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The World Has Passed ‘Peak Agricultural Land’

113 points by cheinyeanlim 4y ago

kderbyma 4y ago
- Turing_Machine 4y ago
  Nah, we're fine. The article stresses that the reason the amount of agricultural land is falling is because we're getting more efficient, allowing marginal land to fall out of use. There's considerably more forest in the United States than there was a hundred years ago, and the same is true for most First World countries. The wilderness land that's actually under attack is mostly in Third World countries where they practice "traditional", "organic" agriculture of the sort beloved by urban First World environmentalists.
  - emodendroket 4y ago
    I mean it’s true that wilderness is under attack more in poorer countries (they didn’t so thoroughly deforest themselves in the first place after all). But they’re not using traditional, let alone organic, methods.
    - Turing_Machine 4y ago
      Yes, they are. Slash and burn agriculture is the traditional method in, say, the Amazon basin. That's how the Native Americans did it. It's "organic", too. Slash and burn doesn't typically use pesticides or artificial fertilizers.
      - emodendroket 4y ago
        It’s true that indigenous methods of farming aren’t necessarily environmentally friendly but not true that the people clearing the Amazon for crops today are indigenous people using traditional methods and not farmers with modern equipment and pesticides.
        Turing_Machine 4y ago
        I didn't say it was the same people. I said they were using the "traditional organic methods". And they are.
        emodendroket 4y ago
        But they aren’t? They’re using fertilizers, pesticides, tractors, and the rest of it. If you just meant to score some cheap points by referring to clearing the forest as “traditional organic methods” then not really anything worth engaging with.
  - Xylakant 4y ago
    Even organic agriculture isn’t like it used to be - organic farmers use machines and technology just like all others.
  - jamesfinlayson 4y ago
    A lot of the farmland in and around where my grandfather grew up has been unused for decades now - 100 years ago a family could farm it and made enough money to live off. Now it's either not economical to work it like they did 100 years ago or it's not economical to buy the right equipment etc to do it the modern way.
  - idontwantthis 4y ago
    Right, environmentalists love industrial oil palm plantations and cattle grazing.
  - shafyy 4y ago
    Forest != forest. Many of the new forests that were planted in the last few decades were basically tree factories. These forest don't help with biodiversity and don't help with CO2 capture as much as mixed forests.
    - Turing_Machine 4y ago
      While tree farms do exist, that's not the case for the marginal farms that have been abandoned in (e.g.) New England.
    - lotsofspots 4y ago
      Right, and the fact that that wood is destined to be harvested means it's not really long-term carbon storage, either.
      - MrVandemar 4y ago
        Doesn't stop them getting carbon-capture government subsidies over here in Australia either. :(
      - sokoloff 4y ago
        If it’s going to be harvested for building materials (rather than as fuel), why wouldn’t it be carbon storage?
      - 988747 4y ago
        Define long-term. If the wood takes 20 years to grow, and is then harvested and made into furniture, and that piece of furniture lasts another 20 years, that's pretty long term to me. But of course harvesting wood to be burned up is a crime.
        Scarblac 4y ago
        The fossil fuel we get from the earth and burn, adding its carbon to the atmosphere, was stored there for hundreds of millions of years. That's the long term meant.
  - eyelidlessness 4y ago
    > The wilderness land that's actually under attack is mostly in Third World countries where they practice "traditional", "organic" agriculture of the sort beloved by urban First World environmentalists. That’s a really weird way of framing multinational agriculture’s impacts on indigenous land. Like, none of what you’re saying is specifically wrong at a sub-clause level, the wilderness land under attack is “where they…”, but it’s not under attack by them or what they might practice. They’re not actually the ones rapidly deforesting or otherwise devastating mostly pristine ecosystems. Cattle farms serving the US and many first world countries certainly are. It’s not a testament to our better farming techniques, it’s a testament to our prowess externalizing the costs of our lifestyle and internalizing the benefits of that. We’ve effectively outsourced imperialism. That’s not yay us, that’s gig genocide.
    - Turing_Machine 4y ago
      > They’re not actually the ones rapidly deforesting or otherwise devastating mostly pristine ecosystems. You're aware that about 90% of the megafauna in the Americas went extinct within a few centuries after the arrival of the early Native Americans? Yeah, well, it wasn't Archer Daniels Midland or Cargill that did that.
      - eyelidlessness 4y ago
        There are so many things in such a short comment to unpack. I don’t think I have the energy to do so right now, but I’ll leave these initial thoughts: You’ve got a rhetorical style that suggests you’re familiar with sparring on the topic. I’m not interested in that kind of exchange even if I do have energy for it. If that’s how you want to discuss the topic, you may have the last word. If I’ve mistakenly categorized your reply, - What happened when natives arrived is as relevant to what their descendants do now, as what happened when europeans arrived characterizes what their descendants do now. I’ll leave that open ended - Of course businesses which didn’t exist couldn’t have caused things which happened before they existed - The history of when natives arrived or even whether they migrated is disputed - All of this historical focus might be interesting from a “how did now come to be?” perspective, but it’s not an analysis of what’s happening now - Applying a similar historical analysis to euro records doesn’t produce megafauna or any other exculpatory extinction records Now if we resume conversation, I hope we can agree not to engage such gotcha bullshit.
  - josefx 4y ago
    > "traditional", "organic" Traditional is a bit weird with agriculture, techniques like crop rotation have been around since 6000 BC. There are so many ancient improvements third world countries may not even use.
  - imtringued 4y ago
