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Paradoxish posted:The crux of the problem is that crops are grown primarily for profit, not for providing food. I know I probably sound like a broken record but it really is amazing just how pervasively capitalism had hosed us.
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Jul 21, 2019 17:27
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Lampsacus posted:I'm spoiling the plot of the colony ship sci fi book Aurora. That's not how viruses work, or did they forge living cells out of metal and put artificial metallic DNA into them, too?
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Jul 21, 2019 19:37
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nankeen posted:this is my benchmark for whether someone feasibly could survive in the post-industrial idyll: have you ever grown your own pumpkin from a seed, eaten it, and found it nourishing? Yeah, made pumpkin pie with actual pumpkin instead of canned not a pumpkin squash. Roasted the seeds in an oven too which were tasty.
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Jul 21, 2019 20:28
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as an exercise, just bake hemispheres of pumpkin face down in a pan mash a little, serve with a tiny butter this poo poo is like candy and I don't know why Americans aren't hooked on it
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Jul 21, 2019 21:11
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Potato Salad posted:as an exercise, just bake hemispheres of pumpkin face down in a pan Pumpkin and anything that contains it is gross. Pumpkin pie, pumpkin pudding, etc. All terrible.
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Jul 21, 2019 22:21
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Pembroke Fuse posted:The natural conclusion of all climate change denialism is... climate change good? It is if you consider that the motivation for the denialism is to maintain your way of living in ththere s very moment. It can't be caused by humans, because that means we may have to change our behaviour to prevent/ameliorate the situation.
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Jul 21, 2019 22:22
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There Bias Two posted:Pumpkin and anything that contains it is gross. Pumpkin pie, pumpkin pudding, etc. All terrible.
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Jul 21, 2019 22:28
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Squalid posted:This picture is complicated by the fact what I believe is the majority of small farmers, the farm accounts for less than 25% of household income. 57% of farmers earned less than $10,000 from their farm. I couldn't find this but I recall reading in a USDA source that in an average year, most of these farms will lose money. A large proportion of these farms are in effect hobby farms privately subsidized by the operator through the other job as a Walmart manager or nurse or w/e. In the southeast, I believe many of the farms aren't really managed by the owner, but are instead leased to neighboring large scale producers. Such farms will frequently show no income when the land is not in production for whatever reason, but that doesn't make them unsustainable. This is true, but largely beside the point. Here's the report that article is based on: https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/86198/eib-185.pdf?v=43083 Small farms make up about 23% of all US agricultural value. The majority of farms in every category of small farm (including farms where farming is the household's primary occupation) operate with profit margins that place them in high risk zones. Slightly less than half of all midsize farms and about a third of all large farms operate with similarly thin profit margins. Very nearly half of US agricultural production by value operates in a high risk zone. quote:I don't really like talking about a general collapse because I'm not sure what that is supposed to mean. Would a 10x price spike in basic commodities count as a collapse? Does duration matter? If we are specific it makes it much easier to talk about the implications, solutions, and limits of policy. I don't know how to answer this since I think "a major collapse of US agricultural production" kind of speaks for itself. I mean that total agricultural output in the US can easily drop by a very large amount as a result of rolling farm failures since most farms in the US actually can't survive crop failures year after year. The only real solution from a policy perspective is massive subsidies possibly alongside large-scale nationalization.
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Jul 21, 2019 22:30
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Libluini posted:That's not how viruses work, or did they forge living cells out of metal and put artificial metallic DNA into them, too? There are bacteria that 'eat' metal but viruses it doesn't really make sense for.
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Jul 21, 2019 22:41
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Paradoxish posted:This is true, but largely beside the point. Here's the report that article is based on: I mean you're making a fairly complicated argument. Reconstructing it it seems like you are saying an increase in climate related weather extremes will make farm income less stable, which seems plausible. Then, if I am following correctly, you are arguing that this increase in instability will induce the economic collapse of farms operating on thin margins. These farm failures will then result in decreased production even in years without crop failures, with the land of bankrupt farms going fallow. It's an interesting theory. Although the US already has large subsidies for just this kind of thing, so that's one of your solutions that's already in place. The other issue that's confusing me is you have already related farm bankruptcy to farm consolidation, and consolidated operations would presumably not be allowed to go fallow since why then would big growers buy the bankrupt farms in the first place? Nationalization is an interesting response but historically agricultural land nationalization has a very poor track record of increasing land productivity. A hugely disproportionate share of farm produce in the Eastern bloc was produced by the small scale semi-private family plots, relative to the amount of land held by state farms. There's a reason collective farming is essentially dead as an agricultural policy.
