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> Nothing wrong with e.g. organically farmed corn. There is nothing wrong with “factory”, “industrially”, or “sustainably” farmed corn either. Farming at scale

> Nothing wrong with e.g. organically farmed corn. There is nothing wrong with “factory”, “industrially”, or “sustainably” farmed corn either. Farming at scale is the only thing that allows all 8 billion people to eat.

spiderfarmer 5y ago
The romantic view people have of peasant farms is ruining all discourse about agriculture. I blame the books people read to toddlers. Peasant farms were labor intensive, disease ridden, high risk, low reward businesses that shortened lives and ruined families. But somehow for a lot of people this episode in the history of farming is seen as the optimal blueprint for sustainable farming. They ignore the fact that all "successful" examples of small scale circular farming are making their revenue from donations, venues and from "selling" the model. Not from produce.
- imtringued 5y ago
  Well a lot of conventional farms that are hyperoptimized barely make enough money to get by. It is quite weird how we can't maintain something as basic as food security with a market based economy.
  - lobocinza 5y ago
    Farming is an efficient market due to the sheer number of competing agents, that drives the price to be close to the cost. Markets are cyclic. When demand is higher than supply, prices go up, companies profit more and there's incentive for investment. Within time supply exceeds demand and prices go down, so companies barely make enough to pay off and those which are inefficient go broken and are sold, hopefully, to better managers. This is generally a good thing but, of course, food/farming is of public interest. If prices go up those with lower income might struggle to feed themselves. And if prices go down poor farmers might struggle to survive and be forced into selling their land. Thus government intervenes.
    - Retric 5y ago
      What separates poor farmers from say poor food truck owners? The issue with farm subsidies is they don’t actually change profitability long term, they simply result in over production. It’s vastly more efficient to build up a long term storage of surplus say 2 years of corn per American stored at -40C which should last ~100 years. Then let huge swaths of American farmers go bankrupt as you scale back production. This was the basic model hundreds of years ago, they still had famines. Alternatively you can push productivity while paying pay farmers not to produce anything on their land. This keeps them from going bankrupt and requires fewer resources than excess production. We used to do this, it reduces the risk of famine because productivity can be scaled up quickly. Finally you can just massively subsidize production and dump the excess on foreign markets, this is really bad for other countries and costs insane amounts of money and still results in excess production even as everyone gets fat. This is where bio fuels come in. PS: There are also secondary effects as subsidizing farm insurance etc, keeps incompetent farmers in business.
      - giantg2 5y ago
        "There are also secondary effects as subsidizing farm insurance etc, keeps incompetent farmers in business." Any data to back that up? If you're incompetent and your crops repeatedly, then you're not going to be reimbursed enough to make it. "It’s vastly more efficient to build up a long term storage of surplus say 2 years of corn per American stored at -40C which should last ~100 years." Any data to back this up? This is a huge volume. Freezers capable of those temperatures are expensive and consume a lot of energy. "The issue with farm subsidies is they don’t actually change profitability long term, they simply result in over production." I think farm subsidies need to be changed or reduced, but for a slightly different reason. We are basically subsidizing other countries. A lot of our grains get exported, basically sending the fruits of those tax dollars overseas.
        Retric 5y ago
        > incompetence It’s not that people are completely incompetent it’s that some people are better at getting subsidies vs growing food. Essentially subsidies add a parallel skill set which becomes valuable but reduces the impact of being an inefficient farmer. I don’t have hard data, but have been told about people who are better at one side or the other. > Any data to back this up. The freezing thing was actually from a study I read. Ultra large freezers are very energy efficient via classic square vs cube scaling. The freezer loses energy on the surface and needs insulation along the surface while it and stores inside the volume. Energy costs of shipping vs colder climate etc. The idea was a FIFO system along a circular storage system, but I don’t recall all the details.
  - FpUser 5y ago
    >"It is quite weird how we can't maintain something as basic as food security with a market based economy." Because people at the top need other people making them money rather than revolting.
  - fennecfoxen 5y ago
    > It is quite weird how we can't maintain something as basic as food security with a market based economy We can't? Where's the famine? News to me. Last I checked we still have way more food than we know what to do with (massive worldwide fertilizer shortages and inflation notwithstanding).
  - Aunche 5y ago
    Depends on what you mean by food security. We're guarenteed to have enough food without crop subsidies. We would just import a lot more than we export. The government seems that as a national security risk.
