7 ms·

This is not just an environmental and animal welfare concern, although it certainly is those things. But it's also a national security issue of the first order.

This is not just an environmental and animal welfare concern, although it certainly is those things. But it's also a national security issue of the first order. One of the ways big factory farms work so efficiently is by utilizing mono-cropping. They'll plant acre after acre after acre of exactly the same strain of a crop. That gets their efficiency, and hence their profit margin, as high as possible. You don't have to do anything differently in order to support two strains of corn or soybeans. You con't have to worry about one breed of milk cow being more susceptible to disease or giving milk with a different fat content. All your equipment is the same, all of your chemical inputs are the same, all of your processes are the same. That works fine when it works. But when it doesn't work it can go completely to hell. One pathogen could conceivably wipe out a large portion of America's entire corn or soybean crop. Significant enough climate change could as well. A single new strain of disease, if it were robust enough to spread through the air or via wildlife, could kill huge fractions of our cattle or pigs. It's not inconceivable that we could go from large surpluses of cheap food one year to widespread hunger the next, with just the wrong set of circumstances. We've not just improved farming efficient. We've gutted the natural robustness of what used to be a distributed agricultural system.

projektfu 8y ago
Dairy cattle are the poster children for a varied diet. They eat many kinds of waste such as distillers' grains, peanut hulls, beet pulp. They don't care where their corn silage comes from and they can even consume and detoxify aflatoxin-laden corn that cannot be placed into any other food supply. I'm not sure that larger dairy farms are going to have more of a monoculture attitude toward their supply of feed.
- supermatt 8y ago
  Aflatoxins are excreted in milk. You shouldn't feed aflatoxin-laden feed to dairy animals.
  - projektfu 8y ago
    At low enough amounts, aflatoxin will be destroyed in the rumen, and won't enter the bloodstream.
    - supermatt 8y ago
      And although it takes over 5mg of cyanide is enough to kill a human, it doesn't mean you can safely season your soup with 20mg for a family of 5...
      - projektfu 8y ago
        http://extension.uga.edu/publications/detail.html?number=SB57&title=Guidelines%20for%20Using%20Feeds%20Containing%20Aflatoxin%20in%20Dairy%20Rations http://extension.uga.edu/publications/detail.html?number=SB5... There are safe levels in both lactating and non-lactating cows. It's already an acceptable use.
        supermatt 8y ago
        20 parts per billion isn't "consuming" aflatoxin-laden feed - it's eating regular feed with trace contamination. That there are guidelines for achieving this "safe" dilution makes you wonder why the effort is being spent there instead of using the grain for other purposes. Also worth reminding that these measurements are taken via random sampling - as per my cyanide example. Dont intentionally feed aflatoxins to dairy animals! (or any animals, really...)
- GlenTheMachine 8y ago
  I'm not referring to mono cropping for animal feed. I'm referring to mono cropping for human consumption. A large fraction of the calories in your diet likely comes from corn, if you live in the US and get your food from the grocery store. There used to be hundreds, maybe thousands of varieties of corn grown regularly in the US. There aren't any more. It's hard to tell how many corn varieties that are grown commercially in relevant quantities, but it's certainly less than fifty, and maybe less than twenty. Less genetic diversity means less robustness to changing pathogens and climate.
  - ip26 8y ago
    I generally agree with you but FWIW most of the corn (90%+) grown in the US goes into animal feed, e.g. for cows. Which is of course its own little tragedy, considering you get 1 calorie of cow for every 12 calories of corn.
    - ceejayoz 8y ago
      FWIW, that (sorta) still counts as "comes from corn".
    - GlenTheMachine 8y ago
      That's a good point, thanks.
    - opencl 8y ago
