18 ms·

After millennia of expansion, the world has passed ‘peak agricultural land’

308 points by sebg 4y ago

alexfromapex 4y ago
Indoor vertical gardens are really cool, would love to see more of those
- prichino 4y ago
FredPret 4y ago
I’ve always been super pumped about hydroponics and the absurd yields you can get from it. Hopefully it gets cheaper and cheaper over time.
- fatherzine 4y ago
  Hydroponics sounds great on paper. Until you see the sludge they feed the plants with. Given the incentive to cut costs, especially where it's hard to see and/or measure, not sure I want to get anywhere close to the resulting produce.
  - FredPret 4y ago
    https://daily.jstor.org/a-history-of-human-waste-as-fertilizer/ https://daily.jstor.org/a-history-of-human-waste-as-fertiliz...
  - LordDragonfang 4y ago
    This objection baffles me. Traditional agriculture has used literal feces to "feed" plants since its inception, and frequently uses bones and blood as nutrient input. I'm eating the resulting food, not the rot and excrement used to feed it.
    - fatherzine 4y ago
      That is a fault of imagination ;) Think "processed oil refinery sludge" or some other such industrial horror. Oh, sure, there is a shit ton of heavy metals and/or who knows what other garbage in there, but it's below the FDA limit (hello VW wink wink), so let's roll with it straight to mass human consumption.
  - lathyrus_long 4y ago
    What do you mean by "sludge"? Typical hydroponic solution just looks like water, thus the name. The fertilizers used are higher purity ("greenhouse grade", "ultra-soluble", etc.) than those applied to soil, since impurities risk clogging the fertigation equipment.
- watwut 4y ago
  It is cheap way to get badly tasting vegetables. There is real, huge noticeable difference between tomatoes raised via hydroponics and not. Unless they manage to make them super packed with nutrients, which they are definitely not, there is zero reason to eat them.
- jahnu 4y ago
  Solar Foods and similar are also promising ways to massively reduce land use https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Foods https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Foods
- bshipp 4y ago
  I work in hydroponics and when I describe it to someone new I mention it's like creating 15 acres of agricultural land out of thin air. Of course that depends on the crop, but there can be huge advantages to covered agriculture.
  - actionfromafar 4y ago
    Is it still mostly salads or is there hope for high-calorie hydroponics?
    - hanniabu 4y ago
      All depends on the cost of the land it's on, electricity/water costs, the growing apparatus, whether it requires artificial light, and what the market rates for the crop are. So yeah, there's a lot of variables as one could imagine.
    - colechristensen 4y ago
      It's still mostly salads.
  - Gordonjcp 4y ago
    > I mention it's like creating 15 acres of agricultural land out of thin air. So you can just grow things hydroponically out of nothing? You don't need masses of petrochemical-derived fertilisers and plastics?
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Hydroponics are starting to sound like perpetual motion machines, where you can get more calories out than you put in. It kinda works for farmland because it’s basically solar panels as plants.
      - Gordonjcp 4y ago
        I know, right? And if you've got farmland you can't easily put plants on you can put animals on that instead, and eat the animals and use the stuff the animals leave behind to grow plants. It's almost like an ecosystem that has worked for hundreds of thousands of years is actually a pretty solid idea.
- legulere 4y ago
  Hydroponics only makes sense for high price crops like salad or vegetables which make up only small amounts of agriculture. It’s way too expensive for the crops that provide most of the calories consumed by humans or animal feed: wheat, maize, soy
  - hanniabu 4y ago
    > Hydroponics only makes sense for high price crops like salad or vegetables That's only true if it's in the city or other location with high cost/sqft land
  - tekno45 4y ago
    imagine if we can reclaim all the land that salad and veggies use and replace it with good grains? solutions aren't always mutually exclusive.
    - yuliyp 4y ago
      ... that'll be a drop in the bucket. cereal grains alone use more than 10x [1] the amount of land used for vegetables. Add in other large users (coarse grain / oil crops) and it's over 20x, meaning you'd get like a 5% increase by replacing all vegetable land with grains. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/land-use#land-use-by-crop https://ourworldindata.org/land-use#land-use-by-crop
      - tekno45 4y ago
        thanks for sharing, thats pretty good data. can't disagree with that. seems like even more reason to not use the land for things that can be grown vertically/hydroponically. But definitely something i'll be reading more on, thanks for the resource.
    - Gordonjcp 4y ago
      It wouldn't be particularly nutritionally useful, and you'd be able to grow grain for a couple of years before your soil turned into dust. That's why America starved in the 1930s.
- fredrikholm 4y ago
  Hydroponics are limited to low-calorie foods such as lettuce, herbs, spinach etc due to constraints in the method itself. High calorie and/or high fiber foods require complex rhizospheres which is currently only found in healthy soil. To add injury, the substrate used to provide nutrients to hydroponic plants either require petrochemicals or other plant material (compost, husks, seeds...) to mimic a complete nutrient profile. Perhaps there are solvable problems, but given the already high costs and limitations, hydro is not an option if our ecosystems collapse.
  - lathyrus_long 4y ago
    > High calorie and/or high fiber foods require complex rhizospheres which is currently only found in healthy soil. What is your source for this claim? Major grains (wheat, corn, rice, etc.) grow fine hydroponically--I've actually seen modern conventional agriculture described derisively as a hydroponic system using the sterilized natural soil as its inert medium. That description seems basically correct to me, though I don't think it's necessarily bad. Production of grains in systems analogous to hydroponic vegetable production would certainly be possible, just currently uneconomic: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2002655117 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2002655117 The major benefit of hydroponics is in achieving very high yield per acre. This is important e.g. when growing perishable vegetables in expensive greenhouses near densely-populated areas. For grains that are readily dried, stored, and shipped, it's currently far cheaper to cultivate more acres in remote areas at lower yield per acre. The "petrochemical" claim is also confusing. The point of hydroponics is that the plant gets nutrients from the solution, not from the inert substrate. Typical hydroponic substrates may be plant-based (e.g. coir) or not (e.g. rockwool), but in neither case are they providing significant fertility, nor making significant use of petrochemicals. Obviously their energy inputs for production and transportation often come from petroleum; but that's true for almost any human activity today, including organic agriculture. A few niche applications do use petrochemical-based substrates (e.g. phenolic foam), but very rarely. The synthetic nitrogen fertilizers dissolved in the nutrient solution often use hydrogen from natural gas, since that's the cheapest source, but could use any other source of hydrogen (e.g., electrolysis of water) instead. Here's an article studying those economics: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2021.580808/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2021.5808...
