Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security
bloombergquint.com
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Nearly every symbiotic relationship fungi make is based on buying sugars from plants by selling them minerals from biological weathering of rock (particles). What happens in conventional agriculture is that we murder all of the fungi.
There are a few places with strange soil compositions that are actually lacking in particular minerals. We could either elect to do something else with that land, or transition everyone but them to a post-green-revolution strategy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizosphere
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1906655116
https://regenerationinternational.org/why-regenerative-agric...
Some proponents of regenerative agriculture to learn from are:
Joel Salatin - https://www.polyfacefarms.com/
Ray Archuleta - https://soilhealthacademy.org/team/ray-archuleta/
Gabe Brown - http://brownsranch.us/
That is the primary contribution of synthetic fertilizer, and there aren't scalable natural processes to match it. Countries used to go to war over nitrogen stores (such as islands covered in bat guano).
The one that fascinates me the most is the way the Mayans did it - Chinampas. That and aquaculture growing lots of smaller fish seems like a create combo if we could get small backyard pond/farms going
How are we going to feed another 2 billion people let alone those that we have without fossil fuel inputs? Maybe biotech will save us, but I am skeptical.
Stop employing people in bullshit jobs. Immediately you've got 75% workforce on basic income, and I think some of them would like to work on small scale local farms. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regenerative_agriculture] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income]
We already grow food for 10 milliard (thousand millions for our obscurant us friends) people. Problem is poverty and inequality, not scarcity. [https://www.huffpost.com/entry/world-hunger_b_1463429]
There's lots of FUD about China maliciously overconsuming fish, but they actually (sustainably) farm >50% of their seafood IIRC.
Nitrogen is 70% of our atmosphere. When you remove all other plant life in order to get the last 20% of theoretical yield from your land, you end up having to manually provide all of the services that were provided by the plants you killed. The Green Revolution is a petrochemical revolution. Cooking allows us to use lignin calories to recover more calories from our existing food supply. Livestock do the same, either by converting grasses (ungulates) or recycling unpalatable foods (pigs).
When the petrochemicals become expensive we will have to go forward and/or backward to some other solution (most likely old solutions with new twists). The sibling comment with the huge bibliography points to some of the more coherent voices in the world of polyculture agriculture, although Gabe Brown exists in a sort of grey area between aggressive crop rotation and polyculture.
After a rain, as the soil goes from waterlogged to dry, there are phases that are hostile to root hairs and ones that are conducive. So the plant roots pulse with these cycles, advancing and retreating, sometimes arriving at places vacated by other plants. By this mechanism, any plant can scavenge some of the nitrogen left in the decaying root hairs of their neighbors.
I would also warn that thinking nitrogen=legume is a potentially limiting strategic error. While something like 7% of all plants fall into the Fabaceae (legume) family, some other pockets of the Fabales order also have root nodules, in particular, alder, and up into the Rosids clade (buckthorn, ceanothus), and then a few odd stragglers like borage, which makes me wonder if it's a taxonomic problem, parallel evolution, or what.
And then there's mondo grass (asparagaceae), which nobody expects to have root nodules. I knew about that plant for about two decades before someone pointed out it's nitrogen fixing, and that's not even in the wikipedia article. And in fact I'm having a dickens of a time finding a citation for that.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-details/?pubid=440...
Industrialized farming practices are capable of changing.
I assure it is not BS. without fertilizer you do not the explosive yields that we get all over th world including the United States.
And it is in fact well documented in a huge collection of science journals.
India is, by many accounts, likely to switch to a new-new form of agriculture sooner than some of the rest of us. The combination of bigger problems and a shallower 'tradition' of western farming practices makes that easier.
There was a post here about California covering its irrigation canals with solar panels. A couple of us politely pointed out that a couple of provinces in India have already been doing this for a while.
Nevertheless, structural issues remain. Farmer suicides are not even remotely new and it's disingenous to suggest otherwise. And it has to be pointed out that the suicide rate amongst Indian farmers is lower than the national average.
You'll have to pry Western farming methods from the cold dead hands of Indian farmers. Even the urban intelligencia has shut up about organic/traditional farming after seeing what's happening across the Palk Strait.
On paper Mark Shepard seems to have about 106 acres around his house, which I think is a gross branding mistake, because he farms a lot more land than just his homestead. I have to find this interview again because it was kind of shocking and I'm afraid I may be misquoting it. One interviewer got him talking about all of the land he owns elsewhere, leases, or consults on and he makes some comment about he may actually be managing more farmland than anyone east of the Mississippi.
