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Geographically distributing food production increases food security at the expense of transportation costs. This is a tradeoff, it's not a perfect one. Monocropping a plot of land is an act of environmental destruction, but it also improves the efficiency of the food production and distribution network, so again, a tradeoff. There are demonstration farms that do things like multicropping (growing more than one crop in the same field at the same time) but they all run up against the fact that you can't just load up a single worker in a combine harvester and reap 50 acres in a few hours. E.g. they add labor needs which increases the costs of food. So it's a tradeoff, again. If you wanna get real mad about how lovely our food production systems are now, sure, there's plenty to be mad about, including environmental and racial injustice, carbon footprints, the overuse of fertilizers, the shift of land use that puts our most productive fields underneath paved-over suburbs, and so forth. But, hey, maybe also let's all just acknowledge that this poo poo is really really hard and just giving everyone their 40 acres and a mule is a laughably oversimplified suggestion? Reorganizing our society to produce food that is healthy, safe, low-carbon, abundant and affordable for everyone, and reduces the destruction of natural environments, is a really really really complicated and difficult endeavor.
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Aug 27, 2020 00:31
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I went cold turkey on weed and caffeine on Monday. This week has not been a great week.
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Aug 27, 2020 00:41
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Leperflesh posted:I'm amazed we've gone half a page without the "anything that could potentially benefit a landlord is evil" brigade crashing in to explain how a law that permits densification is actually bad because homeowners will build extra units and then rent them out. I posted the bill that we were busy with.
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Aug 27, 2020 00:46
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If you wanna get mad about it eat any fruit or vegetable in another country
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Aug 27, 2020 00:54
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Fly Molo posted:That would be a nice change. Not as effective as replacing some suburbs with free 4-story apartments, but at least a step in the right direction. Depends on the parking requirements.
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Aug 27, 2020 01:01
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Xaris posted:Yeah Sacramento itself is actually rather pleasant and a nice place to live and raise a kid, esp if you're somewhere in the more downtown-y area there's a whole lot of nice housing in walkable areas, train stops, an amazing diverse great food culture (especially middle eastern and asian cuisine), more affordable compared to Bay Area/LA/SD prices, and good geolocation not being too far from the mountains or coast/bay. Although I-80 sucks, traffic really isn't that bad and the Bay or LA area is way worse and you can get around the city itself pretty quickly. Like the one downside is that it does get pretty hot during the summer and you do get the agriculture pollen hellscape at times, but it isn't that bad. Most people's experience with Sac is only ever baking inside their car on a July-August day on the vast expanse of black asphalt on I-80 heading up to tahoe, maybe they once stopped at the IKEA and that's about it. It actually cools off relatively quickly by evening and would absolutely be a lot better than Riverside. Don't say bad things about Nevada County, my friend.
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Aug 27, 2020 01:42
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Kenning posted:Jesus loving Christ people being subsistence farmers is not a laudable social goal holy poo poo. also lol an acre per household of agricultural land use would be significantly less dense than the suburbs already are if the burbs typically have lots a quarter to a third of an acre, then to accommodate these farming parcels you'd be tearing down around 75% of all the existing houses to provide that land
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Aug 27, 2020 01:57
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HelloSailorSign posted:The one who has the mind altering substances is the one who can trade for anything Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope.
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Aug 27, 2020 02:13
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i will fill my acre with grapevines and stills
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Aug 27, 2020 03:07
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Proust Malone posted:Man cannot live on drugs alone. I have used machine learning to alter my internal biochemistry to derive energy from the chemical bonds in drugs. I cannot live without them as they form the bedrock of my metabolism. It's a brave new world out there and I intend to survive, even if that means quaffing 20% alcohol weed shakes.
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Aug 27, 2020 03:17
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H.P. Hovercraft posted:i will fill my acre with grapevines and stills so dope with pretensions?
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Aug 27, 2020 03:33
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Complications posted:so dope with pretensions? of course not, distilled alcohol has medical uses for ah the community and uh stores really well as a trade good
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Aug 27, 2020 03:48
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WAR CRIME GIGOLO posted:Ah yes, another Trumpian goal of making our society into sharecroppers. Love it, we could call it say, "The great leap forward" maybe? Nobody said this lol
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Aug 27, 2020 04:55
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droll posted:Nobody said this lol I respect a goon who knows they need their chicken tendies.
