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Epitope posted:It's a batch culture (i.e. no input of energy sources) of bacteria, so hopefully we can figure out a way to not follow that curve. We won't, because we're not in a closed system. At least, for the next five and a half billion years or so.
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Dec 19, 2014 22:47
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Epitope posted:Except that we're, almost literally, eating oil. And the only thing that will stop us is the oil running out. Oil is cheep. It's convenient, but it's not the only source of energy we have. As the cost of oil rises, which it will, other sources will see greater utilization. If anything, I think there's a greater risk of our lust for cheep energy leading to ecological disasters before the fuel running out. It would probably be better for the species if oil was scarcer.
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Dec 20, 2014 10:26
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Forgall posted:What about hydroponics? Are there serious downsides to them? Are they good for growing stuff other than lettuce, like legumes so we could get some protein out of them? Using 1% of water and being able to easily filter out all useful stuff from runoff and reuse it seems pretty great. And they are basically independent of climate. It's energy intensive, and the equipment is a lot more expensive. Hydroponic food costs a good 3 or so times or more what the regular stuff does. That said, if something came along to make regular food cost more then it would look increasingly viable to farmers.
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Dec 22, 2014 17:09
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On the other hand, if the people running the farms don't feel the sting of rising costs they won't change, ever. At least not unless the way the government works changes. I'd rather see expensive food and a strong social safety net for those that can't afford it than us waffling around burning tons of fossil fuels till the earth boils. On the other hand, we're at least accustomed to spending money on agriculture in the US, so maybe things will change over time as the need becomes more apparent, and we'll see a government initiative to nip things in the bud. It's not like the USDA doesn't already do a lot of work on farming practices already. Things are going to get expensive as at some point though, it all comes down to how we deal with it, or don't. I don't buy the more apocalyptic views though, especially the whole gas == fertilizer thing. Just because gas is the easiest source of H2 for making amonia doesn't mean it's the only one. Also, there's hope that an energy crunch might lead to people making the rational decision and pushing a nuclear policy, which would solve a lot of problems, but I'd rather see that come about from something that isn't wide spread hunger and 10 dollar heads of lettuce. ToxicSlurpee posted:Then we should be dumping piles of money into research already because the number of people that can't find enough to eat regularly is already 10 digits. In many parts of the world you're lucky if you didn't starve to death as a child. Different problem, though. Right now we have a distribution problem. Most people when they talk about future food crises are talking about supply problems. Not that it wouldn't hurt to throw money at the current problems. We could probably solve them in the US budget alone if we had the will.
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Dec 22, 2014 19:39
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whitey delenda est posted:Wait what? The problem isn't that natural gas is sort of a good source of the most abundant element in the universe, the problem is that it takes a shitload of heat and pressure (which needs to be provided by power plants or other sources of energy) to turn Nitrogen into a bioavailable form. You get the nitrogen from air, hydrogens can come from literally any fossil fuel. Current market prices define natural gas as the cheapest source but ain't nothing stopping LPGs from becoming that. Yeah, but it's not like it's a mystery on how to use other sources of energy, or other feed stocks (Electrolized water, for example.) The idea that as fuels decline we're going to suddenly find ourselves with out fertilizer is a pretty common one, and it doesn't make any more sense than the sort of people that think one day oil is just going to disappear (I wish it would.)