Most of us are on the internet all day regardless. We downplay the incremental cost of both doing things, bragging about it online, and getting it on people's radars, like it's simple but we mostly think about the people who are good at it and not all of the ones who quietly disappeared without most of us ever learning about it.
Farming is exhausting. Farming is remote. Farming is slow, and experiments take years to prove to be more than dumb luck. The gap between killing it and selling your audience on the notion that you are killing it is much, much wider. Talk enough, and you have to stop doing, which means you're now selling ideas that you can't back up.
Understand that it is my wish and hope that these sort of low/no fertilizer organic techniques can work better than "traditional" heavy-fertilizer/irrigation farming the west now mainly employs. It's just that vaguely recall hearing about this sort of thing 30 years ago. And 20 years ago. And 10 years ago.
Some of his crops are targets of opportunity. They're a cover crop and if the weather is just right and he gets it planted in time, he might be able to harvest it, or at least graze some livestock on it, but if not, then that's fine too, because the dividends still made it worth doing.
He is a very frugal farmer, both in resources and energy. Mark Shepard, in contrast, seems to be more interested in the energy side of frugality, and is so open in his disdain for people throwing good money/time after bad that it's practically his personality. In particular he likes to rant about how utterly mathematically unsound the idea of rain barrels is, and the kind of cognitive dissonance it takes to keep telling yourself otherwise.
pH and temperature are pretty easy and common ways for soil to keep essential minerals away from the plant life which could utilize them.
I bought some property that was practically concrete at the beginning of the dry season. I hurt my hand and damaged a tool trying to take a soil sample to send to the lab. A couple years later you'd never know, except that past me was apparently smart enough to take a video that I found when trying to free up some disk space.
Plants, bacteria and fungi all manipulate soil PH for better or for worse, and you can steer that. And keeping soil covered, especially with tall plants, can drop the temperature tens of degrees Celsius. A forest floor is much closer to ground temperature, for a host of reasons.
When I was 17 years old I went to Sweden as part of a cultural exchange program (I'm from South America). One of the first things that shocked me was the sheer amount of food being wasted for no reason whatsoever.
In my country, even though I come from a privileged family, you can't shield yourself away from poverty. Throughout my entire life living with my parents I've seen people ring our door to ask for food. Personally, I NEVER waste any food, if I put something on my plate, I'll eat it unless it's rotten. And that goes for pretty much everyone I know. Every time I went out to eat with my parents, if there were any significant amount of food left, we would always ponder whether or not we would want to it later. If we decided we would not, we would take it anyway and find someone on the street who would.
While in Sweden, I lived with Swedish families and attended to a traditional Swedish high school. So I'd eat lunch at school and dinner with my host families. My first day eating lunch at school I was shocked, to say the least. I mean, yeah, the food was great, it's amazing that there is such a functional high-quality school system there, and so organized too; once you're done eating, you're supposed to take your plate, put any leftovers on a big trash bin, and give your plate to the lady who puts them into a industrial washer. The amount of food kids threw away was just staggering. And it's not a one off thing. It's a behavior, they put more food than they know they'll eat, every single day. It's not like they put a ridiculous amount of food on their plate and throw most of it away. It's like they don't even bother paying attention to how hungry they are, they just put whatever amount of food they feel like putting, and then throw away the rest. That goes even for drinks, they would serve a cup full of milk or water, and throw half of it away.
I know I'm talking about kids and teenagers, but they will grow up to be adults some day. And I saw that of many adults also. On of my duties as an exchange student was to connect both cultures, mine and the country I was being hosted by. I always tried to give people there a glimpse of what of poverty was and how privileged they were, and I always felt I never got the idea through. It felt sometimes they have a cartoonish idea of poverty and what it means to not have the money to pay for really basic things.
I'm not here to call anyone out. I just think there are times when the people are also part of problem, and I wanted to give a personal perspective.
An abundance of food does self-perpetuate to the point that it becomes expendable. Well run family kitchens would likely have a positive effect on people's disposition towards food. I mill grains and bake bread, sourcing the grain supply from a well-run farm in my state, and this never fails to give me a moment to reflect on my relationship to food. It is, unfortunately, not commonplace for American households to engage with their consumption further up the supply chain than the supermarket shelf, where access is the most convenient.
