5 ms·

Producing enough food is basically a solved problem, distribution and hindering people to eat an everincreasing amount of meat is the problem

Blahah 11y ago
This is partly true, but is not helpful. The goal is for nobody to go hungry. By increasing crop yields in the most common staple crops, we have a clear technological engineering problem to solve and various ways to approach it, all achievable. This allows more food to be produced more cheaply in the areas that need it most. If we refuse to produce more food until the food that is already produced is distributed evenly, many people will die or go hungry because the socio-political problems are very complex. There is no engineering solution to them in sight. By all means let's try to solve problems of inequality. But let's also try to feed people as soon as possible by whatever means are available.
- marktangotango 11y ago
  Feeding the world isn't a tech problem, it's a public policy problem. Blows my mind how little people know about this.
  - Blahah 11y ago
    It is clearly both, which is what I said above. Synchronising the entire global economy is harder and less tractable than engineering photosynthesis, so we should be working on both (which is exactly what we are doing).
briantakita 11y ago
Monoculture, petrol, chemical agriculture is often produced in a centralized manner, which introduces inefficiencies (with environmental issues) in transport, fertilization, pest control, etc. The current paradigm also requires large amounts of capital to purchase machinery, mined fertilizer, poisonous pesticides, GMOs where seeds can't be saved, etc. This cycle of dependence has caused many small farms to be in financial crisis. Also, don't forget that large scale factory farming is subsidized by the government. Without these subsidizations, large scale factory farming is not viable. Factory meat production follows the same pattern of monoculture, with disgusting & unhealthy results. The alternative is to decentralize food production. Small, organic, polyculture farms reduce or eliminate the need to transport food over long distances, import fertilizer, use pesticides. Decentralized food production also enables the farmer to be independent of having to purchase expensive inputs from large multinational corporations. Small farms are more humane and, similar to startups, freer to innovate.
- kiba 11y ago
  Large scale monoculture is a necessity to feed the world. What are you going to do with a tiny farm that cannot benefit from the economy of scale and agricultural tech?
  - briantakita 11y ago
    Large scale monoculture is not necessary. It's not one tiny farm, it's many tiny farms owned by the people who live in that region. Many of the problems that are "solved" with technology don't exist in natural perennial polycultures. For example, pests. In a natural perennial polyculture, you have an ecosystem that naturally manages the pests (via predators). These organisms evolve with the pests. Tiny farms grow more food per acre than large monoculture farms. Agricultural tech creates problems of it's own & does not match the prowess of nature. Natural processes grow the food, not technology. Technology can help, however, it can also hinder, and it does in our current petrolchemical centralized paradigm. Look at the pollution, soil degregation, erosion, desertification, poverty, etc. Large scale monoculture ruined just about every ecosystem that it has been used on. For example, the American Plains used to have 10s of feet of rich topsoil built by natural processes over the years. It's now eroded due to runoff & mismanagement propagated by large scale monoculture. I can provide many other examples & problems, but I'll keep this post short. Large scale monoculture is a failed experiment & a blight on the planet. It's also only viable because of government subsidization. Our monoculture paradigm benefitted from, wasted, & toxified our natural inheritance in less than 100 years. So yes, monoculture is extremely efficient at creating a mess.
    - Turing_Machine 11y ago
      "Large scale monoculture is a failed experiment" That is simply not true. Crop yields continue to increase. By a lot. http://crops.missouri.edu/audit/images/CornYields_MO.jpg http://crops.missouri.edu/audit/images/CornYields_MO.jpg We no longer need to have 90% of the population working as stoop-labor agricultural peasants. Famine is essentially a thing of the past (it only happens in areas where the government is severely fucked up for one reason or another). Mechanized agriculture is the greatest success story in the history of the human race. If you really want to go back to the age of peasants and serfs, why don't you lead by example? Start by producing all of your own food using intensive hand cultivation. Then produce all of the food for 150 other people using intensive hand cultivation.
jerf 11y ago
If we can do more with less, we will use less; less space, less soil augmentation, less everything. That's still a good thing. Also, the more minimalistic our food plants become, the more alternatives we create for ourselves; if nothing else, space travel and settlement is going to demand as much efficiency in our crops as we can get.
- kiba 11y ago
  Unless the increase in efficiency cause demand to grow faster. This is known as the Jevons paradox.
  - jerf 11y ago
    Generically, sure. In this specific arena, food demand is at least modestly constant. And now that endless overpopulation is less of a concern than it used to be, I don't think we have much to worry about there.

