7 ms·

A number of commenters are pointing out that natural fertilizers exist. That is true. It is also true that artificial fertilizers were invented because around 1

A number of commenters are pointing out that natural fertilizers exist. That is true. It is also true that artificial fertilizers were invented because around 1900 humanity ran out of biologically accessible ("fixed") nitrogen that it could convert to crops. The key nitrogen atom in roughly half of the amino acids in your body was part of a nitrogen-nitrogen pair floating in the atmosphere until it was fixed in a factory. If all the factories making fertilizers shut down tomorrow, there would be mass famine.

cornholio 3y ago
To add to this: livestock make up 62% of the world's mammal biomass; humans account for 34%; and wild mammals are just 4%. Humanity, and especially the meat eating subspecies, is just a side effect of the Haber-Bosch reaction.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- d4nt 3y ago
  “Subspecies” feels a bit othering. Humans have been eating meat since Homo erectus (about 2M years).
  - riedel 3y ago
    No sustained increase in zooarchaeological evidence for carnivory after the appearance of Homo erectus [1]. [1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2115540119 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2115540119
    - soperj 3y ago
      > The evolution of these traits is commonly linked to a major dietary shift involving increased consumption of animal tissues. I've never heard of this linkage. I've always heard it was on account of cooking the meat, rather than eating more of it.
    - losteric 3y ago
      Yep, 2MM years of eating meat - it's definitely weird to suggest meat eating humans are a new "subspecies" rather than the historical norm.
    - MadcapJake 3y ago
      I'd argue that the increase occurred earlier. Everything we're learning about other human species is showing they also had intelligence and were around before Erectus came to be.
  - Synaesthesia 3y ago
    Hundreds of millions of people in India and around the world are just fine without meat, it’s not like we have to eat it. Could even be better for us not to.
    - steve_adams_86 3y ago
      There is an extremely high correlation between eating meat and poorer health outcomes. You can find studies where meat is better or being vegan or vegetarian looks worse, but on balance, it appears that limiting meat intake (little to none) points to better health outcomes. Nutrition is complicated. It could be that impulsive eaters or people who make poor eating decisions rarely exclude meat from their diet, and the issue isn’t the meat so much as the rest of their diet or the sheer volume of what they eat. In any case, there isn’t any compelling data to eat meat other than “it tastes good”. Unless you live on subsistence farming and a goat eating grass you can’t eat is an essential source of food for you.
      - 3seashells 3y ago
        The northern native Americans mostly lived from meat. They seem to have not suffered any malnutrition? Another thing.. Non fungicide treated plant based food seems to cause a amount of cancer. https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/substances/aflatoxins https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/s...
      - KronisLV 3y ago
        > Nutrition is complicated. "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Defense_of_Food https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Defense_of_Food Might be simplifying things too much in general, but for the layperson it's not horrible advice - just a bit of everything, without going into excess. Some grains, veggies, fruits and berries, probably some dairy products, eggs/fish/meat occasionally too, at least for the folks for whom a vegetarian/vegan lifestyle would be be difficult. Personally, I have both lactose free milk and plant based alternatives sometimes (there's a rice drink that I like, but oat/almond varieties are okay), some cheese (also the cottage variety) and meat sometimes, though mostly chicken instead of something like beef. In equal measure if not more, I also choose plant based alternatives too, like bean/pea/spinach burger patties, or just dishes without meat sometimes. A bit of fat, a bit of sugar, albeit limiting sugary drinks and processed foods somewhat. Bloodwork seems fine so far, also losing a little bit of weight gradually to improve BMI, maybe should slightly lower cholesterol because it's towards the upper end of a healthy reference interval. Although I will say that sometimes there's definitely a pronounced sense of hunger, even though I've had enough food, which is annoying.
  - jiveturkey42 3y ago
    Not exactly a subspecies, but lots of evidence to suggest poor health and malnutrition after the switch from hunter-gatherer to sedentary grain eaters https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2106743119 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2106743119