oefrha 4y ago
Tangential but I’m under the impression that “The world produces more food than ever” may not be true this year, and may not be true in the following years if the climate keeps being highly irregular.
- protomyth 4y ago
  This year is all about fertilizer prices driven by high petroleum costs.
  - ajmurmann 4y ago
    And maybe a war in a country that produces a lot of wheat
    - protomyth 4y ago
      True, but if the input costs were lower, the difference would easily be made up.
      - lucozade 4y ago
        Russia is the biggest fertiliser exporter in the world. Sanctions aren't likely to keep prices down.
      - tagami 4y ago
        you can't "spin up a new instance" with farming. The ripples are just now reaching the shore. This will be a longer period for recovery than most people understand.
        protomyth 4y ago
        No, but they decide each planting season what to plant. Farmers tend to shuffle crops when needed. Haven't talked to anyone around here about what is in the ground.
eastern 4y ago
Waiting eagerly for the world to pass peak peak.
rr808 4y ago
To me it seems super sized farms and corporate land is the main trend. Massive farms in easily farmed locations and the death of small family owned operations. If you try to run a small farm in marginal land it just doesn't pay any more. The new generations aren't interested either. I know my Wife's grand mothers old farm is abandoned, the land behind my holiday house used to be farm now its reverting to forest, meanwhile my Uncle's farm was merged with 4 others so is still family owned but a mega operation with low wage workers.
- nicoburns 4y ago
  It has been the main trend in recent decades, but current farming practices aren't sustainable, deplete the soil, and depend heavily on oil-derived external inputs (e.g. ammonia fertiliser). It may well be that crop-mixing makes a big come back in the decades to come, and that may not be as suitable for mega-farms.
- wollsmoth 4y ago
  There are actually a ton of small farms being run around the US at least. i learned of this site from the Omivore's Dilemma: http://www.eatwild.com/products/ http://www.eatwild.com/products/ This kind of farming is doable, and can be profitable if run well. But it's labor intensive and doesn't scale as well as conventional farming operations. Running a small farm properly is a hell of a lot of work. A modern farm can allow farmers more off time and less effort.
  - piker 4y ago
    What you are describing is an unprofitable business. You can make equilibrium money in it but you must supply the labour and get no time off. If you instead substituted yourself out and bought the labour there would be nothing left over.
    - giantg2 4y ago
      In general I believe small-time farmers should provide at least some of rhe labor. Otherwise you end up with gentleman farmers just paying low wages to the actual labor.
aaron695 4y ago
legitster 4y ago
You can already see this trend in the western world. In our county, we may have rezoned 1/2 of our farmland in the last few decades. It's just a pity they all turn into housing developments. We should really be setting aside more as green space.
- mc32 4y ago
  In many parts of the east coast and even some in the west coast of the USA, what was once pastureland or farmland has returned to a more natural state and a naive person would not know these places were one productive agricultural lands. This is why today the USA has more forest than it did at the turn of the 1900s. But yeah, it’s sad that all the orchards from mountain view to San Jose and beyond in the San Francisco and San Pablo Bay Areas have turned into housing tracts. I also long for the peaceful orchards, vineyards and fields of corn, but alas, time marches on.
  - chasd00 4y ago
    > But yeah, it’s sad that all the orchards from mountain view to San Jose and beyond in the San Francisco and San Pablo Bay Areas have turned into housing tracts. I also long for the peaceful orchards, vineyards and fields of corn, but alas, time marches on. i was under the impression no additional housing is being built and that was a major problem.
    - RationPhantoms 4y ago
      keyword is affordable housing. Mansions/million-dollar condos are still being developed.
      - mattnewton 4y ago
        This is a problem, where we effectively don’t allow multi family or cheap apartments in many areas and only allow expensive single family units. However I believe California housing supply is so far behind demand that even expensive units are desirable to alleviate pressure on less expensive units, that people might otherwise compete for.
photochemsyn 4y ago
This is promising, but it does basically rely on human populations stabilizing fairly soon. Interestingly the most solid factors for that is women's education and rights and children's health care, that correlates most closely with reduced population growth (I mean, not many people would really want to pump out ten kids and watch six to eight of them die of childhood diseases, which was about the pre-industrial norm, given the choice - having two kids is the basic replacement number assuming they survive to adulthood). Hydroponics plus desalination is kind of interesting, as then you could grow some crops on seriously non-arable land, although I don't recall ever seeing high-protein crops (such as legumes with associated nitrogen-fixing bacteria) grown hydroponically. In terms of total calories per land area IIRC potatoes are the big winners there, never seen hydroponic potatoes either.
- thfuran 4y ago
  >not many people would really want to pump out ten kids and watch six to eight of them die of childhood diseases, which was about the pre-industrial norm Wasn't something like 50% childhood mortality more typical?
  - lordnacho 4y ago
    Probably with a lot of variance, this would happen to some people. IIRC Darwin.
  - photochemsyn 4y ago
    I think child mortality is counted as deaths before age five; I think it's lower if you count survival to adulthood and then having children. For population to remain constant each couple has to have two children survive to that point (on average; if some people have larger families and some have none it would balance out). Regardless, having half your children die as the norm is a pretty unpleasant reality.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      You need a bit more than each couple having two kids because of people who never marry, etc. But I suspect we’re headed toward a world where many have zero or at most one kid - and a small few have many. Arguably more efficient, too.
