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Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security

• mrtweetyhack 5y ago
• chmod775 5y ago
  Is this just the global supply chain failing? If that's the case people might be able to make a quick buck locally sourcing and making fertilizer, which previously might've been beaten by economies of scale.
• eunos 5y ago
  And people were mocking when Chinese govt was cracking down on food waste last year.
• WhyKill 5y ago
  It's called compost honey, look it up. But seriously, composting, no till, stop spraying R0undup aka glyphosate, plant trees in fields, more cover crops, more green mulch, more pollinators, more ponds, more pastureland, more aquaculture, more polyculture in general. The problem is the desert style of farming that led to the dust bowl and will lead to the next one. This comes from a very new (<3 years) farmer who has read a bunch and microfarmed for three years on 5 acres. The problem is people got sold a bunch of lies about machines and chemicals and those lies are now coming home to roost. Organic and no till and permaculture are probably the way out of this. You can absorb nitro from the atmosphere but that's one way, nature has been doing it another way for eons.
• ryanmercer 5y ago
  Well, we can feed ourselves a lot better rapidly by: - Drastically reducing food waste. In the United States, food waste is estimated at 30-40% https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs - Shift away from animal based protein rapidly. 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#:~:text=Livestock%20takes%20up%20nearly%2080,required%20to%20produce%20our%20food https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets.... (don't get me wrong, I love meat, but I also love a habitable planet that can sustain the current population...)
  • slickrick216 5y ago
    If we just rate things better by calories we will enter a negative feedback loop where something is always better until we are all eating some synthetic sludge. Not saying you don’t have a point but we should aim to have our cake and eat it or else the future will just be worse and leave people with nothing to hope for.
    • yesenadam 5y ago
      Vegetarian diet somehow equals synthetic sludge and nothing to hope for?! Sorry if that mischaracterizes your point, but it does seem that's the slippery slope you were going for.
      • incone123 5y ago
        I regularly hear people saying the earth could support x billion people if we all just adopted diet y. Is it really our ambition to turn the whole world into residential skyscrapers just because we figured out how to feed 40 billion people on this one planet?
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
  • ianhawes 5y ago
    It will be hard to give up my fertilizer-fed beef.
    • citizenkeen 5y ago
      (1) [Thing] is bad for the world (2) But I want it. This is the recipe for the road we are on.
      • Asooka 5y ago
        If eating meat were bad for the environment, all predators who eat exclusively large prey would be extinct. We can have a discussion about how much meat per year production is sustainable, but I'm not going to start eating bugs.
• zqmall 5y ago
  In 2012 you could feed 570 million people with the crops that go into the "green" ethanol scam: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/10/01/162127460/does-your-gas-tank-hold-enough-food-to-feed-22-people?t=1651493178943 https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/10/01/162127460/do... I'm not opposed to farm subsidies as part of food independence for national security, but please do not call it "green".
  • cryptonector 5y ago
    Maybe rising corn prices is all that's needed to help bring an end to ethanol in gasoline! (Except I don't want to starve people just to fix political problems, or, really, at all.)
  • bjt2n3904 5y ago
    I was reading the journals of Gareth Jones about his time spent in Soviet Russia and Ukraine, and find remarkable similarities to this sort of thing. The government took over, for example, the manufacture and maintenance of tractors, and also selected people nearly at random to maintain them. The one guy he interviewed said something to the extent that the tractors barely last a year before breaking. The people who designed them were incompetent, the people who used them were incompetent, and the people who maintained them were incompetent. Not that it mattered, the oil they used was basically sludge. I'm getting to the point where I'm struggling to believe Hanlon's Razor. Especially when the most extreme environmentalists seem to align with Thanos' ideas about resolution to climate issues.
    • JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
      Thanos’ ideas about everything were extremely silly. A halving of population would do nothing on any time scale. A small blip easily recovered by reproduction. People deserve better writing, even in comic book movies.
      • bitwize 5y ago
        The original rationale for Thanos made a lot more sense: he simped for Death, like the concept of death was a woman in the Marvel universe. He thought half the universe's souls would make a perfect offering for her and would impress her enough to make her want to be with him. It's outrageously comic-book-y, but may as well lean into the illogic.
• _8j50 5y ago
  If all the land and resource that goes into feeding cows is used for crops, a lot more people can be supported. It has never been a lack of global food shortage, it is always regional anyways.
  • simonsarris 5y ago
    There are an enormous number of products that cattle provide beyond beef, from cosmetics to medicine to important industrial and agricultural products, with manure, bonemeal, and bloodmeal among them.