    - spiderfarmer 5y ago
      And rightly so. You can't immediately switch to domestic supply in case of supply issues and utter chaos is just 2 meals away.
- leethargo 5y ago
  Similar with the artificial battle front between organic vs conventional/industrial, where each side claims the solution to sustainable food production, but no common ground is allowed. By the way, not all children's books are equally naive. We've recently found a nice one [1] (in German) which shows small- and large-scale farms side-by-side, in a brutally honest way (including butchering). [1] https://www.amazon.com/Wo-kommt-unser-Essen-her/dp/3407758162 https://www.amazon.com/Wo-kommt-unser-Essen-her/dp/340775816...
  - dillonkp 5y ago
    This looks like a great book! Getting back to refreshing my dormant German, have any other good books like this? - Thanks!
    - leethargo 5y ago
      If you're looking for similar books with realistic depictions of agriculture: No, that was a lucky find in the library. In case you just want to practice German with media for children, I always recommend "Die Sendung mit der Maus" [1]. It's a mix of short animated stories with "how it's made" features, where they go filming in factories etc. [1] https://www.wdrmaus.de/aktuelle-sendung/ https://www.wdrmaus.de/aktuelle-sendung/
      - dillonkp 5y ago
        Thanks for the resource! I will definitely check it out.
- giantg2 5y ago
  What was that one on Netflix that sold organic specialty produce to restaurants in Chicago? I thought that one was profitable without any sort of assistance. Either way, we have several examples of local "peasant" farms, some organic, that do well.
  - spiderfarmer 5y ago
    They got a lot of exposure, even before Netflix. Now their model is to milk the brand they built. That's not traditional farming, that's marketing wrapped in farming.
    - giantg2 5y ago
      Yeah, but if I remember correctly, actual farm operations were profitable, right? The marketing is just extra, or what it evolved into. Don't get me wrong - small farms are a lot of work. For the most part, at least one member of the family has to have an outside job with benefits just due to healthcare costs. But it can make some money. I hope to have a small farm as a "retirement" plan. It would mostly be an apiary for the commercial portion, maybe with some log and block grown mushrooms. Then the rest would likely be for personal use. Obviously the major costs like the initial land and health insurance would come from savings, so it would be mostly supplemental income to an already solid retirement plan. I don't think it will happen though. I assume the biggest draw is the lifestyle ideals. It seems a common dream on this community. Maybe because we're tired of building some intangible thing or some app that nobody really needs, and want to have a physical job with meaningful produce.
      - dahfizz 5y ago
        > I assume the biggest draw is the lifestyle ideals. A lot of people who have never physically worked a day in their life like the idea of hard labor. After a week of hard labor, they would decide to take up woodworking instead.
        giantg2 5y ago
- AniseAbyss 5y ago
  My country is one of the biggest agricultural exporters in the world yet less than 1% of the population works in the farming industry. Farming is what drives all the mechanization and robotics research.
  - otikik 5y ago
    > Farming is what drives all the mechanization and robotics research I don't doubt it is a big drive, but wouldn't the military take the biggest portion of that cake?
imtringued 5y ago
I am unimpressed by the idea that we can solve this with more technology. Some of those billions of people feed themselves. Theit biggest problem isn't minmaxing an 8t/ha yield to 11t/h. Their problem is getting from 1t/h to 6t/h which is entirely possible with just manure, some crop rotation and good quality seeds that can actually be resown. The idea that e.g. hybrid rice is going to solve world hunger is absurd.
- AniseAbyss 5y ago
  Does a life as a subsistence farmer seem appealing to you? A short life.
adrianN 5y ago
Farming at this scale allows people to eat meat for every meal.
- hypertele-Xii 5y ago
  Which they should stop doing.
  - macinjosh 5y ago
    Never.
giantg2 5y ago
Depends on how you look at it. Agriculture generally requires a lot of water. Much of this corn is being irrigated with water from the aquifers. Sustainable farming is good, but I don't think we do very much of it. I wonder if there's any evidence that we can sustainably support 8 billion people. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/kansas-aquifer-ogallala-water-crisis-drought/621007/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/kansas-aqu...
- nerdponx 5y ago
  And this is why I get so bothered by all the hand-wringing over declining population growth.
- gruez 5y ago
  >I wonder if there's any evidence that we can sustainably support 8 billion people. it depends on the type of lifestyle you're willing to have and how much % of the GDP you're willing to pour into it. I'm sure you can sustainably feed all 8 billion people if we poured 50% of our GDP into food production and we only ate rice and beans.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    "it depends on the type of lifestyle you're willing to have" Not just oneself, but entire nations. Scarcity of resources have historically been a major cause of wars. I don't see the world coming to a consensus on lifestyle any time soon.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
