There's a great method called Agroforestry that uses forest floors to produce more food:
Quick overview of a farmer's land that uses this method: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stABAx82TbY he harvest around 3x more cocoa per hectare than traditional methods and its one of the most valuable in the world right now.
I love this idea, its something I've thought a lot about. Our large scale farming strategies seem fundamentally ignorant. Nature it full of complex systems of independence that we should be using directly in our farming strategies. I'm particularly interested in fungi to support the nutrient and immune systems of my farms.
See the work of Paul Staments using fungi to treat bee colony collapse.
If we could instead build swarms of self-maintaining intelligent human-scale robots, perhaps working with genetically engineered work animals (monkeys?), they could hand-plant, hand-till, and hand-harvest crops at a far greater efficiency with far less disruption to the ecosystem.
Picture ten thousand dog-sized robots going individually planting and caring for and harvesting millions of plants in a big forest, or a field (with different plants shading each other). An individual dollop of manure on each plant. Weeds removed by "hand" without chemicals.
Basically an automated version of the extremely-efficient overlapping-crop style of farming that was often used in medieval Japan and other places with a lot of labor and know-how but without much flat land and without modern mechanization.
People still do that but it’s generally not a good idea for many reasons. Feral hogs destroy crops, are dangerous to people, and eat foods that native species rely on to survive. In colonial times, it made a lot of sense to do that, but not so much now.
After Brexit I can only see practices like this increasing in the UK. A lot of the farm work is done by immigrants, because natives don't want to do the work. People aren't going to pay more for food, so the wages can't go up, meaning more 'efficient' farming practices will be used.
While your examples and reasoning seems good, I don’t think it’s enough to support the conclusion.
From what I have seen, everyone who thinks there are any significant difficulties that need to be overcome is a Remainer and everyone who is a Leaver is absolutely certain that any claim of difficulty is “just project fear” — this, combined with the inherent time lag between planting and harvesting, means that what crops are around next year is entirely down to what UK farmers already believe will happen next year.
Four outcomes, for any given farm:
1. Current crops, easy access to labour: fine
2. Efficient crops, easy access to labour: fine
3. Efficient crops, no access to labour: fine
4. Current crops, no access to labour: bankruptcy
You may consider 4. to be an obvious safe bet, but when I say I think Leavers regard any talk of difficulty as total nonsense, I mean I get the impression they place it in the same mental bucket as “Satan is real and knows your online banking password”.
In outcome 4., the farms won’t be around afterwards to try it again the right way.
Given the UK is a net food importer, this is mostly separate to any question of food security, but ironically the lack of access to labour could increase unemployment.
Voting with your wallet is a good start. In the EU there are strict requirements on what can be labeled ecological, including the use of the EU ecolabel. I believe the US has similar labelling.
If you local supermarket doesn't have a suitable stock of ecological supplies, write to them and ask for some, or start shopping at an organic shop.
At least in Germany since 2015 desiccation with Glyphosat is strictly regulated and only allowed in rare circumstances. Not sure about EU global situation, tho.
Oh yeah? And what about restaurants takeaways, canteens etc. which people consume about as much as they do home cooked food? Those places will always be buying the cheapest, most unethical food possible.
Here (Lille, France and Antwerp, Belgium) it is quite easy to find restaurants, takeaways, food trucks, etc, that offer food made from either locally sourced, organic or ethical ingredients, or all of those at the same time.
Likewise in Victoria, BC, Canada. I have no excuse not to eat ethically and sustainably because the options are never more than a short walk or drive away.
Not all people have this luxury though. On one hand, I have to make the choice to eat ethically but also spend more money. When I lived up north, options were a lot more scarce, and the average income was a lot lower. The community I lived in heavily relied on the cheapest options available.
Not sure why you were down voted as you make a very good point, at least in the UK that is very much the case. You can find organic food restaurants if you look hard, but almost all high street brands have very limited or no organic food - even brands that advertise themselves as healthy such as Pret or EAT.
The cost of land(and really property tax+financing costs or opportunity cost, because land can be resold) is only a small part of the overall cost of producing food. Even if you reduce the land cost by a third, if you increase the other costs it can outweigh any gains from the new system.
I’m sorry but this fails reason on even a basic level and reminds me of something a snopes fact check would be needed for. There is x amount of energy in sunlight and if it is going through leaves it is not available to your crop to grow. Same goes for the nutrients fueling all those trees etc. He is doing a great job at making a forest web but I’d like some verified figures for that cocoa production vs a real cocoa farm.
The natural habitat of Cocoa tree as usually bellow other trees, like many other species, Coffee too, it likes to be a little shaded by others, and the main thing about this method shown in the videos is very regular pruning and by organizing the organic matter in the ground the nutrients gets available for other species as well as more sunlight, so making very good use of the ecological succession - soil gets better and better naturally with nature processes - which is something very well known and studied in Botany but very little applied to agriculture, this is the gap this farmer is filling. As shown a little in the video, when he's going to grow something very sun hungry like lettuce or corn he does that by opening a big area in the forest and together with the lettuce he introduces seeds of other trees for the next natural succession.
I don't have an actual verified study to show you :/ But I believe there are a bunch of studies, as I have seeing a few universities making them, but I don't know how to find them. All I have now is my own experience on this topic.
> There is x amount of energy in sunlight and if it is going through leaves it is not available to your crop to grow.
Crops are not necessarily sun-bound, other factors/resources tend to set the growth limits.
And the cacao tree specifically is a small (under 8m) tropical tree, at such a low height it's can't have evolved as a sun-loving plant given it's only ever well below the forest's canopy.
Isn't cacao tree originally a rain forest tree, in which case it's probably naturally adapted to growing surrounded by taller trees in a semi-shaded conditions?
It's slightly terrifying to see the data about the loss of nutrients in plants around the world due to climate change. On YouTube there was an interesting Veritasim story about plants and their mineral levels.
It seems plants have fewer minerals now compared to 100 years ago. Farmers have fertilizer and the plants grow but they don't have the same levels of nutrition even with all that help. Samples of weeds from the 1800s were compared to the same weeds now and even the weeds have fewer minerals, so it's all plants not just food crops.
Larger farms growing more food may not solve the problem it's the quality of the plant not just the quantity.
IIRC that youtube video concluded that the difference in nutrient content was because growth rates were accelerated by the increased CO2 in the atmosphere but the rate of extracting nutrients from the soil was not accelerated. This is then presumably related to the global greening phenomenon we've witnessed where the increased CO2 has lead to a large increase in forestation globally.
It's important to note that the video asserts that food is still plenty nutritious and if you eat a well balanced diet you're fine and my own note is that there is also probably a limit to this effect.
Depending on what you mean, either yes or no :-) This is based on my poor understanding of the situation. Someone who is knowledgeable will hopefully be able to correct me.
I think there are actually plenty of nutrients in soil (even many "poor" soils). The real problem is that they aren't bio-available. So you'll have lots of different mineral salts in the soil (usually one or two orders of magnitude more than you need, by weight), but it's not in a form that the plant can absorb by its roots.
I think the real problem is the kind of mono-culture cropping we do. Really you want a variety of plants pulling up nutrients out of the ground (because different varieties have different abilities to break down and convert the nutrients in the soil). Then you want those plants to break down and be reintegrated in the soil. Finally, you often want some of that happening in an anaerobic environment, so you don't bind oxygen to it.
There are some new (old? ha ha) techniques being developed to build fertility (really just making existing nutrients bio-available) in the soil. Avoiding tilling, building up micro-organisms and insects to distribute the soil, allowing a variety of plants to grow (some long roots, some short roots, etc, etc). It's pretty complicated, though and I expect that it will take us a very long time to learn how to do these things effectively.
It definitely seems easier to just add what you think the soil is missing, but there are many disadvantages to that approach as we see over time. I did some experiments in containers a while ago. My idea was to see what kind of production I could get without adding any inputs to the soil at all (just water), and harvesting as much food as I could.
I had some experience from doing planted fish tanks with really intense planting (every single space possible occupied with a plant) and knew that it was reasonable to assume that plants can grow really well being very crowded as long as nutrients are available. I planted my containers so that light was the limiting factor, but grew a lot of local weeds that grew in poor soil as well as food on the assumption that they would build fertility fastest. I ran my experiment over 5 years and was really surprised at my results -- my production increased over time. One year, I even got 5 (!) harvests of potatoes from the same container -- I've never even come close to that level of production doing it more traditionally.
It was all very unscientific and I was really doing it out of curiosity more than trying to prove anything. In the end, it seems my neighbor didn't like my container garden of weeds and he convinced my gas man to apply herbicide to it. That was the end of my experiment (I caught him in the act as I came home from work a little bit early that day -- one of the few times I've really blown my top).
Anyway, I don't think we really have to worry over much about actually depleting our soils. I think they can rebound fairly quickly with the right approach. However, I think it is possible that our current intensive farming approaches do not produce the most nutrient rich produce possible.
>Really you want a variety of plants pulling up nutrients out of the ground (because different varieties have different abilities to break down and convert the nutrients in the soil)
That doesn't appear to be needed. The plants don't have the ability at all, the microorganisms they attract and feed do it. You can build fertility while growing a single crop year after year, Fukuoka did rice and wheat every year for decades on the same land just fine. As long as you keep the microorganisms fed and don't insist on a program of routinely killing them, they'll break down the minerals that the plants need and make them available.
>Finally, you often want some of that happening in an anaerobic environment, so you don't bind oxygen to it.
No you don't. When it happens in an anaerobic environment you get end products that hinder plant growth instead of helping it. This is the main reason soil compaction is a problem, you get pooled water in the ground creating anaerobic conditions which kill off all the good bacteria and fungi.
> Fukuoka did rice and wheat every year for decades on the same land just fine.
Fukuoka also used wild carrots and daikon to bring up nutrients from lower down (source: My friend studied with him). Also white clover to fix nitrogen (and even went so far as to say, "Don't bother experimenting with anything else. I've tried everything and white clover is the best."). Rice is a summer crop and in most places in Japan you can have a winter crop as well, which you use for nutrient migration. Fukuoka's techniques work very well around where I like (my friend's fields are fantastic), but apparently don't work very well in more temperate climes (just from what I've heard).
>Fukuoka also used wild carrots and daikon to bring up nutrients from lower down (source: My friend studied with him).
Not according to him he didn't. Read his books, he was very clear about everything he did. He grew vegetables to eat, in a completely different area, it had nothing to do with the grain field.
>Also white clover to fix nitrogen
Nitrogen is a non-issue precisely because you can pull it out of the air for free. You said you want a variety of plants to pull nutrients from the ground. Clover pulling nitrogen from the air is not support for that idea.
>Rice is a summer crop and in most places in Japan you can have a winter crop as well, which you use for nutrient migration.
But he didn't do that, he used it for a crop. He did rice and wheat, like I said. Both were crops, he sold the harvests. He did it for decades without any decline in yields. The idea that you need a "diverse polyculture" of plants as the current fad calls it is completely unsupported by evidence. They just need a healthy ecosystem to grow in, not necessarily different plants.
>Fukuoka's techniques work very well around where I like (my friend's fields are fantastic), but apparently don't work very well in more temperate climes
The techniques and ideas work fine, but you can't blindly copy his setup as it was. You don't have the season for two crops, so you don't do rice and wheat. You just do wheat. Marc Bonfils has grown winter wheat every year in the same field for over a decade with no inputs, no rotation, and yields increased each year as the soil was restored. If you are in a cold enough climate it might even make sense to compost your straw in the spring in order to warm your soil up earlier, but I am not sure about that yet, I'll be testing it this spring.
It did conclude that, but it is just some guy making a statement, and he completely dismissed the soil issue without even considering it. The idea that you are fine if you eat an ill defined "well balanced diet" isn't very well supported. Lots of people have vitamin deficiencies they are not aware of. Very few people get enough B1 or b9 for example, and those are down 1/3 from what they used to be in lots of plants.
Your correlation is a bit backward there, but then you're in good company.
In living soil, not the dirt most agriculture is growing on, plants are trading sugars for water, minerals, and/or protection with symbiotic fungi and nitrogen fixing bacteria.
These microbes don't like tilling. Soil structure and the organisms break down, releasing carbon into the atmosphere. It's very hard to bring them back, especially to the middle of big square fields where everything is dead in a several mile radius.
It is actually very easy to bring them back, but you can't go ahead and then kill them a week later and expect any benefit. Stop tilling and spraying and put down some compost and you've got your microorganisms back and the food to get them through until the first plant roots are well established to keep it going from there. The thing that is hard to bring back is the thousands of years of accumulated topsoil that we've destroyed.
Either tilling or herbicides. It is not that simple to say stop tilling. No-till might become viable when we have farming robots that can deal with weeds. I think the bigger problem is moving away from crop rotation to monocultures.