bryanlarsen 4y ago
The article is better than the headline. Remember that the reason we use so much land is because that's the cheapest way to grow food. We could grow more food on less land by farming more intensively. We don't because that would make the food more expensive. At an extreme, a greenhouse can increase yields 100x but at an increase in costs of 10x.
- twox2 4y ago
  Yields increased by 10x for costs increased by 10x sounds cheaper to me.
  - dtech 4y ago
    I assume the 10x cost increase was per-yield, 100x the yield for 1000x the price.
    - forrestthewoods 4y ago
      Ahh that makes sense. The original language was pretty confusing. Increase yields 100x per sqft Increase costs 10x per lb
  - jonny_eh 4y ago
    People can only eat so much food, and it can only be sold for so little.
  - georgeecollins 4y ago
    Yield per acre 100x, yield per $, 1/10x
  - shagie 4y ago
    https://agfundernews.com/the-economics-of-local-vertical-and-greenhouse-farming-are-getting-competitive https://agfundernews.com/the-economics-of-local-vertical-and... For greens, an conventional farm is $0.65/lb and a greenhouse is $2.33/lb. > Assuming a 40-45% gross margin for a typical supermarket produce department, retail prices for greens would need to be approximately $1 a pound for conventional, $4 a pound for greenhouse, $5 a pound for vertical, and $12 a pound for container-grown. A typical head of bibb or butter lettuce weighs less than half a pound. Therefore, the lettuce can be grown in a greenhouse or vertical farm and sold at retail for $2 to $3 per head. > Although greenhouse or vertical farming is three to five times more expensive than growing on a conventional outdoor farm, it still allows for competitive pricing to the consumer with other vegetables and sides. The yield can go up, but the cost per unit goes up too.
99_00 4y ago
Fossil fuels are a big input into agriculture. Running machines, fertilizer, transportation to market. Fossil fuels are used because for the industry they are the best cost vs benefit. The industry doesn't pay the externalities. Moving off fossil fuels or forcing the industry to pay externalities increases input cost and price for consumers. If managed correctly (considering technological, economic, business) price increases can be acceptable. If managed incorrectly, it means prices skyrocket and some people simply in the world simply can not afford adequate nutrition. It is my opinion that sanctions, ESG, and fossil fuel divestment are incorrect management of transitioning off fossil fuels. And we are seeing the result.
dukeofdoom 4y ago
Not worried because the bigger problem will be population decline, once the boomers start dying on mass. The US will be more like Japan. You won't be able to import enough immigrants to offset this, since the lowering standards of living in the US is increasing to trend to the world average. Less people, less agricultural land needed. Too many people are having abortions, or choosing to not to have kids, and not enough kids are born to replace the dying.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  In 2019 there were 3,747,540 natural births in the US. There were 2,854,838 natural deaths. There were 31% more births than deaths. The natural population growth isn't declining yet. And even if it was - as long productivity increases - that's all that really matters. Population can decrease like in Japan while GDP increases due to productivity growth. Population growth != better living standards. See the Malthusian Trap that was the popular way of thinking prior to the industrial revolution. Population kept increases - yet people just kept getting more miserable lives.
  - beiller 4y ago
    May I ask what is a natural death? The numbers given don't align with other metrics I was able to look up like the "fertility rate" which is 1.70 births per woman (2019) making the growth negative (you need >2.0 right?)
asdff 4y ago
This isn't concerning. In the middle ages, the vast majority of the isle of Britain was under the plow to feed a couple million people. Yields have improved dramatically in the last century, by orders of magnitude for many staple crops. This is due to utilizing hybridized species that might have favorable traits compared to pure species, and also by using fertilizer and modern irrigation. The latter was called the green revolution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution
- dan-robertson 4y ago
  I don’t think that your statement about Great Britain is correct. If so much land were devoted to agriculture in the Middle Ages, there wouldn’t have been much of the forests left to devote to shipbuilding during the early–middle modern period. It is true that some land that is now urban or used for grazing was more once intensively farmed (especially eg in the highlands where most agriculture is sheep farming). But I think the amount of land devoted to crops, and certainly the kind of intensive growing that leaves little room for wildlife is a more modern invention. I would guess that land devoted to agriculture (maybe except for some kinds of grazing) probably peaked in the 20th century, perhaps during or shortly after the war when food imports were harder to come by.
  - whatshisface 4y ago
    You're making an assumption about how much forest land would be required to support the shipbuilding that doesn't match what we know about Britain's history of forestation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forestry_in_the_United_Kingdom#/media/File:Woodland_as_a_percentage_of_land_area_in_England.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forestry_in_the_United_Kingdom...
    - DoughnutHole 4y ago
      If I remember correctly quite a lot of British lumber used for shipbuilding from the Elizabethan era on came from Ireland, which was comparatively well forested in the Middle Ages. You don't need natively forestry so much when you've a subject neighbour to pillage.
mensetmanusman 4y ago
Moore’s law for agriculture. We haven’t begun to explore the 3rd dimension. A skyscraper per city providing all the food for that city is one possible future…
- koheripbal 4y ago
  It takes about an acre of land to feed one person for the year, and that is with modern yield efficiencies. Even if you assume a 10x increase in yield efficiency, you would still need about 200 skyscrapers growing food, for every skyscraper holding people.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  That's gonna need to be an awfully big skyscraper. You'd need about 680,000 km² of land to grow the food to feed NYC (more than the entirety of New York State). If you assume that yields could be 100x better in-doors (a strong assumption) - you'd still need a building with about 10x the floor space of the entire city's land area.