    • modo_mario 5y ago
      I agree with this. Tbh there are things that can be done to reduce it's footprint and we should collectively eat less meat. But comparing 1 to 1 what ends up on the cows plat and what ends up in the store generally doesn't do it justice. Absolutely everything gets used and processed.
  • godmode2019 5y ago
    When you feed a cow you are essentially trading up. Animal meat is much more bioavailable and nutrient dense. Especially when they are eating grass on land unsuitable for crops.
    • anthonypasq 5y ago
      I dont think so... It takes way more than 1 calorie of plant matter to generate 1 calorie of beef
      • nemo44x 5y ago
        Plant matter that we can’t eat and grows in areas we can’t farm.
        • pm90 5y ago
          The Amazon? Yeah sure but not sure thats a good trade: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2022/amazon-beef-deforestation-brazil/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2022/amazon...
• jlengrand 5y ago
  Global food shortage always feels like "well, I'm not concerned many other countries will be hit first". Many countries will literally have issues, but the food will _also_ be a lot more expensive for all of us. The coming years will be "fun" (and I mean bad, to be clear).
  • alecco 5y ago
    Middle East is starting to have issues. This will impact oil prices.
    • px43 5y ago
      I don't think that the people experiencing poverty and hunger in the middle east have any relation to anyone in the oil industry there.
      • orwin 5y ago
        History doesn't agree with you. Last time the middle-east and Maghreb got hungry, it was 2011. The Arab spring wouldn't have come if it weren't for food riots.
        • px43 5y ago
          In what way was Arab spring correlated with oil prices? https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-chart https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-cha...
    • unmole 5y ago
      If anything, high oil prices will allow governments in the region to subsidise food. Saudis have already started to help out Egypt. They definitely don't want the regime collapsing.
  • throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    >The coming years will be fun I wouldn't call the impending cognitive dissonance "fun" unless one likes being a spectator of ideologically driven mental gymnastics. We've done weird stuff to low levels of our economies. That's gonna have marginal consequences across the board. And a little bit across the board adds up to a lot of hardship.
• kickout 5y ago
  Mostly good comments in here. My take is we have at least 1-2 years of global supply of most grains. This is a completely political problem; its not like we're getting 2012 US Midwest levels of drought in back-to-back years (now THAT would be a crunch). Food waste is a problem, yes. Animal protein is not a problem. There is plenty of land in the US only suitable for grazing. Much better than that synthetic soup of Impossible Meat. Food system has largely run on the JIT systems for decades that crunched the chip industry. We haven't had a serious shock I'd argue and I don't think this is one either. People recognize the JIT-ness and fragility of the system though and are (slowly) trying to backstop it. Will take a combination of distributed controlled environments for high value fruits and vegetables, _proper_ land use (high value crop land for crops; high value grazing land for grazing). This, currently, is dictated by the incentive structures in place with subsidies--which can be changed in theory.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • pasabagi 5y ago
    > its not like we're getting 2012 US Midwest levels of drought in back-to-back years (now THAT would be a crunch). I got a shiver down my spine just reading that sentence. Please do not tempt fate. We just had the hottest year on record. I expect we'll break that record in the next few years again. Drought is depressingly likely.
    • lm28469 5y ago
      Didn't China predict they'll have their lowest crops yields in modern history ? I can't find the article I remember reading but here is one: https://www.reuters.com/business/china-ensure-agricultural-product-supplies-including-grains-2022-03-05/ https://www.reuters.com/business/china-ensure-agricultural-p... and another: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-23/climate-change-threatens-china-s-crop-yield-food-security https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-23/climate-c... Looks like everything is aligning for a pretty bad 2022 and 2023
    • kickout 5y ago
• pedro2 5y ago
  God another doomsday scenario? I'll take "ignore" for 50 please. This only contributes for my anxiety levels. I'll outsource the worries for the big government, TYVM.
• lvl102 5y ago
  We produce 3-4x the food needed.
• jiveturkey42 5y ago
  Threads like these reminds me that HN is an overwhelmingly urban community with almost zero exposure to the agriculture sector
  • mateo1 5y ago
    Not only that, but most of HN, even the professional programmers who've been here for a decade, have absolutely no clue about anything regarding the physical world. Chemical equilibriums, enthalpy of formation, basic irradiance calculations etc. That's perfectly fine, as long as you don't make really bold statements about things you don't understand. This thread reminds me of reddit. A ton of highly upvoted comments that are completely wrong. You don't need to live in the countryside to understand the basic economics surrounding agriculture, and no, "artificial" fertilizers aren't a scam nor a big corp trick. If you think you can replace them with fungi, good luck.
