I can't imagine the amount of "non-valued" food, fruit vegetables etc which end up in the bin.
Aquaponics is getting more and more popular and can be very cheap. I imagine that a good "how to" guide and a small monetary donation could help a lot of people.
Money is a tool for overcoming barriers to cooperation. People who can't self-organize to cheaply produce food for survival will continue to not be able unless enough money is available.
In terms of growing your own food, poverty of post USSR Russia is an interesting case study. The concept of a “dacha” became hugely important in subsistence. In last years of USSR shops became empty in most regions. You literally could not buy food even if you had money. Limited rations were provided so people didn’t die of starvation.
A lot of families turned to weekend farming. Usually not any kind of livestock, just vegetables. Potatoes, onions, garlic, cabbage, tomatoes, cucumbers and such. Pesticides were expensive, so not an option. Composting and dun from the villages who had livestock were primarily used.
My grandparents weekend farm produced enough to feed several families and we often gave away or bartered extra sacks of potatos. In all, the land used for this was less than .2 acre. Worked by 2 adults part time with rudimentary tools more reminiscent of 18/19th century than a modern operation.
I wonder if anyone has ever starved when some government came in to make the food free?
Edit: I wonder if I’m the only on that has seen HN move exponentially faster towards reddit in the last year?
I would also say "urbanization" but that generates other externalities and costs which interact closely with the biodiversity problem.
If you banned the pesticides, it would do a lot of good, but now consider how many more acres would need to be farmed in order to keep the overall yields the same. How many acres would be cleared that would not otherwise be cleared?
I agree that glyphosate (RoundUp now makes up less than half the market, which is largely Chinese-made and Chinese-consumed now) should probably be far more heavily regulated, but be aware that humans are not going to happily grow less food on the same land when yields drop.
Taste the rainforest.
It’s a short term gain. Long term sustainability is more important.
Given how much food we throw away, I really don’t think the yield per acre is a problem. It’s a race to the bottom anyway.
The argument above, if I'm not mistaken, is that we should produce less food, and so if that is the objective, we can farm the same acreage with a lower yield per acre just fine. Less supply is a fundamental part of the idea, in fact, to inflate food prices and reduce waste.
I think other comments, however, did address the discussion of people who struggle to afford food at current prices-- additionally, in the U.S. specifically, 40% of food is wasted [1]. Maybe just a decrease in U.S. food supply would be in order? Or specifically countries where food waste is that high?
[1] https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/wasted-food-IP.pdf
Also the wasted food cannot be shipped to countries that need it, like Africa, without a high cost, unless you're talking about food low in nutrients, like sugar, flour or corn, that can be stored for months or years and that does nothing to help those populations, because they need proteins, they need nutrients.
So the starvation argument makes absolutely no sense.
Also I believe that in some cases a lower yield per acre should reduce the costs. If you eliminate the waste, if you make the distribution channels efficient, if you keep the soil healthy, production costs should in fact go down.
So in a lot of places you can't swap out meat for, say, corn. It's meat ... or nothing (well, grass, which I guess you could make plastic from but little else).
All of agriculture is also pretty inefficient btw. From the sunlight to calories (before any processing) there's ~1.8% efficiency.
This feels like saying we absolutely need multiple GB of RAM to display a website because how else would Angular work otherwise?
If the increased yield per acre is used primarily to support todays industrial-scale meat production, maybe we should address the latter first. The way meat production works today seems to have almost exclusively downsides: It's a moral bankruptcy considering current state of research in animal consciousness, it's a health hazard for consumers, it's an inefficient way to consume proteins and as you note, it monopolizes vast parts of crop production.
That is, you can’t just swap out corn/hay fields for rice and bean fields. I would love to be proven wrong though, it would help me rationalize further reducing my meat consumption
If these numbers are even close to accurate, eliminating roundup and modern farming would kill BILLIONS of humans.
I would love to get more accurate numbers, but what do you intend to do about the little "humans need food" issue in general ?
The solution is obvious, straightforward, and would be relatively easy, but human nature makes it hard to discuss, let alone implement.
Better quality combined with eating less, both would be good and producing less waste.
The alternatives to Roundup tend to be worse than Roundup. That's why people use Roundup. That's not to say Roundup per se is absolutely necessary, but farming without pesticides doesn't work at the scale necessary to feed the human population. There's no choice between "overproduction" and "appropriate production" by getting rid of pesticides. Despite all the overproduction, we still have spikes in food prices caused by bad harvests. Limiting production even more would be risky.
> ... and organic farming techniques, of widely adopted, wouldn't make it impossible to continue to produce enough.
First of all, "organic farming" is marketing BS. It doesn't have any properly defined meaning, it also uses pesticides (just not those deemed "not organic") which aren't harmless either, it is vastly more expensive even at scale (which by now it has, due to high demand in rich countries). It's wishful thinking that it could replace modern farming.
