There's a great method called Agroforestry that uses forest floors to produce more food:
Quick overview of a farmer's land that uses this method: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stABAx82TbY he harvest around 3x more cocoa per hectare than traditional methods and its one of the most valuable in the world right now.
I love this idea, its something I've thought a lot about. Our large scale farming strategies seem fundamentally ignorant. Nature it full of complex systems of independence that we should be using directly in our farming strategies. I'm particularly interested in fungi to support the nutrient and immune systems of my farms.
See the work of Paul Staments using fungi to treat bee colony collapse.
I’m sorry but this fails reason on even a basic level and reminds me of something a snopes fact check would be needed for. There is x amount of energy in sunlight and if it is going through leaves it is not available to your crop to grow. Same goes for the nutrients fueling all those trees etc. He is doing a great job at making a forest web but I’d like some verified figures for that cocoa production vs a real cocoa farm.
It's slightly terrifying to see the data about the loss of nutrients in plants around the world due to climate change. On YouTube there was an interesting Veritasim story about plants and their mineral levels.
It seems plants have fewer minerals now compared to 100 years ago. Farmers have fertilizer and the plants grow but they don't have the same levels of nutrition even with all that help. Samples of weeds from the 1800s were compared to the same weeds now and even the weeds have fewer minerals, so it's all plants not just food crops.
Larger farms growing more food may not solve the problem it's the quality of the plant not just the quantity.
IIRC that youtube video concluded that the difference in nutrient content was because growth rates were accelerated by the increased CO2 in the atmosphere but the rate of extracting nutrients from the soil was not accelerated. This is then presumably related to the global greening phenomenon we've witnessed where the increased CO2 has lead to a large increase in forestation globally.
It's important to note that the video asserts that food is still plenty nutritious and if you eat a well balanced diet you're fine and my own note is that there is also probably a limit to this effect.
Your correlation is a bit backward there, but then you're in good company.
In living soil, not the dirt most agriculture is growing on, plants are trading sugars for water, minerals, and/or protection with symbiotic fungi and nitrogen fixing bacteria.
These microbes don't like tilling. Soil structure and the organisms break down, releasing carbon into the atmosphere. It's very hard to bring them back, especially to the middle of big square fields where everything is dead in a several mile radius.
I don't know how much the analogy holds, but when you're growing Peyote for consumption you want to let it grow a long time so it can produce as many of the alkaloids your looking to hallucinate on.
Grafting Peyote onto most cacti allow it to grow faster, but by reports doesn't increase the mescaline content since those chemical pathways are just as effective as they always are.
Let's try to break this problem down to first principles:
- Humans need food to live because it provides energy and nutrients.
- From a fundamental standpoint of physics and available materials, nutrients are relatively easy to get; as far as I know, most vitamins and minerals are pretty cheap to either come by naturally or manufacture, and you don't need that much of any of them to keep a person healthy, so let's assume food energy is the real limiting factor here.
- The energy in most food comes from photosynthesis (either directly, in the case of eating plants, or indirectly, in the case of feeding plants to animals for growing meat).
- Photosynthesis is an extremely inefficient way to turn solar radiation into chemical energy. Only about 3 to 6 percent of incoming solar energy is used by plants to create biomass, and not all of that biomass necessarily equates to calories we can digest and absorb.
So, while this isn't a particularly appetizing future to imagine living in, I don't know of any fundamental reason why artificially producing edible calories via solar electricity and chemical processes couldn't vastly exceed the efficiency of natural-grown food. It might be tricky getting to the point where fake food like this is healthy and tastes good...but if it saves the world from starving and stops civilization from collapsing then hey, it's not a bad fallback plan.
Besides being a big jump in efficiency, this type of tech could also enable the use of non-arable land for food production, since presumably you could set up the necessary manufacturing facilities anywhere you want.
> From a fundamental standpoint of physics and available materials, nutrients are relatively easy to get; as far as I know, most vitamins and minerals are pretty cheap to either come by naturally or manufacture, and you don't need that much of any of them to keep a person healthy, so let's assume food energy is the real limiting factor here.
Food is more complicated than this picture. So much that nutritionists have major differences over which basic materials are beneficial in bulk and which cause health problems. Vitamins, minerals and medicines are not automatically absorbed well by our digestive system. The many biological foibles of human metabolism and our symbiotic gut flora, still confounds expectations about what food can be and can do to health.
There have been many, perhaps endless attempts to synthesize a wholesome food product - it would be worth a fortune. I am aware of zero successes to date and this shouldn't be the case if its not very difficult. We don't even synthesize sugar for consumption - maybe start there, but it is not even clear if/how much it causes diabetes or other diseases.
