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USDA announces plans to support innovative American-made fertilizer
- sudden_dystopia 5y agoEveryone needs to start composting
- maerF0x0 5y agoand add chickens + vermicomposting too! That being said, I think organic waste separation of trash is a better idea than everyone composting (from a pest, disease, and efficiency of economy perspective)
- 6d6b73 5y agoWhy waste fuel moving organic waste to a central location when you can have it "processed" and used locally?
- ceejayoz 5y agoBecause it's more likely to actually happen that way. I've tried composting, and don't have the patience for it. Lots of folks live in apartments or places with HOAs that forbid it. There's also the benefit that industrial composting can process things like dairy and meat safely that can't be home-composted.
- 6d6b73 5y agoIf you don't have patience to dump organic waste in a one spot outside of your house, how do you plan on doing the same with the waste bin provided by your city? Yes, I understand that this will not be possible everywhere, but let's just start doing this where possible, before we look for expensive and complex solutions to simple problems.
- bluGill 5y agoWhat I'd like is an automatic waste sorter. Throw everything into one bin, put sort the glass one way, paper another, all X plastics in their places, metals, compostables... We have made progress in that for recycling, but there are two trucks that come by my house.
- ceejayoz 5y ago> Throw everything into one bin, put sort the glass one way, paper another, all X plastics in their places, metals, compostables... Cardboard, at the very least, would generally be immediately ruined and rendered non-recylcable doing this.
- jcranmer 5y agoCardboard itself is only barely recyclable in the first place. My understanding of the recycling process for paper is that basically you're required to go a grade down in the process, and cardboard itself is basically the end of that process. I suspect you'd environmentally gain more from improved recovery of more useful materials from single-stream waste than you'd lose from no longer recycling cardboard products. (Especially since a large amount of dedicated cardboard recycling is itself going to be spoiled by the inclusion of greasy pizza boxes in that stream).
- maxerickson 5y agoCorrugated cardboard recycling is pretty big because of the volume of material used in manufacturing and commerce. There are facilities that sort the entire stream, partly because diverting material away from the landfill saves cost there.
- swarnie 5y agoDoesn't a heap need tending to in some way? I'm happy to put my food waste in a little box and have the government come round with a truck once per week, at the very least its rotting somewhere miles away from me. I don't think i have the space or knowledge to do it myself
- boringg 5y agoMore cost-effective to do it at a centrally processed location + you can capture methane and utilize it either as renewable natural gas or process it into fuel cell grade hydrogen. As well more people opt-in since not everyone has to learn how to properly compost all they need to do is source-separate.
- 6d6b73 5y agoI'm not sure how it is more effective to drive horribly ineffective diesel trucks to gather that waste and to dump it somewhere else, build a thousands of facilities to process this and utilize the methane safely instead of simply having a compost pile behind your house (where possible).
- boringg 5y agoThat's easy to solve - use Hydrogen trucks or EV trucks for the heavy duty load. Not yet in the commercial market - coming in quickly.
- 6d6b73 5y agoHow is that easy if there are currently on H-powered garbage trucks on the market and it will take billions of dollars to replace all of them?
- boringg 5y agoIt costs billions of dollars to replace the fleet anyways so its already a sunk cost - instead of replacing with diesel your replacing with H2 or EV at the end of their life. You are just substituting out one product for another - that is relatively easy.
- 6d6b73 5y agoYeah but it will take years for this to happen, and just replacing the trucks is only part of the cost - you still need to build new infrastructure to either charge with electricity or fuel with hydrogen. But wait! There is more - you need to pay millions to get rid of all the old infrastructure like gas stations that cities have, with old fuel tanks, distributors etc. In the current economic climate, I don't see how most of the cities could afford to do all of this.
- bluGill 5y agobecause compost piles attract rats, mice, and other undesirables.
- 6d6b73 5y agoYou can go to Central Park and see rats everywhere, and I don't see any compost piles there.
