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Ardennes posted:Americans may eat way too much meat, but that isn't necessarily the same thing as protein. If anything the key would be to produce that protein is a more sustainable and less intensive way. If you want to talk about the economics of food here please do. I don't know nearly enough about that particular subject which is why I mainly alluded to neoliberal monoculture encouragement etc. rather than tried to do a full breakdown.
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Dec 20, 2014 04:31
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Nessus posted:The big hurdle is that you would have to convince people to eat crickets. While you could probably convince people to eat less meat, I don't think - for instance - the rising affluent people in China or India would particularly want to get told, you know, 'hey, just so you know, you are going to be eating crickets because they're about 40% more optimal in terms of feed converted into edible protein.' They would probably say, "gently caress you, we're going to have chicken, at the very least." Yeah, it's very reminiscent of the struggle to get the public to embrace toilet to tap. It's really efficient, but a fair amount of the public has a huge gross out factor response to it and try to push de-salinization plants that use orders of magnitude more energy, but which seem nice and clean. Though interestingly enough you can usually get people to change their stance by showing them the sheer amount of technology separating waste water intake from the drinking water output. Maybe the chemical process whitey delenda est mentions would be useful in more ways than one by letting the public put a purifying technological step between the bug intake and the food output.
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Dec 20, 2014 04:36
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whitey delenda est posted:If you want to talk about the economics of food here please do. I don't know nearly enough about that particular subject which is why I mainly alluded to neoliberal monoculture encouragement etc. rather than tried to do a full breakdown. If you want to know more about the economics of food as it applies to the States give King Corn a watch sometime. The tl;dr of it is that corn is massively, massively subsidized in America to the point where it's so cheap it's literally impossible to actually profit off of the corn itself. The corn crop is a record yield every year and just keeps growing. The cost of corn being so massively low is the reason why corn is in everything. It's dirt rear end cheap to buy insane amounts of corn so the food industry is constantly looking for new stuff to do with it, which is also why corn syrup of various types has gotten into everything. Of course this is also why corn is being used to feed livestock even though it's less than ideal and, for example, kills the poo poo out of cows that eat nothing but corn. It's far cheaper to grow corn on land then feed it to animals in a factory farm than it is to actually graze animals. A full breakdown gets difficult however in that it's a massively complex subject. If one crop fails then it can have a ripple effect through other things. Think of things like when the pumpkin crop failed. Suddenly the pumpkin pie filling ran out so people were buying more of other types of pies. The demand for every other type of pie filling went up because the supply of pumpkin pie went down. Similarly fuel prices going up tends to drive up food prices because food needs to be delivered and farm machinery uses oil. Now that ethanol is becoming increasingly popular there is a link between corn and gasoline. If fossil fuel prices get high enough that it's cheaper to produce ethanol suddenly you have an increased demand for ethanol, which can gently caress up the food supply.
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Dec 20, 2014 04:42
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whitey delenda est posted:If you want to talk about the economics of food here please do. I don't know nearly enough about that particular subject which is why I mainly alluded to neoliberal monoculture encouragement etc. rather than tried to do a full breakdown. There is the micro level and the macro level, and then where they intersect. You have a situation like Venezuela where it is complicated really separating the two. Furthermore, you have can have a discussion over philosophies of protection (mono-culture for example) versus financial instruments. My take is that while on a global supply is important, it isn't in this case a particular determinate of price and therefore the social effects of price. You can manage agriculture as effectively and make it efficiently as possible, but it is ultimately not going to be the key determinate of that factor in an international sense. When you get down to the level of individual countries, obviously it becomes more complex but in the sense of the efficiency of their individual economies. The US consumes a lot of resources but does in fact produce a large amount of food, but ultimately this produces a calorie excess.
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Dec 20, 2014 04:42
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Most Americans eat too much protein, carbs, and fat because they're fatties. Eating a large proportion of your calories as protein is helpful however because it's satiating and generally will lead to a lower overall caloric consumption, that's why low carb diets generally work even though the assertion that "calories don't matter" while on them is totally false. Also a higher amount of protein is recommended if you do any resistance training and if you don't you really ought to anyways.
