A remarkable amount of the fertilizer applied via modern industrial farming practices is just wasted:
> "According to an average of 13 global databases from 10 data sources, in 2010, 161 teragrams of nitrogen were applied to agricultural crops, but only 73 teragrams of nitrogen made it to the harvested crop. A total of 86 teragrams of nitrogen was wasted, perhaps ending up in the water, air, or soil. The new research was published in the journal Nature Food in July."
Large-area applications by mechanized systems seem to be part of the problem, but that's also necessary to escape the subsitence agriculture trap, i.e. with such systems, it's not necessary for half or more of the human population to be working in the fields to grow food, it's more like 1 in 50 or 1 in 100.
The most promising solution might be AI + robots. If a robot could crawl up and down fields inspecting individual plants for nutrient status and applying small amounts of fertilizer as needed (also weeding and checking for pest infestations), it could cut fertilizer use in half while maintaining the same level of production - and perhaps eliminate the need for most herbicides and pesticides.
There is so little organic matter in the topsoil due to modern farming practices and it gets worse every year. The result is soil that doesn't retain water, it just runs off. This means that irrigation has to be more and more frequent, and it means that fertilizer runs off (causing algal blooms etc) more than it percolates into the soil
I'm not sure why the general tone of HN seems to be that modern farming isn't changing at all.
Erosion has been on everyone's radar for decades. We went from plow -> till -> low till -> no till. Believe me, the folks who do this talk about plowing practices and cover crops. They also discuss GMO crops and the crazy legal restrictions around seed that come with it.
> Brown earth has a deep top layer where most of the nutrients are and biological activities take place. At around 20 centimetres deep
Fun fact, where I grew up there is over 10 feet of black dirt before you hit bedrock. A lot of the Midwestern US is like that. Even with all that runway those guys _still_ discuss erosion.
It’s strange that the article you linked doesn’t mention no-till farming. Farmers replace the plows on their tractors (which turn over the soil) with knives that have fertilizer injectors on the tips. Rather than plow, then spray fertilizer on to the surface, they inject fertilizer into the ground. After a few years, earthworms reestablish themselves and naturally aerate the soil.
This can be combined with other (well established, commercially available) precision agriculture techniques to minimize irrigation and fertilizer waste.
The big problem is the up front cost of replacing tractor implements, and training labor.
Anyway, this is much easier than agroforestry, building glass hydroponics towers, etc.
> 161 teragrams of nitrogen were applied to agricultural crops, but only 73 teragrams of nitrogen made it to the harvested crop
Getting ~half of the nitrogen from the fertilizer into the harvest seems awfully impressive to me. There are so many ways for nitrogen to escape - into runoff, broken down back into the atmosphere, used to grow weeds and non-productive parts of the plant, etc.
> A remarkable amount of the fertilizer applied via modern industrial farming practices is just wasted:
Hmm, the fact that there is waste totally unsurprising given some of nitrogen deliverey methods (like anhydrous ammonia). But those numbers are really high.
> water, air, or soil
Ah, but if it's still in the soil that could probably account for a big chunk of it that would eventually get used
While it's cool and all to want to work on AI+Robots, because obviously that's where this thought is coming from because who wants to actually work in the fields am I right?\s
I think it's more important to think about market fit and margins of farming, in what world is introducing a complex, expensive machine to an already thin margin industry a practical solution?
The reason it's inefficient and wasteful isn't because "they're some hicks who need the righteous engineer to come and save them with their brilliance" its because its fast and cheap
Modern industrial-scale farming equipment is already highly engineered. Adding features that allowed for more precise care of individual plants would be an extension of existing technology, not something radically new. Take a look at modern combine harvesters, for example:
This is also a sector that would benefit from electrification, incidentally.
Of course, the fossil fuel and petrochemical sector won't like being cut out of the agriculture business to any extent, so there's that kind of resistance to such changes.
Yes, but fast and cheap is temporary (and the end result is a lot of pain).
This is a problem that requires structural investment from government (the populace) but once done, the return on investment seems very high.
How do you think the Netherlands are the second leading agricultural exporter in the world right now? Short answer - very efficient greenhouses.
To get an idea of just how efficient - they use ~4 to 9 liters of water per pound of tomatoes produced. The world average is 60 liters per pound of tomatoes. Not the high end - the AVERAGE.