      This was true several decades ago, but now about 1/3 of it used to manufacture ethanol due to the US transition to gasoline having 10% ethanol content. It is still very much true that far more of it goes to animal feed than food for humans though. https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10339 https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10339
      - dinglejungle 8y ago
        Note that a byproduct of ethanol production is distillers grains[1] which are used as an animal feed. Also worth noting that the percentage of corn used for direct human consumption has stayed at around 10-20% before, during, and after the ramp up in ethanol production: Ethanol + animal feed chart: https://i.imgur.com/1QqPTje.png https://i.imgur.com/1QqPTje.png Ethanol production chart: https://i.imgur.com/3wwzkIi.png https://i.imgur.com/3wwzkIi.png [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distillers_grains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distillers_grains
- cwbrandsma 8y ago
  We have fed our dairy cows potatoes, they love them. Happens any time the prices of potatoes drops significantly (joys of dairying in Idaho). I have a picture of my potato loving wife sitting on a 5 ton pile of potatoes like it is her thrown.
badpun 8y ago
> It's not inconceivable that we could go from large surpluses of cheap food one year to widespread hunger the next Can't the US just import a big portion of its food for a couple years, until the situation is back to normal?
- gotocake 8y ago
  Assuming the crisis is limited to just the U.S., maybe. Otherwise no, because everyone would be suffering and stockpiling what they could for their own citizens. There are also geopolitical concerns, such as pricing those exports very dearly, or withholding them barring some concessions.
  - justin66 8y ago
    > Otherwise no, because everyone would be suffering and stockpiling what they could for their own citizens. This is not how it works. People going hungry in spite of their country having a good crop is a sadly regular theme throughout history. Crops going to the highest bidder and crops going to whoever has the most political influence are sadly regular occurrences. (the most recent example of relatively widespread hunger of this sort that I'm aware of occurred in the aftermath of the 2008 recession, although economics isn't really my thing)
- GlenTheMachine 8y ago
  Three things a superpower should never outsource: * energy production * food supply * coinage
  - toss1 8y ago
    Plus: * manufacturing * security-sensitive or military electronics The American MBAs proudly proclaimed the quarterly profits from outsourcing what they saw as menial and fungible manufacturing operations to exploit cheap labor zones such as China. Meanwhile, China has a longer view, including 500-year plans. They are strategically building the hard-won knowledge and processes to effectively and efficiently manufacture goods, and expropriating the IP for design. Beyond that, they are now manufacturing many mission-critical and eavesdropping-capable components used in our defense operations. So, while we think we're exploiting their cheap labor, they are exploiting our myopic focus on short term profits. This advantage squandered for a few company's short-term profits will be recorded as one of history's great strategic blunders.
colechristensen 8y ago
This post contains many factual or implication errors. Monoculture isn't new, and isn't driven by corporate megafarms. Monoculture is as old as human civilization. Planting large areas of land with a single crop is just the default way of doing things. It was made more solid not recently, but 100 years ago with mechanization. Crop rotation though has been a part of agriculture for thousands of years and is still done at any scale. Almost all mass produced crops are F1 hybrids. There isn't "one strain" being planted en mass. Hybrids are tuned to have different features depending on need. Different climates will use crops with varying days to maturity. Different fields or sections of fields will use hybrids for drought/flood tolerance, resistance to different pests or diseases (which are cyclical and regional), and different end uses (grains for cattle feed, for brewing into biofuels, for oil extraction, for human consumption, etc.), and for different soil conditions. This is in contrast to the common FUD about bananas which are indeed all exact genetic copies and have gone through a global crop failure in the past. >We've not just improved farming efficient. We've gutted the natural robustness of what used to be a distributed agricultural system. I don't know when you think this natural robustness golden age was, but crop failures have been around as long as human civilization and we are now more prepared and resilient to these things than any time before, not less, because there are a large number of people with a lot of interest in designing the plants we use to survive to be able to respond to a variety of conditions.