- wil421 5y agoYou can get free compost in my county. They take all of those tall brown paper bags that are used for yard waste and compost them. Where i live now it’s a private company moving the recycle stuff but where I lived before the county picked them up with a suction machine. You could put leaves and grass clippings at the curb and they would suck it up every Monday.
- rdtwo 5y agoIt’s expensive to setup your own hot compost process. It’s both complicated and requires a volume of material most don’t have. Composting should be done at scale really
- maerF0x0 5y ago> Why waste fuel moving organic waste to a central location The point of this whole post is Fertilizer. You eventually have to collect the distributed waste (or compost fertilizer) to a a centralized place. Caveated that the resulting mass could be decreased, but also lose the opportunity to make compost tea, feeding any edible mass to animals, or vermicomposting to get even richer output. Also lets not discount the distributed cost to teach millions of people how to properly blend (mix grass with food waste etc), turn (else you can either cause fires or create methane), harvest (when's it done), and then redistribute the output. Yes we could all become home gardeners, but then expect to see our GDP to decline as Software engineers, Lawyers, architects et al. star doing "farm work" and labor.
- 6d6b73 5y agoYou really don't need much time to become a home gardener, and believe me that spending time outside digging in the dirt is a very health way to spend time away from the computer.
- zahma 5y agoAgreed. I wish there was a tax credit for farmers who don’t use fertilizer, even if that’s only imported, so as to encourage composting. Right now it’s pretty easy to externalize agricultural waste on the public’s dime or health. I’m thinking about the hog waste lagoons in NC for example. What if some portion of that vast expanse of pig shit could be reused?
- bluGill 5y agoMostly it is reused. However shipping is expensive and you can apply too much and cause problems. there is way too much manure in some places, and not enough in others. It isn't exactly safe either. There is a lot of diseases in that manure. You need to take more care when applying it than some fertilizers. (though not nearly as much as anhydrous ammonia)
- wyager 5y agoThis reminds me of Mao's efforts to get people to smelt steel in their backyards. It was a plainly inefficient and pointless use of labor and resources, mostly for political signaling purposes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_furnace https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_furnace
- analyte123 5y agoWhile you can’t make industrial quality steel in your backyard, most households could make food that is better than “industrial” quality produce in their backyard.
- Auracle 5y agoI live in an area where most people garden - including my wife and both of our sets of parents. The produce is undeniably better, but it’s still not an efficient use of most professional’s time. If you’re particularly poor or retired then it absolutely does. Fruit trees are more expensive in the beginning, but they need less overall time put in to them for what you get out. They’d be a good choice for most people with a yard.
- cwkoss 5y agoPermaculture techniques like no-dig cultivation, perennial plants, and frequent mulching can reduce the amount of labor needed to yield valuable and nutritionally dense produce greatly. Everyone with a yard with trees that need occasional pruning and a 4'x4' space for a compost pile can buy a ~$120 electric chipper and make their own composted mulch and replace the majority of soil amendments the home gardener uses.
- asdff 5y agoIt takes a lot of labor even just to maintain my few plants and keep up with pests/drought/storms/nutrient deficiencies. The pests are such an issue. Anytime you grow anything in quantity, you are entering this unbalanced thermodynamic state and the environment will respond by creating an equilibrium. In other words more pests find more food and more of their offspring survive and there are more pests overall. The farmer has historically and even today solved this with scale. Suppose they manage to kill 95% of the pests and the remaining continue to eat out the crop all season, which is fine because there is enough crop where some loss from pests are tolerated. Meanwhile in my case and in the personal garden scale, one pest can ruin your entire crop. I've had one rat come over and eat all my produce in two nights. Then after that they marched right next door to my neighbor's garden and ate most of their produce. Gardening is a fun and rewarding hobby, but make no mistake that it takes a ton of labor, and you are going to have a hard time turning a backyard garden or a community garden plot into a reliable enough food source to actually consistently feed yourself. Starving to death is not so uncommon even among the old fronteirspeople who knew a thing or two about what they were doing about homesteading.
