9 ms·

Meanwhile the pesticide manufacturers are following the cigarette company playbook and busily funding bullshit research and top notch PR to deflect blame. This

Meanwhile the pesticide manufacturers are following the cigarette company playbook and busily funding bullshit research and top notch PR to deflect blame. This is what happens. We blanket our fields and their surroundings with chemicals specifically designed to highly efficiently kill insects and are surprised when insects die in droves. But sure, blame people living in cities.

mikorym 6y ago
But keep in mind that pesticides (in the correct quantities) are crucial for high yields, whereas I am not sure whether tobacco is crucial for anything.
- bad_user 6y ago
  Indeed, I see plenty of criticism of industrial farming practices, but it's what's feeding the world population and without alternatives that are as efficient as current practices, the suggestion to give up pesticides is akin to saying that it's OK for people to die of hunger, as long as it ain't you. On the other hand denying a problem delays working on a solution.
  - erpellan 6y ago
    Something like 70% of farming is growing crops to feed animals which we then eat. Meat is an incredibly inefficient way to turn sunlight and water into calories. If we all switched away from meat and ate mostly plants instead we’d have more than enough without needing such intensive farming methods. More seriously than that though, current methods are actively destructive to the soil - the longer we farm so intensively the less viable farmland we will have. Does that sound sustainable?
    - sleepygardener 6y ago
      If this is all true, I wonder why a kg of pepper/cucumber (or any other vegetable for that matter) costs very close to a kg of chicken/pork etc. Shouldn't the additional complexity/resource intensiveness of meat production be reflected in the consumer price?
      - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
        It should but as you deducted yourself, that is not the case. I suspect they force the profit margins of vegetables way up somehow. I'm sure they've done a lot of research and experiments and concluded that: * People are willing to pay x for a pepper * People do not consume significantly more peppers if the price is lowered * People are willing to pay y for a kg of chicken * People buy significantly less chicken if the price goes up much higher TL;DR it's about price vs volume vs profit margins, and I'm sure they continuously hover around an optimum for these products.
      - refusenick 6y ago
        subsidies
      - rwmj 6y ago
        Meat farmers don't buy cucumbers from the shops to feed to their animals. You'd need to compare farm gate prices of the kinds of low-grade grains used in animal feed. In any case what you say isn't even true: At my local supermarket cucumbers are £1.80/kg, while chicken starts at £1.95/kg for super-cheap chicken thighs with bone-in, up to nearly £20/kg ("Sainsbury's Norfolk Black Corn Fed Free Range Chicken Fillets" in case you want to know), the average being around £5/kg. There are no pork products at all below £4/kg.
        sleepygardener 6y ago
        YMMV of course, doesn't mean that what I say is not true, neither I'm saying it's the same for all countries. In my supermarket (central EU) a kg of pepper is 3-4 Eur/kg, chicken breasts without bone are cca 4,50 Eur/kg, whole chicken is 2 - 3 Eur/kg. Not mentioning pepper is supposedly 94% water. I'm definitely going to be fed more times buying 1 kg chicken instead of vegetables.
        erpellan 6y ago
        Fresh vegetables are great but yes, mostly water. Beans, rice, lentils, grains (in dry form) cost less per kg than chicken, don't need refrigeration and will make many more meals.
    - JetSetWilly 6y ago
      Around here land of good quality is used to grow crops for human consumption, and land of marginal or poor quality can't grow many crops so is used as grazing land. Is it "70% of farming" by area of land? That doesn't sound so bad because most farmed land isn't all that great. Can we really say that 70% of the yield of high quality farming land is going to feed animals?
      - Mvandenbergh 6y ago
        In some parts of the world, marginal quality land is used for monocropping of animal feedstock using intensive exogenous inputs (fertiliser and pesticide). Raising animals for meat on meadowland, depending on the level of intervention used on that land, can actually be good for biodiversity although if those animal are excreting larvicides everywhere they go, it's not so good. In the English context, the richest habitat with the best biodiversity is a complex mix between meadows, hedgerows, and woodland. The exact historical balance, especially between meadows and woods is hotly contested and an open research topic.
