> IMHO it's simple: current farming depends on oil
Valid point, though everything depends on energy, oil being one of the main sources.
Not the only matter at hand though soil degradation, pesticide resistant pests, water pollution, ...
We actually have no quantitative problems for now: we waste over 30% of the food production, part of it being expensive food (meat, bananas, etc). See http://www.fao.org/save-food/en/
So yeah, we can afford some optimizations while researching for sustainable solutions.
Solved problem? We've hardly even identified the actual problem.
As it it stands now farming is an open loop system and input supplies are becoming constrained and expensive. We have killed our soils and the dirt that is left behind requires external inputs to produce current crop numbers.
In addition to this, we grow a large portion of our food in the United States in areas with active droughts and impending water shortages.
Fortunately there are better ways to do things, I just don't know that we can change fast enough.
To address the greater point of your comment though, I agree.
>> 90%, literally, of agriculture is used to feed animals for meat production.
How did you get that number?
>>but you're inferring that meat is efficient in the present
Apart from the first world countries, agriculture productivity in most poor and developing countries is still at where it was middle ages. In my own country(India) there are farmers that still plough the land with cattle, the remaining grain processing methods are super outdated. These sort of stone age farming practices, combined with stagnant government policies making it difficult for importing agriculture equipment, add to this no coherent thought or depth in making long term investments in irrigation infrastructure is what makes this whole process inefficient. Not Meat.
>>The planet is resource-strapped
The planet has plenty of resources we just need to know how to tap into them efficiently.
> Being able to reduce land area used by farming would be a major win for humanity.
We do know already how do do that though and the answer is to reduce meat usage which is by far what's taking the majority of the agricultural land use. The crop production is as almost as efficient as it can get after multiple agricultural revolutions.
> But people starving is not a crop efficiency problem. It's a political problem, every time.
Yes, one example of that political problem would be food prices being driven up by creating political barriers to more resource efficient crop technologies.
> Every single method of food production seems unsustainable to me
I don't agree. Look at the statistics on food waste, resource consumption of meat production, energy consumption in developed countries in general,... We are using farmland to produce fuel...
Food production could be much more sustainable if we wanted. We are very far away from an efficient usage of the available resources. Current methods of food production look unsustainable because we are not even trying.
Edit: Just to give you a number: In 2010, the postharvest food loss was estimated to be 1250 kcal per capita per day in the US.
> When you consider cost/acre and calories/acre, it is also abundantly clear that for all its flaws, modern industrial farming is a technological marvel.
Modern farming seems optimized for the wrong thing all too often: cheap calories. Calories are important (for basic metabolic needs) but not the whole story. Nutrient density and sustainable practices are worth promoting.
>We already produce enough food to feed the world and likely won't have trouble producing enough food to feed the coming extra billions, but if we can focus on increasing yields and moving away from raising animals for consumption we can also reduce our footprint on the world.
I saw some mango farming videos in Africa and that's pretty much it. There are lots of inefficient farming practices and agriculture experts are teaching farmers how to improve their yields significantly without any fancy technology.
> I also think vegetables are very energy inefficient compared to for example potatoes. Not sure how we can defend growing anything with such a minuscule calorie count given the impact of pesticides and herbicides on the environment.
Cattle are herbivores, so we're feeding _them_ plant matter for them to convert to meat for us to eat. We're also growing massive amounts of soy and corn just to feed those cattle already, when we could be growing substantially less than that to feed ourselves.
> Not sure how we can defend growing anything with such a minuscule calorie count given the impact of pesticides and herbicides on the environment.
Not sure how we can defend the current status quo when we're growing many times the amount of crops to feed the animals using those pesticides and herbicides, _and_ pumping said cattle full of antibiotics, but yet here we are.
This could easily be solved by removing animal ag subsidies and with taxing of negative externalities.
That's one law, the market (= higher prices) will take care of the rest.
> people in the developing world are consuming more meat as their incomes rise
I'm aware :) However, that made sense when there were 1 B of humans, not when our needs overshoot the environmental capacity of our environment. If everyone ate like we westerners do (and they will want to, when we still do) then we'd need something like 4-5 earths to sustain everyone.
> mass-deployment of nuclear power plants and vertical farms requires only that
Sure, but that means a lot of resources (oil, for example) and further destruction of the environment (mining, built-up areas), and a large timescale.
Abolishment of animal ag subsidies is a piece of paper and few signatures.
> And in my view it's all based on a flawed premise: that farming needs any kind of technological revolution. It just doesn't. It's mostly fine.
Modern agriculture is good at producing of astonishing quantities of calorie-rich food, which makes people obese because of lack of nutrients. 4.7M dies per year because of obesity, which, of course, is not a problem for those, who produces bland food.
> We already produce enough food to feed the world and likely won't have trouble producing enough food to feed the coming extra billions, but if we can focus on increasing yeilds and moving away from raising animals for consumption we can also reduce our footprint on the world.
If we want to release cropland back to the wild, then by far the cheapest way to do it is improve farming infrastructure and practice in low income countries, which is where yields lag so far behind the state of the art.
An unrelated issue. That’s important. I have no reason to expect it to get worse. What runs off the fields is necessarily not used by crops.
> And you can bet farmers are already maxing that out as much as they can on an industrial scale.
I doubt that.
All industries, agriculture included, are incentivised to maximise profits. Optimising profit sure isn’t environmentally friendly, but it also doesn’t mean treating fertiliser as a magic potion.
That’s pointlessly expensive right now for most crops, so those are fairly limited. Likewise, the economically optimal quantity of fertiliser used by farms is different from the optimal quantity for the health of people living down-river — but that’s just as true regardless of if CO2 is higher or lower than we consider desirable for the general global climate.
>Sure, there's [fossil fuels] somewhere up the supply chain but... it's not a big deal.
It is if you want sustainable food production.
An unsustainable system is by definition in the process of destroying itself. I don't know about you, but I want humanity to continue having food for generations to come.
> Also, from what I've seen the problems with food scarcity don't stem from low crop yields but rather from distribution. I don't think seeing it as a crop yield problem is the right way to approach it.
Absolutely agree on this one. The world produces enough food (well, cereal grains) to feed everyone. However, I would still argue that increasing crop yields is incredibly important for the species as a whole. Better yields means lesser land required for cultivation. You basically reduce the environmental footprint of agriculture and I think this would be incredibly important e.g. in Africa where you either may not have a lot of Arable land OR might not want to cut down virgin forests just to feed your people.
Valid point, though everything depends on energy, oil being one of the main sources.
Not the only matter at hand though soil degradation, pesticide resistant pests, water pollution, ...
We actually have no quantitative problems for now: we waste over 30% of the food production, part of it being expensive food (meat, bananas, etc). See http://www.fao.org/save-food/en/
So yeah, we can afford some optimizations while researching for sustainable solutions.
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