AI robots that do companion planting with robots. There's a free idea for you. Harvesting would not work with combine harvesters. You'd have to harvest corn planted with beans like you were picking strawberries, but with robots, maybe it's doable.
Well, that explains why our water is so high in nitrates. I've been looking into our local water supply. Out of the over 200 contaminants, the one that exceeds the EWG's limit by the most margin is nitrates which is said to come from fertilizer run off.
> A remarkable amount of the fertilizer applied via modern industrial farming practices is just wasted
You can also cut out most of the nitrogen just by using Plant Growth Promoting Bacteria (e.g. azospirillum), but most US farmers don't do that. Without PGPBs, most of the plant's energy is wasted just trying to uptake the nitrogen from the soil. Whereas the with the bacteria, not only do the bacteria produce the nitrogen themselves, but they also do all the work of feeding it to your plants so they can spend their energy growing and producing food instead.
45% conversion to crop is actually amazing and way higher than I thought it would be.
You'd never be able to get it to 100% just based on thermodynamics alone. It takes a lot of energy to move nutrients from an area of low concentration (the soil) to an area of high concentration (the plant).
Just making up number here, but if a plant needed 10 grams of nitrogen, but the soil contained only 50 mg at any given time (but was constantly replenished), plant growth and yield would suffer considerably - despite the fact that a sufficient supply is available over time. You need to have an excess supply of nutrients available to maximize growth.
It's similar to water - many plants will die in soil that has a low level of moisture. The water is there, the plant just doesn't have the capacity to actually pull in enough to sustain life.
Idea: Take some clay, form and burn a repository for nitrogen rich water, that can be reached by roots, but not by rainwater, bury them beneath the field, resupply it via a feed line.
Now watch roots and heavy tractors ruin that brilliant plan.
Hydroponics usually measure the nutrients in the water and only add when needed. Indoor farming with soil beds can adopt water recycling too but there's no requirement to.
Few things have a single cause, but I think it's not outlandish to hypothesize that potential pending famines could be driven by a fertilizer shortage, driven by Russia's invasion and global economic issues, driven by the pandemic.
Maybe this is obvious to those smarter than I, but I'm beginning to have a sinking sense that direct deaths by SARS-COV2 will be a shockingly small minority of total deaths caused by the pandemic over the next generation. We're going to see this event loud and clear in every economic and demographic chart for the next half-century, aren't we?
For any past-3-years timespan currently, you'll get the right picture only by looking at the numbers in light of consideration from the pandemic.
It's not that rates are low now, it's that they were temporarily high for three years, during the pandemic shutdowns and backlogged demand from that.
(Same goes for the apparent recession in 2022. That was mostly an artifact of the pandemic numbers, comparing 2022 to a 2021 that was artificially high from time-shifted backlogged demand from 2020.)
>I doubt it. In as much as they are allowed to function, markets will reward people addressing the shortages with outsized profit.
Standing nuclear armies 600K+ soldiers strong enforcing blockades, embargoes, price caps, bans, sanctions etc are not the most shining indicator of a free market that will correct shortages to equilibrium...
How can you price gouge something like Sri-Lakha, that has no currency to trade with? This whole mental model just has no grasp for the moment when the rear of the car falls off..
I'm not sure i follow. How exactly will the people "awarded with outsized profit for addressing the shortages" help those starving due to lack of affordable food? "The market" doesn't work for goods whose demand is inelastic, such as food and medicine. Letting people starve "to allow the market to function" is cold blooded greed.
> I doubt it. In as much as they are allowed to function, markets will reward people addressing the shortages with outsized profit
This is dangerous, fantasy thinking detached fromt the real world.v
If there is shortage of food today, you plant wheat today, it will be ready to eat in 7 months.
If it's not the right time to plant, it could be a year. By that time, people will be dead already.
Now, we don't even have idle land ready to plant, and if you have to invest in greenhouses or similar to increate productivity, farmers don't have that kind of money and even if they did capacity would take years to come online.
Having trust in the market is not a magic solution. Yes, prices will rise as they already are if there is a shortage but that's not going to make local production materialises out of thin air if there are other obstacles.
At some point, you need a concerted strategic answer at the correct level if you are facing a strategic threat like disruption of food supply. That's why China restricted exports. It remains to be seen if the USA and Europe will react fast enough and appropriately enough. What happened with Covid doesn't give me much hope.