Watch the video I linked. It explains how weeds thrive under bacterially dominated soils, precisely what is created by tillage and spraying. When you have a balance of bacteria and fungi, crop species out compete weeds on their own, because the environment is suited to their needs.
Weeds are just plants that are native. They will always outperform genetically modified foreign crops that are optimized for yield. Some fast-growing crops can dominate weeds but you will still want to till for other reasons.
I watched this video and she has no compelling evidence that this can work on a large scale. My family is doing farming for generations. You need fertilizers because crops consume minerals from the soil. You need chemicals because of monocultures create conditions for diseases and bugs. You need tilling because you do not have unlimited labour.
On one hand we have physical evidence and scientists, on the other hand we have you saying "my family has been destroying the soil for a long time and learned nothing the whole time". While you may find the latter more compelling, I do not.
Weeds are early colonizing species, frequently foreign invasives, not natives. They do not always outperform crop species, as demonstrated by the millions of acres where they are outcompeted by the crops. You create barren lifeless dirt, precisely the niche early colonizing species evolved to fill. Of course they fill it. Just because you create your own problem, doesn't mean the rest of us suffer from that problem too.
You do not want to till for other reasons, literally the entire purpose of tilling is to hinder plant growth. The fact that it hinders crop growth as well as weed growth seems to be lost on many people. There's a reason the majority of farms in the US and Canada are already no-till.
You do not need fertilizers because the dirt is made of those very minerals. You have literally tons of phosphorus sitting under your crop, but you have killed the microorganisms responsible for converting it to plant available forms.
Monocultures do not create conditions for diseases and bugs. This has been researched to death. If alternating strips of corn and soybeans lowered disease and pest rates that's what everyone would do. It doesn't help at all. The problem is not the plants, it is the soil.
I have no idea what your last point is even supposed to mean. Tilling is labor. "I don't have unlimited labor so I will use my limited labor on a process that increases my costs and lowers my yields" is pretty hard to make sense of.
> On one hand we have physical evidence and scientists, on the other hand we have you saying "my family has been destroying the soil for a long time and learned nothing the whole time". While you may find the latter more compelling, I do not.
Do not underestimate farmers. They might not be smart individually but good ideas spread very quickly. If the above scientist shows me a farm that is a 100h size and makes a profit then we can talk.
> Weeds are early colonizing species, frequently foreign invasives, not natives. They do not always outperform crop species, as demonstrated by the millions of acres where they are outcompeted by the crops. You create barren lifeless dirt, precisely the niche early colonizing species evolved to fill. Of course they fill it. Just because you create your own problem, doesn't mean the rest of us to suffer from that problem too.
Cucumber/tomato/potato/radish and are not native to Europe. Not only that but most of the vegetables you eat is heavily modified by selective breeding to increase yield. Weeds, on the other hand, are aggressive plants that optimize for survival. You contradict yourself, how land be barren and lifeless when weeds grow perfectly. Weeds grow because you need have certain spacing between your crops. You either need to use chemicals or labour and tilling to ensure high yield. In some cases, you can reduce tilling when the plant is aggressive enough (corn) in others it is not possible.
> You do not want to till for other reasons, literally the entire purpose of tilling is to hinder plant growth. The fact that it hinders crop growth, as well as weed growth, seems to be lost on many people. There's a reason the majority of farms in the US and Canada are already no-till.
You will till to prepare for sowing. Even "no-till" farmers will till to some extent. There is more no-till because chemical solutions are better. My parents reduced tiling after using herbicide that can be used to target weeds in specific periods after crops are already growing.
> I have no idea what your last point is even supposed to mean. Tilling is labor. "I don't have unlimited labor so I will use my limited labor on a process that increases my costs and lowers my yields" is pretty hard to make sense of.
Because you are not a farmer. Tilling is a very quick procedure that is not labour intensive. By labour, I mean manually removing weeds before they spill seeds or outgrow crops. For many vegetable/fruits, manual weeding is still essential.
>If the above scientist shows me a farm that is a 100h size and makes a profit then we can talk.
The above farm is 20 times that size and switched over specifically because it is more profitable, that's the point. Maybe instead of insisting that reality isn't real you just watch the video? We're talking about real farms, not piddly hobbyist nonsense. If I were underestimating farmers, we wouldn't be having this discussion. But since most farmers are old, stuck in their ways and borderline illiterate, lots of them keep doing the same bad things that we've known are bad for over 70 years.
>Cucumber/tomato/potato/radish and are not native to Europe. Not only that but most of the vegetables you eat is heavily modified by selective breeding to increase yield.
None of those things are relevant at all. The genetic difference between crop species and their wild ancestors is tiny, and in fact most crop species out-compete their wild ancestors when sowed together.
>Weeds, on the other hand, are aggressive plants that optimize for survival.
All plants are optimized for survival. That's a meaningless statement. The question is survival WHERE? Wolves are optimized for survival, yet if you toss one in the middle of the ocean it doesn't actually survive. Corn is optimized for survival, but if you toss it in a barren dead patch of dirt, it struggles to grow. Corn evolved to form symbiotic relationships with fungi, which your tillage has exterminated. There are plants that evolved to grow in barren dead dirt. They do well there. You call them weeds, and pretend the ecosystem doesn't matter, weeds are just magically better no matter what. Yet if you have a healthy soil with plenty of undisturbed fungi, the corn out-competes the weeds.
Take the wild ancestor of any crop you are pretending can't compete and do a test with it. They compete fine in a healthy soil with a balanced microbiology, just like their modern crop varieties do. But if the rhizosphere is gone, the only plants that can grow well are those adapted to dead barren dirt, whose entire ecological niche is to colonize such areas and gradually restore them to healthy ecosystems. So on tilled dirt, they get out-competed by weeds just like the modern crop varieties do. Again, if you simply watched the video I linked before which you said you watched, you would already have had a microbiologist explain this for you with nice diagrams and everything. Ecological succession is real. The species which thrive in barren dirt are not the same as the species that thrive in old growth forests. Are pine trees not optimized for survival? Then why do they get out-competed by weeds if I plant them in tilled dead dirt? Have we modified them by selective breeding to increase yield? This is trivially easy to test for yourself if you don't believe scientists and their silly evidence.
>Weeds grow because you need have certain spacing between your crops. You either need to use chemicals or labour and tilling to ensure high yield.
No, you leave the residue and it blocks 95% of weed seed germination. If you haven't heard of mulch, you're not even attempting to be a farmer. You are just blindly going through the motions of what your great grandparents did.
>You will till to prepare for sowing.
No I do not.
>Even "no-till" farmers will till to some extent.
No we do not. The coulters on the planter simply open the soil for the seed to be deposited. Seriously, go look at a no-till planter before pretending they don't exist. You are thinking of strip tilling, which is a form of conservation tillage. No-till is not conservation tillage, it is no tillage.
>Because you are not a farmer
Yes I am. For someone who seems to have obtained all his knowledge of farming from farm simulator 2015, it seems silly to call the person pointing to scientists, farmers and university agricultural departments "not a farmer".
>Tilling is a very quick procedure that is not labour intensive
How do you think that driving equipment, literally the only labor done on a farm, is not labor? This isn't the 1800s, all farming involves is driving slowly for hours at a time, unless you have a self-driving tractor in which case it involves playing games on your phone. Tillage is literally the slowest and most fuel burning procedure in many primitive farming operations. Only for some crops is harvesting worse. But hey what do I know, I am totally not a farmer right? I bet people who study this for a living in the biggest farming area on the planet will say something else right? Oops, they say I am right. I guess it because they are not a farmer too! https://store.extension.iastate.edu/product/4047
>By labour, I mean manually removing weeds before they spill seeds or outgrow crops
Are you high? How can you say I am not a farmer when you think people walk around 5000 acres of fields pulling weeds by hand? Driving a tractor is labor. Literally the only labor done on a farm in decades.
>For many vegetable/fruits, manual weeding is still essential.
Maybe somewhere in eastern Europe where they are still living in the 1820s, but in the 21st century literally no farms do any manual weeding. Vegetable "farms" are called market gardens, and they use mexicans to pick the vegetables, not to weed.
You can only see massive corn and soybean "farms", where everything labour intensive is imported. The world is not like that. Most fruit and vegetables you eat have some element of manual labour.
> None of those things are relevant at all. The genetic difference between crop species and their wild ancestors is tiny, and in fact most crop species out-compete their wild ancestors when sowed together.
Try growing tomato. It needs to 45-60 days before you can eat anything. It requires herbicides and sometimes manual weeding. Special plows are used to prepare the field. It is often chemically pollinated. For high yield, you will manually remove the lower sprouts. If you want to grow vertically you need again manually lace tomatoes. Often tomatoes will use drip irrigation that needs to be manually setup.
> How do you think that driving equipment, literally the only labor done on a farm, is not labor? This isn't the 1800s, all farming involves is driving slowly for hours at a time, unless you have a self-driving tractor in which case it involves playing games on your phone. Tillage is literally the slowest and most fuel burning procedure in many primitive farming operations. Only for some crops is harvesting worse. But hey what do I know, I am totally not a farmer right? I bet people who study this for a living in the biggest farming area on the planet will say something else right? Oops, they say I am right. I guess it because they are not a farmer too!
That your idea of farming. Compared to tomato production tilling is a low effort.
> No we do not. The coulters on the planter simply open the soil for the seed to be deposited. Seriously, go look at a no-till planter before pretending they don't exist. You are thinking of strip tilling, which is a form of conservation tillage. No-till is not conservation tillage, it is no tillage.
In Europe only like 4% farmland is zero-till. Everything else is either conservative or full till. Zero-till can only be used for very specific crops.
>Most fruit and vegetables you eat have some element of manual labour.
And that is relevant how?
>Try growing tomato.
You try. Literally nothing you said except 45-60 days is correct. And literally none of it is relevant to the discussion. What on earth does tomatoes taking 60 days to start producing fruit have to do with no-till or weeds? Pro-tip: my garden is full of tomatoes. It is not tilled, plowed, weeded, fertilized, irrigated, or sprayed with anything. Pruning tomatoes lowers the yield per plant, it only increases the yield per sq foot, which is why only greenhouse producers do it.
>Compared to tomato production tilling is a low effort.
So because you have a garden and you waste lots of time gardening poorly, that means it makes sense to waste even more time doing more unnecessary labor to lower your yields? Tilling is labor, saying "I do lots of even dumber things" doesn't change this.
>In Europe only like 4% farmland is zero-till.
So those 4% are magic and defying the laws of physics? Or those 96% are dumbasses?
>Zero-till can only be used for very specific crops.
Nonsense. Name a single crop that you think can not be grown no-till and I will show you someone growing it no-till.
> There's a reason the majority of farms in the US and Canada are already no-till.
I have heard this several times lately. But I grew up around tilled (sometimes double tilled) farmland, and I still see a lot of tilled earth when I'm out of town and think to look.
What do we mean by most and what definition of no-till are we using?
We mean more than 50% of the farmed acres, and the definition is not tilling. Using a no-till planter to seed through the residue of the previous crop or cover crop. Most of the tilled acres are using some form of conservation tillage too, like strip till. Get out of Ontario and go look at a real farm.
I do not know where you getting this data. I can tell you that in Europe there is very little land that is not tilled. Even on below if exclude grasslands you find that 70-90% of arable land is tilled.
Even US and Canada no-till farming is still around 20-30%. It higher than Europe because of more intense use of herbicides and different farming practices.
Wider use of crop rotation, GMO, farming robots and micro-irrigation might reduce the need for tilling but it is still very far of. Farming is heavily subsidized but still not very profitable. Margins are small and no-till methods are not economically viable for most places.
Weeds are pioneer species (species that quickly colonize damaged or degraded areas). They aren't always native. They do have their uses for soil improvement, both structurally and nutrient availability, but if you're tilling anyway, or your animals are being poisoned by the weeds, you won't be that impressed.
The soil has plenty of minerals in it. But most plants can't access them without symbiosis with fungi, which are all dead from the tilling.
I don't know how much the analogy holds, but when you're growing Peyote for consumption you want to let it grow a long time so it can produce as many of the alkaloids your looking to hallucinate on.
Grafting Peyote onto most cacti allow it to grow faster, but by reports doesn't increase the mescaline content since those chemical pathways are just as effective as they always are.
Let's try to break this problem down to first principles:
- Humans need food to live because it provides energy and nutrients.
- From a fundamental standpoint of physics and available materials, nutrients are relatively easy to get; as far as I know, most vitamins and minerals are pretty cheap to either come by naturally or manufacture, and you don't need that much of any of them to keep a person healthy, so let's assume food energy is the real limiting factor here.
- The energy in most food comes from photosynthesis (either directly, in the case of eating plants, or indirectly, in the case of feeding plants to animals for growing meat).
- Photosynthesis is an extremely inefficient way to turn solar radiation into chemical energy. Only about 3 to 6 percent of incoming solar energy is used by plants to create biomass, and not all of that biomass necessarily equates to calories we can digest and absorb.