- GlenTheMachine 8y ago
  A few counterpoints: "Monoculture isn't new, and isn't driven by corporate megafarms. Monoculture is as old as human civilization." Sure, individual farms have planted monocultures for thousands of years. But different farmers would often plant different strains. So in one area you'd have a couple of different cultivars, whereas now all of those farms are owned by the same entities and are typically planting exactly the same thing. As the farms get bigger and more uniform, what they plant gets more uniform too. This is driven by a bunch of different factors, but one way or another nearly all of them can be traced back to the drive to optimize efficiency of production over everything else. "Almost all mass produced crops are F1 hybrids. " Yep. But hybrids of a relatively small set of parents. And that's the problem. They're all either the exact same strain, or they're related strains. Compare, eg, against a "heritage" seed catalog. You get hundreds of strains. We used to grow those. The genetic diversity was higher then. In Mexico, the historical record doesn't show hundreds of strains. It shows thousands. Thousands upon thousands. There is corn that's optimized to grow in upland deserts, and in salty soil, and in areas with a much shorter growing period - less than 60 days. "I don't know when you think this natural robustness golden age was, but crop failures have been around as long as human civilization and we are now more prepared and resilient to these things than any time before, not less, because there are a large number of people with a lot of interest in designing the plants we use to survive to be able to respond to a variety of conditions." It is absolutely true that as farming has become more scientific, we've gotten smarter about how to deal with pathogens after the fact. We have much better chemical controls now, and we have better biosecurity procedures to prevent diseases from spreading. But. You seem to be taking the stance that because we're better at dealing with one aspect of crop pathogens, therefore we're better at dealing with crop pathogens, period. I disagree. Just as with human diseases, it's entirely possible to on one hand have much better medicines available but on the other hand still be more susceptible to epidemics due to other factors that have gotten worse - antibiotic resistance, global travel, etc. In the case of crop pathogens, we're more susceptible than we otherwise would have been because the genetic diversity of our major crop systems is nearly nonexistent. This is why seed banks are a thing - because ag scientists realize that at some point we'll run into a pathogen for which none of our chemical treatments are effective, and genetic resistance is our only chance -- and therefore we must preserve the genes of as many different varieties as possible. This is what is happening with bananas, and possibly with cacao as well (black pod disease)... and citrus (citrus greening)... and maybe even wheat (stem rust). The point being, chemical responses to crop pathogens often aren't sufficient. Genetic modification might be, but personally I'd rather not place all my eggs in that basket. For those who don't know the story: we used to all eat Gros Michel bananas. You can't buy a Gros Michel banana anymore; fusarium nearly wiped out the entire cultivar. We didn't, and still don't, have an effective chemical response to fusarium. So we switched to Cavendish, which was resistant. Now a new strain of fusarium is killing Cavendish, and it isn't clear what we're going to switch to next. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_disease Bananas are an extreme case because bananas are grown through root cuttings, ie they're all genetically identical, as you said above. Corn isn't as genetically fragile as bananas. But it's heading there.
Spooky23 8y ago