    I can't bear the ideological stench. https://panamaupclose.com/2020/05/25/farmers-learn-not-to-slash-and-burn/ https://panamaupclose.com/2020/05/25/farmers-learn-not-to-sl... This entire article is about abandoning traditional methods and replacing them with organic agriculture. You're just creating a straw man to defeat when your original position doesn't even make sense. Continuous no till, cover cropping, crop rotation, managing mycorrhizal fungi and things like system of rice intensification are hardly traditional and they are also orthogonal whether they are used for organic farming or not but they massively reduce the need for synthetic inputs. This rubs a lot of people proud of conventional agriculture the wrong way because it means their products are really just there to take a shortcut to save money in the short term. The fact that these newer practices are trying to work by understanding the plants and the entire ecosystem you are building rather than treating them as a blackbox which need specific inputs and the recipe is done. Imagine doing something for 30 years and then some new guy comes along and uses a new method that reduces his yields by -10% but saves him expensive inputs and thus results in greater profit while his soil gets better every year and the conventional farmer's soil gets worse. This is particularly annoying to the Bill Gates types who think they are some sort of Messiah because they have a lot of money and push people around.
    - upsidesinclude 4y ago
      I think it be great if you repost this as a direct submission and not below another comment. Forest for the trees with these things...
    - Turing_Machine 4y ago
      > I can't bear the ideological stench. What you call "ideological stench" others call "facts". None of these "newer practices" are responsible for the increase in forest cover in the United States over the past century. None of them are responsible for this: https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/images/US_Corn_Yld_Trend.png https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/images/US... Also, facts (such as the one in the image linked immediately above) don't cease being facts just because you mod them down. Before modern agriculture, just about every area could count on having a famine every few years. That doesn't happen any more, except in areas where the government is fucked up. And it wasn't "organic farming" that did it. The "organic" bullshit is a gigantic scam aimed at extracting money from rich First-Worlders at the expense of raising food prices for the impoverished.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    When the UK beef farming industry looked into going net zero, they found that the lowest hanging fruit was to stop buying animal feed that was grown on cleared rainforest. Does anyone who likes beef actually want them to be fed that way? Do the people clearing the rainforests actually want that? Or is it just what will bring them profit in the current system. It's all just a series of poorly applied financial incentives that we are able to change. Meat in a Net Zero World: https://wrap.org.uk/sites/default/files/2021-09/Meat-in-a-Net-Zero-world-publication-and%202021-update_0.pdf https://wrap.org.uk/sites/default/files/2021-09/Meat-in-a-Ne...
throwaway892238 4y ago
Remember back in the 70s when there was panic over overpopulation? I feel like we'll actually be running out of water before then (thanks climate change) but if that hadn't happened, it would have been running out of food. Once we reach "peak optimal food production", our population will eventually outstrip food reserves. We would have to start culling people or we'd starve. On an unrelated note, the Overpopulation wikipedia page is interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpopulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpopulation
- shafyy 4y ago
  We're not running out of food, but the there's a huge price we're paying for that: We're destroying nature and ecosystems. Don't ever think this comes for free.
  - iratewizard 4y ago
    Modern day catastrophism
    - ben_w 4y ago
      We can fix this stuff we know about now, and give future centuries a strong foundation upon which to recognise and solve the problems they know about. Only, we can't do that by just dismissing any discussion of the current problems — the best way to have a catastrophe is to ignore all the problems.
    - nitwit005 4y ago
      You can easily measure the catastrophe in progress. It's hard to call that some sort of panic.
  - jl6 4y ago
    Yes. It’s easy to say “Malthus was wrong” because food production has so far kept up with population growth. What that doesn’t account for is that food production has been subsidized by natural resources like aquifers, topsoil, pollinating insects, cheap oil to make fertilizer and mechanized farm machinery - all of which we need to stop abusing either to save the climate or because they will run out anyway. We need renewable farming as well as renewable energy, and I don’t see any guarantee that such a thing can support a world of 8+ billion people.
epistasis 4y ago
Agricultural land can be pretty bad for the ecosystem, so this is probably good. The less land we farm, while maintaining food security, the better.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  I'm confident we can have both; industrial-scale monocropping is the bad one. We can do better with farming and land management techniques going back hundreds of years, but that cuts into short-term profit margins.
  - epistasis 4y ago
    > that cuts into short-term profit margins. We can always change how profits are made in farming, and farming tends to be one of the areas that even "free market" economies like the US tend to interfere the most in. I would be far far far more concerned about the change in labor requirements needed to use these methods. If we suddenly need 30% of our workforce working in fields in order to feed ourselves, profit is not the problem. And we also need to evaluate these methods for actual increases in ecosystem diversity. When it comes to the ecosystem and land use, most of the population evaluates aesthetics rather than actual environmental impact in terms of how much of the non-human ecosystem is allowed to flourish. Which, for example, results in lots of people thinking that placing their homes in the midst of lots of greenery, sprawled out, is more environmentally friendly than a multi family apartment complex, or a small village with houses right next to each other, where you can walk for most of your daily needs. Whereas in reality in most ecosystems, the constraint is land untouched by humans, so that apex predators have enough land to exist, and enough of the smaller creatures to feed them. It is very good for humans to live amongst nature, but especially with suburban sprawl we have taken that desire to live amongst nature and made it one of the most environmentally unfriendly ways of existing.
- xcambar 4y ago