eth0up 4y ago
From my perspective, in Florida (and elsewhere), we've been aiming for peak madness for decades. Things grow in Florida, and by choice, many of the wrong things. The focus here is primarily on impressionism and more often than not, a sub-mediocre version. The cult of Saint Augustine grass and soulless sub-developments has, in fear of creative alternatives and erosion, paved the state with this alien blight. We have a perennial swarm of whining 2-stroke engines thrashing, blowing and mangling countless tons of shrubbery and alien blight, most of which is never composted with intent for reuse. The whine of the blower is our State Anthem. The average home, if not encompassed by a mote of cement, grows nothing useful. A vegetable garden is a rare sight, and a community allotment even more so. In the 1920s, Florida produced more celery than any place in the world, and certain areas, through means of agriculture, thrived during the Depression. For many years, Polk County alone, produced more citrus than the entire state of California, although politics, land repurposing and ' citrus greening' have changed this. Amaranth grows everywhere here, on farms, roadsides and in yards. It's typically weeded, sprayed or fought. I wonder how easy it would be to grow crops of it. If that's a bad plan, many other useful things grow here, despite our objections. Even if we only grew conventional produce, we could grow far more than we do, and in a relatively harmonious manner. And this could be done without additional deforestation. Currently, a thousand people each day are relocating from New York to Florida (and many more from elsewhere), with the general intent to make things here resemble New York (or elsewhere) as much as they can afford. Our wetlands, which once comprised the majority of our territory, is replaced with retention ponds that are politically qualified as restoration of... wetlands. It took vicious battles to spare our keystone Everglades of airports, damming and concrete jungles, but we sort of did it. Sort of. The prevailing psyche, however, is generally hostile to anything indigenous here but the winter weather and surface image of the coastline. And then there's Sludge, the PFAS saturated, miraculously marketed product of repurposed sewage, which is sometimes forced on ranchers and others. I once spoke to a rancher who told me he's seen his cows chewing on condoms. When I asked him why he used the stuff, he said there's enough coercion to do so that he has little choice. My point is that rather than thinking exclusively in terms of carbon, stolid convention and zero self reflection, we might contemplate the many opportunities right in front of us, to do things differently, or do different things. It may seem extreme now, but without a paradigm shift (in an actually realistic and very potentially amenable direction), things will become extreme in a less amenable and less manageable way. Yes, if we continue being myopic maniacs, food production will be a problem. We may have other options though. I frequently read comments on HN hostile to small-scale and organic farming. Citations abound, illustrating the impracticality and futility of small, especially organic operations. Yet, in my direct experience, I've seen a 5 acre farm not only remain the sole (and successful) business of a small family for decades and produce enough to sell, consume and compost, but no worker there has ever made minimum wage. I'm convinced we can do things differently and better.
soorya3 4y ago
we also consume more food than required and US alone wastes about 30-40% of food. https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs. Hypothetically if we eliminate the waste effectively we need 40% less land + reduced consumption of other resources
bmmayer1 4y ago
Is this like when we reached peak oil 10 times in the last 50 years?
99_00 4y ago
Transportation and refrigeration allow us to grow food where it it grows most efficiently and move it to where it is needed. The alternative is to use more land to inefficiently grow food locally and eat canned, pickled, and dried food off season.
JoeAltmaier 4y ago
Combine land use with yield improvements - 10X - 20X per acre since the 1950's. So the land-use graph, multiplied by this rising yield line, shows a very different curve. A shocking rise in crop consumption that exceeds world population growth by some factor. For industrial uses presumably (cotton, oil-seed and so on). Make of that what you will.
- algoatecorn 4y ago
  More of our food crops have been funneled into livestock as feed as well
  - JoeAltmaier 4y ago
    That's complicated. I'd imagine animal husbandry would scale well with population growth. What use is a cow, but for somebody to eat it? If that were the case, then the animal-feed component might match population growth (and not acres under cultivation).
- everybodyknows 4y ago
  Also, biofuel.
nonameking2026 4y ago
Yes - and 640kb is all we'll ever need. Global cooling will kill us all and Al Gore will save the world. Focus on pollution and think about before buying the iphone 4na1° because the most likely problem for the problems in this world is you (and me) over consuming. Not Brazilian farmer trying to make an honest living.
- SiempreViernes 4y ago
  You realize a good chunk of those Brazilian farmers are trying to make an honest living explicitly by providing the products you're over-consuming?
  - nonameking2026 4y ago
    Fair point. I need a diet. Still have my iPhone 7 though :)
mlindner 4y ago
This is as false as the last time this type of nonsense was claimed. It causes really bad policy.
contingencies 4y ago
Fundamentally large-scale monocultures are inefficient because they require large scale external inputs. When the overall cost of these inputs (transportation, source-site damage, energy inputs, requisite equipment, etc.) are considered in aggregate, the approach does not make sense economically. Obviously, it is also unsustainable. I believe a sustainable, long-term agriculture would include in its design the following features: multi-crop/intercrop by design (ecosystem vs. monoculture), reduction of emphasis on uniformity, iterative rather than total harvesting. Perhaps the main issue with such an approach is currently harvesting technology. Densely interplanted crops may be hard to access and thus hard to harvest. And yet, because they should tend to require less external inputs, be more resistant to pathogens, and provide healthier soils, improved water retention, reduced wind exposure, and multiple crops on the same land, there should be a budget for this.
sammalloy 4y ago
Thinking out of the box on this, I would like to see more zoning exceptions and subsidies for home owners who have enough land for small scale farming at a hyper local level. I’ve seen people do this for specific crops in mixed use areas (residential and industry) and it’s been very successful and helps feed the community.
karmakaze 4y ago
Should we start to measure in volume akin to transistor count and process node?