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Jul 21, 2019 23:04
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your faith in the efficiency and rationality of the market is breathtaking in this the year of our lord two thousand and nineteen
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Jul 21, 2019 23:11
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Libluini posted:That's not how viruses work, or did they forge living cells out of metal and put artificial metallic DNA into them, too?
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Jul 21, 2019 23:56
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Shifty Nipples posted:Yeah, made pumpkin pie with actual pumpkin instead of canned not a pumpkin squash. Roasted the seeds in an oven too which were tasty.
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Jul 21, 2019 23:59
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so, squalid - can you tell us why a BOE is no big deal? because we're probably gonna have one in the next 3 years at this point.
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Jul 22, 2019 01:10
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It would help immensely if our farm policy weren't designed intentionally to favor larger farms and the commodity trades.
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Jul 22, 2019 01:14
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StabbinHobo posted:your faith in the efficiency and rationality of the market is breathtaking in this the year of our lord two thousand and nineteen I'm not really much for faith. I'm not really sure what you are suggesting anyway as Paradoxish has already pointed out modern western agriculture deviates very far from the free market anyway, so an argument that modern American agriculture is systemically robust is not really an argument for free markets. If you are offended at my dismissal of nationalized agriculture, well you should probably ask yourself why over the last 30 years every socialist state has progressively abandoned collective farming and state agriculture. Sometimes they basically fake keeping the land nationalized by using 99 year leases, but honestly, what are the odds they decline to renew any of those? Even in Cuba agricultural policy has been marked by steady liberalization since the special period, which is most famous for the way small scale private producers made up for the collapse of large state farms. Certainly, nobody can claim with a straight face state agriculture has historically been more sustainable than private production. dream9!bed!! posted:so, squalid - can you tell us why a BOE is no big deal? because we're probably gonna have one in the next 3 years at this point. no, because I don't know what BOE means. Although If you believe I don't think climate change is a big deal I'm not sure where you got that idea, certainly it is not from anything I have said.
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Jul 22, 2019 02:25
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Squalid posted:no, because I don't know what BOE means. Although If you believe I don't think climate change is a big deal I'm not sure where you got that idea, certainly it is not from anything I have said. Like you’ve never seen the acronym or you don’t know what the Blue Ocean Event is?
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Jul 22, 2019 02:33
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Squalid posted:no, because I don't know what BOE means. Although If you believe I don't think climate change is a big deal I'm not sure where you got that idea, certainly it is not from anything I have said. Blue Ocean Event - when all the ice in the ocean melts for some amount of time during the year. As said, we’ll be seeing the first soon.
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Jul 22, 2019 02:34
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If anyone doesn't know what a blue ocean event is or what the probable consequences of it will be, it's a situation that kicks off when the ice in the arctic is between 1 and 2 million kilometers squared (we've already come pretty close to this previously). Hopefully you understand albedo, but if not, essentially it's why you want to wear white in a desert - light colors reflect light and solar energy, while dark absorbs it. Clouds and snow and ice reflect while water absorbs because it's dark. Thus, a 'blue' ocean, blue like the water. The water absorbs the heat and poo poo goes bad from there because it generally shouldn't be doing that at the arctic. If you aren't aware, the arctic basically regulates the weather on the planet. Have you noticed how polar vortexes became a thing a few years ago? Yeah that's because the arctic is breaking down and it can't hold itself together. In fact the polar cell literally just failed today and weather forecasts suggest it's going to get even worse up there! For the arctic, we have evidence from previous BOEs of what happens - a sudden jump of average temperature year-round of about +15 to 20C that will be completed within 10 years, meaning that most of the arctic will be sitting around the 60s and 70s or higher Fahrenheit (which it is currently doing already up to the 80th degree north). It starts out with the ice dipping down low and then not recovering, then within a few years there's no ice during the entire summer, then a few more years there's either no ice or far too little ice at any point in the year including winter. The consequences for us at first are going to be worse and more random weather, like all that sudden flooding and storming everywhere, polar vortexes during winter and possibly even otherwise, hotter summers, huge droughts that destroy cities and regions, etc. poo poo will slow down due to megafucker storms and floods and heatwaves until they happen often enough that you either need to risk it or can't do anything. This is actually going on right now, at work we had several extreme storms this week as the arctic wind from the failed polar cell pushed through that caused the truck yard to be closed during one of Amazon's most busy weeks, across three different days, for several hours each. Given a long enough time, the jet stream may die because the overall climate is essentially regulated by the arctic. Once that happens we have a good chance to hit equitable climate where in the north and south it stays cold and in the center it remains remains hot. There will probably be nobody still around to see that part, though. It's worth noting that if a BOE happens without us pumping loads of every kind of gas into the atmosphere it takes quite a bit of time, if I recall correctly around 10,000 years to restabilize naturally based on what I've read on the previous one. With us doing that and pumping more and more out? Who knows! Considerably longer than the amount of time anything we could recognize as being civilization has existed, for certain. An important note on this: the definition of blue ocean event is that the ice 1-2m km2 because the ice in the Canadian Archipelago is considered safe and hard to melt. However, that ice being safe is actually false, as it is actually getting hosed up right now even though it shouldn't be, and indeed a massive crack has formed there splitting the main ice of the arctic from Canada and Greenland.
