
Can We Grow More Food on Less Land? - caprorso
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/05/climate/agriculture-food-global-warming.html
======
alisson
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](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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE)

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
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.

~~~
alisson
The natural habitat of Cocoa tree as usually bellow other trees, like many
other species, Coffee too, it likes to be a little shaded by others, and the
main thing about this method shown in the videos is very regular pruning and
by organizing the organic matter in the ground the nutrients gets available
for other species as well as more sunlight, so making very good use of the
ecological succession - soil gets better and better naturally with nature
processes - which is something very well known and studied in Botany but very
little applied to agriculture, this is the gap this farmer is filling. As
shown a little in the video, when he's going to grow something very sun hungry
like lettuce or corn he does that by opening a big area in the forest and
together with the lettuce he introduces seeds of other trees for the next
natural succession.

I don't have an actual verified study to show you :/ But I believe there are a
bunch of studies, as I have seeing a few universities making them, but I don't
know how to find them. All I have now is my own experience on this topic.

------
dghughes
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.

~~~
nyokodo
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.

~~~
tiglionabbit
Is it possible that the soil is also depleted of interesting nutrients and
that the fertilizer isn't providing them either?

Our understanding of what micronutrients humans need is not great. For plants,
it may be even less understood.

~~~
mikekchar
Depending on what you mean, either yes or no :-) This is based on my poor
understanding of the situation. Someone who is knowledgeable will hopefully be
able to correct me.

I think there are actually _plenty_ of nutrients in soil (even many "poor"
soils). The real problem is that they aren't bio-available. So you'll have
lots of different mineral salts in the soil (usually one or two orders of
magnitude more than you need, by weight), but it's not in a form that the
plant can absorb by its roots.

I think the real problem is the kind of mono-culture cropping we do. Really
you want a variety of plants pulling up nutrients out of the ground (because
different varieties have different abilities to break down and convert the
nutrients in the soil). Then you want those plants to break down and be
reintegrated in the soil. Finally, you often want some of that happening in an
anaerobic environment, so you don't bind oxygen to it.

There are some new (old? ha ha) techniques being developed to build fertility
(really just making existing nutrients bio-available) in the soil. Avoiding
tilling, building up micro-organisms and insects to distribute the soil,
allowing a variety of plants to grow (some long roots, some short roots, etc,
etc). It's pretty complicated, though and I expect that it will take us a very
long time to learn how to do these things effectively.

It definitely seems easier to just add what you think the soil is missing, but
there are many disadvantages to that approach as we see over time. I did some
experiments in containers a while ago. My idea was to see what kind of
production I could get without adding any inputs to the soil at all (just
water), and harvesting as much food as I could.

I had some experience from doing planted fish tanks with really intense
planting (every single space possible occupied with a plant) and knew that it
was reasonable to assume that plants can grow really well being very crowded
as long as nutrients are available. I planted my containers so that light was
the limiting factor, but grew a lot of local weeds that grew in poor soil as
well as food on the assumption that they would build fertility fastest. I ran
my experiment over 5 years and was really surprised at my results -- my
production increased over time. One year, I even got 5 (!) harvests of
potatoes from the same container -- I've never even come close to that level
of production doing it more traditionally.

It was all very unscientific and I was really doing it out of curiosity more
than trying to prove anything. In the end, it seems my neighbor didn't like my
container garden of weeds and he convinced my gas man to apply herbicide to
it. That was the end of my experiment (I caught him in the act as I came home
from work a little bit early that day -- one of the few times I've really
blown my top).

Anyway, I don't think we really have to worry over much about actually
depleting our soils. I think they can rebound fairly quickly with the right
approach. However, I think it _is_ possible that our current intensive farming
approaches do not produce the most nutrient rich produce possible.

~~~
agsdfgsd
>Really you want a variety of plants pulling up nutrients out of the ground
(because different varieties have different abilities to break down and
convert the nutrients in the soil)

That doesn't appear to be needed. The plants don't have the ability at all,
the microorganisms they attract and feed do it. You can build fertility while
growing a single crop year after year, Fukuoka did rice and wheat every year
for decades on the same land just fine. As long as you keep the microorganisms
fed and don't insist on a program of routinely killing them, they'll break
down the minerals that the plants need and make them available.

>Finally, you often want some of that happening in an anaerobic environment,
so you don't bind oxygen to it.

No you don't. When it happens in an anaerobic environment you get end products
that hinder plant growth instead of helping it. This is the main reason soil
compaction is a problem, you get pooled water in the ground creating anaerobic
conditions which kill off all the good bacteria and fungi.