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Aug 27, 2020 04:57
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Leperflesh posted:Geographically distributing food production increases food security at the expense of transportation costs. This is a tradeoff, it's not a perfect one. Monocropping a plot of land is an act of environmental destruction, but it also improves the efficiency of the food production and distribution network, so again, a tradeoff. There are demonstration farms that do things like multicropping (growing more than one crop in the same field at the same time) but they all run up against the fact that you can't just load up a single worker in a combine harvester and reap 50 acres in a few hours. E.g. they add labor needs which increases the costs of food. So it's a tradeoff, again. It depends on what kind of farming you're doing, and how one defines "multicropping". With open land farming "multicropping" is often done via crop rotation so that they're almost always growing something on the land. You can see this on steroids with how hard some of the smaller hmong farms will run their land with the various rotating specialty crops. If you're talking about permanent crop farming (i.e. trees, grape vines, etc.), then basically the rows between those crops are marginal land. Planting other crops on that marginal land can work, but it can be difficult. The plants can't interfere with the primary crop (soil wise for example), they can't hinder duties for maintaining the primary crop, and basically they need to be harvested without affecting the primary crop. For our tests between the grapevines we settled on.. I want to say Camelina* for biofuels or biolubricants. It worked out okay; You usually want to have a cover crop in between grapevines anyway so that you can later till it into the ground as organic matter. So, grow something in the off season that you can chop the head off with oil seeds, and leave the stalk to till into the ground for organic matter. Has to have a short lifecycle so that it doesn't get in the way of any other duties with tending with the grapes. However, that means that the rows need minimal prep for the crop, the crop needs to be planted in a timely manner since you're on a narrow schedule, and then you need a special machine to harvest it. We were using a grey market rice harvester from China/Korea; a Yanmar/Kukje KC 575 rice harvester. It fit well enough between rows, was cheap, but hard to get replacement parts. Couldn't find a combine small enough or cheap enough that was made locally. With enough trials we probably could have gotten it to production level, and it could make better use of the land, but the old harvester was a pain in the rear end to maintain, couldn't get parts for it, and then the contracts that we had for the stuff were iffy. We were going to pursue another crop used to make a specialty flour for cooking but the harvester gave us too much trouble (If anyone has a line on cheap replacement parts from Korea or China for a KC 575, let me know. Can't afford to ship another harvester to LA in a container). However, with that said... if the R&D was done on it, and maybe if it was packaged as a service (i.e. someone comes in, "leases" the rows, plants it, harvests it, has the land owner do minimal maintenance, then pays a share to the farmer), then you could find more widespread adoption. There's other things that could be planted obviously but this fit the specific niche for grapevines, and there's a loooooooot of that unused marginal land out there when you consider how many grapevines there are. That's my Having-lived-through-the-bioenergy-bust Ted Talk; at least we made some friends. Thank you for coming. * It's been many years now; I don't remember the exact plant at this moment but we had a spat with the Organic Council about it since they said it was GMO and they didn't want it inbetween the rows of certified organic grapevines, and we said it wasn't GMO, and they said all of that plant was basically GMO since it intermixed with the wild stuff up in Canada so we told them to gently caress off and dropped organic. BeAuMaN fucked around with this message at 05:05 on Aug 27, 2020 |
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Aug 27, 2020 04:58
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droll posted:Nobody said this lol People literally said you could feed a family of 4 on an acre of farmland in CA because of our year-round growing season. I was making fun of the idea of prioritizing vegetable gardening as part of zoning, and well then we extrapolated.
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Aug 27, 2020 05:25
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BeAuMaN posted:It depends on what kind of farming you're doing, and how one defines "multicropping". With open land farming "multicropping" is often done via crop rotation so that they're almost always growing something on the land. You can see this on steroids with how hard some of the smaller hmong farms will run their land with the various rotating specialty crops. Yeah that's definitely multicropping, but when I was talking about acts of ecological destruction from monocropping I don't think raising a single, secondary crop between your monoculture grapevines is rescuing very many ecologies; although if it means you leave wild land wild rather than plowing it, maybe. You do that just by increasing food yields of any staple too, though. I was more thinking of the so-called "traditional" forest multicropping thing; multiple varieties of food plants all intermixed in a biome that is essentially self-sustaining, albeit focused on human-edibles, but which also provides habitat. There are monocultures that can provide habitat, like rice paddies, and of course there are animals that have adapted to surviving in human farmland, including a few species we don't regard as pests and do our best to eradicate. But for the most part, creating millions of square miles of wheat and corn that used to be north america's great prairies supporting millions of bison and hundreds of millions of other animals spread across a hundred or so species is the sort of thing we did in order to provide a huge overabundance of carbs to a rapidly expanding and now rapidly obesifying north american population and gosh it sure would be cool if we could not do that. As I'm sure you're aware, there's a whole farm-to-plate buy local low-carbon-footprint food thing going on, and I'm afraid that sensibility, while laudable, leads to a lot of people who mistakenly believe that with current technology we could feed everyone in america with nothing but urban gardens and small locally-run solar powered organic multicropped family owned farms. And no, we absolutely cannot do that yet, maybe not ever, because none of those farms are producing the megatons of corn, wheat, or soybeans that we consume on a daily basis in this country. We can't support closing in on 400M people with locally-grown kale and neighborhood zucchini. Sure as gently caress aren't going to provide sustainable free good nutrition to poor people by assigning each of them a quarter acre and a rototiller or whatever. We sure as hell can do a lot better though, and community gardens are definitely cool and good. So basically, HelloSailorSign posted:In a year round growing place like many areas of California, you could definitely feed a family of 4 on an acre and a half, not just with high calorie crops, and make it work... Megaman's Jockstrap posted:You can feed an entire family on an acre in CA because it's a year-round growing season. quote:Having said that, most agriculture needs to go much more local, so that we stop pumping carbon into the atmosphere to move food around. Absolutely, yes. Suburbs are a blight not only because of the insane cost of delivering infrastructure, and not only because commuting is inherently wasteful, but also because they're often right on top of what used to be local food production and the best soil. We still need vast fields of wheat and corn and soybeans etc., but they don't need to be in Kansas.