    - dalore 6y ago
      Most of those crops are inedible to humans or the waste products from human crops that are non saleable. Meat is inefficient for calories, but very efficient for nutrients. Food is more than cheap calories.
      - geddy 6y ago
        What? How can meat possibly be more efficient for nutrients? Where do you think the animals get the nutrients in the first place? Everything originates from plants.
        bad_user 6y ago
        That's a really dumb argument. Where do you think the energy and the nutrients from plants come from? It comes from the sun and the soil. So if plants are a middleman, we might as well eat dirt and stay in the sun all day.
        geddy 6y ago
        We are biologically herbivores, and we are built to process plants (jaw moves side to side and we have long intestinal tracts, the exact opposite case applies to carnivores). We don't "eat dirt" because we are built to eat plants. Your argument on that is a silly one. You're running anywhere from 5-12x the amount of plant calories (depending on the animal) through animals (that need to be fed water in addition to plants), to produce fractions of calories on the other end. It's highly inefficient and that by itself is a terrific argument for stopping the consumption of animal products. Not to mention all of the potent affects on climate change, and the water usage associated with producing meat. We're paving the rainforests to plant more crops to feed back to animals, despite having millions starving to death. Go search for `animal agriculture inefficient` and read the metric ton of studies if you don't believe me. I can't fathom how you could think that spending 12,000,000 calories of plants to get 1,000,000 calories of beef is worth it "for the nutrients". I'm curious as to what nutrients you think are so critical here, because literally every vital nutrient can be obtained from plants, and in the cases of Vitamin D and B12, they are both supplemented into animal feed as it is, and can easily be taken in pill form.
    - kraussvonespy 6y ago
      In my area of the US, a good percentage of the majority crop (corn) goes to produce alcohol to burn as fuel. So we pour poisons and fertilizer on the land and burn huge amounts of petroleum to produce a seriously inefficient crop to supplement an energy source that doesn't need supplementing. Just to give farmers something to do and to keep the CEOs of the chemical companies in yachts and private jets. This kind of reminds me of the Soviet whaling program that almost wiped out entire species of whales for no reason other than the 5 year plan said that they needed to continue whaling.
      - godtoldmetodoit 6y ago
        Ethanol is such a disaster. Is there any legitimate reason for ethanol production to be a thing outside of subsidizing mega farmers? Can we just cut them checks instead?
        kraussvonespy 6y ago
        If you peel back all of the propaganda, no, there's no legitimate reason to produce ethanol. It's just a way to continue to feed money into the farming-industrial complex (farmers, chemical companies, implement companies, seed companies, ethanol manufacturers, etc.) Even if the crop that was grown to make ethanol was less stupid (sugar beets for example), it still wouldn't make much sense.
      - kraussvonespy 6y ago
        For the record, I just found a reference that states that ~40% of corn grown in the US gets turned into ethanol. 40%. We consume somewhere between a half a gallon and a full gallon of petroleum (between fuel for the machines, production of chemicals, etc.) for every gallon of ethanol we get out of the process. There is no justification for this other than make-work for farmers, chemical companies and the whole ethanol-industrial complex.
  - Arnt 6y ago
    Current practices are marvellously efficient in parts, but only in parts. Go look at how much of the marvellously efficiently grown produce is discarded during distribution, for example. We grow so many cucumbers that we can afford to throw away the worst-looking half and still have enough.
  - youngtaff 6y ago
    Yeh, but if pesticides wipe out pollinating insects then we're all dead anyway
    - asheley 6y ago
      pis message me on facebook name is agnes flavrey john rey so we can chat and do something new i wait there
- amelius 6y ago
  I think we would survive on 50% of the yield.
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    Maybe "in general", but they don't have that big a margin everywhere. Remember, food shortages is more of a logistics problem than a farming problem.
    - gcatalfamo 6y ago
      This. You can can’t relocate certain products just because there’s more elsewhere. This does not work with all kinds of produce (it does for some but quality and taste go down fast). In other cases you can technically do that, but it’s not sustainable cost-wise.
    - BiteCode_dev 6y ago
      We already have hunger despite our industry producing too much food. The problem is political and economical, not technical.