    - themaninthedark 3y ago
      What exactly were the hunters from Hunter-Gatherer's hunting if it was not meat? Isn't the poor health with the switch explained by the lack of food diversity? Also, wouldn't there be less meat availability after the switch from hunter-gatherer as your population grows and your crop/planting efforts grow but animal husbandry did not scale at the same pace.
Retric 3y ago
It’s not nearly so dire because the majority of farmland isn’t raising crops for direct human consumption. 40% of US corn is turned into ethanol and the majority of the remainder is used to feed livestock who burn calories by exiting. In the event of a major disaster most of the existing livestock would be slaughtered and a significant percentage of biofuel/animal feed would be converted for human consumption. It’s less palatable than sweet corn, but vastly better than starvation. Longer term you get different crops and even a return to things like crop rotation. Meanwhile people would be extremely motivating to get alternatives working.
- dalbasal 3y ago
  Livestock feed is part of food's supply chain (and ou literal food chain). Yes, we can eat eat a lot of this feed... but that doesn't mean that the world will neatly respond to a shortage of quantity with a slight tweak to quality. A shortage is still a shortage, with all the dynamics of any other shortage.
  - Delphiza 3y ago
    Yes, the world did not respond neatly to a shortage of toilet paper. In the event of a shortage of animal-based protein, I would expect the response would be worse than the toilet paper wars.
    - r00fus 3y ago
      The TP shortage was most definitely exacerbated by some people buying 1000x as much just to be able to resell it at a profit. So I agree, if meats were in shortage you would see similar attempts (even though it's illegal) and worse - the hoarding would result in spoilage exacerbating it even further.
    - Retric 3y ago
      A large percentage of the TP shortage was a change in form factor as offices/restaurants generally used a different supply chain than people do. I saw plenty of stores stacking “office” style giant roles of TP in random cardboard packages which made a real impact in aggregate. I expect people would do similar things in a real food shortage. If your starving buying a 5 gallon bucket of feed corn from the back of some guy’s truck suddenly looks appealing as do dog biscuits etc.
seltzered_ 3y ago
Yes but... Some of the famines in the 1940s werent natural famines, they were due to war and colonizing forces, see: https://nitter.net/i/status/1210635179221348352 https://nitter.net/i/status/1210635179221348352 (linking to Winston Churchill associates with Indian famine deaths: https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/03/29/asia/churchill-bengal-famine-intl-scli-gbr/index.html?__twitter_impression=true https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/03/29/asia/churchill-bengal-fam... ) The other part of our predicament is that excess nitrogen impacts water supplies (see http://e360.yale.edu/features/the-nitrogen-problem-why-global-warming-is-making-it-worse http://e360.yale.edu/features/the-nitrogen-problem-why-globa... ) and creates ocean dead zones ( see https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/deadzone.html https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/deadzone.html , https://oceantoday.noaa.gov/happenowdeadzone/ https://oceantoday.noaa.gov/happenowdeadzone/ )
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  I think the point was without artificial fertilizer there would be famine everywhere all the time. But it is absolutely true that while necessary a nitrogen source fertilizer isn’t sufficient to produce food.
photochemsyn 3y ago
An additional issue is that a good fraction of 'organic nitrogen fertilizer' comes in the form of fish meal. This isn't a very environmentally friendly or sustainable approach, however - e.g. at peak extraction, 2/3 of sardine fishery production on the US west coast was being converted into crop fertilizer (mid 20th century). Note however that modern industrial agriculture uses fertilizer fairly inefficiently, and a large fraction just runs off the fields into waterways. Here is where the AI robots could make a big difference, by crawling up and down farm fields and selectively applying fertilizer to individual plants as needed (while also removing weeds and treating pest infestations). Of course, this doesn't make agrichemical producers all that happy as it could greatly reduce demand.
- searine 3y ago
  >Here is where the AI robots could make a big difference Usually when someone says "AI will save the world because" it is followed by a bunch of naive hyperbole. However, you are 100% right. A few robust robots with an AI to spot pests and poor nutrition could decimate input costs for a farm and solve several environmental issues in one go.
