7 ms·

Climate fluctuations are becoming more and more of an emergency. I was at a farmer conference and the main speaker spoke about how bad it is for them. Lots of c

Climate fluctuations are becoming more and more of an emergency. I was at a farmer conference and the main speaker spoke about how bad it is for them. Lots of crops are dying. Some GMO crops customized for this climate are able to survive if they are timed to perfection. We should be very worried about our food sources

iagovar 7y ago
Some farmers voice this same concern in Spain. They also have more extreme events destroying their fields (more hail, new insects). They seem worried, although it's true that I only have access to a little subset of them.
lettergram 7y ago
That’s the real concern for me. I live in central Illinois, one of the best places to grow crops in the world (#1 soy producer and one of the top corn). This year the Farmers around me planted 4 weeks late. This was due to the non-stop rain, so they couldn’t till. That’s probably the scariest in terms of food production.
- VBprogrammer 7y ago
  > one of the best places to grow crops in the world (#1 soy producer and one of the top corn) This makes me quite sad - the idea of one of the best places in the world to grow crops being wasted on massive monocultures of these industrial crops.
  - tryptophan 7y ago
    Not only that - we also subsidize these useless crops. For some reason we grow corn just to burn it in car fuel as an additive. Corn is so subsidized it also becomes cheaper to add high-fructose corn syrup to everything instead of sugar.
    - henryfjordan 7y ago
      The carbon in that corn comes from the air. If we all burned corn fuel instead of oil found in the ground we'd be a lot better off in terms of emissions.
      - tasty_freeze 7y ago
        If we took the same amount of money which is used to subsidize corn and used it to fund research on batteries, solar cells, etc, or used the money to upgrade our power grid, or subsidized energy efficiency in homes, the money would have a far greater effect.
      - AngryData 7y ago
        Yeah but what if you account for the synthetic fertilizer which is produced primarily from natural gas? And if it isn't produced from natural gas it requires near 100x as much electricity, which still currently comes from fossil fuels. If we produced all our fertilizer without natural gas we would consume the current total world's energy production.
        philipkglass 7y ago
        That is incorrect. World ammonia production in 2016 was 175 million tonnes. Producing that much ammonia -- the basis for all synthetic nitrogen fertilizers -- requires about 31 million tonnes of hydrogen. At present this hydrogen is indeed mostly made from natural gas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia_production As of 2011, it required 50 kilowatt hours to produce a kilogram of hydrogen by electrolysis of water, or 50 megawatt hours per tonne: https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/doe-technical-targets-hydrogen-production-electrolysis https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/doe-technical-targets-... That comes out to a total of 1550,000,000 megawatt hours, e.g. 1550 terawatt hours, to make 31 million tonnes of hydrogen. World electricity consumption in 2016 was 20,863 terawatt hours: https://www.iea.org/statistics/electricity/ https://www.iea.org/statistics/electricity/ Producing the world's synthetic fertilizer starting from electricity instead of natural gas would require about a 7.4% increase in world electricity production: (20863+1550) / 20863 = 1.074. It is true that this would benefit the climate only if the extra electricity generation were based on low-emissions sources like hydroelectricity, wind, nuclear, or solar. On the larger point, I think that corn-to-biofuel is a very poor use of money, land, and indirect fossil fuel inputs.
- WanderPanda 7y ago
  Are you drilling for water in Illinois? I saw a lot of these round artificial rain plants when I once travelled the midwestern states. For me it was always counter-intuitive that you have to do this in an area that is considered the bread-basket of the world.
  - war1025 7y ago
    As far as I know, irrigating crops is only a thing west of the Missouri river. (Dakotas, Nebraska, etc.) I live in Iowa, and we definitely don't irrigate crops here. (On a mass scale at least. Specialty crops and orchards have irrigation systems set up)
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- SilasX 7y ago
  I'm a lot sadder at the fact that they can't find a workaround for that.
  - war1025 7y ago
    Hard to plant in a swamp. And even if you did manage to plant, much of the crop would be in danger of drowning or rotting before it ever had a chance.
    - SilasX 7y ago
      What about rice paddies?
      - war1025 7y ago
        My understanding is that for commercial rice production, the paddies are drained both for planting and before harvest. I may be wrong on that. Either way, the machinery used for planting corn and soybeans is developed for use on relatively dry ground. And the plants themselves cannot survive submersion for long periods of time.
rwoodley 7y ago