We might be stuck for a while longer with reliance on foods that needs to live for bit (plant or animal) before we can sustain our own lives with them - seems to be a very old system requirement of multicellular life, and one that has not been cracked yet.
This sounds good in theory, but I don't think it would work given our limited knowledge of food and nutrition. Nutritional scientists have been wrong many times in the past--who's to say a rollout of synthetic "food" couldn't wipe out the human population in the future? I'd cite the Precautionary Principle (http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf) when dealing with global ruin problems.
In practice, the replicating the composition of food (proteins, carbs, fats, vitamins, minerals, bacteria, fiber, etc.) is a huge feat. Especially because we don't understand enough about human diet. (See: 1 gazillion articles about dieting.)
It's like gene editing. There's a lot that theoretical possible, but the real sci-fi stuff is way out of our reach right now.
I have no expertise in this area, but everything you said seems to make sense. If you're an expert (or if anyone else reading this is), can you shed some light on why using artificial processes to create "food" would be difficult?
It would be so cool if we had some mainstream open source software that could simulate chemical processes in a macro-level way, for example, to explore new ways of creating complex carbohydrates faster than in nature.
[ A political science graduate of Yale University, Jeavons worked for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and Stanford University before launching his career in small-scale agriculture education. He is the author of the best-selling sustainable farming handbook How to Grow More Vegetables, Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible On Less Land Than You Can Imagine, now in its 8th edition in eight languages ]
I wouldn't consider the market gardener to be in the same area as grow biointensive. Jeavons has a strong focus on self-sufficiency and sustainability in his system and goals. Fortier does not, he's only interested in organic as gimmick to make money. Also his book is pretty deceptive compared to what he really does on his "farm", which wasn't actually profitable until after he released the book and got "famous", which is what sell the overpriced lettuce that finally got him profitable.
I think the biointensive system Jeavons promotes gives you a pretty good starting place, but it does promote a bit of needless work. Skip the composting and just use the compost crops as a mulch. There's no need to build piles and turn them and then spread the compost, you can just let it compost in place on the garden where it will end up. You can skip growing the compost crops too if you have trees to collect leaves from in the fall. And save your back and skip the double digging, or any digging at all for that matter. All it does is set you back in your first couple of years for no reason.
Growing vegetables in greenhouses can be done very efficiently. The Wageningen University researched high-tech greenhouses in Riyad (Saudi Arabia) and found that it only required 5 liter fresh water per kg tomatoes, compared to 168 liters in a low-tech greenhouse [1]. This is possible using a closed system that recycles the water that evaporates in the greenhouse. The low-tech example is a plastic tunnel without such facilities (the most commonly used type of Greenhouse in the Middle East). The yield per square meter was also 50% higher for the high-tech greenhouse compared to the low-tech greenhouse.
There is also the problem of food distribution. Ignoring future population growth, the world does produce enough food to people everyone [0] (obtained from the first sentence of [1]). If we are collectively unwilling to solve the distribution problem today, then it there is a good chance that we won't do much about the shortage tomorrow. In addition, unconsumed food waste is also problem, and probably does have some correlation with the unequal distribution.
An article with the headline "Can we share food more fairly today?" does have a simple answer, but would rock the political establishment uncomfortably, so has little chance of ever being published.
[0] Leathers, H., & Foster, P. (2009). The world food problem: toward ending undernutrition in the third world. Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers Inc.
We are missing a bit of humility. Just because an apple can be gotten in February doesn't mean you should. It stretches, complicates, and reduces the efficiency of the supply chain immensely.
I heard some advice years ago that one of the better things you can do as an environmentalist is teach your kids about the seasonality of foods. Make a big deal about it being orange or pear or cherry season, cut back on buying these fruits the rest of the year, even if you can afford it. Eat something else instead of making the world bend to your craving.
Population growth is leveling off. Birth rate globally is already at/below replacement rate (there are ~2B children right now, the UN estimates that in a century, there will still be ~2B children). The growth we are seeing now is a growth of the adult population, not the child population, due to the 1-2 generation overhang between nations getting decent food and health care (especially immunizations), and the birth rate dropping in those nations from the 5-6 of backwards nations to the <2 of modern nations. (See Hans Rosling for details.)
Meanwhile, in a half-century, we've doubled the population, while significantly reducing food costs and radically reducing hunger globally. I'm with Hans Rosling here... the angst about how the world is hungry and getting hungrier is just our minds telling us stories, contradicting the facts on the ground.
I don't see a good reason to believe that we will have global food shortages in the future. We'll have less hunger, not more, as the population levels out over the next few decades. I'm basing that argument on past behavior, absorbing the needs of much higher population growth with less technology for decades.