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Dec 23, 2014 00:15
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whitey delenda est posted:Ammonia fertilizer no, but we're not doomsaying about that element. Nitrogen is freely available in the atmosphere and can be fixed by ecological processes. No, don't think I was accusing you of doing that, I'm mostly commenting on things I've seen elsewhere. Phosphorus is a problem, obviously. ToxicSlurpee posted:It isn't that people are necessarily worried about that stuff just vanishing but rather people are worried about it becoming increasingly scarce. A big problem we're going to run into is that the easy sources of these things are being exploited into nothing. There is also the mathematical fact that there is a finite amount of this stuff around thanks to the Earth only being so large. Eventually the energy required to produce enough food for all of us is going to be more than can be expended. That's the issue. It's comparable to the whole "destroy the Earth" thing. We'd have a hard time actually destroying it but it's on the way to becoming uninhabitable as far as we're concerned. Sure, this stuff will eventually run out if enough of it gets used but we'd have much larger problems long before the well goes dry. I'm aware, but when you have people in previous threads on the subject advocating a return to an agrarian society and manual labor intensive farming they might as well be saying it will end abruptly. Otherwise the cure is a lot worse than the disease. whitey delenda est posted:Yes in la la land where anybody anywhere wants nuclear power infrastructure constructed. That's the paradox, isn't it? We would be better, as a whole, if we used nuclear power and electrified as much as we could, but people won't stomach that unless they feel the pressure in costs.
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Dec 23, 2014 00:56
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Not being able to afford food is a distribution problem, not a supply issue, like I said. People starve because of poor economic conditions and a lack of systems in place to provide a safety net for the worlds hungry. I think that's a distribution problem because it could be fixed with out farming any more food and pushing existing food out the backs of c-130's for free on people that can't afford it.
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Dec 23, 2014 21:04
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Fish of hemp posted:Could rodents be used as source of meat? I mean rats, guinea pigs, rabbits and so fort. I'd think that a hare doesn't need as much food as a cow and could be slaughtered earlier. Sure, but it's not just the type of meat that causes the problem. For example, you could have a very dense industrial rabbit farm, with tons of rabbits being fed manufactured food pellets, or you could have a lot of cattle on marginal grazing land that isn't really good for anything else. Meat's complicated. It's in really high demand, so we get a lot of high density farming to meet demand, but properly applied grazing most certainly has it's place in providing food to the world. Cows and other animals eat calories that humans can't eat, there by producing food on land that otherwise wouldn't be useful for much of anything. Pigs are fantastic end points for food waste, but not every farm operation is feeding them much if any at all. At any rate, a lot of rodents are grown for food. Guinea pigs are popular for food in some South American nations, rabbits are eaten and farmed all over, and squirrels are regularly hunted and eaten in the south.
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Jan 20, 2015 16:53
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whitey delenda est posted:In general meat-talk kind of misses the forest for the trees, there's a 10:1 conversion factor to get calories into meatform regardless, and that's going to be the fundamental problem from an ecological perspective. Even assuming that you're raising animals on otherwise utterly-worthless land, it's a LOT of energy to put in and that's not counting the mechanical requirements of slaughter techniques. To speculate wildly for a bit, in addition to developing novel resource capture and remediation techniques, there's going to need to be some Meat Moderation public health campaigns in developing countries that make the anti-smoking efforts of the last 40 years look like a child's lemonade stand advertisement. I agree that less meat eating would be a good end goal, but there's still a pretty big place for grazing. I mean, there's a lot of grazing in west Texas, and a massive deer population on top of that. Obviously ever environment is different, but grazing animals are a natural part of a lot of environments, and that should be taken into account.