There is something they/we can do: vote for candidates who actually take the threat of climate change seriously.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- kabwj 7y ago
  Democracy doesn’t work. If this doesn’t prove it nothing will.
  - nec4b 7y ago
    Which autocracy is doing better in terms of preserving the environment or combating climate change or global warming or whatever it is called today?
- chillacy 7y ago
  Fighting climate change is a prisoners dilemma type problem, any country can choose to defect and pollute the commons. Just like federal issues can’t be solved by individual states, global issues can’t be solved at a country level.
mrguyorama 7y ago
Do those same farmers still vote highly in favor of the one (american, I've made an assumption here) political party that denies global warming is real? I come from a agricultural small town in the north, and up there you'd think Trump was a god. This despite every single farm up there depending on illegal migrant workers to basically survive.
- fillskills 7y ago
  Sadly they do. Somehow other issues are more important to them than this.
  - Fjolsvith 7y ago
    Farmers are typically fairly wealthy, and hate paying taxes, mainly because they pay about 10% of their land value in property taxes each year.
    - Fjolsvith 7y ago
      So no one going to comment how those Democrat politicians could scale back their taxing agenda and pull in those farmer votes?
- AngryData 7y ago
  In my area of the midwest, not at all, the farmers are more likely to be democrats because democrats promote stable and predictable crop markets. However, even in the extremely rural areas here farmers are still a minority of the population.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  20% of US population is in rural countries. It's not the farmers electing the Republican Party
fooblitzky 7y ago
That's one of the reasons I've been looking into aquaponics a lot recently. It's a really cool (almost) closed-loop system where fish waste feeds the vegetables. The only inputs are fish food and replacing water lost by evaporation. You get fish and vegetables as outputs. Insect farming is also another area I'm interested in - you can eat the insects (super nutritious!) and use them as fish food too. I think our globalized food network is very vulnerable, say to a bad year globally, and the best way to mitigate the risk is to produce as much of your own food as you can.
- jbattle 7y ago
  I know a guy that was using discarded bakery products as the fish food. Made good use of food that was otherwise destined for a landfill (I assume)
  - meruru 7y ago
    I throw that stuff in a hole in the backyard, covered with leaves.
jseliger 7y ago
Interestingly, I submitted this to HN: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/06/17/climeworks-starts-paid-carbon-dioxide-removal/ https://cleantechnica.com/2019/06/17/climeworks-starts-paid-... a day or two ago and it didn't make it out of the "new" bin. I signed up fora CO2 reduction subscription: https://www.climeworks.com/ https://www.climeworks.com/. Probably a very minor thing, but when I read about these kinds of massive global issues, I like to ask, "What can / should I be doing?"
bit_logic 7y ago
This is the part of climate change that the media has really failed to talk about. It's always about sea level rise, but that doesn't make most people worry enough (just move or build levees). The real impact is that the climate will change everywhere. Good farmland will become bad. Areas with bad farmland will become good. And it's not easy to just shift the agriculture industry from one place to the other, and there's no control over where this happens. Also climate change doesn't care about borders. A country that has a lot of food production could suddenly have almost nothing. And even if a country is lucky and suddenly has good farmland, it's still a food crisis until that country can get their agriculture industry up and running.
- omegaworks 7y ago
  Our modern rationalization for private land ownership is that it's the best means to optimize for long-term agricultural output. A shifting climate risks undoing the very American notion that success of private landowners can occur independently of the success of the larger society. A notion that emerged out of a simple abundance of land resources that had been sustainably cultivated by indigenous societies for centuries, and a government that encouraged white settlers to a first-come-first-serve buffet. It'll be interesting to see how it all unravels.
- jay_kyburz 7y ago
  If I were a large investor, I would put some money into working out how to farm food inside. Not just a glass house, but an air tight box, with a complete ecosystem inside. From the fungus in the soil, to bees for pollination. We need to understand how it works and how to manage it.
  - pertymcpert 7y ago
    Uhm. You will need to input some carbon into the system because otherwise the plants won't be able to obtain raw materials to grow and actually produce food.
    - chronolitus 7y ago

iagovar 7y ago

Some farmers voice this same concern in Spain. They also have more extreme events destroying their fields (more hail, new insects). They seem worried, although it's true that I only have access to a little subset of them.