So, while this isn't a particularly appetizing future to imagine living in, I don't know of any fundamental reason why artificially producing edible calories via solar electricity and chemical processes couldn't vastly exceed the efficiency of natural-grown food. It might be tricky getting to the point where fake food like this is healthy and tastes good...but if it saves the world from starving and stops civilization from collapsing then hey, it's not a bad fallback plan.
Besides being a big jump in efficiency, this type of tech could also enable the use of non-arable land for food production, since presumably you could set up the necessary manufacturing facilities anywhere you want.
> From a fundamental standpoint of physics and available materials, nutrients are relatively easy to get; as far as I know, most vitamins and minerals are pretty cheap to either come by naturally or manufacture, and you don't need that much of any of them to keep a person healthy, so let's assume food energy is the real limiting factor here.
Food is more complicated than this picture. So much that nutritionists have major differences over which basic materials are beneficial in bulk and which cause health problems. Vitamins, minerals and medicines are not automatically absorbed well by our digestive system. The many biological foibles of human metabolism and our symbiotic gut flora, still confounds expectations about what food can be and can do to health.
There have been many, perhaps endless attempts to synthesize a wholesome food product - it would be worth a fortune. I am aware of zero successes to date and this shouldn't be the case if its not very difficult. We don't even synthesize sugar for consumption - maybe start there, but it is not even clear if/how much it causes diabetes or other diseases.
We might be stuck for a while longer with reliance on foods that needs to live for bit (plant or animal) before we can sustain our own lives with them - seems to be a very old system requirement of multicellular life, and one that has not been cracked yet.
> There have been many, perhaps endless attempts to synthesize a wholesome food product - it would be worth a fortune. I am aware of zero successes to date and this shouldn't be the case if its not very difficult. We don't even synthesize sugar for consumption - maybe start there, but it is not even clear if/how much it causes diabetes or other diseases.
There are lots of synthetic foods. The main problem is marketing. How are you going to sell your lab food when "processed" is bad and "natural" is good? The organic movement has taught people to distrust science in food, and its not something that is going to easily be reversed. The fact that most synthetic advances are used for cost reduction - not health doesn't help here either.
The only place where this has seen any adoption is synthetic meats. But I expect vegetable replacements to be many decades off - if ever.
What specifically are you looking for? That synthetic foods exist? Google provides many results on the subject. You probably have already eaten some synthetic ingredients.
Many vitamin additives today are artifical. And of course artificial flavoring has vast commercial adoption. In the case of McDonald's french fries this was used to dramatically reduce the amount of saturated fat while maintaining the beef flavor - they are no longer deep fried in beef talow.
We can't yet recreate the texture of a pepper, but we can certainly create a synthetic smoothie with the necessities of life. Organic chemistry is a rich field of study.
You didn't referenced anything approaching wholesome food.
Of course there are a few simple compounds which are edible, but most artificial additives are extracted and processed from grown inputs, and this is susceptible to unexpected health problems as happened with exposure to trans fats for decades - now banned.
> we can certainly create a synthetic smoothie with the necessities of life
That is a low bar - being capable at any cost to synthesis a smoothie with 'the necessities of life' including growth? good health? You didnt even reference that.
The food landscape is filled with pseudoscience, and whether a compound is synthesized or extracted is more of an economic decision not a scientific one.
It is a plain language term, pseudoscience most often alludes to science by misrepresenting scientific terms. In this context "wholesome" plainly refers to foods which provide broad but not necessarily complete nutrition, so they can be eaten perfectly safely in bulk like potatoes and rice (note the objective of this thread).
Small amounts of almost anything can be synthesized at great expense, but you should have provided an example of a wholesome food which would not be completely uneconomical to synthesize (and purify) in bulk, to support a claim that there exists such a potential economic possibility. Even how much for example, it costs to synthesize food grade sugars would be a start on showing your advice on this subject is grounded in reality.
This sounds good in theory, but I don't think it would work given our limited knowledge of food and nutrition. Nutritional scientists have been wrong many times in the past--who's to say a rollout of synthetic "food" couldn't wipe out the human population in the future? I'd cite the Precautionary Principle (http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf) when dealing with global ruin problems.
1. Any transition to synthetic foods would be gradual.
2. People have already subsisted on fully synthetic diets (aka elemental diets) in the past as part of things like space-travel research and treatments for gastrointestinal disorders. They do fine.
These claims are not easily substantiated - that curious 45 year old report notwithstanding.
The short wikipedia article on Elemental diets, summarizes a handfull from more recent years:
> Many patients are unable to tolerate the taste, even if the diet is flavoured, and choose to receive it through intragastric administration.[2] Possible nausea and diarrhea can result from the high sugar content which can also complicate hyperglycaemia in patients with pre-existing diabetes.[2] As a result of suppression of healthy bacteria, via a loss of bacterial food source, prolonged use of an elemental diet elevates the risk of developing clostridium difficile infection/colonisation.[6]
The question wasn't whether a synthetic diet has side effects compared to a natural one, the question was whether we could accidentally "wipe out the human population".
I was replying to your own claims, but I dont think it actually is ridiculous to worry if novel food products could "wipe out the human population". Its just an unnecessarily extreme phrase for catastrophe, but it is possible. Disease can wipe out a population and novel material exposures can cause novel diseases like Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
Food safety should not be presumed on theoretical basis, only a long history of consumption can reliably evidence it.
My claim was "they do fine" which, in the context of the question, doesn't mean "there are no side effects".
When a family friend had to have his spleen removed, it put him at somewhat higher risk of infection for the rest of their life, but in the context of him having emergency surgery for a ruptured spleen everyone knew what "he's going to be fine" meant.
> I dont think it actually is ridiculous to worry if novel food products could "wipe out the human population".
I don't think it's ridiculous to worry about in principle. If fact, I think human extinction is super important to worry about and not enough people do it. But I do think it's basically ridiculous to worry about any particular disease or diet doing it (except possibly maliciously engineered diseases). Diseases and diet changes just never have the extreme mortality rates you'd need to threaten the species.
I read the description "fully synthetic" here as practically specifying a product which can be created by manufacturing process from elements - as the clinical term "elemental diet" also accidentally suggests. Such a product is also what the lead comment supposed was possible as an alternative to agricultural production of food. To me this is the context of "synthetic foods" which we replied under.
From intuition and lack of ever coming across news of an alternative capabilty, I strongly suspect that besides salts and water most of the materials found in medical "elemental" diets ( carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, amino acids, etc) are refined and processed extracts of natural, oops.. grown;) ingredients.
This product guide partially confirms my intuition [1] :
>" Modified cornstarch and maltodextrin derived from corn are two commonly used ingredients in elemental diets. Physicians’ Elemental Diet instead contains tapioca maltodextrin and no modified cornstarch. "
>I think human extinction is super important to worry about and not enough people do it.
Not enough influential people do for sure, or of less absolute but much less unlikely threats. Oh well, we made it this far, not all bad, at least there is much room for improvement.
Sure, that's a fine criticism to keep in mind. However, I believe the idea is that although the ingredients come from agricultural sources, they have been purified to such a degree that it doesn't matter; they're chemically identical to synthetic ones. (The key question was whether truly synthetic diets are nutritially satisfactory, not whether they are economically efficient to produce now...which they are not.) Of course, it's still conceivable that some secret molecule is needed by the body in minute quantities that was insufficiently filtered from the agricultural sources, but at some level of effective purification that worry starts to bleed into homeopathy.
We didnt find any reference to a "truly synthetic diet", so it remains a conceptual talking point which is of unknown economy and unknown capability to produce, yet it has been too easy to confuse the medical diet as evidence of the concept.
> that although the ingredients come from agricultural sources, they have been purified to such a degree that it doesn't matter; they're chemically identical to synthetic ones.
Technically speaking, they are not chemically identical. They are in certain contexts chemically equivalent, subject to 'trace' contamination, bonding and structural differences which are assessed to be biologically insignificant. Synthesis can produce materials which are purer (as in simpler) than grown, but it is prohibitively difficult to achieve an exact, indistinguishable configuration of biologically generated materials.
It could be common to regard this distinction between identity and equivalence as pedantic, yet it is wrong and unscientific - the difference in meaning between these terms has categorical consequences to deduction. Loose claims of chemical identity, gloze over the theoretical component of equivalence - which is subject to change. Prions for example were easily described as chemically equivalent to their other phenotypes, until they became common knowledge around the 90s. Differentiating phenotypes in chemical terms surely involves advanced notation which I expect neither of us are familiar with. For sure homeopathy is a fanciful placebo based therapy, but even pure chemically speaking "simple" H2O carries perplexing detail at the molecular level[1] Whatever might be theoretically insignificant or not, is subject to ongoing insight and discovery.
> bonding and structural differences which are assessed to be biologically insignificant.
Are there specific plausible possibilities in nutritionally required molecules that you are referring to here, or is this just a "no one knows for sure" argument?
> Prions for example were easily described as chemically equivalent to their other phenotypes
Did anyone ever actually point to a container of prions and mistakenly describe them as chemically identical? When I said "chemically identical", I did not merely mean the amino acid sequence.
Like, we have x-ray diffraction for this stuff. There is a reason vitamin supplements work to correct vitamin deficiencies. There is just not much room for unknown unknowns here.
> People have already subsisted on fully synthetic diets (aka elemental diets) in the past ... they do fine.
We managed to establish that what you wrote there is wrong. That was my primary goal because it contradicted my other main comment, but I hope you can take that information in, and perhaps think about what lead you to that mistaken confidence. The elemental diet is not fully synthetic - it is mostly grown...
> they have been purified to such a degree that it doesn't matter; they're chemically identical to synthetic ones.
That object > "they" it doesnt exist yet. It's aspiration, an ideal, supposedly attainable with help from x-ray diffraction and whatever else you might think of, but its not real yet.
As an abstract concept you can talk about fully synthetic food that is chemically identical to food which can only currently be produced with essential and substantial use of non-designed, non-fully comprehended biological entities (lifeforms). What definitely "no one knows for sure" is that humans are capable of arranging that. It might be possible in a few decades time, with help from AI to take care of all of the biological intricacies which are too complicated for humans to grasp.
> Are there specific plausible possibilities
Its about recognizing the likelihood of important surprises - which can not be specified but which the situation is more than complicated enough to continue throwing up, as can be noted many times in the history of modern science. And the importance of not exaggerating the extents of current technological capabilities and understanding. Yes modern capabilities are dazzling and exciting, but still far from sufficient to get presumptuous about natures complexity.
> We managed to establish that what you wrote there is wrong.
No, we just didn't find citations.
It sounds like you're more interested in proving me wrong, and giving a well-worn lecture about scientific modesty, than in telling me something new, so I don't think there's much to be gained from continuing.
Yet again it is not true that we didn't find citations - I did for you. This avoidance and complaining about being given a worn out lecture really seems like bad faith. I wouldn't say that but you left our previous argument saying it to me, on the back of a completely erroneous dismissal of peer reviewed evidence I brought - to show you something new. Ok, better faith next time I hope, and when you can show me something new...
It’s all way easier than this. Eating vegan prevents all of this as it’s basic food-web biology that as you go up the food chain you lose energy by a factor of 10. Yeah an artificial leaf is technically more efficient than a plant at making energy from sunlight but plants already operate at 1-2% so unless you plan on making a synthetic system better than 10-20% at making biomass (hint: you don’t) then just cutting meat farm subsidies and introducing a meat tax alone already puts you way ahead of decades of scientific funding at perfecting multilayer amorphous silicon to where it’s less than $1000/cm^2.
Edit: It’s also not clear that the synthetic foods considered in your post are those which are less energy intensive to produce, I should note.
Most farm subsidies do not go directly to meat. In fact, current subsidies probably shift some land away from pastures and grazing to oversupplied field crops:
You can absolutely be both against the farm bill and simultaneously in favor of reducing American meat consumption... But you're probably looking at corn and soy subsidies that in turn make cheaper feed, rather than something as simple and direct as cutting a meat subsidy.
Most of it doesn't go to any single use. Only 36% of US corn production goes to livestock feed. 40% to ethanol production. And while people like to complain about the caloric inefficiency of animals vs plants, the reality is that chicken being fed corn produces 5 million calories per acre, the same calories per acre as wheat. Almost all plant crops produce fewer calories per acre than that. For some reason nobody seems to be demanding that we stop eating wheat, nevermind things like lettuce, spinach, broccoli, onions, tomatoes, etc, that produce far fewer calories per acre.
In practice, the replicating the composition of food (proteins, carbs, fats, vitamins, minerals, bacteria, fiber, etc.) is a huge feat. Especially because we don't understand enough about human diet. (See: 1 gazillion articles about dieting.)
It's like gene editing. There's a lot that theoretical possible, but the real sci-fi stuff is way out of our reach right now.
I have no expertise in this area, but everything you said seems to make sense. If you're an expert (or if anyone else reading this is), can you shed some light on why using artificial processes to create "food" would be difficult?
