17 ms·

The fertilizer shortage will persist in 2023

140 points by DocFeind 4y ago

Tokkemon 4y ago
What if we raid some more islands for bird poop?
amriksohata 4y ago
The indore method (used in india for centuries by hindu farmers) would mean there would be no need for chemical fertilizer.
Waterluvian 4y ago
Few things have a single cause, but I think it's not outlandish to hypothesize that potential pending famines could be driven by a fertilizer shortage, driven by Russia's invasion and global economic issues, driven by the pandemic. Maybe this is obvious to those smarter than I, but I'm beginning to have a sinking sense that direct deaths by SARS-COV2 will be a shockingly small minority of total deaths caused by the pandemic over the next generation. We're going to see this event loud and clear in every economic and demographic chart for the next half-century, aren't we?
- djbusby 4y ago
  Assuming this is the only loud event for the next 50 years. Or, this past three years event is the start of a longer, bigger event. Then, the ignition is lost in the flame.
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    > Then, the ignition is lost in the flame. Goosebumps from this line. It's apt and thoughtful. I'm thinking about how these events can be fractal-like. The past few years of active pandemic have felt like the "flame" but could be seen as the "ignition" for countless other, possibly even worse global events. It's like a Great Tree Shaking: all non-resilient systems began showing cracks of one size or another, cascading stress to other systems, many of which buckle or break.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Arguably history is the study of an ever-breaking quasi-non-resilient combination of systems and arguing that your particular causal viewpoint is the One True one.
    - hammock 4y ago
      Lost ignitions: the research being done in Wuhan, the 2014-2022 civil war in Ukraine, the Las Vegas mass shooting, etc?
      - pjc50 4y ago
        Three totally unrelated things? There's no proof of the ""lab leak"" allegations (and I doubt there can ever be short of an admission by the Chinese government), the war in Ukraine was a proxy for the current invasion, and the Las Vegas mass shooting .. was just a larger incident of something that routinely happens in America that does not move the needle politically?
    - LeifCarrotson 4y ago
      We spent the first 50 years of the information age building systems to be as hyper-efficient as possible, with ruthless competition eliminating resiliency first in existing commercial, social, and political structures, and then in the education and life experience of the people that built those structures later. Like a Californian wilderness, we've been accumulating surface fuel load for decades.
      - hd95489 4y ago
        At least in the us the first thing ruthless competition does is eliminate all competition and establish a monopoly like position. Every industry wants to consolidate to 2-4 players that split the market and don’t compete
      - eru 4y ago
        If you ban 'price-gouging', you remove incentives for suppliers to be resilient.
    - 4y ago
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- danuker 4y ago
  I doubt it. In as much as they are allowed to function, markets will reward people addressing the shortages with outsized profit. Same as getting through the energy crisis, we can overcome the food crisis, one obstacle at a time. The connectedness of economies is also an advantage. Shipping rates are almost at a 3-year low: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/baltic https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/baltic The greatest risk are policies forbidding "price gouging" going haywire and actually forbidding disaster response.
  - brmgb 4y ago
    Having trust in the market is not a magic solution. Yes, prices will rise as they already are if there is a shortage but that's not going to make local production materialises out of thin air if there are other obstacles. At some point, you need a concerted strategic answer at the correct level if you are facing a strategic threat like disruption of food supply. That's why China restricted exports. It remains to be seen if the USA and Europe will react fast enough and appropriately enough. What happened with Covid doesn't give me much hope. Edit: As I am downvoted strongly (I imagine that it’s because the Covid answer is stupidly seen as political in the US - at least I hope so because if it’s about the ability of the market to solve issues it doesn’t bode well for us all), the EU took ages to secure first masks then vaccine supply and the utter stupidity of the US answer which avoided imposing wearing masks and making vaccination mandatory costed you hundred thousands of unnecessary death compared to country of equivalent development. Look at Taiwan or South Korea to see how it supposed to be done.
  - qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
    How can you price gouge something like Sri-Lakha, that has no currency to trade with? This whole mental model just has no grasp for the moment when the rear of the car falls off..
    - danuker 4y ago
      Hire its citizens. No money means you'd benefit by sending them money. But inequality is a different problem than getting through crises. It should be addressed while leaving the production incentives intact. For example, progressive and/or negative income taxes.
- officialjunk 4y ago
  probably. heart attacks on the rise for covid survivors aged 25-44 https://www.khon2.com/local-news/heart-attacks-on-dramatic-rise-for-25-44-age-group/ https://www.khon2.com/local-news/heart-attacks-on-dramatic-r...
  - probably_wrong 4y ago
    First, this content is locked in my region so I don't know exactly what you linked to. Second, if you are linking to a news article about that one University guy who said young people shouldn't take the vaccine, it is my understanding that his study was flawed. But again, I can't read the article so take this with a grain of salt.
    - Waterluvian 4y ago
      Here's the academic article immediately linked to in the above news page: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jmv.28187 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jmv.28187
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - dehrmann 4y ago
    That's not what the study's abstract said. It said heart attack deaths increased during the pandemic. It could be due to covid itself, fear of covid while seeking treatment, worse quality treatment, lifestyle chances, social isolation, others, or some combination. One of the study's authors did say there's a link, but I have to wonder why it wasn't in the abstract.
- ajross 4y ago
  I don't see how that's sustained by the article. This is just another face of the energy crunch. Oil and gas are somewhat rarer more expensive, and so everything made from them is more expensive and the economy needs to seek to a new price equilibrium. In this case, that mostly means "reduced travel and air freight" and "reduced gas heating usage". But as a side effect farmers need to scramble to match their own market. So some of this will end up meaning "more expensive fertilizer-heavy crops". But at the economic level farming is less able to tolerate volatility (you can't JustInTime a soybean, literally farmers reap what was sown months ago), so there's need for some assistance at the regulatory level. Which is what this article is about. Basically, no. No famines. Just pricing and regulatory changes.
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    There is a famine in Madagascar now, although not related to fertiliser. The system is fragile
    - eru 4y ago
      That's entirely the fault of their inept and corrupt administration there.
      - ajross 4y ago
        Well, and also a big drought. Economies (and weather) are indeed unstable in general. But per the upthread hypothesis there's no particular instability in the food supply caused by fertilizer/energy/covid disruption that seems notable. We've been here before and we'll be here again.
      - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