  • kickout 5y ago
    It's ok though. I like these threads on HN. Hopefully helps educate people. People on HN have a lot of skills to offer agriculture they likely aren't even aware of. Every article/discussion helps spread the message, hopefully. ETA: Most people don't understand agriculture or where their food comes from--HN no different. Only small % of people involved in agriculture _directly_
    • jiveturkey42 5y ago
      Alternatively, I would argue that much harm has been done to agriculture by the 'information' sector in general. Commoditizing and industrializing food production (a reduction to data and numbers) has caused most of the issues collectively known as the 'modern American diet'
      • kickout 5y ago
        Kind of agree. I don't think ag was malicious in that regard. No different than any business trying to maximize profits by any* means necessary (tm). Just so happens it affects human health.
• bkland 5y ago
  It is fascinating that we have recessions, food crises etc. all because NATO wanted to expand and Donbass cannot be allowed to be independent. While we are at it, should we liberate Northern Ireland? What exactly is the difference, except that in the case of Northern Ireland less than 50% wants to be British and in Donbass more than 50% wants to be Russian.
  • modo_mario 5y ago
    Weird how this Donbas includes parts that are very much pro Ukrainian. Russia doesn't leave room for neutrality on it's border. Especially not if you can't leverage another power like China or aren't willing to militarise completely. Also I'd suggest you don't use independent. They went away from claiming that and it's not like the veneer of it in Transnistria and South-Ossetia was much better. The ethnic cleansing projects there went a lot smoother for Putin tho. Do they care so much about Armenia independence too? And yeah let northern Ireland have it's independence if a vote goes that way imo.
  • oceanplexian 5y ago
    Ukraine is a contributing factor but so was COVID. Governments printed trillions of dollars and messed with the economy while millions of people stayed inside and didn’t work for weeks or months. What did everyone think was going to happen?
• deleted 5y ago
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• twa999 5y ago
  we are again at the narrow window between "it's not happening" and "it's good actually"
• londons_explore 5y ago
  Everyone saying 'we need to grow more crops!' needs to see that the futures markets deal with exactly this. As people see high futures prices for corn, they'll grow more corn because it's more profitable. Some farmers will switch from livestock to corn. Others who have storage facilities will make money by buying now to sell later and make use of the price difference. At a certain point, prices get too high for making bioethanol. And that gets eaten by people instead. Basically - there is no shortage because markets will do their job and mean there is always availability of all goods. The only time there will be a shortage is when governments do things like cap prices or restrict exports/imports.
  • modo_mario 5y ago
    > Some farmers will switch from livestock to corn. This switch can take too long and would need to take place in an industry often already razor tin margins thanks to big chains (which can contribute to inflexibility) and then plants take time to grow and depend on the seasons, etc. Also fertilisers go into both the livestock and the corn feed. >Basically - there is no shortage because markets will do their job and mean there is always availability of all goods. A shortage doesn't need to mean people are starving. If prices of staple foods go up enough it too causes societal unrest. (See Arab spring where bread prices went up, governments tried to protect their peg to the dollar, etc) >The only time there will be a shortage is when governments do things like cap prices or restrict exports/imports. Well here we see that happening when fuels and other components for fertilisers and some things like vegetable oils are affected by war.
  • taylodl 5y ago
    The markets can't solve problems due to lack of critical resources. Market theory rests on the assumption that all needed resources are readily available. Demand can be met my using capital to create more manufacturing facilities. Remove that assumption and market theory essentially collapses. Where market theory can still save the day is finding alternatives. If a key resource needed for the production and distribution of goods is missing then market forces will tend to produce an alternative. That works so long as an actual replacement exists and the cost of the replacement is in line with the original. Water is an irreplaceable resource - if you don't have water and you need it for production then you're pretty much screwed. The market won't "solve" that problem for you. If, as in this case, you need fertilizer then there may be an alternative but it may take several years to ramp up the production of that alternative and that alternative may be considerably more expensive than the original. This scenario leads to food shortages, food insecurity, and spiraling food costs. The market can't prevent these realities. In short, markets are just a tool and like all tools you need to understand their usefulness and limitations.