    - ashtonkem 6y ago
      Famine and other large scale hunger are often more political than logistical. The capability to feed everyone exists, the will to do it does not. Or, in more tragic cases, the will to make certain some people can’t eat occasionally exists at the highest levels.
    - kaybe 6y ago
      I am also a bit afraid for the future. The way we're going, harvests will fail more frequently, meaning some areas of the world will have to have overproduction to feed the rest, and which areas that are will be hard to predict. So it's safer to have some overproduction everywhere, at least of basics. The current method of monoculture and cash crops makes that even worse since that means an area is susceptible to the same kind of weather problems, eg dry summers. If we planted more varied crops some of them can profit even if others fail.
  - 6y ago
- sgt101 6y ago
  High yields for a wide variety of crops in a wide variety of places. If a lower variety was maintained locally with plants that were more robust in that setting the use of pesticides could be reduced, supply maintained (but choice reduced).
  - alexfromapex 6y ago
    This is the right answer. Crop growth needs to be distributed locally and become more integrated with architecture in big cities. These large-scale industrial farms make communities less self sufficient in many ways.
    - mmm_grayons 6y ago
      You'd be surrendering colossal economies of scale were you to do that, causing much higher food prices. Most people in big cities don't care to grow food, and most people who grow food don't care to live in big cities. The parent with whom you're agreeing also mentioned a lower local diversity of things grown, which means that to get a decent variety of stuff, that actually increases reliance. I think if anything, we're going to see a desire to become less reliant on others (especially internationally) which will drive people to grow a larger variety of crops locally.
      - alexfromapex 6y ago
        I never mentioned anything about decreasing diversity so I guess we’re agreeing?
- brnt 6y ago
  Keep in mind pesticide research is a multi-billion dollareuro business, and that a pesticide 20 years ago has little to do with a pesticide now. Recent techniques such as seed coating also have had big changes. Nobody contests the use of pesticides and pesticide research, but we should also not underestimate the role and pervasiveness of these stuffs on much of our planets acreage and soil. The chemical implicated in bees demise, neonicotinoids, sounds like it actually may have something to do with tobacco production though!
  - dikkechill 6y ago
    One of the driving forces behind the neonicotinoids theory is a toxicologist called Henk Tennekes, who used to work as a consultant for Solvay, Roche, Monsanto en Sandoz (now known as Syngenta). Basically he claims that the toxicity was underestimated as it grows with time, the damage to the nerve system in insects is irreversible. The pesticides also go into the surface water, where they found a link between higher surface-water concentrations of imidacloprid - a specific neonicotinoid - and a decline of birds that feed on insects. Article in Dutch: https://www.ftm.nl/artikelen/toxicoloog-tennekes-had-al-die-tijd-gelijk-over-bijensterfte https://www.ftm.nl/artikelen/toxicoloog-tennekes-had-al-die-... On the toxicity of exposure time: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0300483X10002738?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03004... On the decline of insectivorous birds: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature13531 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature13531
    - dikkechill 6y ago
      Perhaps a better source in English, the EU policy advisory report from the European Academies Science Advisory Council from 2015 on Ecosystem services, agriculture and neonicotinoids. https://easac.eu/fileadmin/Reports/Easac_15_ES_web_complete_01.pdf https://easac.eu/fileadmin/Reports/Easac_15_ES_web_complete_... Most neonicotinoids are now banned for outdoor use in the EU: https://ec.europa.eu/food/plant/pesticides/approval_active_substances/approval_renewal/neonicotinoids_en https://ec.europa.eu/food/plant/pesticides/approval_active_s...
  - mikorym 6y ago
- Angostura 6y ago
  Keep in mind that ecosystem services are crucial for keeping you alive too.
  - jansan 6y ago
    Keep in mind insects are responsible for some of the most devastating plaques in history.
    - ryder9 6y ago
      no, insects are simply the carriers... also all insects aren't the same, most of your produce is pollinated by insects; they're also the base for a very complex food chain that would collapse without insects this is a weird take to have which shuns all nuance and objectivity
      - lisper 6y ago
        In some cases the insects themselves are the problem. https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2020-africa-locusts/ https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2020-africa-locusts/
rb808 6y ago
source?
kraussvonespy 6y ago
There are always people from the Union of Bought and Paid-for Scientists that will gladly give up on science for a well-paid gig at some bullshit think tank. Somewhere around 3% if we use climate-change numbers.