~~~
mikekchar
> Fukuoka did rice and wheat every year for decades on the same land just
> fine.

Fukuoka also used wild carrots and daikon to bring up nutrients from lower
down (source: My friend studied with him). Also white clover to fix nitrogen
(and even went so far as to say, "Don't bother experimenting with anything
else. I've tried everything and white clover is the best."). Rice is a summer
crop and in most places in Japan you can have a winter crop as well, which you
use for nutrient migration. Fukuoka's techniques work very well around where I
like (my friend's fields are fantastic), but apparently don't work very well
in more temperate climes (just from what I've heard).

~~~
agsdfgsd
>Fukuoka also used wild carrots and daikon to bring up nutrients from lower
down (source: My friend studied with him).

Not according to him he didn't. Read his books, he was very clear about
everything he did. He grew vegetables to eat, in a completely different area,
it had nothing to do with the grain field.

>Also white clover to fix nitrogen

Nitrogen is a non-issue precisely because you can pull it out of the air for
free. You said you want a variety of plants to pull nutrients from the ground.
Clover pulling nitrogen from the air is not support for that idea.

>Rice is a summer crop and in most places in Japan you can have a winter crop
as well, which you use for nutrient migration.

But he didn't do that, he used it for a crop. He did rice and wheat, like I
said. Both were crops, he sold the harvests. He did it for decades without any
decline in yields. The idea that you need a "diverse polyculture" of plants as
the current fad calls it is completely unsupported by evidence. They just need
a healthy ecosystem to grow in, not necessarily different plants.

>Fukuoka's techniques work very well around where I like (my friend's fields
are fantastic), but apparently don't work very well in more temperate climes

The techniques and ideas work fine, but you can't blindly copy his setup as it
was. You don't have the season for two crops, so you don't do rice and wheat.
You just do wheat. Marc Bonfils has grown winter wheat every year in the same
field for over a decade with no inputs, no rotation, and yields increased each
year as the soil was restored. If you are in a cold enough climate it might
even make sense to compost your straw in the spring in order to warm your soil
up earlier, but I am not sure about that yet, I'll be testing it this spring.

------
NickM
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.

~~~
strainer
> 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.

~~~
slededit
> 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.

There are lots of synthetic foods. The main problem is marketing. How are you
going to sell your lab food when "processed" is bad and "natural" is good? The
organic movement has taught people to distrust science in food, and its not
something that is going to easily be reversed. The fact that most synthetic
advances are used for cost reduction - not health doesn't help here either.

The only place where this has seen any adoption is synthetic meats. But I
expect vegetable replacements to be many decades off - if ever.

~~~
baxtr
Could you cite studies and give examples?

~~~
slededit
What specifically are you looking for? That synthetic foods exist? Google
provides many results on the subject. You probably have already eaten some
synthetic ingredients.

For a real world example sugar was first synthesized in 1953
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucrose#Chemical_synthesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucrose#Chemical_synthesis)

Carbohydrate synthesis is also a well studied field.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbohydrate_synthesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbohydrate_synthesis)

Many vitamin additives today are artifical. And of course artificial flavoring
has vast commercial adoption. In the case of McDonald's french fries this was
used to dramatically reduce the amount of saturated fat while maintaining the
beef flavor - they are no longer deep fried in beef talow.

We can't yet recreate the texture of a pepper, but we can certainly create a
synthetic smoothie with the necessities of life. Organic chemistry is a rich
field of study.

~~~
strainer
You didn't referenced anything approaching wholesome food.

Of course there are a few simple compounds which are edible, but most
artificial additives are extracted and processed from grown inputs, and this
is susceptible to unexpected health problems as happened with exposure to
trans fats for decades - now banned.