• cerol 5y ago
  Food security always makes me think about food waste. When I was 17 years old I went to Sweden as part of a cultural exchange program (I'm from South America). One of the first things that shocked me was the sheer amount of food being wasted for no reason whatsoever. In my country, even though I come from a privileged family, you can't shield yourself away from poverty. Throughout my entire life living with my parents I've seen people ring our door to ask for food. Personally, I NEVER waste any food, if I put something on my plate, I'll eat it unless it's rotten. And that goes for pretty much everyone I know. Every time I went out to eat with my parents, if there were any significant amount of food left, we would always ponder whether or not we would want to it later. If we decided we would not, we would take it anyway and find someone on the street who would. While in Sweden, I lived with Swedish families and attended to a traditional Swedish high school. So I'd eat lunch at school and dinner with my host families. My first day eating lunch at school I was shocked, to say the least. I mean, yeah, the food was great, it's amazing that there is such a functional high-quality school system there, and so organized too; once you're done eating, you're supposed to take your plate, put any leftovers on a big trash bin, and give your plate to the lady who puts them into a industrial washer. The amount of food kids threw away was just staggering. And it's not a one off thing. It's a behavior, they put more food than they know they'll eat, every single day. It's not like they put a ridiculous amount of food on their plate and throw most of it away. It's like they don't even bother paying attention to how hungry they are, they just put whatever amount of food they feel like putting, and then throw away the rest. That goes even for drinks, they would serve a cup full of milk or water, and throw half of it away. I know I'm talking about kids and teenagers, but they will grow up to be adults some day. And I saw that of many adults also. On of my duties as an exchange student was to connect both cultures, mine and the country I was being hosted by. I always tried to give people there a glimpse of what of poverty was and how privileged they were, and I always felt I never got the idea through. It felt sometimes they have a cartoonish idea of poverty and what it means to not have the money to pay for really basic things. I'm not here to call anyone out. I just think there are times when the people are also part of problem, and I wanted to give a personal perspective.
  • blockwriter 5y ago
    I agree with eating what you acquire and prepare, but food waste is also a byproduct of adequate food supply, or of supersaturated food systems. It is not only an individual attitude toward food. It would be great if I could give my leftovers that are likely to go to waste to someone down the hall in my building, but they are not in a food scarce situation. In their calculus, it would be easier, and safer, to make their own dinner. There is perhaps only one person within five miles of me that is food scarce to the point that my leftovers would be useful or desirable to them. Within ten miles, there is perhaps an order of magnitude more; within twenty, two or three orders more. All the same, it would not make sense to rectify accidental waste by donating it in almost every instance when I produce accidental food waste. The transport required would make it unfeasible. An abundance of food does self-perpetuate to the point that it becomes expendable. Well run family kitchens would likely have a positive effect on people's disposition towards food. I mill grains and bake bread, sourcing the grain supply from a well-run farm in my state, and this never fails to give me a moment to reflect on my relationship to food. It is, unfortunately, not commonplace for American households to engage with their consumption further up the supply chain than the supermarket shelf, where access is the most convenient.
• catchclose8919 5y ago
  • phil21 5y ago
    > Wtf happened with the chemical industry in general? Don't look now, but the same thing that happened to quite literally every single important industry critical to human survival. It's all incredibly centralized and fragile, to a degree I don't think many even begin to realize. > Why don't we have more, spread around the world, and capable of slight over-production just in case? Money. > or we're all just "green" and "bio" and stuff now, willing to let poorer people just suffer hunger? Nope, just money. Would have been far "greener" and "bio" and stuff if we had actually invested in such infrastructure, even if more expensive. This ironically enables the current historically cheap food situation we're currently in. In no time in human history has less labor or wealth per capita been put into food production. > While we're it, I still can't wrap my head of the stupidity of all those charities that work to "solve hunger" in Africa and places but can't ever bother to help them pool investment This is definitely one of my pet peeve rants as well. I've always said these organizations are likely to cause more death and human suffering than anything that has come before it. As soon as the ships of grain stop sailing whenever a moderate disruption finally happens (60-70 years of peace is really just a minor blip on the radar), people very rapidly will starve with little local recourse or knowledge to fall back on. Teach a man to fish and all that.
  • falcolas 5y ago
    It’s all about the money (as usual) - likely the economies of scale specifically. They technically can produce it almost everywhere, but it was cheaper to import it, and likely would still be even if local plants were started up.
    • rightbyte 5y ago
      That sounds like a problem due to the current lack of protectionism for strategic assets? I.e. it is not viable to do domestic base industry in a lot of areas. COVID showed us that governments are quick to stop exports if they feel there is a need to.
• MomoXenosaga 5y ago
  Honestly yes. In WW2 the food situation for poor people in England actually improved when they introduced the distribution system. Of course for those of us in the West "feeding" means buying strawberries in September just because we can.
• supertofu 5y ago
  Ok, so we have all these enormous factory farms full of animals who produce fertilizer quite naturally. All we have to do is give them nutritious feed and better lives so they are spared disease. Why can't Big Agriculture pivot to actually using the poop that these animals produce?