Logistics is hard. On top of that, importing food is a very political subject. Do you want to feed everyone in the world as resource-efficiently as possible, or do you want every country/region/city/neighborhood/community to be equipped to feed itself? Bear in mind that these two are very much different scenarios. Small, poor, inefficient farmers have been bankrupted by cheap imports they cannot compete with more than once in world history. Similarly, price controls on food have led to famine more than once.
This is without even touching on the point that a lot of poorer countries really want to be able to export food for a profit.
I get the sense that the short answer to your uncomfortable question is simple: yes. With the asterisk being all the political and economic questions that go in it and don't have simple answers.
On that note, NYTimes seems to be pushing many climate articles today[1] with an urgent framing but casually neglecting to mention the relatively small number of corporations responsible for most greenhouse emissions[2].
This is called Permaculture, it maximizes yield using natural methods (i.e. avoid tiling the soil, herbicides, etc) and results in an "edible forest"
From the wikipedia:
4 Common practices
4.1 Agroforestry
4.2 Hügelkultur
4.3 Natural building
4.4 Rainwater harvesting
4.5 Sheet mulching
4.6 Intensive rotational grazing
4.7 Keyline design
4.8 Fruit tree management
Don’t we already know how to do this? For example, the concept of companion planting — growing plants which behave symbiotically together — is a centuries old idea. The issue is whether we have an economic incentive to.
What would make people eat less beef? Since taxes seem a hard sell, would subsidizing chicken + non-meat protein help? As a vegetarian I'm trying to get my head around what would help change the behaviour of the meat eating HN members.
A lower subsidy on corn would significantly raise beef prices relative to chicken, without being a tax. That's difficult in the US for systemic political reasons, but not necessarily a tax issue.
Longer term, lab grown protean is likely to be a net win.
What will it take to convince vegetarians that a meat-based diet is actually the healthiest way to eat, and that meat can be raised in humane, environmentally-friendly ways?
:-)
Edit: This a serious question. Down voting is hardly a productive form of dialog.
Continuing to improve artificial meat (e.g. Impossible Burgers) to get to the point where it's better than the real thing. You don't change people's minds by taking things away from them. You give them a better substitute.
Ruminant animals have an important place in Agriculture. They add nutrients back to the soil, and can be raised in land unfit for growing crops. For example, in the UK only 36% of agricultural land is croppable. The rest of the land is perfect for raising cattle and other ruminants.
In the USA, 44% of land is for agriculture, but only 17% is arable, 27% serves as pasture land.
Only around 10% of a cow's lifetime feed comes from grain, and very little of what they are fed is human consumable. Think leftovers from corn (stalks, etc), leftovers from brewing (malt, oats, all that kind of stuff).
Beef is also very nutrient dense, and provides a large % of bioavailable nutrients and amino acids per gram.
Eating meat is way easier than eating balanced vegetarian imho. I've cut down on my meat lately and it does require more time and involvement to eat vegetarian. E.g. an easy dinner is bbq a steak and chuck out some salad, done. Our entire society is based on convenience of eating meat, to get the same from a vegetarian diet is a lot harder to learn, you really have to want to. I still eat fish and eggs for this reason, I'm not really sure how to go full vegetarian, I know its possible but its another level of work for me. There's probably a bit of FUD thrown around by the meat industry that you need protein and iron from red meat as well.
Convince people that ground beef (and chicken for that matter) that's made up partially of plants (probably soy) is more upscale than just ground beef.
People have been socially/culturally conditioned to think that meat that's not all meat is inferior (because it often is/was). If you can get over the culture/perception hurdle most people won't really care that ground beef is only beef so long as their taco or McDouble tastes the way they want. The health angle is probably the best way to go about doing this.
Before adopting this approach, please be aware that chicken has substantially higher animal welfare costs than beef -- likely by orders of magnitude. This makes the calculus more complex, such that if you're sympathetic to animal welfare you may very well reverse the recommendation[0]. The safest recommendations are plant-based alternatives (e.g. Beyond Burger) or fueling cell-based meat research.
A good book on how various animals are treated is Compassion by the Pound[1], authored by agricultural economists. The short of it is that chickens bred for meat are treated very poorly throughout their lives, whereas beef cows are treated reasonably well (with the possible exception of slaughter). Not only that, but you also have to raise far more chickens per pound of meat compared to cows as they're so much smaller, amplifying the effect. It's a far more extreme difference compared than the environmental impact differences.
As a vegetarian that actually doesn't like many vegetables (I don't like bell peppers, for example, which severely limits my options) and who was a huge carnivore before going veggie ( and with more than one hunter in the family): I see two groups of meat eaters.
