7 ms·

When I first heard of the concept of things like vertical farming, or shipping container farming, or even farm bots. I thought those were a great ideas. That te

by hosh 4y ago

When I first heard of the concept of things like vertical farming, or shipping container farming, or even farm bots. I thought those were a great ideas. That tech like this will solve for food problems, such as urban blight. Back then, I was still optimistic about the role of tech, and that more tech will solve things like this. It was also before I really deep dived into permaculture design, and many of the related ideas. What I came to realize is that we already have the solution for many of our food scarcity issues in permaculture design, and have been for long time. And that more tech in this adds bunch of unnecessary, fragile, non-regenerative, non-self-healing technology. With permaculture design, most of the efforts goes into the design, but the technological palette is no-tech to low-tech. There is capital, but it’s largely going into design and can be deployed by humans with hand tools. Take vertical farming. One of the key ideas in vertical farming that maps to permaculture design is the use of canopy layers, understanding that plants compete for light, and not root space. Different species of plants will live at different canopy layers. As such, you can construct a perennial plant “guild” which occupies all the ecological functions, at different canopy layers, that also yields something useful for humans. You don’t need to maximize yields; and instead, when designed well, get something that is resilient against environmental changes while also restoring soil health. The indoor vertical farming using hydroponics doesn’t give us that.

