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.