> Farming at scale is the only thing that allows all 8 billion people to eat. False; you can feed 8 billion people using small scale / non-industrial farming as well, it just means more people would be working in the farming industry and the cost might go up. But industrial farming is not to provide food, but to provide raw resources - I mean this very article is about growing corn to turn into bioethanol to mix in fuel for cars.
- CivBase 5y ago
  > it just means more people would be working in the farming industry and the cost might go up. You say that like it's a small thing. Keeping most of the population out agriculture and allowing them to produce other goods and services is the primary benefit of the agriculture industry. > But industrial farming is not to provide food, but to provide raw resources - I mean this very article is about growing corn to turn into bioethanol to mix in fuel for cars. Less than half of the corn produced in the US goes to ethanol production. Most of it goes towards feeding people - either directly or indirectly. If we include other produce, then the vast majority of the agriculture industry's output becomes food.
tw3464575686 5y ago
Not really. Small-scale sustainable farms produce more food per hectare than industrial farming. However, they are usually less profitable, since they need more manpower per hectare. Efficiency in terms of money earned is not the same as efficiency in terms of food produced, and with a growing population and a diminishing area of arable land, one seems more critical than the other, especially when you consider that industrial farming tends to destroy topsoil and emits quite a bit of CO2, whereas small-scale sustainable farming usually does the opposite.
- jahnu 5y ago
  > Small-scale sustainable farms produce more food per hectare than industrial farming. I thought that was only true in poor and developing countries but that large industrial farms in highly developed nations produced way more than everybody else. Have you a source you could share as this is a very interesting point?
  - tw3464575686 5y ago
    Ha, no, you're right. Don't remember were i first heard it, but looking for the sources now, it seems that small farms are more productive in poor countries, but less productive than industrial farms in developed nations. However, the source i found for that [0] doesn't mention what techniques are used, and seems to only focus on size. So now i'm curious if there is reliable data looking at differences in yield between farming techniques? (e.g. industrial/chemical vs organic vs permaculture) [0] https://grist.org/food/do-industrial-agricultural-methods-actually-yield-more-food-per-acre-than-organic-ones/ https://grist.org/food/do-industrial-agricultural-methods-ac...
    - jahnu 5y ago
      Good article, that.
  - goda90 5y ago
    Gabe Brown claims he can get more calories per acre than monoculture farms[0]. He also claims that it's more thought, but not much more physical work overall. His profits probably depend somewhat on premium pricing that wouldn't hold up if everyone followed his model, but a shift in subsidies could help that. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yPjoh9YJMk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yPjoh9YJMk
walnutclosefarm 5y ago
There are all kinds of things "wrong" with the way we raise corn in this country. It's environmentally unsound (among other things, it's killing the Gulf of Mexico). It's not economically viable, absent significant government subsidies. It's the source of the worst (high fructose corn syrup) and second worse (too much meat in our diet) food induced health problems in the country. And it is, as the posted article points out, at the center of a huge "clean energy" scam. We could contribute a great deal more to feeding the world, and doing less damage to the environment and our health, but alternative uses for much of the land that is in corn in the US.
aklemm 5y ago
Fewer people is the answer. Is there a way to humanely, ethically, and justly limit the population? Conventionally, talking heads seem to indicate the right way forward is to use tech and industrial agriculture to support 20bn+ on the planet. Seems totally doable, but at the cost of losing the natural environment as well as more natural food sources altogether. Anyway, I say get us back to around 5bn people and keep it there.
- rhino369 5y ago
  You would said 500 million people 200 years ago. Malthusians in 200 years will say 50 billion.
  - aklemm 5y ago
    Is this helpful? I mean, we’ve already passed the point of too much natural habitat lost and too much industrial ag needed, so I think a number less then our current population is reasonable.
- greedo 5y ago
  Trying to limit the world's population is impossible. It would require an authoritarian world government and that's not going to happen.
  - aklemm 5y ago
    Remove tax deductions for more than two kids per couple. Tax the suburbs more highly. Encourage couples to only have two kids just like we encourage people not to litter. Trade less with countries with high birth rates and raise fees on those countries’ environmental impact. All that could be done democratically, no?
    - PolygonSheep 5y ago
      Punitive taxation and restricting trade with Africa wouldn't be a good look... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependencies_by_total_fertility_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d... (Not to say it's only Africa by any means, but you do have to go quite a ways down the list before you hit a non-African country).