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Dec 20, 2014 04:43
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Ardennes posted:The US consumes a lot of resources but does in fact produce a large amount of food, but ultimately this produces a calorie excess. I think it's time for the oh god we're all gonna die picture:  Not going to last another 30 years.
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Dec 20, 2014 04:47
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ToxicSlurpee posted:tl;dr of it is that corn is massively, massively subsidized in America to the point where it's so cheap it's literally impossible to actually profit off of the corn itself. I think you may be confused.
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Dec 20, 2014 04:57
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Job Truniht posted:I think it's time for the oh god we're all gonna die picture: Climate change is going to happen no doubt. My personal expectation, least in the US, I do think we have here agricultural engineering to keep yields fairly high even if drought becomes a constant issue. It is just we are going to have to start looking at what Israel does for example. Granted, there is going to have to be a higher cost of production as well. That said, food prices and energy especially oil prices to correlated to some extent. Rice and Soybeans are down for the year (where do you think they were going...), and wheat and sugar are down modestly.
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Dec 20, 2014 04:58
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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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Hi, food security is what I do for a job, so I'm glad people made this thread.whitey delenda est posted:The phenomenon by which an increased standard of living exponentially increases energy demand in the form of higher order foodstuffs is balanced quite nicely by plummeting birthrates in developing countries. There's an inverse correlation between the wealth or GDI of a population and birthrate, mainly as women can A) afford to control their own reproduction and B) exist within a system of laws that supports the practice of birth control and provides economically feasible alternatives to makin' babies. I suggest you take a look at this for a brief overview: http://www.farmingfirst.org/women_infographic/ Baudolino posted:There is so much food being wasted today that a lot can be done to stave off starvation by just not tossing poo poo away before you have to. Another important point to keep in mind when discussing agriculture is that in the developed and the richer end (Southern Cone, Eastern Europe) of developing economies people who work in agriculture are old as gently caress. I'm talking about averages that are constantly getting closer to the retirement age, I believe in the USA the figure is 59 years old. Obviously this isn't an issue in a place like Niger, but as economies develop and more efficient agricultural techniques are introduced, people stop having to depend on subsistence agriculture and are free to move elsewhere. They move to towns, and discover that they can make a lot more money with a less strenuous work-day, and people still associate agricultural work with being poor and hungry. Overall, the richer a country gets, the more unappealing that agriculture gets and you have more people that are born in urban areas and have no connection to agriculture. This is an issue, since agriculture is primarily something you do if your parents did it (90% of farming worldwide is run by a single individual or a family and depend on family labour). This is why talent development and youth in agriculture (beyond just trying to get people to stop 8 year old children as extra farm hands) are themes that are gaining traction as people start to realise the need to attract younger workers that have no previous connection to rural living as an important tenet in developing agriculture. I also didn't see it mentioned elsewhere on the thread, so I'll point it out. The official FAO figures for hunger are: 805 million hungry on a daily basis and 2 billion people in a situation of undernutrition.
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Dec 20, 2014 10:48
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Ghost of Mussolini posted:Another important point to keep in mind when discussing agriculture is that in the developed and the richer end (Southern Cone, Eastern Europe) of developing economies people who work in agriculture are old as gently caress. I'm talking about averages that are constantly getting closer to the retirement age, I believe in the USA the figure is 59 years old. I can only talk about Australia here, but we have a similar average farmer age and this statistic gets thrown around a lot by people trying to draw attention to the perceived crisis of young people avoiding agriculture. While it is correct, it misses a lot of the detail. The average age of farmers is skewed by older farmers staying on the land without much actual productive agricultural activity going on, and the productive farms tend to be very large and with few employees. So the average age of a farmer might be 59, but if you weight it by the amount they produce then that goes right down.