  - snapcaster 3y ago
    What are you basing that on?
    - searine 3y ago
      The reason chemical pest control and broadly spraying fertilizer on the top of fields are a thing is that they have low labor costs. You'd get more efficacy if you walked the field and removed pests by hand or sprayed fertilizer only where you need it. It's the simple reason why a well-tended garden produces better produce than a corporate farm. There is simply more effort per plant in a garden. Tractors are currently too dumb to treat plants individually. They require plants to emerge, grow, harvest at the same time, and in the same way. Current modalities for pests/nutrition treat plants at the field level, not at the individual level. This creates lots of waste and externalities. If there were a robustly built robot smart enough to deal with plant issues in and individual way then there is a huge slice of efficiency that could be gained. A field with the productivity of a garden. People have been trying to create this for a decade now and the limiting factor is the software. Maybe with the latest round of AI advances that will change.
KaiserPro 3y ago
yes, however now, we have soil turned to sand and really aggressive nitrogen run off because it doesn't pay to manage the soil properly. In the Netherlands, they have so much shit, that its limiting how much cattle they can produce (because of laws about nitrogen runoff.) Now the soil is fucked, it doesn't absorb water. That means that not only does it dry out quicker, it means that it can't generate rain as much, which means more drought, and higher temperatures. Worse still, because it can't absorb as much water, you get worse flooding. Farming needs swales, ground cover, mixed planting and shite. lots of shite.
- belinder 3y ago
  I'm not sure I understand, you're saying in the Netherlands they have a lot of it, but then for farming you need a lot of it - so is it bad or good?
  - eppp 3y ago
    You can absolutely have too much of it in one place even though it is useful. Large hog farms produce so much manure that they have problems getting rid of it all. The big problem is that it costs too much to haul and the feed is trucked in. Ideally the feed trucks would leave with manure to take back to where the feed comes from to use as fertilizer but of course that isn't in any way economical. It does work in some situations though like a lot of dairies where they pump the storage pits into tanks and spray or inject it back into the feedstock fields.
    - bluGill 3y ago
      Manure is a hazardous material and must not be hauled in the same trailer that hauls animal food. You can truck manure around, but it can't use the same trucks and trailers as was used to get the food to the animal.
  - carstenhag 3y ago
    It's useful, but at some point it becomes dangerously high and contaminates drinking water.
TaylorAlexander 3y ago
You are correct that your argument is a common one. There is also a common response - the invention and use of artificial fertilizers allowed us to dispense with good land use practices, hammer the land with chemicals to squeeze as much crop out of it as possible, and dramatically raise the amount of crop grown for meats and industrial outputs like corn syrup and ethanol. We have way more crop land than is required to feed our population a healthy diet, we are degrading our soil, and modern farming economics have become so dependent on industrial inputs that farmers in India have committed waves of suicide after becoming so indebted to Monsanto/Bayer that they are unable to imagine any future for themselves. You are right that we are so dependent on artificial fertilizers that we cannot simply cease production tomorrow, but that only speaks to our dependence on them due to economic and social factors, not their inherent necessity to our ability to feed ourselves. Essentially no one is saying we should shut down all the factories tomorrow so the argument is a dead end. What many people are saying however, is that we went very far down the wrong road, and we are paying the price today. We must figure out how to bring our farming practices back in to balance with ecology.
- ponector 3y ago
  Is it a wrong road? Ban on chemical fertilizers in Sri Lanka resulted in famine. Rice producer became rice importer.
  - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
    I am not familiar with how that was implemented, but I can imagine many ways a forced transition could go poorly.
  - for1nner 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
      > Did you read his post? Thanks for backing me up. I am a woman tho.
3seashells 3y ago
That running out was also the reason for ww2. As empires could not be trusted on free trade and thus any non empire was one trade crisis away from starvation with haber Bosch. Thus the various "economic independence" aka autarky movements by non colonial powers that became monstrous programs for medieval like farming.