And meals are often bigger than what everyone can finish during that meal. This is especially so when there is visit. In Chinese culture, it's not done to ask visit whether they want more food because they are not supposed to say yes. Asking is thus equivalent to signalling that you don't want to give them more food, i.e. a lack of hospitality. Thus people make more food than necessary.
That in itself isn't a problem because one could save the leftovers in the fridge. But some refuse to eat leftover food because it's not fresh, or they refuse to eat fridge leftovers that are more than 1 day old (you can save most leftovers in the fridge for 3 days if you put them in the fridge immediately after eating). Some even believe that even frozen food is considered unfresh, or has fewer nutrients or something. Others refuse to put anything in the fridge at all because they hate colder-than-room-temperature food (why reheating is a problem eludes me, but they refuse to use reheating as a solution).
All of this pains me. I hate wasting food. The result: I'm often the only one who eats the oldest leftovers, everybody else eats fresh even though there are lots of leftovers.
This doesn't just apply to food, but also energy. Some insist on turning the heat so high that they can wear tshirts indoors during winter, because that's more comfortable than wearing more clothes. Others think I'm being weird for trying so hard to drive electric-only (driving to a public charging station can be a pain compared to parking at the most convenient location).
3 days? Try a week or two.
I'm just happy if I can get my wife to put food in the fridge in under 2 hours.
"In the United States 30 per cent of all food, worth US$48.3 billion (€32.5 billion), is thrown away each year." "The food currently wasted in Europe could feed 200 million people (FAO, 2013)."
Source: https://www.unep.org/thinkeatsave/get-informed/worldwide-foo...
That seems unlikely to me. I'm pretty sure that even poor people in the US pay more than a dollar a day for their food. So where does all the money go?
Tax breaks and other subsidies let the farmers stay afloat, and organizations such as the Chicago Board of Trade set artificially low wholesale prices.
I was over at a friend's house a few years ago, and she had prepared lunch for her daughter. When her daughter complained she didn't like it, my friend threw the whole plate food in the trash without blinking, and made something else. I asked my friend, and she said the food is so cheap it doesn't matter. And you can't just let your child not eat.
My parents certainly didn't grow up poor. Both of my grandfathers made a good living. I don't know what conclusion to draw, but there seems to have been a huge cultural shift towards food in the post war years.
You can, most of us just don't because people think you're neglecting the kid if the kid chooses not to eat a meal you provide them. Same reason we send way more food for lunches than my kids ever eat—because the amount they will eat looks "too small" and my wife's worried what people will think.
I hate this stuff, but get the reasoning. IMO they'll eat if they're hungry. Meanwhile, we have an obesity crisis.
Historian Rachel Laudan talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about food waste. Laudan argues that there are tradeoffs in preventing food waste--in reduced time for example, or a reduction in food security, and that these tradeoffs need to be measured carefully when considering policy or giving advice to individuals or organizations. She also discusses the role of food taboos and moralizing about food. Along the way, Laudan defends the virtue of individual choice and freedom in deciding what to eat.
1) poverty means people can't afford food
2) you're not reaching a great many villages by anything bigger than a land cruiser.
Distribution has always been the cause of global hunger issues, at least for the past few decades.
Food security is a wholly separate issue.
Every time I see a garbage can, I see money that was spent on waste. And when I see money, I see time that was spent. And time is something you can't get back, it's gone for good once you spend it. Every garbage can is a waste of life. Minutes and hours thrown away.
Quite the opposite. Often food waste is the result of convenience. That garbage can full of food in the cafeteria is a prime example: People could get smaller portions, but then they'd have to queue again to get seconds if they got too little, so they get a little more to be on the safe side.
Sometimes, something in my fridge spoils because I didn't eat it fast enough. I could always shop only for the next day when I'm sure I'll eat it, but then I'd spend at least an hour extra each week on trips to the store.
Sure, some time was spent to produce it, but the low price is a good signal that that is negligible.
I don't have any food growing in my garden even though I could. Is that food waste? What if I plant some vegies and forget to eat them and they die and rot. Is that food waste? I don't see that food waste itself is a real problem, just an illusion because it's so visible.
Surely we all waste electricity by having hot showers instead of cold, or leaving our computers on when we're not using them. We can afford it, so why not? Even those poor people are wasting oxygen in the air! Imagine how scarce that is in space or a submarine.
I also hate food waste, because it seems to dumb. But I think it is there for a reason - at least to some degree.