spiderfarmer 5y ago

The romantic view people have of peasant farms is ruining all discourse about agriculture. I blame the books people read to toddlers. Peasant farms were labor intensive, disease ridden, high risk, low reward businesses that shortened lives and ruined families. But somehow for a lot of people this episode in the history of farming is seen as the optimal blueprint for sustainable farming. They ignore the fact that all "successful" examples of small scale circular farming are making their revenue from donations, venues and from "selling" the model. Not from produce.

imtringued 5y ago
Well a lot of conventional farms that are hyperoptimized barely make enough money to get by. It is quite weird how we can't maintain something as basic as food security with a market based economy.
- lobocinza 5y ago
  Farming is an efficient market due to the sheer number of competing agents, that drives the price to be close to the cost. Markets are cyclic. When demand is higher than supply, prices go up, companies profit more and there's incentive for investment. Within time supply exceeds demand and prices go down, so companies barely make enough to pay off and those which are inefficient go broken and are sold, hopefully, to better managers. This is generally a good thing but, of course, food/farming is of public interest. If prices go up those with lower income might struggle to feed themselves. And if prices go down poor farmers might struggle to survive and be forced into selling their land. Thus government intervenes.
  - Retric 5y ago
    What separates poor farmers from say poor food truck owners? The issue with farm subsidies is they don’t actually change profitability long term, they simply result in over production. It’s vastly more efficient to build up a long term storage of surplus say 2 years of corn per American stored at -40C which should last ~100 years. Then let huge swaths of American farmers go bankrupt as you scale back production. This was the basic model hundreds of years ago, they still had famines. Alternatively you can push productivity while paying pay farmers not to produce anything on their land. This keeps them from going bankrupt and requires fewer resources than excess production. We used to do this, it reduces the risk of famine because productivity can be scaled up quickly. Finally you can just massively subsidize production and dump the excess on foreign markets, this is really bad for other countries and costs insane amounts of money and still results in excess production even as everyone gets fat. This is where bio fuels come in. PS: There are also secondary effects as subsidizing farm insurance etc, keeps incompetent farmers in business.
    - giantg2 5y ago
      "There are also secondary effects as subsidizing farm insurance etc, keeps incompetent farmers in business." Any data to back that up? If you're incompetent and your crops repeatedly, then you're not going to be reimbursed enough to make it. "It’s vastly more efficient to build up a long term storage of surplus say 2 years of corn per American stored at -40C which should last ~100 years." Any data to back this up? This is a huge volume. Freezers capable of those temperatures are expensive and consume a lot of energy. "The issue with farm subsidies is they don’t actually change profitability long term, they simply result in over production." I think farm subsidies need to be changed or reduced, but for a slightly different reason. We are basically subsidizing other countries. A lot of our grains get exported, basically sending the fruits of those tax dollars overseas.
      - Retric 5y ago
        > incompetence It’s not that people are completely incompetent it’s that some people are better at getting subsidies vs growing food. Essentially subsidies add a parallel skill set which becomes valuable but reduces the impact of being an inefficient farmer. I don’t have hard data, but have been told about people who are better at one side or the other. > Any data to back this up. The freezing thing was actually from a study I read. Ultra large freezers are very energy efficient via classic square vs cube scaling. The freezer loses energy on the surface and needs insulation along the surface while it and stores inside the volume. Energy costs of shipping vs colder climate etc. The idea was a FIFO system along a circular storage system, but I don’t recall all the details.
- FpUser 5y ago
  >"It is quite weird how we can't maintain something as basic as food security with a market based economy." Because people at the top need other people making them money rather than revolting.
- fennecfoxen 5y ago
  > It is quite weird how we can't maintain something as basic as food security with a market based economy We can't? Where's the famine? News to me. Last I checked we still have way more food than we know what to do with (massive worldwide fertilizer shortages and inflation notwithstanding).
- Aunche 5y ago
  Depends on what you mean by food security. We're guarenteed to have enough food without crop subsidies. We would just import a lot more than we export. The government seems that as a national security risk.
  - spiderfarmer 5y ago
    And rightly so. You can't immediately switch to domestic supply in case of supply issues and utter chaos is just 2 meals away.
leethargo 5y ago
Similar with the artificial battle front between organic vs conventional/industrial, where each side claims the solution to sustainable food production, but no common ground is allowed. By the way, not all children's books are equally naive. We've recently found a nice one [1] (in German) which shows small- and large-scale farms side-by-side, in a brutally honest way (including butchering). [1] https://www.amazon.com/Wo-kommt-unser-Essen-her/dp/3407758162 https://www.amazon.com/Wo-kommt-unser-Essen-her/dp/340775816...
- dillonkp 5y ago
  This looks like a great book! Getting back to refreshing my dormant German, have any other good books like this? - Thanks!
  - leethargo 5y ago
    If you're looking for similar books with realistic depictions of agriculture: No, that was a lucky find in the library. In case you just want to practice German with media for children, I always recommend "Die Sendung mit der Maus" [1]. It's a mix of short animated stories with "how it's made" features, where they go filming in factories etc. [1] https://www.wdrmaus.de/aktuelle-sendung/ https://www.wdrmaus.de/aktuelle-sendung/
    - dillonkp 5y ago
      Thanks for the resource! I will definitely check it out.
giantg2 5y ago
What was that one on Netflix that sold organic specialty produce to restaurants in Chicago? I thought that one was profitable without any sort of assistance. Either way, we have several examples of local "peasant" farms, some organic, that do well.
- spiderfarmer 5y ago
  They got a lot of exposure, even before Netflix. Now their model is to milk the brand they built. That's not traditional farming, that's marketing wrapped in farming.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    Yeah, but if I remember correctly, actual farm operations were profitable, right? The marketing is just extra, or what it evolved into. Don't get me wrong - small farms are a lot of work. For the most part, at least one member of the family has to have an outside job with benefits just due to healthcare costs. But it can make some money. I hope to have a small farm as a "retirement" plan. It would mostly be an apiary for the commercial portion, maybe with some log and block grown mushrooms. Then the rest would likely be for personal use. Obviously the major costs like the initial land and health insurance would come from savings, so it would be mostly supplemental income to an already solid retirement plan. I don't think it will happen though. I assume the biggest draw is the lifestyle ideals. It seems a common dream on this community. Maybe because we're tired of building some intangible thing or some app that nobody really needs, and want to have a physical job with meaningful produce.
    - dahfizz 5y ago
      > I assume the biggest draw is the lifestyle ideals. A lot of people who have never physically worked a day in their life like the idea of hard labor. After a week of hard labor, they would decide to take up woodworking instead.
      - giantg2 5y ago
AniseAbyss 5y ago
My country is one of the biggest agricultural exporters in the world yet less than 1% of the population works in the farming industry. Farming is what drives all the mechanization and robotics research.
- otikik 5y ago
  > Farming is what drives all the mechanization and robotics research I don't doubt it is a big drive, but wouldn't the military take the biggest portion of that cake?