cornholio 3y ago

To add to this: livestock make up 62% of the world's mammal biomass; humans account for 34%; and wild mammals are just 4%. Humanity, and especially the meat eating subspecies, is just a side effect of the Haber-Bosch reaction.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
d4nt 3y ago
“Subspecies” feels a bit othering. Humans have been eating meat since Homo erectus (about 2M years).
- riedel 3y ago
  No sustained increase in zooarchaeological evidence for carnivory after the appearance of Homo erectus [1]. [1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2115540119 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2115540119
  - soperj 3y ago
    > The evolution of these traits is commonly linked to a major dietary shift involving increased consumption of animal tissues. I've never heard of this linkage. I've always heard it was on account of cooking the meat, rather than eating more of it.
  - losteric 3y ago
    Yep, 2MM years of eating meat - it's definitely weird to suggest meat eating humans are a new "subspecies" rather than the historical norm.
  - MadcapJake 3y ago
    I'd argue that the increase occurred earlier. Everything we're learning about other human species is showing they also had intelligence and were around before Erectus came to be.
- Synaesthesia 3y ago
  Hundreds of millions of people in India and around the world are just fine without meat, it’s not like we have to eat it. Could even be better for us not to.
  - steve_adams_86 3y ago
    There is an extremely high correlation between eating meat and poorer health outcomes. You can find studies where meat is better or being vegan or vegetarian looks worse, but on balance, it appears that limiting meat intake (little to none) points to better health outcomes. Nutrition is complicated. It could be that impulsive eaters or people who make poor eating decisions rarely exclude meat from their diet, and the issue isn’t the meat so much as the rest of their diet or the sheer volume of what they eat. In any case, there isn’t any compelling data to eat meat other than “it tastes good”. Unless you live on subsistence farming and a goat eating grass you can’t eat is an essential source of food for you.
    - 3seashells 3y ago
      The northern native Americans mostly lived from meat. They seem to have not suffered any malnutrition? Another thing.. Non fungicide treated plant based food seems to cause a amount of cancer. https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/substances/aflatoxins https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/s...
    - KronisLV 3y ago
      > Nutrition is complicated. "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Defense_of_Food https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Defense_of_Food Might be simplifying things too much in general, but for the layperson it's not horrible advice - just a bit of everything, without going into excess. Some grains, veggies, fruits and berries, probably some dairy products, eggs/fish/meat occasionally too, at least for the folks for whom a vegetarian/vegan lifestyle would be be difficult. Personally, I have both lactose free milk and plant based alternatives sometimes (there's a rice drink that I like, but oat/almond varieties are okay), some cheese (also the cottage variety) and meat sometimes, though mostly chicken instead of something like beef. In equal measure if not more, I also choose plant based alternatives too, like bean/pea/spinach burger patties, or just dishes without meat sometimes. A bit of fat, a bit of sugar, albeit limiting sugary drinks and processed foods somewhat. Bloodwork seems fine so far, also losing a little bit of weight gradually to improve BMI, maybe should slightly lower cholesterol because it's towards the upper end of a healthy reference interval. Although I will say that sometimes there's definitely a pronounced sense of hunger, even though I've had enough food, which is annoying.
- jiveturkey42 3y ago
  Not exactly a subspecies, but lots of evidence to suggest poor health and malnutrition after the switch from hunter-gatherer to sedentary grain eaters https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2106743119 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2106743119
  - themaninthedark 3y ago
    What exactly were the hunters from Hunter-Gatherer's hunting if it was not meat? Isn't the poor health with the switch explained by the lack of food diversity? Also, wouldn't there be less meat availability after the switch from hunter-gatherer as your population grows and your crop/planting efforts grow but animal husbandry did not scale at the same pace.