Even in my university's restaurant, which feeds students on a massive industrial scale, I see food waste. But even in a much bigger scale, the amount was significantly less.
Elimination of food waste is not practical and should not be a goal, you'll just ultimately fail and give up on intermediary goals that might just suffice.
Perhaps some farmers might switch to practices that are not so dependent upon as much to external inputs … but even switching to things like no-till or using local inputs like manure, or using soil-regenerating practices like polycropping or integrated pest-control is going to take time.
It’s doable though. The Cubans have been operating their agriculture without imported oil and fertilizers since the US shut down imports. That also meant that use of tractors became limited, as are long-distance transport for food.
Better than food security is food sovereignty, and people within a locality being able to feed themselves.
Growing without synthetic fertilizers appeals to the symbiotic Nature living, I get that. It's an ideal like any other, maybe worth of pursuit. But we first need to make peace with the fact that we'll either:
a) Be able to feed about a billion humans at most; or
b) Completely destroy many pristine ecosystems by multiplying arable land area by 5.
Removal of synthetic fertilizers would induce a yield drop of 80%: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cereal-crop-yield-vs-fert...
Runoff to freshwater inducing toxicity is one major impact from over fertilization, which is not an implication of the product itself, but it's over use.
I'm told. IANA farmer but I know many and worked with ag and water quality researchers for a few years in MN, USA.
This resulted in widespread food insecurity, with the Cuban government rationing food to UN poverty levels [1]. Cuba also experienced food shortages due to COVID [2]. Cuba's agricultural experience is not a very good case for organic farming.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Period#Caloric_intake_...
2. https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2021/07/12/cubas-f...
not saying this is a bad thing. soil regeneration and more sustainable farming practices are a good thing Imo. it's just that we can't switch to that instantly. yield goes down, takes time to switch, cost likely will increase to make the same $/acre of land, etc.
But before modern farming we couldn't sustain more than a billion humans or so, and most of our advancements since then have been from better machinery, watering and most of all fertilizer. Depending on what you cut, you lose way more than 50%.
1: https://extension.okstate.edu/fact-sheets/corn-as-cattle-fee...
Dividing the available arable land by global population leaves only a 100x100m plot per person - and that's before barns, silos, houses or warehouses. That's not a whole lot - as a city dweller, I'm confident I'd starve the first winter if not earlier
Modern agriculture is really impressive - farmers manage to feed around 10-20 people from such a plot
The bigger problems are a.) skills and b.) labor. Homesteading methods basically require full-time gardening by people who have put significant efforts into maximizing yields, intercropping, planting multiple harvests, growing vertically, etc. The advantage of our mechanized farming system is that we can feed the population with 1.4% of the population.
[1] https://www.theseasonalhomestead.com/the-truth-about-self-su...
[1] https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Agriculture/...
And, soil rebuilding takes time. No-till won’t really start becoming advantageous until about year 4 or 5.
But like I said — the Cubans had to do this. They were not given the time to switch.
from all the reading I have done, and in my own experience with a shitty 3acre hobby farm, overall yield per acre never reaches an equivalent to modern destructive farming practices.
TL;DR Fertilizer dilutes the taste and nutrition of plants by making them bigger not better.
> And, soil rebuilding takes time.
So modern day farm equipment, ploughs which dig deeper cause soil erosion which in turn means more fertilizers plus an increase in the seeds grown to yield highly in certain chemical profile environments. Alot of plants classed as weeds can also be used. So the Mediterranean diet which is supposed to help you live a long life is actually based on picking wild herbs and plants, not the stuff you buy from a supermarket! You can eat dandelions and other wild plants. Wild blackberries taste so much better than any you can buy in a shop and the plants you can buy from a garden centre dont produce black berries which taste anywhere near as good as wild blackberries. Even wild strawberries although tiny like the size of a petit pois pea, have so much more flavour, although I will try a £350 Japanese strawberry (yes just 1 strawberry costs £350). https://metro.co.uk/2020/05/12/paul-hollywood-eats-japan-vie...
Japan doesnt have the land mass so couldnt compete on quantity, so they lead on quality food, thats why their food is the most expensive in the world.
When the horse and horse drawn ploughs are used, less soil erosion is seen as more white root masses are seen holding the soil together.
Not so long ago < 10-30years, it was common to spread manure on field instead of using fertilizer because the bacteria in the manure benefits the ground and crops, its also where we found/find our antibiotics.
