8 ms·

Is Technological Progress Slowing? The Case of American Agriculture

56 points by _Microft 5y ago

jrm4 5y ago
Let me stop this right here; are we equating "OVERproduction of food that we likely don't need" to "progress?"
- LeanderK 5y ago
  yeah, i was also not sure whether I've missed something. Equating "Technological Progress" to "Increase in Agricultural Output" doesn't make sense...maybe we don't need that much more food, that's why it's slowing down. Maybe the american agricultural output could double in the next 10 years, but is it energy well spent? After all, it's a bit of a zero-sum game, a society has finite capacity for research and must spend its budget wisely.
  - lambdadmitry 5y ago
    Agricultural output is usually per unit of land and/or inputs, so more output means less land, less pollution, and less ecological damage for a fixed amount of food produced. If some fields can be reforested instead, it'd pull carbon out of the air and increase biodiversity.
    - tspike 5y ago
      Most agricultural land was short grass or long grass prairie prior to being plowed over. Prairie is the most endangered ecosystem on the planet. Perhaps instead of "reforestation" we can look at restoring native prairie.
    - nosianu 5y ago
      What will happen instead is that all land that could possibly be used will continue to be used. Overproduction will instead be exported, which will hit farmers in less developed countries who cannot compete hard. https://theexchange.africa/industry-and-trade/agribusiness/why-africas-smallholder-growers-cant-compete-with-european-american-farmers/ https://theexchange.africa/industry-and-trade/agribusiness/w... It's not just food from fields. Meat also is overproduced to be exported in countries like the US, UK or Germany and others. https://beef2live.com/story-world-beef-imports-ranking-countries-0-106900 https://beef2live.com/story-world-beef-imports-ranking-count... (some countries, like the US, are both big im- as well as exporters) I know from following relevant news that here in Germany we could significantly scale down our environmentally bad big pig farms, which also suffer from crowded conditions and not exactly a good life for the animals, if not both the businesses involved as well as government concerned about GDP and creating a lot of exports would oppose restrictions on the meat industry. I'm not even against meat at all, but this is a bad cycle. We can export more when/if we are cheap, and that requires industrialized "meat production" to the detriment of the animals. The incentives are wrong IMO. Some might argue that imported cheaper food is better for African countries, but they can't compete on high-tech, they can't compete in agriculture, how are they supposed to bootstrap their economies? There also are reports about all the worn clothing that ends up in Africa, so no local textile industry either. Unchecked, tose able to produce cheaply will never voluntarily restrain themselves and give up "productive land". Instead, they will use their advantage to conquer ever more markets.
  - kiba 5y ago
    Is it physically or biologically possible to double agricultural output in the next ten years? It doesn't matter how much you spend on R&D if we hit the limit of what we can do with biology.
    - mikeyouse 5y ago
      Probably yes.. e.g. there's a massive amount of research into RuBisCO. If we could speed up the primary carbon-fixing reaction, we could massively increase Ag output (also could make a dent in carbon sequestration): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RuBisCO#Genetic_engineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RuBisCO#Genetic_engineering There's tons about plant bio we don't fully understand and a lot of room for R&D. An imperfect measure, but in 2021, Google Scholar added over 5,000 results for the term; https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C23&as_ylo=2021&q=rubisco&btnG= https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C23&as_yl...
    - kickout 5y ago
      Yes, it is possible. Probably just entering a new golden age with genomic tools and excellent metadata on the farms that currently do produce. Plenty of arable land, but ideally we only want the most efficient land in production.
    - BurningFrog 5y ago
      If/when we figure out how to make good tasting beef industrially, without the intermittent "there is a cow" stage, the world will change a LOT, for the better.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- droopyEyelids 5y ago