It would be so cool if we had some mainstream open source software that could simulate chemical processes in a macro-level way, for example, to explore new ways of creating complex carbohydrates faster than in nature.
A carbohydrate is not a simple organic structure, the synthesis of molecules like that is quite complicated, and involves a lot of inefficiencies and filtering out of by-products.
Chemical fuels like methane or ethane are far simpler, and just inputting energy and synthesising them from basic building blocks is difficult to do cheaply and at scale.
It's expensive and it tastes awful. It's hard to give an easy answer to "why is this super complicated thing expensive?", and I'm no expert, but you essentially have to replicate the specialized microbiological machinery of multiple plant species.
[ A political science graduate of Yale University, Jeavons worked for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and Stanford University before launching his career in small-scale agriculture education. He is the author of the best-selling sustainable farming handbook How to Grow More Vegetables, Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible On Less Land Than You Can Imagine, now in its 8th edition in eight languages ]
I wouldn't consider the market gardener to be in the same area as grow biointensive. Jeavons has a strong focus on self-sufficiency and sustainability in his system and goals. Fortier does not, he's only interested in organic as gimmick to make money. Also his book is pretty deceptive compared to what he really does on his "farm", which wasn't actually profitable until after he released the book and got "famous", which is what sell the overpriced lettuce that finally got him profitable.
I think the biointensive system Jeavons promotes gives you a pretty good starting place, but it does promote a bit of needless work. Skip the composting and just use the compost crops as a mulch. There's no need to build piles and turn them and then spread the compost, you can just let it compost in place on the garden where it will end up. You can skip growing the compost crops too if you have trees to collect leaves from in the fall. And save your back and skip the double digging, or any digging at all for that matter. All it does is set you back in your first couple of years for no reason.
Growing vegetables in greenhouses can be done very efficiently. The Wageningen University researched high-tech greenhouses in Riyad (Saudi Arabia) and found that it only required 5 liter fresh water per kg tomatoes, compared to 168 liters in a low-tech greenhouse [1]. This is possible using a closed system that recycles the water that evaporates in the greenhouse. The low-tech example is a plastic tunnel without such facilities (the most commonly used type of Greenhouse in the Middle East). The yield per square meter was also 50% higher for the high-tech greenhouse compared to the low-tech greenhouse.
There is also the problem of food distribution. Ignoring future population growth, the world does produce enough food to people everyone [0] (obtained from the first sentence of [1]). If we are collectively unwilling to solve the distribution problem today, then it there is a good chance that we won't do much about the shortage tomorrow. In addition, unconsumed food waste is also problem, and probably does have some correlation with the unequal distribution.
An article with the headline "Can we share food more fairly today?" does have a simple answer, but would rock the political establishment uncomfortably, so has little chance of ever being published.
[0] Leathers, H., & Foster, P. (2009). The world food problem: toward ending undernutrition in the third world. Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers Inc.
We are missing a bit of humility. Just because an apple can be gotten in February doesn't mean you should. It stretches, complicates, and reduces the efficiency of the supply chain immensely.
I heard some advice years ago that one of the better things you can do as an environmentalist is teach your kids about the seasonality of foods. Make a big deal about it being orange or pear or cherry season, cut back on buying these fruits the rest of the year, even if you can afford it. Eat something else instead of making the world bend to your craving.
By March in 18th century New Hampshire, the pickings were getting pretty lean. You might be able to go down into the cellar and get a soft apple or a potato out of a barrel, and you would have wheat, oats, and barley. Maybe there was still some kale under the snow in the garden. Beyond that, you killed a chicken or went out to hunt some game. So when the raspberries came into season, it was indeed a treat.
Population growth is leveling off. Birth rate globally is already at/below replacement rate (there are ~2B children right now, the UN estimates that in a century, there will still be ~2B children). The growth we are seeing now is a growth of the adult population, not the child population, due to the 1-2 generation overhang between nations getting decent food and health care (especially immunizations), and the birth rate dropping in those nations from the 5-6 of backwards nations to the <2 of modern nations. (See Hans Rosling for details.)
Meanwhile, in a half-century, we've doubled the population, while significantly reducing food costs and radically reducing hunger globally. I'm with Hans Rosling here... the angst about how the world is hungry and getting hungrier is just our minds telling us stories, contradicting the facts on the ground.
I don't see a good reason to believe that we will have global food shortages in the future. We'll have less hunger, not more, as the population levels out over the next few decades. I'm basing that argument on past behavior, absorbing the needs of much higher population growth with less technology for decades.
>Birth rate globally is already at/below replacement rate
No it is not. Current RNI is 1.06% and projections do not suggest it getting down to replacement levels in the next 50 years unless mortality increases substantially.
>Meanwhile, in a half-century, we've doubled the population, while significantly reducing food costs and radically reducing hunger globally.
By destroying vast portions of the natural world and wiping out thousands of species and even putting the future survival of our own species at risk. The "angst" is entirely valid. Destroying the planet to prop up obscenely inflated population levels for absolutely no benefit is horrifyingly evil. The expected population growth in Africa is enough to finish destroying every last spec of natural ecosystem on the planet that is capable of being used for food production. Yes, we absolutely need to address this problem.
"Future survival of our own species"? Nah. The last human being will eat the last cockroach. We have made technology to adapt to living on the moon. We might make things painful for humanity in general, might even break civilization (although I think that's unlikely). But survival of the species? We haven't yet invented technology that can wipe out humans.
As for our "evil", "obscenely inflated population levels"... well, what do you think we should do about it? Because the only "solution" I can see to this thing that horrifies you is what the Nazis called a Final Solution. The global population is what it is, whether you like it or not. If you had Thanos' infinity glove, would you use it? Would you use it, knowing you're just knocking the population back to 1965 levels?
>Because the only "solution" I can see to this thing that horrifies you is what the Nazis called a Final Solution.
Uh, the solution to do what the article suggests. Grow more food on less land so that population growth doesn't come at the expense of the last shreds of wilderness on the planet. How does one get to the point where you think "growing more food is hitler!!1" is a reasonable response?
We're already growing more calories per acre than any time in history, by a large margin. Mostly doing the very agricultural practices you decry, the ones that are "destroying the planet". That's one reason the population has grown so rapidly - famine is no longer keeping it in check.
"The last shreds of wilderness" is an absurd hyperbole. There's still a lot of wilderness left, and I think we're approaching maximum land under cultivation. (checks google) As a matter of fact... in 1970, 4.48B hectares were cultivated. in 2008, it was 4.83B, a <10% increase over almost 40 years and a near-doubling of the population. What happened? Incredible increases in yield starting post-WWII, greatly increasing the amount of food per acre.
So where does this leave the original study? Does it assume there will be no improvement in yield? Is farming more land the only solution being tried? Obviously not. What they're breathlessly recommending is exactly what we've been doing for over half a century now (really, about two centuries) - improving yield.
>Mostly doing the very agricultural practices you decry, the ones that are "destroying the planet".
What are you talking about? We're doing it using the increased atmospheric CO2. Slash and burn is what is destroying the planet, and it has terrible long term productivity. That's why they have to keep slashing and burning.
>There's still a lot of wilderness left, and I think we're approaching maximum land under cultivation.
The acres currently under cultivation is entirely irrelevant. If I burn down 100 acres of rainforest every year and cultivate it, its always 100 acres of cultivated land. But I am destroying 100 acres of wilderness every year. The land that is now a barren wasteland still matters, even though I am no longer cultivating it.
>What they're breathlessly recommending is exactly what we've been doing for over half a century now (really, about two centuries) - improving yield.
Except we're not doing that, which is the point. We accidentally did that with CO2 emissions, but we're reaching the limits of what increased atmospheric CO2 can do. Once CO2 is no longer the limiting factor for growth, no amount of extra CO2 will help. Agricultural science is not interested in producing more food with less, it is interested in producing more profit.
Logistics is hard. On top of that, importing food is a very political subject. Do you want to feed everyone in the world as resource-efficiently as possible, or do you want every country/region/city/neighborhood/community to be equipped to feed itself? Bear in mind that these two are very much different scenarios. Small, poor, inefficient farmers have been bankrupted by cheap imports they cannot compete with more than once in world history. Similarly, price controls on food have led to famine more than once.
This is without even touching on the point that a lot of poorer countries really want to be able to export food for a profit.
I get the sense that the short answer to your uncomfortable question is simple: yes. With the asterisk being all the political and economic questions that go in it and don't have simple answers.
On that note, NYTimes seems to be pushing many climate articles today[1] with an urgent framing but casually neglecting to mention the relatively small number of corporations responsible for most greenhouse emissions[2].
This is called Permaculture, it maximizes yield using natural methods (i.e. avoid tiling the soil, herbicides, etc) and results in an "edible forest"
From the wikipedia:
4 Common practices
4.1 Agroforestry
4.2 Hügelkultur
4.3 Natural building
4.4 Rainwater harvesting
4.5 Sheet mulching
4.6 Intensive rotational grazing
4.7 Keyline design
4.8 Fruit tree management
Permaculture doesn't mean food forest. A food forest is one form of permaculture, but it is by no means the only form, or even the ideal one. The hype about food forests comes from how effective they are in tropical climates. But it isn't actually very efficient in temperate climates. Temperate climates do need to rely heavily on annual crops. Those crops can be grown using permaculture, we don't have to trade our potatoes for chestnuts.
Don’t we already know how to do this? For example, the concept of companion planting — growing plants which behave symbiotically together — is a centuries old idea. The issue is whether we have an economic incentive to.
I am not an agronomist, but my instinct is that companion planting interferes with large-scale farming, where machines or poorly paid humans in a hurry need to easy access to a single crop to harvest, and often destroy the field as they work. I'd like to think if the yields were worth it we'd have worked around that, but possibly robotic harvesters can take us there.
> companion planting interferes with large-scale farming, where machines or poorly paid humans in a hurry need to easy access to a single crop to harvest
The current world population of 7.7 billion is projected to grow to at least 10 billion, before it might turn and start decreasing. The availability of human labor is one thing there should be no shortage of in the future.
And that is the crux of the entire question. You get what you incentivize. Current US Farming practices are extremely incentivized towards singular homogenous products using an absolute minimum of human labor.
Eh, grains are never the problem. Essentially none of the problems you hear about in agriculture apply to grains.
We can produce just staggering amounts of grain on a per-acre basis, and we can ship them without refrigeration and store them for long periods of time without any significant loss of nutritional value. The carbon, energy and monetary cost of shipping huge quantities of grain from the center of the US to the coasts where people live is negligible.
You don't have the complex social issues of migrant and immigrant labor with grain production; I mean, it wouldn't surprise me if there's some, but it's definitely not a necessary component the way it is in current vegetable production and in meat processing.
There's some potential problems in water usage in some places grains are produced, you can have some good conversations about fertilizer and pesticide production, and about soil maintenance, and we continually want to be working to improve the resiliency and productivity of the crop varieties, but grains are in pretty good shape and there's a clear road map for future work, with lots of incremental progress being made every day.
Produce and meat production is where the big gains are to be had, for the environment, food security, and improving the conditions of working people. Just bank on having half our calories coming from massive grain farms located at great distance from the population centers and try to figure out how to fix the rest, and then maybe it will be time to revisit grains.
Yeah, but aren’t you worried you’re going to really eat crow when you find out that the industrial features of grains are decisively harmful for the environment?
Like obviously meat production is too. But did you consider that wiping out insects might have as much to do with grain pesticides as produce pesticides?
It would be smarter if you just said the truth, which is “It’s hard to tell if the economic costs of grain production (like environmental damage) line up with the accounting costs (what shows up in a price per metric ton), because our framework for accounting for environmental damage has basically never slowed down production in a single market before lower prices has.”
Really, even nuclear power plants still make money right? Name one market where accounting for environmental damage reduces supply before a decline in prices did.
It should be obvious that what I’m saying isn’t an oxymoron. Organic produce is supposed to “account” for environmental costs, and it’s oftentimes more profitable to make. So the same land will be induced into making whatever is most profitable per acre. Obviously the problem is that people are incentivized to make the accounting costs of environmental impact as small as possible, even when selling organic produce. And that’s the problem.
There is always room for improvement, but there are clear paths to improving grain production
and reducing the environmental that are not particularly revolutionary and are actively being developed and implemented. We don't need a Next Big Idea for grain production, there's like 20 Next Little Ideas already in the pipeline.
Isn't that exactly what we're doing, though? The essence of cheap junk calories is grain (flour), soybean oil (another plant with similar growing needs), sugar (largely from grain in the US - high fructose corn syrup - but sugarcane is also easy to grow at scale), and meat from grain-fed chickens and cows.
All this stuff is shipped to factories, where it is broken down into refined materials for other factories, that make the junk food - burgers, sliced bread, candy bars, whatever - that are sealed or frozen for portability and shelf stability.