I only know of one farm equipment manufacturer who is actively developing smaller farm robots/equipment (German) where as everyone else is going bigger and bigger.
I'd bet on the smaller farm equipment manufacturer because people will be looking for labour saving devices in their gardens ( & country estates) where you can have more control over the quality of the food grown, but I also understand many people live in new build estates with a tiny garden and no robots will really needed.
EU regs and their intentions mean more land has to be left wild and more hedgerows planted which means smaller fields. When fertilizers use jumped years ago many farmers started ripping up their hedgerows, now in Europe there is a trend to replace these massive plain's like fields with smaller tithe like fields which means its incompatible with large farm equipment. Protecting the wildlife is paramount.
The problem with neonicotinoids which is seeds coated with nicotine like chemicals (manmade tend to be longer lasting because they dont break down in the environment) and it messed up insects in particular bee nervous systems. Man Made Pyrethrin's are the same, they dont break down easily unlike whats found naturally in Chrysanthemum flowers. Ironically organic veg is using nicotine and nothing else which is what your grand parents used to use after the war. They used to smoke roll ups and place the used fag but's in a jam jar with water, that dark brown liquid was then sprayed onto the garden as an insecticide/pesticide. You pay a premium for this today in the super markets, but you could just buy a packet of rolling tobacco and put some baccy in a jam jar with water, let it soak and then use that liquid if you dont want to take up smoking!
>Yields for a specific crop goes down in polycropping. Yield across the entire portfolio goes up.
This is because the defensive chemicals in different plants compliment each other so instead of having a monocrop with one chemical defence, there is a range of chemicals which is enough to deter a wider range of pests.
The same mentality is seen in warfare, you dont bet on just the Airforce, you need the Navy and Army as well to really win a war.
Its also why I would invest in small robot manufacturers & AI companies which can tend to individual crops than an instrument which doesnt offer anything personal to a plant.
Its also why Bill Gates is the largest land owner in the US.
It's the only fair way to do it, IMO.
Civil wars and regime changes aren't a lot of fun to live... or die through.
It is "dismal" but unnecessary through good governance. We really do have enough resources to ensure moderate standards of living.
Political upheaval would be appropriately considered a market failure.
Unless there's something in it for them by their own assessment people will not make sacrifices of that magnitude.
Government isn’t directly responsible for food prices, but they frequently involve themselves because social order/stability requires reasonable food prices. When store shelves are empty in a neighborhood/ region, riots break out. Riots work on the time scale of hours/days. Families having fewer kids is on the time scale of years. Farmers planning for likely yields/costs is months/years.
Your idea of “fair” suggests you would just shrug at the famines caused by Stalin and Mao regimes and blame the people because they weren’t willing to pay enough. When people are food desperate, social order, norms, and predictability break down. This is why governments have strong incentives to intervene to ensure reasonable food prices.
Oh, and to paraphrase Hitchhiker's Guide, programmers will probably the first ones up against the wall when the revolution comes.
On a less violent note, every country has seen birth rates decline as it became richer. Modern western societies only grow through immigration, and even many countries in, say, Africa, have seen drastic declines. Humanity doesn’t expand until it unavoidably runs out of food, that’s a 19th century idea.
That's all well and good, but the implication is that people should live where they grow their food, or move where it can be done. Implementing it at scale would mean either billions of dead or billions of refugees.
Food waste is a problem, yes. Animal protein is not a problem. There is plenty of land in the US only suitable for grazing. Much better than that synthetic soup of Impossible Meat.
Food system has largely run on the JIT systems for decades that crunched the chip industry. We haven't had a serious shock I'd argue and I don't think this is one either. People recognize the JIT-ness and fragility of the system though and are (slowly) trying to backstop it. Will take a combination of distributed controlled environments for high value fruits and vegetables, _proper_ land use (high value crop land for crops; high value grazing land for grazing). This, currently, is dictated by the incentive structures in place with subsidies--which can be changed in theory.
This statement is wrong. Livestock grazes early in its lifetime, but is moved to feed lots and feed corn and soy to prepare for slaughter. The US spends a quarter of its corn crop on feeding animals, whereas less than 10% is directly feed to people. Animal protein is a significant opportunity cost to US agriculture.
Something like 30-50M buffalo lived and grazed in North America before they were all killed. The ecosystem can most certainly sustain 30-50M cattle grazing. They wouldn't be as _profitable_ as corn-finished cattle, but they produce meat.