308 points by sebg 4y ago

alexfromapex 4y ago

Indoor vertical gardens are really cool, would love to see more of those

prichino 4y ago

FredPret 4y ago

I’ve always been super pumped about hydroponics and the absurd yields you can get from it. Hopefully it gets cheaper and cheaper over time.

fatherzine 4y ago
Hydroponics sounds great on paper. Until you see the sludge they feed the plants with. Given the incentive to cut costs, especially where it's hard to see and/or measure, not sure I want to get anywhere close to the resulting produce.
- FredPret 4y ago
  https://daily.jstor.org/a-history-of-human-waste-as-fertilizer/ https://daily.jstor.org/a-history-of-human-waste-as-fertiliz...
- LordDragonfang 4y ago
  This objection baffles me. Traditional agriculture has used literal feces to "feed" plants since its inception, and frequently uses bones and blood as nutrient input. I'm eating the resulting food, not the rot and excrement used to feed it.
  - fatherzine 4y ago
    That is a fault of imagination ;) Think "processed oil refinery sludge" or some other such industrial horror. Oh, sure, there is a shit ton of heavy metals and/or who knows what other garbage in there, but it's below the FDA limit (hello VW wink wink), so let's roll with it straight to mass human consumption.
- lathyrus_long 4y ago
  What do you mean by "sludge"? Typical hydroponic solution just looks like water, thus the name. The fertilizers used are higher purity ("greenhouse grade", "ultra-soluble", etc.) than those applied to soil, since impurities risk clogging the fertigation equipment.
watwut 4y ago
It is cheap way to get badly tasting vegetables. There is real, huge noticeable difference between tomatoes raised via hydroponics and not. Unless they manage to make them super packed with nutrients, which they are definitely not, there is zero reason to eat them.
jahnu 4y ago
Solar Foods and similar are also promising ways to massively reduce land use https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Foods https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Foods
bshipp 4y ago
I work in hydroponics and when I describe it to someone new I mention it's like creating 15 acres of agricultural land out of thin air. Of course that depends on the crop, but there can be huge advantages to covered agriculture.
- actionfromafar 4y ago
  Is it still mostly salads or is there hope for high-calorie hydroponics?
  - hanniabu 4y ago
    All depends on the cost of the land it's on, electricity/water costs, the growing apparatus, whether it requires artificial light, and what the market rates for the crop are. So yeah, there's a lot of variables as one could imagine.
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    It's still mostly salads.
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  > I mention it's like creating 15 acres of agricultural land out of thin air. So you can just grow things hydroponically out of nothing? You don't need masses of petrochemical-derived fertilisers and plastics?
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Hydroponics are starting to sound like perpetual motion machines, where you can get more calories out than you put in. It kinda works for farmland because it’s basically solar panels as plants.
    - Gordonjcp 4y ago
      I know, right? And if you've got farmland you can't easily put plants on you can put animals on that instead, and eat the animals and use the stuff the animals leave behind to grow plants. It's almost like an ecosystem that has worked for hundreds of thousands of years is actually a pretty solid idea.
legulere 4y ago
Hydroponics only makes sense for high price crops like salad or vegetables which make up only small amounts of agriculture. It’s way too expensive for the crops that provide most of the calories consumed by humans or animal feed: wheat, maize, soy
- hanniabu 4y ago
  > Hydroponics only makes sense for high price crops like salad or vegetables That's only true if it's in the city or other location with high cost/sqft land
- tekno45 4y ago
  imagine if we can reclaim all the land that salad and veggies use and replace it with good grains? solutions aren't always mutually exclusive.
  - yuliyp 4y ago
    ... that'll be a drop in the bucket. cereal grains alone use more than 10x [1] the amount of land used for vegetables. Add in other large users (coarse grain / oil crops) and it's over 20x, meaning you'd get like a 5% increase by replacing all vegetable land with grains. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/land-use#land-use-by-crop https://ourworldindata.org/land-use#land-use-by-crop
    - tekno45 4y ago
      thanks for sharing, thats pretty good data. can't disagree with that. seems like even more reason to not use the land for things that can be grown vertically/hydroponically. But definitely something i'll be reading more on, thanks for the resource.
  - Gordonjcp 4y ago
    It wouldn't be particularly nutritionally useful, and you'd be able to grow grain for a couple of years before your soil turned into dust. That's why America starved in the 1930s.
fredrikholm 4y ago
Hydroponics are limited to low-calorie foods such as lettuce, herbs, spinach etc due to constraints in the method itself. High calorie and/or high fiber foods require complex rhizospheres which is currently only found in healthy soil. To add injury, the substrate used to provide nutrients to hydroponic plants either require petrochemicals or other plant material (compost, husks, seeds...) to mimic a complete nutrient profile. Perhaps there are solvable problems, but given the already high costs and limitations, hydro is not an option if our ecosystems collapse.
- lathyrus_long 4y ago
  > High calorie and/or high fiber foods require complex rhizospheres which is currently only found in healthy soil. What is your source for this claim? Major grains (wheat, corn, rice, etc.) grow fine hydroponically--I've actually seen modern conventional agriculture described derisively as a hydroponic system using the sterilized natural soil as its inert medium. That description seems basically correct to me, though I don't think it's necessarily bad. Production of grains in systems analogous to hydroponic vegetable production would certainly be possible, just currently uneconomic: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2002655117 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2002655117 The major benefit of hydroponics is in achieving very high yield per acre. This is important e.g. when growing perishable vegetables in expensive greenhouses near densely-populated areas. For grains that are readily dried, stored, and shipped, it's currently far cheaper to cultivate more acres in remote areas at lower yield per acre. The "petrochemical" claim is also confusing. The point of hydroponics is that the plant gets nutrients from the solution, not from the inert substrate. Typical hydroponic substrates may be plant-based (e.g. coir) or not (e.g. rockwool), but in neither case are they providing significant fertility, nor making significant use of petrochemicals. Obviously their energy inputs for production and transportation often come from petroleum; but that's true for almost any human activity today, including organic agriculture. A few niche applications do use petrochemical-based substrates (e.g. phenolic foam), but very rarely. The synthetic nitrogen fertilizers dissolved in the nutrient solution often use hydrogen from natural gas, since that's the cheapest source, but could use any other source of hydrogen (e.g., electrolysis of water) instead. Here's an article studying those economics: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2021.580808/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2021.5808...