lettergram 7y ago

That’s the real concern for me. I live in central Illinois, one of the best places to grow crops in the world (#1 soy producer and one of the top corn). This year the Farmers around me planted 4 weeks late. This was due to the non-stop rain, so they couldn’t till. That’s probably the scariest in terms of food production.

VBprogrammer 7y ago
> one of the best places to grow crops in the world (#1 soy producer and one of the top corn) This makes me quite sad - the idea of one of the best places in the world to grow crops being wasted on massive monocultures of these industrial crops.
- tryptophan 7y ago
  Not only that - we also subsidize these useless crops. For some reason we grow corn just to burn it in car fuel as an additive. Corn is so subsidized it also becomes cheaper to add high-fructose corn syrup to everything instead of sugar.
  - henryfjordan 7y ago
    The carbon in that corn comes from the air. If we all burned corn fuel instead of oil found in the ground we'd be a lot better off in terms of emissions.
    - tasty_freeze 7y ago
      If we took the same amount of money which is used to subsidize corn and used it to fund research on batteries, solar cells, etc, or used the money to upgrade our power grid, or subsidized energy efficiency in homes, the money would have a far greater effect.
    - AngryData 7y ago
      Yeah but what if you account for the synthetic fertilizer which is produced primarily from natural gas? And if it isn't produced from natural gas it requires near 100x as much electricity, which still currently comes from fossil fuels. If we produced all our fertilizer without natural gas we would consume the current total world's energy production.
      - philipkglass 7y ago
        That is incorrect. World ammonia production in 2016 was 175 million tonnes. Producing that much ammonia -- the basis for all synthetic nitrogen fertilizers -- requires about 31 million tonnes of hydrogen. At present this hydrogen is indeed mostly made from natural gas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia_production As of 2011, it required 50 kilowatt hours to produce a kilogram of hydrogen by electrolysis of water, or 50 megawatt hours per tonne: https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/doe-technical-targets-hydrogen-production-electrolysis https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/doe-technical-targets-... That comes out to a total of 1550,000,000 megawatt hours, e.g. 1550 terawatt hours, to make 31 million tonnes of hydrogen. World electricity consumption in 2016 was 20,863 terawatt hours: https://www.iea.org/statistics/electricity/ https://www.iea.org/statistics/electricity/ Producing the world's synthetic fertilizer starting from electricity instead of natural gas would require about a 7.4% increase in world electricity production: (20863+1550) / 20863 = 1.074. It is true that this would benefit the climate only if the extra electricity generation were based on low-emissions sources like hydroelectricity, wind, nuclear, or solar. On the larger point, I think that corn-to-biofuel is a very poor use of money, land, and indirect fossil fuel inputs.
WanderPanda 7y ago
Are you drilling for water in Illinois? I saw a lot of these round artificial rain plants when I once travelled the midwestern states. For me it was always counter-intuitive that you have to do this in an area that is considered the bread-basket of the world.
- war1025 7y ago
  As far as I know, irrigating crops is only a thing west of the Missouri river. (Dakotas, Nebraska, etc.) I live in Iowa, and we definitely don't irrigate crops here. (On a mass scale at least. Specialty crops and orchards have irrigation systems set up)
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
SilasX 7y ago
I'm a lot sadder at the fact that they can't find a workaround for that.
- war1025 7y ago
  Hard to plant in a swamp. And even if you did manage to plant, much of the crop would be in danger of drowning or rotting before it ever had a chance.
  - SilasX 7y ago
    What about rice paddies?
    - war1025 7y ago
      My understanding is that for commercial rice production, the paddies are drained both for planting and before harvest. I may be wrong on that. Either way, the machinery used for planting corn and soybeans is developed for use on relatively dry ground. And the plants themselves cannot survive submersion for long periods of time.