And there are many price and institutional barriers to completely grass fed cattle. The primary being that slaughter is centralized to FSIS inspected facilities where most non-poultry spend their final weeks packed in eating soy and corn.
That's very likely in the current climate change scenario. Look at what's happening in the American South West right now. Lake Mead is currently at unprecedented low levels with no evidence that this will change course any time soon. It's possible within a decade there won't be enough water to run the Hoover dam. That's something no one would have taken as a serious risk 10 years ago.
* Edit * For clarity the compact divides up 17 million acre/ft per year and the real average historic flow is closer to 13 million acre/ft per year. The compact also double dips in it's accounting for some return flows.
Only in the sense that you can theoretically produce meat that way, but in reality most meat is produced on CAFOs that use grain.
Feeding cows grain in a CAFO setting allows them to rapidly put on weight and turnover their herds faster. Not doing so would result in dramatically lower yields per acre of grassland.
I got a shiver down my spine just reading that sentence. Please do not tempt fate. We just had the hottest year on record. I expect we'll break that record in the next few years again. Drought is depressingly likely.
I can't find the article I remember reading but here is one: https://www.reuters.com/business/china-ensure-agricultural-p... and another: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-23/climate-c...
Looks like everything is aligning for a pretty bad 2022 and 2023
Fortunately, they do. Higher atmospheric CO2 levels mean that plants can obtain the CO2 they need more easily, with the stomata in their leaves not having to open as much. Consequently, they loose less water through the stomata, and are more drought resistant.
Of course, this only helps to a certain extent. A bad enough drought will still be very bad. And a very bad drought is bound to happen sooner or later, just from natural variability. So a robust food supply system, incorporating both a degree of local self-sufficiency in inputs, and global trade (for when crops fail in one location) is essential.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/10/01/162127460/do...
I'm not opposed to farm subsidies as part of food independence for national security, but please do not call it "green".
Would love to see the funding behind many of these green groups. I'll bet most of it comes from oil companies, governments, etc. The past 15 years, much of the anti-coal "green" movement was funded by oil companies who wanted to take out their coal competitors and replace it with "clean" natural gas. It was all about taking market share. Nothing to do with the environment.
We used to race go karts with Rotax engines, and the local series organizers decided to mandate 91 octane pump gas ("cost saving measure") as opposed to the VP racing fuel that the engine was designed to use.
The end result was that all the racers ended up having excessive carbon buildup in the cylinder, and would go through several sets of the fuel pump internals every year. The fuel pump is a pulse driven flexible element that the pump gas (containing ethanol) would just destroy.
Never had those issues with the ethanol free VP fuel.
I’ve just been phasing out every gas engine I own for battery powered. I’m done with gasoline as much as possible. A lifetime of begging this horrible Frankenstein machine we call the internal combustion engine to work is enough for me.
In regards to your other question about why its a bad way to produce alcohol, from an EROI perspective, a frequently cited figure is its around 1.5:1 (invest one unit of energy, get 1.5 back). Making it from Brazilian sugar cane on the other hand is 8:1.
Whatever the exact numbers are, the benefits are pretty modest if there are any. Its an agricultural subsidy program.
The government took over, for example, the manufacture and maintenance of tractors, and also selected people nearly at random to maintain them.
The one guy he interviewed said something to the extent that the tractors barely last a year before breaking. The people who designed them were incompetent, the people who used them were incompetent, and the people who maintained them were incompetent. Not that it mattered, the oil they used was basically sludge.
I'm getting to the point where I'm struggling to believe Hanlon's Razor. Especially when the most extreme environmentalists seem to align with Thanos' ideas about resolution to climate issues.
Most of it went rotting. I remember a village school with a large yard full of half-disassembled tractors and combines. Apparently the students were supposed to learn to use all the stuff and then give the field no rest. In reality it would just rot.
I don't think you should label all that people incompetent. They were mostly very practical in solving their immediate problem while having no freedom to rethink it. The system sucked and people were just trapped in it.
It's outrageously comic-book-y, but may as well lean into the illogic.
See: Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler, ISIS, Kim Jong Un, and numerous other examples.
If they were rational they would not be despots and fanatics. Unfortunately charismatic lunatics command followings. Charisma bypasses the rational mind and shoots straight into the limbic system (as do fear, outrage, etc).
Cult leaders are good cases too: L. Ron Hubbard, Jim Jones, Charles Manson, Keith Raniere, etc. These people would be as bad as the worst despots if they actually had power over more than a few people.