oefrha 4y ago

Tangential but I’m under the impression that “The world produces more food than ever” may not be true this year, and may not be true in the following years if the climate keeps being highly irregular.

protomyth 4y ago
This year is all about fertilizer prices driven by high petroleum costs.
- ajmurmann 4y ago
  And maybe a war in a country that produces a lot of wheat
  - protomyth 4y ago
    True, but if the input costs were lower, the difference would easily be made up.
    - lucozade 4y ago
      Russia is the biggest fertiliser exporter in the world. Sanctions aren't likely to keep prices down.
    - tagami 4y ago
      you can't "spin up a new instance" with farming. The ripples are just now reaching the shore. This will be a longer period for recovery than most people understand.
      - protomyth 4y ago
        No, but they decide each planting season what to plant. Farmers tend to shuffle crops when needed. Haven't talked to anyone around here about what is in the ground.

eastern 4y ago

Waiting eagerly for the world to pass peak peak.

rr808 4y ago

To me it seems super sized farms and corporate land is the main trend. Massive farms in easily farmed locations and the death of small family owned operations. If you try to run a small farm in marginal land it just doesn't pay any more. The new generations aren't interested either. I know my Wife's grand mothers old farm is abandoned, the land behind my holiday house used to be farm now its reverting to forest, meanwhile my Uncle's farm was merged with 4 others so is still family owned but a mega operation with low wage workers.

nicoburns 4y ago
It has been the main trend in recent decades, but current farming practices aren't sustainable, deplete the soil, and depend heavily on oil-derived external inputs (e.g. ammonia fertiliser). It may well be that crop-mixing makes a big come back in the decades to come, and that may not be as suitable for mega-farms.
wollsmoth 4y ago
There are actually a ton of small farms being run around the US at least. i learned of this site from the Omivore's Dilemma: http://www.eatwild.com/products/ http://www.eatwild.com/products/ This kind of farming is doable, and can be profitable if run well. But it's labor intensive and doesn't scale as well as conventional farming operations. Running a small farm properly is a hell of a lot of work. A modern farm can allow farmers more off time and less effort.
- piker 4y ago
  What you are describing is an unprofitable business. You can make equilibrium money in it but you must supply the labour and get no time off. If you instead substituted yourself out and bought the labour there would be nothing left over.
  - giantg2 4y ago
    In general I believe small-time farmers should provide at least some of rhe labor. Otherwise you end up with gentleman farmers just paying low wages to the actual labor.

aaron695 4y ago

legitster 4y ago

You can already see this trend in the western world. In our county, we may have rezoned 1/2 of our farmland in the last few decades. It's just a pity they all turn into housing developments. We should really be setting aside more as green space.

mc32 4y ago
In many parts of the east coast and even some in the west coast of the USA, what was once pastureland or farmland has returned to a more natural state and a naive person would not know these places were one productive agricultural lands. This is why today the USA has more forest than it did at the turn of the 1900s. But yeah, it’s sad that all the orchards from mountain view to San Jose and beyond in the San Francisco and San Pablo Bay Areas have turned into housing tracts. I also long for the peaceful orchards, vineyards and fields of corn, but alas, time marches on.
- chasd00 4y ago
  > But yeah, it’s sad that all the orchards from mountain view to San Jose and beyond in the San Francisco and San Pablo Bay Areas have turned into housing tracts. I also long for the peaceful orchards, vineyards and fields of corn, but alas, time marches on. i was under the impression no additional housing is being built and that was a major problem.
  - RationPhantoms 4y ago
    keyword is affordable housing. Mansions/million-dollar condos are still being developed.
    - mattnewton 4y ago
      This is a problem, where we effectively don’t allow multi family or cheap apartments in many areas and only allow expensive single family units. However I believe California housing supply is so far behind demand that even expensive units are desirable to alleviate pressure on less expensive units, that people might otherwise compete for.

photochemsyn 4y ago

This is promising, but it does basically rely on human populations stabilizing fairly soon. Interestingly the most solid factors for that is women's education and rights and children's health care, that correlates most closely with reduced population growth (I mean, not many people would really want to pump out ten kids and watch six to eight of them die of childhood diseases, which was about the pre-industrial norm, given the choice - having two kids is the basic replacement number assuming they survive to adulthood). Hydroponics plus desalination is kind of interesting, as then you could grow some crops on seriously non-arable land, although I don't recall ever seeing high-protein crops (such as legumes with associated nitrogen-fixing bacteria) grown hydroponically. In terms of total calories per land area IIRC potatoes are the big winners there, never seen hydroponic potatoes either.

thfuran 4y ago
>not many people would really want to pump out ten kids and watch six to eight of them die of childhood diseases, which was about the pre-industrial norm Wasn't something like 50% childhood mortality more typical?
- lordnacho 4y ago
  Probably with a lot of variance, this would happen to some people. IIRC Darwin.
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  I think child mortality is counted as deaths before age five; I think it's lower if you count survival to adulthood and then having children. For population to remain constant each couple has to have two children survive to that point (on average; if some people have larger families and some have none it would balance out). Regardless, having half your children die as the norm is a pretty unpleasant reality.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    You need a bit more than each couple having two kids because of people who never marry, etc. But I suspect we’re headed toward a world where many have zero or at most one kid - and a small few have many. Arguably more efficient, too.