Edit: As I am downvoted strongly (I imagine that it’s because the Covid answer is stupidly seen as political in the US - at least I hope so because if it’s about the ability of the market to solve issues it doesn’t bode well for us all), the EU took ages to secure first masks then vaccine supply and the utter stupidity of the US answer which avoided imposing wearing masks and making vaccination mandatory costed you hundred thousands of unnecessary death compared to country of equivalent development. Look at Taiwan or South Korea to see how it supposed to be done.
> The fertilizer shortage is caused by the war in Ukraine.
The war certainly exacerbated the issue, but there were already fertilizer supply issues before. I remember well purchasing my 2022 crop year fertilizer in December 2021, which is earlier than I normally get around to it, but was prompted to because the prices had already risen substantially by that time and were predicted to go even higher (which they did). War in Ukraine didn't break out for at least another month after that. Not so much COVID directly, but natural gas prices were a large component, seeing fertilizer plants go offline in the mid-2021 timeframe[1].
Arguably the war in Ukraine was influenced by the unrest against Lukanhesko after his poor handling of covid-19...and by Russians thinking that was yet another example of NATO attacks against their security.
I don't see how that's sustained by the article. This is just another face of the energy crunch. Oil and gas are somewhat rarer more expensive, and so everything made from them is more expensive and the economy needs to seek to a new price equilibrium. In this case, that mostly means "reduced travel and air freight" and "reduced gas heating usage".
But as a side effect farmers need to scramble to match their own market. So some of this will end up meaning "more expensive fertilizer-heavy crops". But at the economic level farming is less able to tolerate volatility (you can't JustInTime a soybean, literally farmers reap what was sown months ago), so there's need for some assistance at the regulatory level. Which is what this article is about.
Basically, no. No famines. Just pricing and regulatory changes.
Goosebumps from this line. It's apt and thoughtful. I'm thinking about how these events can be fractal-like. The past few years of active pandemic have felt like the "flame" but could be seen as the "ignition" for countless other, possibly even worse global events. It's like a Great Tree Shaking: all non-resilient systems began showing cracks of one size or another, cascading stress to other systems, many of which buckle or break.
Well, 20.8% of goal potash production comes from Russia and another 18% from Belarus. It's a key ingredients in making fertilizer. There is your single cause.
It's not really the conflict directly so much as the sanctions campaigns that followed.
Russia and Belarus are the number one and two suppliers of a basic fertilizer component, but now Western aligned nation cannot import from them and the Brits have gone further by making it harder to insure the shipments which affects the ability for Russia (and by extension Belarus) to export to anyone by sea.
The Germans _could_ have helped make up the difference since they can make some amount of fertilizer using natural gas, but some terrorist state (we still don't know exactly who) blew up NS1 and NS2 which makes this basically impossible. Germany now needs to preserve all its gas just to keep some manufacturing going, heat people's homes, and run the lights.
The pandemic has had some effect, but a lot of the fertilizer being sold internationally goes to Egypt, the Middle East, and North Africa. It doesn't actually have to go all that far in the global scheme of things.
The conflict itself affects wheat prices, since Ukraine is a major wheat exporter (as is Russia), but the fertilizer issues are due primarily to Western sanctions and Kremlin counter-sanctions.
That's not what the study's abstract said. It said heart attack deaths increased during the pandemic. It could be due to covid itself, fear of covid while seeking treatment, worse quality treatment, lifestyle chances, social isolation, others, or some combination.
One of the study's authors did say there's a link, but I have to wonder why it wasn't in the abstract.
First, this content is locked in my region so I don't know exactly what you linked to.
Second, if you are linking to a news article about that one University guy who said young people shouldn't take the vaccine, it is my understanding that his study was flawed. But again, I can't read the article so take this with a grain of salt.
Sooner or later energy prices will increase and fertilizer will get more expensive. Step functions and impulses are useful ways to probe the inner working of a system and in this case helped to highlight the dominant role energy plays everywhere. We re-learned what we forgot or ignored since the last energy aka. oil price shock in the '70. In the long run the situation for food security is challenging unless we switch to a different paradigm of farming and population control.
This is such a weird comment. For much of the world, food security is an ever present problem that is heavily affected by energy prices (among other things). Fertilizer prices are already up significantly. This isn't something we have to wait for. It's already been happening for the past decade and it's going to keep getting worse.