  • voakbasda 5y ago
    Small farmer here. Most of my fertilizer comes from the rear end of my animals. They choose where to apply it, and my free range birds spread it around a bit. I would not try to spread it any other way. I try to avoid man made inputs, but the land is still far less productive than the few times I have applied synthetic fertilizers. Big Ag invests in machines that each cost hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. Those machines are tuned to spread powdered/pelletized fertilizer that comes from a factory. It would be prohibitively expensive to pivot to machines that can collect and spread manure, and the results would be suboptimal compared to their usual inputs. It is simply not worth the cost, as it would put them at a disadvantage to those who do not switch over. The shortage will pass long before they could pay off the investment.
• mike_hearn 5y ago
  I'm always bothered by stories like these that seem to do a reasonable job of listing causes of self-inflicted problems, and then try to act like it was some sort of inevitable act of God, or natural law of the universe or something. According to TFA the causes are: 1. Back-to-back storms in the USA causing production shutdowns. OK, that one is genuinely just random natural variance. 2. Natural gas price explosion. This is due largely to sanctions on Russia. Governments don't actually have to sanction Russian natural gas. It's a choice, one that can be undone tomorrow if need be. 3. Sanctions on a major Belarusian potash producer. Same thing. Belarus isn't even Russia. This could be fixed tomorrow with the wave of a bureaucrat's pen. 4. Ongoing side effects of lockdowns. This was a major own goal. People warned at the time you can't just shut down the economy even if actually had worked, which it didn't. This one sits squarely in government footgun area. 5. China has restricted exports of phosphate to build up stockpiles at home. Once again, governments are creating the damage here. 6. "Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which effectively cut off nearly a fifth of the world’s nutrient exports". For the third time, no, governments cut off those nutrient exports. It wasn't some sort of physical law that said invasions => cut off nutrient supply. It was and is a choice. What seems to be happening here is that comfortable and powerful politicians have decided that showing how much they care about Ukraine is more important than people eating. The poor around the world will starve, so (primarily) European countries can wave a blue and yellow flag over their bodies. It feels very wrong.
  • llanowarelves 5y ago
    It's not an own-goal for the elites and politicians, who now have an excuse for their bad monetary policy causing inflation, and who have got and will continue to get many more dependents as things worsen. Never let a good crisis go to waste!
  • c1ccccc1 5y ago
    These are good points, I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. That said, I think it still makes sense for western countries to sanction Russia. Yes, sanctions are wasteful of resources, which could lead to food shortages and people dying, but that's kind of the problem with war: It kills people and wastes resources. Even without sanctions, there would be many Ukrainians (and Russians) killed, and Ukraine would not be keeping up its wheat exports. Ideally, we'd like to prevent this kind of thing from happening very often, which in practice means there needs to be some kind of deterrence against strong countries invading their weaker neighbours. Since western powers can't fight directly against Russia, as it would risk nuclear war, sanctions are one of the few tools available for deterrence. Sanctions aren't about waving a blue and yellow flag or about showing how much you care. They're about preventing similar future conflicts and hopefully giving Ukraine a better negotiating position so the war can end sooner. Also, it seems like European and North American sanctions shouldn't be a problem for most poor countries unless they're also participating in those sanctions themselves? While sanctions make sense for rich countries, the first priority should definitely be to feed your own people. So if the government of India decides that in order to feed its people, it needs to import potash from Belarus, more power to it.
• disambiguation 5y ago
  This is a story about supply chains and inflation, but the real story is that we're in the century of "peak resources". Fertilizer depends on phosphorous which cannot be renewed or substituted once its gone. Without fertilizer we can't support the multi-billion person population we have today. We're not running out tomorrow, or even this decade, but we may experience peak phosphorous within our lifetimes.
  • usrn 5y ago
    Short of a nuclear reaction it isn't "gone" and some organisms are known to concentrate it when it's scattered.
    • disambiguation 5y ago
      Sure there is some level of recovery, likewise we can pull CO2 out of the atmosphere and stick it back in the ground. A lot of problems go away if we "solve" energy, but that's also challenged by the same "peak" resource scenarios.
    • blacksqr 5y ago
      For example, sargassum seaweed, which floats freely in the ocean, is rich in both phosphorus and ammonium. There are already efforts in the Caribbean to turn sargassum into compost, because there's so much of it washing ashore that it's become a nuisance. Medieval Irish farmers relied on seaweed fertilizer to turn much of the island into rich farmland.
  • Aperocky 5y ago
    > Fertilizer depends on phosphorous which cannot be renewed or substituted once its gone. Can you elaborate? It's not like phosphorous in fertilizer are leaving Earth after being used as fertilizer.
    • disambiguation 5y ago
      See my other comment about CO2, with enough energy all things are possible. There is something called the "phosphorous cycle" but its a lot like oil and does not replenish anywhere near the rate we consume it.
• netmonk 5y ago
  When you understand that human and animals organic dejections are alternative fertiliser and that most aerial virus spreads through shit you can understand the main way how covid 19 was spread accross the world with very high correlation between biosolid (shit based fertiliser) spray on fields and covid 19 infection in US for exemple (https://theethicalskeptic.com/2021/11/15/chinas-ccp-concealed-sars-cov-2-presence-in-china-as-far-back-as-march-2018/ https://theethicalskeptic.com/2021/11/15/chinas-ccp-conceale...)
• Wolfenstein98k 5y ago
  One of the few topics that makes me genuinely question my Pinkerian "you can't stop progress" tendency.
• ZealousForJesus 5y ago
  How about brokering a peace deal? Which is more important, American pride or feeding your family?
• SemanticStrengh 5y ago
  As a reminder Skq1 solves world hunger however like most scientific revolutions, nobody will use it. It multiply by two plants growth rate. https://www.dissercat.com/content/biotekhnologicheskie-osnovy-povysheniya-effektivnosti-vosproizvodstva-iskhodnogo-materiala-v https://www.dissercat.com/content/biotekhnologicheskie-osnov... https://patents.google.com/patent/EP2095713A1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/EP2095713A1/en Ah yes downvote because key knowledge nobody knows should keep being ignored otherwise it could.. save life's? Imagine the horror!
• EricE 5y ago
  We've been doing stupid crap - like subsidizing corn production for ethanol - that seriously needs to end. The amount of government/market mismanagement and interference driven by special interests is beyond ridiculous. The rubber band is beginning to snap!
  • oh_sigh 5y ago
    Doesn't that mean we have extra corn that can be used for human/animal consumption if shit hits the fan? Right now we're growing a bunch of crops that don't feed anyone, but it would not be hard at all to have that be the case. Much easier than the whole process of starting from scratch to get new farmland ready for growing corn.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • jonhohle 5y ago
      Ethanol corn can be digested by animals but not humans.
      • giantrobot 5y ago
        It can be turned into corn meal and can definitely be digested by humans. It just can't be eaten directly off the cob.
  • simonsarris 5y ago
    Excess agricultural capacity is generally a good idea. If we have zero excess in the system, then when a hiccup occurred we might find ourselves in famine. With corn-for-ethanol, the US gov is paying to keep farmland productive that has no human-or-livestock feed value. But you could imagine a situation where more human or livestock feed is needed (massive disruption of cropland, say), and in those or subsequent years we could convert basically-for-ethanol fields to consumption fields. Or if you are running out of fertilizer instead of running out of food, then you can divert expected and stored fertilizer for ethanol fields onto human-and-livestock feed fields. Once again the excess capacity acts in your favor. (Or ought to) This is assuming that governing bodies and farmers are making coherent rational decisions and in addition responding to local conditions. I have no opinion on that. Just explaining why subsidizing what looks like superfluous excess capacity is not necessarily a dumb thing to do.
• Alex3917 5y ago
  I don't get this whole fertilizer crunch thing. If you look at the price of Osmocote on Amazon, it's basically not much different than it's always been: https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B00GTDGMHC https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B00GTDGMHC So basically the cost of enough fertilizer to feed an entire family for a year has gone up by, what, $20? $100? And that's at retail prices; the cost (and cost increase) would obviously be much smaller when purchased in bulk. And that's also for the name brand product, obviously generics are much cheaper. I'm not a farmer but I did fertilize ~20 fruit trees with weekend with Plant-tone, Peters 20-20-20, Garden Lime, and Fish & Kelp. My cost of doing that for the entire year will be maybe $60, and that's only because I'm trying to maximize fruit quality and tree health rather than minimize costs.
  • tagami 5y ago
    That looks like a 50% increase over the average price according to the link you sent.
  • n00j 5y ago
    It takes a bit of time for old stock to sell out. If you pay attention, you can see a pattern in a lot of items that retailers tend to only increase the prices when their old stick sells out and new stock come in, and then there is a dramatic rise in the price of the item.
• hosh 5y ago
  I mean, we have been depleting soil fertility through the use of synthetic fertilizers for decades. It’s been a self-destructive cycle. Perhaps some farmers might switch to practices that are not so dependent upon as much to external inputs … but even switching to things like no-till or using local inputs like manure, or using soil-regenerating practices like polycropping or integrated pest-control is going to take time. It’s doable though. The Cubans have been operating their agriculture without imported oil and fertilizers since the US shut down imports. That also meant that use of tractors became limited, as are long-distance transport for food. Better than food security is food sovereignty, and people within a locality being able to feed themselves.