Group A, who just like the taste and texture of meat. For them, a variety of substitutes that adequately matched would suffice. As of today, we have many fake meats that do a good job of matching the taste/texture of HEAVILY PROCESSED meats (e.g. turkey loaf), but not matching more straightforward meats. Likely vat-grown meat will be the only reasonably quick way to match both demands for the general population. Outside of that as more research is done into faux meats to match tastes and textures we will presumably get there, and as meat alternatives become more popular there is a feedback loop where research gets more widespread and has a better ROI, so maybe it's not so far off, but I personally wouldn't bet on it. Expense is a big deal to this group, as they basically want to be content (food-wise) with minimal effort, so meat alternatives that are familiar and not expensive is not a difficult transition, particularly if meat becomes more expensive. Making it low-effort to know what you are getting also helps. Currently meat alternatives are completely separate from meats in the store, and the delivery very different. (a box of burgers or a bag of crumble, for example, vs the pile of ground beef).
Group B, who are invested into the particulars of meat. These are the ones who will debate for hours the precise way to grill the perfect steak. Like with audiophiles who complain of qualities I can't hear, I have to assume they aren't delusional, but it doesn't really matter for the purpose of your question. This group is unlikely to be satisfied by vat-grown meat, outside of random luck. I don't see this group changing within their lifetimes, though they can be swayed to alter portion sizes. Honestly, the best way to REDUCE meat consumption is to avoid angering this group - they can take meat becoming a bit more expensive and more of a luxury without a fuss, but if it looks like meat were to be banned or too expensive they would react with all the furor you can expect from someone losing something they are passionate about. And their message would resonate with Group A, because Group A is just looking to be content like they currently are, so change represents risk, not benefit. This means the goals of REDUCING meat consumption and REMOVING meat consumption are at odds with one another.
If you have ethical motivations, none of the above is fast and vat-grown meat research has its own ethical questions, but I don't see a realistic fast alternative that doesn't involve mass suffering (to more than humans) due to uncontrolled events.
>“We could imagine a significant shift from beef to chicken, and that by itself goes a long way.” (Poultry production has about one-eighth the climate impact of beef production.)
I think the possible benefits of this approach might be exaggerated. The uniquely "large" environmental impact of beef cattle results from methane emissions, but methane is not the big challenge; land use is. While methane is a potent greenhouse gas, it also has a shorter atmospheric lifetime than CO2/N2O, which, to me, suggests that it should be addressed after the other gases; the impact of a reduction in methane emissions will be felt quickly, and the risk of methane accumulation is lower.
Land use -- with 40% of the world's land devoted to agriculture -- is much more of a problem and I see less indication that it will be addressed by changing the relevant animal. A little, sure, but a lot of the land currently used for pasturing cattle isn't appropriate for chickens anyway, and I'm not convinced that it takes 8x as much land to raise a pound of beef vs. chicken.
Lab-grown meat is/will be a huge net win for the environment and hopefully our wallets, and I think it will be the final compromise on this front, at least for the next few hundred years. A few decades of lead time doesn't bother me for reasons discussed above.
On another front, the densest sources of plant protein after soy are hempseed, lentils and pumpkin seeds. These rarely make it into our diets, though. You need more than mere tax incentives -- the strong flavors of those seeds need to be managed somehow. I made a "curry" with a hemp-milk base once. The only thing that corrected the smell was a lot of Worcestershire sauce. Ironically, it's vegetarians who won't eat fermented anchovies.
The last two graphs show that 41% of the land in the contiguous 48 states is used for feeding livestock. More than 33% of the 48 states is just pasture, most of which I believe is used by cattle.
What would it take to shift protein consumption from beef (3% efficient) to products like poultry (21%) and eggs (31%)? [2]
I think we have to take a hard look at taxes, fees, and subsidies for land use and agricultural products, but there's not much political pressure to do so right now.
There is a lot of innovation around high tech farming in places other than than the country side. With hydroponics, you can grow all sorts of stuff anywhere you can supply water, energy, and the right nutrients. People are growing herbs in underground abandoned subway stations, old industrial facilities, on roofs, deserts, etc. The reason is that it works really well and you can get great yields if you can micromanage the conditions in which plants grow.
Food production is fundamentally an energy problem; not a land problem. Using cheap electricity, you can desalinate water, pump nutrients around, generate light and control the temperature.
Eating meat is a problem given the vast resources needed to produce it. However, there's a lot of innovation in developing synthetic meats. Lab grown meat is becoming a thing. I'm talking about actual muscle tissue grown in labs. There are also many plant and mushroom based meat alternatives that are getting better and more popular. In short, we might eat a proper steak for nostalgic reasons once in a while in a few decades but we'll have plenty of alternative protein sources to supplement our diet with on a day to day basis. And making out-competing popular meat products like a big mac isn't exactly rocket science. The whole point of stuff like that is that it is industrialized low quality stuff. Most of the meat we're eat isn't exactly high quality stuff.