Blahah 11y ago

This is partly true, but is not helpful. The goal is for nobody to go hungry. By increasing crop yields in the most common staple crops, we have a clear technological engineering problem to solve and various ways to approach it, all achievable. This allows more food to be produced more cheaply in the areas that need it most. If we refuse to produce more food until the food that is already produced is distributed evenly, many people will die or go hungry because the socio-political problems are very complex. There is no engineering solution to them in sight. By all means let's try to solve problems of inequality. But let's also try to feed people as soon as possible by whatever means are available.

marktangotango 11y ago
Feeding the world isn't a tech problem, it's a public policy problem. Blows my mind how little people know about this.
- Blahah 11y ago
  It is clearly both, which is what I said above. Synchronising the entire global economy is harder and less tractable than engineering photosynthesis, so we should be working on both (which is exactly what we are doing).

briantakita 11y ago

Monoculture, petrol, chemical agriculture is often produced in a centralized manner, which introduces inefficiencies (with environmental issues) in transport, fertilization, pest control, etc. The current paradigm also requires large amounts of capital to purchase machinery, mined fertilizer, poisonous pesticides, GMOs where seeds can't be saved, etc. This cycle of dependence has caused many small farms to be in financial crisis. Also, don't forget that large scale factory farming is subsidized by the government. Without these subsidizations, large scale factory farming is not viable. Factory meat production follows the same pattern of monoculture, with disgusting & unhealthy results. The alternative is to decentralize food production. Small, organic, polyculture farms reduce or eliminate the need to transport food over long distances, import fertilizer, use pesticides. Decentralized food production also enables the farmer to be independent of having to purchase expensive inputs from large multinational corporations. Small farms are more humane and, similar to startups, freer to innovate.

kiba 11y ago
Large scale monoculture is a necessity to feed the world. What are you going to do with a tiny farm that cannot benefit from the economy of scale and agricultural tech?
- briantakita 11y ago
  Large scale monoculture is not necessary. It's not one tiny farm, it's many tiny farms owned by the people who live in that region. Many of the problems that are "solved" with technology don't exist in natural perennial polycultures. For example, pests. In a natural perennial polyculture, you have an ecosystem that naturally manages the pests (via predators). These organisms evolve with the pests. Tiny farms grow more food per acre than large monoculture farms. Agricultural tech creates problems of it's own & does not match the prowess of nature. Natural processes grow the food, not technology. Technology can help, however, it can also hinder, and it does in our current petrolchemical centralized paradigm. Look at the pollution, soil degregation, erosion, desertification, poverty, etc. Large scale monoculture ruined just about every ecosystem that it has been used on. For example, the American Plains used to have 10s of feet of rich topsoil built by natural processes over the years. It's now eroded due to runoff & mismanagement propagated by large scale monoculture. I can provide many other examples & problems, but I'll keep this post short. Large scale monoculture is a failed experiment & a blight on the planet. It's also only viable because of government subsidization. Our monoculture paradigm benefitted from, wasted, & toxified our natural inheritance in less than 100 years. So yes, monoculture is extremely efficient at creating a mess.
  - Turing_Machine 11y ago
    "Large scale monoculture is a failed experiment" That is simply not true. Crop yields continue to increase. By a lot. http://crops.missouri.edu/audit/images/CornYields_MO.jpg http://crops.missouri.edu/audit/images/CornYields_MO.jpg We no longer need to have 90% of the population working as stoop-labor agricultural peasants. Famine is essentially a thing of the past (it only happens in areas where the government is severely fucked up for one reason or another). Mechanized agriculture is the greatest success story in the history of the human race. If you really want to go back to the age of peasants and serfs, why don't you lead by example? Start by producing all of your own food using intensive hand cultivation. Then produce all of the food for 150 other people using intensive hand cultivation.

jerf 11y ago

If we can do more with less, we will use less; less space, less soil augmentation, less everything. That's still a good thing. Also, the more minimalistic our food plants become, the more alternatives we create for ourselves; if nothing else, space travel and settlement is going to demand as much efficiency in our crops as we can get.

kiba 11y ago
Unless the increase in efficiency cause demand to grow faster. This is known as the Jevons paradox.
- jerf 11y ago
  Generically, sure. In this specific arena, food demand is at least modestly constant. And now that endless overpopulation is less of a concern than it used to be, I don't think we have much to worry about there.