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Jul 22, 2019 02:57
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Squalid posted:I mean you're making a fairly complicated argument. Reconstructing it it seems like you are saying an increase in climate related weather extremes will make farm income less stable, which seems plausible. Then, if I am following correctly, you are arguing that this increase in instability will induce the economic collapse of farms operating on thin margins. These farm failures will then result in decreased production even in years without crop failures, with the land of bankrupt farms going fallow. I'm making the argument that the land itself is going to become unprofitable and that that will ultimately lead to a (large) decrease in US agricultural output. Farm failures will likely lead to greater consolidation as well, but there's going to be a lot of land that larger farms won't want because of persistent flooding or drought or just generally poor conditions. The land doesn't have to be useless or completely infertile for commercial farming to have no interest in it, which shouldn't be a controversial statement since there's plenty of land right now that could theoretically be used for farming and isn't. quote:The other issue that's confusing me is you have already related farm bankruptcy to farm consolidation, and consolidated operations would presumably not be allowed to go fallow since why then would big growers buy the bankrupt farms in the first place? See above, but just to be clear: I wasn't suggesting that large operations were going to buy up literally all of the land. Some of it will simply become unprofitable for smaller farms, a lot of it will become unprofitable in general. It won't be used by anyone. I was just saying that climate change is likely to lead to greater consolidation since small farms can't absorb this level of risk. "Agricultural output will decrease" and "farms are likely to become more consolidated" are not mutually exclusive statements. quote:Nationalization is an interesting response but historically agricultural land nationalization has a very poor track record of increasing land productivity. A hugely disproportionate share of farm produce in the Eastern bloc was produced by the small scale semi-private family plots, relative to the amount of land held by state farms. There's a reason collective farming is essentially dead as an agricultural policy. So, I'd argue we're actually splitting hairs here. The issues with agriculture in capitalist economies are actually well known and well studied, and it's not an accident that just about every industrialized nation heavily subsidizes agriculture. Agriculture largely can't exist in a way that's socially acceptable within a normal market framework and the government already uses subsidies to direct agricultural production. We do it this way so we can pretend that we don't have a partially nationalized agricultural industry, but eh. Collective farming is something else entirely so I'm not sure why you're bringing it up. You can have a fully nationalized agricultural industry without collectivization.
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Jul 22, 2019 03:03
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Potato Salad posted:as an exercise, just bake hemispheres of pumpkin face down in a pan Last night we cooked a soup made with pumpkin, onion, sweet potato, cashews and coconut milk.
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Jul 22, 2019 03:06
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BOE sounds pretty bad imoParadoxish posted:So, I'd argue we're actually splitting hairs here. The issues with agriculture in capitalist economies are actually well known and well studied, and it's not an accident that just about every industrialized nation heavily subsidizes agriculture. Agriculture largely can't exist in a way that's socially acceptable within a normal market framework and the government already uses subsidies to direct agricultural production. We do it this way so we can pretend that we don't have a partially nationalized agricultural industry, but eh. Yeah we are kinda splitting hairs. It's obvious that climate change presents a lot of real problems for agriculture. If we want to assess likely future impacts, we also have to consider the ways in which systems can adapt, and have adapted in the past, besides just looking at the problems. If you aren't talking about East bloc style state farms/collectivization I'm really not sure what you mean by nationalized agriculture, so its hard to consider how it would effect production and climate change. Of course there's already a large amount of nationalized land in the US, its just used for ranching and forestry. I don't really see how that model would be useful to apply to cotton or w/e. Historically state farms in places like Cuba have a very poor track record of sustainability, as they have rarely prioritized long term viability over meeting short term quotas. Squalid fucked around with this message at 03:20 on Jul 22, 2019 |
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Jul 22, 2019 03:09
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Summer squash are hitting hard where I am. Cut, oil, salt, grill. Same for turnips and kohlrabi.
