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I like your framework, but I do question your dismissal of raw materials. The 'green revolution' broke a barrier in our ability to grow food (amount per acre),
by mellavora 5y ago
I like your framework, but I do question your dismissal of raw materials.
The 'green revolution' broke a barrier in our ability to grow food (amount per acre), but it isn't clear if that increase can be sustained for the next 100 years-- the massive amounts of chemicals we put on the land are killing the soil.
That's before we get to climate-change threats to food production.
Or species diversity threats to food production.
Or the elimination of 80% of insect biomass in developed countries, with concordant impact on food production.
- bryanlarsen 5y agoWe could easily grow a lot more food in less space if we had to. To give an extreme example: greenhouses grow about 1000x as much food per acre as conventional farming does, but the resulting food costs about 10x as much. We use all our land to grow food not because we have to, but because that's the cheapest way of doing so. We could grow food more intensively, but then the price of food would go up.
- imtringued 5y agoThere is this agrotech thing called no till farming and combined with proper crop rotation and carefully selected cover crops and soil management your soil will improve every single year instead of degrading. I have seen a lot of hackernews comments that think they can just chemically or genetically engineer their way out of this. Just spray compound X and Y on crop Z and you are ready to go. It may look technologically impressive but that is actually the lazy solution.
- bryanlarsen 5y agoYou're totally right, no-till farming is the best way to preserve the soil. The problem is that no-till farming uses a lot of chemicals, and consumers think that organic farming is the solution. But organic farming uses tillage for weed control, so it destroys the soil.