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Jan 20, 2015 17:34
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Yes, that's true. There's too much of a demand for beef. Not going to argue that. Still, when you make policy you have to look at a lot of different issues. There's a certain amount of beef production that's good to have (Since they eat things a lot of other animals can't.) just like there's a specific carrying capacity for every other animals. People tend to want a panacea, like "If we all ate X then it'd be rainbows." but that's rarely the case. edit: Let's take beef as an easy example. The life cycle of beef is kind of complicated, due to a number of factors. Beef's graded in the US based on it's marbling. Different grades have different life cycle requirements. Your average cow that makes steak is raised on a ranch, eating grass and hay for the first part of it's life. Then it's sent off to be finished. Cows are finished on a lot of things. This is where the grain use comes in, but it's not just grain they eat. Cows are fed a lot of by products. They can eat fermented stalks. You see a lot of ethanol and corn syrup by products being used by finishing lots. So, do we want to get people to eat less beef? Sure. But we also want to maintain a steady demand for beef, or other meats that eat the byproducts that finishing lots are using. Then not every finishing lot is going to do things the same way, so making a global policy on it all is hard, let alone a national one. That's just looking at it all from the grain input standpoint. You've got to look at waste run off, methane, and a lot of other things. It's a complicated policy issue, to say the least. For everything we eat. Not just beef. You could look at pigs, chickens, rabbits, or anything else really. One thing that'd help, in addition to a push for less red meat, and less meat in general, is a good analysis of the supply line and how it reacts to changes in the market. Even the numbers are hard to pin down. Does a cow that's fed brewery waste get counted as eating grain? It's not like they're specifically growing the grain for the cow to eat, but at the same time the cow has to eat something, so there is a noticeable demand increase from the cow that effects the prices that effects what farmers grow and how they grow it. Food's complicated. It's going to get a lot more complicated as time goes on. Killer-of-Lawyers fucked around with this message at 18:19 on Jan 20, 2015 |
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Jan 20, 2015 17:57
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ToxicSlurpee posted:I'm not saying that beef is bad in and of itself just that there is too much of it. One of the major issues with food production is that people gravitate toward the "best" food. Part of the issue with food waste, especially in the developed world, is that when you have a poo poo load of options people just won't eat certain things. In the past people happily chowed down on all sorts of things that now make Americans go "gently caress, people ate that?" Even parts of the cow. How many people eat beef tongue? Blood pudding? Black sausage? Pig's feet? As much as people demand beef there are even cuts that aren't in high demand. There's also the status of it; part of eating the $20 steak is saying "I can afford this $20 steak." Buying the cheaper, more sensible steak comes with the connotation of being viewed as poor. Granted I'm kind of an odd duck in that my favorite part is the stew beef cooked in a stir fry but I digress... I expanded my post a little while you replied, and touched on that a little. That said, I'm from Texas, so pigs feet, cow stomach stew (Menudo), and a lot of those 'icky' foods are alive and well down here. Not that it discounts your point. People in the south eat those sorts of things because they're poorer, and I agree that availability tends to whittle down choices over time in the population. However, I'd disagree that America's system is broken, at least compared to a lot of the world. I think it could sure as hell be a whole lot better, but America has a lot going for it when it comes to conservation and farming. There's more the government could be doing, and I think we'll see more as time goes on. Also, you're equating a number of loud mouths and their opinions to the entire populace, and that's not the best way to look at things. whitey delenda est posted:Yeah this is where I'm heading with the public health interventions. Undoing the "status" of beef specifically, and to a lesser extent meat-eating generally, as a wealth signifier is going to be incredibly challenging. It's also where this field starts to go interdisciplinary with a quickness. Looking for literature on meat eating and social history of the phenomenon is frustrating, because for whatever reason this has been a subject that loonies cotton to EN MASSE. It's like vaccines except bigger. Tell me about it. It's drat hard to find a good article to back much of anything up any way with out getting a lot of fringe woo from all sides on the matter.
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Jan 20, 2015 18:24
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Yeah, although when we're talking about the food supply as a whole it's alright if some people are picky, the parts get eaten by other people in other regions. Just because all everyone in one state wants to eat are steaks doesn't mean that the entire cow isn't getting used. As far as eating meat, eh, I wouldn't want to give it up. I could probably do with eating less. I think as far as policy goes we should focus on efficiency and conservation of resources. I'm more concerned with making sure that run off from ranches isn't an issue, or the over use of water isn't going to be a problem than I am with making people eat less in the US. We aren't starving from a lack of food at this point, and I'd rather work the system into one that makes sure we won't be starving rather than preparing the population for a future with scarce food.
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Jan 21, 2015 23:55
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Yeah, food safety is one of those things you don't want to gently caress around with. We're not starving, so you won't be saving any lives by convincing people to eat spoiled food. You will, however, end up killing a non zero amount of people. The calculus doesn't add up.