  We can add a few more variables and draw different conclusions. The quality of the meat is lowering because of intensive "meat factories". Also, the animals are given a lot of antibiotics, which eventually lowers microbial biodiversity also in the land, and, even worse, favours antibiotic resistance at every level, down to the consumer. This is not even considering animal well-being...
shafyy 4y ago
The important caveat, and misleading headline, here is what comes further down in the article: "Global pasture has peaked. Global cropland has not." We still use an increasing amount of cropland to feed the animals that we're moving closer and closer together in industrial farming (that's why pasture land is decreasing). I think many still underestimate the effect on climate change of livestock agriculture. Furthermore, livestock agriculture is one of the leading causes of the collapse of biodiversity - a crisis that will have much more dire consequences than climate change, in my opninion. Also a crisis that almost nobody is aware of presently.
- oifjsidjf 4y ago
  A few "small" problems with your statement: 1) Growing monocrop plants on a large scale is much more destructive to the environment as it completely destroys the ecosystem. You destroy all other plants and small animals that would regenerate the soil. Instead you just steal from the soil over and over again without regenerating it. Cows shitting provide fertilizer. But this obviously doesn't happen on monocrop land. 2) Most of the places where cows graze grass can NOT support human eatable plant food growing. Only grass can grow there, not eg corn or some grains. So that land can either do nothing or you can unleash cows onto that land to convert that grass into human food (cows).
  - te_chris 4y ago
    That land is not doing nothing if it’s been rewilded. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-damaging-farm-products-organic-pasture-fed-beef-lamb https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-dam...
  - bjoli 4y ago
    These are the arguments that are always made. The thing is we still devote too much cropland to animals because we have a demand that couldn't possibly be met by grazing animals. Take wild moose as an example. My home country has an artificially high moose pupilation due to current forresting practices. Yet the annual yield is only something like 3% of the Swedish meat consumption. Removing crops as a part of animal feed would mean something like reducing our meat consumption by 90%. Edit: and there are ways of maintaining a healthy soil without animals. I have done it in a very small scale for my plantations (just 40m2) and there are examples of people doing it on a much larger scale. I have yet to find data about yields though, but they seem competitive.
fancymcpoopoo 4y ago
lol. is this headline out of a fearmongering generator?
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  Is it? The headline just states a fact; it doesn't tell you how you should feel about it.
thriftwy 4y ago
In Russia that has probably happened 50 years ago or so. In pre-railway times, people had to grow grains everywhere where they lived, including Russian north such as Archangel, and Siberia. Today, the intensified farming mostly happens in a tiny south-western tip of a country. The downside here is that there's no longer an economical reason for rural life style in most of the country. But, forests and grasslands reclaim former fields all right.
baybal2 4y ago
secondcoming 4y ago
Whatever happened to Peak Oil?
- grecy 4y ago
  I think the consensus now is that we'll never "run out" of oil, because we will always invent more and more creative (read: expensive) ways of drilling for it like fracking and sideways drilling and deeper drilling. The catch is that oil will just get more and more expensive. So while we'll never run out, it might cost 10x or 100x or 1000x what it does today, which for many practical purposes is the same as having none.
  - _Algernon_ 4y ago
    I mean we will still run out when EROEI dips under 1.
    - viridian 4y ago
      Functionally won't happen because we have a near infinite demand for petroleum products. We may see a world where no one drives a gasoline vehicle, but plastics, resins, rubber, kerosine have certain applications where people would be willing to absorb 100x the current cost of extraction.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Shouldn't this url just point to the original publication here: https://ourworldindata.org/peak-agriculture-land https://ourworldindata.org/peak-agriculture-land This seems like blogspam taking advantage of their Creative Commons licencing.
LatteLazy 4y ago
Good thing we have vastly more than we need...
dsign 4y ago
There is some debate now in Sweden about how much of a good idea is to use nuclear power. The greens are absolutely convinced it's a bad idea. Their arguments against nuclear make no sense to me. But their arguments pro-renewable make even less sense. Towns in Sweden are opposing wind energy on the (green) basis that it disturbs the local wildlife, and I saw a field of solar power replace a field of wheat the other day, and trust me it looks even worse than a wind turbine. So no matter where one looks, the bottom line seems pretty clear: there are no good compromises that preserve the planet and promote economic development[^1]. Maybe it is time to start talking about the no-compromise solutions? Like colonizing space[^2] and de-industrializing and de-populating Earth? Because if we don't, when global warming gets worse and the majority of people start considering that industrialization is a threat to the environment and their survival, we will just be talking about de-industrialization and forcing everybody to go vegetarian and poor, no choice involved. [^1]: If you think you have all the material wealth you need, cheers! But poverty still affects the quality of life of most people on the planet, and most people would rather have a better life. [^2]: Must people imagine cramped space bases separated from vacuum by a paper-thin wall while working under the whipping of something like Amazon 5.0, but lush, ginormous space habitats with sensible bylaws are also an option.
- 10u152 4y ago
  I’ve always been curious of the whole “wind turbines disturb wildlife” thing. Surely climate change will disturb them much, much more? Also I’m not sure depopulation is exactly a “zero compromise” solution.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  I dont believe you harbor any bad intentions but how could de-populating the earth be anything but evil in practice? Where are we starting? And how are we preventing the selected people from having babies?
  - dsign 4y ago