bryanlarsen 4y ago

The article is better than the headline. Remember that the reason we use so much land is because that's the cheapest way to grow food. We could grow more food on less land by farming more intensively. We don't because that would make the food more expensive. At an extreme, a greenhouse can increase yields 100x but at an increase in costs of 10x.

twox2 4y ago
Yields increased by 10x for costs increased by 10x sounds cheaper to me.
- dtech 4y ago
  I assume the 10x cost increase was per-yield, 100x the yield for 1000x the price.
  - forrestthewoods 4y ago
    Ahh that makes sense. The original language was pretty confusing. Increase yields 100x per sqft Increase costs 10x per lb
- jonny_eh 4y ago
  People can only eat so much food, and it can only be sold for so little.
- georgeecollins 4y ago
  Yield per acre 100x, yield per $, 1/10x
- shagie 4y ago
  https://agfundernews.com/the-economics-of-local-vertical-and-greenhouse-farming-are-getting-competitive https://agfundernews.com/the-economics-of-local-vertical-and... For greens, an conventional farm is $0.65/lb and a greenhouse is $2.33/lb. > Assuming a 40-45% gross margin for a typical supermarket produce department, retail prices for greens would need to be approximately $1 a pound for conventional, $4 a pound for greenhouse, $5 a pound for vertical, and $12 a pound for container-grown. A typical head of bibb or butter lettuce weighs less than half a pound. Therefore, the lettuce can be grown in a greenhouse or vertical farm and sold at retail for $2 to $3 per head. > Although greenhouse or vertical farming is three to five times more expensive than growing on a conventional outdoor farm, it still allows for competitive pricing to the consumer with other vegetables and sides. The yield can go up, but the cost per unit goes up too.

99_00 4y ago

Fossil fuels are a big input into agriculture. Running machines, fertilizer, transportation to market. Fossil fuels are used because for the industry they are the best cost vs benefit. The industry doesn't pay the externalities. Moving off fossil fuels or forcing the industry to pay externalities increases input cost and price for consumers. If managed correctly (considering technological, economic, business) price increases can be acceptable. If managed incorrectly, it means prices skyrocket and some people simply in the world simply can not afford adequate nutrition. It is my opinion that sanctions, ESG, and fossil fuel divestment are incorrect management of transitioning off fossil fuels. And we are seeing the result.

dukeofdoom 4y ago

Not worried because the bigger problem will be population decline, once the boomers start dying on mass. The US will be more like Japan. You won't be able to import enough immigrants to offset this, since the lowering standards of living in the US is increasing to trend to the world average. Less people, less agricultural land needed. Too many people are having abortions, or choosing to not to have kids, and not enough kids are born to replace the dying.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
In 2019 there were 3,747,540 natural births in the US. There were 2,854,838 natural deaths. There were 31% more births than deaths. The natural population growth isn't declining yet. And even if it was - as long productivity increases - that's all that really matters. Population can decrease like in Japan while GDP increases due to productivity growth. Population growth != better living standards. See the Malthusian Trap that was the popular way of thinking prior to the industrial revolution. Population kept increases - yet people just kept getting more miserable lives.
- beiller 4y ago
  May I ask what is a natural death? The numbers given don't align with other metrics I was able to look up like the "fertility rate" which is 1.70 births per woman (2019) making the growth negative (you need >2.0 right?)

asdff 4y ago

This isn't concerning. In the middle ages, the vast majority of the isle of Britain was under the plow to feed a couple million people. Yields have improved dramatically in the last century, by orders of magnitude for many staple crops. This is due to utilizing hybridized species that might have favorable traits compared to pure species, and also by using fertilizer and modern irrigation. The latter was called the green revolution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution

dan-robertson 4y ago
I don’t think that your statement about Great Britain is correct. If so much land were devoted to agriculture in the Middle Ages, there wouldn’t have been much of the forests left to devote to shipbuilding during the early–middle modern period. It is true that some land that is now urban or used for grazing was more once intensively farmed (especially eg in the highlands where most agriculture is sheep farming). But I think the amount of land devoted to crops, and certainly the kind of intensive growing that leaves little room for wildlife is a more modern invention. I would guess that land devoted to agriculture (maybe except for some kinds of grazing) probably peaked in the 20th century, perhaps during or shortly after the war when food imports were harder to come by.
- whatshisface 4y ago
  You're making an assumption about how much forest land would be required to support the shipbuilding that doesn't match what we know about Britain's history of forestation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forestry_in_the_United_Kingdom#/media/File:Woodland_as_a_percentage_of_land_area_in_England.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forestry_in_the_United_Kingdom...
  - DoughnutHole 4y ago
    If I remember correctly quite a lot of British lumber used for shipbuilding from the Elizabethan era on came from Ireland, which was comparatively well forested in the Middle Ages. You don't need natively forestry so much when you've a subject neighbour to pillage.

mensetmanusman 4y ago

Moore’s law for agriculture. We haven’t begun to explore the 3rd dimension. A skyscraper per city providing all the food for that city is one possible future…

koheripbal 4y ago
It takes about an acre of land to feed one person for the year, and that is with modern yield efficiencies. Even if you assume a 10x increase in yield efficiency, you would still need about 200 skyscrapers growing food, for every skyscraper holding people.
onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
That's gonna need to be an awfully big skyscraper. You'd need about 680,000 km² of land to grow the food to feed NYC (more than the entirety of New York State). If you assume that yields could be 100x better in-doors (a strong assumption) - you'd still need a building with about 10x the floor space of the entire city's land area.