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Jan 22, 2015 13:19
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Yeah, that's a bad sentence right there. I think it might be missing a comma, or just not well put together. I'd probably just remove the spoilage part all together. It doesn't add anything to the sentence, and comes out of left field. You introduce spoilage and never refer to spoilage again. What purpose does it add to an otherwise functional idea of "People are discovering other flavors in food besides the traditional milquetoast western ones."? Either way, most people were responding to Toxic, not you. edit: Also, yuppies are a terrible target. They're picky, horrible eaters who would just as soon rally against efficient meat processing because it's gross and unnatural as they would rally around eating grasshoppers. Never mind the fact that grasshoppers aren't really a solution to anything. If you're that concerned about the efficiency of food then just get people to eat plant protein, which is more efficient than eating bugs. Killer-of-Lawyers fucked around with this message at 16:01 on Jan 22, 2015 |
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Jan 22, 2015 15:57
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Thermometric water use can be a little deceptive though. A lot of it goes back into the source after being run through cooling ponds/towers. You can also use salt water if you need to. Not to discount how much water is used to run turbines, but it's a situation where a lot of it is recovered.  Indeed, you can see how we've become more efficent with water use from generation as time has gone on, and the amount of withdraws have remained relatively constant for the past few decades. Then again, public use has a lot of recovery that could be done was well. Irrigation is probably the worst offender, particularly in very arid areas. I've never been sold on farming in arid areas. California is productive, but at a pretty big cost.
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Mar 17, 2015 20:32
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enraged_camel posted:I read something about underwater desalination, where the membranes are placed a thousand feet under the ocean and the pressure does most of the work. Sure, we can use all the water we desalinate to clean the mirrors and panels on the solar plants. edit: http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy11osti/50900.pdf This is a good overview of the difference between withdrawing water and consumption of water for various types of power generation, with an eye towards renewable sources. Killer-of-Lawyers fucked around with this message at 21:17 on Mar 17, 2015 |
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Mar 17, 2015 20:54
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Xipe Totec posted:reading the last few pages, the only solutions put forward are PR campaigns within The Free Market. You're right, we should try full communism (TM).
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Mar 17, 2015 23:54
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Discendo Vox posted:Bitcoin agroconomics. Can we get some brain marbles on this problem?!
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Mar 18, 2015 00:27
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whitey delenda est posted:If only there was a decentralized attention based food source. Maybe those sun worshipers have it figured out after all. Maybe food already is attention based. You ever seen a pot boil?
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Mar 18, 2015 03:57
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They are, really. Every single idiot I've ever seen tote the back to primitive agriculture is a nut job that'd have us return to the feudal era. They also don't give a drat about land use at all, and would cover the world in their labor intensive shity farms just to stop the evils of global food transportation. They are quite happy with the third world slaving in poor farm land to try and feed themselves, forever locking them into poverty and long arduous manual labor simply because they feel it's the more green solution.