- wahnfrieden 5y agoThe neoliberal response
- swarnie 5y agoGreat ideology, im not sure why so many fear it?
- throwaway2048 5y agoBecause it favors aesthetic nonsense over real action
- daenz 5y ago>fear Criticism of something is not necessarily an expression of fear. This reaction primarily serves to make critics feel ashamed for speaking out against something, as in "oh you're just afraid of my-good-idea-X"
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- dustymcp 5y agoAlot of us already are, i use my leafdrops and all vegetable trash to grow my garden most of the summer and fall we dont need to buy any, but it takes alot of work..
- r00fus 5y agos/Everyone/municipalities/ An individual mandate (esp. an unfunded mandate) to resolve systemic issues is definitely an anti-pattern.
- agumonkey 5y agoI'm a bit tired of this argument. We're all buying the wrong stuff, our mass is part of the system. I'm not judging consumers, I'm just saying everybody living differently will change the system. Wouldn't word of mouth, follower effect kick a stronger longer response to the top-down policies ?
- UncleOxidant 5y agoSewage treatment plants need to start creating fertilizer. Example: https://www.cleanwatergrow.com/ https://www.cleanwatergrow.com/
- BoGs83 5y agoIt is amazing that one of the outcomes of the Russian-Ukraine war is helping de-globalize. I for one welcome more north american (canada, united states and mexico) manufacturing even if it costs more. We need to look at the supply chain stability as a national security effort.
- ISL 5y agoIt isn't obvious that deglobalizing is good for national security. The imposition of sanctions is allowing NATO to counter Russia without firing a shot. A world in which we're able to work out our problems without shooting at one another may be a good one. Retaining the capacity to decouple is important, but nurturing some level of interdependence may help us to find a way to work together. If we have nothing to lose by going to war, we'll have more wars.
- azinman2 5y agoIt gives some teeth as a counter punch, but it’s not “working out our differences” in the slightest. What will come from this is a push for Russia and China to be completely self-dependent. Regardless of upcoming trade, the consequences are loud and clear.
- 8ytecoder 5y agoI’m also entirely skeptical that this would work in the slightest with China.
- sgc 5y agoThat was one of the arguments for globalization. But what we see is there are only a few big actors, who will remain big actors for centuries if not forever due to their size and nuclear capabilities. One of the three biggest actors showed they are willing to destroy everything despite sanctions, and no doubt will permanently change their supply chain to avoid too much pain in the future. So the ship has sailed, likely forever. Just like in the corporate world, modern power consolidates. For smaller countries "soft power" from globalization can work because the relationships are extremely lopsided, and likely will well into the future - based on how the pie of vassal or semi-vassal states is divided in the next couple decades.
- 01100011 5y agoGlad to see they're doing this but I feel like it will be years before a US fertilizer supply chain can ramp up.
- simulate-me 5y agoSo we shouldn’t try at all?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- zahma 5y agoSame botched logic that says we shouldn’t invest in light rail / subways. The incumbent advantage never favors progress.
- Splendor 5y agoBrilliant insight.
- infamouscow 5y agoThe best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.
- kayamon 5y agoUsually best to wait till the fall, they’ll come up lovely come spring.
- bluGill 5y agoThe US actually makes a lot of fertilizer and those companies are looking to expand. (the big ones also own oil refineries so they have plenty of money to invest right now)
- bannedbybros 5y ago
- mabbo 5y agoWhile I doubt this war will trigger the end of globalization, perhaps it will end blind globalization. I can imagine a lot of countries are now asking which critical resources come from so few countries/places that a trade blockage from just one could cripple them. Fertilizer is a good example. Oil for heating homes in winter, or energy generally. Food is an obvious one. I bet there are a lot more. I don't think complete protectionism is the answer either, but I suspect there is a safer place between the two extremes that many countries will start to move towards.