    What I mean is that as the (probably justified) climate furor goes up, so will go hopelessness. According to the current civic discourse, it's all our fault (well, it really is) and therefore we are a blight for the planet. People may start thinking that having less babies and less population is a good idea. You don't really need to forbid people to have babies, all you need to do is to stop pushing for people to have babies above the replacement rate. In some developed countries and in some underdeveloped countries with easy access to contraceptives, people are already having babies below the replacement rate and the governments are trying to revert the trend. And this is today; who knows how culture will change if things get really bad. Leaving the babies aside for a minute, the "industries are bad for the environment" is a widely held belief already. Optimistic people believe in clean industries and if we get them in time, all will be good. If they don't, then the pessimistic people will say that there is no such thing as clean industries, and as the threats associated with global warming get more severe, pushing for de-industrialization may give an easy remedy. It could be an extra-economic movement (political movement, even a violent revolution), not something necessarily incentivized by market forces. Regarding cattle (and in minor degree, crops), nobody seems to have a good solution. Don't get me wrong, IMO industries are good for human well-being, and with a bigger, properly-trained population under supportive economic conditions industries will be even more so. But there is only so much of that the planet can take. Therefore, as long as we choose compromise, we are choosing away well-being. If what I said about compromises and choosing away well-being and cow meat makes my point difficult to understand, here is a thought experiment that may help: imagine that in the year 2050 we discover a way of keeping people young forever at the cost of expending 1000 kW[^1] per person in a biomedical simulation... ---- [^1]: kW is a power unit, so that means 1000 kW.h per hour, or 24000 kW.h per day per person.
BirAdam 4y ago
So, reading comments… two things really stand out to me. First, people forget that the USA throws away more food than Africa produces. The planet is not really close to being out of food, stuff is just wasted by the comparatively rich countries. Second, farming is not all or nothing. There are practices that mix plants, offer diverse sections for pollinators, purposeful use of specific plants that keep predators off of cash crops without toxins, and so on. These could be done while fallow grass growing plots are used for grazing and fertilizer production (you know, animal poop). People always want to believe doom and gloom for some reason, but humans are an incredible animal. We have always found solutions and adopted them because in most cases what is right also happens to be what works best.
- xtian 4y ago
  Yes, we can and should continue to increase food production. It’s a prerequisite to eradicating poverty worldwide. These narratives are supported by people who are threatened by the prospect that there are no limits to human growth and potential.
- bioemerl 4y ago
  > stuff is just wasted by the comparatively rich countries. I don't think it's fair to call that wasted, as if the food produced in these wealthy nations could be transferred to the poor nations. The cause of food shortages in Africa is the fact it's a lot of non fertile land. The cause of food waste in the United States is that we have a LOT of fertile land and relatively few people. It would be like blaming my water usage for shortages in the southwest. You have to see that the two systems are disconnected and just because one nation wastes food does not mean other nations are denied it. Global trade has eased a lot of regional shortages, but geography and environment still matter. The same goes for famine. We may be able to adapt, but some regions simply will not and even with global increases we may still see regional shortages and famines. As someone living in the USA, I'm not worried. We will be fine because we have such a large buffer. If you live in an area that doesn't. You have plenty reason to worry, especially if global trade hiccups or you're in a relatively poor nation vulnerable to trade disruption.
  - 4y ago
AngryData 4y ago
No mention of fertilizer usage, which is created using fossil fuels. Of course you need less land if you take the biomass from a million+ years ago and use it as feedstock for you crops today to produce more than the soil ever could naturally. And even that isn't enough looking at the decline in topsoil thickness which takes 75+ years to build up to even make high yields possible.
pmayrgundter 4y ago
Scan down the page to see the graph. It's an "s-curve" growth trend you'd expect in any species, as studied in ecology[1]. The expected peak was also put in the early 2020s by the Club of Rome studies in the 1970s[2]. Now we get to the fun part of seeing whether we level out at this population or go into collapse. [1]https://www.britannica.com/science/population-ecology/Logistic-population-growth https://www.britannica.com/science/population-ecology/Logist... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth It also happens to be the normalization function used in neural networks to squash the summed inputs from a feed-forward layer. Interesting to think of the connection there.
- snowwrestler 4y ago
  A declining human population is not necessarily “collapse.” There are a broad range of societies possible between flat population growth and collapse.
  - pmayrgundter 4y ago
    Yes, definitely.
- nitwit005 4y ago
  A generic animal model isn't going to work. Much of the increase in food production isn't going directly to feeding humans. It's going to livestock, making ethanol for fuel, etc.
  - pmayrgundter 4y ago
    I agree those are factors, but it's not clear they require a new model. From a complexity analysis, the exponential terms will dominate over fixed coefficients, which is what i take your factors to be. In other words, how much livestock, ethanol, etc. do we need? That's mainly dependent on # of people, not living standard. Ofc it's more complex, but again, not clear the usual ecological model won't work and indeed it appears to be.
genericone 4y ago
IMHO, people traditionally migrated to areas with arable land. Then civilization sprang up around that arable land. As more and more people moved in, rather than staying valuable as arable land, it became residential/commercial/industrial land. This pushes agriculture further and further from those initial ideal conditions. This seems inevitable as long as people prefer density. Bootstrap farmers attract other farmers, which creates communities, which attracts non-farmers. That progression inevitably leads to those some of the largest communities becoming not only non-farming, but anti-farming.
more_corn 4y ago
Look out the window. If you see a lawn this is not true. Likewise a fallow field.

