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I live in western Canada -- I can assure you there is no lack of arable farmland. What we lack is western governments that: - Understand where fertilizer come

I live in western Canada -- I can assure you there is no lack of arable farmland. What we lack is western governments that: - Understand where fertilizer comes from, and how to create billions of tons of it from raw materials available in western Canada. - Stops crushing small business and farmers, by forcing them to pay 10x to 100x more in total compliance, regulatory and taxation costs than the big businesses that lobby the government and create the compliance, regulatory and taxation laws - Are forcibly stopped by their citizenry from abusing them for generations.

chrisco255 5y ago
You should go to the capital and protest. I hear that works well in free countries.
- thisiscorrect 5y ago
  It probably does. Where do you find one of those free countries, though?
- pjkundert 5y ago
  Only ineffective protests are allowed. Unless you're high in the grievance hierarchy; then you can burn shit down, and get the Prime Minister to literally kneel before you.
deepsun 5y ago
30% of world supply of fertilizer (Ka-based) comes from Soligorsk -- city in Belarus, dictatorship country that helps Russia to attack Ukraine (provides it's territory, transportation, railroad services, airport services, fuel services to Russian troops.
- brador 5y ago
  What is so special about this place that it makes so much of the worlds fertiliser supply? Why can’t a different place do it?
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    You can build new factories, but it takes time.
    - deepsun 5y ago
      There are almost no factories, only mines.
      - HWR_14 5y ago
        I thought Belarus imported the Ka for the fertilizer from elsewhere. Is that not the case?
        deepsun 5y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belaruskali https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belaruskali Corrections to my post: - 20% of world supply actually - K, not Ka
  - deepsun 5y ago
    The salt mines. For analogy -- what is so special about Klondike and gold, why can't a different place do it?
KarlKemp 5y ago
I don’t understand… From all I can tell, there’s quite a bit of farming happening in Canada. Are you saying the land is farmed, but inefficiently? Or is there land that should be farmed but is forest/wilderness? „Regulation“ and „compliance“ are the same, more or less. It’s just florist to keep repeating both. Taxes rarely prevent some business from existing since almost all taxes are tied to profits, not revenues. Do you have any examples of regulation in farming that make it so much harder for the 1,000,000 $ farm than one 10 x the size? And, if that is so, why aren’t these large companies making the gains in efficiency you are promising?
- friedm4n 5y ago
  > Taxes rarely prevent some business from existing since almost all taxes are tied to profits, not revenues. * Does one need capital for growth (more tractors, more people)? How do taxes affect the process of saving the capital, do they increase or decrease the pace? * Having multiple ways to invest someone's capital, would a person prefer the enterprise with higher net profits?
  - KarlKemp 5y ago
    I’m having doubts a lack of capital is stopping Canada from producing vastly more foodstuffs. For one thing, agriculture is (literally) bread-and-butter business for banks. And there’s been sort of a capital glut. Meaning: a semi-solid business plan will get you all the capital you need, for little more than 0 % interest.
    - rdtwo 5y ago
      Farming isn’t very profitable. High risk venture. I think it’s almost like running a self storage where you are mostly just using the farming to pay for the land.
pasabagi 5y ago
I'm skeptical. A lot of the land that looks like good land in north America has a poor climate, poor soil, or both. Further, to make soil productive, you have to do a lot of work building irrigation and drainage. People look at a state like Montana and think that the vast stretches of land are undeveloped, but in reality, unless you went in with a lot of investment and care, the soil would just lift off and you'd end up with another dust bowl. If Canadian farmers are like farmers in most of the western world, they're great at filling forms, exploiting bureacracy, getting paid to not grow sugar beet or whatever the latest scheme is, then yakking about how it breaks their cowboy hearts that the state can't just let them be free.
- hn_version_0023 5y ago
  Honest question: how much of that poor soil is directly related to the damming of rivers all over the US? I’m curious to know and not really sure how to go about finding an answer.
  - eurasiantiger 5y ago
    Not sure about Canada, but in the US, this mostly due to deforestation and centuries of aggressively farming the same land: there’s preciously little nutrients and carbon in the soil compared to fields that have living forests right around them. Sure there would be crop losses to animals in such fields, but those animals also fertilize the soil and keep the microbiome diverse.
  - pasabagi 5y ago
    Well, at least in Montana, it's just a semi-arid climate. It doesn't rain enough for farming techniques developed in western europe. My general feeling is that a good field is usually the product of generations of work: where I grew up, you had to put drainage channels every two meters, giant ditches, endless effort to get rid of weeds, etc. It wasn't the case you could just move into unmaintained soil, especially virgin soil with shrub on it, and expect it to start producing wheat without a hell of a lot of labour. That's compounded by the fact that farmers are basically soil-seeking missiles, and always have been. If there's a patch of really good farming land, that's probably been a lot of competition for it in the preceding centuries. If there aren't any farmers on it, there's almost always a reason.
ProjectArcturis 5y ago
Can you elaborate? Honestly none of these points make complete sense to me, but I don't know anything at all about Canadian agricultural policy.
kkfx 5y ago
Try to analyze what you eat in an year and how much land is needed to produce it, then try to interpolate for a global population. Just count how much flower (as flower and as products made with it, from bread to biscuits) you consume in an year and how much grain, corn etc you need, with the relevant quantity of land needed. Than try to go the classic natural way, witch means manure and fertilizer derived from urine, compute how much cows, pigs, sheep etc you need both for milk, cheese, butter, meat and manure and so how much prairie/pasture you need. Of course industry have made progress, nourishing cows with grains/cereals etc make them grow more, more quickly, taste better etc, irrigation make fields more productive just to stay basic, but most effective technique also pollute, especially those for agriculture than those for animal husbandry. Yes, there is room to expand productions and ways to do so in less polluting manners, but there is a big issue in the middle: mass distribution is incompatible with a distributed farming model, witch means on one side some big&powerful bodies will fight against such move, and more practically that food prices will jump anyway and food variety will fall much since many long-distance imported products can't be imported at an acceptable cost without mass distribution. In a way or another, even just for changing to a more sustainable system we face huger, and we the "westerns" face the little impact, populations of vast part of the world face far bigger disasters and very probably will not get them without reacting. Between them there are poor from central Asia that can't really do much but there are also big powers like China that desperately need food for an enormous population having a polluted and industrialized land + no fertile ground around to invade. They need to reach South America to find enough food, and South America is already a feud of USA who will not like having less big but still big food supply problems in the meantime South Americans do not like much nourish nor Chinese nor USA while starving... That means some kind of war, perhaps with proxies to avoid a full scale nuclear conflict, and actually war have side effects, one between them is crushing various productions, food included...