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Jul 22, 2019 03:13
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Hexigrammus posted:I've been keeping an eye on the farming situation in the midwest. Looks like the new hotness among midwestern farmers to explain extreme weather over the next few decades is the Grand Solar Minimum / Maunder Minimum. Explicitly stated - nothing to do with human-generated CO2. I can't follow the argument that is being made. How can the sun be blamed? There is a decent amount of evidence that the sun is entering a quiet period. Sun spots have been trending down for about 50 years. Solar cycle 24 was particularly quiet, the quietest in about 100 years. Cycle 25 is off to a slow start. If anything we should be entering into a cool period, not pattern where the the 5 warmest years in history have happened this decade and the arctic is on fire. We are incredibly lucky that the sun is doing this and giving us a bit of breathing room to get our act together. Of course this does nothing about ocean acidification, but climate change would be even worse with even a normal solar regime.
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Jul 22, 2019 05:11
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Zeta Taskforce posted:I can't follow the argument that is being made. How can the sun be blamed? The Sun: "I am the master of the climate. I will cause another Little Ice Age." Humanity: "Hold my Carbon."
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Jul 22, 2019 05:21
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It's not about making a rational argument based on evidence, it's about rationalizing away what's happening to avoid blame or keep on trucking and making money.
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Jul 22, 2019 05:22
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Shima Honnou posted:It's not about making a rational argument based on evidence, it's about rationalizing away what's happening to avoid blame or keep on trucking and making money. It's the same thing being done with concentration camps. Any excuse not to care is good enough
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Jul 22, 2019 14:00
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Squalid posted:If you aren't talking about East bloc style state farms/collectivization I'm really not sure what you mean by nationalized agriculture
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Jul 22, 2019 14:02
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Lampsacus posted:It might not have been viruses, but some metal eating life. Or maybe it was an unknown alien. Because it's a science fiction novel that's under no pretense of being accurate for how stuff actually works within reason. And it hardly invalidates the pertinent aspect of the novel which is that a closed ecosystem can cause problems that cannot be resolved within the closed ecosystem. Also your post is nit picking and pedantic. IIRC it's bacteria and I don't think it's that pedantic; while yeah, science fiction has no responsibility to accuracy because it's science fiction, one of the draws of KSR books is that he's actually particularly attentive to using mostly-plausible science that makes it really easy for the scientifically-literate to buy in to his creations.
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Jul 22, 2019 14:18
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Squalid posted:If you aren't talking about East bloc style state farms/collectivization I'm really not sure what you mean by nationalized agriculture, so its hard to consider how it would effect production and climate change. Of course there's already a large amount of nationalized land in the US, its just used for ranching and forestry. I don't really see how that model would be useful to apply to cotton or w/e. Historically state farms in places like Cuba have a very poor track record of sustainability, as they have rarely prioritized long term viability over meeting short term quotas. The federal government already leases land for farming. So do state and municipal governments. Additionally, about half of all US farmland is rented and about half of that land is owned by a tiny percentage of landlords. Not only that, but those landlords are almost always actively involved in the production activities that occur on their land. There's no reason the federal government couldn't buy up more land, lease that land out, and then direct activities on that land. It'd be largely indistinguishable from what happens right now, except that production could (in theory) be directed for the public good rather than for profit. We probably wouldn't call that nationalization, but that's only because we really desperately want to pretend that the US economy isn't driven in large part by government spending.
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Jul 22, 2019 15:00
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At most we'd refer to it as private-public partnership with huge gesticulating emphasis on the private bit ^^^^^ right, we really do not like admitting how significant a role government plays in domestic industry
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Jul 22, 2019 15:38
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It's really not that complicated? Our agricultural techniques erode topsoil at an alarming rate on our current course we are due to basically be out of sustainable agricultural land in the next 50-100 years.