steve_adams_86 4y ago
The key thing people don’t realize or understand is that hardly any agriculture is sustainable, and even less is restorative. Permaculture is extremely interesting because of that. The challenge is finding ways to harvest food reliably and at any meaningful scale.
- echelon 4y ago
  > sustainable While we're solving for human markets and economies, the unspoken goal is to turn earth's limited resources into thought, whereby some intelligent process achieves the escape velocity to leave this gravity well and proliferate throughout the universe.
  - hosh 4y ago
    I know there are people who see it this way and feel like this. It presumes a couple things: - that intelligent thought (or in other belief structures, spirit, consciousness, etc) are the only thing of value worth propogating - that by escaping the gravity well, we can also escape the problems we wrought by bad design. We’re more likely to carry the problems forward. Our so-called “intelligent thought” have problems built into how we approach the design, so like running away from our shadows, it will come up wherever we go. And, if we are aware of the bad design, why wouldn’t we just fix it while we’re here on this planet?
    - abakker 4y ago
      because fixing things costs money. Even when it saves money. Money is the catalyst that allows anything to happen, and not enough people have enough of it to turn good ideas into good designs into good products.
      - Alupis 4y ago
        And flying to another planet that happens to be completely inhospitable is somehow cheaper or easier? When you realize there are no hospitable planets, besides earth, within our solar system - you will realize there is no escaping the problems we have created here on earth. No, they must be solved, not avoided. There is no future where any of us alive today, or for many, many generations (dozens, maybe hundreds or thousands, if it's even possible) will be capable of traveling to another system with potentially hospitable planets.
        esafak 4y ago
        Besides, how could terraforming Mars be easier than fixing our problems?
        echelon 4y ago
        > Besides, how could terraforming Mars be easier than fixing our problems? We don't need to terraform Mars to our incredibly fine tuned biology. What comes next will evolve beyond our limitations. Humans are a stepping stone. Just a blink of an eye in an infinite time scale.
- hosh 4y ago
  I think nothing will work without some kind of change to the way of life. Urban living has taken people away from the land, so there is this illusion that we don’t have to participate in the ecology. Like water infrastructure, people growing up in cities expect food-on-demand … if you have the money for it. The idea that if you want to eat an apple means going into the back yard and picking one off the tree is an alien ideas. (Kids think food comes from grocery stores, not from trees). How fresh is that, right off the tree? Yet, now we have marketing that plays into that illusion, like tomatoes on the vine and it misses the point. When I personally harvested an apple and interact with an apple tree in my back yard, I am directly participating in the well-being of the ecology. There is no way forward for our civilization to “scale” in a way that maintains that illusion of on-demand-food. It’s how we view the world, and our way of life that needs to change.
  - kdmccormick 4y ago
    I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but I don't like how you're going after urban living. I can rewrite what you've written, but from an urbanist perspective regarding transportation sustainability: Rural living has taken people away from one another, so there is an illusion that we don't have to pay the true costs of travel. People growing up in towns expect cars and on-demand access to roads and gasoline and airports... if you have the money for it. The idea that if you want to go to a friend's house you need to walk or bike there is an alien ideas. (Kids think we travel in cars, not on foot). How simple is that, riding a bike through your neighborhood? Yet, now we have marketing that plays into that illusion, like hybrids and EV cars and "eco-conscious" airlines and it misses the point. When I personally walk, bike, or take the train to my destination, I am directly participating in a sustainable transit network. There is no way forward for our civilization to “scale” in a way that maintains that illusion of on-demand-travel. It’s how we view the world, and our way of life that needs to change.
    - hosh 4y ago
      People get attached to things, including urban living. I am not sure what you are trying to accomplish with rewriting it from the perspective of travel. That is pretty much how I feel about travel and transport infrastructure too. Some cultures attach a lot of importance on travel, associating it with freedom, or mobility (both in the literal sense, and as a metaphor for class mobility). Don’t get me wrong, I love to travel, to explore, to hike the wildernesses or enjoy different urban locale and take full advantage of the transport infrastructure. That doesn’t mean it isn’t an illusion.
- metalspot 4y ago
  > hardly any agriculture is sustainable humans have been doing it for 1000's of years. that is a much longer record of sustainable success than anything else we know of. there isn't any particular reason to think that industrial agriculture will fail any time soon. the worst case scenario is that it becomes more expensive over time. we spend <5% of our GDP on food, so even a 10X increase in raw production cost would be survivable. we massively over produce food (30% of corn burned as gasoline off the top, another large percentage of soy and corn used as animal feed, huge amounts of waste) and the biggest nutrition problem we have is obesity. the US has huge amounts of underutilized marginal land simply because there is no reason to use it. we already have way too much food.
  - ravi-delia 4y ago
    Worth drawing a distinction between the farming of the past and the farming of the present. Until the agricultural revolution humans sat right up against the population ceiling- the only reason hunger wasn't the leading cause of death is that disease reliably killed us first. They left fields fallow, and when they grew too much (which they had to if they wanted to feed their families) they depleted the soil and starved. We couldn't do permanent damage because our population was partially governed by it, just like every other animal. I don't actually disagree with you- infinite growth might not be possible but we haven't even started tapping the lightcone. Fertilizer works, negative effects can be mitigated, and honestly nothing is worth returning to the "sustainable" famine nightmare of the past.
    - miohtama 4y ago
      Farming started in Fertile Crescent thousands of years ago. If you visit the region today it’s all but fertile. Sand, sand and more sand. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-jun-15-op-diamond15-story.html#:~:text=So%20how%20did%20Fertile%20Crescent,special%20blindness%20on%20their%20part https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-jun-15-op-diamo.... > When you clear a forest in a high-rainfall tropical area, new trees grow up to a height of 15 feet within a year; in a dry area like the Fertile Crescent, regeneration is much slower. And when you add to the equation grazing by sheep and goats, new trees stand little chance. Deforestation led to soil erosion, and irrigation agriculture led to salinization, both by releasing salt buried deep in the ground and by adding salt through irrigation water. After centuries of degradation, areas of Iraq that formerly supported productive irrigation agriculture are today salt pans where nothing grows.