I'm guessing a lot more waste happens towards to consumer side. Producers for example sort out misshapen fruits and vegetables for use in manufacturing processes. Tomato sauce, jams, pre-chopped veggies. Scrap vegetable waste goes for animal feed. Scrap meat for pet food, etc. But when it gets to the grocery store or restaurant, the waste food is less likely to be used in this manner.
Great point. As a kid growing up in India, reading about recurring starvation / famine there, and in Africa, etc., I also read about some European countries dumping mountains of butter and other edibles into the sea, due to surpluses, and maybe to keep the price up.
I mean, I understand it is about economics, supply and demand, profits, etc., but still,
- The part of the world that consumes the most eats too much. A balanced diet would reduce greatly the food consumption.
- The part of the world that consumes the most wastes a huge quantity of the food it produces.
- Human don't need to eat meat to be healthy and we are past the need for hunting for survival. We can even produce non animal b12 supplements if we ever need to. Since most food are grown to be fed to cattle, if we stop eating meat, we suddently multiply our food flow by a huge amount while diminushing the water consumption, pollution, and a lot of public health issues.
Food is not a production problem anymore. It's a social and political one.
Luckily we have already solved this problem, we just need to distribute the solution to the developing world. Better crops and machinery result in much higher yields. If you are a small farmer and you are using livestock for labor something like 40% of your land has to be devoted to growing food for the animals to do the work. We must continue to innovate for that is the only way that everyone can win.
I recently conducted a report and presentation about reducetarianism (though in my own language).
There are 3 main reasons why people go vegetarian, vegan, or reducetarian (the former 2 are a subset of reducetarianism): environment, animal welfare, and health.
Re: "Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?". My conclusion to based on the research I performed is:
Yeah, we can, and not only that we can also reduce the Co2 footprint by avoiding eating cattle. Alternatives which are size efficient are chicken and insects (such as grasshoppers and mealworms). However, chicken have a CNS, and if you grow more chicken, more chicken suffer, so this is a pro environment yet anti animal welfare argument.
What is going to be good for the environment is using solar energy, using electric cars (to go to the grocery store). Because the transport from (very efficient, huge) transport ships has less impact on environment than you going to/from grocery store by (conventional) car.
What is going to be good for animal welfare is growing & consuming less animals with a CNS. Alternatives such as insects or lab meat.
[+] [-] alisson|7 years ago|reply
Quick overview of a farmer's land that uses this method: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stABAx82TbY he harvest around 3x more cocoa per hectare than traditional methods and its one of the most valuable in the world right now.
Big producers joining to make it more scalable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE
[+] [-] ghthor|7 years ago|reply
See the work of Paul Staments using fungi to treat bee colony collapse.
[+] [-] JohnJamesRambo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dghughes|7 years ago|reply
It seems plants have fewer minerals now compared to 100 years ago. Farmers have fertilizer and the plants grow but they don't have the same levels of nutrition even with all that help. Samples of weeds from the 1800s were compared to the same weeds now and even the weeds have fewer minerals, so it's all plants not just food crops.
Larger farms growing more food may not solve the problem it's the quality of the plant not just the quantity.
[+] [-] nyokodo|7 years ago|reply
It's important to note that the video asserts that food is still plenty nutritious and if you eat a well balanced diet you're fine and my own note is that there is also probably a limit to this effect.
[+] [-] hinkley|7 years ago|reply
In living soil, not the dirt most agriculture is growing on, plants are trading sugars for water, minerals, and/or protection with symbiotic fungi and nitrogen fixing bacteria.
These microbes don't like tilling. Soil structure and the organisms break down, releasing carbon into the atmosphere. It's very hard to bring them back, especially to the middle of big square fields where everything is dead in a several mile radius.
[+] [-] undersuit|7 years ago|reply
Grafting Peyote onto most cacti allow it to grow faster, but by reports doesn't increase the mescaline content since those chemical pathways are just as effective as they always are.
Reminds me of Peter Norvig's Whiskey Story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9371086
[+] [-] fouc|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 08-15|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NickM|7 years ago|reply
- Humans need food to live because it provides energy and nutrients.
- From a fundamental standpoint of physics and available materials, nutrients are relatively easy to get; as far as I know, most vitamins and minerals are pretty cheap to either come by naturally or manufacture, and you don't need that much of any of them to keep a person healthy, so let's assume food energy is the real limiting factor here.
- The energy in most food comes from photosynthesis (either directly, in the case of eating plants, or indirectly, in the case of feeding plants to animals for growing meat).
- Photosynthesis is an extremely inefficient way to turn solar radiation into chemical energy. Only about 3 to 6 percent of incoming solar energy is used by plants to create biomass, and not all of that biomass necessarily equates to calories we can digest and absorb.