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Mar 19, 2015 07:55
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Modern agriculture has a lot of problems. Deadzones in the Gulf of Mexico. Waste. Diversion of rivers to feed thirsty desert cropland. However, ancient agriculture has ruined entire swathes of china from erosion, causing rampant flooding by removing the topsoil on mountains to grow rice. The forests of Europe were burned down to make crop land before we were out of the stone age. There's a mental fallicy, that nature knows best, that the ancestors know best. It's easy for people to consume, and it spreads like wildfire among people who've never been on a farm a day in their life. Growth isn't sustainable they cry, ignoring the fact that cities are far more efficient in terms of resource use than rural land they idealize. They cry about nestle bottling water, ignoring the right of the native american's that own the water to use their resources to better themselves with out interference by white middle class Californians who gleefully pour entire rivers into desert to grow avocados on the rest of the nations dime. A strong agriculture industry with heavy influence and involvement from the government to aid in production and provide incentives for efficiency that wouldn't exist is vital to us going forward. It's pure insanity that in the same post they can rile against the evils of government subsidy and the USDA while pretending to espouse a non capitalist agenda. edit: How about some numbers?! Everyone loves numbers. The coke system uses 77,481,700,000 gallons of water a year to make it's products. The US withdraws 306,000,000,000 gallons a day. Every day. Over a third of that goes to watering fields. You want to play coke up as a drain on water resources? C'mon, pull the other leg. Idiots love to rail against bottled water and soda, but they're such a small impact compared to the water that goes into growing their organic kale daily! The third world is suffering from a lack of sanitation and poor regulation. The ironic thing is that large corporations moving in to bottle the water brings some modicum of investment in treatment, which is more than can be said for the local municipalities in many parts of the world. And yet Americans, who've never felt thirst in their life have the gall to go around telling poor people the world over that their loving factory jobs at the local soda plant is endangering the world. It's pure unadulterated hypocrisy. Killer-of-Lawyers fucked around with this message at 10:26 on Mar 19, 2015 |
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Mar 19, 2015 10:09
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Corn isn't always irrigated, so how thirsty it is doesn't always factor into the picture. The yields are lower, but not that much lower. That said, it's better for the environment to grow less acres of corn if you can do so with a responsible and efficient method of irrigation. Also, we do rotate our crops, or at least, the farms that are actually listening to the USDA do. This monoculture is usualy a gross overstatement. Like when people talk about factory farming cattle. (Since the average lay man doesn't have a clue what the difference between a finishing lot and a ranch is.) Powercrazy posted:There is obviously some nuance to the position of "eat local." It should actually be something like "grow local, with minimal external inputs." A good example is my 'favorite' crop and darling of middle America, Corn. Corn has some of the highest subsidies and is an incredibly thirsty crop, and yet it's grown in the great plains, which are pretty arid all things considered. Why are we growing corn instead of any other crop? No. Grow crops where it's the most efficient and leave the less efficient farmland as fallow fields or ranch land. edit: http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/884158/eib99.pdf This is a good report on irrigation. Where it goes, what it comes from, it's economic costs and efficiency. It's a good jumping off point. Killer-of-Lawyers fucked around with this message at 18:45 on Mar 19, 2015 |
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Mar 19, 2015 18:11
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I don't disagree with nature knows best, it's just the crunchy types tend to be anti nature. They'll go on about food forests (Cause growing a forest in the plains is totally what nature intended.) or talk about how ancient farmers didn't screw things up. Just look at Toxic slurpy talking about modern farming trying to grow rice on mountain tops, which is what was happening in china over a century ago. Modern agriculture, with the support of the USDA and it's vast resources are what's going to get us to a better state with nature. The problem is a 60 page report on water use isn't an easy soundbite like 'Monsanto is suing farmers and wants to control what you eat'. Hell, tillage is one of those things that organic farms can be really bad about. They lack a good way of controlling weeds, so they till the soil, rather than using herbicides and performing a large burn down instead. I suppose I shouldn't rail so hard on the eating local thing, it's just that some places just aren't meant for growing much of anything, and you can do a lot of ecological damage by trying to grow things there. I also get really frustrated at the constant cries of ammonia running out. Because the planet is in short supply of hydrogen and nitrogen.  So does nature have a place in our food supply? Sure. The issue is that all of those natural practices are already being pushed by the USDA. The US, for all it's faults, and it's over subsidization of corn, has a fantastically managed agricultural support system in place, and spends a lot of money on projects to keep things improving, from replacing old tractors to insuring crops. I get prickly about defending it. Food Security is a complex problem. There's no one size solutions. Growing grasshoppers won't fix the world. Doing that one farming method you saw on Youtube won't fix the world. You could eliminate irrigation all together (Goodbye rice.) and it might even make things worse. In some areas it isn't a bad idea to irrigate, there's a giant river near by, after all. It's a complex issue, and that's what governments are for. No one likes to hear it, but it's true. Killer-of-Lawyers fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Mar 19, 2015 |