  • Bayart 5y ago
    > Better than food security is food sovereignty, and people within a locality being able to feed themselves. That's all well and good, but the implication is that people should live where they grow their food, or move where it can be done. Implementing it at scale would mean either billions of dead or billions of refugees.
  • unmole 5y ago
    Cubans on average lost ~6kgs during the crisis in the 90's. Sure, diabetes and heart disease dropped as a result but I would much rather have a food surplus.
  • mcguire 5y ago
    From the link I posted above: "Fifty-six percent of all land used for corn, soybeans, wheat, and cotton was on farms that used no-till/strip-till on at least part of their cropland in 2010-11."
  • Manuel_D 5y ago
    > It’s doable though. The Cubans have been operating their agriculture without imported oil and fertilizers since the US shut down imports. That also meant that use of tractors became limited, as are long-distance transport for food. This resulted in widespread food insecurity, with the Cuban government rationing food to UN poverty levels [1]. Cuba also experienced food shortages due to COVID [2]. Cuba's agricultural experience is not a very good case for organic farming. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Period#Caloric_intake_statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Period#Caloric_intake_... 2. https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2021/07/12/cubas-food-shortages-and-pandemic-fueled-economic-woes-drive-biggest-protest-in-decades/?sh=36cac30472fb https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2021/07/12/cubas-f...
• deleted 5y ago
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• motohagiography 5y ago
  This is an engineered problem. Fertilizer shipments were interrupted by a labour attack by rail workers unions limiting and delaying shipments during planting season, and who are co-ordinating with other groups to create scarcity as a means to impose stronger government social controls. There is an active disinformation campaign about attacks on food processing plants as a means to sow popular panic as well. Yes, fertilizer comes from Ukraine and Russia, but only in single digit percentages, and it also comes from everywhere else in the world. This whole situation has moved beyond a conspiracy to a kind of ideology that has seized western countries. There is a cadre of people who are creating chaos because they think it puts them at the center of it and sets them up to become the party who manages it. We have the most sophisticated data collection and logistics networks in the history of the world, and you think we just accidentally run out of a fundamental economic factor at a key moment in the natural economic cycle, and that risks mass starvation? We can somehow predict macro climate impacts, but not manage how much fertilizer we're going to need for a planting season? It's just politics by people who use politics as a means to gratify an urge for power for its own end. I would be suprised if people were still acting fooled.
  • jimbokun 5y ago
    > We have the most sophisticated data collection and logistics networks in the history of the world, and you think we just accidentally run out of a fundamental economic factor at a key moment in the natural economic cycle, and that risks mass starvation? Absolutely. There is no omniscient Illuminati pulling the strings for the entire planet. Just people, corporations, governments, and other corporate entities making decisions based on what they perceive to be their best interest. And all of them are limited and fallible. Also, wars and pandemics tend to throw a wrench into the quality of planning forecasts.
    • motohagiography 5y ago
      Maybe you're right, it's probably nothing. Of course there is no omniscient illuminati, as even just for the omniscience part, first you would have to somehow subordinate all the principled thinkers working at companies like google and facebook, of which there are at least dozens. This is after stacking entire sectors of academia and their appendant policy arms with what would essentially be intellectual zombies who did nothing to resist the agenda of said plot. That's hundreds of fellowships and thousands of adjunct jobs. Even if you funded most of them, it would take several millions of dollars. Journalists are far too curious, and we can rely on them to object to any falsehood and propaganda such a scheme would require to survive. Really, all 6 or 7 media conglomerates working together to push the same messages or to kill stories that would expose said plot seems pretty far fetched. The logistics alone would be baffling. The only plausible way that could happen would be through a kind of religious hysteria of people who imagine themselves as enlightened through an awakening, and on a path to redemption that requires them to efface themselves, dismantle their formerly sinful lives and prevent others from sinning in a similar way. It's absurd in a modern era. It would have to be wrapped in a political agenda, which educated people are basically immune to, especially ones who are largely agnostic. The amount of effort they would need just to suppress naturally occuring logical questions that would imply a conspiracy which would unravel under the most minor scrutiny would be so immense as to not be in the realm of serious consideration. There are however, movements and ideologues reading from the same script that do things like creating a rail workers strike during planting season. It doesn't take a conspiracy, just the logic of an idea.
• xyzzy21 5y ago
  The Green Revolution of the 1960s proved that we could - that Malthusian claims were BS. What we have now is those same Malthusians actively sabotaging the roots of the Green Revolution by shutting down energy and means of production. Technically mass murder.