xyzzyz 4y ago
How do harvesting machines work with this mixed planting approach? Do you need to redesign existing machines completely for this novel planting scheme? Won’t it be extremely hard to harvest from one type of plant without damaging other plants that are “occupying different canopy layers”?
- monetus 4y ago
  It takes new machines and they generally damage something, yes. Despites op's emphasis on low-tech, the people I know who do permaculture seemed like they were excited for robot arms and computer vision to be better and cheaper.
  - xyzzyz 4y ago
    > I know who do permaculture seemed like they were excited for robot arms and computer vision to be better and cheaper. If you need robot arms and computer vision, it sounds then like permaculture is impractical at scale necessary for replacing standard agricultural practices.
    - peteradio 4y ago
      We already use computer vision to sort tomatoes at scale, I'm not sure if requiring computer vision precludes a successful automation.
      - xyzzyz 4y ago
        Probably not, but my bigger point is that all those comments about permaculture typically completely ignore practicalities of large scale agriculture that are absolutely crucial to human flourishing. Gardening is my hobby, and over the years I found a lot of practices that improve my yield tremendously without depending on chemical pesticides or artificial fertilizers. However, I would not dare suggesting to the professional farmers that they should follow my steps. These practices work in my garden, but they simply aren’t practical if you need to feed the entire world.
    - 4y ago
whitemary 4y ago
Keep digging and sooner or later you'll come around to accepting that your previous discoveries (like broad implementation of permaculture) can never be realized under capitalism; that capitalism is in fact the opposition to your vision.
- asdfman123 4y ago
  Centralized state control has no obligation to the environment either.
  - claudiulodro 4y ago
    I don't think they said it did? There are many more social systems out there than simply US-Style Capitalism and Soviet-style Communism. Something like Anarcho-primitivism is one example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-primitivism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-primitivism
    - asdfman123 4y ago
      I see the word “abolition” in the first sentence of that article.
      - claudiulodro 4y ago
        Did you finish the sentence and get to "abandonment of large-scale organization"? The state isn't the one abolishing things in that system.
        asdfman123 4y ago
        If you don’t want to use the phrase “the state,” that’s fine. Whatever powerful entity that determines the laws has no obligation to the environment.
    - namdnay 4y ago
      Out there where? In the real world, or in someone’s imagination? It’s like someone saying “java projects get too messy when there are hundreds of developers on them , this new language I’ve invented will be much better, trust me”
at_a_remove 4y ago
I wonder about affordability, but I am very pro-farmbot. Far more than self-driving cars. If anything, farmbots could provide a lot of very helpful groundwork in a lower-stakes environment which the self-driving cars people could use. My only real concern is if farmbots could be cheap enough to absorb a large portion of the -cide market. Most herbicides, for example, could be replaced by something which plucks. Insecticide money could, partially, go into bots that could pick-and-crush unwanted insects aboveground. We would still have grubs. Fungicide expenditure could be slashed: detect infection on a plant, spray it and its neighbors, maybe a few more downwind. Your bot, named He Who Walks Behind the Rows, trundles along slowly, observing each plant. Per acre, it would have to travel roughly three and a third miles. At a half-mile-per-hour pace, thirteen hours a day, you could swing two acres a day per bot. Let's say your bot eats your production cost in half, about four hundred dollars per acre. If a bot lasts only a season, well, it has to cost under a grand to be worth it, and I haven't even touched power costs yet. So it will need to survive multiple growing seasons. I can see Overlord stations every few acres, maybe grabbing some solar power or charging up off a grid, storing it so that it can be dispersed to the bots at night. They could serve as data collection points, centimeter-level GPS correction servers, and so on, as well. I could see the temptation to work irrigation into the bot somehow but water is heavy and I imagine something entirely separate to provide water. I'm making a lot of assumptions, like "each plant ought to be looked at each day" and the standard thirty-inch rows, etc.
dpflan 4y ago
Check this out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34963057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34963057 From a previous article discussion on the vertical farming bubble popping: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34959649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34959649 """ It appears to me that Silicon Valley is unaware that there's such a thing as Food Valley. Which does exactly what you ask for. Food Valley centers around the Dutch University of Wageningen, the pinnacle of agricultural research, teamed up with a network of innovative food companies and experts. ... Here is a link: https://www.wur.nl/en/article/Foodvalley-2.htm https://www.wur.nl/en/article/Foodvalley-2.htm """
dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
>plants compete for light, and not root space Isn't this common knowledge? On a related subject, my prediction: artificially grown meat will most likely go down as a failure, because of an oversight of understanding of some basic concepts. Either that, or the quality of the meat would be extremely poor.
forgetfreeman 4y ago
Uh, no. Permaculture produces a fraction of the calories per acre of traditional monoculture agriculture. It is nothing more than an amusement for dilettantes, as is any other system that claims to significantly improve upon the ~12,000 of human experience with field-based agriculture. I'm in the process of converting a 20 acre tract of woods into a "productive" farm via a combination of aquapontics and permaculture, I just don't have any illusions that I'm doing anything other than fucking around for my own amusement.
- greenonions 4y ago
  Does the traditional monoculture acres include the acres for fertilizer, the production of all of the equipment needed, fuel, seed, equipment and fuel for transport to final location, storage, pesticides, insecticides, and water? I agree that intensive agriculture is needed, but it's not so easy to compare the two.
  - forgetfreeman 4y ago
    It's trivial to compare the two unless you showed up to the conversation with an agenda or you're pretending issues with population density don't shit all over whatever counterfactual is being peddled by the homesteader-instagram industrial complex. One system feeds the overwhelming majority of humans on the planet, and takes most of the arable dry land surface of the planet to do so. The other produces a fraction of the food per acre, so unless you're planning on raising Atlantis you've got a serious problem to contend with.
rufus_foreman 4y ago
We don't have food scarcity issues.