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Mar 19, 2015 19:06
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whitey delenda est posted:I mean, get prickly all you want, but sustainable practices certainly aren't being pushed hard enough. Or... I actually can't comment on the "push" but the adoption / mandate of adoption certainly isn't. DAT drat GUBMINT is also fighting an incredible institutional inertia that spans the industry: the chemical fertilizer producers, the seed distributors, the failure of the land grant university system, and the farmers themselves. Yeah, I hear you. It's far from perfect what we have now, but keep in mind I'm talking to people who would have the USDA removed because subsidies are baaaaad and the root of all our problems. It's like libertarians in socialists clothing. If we're going to see an improvement, we're probably going to see more monetary incentives out of the government to make the changes needed. Guy DeBorgore posted:We've learned kind of a lot about agriculture and ecology in the last few thousands years. Modern science has contributed a lot to the revitalization of "low-tech" farming techniques (I don't really know a better word). There's a very sound ecological basis for practices like intercropping with witchweed instead of using pesticides. A. Modern agriculture is an evolution of ancient agriculture, and didn't just throw away everything we learned. It's a system put forth by university academics and founded on more real data than we've had in the past. B. Maybe we shouldn't be farming in areas that have erosion problems, instead of trying to get everyone to be a poor rural farmer like you want them to be. C. You can have urban areas with far less people in the countryside than we have now. We don't need that many people farming. D. Got any examples of coke plants in areas with limited water where their inclusion is leading to people going thirsty? Because if they're moving into farm land, then there's already a lot of water to go around. If they're moving into a urban area or a town, then they're bringing an actual decent sanitation system, which in places like India are sorely needed. Lastly, they're bringing jobs that are probably an improvement over poking at the ground with a stick all day to barely make enough food to feed yourself. The only reason you don't want to get bogged down in numbers is because you don't want your dogmatic beliefs challenged, because that would mean you'd have to think about the world in a manner other than 'ugg, corporation must be bad. Subsidies bad.'
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Mar 19, 2015 19:33
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Guy DeBorgore posted:Dude, nobody is arguing against modern agriculture. Then we move them off the farm. We should focus on developing the third world, not coming up with a stupid list of best practices for subsistence farmers. My plan is to increase production in the parts of the world where it makes sense, grow grain there, and drop it out the back of c-130's for the hungry. That's how you solve food crises. Incidentally, we're pretty food secure in the developed world, so it stands to reason that making the entire world modern and developed would do a lot for food security. Since, as we've already established, there is more than enough food being made for everyone. We just need to get it to them, and it'll be a hell of a lot easier if they're living in urban areas than if they're spread across hell and back. So you brought coke up, and found your statement indefensible. Fantastic, we're making headway.
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Mar 19, 2015 19:53
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You mean the issue of everyone in one particular region growing on particular strain of a crop? I'd probably deal with it by offering subsidies to people who want to grow a few acres of less productive seed, promoting seed banks, and so on and so forth. If we're talking about the risk of a disease causing a catastrophic crop failure in an entire region, then I'd find that it'd be hard to happen across all productive regions of the world, and happen to every single staple crop during the same year, so I'd find that the basics of keeping various strains around to be sufficient, as long as we were growing enough that a drop in one crop won't effect supply. As it stands we're already growing an abundance of calories, so it shouldn't be too hard. Needless to say, the whole pushing things out the back of c-130's is an unrealistic exaggeration, but the basic idea of grow food where it makes the most sense and reducing the human foot print via urbanization as much as possible is a good solution to the problem as long as you make headway against the distribution issues we face in the third world. I'm inclined to believe that the issues will go away as the third world develops. ToxicSlurpee posted:One of the biggest issues is in food waste. Yeah we produce enough to feed everybody but the first world has major issues with food just being thrown out because whatever gently caress it who cares I can afford more. Work in a restaurant for a while and you'll see just how uncaring western society is to food waste. The fact that that increases food scarcity for others is met with "meh, not my problem. I'm not them." I've mentioned waste before, and yes, it's a problem, but it doesn't change the fact that right now we have an issue with getting food to poor people, not with making enough food for poor people. The waste is just an example of having more capacity to feed than demand where the foods going anyways. Ideally I'd like to see all that food waste end up on pig farms, while were working on global infrastructure anyways. Killer-of-Lawyers fucked around with this message at 20:05 on Mar 19, 2015 |
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Mar 19, 2015 20:02
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A steady state economy is a dumb idea. Sorry. It's never going to happen. You might as well focus on mitigating the environmental impact of modern society than pushing for a ridiculous pipe dream.