- belval 5y agoIndeed, it is possibly a best case scenario for the US, in the sense that now we are getting an example of what happens when a leader pushes through sanctions and it gives us a sense of just how catastrophic a Chinese invasion of a foreign neighbor would be. So far, it also shows that the theory that a strongly interconnected economy can prevent war is pretty moot. The EU and the US applied just about every economic sanctions (except imports of oil and gas in the case of EU) and Putin won't stop.
- ledauphin 5y agoI've not really seen people discussing this, but it seems like one of the biggest 'results' of this invasion as far as long term geopolitics goes. Personally, I'd bought into the idea that heavily intertwined economies tended to prevent war. I'm much less convinced now, inasmuch as it seems fairly clear that autocrats with the power to wage war may yet do so on much more ideological grounds, economics be damned.
- throwanem 5y ago> I'd bought into the idea that heavily intertwined economies tended to prevent war Hardly a novel error, at least: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion
- munificent 5y agoYes, I think the real takeaway is that people are not rational actors and people in positions of massive power even less so. I think there was an assumption baked into globalism that heads of state would behave in the best interest of their citizens, but that's only even approximately true when the country is a functioning democracy. In an authoritarian state, what's good for the leader may vary wildly from what's good for the people. One could argue that the entire point of autocratic power is for the leader to be able to do what their people don't want. And once you have someone with that level of power and no obligations to the masses, there should be no expectation that they will be have rationally or in the economic interests of the entire country. As long as it benefits their perverse psychology or isolated offshore bank accounts, it's on the table.
- fallingfrog 5y agoA quibble: "Sustainable – reduces the greenhouse gas impact of transportation, production, and use through renewable energy sources, feedstocks, formulations, and incentivizing greater precision in fertilizer use;" That's not what sustainable means - I feel like we're watering down this term until it is becoming meaningless. "Sustainable" literally means that you can sustain the practice indefinitely, and any process based on fossil fuels or any other resource that can be depleted automatically fails that test. No process that doesn't use 100% renewable energy and 100% renewable material inputs is sustainable, by definition. And also, by definition, any process that is not sustainable will not be sustained in the long term, because that's what the word means. It's fine to use "reduced environmental impact" or something like that, but let's not use "sustainable" unless we really, actually mean sustainable.
- phantomread 5y agoOnce it became a target, the precision of the term was at risk. Especially if you consider that the ability to redefine "what it means to be sustainable" is a means to greenlight high-value projects or grease the skids on large purchases of materials or services. You've correctly pointed out that use of the term "sustainable" is not sustainable.
- moltke 5y ago"Sustainable" will be used the way the words "racism" and "diversity" are used now; they will be used to push whatever is profitable for the elites.
- mannerheim 5y ago> "Sustainable" literally means that you can sustain the practice indefinitely, and any process based on fossil fuels or any other resource that can be depleted automatically fails that test. This is a definition of sustainable by which nothing in the universe is sustainable.
- jimkri 5y agoI think there is a huge opportunity to use Seaweed or Algae for fertilizer. Theres ways to do this on each coast but also to utilize the Pig and Cow farming waste to not only clean water in the process but to take major waste producing industries and try to soften their impact. I think the more people that know about the use cases of Seaweed and Algae will help that industry come back. There were too many companies that only saw Algae as a way to make bio fuel. I see it as a way to clean dirty water, and to produce a bi-product that can go back into the ground. I also think theres a way we can just use the warmer waters and the over production of seaweed, like the gulf coast especially closer to Mexico. So much seaweed is scrapped from the beaches but never used at scale for production
- bluGill 5y agoI don't think there is enough to scale that way. I'm also not sure if there are ecosysytem concerns from taking it from the sea and moving it to the midwest. I have no idea how seaweed will affect soil long term. That said, within the limits of the above by all means use it. Just don't pretend it is an answer along.
- jimkri 5y agoYeah honestly I think there would be too much processing involved to make it realistic. The benefits of Seaweed to soil (ignoring salt and sand) has been proven to help bring key nutrients and metals to the soil that are missing from farm land that was used for single plant production.