This is how we've doubled the population of the planet in 50 years, while bringing per-capita food cost to the lowest point in human history.
Well, yeah. I'm just saying we should keep doing it.
People whine about high fructose corn syrup, but it's not like it's a plot or something; people really like sweet things, and HFCS is a really efficient way to produce sweet stuff. If you restricted the sale of sweet stuff to help combat obesity, it might have an impact on the corn market, but corn would still be an amazing, important, huge part of out food supply.
On the other hand, consider grain-fed chickens. Factory farmed chicken is fantastic from an environmental and a dietary standpoint, it is extremely space efficient; even when the land used to grow the grains is considered, it is still competitive with plant sources of protein, and it's a lean, versatile meat. It's even a major source of organic fertilizer.
Meanwhile, it's pretty bad from an animal welfare perspective, and it is just awful from a labor standpoint. Meat processing at scale is one of the greatest cesspools of human misery in the US, and has been for over a century. A huge number of people make a pittance of a wage doing unpleasant, dangerous, body-breaking work, and it is a big consumer of illegal immigration as a source of cheap, exploitable labor.
Fixing meat processing, through technology, regulation or labor organization, would be HUGE.
> HFCS is a really efficient way to produce sweet stuff.
Nowhere near as efficient as sugarcane. HFCS would not be produced, sold or consumed at anything approaching current levels without tariffs preventing the import of sugarcane.
I would also argue that concerns over crops taking up too much land are somewhat misplaced until we reach a point where we at risk of not having enough farmland to feed the population. When we reach that point, only food that can be grown in ultra-dense (calories per acre) ways will be affordable, and other foods will be luxuries with a high premium.
Until then we are enjoying our relative luxury of plentiful land, and can enjoy luxury crops and meat for cheap.
Although this harms the environment, nobody starves to death because of this current practice- all those who currently starve to death do so because of distribution problems /abject poverty.
To clarify: you suggest we could grow more food using fewer resources if we used the centuries-old idea of companion planting? That sounds highly unlikely. The problems we know companion planting could solve (=pests) are solved way more effectively in modern monoculture.
What would make people eat less beef? Since taxes seem a hard sell, would subsidizing chicken + non-meat protein help? As a vegetarian I'm trying to get my head around what would help change the behaviour of the meat eating HN members.
A lower subsidy on corn would significantly raise beef prices relative to chicken, without being a tax. That's difficult in the US for systemic political reasons, but not necessarily a tax issue.
Longer term, lab grown protean is likely to be a net win.
I farm outside of the US, so maybe I have misunderstood something, but did the 2014 farm bill not eliminate those subsidies that people used to talk about with respect to corn? As I understand it, since 2014, the system was brought in line with the system we use in my country. There is crop insurance available to corn farmers, where the government pays a portion (65%, if I recall correctly?) of the cost, but that is not limited to corn and not really an incentive to grow corn in particular. I would not be at all surprised if corn takes the largest share of claims simply due to how much of it is grown.
But it would be seen as a "tax" to the corn producers, beef eaters, sugar water drinkers, car owners, and probably a load of other groups who benefit from the artificially cheap price.
Well sure, but there are a lot of lobbying groups relying on the subsidies. Beef, pork, ethanol, corn syrup, international food exporters.
If a congressperson raises the price of the commodity they all rely on, they will piss of a LOT of money, and probably not raise enough next election cycle, and lose their seat.
What will it take to convince vegetarians that a meat-based diet is actually the healthiest way to eat, and that meat can be raised in humane, environmentally-friendly ways?
:-)
Edit: This a serious question. Down voting is hardly a productive form of dialog.
Disprove the studies that show red meat increases cancer risk. Figure out how to get a cow's feed conversion efficiency below 2. Make the meat industry default humane instead of default The Jungle. Reverse global deforestation for grazing cattle, and switch to bison where appropriate in North America.
If I have to spend weeks of effort to identify a quality supplier, pay ten times market rate, and do all my own butchering it's just not worth it.
Red meat may increase cancer risk. Cured meat does increases cancer risk.
Carcinogenicity of consumption of red and processed meat
> On the basis of the large amount of data and the consistent associations of colorectal cancer with consumption of processed meat across studies in different populations, which make chance, bias, and confounding unlikely as explanations, the majority of the Working Group concluded that there is sufficient evidence in human beings for the carcinogenicity of the consumption of processed meat. Chance, bias, and confounding could not be ruled out with the same degree of confidence for the data on red meat consumption, since no clear association was seen in several of the high quality studies and residual confounding from other diet and lifestyle risk is difficult to exclude. The Working Group concluded that there is limited evidence in human beings for the carcinogenicity of the consumption of red meat.
Bouvard, V., Loomis, D., Guyton, K.Z., Grosse, Y., El Ghissassi, F., Benbrahim-Tallaa, L., Guha, N., Mattock, H. and Straif, K., 2015. Carcinogenicity of consumption of red and processed meat. The Lancet Oncology, 16(16), pp.1599-1600.
Have you read about the deforestation from palm oil, canola oil, and coconuts that feed vegans? It's not clear to me eating meat in the USA, especially local meat where I am in New England, is comparatively worse.
(Ironically I'm "deforesting" a former field of small pines to restore it to sheep grazing this year. But I do not think this ecologically destructive: ultimately it would be building soil.)
I have. I do my damndest to avoid palm oil & friends.
There's definitely local meat that's fine for the planet. As far as I'm aware, the trouble is the bulk of the market, the high-volume bottom-dollar part of the market. The industrial beef grown on soy & corn. It's the McDonalds patty, not the quarter buck in the freezer at grandma's.
As for your sheep field, pasture is not really the most carbon-rich soil. But, maybe it's not much worse than pine forest. The best are wetlands, bogs, & frequent fire areas.
Depending on their definition of humane, nothing. To some vegetarians, they don't really care about what the healthiest way to eat is if it comes at the cost of killing animals. So the argument of "oh well it's the healthiest way" doesn't even effect the argument.
I'm sure we could produce more meat, raised in more sustainable ways, but that would involve people taking a major decrease in the amount of meat they eat. Modern levels of meat intake are at their highest levels in history. We can easily afford to lower are intake.
I'm also not a vegetarian, just know quite a few and have been around when the arguments come up.
I've been a vegetarian (and vegan). Now I considered myself a reducetarian.
There are 3 motivations why people follow such a diet or lifestyle: environment, animal welfare, and health. It is important to realise the interests of these motivations aren't always aligned.
As an example, consider the difference of impact with regards to eating less cow or eating less chicken. If we'd eat less cow, the Co2 footprint would be lower compared to chicken due to required more land and more methane gas from cows however it'd be good for animal welfare since less cows suffer since one cow provides far more meat than a chicken. Conversely, the bio industry's chicken farm's are very efficient regarding space and size however many more animals per human meal are required so more chicken suffer.
Another example I like is rennet and gelatine. Gelatine is by-product. Not one animal less is going to get killed because you eat a gelatine pudding because there's an excess of gelatine. So avoiding gelatine in order to increase animal welfare is inefficient. Rennet, per whole cheese, very little is required from the stomach of the (male) calve, and males are pretty much useless anyway since you need females for the milk. If you eat cheese with rennet regularly then a very low amount of calves die due to that. However technically, it isn't vegan nor is it vegetarian.
And not all meats/animals are the same. I myself eat meat, but do not eat mammals. I am looking forward to the widespread availability of safe, delicious, lab-grown meats.
> the healthiest way to eat
I suspect that, for most people, the best plant-based diet is equal to the best omnivorous diet in terms of nutrition. Admittedly, it can take more effort to get your protein.
> meat can be raised in humane ways
"Humane" is a vague word. Some will tell you that slaughtering an animal at all in not humane.
> can be raised in environmentally-friendly ways
This would be really hard for many animals. Show me a carbon-neutral cow.
The ones that live in tiny spaces and eat corn have high carbon footprints because of all the farming that has to happen to feed them and all the land that is prevented from being forest to serve that need.
We don't spend nearly as much energy feeding the free-range ones, but the land-footprint needed to serve them is even greater.
Any purely grass fed cow should be close, no? They're part of the normal carbon cycle, and that carbon is pulled back in when the grass regrows. The problem is when you bring sequestered carbon (fossil fuels) into the mix.
> We don't spend nearly as much energy feeding the free-range ones, but the land-footprint needed to serve them is even greater.
That land likely can't be used for anything else, only a small % of land can be used for growing crops.
> The ones that live in tiny spaces and eat corn have high carbon footprints because of all the farming that has to happen to feed them and all the land that is prevented from being forest to serve that need.
Only about 10-15% of US cattle heads are on feedlots at any given time. The food at feedlots doesn't always compete with human edible food, and only represents about 10% of their lifetime food.
Free range cattle are only really a thing in land that isn't good for plant farming, usually because it's too arid. Cattle open up massive amounts of otherwise-unfarmable land to agriculture.
The number of cattle in the US has been steady for decades now (suggesting something of a drop in intake). For purely grass-fed cattle, they're carbon-neutral at this point, because the life of methane in the atmosphere is about 9 years, as opposed to CO2, which is 100 years.
Corn-feeding is really the only carbon footprint problem associated with beef.
Nutritional value, "healthiest way to eat", matters to very few people. Most people eat food that is actively bad for them. People eat what's available to them. That means that they can get their hands on it, and can afford it.
Last night, I found a gorgeous piece of sea bass from the Falklands - $18 for 5oz. Pan fried it and split it with my spouse. Why? Because it's available and I can afford it.
Doing it and proving it. Show me the meat (natural or artificial). Show me the ecological budget -- inputs and outputs. Solve the replication crisis in food science. Show me that the proposed diet is sustainable, i.e., that people can actually bring themselves to eat that way on a continual basis.
Disclosure: I'm not a vegetarian, but I eat relatively little meat.
Some strong scientific studies indicating such would be a good place to start :-)
On the other hand:
(1) "meat-based diet is actually the healthiest way to eat"
Position of the American Dietetic Association: vegetarian diets, (2009): "It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes."
Health effects of vegan diets, Craig, W., The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, (2009) From the summary: “Vegans are thinner, have lower serum cholesterol and blood pressure, and enjoy a lower risk of CVD. BMD and the risk of bone fracture may be a concern when there is an inadequate intake of calcium and vitamin D. Where available, calcium- and vitamin D–fortified foods should be regularly consumed. … Vegans generally have an adequate iron intake and do not experience anemia more frequently than others. Typically, vegans can avoid nutritional problems if appropriate food choices are made. Their health status appears to be at least as good as other vegetarians, such as lactoovovegetarians.”
(2) meat can be raised in humane, environmentally-friendly ways
Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers. Poore J. and Nemecek T. Science, (2018). Example conclusion: meat and dairy provide 18% of calories and 37% of protein, but uses 83% of farmland and produces 60% of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Analysis and valuation of the health and climate change cobenefits of dietary change. Springmann M. et al. PNAS (2016)
“The food system is responsible for more than a quarter of all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, of which up to 80% are associated with livestock production. Reductions in meat consumption and other dietary changes would ease pressure on land use and reduce GHG emissions. Transitioning toward more plant-based diets that are in line with standard dietary guidelines could reduce global mortality by 6–10% and food-related greenhouse gas emissions by 29–70% compared with a reference scenario in 2050.”
And well, I'm not sure if humane slaughter matters to conscious animals. I certainly wouldn't appreciate if someone humanely slaughtered me. And as for the consciousness aspect: The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness 2012. A group of prominent neuroscientists created The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, in which they state their support for the idea that animals are conscious and aware in a similar way as humans. “The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”
You may be getting downvoted because your assertions are based on opinion, not fact. Many people don't want to take the time and effort to change a single stranger's opinion. cjrd is an exception and I'll point to their comment.
The cows eat grass and live in harmony with their environment.
• Humane treatment: If you think killing an animal is inhumane, full stop, then sure, from that perspective, it is always inhumane to eat animals. I respect if you have that belief and are a vegetarian as a result.
But it's not a belief I hold.
Everything that lives is going to die; that's the game. The best we can hope for is to live well and to die well. We can give this to the animals we eat.
(I sometimes think of it like this: If all of Earth were some sort of human farm for aliens, would I want them to go vegetarian, replacing humans with vast fields of grain and synthetic labs growing human-like meat? No, I would not. I'd rather be a farm animal than not exist at all.)
• Demonstrate it works: Well, so far so good for me! I've tried eating vegan, vegetarian, the standard "well-balanced diet" (veggies, fruits, rice, potatoes, a little meat, a little fish), low-carb (veggies, meat), and now, pretty much just meat, with a little of fruit now and then. So far, the meat diet is _by far_ the most amazing for me.
I don't get sleepy after I eat, my stomach feels great, I'm getting stronger and leaner, and I'm still just as excited to eat a piece of meat as I was two months ago. We'll see how it works out with time!