It’s a great example of how “normal” minded people need to be wary of extremists on the left and right. The people fighting to kill dairy are mostly transitioning people to soy grown in a region depleting it’s groundwater to pump out surplus and nuts grown in a few California counties. The consolidation effects kill agriculture everywhere else. There were 50 vegetable farms within 20 miles of my home in 1981. Today there are 3. Good thing California has no long term risks from a transport or water POV.
- quixoticelixer- 8y ago
  A lot of soy goes to animal feed and eating soy directly is a lot more efficient than giving it to a cow first.
  - Spooky23 8y ago
    Feedlots mostly use corn, not soy. And again, my issue is with the agriculture policy that demands scale up agriculture. The government created these problems in search of low prices and other political goals. The dairy farm that i worked on as a kid had about 50 cows and didn’t have the impact that massive operations have, and grew a lot of its own fodder. Again it’s a stark difference... probably 100 dairy operations in my county when I was a kid, and I’d guest 12-20 now, most of whom are probably going to be gone in the next year.
    - emp 8y ago
      The majority of soy goes to feeding animals ... http://www.wisoybean.org/news/soybean_facts.php http://www.wisoybean.org/news/soybean_facts.php
      - mikekchar 8y ago
        That says that the majority of soy meal goes to animal feed. I couldn't actually get the amount of soy beans used for animal feed. Perhaps you can find it. According to this [1], they were forecasting about 4,200 million bushels of soybeans being harvested in 2016 with nearly 2,000 million bushels being exported (about 47 percent according to the source). I tried to find a reputable source for soy bean use in the US and failed, but some sources I was able to find (mostly vegan activist groups) stated that 80% of soy bean use is for meal while 20% is for oil. Of the 80% used for meal, 97-98% is used for animal feed while 2-3% is used for food. As far as I can tell that means that if we round things up to the nearest 10%, about half of the soybeans grown are exported, 40% is used for animal feed (cattle, chickens and pigs) 10% for oil (of which some is cooking oil) and a negligible amount used directly for human consumption. Possible the parent was considering only cattle consumption because another source I found suggested that you don't want to feed cattle more than 15-25% of their diet on soy because they can't digest it. Chickens and pigs presumably don't have the same problem. I find it interesting that in truth the largest category of "use" for soybeans in the US is as an export trade good. I wasn't actually following the discussion above closely so I'm not sure how it impacts anything. However, it occurs to me that possibly the land could be put to better use. However it was also interesting to me that according to your source Wisconsin has 11K soybean growers over 1.6 million acres. That's an average farm size of 145 acres. As a person who grew up in the prairies of Canada but now lives in Japan, that seems to me to be both not so big and also gigantic :-) (I don't think I've ever seen a Japanese farm bigger than about 30 acres!) [1] - https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/soybeans-oil-crops/related-data-statistics/ https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/soybeans-oil-crops/rel...
seanwilson 8y ago
> That works fine when it works. But when it doesn't work it can go completely to hell. One pathogen could conceivably wipe out a large portion of America's entire corn or soybean crop. Can this realistically happen? Are there examples of this happening? If it's such an obvious catastrophic problem just waiting to happen why don't farmers or the government do anything about it?
- exhilaration 8y ago
  The most famous example in recent history is the Great Irish Famine, a.k.a. the Irish Potato Famine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)
- reportingsjr 8y ago
  The most well known example of this is the Gros Michel banana. It used to be the main type of banana sold in stores until a disease called Panama disease wiped out nearly all of them.
  - seanwilson 8y ago
    Are there more recent examples given this is from the 1950s? If not, is there a reason there aren't more recent examples?
nhorob67 8y ago
Other than alfalfa, the vast majority of the farms that I know of that supply large dairies take advantage of crop rotations. These are from crop farms that supply large dairies in Minnesota and South Dakota.