> we can certainly create a synthetic smoothie with the necessities of life

That is a low bar - being capable at any cost to synthesis a smoothie with
'the necessities of life' including growth? good health? You didnt even
reference that.

~~~
slededit
“Wholesome” is not a scientific term.

The food landscape is filled with pseudoscience, and whether a compound is
synthesized or extracted is more of an economic decision not a scientific one.

~~~
strainer
It is a plain language term, pseudoscience most often alludes to science by
misrepresenting scientific terms. In this context "wholesome" plainly refers
to foods which provide broad but not necessarily complete nutrition, so they
can be eaten perfectly safely in bulk like potatoes and rice (note the
objective of this thread).

Small amounts of almost anything can be synthesized at great expense, but you
should have provided an example of a wholesome food which would not be
completely uneconomical to synthesize (and purify) in bulk, to support a claim
that there exists such a potential economic possibility. Even how much for
example, it costs to synthesize food grade sugars would be a start on showing
your advice on this subject is grounded in reality.

------
vram22
Recently posted on HN, under the thread "A remote UK community living off-grid
(bbc.co.uk)":

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18498110](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
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.

------
dajonker
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.

[1] [https://www.wur.nl/nl/nieuws/Nieuwe-onderzoekskas-in-
Riyad-m...](https://www.wur.nl/nl/nieuws/Nieuwe-onderzoekskas-in-Riyad-
maakt-30-90-waterbesparing-mogelijk.htm) (in Dutch only)

------
tareqak
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.

[1]
[http://12.000.scripts.mit.edu/mission2014/problems/inadequat...](http://12.000.scripts.mit.edu/mission2014/problems/inadequate-
food-distribution-systems)

~~~
hinkley
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.

~~~
wrycoder
By March in 18th century New Hampshire, the pickings were getting pretty lean.
You might be able to go down into the cellar and get a soft apple or a potato
out of a barrel, and you would have wheat, oats, and barley. Maybe there was
still some kale under the snow in the garden. Beyond that, you killed a
chicken or went out to hunt some game. So when the raspberries came into
season, it was indeed a treat.

~~~
ryacko
By the 19th century, canning allowed for a greater variety of perhaps less
nutritious food.

------
fouc
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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture)

~~~
agsdfgsd
Permaculture doesn't mean food forest. A food forest is one form of
permaculture, but it is by no means the only form, or even the ideal one. The
hype about food forests comes from how effective they are in tropical
climates. But it isn't actually very efficient in temperate climates.
Temperate climates do need to rely heavily on annual crops. Those crops can be
grown using permaculture, we don't have to trade our potatoes for chestnuts.

------
QML
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.

~~~
blacksmith_tb
I am not an agronomist, but my instinct is that companion planting interferes
with large-scale farming, where machines or poorly paid humans in a hurry need
to easy access to a single crop to harvest, and often destroy the field as
they work. I'd like to think if the yields were worth it we'd have worked
around that, but possibly robotic harvesters can take us there.

~~~
maerF0x0
And that is the crux of the entire question. You get what you incentivize.
Current US Farming practices are extremely incentivized towards singular
homogenous products using an absolute minimum of human labor.

~~~
saalweachter
Eh, grains are never the problem. Essentially none of the problems you hear
about in agriculture apply to grains.

We can produce just staggering amounts of grain on a per-acre basis, and we
can ship them without refrigeration and store them for long periods of time
without any significant loss of nutritional value. The carbon, energy and
monetary cost of shipping huge quantities of grain from the center of the US
to the coasts where people live is negligible.

You don't have the complex social issues of migrant and immigrant labor with
grain production; I mean, it wouldn't surprise me if there's some, but it's
definitely not a necessary component the way it is in current vegetable
production and in meat processing.

There's some potential problems in water usage in some places grains are
produced, you can have some good conversations about fertilizer and pesticide
production, and about soil maintenance, and we continually want to be working
to improve the resiliency and productivity of the crop varieties, but grains
are in pretty good shape and there's a clear road map for future work, with
lots of incremental progress being made every day.

Produce and meat production is where the big gains are to be had, for the
environment, food security, and improving the conditions of working people.
Just bank on having half our calories coming from massive grain farms located
at great distance from the population centers and try to figure out how to fix
the rest, and then maybe it will be time to revisit grains.

