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1 employee - 10 000 acres - 100 000 people fed We can have free unlimited food for everyone today maybe not free unlimited saffron, but flour(s), legumes and

1 employee - 10 000 acres - 100 000 people fed We can have free unlimited food for everyone today maybe not free unlimited saffron, but flour(s), legumes and nuts, potatoes could be distributed for free (subject to some rationing, 5000Kcal per person per day). This is not utopian, this is technical possible right now.

veddox 3y ago
There‘s no such thing as a free meal. Of course you could distribute free food to all your citizens (the Ancient Romans famously did), but somebody still needs to pay for it. It‘s not just about on-farm labour, you need big machines (and lots of diesel!), fertiliser, pesticides… And that‘s before you look at all the rest of the food system, because to put a meal on the table you need the whole supply chain (ag-tech, fertiliser production, food processing, wholesale suppliers, etc.) In modern agriculture, the farmer only gets a fraction of the money you pay for your loaf of bread, because there are so many other people involved.
- GeoAtreides 3y ago
  Machines and free energy (solar, for example) make free meals possible. Maybe if we can reduce the need for profit we also reduce the need for fertilizers, maybe the relation between fertilizers used and crop productivity is not linear (-20% productivity but -40% fertilizers?). Food processing won't be necessary: why have a factory for chips? or for hummus? _Most_ people can cook. The thing is, contrary to other things, like fusion, this is possible. Now more so than ever; we have everything we need to start a food UBI. The rest are just accounting details, like how less rich the 1% should be to fund all this.
  - veddox 3y ago
    > contrary to other things, like fusion, this is possible. Of course it's possible, I'm just saying it's not (and can never be) free. "Free for consumers" simply means somebody else paid for the costs - or more likely, the consumer paid the costs through taxes rather than at the store. You will always have input costs to produce an output, and these will not be negligible. Just a few points on what you said, and these are not "accounting details": (1) Solar energy is not free - you need to build, install, and maintain panels and a power grid. (2) Of course you can reduce fertiliser, organic farming does so and takes ~20% yield decrease (depending on the crop). But then you have higher labour and machine costs to control weeds, and an overall higher per-hectare price. (3) Food processing matters because you probably don't want to spend most of your day milling your grain ration to make flour that you can then bake into bread. Ditto for other types of staple foods (you want to make your own sausages?). (On a historical side-note, here's a write-up of how ancient food systems worked: https://acoup.blog/2020/08/06/collections-bread-how-did-they-make-it-part-iii-actually-farming/ https://acoup.blog/2020/08/06/collections-bread-how-did-they...). Bottom line: Food systems are incredibly complex!
  - nradov 3y ago
    There is no particular "need" for profit, but by default most people will direct their labor and capital towards whatever earns them they highest profit. Attempts to impose central planning on food production inevitably lead to shortages, rationing, black markets, and famine.
    - binary132 3y ago
      It seems to me that most modern agriculture is, at least in effect, centrally planned, between regulation and subsidy. I am curious whether you have a counterexample outside of subsistence farming.
BobaFloutist 3y ago
Pretty sure the devil's in the distribution. Nuts also take enormous amounts of water, which is a pretty big problem where they're grown.
- GeoAtreides 3y ago
  Nuts would require the same amount water regardless of whatever economic system they're grown under. Maybe we can reduce the amount of water going to red meat and use it for nuts? Big centers, like Costco, could serve as distribution centers; while software can handle the rationing.
  - BobaFloutist 3y ago
    It's not the economic system they're grown under, it's the geographic locations and their propensity for drought.
nradov 3y ago
We already have free food for those who really need it through the food stamps (SNAP) program. Very few people need as much 5000 kcal/day; that amount is only needed for people doing really hard manual labor or sports training. https://www.usa.gov/food-stamps https://www.usa.gov/food-stamps

veddox 3y ago

There‘s no such thing as a free meal. Of course you could distribute free food to all your citizens (the Ancient Romans famously did), but somebody still needs to pay for it. It‘s not just about on-farm labour, you need big machines (and lots of diesel!), fertiliser, pesticides… And that‘s before you look at all the rest of the food system, because to put a meal on the table you need the whole supply chain (ag-tech, fertiliser production, food processing, wholesale suppliers, etc.) In modern agriculture, the farmer only gets a fraction of the money you pay for your loaf of bread, because there are so many other people involved.

GeoAtreides 3y ago
Machines and free energy (solar, for example) make free meals possible. Maybe if we can reduce the need for profit we also reduce the need for fertilizers, maybe the relation between fertilizers used and crop productivity is not linear (-20% productivity but -40% fertilizers?). Food processing won't be necessary: why have a factory for chips? or for hummus? _Most_ people can cook. The thing is, contrary to other things, like fusion, this is possible. Now more so than ever; we have everything we need to start a food UBI. The rest are just accounting details, like how less rich the 1% should be to fund all this.
- veddox 3y ago
  > contrary to other things, like fusion, this is possible. Of course it's possible, I'm just saying it's not (and can never be) free. "Free for consumers" simply means somebody else paid for the costs - or more likely, the consumer paid the costs through taxes rather than at the store. You will always have input costs to produce an output, and these will not be negligible. Just a few points on what you said, and these are not "accounting details": (1) Solar energy is not free - you need to build, install, and maintain panels and a power grid. (2) Of course you can reduce fertiliser, organic farming does so and takes ~20% yield decrease (depending on the crop). But then you have higher labour and machine costs to control weeds, and an overall higher per-hectare price. (3) Food processing matters because you probably don't want to spend most of your day milling your grain ration to make flour that you can then bake into bread. Ditto for other types of staple foods (you want to make your own sausages?). (On a historical side-note, here's a write-up of how ancient food systems worked: https://acoup.blog/2020/08/06/collections-bread-how-did-they-make-it-part-iii-actually-farming/ https://acoup.blog/2020/08/06/collections-bread-how-did-they...). Bottom line: Food systems are incredibly complex!
- nradov 3y ago
  There is no particular "need" for profit, but by default most people will direct their labor and capital towards whatever earns them they highest profit. Attempts to impose central planning on food production inevitably lead to shortages, rationing, black markets, and famine.
  - binary132 3y ago
    It seems to me that most modern agriculture is, at least in effect, centrally planned, between regulation and subsidy. I am curious whether you have a counterexample outside of subsistence farming.

BobaFloutist 3y ago

Pretty sure the devil's in the distribution. Nuts also take enormous amounts of water, which is a pretty big problem where they're grown.

GeoAtreides 3y ago
Nuts would require the same amount water regardless of whatever economic system they're grown under. Maybe we can reduce the amount of water going to red meat and use it for nuts? Big centers, like Costco, could serve as distribution centers; while software can handle the rationing.
- BobaFloutist 3y ago
  It's not the economic system they're grown under, it's the geographic locations and their propensity for drought.

nradov 3y ago

We already have free food for those who really need it through the food stamps (SNAP) program. Very few people need as much 5000 kcal/day; that amount is only needed for people doing really hard manual labor or sports training. https://www.usa.gov/food-stamps https://www.usa.gov/food-stamps