        United Nations says it's "first climate change famine". Why are you blaming administration? I am not sure how corrupt they are, but how do you deal with drought in a country that has GDP per capital of $520? Like you can't afford to do much with that. https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/10/1103712 https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/10/1103712
- xadhominemx 4y ago
  That seems very outlandish actually
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  What does COVID have to do with this? The fertilizer shortage is caused by the war in Ukraine. This war will cause more deaths indirectly than it does directly, just like almost all large wars.
  - afarrell 4y ago
    Arguably the war in Ukraine was influenced by the unrest against Lukanhesko after his poor handling of covid-19...and by Russians thinking that was yet another example of NATO attacks against their security.
    - bryanlarsen 4y ago
      This war has one primary cause: Putin. Anything else is a very distant secondary. COVID caused Putin to isolate and become paranoid, but it's still Putin's fault, not COVID's.
      - ceejayoz 4y ago
        Putin's motivations predate the war, too; the invasion of Crimea was in 2014, and before that was Georgia in 2008.
        knewter 4y ago
        I always find it interesting when people being up the 2014 Ukraine situation without referencing the call from Victoria Nuland discussing who the US was going to put in charge ("surprisingly", those ended up being the government the people elected) https://odysee.com/@AdamFitzgerald:2/Victoria-Nuland-Phone-Call-To-Ukraine-Geofrrey-Pyatt-(2014):2 https://odysee.com/@AdamFitzgerald:2/Victoria-Nuland-Phone-C...
        mikeyouse 4y ago
        Likely because people who know anything about the region know that that supposedly damning call happened after three months of violent protests against the most corrupt government in recent European history.. the reference to Klitchko being made deputy PM means it was recorded after Jan 26th which was when Yanukovych was trying everything to stay in power, including bringing opposition leaders into his government (and working with Russian intelligence to bug US diplomatic phones). He was doing so because many regional offices had already been taken over by protesters and his police forces had already shot several people. The leader who the US diplomats were talking about was already a popular opposition leader, so it's entirely unsurprising that Yatsenyuk was part of government post-Maidan. I think I'm mostly annoyed with these dumb conspiracy theories because they deny agency to the millions of people who actually cast out a criminal and democratically elected their own leadership. "hurr durr, the CIA did it" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Euromaidan_regional_state_administration_occupations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Euromaidan_regional_state...
- heisenbit 4y ago
  Sooner or later energy prices will increase and fertilizer will get more expensive. Step functions and impulses are useful ways to probe the inner working of a system and in this case helped to highlight the dominant role energy plays everywhere. We re-learned what we forgot or ignored since the last energy aka. oil price shock in the '70. In the long run the situation for food security is challenging unless we switch to a different paradigm of farming and population control.
  - kragen 4y ago
    energy prices are decreasing, not increasing; solar power is half as expensive as coal power in most of the world already, and it's likely to get even cheaper over time as pv production scales up (of course in northern europe this year that is not the case because they were relying on russian gas, but that's not 'sooner or later', that's just right now)
  - Sakos 4y ago
    This is such a weird comment. For much of the world, food security is an ever present problem that is heavily affected by energy prices (among other things). Fertilizer prices are already up significantly. This isn't something we have to wait for. It's already been happening for the past decade and it's going to keep getting worse. You're fortunate that you live in a country where food security on a population level isn't a constantly relevant concern.
- ajmurmann 4y ago
  Well, 20.8% of goal potash production comes from Russia and another 18% from Belarus. It's a key ingredients in making fertilizer. There is your single cause. Source: https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/our-natural-resources/minerals-mining/minerals-metals-facts/potash-facts/20521#L2 https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/our-natural-resources/minerals-minin...
  - Scoundreller 4y ago
    Have they stopped producing? Don’t think any of the big buyers are resisting purchase from those two countries.
    - HDThoreaun 4y ago
      They've stopped exporting to western countries.
      - Scoundreller 4y ago
        After the US (which I’m assuming imports from Canada, the largest exporter), the next 6 largest importers aren’t western countries (if you exclude Brazil in that): https://www.nationmaster.com/nmx/ranking/potash-fertilizer-imports https://www.nationmaster.com/nmx/ranking/potash-fertilizer-i... https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/our-natural-resources/minerals-mining/minerals-metals-facts/potash-facts/20521 https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/our-natural-resources/minerals-minin... The biggest issue is that Belarus has restricted access to euro seaports, but Belarus and Russia have extensive rail networks.
        sudosysgen 4y ago
        Reduced supply to Western countries would still push prices way up.
- hedora 4y ago
  The big lesson from the 1918 flu pandemic was that lockdowns didn’t really work. The scientific consensus after that was to isolate the highest risk populations, and let it run through the rest of the population. That way, it hits herd immunity / becomes endemic without infecting people that are likely to die from it. For COVID, the conventional approach would be to lock down nursing homes and provide shelter in place orders / resources for the top 1-5% risk groups for 3 months while otherwise ignoring the pandemic. If it were not for RNA vaccines, that approach certainly would have been better than what we did with COVID. Economic disruption would be minimal, per case fatality would be cut significantly, and the tripledemic / avian flu / 2021 famine / rebound of malaria, etc. probably would not have happened. With the vaccines, it is unclear if the lockdowns helped or hurt average life expectancies. We will know in a few more years.
  - lukas099 4y ago
    > If it were not for RNA vaccines, that approach certainly would have been better than what we did with COVID. I know that 'flatten the curve' largely left the public consciousness, but wouldn't letting the virus run largely unrestricted have overwhelmed the health care system?
    - arghnoname 4y ago
      The curve flattening was initially proposed for a short period of time. Maybe weeks or a few months, I forget. I think some initial panic is forgivable, even if it led to actions that were counter to previous guidance. We were ventilating patients early on, for instance, and we later learned that this causes more harm than good for many patients and should be deferred if at all possible. I think it's arguable that a short term lockdown was the right call. It's arguable it wasn't, but in my opinion it wasn't crazy. During that initial period we were supposed to be increasing capacity and learning treatment. Encouraging people to lose weight and improve their health during this time would probably help with outcomes as well. Capacity was increased to some extent. Remember the tents and the medical ship in NYC? I think neither were used at all. We don't seem to be having conversations now about more long-term increases in health care capacity. It's just like nothing was learned. It all just became political and like all things political in the US, incredibly stupid and tribal. For what it's worth, when DeSantis started relaxing Florida lockdowns I thought the death toll in Florida was going to be sobering and it was reckless. I now think it was the right thing to do. DeSantis seemed to be following the pre-COVID playbook. I was scared and clung on too much to the status quo procedure on COVID.