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Dec 21, 2014 02:38
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open24hours posted:I can only talk about Australia here, but we have a similar average farmer age and this statistic gets thrown around a lot by people trying to draw attention to the perceived crisis of young people avoiding agriculture. While it is correct, it misses a lot of the detail. The average age of farmers is skewed by older farmers staying on the land without much actual productive agricultural activity going on, and the productive farms tend to be very large and with few employees. I think other things skewing the numbers are the fact that the population as a whole is getting older and there just aren't as many people needed to grow food now as there were in the past. It was actually very, very recently in history that most humans were still farmers. Now comparatively few of us are. Fewer people are going into agriculture because fewer people are needed.
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Dec 21, 2014 02:58
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ToxicSlurpee posted:I think other things skewing the numbers are the fact that the population as a whole is getting older and there just aren't as many people needed to grow food now as there were in the past. It was actually very, very recently in history that most humans were still farmers. Now comparatively few of us are. Fewer people are going into agriculture because fewer people are needed. This is also true. The amount of work one person can do with modern machinery is staggering compared to manual production techniques. There's not much room in the industry for the stereotypical smallholder now, and without considerable government intervention that's unlikely to change. I don't think they'll disappear entirely though. A lot of people in rich countries actually like farming and are willing to self-subsidise their operations with off-farm income. open24hours fucked around with this message at 06:05 on Dec 21, 2014 |
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Dec 21, 2014 06:02
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I hope you didn't interpret my remarks on birth rate v. energy consumption to be anything other than statistical, ghost of Mussolini, I didn't mean to imply that women are only good for popping out babies, just that the data on maintaining the population and general dietary needs bears that correlation out.
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Dec 21, 2014 06:35
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Before we all succumb to despair we should remember that it is possible to change what people see as "good eating". The Chinese traditionally don`t like to eat cheese. Due to western influence this is slowly starting to change. The Potato used to be tougth of as a good for nothing pagan vegetable that good christian farmers ougth to stay away from. These days they are grown in most European countries. Back in the middle ages the wealthy nobles would cats and dogs just to distinguish themselves from the common folk. A more recent example is the consumption of horse meat in parts of Europe which used to be taboo. Peoples`s food preferences can be made to change. If people like Nigella Lawson and other celerbity chefs could start making food from "undesireable" body parts things migth start to change. Soon every foodie will start making blood sausage and cooked bull`s testicles, after that it`s just a matter of time before ordinary people start doing the same. The key is to get the " cool people" to endorse this.If this seems far fetched please remeber that we live in a world where the age old tradition of giving your financee a big fat diomand was created from thin air by deBeers marketing department in the 20`s. The norms and expectations of the general public can be molded like silly putty if you have the rigth tools. It`s 100% possible to make blood sausage and crickes the next cool thing. So let`s not give up yet folks.
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Dec 21, 2014 20:48
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Raskolnikov38 posted:The mass usage of phosphate fertilizers came up during fishmech's age o' corn derail that had me wondering, if most of this stuff ends up in the oceans can't we just extract it similarly to how people have been going on about getting uranium out of seawater? The ocean is pretty big. Getting useful quantities of phosphate without spending ludicrous amounts of energy and/or money is probably going to be, uh, challenging.
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Dec 22, 2014 00:24
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Raskolnikov38 posted:The mass usage of phosphate fertilizers came up during fishmech's age o' corn derail that had me wondering, if most of this stuff ends up in the oceans can't we just extract it similarly to how people have been going on about getting uranium out of seawater? you need mindbogglingly vast quantities of phosphate to sustain the modern agricultural system you do not need very much uranium (in relative terms) to fuel a nuclear plant
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Dec 22, 2014 00:34
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LemonDrizzle posted:you need mindbogglingly vast quantities of phosphate to sustain the modern agricultural system Since much of the agricultural runoff enters the sea via rivers, it would be easier to reclaim it from said rivers. Imagine scouring all water coming out of every major river system going through some sort of agricultural area for phosphate.