I came to this way of eating because I was experiencing (1) frequent stomach aches (2) tiredness after eating (3) slowly but ever-increasing fatness. So I did a bunch of Googling around and looked at a bunch of accounts on twitter. The stuff I found the most compelling ended up being:
Actual scientific data proving something that's actually scientifically untrue. Every nutritionist suddenly bribed by a the meat lobby to throw out years of data to the contrary. Proof that the animals being made into food are entirely incapable of thought or physical feeling. That would probably cover everyone.
OP asked what it would take to convince all vegetarians that a meat based diet is healthiest, and that animals can be raised humanely with low environmental impact. Just because you can't digest the straw man you threw together, doesn't make a "meat based" diet a thing these people are going to be convinced to move to.
Let's ignore the health. That's a minefield of BS pseudo-science and people claiming their "body hack" would work for the world at large, and I'm not even going to get there. (personally- meat is fine, plants are great, most people probably eat too many carbs and fats and don't exercise enough. Organic is because all food is organic material and the name is just a marketing for a style of farming).
How would you convince a vegan that meat is the best choice? Answer: prove that animals can't think or feel. Otherwise, someone will say that there's a moral wrong being committed. It doesn't matter if you agree with that or not (FWIW: I have a butcher's chart of a pig tattoo'd on my arm, so my stance is literally worn on my sleeve here), we're talking about convincing someone else.
You might be able to convince 80% with "but evolution!!1!" type arguments, but when you get to a moral vegetarian, they don't think killing animals is morally correct, and that's the 20% you're never convincing. OP put up a dumb hypothetical "how do you", my answer is "you can't because reasons".
Continuing to improve artificial meat (e.g. Impossible Burgers) to get to the point where it's better than the real thing. You don't change people's minds by taking things away from them. You give them a better substitute.
>Continuing to improve artificial meat (e.g. Impossible Burgers) to get to the point where it's better than the real thing.
It already is better than much of the fast-food/cafeteria grade meat people use. Taco Bell's taco meat, for example, was mostly soy protein with other fillers and additives as it is. Swapping it out for lab-meat would actually make it more meaty. The barrier right now is cost, not quality.
You don't need to 100% replace everything. You can have a situation where people eat real meat on special occasions or offered as gifts, but rely on cheaper fake stuff for their everyday meals.
But part of it is also just food-culture. Eating meat used to be a status symbol so once meat got cheap enough to be a staple people insist on having it with every meal. Consequently they've forgotten how to eat and enjoy mostly plant based diets. India, though, has plenty of great and satisfying vegetarian dishes as part of its food culture because meals without meat aren't believed to be any kind of special niche.
Artificial food will always lack the bio-availabilities of real food our bodies evolved to process. For example, vitamin C artificially synthesized from glucose is more difficult to assimilate by the guts than "natural" vitamin C, especially when consumed with carbs.
It's a simple compound, comprising just 20 atoms: six carbon, six oxygen and eight hydrogen. It's related to glucose (and manufactured commercially from it). Also, it's water soluble, and I don't believe that there's an associated carrier.
That sounds surprising. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3847730/ suggests that there is no difference in bioabsorption in humans between synthetic and natural vitamin C, particularly in the cases where you're not taking straight vitamin C (i.e., supplemental vitamin C tablets).
Ruminant animals have an important place in Agriculture. They add nutrients back to the soil, and can be raised in land unfit for growing crops. For example, in the UK only 36% of agricultural land is croppable. The rest of the land is perfect for raising cattle and other ruminants.
In the USA, 44% of land is for agriculture, but only 17% is arable, 27% serves as pasture land.
Only around 10% of a cow's lifetime feed comes from grain, and very little of what they are fed is human consumable. Think leftovers from corn (stalks, etc), leftovers from brewing (malt, oats, all that kind of stuff).
Beef is also very nutrient dense, and provides a large % of bioavailable nutrients and amino acids per gram.
As one particularly loud farmer I'm familiar with is fond of saying, there are certain foods that should only be eaten if you have a gizzard.
Gizzards can't process all of the things a ruminant can, but there's some overlap.
The thing is chickens aren't vegetarians. They're omnivores. We'd be better off if we processed the leftovers through invertibrates (worms, soldier flies) and then fed the invertibrates to the chickens. Same for pigs. And both pathways would still be more efficient than cows.
Eating meat is way easier than eating balanced vegetarian imho. I've cut down on my meat lately and it does require more time and involvement to eat vegetarian. E.g. an easy dinner is bbq a steak and chuck out some salad, done. Our entire society is based on convenience of eating meat, to get the same from a vegetarian diet is a lot harder to learn, you really have to want to. I still eat fish and eggs for this reason, I'm not really sure how to go full vegetarian, I know its possible but its another level of work for me. There's probably a bit of FUD thrown around by the meat industry that you need protein and iron from red meat as well.
It is not that difficult, just a matter of taste/preferences. There are 10s of veggies which you can cook in all combinations and with spices. Add bread, rice and you'll have dozens of dishes with all nutrients.
> There are 10s of veggies which you can cook in all combinations and with spices. Add bread, rice and you'll have dozens of dishes with all nutrients.
I don't think thats true - I've known a number of strict vegetarians (vegans?) and they've often problems with low B12 and iron. Eggs/fish a bit of chicken and a bit of meat make it way easier, but the amount required is way less than the amount of meat most people eat. As in many things the answers in the middle imho.
Convince people that ground beef (and chicken for that matter) that's made up partially of plants (probably soy) is more upscale than just ground beef.
People have been socially/culturally conditioned to think that meat that's not all meat is inferior (because it often is/was). If you can get over the culture/perception hurdle most people won't really care that ground beef is only beef so long as their taco or McDouble tastes the way they want. The health angle is probably the best way to go about doing this.
Before adopting this approach, please be aware that chicken has substantially higher animal welfare costs than beef -- likely by orders of magnitude. This makes the calculus more complex, such that if you're sympathetic to animal welfare you may very well reverse the recommendation[0]. The safest recommendations are plant-based alternatives (e.g. Beyond Burger) or fueling cell-based meat research.
A good book on how various animals are treated is Compassion by the Pound[1], authored by agricultural economists. The short of it is that chickens bred for meat are treated very poorly throughout their lives, whereas beef cows are treated reasonably well (with the possible exception of slaughter). Not only that, but you also have to raise far more chickens per pound of meat compared to cows as they're so much smaller, amplifying the effect. It's a far more extreme difference compared than the environmental impact differences.
They are, but while intelligence does likely have a correlation with capacity for suffering, it isn't the same thing. For example, a human infant is much less intelligent than an adult, but we do not typically believe their capacity for suffering is lower than an adult.
Cross-species capacity for suffering is still under heavy research, but the general consensus is that birds (including chickens) have a comparable capacity of suffering to mammals. This is considered likely true or at least plausibly true for fish as well, though their brains are sufficiently different from mammals and birds that there's still more research going on to understand it more. Animals that likely have no capacity for suffering are bivalves, for example.
It'll take a lot more research to figure out the concrete answer for those in between (e.g. insects, where the latest I've heard is that the most they can suffer is similar to an annoyance or mild pain from a human perspective).
I suppose I care less about the suffering of less intelligent animals than I do about more intelligent ones. All else being equal, I’d like chickens to be raised better, to the point where I pay a lot extra for it (though this is partly pure selfishness, I think chickens who’ve gotten a lot of exercise taste much better), and I think that sadism against chickens is still sadistic and evil, but even if they can suffer, I’m not going to put them on the same level as eg a suffering whale.
And babies past a few months of age are pretty remarkably intelligent, albeit still a bit uncalibrated.
It is plausible chickens have less moral weight than whales. But it's not exactly because of intelligence -- it's their capacity to suffer. I know intelligence is very tempting to use because it's a very good proxy in the extreme cases (e.g. a sponge vs. a human), so it's usually our first intuition.
But if you probe into it, I believe you'll find it's an artificial distinction that rather quickly falls apart. If your moral values ascribe negative value to the suffering of, say, both a human and a dog, then the only consistent viewpoint is to ascribe negative value to any suffering of a materially similar quality -- i.e. what matters on a moral level is the capacity of suffering for the species or individual.
There's a few uncomfortable thought experiments you can think through on this topic. E.g. you can imagine genetically engineering a human as dumb as a chicken, or perhaps a traumatic brain injury causing that, but with their mental capacity for suffering just as intact as yours or mine. Would their suffering count for less? Why would it?
As for chicken vs. whale, it may be the case that a chicken suffers less than a whale. More primitive intelligence may imply more primitive suffering. But what if it doesn't for this case? How confident can you be it does imply that, given both how chickens react to pain and stress and the neurological research that's been done on them? And even if it less, by how much? A factor of two, ten, forty, a thousand?
Those questions may seem too philosophical, but they can't be ignored in the face of a recommendation to eat 40 extremely-poorly-raised chickens per year instead of 1 reasonably-well-raised cow. And given all we know of animal cognition, it's reasonably to assume chickens have a lower capacity to suffer (and also to assume it's the same -- there's still uncertainty), but not so much lower that that calculus is anywhere close to being worthwhile.
Yes, but most meat chickens and egg chickens live out their lives in cages, without enough space to turn around with their beaks mutilated. Most cattle live the enormous majority of their lives in a kind of cattle paradise in comparison, with ever present adequate food, no predators and some modicum of medical care.
As a vegetarian that actually doesn't like many vegetables (I don't like bell peppers, for example, which severely limits my options) and who was a huge carnivore before going veggie ( and with more than one hunter in the family): I see two groups of meat eaters.
Group A, who just like the taste and texture of meat. For them, a variety of substitutes that adequately matched would suffice. As of today, we have many fake meats that do a good job of matching the taste/texture of HEAVILY PROCESSED meats (e.g. turkey loaf), but not matching more straightforward meats. Likely vat-grown meat will be the only reasonably quick way to match both demands for the general population. Outside of that as more research is done into faux meats to match tastes and textures we will presumably get there, and as meat alternatives become more popular there is a feedback loop where research gets more widespread and has a better ROI, so maybe it's not so far off, but I personally wouldn't bet on it. Expense is a big deal to this group, as they basically want to be content (food-wise) with minimal effort, so meat alternatives that are familiar and not expensive is not a difficult transition, particularly if meat becomes more expensive. Making it low-effort to know what you are getting also helps. Currently meat alternatives are completely separate from meats in the store, and the delivery very different. (a box of burgers or a bag of crumble, for example, vs the pile of ground beef).
Group B, who are invested into the particulars of meat. These are the ones who will debate for hours the precise way to grill the perfect steak. Like with audiophiles who complain of qualities I can't hear, I have to assume they aren't delusional, but it doesn't really matter for the purpose of your question. This group is unlikely to be satisfied by vat-grown meat, outside of random luck. I don't see this group changing within their lifetimes, though they can be swayed to alter portion sizes. Honestly, the best way to REDUCE meat consumption is to avoid angering this group - they can take meat becoming a bit more expensive and more of a luxury without a fuss, but if it looks like meat were to be banned or too expensive they would react with all the furor you can expect from someone losing something they are passionate about. And their message would resonate with Group A, because Group A is just looking to be content like they currently are, so change represents risk, not benefit. This means the goals of REDUCING meat consumption and REMOVING meat consumption are at odds with one another.
If you have ethical motivations, none of the above is fast and vat-grown meat research has its own ethical questions, but I don't see a realistic fast alternative that doesn't involve mass suffering (to more than humans) due to uncontrolled events.
Making convincing lab-grown A5 wagyu will help a lot with both groups, I'm guessing, assuming it can be done for less than the real thing.
In fact, I'd probably start there, since it's probably the first type of meat that could be made cheaper than the real thing, and it's a total luxury good that most people never get to experience, so it's not really competing with the real thing in most peoples' minds. Similar to the Tesla business model, start with the high margin stuff and move down as you ramp up volume and start getting efficiencies of scale and more R&D.
>“We could imagine a significant shift from beef to chicken, and that by itself goes a long way.” (Poultry production has about one-eighth the climate impact of beef production.)
I think the possible benefits of this approach might be exaggerated. The uniquely "large" environmental impact of beef cattle results from methane emissions, but methane is not the big challenge; land use is. While methane is a potent greenhouse gas, it also has a shorter atmospheric lifetime than CO2/N2O, which, to me, suggests that it should be addressed after the other gases; the impact of a reduction in methane emissions will be felt quickly, and the risk of methane accumulation is lower.
Land use -- with 40% of the world's land devoted to agriculture -- is much more of a problem and I see less indication that it will be addressed by changing the relevant animal. A little, sure, but a lot of the land currently used for pasturing cattle isn't appropriate for chickens anyway, and I'm not convinced that it takes 8x as much land to raise a pound of beef vs. chicken.
Lab-grown meat is/will be a huge net win for the environment and hopefully our wallets, and I think it will be the final compromise on this front, at least for the next few hundred years. A few decades of lead time doesn't bother me for reasons discussed above.