projektfu 8y ago

Dairy cattle are the poster children for a varied diet. They eat many kinds of waste such as distillers' grains, peanut hulls, beet pulp. They don't care where their corn silage comes from and they can even consume and detoxify aflatoxin-laden corn that cannot be placed into any other food supply. I'm not sure that larger dairy farms are going to have more of a monoculture attitude toward their supply of feed.

supermatt 8y ago
Aflatoxins are excreted in milk. You shouldn't feed aflatoxin-laden feed to dairy animals.
- projektfu 8y ago
  At low enough amounts, aflatoxin will be destroyed in the rumen, and won't enter the bloodstream.
  - supermatt 8y ago
    And although it takes over 5mg of cyanide is enough to kill a human, it doesn't mean you can safely season your soup with 20mg for a family of 5...
    - projektfu 8y ago
      http://extension.uga.edu/publications/detail.html?number=SB57&title=Guidelines%20for%20Using%20Feeds%20Containing%20Aflatoxin%20in%20Dairy%20Rations http://extension.uga.edu/publications/detail.html?number=SB5... There are safe levels in both lactating and non-lactating cows. It's already an acceptable use.
      - supermatt 8y ago
        20 parts per billion isn't "consuming" aflatoxin-laden feed - it's eating regular feed with trace contamination. That there are guidelines for achieving this "safe" dilution makes you wonder why the effort is being spent there instead of using the grain for other purposes. Also worth reminding that these measurements are taken via random sampling - as per my cyanide example. Dont intentionally feed aflatoxins to dairy animals! (or any animals, really...)
GlenTheMachine 8y ago
I'm not referring to mono cropping for animal feed. I'm referring to mono cropping for human consumption. A large fraction of the calories in your diet likely comes from corn, if you live in the US and get your food from the grocery store. There used to be hundreds, maybe thousands of varieties of corn grown regularly in the US. There aren't any more. It's hard to tell how many corn varieties that are grown commercially in relevant quantities, but it's certainly less than fifty, and maybe less than twenty. Less genetic diversity means less robustness to changing pathogens and climate.
- ip26 8y ago
  I generally agree with you but FWIW most of the corn (90%+) grown in the US goes into animal feed, e.g. for cows. Which is of course its own little tragedy, considering you get 1 calorie of cow for every 12 calories of corn.
  - ceejayoz 8y ago
    FWIW, that (sorta) still counts as "comes from corn".
  - GlenTheMachine 8y ago
    That's a good point, thanks.
  - opencl 8y ago
    This was true several decades ago, but now about 1/3 of it used to manufacture ethanol due to the US transition to gasoline having 10% ethanol content. It is still very much true that far more of it goes to animal feed than food for humans though. https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10339 https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10339
    - dinglejungle 8y ago
      Note that a byproduct of ethanol production is distillers grains[1] which are used as an animal feed. Also worth noting that the percentage of corn used for direct human consumption has stayed at around 10-20% before, during, and after the ramp up in ethanol production: Ethanol + animal feed chart: https://i.imgur.com/1QqPTje.png https://i.imgur.com/1QqPTje.png Ethanol production chart: https://i.imgur.com/3wwzkIi.png https://i.imgur.com/3wwzkIi.png [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distillers_grains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distillers_grains
cwbrandsma 8y ago
We have fed our dairy cows potatoes, they love them. Happens any time the prices of potatoes drops significantly (joys of dairying in Idaho). I have a picture of my potato loving wife sitting on a 5 ton pile of potatoes like it is her thrown.

badpun 8y ago

> It's not inconceivable that we could go from large surpluses of cheap food one year to widespread hunger the next Can't the US just import a big portion of its food for a couple years, until the situation is back to normal?

gotocake 8y ago
Assuming the crisis is limited to just the U.S., maybe. Otherwise no, because everyone would be suffering and stockpiling what they could for their own citizens. There are also geopolitical concerns, such as pricing those exports very dearly, or withholding them barring some concessions.
- justin66 8y ago
  > Otherwise no, because everyone would be suffering and stockpiling what they could for their own citizens. This is not how it works. People going hungry in spite of their country having a good crop is a sadly regular theme throughout history. Crops going to the highest bidder and crops going to whoever has the most political influence are sadly regular occurrences. (the most recent example of relatively widespread hunger of this sort that I'm aware of occurred in the aftermath of the 2008 recession, although economics isn't really my thing)
GlenTheMachine 8y ago
Three things a superpower should never outsource: * energy production * food supply * coinage
- toss1 8y ago
  Plus: * manufacturing * security-sensitive or military electronics The American MBAs proudly proclaimed the quarterly profits from outsourcing what they saw as menial and fungible manufacturing operations to exploit cheap labor zones such as China. Meanwhile, China has a longer view, including 500-year plans. They are strategically building the hard-won knowledge and processes to effectively and efficiently manufacture goods, and expropriating the IP for design. Beyond that, they are now manufacturing many mission-critical and eavesdropping-capable components used in our defense operations. So, while we think we're exploiting their cheap labor, they are exploiting our myopic focus on short term profits. This advantage squandered for a few company's short-term profits will be recorded as one of history's great strategic blunders.