rwoodley 7y ago

There is something they/we can do: vote for candidates who actually take the threat of climate change seriously.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
kabwj 7y ago
Democracy doesn’t work. If this doesn’t prove it nothing will.
- nec4b 7y ago
  Which autocracy is doing better in terms of preserving the environment or combating climate change or global warming or whatever it is called today?
chillacy 7y ago
Fighting climate change is a prisoners dilemma type problem, any country can choose to defect and pollute the commons. Just like federal issues can’t be solved by individual states, global issues can’t be solved at a country level.

mrguyorama 7y ago

Do those same farmers still vote highly in favor of the one (american, I've made an assumption here) political party that denies global warming is real? I come from a agricultural small town in the north, and up there you'd think Trump was a god. This despite every single farm up there depending on illegal migrant workers to basically survive.

fillskills 7y ago
Sadly they do. Somehow other issues are more important to them than this.
- Fjolsvith 7y ago
  Farmers are typically fairly wealthy, and hate paying taxes, mainly because they pay about 10% of their land value in property taxes each year.
  - Fjolsvith 7y ago
    So no one going to comment how those Democrat politicians could scale back their taxing agenda and pull in those farmer votes?
AngryData 7y ago
In my area of the midwest, not at all, the farmers are more likely to be democrats because democrats promote stable and predictable crop markets. However, even in the extremely rural areas here farmers are still a minority of the population.
lonelappde 7y ago
20% of US population is in rural countries. It's not the farmers electing the Republican Party

fooblitzky 7y ago

That's one of the reasons I've been looking into aquaponics a lot recently. It's a really cool (almost) closed-loop system where fish waste feeds the vegetables. The only inputs are fish food and replacing water lost by evaporation. You get fish and vegetables as outputs. Insect farming is also another area I'm interested in - you can eat the insects (super nutritious!) and use them as fish food too. I think our globalized food network is very vulnerable, say to a bad year globally, and the best way to mitigate the risk is to produce as much of your own food as you can.

jbattle 7y ago
I know a guy that was using discarded bakery products as the fish food. Made good use of food that was otherwise destined for a landfill (I assume)
- meruru 7y ago
  I throw that stuff in a hole in the backyard, covered with leaves.

jseliger 7y ago

Interestingly, I submitted this to HN: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/06/17/climeworks-starts-paid-carbon-dioxide-removal/ https://cleantechnica.com/2019/06/17/climeworks-starts-paid-... a day or two ago and it didn't make it out of the "new" bin. I signed up fora CO2 reduction subscription: https://www.climeworks.com/ https://www.climeworks.com/. Probably a very minor thing, but when I read about these kinds of massive global issues, I like to ask, "What can / should I be doing?"

bit_logic 7y ago

This is the part of climate change that the media has really failed to talk about. It's always about sea level rise, but that doesn't make most people worry enough (just move or build levees). The real impact is that the climate will change everywhere. Good farmland will become bad. Areas with bad farmland will become good. And it's not easy to just shift the agriculture industry from one place to the other, and there's no control over where this happens. Also climate change doesn't care about borders. A country that has a lot of food production could suddenly have almost nothing. And even if a country is lucky and suddenly has good farmland, it's still a food crisis until that country can get their agriculture industry up and running.

omegaworks 7y ago
Our modern rationalization for private land ownership is that it's the best means to optimize for long-term agricultural output. A shifting climate risks undoing the very American notion that success of private landowners can occur independently of the success of the larger society. A notion that emerged out of a simple abundance of land resources that had been sustainably cultivated by indigenous societies for centuries, and a government that encouraged white settlers to a first-come-first-serve buffet. It'll be interesting to see how it all unravels.
jay_kyburz 7y ago
If I were a large investor, I would put some money into working out how to farm food inside. Not just a glass house, but an air tight box, with a complete ecosystem inside. From the fungus in the soil, to bees for pollination. We need to understand how it works and how to manage it.
- pertymcpert 7y ago
  Uhm. You will need to input some carbon into the system because otherwise the plants won't be able to obtain raw materials to grow and actually produce food.
  - chronolitus 7y ago