chrisco255 5y ago

You should go to the capital and protest. I hear that works well in free countries.

thisiscorrect 5y ago
It probably does. Where do you find one of those free countries, though?
pjkundert 5y ago
Only ineffective protests are allowed. Unless you're high in the grievance hierarchy; then you can burn shit down, and get the Prime Minister to literally kneel before you.

deepsun 5y ago

30% of world supply of fertilizer (Ka-based) comes from Soligorsk -- city in Belarus, dictatorship country that helps Russia to attack Ukraine (provides it's territory, transportation, railroad services, airport services, fuel services to Russian troops.

brador 5y ago
What is so special about this place that it makes so much of the worlds fertiliser supply? Why can’t a different place do it?
- HWR_14 5y ago
  You can build new factories, but it takes time.
  - deepsun 5y ago
    There are almost no factories, only mines.
    - HWR_14 5y ago
      I thought Belarus imported the Ka for the fertilizer from elsewhere. Is that not the case?
      - deepsun 5y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belaruskali https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belaruskali Corrections to my post: - 20% of world supply actually - K, not Ka
- deepsun 5y ago
  The salt mines. For analogy -- what is so special about Klondike and gold, why can't a different place do it?

KarlKemp 5y ago

I don’t understand… From all I can tell, there’s quite a bit of farming happening in Canada. Are you saying the land is farmed, but inefficiently? Or is there land that should be farmed but is forest/wilderness? „Regulation“ and „compliance“ are the same, more or less. It’s just florist to keep repeating both. Taxes rarely prevent some business from existing since almost all taxes are tied to profits, not revenues. Do you have any examples of regulation in farming that make it so much harder for the 1,000,000 $ farm than one 10 x the size? And, if that is so, why aren’t these large companies making the gains in efficiency you are promising?

