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There are two Achilles heel of modern farming. One is that it's water intensive, which will come to a head real soon due to climate change. The other is that it
by AstralStorm 3y ago
There are two Achilles heel of modern farming. One is that it's water intensive, which will come to a head real soon due to climate change.
The other is that it depends on mined and processed fertilizer a lot, especially for potassium and phosphorus. These can go down in availability due to various geopolitics. Nitrogen en masse is not free either.
Making these from scratch in large amounts literally requires fossil fuels, in particular syngas.
- Phileosopher 3y agoI'm not convinced those are legitimate problems, since we're great at detecting future problems but terrible at imagining future solutions. In the late 19th century for example, people were afraid NYC would cease to function because it'd be covered in pony poop. Nitrogen exists in the air, meaning it's a question of filtering it. I've heard rumor of carbon capture devices, so yanking nitrogen out of the air seems trivial once someone gets the engineering down. Water is mostly the same issue, with desalination being the final end to that scarcity. Before that, we'd likely be able to filter plenty of less-than-usable water for our plants' purposes, which may even include wicking it out of the air. Not to say I know what the answer is, but that I know with absolute certitude that I don't know enough to project current geopolitical trends onto future circumstances.