by hosh 4y ago

steve_adams_86 4y ago

The key thing people don’t realize or understand is that hardly any agriculture is sustainable, and even less is restorative. Permaculture is extremely interesting because of that. The challenge is finding ways to harvest food reliably and at any meaningful scale.

echelon 4y ago
> sustainable While we're solving for human markets and economies, the unspoken goal is to turn earth's limited resources into thought, whereby some intelligent process achieves the escape velocity to leave this gravity well and proliferate throughout the universe.
- hosh 4y ago
  I know there are people who see it this way and feel like this. It presumes a couple things: - that intelligent thought (or in other belief structures, spirit, consciousness, etc) are the only thing of value worth propogating - that by escaping the gravity well, we can also escape the problems we wrought by bad design. We’re more likely to carry the problems forward. Our so-called “intelligent thought” have problems built into how we approach the design, so like running away from our shadows, it will come up wherever we go. And, if we are aware of the bad design, why wouldn’t we just fix it while we’re here on this planet?
  - abakker 4y ago
    because fixing things costs money. Even when it saves money. Money is the catalyst that allows anything to happen, and not enough people have enough of it to turn good ideas into good designs into good products.
    - Alupis 4y ago
      And flying to another planet that happens to be completely inhospitable is somehow cheaper or easier? When you realize there are no hospitable planets, besides earth, within our solar system - you will realize there is no escaping the problems we have created here on earth. No, they must be solved, not avoided. There is no future where any of us alive today, or for many, many generations (dozens, maybe hundreds or thousands, if it's even possible) will be capable of traveling to another system with potentially hospitable planets.
      - esafak 4y ago
        Besides, how could terraforming Mars be easier than fixing our problems?
        echelon 4y ago
        > Besides, how could terraforming Mars be easier than fixing our problems? We don't need to terraform Mars to our incredibly fine tuned biology. What comes next will evolve beyond our limitations. Humans are a stepping stone. Just a blink of an eye in an infinite time scale.
hosh 4y ago
I think nothing will work without some kind of change to the way of life. Urban living has taken people away from the land, so there is this illusion that we don’t have to participate in the ecology. Like water infrastructure, people growing up in cities expect food-on-demand … if you have the money for it. The idea that if you want to eat an apple means going into the back yard and picking one off the tree is an alien ideas. (Kids think food comes from grocery stores, not from trees). How fresh is that, right off the tree? Yet, now we have marketing that plays into that illusion, like tomatoes on the vine and it misses the point. When I personally harvested an apple and interact with an apple tree in my back yard, I am directly participating in the well-being of the ecology. There is no way forward for our civilization to “scale” in a way that maintains that illusion of on-demand-food. It’s how we view the world, and our way of life that needs to change.
- kdmccormick 4y ago
  I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but I don't like how you're going after urban living. I can rewrite what you've written, but from an urbanist perspective regarding transportation sustainability: Rural living has taken people away from one another, so there is an illusion that we don't have to pay the true costs of travel. People growing up in towns expect cars and on-demand access to roads and gasoline and airports... if you have the money for it. The idea that if you want to go to a friend's house you need to walk or bike there is an alien ideas. (Kids think we travel in cars, not on foot). How simple is that, riding a bike through your neighborhood? Yet, now we have marketing that plays into that illusion, like hybrids and EV cars and "eco-conscious" airlines and it misses the point. When I personally walk, bike, or take the train to my destination, I am directly participating in a sustainable transit network. There is no way forward for our civilization to “scale” in a way that maintains that illusion of on-demand-travel. It’s how we view the world, and our way of life that needs to change.
  - hosh 4y ago
    People get attached to things, including urban living. I am not sure what you are trying to accomplish with rewriting it from the perspective of travel. That is pretty much how I feel about travel and transport infrastructure too. Some cultures attach a lot of importance on travel, associating it with freedom, or mobility (both in the literal sense, and as a metaphor for class mobility). Don’t get me wrong, I love to travel, to explore, to hike the wildernesses or enjoy different urban locale and take full advantage of the transport infrastructure. That doesn’t mean it isn’t an illusion.
metalspot 4y ago
> hardly any agriculture is sustainable humans have been doing it for 1000's of years. that is a much longer record of sustainable success than anything else we know of. there isn't any particular reason to think that industrial agriculture will fail any time soon. the worst case scenario is that it becomes more expensive over time. we spend <5% of our GDP on food, so even a 10X increase in raw production cost would be survivable. we massively over produce food (30% of corn burned as gasoline off the top, another large percentage of soy and corn used as animal feed, huge amounts of waste) and the biggest nutrition problem we have is obesity. the US has huge amounts of underutilized marginal land simply because there is no reason to use it. we already have way too much food.
- ravi-delia 4y ago
  Worth drawing a distinction between the farming of the past and the farming of the present. Until the agricultural revolution humans sat right up against the population ceiling- the only reason hunger wasn't the leading cause of death is that disease reliably killed us first. They left fields fallow, and when they grew too much (which they had to if they wanted to feed their families) they depleted the soil and starved. We couldn't do permanent damage because our population was partially governed by it, just like every other animal. I don't actually disagree with you- infinite growth might not be possible but we haven't even started tapping the lightcone. Fertilizer works, negative effects can be mitigated, and honestly nothing is worth returning to the "sustainable" famine nightmare of the past.
  - miohtama 4y ago
    Farming started in Fertile Crescent thousands of years ago. If you visit the region today it’s all but fertile. Sand, sand and more sand. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-jun-15-op-diamond15-story.html#:~:text=So%20how%20did%20Fertile%20Crescent,special%20blindness%20on%20their%20part https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-jun-15-op-diamo.... > When you clear a forest in a high-rainfall tropical area, new trees grow up to a height of 15 feet within a year; in a dry area like the Fertile Crescent, regeneration is much slower. And when you add to the equation grazing by sheep and goats, new trees stand little chance. Deforestation led to soil erosion, and irrigation agriculture led to salinization, both by releasing salt buried deep in the ground and by adding salt through irrigation water. After centuries of degradation, areas of Iraq that formerly supported productive irrigation agriculture are today salt pans where nothing grows.