mikorym 6y ago

But keep in mind that pesticides (in the correct quantities) are crucial for high yields, whereas I am not sure whether tobacco is crucial for anything.

bad_user 6y ago
Indeed, I see plenty of criticism of industrial farming practices, but it's what's feeding the world population and without alternatives that are as efficient as current practices, the suggestion to give up pesticides is akin to saying that it's OK for people to die of hunger, as long as it ain't you. On the other hand denying a problem delays working on a solution.
- erpellan 6y ago
  Something like 70% of farming is growing crops to feed animals which we then eat. Meat is an incredibly inefficient way to turn sunlight and water into calories. If we all switched away from meat and ate mostly plants instead we’d have more than enough without needing such intensive farming methods. More seriously than that though, current methods are actively destructive to the soil - the longer we farm so intensively the less viable farmland we will have. Does that sound sustainable?
  - sleepygardener 6y ago
    If this is all true, I wonder why a kg of pepper/cucumber (or any other vegetable for that matter) costs very close to a kg of chicken/pork etc. Shouldn't the additional complexity/resource intensiveness of meat production be reflected in the consumer price?
    - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
      It should but as you deducted yourself, that is not the case. I suspect they force the profit margins of vegetables way up somehow. I'm sure they've done a lot of research and experiments and concluded that: * People are willing to pay x for a pepper * People do not consume significantly more peppers if the price is lowered * People are willing to pay y for a kg of chicken * People buy significantly less chicken if the price goes up much higher TL;DR it's about price vs volume vs profit margins, and I'm sure they continuously hover around an optimum for these products.
    - refusenick 6y ago
      subsidies
    - rwmj 6y ago
      Meat farmers don't buy cucumbers from the shops to feed to their animals. You'd need to compare farm gate prices of the kinds of low-grade grains used in animal feed. In any case what you say isn't even true: At my local supermarket cucumbers are £1.80/kg, while chicken starts at £1.95/kg for super-cheap chicken thighs with bone-in, up to nearly £20/kg ("Sainsbury's Norfolk Black Corn Fed Free Range Chicken Fillets" in case you want to know), the average being around £5/kg. There are no pork products at all below £4/kg.
      - sleepygardener 6y ago
        YMMV of course, doesn't mean that what I say is not true, neither I'm saying it's the same for all countries. In my supermarket (central EU) a kg of pepper is 3-4 Eur/kg, chicken breasts without bone are cca 4,50 Eur/kg, whole chicken is 2 - 3 Eur/kg. Not mentioning pepper is supposedly 94% water. I'm definitely going to be fed more times buying 1 kg chicken instead of vegetables.
        erpellan 6y ago
        Fresh vegetables are great but yes, mostly water. Beans, rice, lentils, grains (in dry form) cost less per kg than chicken, don't need refrigeration and will make many more meals.
  - JetSetWilly 6y ago
    Around here land of good quality is used to grow crops for human consumption, and land of marginal or poor quality can't grow many crops so is used as grazing land. Is it "70% of farming" by area of land? That doesn't sound so bad because most farmed land isn't all that great. Can we really say that 70% of the yield of high quality farming land is going to feed animals?
    - Mvandenbergh 6y ago
      In some parts of the world, marginal quality land is used for monocropping of animal feedstock using intensive exogenous inputs (fertiliser and pesticide). Raising animals for meat on meadowland, depending on the level of intervention used on that land, can actually be good for biodiversity although if those animal are excreting larvicides everywhere they go, it's not so good. In the English context, the richest habitat with the best biodiversity is a complex mix between meadows, hedgerows, and woodland. The exact historical balance, especially between meadows and woods is hotly contested and an open research topic.
  - dalore 6y ago
    Most of those crops are inedible to humans or the waste products from human crops that are non saleable. Meat is inefficient for calories, but very efficient for nutrients. Food is more than cheap calories.