  Corn and soybeans are better thought of as raw material for industry, rather than food. We don't need more corn to eat, but alongside the fact that it's an industrial input, it's a strategic export that works as a part of American foreign policy: other nations are dependent on US crop imports the way they're dependent on oil. In that way, rising output is always great, as it solidifies our position as an exporter, and lowers the price of the material which prevents competition and solidifies this dependence. And it's a better (more affordable) product for the importer countries.
  - kickout 5y ago
    Well stated and I mostly agree
- FpUser 5y ago
  It is strange talking about overproduction when large part of the world is hungry.
  - amerine 5y ago
    OP is spot on. There’s a big reason we use corn for so much more than food today. We over produce it.
  - goatlover 5y ago
    Growing enough food isn't the problem. Distribution, which includes economic and political factors, is the issue. Google tells me that 811 million people go hungry. That's a lot of people, but it's not a large part of the world, since 7 billion people presumably have enough to eat.
    - FpUser 5y ago
      That's the point. Instead of worrying about overproduction we should worry about distributing food to ones they need it. And 811 million is a huge number. Can't be ignored just because another 7B are ok. Also I suspect that there are more than 811 hungry. They're just not literally dying.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    Zimbabwe could easily feed itself and export to other African nations until Mugabe basically threw out all the farmers because they are white. Sending food from developed nations might work over the short term but you know, before the industrial revolution every economy was an agricultural one. The only thing these countries can export is food. If the developed nations want to act as a parent, then they would obviously give a lot of things away for free, just like you give food to your children for free. That's not what's happening though. Institutions like the IMF are counting every dollar owed to them by developing countries.
- xwdv 5y ago
  Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.
- koheripbal 5y ago
  There are certain events in human history that are so destructive, that paying a regular cost to prevent them is wise. Famine is one of those calamities. It will absolutely destroy the entire economy, and get even bring down governments/democracies. Over-production is an absolute conscience choice we make. Do not mistake insurance for waste. Also note that US food surpluses are funnelled into the US Food Aid program which distributes excess production (which we actually used to outright destroy) into preventing famines abroad. This has significant humanitarian, as well as diplomatic value. Because of the intentional overproduction , the US has not had a food shortage for over 100 years, despite occasional crop failures that have occured.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    It's fine if you throw the overproduced food away. If someone gets the silly idea to eat more then you will create massive medical costs in the process.
pnathan 5y ago
Suggestion: go sell something new to people. figure out what they will buy, won't buy, what they are paid for, what they believe. I've worked in ag-tech and I think that long-term sustained contact with decision makers for growing operations will be much more revealing than R&D budgets.
- kickout 5y ago
  Correct, but that data is hard to enumerate and quantify. Long-term sustained contact with decision makers are also a relatively small cabal and notoriously fickle (IMO). It's hard to sell people something new when their margins are very small and the risk of failure is high even when you do _everything_ right (weather). Thus, these decision makers usually go with what has worked in past and are extremely cautious to try something new. That mindset contributes to some serious moats in ag (tractors, seed, chemical, fert companies).
ddimond 5y ago
A potential alternate theory: worsening soil? The 1940-70s productivity boon seems to correlate (to my knowledge) with increased chemical input usage. Perhaps these were short-term wins at the cost of long-term damage.
gtsop 5y ago
IMHO the answer to the question is quite simple and doesn't need any stats from a particular buisness sector of a particular country and 50 paragraphs. Technological progress is not slowing, but it is being slowed down, like accelerating a car while having the handbrake slightly engaged. On one hand we have the constant need to do more with less, building on top of our evergrowing pile of collective knowledge and wisdom. On the other hand we have economic forces that drag down tech progress: Patents, trade secrets, conflicting corporate interests, planned obsolesence etc...
- pawelmurias 5y ago
  Wouldn't planned obsolescence actually speed up tech progress? Old things lasting forever are taking places for new things.
  - gtsop 5y ago
    My thought was that it is a waste of resources: - R&D resources towards making things last less instead of more - If you are a technologist/researcher and you have to constantly pay for more equipment then it is harder to spend those funds in research. Also, I wouldn't agree much with the argument that new things take up space from new things. New and old can co-exist, the issue is that you are buying the same tech over and over again slightly revamped
  - teddyh 5y ago
    Planned obsolescence increases products being bought and sold, but I would guess that it actually decreases innovation, since customers (of a product which breaks or stops being supported) are going to need a new product no matter what – innovation will not increase their need, so innovation is not necessary.
    - maximus-decimus 5y ago
      you might not "need" it, but sellers need to innovate to beat their competition.
orwin 5y ago
If the premise is true, this isn't good news. I know people are still circumspect of `The limit to growth` since their worse predictions (about ressources especially) turned out to be "wrong" (Jury is still out on conventionnal oil tbh), but their optimistic models, even the "business as usual" one, all demand a continuous (or even growing) rate of progress. We can't really afford not to continue progressing in all fields.
halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
We're about to see a huge "Green" revolution (renewables, battery, etc) in the next 10 years as well as huge advancements in medicine. Tbh, I think we're just about to get started with this next wave.
- brighton36 5y ago
  I'm very skeptical that these technologies will be more efficient than incumbent solutions. These products seem to be designed to comport with well intended political goals, rather than consumer preferences. It may be that these products are taxes-by-another-name, as consumers either shell out more money for inferior solutions (ebikes, I guess), or, turn to the secondary market instead (for gas leafblowers, say). After seeing what we did with recycling, I would not be so naive going forward, on the claims of environmentalists. (I still have yet to see the research on the electric car co2 implications of producing batteries and offloading co2 output to power plants, when compared to the incumbent solution)
  - Hokusai 5y ago
    > I still have yet to see the research on the electric car co2 implications of producing batteries and offloading co2 output to power plants, when compared to the incumbent solution - https://www.transportenvironment.org/discover/does-electric-vehicle-emit-less-petrol-or-diesel/ https://www.transportenvironment.org/discover/does-electric-... This numbers take into account that countries like Poland use coal to produce electricity. And even that is improving fast.
    - brighton36 5y ago
      Thank-you. Candidly, I think 'no car' is what we should be promoting. I got rid of mine earlier in the year. I may find out this plan is wishful thinking. We'll see.
    - KptMarchewa 5y ago
      Also, don't forget that even we in Poland use mostly coal for electricity - and will continue for next 20 years - it's share will fall, hopefully drastically.
kickout 5y ago
Good article, although I need to digest some of the points. I don't necessarily agree with a few points. The highlight for me is one of the last graphs showing a sharp deviation in private sector ag R&D and public sector R&D. Private sector agriculture corporations are dominated by legacy multinationals that are very much in the rent-seeking stage of their existence. Because of onerous regulations (that aren't necessarily wrong) it is difficult for start-ups to disrupt these legacy players. However Ag3.0 (yes I am stealing a web3.0 reference) will change this dynamic significantly when this current 'chemical era' in worldwide agriculture burns itself out due to unsustainability. See website in bio for my thoughts. ETA: The 'cheat code' used to get that insane efficiency on corn yields is well known and well understood. Single-cross hybrids. Once scientists/breeders perfected the seed production mechanism, we reap those insane gains in the early 1940s. It was a transcendent change and IMO needs to be analyzed through a different lens that the slow grind of mechanization improvements, fertility improvements, etc. ETA2: this link has a graphic that shows a _different_ measure of efficiency, one that shows steady growth over the past ~50 years. https://thinkingagriculture.io/what-agriculture-has-and-doesnt-have/ https://thinkingagriculture.io/what-agriculture-has-and-does...
tspike 5y ago
"Progress" needs to be defined. What is the goal here? Neither diversity nor soil was mentioned once in TFA. Is yield the only relevant metric? What about quantity/impact of pesticides? Amount of fertilizer required? Sustainability of local communities? Negative externalities?
- kickout 5y ago
  For farmers, yes, yield is the only goal. All of those things you mentioned are intangible at this point and are not incentivized. We need to restructure the incentives around farming away from a commodity perspective (yield) and more around quality (sustainability and all that good stuff). I often say, don't make farmers out to be the bad guys anymore than airplanes, cars, ihpones, etc. that similarly don't price in externalities.
  - tspike 5y ago
    I'm a small-scale farmer. Yield is a secondary goal. Primary goals for me are the health of my land, the quality of life for my animals, and the ability to provide for my family.
    - kickout 5y ago
      Correct, and not to sound too obtuse, but your production 'doesn't really matter' in a supply chain sense. Most agriculture production comes from highly scaled, large operations. My goal is to accept this fact, and try to bring those sustainability qualities to the big guys instead of chopping the big guys up in 1,000 smaller players that _would_ care.
  - BurningFrog 5y ago
    For a farmer, at least those who own the farmland, the sustainability of their land is far more important than the yield this year.
    - nickff 5y ago
      >" For a farmer, at least those who own the farmland, the sustainability of their land is far more important than the yield this year." Sustainability only matters if they can make the mortgage payments this year.
time_to_smile 5y ago
> the enormous increase in agricultural output in the US has been sustained without any significant increase in these two inputs. Land use has stayed roughly flat, while labor has fallen dramatically. That suggests it’s technology that instead accounts for the big upswing in production. It's mind blowing to me that I could find no reference to the Haber process[0] in the article at all. The missing input here is fossil fuels. Certainly mechanical automation has played a factor, but the number 1 contributor to increased crop yields worldwide is the use of nitrogen based fertilizer. We have completely disrupted the natural nitrogen cycle and are completely dependent on nitrogen fixation for modern day agriculture. The Haber process is an essential part of nitrogen fixation and is also completely dependent on natural gas as a feedstock for the process. We have had amazing growth in agricultural output in the last century not because of our inventive minds but because of our ready access to hydrocarbons. In a world increasingly at risk because of this dependence on hydrocarbons it's borderline irresponsible to use agricultural production as a proxy for "technology" and not even mention the relationship to fossil fuels. [0].https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
- Enginerrrd 5y ago
  I feel like this is a little disingenuous. It is currently most economical to source the hydrogen for the Haber process from natural gas, but there are many alternative ways to produce hydrogen. I wouldn't call that true "dependence".
  - time_to_smile 5y ago
    "most economical" is not just some minor feature. If you were to switch to another means of producing hydrogen the price of the process would rise dramatically. The only non-fossil fuel hydrogen generation process is water electrolysis (well and biomass, but guess what's involved in efficiently producing large quantities of biomass). If you currently eliminated fossil fuels from the process the price required to maintain our current food levels would escalate dramatically. In practice this would mean likely that both food production will drop and food prices would rise. I don't think it's disingenuous. Maybe I should add "affordable" as a prefix to nitrogen fixation, but "less economic" fertilizer means "less economic" food which is a fairly big problem.
aiscapehumanity 5y ago
Author discovers technic distribution has diverged from anthropometric spheres, resultingly thinks its declining overall
The_rationalist 5y ago
There are easy ways to bring major yield improvements but scientific knowledge is by default ignored. E.g Skq1

56 points by _Microft 5y ago

jrm4 5y ago

Let me stop this right here; are we equating "OVERproduction of food that we likely don't need" to "progress?"

LeanderK 5y ago
yeah, i was also not sure whether I've missed something. Equating "Technological Progress" to "Increase in Agricultural Output" doesn't make sense...maybe we don't need that much more food, that's why it's slowing down. Maybe the american agricultural output could double in the next 10 years, but is it energy well spent? After all, it's a bit of a zero-sum game, a society has finite capacity for research and must spend its budget wisely.
- lambdadmitry 5y ago
  Agricultural output is usually per unit of land and/or inputs, so more output means less land, less pollution, and less ecological damage for a fixed amount of food produced. If some fields can be reforested instead, it'd pull carbon out of the air and increase biodiversity.
  - tspike 5y ago
    Most agricultural land was short grass or long grass prairie prior to being plowed over. Prairie is the most endangered ecosystem on the planet. Perhaps instead of "reforestation" we can look at restoring native prairie.
  - nosianu 5y ago
    What will happen instead is that all land that could possibly be used will continue to be used. Overproduction will instead be exported, which will hit farmers in less developed countries who cannot compete hard. https://theexchange.africa/industry-and-trade/agribusiness/why-africas-smallholder-growers-cant-compete-with-european-american-farmers/ https://theexchange.africa/industry-and-trade/agribusiness/w... It's not just food from fields. Meat also is overproduced to be exported in countries like the US, UK or Germany and others. https://beef2live.com/story-world-beef-imports-ranking-countries-0-106900 https://beef2live.com/story-world-beef-imports-ranking-count... (some countries, like the US, are both big im- as well as exporters) I know from following relevant news that here in Germany we could significantly scale down our environmentally bad big pig farms, which also suffer from crowded conditions and not exactly a good life for the animals, if not both the businesses involved as well as government concerned about GDP and creating a lot of exports would oppose restrictions on the meat industry. I'm not even against meat at all, but this is a bad cycle. We can export more when/if we are cheap, and that requires industrialized "meat production" to the detriment of the animals. The incentives are wrong IMO. Some might argue that imported cheaper food is better for African countries, but they can't compete on high-tech, they can't compete in agriculture, how are they supposed to bootstrap their economies? There also are reports about all the worn clothing that ends up in Africa, so no local textile industry either. Unchecked, tose able to produce cheaply will never voluntarily restrain themselves and give up "productive land". Instead, they will use their advantage to conquer ever more markets.
- kiba 5y ago
  Is it physically or biologically possible to double agricultural output in the next ten years? It doesn't matter how much you spend on R&D if we hit the limit of what we can do with biology.
  - mikeyouse 5y ago
    Probably yes.. e.g. there's a massive amount of research into RuBisCO. If we could speed up the primary carbon-fixing reaction, we could massively increase Ag output (also could make a dent in carbon sequestration): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RuBisCO#Genetic_engineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RuBisCO#Genetic_engineering There's tons about plant bio we don't fully understand and a lot of room for R&D. An imperfect measure, but in 2021, Google Scholar added over 5,000 results for the term; https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C23&as_ylo=2021&q=rubisco&btnG= https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C23&as_yl...
  - kickout 5y ago
    Yes, it is possible. Probably just entering a new golden age with genomic tools and excellent metadata on the farms that currently do produce. Plenty of arable land, but ideally we only want the most efficient land in production.
  - BurningFrog 5y ago
    If/when we figure out how to make good tasting beef industrially, without the intermittent "there is a cow" stage, the world will change a LOT, for the better.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
droopyEyelids 5y ago
Corn and soybeans are better thought of as raw material for industry, rather than food. We don't need more corn to eat, but alongside the fact that it's an industrial input, it's a strategic export that works as a part of American foreign policy: other nations are dependent on US crop imports the way they're dependent on oil. In that way, rising output is always great, as it solidifies our position as an exporter, and lowers the price of the material which prevents competition and solidifies this dependence. And it's a better (more affordable) product for the importer countries.
- kickout 5y ago
  Well stated and I mostly agree
FpUser 5y ago
It is strange talking about overproduction when large part of the world is hungry.
- amerine 5y ago
  OP is spot on. There’s a big reason we use corn for so much more than food today. We over produce it.
- goatlover 5y ago
  Growing enough food isn't the problem. Distribution, which includes economic and political factors, is the issue. Google tells me that 811 million people go hungry. That's a lot of people, but it's not a large part of the world, since 7 billion people presumably have enough to eat.
  - FpUser 5y ago
    That's the point. Instead of worrying about overproduction we should worry about distributing food to ones they need it. And 811 million is a huge number. Can't be ignored just because another 7B are ok. Also I suspect that there are more than 811 hungry. They're just not literally dying.
- imtringued 5y ago
  Zimbabwe could easily feed itself and export to other African nations until Mugabe basically threw out all the farmers because they are white. Sending food from developed nations might work over the short term but you know, before the industrial revolution every economy was an agricultural one. The only thing these countries can export is food. If the developed nations want to act as a parent, then they would obviously give a lot of things away for free, just like you give food to your children for free. That's not what's happening though. Institutions like the IMF are counting every dollar owed to them by developing countries.
xwdv 5y ago
Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.
koheripbal 5y ago
There are certain events in human history that are so destructive, that paying a regular cost to prevent them is wise. Famine is one of those calamities. It will absolutely destroy the entire economy, and get even bring down governments/democracies. Over-production is an absolute conscience choice we make. Do not mistake insurance for waste. Also note that US food surpluses are funnelled into the US Food Aid program which distributes excess production (which we actually used to outright destroy) into preventing famines abroad. This has significant humanitarian, as well as diplomatic value. Because of the intentional overproduction , the US has not had a food shortage for over 100 years, despite occasional crop failures that have occured.
- imtringued 5y ago
  It's fine if you throw the overproduced food away. If someone gets the silly idea to eat more then you will create massive medical costs in the process.

pnathan 5y ago

Suggestion: go sell something new to people. figure out what they will buy, won't buy, what they are paid for, what they believe. I've worked in ag-tech and I think that long-term sustained contact with decision makers for growing operations will be much more revealing than R&D budgets.

kickout 5y ago
Correct, but that data is hard to enumerate and quantify. Long-term sustained contact with decision makers are also a relatively small cabal and notoriously fickle (IMO). It's hard to sell people something new when their margins are very small and the risk of failure is high even when you do _everything_ right (weather). Thus, these decision makers usually go with what has worked in past and are extremely cautious to try something new. That mindset contributes to some serious moats in ag (tractors, seed, chemical, fert companies).

ddimond 5y ago

A potential alternate theory: worsening soil? The 1940-70s productivity boon seems to correlate (to my knowledge) with increased chemical input usage. Perhaps these were short-term wins at the cost of long-term damage.

gtsop 5y ago

IMHO the answer to the question is quite simple and doesn't need any stats from a particular buisness sector of a particular country and 50 paragraphs. Technological progress is not slowing, but it is being slowed down, like accelerating a car while having the handbrake slightly engaged. On one hand we have the constant need to do more with less, building on top of our evergrowing pile of collective knowledge and wisdom. On the other hand we have economic forces that drag down tech progress: Patents, trade secrets, conflicting corporate interests, planned obsolesence etc...

pawelmurias 5y ago
Wouldn't planned obsolescence actually speed up tech progress? Old things lasting forever are taking places for new things.
- gtsop 5y ago
  My thought was that it is a waste of resources: - R&D resources towards making things last less instead of more - If you are a technologist/researcher and you have to constantly pay for more equipment then it is harder to spend those funds in research. Also, I wouldn't agree much with the argument that new things take up space from new things. New and old can co-exist, the issue is that you are buying the same tech over and over again slightly revamped
- teddyh 5y ago
  Planned obsolescence increases products being bought and sold, but I would guess that it actually decreases innovation, since customers (of a product which breaks or stops being supported) are going to need a new product no matter what – innovation will not increase their need, so innovation is not necessary.
  - maximus-decimus 5y ago
    you might not "need" it, but sellers need to innovate to beat their competition.

orwin 5y ago

If the premise is true, this isn't good news. I know people are still circumspect of `The limit to growth` since their worse predictions (about ressources especially) turned out to be "wrong" (Jury is still out on conventionnal oil tbh), but their optimistic models, even the "business as usual" one, all demand a continuous (or even growing) rate of progress. We can't really afford not to continue progressing in all fields.

halfmatthalfcat 5y ago

We're about to see a huge "Green" revolution (renewables, battery, etc) in the next 10 years as well as huge advancements in medicine. Tbh, I think we're just about to get started with this next wave.

brighton36 5y ago
I'm very skeptical that these technologies will be more efficient than incumbent solutions. These products seem to be designed to comport with well intended political goals, rather than consumer preferences. It may be that these products are taxes-by-another-name, as consumers either shell out more money for inferior solutions (ebikes, I guess), or, turn to the secondary market instead (for gas leafblowers, say). After seeing what we did with recycling, I would not be so naive going forward, on the claims of environmentalists. (I still have yet to see the research on the electric car co2 implications of producing batteries and offloading co2 output to power plants, when compared to the incumbent solution)
- Hokusai 5y ago
  > I still have yet to see the research on the electric car co2 implications of producing batteries and offloading co2 output to power plants, when compared to the incumbent solution - https://www.transportenvironment.org/discover/does-electric-vehicle-emit-less-petrol-or-diesel/ https://www.transportenvironment.org/discover/does-electric-... This numbers take into account that countries like Poland use coal to produce electricity. And even that is improving fast.
  - brighton36 5y ago
    Thank-you. Candidly, I think 'no car' is what we should be promoting. I got rid of mine earlier in the year. I may find out this plan is wishful thinking. We'll see.
  - KptMarchewa 5y ago
    Also, don't forget that even we in Poland use mostly coal for electricity - and will continue for next 20 years - it's share will fall, hopefully drastically.