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Jul 22, 2019 15:45
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well luckily there'll be far fewer people to feed in the next 50-100 years, once again '''climate change''' solves its own problems
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Jul 22, 2019 15:51
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Paradoxish posted:The federal government already leases land for farming. So do state and municipal governments. but under this model it sounds like production would still be dictated by private markets and individual profit seeking farmers? You've just traded mortgages for leases, and I'm not sure this fundamentally changes the incentives driving farm consolidation and land utilization. Leases also complicate capital investment. I would call this agricultural land nationalization, but farming would still be private. I find this line of argument interesting, because it is about something real. I dislike hand-wavy responses like "nationalize it" to complicated issues because it could actually mean a lot of different things that could produce different results. Avoiding this issue is also why when I talk about these issues I try to start by referring to history and the real world. We can make definite statements about the effects of land nationalization in Vietnam and Cuba, so it makes sense as a starting point to look at what resulted. StabbinHobo posted:yea its fairly clear you're like, old or something, and stuck in a 90's style economic/academic debate over russian agriculture So do you have some more up to date information on nationalized agriculture you'd like to share or. . . ? Kinda hard for me to make any inferences about your positions here Gitro posted:well luckily there'll be far fewer people to feed in the next 50-100 years, once again '''climate change''' solves its own problems lol but also this is a legitimate issue when trying to predict the results of climate change. subtracting 1 billion people from the world population is going to have a major influence on carbon emissions
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Jul 22, 2019 16:07
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Squalid posted:but under this model it sounds like production would still be dictated by private markets and individual profit seeking farmers? You've just traded mortgages for leases, and I'm not sure this fundamentally changes the incentives driving farm consolidation and land utilization. Leases also complicate capital investment. I would call this agricultural land nationalization, but farming would still be private. And this is why I said that we're splitting hairs. Again, the idea that this is "profit seeking" behavior is largely a fiction that we tell ourselves because we want to downplay the role of government spending and planning in the economy. Agricultural subsidies are used to direct agricultural output because farming is actually problematic in industrialized market economies. Is a private farmer whose land and productive work is subsidized by the government engaging in market behavior? Sure, you can say that if you want, but I don't think that the distinction is meaningful.
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Jul 22, 2019 16:15
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nankeen posted:see, growing your own pumpkins and making pumpkin pie and sharing it with your neighbours is a much better post-climate survival plan than pretty much anything involving a gun Add some backyard chickens into the mix and give neighbors free eggs, and the chickens can eat the stuff from the garden we don't end up eating. e: I'm gonna roam the post-apocalypse wasteland on my bicycle with a chicken in a basket like it's E.T.
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Jul 22, 2019 17:20
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Squalid posted:lol but also this is a legitimate issue when trying to predict the results of climate change. subtracting 1 billion people from the world population is going to have a major influence on carbon emissions Carbon has a bake-in period before it reaches its full heating potential, while previously we thought it was closer to 30 to 40 years more recent modeling suggests it takes between 10 and 15 to hit that point, meaning what we're feeling right now isn't what we've emitted right now but rather what was emitted way back during Bush 2 and Obama. Atmospheric carbon goes through chemical property changes that lead to it not having as powerful of a warming potential when first emitted, instead gaining that power later. Because of this even if we were to entirely stop all emissions right this very second - all vehicle engines stop turning over, all factories and power plants shut down, even if every human died right now, everything - conditions will continue to worsen for at a minimum one decade. This is why the last IPCC stated that there will be no virtually extant permafrost outside of the ocean by 2050 regardless of what we actually do, because the problem is baked in. And of course that's made worse by the fact that permafrost, it has been found, just kinda collapses into nothing and loses all insulation properties when heated so that 2050 timeline is likely optimistic.
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Jul 22, 2019 17:27
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Paradoxish posted:People who don't have any background at all in agriculture or land use really don't seem to grasp how fragile farming is in particular. Modern agricultural practices are not in any way optimized for long-term resiliency, and this is true for a variety of good and not-so-good reasons. oddly enough, that's why every time someones like "we waste 50% of our food!" i want to yell THATS A GOOD THING, but try explaining that to a rose emoji. StabbinHobo fucked around with this message at 17:38 on Jul 22, 2019 |
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Jul 22, 2019 17:34
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StabbinHobo posted:oddly enough, that's why every time someones like "we waste 50% of our food!" i want to yell THATS A GOOD THING, but try explaining that to a rose emoji. Do you really think double capacity is what's required for resiliency?
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Jul 22, 2019 17:38
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With double capacity you can afford to lose half of it, though I'm pretty sure most people who talk about food waste are talking about the end source like restaurants and bakeries and grocery stores throwing unbought poo poo out on the daily more than the stuff that's left in a field because it won't look good enough for a suburbanite to buy it.
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Jul 22, 2019 17:40
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