113 points by cheinyeanlim 4y ago

Turing_Machine 4y ago
Nah, we're fine. The article stresses that the reason the amount of agricultural land is falling is because we're getting more efficient, allowing marginal land to fall out of use. There's considerably more forest in the United States than there was a hundred years ago, and the same is true for most First World countries. The wilderness land that's actually under attack is mostly in Third World countries where they practice "traditional", "organic" agriculture of the sort beloved by urban First World environmentalists.
- emodendroket 4y ago
  I mean it’s true that wilderness is under attack more in poorer countries (they didn’t so thoroughly deforest themselves in the first place after all). But they’re not using traditional, let alone organic, methods.
  - Turing_Machine 4y ago
    Yes, they are. Slash and burn agriculture is the traditional method in, say, the Amazon basin. That's how the Native Americans did it. It's "organic", too. Slash and burn doesn't typically use pesticides or artificial fertilizers.
    - emodendroket 4y ago
      It’s true that indigenous methods of farming aren’t necessarily environmentally friendly but not true that the people clearing the Amazon for crops today are indigenous people using traditional methods and not farmers with modern equipment and pesticides.
      - Turing_Machine 4y ago
        I didn't say it was the same people. I said they were using the "traditional organic methods". And they are.
        emodendroket 4y ago
        But they aren’t? They’re using fertilizers, pesticides, tractors, and the rest of it. If you just meant to score some cheap points by referring to clearing the forest as “traditional organic methods” then not really anything worth engaging with.
- Xylakant 4y ago
  Even organic agriculture isn’t like it used to be - organic farmers use machines and technology just like all others.
- jamesfinlayson 4y ago
  A lot of the farmland in and around where my grandfather grew up has been unused for decades now - 100 years ago a family could farm it and made enough money to live off. Now it's either not economical to work it like they did 100 years ago or it's not economical to buy the right equipment etc to do it the modern way.
- idontwantthis 4y ago
  Right, environmentalists love industrial oil palm plantations and cattle grazing.
- shafyy 4y ago
  Forest != forest. Many of the new forests that were planted in the last few decades were basically tree factories. These forest don't help with biodiversity and don't help with CO2 capture as much as mixed forests.
  - Turing_Machine 4y ago
    While tree farms do exist, that's not the case for the marginal farms that have been abandoned in (e.g.) New England.
  - lotsofspots 4y ago
    Right, and the fact that that wood is destined to be harvested means it's not really long-term carbon storage, either.
    - MrVandemar 4y ago
      Doesn't stop them getting carbon-capture government subsidies over here in Australia either. :(
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      If it’s going to be harvested for building materials (rather than as fuel), why wouldn’t it be carbon storage?
    - 988747 4y ago
      Define long-term. If the wood takes 20 years to grow, and is then harvested and made into furniture, and that piece of furniture lasts another 20 years, that's pretty long term to me. But of course harvesting wood to be burned up is a crime.
      - Scarblac 4y ago
        The fossil fuel we get from the earth and burn, adding its carbon to the atmosphere, was stored there for hundreds of millions of years. That's the long term meant.
- eyelidlessness 4y ago
  > The wilderness land that's actually under attack is mostly in Third World countries where they practice "traditional", "organic" agriculture of the sort beloved by urban First World environmentalists. That’s a really weird way of framing multinational agriculture’s impacts on indigenous land. Like, none of what you’re saying is specifically wrong at a sub-clause level, the wilderness land under attack is “where they…”, but it’s not under attack by them or what they might practice. They’re not actually the ones rapidly deforesting or otherwise devastating mostly pristine ecosystems. Cattle farms serving the US and many first world countries certainly are. It’s not a testament to our better farming techniques, it’s a testament to our prowess externalizing the costs of our lifestyle and internalizing the benefits of that. We’ve effectively outsourced imperialism. That’s not yay us, that’s gig genocide.
  - Turing_Machine 4y ago
    > They’re not actually the ones rapidly deforesting or otherwise devastating mostly pristine ecosystems. You're aware that about 90% of the megafauna in the Americas went extinct within a few centuries after the arrival of the early Native Americans? Yeah, well, it wasn't Archer Daniels Midland or Cargill that did that.
    - eyelidlessness 4y ago
      There are so many things in such a short comment to unpack. I don’t think I have the energy to do so right now, but I’ll leave these initial thoughts: You’ve got a rhetorical style that suggests you’re familiar with sparring on the topic. I’m not interested in that kind of exchange even if I do have energy for it. If that’s how you want to discuss the topic, you may have the last word. If I’ve mistakenly categorized your reply, - What happened when natives arrived is as relevant to what their descendants do now, as what happened when europeans arrived characterizes what their descendants do now. I’ll leave that open ended - Of course businesses which didn’t exist couldn’t have caused things which happened before they existed - The history of when natives arrived or even whether they migrated is disputed - All of this historical focus might be interesting from a “how did now come to be?” perspective, but it’s not an analysis of what’s happening now - Applying a similar historical analysis to euro records doesn’t produce megafauna or any other exculpatory extinction records Now if we resume conversation, I hope we can agree not to engage such gotcha bullshit.
- josefx 4y ago
  > "traditional", "organic" Traditional is a bit weird with agriculture, techniques like crop rotation have been around since 6000 BC. There are so many ancient improvements third world countries may not even use.
- imtringued 4y ago
  I can't bear the ideological stench. https://panamaupclose.com/2020/05/25/farmers-learn-not-to-slash-and-burn/ https://panamaupclose.com/2020/05/25/farmers-learn-not-to-sl... This entire article is about abandoning traditional methods and replacing them with organic agriculture. You're just creating a straw man to defeat when your original position doesn't even make sense. Continuous no till, cover cropping, crop rotation, managing mycorrhizal fungi and things like system of rice intensification are hardly traditional and they are also orthogonal whether they are used for organic farming or not but they massively reduce the need for synthetic inputs. This rubs a lot of people proud of conventional agriculture the wrong way because it means their products are really just there to take a shortcut to save money in the short term. The fact that these newer practices are trying to work by understanding the plants and the entire ecosystem you are building rather than treating them as a blackbox which need specific inputs and the recipe is done. Imagine doing something for 30 years and then some new guy comes along and uses a new method that reduces his yields by -10% but saves him expensive inputs and thus results in greater profit while his soil gets better every year and the conventional farmer's soil gets worse. This is particularly annoying to the Bill Gates types who think they are some sort of Messiah because they have a lot of money and push people around.
  - upsidesinclude 4y ago
    I think it be great if you repost this as a direct submission and not below another comment. Forest for the trees with these things...
  - Turing_Machine 4y ago
    > I can't bear the ideological stench. What you call "ideological stench" others call "facts". None of these "newer practices" are responsible for the increase in forest cover in the United States over the past century. None of them are responsible for this: https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/images/US_Corn_Yld_Trend.png https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/images/US... Also, facts (such as the one in the image linked immediately above) don't cease being facts just because you mod them down. Before modern agriculture, just about every area could count on having a famine every few years. That doesn't happen any more, except in areas where the government is fucked up. And it wasn't "organic farming" that did it. The "organic" bullshit is a gigantic scam aimed at extracting money from rich First-Worlders at the expense of raising food prices for the impoverished.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  When the UK beef farming industry looked into going net zero, they found that the lowest hanging fruit was to stop buying animal feed that was grown on cleared rainforest. Does anyone who likes beef actually want them to be fed that way? Do the people clearing the rainforests actually want that? Or is it just what will bring them profit in the current system. It's all just a series of poorly applied financial incentives that we are able to change. Meat in a Net Zero World: https://wrap.org.uk/sites/default/files/2021-09/Meat-in-a-Net-Zero-world-publication-and%202021-update_0.pdf https://wrap.org.uk/sites/default/files/2021-09/Meat-in-a-Ne...