~~~
beat
Isn't that exactly what we're doing, though? The essence of cheap junk
calories is grain (flour), soybean oil (another plant with similar growing
needs), sugar (largely from grain in the US - high fructose corn syrup - but
sugarcane is also easy to grow at scale), and meat from grain-fed chickens and
cows.

All this stuff is shipped to factories, where it is broken down into refined
materials for other factories, that make the junk food - burgers, sliced
bread, candy bars, whatever - that are sealed or frozen for portability and
shelf stability.

This is how we've doubled the population of the planet in 50 years, while
bringing per-capita food cost to the lowest point in human history.

~~~
saalweachter
Well, yeah. I'm just saying we should keep doing it.

People whine about high fructose corn syrup, but it's not like it's a plot or
something; people really like sweet things, and HFCS is a really efficient way
to produce sweet stuff. If you restricted the sale of sweet stuff to help
combat obesity, it might have an impact on the corn market, but corn would
still be an amazing, important, huge part of out food supply.

On the other hand, consider grain-fed chickens. Factory farmed chicken is
fantastic from an environmental and a dietary standpoint, it is extremely
space efficient; even when the land used to grow the grains is considered, it
is still competitive with plant sources of protein, and it's a lean, versatile
meat. It's even a major source of organic fertilizer.

Meanwhile, it's pretty bad from an animal welfare perspective, and it is just
awful from a labor standpoint. Meat processing at scale is one of the greatest
cesspools of human misery in the US, and has been for over a century. A huge
number of people make a pittance of a wage doing unpleasant, dangerous, body-
breaking work, and it is a big consumer of illegal immigration as a source of
cheap, exploitable labor.

Fixing meat processing, through technology, regulation or labor organization,
would be HUGE.

~~~
barry-cotter
> HFCS is a really efficient way to produce sweet stuff.

Nowhere near as efficient as sugarcane. HFCS would not be produced, sold or
consumed at anything approaching current levels without tariffs preventing the
import of sugarcane.

------
kieranmaine
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.

~~~
dilap
I have a mirror-image question:

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.

~~~
mac01021
I imagine it depends on the vegetarian.

And not all meats/animals are the same. I myself eat meat, but do not eat
mammals. I am looking forward to the widespread availability of safe,
delicious, lab-grown meats.

> the healthiest way to eat

I suspect that, for most people, the best plant-based diet is equal to the
best omnivorous diet in terms of nutrition. Admittedly, it can take more
effort to get your protein.

> meat can be raised in humane ways

"Humane" is a vague word. Some will tell you that slaughtering an animal at
all in not humane.

> can be raised in environmentally-friendly ways

This would be really hard for many animals. Show me a carbon-neutral cow.

The ones that live in tiny spaces and eat corn have high carbon footprints
because of all the farming that has to happen to feed them and all the land
that is prevented from being forest to serve that need.

We don't spend nearly as much energy feeding the free-range ones, but the
land-footprint needed to serve them is even greater.

~~~
ericd
>Show me a carbon-neutral cow.

Any purely grass fed cow should be close, no? They're part of the normal
carbon cycle, and that carbon is pulled back in when the grass regrows. The
problem is when you bring sequestered carbon (fossil fuels) into the mix.

~~~
mac01021
No, because that land could be be reforested if it weren't kept for the
cattle.

~~~
ericd
A lot of grassland can’t support a forest. Cattle are able to survive on land
that is otherwise too marginal to do much of anything but grow grass.

------
maccam94
From a recent Bloomberg article[1]

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/](https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/)

2:
[http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/10...](http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/105002)

~~~
randyrand
wow. those numbers are so cool. never knew poultry was so efficient. No wonder
it’s so much cheaper.

What would it take to make beef production more efficient? genetic engineering
perhaps.

People wil naturally switch to more efficient food as population goes up and
food resources become more scarce.

~~~
bagacrap
It's not exactly surprising, is it? Besides efficiency, what would increase
the price of a piece of food? (In the long run I assume supply would match
demand so a mismatch there wouldn't be the cause.)

So I think the answer to your question about increasing efficiency is probably
pretty difficult. There's already a huge profit motive to increase efficiency,
so if a few labcoats could easily solve the problem I'm sure they would have
by now. I think the answer is to eat animals who reach maturity faster (or
just grow more per unit time?). Like insects :-)

------
agumonkey
What if we all had a green wall with aquaponics ?