Thanos' line is more rational than this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenu
The population was half of 2020 in 1973 (1). Emissions were also half of now back then (2). That’s nearly 30 years of runway that Thano’s solution would provide. With today’s technology and rapid iteration, we could definitely do something better for climate change.
I’m not endorsing the method, but merely disagreeing with your assertion.
(1) https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-populat...
(2) https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-co2-emissi...
> The rest is No. 2 yellow field corn, which is indigestible to humans and used in animal feed, food supplements and ethanol.
https://agcrops.osu.edu/newsletter/corn-newsletter/2016-40/t...
A problem is it is lacking in free niacin, which can result in pellagra, if the diet is principally corn meal. Nixtamalization corrects that[0].
Without nixtamalization, cornmeal doesn't form a dough. You can make corn bread, but not tortillas.
Corn chips, e.g. Fritos, and corn bread don't use nixtamalized corn, but they are quite digestible!
Fertilizer depends on phosphorous which cannot be renewed or substituted once its gone.
Without fertilizer we can't support the multi-billion person population we have today.
We're not running out tomorrow, or even this decade, but we may experience peak phosphorous within our lifetimes.
Can you elaborate? It's not like phosphorous in fertilizer are leaving Earth after being used as fertilizer.
Furthermore, soil needs to be alive, and commercial farming practices kills it every year. So instead of building up soil fertility year after year, external inputs is added year after year in a self-destructive cycle.
There is something called the "phosphorous cycle" but its a lot like oil and does not replenish anywhere near the rate we consume it.
There are already efforts in the Caribbean to turn sargassum into compost, because there's so much of it washing ashore that it's become a nuisance.
Medieval Irish farmers relied on seaweed fertilizer to turn much of the island into rich farmland.
A lot of problems go away if we "solve" energy, but that's also challenged by the same "peak" resource scenarios.
Others who have storage facilities will make money by buying now to sell later and make use of the price difference.
At a certain point, prices get too high for making bioethanol. And that gets eaten by people instead.
Basically - there is no shortage because markets will do their job and mean there is always availability of all goods.
The only time there will be a shortage is when governments do things like cap prices or restrict exports/imports.
Where market theory can still save the day is finding alternatives. If a key resource needed for the production and distribution of goods is missing then market forces will tend to produce an alternative. That works so long as an actual replacement exists and the cost of the replacement is in line with the original. Water is an irreplaceable resource - if you don't have water and you need it for production then you're pretty much screwed. The market won't "solve" that problem for you. If, as in this case, you need fertilizer then there may be an alternative but it may take several years to ramp up the production of that alternative and that alternative may be considerably more expensive than the original. This scenario leads to food shortages, food insecurity, and spiraling food costs. The market can't prevent these realities.
In short, markets are just a tool and like all tools you need to understand their usefulness and limitations.
This switch can take too long and would need to take place in an industry often already razor tin margins thanks to big chains (which can contribute to inflexibility) and then plants take time to grow and depend on the seasons, etc. Also fertilisers go into both the livestock and the corn feed.
>Basically - there is no shortage because markets will do their job and mean there is always availability of all goods.
A shortage doesn't need to mean people are starving. If prices of staple foods go up enough it too causes societal unrest. (See Arab spring where bread prices went up, governments tried to protect their peg to the dollar, etc)
>The only time there will be a shortage is when governments do things like cap prices or restrict exports/imports.
Well here we see that happening when fuels and other components for fertilisers and some things like vegetable oils are affected by war.
Food is just not like other commodities. Shortages lead not just to recessions but revolutions. Any Government and society not paying close attention and investing in either ramping up domestic production or stockpiling is going to have a really bad time.
According to TFA the causes are:
1. Back-to-back storms in the USA causing production shutdowns. OK, that one is genuinely just random natural variance.
2. Natural gas price explosion. This is due largely to sanctions on Russia. Governments don't actually have to sanction Russian natural gas. It's a choice, one that can be undone tomorrow if need be.
3. Sanctions on a major Belarusian potash producer. Same thing. Belarus isn't even Russia. This could be fixed tomorrow with the wave of a bureaucrat's pen.
4. Ongoing side effects of lockdowns. This was a major own goal. People warned at the time you can't just shut down the economy even if actually had worked, which it didn't. This one sits squarely in government footgun area.
5. China has restricted exports of phosphate to build up stockpiles at home. Once again, governments are creating the damage here.