So, while this isn't a particularly appetizing future to imagine living in, I don't know of any fundamental reason why artificially producing edible calories via solar electricity and chemical processes couldn't vastly exceed the efficiency of natural-grown food. It might be tricky getting to the point where fake food like this is healthy and tastes good...but if it saves the world from starving and stops civilization from collapsing then hey, it's not a bad fallback plan.
Besides being a big jump in efficiency, this type of tech could also enable the use of non-arable land for food production, since presumably you could set up the necessary manufacturing facilities anywhere you want.
[+] [-] strainer|7 years ago|reply
Food is more complicated than this picture. So much that nutritionists have major differences over which basic materials are beneficial in bulk and which cause health problems. Vitamins, minerals and medicines are not automatically absorbed well by our digestive system. The many biological foibles of human metabolism and our symbiotic gut flora, still confounds expectations about what food can be and can do to health.
There have been many, perhaps endless attempts to synthesize a wholesome food product - it would be worth a fortune. I am aware of zero successes to date and this shouldn't be the case if its not very difficult. We don't even synthesize sugar for consumption - maybe start there, but it is not even clear if/how much it causes diabetes or other diseases.
We might be stuck for a while longer with reliance on foods that needs to live for bit (plant or animal) before we can sustain our own lives with them - seems to be a very old system requirement of multicellular life, and one that has not been cracked yet.
[+] [-] whitepoplar|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulddraper|7 years ago|reply
In practice, the replicating the composition of food (proteins, carbs, fats, vitamins, minerals, bacteria, fiber, etc.) is a huge feat. Especially because we don't understand enough about human diet. (See: 1 gazillion articles about dieting.)
It's like gene editing. There's a lot that theoretical possible, but the real sci-fi stuff is way out of our reach right now.
[+] [-] daenz|7 years ago|reply
It would be so cool if we had some mainstream open source software that could simulate chemical processes in a macro-level way, for example, to explore new ways of creating complex carbohydrates faster than in nature.
[+] [-] clairity|7 years ago|reply
a biologist sees that and thinks "wow, a plant only needs 3-6% of the solar energy available to them to thrive!" #perspectives
[+] [-] vram22|7 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18498110
Excerpt from the comment:
[ A political science graduate of Yale University, Jeavons worked for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and Stanford University before launching his career in small-scale agriculture education. He is the author of the best-selling sustainable farming handbook How to Grow More Vegetables, Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible On Less Land Than You Can Imagine, now in its 8th edition in eight languages ]
[+] [-] agsdfgsd|7 years ago|reply
I think the biointensive system Jeavons promotes gives you a pretty good starting place, but it does promote a bit of needless work. Skip the composting and just use the compost crops as a mulch. There's no need to build piles and turn them and then spread the compost, you can just let it compost in place on the garden where it will end up. You can skip growing the compost crops too if you have trees to collect leaves from in the fall. And save your back and skip the double digging, or any digging at all for that matter. All it does is set you back in your first couple of years for no reason.
[+] [-] dajonker|7 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.wur.nl/nl/nieuws/Nieuwe-onderzoekskas-in-Riyad-m... (in Dutch only)
[+] [-] tareqak|7 years ago|reply
An article with the headline "Can we share food more fairly today?" does have a simple answer, but would rock the political establishment uncomfortably, so has little chance of ever being published.
[0] Leathers, H., & Foster, P. (2009). The world food problem: toward ending undernutrition in the third world. Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers Inc.
[1] http://12.000.scripts.mit.edu/mission2014/problems/inadequat...
[+] [-] hinkley|7 years ago|reply
I heard some advice years ago that one of the better things you can do as an environmentalist is teach your kids about the seasonality of foods. Make a big deal about it being orange or pear or cherry season, cut back on buying these fruits the rest of the year, even if you can afford it. Eat something else instead of making the world bend to your craving.
[+] [-] beat|7 years ago|reply
Meanwhile, in a half-century, we've doubled the population, while significantly reducing food costs and radically reducing hunger globally. I'm with Hans Rosling here... the angst about how the world is hungry and getting hungrier is just our minds telling us stories, contradicting the facts on the ground.
I don't see a good reason to believe that we will have global food shortages in the future. We'll have less hunger, not more, as the population levels out over the next few decades. I'm basing that argument on past behavior, absorbing the needs of much higher population growth with less technology for decades.
[+] [-] Kalium|7 years ago|reply
This is without even touching on the point that a lot of poorer countries really want to be able to export food for a profit.
I get the sense that the short answer to your uncomfortable question is simple: yes. With the asterisk being all the political and economic questions that go in it and don't have simple answers.
[+] [-] omegaworks|7 years ago|reply
1. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/07/climate/world...
2. https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...