    - geddy 6y ago
      What? How can meat possibly be more efficient for nutrients? Where do you think the animals get the nutrients in the first place? Everything originates from plants.
      - bad_user 6y ago
        That's a really dumb argument. Where do you think the energy and the nutrients from plants come from? It comes from the sun and the soil. So if plants are a middleman, we might as well eat dirt and stay in the sun all day.
        geddy 6y ago
        We are biologically herbivores, and we are built to process plants (jaw moves side to side and we have long intestinal tracts, the exact opposite case applies to carnivores). We don't "eat dirt" because we are built to eat plants. Your argument on that is a silly one. You're running anywhere from 5-12x the amount of plant calories (depending on the animal) through animals (that need to be fed water in addition to plants), to produce fractions of calories on the other end. It's highly inefficient and that by itself is a terrific argument for stopping the consumption of animal products. Not to mention all of the potent affects on climate change, and the water usage associated with producing meat. We're paving the rainforests to plant more crops to feed back to animals, despite having millions starving to death. Go search for `animal agriculture inefficient` and read the metric ton of studies if you don't believe me. I can't fathom how you could think that spending 12,000,000 calories of plants to get 1,000,000 calories of beef is worth it "for the nutrients". I'm curious as to what nutrients you think are so critical here, because literally every vital nutrient can be obtained from plants, and in the cases of Vitamin D and B12, they are both supplemented into animal feed as it is, and can easily be taken in pill form.
  - kraussvonespy 6y ago
    In my area of the US, a good percentage of the majority crop (corn) goes to produce alcohol to burn as fuel. So we pour poisons and fertilizer on the land and burn huge amounts of petroleum to produce a seriously inefficient crop to supplement an energy source that doesn't need supplementing. Just to give farmers something to do and to keep the CEOs of the chemical companies in yachts and private jets. This kind of reminds me of the Soviet whaling program that almost wiped out entire species of whales for no reason other than the 5 year plan said that they needed to continue whaling.
    - godtoldmetodoit 6y ago
      Ethanol is such a disaster. Is there any legitimate reason for ethanol production to be a thing outside of subsidizing mega farmers? Can we just cut them checks instead?
      - kraussvonespy 6y ago
        If you peel back all of the propaganda, no, there's no legitimate reason to produce ethanol. It's just a way to continue to feed money into the farming-industrial complex (farmers, chemical companies, implement companies, seed companies, ethanol manufacturers, etc.) Even if the crop that was grown to make ethanol was less stupid (sugar beets for example), it still wouldn't make much sense.
    - kraussvonespy 6y ago
      For the record, I just found a reference that states that ~40% of corn grown in the US gets turned into ethanol. 40%. We consume somewhere between a half a gallon and a full gallon of petroleum (between fuel for the machines, production of chemicals, etc.) for every gallon of ethanol we get out of the process. There is no justification for this other than make-work for farmers, chemical companies and the whole ethanol-industrial complex.
- Arnt 6y ago
  Current practices are marvellously efficient in parts, but only in parts. Go look at how much of the marvellously efficiently grown produce is discarded during distribution, for example. We grow so many cucumbers that we can afford to throw away the worst-looking half and still have enough.
- youngtaff 6y ago
  Yeh, but if pesticides wipe out pollinating insects then we're all dead anyway
  - asheley 6y ago
    pis message me on facebook name is agnes flavrey john rey so we can chat and do something new i wait there
amelius 6y ago
I think we would survive on 50% of the yield.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  Maybe "in general", but they don't have that big a margin everywhere. Remember, food shortages is more of a logistics problem than a farming problem.
  - gcatalfamo 6y ago
    This. You can can’t relocate certain products just because there’s more elsewhere. This does not work with all kinds of produce (it does for some but quality and taste go down fast). In other cases you can technically do that, but it’s not sustainable cost-wise.
  - BiteCode_dev 6y ago
    We already have hunger despite our industry producing too much food. The problem is political and economical, not technical.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    Famine and other large scale hunger are often more political than logistical. The capability to feed everyone exists, the will to do it does not. Or, in more tragic cases, the will to make certain some people can’t eat occasionally exists at the highest levels.