Retric 3y ago

It’s not nearly so dire because the majority of farmland isn’t raising crops for direct human consumption. 40% of US corn is turned into ethanol and the majority of the remainder is used to feed livestock who burn calories by exiting. In the event of a major disaster most of the existing livestock would be slaughtered and a significant percentage of biofuel/animal feed would be converted for human consumption. It’s less palatable than sweet corn, but vastly better than starvation. Longer term you get different crops and even a return to things like crop rotation. Meanwhile people would be extremely motivating to get alternatives working.

dalbasal 3y ago
Livestock feed is part of food's supply chain (and ou literal food chain). Yes, we can eat eat a lot of this feed... but that doesn't mean that the world will neatly respond to a shortage of quantity with a slight tweak to quality. A shortage is still a shortage, with all the dynamics of any other shortage.
- Delphiza 3y ago
  Yes, the world did not respond neatly to a shortage of toilet paper. In the event of a shortage of animal-based protein, I would expect the response would be worse than the toilet paper wars.
  - r00fus 3y ago
    The TP shortage was most definitely exacerbated by some people buying 1000x as much just to be able to resell it at a profit. So I agree, if meats were in shortage you would see similar attempts (even though it's illegal) and worse - the hoarding would result in spoilage exacerbating it even further.
  - Retric 3y ago
    A large percentage of the TP shortage was a change in form factor as offices/restaurants generally used a different supply chain than people do. I saw plenty of stores stacking “office” style giant roles of TP in random cardboard packages which made a real impact in aggregate. I expect people would do similar things in a real food shortage. If your starving buying a 5 gallon bucket of feed corn from the back of some guy’s truck suddenly looks appealing as do dog biscuits etc.

seltzered_ 3y ago

Yes but... Some of the famines in the 1940s werent natural famines, they were due to war and colonizing forces, see: https://nitter.net/i/status/1210635179221348352 https://nitter.net/i/status/1210635179221348352 (linking to Winston Churchill associates with Indian famine deaths: https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/03/29/asia/churchill-bengal-famine-intl-scli-gbr/index.html?__twitter_impression=true https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/03/29/asia/churchill-bengal-fam... ) The other part of our predicament is that excess nitrogen impacts water supplies (see http://e360.yale.edu/features/the-nitrogen-problem-why-global-warming-is-making-it-worse http://e360.yale.edu/features/the-nitrogen-problem-why-globa... ) and creates ocean dead zones ( see https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/deadzone.html https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/deadzone.html , https://oceantoday.noaa.gov/happenowdeadzone/ https://oceantoday.noaa.gov/happenowdeadzone/ )

fnordpiglet 3y ago
I think the point was without artificial fertilizer there would be famine everywhere all the time. But it is absolutely true that while necessary a nitrogen source fertilizer isn’t sufficient to produce food.

photochemsyn 3y ago

An additional issue is that a good fraction of 'organic nitrogen fertilizer' comes in the form of fish meal. This isn't a very environmentally friendly or sustainable approach, however - e.g. at peak extraction, 2/3 of sardine fishery production on the US west coast was being converted into crop fertilizer (mid 20th century). Note however that modern industrial agriculture uses fertilizer fairly inefficiently, and a large fraction just runs off the fields into waterways. Here is where the AI robots could make a big difference, by crawling up and down farm fields and selectively applying fertilizer to individual plants as needed (while also removing weeds and treating pest infestations). Of course, this doesn't make agrichemical producers all that happy as it could greatly reduce demand.