~~~
snarf21
I think this is what it has to eventually be. We all have a garden in our
garage. We save tons on transportation costs throughout the chain. It has to
be near zero work. People used to _all_ have gardens in their backyard but
stopped when they could afford the cheap produce at the store.

~~~
stale2002
This is a horribly inefficient way to grow food.

The reason why food is grown by large industrial farming companies is because
they can grow it ~100 times cheaper than you could.

If everyone had to grow their own food, then everyone would starve to death.

The idea of locally grown food in everyone's backyard is a fairy tale that
just _sounds_ nice, but would actually be horrible.

~~~
agsdfgsd
>The reason why food is grown by large industrial farming companies is because
they can grow it ~100 times cheaper than you could.

No, it is because people don't want to grow food. My tomatoes cost me 2
minutes of time. I don't know how much you want to value my time at, but lets
say I am pretty awesome and deserve $100/hour. That's $3.33 cents for all the
tomatoes I can eat. Where are the industrial farming companies producing
tomatoes for 3.3 cents per 100 pounds?

>If everyone had to grow their own food, then everyone would starve to death.

If that were true, we wouldn't exist. People did grow their own food for
thousands of years. If everyone had to grow their own food, we'd be fine. All
mechanization did was free up people from agricultural labor to do other jobs,
humans predate tractors.

>The idea of locally grown food in everyone's backyard is a fairy tale that
just sounds nice, but would actually be horrible.

It is a reality for lots of people, and we're pretty happy about it.

~~~
stale2002
> If that were true, we wouldn't exist. People did grow their own food for
> thousands of years. If everyone had to grow their own food, we'd be fine.
> All mechanization did was free up people from agricultural labor to do other
> jobs, humans predate tractors.

This works when everyone owns many acres of land per person, and is spending
their entire life working the fields, doing hard labor, and doing very little
else with their life yes. We don't live in that world anymore, though.

I suspect there isn't even enough physical land on the earth to support this
inefficient method of farming.

We have significant evidence of how this worked out for people. That world
that you are describing, where everyone spent their entire life just trying to
barely feed themselves, was a horrible place, for everyone.

This period of time was called "the history of the world before the industrial
era". And lots and lots of people died. So no, they were not fine.

> It is a reality for lots of people, and we're pretty happy about it.

By "a lot" do you mean a very small percentage of the total population?

> My tomatoes cost me 2 minutes of time.

What you do with your tiny backyard garden is irrelevant. It is mathmatically
impossible for you to be feeding yourself entirely on that, unless you have
multiple acres of land, which I doubt is what you are describing. Your
anecdote does not overrule physics.

~~~
agsdfgsd
>We don't live in that world anymore, though.

Exactly, we live in a world with machines. Making it _easier_ , not harder.

>I suspect there isn't even enough physical land on the earth to support this
inefficient method of farming.

The calories produced per acre is higher, not lower. We need less land, not
more. Why do you think it is inefficient?

>That world that you are describing, where everyone spent their entire life
just trying to barely feed themselves, was a horrible place, for everyone.

That's a modern myth. We have detailed records of rural life in the 1500s.
People worked fewer hours than they do now.

>By "a lot" do you mean a very small percentage of the total population?

Yes. It only takes one person doing it to prove your claim that is impossible
is false.

>What you do with your tiny backyard garden is irrelevant

No it is not, it is the entire point.

> It is mathmatically impossible for you to be feeding yourself entirely on
> that, unless you have multiple acres of land

It takes less than half an acre of land to feed a person growing food for
yourself.

>Your anecdote does not overrule physics.

Please point me to the law of physics which states plants don't grow if
stale2002 doesn't want them to.

------
jillesvangurp
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.

------
ryanmercer
Or we could stop throwing away nearly 1/3 of the food we produce...

~~~
vram22
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,

 _shudder_

~~~
iguy
Instead of making the famous mountain of butter (beside a lake of milk) they
now pay famers not to farm, which has its own oddities. Including discouraging
of re-wilding I think, as the land has to be plausibly farm-able to get the
cash.