friedm4n 5y ago
> Taxes rarely prevent some business from existing since almost all taxes are tied to profits, not revenues. * Does one need capital for growth (more tractors, more people)? How do taxes affect the process of saving the capital, do they increase or decrease the pace? * Having multiple ways to invest someone's capital, would a person prefer the enterprise with higher net profits?
- KarlKemp 5y ago
  I’m having doubts a lack of capital is stopping Canada from producing vastly more foodstuffs. For one thing, agriculture is (literally) bread-and-butter business for banks. And there’s been sort of a capital glut. Meaning: a semi-solid business plan will get you all the capital you need, for little more than 0 % interest.
  - rdtwo 5y ago
    Farming isn’t very profitable. High risk venture. I think it’s almost like running a self storage where you are mostly just using the farming to pay for the land.

pasabagi 5y ago

I'm skeptical. A lot of the land that looks like good land in north America has a poor climate, poor soil, or both. Further, to make soil productive, you have to do a lot of work building irrigation and drainage. People look at a state like Montana and think that the vast stretches of land are undeveloped, but in reality, unless you went in with a lot of investment and care, the soil would just lift off and you'd end up with another dust bowl. If Canadian farmers are like farmers in most of the western world, they're great at filling forms, exploiting bureacracy, getting paid to not grow sugar beet or whatever the latest scheme is, then yakking about how it breaks their cowboy hearts that the state can't just let them be free.

hn_version_0023 5y ago
Honest question: how much of that poor soil is directly related to the damming of rivers all over the US? I’m curious to know and not really sure how to go about finding an answer.
- eurasiantiger 5y ago
  Not sure about Canada, but in the US, this mostly due to deforestation and centuries of aggressively farming the same land: there’s preciously little nutrients and carbon in the soil compared to fields that have living forests right around them. Sure there would be crop losses to animals in such fields, but those animals also fertilize the soil and keep the microbiome diverse.
- pasabagi 5y ago
  Well, at least in Montana, it's just a semi-arid climate. It doesn't rain enough for farming techniques developed in western europe. My general feeling is that a good field is usually the product of generations of work: where I grew up, you had to put drainage channels every two meters, giant ditches, endless effort to get rid of weeds, etc. It wasn't the case you could just move into unmaintained soil, especially virgin soil with shrub on it, and expect it to start producing wheat without a hell of a lot of labour. That's compounded by the fact that farmers are basically soil-seeking missiles, and always have been. If there's a patch of really good farming land, that's probably been a lot of competition for it in the preceding centuries. If there aren't any farmers on it, there's almost always a reason.

ProjectArcturis 5y ago

Can you elaborate? Honestly none of these points make complete sense to me, but I don't know anything at all about Canadian agricultural policy.

kkfx 5y ago

Try to analyze what you eat in an year and how much land is needed to produce it, then try to interpolate for a global population. Just count how much flower (as flower and as products made with it, from bread to biscuits) you consume in an year and how much grain, corn etc you need, with the relevant quantity of land needed. Than try to go the classic natural way, witch means manure and fertilizer derived from urine, compute how much cows, pigs, sheep etc you need both for milk, cheese, butter, meat and manure and so how much prairie/pasture you need. Of course industry have made progress, nourishing cows with grains/cereals etc make them grow more, more quickly, taste better etc, irrigation make fields more productive just to stay basic, but most effective technique also pollute, especially those for agriculture than those for animal husbandry. Yes, there is room to expand productions and ways to do so in less polluting manners, but there is a big issue in the middle: mass distribution is incompatible with a distributed farming model, witch means on one side some big&powerful bodies will fight against such move, and more practically that food prices will jump anyway and food variety will fall much since many long-distance imported products can't be imported at an acceptable cost without mass distribution. In a way or another, even just for changing to a more sustainable system we face huger, and we the "westerns" face the little impact, populations of vast part of the world face far bigger disasters and very probably will not get them without reacting. Between them there are poor from central Asia that can't really do much but there are also big powers like China that desperately need food for an enormous population having a polluted and industrialized land + no fertile ground around to invade. They need to reach South America to find enough food, and South America is already a feud of USA who will not like having less big but still big food supply problems in the meantime South Americans do not like much nourish nor Chinese nor USA while starving... That means some kind of war, perhaps with proxies to avoid a full scale nuclear conflict, and actually war have side effects, one between them is crushing various productions, food included...