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We already use half of all habitable land for agriculture. "The expansion of agriculture has been one of humanity’s largest impacts on the environment. It has

We already use half of all habitable land for agriculture. "The expansion of agriculture has been one of humanity’s largest impacts on the environment. It has transformed habitats and is one of the greatest pressures for biodiversity: of the 28,000 species evaluated to be threatened with extinction on the IUCN Red List, agriculture is listed as a threat for 24,000 of them" https://ourworldindata.org/land-use https://ourworldindata.org/land-use Do we really want to keep eating into what wilderness remains? Just because we "have" it doesn't mean we should convert it. We already produce enough food to feed the world and likely won't have trouble producing enough food to feed the coming extra billions, but if we can focus on increasing yeilds and moving away from raising animals for consumption we can also reduce our footprint on the world.

tuatoru 6y ago
> We already produce enough food to feed the world and likely won't have trouble producing enough food to feed the coming extra billions, but if we can focus on increasing yeilds and moving away from raising animals for consumption we can also reduce our footprint on the world. If we want to release cropland back to the wild, then by far the cheapest way to do it is improve farming infrastructure and practice in low income countries, which is where yields lag so far behind the state of the art. Not a technical problem, a social one.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago
  "cheaper" is to get everyone to stop growing food to feed to animals to eat
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  Social, or political - giving less technological countries advances shifts power. And who in those countries gets the advances? A corporation or a community - if a community currently grow the own food inefficiently and you take the growing land, give it to a corporation and produce the same food efficiently then the people lose income, need to buy their food, and all financial benefits of the food sale get privatised. The value produced by that land is moved. We need to be careful not to spread the bad parts of efficient production.
imtringued 6y ago
>We already produce enough food to feed the world and likely won't have trouble producing enough food to feed the coming extra billions, but if we can focus on increasing yields and moving away from raising animals for consumption we can also reduce our footprint on the world. I saw some mango farming videos in Africa and that's pretty much it. There are lots of inefficient farming practices and agriculture experts are teaching farmers how to improve their yields significantly without any fancy technology.

tuatoru 6y ago

> We already produce enough food to feed the world and likely won't have trouble producing enough food to feed the coming extra billions, but if we can focus on increasing yeilds and moving away from raising animals for consumption we can also reduce our footprint on the world. If we want to release cropland back to the wild, then by far the cheapest way to do it is improve farming infrastructure and practice in low income countries, which is where yields lag so far behind the state of the art. Not a technical problem, a social one.

X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago
"cheaper" is to get everyone to stop growing food to feed to animals to eat
pbhjpbhj 6y ago
Social, or political - giving less technological countries advances shifts power. And who in those countries gets the advances? A corporation or a community - if a community currently grow the own food inefficiently and you take the growing land, give it to a corporation and produce the same food efficiently then the people lose income, need to buy their food, and all financial benefits of the food sale get privatised. The value produced by that land is moved. We need to be careful not to spread the bad parts of efficient production.

imtringued 6y ago

>We already produce enough food to feed the world and likely won't have trouble producing enough food to feed the coming extra billions, but if we can focus on increasing yields and moving away from raising animals for consumption we can also reduce our footprint on the world. I saw some mango farming videos in Africa and that's pretty much it. There are lots of inefficient farming practices and agriculture experts are teaching farmers how to improve their yields significantly without any fancy technology.