On another front, the densest sources of plant protein after soy are hempseed, lentils and pumpkin seeds. These rarely make it into our diets, though. You need more than mere tax incentives -- the strong flavors of those seeds need to be managed somehow. I made a "curry" with a hemp-milk base once. The only thing that corrected the smell was a lot of Worcestershire sauce. Ironically, it's vegetarians who won't eat fermented anchovies.
I'm not interested in eating less meat so we can grow the population more. It's not a cost issue. Why do we want a population size that requires people to cut back on quality of life?
Plenty has been written on "the population question". Your intuitions don't agree with my understanding of the state of the art.
Many environmentalists say that even the current world population can't afford Western middle-class quality of life.
Efforts to limit population growth are already in place but it's mostly occurring in parts of the world too poor to do anything about it. We don't "want" higher population but short of some kind of massive neo-colonial invasion there's no way to stop it.
>Many environmentalists say that even the current world population can't afford Western middle-class quality of life.
What makes you think we (we as in those of us who see reduction as a focus on environmentalism) disagree with this? We are, indeed, already too many, meaning that we should reduce further, and further, and not just be content with our current numbers, and certainly not allow those numbers to keep growing.
The city I was born in, Montpellier, grew from 100k inhabitants in 1960 to 270k in 2018. It turned from beautiful Haussmann style architecture surrounded by crops of vines and wild countryside land to a nightmare of concrete towers, oppressive modern architecture ( https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/Pierres_... can you look at this and not feel overly disgusted?), overgrowth of suburbs around it to the point where we need to travel much further to see any wildland and a homeless problem ala san francisco that keeps getting worse and worse as we fail to build as much as necessary to fulfill the need of our constant growth and and rents and property costs keep growing beyond more and more out of reach of the average french man living there.
It is not just about CO2 emissions like what people on the left side focus on so much. It is about quality of life itself. Or lack thereof induced by letting things go on like this.
You are right, current numbers are horrendous and more than the earth could withstand if everyone had western middle class style economy, as even western countries have too much population. It isn't solely poor countries that should reduce their numbers. Encouraging people to sterilize in France would be a great thing too.
>>Why do we want a population size that requires people to cut back on quality of life?
If you can show me how eating meat directly correlates to a better quality of life, I'll be gobsmacked.
You may enjoy eating meat, but that doesn't mean it's making your life better/easier. Besides the nutritional side (which is complex, but let's just agree that you can make cases both for or against eating animal flesh as helping your diet and wellness) the agriculture industry is responsible for approximately 9% of US carbon emissions and livestock account for about 3% all by themselves[1]. Changing that could possibly affect your quality of life (assuming you aren't planning on dying in the next 10-20 years before the impact of that starts mattering).
Overall, eating meat is at best likely a net-neutral on your quality of life, even including how much you love eating a burger.
I think you may not be valuing beef appropriately for people who really love burgers or good steak. And there happen to be a lot of those. It's hard to appropriately value things like that if you don't appreciate them yourself.
But sure, maybe that's not in their long term best interest. And unfortunately, humans are, on average, very bad at optimizing for their long term best interest vs. short term.
It's a selfish attitude, but certainly a more realistic one for most people. Look at it this way: You enjoy eating meat, and aren't interested in giving that up for the benefit of others just like others aren't willing to give up their desire to have children for your benefit.
eating beef being higher quality of life may be less real and more perceived (because of habit and freedom), given that there are several similar substitutes.
Would you eat more chicken instead of beef though? Is there a certain meat you couldn't do without and if so why? I'm not against anyone eating meat (although as an ethical - and hypocritical milk drinking vegetarian - I'd like to see animal suffering reduced) just interested in what meat eaters love about meat.
I don't see stacking as many people as possible on Earth as a worthy goal and therefore I am not interested in changing my behavior for the purpose of achieving it.
Your animal suffering point has merit. But what the article is talking about is simply growing enough food to feed more people, so that's what I am addressing. However, I think that this is just another symptom of the same thing. Factory farming is only necessary if we need to feed multiple billions.
I agree that we should stop over population, but that involves developing and enriching countries to lower the birth rate. As countries get richer they eat more meat, so the problem may still remain even if the population does decline.
Chicken and beef have significantly different tastes, textures, and preparation options. They're substitute goods in the same was as a bicycle and a scooter; they provide the same kind of utility, but one may be preferred over the other for reasons that are hard to enumerate and don't really address the utility.
Just about every segment of food production is heavily subsidized at this point. We're VERY good at producing a tons of food, and we're also very good at transportation at this point, so the only way to keep those people in business is to buy up tons of milk and pour it down the drain or make excess crops into fertilizers to influence price.
If enough of the global beef supply were tainted by a human-communicable disease, people might shy away from it. Could the plot of some eco-terrorist film, preferably starring Nicolas Cage. Working title: "The Meating"
I think that it would help if more vegetarian advocates focused on finding ways that non-meat diets can fit with people's lifestyles and preferences. For example, I don't like the taste of many vegan dishes and (back when I was more series about working out) I was looking for a high protein, high calorie diet. When I looked into veganism, a lot of the resources came across as dismissive of my goals or felt like they came from a perspective of "we're morally right so we don't have to find a way to work with people's preferences".
I'm not trying to say that's what the people giving advice actually thought; I'm just saying that's how I felt that it came across sometimes.
Totally understand your point, and the veg lifestyle is becoming much more mainstream in athletics. e.g. check out Nimai Delgado's (IFBB bodybuilder) instagram posts on simple, high protein, high calorie foods for bodybuilding: https://www.instagram.com/veganbodybuildingfood
The last two graphs show that 41% of the land in the contiguous 48 states is used for feeding livestock. More than 33% of the 48 states is just pasture, most of which I believe is used by cattle.
What would it take to shift protein consumption from beef (3% efficient) to products like poultry (21%) and eggs (31%)? [2]
I think we have to take a hard look at taxes, fees, and subsidies for land use and agricultural products, but there's not much political pressure to do so right now.
Land used for grazing livestock is often no good for growing crops.
> For example, US NRCS statistics indicate that about 59 percent of US non-federal pasture and unforested rangeland is unsuitable for cultivation, yet such land has value for grazing of livestock.
Oh yeah, I"m not suggesting that the pasture could be converted to cropland. I think we just aren't pricing in a bunch of externalities for beef production that would otherwise raise the price and shift consumption to poultry.
The fees to access that land are very low ($1.70/cow/month)[1]. Maybe those lands would have more ecological value if they weren't being grazed, so add a charge for the environmental burden. A tax on bovine methane emissions is also necessary.
Also I totally forgot about water usage as well. Most of the time it is much cheaper to use water than it should be, and cattle consume huge amounts of it.
It's not exactly surprising, is it? Besides efficiency, what would increase the price of a piece of food? (In the long run I assume supply would match demand so a mismatch there wouldn't be the cause.)
So I think the answer to your question about increasing efficiency is probably pretty difficult. There's already a huge profit motive to increase efficiency, so if a few labcoats could easily solve the problem I'm sure they would have by now. I think the answer is to eat animals who reach maturity faster (or just grow more per unit time?). Like insects :-)
>What would it take to make beef production more efficient?
Nothing. Large animals that live long lives are inefficient by their very nature. The bigger an animal is, the more of its energy consumption goes to maintenance rather than growth. And the longer it lives before reaching slaughter weight, the more that inefficiency compounds. If you somehow turned cattle into 5 pound animals that mature in 6 weeks, they would be efficient, but they also wouldn't really qualify as cattle any more and their meat would likely be noticeably different than beef.
I think this is what it has to eventually be. We all have a garden in our garage. We save tons on transportation costs throughout the chain. It has to be near zero work. People used to all have gardens in their backyard but stopped when they could afford the cheap produce at the store.
The missing context is that people did that out of necessity. Hundred years ago 56% of Americans were rather poor. Most non-city people had outhouses in the 1940s. America’s rise to wealth has been long and hard fought. Wealth didn’t just land into our laps.
The average American family had an annual income of ~$3000 (in today’s dollars), So, yeah, poor.
The average US family had an annual income of $956 in 1940. That is $17,268.43 in todays dollars, far more than $3k. And that was almost entirely earned by a single individual rather than both adults in the household working like now. Also, someone earning that little paid no income tax. The average house price in 1940 was $2938, which is $53k in today's money. Now the average family income is $70k, but that's mostly two people's income, they only get to keep $60k because of income tax, and houses are $200k. So we earn about twice as much, but houses cost about 4 times as much. It isn't nearly as clear cut a win for modern life as you make it out to be.
It’s my fault. Hundred years ago refers to previous turn of century, circa 1900, then went to 1940 about indoor plumbing for toilets. We were poor, not much above Mexican or Finnish standards (better, but hardly by much). It was anascrnt industrislization as well as WWi and WWii that catapulted us into a powerhouse.
That doesn't actually change much. Average income in 1900 was $438, which is $13,186.15 in 2018 dollars. And 1900 was a low point historically more so than now is a high point. The worst of the gilded age exploitation was happening then, causing huge poverty.
> I think this is what it has to eventually be. We all have a garden in our garage.
No you won't, at least not with greens. Did you even try to do the math for the required amount of food a single person needs per-year ? Even if you go with rabbits, which are easy to raise, you can only self produce a small amount of meat per year, maybe ~150lb once you get to "scale".
It's almost certainly less efficient when you account for spoilage (namely all of the crazy seasonal work you need to do every year to keep all of your surplus from spoiling so you can eat it out of season). The market is pretty efficient, it turns out.
Isn't it partially true though ? at first true maybe but given some time they start a margin chase ending up in picking plants that will look good 1 month later on shelves even though they're not the best nutrition wise.
>The reason why food is grown by large industrial farming companies is because they can grow it ~100 times cheaper than you could.
No, it is because people don't want to grow food. My tomatoes cost me 2 minutes of time. I don't know how much you want to value my time at, but lets say I am pretty awesome and deserve $100/hour. That's $3.33 cents for all the tomatoes I can eat. Where are the industrial farming companies producing tomatoes for 3.3 cents per 100 pounds?
>If everyone had to grow their own food, then everyone would starve to death.
If that were true, we wouldn't exist. People did grow their own food for thousands of years. If everyone had to grow their own food, we'd be fine. All mechanization did was free up people from agricultural labor to do other jobs, humans predate tractors.
>The idea of locally grown food in everyone's backyard is a fairy tale that just sounds nice, but would actually be horrible.
It is a reality for lots of people, and we're pretty happy about it.
> If that were true, we wouldn't exist. People did grow their own food for thousands of years. If everyone had to grow their own food, we'd be fine. All mechanization did was free up people from agricultural labor to do other jobs, humans predate tractors.
This works when everyone owns many acres of land per person, and is spending their entire life working the fields, doing hard labor, and doing very little else with their life yes. We don't live in that world anymore, though.
I suspect there isn't even enough physical land on the earth to support this inefficient method of farming.
We have significant evidence of how this worked out for people. That world that you are describing, where everyone spent their entire life just trying to barely feed themselves, was a horrible place, for everyone.
This period of time was called "the history of the world before the industrial era". And lots and lots of people died. So no, they were not fine.
> It is a reality for lots of people, and we're pretty happy about it.
By "a lot" do you mean a very small percentage of the total population?
> My tomatoes cost me 2 minutes of time.
What you do with your tiny backyard garden is irrelevant. It is mathmatically impossible for you to be feeding yourself entirely on that, unless you have multiple acres of land, which I doubt is what you are describing. Your anecdote does not overrule physics.
Where is the energy for your garage garden coming from? Plants need a lot of light. Most buildings do not have nearly intense enough light (house plants are low light plants that grow slow so they do fine, but if you want to grow food you generally want a plant that needs a lot more light)
We save tons on transportation costs, but lose many orders of magnitude more on redundant labor and economies of scale (one tractor working in a big field is a lot more economical than 1200 humans working in 1200 gardens). Maybe technological advancements will change all of that--perhaps we could have fully robotic farms, but even then I would expect one big factory farm with a handful of big, expensive robots to outperform many gardens each with a small robot.
>(one tractor working in a big field is a lot more economical than 1200 humans working in 1200 gardens).
Sure. But 1200 humans working in 1200 gardens is also a lot more economical than 1200 humans sitting at home playing Fortnite all day because there are no jobs.
The idea of employment guarantees as welfare policy has been getting traction, and programs like this where raw output isn't the main goal would be good candidates.
> is also a lot more economical than 1200 humans sitting at home playing Fortnite all day because there are no jobs
No it is not. I personally care about people being able to do what they want with their free time.
The situation you describe is only "efficient" if you value everyone's free time and happiness at 0. I care about people's happiness, on the other hand.
The main goal of society should be to provide people with things that they want, and that includes leisure time.
On the contrary, I think it would be a great benefit to people if they could be more self reliant / not as dependent on state and corporations to survive. I prefer self reliance to more leisure time.