- untouchable 5y agoAs someone with a medium to large scale farm, the fertilizer price rises have been pretty severe. Already up about 40% over last year. It's really a confluence of factors. Natural gas is required to produce ammonia (it's about 80% of the cost), and usually the the prices of both move together, but this has outpaced those global fuel increases. Supply chain disruptions, increased demand, new tariffs on urea, higher fuel costs have all contributed. Fertilizer accounts for about 35% of the input costs for my farm (corn and beans) and 25% for other crops so price changes have a pretty significant impact. There's pros and cons, price increases means less fertilizer applied and lower yields, but also less environmental impact and runoff/leaching.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago> Natural gas is required to produce ammonia If I were a chemist, this would be a problem I would set out to solve: an inexpensive means to produce ammonia without natural gas. The history of (industrial) chemistry is almost nothing but new, inexpensive processes to produce a once-expensive compound. (I don't doubt of course that the natural gas process for creating ammonia was, at one time, such a breakthrough.)
- bluGill 5y agoOr even a way to make it more efficient. I have relatives in the business. They are buying out a lot of ammonia plants around the country that were build post WWII with Nazi technology, and then never upgraded. Just by modernizing those plants they are able to save a lot of money in the processing. Stagnation has been a real problem even though the chemists knew how to do better for years.
- pfdietz 5y agoUltimately this will mean hydrogen from electrolysis. In some places (including Europe, China, and the Middle East(!)) this is already cheaper than hydrogen from natural gas.
- viburnum 5y agoThe Birkeland–Eyde process (making fertilizer from hydro power) is actually older than Bosch-Haber (from fossil fuels), but the latter was cheaper.
- boringg 5y agoWhat's the TL;DR on fertilizer market? Is it a function of lack of access to Potash deposits in the US vs demand?
- kube-system 5y agoModern fertilizers are made with petroleum derived chemicals.
- danbruc 5y agoThat doesn't sound right, what plants need - primarily nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium - is not contained in petroleum. Methane from natural gas is however used as a source of hydrogen to fixate nitrogen from the air in the form of ammonia.
- kube-system 5y agoSulphur and Ammonia are made from oil and natural gas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia_production#Modern_ammonia-producing_plants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia_production#Modern_ammo... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur#Production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur#Production
- cdiamand 5y agoMy understanding is that there are three popular types of fertilizer and all three require materials (phosphate, nitrogen, potash) that currently in a shortage. Much of the potash of the world is in Belarus and Russia. Nitrogen fertilizer requires liquid natural gas, of which the price is surging. Phosphate based fertilizers are currently under export ban by China.
- rowanajmarshall 5y agoThere's a few different reason: * Ukraine and Russia are collectively the world's largest producer of potash * Nitrogen fertilisers use natural gas in their production, which has skyrocketed in price * China has banned or heavily restricted the export of fertiliser and fertiliser components over local supply fears Put that together with the effective removal of the world's largest exporter of wheat (Russia) and the 5th largest exporter of wheat (Ukraine) from world supply, and food prices are gonna get nasty. Moreso in countries that tend to import Russian/Ukrainian wheat e.g. Egypt, Turkey, Bangladesh
- aaron695 5y ago
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- hnthrowaway0315 5y agoI believe the RU war opens a new door to a lot of grief and opportunities. My company has X teams in Ukraine and Y teams in Belarus and we had to evacuate all teams in the recent weeks. Those teams take care of most of the IT-Ops and Big data infrastructures and the invasion impacted us greatly. All in all, I see immediate impact to the IT world is that Former-USSR countries will quickly lose the IT premium. During the last decade a lot of IT Operation business was out-sourced to Ukraine, Belarus as well as Romania (while not a former USSR republic, it is in the neighborhood of Ukraine). With geopolitics events fold out, all such business is going to flow to other part of the world. In the long run, the world is probably going to be more fractured. Not to say globalization is going to end, but it's going to pause for a while. Geopolitics events can and will impact commodity prices and trigger weird shits on the future market. We are also going to say more chaos in countries which produce a lot of commodities but have a weaker economy as everyone needs more commodity under their belt. It also impacts whoever is in the middle of two major players. Poland for example has long been a major production base in EU. However, if Russia is able to swallow Ukraine in whole, theoretically the whole Poland is not going to be safe (enough). I wonder what could be the consequences of such geopolitical events.