You're fortunate that you live in a country where food security on a population level isn't a constantly relevant concern.
energy prices are decreasing, not increasing; solar power is half as expensive as coal power in most of the world already, and it's likely to get even cheaper over time as pv production scales up
(of course in northern europe this year that is not the case because they were relying on russian gas, but that's not 'sooner or later', that's just right now)
The big lesson from the 1918 flu pandemic was that lockdowns didn’t really work.
The scientific consensus after that was to isolate the highest risk populations, and let it run through the rest of the population. That way, it hits herd immunity / becomes endemic without infecting people that are likely to die from it. For COVID, the conventional approach would be to lock down nursing homes and provide shelter in place orders / resources for the top 1-5% risk groups for 3 months while otherwise ignoring the pandemic.
If it were not for RNA vaccines, that approach certainly would have been better than what we did with COVID. Economic disruption would be minimal, per case fatality would be cut significantly, and the tripledemic / avian flu / 2021 famine / rebound of malaria, etc. probably would not have happened.
With the vaccines, it is unclear if the lockdowns helped or hurt average life expectancies. We will know in a few more years.
In retrospect, herd immunity for COVID doesn't seem like it ever was possible. It's a ridiculously infectious disease, basically everyone has to get infected and even then herd immunity is not guaranteed.
The most likely outcome without lockdowns, even if you isolate the 1-5% most vulnerable, would be catastrophic failure of the healthcare system. Plenty of countries really did try not to use lockdowns, but invariably all countries that didn't have extremely young demographics and tried not using lockdowns were at the brink at least once.
The approach you suggest would have been disastrous without RNA vaccines and from what happened in most countries which lifted restrictions too early, would also have been disastrous with them. The government where I live is one of them and they had to flip-flop on the issue about 7 times as the system got close to the breaking point. Increasing capacity wasn't feasible either because trained personnel was the bottleneck, and even if you could train three times faster, no one would want to do the job anyways.
The problem with health system breakdown is that at some point it's not even COVID that kills people. If that happens, even just a broken bone can be genuinely life threatening. People will start dying of a plethora of things they'd normally be able to easily deal with.
> If it were not for RNA vaccines, that approach certainly would have been better than what we did with COVID.
I know that 'flatten the curve' largely left the public consciousness, but wouldn't letting the virus run largely unrestricted have overwhelmed the health care system?
1. I hate how everything has to have a financialised solution:
To achieve this, the report suggests “mobilizing international financial support” and implementing tools such as “fertilizer contract swaps” to keep farmer costs manageable.
2. I read articles like this and wonder, will the world ditch meat, or will will the richer countries continue to eat ridiculous amounts of the stuff, using up all the land that could grow food for a plant based diet? Something will have ti give at some point.
Demand for meat is rising due to incomes level rising in developing nations. Developing nations also outnumber developed nations, so whatever climate-saving diet related behaviors the West decides to take is still going to face pressure from an even larger group of people who want to spend their growing paycheck on goods like meat.
The real problem is majority of crops being grown for animal agriculture, which is an extremely wasteful way of producing food. We'd only need a fraction of the farmlands if we were actually eating the crops we grow. Sadly, we can't count on consumers making rational choices and politicians are not going to tank their popularity by pushing for these changes. It's the same as climate change.
> which is an extremely wasteful way of producing food.
Depends on what you are optimizing for.
As a farmer, I can make more money growing crops for human consumption. It is the most logical business model. But the real world is a harsh mistress and the nature of... nature means that is isn't realistic to grow the same crops over and over and over again. Disease, soil health, etc. requires crop rotation to sustain a viable farm.
Now the problem of equipment and markets. While I could theoretically introduce more human foods into the rotation, those human foods aren't compatible with the equipment I have. Nor is there a local market for them. This means more heavy iron, more trucking, more fuel, more fertilizer (no animals to help provide it), etc. Is that not a waste?
I primary grow food for humans, but every 2-4 years (depending on the quality of the farmland) in my rotation a field will get a crop destined for animal consumption to address soil health and disease/pest control most particularly. If there is a way to avoid this without simply trading for waste somewhere else, I'm all ears. I'd be happy to grow nothing but human food.
Agriculture is already excessively optimized to a fault, so it seems likely that we have already found what is least wasteful overall. Of course, if you want to minimize a specific waste to the detriment of others then no doubt the calculus changes.