- bruiseralmighty 4y ago
  It's not really the conflict directly so much as the sanctions campaigns that followed. Russia and Belarus are the number one and two suppliers of a basic fertilizer component, but now Western aligned nation cannot import from them and the Brits have gone further by making it harder to insure the shipments which affects the ability for Russia (and by extension Belarus) to export to anyone by sea. The Germans _could_ have helped make up the difference since they can make some amount of fertilizer using natural gas, but some terrorist state (we still don't know exactly who) blew up NS1 and NS2 which makes this basically impossible. Germany now needs to preserve all its gas just to keep some manufacturing going, heat people's homes, and run the lights. The pandemic has had some effect, but a lot of the fertilizer being sold internationally goes to Egypt, the Middle East, and North Africa. It doesn't actually have to go all that far in the global scheme of things. The conflict itself affects wheat prices, since Ukraine is a major wheat exporter (as is Russia), but the fertilizer issues are due primarily to Western sanctions and Kremlin counter-sanctions.
debacle 4y ago
Recently, I have seen a short-sighted push to allow human waste to fertilize crops. That is absolutely 100% not the solution to anything for probably a dozen very good reasons. The impact of this kind of "recycling" is well studied and the negatives outweigh the positives.
- dyndos 4y ago
  Care to elaborate? What did those studies show? As far as I know, properly handled humanure is quite effective. And it's better than letting excess nitrogen seep into the waterways.
- ch4s3 4y ago
  Pharmaceutical contamination seems like the biggest problem, but I guess heating to kill pathogens makes the energy math unfavorable as well.
  - debacle 4y ago
    You can kill the pathogens through curing the compost, but that takes time, space, and equipment. In the meantime you'd be dealing with hazardous waste.
- GalenErso 4y ago
  North Korea uses human waste as a fertilizer. Which causes this: North Korean defector found to have 'enormous parasites' https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-42021373.amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-420... > "I've never seen anything like this in my 20 years as a physician," South Korean doctor Lee Cook-jong told journalists, explaining that the longest worm removed from the patient's intestines was 27cm (11in) long. > In 2015 South Korean researchers studied the health records of North Korean defectors who had visited a hospital in Cheonan between 2006 and 2014. > They found that they showed higher rates of chronic hepatitis B, chronic hepatitis C, tuberculosis and parasite infections, compared to South Koreans. > The soldier's food may have been contaminated because the North still uses human faeces as fertiliser, known as "night soil". > Lee Min-bok, a North Korean agriculture expert, told Reuters: "Chemical fertiliser was supplied by the state until the 1970s. By the 1990s, the state could not supply it any more, so farmers started to use a lot of night soil instead."
photochemsyn 4y ago
A remarkable amount of the fertilizer applied via modern industrial farming practices is just wasted: > "According to an average of 13 global databases from 10 data sources, in 2010, 161 teragrams of nitrogen were applied to agricultural crops, but only 73 teragrams of nitrogen made it to the harvested crop. A total of 86 teragrams of nitrogen was wasted, perhaps ending up in the water, air, or soil. The new research was published in the journal Nature Food in July." https://eos.org/articles/index-suggests-that-half-of-nitrogen-applied-to-crops-is-lost https://eos.org/articles/index-suggests-that-half-of-nitroge... Large-area applications by mechanized systems seem to be part of the problem, but that's also necessary to escape the subsitence agriculture trap, i.e. with such systems, it's not necessary for half or more of the human population to be working in the fields to grow food, it's more like 1 in 50 or 1 in 100. The most promising solution might be AI + robots. If a robot could crawl up and down fields inspecting individual plants for nutrient status and applying small amounts of fertilizer as needed (also weeding and checking for pest infestations), it could cut fertilizer use in half while maintaining the same level of production - and perhaps eliminate the need for most herbicides and pesticides.
- soperj 4y ago
  I'd say the majority of that ends up in the sea, causing algae blooms and killing life for miles around. So worse than wasted.
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    Surely there is more farm land away from the sea than adjacent to it. How does for example fertilizer from here[1] or here[2] end up at sea? [1] https://goo.gl/maps/Pm4JGesJZ9xELrBB8 https://goo.gl/maps/Pm4JGesJZ9xELrBB8 [2] https://goo.gl/maps/rzGttw1gMchSWXREA https://goo.gl/maps/rzGttw1gMchSWXREA
    - hammock 4y ago
      The Mississippi and Rhine Rivers
greenie_beans 4y ago
read wendell berry https://www.counterpointpress.com/books/the-unsettling-of-america/ https://www.counterpointpress.com/books/the-unsettling-of-am...
banDeveloper 4y ago
The real problem is majority of crops being grown for animal agriculture, which is an extremely wasteful way of producing food. We'd only need a fraction of the farmlands if we were actually eating the crops we grow. Sadly, we can't count on consumers making rational choices and politicians are not going to tank their popularity by pushing for these changes. It's the same as climate change.
- jethro_tell 4y ago
  It is climate change.
- eru 4y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean by not making rational choices? People have a preference for meat. Rationality doesn't say what your preferences should be, it just helps you satisfy them.
  - banDeveloper 4y ago
    I mean thinking about long term consequences of their actions and making a choice that leads to the best outcome for the society at large. You're right in saying people have a preference, but the way you say it makes it seem like that's all their is to it, as if people's dietary choices have no broader impact.
  - occz 4y ago
    People have a preference for meat post huge subsidies, which essentially makes the preference mean nothing whatsoever. If people prefer meat when it's not subsidised, then sure, what the hell, let them have it.
    - arghnoname 4y ago
      Farming and subsidies go hand in hand. I'm from the midwest. Whether it's growing food in the first place or leaving a field fallow in another, a subsidy is probably involved. This is a good thing. Farming is very tough business and I would rather keep these guys in business because I like eating quite a bit.
bjt2n3904 4y ago
Man. Whenever I see these threads, I see a ton of people hopping in with their ideas on how to optimize a critical resource. It's the "heat people, not homes" mantra. I mean, I get it. Every programmer salivates at the idea of writing a super efficient hand crafted assembly routine that blows the doors off of what's on the market right now, and that's good. But I can't help but think... If I wanted to drastically change people's behavior, it can be done easily. Step one: Cause a supply chain issue, creating artificial scarcity. Step two: Lecture everyone on how they need to be less wasteful, caution them about how painful life will be if "we aren't all in this together". Step three: Find every day Joe's and make an example of them in the public sphere for selfishly squandering precious resources. The public will gladly be your enforcers, thinking that if they all try hard enough the artificially created problem will go away. This technique always results in artificially created human suffering, and waste. The old joke about economic systems and cows was something to the tune of, "you have two cows. The communist milks your cows, and pours the milk down the drain". It's fascinating to read what Gareth Jones wrote about tractors in the Soviet Union -- how meddlesome people who didn't know how to farm / engineer inserted themselves into the process to tell everyone how to do their jobs, and royally screwed everything up. Edit: Link for the curious. Day thirty. https://www.garethjones.org/soviet_articles/experiences_in_russia_1931_days29to41.htm https://www.garethjones.org/soviet_articles/experiences_in_r...