  • BeFlatXIII 5y ago
    > Malthusian claims were BS The Green Revolution merely raised the ceiling massively higher. It did not perform any magic to make it permanently vanish.
    • goatlover 5y ago
      Women choosing to have less children is the other half of the failed mass starvation predictions. World’s population will peak this century and start to decline. We currently produce enough food to feed 10 billion, if waste is accounted for.
  • wing-_-nuts 5y ago
    > those same Malthusians actively sabotaging the roots of the Green Revolution by shutting down energy and means of production. Technically mass murder I don't suppose you'd like to expand on this argument or back it with any sort of substance?
  • vkou 5y ago
    Do we also get to describe carbon-polluting energy generation in the same terms? As 'technically mass murder'? What's your suggested next step? Line up the 'technical mass murderers' against the wall?
  • kristjansson 5y ago
    The Green Revolution proved we could increase crop production through additional inputs, not magic. We moved the constraint from local soil conditions to global resource extraction.
    • deleted 5y ago
• bob1029 5y ago
  I feel like the economics will sort this out automatically, at least for the average first-world citizen. Most consume way more than they actually utilize for nutritional value. In America, food is entertainment more than anything else. Once the price of this "entertainment" becomes prohibitive, people will start looking at it with the proper perspective. Simply switching from daily takeout to weekly meal prep can shave $500-1000 off someone's monthly food budget. The time/discipline tradeoff is complex, but ultimately a hungry person will figure something out.
  • marcosdumay 5y ago
    Meat normally fixes the fluctuations on agriculture output. When it's very plentiful, meat producers switch into more grains and grow more cattle. When it's scarce, meat producers slaughter their cattle earlier, and do as much as possible to substitute grains for grass. AFAIK, the second largest stabilizer is on stockpiles. But some countries do almost none of it.
  • jimbokun 5y ago
    How about the majority of the world's people who are not first world citizens?
    • deleted 5y ago
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    • bob1029 5y ago
      A shifted American perspective on what food is actually for might help the rest of the world as well.
    • rootsudo 5y ago
      Ironically it would be easier, food costs in "first world" are the most expensive, while emerging economies have much more potential to stablize and finally use their local resources to grow "cheap" food. At the same time it also depends on what that local population really is used too - different to compare Asia, South East Asia to Africa.
  • 5y ago
• dghughes 5y ago
  Not just fertilizer but politics. In my Canadian province there was a bumper crop of potatoes in 2021 but one field had one section with a potato virus. Shipments stopped and it took months of deals to get back to selling them. Even Puerto Rico with no potato fields and willing to take shipments was not allowed to receive any. Millions of pounds of perfectly good potatoes had to be destroyed. The US FDA declared the potato virus a threat to human health but no other country made that determination. Politics ruined a lot of food.
• hinkley 5y ago
  The fungi guys will tell you that running out of mineral fertilizer is bullshit on roughly 95% of the arable land because all of the minerals your food needs are right there in the sand and clay. I once heard it described that conventional agriculture is essentially a hydroponics system using partially sterilized soil as the substrate. Nearly every symbiotic relationship fungi make is based on buying sugars from plants by selling them minerals from biological weathering of rock (particles). What happens in conventional agriculture is that we murder all of the fungi. There are a few places with strange soil compositions that are actually lacking in particular minerals. We could either elect to do something else with that land, or transition everyone but them to a post-green-revolution strategy.
  • cryptonector 5y ago
    OK, that may be, however, that doesn't change that our method of agriculture is about to come up short, and that to switch to other approaches will take time.
  • etrautmann 5y ago
    That's interesting, but a slight oversimplication since nitrogen isn't coming from the minerals. As long as nitrogen fixation can still occur (via decomposition of something organic, etc), I think the general principle seems reasonable, though not an expert.
    • giantg2 5y ago
      Or from crop rotations of legumes with nitrogen fixing microbes. But that too would require a move away from intensive industrialized agricultural practices.
      • mcguire 5y ago
        "Fifty-six percent of all land used for corn, soybeans, wheat, and cotton was on farms that used no-till/strip-till on at least part of their cropland in 2010-11: 23 percent of land was on farms that used no-till/strip-till on all land in these crops while 33 percent was on farms that used a mix of no-till, strip-till, and other tillage practices." (From the report summary.) https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-details/?pubid=44030 https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-details/?pubid=440... Industrialized farming practices are capable of changing.
• kderbyma 5y ago
  Communities should be more designed to self sustain. they should build aquaponics into sky scrapers and have tenants split the costs and the profits.
  • KarlKemp 5y ago
    How are ten ants supposed to afford a sky scraper?