  - kaybe 6y ago
    I am also a bit afraid for the future. The way we're going, harvests will fail more frequently, meaning some areas of the world will have to have overproduction to feed the rest, and which areas that are will be hard to predict. So it's safer to have some overproduction everywhere, at least of basics. The current method of monoculture and cash crops makes that even worse since that means an area is susceptible to the same kind of weather problems, eg dry summers. If we planted more varied crops some of them can profit even if others fail.
- 6y ago
sgt101 6y ago
High yields for a wide variety of crops in a wide variety of places. If a lower variety was maintained locally with plants that were more robust in that setting the use of pesticides could be reduced, supply maintained (but choice reduced).
- alexfromapex 6y ago
  This is the right answer. Crop growth needs to be distributed locally and become more integrated with architecture in big cities. These large-scale industrial farms make communities less self sufficient in many ways.
  - mmm_grayons 6y ago
    You'd be surrendering colossal economies of scale were you to do that, causing much higher food prices. Most people in big cities don't care to grow food, and most people who grow food don't care to live in big cities. The parent with whom you're agreeing also mentioned a lower local diversity of things grown, which means that to get a decent variety of stuff, that actually increases reliance. I think if anything, we're going to see a desire to become less reliant on others (especially internationally) which will drive people to grow a larger variety of crops locally.
    - alexfromapex 6y ago
      I never mentioned anything about decreasing diversity so I guess we’re agreeing?
brnt 6y ago
Keep in mind pesticide research is a multi-billion dollareuro business, and that a pesticide 20 years ago has little to do with a pesticide now. Recent techniques such as seed coating also have had big changes. Nobody contests the use of pesticides and pesticide research, but we should also not underestimate the role and pervasiveness of these stuffs on much of our planets acreage and soil. The chemical implicated in bees demise, neonicotinoids, sounds like it actually may have something to do with tobacco production though!
- dikkechill 6y ago
  One of the driving forces behind the neonicotinoids theory is a toxicologist called Henk Tennekes, who used to work as a consultant for Solvay, Roche, Monsanto en Sandoz (now known as Syngenta). Basically he claims that the toxicity was underestimated as it grows with time, the damage to the nerve system in insects is irreversible. The pesticides also go into the surface water, where they found a link between higher surface-water concentrations of imidacloprid - a specific neonicotinoid - and a decline of birds that feed on insects. Article in Dutch: https://www.ftm.nl/artikelen/toxicoloog-tennekes-had-al-die-tijd-gelijk-over-bijensterfte https://www.ftm.nl/artikelen/toxicoloog-tennekes-had-al-die-... On the toxicity of exposure time: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0300483X10002738?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03004... On the decline of insectivorous birds: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature13531 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature13531
  - dikkechill 6y ago
    Perhaps a better source in English, the EU policy advisory report from the European Academies Science Advisory Council from 2015 on Ecosystem services, agriculture and neonicotinoids. https://easac.eu/fileadmin/Reports/Easac_15_ES_web_complete_01.pdf https://easac.eu/fileadmin/Reports/Easac_15_ES_web_complete_... Most neonicotinoids are now banned for outdoor use in the EU: https://ec.europa.eu/food/plant/pesticides/approval_active_substances/approval_renewal/neonicotinoids_en https://ec.europa.eu/food/plant/pesticides/approval_active_s...
- mikorym 6y ago
Angostura 6y ago
Keep in mind that ecosystem services are crucial for keeping you alive too.
- jansan 6y ago
  Keep in mind insects are responsible for some of the most devastating plaques in history.
  - ryder9 6y ago
    no, insects are simply the carriers... also all insects aren't the same, most of your produce is pollinated by insects; they're also the base for a very complex food chain that would collapse without insects this is a weird take to have which shuns all nuance and objectivity
    - lisper 6y ago
      In some cases the insects themselves are the problem. https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2020-africa-locusts/ https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2020-africa-locusts/

rb808 6y ago

source?

kraussvonespy 6y ago

There are always people from the Union of Bought and Paid-for Scientists that will gladly give up on science for a well-paid gig at some bullshit think tank. Somewhere around 3% if we use climate-change numbers.