- Chris2048 4y ago
  The one(s) I heard where: COMMUNISM: You have two cows. The government takes both and gives you the milk it thinks you need. BUREAUCRACY: You have two cows. At first the government regulates what you can feed them and when you can milk them. Then it pays you not to milk them. Then it takes both, shoots one, milks the other and pours the milk down the drain. Then it requires you to fill out forms accounting for the missing cows.
qualudeheart 4y ago
Is anyone using ML to optimize fertilizer production?
- iceTA 4y ago
  This is the most HN possible response to this article, I love it.
  - qualudeheart 4y ago
    You’ll like my other comments then. I have some spicy ideas.
- FooBarBizBazz 4y ago
  I can't see how that would go wrong.
WillAdams 4y ago
We are currently burning (or applying as fertilizer) 10 calories of petrochemical energy to get 1 calorie of food energy --- we need to rebalance this equation somehow.
- kragen 4y ago
  i have heard this before, so i looked at the underlying research it is not true and has never been true for the food supply in general it is true in a few expensive crops of low calorie content; i think lettuce and almonds were the ones i saw
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- eru 4y ago
  Even if this was true, why do you think we need to rebalance? We could also just find another source of cheap energy.
- lukas099 4y ago
  Is this even physically possible to significantly improve? How many calories of sunlight energy do plants use to create 1 calorie of chemical bonds?
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    A tiny percentage of sunlight energy actually makes it into the agricultural product’s chemical energy. Is it possible to actually improve? Corn yields between 1940 and present went up an enormous amount, averaging 25ish bushels per acre in 1940 and before to 180ish today. 7x increase with the same sun, but improved plants and agricultural practices. Look up C3 and C4 photosynthesis to see differences in energy capture. There are plenty of axes on which agricultural productivity can be increased.
iceTA 4y ago
Two things. 1. I hate how everything has to have a financialised solution: To achieve this, the report suggests “mobilizing international financial support” and implementing tools such as “fertilizer contract swaps” to keep farmer costs manageable. 2. I read articles like this and wonder, will the world ditch meat, or will will the richer countries continue to eat ridiculous amounts of the stuff, using up all the land that could grow food for a plant based diet? Something will have ti give at some point.
- debacle 4y ago
  Regenerative agriculture relies on poultry and livestock to restore the topsoil layer. Meat isn't going away. In fact, we may wind up eating more, not less, of it, over time.
  - eru 4y ago
    > Regenerative agriculture relies on poultry and livestock to restore the topsoil layer. Why not use human excrement instead?
    - debacle 4y ago
      "The use of untreated human feces in agriculture poses significant health risks and has contributed to widespread infection with parasitic worms—a disease called helminthiasis, affecting over 1.5 billion people in developing countries." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_feces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_feces
      - another_story 4y ago
        It's the same for using animal feces. There are ways to mitigate risk. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.7b02811 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.7b02811
        eru 4y ago
        Yes, exactly. Who said anything about using human poop untreated?
TurkishPoptart 4y ago
Russia was a net exporter of fertilizer, and China is a net importer. if Peter Zeihan is right, this will cause food shortages in China.
- eru 4y ago
  Why? China can buy fertilizer on the world market. Prices might rise a bit, but China is a solidly middle income country.
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  China has the money to pay the increased costs. Brazil is likely the most fucked by the fertilizer shortage since their massive soy farms are all on desert soil which requires loads of fertilizer which they can no longer afford.
DevX101 4y ago
Nitrogen fertilizers are directly responsible for keeping about 3-4 billion people alive today. Any persistent shortage or supply chain disruption should be considered a global security issue.
- algoatecorn 4y ago
  This is a key insight and unfortunately not enough people make it to this cold hard fact before they begin preaching about food system transformation. Nat gas + Haber Bosch is the foundational structure of our food system and its ability to feed our current population. Perhaps a new innovation will replace it, but so far much of the proposed methods are complete fairy tale nonsense which will result in mass starvation without appropriate due diligence.
fredgrott 4y ago
The context is China imports 90% from Russia and India is at 40% imports from Russia and the deep sea ports Russia uses shippers will not ship from as they are north of Black Sea for obvious reasons. To complicate matters Russia currently is using all available train cars and thus has no compacity to increase rail traffic to ship fertilizer.
amts 4y ago
"Each hour 430 quintillion Joules of energy from the sun hits the Earth. That's 430 with 18 zeroes after it. In comparison, the total amount of energy that all humans use in a year is 410 quintillion Joules." [1] "The 70 percent of solar energy the Earth absorbs per year equals roughly 3.85 million exajoules. In other words, the amount of solar energy hitting the earth in one hour is more than enough to power the world for one year." [2] "The total solar power hitting Earth is about 173,000 terawatts, or 1.73×10^17 joules per second. That’s roughly equivalent to the energy of 41 Megatons of TNT exploding… every second. It’s hard for us to comprehend how much energy a joule is (or even what energy is in the first place). But energy can be converted into mass, and we do understand what mass is." [3] Thus, equatorial and semi-equatorial regions should be energy magnats of the world and be able to get nitrogen, phosphorus, water, etc for their food from thin air and sand. Yet, the relevant world has still to feed the majority of these regions, including the solar tech etc. [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/this-is-the-potential-of-solar-power-2015-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/this-is-the-potential-of-sol... [2] https://www.ucdavis.edu/climate/definitions/how-is-solar-power-generated https://www.ucdavis.edu/climate/definitions/how-is-solar-pow... [3] https://www.quora.com/How-much-energy-from-the-Sun-hits-the-earth-every-second-in-units-I-can-actually-comprehend https://www.quora.com/How-much-energy-from-the-Sun-hits-the-...
colechristensen 4y ago
This article doesn’t really have any content and the comments don’t reflect any particular amount of practical knowledge but just vague things heard and repeated. First issue “fertilizer” is not one thing but a class of things produced in very different ways. The article doesn’t even mention which things are going to have supply problems and why.
forgetfreeman 4y ago
Nothing highlights the smug ignorance at the heart of the developer community more effectively than bringing up agriculture.
mountaintimefrm 4y ago
What better time than now to start implementing on your farm an agroforestry system based on nitrogen-fixing trees and shrubs.