Thanks for making food. I'm a fan. Like Bloomberg's statement about how easy it is to grow crops, you spend enough time in a city and you're prone to start thinking food grows on trees, pun intended.
One of the things I've realized as I've gotten older is that parts of the economy I don't understand are rarely as wasteful as they might appear. Waste is super expensive and no one likes wasting money. The people growing alfalfa know exactly why they're doing it. It's pretty great we can regenerate the soil and feed some cattle at the same time, isn't that kind of sustainable thing the goal?
I mean thinking about long term consequences of their actions and making a choice that leads to the best outcome for the society at large. You're right in saying people have a preference, but the way you say it makes it seem like that's all their is to it, as if people's dietary choices have no broader impact.
People have a preference for meat post huge subsidies, which essentially makes the preference mean nothing whatsoever. If people prefer meat when it's not subsidised, then sure, what the hell, let them have it.
We can do multiple things to address climate change at the same time. My proposition is to slowly redirect all the animal agriculture subsidies elsewhere. Animal products going up in price by 3 - 10 fold would surely decrease consumption.
Do you have a more sustainable way to produce meat in mind? Ethics aside, the addition of another trophic level makes meat production necessarily less efficient than that of an equivalent amount of plants.
Nitrogen fertilizers are directly responsible for keeping about 3-4 billion people alive today. Any persistent shortage or supply chain disruption should be considered a global security issue.
This is a key insight and unfortunately not enough people make it to this cold hard fact before they begin preaching about food system transformation.
Nat gas + Haber Bosch is the foundational structure of our food system and its ability to feed our current population. Perhaps a new innovation will replace it, but so far much of the proposed methods are complete fairy tale nonsense which will result in mass starvation without appropriate due diligence.
"Each hour 430 quintillion Joules of energy from the sun hits the Earth. That's 430 with 18 zeroes after it.
In comparison, the total amount of energy that all humans use in a year is 410 quintillion Joules." [1]
"The 70 percent of solar energy the Earth absorbs per year equals roughly 3.85 million exajoules. In other words, the amount of solar energy hitting the earth in one hour is more than enough to power the world for one year." [2]
"The total solar power hitting Earth is about 173,000 terawatts, or 1.73×10^17
joules per second. That’s roughly equivalent to the energy of 41 Megatons of TNT exploding… every second.
It’s hard for us to comprehend how much energy a joule is (or even what energy is in the first place). But energy can be converted into mass, and we do understand what mass is." [3]
Thus, equatorial and semi-equatorial regions should be energy magnats of the world and be able to get nitrogen, phosphorus, water, etc for their food from thin air and sand.
Yet, the relevant world has still to feed the majority of these regions,
including the solar tech etc.
Readit News
> "According to an average of 13 global databases from 10 data sources, in 2010, 161 teragrams of nitrogen were applied to agricultural crops, but only 73 teragrams of nitrogen made it to the harvested crop. A total of 86 teragrams of nitrogen was wasted, perhaps ending up in the water, air, or soil. The new research was published in the journal Nature Food in July."
https://eos.org/articles/index-suggests-that-half-of-nitroge...
Large-area applications by mechanized systems seem to be part of the problem, but that's also necessary to escape the subsitence agriculture trap, i.e. with such systems, it's not necessary for half or more of the human population to be working in the fields to grow food, it's more like 1 in 50 or 1 in 100.
The most promising solution might be AI + robots. If a robot could crawl up and down fields inspecting individual plants for nutrient status and applying small amounts of fertilizer as needed (also weeding and checking for pest infestations), it could cut fertilizer use in half while maintaining the same level of production - and perhaps eliminate the need for most herbicides and pesticides.
Lots of places to read more about this issue and here's a start: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/soil-degradation.html
Erosion has been on everyone's radar for decades. We went from plow -> till -> low till -> no till. Believe me, the folks who do this talk about plowing practices and cover crops. They also discuss GMO crops and the crazy legal restrictions around seed that come with it.
> Brown earth has a deep top layer where most of the nutrients are and biological activities take place. At around 20 centimetres deep
Fun fact, where I grew up there is over 10 feet of black dirt before you hit bedrock. A lot of the Midwestern US is like that. Even with all that runway those guys _still_ discuss erosion.
This can be combined with other (well established, commercially available) precision agriculture techniques to minimize irrigation and fertilizer waste.
The big problem is the up front cost of replacing tractor implements, and training labor.