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Dec 22, 2014 00:43
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Baudolino posted:Before we all succumb to despair we should remember that it is possible to change what people see as "good eating". The Chinese traditionally don`t like to eat cheese. Due to western influence this is slowly starting to change. The Potato used to be tougth of as a good for nothing pagan vegetable that good christian farmers ougth to stay away from. These days they are grown in most European countries. Back in the middle ages the wealthy nobles would cats and dogs just to distinguish themselves from the common folk. A more recent example is the consumption of horse meat in parts of Europe which used to be taboo. Peoples`s food preferences can be made to change. If people like Nigella Lawson and other celerbity chefs could start making food from "undesireable" body parts things migth start to change. Soon every foodie will start making blood sausage and cooked bull`s testicles, after that it`s just a matter of time before ordinary people start doing the same. The key is to get the " cool people" to endorse this.If this seems far fetched please remeber that we live in a world where the age old tradition of giving your financee a big fat diomand was created from thin air by deBeers marketing department in the 20`s. The norms and expectations of the general public can be molded like silly putty if you have the rigth tools. It`s 100% possible to make blood sausage and crickes the next cool thing. So let`s not give up yet folks. We made "whole grain" mean healthier, now we need to do the same for "whole animal" 
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Dec 22, 2014 06:21
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Whole pasture
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Dec 22, 2014 06:49
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Epitope posted:We made "whole grain" mean healthier, now we need to do the same for "whole animal" People would interpret that as eating the entire animal at once, probably deep-fried, and think that it would let them safely lose weight if it is the only thing they eat.
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Dec 22, 2014 06:57
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It probably would
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Dec 22, 2014 07:00
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Discendo Vox posted:People would interpret that as eating the entire animal at once, probably deep-fried, and think that it would let them safely lose weight if it is the only thing they eat.
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Dec 22, 2014 07:01
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blowfish posted:Since much of the agricultural runoff enters the sea via rivers, it would be easier to reclaim it from said rivers. And with an operation like that you probably suddenly have member of the environmental wing concerned about the impediment such extraction operations would present to plant and animal life in the river. Physical obstructions or process that change the water temperature even a few degrees can have outsized negative effects. It's probably an issue you're going to run into with any large scale project, geo-engineering or other wise, and the split it will cause in the base for solutions to these problems will keep it from happening for the foreseeable future.
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Dec 22, 2014 09:10
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GhostofJohnMuir posted:And with an operation like that you probably suddenly have member of the environmental wing concerned about the impediment such extraction operations would present to plant and animal life in the river. Physical obstructions or process that change the water temperature even a few degrees can have outsized negative effects. It's probably an issue you're going to run into with any large scale project, geo-engineering or other wise, and the split it will cause in the base for solutions to these problems will keep it from happening for the foreseeable future. It would probably be more efficient (cost/energy/effort) to not pollute the waterways in the first place and capture more ag runoff for on-site treatment and re-capture of phosphorous et al. if that's your goal.
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Dec 22, 2014 09:12
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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.
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Dec 22, 2014 13:19
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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.  and possibly energy inputs, mostly.
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Dec 22, 2014 13:31
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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. Hydroponics work well for some types of crops. With advances in solar power, and the ability to desalinate water on a small scale relatively cheaply, it's entirely possible we'll see a proliferation of hydroponic activity, especially in very dry areas. At the moment i don't think building them on a scale to grow crops like wheat, rice, potatoes, corn, etc is really viable though.
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Dec 22, 2014 13:37
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I think if you can find a good way of leeching heavy metals from sewage, you can 'close the cycle' and treat sewage instead of pumping it out into the ocean. But as it is now you have to, otherwise that stuff will just slowly build up. It's kind of both a technological problem, but more than that a development problem. We have great technology to produce from raw inputs, but not the technology to recycle efficiently (disassemble back into raw inputs). Though you could mitigate some problems with heavy regulation, there's just still a lot of things you just can't do.
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Dec 22, 2014 13:43
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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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Rent-A-Cop posted:If you have some kind of problem with the idea of deep frying a whole pig then you're not a true American. What? No, you don't get it. Dip it in chocolate next.
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Dec 22, 2014 17:37
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted: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 17:41
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Forgall posted:Guess we are just going to farm the old way till there's a huge food crisis and billions starve. Then we might think about switching. If it's so energy intensive, it may straight up be a worse option than conventional farming. This partially depends on what the energy costs come from.