kickout 5y ago

Good article, although I need to digest some of the points. I don't necessarily agree with a few points. The highlight for me is one of the last graphs showing a sharp deviation in private sector ag R&D and public sector R&D. Private sector agriculture corporations are dominated by legacy multinationals that are very much in the rent-seeking stage of their existence. Because of onerous regulations (that aren't necessarily wrong) it is difficult for start-ups to disrupt these legacy players. However Ag3.0 (yes I am stealing a web3.0 reference) will change this dynamic significantly when this current 'chemical era' in worldwide agriculture burns itself out due to unsustainability. See website in bio for my thoughts. ETA: The 'cheat code' used to get that insane efficiency on corn yields is well known and well understood. Single-cross hybrids. Once scientists/breeders perfected the seed production mechanism, we reap those insane gains in the early 1940s. It was a transcendent change and IMO needs to be analyzed through a different lens that the slow grind of mechanization improvements, fertility improvements, etc. ETA2: this link has a graphic that shows a _different_ measure of efficiency, one that shows steady growth over the past ~50 years. https://thinkingagriculture.io/what-agriculture-has-and-doesnt-have/ https://thinkingagriculture.io/what-agriculture-has-and-does...

tspike 5y ago

"Progress" needs to be defined. What is the goal here? Neither diversity nor soil was mentioned once in TFA. Is yield the only relevant metric? What about quantity/impact of pesticides? Amount of fertilizer required? Sustainability of local communities? Negative externalities?

kickout 5y ago
For farmers, yes, yield is the only goal. All of those things you mentioned are intangible at this point and are not incentivized. We need to restructure the incentives around farming away from a commodity perspective (yield) and more around quality (sustainability and all that good stuff). I often say, don't make farmers out to be the bad guys anymore than airplanes, cars, ihpones, etc. that similarly don't price in externalities.
- tspike 5y ago
  I'm a small-scale farmer. Yield is a secondary goal. Primary goals for me are the health of my land, the quality of life for my animals, and the ability to provide for my family.
  - kickout 5y ago
    Correct, and not to sound too obtuse, but your production 'doesn't really matter' in a supply chain sense. Most agriculture production comes from highly scaled, large operations. My goal is to accept this fact, and try to bring those sustainability qualities to the big guys instead of chopping the big guys up in 1,000 smaller players that _would_ care.
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  For a farmer, at least those who own the farmland, the sustainability of their land is far more important than the yield this year.
  - nickff 5y ago
    >" For a farmer, at least those who own the farmland, the sustainability of their land is far more important than the yield this year." Sustainability only matters if they can make the mortgage payments this year.

time_to_smile 5y ago

> the enormous increase in agricultural output in the US has been sustained without any significant increase in these two inputs. Land use has stayed roughly flat, while labor has fallen dramatically. That suggests it’s technology that instead accounts for the big upswing in production. It's mind blowing to me that I could find no reference to the Haber process[0] in the article at all. The missing input here is fossil fuels. Certainly mechanical automation has played a factor, but the number 1 contributor to increased crop yields worldwide is the use of nitrogen based fertilizer. We have completely disrupted the natural nitrogen cycle and are completely dependent on nitrogen fixation for modern day agriculture. The Haber process is an essential part of nitrogen fixation and is also completely dependent on natural gas as a feedstock for the process. We have had amazing growth in agricultural output in the last century not because of our inventive minds but because of our ready access to hydrocarbons. In a world increasingly at risk because of this dependence on hydrocarbons it's borderline irresponsible to use agricultural production as a proxy for "technology" and not even mention the relationship to fossil fuels. [0].https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process

Enginerrrd 5y ago
I feel like this is a little disingenuous. It is currently most economical to source the hydrogen for the Haber process from natural gas, but there are many alternative ways to produce hydrogen. I wouldn't call that true "dependence".
- time_to_smile 5y ago
  "most economical" is not just some minor feature. If you were to switch to another means of producing hydrogen the price of the process would rise dramatically. The only non-fossil fuel hydrogen generation process is water electrolysis (well and biomass, but guess what's involved in efficiently producing large quantities of biomass). If you currently eliminated fossil fuels from the process the price required to maintain our current food levels would escalate dramatically. In practice this would mean likely that both food production will drop and food prices would rise. I don't think it's disingenuous. Maybe I should add "affordable" as a prefix to nitrogen fixation, but "less economic" fertilizer means "less economic" food which is a fairly big problem.

aiscapehumanity 5y ago

Author discovers technic distribution has diverged from anthropometric spheres, resultingly thinks its declining overall

The_rationalist 5y ago

There are easy ways to bring major yield improvements but scientific knowledge is by default ignored. E.g Skq1