Anyway, this is much easier than agroforestry, building glass hydroponics towers, etc.
Industrial farms are very far away from the foundations of healthy soil, and they need copious amounts of fertilizer and water to compensate.
The food produced is less nutritious and less sustainable as a result.
Consider investing in a local CSA if you have the opportunity. It’s a fantastic way to support locally sustainable agriculture.
https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Factory-Price-Wholesa...
Getting ~half of the nitrogen from the fertilizer into the harvest seems awfully impressive to me. There are so many ways for nitrogen to escape - into runoff, broken down back into the atmosphere, used to grow weeds and non-productive parts of the plant, etc.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV0cR_Nhac0 Sniper robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals | Challengers
Hmm, the fact that there is waste totally unsurprising given some of nitrogen deliverey methods (like anhydrous ammonia). But those numbers are really high.
> water, air, or soil
Ah, but if it's still in the soil that could probably account for a big chunk of it that would eventually get used
In the world where it is cheaper than the rising price of fertilizer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2LnkKgwpOE
This is also a sector that would benefit from electrification, incidentally.
Of course, the fossil fuel and petrochemical sector won't like being cut out of the agriculture business to any extent, so there's that kind of resistance to such changes.
This is a problem that requires structural investment from government (the populace) but once done, the return on investment seems very high.
How do you think the Netherlands are the second leading agricultural exporter in the world right now? Short answer - very efficient greenhouses.
To get an idea of just how efficient - they use ~4 to 9 liters of water per pound of tomatoes produced. The world average is 60 liters per pound of tomatoes. Not the high end - the AVERAGE.
Really bad in New Zealand with all the dairy production.
You can also cut out most of the nitrogen just by using Plant Growth Promoting Bacteria (e.g. azospirillum), but most US farmers don't do that. Without PGPBs, most of the plant's energy is wasted just trying to uptake the nitrogen from the soil. Whereas the with the bacteria, not only do the bacteria produce the nitrogen themselves, but they also do all the work of feeding it to your plants so they can spend their energy growing and producing food instead.
Why?
Is it not cost-effective?
[1] https://goo.gl/maps/Pm4JGesJZ9xELrBB8 [2] https://goo.gl/maps/rzGttw1gMchSWXREA
You'd never be able to get it to 100% just based on thermodynamics alone. It takes a lot of energy to move nutrients from an area of low concentration (the soil) to an area of high concentration (the plant).
Just making up number here, but if a plant needed 10 grams of nitrogen, but the soil contained only 50 mg at any given time (but was constantly replenished), plant growth and yield would suffer considerably - despite the fact that a sufficient supply is available over time. You need to have an excess supply of nutrients available to maximize growth.
It's similar to water - many plants will die in soil that has a low level of moisture. The water is there, the plant just doesn't have the capacity to actually pull in enough to sustain life.
Now watch roots and heavy tractors ruin that brilliant plan.
(Though in theory you could still just let your wastewater drain into the ground, and have the same problem.)
Maybe this is obvious to those smarter than I, but I'm beginning to have a sinking sense that direct deaths by SARS-COV2 will be a shockingly small minority of total deaths caused by the pandemic over the next generation. We're going to see this event loud and clear in every economic and demographic chart for the next half-century, aren't we?
Same as getting through the energy crisis, we can overcome the food crisis, one obstacle at a time.
The connectedness of economies is also an advantage. Shipping rates are almost at a 3-year low: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/baltic
The greatest risk are policies forbidding "price gouging" going haywire and actually forbidding disaster response.
Aboriginal Tasmanians survived crisis after crisis for tens of thousands of years, until one arrived they weren't equipped to deal with.
Iain Banks would call it an Excession or "out of context problem".
It's not that rates are low now, it's that they were temporarily high for three years, during the pandemic shutdowns and backlogged demand from that.
(Same goes for the apparent recession in 2022. That was mostly an artifact of the pandemic numbers, comparing 2022 to a 2021 that was artificially high from time-shifted backlogged demand from 2020.)
Standing nuclear armies 600K+ soldiers strong enforcing blockades, embargoes, price caps, bans, sanctions etc are not the most shining indicator of a free market that will correct shortages to equilibrium...
This is dangerous, fantasy thinking detached fromt the real world.v
If there is shortage of food today, you plant wheat today, it will be ready to eat in 7 months.