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Dec 22, 2014 17:45
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Discendo Vox posted:If it's so energy intensive, it may straight up be a worse option than conventional farming. This partially depends on what the energy costs come from. That also depends on how you define "conventional farming." One of the major issues that current farming methods have right now is that it's extremely, excessively dependant on chemical fertilizers and monocultures. One thing that has been shown time and and time again is that growing the same crop on the same land repeatedly is a terrible idea but a lot of contemporary farming methods rely heavily on just that. The corn that America grows is probably one of the worst for that sort of thing. Really, there just aren't a lot of good answers.
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Dec 22, 2014 17:52
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted: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. This, hydroponic farming takes the problems that I detailed in the OP and actually makes them worse (for the most part). You've got dirt out there, why not utilize it? At the very least, soil is slowly creating more of itself and reclaiming small portions of resources from the environment via deposition effects. The energy problem could be addressed via non-fossil-fuel means, but for the foreseeable future scaling it up to staple farming is physically very challenging. echinopsis posted:Whole pasture You joke, but this is going to be an integral part of how we address near-term issues. The overarching idea of "agroecology" is to once again find a niche for the human organism in a broader ecological context. There's more farms doing this these days, I think an important example of which is Veta La Palma in Spain. You essentially foster an ecosystem that you can disturb minimally to harvest your food crop (in their case it's fish) and it doesn't even blink because the biodiversity and density of resources remain balanced. Theoretically you can also incorporate other foods into the ecosystem and harvest some of them as well. Of course, the annual fish harvest is only about 1500 tons off of 8000 acres of aquaculture. For reference a similar area of corn field would probably give you something to the tune of 37,000 tons of grain.
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Dec 22, 2014 17:58
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Forgall posted:Guess we are just going to farm the old way till there's a huge food crisis and billions starve. Then we might think about switching. That's really not likely to happen - we'll use the easiest and most accessible resources until they start getting scarce/expensive, at which point people will have an incentive to start introducing alternatives. It's not like we're going to wake up one day and go 'ooops, all the productive land/phosphate/whatever is all gone, time to die.'
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Dec 22, 2014 18:40
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LemonDrizzle posted:That's really not likely to happen - we'll use the easiest and most accessible resources until they start getting scarce/expensive, at which point people will have an incentive to start introducing alternatives. It's not like we're going to wake up one day and go 'ooops, all the productive land/phosphate/whatever is all gone, time to die.' Actually if you look at human history we very well may do that. There are pretty huge swathes of land on Earth that are now completely and totally unproductive thanks to human activity. The phosphates are also running out and you kind of need those for current farming techniques. Which are leeching nutrients out of the soil something fierce. Same with the American corn crop. It relies extremely heavily on ammonia, which eats a lot of gas to produce. No gas, no ammonia. No ammonia, no record corn crops. Yeah it might not exactly cause the human race to totally extinct itself but having 7 billion of us? Good luck with that.
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Dec 22, 2014 18:47
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Actually if you look at human history we very well may do that. There are pretty huge swathes of land on Earth that are now completely and totally unproductive thanks to human activity. I don't think the Fertile Crescent counts.
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Dec 22, 2014 18:50
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LemonDrizzle posted:That's really not likely to happen - we'll use the easiest and most accessible resources until they start getting scarce/expensive, at which point people will have an incentive to start introducing alternatives. It's not like we're going to wake up one day and go 'ooops, all the productive land/phosphate/whatever is all gone, time to die.'
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Dec 22, 2014 18:52
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rudatron posted:Economic alternatives have to be developed first before they can be introduces, and that takes time and money. Simply assuming that an 'incentive' necessitates a 'solution' is to assume that instantaneous development and infinite work capacity. Research grants need to be pushed to solve this problem now. If they aren't ready in time, a lot of people are doing to die. Yup, and the "economic alternatives will become viable as traditional practices become more expensive" is the neoliberal version of "technology will provide a solution" or "science will save the day".
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Dec 22, 2014 18:53
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