140 points by DocFeind 4y ago

What if we raid some more islands for bird poop?

The indore method (used in india for centuries by hindu farmers) would mean there would be no need for chemical fertilizer.

Waterluvian 4y ago

Few things have a single cause, but I think it's not outlandish to hypothesize that potential pending famines could be driven by a fertilizer shortage, driven by Russia's invasion and global economic issues, driven by the pandemic. Maybe this is obvious to those smarter than I, but I'm beginning to have a sinking sense that direct deaths by SARS-COV2 will be a shockingly small minority of total deaths caused by the pandemic over the next generation. We're going to see this event loud and clear in every economic and demographic chart for the next half-century, aren't we?

djbusby 4y ago
Assuming this is the only loud event for the next 50 years. Or, this past three years event is the start of a longer, bigger event. Then, the ignition is lost in the flame.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  > Then, the ignition is lost in the flame. Goosebumps from this line. It's apt and thoughtful. I'm thinking about how these events can be fractal-like. The past few years of active pandemic have felt like the "flame" but could be seen as the "ignition" for countless other, possibly even worse global events. It's like a Great Tree Shaking: all non-resilient systems began showing cracks of one size or another, cascading stress to other systems, many of which buckle or break.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Arguably history is the study of an ever-breaking quasi-non-resilient combination of systems and arguing that your particular causal viewpoint is the One True one.
  - hammock 4y ago
    Lost ignitions: the research being done in Wuhan, the 2014-2022 civil war in Ukraine, the Las Vegas mass shooting, etc?
    - pjc50 4y ago
      Three totally unrelated things? There's no proof of the ""lab leak"" allegations (and I doubt there can ever be short of an admission by the Chinese government), the war in Ukraine was a proxy for the current invasion, and the Las Vegas mass shooting .. was just a larger incident of something that routinely happens in America that does not move the needle politically?
  - LeifCarrotson 4y ago
    We spent the first 50 years of the information age building systems to be as hyper-efficient as possible, with ruthless competition eliminating resiliency first in existing commercial, social, and political structures, and then in the education and life experience of the people that built those structures later. Like a Californian wilderness, we've been accumulating surface fuel load for decades.
    - hd95489 4y ago
      At least in the us the first thing ruthless competition does is eliminate all competition and establish a monopoly like position. Every industry wants to consolidate to 2-4 players that split the market and don’t compete
    - eru 4y ago
      If you ban 'price-gouging', you remove incentives for suppliers to be resilient.
  - 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
danuker 4y ago
I doubt it. In as much as they are allowed to function, markets will reward people addressing the shortages with outsized profit. Same as getting through the energy crisis, we can overcome the food crisis, one obstacle at a time. The connectedness of economies is also an advantage. Shipping rates are almost at a 3-year low: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/baltic https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/baltic The greatest risk are policies forbidding "price gouging" going haywire and actually forbidding disaster response.
- brmgb 4y ago
  Having trust in the market is not a magic solution. Yes, prices will rise as they already are if there is a shortage but that's not going to make local production materialises out of thin air if there are other obstacles. At some point, you need a concerted strategic answer at the correct level if you are facing a strategic threat like disruption of food supply. That's why China restricted exports. It remains to be seen if the USA and Europe will react fast enough and appropriately enough. What happened with Covid doesn't give me much hope. Edit: As I am downvoted strongly (I imagine that it’s because the Covid answer is stupidly seen as political in the US - at least I hope so because if it’s about the ability of the market to solve issues it doesn’t bode well for us all), the EU took ages to secure first masks then vaccine supply and the utter stupidity of the US answer which avoided imposing wearing masks and making vaccination mandatory costed you hundred thousands of unnecessary death compared to country of equivalent development. Look at Taiwan or South Korea to see how it supposed to be done.
- qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
  How can you price gouge something like Sri-Lakha, that has no currency to trade with? This whole mental model just has no grasp for the moment when the rear of the car falls off..
  - danuker 4y ago
    Hire its citizens. No money means you'd benefit by sending them money. But inequality is a different problem than getting through crises. It should be addressed while leaving the production incentives intact. For example, progressive and/or negative income taxes.
officialjunk 4y ago
probably. heart attacks on the rise for covid survivors aged 25-44 https://www.khon2.com/local-news/heart-attacks-on-dramatic-rise-for-25-44-age-group/ https://www.khon2.com/local-news/heart-attacks-on-dramatic-r...
- probably_wrong 4y ago
  First, this content is locked in my region so I don't know exactly what you linked to. Second, if you are linking to a news article about that one University guy who said young people shouldn't take the vaccine, it is my understanding that his study was flawed. But again, I can't read the article so take this with a grain of salt.
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    Here's the academic article immediately linked to in the above news page: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jmv.28187 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jmv.28187
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- dehrmann 4y ago
  That's not what the study's abstract said. It said heart attack deaths increased during the pandemic. It could be due to covid itself, fear of covid while seeking treatment, worse quality treatment, lifestyle chances, social isolation, others, or some combination. One of the study's authors did say there's a link, but I have to wonder why it wasn't in the abstract.
ajross 4y ago
I don't see how that's sustained by the article. This is just another face of the energy crunch. Oil and gas are somewhat rarer more expensive, and so everything made from them is more expensive and the economy needs to seek to a new price equilibrium. In this case, that mostly means "reduced travel and air freight" and "reduced gas heating usage". But as a side effect farmers need to scramble to match their own market. So some of this will end up meaning "more expensive fertilizer-heavy crops". But at the economic level farming is less able to tolerate volatility (you can't JustInTime a soybean, literally farmers reap what was sown months ago), so there's need for some assistance at the regulatory level. Which is what this article is about. Basically, no. No famines. Just pricing and regulatory changes.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  There is a famine in Madagascar now, although not related to fertiliser. The system is fragile
  - eru 4y ago
    That's entirely the fault of their inept and corrupt administration there.
    - ajross 4y ago
      Well, and also a big drought. Economies (and weather) are indeed unstable in general. But per the upthread hypothesis there's no particular instability in the food supply caused by fertilizer/energy/covid disruption that seems notable. We've been here before and we'll be here again.
    - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      United Nations says it's "first climate change famine". Why are you blaming administration? I am not sure how corrupt they are, but how do you deal with drought in a country that has GDP per capital of $520? Like you can't afford to do much with that. https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/10/1103712 https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/10/1103712
xadhominemx 4y ago
That seems very outlandish actually
bryanlarsen 4y ago
What does COVID have to do with this? The fertilizer shortage is caused by the war in Ukraine. This war will cause more deaths indirectly than it does directly, just like almost all large wars.
- afarrell 4y ago
  Arguably the war in Ukraine was influenced by the unrest against Lukanhesko after his poor handling of covid-19...and by Russians thinking that was yet another example of NATO attacks against their security.