Remember back in the 70s when there was panic over overpopulation? I feel like we'll actually be running out of water before then (thanks climate change) but if that hadn't happened, it would have been running out of food. Once we reach "peak optimal food production", our population will eventually outstrip food reserves. We would have to start culling people or we'd starve. On an unrelated note, the Overpopulation wikipedia page is interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpopulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpopulation

shafyy 4y ago
We're not running out of food, but the there's a huge price we're paying for that: We're destroying nature and ecosystems. Don't ever think this comes for free.
- iratewizard 4y ago
  Modern day catastrophism
  - ben_w 4y ago
    We can fix this stuff we know about now, and give future centuries a strong foundation upon which to recognise and solve the problems they know about. Only, we can't do that by just dismissing any discussion of the current problems — the best way to have a catastrophe is to ignore all the problems.
  - nitwit005 4y ago
    You can easily measure the catastrophe in progress. It's hard to call that some sort of panic.
- jl6 4y ago
  Yes. It’s easy to say “Malthus was wrong” because food production has so far kept up with population growth. What that doesn’t account for is that food production has been subsidized by natural resources like aquifers, topsoil, pollinating insects, cheap oil to make fertilizer and mechanized farm machinery - all of which we need to stop abusing either to save the climate or because they will run out anyway. We need renewable farming as well as renewable energy, and I don’t see any guarantee that such a thing can support a world of 8+ billion people.

epistasis 4y ago

Agricultural land can be pretty bad for the ecosystem, so this is probably good. The less land we farm, while maintaining food security, the better.

Cthulhu_ 4y ago
I'm confident we can have both; industrial-scale monocropping is the bad one. We can do better with farming and land management techniques going back hundreds of years, but that cuts into short-term profit margins.
- epistasis 4y ago
  > that cuts into short-term profit margins. We can always change how profits are made in farming, and farming tends to be one of the areas that even "free market" economies like the US tend to interfere the most in. I would be far far far more concerned about the change in labor requirements needed to use these methods. If we suddenly need 30% of our workforce working in fields in order to feed ourselves, profit is not the problem. And we also need to evaluate these methods for actual increases in ecosystem diversity. When it comes to the ecosystem and land use, most of the population evaluates aesthetics rather than actual environmental impact in terms of how much of the non-human ecosystem is allowed to flourish. Which, for example, results in lots of people thinking that placing their homes in the midst of lots of greenery, sprawled out, is more environmentally friendly than a multi family apartment complex, or a small village with houses right next to each other, where you can walk for most of your daily needs. Whereas in reality in most ecosystems, the constraint is land untouched by humans, so that apex predators have enough land to exist, and enough of the smaller creatures to feed them. It is very good for humans to live amongst nature, but especially with suburban sprawl we have taken that desire to live amongst nature and made it one of the most environmentally unfriendly ways of existing.
xcambar 4y ago
We can add a few more variables and draw different conclusions. The quality of the meat is lowering because of intensive "meat factories". Also, the animals are given a lot of antibiotics, which eventually lowers microbial biodiversity also in the land, and, even worse, favours antibiotic resistance at every level, down to the consumer. This is not even considering animal well-being...

shafyy 4y ago

The important caveat, and misleading headline, here is what comes further down in the article: "Global pasture has peaked. Global cropland has not." We still use an increasing amount of cropland to feed the animals that we're moving closer and closer together in industrial farming (that's why pasture land is decreasing). I think many still underestimate the effect on climate change of livestock agriculture. Furthermore, livestock agriculture is one of the leading causes of the collapse of biodiversity - a crisis that will have much more dire consequences than climate change, in my opninion. Also a crisis that almost nobody is aware of presently.

oifjsidjf 4y ago
A few "small" problems with your statement: 1) Growing monocrop plants on a large scale is much more destructive to the environment as it completely destroys the ecosystem. You destroy all other plants and small animals that would regenerate the soil. Instead you just steal from the soil over and over again without regenerating it. Cows shitting provide fertilizer. But this obviously doesn't happen on monocrop land. 2) Most of the places where cows graze grass can NOT support human eatable plant food growing. Only grass can grow there, not eg corn or some grains. So that land can either do nothing or you can unleash cows onto that land to convert that grass into human food (cows).
- te_chris 4y ago
  That land is not doing nothing if it’s been rewilded. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-damaging-farm-products-organic-pasture-fed-beef-lamb https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-dam...
- bjoli 4y ago
  These are the arguments that are always made. The thing is we still devote too much cropland to animals because we have a demand that couldn't possibly be met by grazing animals. Take wild moose as an example. My home country has an artificially high moose pupilation due to current forresting practices. Yet the annual yield is only something like 3% of the Swedish meat consumption. Removing crops as a part of animal feed would mean something like reducing our meat consumption by 90%. Edit: and there are ways of maintaining a healthy soil without animals. I have done it in a very small scale for my plantations (just 40m2) and there are examples of people doing it on a much larger scale. I have yet to find data about yields though, but they seem competitive.

fancymcpoopoo 4y ago

lol. is this headline out of a fearmongering generator?

Cthulhu_ 4y ago
Is it? The headline just states a fact; it doesn't tell you how you should feel about it.

thriftwy 4y ago

In Russia that has probably happened 50 years ago or so. In pre-railway times, people had to grow grains everywhere where they lived, including Russian north such as Archangel, and Siberia. Today, the intensified farming mostly happens in a tiny south-western tip of a country. The downside here is that there's no longer an economical reason for rural life style in most of the country. But, forests and grasslands reclaim former fields all right.

baybal2 4y ago

secondcoming 4y ago

Whatever happened to Peak Oil?

grecy 4y ago
I think the consensus now is that we'll never "run out" of oil, because we will always invent more and more creative (read: expensive) ways of drilling for it like fracking and sideways drilling and deeper drilling. The catch is that oil will just get more and more expensive. So while we'll never run out, it might cost 10x or 100x or 1000x what it does today, which for many practical purposes is the same as having none.
- _Algernon_ 4y ago
  I mean we will still run out when EROEI dips under 1.
  - viridian 4y ago
    Functionally won't happen because we have a near infinite demand for petroleum products. We may see a world where no one drives a gasoline vehicle, but plastics, resins, rubber, kerosine have certain applications where people would be willing to absorb 100x the current cost of extraction.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

Shouldn't this url just point to the original publication here: https://ourworldindata.org/peak-agriculture-land https://ourworldindata.org/peak-agriculture-land This seems like blogspam taking advantage of their Creative Commons licencing.

LatteLazy 4y ago

Good thing we have vastly more than we need...

dsign 4y ago

There is some debate now in Sweden about how much of a good idea is to use nuclear power. The greens are absolutely convinced it's a bad idea. Their arguments against nuclear make no sense to me. But their arguments pro-renewable make even less sense. Towns in Sweden are opposing wind energy on the (green) basis that it disturbs the local wildlife, and I saw a field of solar power replace a field of wheat the other day, and trust me it looks even worse than a wind turbine. So no matter where one looks, the bottom line seems pretty clear: there are no good compromises that preserve the planet and promote economic development[^1]. Maybe it is time to start talking about the no-compromise solutions? Like colonizing space[^2] and de-industrializing and de-populating Earth? Because if we don't, when global warming gets worse and the majority of people start considering that industrialization is a threat to the environment and their survival, we will just be talking about de-industrialization and forcing everybody to go vegetarian and poor, no choice involved. [^1]: If you think you have all the material wealth you need, cheers! But poverty still affects the quality of life of most people on the planet, and most people would rather have a better life. [^2]: Must people imagine cramped space bases separated from vacuum by a paper-thin wall while working under the whipping of something like Amazon 5.0, but lush, ginormous space habitats with sensible bylaws are also an option.