colechristensen 8y ago

This post contains many factual or implication errors. Monoculture isn't new, and isn't driven by corporate megafarms. Monoculture is as old as human civilization. Planting large areas of land with a single crop is just the default way of doing things. It was made more solid not recently, but 100 years ago with mechanization. Crop rotation though has been a part of agriculture for thousands of years and is still done at any scale. Almost all mass produced crops are F1 hybrids. There isn't "one strain" being planted en mass. Hybrids are tuned to have different features depending on need. Different climates will use crops with varying days to maturity. Different fields or sections of fields will use hybrids for drought/flood tolerance, resistance to different pests or diseases (which are cyclical and regional), and different end uses (grains for cattle feed, for brewing into biofuels, for oil extraction, for human consumption, etc.), and for different soil conditions. This is in contrast to the common FUD about bananas which are indeed all exact genetic copies and have gone through a global crop failure in the past. >We've not just improved farming efficient. We've gutted the natural robustness of what used to be a distributed agricultural system. I don't know when you think this natural robustness golden age was, but crop failures have been around as long as human civilization and we are now more prepared and resilient to these things than any time before, not less, because there are a large number of people with a lot of interest in designing the plants we use to survive to be able to respond to a variety of conditions.

GlenTheMachine 8y ago
A few counterpoints: "Monoculture isn't new, and isn't driven by corporate megafarms. Monoculture is as old as human civilization." Sure, individual farms have planted monocultures for thousands of years. But different farmers would often plant different strains. So in one area you'd have a couple of different cultivars, whereas now all of those farms are owned by the same entities and are typically planting exactly the same thing. As the farms get bigger and more uniform, what they plant gets more uniform too. This is driven by a bunch of different factors, but one way or another nearly all of them can be traced back to the drive to optimize efficiency of production over everything else. "Almost all mass produced crops are F1 hybrids. " Yep. But hybrids of a relatively small set of parents. And that's the problem. They're all either the exact same strain, or they're related strains. Compare, eg, against a "heritage" seed catalog. You get hundreds of strains. We used to grow those. The genetic diversity was higher then. In Mexico, the historical record doesn't show hundreds of strains. It shows thousands. Thousands upon thousands. There is corn that's optimized to grow in upland deserts, and in salty soil, and in areas with a much shorter growing period - less than 60 days. "I don't know when you think this natural robustness golden age was, but crop failures have been around as long as human civilization and we are now more prepared and resilient to these things than any time before, not less, because there are a large number of people with a lot of interest in designing the plants we use to survive to be able to respond to a variety of conditions." It is absolutely true that as farming has become more scientific, we've gotten smarter about how to deal with pathogens after the fact. We have much better chemical controls now, and we have better biosecurity procedures to prevent diseases from spreading. But. You seem to be taking the stance that because we're better at dealing with one aspect of crop pathogens, therefore we're better at dealing with crop pathogens, period. I disagree. Just as with human diseases, it's entirely possible to on one hand have much better medicines available but on the other hand still be more susceptible to epidemics due to other factors that have gotten worse - antibiotic resistance, global travel, etc. In the case of crop pathogens, we're more susceptible than we otherwise would have been because the genetic diversity of our major crop systems is nearly nonexistent. This is why seed banks are a thing - because ag scientists realize that at some point we'll run into a pathogen for which none of our chemical treatments are effective, and genetic resistance is our only chance -- and therefore we must preserve the genes of as many different varieties as possible. This is what is happening with bananas, and possibly with cacao as well (black pod disease)... and citrus (citrus greening)... and maybe even wheat (stem rust). The point being, chemical responses to crop pathogens often aren't sufficient. Genetic modification might be, but personally I'd rather not place all my eggs in that basket. For those who don't know the story: we used to all eat Gros Michel bananas. You can't buy a Gros Michel banana anymore; fusarium nearly wiped out the entire cultivar. We didn't, and still don't, have an effective chemical response to fusarium. So we switched to Cavendish, which was resistant. Now a new strain of fusarium is killing Cavendish, and it isn't clear what we're going to switch to next. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_disease Bananas are an extreme case because bananas are grown through root cuttings, ie they're all genetically identical, as you said above. Corn isn't as genetically fragile as bananas. But it's heading there.