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago
    This war has one primary cause: Putin. Anything else is a very distant secondary. COVID caused Putin to isolate and become paranoid, but it's still Putin's fault, not COVID's.
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      Putin's motivations predate the war, too; the invasion of Crimea was in 2014, and before that was Georgia in 2008.
      - knewter 4y ago
        I always find it interesting when people being up the 2014 Ukraine situation without referencing the call from Victoria Nuland discussing who the US was going to put in charge ("surprisingly", those ended up being the government the people elected) https://odysee.com/@AdamFitzgerald:2/Victoria-Nuland-Phone-Call-To-Ukraine-Geofrrey-Pyatt-(2014):2 https://odysee.com/@AdamFitzgerald:2/Victoria-Nuland-Phone-C...
        mikeyouse 4y ago
        Likely because people who know anything about the region know that that supposedly damning call happened after three months of violent protests against the most corrupt government in recent European history.. the reference to Klitchko being made deputy PM means it was recorded after Jan 26th which was when Yanukovych was trying everything to stay in power, including bringing opposition leaders into his government (and working with Russian intelligence to bug US diplomatic phones). He was doing so because many regional offices had already been taken over by protesters and his police forces had already shot several people. The leader who the US diplomats were talking about was already a popular opposition leader, so it's entirely unsurprising that Yatsenyuk was part of government post-Maidan. I think I'm mostly annoyed with these dumb conspiracy theories because they deny agency to the millions of people who actually cast out a criminal and democratically elected their own leadership. "hurr durr, the CIA did it" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Euromaidan_regional_state_administration_occupations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Euromaidan_regional_state...
heisenbit 4y ago
Sooner or later energy prices will increase and fertilizer will get more expensive. Step functions and impulses are useful ways to probe the inner working of a system and in this case helped to highlight the dominant role energy plays everywhere. We re-learned what we forgot or ignored since the last energy aka. oil price shock in the '70. In the long run the situation for food security is challenging unless we switch to a different paradigm of farming and population control.
- kragen 4y ago
  energy prices are decreasing, not increasing; solar power is half as expensive as coal power in most of the world already, and it's likely to get even cheaper over time as pv production scales up (of course in northern europe this year that is not the case because they were relying on russian gas, but that's not 'sooner or later', that's just right now)
- Sakos 4y ago
  This is such a weird comment. For much of the world, food security is an ever present problem that is heavily affected by energy prices (among other things). Fertilizer prices are already up significantly. This isn't something we have to wait for. It's already been happening for the past decade and it's going to keep getting worse. You're fortunate that you live in a country where food security on a population level isn't a constantly relevant concern.
ajmurmann 4y ago
Well, 20.8% of goal potash production comes from Russia and another 18% from Belarus. It's a key ingredients in making fertilizer. There is your single cause. Source: https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/our-natural-resources/minerals-mining/minerals-metals-facts/potash-facts/20521#L2 https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/our-natural-resources/minerals-minin...
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  Have they stopped producing? Don’t think any of the big buyers are resisting purchase from those two countries.
  - HDThoreaun 4y ago
    They've stopped exporting to western countries.
    - Scoundreller 4y ago
      After the US (which I’m assuming imports from Canada, the largest exporter), the next 6 largest importers aren’t western countries (if you exclude Brazil in that): https://www.nationmaster.com/nmx/ranking/potash-fertilizer-imports https://www.nationmaster.com/nmx/ranking/potash-fertilizer-i... https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/our-natural-resources/minerals-mining/minerals-metals-facts/potash-facts/20521 https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/our-natural-resources/minerals-minin... The biggest issue is that Belarus has restricted access to euro seaports, but Belarus and Russia have extensive rail networks.
      - sudosysgen 4y ago
        Reduced supply to Western countries would still push prices way up.
hedora 4y ago
The big lesson from the 1918 flu pandemic was that lockdowns didn’t really work. The scientific consensus after that was to isolate the highest risk populations, and let it run through the rest of the population. That way, it hits herd immunity / becomes endemic without infecting people that are likely to die from it. For COVID, the conventional approach would be to lock down nursing homes and provide shelter in place orders / resources for the top 1-5% risk groups for 3 months while otherwise ignoring the pandemic. If it were not for RNA vaccines, that approach certainly would have been better than what we did with COVID. Economic disruption would be minimal, per case fatality would be cut significantly, and the tripledemic / avian flu / 2021 famine / rebound of malaria, etc. probably would not have happened. With the vaccines, it is unclear if the lockdowns helped or hurt average life expectancies. We will know in a few more years.
- lukas099 4y ago
  > If it were not for RNA vaccines, that approach certainly would have been better than what we did with COVID. I know that 'flatten the curve' largely left the public consciousness, but wouldn't letting the virus run largely unrestricted have overwhelmed the health care system?
  - arghnoname 4y ago
    The curve flattening was initially proposed for a short period of time. Maybe weeks or a few months, I forget. I think some initial panic is forgivable, even if it led to actions that were counter to previous guidance. We were ventilating patients early on, for instance, and we later learned that this causes more harm than good for many patients and should be deferred if at all possible. I think it's arguable that a short term lockdown was the right call. It's arguable it wasn't, but in my opinion it wasn't crazy. During that initial period we were supposed to be increasing capacity and learning treatment. Encouraging people to lose weight and improve their health during this time would probably help with outcomes as well. Capacity was increased to some extent. Remember the tents and the medical ship in NYC? I think neither were used at all. We don't seem to be having conversations now about more long-term increases in health care capacity. It's just like nothing was learned. It all just became political and like all things political in the US, incredibly stupid and tribal. For what it's worth, when DeSantis started relaxing Florida lockdowns I thought the death toll in Florida was going to be sobering and it was reckless. I now think it was the right thing to do. DeSantis seemed to be following the pre-COVID playbook. I was scared and clung on too much to the status quo procedure on COVID.
bruiseralmighty 4y ago
It's not really the conflict directly so much as the sanctions campaigns that followed. Russia and Belarus are the number one and two suppliers of a basic fertilizer component, but now Western aligned nation cannot import from them and the Brits have gone further by making it harder to insure the shipments which affects the ability for Russia (and by extension Belarus) to export to anyone by sea. The Germans _could_ have helped make up the difference since they can make some amount of fertilizer using natural gas, but some terrorist state (we still don't know exactly who) blew up NS1 and NS2 which makes this basically impossible. Germany now needs to preserve all its gas just to keep some manufacturing going, heat people's homes, and run the lights. The pandemic has had some effect, but a lot of the fertilizer being sold internationally goes to Egypt, the Middle East, and North Africa. It doesn't actually have to go all that far in the global scheme of things. The conflict itself affects wheat prices, since Ukraine is a major wheat exporter (as is Russia), but the fertilizer issues are due primarily to Western sanctions and Kremlin counter-sanctions.