If it's not the right time to plant, it could be a year. By that time, people will be dead already.
Now, we don't even have idle land ready to plant, and if you have to invest in greenhouses or similar to increate productivity, farmers don't have that kind of money and even if they did capacity would take years to come online.
At some point, you need a concerted strategic answer at the correct level if you are facing a strategic threat like disruption of food supply. That's why China restricted exports. It remains to be seen if the USA and Europe will react fast enough and appropriately enough. What happened with Covid doesn't give me much hope.
Edit: As I am downvoted strongly (I imagine that it’s because the Covid answer is stupidly seen as political in the US - at least I hope so because if it’s about the ability of the market to solve issues it doesn’t bode well for us all), the EU took ages to secure first masks then vaccine supply and the utter stupidity of the US answer which avoided imposing wearing masks and making vaccination mandatory costed you hundred thousands of unnecessary death compared to country of equivalent development. Look at Taiwan or South Korea to see how it supposed to be done.
This war will cause more deaths indirectly than it does directly, just like almost all large wars.
The war certainly exacerbated the issue, but there were already fertilizer supply issues before. I remember well purchasing my 2022 crop year fertilizer in December 2021, which is earlier than I normally get around to it, but was prompted to because the prices had already risen substantially by that time and were predicted to go even higher (which they did). War in Ukraine didn't break out for at least another month after that. Not so much COVID directly, but natural gas prices were a large component, seeing fertilizer plants go offline in the mid-2021 timeframe[1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/16/business/natural-gas-pric...
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But as a side effect farmers need to scramble to match their own market. So some of this will end up meaning "more expensive fertilizer-heavy crops". But at the economic level farming is less able to tolerate volatility (you can't JustInTime a soybean, literally farmers reap what was sown months ago), so there's need for some assistance at the regulatory level. Which is what this article is about.
Basically, no. No famines. Just pricing and regulatory changes.
Or, this past three years event is the start of a longer, bigger event. Then, the ignition is lost in the flame.
Goosebumps from this line. It's apt and thoughtful. I'm thinking about how these events can be fractal-like. The past few years of active pandemic have felt like the "flame" but could be seen as the "ignition" for countless other, possibly even worse global events. It's like a Great Tree Shaking: all non-resilient systems began showing cracks of one size or another, cascading stress to other systems, many of which buckle or break.
Deleted Comment
Source: https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/our-natural-resources/minerals-minin...
Don’t think any of the big buyers are resisting purchase from those two countries.
Russia and Belarus are the number one and two suppliers of a basic fertilizer component, but now Western aligned nation cannot import from them and the Brits have gone further by making it harder to insure the shipments which affects the ability for Russia (and by extension Belarus) to export to anyone by sea.
The Germans _could_ have helped make up the difference since they can make some amount of fertilizer using natural gas, but some terrorist state (we still don't know exactly who) blew up NS1 and NS2 which makes this basically impossible. Germany now needs to preserve all its gas just to keep some manufacturing going, heat people's homes, and run the lights.
The pandemic has had some effect, but a lot of the fertilizer being sold internationally goes to Egypt, the Middle East, and North Africa. It doesn't actually have to go all that far in the global scheme of things.
The conflict itself affects wheat prices, since Ukraine is a major wheat exporter (as is Russia), but the fertilizer issues are due primarily to Western sanctions and Kremlin counter-sanctions.
One of the study's authors did say there's a link, but I have to wonder why it wasn't in the abstract.
Second, if you are linking to a news article about that one University guy who said young people shouldn't take the vaccine, it is my understanding that his study was flawed. But again, I can't read the article so take this with a grain of salt.
You're fortunate that you live in a country where food security on a population level isn't a constantly relevant concern.
(of course in northern europe this year that is not the case because they were relying on russian gas, but that's not 'sooner or later', that's just right now)
The scientific consensus after that was to isolate the highest risk populations, and let it run through the rest of the population. That way, it hits herd immunity / becomes endemic without infecting people that are likely to die from it. For COVID, the conventional approach would be to lock down nursing homes and provide shelter in place orders / resources for the top 1-5% risk groups for 3 months while otherwise ignoring the pandemic.
If it were not for RNA vaccines, that approach certainly would have been better than what we did with COVID. Economic disruption would be minimal, per case fatality would be cut significantly, and the tripledemic / avian flu / 2021 famine / rebound of malaria, etc. probably would not have happened.