At least in the US, there is a "certified organic" label regulated by the USDA. https://www.ams.usda.gov/about-ams/programs-offices/national...
https://www.ams.usda.gov/grades-standards/organic-labeling-s...
Organics pesticide use is much more selective and heavily controlled than standard regulations[1]. Your notion that most consumers of organic food have unrealistic expectations ( with no survey to support that ) is really just a statement of your own expectations.
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-n...
Who decides which pesticides are okay, what is the criterion that everyone can agree on? Why are there differences across countries, if there is a proper definition of it?
By the way, you can slap a "gluten free" label on table water and it'll be marketing BS, but at least "gluten free" has a properly defined meaning.
> Who decides which pesticides are okay, what is the criterion that everyone can agree on?
You know in this age of IT you can find answers to your questions. [3]
> Why are there differences across countries, if there is a proper definition of it?
Because it is a developed practical system, its not defined by dictionary definition - it is very complicated. Why are there differences across countries in safety regulations? How well is the term "safety" internationally defined ? Where did you get the idea that dictionary definition of "organic farming" should be able to completely explain the practice. What other well defined terms do that ?? Renewables, Genetic Engineering, Nuclear, Carbon reduction?
I think this involves unwillingness to observe context and make sense of terms, for the sake of the sort of argument which is fun for supporting sport teams.
[1] https://www.ams.usda.gov/rules-regulations/organic/labeling
[2] https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?c=ecfr&SID=9874504b6f1...
It's a bunch of semi-religious practices that were made up on the spot with no scientific basis whatsoever. For you to put it next to Genetic Engineering or Renewables is quite misleading.
Organic farming has its origins in nonsense beliefs, the practices that exist today are still based on them, even if they're regulated now. Farmers practice organic farming for basically two reasons:
1) To make money by selling inefficiently produced food at inflated prices
2) Because they irrationally and dogmatically believe organic farming is "better", without any scientific basis
The people in group #1 don't actually believe in the principle, they just believe in the money they'll make.
https://southsaskfarmer.com/2015/01/11/why-im-not-an-organic...
Please don't defend untrue claims in these discussions by asking questions "not to be answered"
It's not untrue to say there is no clearly defined meaning of "safety", just like there is no clearly defined meaning of "organic farming". The fact that there are standards bodies or certifications doesn't change that.
The other claim is that organic farming is marketing BS. I don't even see you arguing that it isn't. Even many organic farmers agree!
So, what's the issue?
No, rhetorical questions have expected answers. You simply rejected answers which you did not expect and then declared your own questions "not to be answered".
>It's not untrue ((its true)) to say there is no clearly defined meaning of "safety"
Agreed (see - rhetorical). There is not one clear definition of safety, there are many for different contexts and in different jurisdictions.
Your idea that organic farming should be atomically definable, doesn't make nonsense bullshit out of organic agriculture and labeling - it has made nonsense of your understanding of organic agriculture.
Im not continuing this with you, but may link to it in the next discussion featuring insubstantial and false claims about organic farming. Organic agriculture deserves fair assessment and criticism for these times, not so much name calling. Have a good weekend.
Not necessarily, but either way the answer is not the point.
> You simply rejected answers which you did not expect and then declared your own questions "not to be answered".
Okay Dr. Mind Reader. Do you believe I didn't expect that someone could google who does organic certifications and give me links to that? Do you believe I have never heard of such a thing as organic certification, even after multiple people have pointed it out to me right here?
Once again, I don't actually expect you to answer these question. The point of the questions is to make you think. You could answer them, but you would be missing the point.
> Your idea that organic farming should be atomically definable, doesn't make nonsense bullshit out of organic agriculture and labeling - it has made nonsense of your understanding of organic agriculture.
I didn't say it should be and indeed it doesn't. I really just mentioned it, you don't even seem to disagree that it doesn't have a clearly defined meaning, so what is your problem?
Anyway, what actually makes organic farming bullshit is the fact that it's based on bullshit theories. It has no basis in science. It comes out of nonsense beliefs, like Antroposophy. What makes it marketing bullshit is the fact that "organic" is used as a label of quality, even though the practice is based on bullshit theories, just like Homeopathy, which also has certifications. The farmers following these inefficient practices often do it only for the marketing effect. I don't even see you contest that at all, so I must conclude that you actually agree with me on this. Glad we're on the same page!
But, in addition to being neither of those things, it is an utter disaster for the environment.
The part that makes it BS has nothing to do with regulation. Homeopathy and Chiropractic are regulated and certified in various ways, they're still BS.
That goop had better be poisoning dolphins or something, because the null hypothesis -- that it really isn't so bad and organic labels reject it on account of the FUD opportunity -- is pretty damning.
Honestly, I think everything you said supports my point.
Now, maybe you don't tell anyone that you're more organic than the organic pope, but that makes you an extreme exception, not the rule.
Also most of the plants we cultivate are invasive species, and their main pests are invasive as well, so we have plenty of opportunities to experiment on this invasive species before before we kill native species in their original habitats.