debacle 4y ago

Recently, I have seen a short-sighted push to allow human waste to fertilize crops. That is absolutely 100% not the solution to anything for probably a dozen very good reasons. The impact of this kind of "recycling" is well studied and the negatives outweigh the positives.

dyndos 4y ago
Care to elaborate? What did those studies show? As far as I know, properly handled humanure is quite effective. And it's better than letting excess nitrogen seep into the waterways.
ch4s3 4y ago
Pharmaceutical contamination seems like the biggest problem, but I guess heating to kill pathogens makes the energy math unfavorable as well.
- debacle 4y ago
  You can kill the pathogens through curing the compost, but that takes time, space, and equipment. In the meantime you'd be dealing with hazardous waste.
GalenErso 4y ago
North Korea uses human waste as a fertilizer. Which causes this: North Korean defector found to have 'enormous parasites' https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-42021373.amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-420... > "I've never seen anything like this in my 20 years as a physician," South Korean doctor Lee Cook-jong told journalists, explaining that the longest worm removed from the patient's intestines was 27cm (11in) long. > In 2015 South Korean researchers studied the health records of North Korean defectors who had visited a hospital in Cheonan between 2006 and 2014. > They found that they showed higher rates of chronic hepatitis B, chronic hepatitis C, tuberculosis and parasite infections, compared to South Koreans. > The soldier's food may have been contaminated because the North still uses human faeces as fertiliser, known as "night soil". > Lee Min-bok, a North Korean agriculture expert, told Reuters: "Chemical fertiliser was supplied by the state until the 1970s. By the 1990s, the state could not supply it any more, so farmers started to use a lot of night soil instead."

photochemsyn 4y ago

A remarkable amount of the fertilizer applied via modern industrial farming practices is just wasted: > "According to an average of 13 global databases from 10 data sources, in 2010, 161 teragrams of nitrogen were applied to agricultural crops, but only 73 teragrams of nitrogen made it to the harvested crop. A total of 86 teragrams of nitrogen was wasted, perhaps ending up in the water, air, or soil. The new research was published in the journal Nature Food in July." https://eos.org/articles/index-suggests-that-half-of-nitrogen-applied-to-crops-is-lost https://eos.org/articles/index-suggests-that-half-of-nitroge... Large-area applications by mechanized systems seem to be part of the problem, but that's also necessary to escape the subsitence agriculture trap, i.e. with such systems, it's not necessary for half or more of the human population to be working in the fields to grow food, it's more like 1 in 50 or 1 in 100. The most promising solution might be AI + robots. If a robot could crawl up and down fields inspecting individual plants for nutrient status and applying small amounts of fertilizer as needed (also weeding and checking for pest infestations), it could cut fertilizer use in half while maintaining the same level of production - and perhaps eliminate the need for most herbicides and pesticides.

soperj 4y ago
I'd say the majority of that ends up in the sea, causing algae blooms and killing life for miles around. So worse than wasted.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  Surely there is more farm land away from the sea than adjacent to it. How does for example fertilizer from here[1] or here[2] end up at sea? [1] https://goo.gl/maps/Pm4JGesJZ9xELrBB8 https://goo.gl/maps/Pm4JGesJZ9xELrBB8 [2] https://goo.gl/maps/rzGttw1gMchSWXREA https://goo.gl/maps/rzGttw1gMchSWXREA
  - hammock 4y ago
    The Mississippi and Rhine Rivers

greenie_beans 4y ago

read wendell berry https://www.counterpointpress.com/books/the-unsettling-of-america/ https://www.counterpointpress.com/books/the-unsettling-of-am...

banDeveloper 4y ago

The real problem is majority of crops being grown for animal agriculture, which is an extremely wasteful way of producing food. We'd only need a fraction of the farmlands if we were actually eating the crops we grow. Sadly, we can't count on consumers making rational choices and politicians are not going to tank their popularity by pushing for these changes. It's the same as climate change.

jethro_tell 4y ago
It is climate change.
eru 4y ago
I'm not sure what you mean by not making rational choices? People have a preference for meat. Rationality doesn't say what your preferences should be, it just helps you satisfy them.
- banDeveloper 4y ago
  I mean thinking about long term consequences of their actions and making a choice that leads to the best outcome for the society at large. You're right in saying people have a preference, but the way you say it makes it seem like that's all their is to it, as if people's dietary choices have no broader impact.
- occz 4y ago
  People have a preference for meat post huge subsidies, which essentially makes the preference mean nothing whatsoever. If people prefer meat when it's not subsidised, then sure, what the hell, let them have it.
  - arghnoname 4y ago
    Farming and subsidies go hand in hand. I'm from the midwest. Whether it's growing food in the first place or leaving a field fallow in another, a subsidy is probably involved. This is a good thing. Farming is very tough business and I would rather keep these guys in business because I like eating quite a bit.

bjt2n3904 4y ago

Man. Whenever I see these threads, I see a ton of people hopping in with their ideas on how to optimize a critical resource. It's the "heat people, not homes" mantra. I mean, I get it. Every programmer salivates at the idea of writing a super efficient hand crafted assembly routine that blows the doors off of what's on the market right now, and that's good. But I can't help but think... If I wanted to drastically change people's behavior, it can be done easily. Step one: Cause a supply chain issue, creating artificial scarcity. Step two: Lecture everyone on how they need to be less wasteful, caution them about how painful life will be if "we aren't all in this together". Step three: Find every day Joe's and make an example of them in the public sphere for selfishly squandering precious resources. The public will gladly be your enforcers, thinking that if they all try hard enough the artificially created problem will go away. This technique always results in artificially created human suffering, and waste. The old joke about economic systems and cows was something to the tune of, "you have two cows. The communist milks your cows, and pours the milk down the drain". It's fascinating to read what Gareth Jones wrote about tractors in the Soviet Union -- how meddlesome people who didn't know how to farm / engineer inserted themselves into the process to tell everyone how to do their jobs, and royally screwed everything up. Edit: Link for the curious. Day thirty. https://www.garethjones.org/soviet_articles/experiences_in_russia_1931_days29to41.htm https://www.garethjones.org/soviet_articles/experiences_in_r...