10u152 4y ago
I’ve always been curious of the whole “wind turbines disturb wildlife” thing. Surely climate change will disturb them much, much more? Also I’m not sure depopulation is exactly a “zero compromise” solution.
nonethewiser 4y ago
I dont believe you harbor any bad intentions but how could de-populating the earth be anything but evil in practice? Where are we starting? And how are we preventing the selected people from having babies?
- dsign 4y ago
  What I mean is that as the (probably justified) climate furor goes up, so will go hopelessness. According to the current civic discourse, it's all our fault (well, it really is) and therefore we are a blight for the planet. People may start thinking that having less babies and less population is a good idea. You don't really need to forbid people to have babies, all you need to do is to stop pushing for people to have babies above the replacement rate. In some developed countries and in some underdeveloped countries with easy access to contraceptives, people are already having babies below the replacement rate and the governments are trying to revert the trend. And this is today; who knows how culture will change if things get really bad. Leaving the babies aside for a minute, the "industries are bad for the environment" is a widely held belief already. Optimistic people believe in clean industries and if we get them in time, all will be good. If they don't, then the pessimistic people will say that there is no such thing as clean industries, and as the threats associated with global warming get more severe, pushing for de-industrialization may give an easy remedy. It could be an extra-economic movement (political movement, even a violent revolution), not something necessarily incentivized by market forces. Regarding cattle (and in minor degree, crops), nobody seems to have a good solution. Don't get me wrong, IMO industries are good for human well-being, and with a bigger, properly-trained population under supportive economic conditions industries will be even more so. But there is only so much of that the planet can take. Therefore, as long as we choose compromise, we are choosing away well-being. If what I said about compromises and choosing away well-being and cow meat makes my point difficult to understand, here is a thought experiment that may help: imagine that in the year 2050 we discover a way of keeping people young forever at the cost of expending 1000 kW[^1] per person in a biomedical simulation... ---- [^1]: kW is a power unit, so that means 1000 kW.h per hour, or 24000 kW.h per day per person.

BirAdam 4y ago

So, reading comments… two things really stand out to me. First, people forget that the USA throws away more food than Africa produces. The planet is not really close to being out of food, stuff is just wasted by the comparatively rich countries. Second, farming is not all or nothing. There are practices that mix plants, offer diverse sections for pollinators, purposeful use of specific plants that keep predators off of cash crops without toxins, and so on. These could be done while fallow grass growing plots are used for grazing and fertilizer production (you know, animal poop). People always want to believe doom and gloom for some reason, but humans are an incredible animal. We have always found solutions and adopted them because in most cases what is right also happens to be what works best.

xtian 4y ago
Yes, we can and should continue to increase food production. It’s a prerequisite to eradicating poverty worldwide. These narratives are supported by people who are threatened by the prospect that there are no limits to human growth and potential.
bioemerl 4y ago
> stuff is just wasted by the comparatively rich countries. I don't think it's fair to call that wasted, as if the food produced in these wealthy nations could be transferred to the poor nations. The cause of food shortages in Africa is the fact it's a lot of non fertile land. The cause of food waste in the United States is that we have a LOT of fertile land and relatively few people. It would be like blaming my water usage for shortages in the southwest. You have to see that the two systems are disconnected and just because one nation wastes food does not mean other nations are denied it. Global trade has eased a lot of regional shortages, but geography and environment still matter. The same goes for famine. We may be able to adapt, but some regions simply will not and even with global increases we may still see regional shortages and famines. As someone living in the USA, I'm not worried. We will be fine because we have such a large buffer. If you live in an area that doesn't. You have plenty reason to worry, especially if global trade hiccups or you're in a relatively poor nation vulnerable to trade disruption.
- 4y ago

AngryData 4y ago

No mention of fertilizer usage, which is created using fossil fuels. Of course you need less land if you take the biomass from a million+ years ago and use it as feedstock for you crops today to produce more than the soil ever could naturally. And even that isn't enough looking at the decline in topsoil thickness which takes 75+ years to build up to even make high yields possible.

pmayrgundter 4y ago

Scan down the page to see the graph. It's an "s-curve" growth trend you'd expect in any species, as studied in ecology[1]. The expected peak was also put in the early 2020s by the Club of Rome studies in the 1970s[2]. Now we get to the fun part of seeing whether we level out at this population or go into collapse. [1]https://www.britannica.com/science/population-ecology/Logistic-population-growth https://www.britannica.com/science/population-ecology/Logist... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth It also happens to be the normalization function used in neural networks to squash the summed inputs from a feed-forward layer. Interesting to think of the connection there.

snowwrestler 4y ago
A declining human population is not necessarily “collapse.” There are a broad range of societies possible between flat population growth and collapse.
- pmayrgundter 4y ago
  Yes, definitely.
nitwit005 4y ago
A generic animal model isn't going to work. Much of the increase in food production isn't going directly to feeding humans. It's going to livestock, making ethanol for fuel, etc.
- pmayrgundter 4y ago
  I agree those are factors, but it's not clear they require a new model. From a complexity analysis, the exponential terms will dominate over fixed coefficients, which is what i take your factors to be. In other words, how much livestock, ethanol, etc. do we need? That's mainly dependent on # of people, not living standard. Ofc it's more complex, but again, not clear the usual ecological model won't work and indeed it appears to be.

genericone 4y ago

IMHO, people traditionally migrated to areas with arable land. Then civilization sprang up around that arable land. As more and more people moved in, rather than staying valuable as arable land, it became residential/commercial/industrial land. This pushes agriculture further and further from those initial ideal conditions. This seems inevitable as long as people prefer density. Bootstrap farmers attract other farmers, which creates communities, which attracts non-farmers. That progression inevitably leads to those some of the largest communities becoming not only non-farming, but anti-farming.

more_corn 4y ago

Look out the window. If you see a lawn this is not true. Likewise a fallow field.