searine 3y ago
>Here is where the AI robots could make a big difference Usually when someone says "AI will save the world because" it is followed by a bunch of naive hyperbole. However, you are 100% right. A few robust robots with an AI to spot pests and poor nutrition could decimate input costs for a farm and solve several environmental issues in one go.
- snapcaster 3y ago
  What are you basing that on?
  - searine 3y ago
    The reason chemical pest control and broadly spraying fertilizer on the top of fields are a thing is that they have low labor costs. You'd get more efficacy if you walked the field and removed pests by hand or sprayed fertilizer only where you need it. It's the simple reason why a well-tended garden produces better produce than a corporate farm. There is simply more effort per plant in a garden. Tractors are currently too dumb to treat plants individually. They require plants to emerge, grow, harvest at the same time, and in the same way. Current modalities for pests/nutrition treat plants at the field level, not at the individual level. This creates lots of waste and externalities. If there were a robustly built robot smart enough to deal with plant issues in and individual way then there is a huge slice of efficiency that could be gained. A field with the productivity of a garden. People have been trying to create this for a decade now and the limiting factor is the software. Maybe with the latest round of AI advances that will change.

KaiserPro 3y ago

yes, however now, we have soil turned to sand and really aggressive nitrogen run off because it doesn't pay to manage the soil properly. In the Netherlands, they have so much shit, that its limiting how much cattle they can produce (because of laws about nitrogen runoff.) Now the soil is fucked, it doesn't absorb water. That means that not only does it dry out quicker, it means that it can't generate rain as much, which means more drought, and higher temperatures. Worse still, because it can't absorb as much water, you get worse flooding. Farming needs swales, ground cover, mixed planting and shite. lots of shite.

belinder 3y ago
I'm not sure I understand, you're saying in the Netherlands they have a lot of it, but then for farming you need a lot of it - so is it bad or good?
- eppp 3y ago
  You can absolutely have too much of it in one place even though it is useful. Large hog farms produce so much manure that they have problems getting rid of it all. The big problem is that it costs too much to haul and the feed is trucked in. Ideally the feed trucks would leave with manure to take back to where the feed comes from to use as fertilizer but of course that isn't in any way economical. It does work in some situations though like a lot of dairies where they pump the storage pits into tanks and spray or inject it back into the feedstock fields.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    Manure is a hazardous material and must not be hauled in the same trailer that hauls animal food. You can truck manure around, but it can't use the same trucks and trailers as was used to get the food to the animal.
- carstenhag 3y ago
  It's useful, but at some point it becomes dangerously high and contaminates drinking water.

TaylorAlexander 3y ago

You are correct that your argument is a common one. There is also a common response - the invention and use of artificial fertilizers allowed us to dispense with good land use practices, hammer the land with chemicals to squeeze as much crop out of it as possible, and dramatically raise the amount of crop grown for meats and industrial outputs like corn syrup and ethanol. We have way more crop land than is required to feed our population a healthy diet, we are degrading our soil, and modern farming economics have become so dependent on industrial inputs that farmers in India have committed waves of suicide after becoming so indebted to Monsanto/Bayer that they are unable to imagine any future for themselves. You are right that we are so dependent on artificial fertilizers that we cannot simply cease production tomorrow, but that only speaks to our dependence on them due to economic and social factors, not their inherent necessity to our ability to feed ourselves. Essentially no one is saying we should shut down all the factories tomorrow so the argument is a dead end. What many people are saying however, is that we went very far down the wrong road, and we are paying the price today. We must figure out how to bring our farming practices back in to balance with ecology.

ponector 3y ago
Is it a wrong road? Ban on chemical fertilizers in Sri Lanka resulted in famine. Rice producer became rice importer.
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  I am not familiar with how that was implemented, but I can imagine many ways a forced transition could go poorly.
- for1nner 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
    > Did you read his post? Thanks for backing me up. I am a woman tho.

3seashells 3y ago

That running out was also the reason for ww2. As empires could not be trusted on free trade and thus any non empire was one trade crisis away from starvation with haber Bosch. Thus the various "economic independence" aka autarky movements by non colonial powers that became monstrous programs for medieval like farming.