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Aug 27, 2020 05:41
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Leperflesh posted:Absolutely, yes. Suburbs are a blight not only because of the insane cost of delivering infrastructure, and not only because commuting is inherently wasteful, but also because they're often right on top of what used to be local food production and the best soil. We still need vast fields of wheat and corn and soybeans etc., but they don't need to be in Kansas. Would demolished suburbs still be viable cropland or would they have effectively destroyed the soil during paving and construction?
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Aug 27, 2020 05:46
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My brother in law grows a poo poo ton of corn, beans, and wheat. By that I mean 60,000 acres. The corn and the beans are for industrial products. The wheat is about it for eating
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Aug 27, 2020 05:53
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Complications posted:Would demolished suburbs still be viable cropland or would they have effectively destroyed the soil during paving and construction? Only one way to find out. Let's get started.
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Aug 27, 2020 06:00
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I thought that the offset CO2 from transportation wasn't really that much due to the ability to transport at scale, so that it doesn't make a huge difference in CO2 emissions between long-distance food transport and short-distance.
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Aug 27, 2020 06:30
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It's like 5-10% of the total for most food. More for stuff shipped air freight.
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Aug 27, 2020 07:21
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Leperflesh posted:Yeah that's definitely multicropping, but when I was talking about acts of ecological destruction from monocropping I don't think raising a single, secondary crop between your monoculture grapevines is rescuing very many ecologies; although if it means you leave wild land wild rather than plowing it, maybe. You do that just by increasing food yields of any staple too, though. Like you say though overall it's all a bunch of tradeoffs. Leperflesh posted:Absolutely, yes. Suburbs are a blight not only because of the insane cost of delivering infrastructure, and not only because commuting is inherently wasteful, but also because they're often right on top of what used to be local food production and the best soil. We still need vast fields of wheat and corn and soybeans etc., but they don't need to be in Kansas.
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Aug 27, 2020 08:22
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agriculture is a science, and should and would be done even in a revolutionary world with greater food localization by experts so instead of 'have the valley feed itself with individual family farms' it'd be, the uc davis aggie school finally has its time to shine, annexes all the fields around davis/winters/woodland and feeds half the valley for a relative pittance of water compared to the poo poo rear end rich family barons farther south
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Aug 27, 2020 10:32
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Just got a huge box of yard signs printed, if anyone in CA 50 wants one PM me.