Spooky23 8y ago

It’s a great example of how “normal” minded people need to be wary of extremists on the left and right. The people fighting to kill dairy are mostly transitioning people to soy grown in a region depleting it’s groundwater to pump out surplus and nuts grown in a few California counties. The consolidation effects kill agriculture everywhere else. There were 50 vegetable farms within 20 miles of my home in 1981. Today there are 3. Good thing California has no long term risks from a transport or water POV.

quixoticelixer- 8y ago
A lot of soy goes to animal feed and eating soy directly is a lot more efficient than giving it to a cow first.
- Spooky23 8y ago
  Feedlots mostly use corn, not soy. And again, my issue is with the agriculture policy that demands scale up agriculture. The government created these problems in search of low prices and other political goals. The dairy farm that i worked on as a kid had about 50 cows and didn’t have the impact that massive operations have, and grew a lot of its own fodder. Again it’s a stark difference... probably 100 dairy operations in my county when I was a kid, and I’d guest 12-20 now, most of whom are probably going to be gone in the next year.
  - emp 8y ago
    The majority of soy goes to feeding animals ... http://www.wisoybean.org/news/soybean_facts.php http://www.wisoybean.org/news/soybean_facts.php
    - mikekchar 8y ago
      That says that the majority of soy meal goes to animal feed. I couldn't actually get the amount of soy beans used for animal feed. Perhaps you can find it. According to this [1], they were forecasting about 4,200 million bushels of soybeans being harvested in 2016 with nearly 2,000 million bushels being exported (about 47 percent according to the source). I tried to find a reputable source for soy bean use in the US and failed, but some sources I was able to find (mostly vegan activist groups) stated that 80% of soy bean use is for meal while 20% is for oil. Of the 80% used for meal, 97-98% is used for animal feed while 2-3% is used for food. As far as I can tell that means that if we round things up to the nearest 10%, about half of the soybeans grown are exported, 40% is used for animal feed (cattle, chickens and pigs) 10% for oil (of which some is cooking oil) and a negligible amount used directly for human consumption. Possible the parent was considering only cattle consumption because another source I found suggested that you don't want to feed cattle more than 15-25% of their diet on soy because they can't digest it. Chickens and pigs presumably don't have the same problem. I find it interesting that in truth the largest category of "use" for soybeans in the US is as an export trade good. I wasn't actually following the discussion above closely so I'm not sure how it impacts anything. However, it occurs to me that possibly the land could be put to better use. However it was also interesting to me that according to your source Wisconsin has 11K soybean growers over 1.6 million acres. That's an average farm size of 145 acres. As a person who grew up in the prairies of Canada but now lives in Japan, that seems to me to be both not so big and also gigantic :-) (I don't think I've ever seen a Japanese farm bigger than about 30 acres!) [1] - https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/soybeans-oil-crops/related-data-statistics/ https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/soybeans-oil-crops/rel...

seanwilson 8y ago

> That works fine when it works. But when it doesn't work it can go completely to hell. One pathogen could conceivably wipe out a large portion of America's entire corn or soybean crop. Can this realistically happen? Are there examples of this happening? If it's such an obvious catastrophic problem just waiting to happen why don't farmers or the government do anything about it?

exhilaration 8y ago
The most famous example in recent history is the Great Irish Famine, a.k.a. the Irish Potato Famine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)
reportingsjr 8y ago
The most well known example of this is the Gros Michel banana. It used to be the main type of banana sold in stores until a disease called Panama disease wiped out nearly all of them.
- seanwilson 8y ago
  Are there more recent examples given this is from the 1950s? If not, is there a reason there aren't more recent examples?

nhorob67 8y ago

Other than alfalfa, the vast majority of the farms that I know of that supply large dairies take advantage of crop rotations. These are from crop farms that supply large dairies in Minnesota and South Dakota.