[+] [-] fouc|7 years ago|reply
From the wikipedia: 4 Common practices 4.1 Agroforestry 4.2 Hügelkultur 4.3 Natural building 4.4 Rainwater harvesting 4.5 Sheet mulching 4.6 Intensive rotational grazing 4.7 Keyline design 4.8 Fruit tree management
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture
[+] [-] QML|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kieranmaine|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Retric|7 years ago|reply
Longer term, lab grown protean is likely to be a net win.
[+] [-] dilap|7 years ago|reply
What will it take to convince vegetarians that a meat-based diet is actually the healthiest way to eat, and that meat can be raised in humane, environmentally-friendly ways?
:-)
Edit: This a serious question. Down voting is hardly a productive form of dialog.
[+] [-] ghaff|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] virtuallynathan|7 years ago|reply
In the USA, 44% of land is for agriculture, but only 17% is arable, 27% serves as pasture land.
Only around 10% of a cow's lifetime feed comes from grain, and very little of what they are fed is human consumable. Think leftovers from corn (stalks, etc), leftovers from brewing (malt, oats, all that kind of stuff).
Beef is also very nutrient dense, and provides a large % of bioavailable nutrients and amino acids per gram.
Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arable_land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_United_King... https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8791215 https://downloads.usda.library.cornell.edu/usda-esmis/files/... https://www.beefresearch.org/CMDocs/BeefResearch/Sustainabil... https://medium.com/@beefitsfordinner/fao-affirms-cattles-cri... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_value#Typical_value...
[+] [-] chadcmulligan|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsfyu404ed|7 years ago|reply
People have been socially/culturally conditioned to think that meat that's not all meat is inferior (because it often is/was). If you can get over the culture/perception hurdle most people won't really care that ground beef is only beef so long as their taco or McDouble tastes the way they want. The health angle is probably the best way to go about doing this.
[+] [-] ceras|7 years ago|reply
A good book on how various animals are treated is Compassion by the Pound[1], authored by agricultural economists. The short of it is that chickens bred for meat are treated very poorly throughout their lives, whereas beef cows are treated reasonably well (with the possible exception of slaughter). Not only that, but you also have to raise far more chickens per pound of meat compared to cows as they're so much smaller, amplifying the effect. It's a far more extreme difference compared than the environmental impact differences.
[0] Some animal welfare activists do so explicitly, whereas others do so implicitly by strictly focusing on chickens. Latter examples are 88% Campaign (https://88percentcampaign.com/) and One Step for Animals (https://www.onestepforanimals.org/). [1] https://www.amazon.com/Compassion-Pound-Economics-Animal-Wel...
[+] [-] ergothus|7 years ago|reply
Group A, who just like the taste and texture of meat. For them, a variety of substitutes that adequately matched would suffice. As of today, we have many fake meats that do a good job of matching the taste/texture of HEAVILY PROCESSED meats (e.g. turkey loaf), but not matching more straightforward meats. Likely vat-grown meat will be the only reasonably quick way to match both demands for the general population. Outside of that as more research is done into faux meats to match tastes and textures we will presumably get there, and as meat alternatives become more popular there is a feedback loop where research gets more widespread and has a better ROI, so maybe it's not so far off, but I personally wouldn't bet on it. Expense is a big deal to this group, as they basically want to be content (food-wise) with minimal effort, so meat alternatives that are familiar and not expensive is not a difficult transition, particularly if meat becomes more expensive. Making it low-effort to know what you are getting also helps. Currently meat alternatives are completely separate from meats in the store, and the delivery very different. (a box of burgers or a bag of crumble, for example, vs the pile of ground beef).
Group B, who are invested into the particulars of meat. These are the ones who will debate for hours the precise way to grill the perfect steak. Like with audiophiles who complain of qualities I can't hear, I have to assume they aren't delusional, but it doesn't really matter for the purpose of your question. This group is unlikely to be satisfied by vat-grown meat, outside of random luck. I don't see this group changing within their lifetimes, though they can be swayed to alter portion sizes. Honestly, the best way to REDUCE meat consumption is to avoid angering this group - they can take meat becoming a bit more expensive and more of a luxury without a fuss, but if it looks like meat were to be banned or too expensive they would react with all the furor you can expect from someone losing something they are passionate about. And their message would resonate with Group A, because Group A is just looking to be content like they currently are, so change represents risk, not benefit. This means the goals of REDUCING meat consumption and REMOVING meat consumption are at odds with one another.
If you have ethical motivations, none of the above is fast and vat-grown meat research has its own ethical questions, but I don't see a realistic fast alternative that doesn't involve mass suffering (to more than humans) due to uncontrolled events.