eth0up 4y ago

From my perspective, in Florida (and elsewhere), we've been aiming for peak madness for decades. Things grow in Florida, and by choice, many of the wrong things. The focus here is primarily on impressionism and more often than not, a sub-mediocre version. The cult of Saint Augustine grass and soulless sub-developments has, in fear of creative alternatives and erosion, paved the state with this alien blight. We have a perennial swarm of whining 2-stroke engines thrashing, blowing and mangling countless tons of shrubbery and alien blight, most of which is never composted with intent for reuse. The whine of the blower is our State Anthem. The average home, if not encompassed by a mote of cement, grows nothing useful. A vegetable garden is a rare sight, and a community allotment even more so. In the 1920s, Florida produced more celery than any place in the world, and certain areas, through means of agriculture, thrived during the Depression. For many years, Polk County alone, produced more citrus than the entire state of California, although politics, land repurposing and ' citrus greening' have changed this. Amaranth grows everywhere here, on farms, roadsides and in yards. It's typically weeded, sprayed or fought. I wonder how easy it would be to grow crops of it. If that's a bad plan, many other useful things grow here, despite our objections. Even if we only grew conventional produce, we could grow far more than we do, and in a relatively harmonious manner. And this could be done without additional deforestation. Currently, a thousand people each day are relocating from New York to Florida (and many more from elsewhere), with the general intent to make things here resemble New York (or elsewhere) as much as they can afford. Our wetlands, which once comprised the majority of our territory, is replaced with retention ponds that are politically qualified as restoration of... wetlands. It took vicious battles to spare our keystone Everglades of airports, damming and concrete jungles, but we sort of did it. Sort of. The prevailing psyche, however, is generally hostile to anything indigenous here but the winter weather and surface image of the coastline. And then there's Sludge, the PFAS saturated, miraculously marketed product of repurposed sewage, which is sometimes forced on ranchers and others. I once spoke to a rancher who told me he's seen his cows chewing on condoms. When I asked him why he used the stuff, he said there's enough coercion to do so that he has little choice. My point is that rather than thinking exclusively in terms of carbon, stolid convention and zero self reflection, we might contemplate the many opportunities right in front of us, to do things differently, or do different things. It may seem extreme now, but without a paradigm shift (in an actually realistic and very potentially amenable direction), things will become extreme in a less amenable and less manageable way. Yes, if we continue being myopic maniacs, food production will be a problem. We may have other options though. I frequently read comments on HN hostile to small-scale and organic farming. Citations abound, illustrating the impracticality and futility of small, especially organic operations. Yet, in my direct experience, I've seen a 5 acre farm not only remain the sole (and successful) business of a small family for decades and produce enough to sell, consume and compost, but no worker there has ever made minimum wage. I'm convinced we can do things differently and better.

soorya3 4y ago

we also consume more food than required and US alone wastes about 30-40% of food. https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs. Hypothetically if we eliminate the waste effectively we need 40% less land + reduced consumption of other resources

bmmayer1 4y ago

Is this like when we reached peak oil 10 times in the last 50 years?

99_00 4y ago

Transportation and refrigeration allow us to grow food where it it grows most efficiently and move it to where it is needed. The alternative is to use more land to inefficiently grow food locally and eat canned, pickled, and dried food off season.

JoeAltmaier 4y ago

Combine land use with yield improvements - 10X - 20X per acre since the 1950's. So the land-use graph, multiplied by this rising yield line, shows a very different curve. A shocking rise in crop consumption that exceeds world population growth by some factor. For industrial uses presumably (cotton, oil-seed and so on). Make of that what you will.

algoatecorn 4y ago
More of our food crops have been funneled into livestock as feed as well
- JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  That's complicated. I'd imagine animal husbandry would scale well with population growth. What use is a cow, but for somebody to eat it? If that were the case, then the animal-feed component might match population growth (and not acres under cultivation).
everybodyknows 4y ago
Also, biofuel.

nonameking2026 4y ago

Yes - and 640kb is all we'll ever need. Global cooling will kill us all and Al Gore will save the world. Focus on pollution and think about before buying the iphone 4na1° because the most likely problem for the problems in this world is you (and me) over consuming. Not Brazilian farmer trying to make an honest living.

SiempreViernes 4y ago
You realize a good chunk of those Brazilian farmers are trying to make an honest living explicitly by providing the products you're over-consuming?
- nonameking2026 4y ago
  Fair point. I need a diet. Still have my iPhone 7 though :)

mlindner 4y ago

This is as false as the last time this type of nonsense was claimed. It causes really bad policy.

contingencies 4y ago

Fundamentally large-scale monocultures are inefficient because they require large scale external inputs. When the overall cost of these inputs (transportation, source-site damage, energy inputs, requisite equipment, etc.) are considered in aggregate, the approach does not make sense economically. Obviously, it is also unsustainable. I believe a sustainable, long-term agriculture would include in its design the following features: multi-crop/intercrop by design (ecosystem vs. monoculture), reduction of emphasis on uniformity, iterative rather than total harvesting. Perhaps the main issue with such an approach is currently harvesting technology. Densely interplanted crops may be hard to access and thus hard to harvest. And yet, because they should tend to require less external inputs, be more resistant to pathogens, and provide healthier soils, improved water retention, reduced wind exposure, and multiple crops on the same land, there should be a budget for this.

sammalloy 4y ago

Thinking out of the box on this, I would like to see more zoning exceptions and subsidies for home owners who have enough land for small scale farming at a hyper local level. I’ve seen people do this for specific crops in mixed use areas (residential and industry) and it’s been very successful and helps feed the community.

karmakaze 4y ago

Should we start to measure in volume akin to transistor count and process node?