Chris2048 4y ago
The one(s) I heard where: COMMUNISM: You have two cows. The government takes both and gives you the milk it thinks you need. BUREAUCRACY: You have two cows. At first the government regulates what you can feed them and when you can milk them. Then it pays you not to milk them. Then it takes both, shoots one, milks the other and pours the milk down the drain. Then it requires you to fill out forms accounting for the missing cows.

qualudeheart 4y ago

Is anyone using ML to optimize fertilizer production?

iceTA 4y ago
This is the most HN possible response to this article, I love it.
- qualudeheart 4y ago
  You’ll like my other comments then. I have some spicy ideas.
FooBarBizBazz 4y ago
I can't see how that would go wrong.

WillAdams 4y ago

We are currently burning (or applying as fertilizer) 10 calories of petrochemical energy to get 1 calorie of food energy --- we need to rebalance this equation somehow.

kragen 4y ago
i have heard this before, so i looked at the underlying research it is not true and has never been true for the food supply in general it is true in a few expensive crops of low calorie content; i think lettuce and almonds were the ones i saw
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
eru 4y ago
Even if this was true, why do you think we need to rebalance? We could also just find another source of cheap energy.
lukas099 4y ago
Is this even physically possible to significantly improve? How many calories of sunlight energy do plants use to create 1 calorie of chemical bonds?
- colechristensen 4y ago
  A tiny percentage of sunlight energy actually makes it into the agricultural product’s chemical energy. Is it possible to actually improve? Corn yields between 1940 and present went up an enormous amount, averaging 25ish bushels per acre in 1940 and before to 180ish today. 7x increase with the same sun, but improved plants and agricultural practices. Look up C3 and C4 photosynthesis to see differences in energy capture. There are plenty of axes on which agricultural productivity can be increased.

iceTA 4y ago

Two things. 1. I hate how everything has to have a financialised solution: To achieve this, the report suggests “mobilizing international financial support” and implementing tools such as “fertilizer contract swaps” to keep farmer costs manageable. 2. I read articles like this and wonder, will the world ditch meat, or will will the richer countries continue to eat ridiculous amounts of the stuff, using up all the land that could grow food for a plant based diet? Something will have ti give at some point.

debacle 4y ago
Regenerative agriculture relies on poultry and livestock to restore the topsoil layer. Meat isn't going away. In fact, we may wind up eating more, not less, of it, over time.
- eru 4y ago
  > Regenerative agriculture relies on poultry and livestock to restore the topsoil layer. Why not use human excrement instead?
  - debacle 4y ago
    "The use of untreated human feces in agriculture poses significant health risks and has contributed to widespread infection with parasitic worms—a disease called helminthiasis, affecting over 1.5 billion people in developing countries." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_feces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_feces
    - another_story 4y ago
      It's the same for using animal feces. There are ways to mitigate risk. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.7b02811 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.7b02811
      - eru 4y ago
        Yes, exactly. Who said anything about using human poop untreated?

TurkishPoptart 4y ago

Russia was a net exporter of fertilizer, and China is a net importer. if Peter Zeihan is right, this will cause food shortages in China.

eru 4y ago
Why? China can buy fertilizer on the world market. Prices might rise a bit, but China is a solidly middle income country.
HDThoreaun 4y ago
China has the money to pay the increased costs. Brazil is likely the most fucked by the fertilizer shortage since their massive soy farms are all on desert soil which requires loads of fertilizer which they can no longer afford.

DevX101 4y ago

Nitrogen fertilizers are directly responsible for keeping about 3-4 billion people alive today. Any persistent shortage or supply chain disruption should be considered a global security issue.

algoatecorn 4y ago
This is a key insight and unfortunately not enough people make it to this cold hard fact before they begin preaching about food system transformation. Nat gas + Haber Bosch is the foundational structure of our food system and its ability to feed our current population. Perhaps a new innovation will replace it, but so far much of the proposed methods are complete fairy tale nonsense which will result in mass starvation without appropriate due diligence.

fredgrott 4y ago

The context is China imports 90% from Russia and India is at 40% imports from Russia and the deep sea ports Russia uses shippers will not ship from as they are north of Black Sea for obvious reasons. To complicate matters Russia currently is using all available train cars and thus has no compacity to increase rail traffic to ship fertilizer.

amts 4y ago

"Each hour 430 quintillion Joules of energy from the sun hits the Earth. That's 430 with 18 zeroes after it. In comparison, the total amount of energy that all humans use in a year is 410 quintillion Joules." [1] "The 70 percent of solar energy the Earth absorbs per year equals roughly 3.85 million exajoules. In other words, the amount of solar energy hitting the earth in one hour is more than enough to power the world for one year." [2] "The total solar power hitting Earth is about 173,000 terawatts, or 1.73×10^17 joules per second. That’s roughly equivalent to the energy of 41 Megatons of TNT exploding… every second. It’s hard for us to comprehend how much energy a joule is (or even what energy is in the first place). But energy can be converted into mass, and we do understand what mass is." [3] Thus, equatorial and semi-equatorial regions should be energy magnats of the world and be able to get nitrogen, phosphorus, water, etc for their food from thin air and sand. Yet, the relevant world has still to feed the majority of these regions, including the solar tech etc. [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/this-is-the-potential-of-solar-power-2015-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/this-is-the-potential-of-sol... [2] https://www.ucdavis.edu/climate/definitions/how-is-solar-power-generated https://www.ucdavis.edu/climate/definitions/how-is-solar-pow... [3] https://www.quora.com/How-much-energy-from-the-Sun-hits-the-earth-every-second-in-units-I-can-actually-comprehend https://www.quora.com/How-much-energy-from-the-Sun-hits-the-...

colechristensen 4y ago

This article doesn’t really have any content and the comments don’t reflect any particular amount of practical knowledge but just vague things heard and repeated. First issue “fertilizer” is not one thing but a class of things produced in very different ways. The article doesn’t even mention which things are going to have supply problems and why.

forgetfreeman 4y ago

Nothing highlights the smug ignorance at the heart of the developer community more effectively than bringing up agriculture.

mountaintimefrm 4y ago

What better time than now to start implementing on your farm an agroforestry system based on nitrogen-fixing trees and shrubs.