- brabel 5y ago> Belorussia It's Belarus!
- hnthrowaway0315 5y agoMy bad! Can I blame it on auto-correct? I guess no :S
- hypertele-Xii 5y agoOutsource IT to Finland. Microsoft already bought Nokia so it's US-strategic. Also Finns are highly educated. Obviously less cheap than poorer ex-Soviet countries though.
- mannerheim 5y agoIt's hard to imagine a world in which Poland will be vulnerable to Russian aggression, but Finland will be left alone.
- Animats 5y agoActual action: "USDA will launch a public inquiry seeking information regarding seeds and agricultural inputs, fertilizer, and retail markets." So this is a long way from increasing domestic production.
- db65edfc7996 5y agoA question I have idly wondered - how much space does it take to feed a country? If you had to feed 100M people with a nutritionally complete diet forever, how small of an area could you manage to generate the food? Using current or near-term feasible (<5 years away) and leaving ethics off the table (Soylent Green, etc)? How many months/years could you stockpile?
- dakna 5y ago> If you had to feed 100M people with a nutritionally complete diet forever, how small of an area could you manage to generate the food? I don't know the answer for centralized food production, but for local food production based on what I know about self-sufficiency and homesteading, my back of the napkin math goes like this: Minimum food production area for family of 4 (2 adults, 2 kids) based on diet: 1/2 acre for vegetables/chickens 2-3 acres for dairy products 5 acres for grains/nuts 10 acres for meat Plus 2-3 acres timber for heating That's ~ 20 acres per family, working all day, almost every day to produce food and heat. That is still assuming you would be able to use modern technology (tractors/implements etc.) instead of manual labor and do this in a moderate hardiness zone, probably 5-9. There is a reason in the 1800s homestead land grants were up to 160 acres. From a US perspective: The US has roughly 900 million acres of farm land. If everyone would homestead (unrealistic), and every family would be relocated to a productive area (unrealistic), this land could support 45 million homesteads. > and leaving ethics off the table (Soylent Green, etc)? I expect this to be an unrealistic scenario as well. IMHO people will start roaming for food and stealing from those who produce it, instead of patiently waiting for their government handout of whatever astronaut food was stored.
- db65edfc7996 5y agoAccounting for meat and dairy is probably an order of magnitude higher quality of life than I was imagining. I was thinking more a diet of beans, starchy potatoes, and mealworms for protein.
- asdff 5y agoIt would probably be easier in practice to involve animals and take advantage of all the land you can. Not everywhere that is currently pasture can even support agriculture that well. Maybe its too rocky to drag a plow or too steep for farm equipment. Maybe the soil and irrigation situation doesn't support much else than whatever bits of greenery are eaten by the grazers. Being able to pasture on these lands suddenly means you can actually extract usable nutrients from them.
- bauble 5y agoTranslation: The USDA plans to increase subsidies for farmers. Not that I'm necessarily against such a thing. Food price stability is very important, and farm subsidies are an important way that we ensure it in the USA.
- rossdavidh 5y agoWell yes, but in a particular way that increases production of fertilizer locally, which not all subsidies for farmers do.
- ep103 5y agoFarmers, in turn, vote for "Small Government" because they don't like people living off welfare. smh
- ct0 5y agoI don't like the line of thinking here. You're saying farmers are the same as those receiving welfare, its not fair to either group. Farmers receive subsidies for the greater good especially of those eating the products of their work.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoIt's the cognitive dissonance of a certain party that equates socialism with evil when it's distributed fairly but a necessity when influential special interests receive a benefit.