With the vaccines, it is unclear if the lockdowns helped or hurt average life expectancies. We will know in a few more years.
The most likely outcome without lockdowns, even if you isolate the 1-5% most vulnerable, would be catastrophic failure of the healthcare system. Plenty of countries really did try not to use lockdowns, but invariably all countries that didn't have extremely young demographics and tried not using lockdowns were at the brink at least once.
The approach you suggest would have been disastrous without RNA vaccines and from what happened in most countries which lifted restrictions too early, would also have been disastrous with them. The government where I live is one of them and they had to flip-flop on the issue about 7 times as the system got close to the breaking point. Increasing capacity wasn't feasible either because trained personnel was the bottleneck, and even if you could train three times faster, no one would want to do the job anyways.
The problem with health system breakdown is that at some point it's not even COVID that kills people. If that happens, even just a broken bone can be genuinely life threatening. People will start dying of a plethora of things they'd normally be able to easily deal with.
I know that 'flatten the curve' largely left the public consciousness, but wouldn't letting the virus run largely unrestricted have overwhelmed the health care system?
1. I hate how everything has to have a financialised solution:
2. I read articles like this and wonder, will the world ditch meat, or will will the richer countries continue to eat ridiculous amounts of the stuff, using up all the land that could grow food for a plant based diet? Something will have ti give at some point.Meat isn't going away. In fact, we may wind up eating more, not less, of it, over time.
Why not use human excrement instead?
frame it as you like, but eating meat is literally only necessary because people want to.
Depends on what you are optimizing for.
As a farmer, I can make more money growing crops for human consumption. It is the most logical business model. But the real world is a harsh mistress and the nature of... nature means that is isn't realistic to grow the same crops over and over and over again. Disease, soil health, etc. requires crop rotation to sustain a viable farm.
Now the problem of equipment and markets. While I could theoretically introduce more human foods into the rotation, those human foods aren't compatible with the equipment I have. Nor is there a local market for them. This means more heavy iron, more trucking, more fuel, more fertilizer (no animals to help provide it), etc. Is that not a waste?
I primary grow food for humans, but every 2-4 years (depending on the quality of the farmland) in my rotation a field will get a crop destined for animal consumption to address soil health and disease/pest control most particularly. If there is a way to avoid this without simply trading for waste somewhere else, I'm all ears. I'd be happy to grow nothing but human food.
Agriculture is already excessively optimized to a fault, so it seems likely that we have already found what is least wasteful overall. Of course, if you want to minimize a specific waste to the detriment of others then no doubt the calculus changes.
One of the things I've realized as I've gotten older is that parts of the economy I don't understand are rarely as wasteful as they might appear. Waste is super expensive and no one likes wasting money. The people growing alfalfa know exactly why they're doing it. It's pretty great we can regenerate the soil and feed some cattle at the same time, isn't that kind of sustainable thing the goal?
People have a preference for meat. Rationality doesn't say what your preferences should be, it just helps you satisfy them.
Stop chasing that most visible way to fight climate change rather than the most effective one.
How we produce meat is an extremely wasteful way of producing food. Changing this would free up tons of farm ground, water and fertilizer.
Nat gas + Haber Bosch is the foundational structure of our food system and its ability to feed our current population. Perhaps a new innovation will replace it, but so far much of the proposed methods are complete fairy tale nonsense which will result in mass starvation without appropriate due diligence.
"The 70 percent of solar energy the Earth absorbs per year equals roughly 3.85 million exajoules. In other words, the amount of solar energy hitting the earth in one hour is more than enough to power the world for one year." [2]
"The total solar power hitting Earth is about 173,000 terawatts, or 1.73×10^17 joules per second. That’s roughly equivalent to the energy of 41 Megatons of TNT exploding… every second. It’s hard for us to comprehend how much energy a joule is (or even what energy is in the first place). But energy can be converted into mass, and we do understand what mass is." [3]
Thus, equatorial and semi-equatorial regions should be energy magnats of the world and be able to get nitrogen, phosphorus, water, etc for their food from thin air and sand. Yet, the relevant world has still to feed the majority of these regions, including the solar tech etc.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/this-is-the-potential-of-sol...
[2] https://www.ucdavis.edu/climate/definitions/how-is-solar-pow...
[3] https://www.quora.com/How-much-energy-from-the-Sun-hits-the-...