imtringued 5y ago

I am unimpressed by the idea that we can solve this with more technology. Some of those billions of people feed themselves. Theit biggest problem isn't minmaxing an 8t/ha yield to 11t/h. Their problem is getting from 1t/h to 6t/h which is entirely possible with just manure, some crop rotation and good quality seeds that can actually be resown. The idea that e.g. hybrid rice is going to solve world hunger is absurd.

AniseAbyss 5y ago
Does a life as a subsistence farmer seem appealing to you? A short life.

adrianN 5y ago

Farming at this scale allows people to eat meat for every meal.

hypertele-Xii 5y ago
Which they should stop doing.
- macinjosh 5y ago
  Never.

giantg2 5y ago

Depends on how you look at it. Agriculture generally requires a lot of water. Much of this corn is being irrigated with water from the aquifers. Sustainable farming is good, but I don't think we do very much of it. I wonder if there's any evidence that we can sustainably support 8 billion people. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/kansas-aquifer-ogallala-water-crisis-drought/621007/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/kansas-aqu...

nerdponx 5y ago
And this is why I get so bothered by all the hand-wringing over declining population growth.
gruez 5y ago
>I wonder if there's any evidence that we can sustainably support 8 billion people. it depends on the type of lifestyle you're willing to have and how much % of the GDP you're willing to pour into it. I'm sure you can sustainably feed all 8 billion people if we poured 50% of our GDP into food production and we only ate rice and beans.
- giantg2 5y ago
  "it depends on the type of lifestyle you're willing to have" Not just oneself, but entire nations. Scarcity of resources have historically been a major cause of wars. I don't see the world coming to a consensus on lifestyle any time soon.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

> Farming at scale is the only thing that allows all 8 billion people to eat. False; you can feed 8 billion people using small scale / non-industrial farming as well, it just means more people would be working in the farming industry and the cost might go up. But industrial farming is not to provide food, but to provide raw resources - I mean this very article is about growing corn to turn into bioethanol to mix in fuel for cars.

