and turn them and then spread the compost, you can just let it compost in place on the garden where it will end up. You can skip growing the compost crops too if you have trees to collect leaves from in the fall. And save your back and skip the double digging, or any digging at all for that matter. All it does is set you back in your first couple of years for no reason.

loeg 8y ago

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

naravara 8y ago
>if any, it is a regression in terms of feeding the world's growing population. Food security is a distribution problem, not a production problem. We're already producing far far more food than we consume or would even need to consume. Big Ag likes to pretend they need higher yields in order to feed the hungry but they're full of it. They want to produce more for cheaper and pocket the margin, but they're not going to do jack squat to get that production out to the people who need it.
- loeg 8y ago
  Both can be problems at the same time. I think you raise a valid concern, but I don't believe it dismisses the yield/density problem in any way. I don't think there's any reason to vilify agricultural businesses in particular for being profit-seeking capitalist corporations.
  - naravara 8y ago
    >I don't think there's any reason to vilify agricultural businesses in particular for being profit-seeking capitalist corporations. It's not about the line of business. It's about disingenuously gussying up the marketing around their own profit maximization by pretending they're being humanitarian. Sort of like "Greenwashing." Everyone does it, but so many people depend on subsistence farming that it comes across as especially crass. Sure they're not alone, but there is plenty of scorn to go around for bottling companies taking up all the ground water, Pharma companies abusing IP law to fleece sick people, etc. There's no reason to be stingy.

alisson 8y ago

There's a great method called Agroforestry that uses forest floors to produce more food: Quick overview of a farmer's land that uses this method: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stABAx82TbY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stABAx82TbY he harvest around 3x more cocoa per hectare than traditional methods and its one of the most valuable in the world right now. Big producers joining to make it more scalable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE

ghthor 8y ago
I love this idea, its something I've thought a lot about. Our large scale farming strategies seem fundamentally ignorant. Nature it full of complex systems of independence that we should be using directly in our farming strategies. I'm particularly interested in fungi to support the nutrient and immune systems of my farms. See the work of Paul Staments using fungi to treat bee colony collapse.
- flavor8 8y ago
  > Our large scale farming strategies seem fundamentally ignorant. For a great example of this, check out: http://nautil.us/issue/66/clockwork/herbicide-is-whats-for-dinner http://nautil.us/issue/66/clockwork/herbicide-is-whats-for-d...
  - ghthor 8y ago
    Wow, that is such an anti earth practice. How can we change this type of insanity? How can we protect our own guts?
    - fyfy18 8y ago
      Voting with your wallet is a good start. In the EU there are strict requirements on what can be labeled ecological, including the use of the EU ecolabel. I believe the US has similar labelling. If you local supermarket doesn't have a suitable stock of ecological supplies, write to them and ask for some, or start shopping at an organic shop.

QML 8y ago

Don’t we already know how to do this? For example, the concept of companion planting — growing plants which behave symbiotically together — is a centuries old idea. The issue is whether we have an economic incentive to.

blacksmith_tb 8y ago
I am not an agronomist, but my instinct is that companion planting interferes with large-scale farming, where machines or poorly paid humans in a hurry need to easy access to a single crop to harvest, and often destroy the field as they work. I'd like to think if the yields were worth it we'd have worked around that, but possibly robotic harvesters can take us there.
- maerF0x0 8y ago
  And that is the crux of the entire question. You get what you incentivize. Current US Farming practices are extremely incentivized towards singular homogenous products using an absolute minimum of human labor.
  - saalweachter 8y ago
    Eh, grains are never the problem. Essentially none of the problems you hear about in agriculture apply to grains. We can produce just staggering amounts of grain on a per-acre basis, and we can ship them without refrigeration and store them for long periods of time without any significant loss of nutritional value. The carbon, energy and monetary cost of shipping huge quantities of grain from the center of the US to the coasts where people live is negligible. You don't have the complex social issues of migrant and immigrant labor with grain production; I mean, it wouldn't surprise me if there's some, but it's definitely not a necessary component the way it is in current vegetable production and in meat processing. There's some potential problems in water usage in some places grains are produced, you can have some good conversations about fertilizer and pesticide production, and about soil maintenance, and we continually want to be working to improve the resiliency and productivity of the crop varieties, but grains are in pretty good shape and there's a clear road map for future work, with lots of incremental progress being made every day. Produce and meat production is where the big gains are to be had, for the environment, food security, and improving the conditions of working people. Just bank on having half our calories coming from massive grain farms located at great distance from the population centers and try to figure out how to fix the rest, and then maybe it will be time to revisit grains.

meggar 8y ago

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

rohit2412 8y ago
Topsoil is needed for plants, which won't grow underground without it. And if you're going to carry soil underground, might as well do it in an above ground building. Or try hydro ponics
- meggar 8y ago
  I was thinking more like a 10 foot wide hole, 1 mile deep.

truculent 8y ago

if not we're fucked, no?

dghughes 8y ago

It's slightly terrifying to see the data about the loss of nutrients in plants around the world due to climate change. On YouTube there was an interesting Veritasim story about plants and their mineral levels. It seems plants have fewer minerals now compared to 100 years ago. Farmers have fertilizer and the plants grow but they don't have the same levels of nutrition even with all that help. Samples of weeds from the 1800s were compared to the same weeds now and even the weeds have fewer minerals, so it's all plants not just food crops. Larger farms growing more food may not solve the problem it's the quality of the plant not just the quantity.

nyokodo 8y ago
IIRC that youtube video concluded that the difference in nutrient content was because growth rates were accelerated by the increased CO2 in the atmosphere but the rate of extracting nutrients from the soil was not accelerated. This is then presumably related to the global greening phenomenon we've witnessed where the increased CO2 has lead to a large increase in forestation globally. It's important to note that the video asserts that food is still plenty nutritious and if you eat a well balanced diet you're fine and my own note is that there is also probably a limit to this effect.
- tiglionabbit 8y ago
  Is it possible that the soil is also depleted of interesting nutrients and that the fertilizer isn't providing them either? Our understanding of what micronutrients humans need is not great. For plants, it may be even less understood.
  - mikekchar 8y ago
    Depending on what you mean, either yes or no :-) This is based on my poor understanding of the situation. Someone who is knowledgeable will hopefully be able to correct me. I think there are actually plenty of nutrients in soil (even many "poor" soils). The real problem is that they aren't bio-available. So you'll have lots of different mineral salts in the soil (usually one or two orders of magnitude more than you need, by weight), but it's not in a form that the plant can absorb by its roots. I think the real problem is the kind of mono-culture cropping we do. Really you want a variety of plants pulling up nutrients out of the ground (because different varieties have different abilities to break down and convert the nutrients in the soil). Then you want those plants to break down and be reintegrated in the soil. Finally, you often want some of that happening in an anaerobic environment, so you don't bind oxygen to it. There are some new (old? ha ha) techniques being developed to build fertility (really just making existing nutrients bio-available) in the soil. Avoiding tilling, building up micro-organisms and insects to distribute the soil, allowing a variety of plants to grow (some long roots, some short roots, etc, etc). It's pretty complicated, though and I expect that it will take us a very long time to learn how to do these things effectively. It definitely seems easier to just add what you think the soil is missing, but there are many disadvantages to that approach as we see over time. I did some experiments in containers a while ago. My idea was to see what kind of production I could get without adding any inputs to the soil at all (just water), and harvesting as much food as I could. I had some experience from doing planted fish tanks with really intense planting (every single space possible occupied with a plant) and knew that it was reasonable to assume that plants can grow really well being very crowded as long as nutrients are available. I planted my containers so that light was the limiting factor, but grew a lot of local weeds that grew in poor soil as well as food on the assumption that they would build fertility fastest. I ran my experiment over 5 years and was really surprised at my results -- my production increased over time. One year, I even got 5 (!) harvests of potatoes from the same container -- I've never even come close to that level of production doing it more traditionally. It was all very unscientific and I was really doing it out of curiosity more than trying to prove anything. In the end, it seems my neighbor didn't like my container garden of weeds and he convinced my gas man to apply herbicide to it. That was the end of my experiment (I caught him in the act as I came home from work a little bit early that day -- one of the few times I've really blown my top). Anyway, I don't think we really have to worry over much about actually depleting our soils. I think they can rebound fairly quickly with the right approach. However, I think it is possible that our current intensive farming approaches do not produce the most nutrient rich produce possible.

pg_bot 8y ago

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

smcameron 8y ago

Didn't Mao Tse Tung have some sort of failed high density agriculture experiment leading to famine? Let's not repeat that particular bit of history.

NickM 8y ago

Let's try to break this problem down to first principles: - Humans need food to live because it provides energy and nutrients. - From a fundamental standpoint of physics and available materials, nutrients are relatively easy to get; as far as I know, most vitamins and minerals are pretty cheap to either come by naturally or manufacture, and you don't need that much of any of them to keep a person healthy, so let's assume food energy is the real limiting factor here. - The energy in most food comes from photosynthesis (either directly, in the case of eating plants, or indirectly, in the case of feeding plants to animals for growing meat). - Photosynthesis is an extremely inefficient way to turn solar radiation into chemical energy. Only about 3 to 6 percent of incoming solar energy is used by plants to create biomass, and not all of that biomass necessarily equates to calories we can digest and absorb. So, while this isn't a particularly appetizing future to imagine living in, I don't know of any fundamental reason why artificially producing edible calories via solar electricity and chemical processes couldn't vastly exceed the efficiency of natural-grown food. It might be tricky getting to the point where fake food like this is healthy and tastes good...but if it saves the world from starving and stops civilization from collapsing then hey, it's not a bad fallback plan. Besides being a big jump in efficiency, this type of tech could also enable the use of non-arable land for food production, since presumably you could set up the necessary manufacturing facilities anywhere you want.

daenz 8y ago
I have no expertise in this area, but everything you said seems to make sense. If you're an expert (or if anyone else reading this is), can you shed some light on why using artificial processes to create "food" would be difficult? It would be so cool if we had some mainstream open source software that could simulate chemical processes in a macro-level way, for example, to explore new ways of creating complex carbohydrates faster than in nature.
- Brakenshire 8y ago
  A carbohydrate is not a simple organic structure, the synthesis of molecules like that is quite complicated, and involves a lot of inefficiencies and filtering out of by-products. Chemical fuels like methane or ethane are far simpler, and just inputting energy and synthesising them from basic building blocks is difficult to do cheaply and at scale.

maccam94 8y ago

From a recent Bloomberg article[1] The last two graphs show that 41% of the land in the contiguous 48 states is used for feeding livestock. More than 33% of the 48 states is just pasture, most of which I believe is used by cattle. What would it take to shift protein consumption from beef (3% efficient) to products like poultry (21%) and eggs (31%)? [2] I think we have to take a hard look at taxes, fees, and subsidies for land use and agricultural products, but there's not much political pressure to do so right now. 1: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/ 2: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/105002 http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/10...

randyrand 8y ago
wow. those numbers are so cool. never knew poultry was so efficient. No wonder it’s so much cheaper. What would it take to make beef production more efficient? genetic engineering perhaps. People wil naturally switch to more efficient food as population goes up and food resources become more scarce.
- bagacrap 8y ago
  It's not exactly surprising, is it? Besides efficiency, what would increase the price of a piece of food? (In the long run I assume supply would match demand so a mismatch there wouldn't be the cause.) So I think the answer to your question about increasing efficiency is probably pretty difficult. There's already a huge profit motive to increase efficiency, so if a few labcoats could easily solve the problem I'm sure they would have by now. I think the answer is to eat animals who reach maturity faster (or just grow more per unit time?). Like insects :-)
- agsdfgsd 8y ago
  >What would it take to make beef production more efficient? Nothing. Large animals that live long lives are inefficient by their very nature. The bigger an animal is, the more of its energy consumption goes to maintenance rather than growth. And the longer it lives before reaching slaughter weight, the more that inefficiency compounds. If you somehow turned cattle into 5 pound animals that mature in 6 weeks, they would be efficient, but they also wouldn't really qualify as cattle any more and their meat would likely be noticeably different than beef.

mettamage 8y ago

The Netherlands! It's a small country that grows a lot of food! Final answer. Now let's read the article and sees what it says. Edit: ah it's more about cattle.

agsdfgsd 8y ago
Not really. The Netherlands has a high dollar value of "agricultural exports" which includes flowers at 10% of that value and equipment and machinery at another 10%. Of the 80% that is actually food, a lot of it is high value low calorie food. And the methods used to produce that food are horribly destructive, not sustainable, and will cost future generations untold hardship to deal with: https://www.dutchnews.nl/features/2018/03/dutch-agriculture-is-not-a-beacon-of-good-farming-practice-to-the-world/ https://www.dutchnews.nl/features/2018/03/dutch-agriculture-...

pier25 8y ago

We can grow food in buildings with hydrophonic systems. The problem is not land but energy.

fouc 8y ago

This is called Permaculture, it maximizes yield using natural methods (i.e. avoid tiling the soil, herbicides, etc) and results in an "edible forest" From the wikipedia: 4 Common practices 4.1 Agroforestry 4.2 Hügelkultur 4.3 Natural building 4.4 Rainwater harvesting 4.5 Sheet mulching 4.6 Intensive rotational grazing 4.7 Keyline design 4.8 Fruit tree management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture

agsdfgsd 8y ago
Permaculture doesn't mean food forest. A food forest is one form of permaculture, but it is by no means the only form, or even the ideal one. The hype about food forests comes from how effective they are in tropical climates. But it isn't actually very efficient in temperate climates. Temperate climates do need to rely heavily on annual crops. Those crops can be grown using permaculture, we don't have to trade our potatoes for chestnuts.

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Fnoord 8y ago

I recently conducted a report and presentation about reducetarianism (though in my own language). There are 3 main reasons why people go vegetarian, vegan, or reducetarian (the former 2 are a subset of reducetarianism): environment, animal welfare, and health. Re: "Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?". My conclusion to based on the research I performed is: Yeah, we can, and not only that we can also reduce the Co2 footprint by avoiding eating cattle. Alternatives which are size efficient are chicken and insects (such as grasshoppers and mealworms). However, chicken have a CNS, and if you grow more chicken, more chicken suffer, so this is a pro environment yet anti animal welfare argument. What is going to be good for the environment is using solar energy, using electric cars (to go to the grocery store). Because the transport from (very efficient, huge) transport ships has less impact on environment than you going to/from grocery store by (conventional) car. What is going to be good for animal welfare is growing & consuming less animals with a CNS. Alternatives such as insects or lab meat.

Joe-Z 8y ago
Would you care to explain what 'CNS' is?
- Fnoord 8y ago
  In this context, it stands for Central Nervous System [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_nervous_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_nervous_system
  - Joe-Z 8y ago
    Thank you!

deleted 8y ago

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jillesvangurp 8y ago

There is a lot of innovation around high tech farming in places other than than the country side. With hydroponics, you can grow all sorts of stuff anywhere you can supply water, energy, and the right nutrients. People are growing herbs in underground abandoned subway stations, old industrial facilities, on roofs, deserts, etc. The reason is that it works really well and you can get great yields if you can micromanage the conditions in which plants grow. Food production is fundamentally an energy problem; not a land problem. Using cheap electricity, you can desalinate water, pump nutrients around, generate light and control the temperature. Eating meat is a problem given the vast resources needed to produce it. However, there's a lot of innovation in developing synthetic meats. Lab grown meat is becoming a thing. I'm talking about actual muscle tissue grown in labs. There are also many plant and mushroom based meat alternatives that are getting better and more popular. In short, we might eat a proper steak for nostalgic reasons once in a while in a few decades but we'll have plenty of alternative protein sources to supplement our diet with on a day to day basis. And making out-competing popular meat products like a big mac isn't exactly rocket science. The whole point of stuff like that is that it is industrialized low quality stuff. Most of the meat we're eat isn't exactly high quality stuff.

dajonker 8y ago

Growing vegetables in greenhouses can be done very efficiently. The Wageningen University researched high-tech greenhouses in Riyad (Saudi Arabia) and found that it only required 5 liter fresh water per kg tomatoes, compared to 168 liters in a low-tech greenhouse [1]. This is possible using a closed system that recycles the water that evaporates in the greenhouse. The low-tech example is a plastic tunnel without such facilities (the most commonly used type of Greenhouse in the Middle East). The yield per square meter was also 50% higher for the high-tech greenhouse compared to the low-tech greenhouse. [1] https://www.wur.nl/nl/nieuws/Nieuwe-onderzoekskas-in-Riyad-maakt-30-90-waterbesparing-mogelijk.htm https://www.wur.nl/nl/nieuws/Nieuwe-onderzoekskas-in-Riyad-m... (in Dutch only)

sametmax 8y ago

We don't need to. - The part of the world that consumes the most eats too much. A balanced diet would reduce greatly the food consumption. - The part of the world that consumes the most wastes a huge quantity of the food it produces. - Human don't need to eat meat to be healthy and we are past the need for hunting for survival. We can even produce non animal b12 supplements if we ever need to. Since most food are grown to be fed to cattle, if we stop eating meat, we suddently multiply our food flow by a huge amount while diminushing the water consumption, pollution, and a lot of public health issues. Food is not a production problem anymore. It's a social and political one.

greedo 8y ago
There is no shortage of food. Even with the Western world eating a rich, meat based diet, there's plenty of food; no need for everyone to go vegan. What there is, is a problem with distribution.

chrisscastaneda 8y ago

We could just grow plants instead of animals, then problem solved.

baldfat 8y ago

1/4 of the worlds for ends up spoiled. 198 million: The number of hectares used to produce food that is lost or wasted each year. This is about the size of Mexico $1,600: The annual amount the average American family of four spends on food that doesn’t get eaten 53 percent: The amount of all food lost or wasted that is comprised of cereals, such as wheat, maize, and rice 64 percent: The share of loss or waste in the developing world that occurs before the food is even processed or sent to market https://www.wri.org/blog/2013/06/numbers-reducing-food-loss-and-waste https://www.wri.org/blog/2013/06/numbers-reducing-food-loss-...