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Aug 27, 2020 19:12
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atelier morgan posted:agriculture is a science, and should and would be done even in a revolutionary world with greater food localization by experts yeah, basically. Ag needs to be done at scale to sustain the kind of population we have now. So even if you're talking After The Glorious Revolution or whatever, your options are: Some form of industrial agriculture, aka "factory farms" or Mass starvation. There is no third option. That doesn't mean that under different forms of political organization there can't be significant changes to how that large scale agriculture is conducted, the stuff you mentioned about farms being more centrally located around water sources is a good example. Less of a need to squeeze out every last dollar from each crop might also lead to more usage of farming practices that are less efficient in term of land use, but less environmentally damaging (Though even here we run into trade-offs. More efficient farming land use means that there's more land on which to plant carbon sinks like trees for example. In Europe forests have actually bee expanding for the last couple decades as the portion of land used for farming declines.) Farming managed for some gain greater than the profit margin of some rear end in a top hat petty land baron along highway 5 (seriously, so many "family farmers" are huge shitheads, you have no idea) might look significantly different. But it would still be done at scale, and would honestly probably still involve stuff like GMOs, just under hopefully better management with a different set of priorities and policies. Fill Baptismal fucked around with this message at 07:53 on Aug 28, 2020 |
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Aug 28, 2020 02:24
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Below are some useful sites to assess what's going on with smoke in the bay area right now, today we seem to all be getting choked in it. These sites would be best seen on a laptop/desktop. I think everyone is familiar with airnow.gov, but they also have a fire map and holy poo poo it gives you a real sense of the scale we're dealing with here (I think this one was shared already tbf): https://fire.airnow.gov you can see individual stations reporting air quality here: https://www2.purpleair.com You can see also see maps for the wind direction here (check Atmospheric Conditions -> Windstream): https://www.wunderground.com/wundermap Here's a everything-but-the-kitchen-sink map from NOAA: https://www.wrh.noaa.gov/map/?&zoom...bs_provider=ALL America Inc. fucked around with this message at 21:11 on Aug 28, 2020 |
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Aug 28, 2020 21:09
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This one is also super good https://maps.nwcg.gov/sa/#/%3F/EditLayerActiveIncidents/37.3686/-121.6893/7 I've set it to show active incidents and NIFS fire perimeters across the whole state but it's more useful if you zoom in. It uses satellite data to find high temperature spots, and color codes them by time; the dark red are the current hotspots. You can see that the four or five really big major burning areas in the greater bay area have all improved a great deal, but there are still serious hotspots and uncontrolled fronts. Play around with layers by expanding the left bar.
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Aug 28, 2020 21:26
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I've been using the Chronicle air quality map, it has realtime data from Purple Air, forecasts from NOAA, and a wind speed overlay. https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/california-fire-map/air-quality/
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Aug 28, 2020 21:45
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Still Dismal posted:highway 5 WTF
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Aug 28, 2020 23:54
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A former classmate of mine was complaining on Facebook about Newsom introducing stricter standards for reopening and intimating that it was some kind of Democrat political ploy. How are the revised guidelines playing out politically in the state as far as you guys can see? I am hoping he's an isolated nutcase and most people support being more cautious about reopening.
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Aug 28, 2020 23:57
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the 5 or i-5 m8
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Aug 29, 2020 00:34
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Da fiveski
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Aug 29, 2020 00:36
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My feeling is that Newsom folded when he saw the stupid astroturf pressure and realized the feds weren't going to do jack poo poo to help. So it was a hasty reopening to prevent poo poo from going bonkers, that left us at half-measures (like, "eat in the parkin lot!")
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Aug 29, 2020 00:38
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Celexi posted:the 5 or i-5 m8 Dude, not m8.
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Aug 29, 2020 00:41
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FilthyImp posted:My feeling is that Newsom folded when he saw the stupid astroturf pressure and realized the feds weren't going to do jack poo poo to help. So it was a hasty reopening to prevent poo poo from going bonkers, that left us at half-measures (like, "eat in the parkin lot!") he did the same thing for housing. get ready for Newsomvilles to start springing up all over. https://twitter.com/TenantsTogether/status/1299487628366983169
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Aug 29, 2020 01:29
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he could have unilaterally extended the eviction moratorium. instead he reveals a poo poo bill at the last minute that needs and absolutely will not get a 2/3rds vote.
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Aug 29, 2020 01:30
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Celexi posted:the 5 or i-5 m8 Describing it as “highway 5” makes it extremely dubious that this person has actually lived in CA
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Aug 29, 2020 01:50
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Doc Hawkins posted:he could have unilaterally extended the eviction moratorium. instead he reveals a poo poo bill at the last minute that needs and absolutely will not get a 2/3rds vote. Well, yeah, his interests are perfectly in line with his landlord donors. What else could he possibly do, stop exploiting the working classes? Notice how even the poo poo bill, if it passed, would be a means-tested pile of garbage. Specifically, one that only pauses evictions for lack of full payment for a year. Meaning somebody who's currently unemployed needs to find a job, start working again, and somehow save up multiple months of back rent in <1 year, otherwise they'll just get evicted next year. 
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Aug 29, 2020 01:56
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Anza Borrego posted:Describing it as “highway 5” makes it extremely dubious that this person has actually lived in CA in road design we just say the number, like i'm currently working on a project on 37 out in vallejo. if you've got really bad Engineer Brain you'll sometimes hear someone actually say something like "SR-237", but even us transportation dorks still drop back into standard california vernacular when giving directions or something - "sorry i'm running late for the meeting on 680/84, there was traffic on the 101"
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Aug 29, 2020 02:28
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