CivBase 5y ago
> it just means more people would be working in the farming industry and the cost might go up. You say that like it's a small thing. Keeping most of the population out agriculture and allowing them to produce other goods and services is the primary benefit of the agriculture industry. > But industrial farming is not to provide food, but to provide raw resources - I mean this very article is about growing corn to turn into bioethanol to mix in fuel for cars. Less than half of the corn produced in the US goes to ethanol production. Most of it goes towards feeding people - either directly or indirectly. If we include other produce, then the vast majority of the agriculture industry's output becomes food.

tw3464575686 5y ago

Not really. Small-scale sustainable farms produce more food per hectare than industrial farming. However, they are usually less profitable, since they need more manpower per hectare. Efficiency in terms of money earned is not the same as efficiency in terms of food produced, and with a growing population and a diminishing area of arable land, one seems more critical than the other, especially when you consider that industrial farming tends to destroy topsoil and emits quite a bit of CO2, whereas small-scale sustainable farming usually does the opposite.

jahnu 5y ago
> Small-scale sustainable farms produce more food per hectare than industrial farming. I thought that was only true in poor and developing countries but that large industrial farms in highly developed nations produced way more than everybody else. Have you a source you could share as this is a very interesting point?
- tw3464575686 5y ago
  Ha, no, you're right. Don't remember were i first heard it, but looking for the sources now, it seems that small farms are more productive in poor countries, but less productive than industrial farms in developed nations. However, the source i found for that [0] doesn't mention what techniques are used, and seems to only focus on size. So now i'm curious if there is reliable data looking at differences in yield between farming techniques? (e.g. industrial/chemical vs organic vs permaculture) [0] https://grist.org/food/do-industrial-agricultural-methods-actually-yield-more-food-per-acre-than-organic-ones/ https://grist.org/food/do-industrial-agricultural-methods-ac...
  - jahnu 5y ago
    Good article, that.
- goda90 5y ago
  Gabe Brown claims he can get more calories per acre than monoculture farms[0]. He also claims that it's more thought, but not much more physical work overall. His profits probably depend somewhat on premium pricing that wouldn't hold up if everyone followed his model, but a shift in subsidies could help that. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yPjoh9YJMk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yPjoh9YJMk

walnutclosefarm 5y ago

There are all kinds of things "wrong" with the way we raise corn in this country. It's environmentally unsound (among other things, it's killing the Gulf of Mexico). It's not economically viable, absent significant government subsidies. It's the source of the worst (high fructose corn syrup) and second worse (too much meat in our diet) food induced health problems in the country. And it is, as the posted article points out, at the center of a huge "clean energy" scam. We could contribute a great deal more to feeding the world, and doing less damage to the environment and our health, but alternative uses for much of the land that is in corn in the US.

aklemm 5y ago

Fewer people is the answer. Is there a way to humanely, ethically, and justly limit the population? Conventionally, talking heads seem to indicate the right way forward is to use tech and industrial agriculture to support 20bn+ on the planet. Seems totally doable, but at the cost of losing the natural environment as well as more natural food sources altogether. Anyway, I say get us back to around 5bn people and keep it there.

rhino369 5y ago
You would said 500 million people 200 years ago. Malthusians in 200 years will say 50 billion.
- aklemm 5y ago
  Is this helpful? I mean, we’ve already passed the point of too much natural habitat lost and too much industrial ag needed, so I think a number less then our current population is reasonable.
greedo 5y ago
Trying to limit the world's population is impossible. It would require an authoritarian world government and that's not going to happen.
- aklemm 5y ago
  Remove tax deductions for more than two kids per couple. Tax the suburbs more highly. Encourage couples to only have two kids just like we encourage people not to litter. Trade less with countries with high birth rates and raise fees on those countries’ environmental impact. All that could be done democratically, no?
  - PolygonSheep 5y ago
    Punitive taxation and restricting trade with Africa wouldn't be a good look... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependencies_by_total_fertility_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d... (Not to say it's only Africa by any means, but you do have to go quite a ways down the list before you hit a non-African country).