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Mar 19, 2015 20:09
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Effectronica posted:I mean the issue of the entire world growing a few strains per crop, and opening the door for a catastrophic situation where you have epidemics leaping from region to region and multiple simultaneous outbreaks. This is going to be a regular strain on the system, bluntly. I don't think that I ever advocated the world only growing a few strains of crops. I advocated growing food where it's efficient to do so, and letting the rest of the world remain fallow. That doesn't mean everyone's growing the same thing, at all. As for steady state economies? No. Optimism. Anyone who wants the world to stop growing is pretty drat selfish and evil. We've got mouths to feed, technology to expand, and factories to build. We can decouple the modernization of the third world from our environmental impact.
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Mar 19, 2015 20:16
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Effectronica posted:Okay, that's part and parcel of modern agriculture though. You need a standardized strain to efficiently harvest. Except we don't. Modern agriculture grows a lot of different strains. In one state alone a number of different wheat crops are grown: http://www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_State/Montana/Publications/crops/variety/whtvar.pdf The idea that modern farming is done with only one strain is just crunchy type idiocy. We've got a lot of wiggle room with thermodynamics on our own planet, and a sun that will continue to pour power into the system for 5 billion more years. Reality only dictates an end to growth a far way away from where we currently are.
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Mar 19, 2015 20:22
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Good question. I'd have to do more research to say for certain, but they're diverse enough that hey're immune to and susceptible to different diseases. Also, rural poor farming is just as likely to breed itself into a hole, if not more so because farmers in poor countries don't have rich governments to insure their crops, subsidize them when they grow strains no one else is growing, or to do the research on diseases. If anything, a strong national entity trying to push efficient farming would be less likely to do something that'd destroy all agriculture, as it'd be headed by researchers and scientists who spend their lives studying diseases. The sort of jobs that you get when your entire population isn't poking the ground with sticks. I think you're just reading the desire to find the most efficient crop into my posts because it's what you expect rather than I ever saying anything of the sort. edit: Oh, right, you were talking about wiggle room in relation to thermodynamics, not crops. In that case, no, we've got energy reserves for centuries. We'd be more concerned with roasting ourselves with climate change before we run out of things to burn.
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Mar 19, 2015 20:33
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How do you figure? How is modern agriculture any more likely to only grow one thing and suffer a catastrophic collapse as opposed to primitive farming? Blights were a thing in the past, after all. Entire nations starved from them. That hasn't happened to the developed world in a long time, even though you claim that modern practices should make it more likely to happen.
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Mar 19, 2015 20:35
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Lower yield, and lower market value. Corns really productive, which makes it attractive. http://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2002/Volume_1,_Chapter_1_US/st99_1_033_033.pdf
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Mar 19, 2015 22:12
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People will have less kids as the world develops. The population isn't going to grow forever. At this point in time, and for the near future, population isn't the issue for food security.
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Mar 20, 2015 00:19
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Like I said last page. Obviously we need to try Full Communism (TM). I've posted links to actual research papers, your response is "It's obvious that companies are the problem, and in 2 pages I can't cite a single source because it's self evident." This is why the thread erupted into one line jokes. There's no sense in continuing a discussion that's just going to be one side repeated spouting off political rhetoric.
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Mar 20, 2015 00:38
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