This aside, it's worth knowing that developed countries typically throw away
much less food than developing ones. Basically because Tesco is much better at
logistics than a million guys trying to drive into Delhi. I don't have the
link to hand but there was a nice comparison US vs Mexico on this somewhere.

~~~
vram22
>Instead of making the famous mountain of butter (beside a lake of milk) they
now pay famers not to farm, which has its own oddities.

Crazy world we live in, where being (over-)efficient has to be subsidized.
There may be a thing such as being too efficient for our own good. Also, the
efficiency as measured, only relates to money / profits / maximizing use of
resources in industrial (including food) production, and often does not take a
holistic view, which should include sustainability of resources, quality of
life (not just economic standard of living) and sustainability of the planet.

I had read E. F. Schumacher's book "Small is Beautiful" when a teenager, when
I was more into these sorts of things (did organic vegetable gardening and
dairy farming, used a biogas plant, etc.), before I got into the software
field full-time. I still recommend his ideas and book about appropriate
technology to interested people - the concepts and principles have not
changed, though technologies have evolved, and a hybrid model may be needed:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._F._Schumacher](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._F._Schumacher)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appropriate_technology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appropriate_technology)

>Including discouraging of re-wilding I think, as the land has to be plausibly
farm-able to get the cash.

Yes, re-wilding is a good idea.

>This aside, it's worth knowing that developed countries typically throw away
much less food than developing ones. Basically because Tesco is much better at
logistics than a million guys trying to drive into Delhi. I don't have the
link to hand but there was a nice comparison US vs Mexico on this somewhere.

Possibly. I do know that plenty of waste happens in India too. In fact,
Schumacher's ideas are very much suited to and applicable to developing
countries. IIRC he was influenced by Mahatma Gandhi some, and Gandhi also had
done significant work in this area, in practice, not just talking about it,
either - including hugely encouraging Indian people to do naturopathy, nature
cure, small scale industry work like traditional means of spinning and weaving
for khadi (a great hand-made Indian cotton textile), etc. We still have Khadi
& Village Industries Emporiums here, where one can buy clothing made of khadi:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khadi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khadi)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khadi#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khadi#History)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_wheel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_wheel)

[http://www.kvic.org.in/kvicres/index.php](http://www.kvic.org.in/kvicres/index.php)

------
baldfat
1/4 of the worlds for ends up spoiled.

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-...](https://www.wri.org/blog/2013/06/numbers-reducing-food-loss-and-
waste)

------
sametmax
We don't need to.

\- 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
There is no shortage of food. Even with the Western world eating a rich, meat
based diet, there's plenty of food; no need for everyone to go vegan.

What there is, is a problem with distribution.

------
pg_bot
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.

------
Fnoord
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.

~~~
Joe-Z
Would you care to explain what 'CNS' is?

~~~
Fnoord
In this context, it stands for Central Nervous System [1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_nervous_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_nervous_system)

~~~
Joe-Z
Thank you!

------
pier25
We can grow food in buildings with hydrophonic systems. The problem is not
land but energy.

------
joering2
Why is food grow not stuck up vertically? I mean let's go 3D, since at least
majority of vegetables and most fruits do not need more than height of 2 feet
of space.

It also surprised me how old school modern farming still remains. Look at the
first picture from this article: a bunch of modern tractors unnecessarily
burning oil, unnecessarily operated by humans. By now this should be three
times the size field with 15 levels up, run by 3D seeds/soil/water/plants/etc
sampling throw out from automatically replaceable cartridge/dispenser.

We have long way to go, but certainly we don't need more land to grow; we need
more technology in place!