[+] [-] scythe|7 years ago|reply
I think the possible benefits of this approach might be exaggerated. The uniquely "large" environmental impact of beef cattle results from methane emissions, but methane is not the big challenge; land use is. While methane is a potent greenhouse gas, it also has a shorter atmospheric lifetime than CO2/N2O, which, to me, suggests that it should be addressed after the other gases; the impact of a reduction in methane emissions will be felt quickly, and the risk of methane accumulation is lower.
Land use -- with 40% of the world's land devoted to agriculture -- is much more of a problem and I see less indication that it will be addressed by changing the relevant animal. A little, sure, but a lot of the land currently used for pasturing cattle isn't appropriate for chickens anyway, and I'm not convinced that it takes 8x as much land to raise a pound of beef vs. chicken.
Lab-grown meat is/will be a huge net win for the environment and hopefully our wallets, and I think it will be the final compromise on this front, at least for the next few hundred years. A few decades of lead time doesn't bother me for reasons discussed above.
On another front, the densest sources of plant protein after soy are hempseed, lentils and pumpkin seeds. These rarely make it into our diets, though. You need more than mere tax incentives -- the strong flavors of those seeds need to be managed somehow. I made a "curry" with a hemp-milk base once. The only thing that corrected the smell was a lot of Worcestershire sauce. Ironically, it's vegetarians who won't eat fermented anchovies.
[+] [-] maccam94|7 years ago|reply
The last two graphs show that 41% of the land in the contiguous 48 states is used for feeding livestock. More than 33% of the 48 states is just pasture, most of which I believe is used by cattle.
What would it take to shift protein consumption from beef (3% efficient) to products like poultry (21%) and eggs (31%)? [2]
I think we have to take a hard look at taxes, fees, and subsidies for land use and agricultural products, but there's not much political pressure to do so right now.
1: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/
2: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/10...
[+] [-] agumonkey|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|7 years ago|reply
Food production is fundamentally an energy problem; not a land problem. Using cheap electricity, you can desalinate water, pump nutrients around, generate light and control the temperature.
Eating meat is a problem given the vast resources needed to produce it. However, there's a lot of innovation in developing synthetic meats. Lab grown meat is becoming a thing. I'm talking about actual muscle tissue grown in labs. There are also many plant and mushroom based meat alternatives that are getting better and more popular. In short, we might eat a proper steak for nostalgic reasons once in a while in a few decades but we'll have plenty of alternative protein sources to supplement our diet with on a day to day basis. And making out-competing popular meat products like a big mac isn't exactly rocket science. The whole point of stuff like that is that it is industrialized low quality stuff. Most of the meat we're eat isn't exactly high quality stuff.
[+] [-] ryanmercer|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pkaye|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vram22|7 years ago|reply
I mean, I understand it is about economics, supply and demand, profits, etc., but still,
shudder
[+] [-] alacombe|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baldfat|7 years ago|reply
198 million: The number of hectares used to produce food that is lost or wasted each year. This is about the size of Mexico
$1,600: The annual amount the average American family of four spends on food that doesn’t get eaten
53 percent: The amount of all food lost or wasted that is comprised of cereals, such as wheat, maize, and rice
64 percent: The share of loss or waste in the developing world that occurs before the food is even processed or sent to market
https://www.wri.org/blog/2013/06/numbers-reducing-food-loss-...
[+] [-] sametmax|7 years ago|reply
- The part of the world that consumes the most eats too much. A balanced diet would reduce greatly the food consumption.
- The part of the world that consumes the most wastes a huge quantity of the food it produces.
- Human don't need to eat meat to be healthy and we are past the need for hunting for survival. We can even produce non animal b12 supplements if we ever need to. Since most food are grown to be fed to cattle, if we stop eating meat, we suddently multiply our food flow by a huge amount while diminushing the water consumption, pollution, and a lot of public health issues.
Food is not a production problem anymore. It's a social and political one.
[+] [-] greedo|7 years ago|reply
What there is, is a problem with distribution.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] pg_bot|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Fnoord|7 years ago|reply
There are 3 main reasons why people go vegetarian, vegan, or reducetarian (the former 2 are a subset of reducetarianism): environment, animal welfare, and health.
Re: "Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?". My conclusion to based on the research I performed is:
Yeah, we can, and not only that we can also reduce the Co2 footprint by avoiding eating cattle. Alternatives which are size efficient are chicken and insects (such as grasshoppers and mealworms). However, chicken have a CNS, and if you grow more chicken, more chicken suffer, so this is a pro environment yet anti animal welfare argument.
What is going to be good for the environment is using solar energy, using electric cars (to go to the grocery store). Because the transport from (very efficient, huge) transport ships has less impact on environment than you going to/from grocery store by (conventional) car.
What is going to be good for animal welfare is growing & consuming less animals with a CNS. Alternatives such as insects or lab meat.