You might prefer that. But other people don't. If they did care about that, then they wouldnt be using that leisure time, they would be becoming more self reliant.
I personally want people to have a choice of what to do with their time, and not have values forced on them.
>No it is not. I personally care about people being able to do what they want with their free time.
Just tranq them all with a guaranteed supply of opiates then. Problem solved.
People's needs and wants are socially conditioned. It's not like their "wants" just sprang out of thin air. They were created by the culture and social expectations around them. And many of those social expectations make people feel obligated to feel useful.
That means they need to be provided with avenues where they can feel useful instead of doping themselves with addictions to fill the sense of purposeless anomie that they fall into when alienated from public life. Make work programs, like urban forestry or gardening, are good ways to do this as they beautify the spaces where we live and are unlikely to be done adequately without some societal coordination.
Basically efficiency isn't the chief concern. If you really have a bunch of people with nothing better to do with their time (e.g. Fortnite), then we don't really need to care about allocating labor as efficiently as possible to maximize yield.
We can use labor in a very inefficient (where yield is concerned) way if we think it will confer ecological, aesthetic, or sociological side-benefits, as would having lots of private gardens.
Fortnite is just an example of something people fall into doing when they don't have any other productive opportunities available to them.
I'm not sure whether you're taking issue with leisure time generally or the tendency for people to participate in leisure that you believe is inefficient, but both are orthogonal to the question of which type of agricultural system is more efficient.
In particular, if your solution is simply "spend less time on [your current] leisure activities!", it can be applied to either aggricultural system. In the case of specialized agriculture, it simply means spending more time on the individual's specialization or really anything with a greater opportunity value than growing one's own food (if your goal is to maximize earnings, it's tough to do worse than spending an hour per day growing your own food to save ~$5).
Somehow it doesn't seem likely to be less efficient when my food grows a few feet away from my dinner table. How much extra labor is involved in logistics (field to silo to warehouse to grocery to home)?
That said I think it's rather naive to assume that everyone in the world has a garage or other indoor space to spare, the resources to climate control it, etc. The world's hungry don't live in single family homes in California.
If it were cheaper, the market would very likely have sussed that out by now (unless you're proposing some recent game-changing technological advancement). In all likelihood, the cost of all of that extra labor is well under $100/week/family, and the time cost alone of managing a greenhouse (maintenance and repairs, cultivating the crops, preserving the food, managing the whole operation, etc) exceed that amount pretty handily (for most families).
There is a lot of innovation around high tech farming in places other than than the country side. With hydroponics, you can grow all sorts of stuff anywhere you can supply water, energy, and the right nutrients. People are growing herbs in underground abandoned subway stations, old industrial facilities, on roofs, deserts, etc. The reason is that it works really well and you can get great yields if you can micromanage the conditions in which plants grow.
Food production is fundamentally an energy problem; not a land problem. Using cheap electricity, you can desalinate water, pump nutrients around, generate light and control the temperature.
Eating meat is a problem given the vast resources needed to produce it. However, there's a lot of innovation in developing synthetic meats. Lab grown meat is becoming a thing. I'm talking about actual muscle tissue grown in labs. There are also many plant and mushroom based meat alternatives that are getting better and more popular. In short, we might eat a proper steak for nostalgic reasons once in a while in a few decades but we'll have plenty of alternative protein sources to supplement our diet with on a day to day basis. And making out-competing popular meat products like a big mac isn't exactly rocket science. The whole point of stuff like that is that it is industrialized low quality stuff. Most of the meat we're eat isn't exactly high quality stuff.
I'm guessing a lot more waste happens towards to consumer side. Producers for example sort out misshapen fruits and vegetables for use in manufacturing processes. Tomato sauce, jams, pre-chopped veggies. Scrap vegetable waste goes for animal feed. Scrap meat for pet food, etc. But when it gets to the grocery store or restaurant, the waste food is less likely to be used in this manner.
Great point. As a kid growing up in India, reading about recurring starvation / famine there, and in Africa, etc., I also read about some European countries dumping mountains of butter and other edibles into the sea, due to surpluses, and maybe to keep the price up.
I mean, I understand it is about economics, supply and demand, profits, etc., but still,
Instead of making the famous mountain of butter (beside a lake of milk) they now pay famers not to farm, which has its own oddities. Including discouraging of re-wilding I think, as the land has to be plausibly farm-able to get the cash.
This aside, it's worth knowing that developed countries typically throw away much less food than developing ones. Basically because Tesco is much better at logistics than a million guys trying to drive into Delhi. I don't have the link to hand but there was a nice comparison US vs Mexico on this somewhere.
>Instead of making the famous mountain of butter (beside a lake of milk) they now pay famers not to farm, which has its own oddities.
Crazy world we live in, where being (over-)efficient has to be subsidized. There may be a thing such as being too efficient for our own good. Also, the efficiency as measured, only relates to money / profits / maximizing use of resources in industrial (including food) production, and often does not take a holistic view, which should include sustainability of resources, quality of life (not just economic standard of living) and sustainability of the planet.
I had read E. F. Schumacher's book "Small is Beautiful" when a teenager, when I was more into these sorts of things (did organic vegetable gardening and dairy farming, used a biogas plant, etc.), before I got into the software field full-time. I still recommend his ideas and book about appropriate technology to interested people - the concepts and principles have not changed, though technologies have evolved, and a hybrid model may be needed:
>Including discouraging of re-wilding I think, as the land has to be plausibly farm-able to get the cash.
Yes, re-wilding is a good idea.
>This aside, it's worth knowing that developed countries typically throw away much less food than developing ones. Basically because Tesco is much better at logistics than a million guys trying to drive into Delhi. I don't have the link to hand but there was a nice comparison US vs Mexico on this somewhere.
Possibly. I do know that plenty of waste happens in India too. In fact, Schumacher's ideas are very much suited to and applicable to developing countries. IIRC he was influenced by Mahatma Gandhi some, and Gandhi also had done significant work in this area, in practice, not just talking about it, either - including hugely encouraging Indian people to do naturopathy, nature cure, small scale industry work like traditional means of spinning and weaving for khadi (a great hand-made Indian cotton textile), etc. We still have Khadi & Village Industries Emporiums here, where one can buy clothing made of khadi:
- The part of the world that consumes the most eats too much. A balanced diet would reduce greatly the food consumption.
- The part of the world that consumes the most wastes a huge quantity of the food it produces.
- Human don't need to eat meat to be healthy and we are past the need for hunting for survival. We can even produce non animal b12 supplements if we ever need to. Since most food are grown to be fed to cattle, if we stop eating meat, we suddently multiply our food flow by a huge amount while diminushing the water consumption, pollution, and a lot of public health issues.
Food is not a production problem anymore. It's a social and political one.
Luckily we have already solved this problem, we just need to distribute the solution to the developing world. Better crops and machinery result in much higher yields. If you are a small farmer and you are using livestock for labor something like 40% of your land has to be devoted to growing food for the animals to do the work. We must continue to innovate for that is the only way that everyone can win.
I recently conducted a report and presentation about reducetarianism (though in my own language).
There are 3 main reasons why people go vegetarian, vegan, or reducetarian (the former 2 are a subset of reducetarianism): environment, animal welfare, and health.
Re: "Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?". My conclusion to based on the research I performed is:
Yeah, we can, and not only that we can also reduce the Co2 footprint by avoiding eating cattle. Alternatives which are size efficient are chicken and insects (such as grasshoppers and mealworms). However, chicken have a CNS, and if you grow more chicken, more chicken suffer, so this is a pro environment yet anti animal welfare argument.
What is going to be good for the environment is using solar energy, using electric cars (to go to the grocery store). Because the transport from (very efficient, huge) transport ships has less impact on environment than you going to/from grocery store by (conventional) car.
What is going to be good for animal welfare is growing & consuming less animals with a CNS. Alternatives such as insects or lab meat.
Why is food grow not stuck up vertically? I mean let's go 3D, since at least majority of vegetables and most fruits do not need more than height of 2 feet of space.
It also surprised me how old school modern farming still remains. Look at the first picture from this article: a bunch of modern tractors unnecessarily burning oil, unnecessarily operated by humans. By now this should be three times the size field with 15 levels up, run by 3D seeds/soil/water/plants/etc sampling throw out from automatically replaceable cartridge/dispenser.
We have long way to go, but certainly we don't need more land to grow; we need more technology in place!
Edit: should have mentioned it - even going vertical you can still use natural light! Its a matter of setting up bunch of mirrors reflecting sunlight. Of course you need sun to grow.
“Its a matter of setting up bunch of mirrors reflecting sunlight. Of course you need sun to grow.”
Doesn’t work > see thermodynamics.
The mirror you’d be setting up would have to set up away from the building where the food is grown and therefore occupy space.
In agronomy there is a concept that the rate of growth is set by whichever one necessary nutrient is limited. Since we fertilize and pump water, the limiting factor is sunlight.
EDIT: 1. This is why Brazil gasohol is the only net positive bio-fuel
2. Manual picking of produce is far superior to mechanized harvest. Tomatoes in the US are large and tasteless because they’ve been bread to be easily picked by machine. ( A lot of thought goes into picking a ripe fruit. It’s not obvious AI can do that. Or that the robots can ever grab fruit with dexterity and w/out crushing)
3.What energy source do you want to run your automatic tractors off of? Diesel for agriculture is arguably the segment that should be given the most slack when transitioning to “green” alternatives.
As an aside, while we're still a ways off from battery-electric farm vehicles (cost/weight of batteries is still just too high to meet the same parameters as diesel tractors, even with very generous assumptions the last time I ran the numbers), I still like the idea of electric farm equipment hardwired to the grid and dragging giant electric cords behind them like really boring EVAs.
(Sure, you'd still want batteries to drive the machinery between fields, and you'd need a way to keep the cords from damaging crops or disrupting the plowing when you're dragging them around, and you'd need to put a huge "tractor electric outlet" by every cluster of fields you're working with, but these are all engineering challenges that could be met with current technology.)
If you don't expose your plants to the sun, you're going to need a lot of energy to power their illumination. I'm not sure solar panels-> tuned led illumination is any more efficient than direct exposure, nor could it be any cheaper (and because solar irradiation on Earth is finite of course the amount of food you can grow is also finite). Then there's the profit per m^2 of agriculture isn't that high -- how much does a structure cost? I'd say at least $400/m^2. If your profit is <$10/m^2, you'd need decades to recoup costs (not a viable investment currently) -- that's only for the structure discounting all the other necessary additional infrastructure, lightning, irrigation, etc. Unless we switch to radically different/more efficient food growing than plants (say direct cell cultivation, or direct nutrient synthesis), then the current approach is probably the best (still with room for some automation and significant genetic improvements on crops, I'd say).
I think direct nutrient synthesis probably has potential, but it will take a very long time to understand nutrition and synthesis of organic mollecules -- not an expert by any means, but I'd be surprised if it took less than several decades to develop the necessary tech/science. Even then the gains in efficiency will probably not be that large -- plants/life in general have been optimizing synthesis for billions of years, they're already quite efficient. What we would gain is minimizing to its limit parts of the plant we don't consume, and concentrate on the essentials/optimal nutrients.
Not really. The Netherlands has a high dollar value of "agricultural exports" which includes flowers at 10% of that value and equipment and machinery at another 10%. Of the 80% that is actually food, a lot of it is high value low calorie food. And the methods used to produce that food are horribly destructive, not sustainable, and will cost future generations untold hardship to deal with: https://www.dutchnews.nl/features/2018/03/dutch-agriculture-...
Topsoil is needed for plants, which won't grow underground without it. And if you're going to carry soil underground, might as well do it in an above ground building. Or try hydro ponics
This is touched on in Pinker's "Enlightenment Now." The current trendy "organic" label requires more land to grow the same amount of food. Whatever benefits of so-called organic farming you perceive, if any, it is a regression in terms of feeding the world's growing population.
>if any, it is a regression in terms of feeding the world's growing population.
Food security is a distribution problem, not a production problem. We're already producing far far more food than we consume or would even need to consume. Big Ag likes to pretend they need higher yields in order to feed the hungry but they're full of it. They want to produce more for cheaper and pocket the margin, but they're not going to do jack squat to get that production out to the people who need it.
>I don't think there's any reason to vilify agricultural businesses in particular for being profit-seeking capitalist corporations.
It's not about the line of business. It's about disingenuously gussying up the marketing around their own profit maximization by pretending they're being humanitarian. Sort of like "Greenwashing."
Everyone does it, but so many people depend on subsistence farming that it comes across as especially crass. Sure they're not alone, but there is plenty of scorn to go around for bottling companies taking up all the ground water, Pharma companies abusing IP law to fleece sick people, etc. There's no reason to be stingy.
Quick overview of a farmer's land that uses this method: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stABAx82TbY he harvest around 3x more cocoa per hectare than traditional methods and its one of the most valuable in the world right now.
Big producers joining to make it more scalable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE