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‘Farms are failing’ as fertilizer prices drive up cost of food

158 points by lxm 5y ago

torpfactory 5y ago
Eliminate subsidies and mandates for ethanol in gasoline. 14-16 million acres of land devoted to a mono crop of corn requiring copious fertilizer and pesticide. Basically this converts oil into a slightly larger quantity of ethanol with some of the most productive farmland in the world.
LatteLazy 5y ago
The problem with farms is they are small businesses. But instead of having entrepreneurs or managers, or some other competent people, they have farmers in charge. And farmers absolutely refuse to do things like accounts or business plans or learning about farming.
- trynumber9 5y ago
  Are you getting your knowledge from stereotypes? I know farmers from my time in a rural midwestern high school and I keep in touch with some. They plan extensively and know more about accounting than I do. Some have agricultural or business degrees too. People generally prefer to make more money for their effort and will take steps in the direction. Sure there are the backward, resistant type of farmers too. But they're not the majority because such farms are much more prone to failure. It doesn't matter if the stereotype is that farmers are all backwards, they adapt to economic pressures regardless.
- Incipient 5y ago
  While you may be right in some cases, or in other countries, here in Australia, farming in general is a highly developed industry with both very modern business models, and a rapidly digitising business platform.
tclover 5y ago
sanctions to Belaruskali in action lol
Incipient 5y ago
Does anyone have a clue why we've suddenly run into fertiliser shortages? I feel like fertiliser and food demands should be fairly slow-moving? Not going up 3x in the space of 18mo.
- pas 5y ago
  Price of inputs increased. Logistic network efficiency fell, delays, ports, trucks, COVID increased labor and other costs. That said, who knows. It's a complex system, cascading failures are common. Maybe the demand shock of the pandemic (restaurants cancelled orders, farmers cut back demand for fertilizer, factories predicted big demand decrease, but that was successfully "worked around" by government intervention, now the demand is higer than estimated, plus the aforementioned other factors.)
trembonator 5y ago
webmobdev 5y ago
The states of Punjab and Haryana are known as the "food bowl" of India, as their agrarian economy provides a huge share of our food that India needs. The "green revolution" was quite successful in these states and made India a food surplus country, from one that used to face famine and depend on foreign countries for its food. (Despite our economically dysfunctional farming economy, India is currently one of the largest producers of food in the world). An unfortunate side effect has been the overuse of insecticide, pesticides and fertilizers, and poor planning in the choice of crops leading to excessive depletion of groundwater for water hungry crops like rice (which is a staple food for half the country) - https://eos.org/articles/indias-food-bowl-heads-toward-desertification https://eos.org/articles/indias-food-bowl-heads-toward-deser... ... Due to this, the fertile soils are being damaged, and farmers are blindly overcompensating with even more fertilizers. The second problem that has now come up is that we are producing so much, that sometimes huge quantities of grain just rot in government storages. So the new Chief Minister of Punjab had suggested a novel idea - if the central government were to increase their procurement price (the government is the largest buyer in India), a large number of farmers could shift to organic farming that would be more sustainable in the long run. While the produce output would be less by 25% to 40% with organic farming (hence the need of increase in the procurement price) less production can address the wastage that happens. Moreover, organic produce is said to be safer and healthier due to the very limited use of insecticides / pesticides and fertilizers, and that would make India healthier.
Bostonian 5y ago
The climate change activists who want to cut oil and natural gas production should consider the consequences: "The price-increases stem partly from global energy costs, with the average natural-gas price in Europe for the October-December quarter 10 times as much as that for the year of 2020, according to World Bank data. Nitrogen production facilities rely heavily on natural gas to convert chemical raw materials into finished products, so rises in the natural-gas price often flow through into fertilizer costs. Major fertilizer producers including China, Turkey, Egypt and Russia also curbed exports in the second half of 2021, further pushing up global prices."
- chrissnell 5y ago
  It's sad that you are being downvoted. Nothing that you said was factually incorrect. People just want to squelch you because they don't like these facts and what they imply. Ideology is making things terrible for everybody.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - JoeAltmaier 5y ago
    Or, read the comments and try to understand.
- rektide 5y ago
  This feels like a cheap & easy way to revel in scorching the earth. If we tried to solve the energy problem at any sizable scale (nuclear or renewable, some of the low-hanging efficiencies available), so many other needs for oil & gas would taper. Prices could be stable or ideally decrease, while production is cut. We've seen too many instances of electricity getting expensive, gas being a better alternative. We need to do better. I'm not even starting in on engaging what I think is the more contemporary geopolitical influence, the reduction in exports you cite.
- Scoundreller 5y ago
  Don’t underestimate the natural gas consumption by the oil industry. Since it’s cheaper than oil as an energy source, gas fuels refining, transportion and a lot of extraction of oil. 1/4 of Canada’s natgas consumption is from Alberta’s oil sands industry. https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/market-snapshots/2017/market-snapshot-natural-gas-plays-important-role-in-albertas-oil-sands.html https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/ma...
aemreunal 5y ago
https://archive.fo/Hvc9L https://archive.fo/Hvc9L
rr808 5y ago
This is a good thing, fertilizer is heavily overused, poisoning waterways. Yes the cost of food may go up as a result but the current farming practices are unsustainable.
- mc32 5y ago
  It means poor people will suffer. Overpopulated paces may suffer more. Places experiencing bad crops as well…. It’s not something to celebrate in detachment. [the market, and thus price of food staples, is global]
  - Gigachad 5y ago
    More production will be moved from grain for cattle to growing food for humans. We can massively scale up our food production if we remove beef from the average diet.
    - mc32 5y ago
      It means everything will get more expensive. Poor people also eat meats. Their staple grains will go up, and if the feed for chickens and cows goes up, so will their meat.
      - woodruffw 5y ago
        I think the person you’re responding to is saying that it’s good that we’ll all be eating less meat. There’s an important point to be made about inequity and the decline of commodity meat, but that point doesn’t detract from the fact that it’s probably good for everyone involved and the planet for us to be eating less meat.
        mc32 5y ago
        Yes, over time, that would be fine, but not a shock induced by the high prices of fertilizer that immediately affect prices --inducing glee in some because they don't see the immediate detrimental effects.
teslabox 5y ago
There are options besides chemical fertilizers. The nodules on legume root are a symbiotic home for nitrogen-fixing bacteria. Farmers traditionally rotate corn and soybeans to reduce their nitrogen costs. Other plants have deeper roots, which pull up nutrients... My comment about biological nitrogen fixation (15 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29829580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29829580 Saw this recently: Black eyed peas could help eliminate need for fertilizer: Popular legume attracts beneficial nitrogen-fixing bacteria - https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2022/01/20/black-eyed-peas-could-help-eliminate-need-fertilizer https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2022/01/20/black-eyed-peas-cou... One of the problems with holistic agriculture is you have to understand more about what plants actually need to grow, and think more to figure out how to work with what you've got. I used to have a local farm that made a great mulch with wood chips and feathers from their turkey operation. Blood meal [1] (nitrogen) and bone meal [2] (calcium, phosphorous) are also good fertilizers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_meal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_meal [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_meal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_meal
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- beebmam 5y ago
  We could all benefit from eating more legumes in our diets, well most of us at least
- gruez 5y ago
  >There are options besides chemical fertilizers. But as it relates to this problem (ie. food getting more expensive), your suggestion doesn't make any sense. Considering that the methods you described aren't widely used, I think it's safe to say that they're more expensive than using synthetic fertilizers. Therefore if we implemented that suggestion we wouldn't have higher food prices... because the food prices would be high to start with, probably much higher than it ever be with synthetic fertilizers.
  - jelliclesfarm 5y ago
SEJeff 5y ago
There is also a slightly different way to grow food using a less intense fertilizer called "square foot gardening". https://squarefootgardening.org/ https://squarefootgardening.org/ There is a best selling book about it and it works surprisingly well. The secret fertilizer for this, affectionately known as "Mel's Mix" recipe is available for anyone to make their own. It's not even terribly hard if you're willing to do a bit of composting outside on your own.
- AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  Efficiency arguments aside, the best thing about home gardening is the buffer it provides for supply uncertainty, since we don't warehouse anything anymore or plan for disruption.
- wombat-man 5y ago
  The US food system at least is designed to generate a lot of food efficiently. This could definitely work, and the food is probably better. But being able to generate cheap calories on demand is a major priority.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- fennecfoxen 5y ago
  How actionable do you think this is to a farmer growing staple crops in sub-Saharan africa?
- Turing_Machine 5y ago
  Edit: "wheat" -> "corn" "Square foot gardening" with hand labor isn't going to replace the 772 million metric tons of wheat and 1 billion metric tons of corn produced annually. Sorry, it just isn't. Given that it's January, why not try the experiment of producing all the food you personally consume this year using the techniques in this book? Growing a few tomatoes and a bit of lettuce is pretty easy, and is a fun and rewarding hobby. Producing every single calorie you consume using only hand labor and no chemical fertilizer is an entirely different kettle of fish. We actually ran that experiment for several millennia. It produced societies in which 90+% of the population were slaves, serfs, or other unfree agricultural laborers. I'd rather we not go back to that, personally.
ploden 5y ago
Maybe we should end the government mandate to burn corn in car engines. Biden seems more pro-ethanol than Trump, I have no idea why.
- wallacoloo 5y ago
  i always assumed ethanol production was encouraged by the govt precisely to spur excess production of corn so as to make our food production more robust. i.e. during a bad year of food production, halt ethanol production and redirect that excess of corn back into the food supply; crisis averted. is that not the case?
  - COGlory 5y ago
    It's because Iowa has a law saying their presidential primary must be first.
  - Beached 5y ago
    the corn used for ethenol is not the same corn used for consumption.
    - gruez 5y ago
      Is it? I get it's not sweet corn (ie. corn on the cob or canned/frozen corn), but it should still be starchy and edible (think tortilla corn).
  - dehrmann 5y ago
    There was a time when I wasn't a fan of the government subsidizing farmers with policies like that, but the cost of underproduction of food is too high, and it's not a problem markets will solve, so it makes sense for governments to step in and overproduce food.
  - beerandt 5y ago
    Subsides are never such simple handouts. Corn and ag subsidies have as much or more to do with govt "buying" surplus and "selling" it to foreign countries as part of aid packages. And dominating the world grain market, which gives the US even more indirect control over foreign grain growing capabilities, making others reliant on the US. (Bc investing in local production is risky when the US can just flood the market.) Separately, most corn grown for ethanol or animal feed isn't going to directly be rerouted to food supply, unless we approach a full collapse type situation (and even then, it would be more market and regulation collapse and black market emergence than due to policy changes). But keeping those farmers in business and capable of growing table corn next season (with minimal capital investment or changes to practices required) accomplishes roughly the same thing.
inamberclad 5y ago
World hunger for the first world maybe. 80% of global food is still produced in very small, un-industrial family farms.
- bryanlarsen 5y ago
  Source? I suspect the number is closer to 20% than 80.
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    FAO’s SOFA report (2014a) estimated, based on an analysis of just 30 countries using the 2000 round of agricultural census data, that there are approximately 500 million family farmers in the world who produce 80% of the world’s food From: https://pure.coventry.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/11930738/1_s2.0_S0305750X15001217_main.pdf https://pure.coventry.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/11930738/1...
    - bryanlarsen 5y ago
      So? My father in law runs a family farm that is over 4 square miles and his neighbor runs one that is over 40. The neighboring Hutterite colony is even bigger. All are very heavily industrialized.
- kspacewalk2 5y ago
  Equally wrong in both counts. Most of the food in the world is produced by industrial farming. And it is (obviously) the poor (people and countries) who will be disproportionately affected by this, as they are by any price shocks. Your food costs will go up, people in Somalia will starve to death.
- TheGigaChad 5y ago
Wesxdz 5y ago
Energy descent hasn't even started yet lol https://youtu.be/uqwWdranB5A https://youtu.be/uqwWdranB5A
trynumber9 5y ago
[flagged]
- giraffe_lady 5y ago
  This describes the comment section of at least one article here every week.
- dzhiurgis 5y ago
  What happened to ngate tho? It’s been dead for months.
nostromo 5y ago
Print several trillion dollars to induce demand while shutting down industry worldwide off and on for two years, which reduces supply. It’s obvious this will cause prices to rise dramatically.
- fennecfoxen 5y ago
  Hello! Urea fertilizer has jumped from $400/ton to $1100/ton in a year. This is not consistent with the price jump being caused by inflation, which remains at much more modest rates. The prices are higher due energy prices rising in Europe and China, natural gas supply disruptions in Texas due to hurricanes and floods, and sanctions on Belarus. They are a driver of inflation, not caused by inflation.
  - WheatM 5y ago
  - nostromo 5y ago
    Inflation is never evenly distributed. That doesn’t dispute the cause for widespread inflation. Inflation is higher than it’s been in 40 years, and that timeframe includes several energy cost spikes, many of which were worse than the current spike.
    - dundarious 5y ago
      For this specific discussion, why focus on inflation (price increases in a broad basket of goods) at all, when it's a specific subset that is causing the issue, and the reasons for price increases in that subset is dominated by specific causation, disconnected from the purported reasons for the broader basket. Because any fixes for the broader inflation problem would have relatively little effect on this specific subset.
      - yossarian1408 5y ago
        ...can you completely discount that rising energy prices may be due to inflationary monetary policy? A higher money supply means more competition for less resources, and if the ultimate resource in nearly every supply chain is energy than it would be sensible to think this could be the starting point of a vicious cycle, rather than sanctions on Belarus or floods in Texas.
markvdb 5y ago
Food prices rising means hunger means social unrest. The developed world is not entirely out of the woods. With low natural gas prices and heavily subsidised food, the poor of the US should hopefully come out relatively unharmed. It's going to be worse in the EU and its periphery: - High dependence on Russian natural gas. - Lots of fertiliser depends on Belarussian potash here. - The natural gas crisis is halting lots of energy intensive processes all over Europe already.
- q1w2 5y ago
  We over-produce a lot of food in the west. I think there's very little risk of hunger.
  - markvdb 5y ago
    It's not about there not being food. It's about people being too poor to buy it, many of them in the eastern EU. Some anecdotal evidence that might sound extreme, but actually isn't. I know an old lady over 80 from Latvia. She worked all her life as a university trained economist. Like almost all people her age, her savings were eaten by the socio-economic chaos of the '90s. She has a <400€/month net pension (considered high locally!) and owns her apartment. She mainly pays for utilities, medical care and food. Without her vegetable garden and her family's financial support, she'd be living in abject poverty. What do you think happens when her utilities double, and her food becomes >10% more expensive? Reality is much bleaker than that for the majority of Latvian pensioners. Not all have a "high" pension of almost 400€. Not all are in good health. Not all have financial support from younger generations. Some of them are going to go hungry.
damnesian 5y ago
It's time to bring back the old practices of crop rotation and use of the chain of life in a healthy ecosystem to manage overgrowth of pest crops. In the old times, farmers depended on birds, insects and rodents to control pests Humanity took tens of thousands of years to perfect agriculture. It's taken humanity in the modern chemical-dependent age less than a hundred years of monoculture to push it to the brink of collapse. Granted, yields will be lower. But instead of growing seed corn and soy beans, farmers need to diversify and bring back species that are unique to their regions- that were carefully selected and bred to grow best in that area. Did you know one in the early 20th century, one of the greatest exporters of apples was the state of Iowa? Not now.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
  This won’t work unless large numbers of people can go back to being farmers and leave their pointless lives in bullshit jobs sitting at a computer looking at Facebook all day. We would have to pay farmers a real wage again and pay more for healthy food that tastes great and doesn’t kill us. It sounds like a beautiful future and I’ve been contemplating and wishing that could happen for humanity a lot recently. I recommend the documentary Ingredients if you haven’t seen it. It’s on Tubi for free. It changed the way I look at food and the world.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
flenserboy 5y ago
Pastures are the future. There's a reason the US Midwest had such great soil — it's not simply a confluence of rivers & luck. The buffalo did their thing, and the grasses they fed on were fed in turn by them. Replacing corn and soy with ruminants will replenish the soil, provide excellent protein for people, and get rid of the cheap, food-like things made from corn, soy, and their chemically-coaxed out byproducts. It's not too late. (A nice effect of this would be the likely (it'll take a while) replenishment of the Ogallala Aquifer.)
- aeternum 5y ago
  Before artificial fertilizer, world famines were commonplace and the base rate of starvation was very high compared to today. I hope that anyone truly advocating for a return to that world has studied history and understands the consequences.
- smallerfish 5y ago
  "Livestock takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land, yet produces less than 20% of the world’s supply of calories." https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets "So if this system is so ideal, why is it that my cow hasn’t tasted a blade of grass since October? Speed, in a word. Cows raised on grass simply take longer to reach slaughter weight than cows raised on a richer diet, and the modern meat industry has devoted itself to shortening a beef calf’s allotted time on earth." https://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/power-steer/ https://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/power-steer/
  - cf141q5325 5y ago
    Thats a simplification for a feel good narrative. Your source lists all land that grows anything but forest as agriculture land. Yet on large parts of those areas you cant do anything but pastures. Also, much of the cow feed isnt calories humans can process. Think byproducts of soy production. The youtube channel "What I've Learned" has a great video on it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGG-A80Tl5g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGG-A80Tl5g What they dont mention is the large part livestock (especially cows an chicken) will have to play in producing soil from the dirt left behind after industrial agriculture. Regenerative agriculture is the term here, with rotating cows and chickens on degraded dirt patches to build top soil. All of this of course doesnt take away from the madness that is industrial meat production. But nothing has ever been solved by oversimplified narratives and action-ism.
jtwebman 5y ago
I think no-dig would work way better but we need machines that can do that to take it to scale. So maybe the farms need to fail to get there. Also doesn't help that 80% goes to feed animals.
99_00 5y ago
Physical laws don’t care about good intentions. Expect more “surprises”.
Razengan 5y ago
Something that bugs me: How much human poop is generated worldwide every day and where does it go?? Why isn’t some of it used as fertilizer, or is it?
- cronix 5y ago
  The UK is importing human waste from the Netherlands to be used as fertilizer. I guess they don't eat enough in the UK to produce what they need locally? Odd thing to need to import! https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/02/sewage-sludge-containing-human-waste-uk https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/02/sewage-s...
- freshpots 5y ago
  https://www.epa.gov/biosolids https://www.epa.gov/biosolids
- unquietcode 5y ago
  It is used as fertilizer, often not for food consumption. You would be depressed to know how many horrible things are to be found in human excrement, including pharmaceuticals, plastics, fire retardants, etc. To me the greatest use of human waste would be carbon sequestration. Think about it: we have an existing network of pipelines directly from every house to a centralized facility that can collect, dry, and [optionally] store that output in the soil or elsewhere for many years.
throwawaymanbot 5y ago

158 points by lxm 5y ago

Eliminate subsidies and mandates for ethanol in gasoline. 14-16 million acres of land devoted to a mono crop of corn requiring copious fertilizer and pesticide. Basically this converts oil into a slightly larger quantity of ethanol with some of the most productive farmland in the world.

LatteLazy 5y ago

The problem with farms is they are small businesses. But instead of having entrepreneurs or managers, or some other competent people, they have farmers in charge. And farmers absolutely refuse to do things like accounts or business plans or learning about farming.

trynumber9 5y ago
Are you getting your knowledge from stereotypes? I know farmers from my time in a rural midwestern high school and I keep in touch with some. They plan extensively and know more about accounting than I do. Some have agricultural or business degrees too. People generally prefer to make more money for their effort and will take steps in the direction. Sure there are the backward, resistant type of farmers too. But they're not the majority because such farms are much more prone to failure. It doesn't matter if the stereotype is that farmers are all backwards, they adapt to economic pressures regardless.
Incipient 5y ago
While you may be right in some cases, or in other countries, here in Australia, farming in general is a highly developed industry with both very modern business models, and a rapidly digitising business platform.

tclover 5y ago

sanctions to Belaruskali in action lol

Incipient 5y ago

Does anyone have a clue why we've suddenly run into fertiliser shortages? I feel like fertiliser and food demands should be fairly slow-moving? Not going up 3x in the space of 18mo.

pas 5y ago
Price of inputs increased. Logistic network efficiency fell, delays, ports, trucks, COVID increased labor and other costs. That said, who knows. It's a complex system, cascading failures are common. Maybe the demand shock of the pandemic (restaurants cancelled orders, farmers cut back demand for fertilizer, factories predicted big demand decrease, but that was successfully "worked around" by government intervention, now the demand is higer than estimated, plus the aforementioned other factors.)

trembonator 5y ago

webmobdev 5y ago

The states of Punjab and Haryana are known as the "food bowl" of India, as their agrarian economy provides a huge share of our food that India needs. The "green revolution" was quite successful in these states and made India a food surplus country, from one that used to face famine and depend on foreign countries for its food. (Despite our economically dysfunctional farming economy, India is currently one of the largest producers of food in the world). An unfortunate side effect has been the overuse of insecticide, pesticides and fertilizers, and poor planning in the choice of crops leading to excessive depletion of groundwater for water hungry crops like rice (which is a staple food for half the country) - https://eos.org/articles/indias-food-bowl-heads-toward-desertification https://eos.org/articles/indias-food-bowl-heads-toward-deser... ... Due to this, the fertile soils are being damaged, and farmers are blindly overcompensating with even more fertilizers. The second problem that has now come up is that we are producing so much, that sometimes huge quantities of grain just rot in government storages. So the new Chief Minister of Punjab had suggested a novel idea - if the central government were to increase their procurement price (the government is the largest buyer in India), a large number of farmers could shift to organic farming that would be more sustainable in the long run. While the produce output would be less by 25% to 40% with organic farming (hence the need of increase in the procurement price) less production can address the wastage that happens. Moreover, organic produce is said to be safer and healthier due to the very limited use of insecticides / pesticides and fertilizers, and that would make India healthier.

Bostonian 5y ago

The climate change activists who want to cut oil and natural gas production should consider the consequences: "The price-increases stem partly from global energy costs, with the average natural-gas price in Europe for the October-December quarter 10 times as much as that for the year of 2020, according to World Bank data. Nitrogen production facilities rely heavily on natural gas to convert chemical raw materials into finished products, so rises in the natural-gas price often flow through into fertilizer costs. Major fertilizer producers including China, Turkey, Egypt and Russia also curbed exports in the second half of 2021, further pushing up global prices."

chrissnell 5y ago
It's sad that you are being downvoted. Nothing that you said was factually incorrect. People just want to squelch you because they don't like these facts and what they imply. Ideology is making things terrible for everybody.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- JoeAltmaier 5y ago
  Or, read the comments and try to understand.
rektide 5y ago
This feels like a cheap & easy way to revel in scorching the earth. If we tried to solve the energy problem at any sizable scale (nuclear or renewable, some of the low-hanging efficiencies available), so many other needs for oil & gas would taper. Prices could be stable or ideally decrease, while production is cut. We've seen too many instances of electricity getting expensive, gas being a better alternative. We need to do better. I'm not even starting in on engaging what I think is the more contemporary geopolitical influence, the reduction in exports you cite.
Scoundreller 5y ago
Don’t underestimate the natural gas consumption by the oil industry. Since it’s cheaper than oil as an energy source, gas fuels refining, transportion and a lot of extraction of oil. 1/4 of Canada’s natgas consumption is from Alberta’s oil sands industry. https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/market-snapshots/2017/market-snapshot-natural-gas-plays-important-role-in-albertas-oil-sands.html https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/ma...

aemreunal 5y ago

https://archive.fo/Hvc9L https://archive.fo/Hvc9L

rr808 5y ago

This is a good thing, fertilizer is heavily overused, poisoning waterways. Yes the cost of food may go up as a result but the current farming practices are unsustainable.

mc32 5y ago
It means poor people will suffer. Overpopulated paces may suffer more. Places experiencing bad crops as well…. It’s not something to celebrate in detachment. [the market, and thus price of food staples, is global]
- Gigachad 5y ago
  More production will be moved from grain for cattle to growing food for humans. We can massively scale up our food production if we remove beef from the average diet.
  - mc32 5y ago
    It means everything will get more expensive. Poor people also eat meats. Their staple grains will go up, and if the feed for chickens and cows goes up, so will their meat.
    - woodruffw 5y ago
      I think the person you’re responding to is saying that it’s good that we’ll all be eating less meat. There’s an important point to be made about inequity and the decline of commodity meat, but that point doesn’t detract from the fact that it’s probably good for everyone involved and the planet for us to be eating less meat.
      - mc32 5y ago
        Yes, over time, that would be fine, but not a shock induced by the high prices of fertilizer that immediately affect prices --inducing glee in some because they don't see the immediate detrimental effects.

teslabox 5y ago

There are options besides chemical fertilizers. The nodules on legume root are a symbiotic home for nitrogen-fixing bacteria. Farmers traditionally rotate corn and soybeans to reduce their nitrogen costs. Other plants have deeper roots, which pull up nutrients... My comment about biological nitrogen fixation (15 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29829580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29829580 Saw this recently: Black eyed peas could help eliminate need for fertilizer: Popular legume attracts beneficial nitrogen-fixing bacteria - https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2022/01/20/black-eyed-peas-could-help-eliminate-need-fertilizer https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2022/01/20/black-eyed-peas-cou... One of the problems with holistic agriculture is you have to understand more about what plants actually need to grow, and think more to figure out how to work with what you've got. I used to have a local farm that made a great mulch with wood chips and feathers from their turkey operation. Blood meal [1] (nitrogen) and bone meal [2] (calcium, phosphorous) are also good fertilizers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_meal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_meal [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_meal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_meal

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
beebmam 5y ago
We could all benefit from eating more legumes in our diets, well most of us at least
gruez 5y ago
>There are options besides chemical fertilizers. But as it relates to this problem (ie. food getting more expensive), your suggestion doesn't make any sense. Considering that the methods you described aren't widely used, I think it's safe to say that they're more expensive than using synthetic fertilizers. Therefore if we implemented that suggestion we wouldn't have higher food prices... because the food prices would be high to start with, probably much higher than it ever be with synthetic fertilizers.
- jelliclesfarm 5y ago

SEJeff 5y ago

There is also a slightly different way to grow food using a less intense fertilizer called "square foot gardening". https://squarefootgardening.org/ https://squarefootgardening.org/ There is a best selling book about it and it works surprisingly well. The secret fertilizer for this, affectionately known as "Mel's Mix" recipe is available for anyone to make their own. It's not even terribly hard if you're willing to do a bit of composting outside on your own.

AtlasBarfed 5y ago
Efficiency arguments aside, the best thing about home gardening is the buffer it provides for supply uncertainty, since we don't warehouse anything anymore or plan for disruption.
wombat-man 5y ago
The US food system at least is designed to generate a lot of food efficiently. This could definitely work, and the food is probably better. But being able to generate cheap calories on demand is a major priority.
- deleted 5y ago
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fennecfoxen 5y ago
How actionable do you think this is to a farmer growing staple crops in sub-Saharan africa?
Turing_Machine 5y ago
Edit: "wheat" -> "corn" "Square foot gardening" with hand labor isn't going to replace the 772 million metric tons of wheat and 1 billion metric tons of corn produced annually. Sorry, it just isn't. Given that it's January, why not try the experiment of producing all the food you personally consume this year using the techniques in this book? Growing a few tomatoes and a bit of lettuce is pretty easy, and is a fun and rewarding hobby. Producing every single calorie you consume using only hand labor and no chemical fertilizer is an entirely different kettle of fish. We actually ran that experiment for several millennia. It produced societies in which 90+% of the population were slaves, serfs, or other unfree agricultural laborers. I'd rather we not go back to that, personally.

ploden 5y ago

Maybe we should end the government mandate to burn corn in car engines. Biden seems more pro-ethanol than Trump, I have no idea why.

wallacoloo 5y ago
i always assumed ethanol production was encouraged by the govt precisely to spur excess production of corn so as to make our food production more robust. i.e. during a bad year of food production, halt ethanol production and redirect that excess of corn back into the food supply; crisis averted. is that not the case?
- COGlory 5y ago
  It's because Iowa has a law saying their presidential primary must be first.
- Beached 5y ago
  the corn used for ethenol is not the same corn used for consumption.
  - gruez 5y ago
    Is it? I get it's not sweet corn (ie. corn on the cob or canned/frozen corn), but it should still be starchy and edible (think tortilla corn).
- dehrmann 5y ago
  There was a time when I wasn't a fan of the government subsidizing farmers with policies like that, but the cost of underproduction of food is too high, and it's not a problem markets will solve, so it makes sense for governments to step in and overproduce food.
- beerandt 5y ago
  Subsides are never such simple handouts. Corn and ag subsidies have as much or more to do with govt "buying" surplus and "selling" it to foreign countries as part of aid packages. And dominating the world grain market, which gives the US even more indirect control over foreign grain growing capabilities, making others reliant on the US. (Bc investing in local production is risky when the US can just flood the market.) Separately, most corn grown for ethanol or animal feed isn't going to directly be rerouted to food supply, unless we approach a full collapse type situation (and even then, it would be more market and regulation collapse and black market emergence than due to policy changes). But keeping those farmers in business and capable of growing table corn next season (with minimal capital investment or changes to practices required) accomplishes roughly the same thing.

inamberclad 5y ago

World hunger for the first world maybe. 80% of global food is still produced in very small, un-industrial family farms.

bryanlarsen 5y ago
Source? I suspect the number is closer to 20% than 80.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  FAO’s SOFA report (2014a) estimated, based on an analysis of just 30 countries using the 2000 round of agricultural census data, that there are approximately 500 million family farmers in the world who produce 80% of the world’s food From: https://pure.coventry.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/11930738/1_s2.0_S0305750X15001217_main.pdf https://pure.coventry.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/11930738/1...
  - bryanlarsen 5y ago
    So? My father in law runs a family farm that is over 4 square miles and his neighbor runs one that is over 40. The neighboring Hutterite colony is even bigger. All are very heavily industrialized.
kspacewalk2 5y ago
Equally wrong in both counts. Most of the food in the world is produced by industrial farming. And it is (obviously) the poor (people and countries) who will be disproportionately affected by this, as they are by any price shocks. Your food costs will go up, people in Somalia will starve to death.
TheGigaChad 5y ago

Wesxdz 5y ago

Energy descent hasn't even started yet lol https://youtu.be/uqwWdranB5A https://youtu.be/uqwWdranB5A

trynumber9 5y ago

[flagged]

giraffe_lady 5y ago
This describes the comment section of at least one article here every week.
dzhiurgis 5y ago
What happened to ngate tho? It’s been dead for months.

nostromo 5y ago

Print several trillion dollars to induce demand while shutting down industry worldwide off and on for two years, which reduces supply. It’s obvious this will cause prices to rise dramatically.

fennecfoxen 5y ago
Hello! Urea fertilizer has jumped from $400/ton to $1100/ton in a year. This is not consistent with the price jump being caused by inflation, which remains at much more modest rates. The prices are higher due energy prices rising in Europe and China, natural gas supply disruptions in Texas due to hurricanes and floods, and sanctions on Belarus. They are a driver of inflation, not caused by inflation.
- WheatM 5y ago
- nostromo 5y ago
  Inflation is never evenly distributed. That doesn’t dispute the cause for widespread inflation. Inflation is higher than it’s been in 40 years, and that timeframe includes several energy cost spikes, many of which were worse than the current spike.
  - dundarious 5y ago
    For this specific discussion, why focus on inflation (price increases in a broad basket of goods) at all, when it's a specific subset that is causing the issue, and the reasons for price increases in that subset is dominated by specific causation, disconnected from the purported reasons for the broader basket. Because any fixes for the broader inflation problem would have relatively little effect on this specific subset.
    - yossarian1408 5y ago
      ...can you completely discount that rising energy prices may be due to inflationary monetary policy? A higher money supply means more competition for less resources, and if the ultimate resource in nearly every supply chain is energy than it would be sensible to think this could be the starting point of a vicious cycle, rather than sanctions on Belarus or floods in Texas.

markvdb 5y ago

Food prices rising means hunger means social unrest. The developed world is not entirely out of the woods. With low natural gas prices and heavily subsidised food, the poor of the US should hopefully come out relatively unharmed. It's going to be worse in the EU and its periphery: - High dependence on Russian natural gas. - Lots of fertiliser depends on Belarussian potash here. - The natural gas crisis is halting lots of energy intensive processes all over Europe already.

q1w2 5y ago
We over-produce a lot of food in the west. I think there's very little risk of hunger.
- markvdb 5y ago
  It's not about there not being food. It's about people being too poor to buy it, many of them in the eastern EU. Some anecdotal evidence that might sound extreme, but actually isn't. I know an old lady over 80 from Latvia. She worked all her life as a university trained economist. Like almost all people her age, her savings were eaten by the socio-economic chaos of the '90s. She has a <400€/month net pension (considered high locally!) and owns her apartment. She mainly pays for utilities, medical care and food. Without her vegetable garden and her family's financial support, she'd be living in abject poverty. What do you think happens when her utilities double, and her food becomes >10% more expensive? Reality is much bleaker than that for the majority of Latvian pensioners. Not all have a "high" pension of almost 400€. Not all are in good health. Not all have financial support from younger generations. Some of them are going to go hungry.

damnesian 5y ago

It's time to bring back the old practices of crop rotation and use of the chain of life in a healthy ecosystem to manage overgrowth of pest crops. In the old times, farmers depended on birds, insects and rodents to control pests Humanity took tens of thousands of years to perfect agriculture. It's taken humanity in the modern chemical-dependent age less than a hundred years of monoculture to push it to the brink of collapse. Granted, yields will be lower. But instead of growing seed corn and soy beans, farmers need to diversify and bring back species that are unique to their regions- that were carefully selected and bred to grow best in that area. Did you know one in the early 20th century, one of the greatest exporters of apples was the state of Iowa? Not now.

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
This won’t work unless large numbers of people can go back to being farmers and leave their pointless lives in bullshit jobs sitting at a computer looking at Facebook all day. We would have to pay farmers a real wage again and pay more for healthy food that tastes great and doesn’t kill us. It sounds like a beautiful future and I’ve been contemplating and wishing that could happen for humanity a lot recently. I recommend the documentary Ingredients if you haven’t seen it. It’s on Tubi for free. It changed the way I look at food and the world.

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flenserboy 5y ago

Pastures are the future. There's a reason the US Midwest had such great soil — it's not simply a confluence of rivers & luck. The buffalo did their thing, and the grasses they fed on were fed in turn by them. Replacing corn and soy with ruminants will replenish the soil, provide excellent protein for people, and get rid of the cheap, food-like things made from corn, soy, and their chemically-coaxed out byproducts. It's not too late. (A nice effect of this would be the likely (it'll take a while) replenishment of the Ogallala Aquifer.)

aeternum 5y ago
Before artificial fertilizer, world famines were commonplace and the base rate of starvation was very high compared to today. I hope that anyone truly advocating for a return to that world has studied history and understands the consequences.
smallerfish 5y ago
"Livestock takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land, yet produces less than 20% of the world’s supply of calories." https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets "So if this system is so ideal, why is it that my cow hasn’t tasted a blade of grass since October? Speed, in a word. Cows raised on grass simply take longer to reach slaughter weight than cows raised on a richer diet, and the modern meat industry has devoted itself to shortening a beef calf’s allotted time on earth." https://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/power-steer/ https://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/power-steer/
- cf141q5325 5y ago
  Thats a simplification for a feel good narrative. Your source lists all land that grows anything but forest as agriculture land. Yet on large parts of those areas you cant do anything but pastures. Also, much of the cow feed isnt calories humans can process. Think byproducts of soy production. The youtube channel "What I've Learned" has a great video on it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGG-A80Tl5g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGG-A80Tl5g What they dont mention is the large part livestock (especially cows an chicken) will have to play in producing soil from the dirt left behind after industrial agriculture. Regenerative agriculture is the term here, with rotating cows and chickens on degraded dirt patches to build top soil. All of this of course doesnt take away from the madness that is industrial meat production. But nothing has ever been solved by oversimplified narratives and action-ism.

jtwebman 5y ago

I think no-dig would work way better but we need machines that can do that to take it to scale. So maybe the farms need to fail to get there. Also doesn't help that 80% goes to feed animals.

99_00 5y ago

Physical laws don’t care about good intentions. Expect more “surprises”.

Razengan 5y ago

Something that bugs me: How much human poop is generated worldwide every day and where does it go?? Why isn’t some of it used as fertilizer, or is it?

cronix 5y ago
The UK is importing human waste from the Netherlands to be used as fertilizer. I guess they don't eat enough in the UK to produce what they need locally? Odd thing to need to import! https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/02/sewage-sludge-containing-human-waste-uk https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/02/sewage-s...
freshpots 5y ago
https://www.epa.gov/biosolids https://www.epa.gov/biosolids
unquietcode 5y ago
It is used as fertilizer, often not for food consumption. You would be depressed to know how many horrible things are to be found in human excrement, including pharmaceuticals, plastics, fire retardants, etc. To me the greatest use of human waste would be carbon sequestration. Think about it: we have an existing network of pipelines directly from every house to a centralized facility that can collect, dry, and [optionally] store that output in the soil or elsewhere for many years.

throwawaymanbot 5y ago