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True, but I want to caution people. It doesn't seem possible to me that sustainable agriculture of any form can feed the number of humans alive today. Aside fro

True, but I want to caution people. It doesn't seem possible to me that sustainable agriculture of any form can feed the number of humans alive today. Aside from trying to do something about the number of alive humans, the only shot at reducing agriculture's destructive influence is going more technological not less and I for one want to see bespoke space colonies constructed by automated factories on the moon not genocides. Compare the livestock vs all other mammal biomass from the first chart in this paper https://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506 https://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506 edit: or just look at google earth and look at the amount of land used for agriculture

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
space_fountain 5y ago
This was originally in reply to a now deleted reply, but it is worth calling out an alternative interpretation, we could move away from meat and make more effective usage of land. I think this is true, but still won't get us all the way. I think even imagining people were willing to give up meat humans still use way too many raw calories for anything like sustainable organic agriculture to be workable. Maybe it would be interesting to know what percentage of the land dedicated to raising meat is for feed vs grazing. Grazing land is usually more marginal than farmland so while overall good to let it go back to nature it won't replace the sort of biodiversity that turning Kansas back to grasslands would Also I don't trust it as much, but if it's true that humans right now make up more biomass than all land animals before we exploded it seems difficult to imagine us keeping up without continuing to have huge impacts on the planet, better to keep those impacts dense and controlled than everywhere https://www.greenpeace.org/static/planet4-international-stateless/2018/07/Screen-Shot-2018-07-17-at-5.35.05-PM.png https://www.greenpeace.org/static/planet4-international-stat...
AussieWog93 5y ago
>I for one want to see bespoke space colonies constructed by automated factories on the moon not genocides. This is why I come to HN. Beautiful!
hunter-gatherer 5y ago
> edit: or just look at google earth and look at the amount of land used for agriculture I also encourage those interested in this topic to do this. Exact percentages are interesting, but it is still abstract. Give yourself and hour and just go look for wilderness using google earth. Our stewardship over the planet, if such a thing ever was, has had a sad outcome.
curtainsforus 5y ago
There's lots of labor-intensive ways to boost yields without monocultures, fertilizers, and pesticides, right? Planting complementary crops together, planting trap crops at the edges of fields to catch pests, things like that. How long till robots can do that sort of work? At that point, you can have super-green-bio gardens (fields) worked and pruned 24/7 at the cost-over-time of the robots (and whoever/whatever oversees them, plus manure I guess). We already have a version of this- called a combine harvester- but the more sophisticated farming tech gets, the more it can reduce reliance on e.g. pesticides without reducing yields.
- space_fountain 5y ago
  Hum, that does seem somewhat possible. I guess my counter is just pointing back at the biomass chart. Maybe labor intensive low fertilizer and pesticide farming can work, but we're talking about a majority of land vertebrate mass being either humans or the things we've grown to eat. There isn't a world in which we keep that up and don't massively distort the rest of the natural world. I think we have to accept that and sort of go on from there and decides what sort of distortions we want. Trading mechanization for pesticides seems great, but we'll still need massive amounts of land dedicated to farming and I definitely see it as a more technical not less solution

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

space_fountain 5y ago

This was originally in reply to a now deleted reply, but it is worth calling out an alternative interpretation, we could move away from meat and make more effective usage of land. I think this is true, but still won't get us all the way. I think even imagining people were willing to give up meat humans still use way too many raw calories for anything like sustainable organic agriculture to be workable. Maybe it would be interesting to know what percentage of the land dedicated to raising meat is for feed vs grazing. Grazing land is usually more marginal than farmland so while overall good to let it go back to nature it won't replace the sort of biodiversity that turning Kansas back to grasslands would Also I don't trust it as much, but if it's true that humans right now make up more biomass than all land animals before we exploded it seems difficult to imagine us keeping up without continuing to have huge impacts on the planet, better to keep those impacts dense and controlled than everywhere https://www.greenpeace.org/static/planet4-international-stateless/2018/07/Screen-Shot-2018-07-17-at-5.35.05-PM.png https://www.greenpeace.org/static/planet4-international-stat...

AussieWog93 5y ago

>I for one want to see bespoke space colonies constructed by automated factories on the moon not genocides. This is why I come to HN. Beautiful!

hunter-gatherer 5y ago

> edit: or just look at google earth and look at the amount of land used for agriculture I also encourage those interested in this topic to do this. Exact percentages are interesting, but it is still abstract. Give yourself and hour and just go look for wilderness using google earth. Our stewardship over the planet, if such a thing ever was, has had a sad outcome.

curtainsforus 5y ago

There's lots of labor-intensive ways to boost yields without monocultures, fertilizers, and pesticides, right? Planting complementary crops together, planting trap crops at the edges of fields to catch pests, things like that. How long till robots can do that sort of work? At that point, you can have super-green-bio gardens (fields) worked and pruned 24/7 at the cost-over-time of the robots (and whoever/whatever oversees them, plus manure I guess). We already have a version of this- called a combine harvester- but the more sophisticated farming tech gets, the more it can reduce reliance on e.g. pesticides without reducing yields.

space_fountain 5y ago
Hum, that does seem somewhat possible. I guess my counter is just pointing back at the biomass chart. Maybe labor intensive low fertilizer and pesticide farming can work, but we're talking about a majority of land vertebrate mass being either humans or the things we've grown to eat. There isn't a world in which we keep that up and don't massively distort the rest of the natural world. I think we have to accept that and sort of go on from there and decides what sort of distortions we want. Trading mechanization for pesticides seems great, but we'll still need massive amounts of land dedicated to farming and I definitely see it as a more technical not less solution