Edit: should have mentioned it - even going vertical you can still use natural
light! Its a matter of setting up bunch of mirrors reflecting sunlight. Of
course you need sun to grow.

~~~
dovvdkc
“Its a matter of setting up bunch of mirrors reflecting sunlight. Of course
you need sun to grow.”

Doesn’t work > see thermodynamics.

The mirror you’d be setting up would have to set up away from the building
where the food is grown and therefore occupy space.

In agronomy there is a concept that the rate of growth is set by whichever one
necessary nutrient is limited. Since we fertilize and pump water, the limiting
factor is sunlight.

EDIT: 1. This is why Brazil gasohol is the only net positive bio-fuel

2\. Manual picking of produce is far superior to mechanized harvest. Tomatoes
in the US are large and tasteless because they’ve been bread to be easily
picked by machine. ( A lot of thought goes into picking a ripe fruit. It’s not
obvious AI can do that. Or that the robots can ever grab fruit with dexterity
and w/out crushing)

3.What energy source do you want to run your automatic tractors off of? Diesel
for agriculture is arguably the segment that should be given the most slack
when transitioning to “green” alternatives.

~~~
saalweachter
As an aside, while we're still a ways off from battery-electric farm vehicles
(cost/weight of batteries is still just too high to meet the same parameters
as diesel tractors, even with very generous assumptions the last time I ran
the numbers), I still like the idea of electric farm equipment hardwired to
the grid and dragging giant electric cords behind them like really boring
EVAs.

(Sure, you'd still want batteries to drive the machinery between fields, and
you'd need a way to keep the cords from damaging crops or disrupting the
plowing when you're dragging them around, and you'd need to put a huge
"tractor electric outlet" by every cluster of fields you're working with, but
these are all engineering challenges that could be met with current
technology.)

------
smcameron
Didn't Mao Tse Tung have some sort of failed high density agriculture
experiment leading to famine? Let's not repeat that particular bit of history.

------
mettamage
The Netherlands!

It's a small country that grows a lot of food!

Final answer.

Now let's read the article and sees what it says.

Edit: ah it's more about cattle.

~~~
agsdfgsd
Not really. The Netherlands has a high dollar value of "agricultural exports"
which includes flowers at 10% of that value and equipment and machinery at
another 10%. Of the 80% that is actually food, a lot of it is high value low
calorie food. And the methods used to produce that food are horribly
destructive, not sustainable, and will cost future generations untold hardship
to deal with: [https://www.dutchnews.nl/features/2018/03/dutch-
agriculture-...](https://www.dutchnews.nl/features/2018/03/dutch-agriculture-
is-not-a-beacon-of-good-farming-practice-to-the-world/)

------
chrisscastaneda
We could just grow plants instead of animals, then problem solved.

------
meggar
Maybe Boring Co and Square Roots can do some underground vertical farming so
we don't keep running out of romaine.

~~~
rohit2412
Topsoil is needed for plants, which won't grow underground without it. And if
you're going to carry soil underground, might as well do it in an above ground
building. Or try hydro ponics

~~~
meggar
I was thinking more like a 10 foot wide hole, 1 mile deep.

------
truculent
if not we're fucked, no?

------
loeg
This is touched on in Pinker's "Enlightenment Now." The current trendy
"organic" label requires more land to grow the same amount of food. Whatever
benefits of so-called organic farming you perceive, if any, it is a regression
in terms of feeding the world's growing population.

~~~
naravara
>if any, it is a regression in terms of feeding the world's growing
population.

Food security is a distribution problem, not a production problem. We're
already producing far far more food than we consume or would even need to
consume. Big Ag likes to pretend they need higher yields in order to feed the
hungry but they're full of it. They want to produce more for cheaper and
pocket the margin, but they're not going to do jack squat to get that
production out to the people who need it.

~~~
loeg
Both can be problems at the same time. I think you raise a valid concern, but
I don't believe it dismisses the yield/density problem in any way.

I don't think there's any reason to vilify agricultural businesses in
particular for being profit-seeking capitalist corporations.

~~~
naravara
>I don't think there's any reason to vilify agricultural businesses in
particular for being profit-seeking capitalist corporations.

It's not about the line of business. It's about disingenuously gussying up the
marketing around their own profit maximization by pretending they're being
humanitarian. Sort of like "Greenwashing."

Everyone does it, but so many people depend on subsistence farming that it
comes across as especially crass. Sure they're not alone, but there is plenty
of scorn to go around for bottling companies taking up all the ground water,
Pharma companies abusing IP law to fleece sick people, etc. There's no reason
to be stingy.