xyzzyz 4y ago

How do harvesting machines work with this mixed planting approach? Do you need to redesign existing machines completely for this novel planting scheme? Won’t it be extremely hard to harvest from one type of plant without damaging other plants that are “occupying different canopy layers”?

monetus 4y ago
It takes new machines and they generally damage something, yes. Despites op's emphasis on low-tech, the people I know who do permaculture seemed like they were excited for robot arms and computer vision to be better and cheaper.
- xyzzyz 4y ago
  > I know who do permaculture seemed like they were excited for robot arms and computer vision to be better and cheaper. If you need robot arms and computer vision, it sounds then like permaculture is impractical at scale necessary for replacing standard agricultural practices.
  - peteradio 4y ago
    We already use computer vision to sort tomatoes at scale, I'm not sure if requiring computer vision precludes a successful automation.
    - xyzzyz 4y ago
      Probably not, but my bigger point is that all those comments about permaculture typically completely ignore practicalities of large scale agriculture that are absolutely crucial to human flourishing. Gardening is my hobby, and over the years I found a lot of practices that improve my yield tremendously without depending on chemical pesticides or artificial fertilizers. However, I would not dare suggesting to the professional farmers that they should follow my steps. These practices work in my garden, but they simply aren’t practical if you need to feed the entire world.
  - 4y ago

whitemary 4y ago

Keep digging and sooner or later you'll come around to accepting that your previous discoveries (like broad implementation of permaculture) can never be realized under capitalism; that capitalism is in fact the opposition to your vision.

asdfman123 4y ago
Centralized state control has no obligation to the environment either.
- claudiulodro 4y ago
  I don't think they said it did? There are many more social systems out there than simply US-Style Capitalism and Soviet-style Communism. Something like Anarcho-primitivism is one example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-primitivism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-primitivism
  - asdfman123 4y ago
    I see the word “abolition” in the first sentence of that article.
    - claudiulodro 4y ago
      Did you finish the sentence and get to "abandonment of large-scale organization"? The state isn't the one abolishing things in that system.
      - asdfman123 4y ago
        If you don’t want to use the phrase “the state,” that’s fine. Whatever powerful entity that determines the laws has no obligation to the environment.
  - namdnay 4y ago
    Out there where? In the real world, or in someone’s imagination? It’s like someone saying “java projects get too messy when there are hundreds of developers on them , this new language I’ve invented will be much better, trust me”

at_a_remove 4y ago

I wonder about affordability, but I am very pro-farmbot. Far more than self-driving cars. If anything, farmbots could provide a lot of very helpful groundwork in a lower-stakes environment which the self-driving cars people could use. My only real concern is if farmbots could be cheap enough to absorb a large portion of the -cide market. Most herbicides, for example, could be replaced by something which plucks. Insecticide money could, partially, go into bots that could pick-and-crush unwanted insects aboveground. We would still have grubs. Fungicide expenditure could be slashed: detect infection on a plant, spray it and its neighbors, maybe a few more downwind. Your bot, named He Who Walks Behind the Rows, trundles along slowly, observing each plant. Per acre, it would have to travel roughly three and a third miles. At a half-mile-per-hour pace, thirteen hours a day, you could swing two acres a day per bot. Let's say your bot eats your production cost in half, about four hundred dollars per acre. If a bot lasts only a season, well, it has to cost under a grand to be worth it, and I haven't even touched power costs yet. So it will need to survive multiple growing seasons. I can see Overlord stations every few acres, maybe grabbing some solar power or charging up off a grid, storing it so that it can be dispersed to the bots at night. They could serve as data collection points, centimeter-level GPS correction servers, and so on, as well. I could see the temptation to work irrigation into the bot somehow but water is heavy and I imagine something entirely separate to provide water. I'm making a lot of assumptions, like "each plant ought to be looked at each day" and the standard thirty-inch rows, etc.

dpflan 4y ago

Check this out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34963057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34963057 From a previous article discussion on the vertical farming bubble popping: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34959649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34959649 """ It appears to me that Silicon Valley is unaware that there's such a thing as Food Valley. Which does exactly what you ask for. Food Valley centers around the Dutch University of Wageningen, the pinnacle of agricultural research, teamed up with a network of innovative food companies and experts. ... Here is a link: https://www.wur.nl/en/article/Foodvalley-2.htm https://www.wur.nl/en/article/Foodvalley-2.htm """

dennis_jeeves1 4y ago

>plants compete for light, and not root space Isn't this common knowledge? On a related subject, my prediction: artificially grown meat will most likely go down as a failure, because of an oversight of understanding of some basic concepts. Either that, or the quality of the meat would be extremely poor.

forgetfreeman 4y ago

Uh, no. Permaculture produces a fraction of the calories per acre of traditional monoculture agriculture. It is nothing more than an amusement for dilettantes, as is any other system that claims to significantly improve upon the ~12,000 of human experience with field-based agriculture. I'm in the process of converting a 20 acre tract of woods into a "productive" farm via a combination of aquapontics and permaculture, I just don't have any illusions that I'm doing anything other than fucking around for my own amusement.

greenonions 4y ago
Does the traditional monoculture acres include the acres for fertilizer, the production of all of the equipment needed, fuel, seed, equipment and fuel for transport to final location, storage, pesticides, insecticides, and water? I agree that intensive agriculture is needed, but it's not so easy to compare the two.
- forgetfreeman 4y ago
  It's trivial to compare the two unless you showed up to the conversation with an agenda or you're pretending issues with population density don't shit all over whatever counterfactual is being peddled by the homesteader-instagram industrial complex. One system feeds the overwhelming majority of humans on the planet, and takes most of the arable dry land surface of the planet to do so. The other produces a fraction of the food per acre, so unless you're planning on raising Atlantis you've got a serious problem to contend with.

rufus_foreman 4y ago

We don't have food scarcity issues.