6. "Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which effectively cut off nearly a fifth of the world’s nutrient exports". For the third time, no, governments cut off those nutrient exports. It wasn't some sort of physical law that said invasions => cut off nutrient supply. It was and is a choice.
What seems to be happening here is that comfortable and powerful politicians have decided that showing how much they care about Ukraine is more important than people eating. The poor around the world will starve, so (primarily) European countries can wave a blue and yellow flag over their bodies. It feels very wrong.
Yes, sanctions are wasteful of resources, which could lead to food shortages and people dying, but that's kind of the problem with war: It kills people and wastes resources. Even without sanctions, there would be many Ukrainians (and Russians) killed, and Ukraine would not be keeping up its wheat exports. Ideally, we'd like to prevent this kind of thing from happening very often, which in practice means there needs to be some kind of deterrence against strong countries invading their weaker neighbours. Since western powers can't fight directly against Russia, as it would risk nuclear war, sanctions are one of the few tools available for deterrence. Sanctions aren't about waving a blue and yellow flag or about showing how much you care. They're about preventing similar future conflicts and hopefully giving Ukraine a better negotiating position so the war can end sooner.
Also, it seems like European and North American sanctions shouldn't be a problem for most poor countries unless they're also participating in those sanctions themselves? While sanctions make sense for rich countries, the first priority should definitely be to feed your own people. So if the government of India decides that in order to feed its people, it needs to import potash from Belarus, more power to it.
The issue with sanctions and poorer countries is that commodities are liquid markets. If rich countries raise prices internally by sanctioning some sources then the higher prices draw supplies away from poorer countries. Or put another way, if you reduce supply whilst keeping demand constant then prices rise, and they rise everywhere. That's what China seems to be trying to wall itself off from, which it can probably do, but it can cause a domino effect where everyone feels they have to go protectionist.
So it boils down to whether you think the concrete pain inflicted on the poor today is worth it to avoid hypothetical pain inflicted on them by a future conflict.
Their currency is up against the Euro since the sanctions; and against the dollar, it's the same as where it was before.
Never let a good crisis go to waste!
Indeed. It's about availability and right to food, as articulated by Amartya Sen in his Nobel prize winning work on the Bengal (and other) famines.
https://www.prismaweb.org/nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Pove...
However, quite a lot of cattle grazing land isn't really suitable for arable farming. The American approach of raising cattle on soybeans grown on arable land may not be sustainable, but more traditional hillside grazing may be.
Animal meat is much more bioavailable and nutrient dense. Especially when they are eating grass on land unsuitable for crops.
At a 50x loss in efficiency.
According to this guy [1], the US could feed 800 million people with the grain spent on cows today. Not grass, grain.
[1] https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-m...
You cannot necessarily grow different stuff in the same field. Not all crops do well in the same kind of soil. For example, you need totally different soil for potatoes than you do for cereal crops if you want them to actually grow.
But seriously, composting, no till, stop spraying R0undup aka glyphosate, plant trees in fields, more cover crops, more green mulch, more pollinators, more ponds, more pastureland, more aquaculture, more polyculture in general. The problem is the desert style of farming that led to the dust bowl and will lead to the next one. This comes from a very new (<3 years) farmer who has read a bunch and microfarmed for three years on 5 acres.
The problem is people got sold a bunch of lies about machines and chemicals and those lies are now coming home to roost. Organic and no till and permaculture are probably the way out of this. You can absorb nitro from the atmosphere but that's one way, nature has been doing it another way for eons.
The Green Revolution merely raised the ceiling massively higher. It did not perform any magic to make it permanently vanish.
I don't suppose you'd like to expand on this argument or back it with any sort of substance?
What's your suggested next step? Line up the 'technical mass murderers' against the wall?
ETA: Most people don't understand agriculture or where their food comes from--HN no different. Only small % of people involved in agriculture _directly_
This is the blind leading the blind, and if you gleaned much from the top comments you'd be worse informed than not reading this entire thread. Half of the posts are just political using couched language to pretend they aren't.
Ag is definitely one of HNs blind spots, usually the topics are simply amusing (e.g. urban food production startups burning millions of VC) - but this is the first actually "substantive to humanity topic" I've read through and the results are a little scary.
And heck, I'm probably contributing to this noise since I also haven't stepped foot on a farm or market garden in well over a decade.
HN might bristle at the idea the Farmer Joe has a more sophisticated mental model of an extremely complex and multivariate system (a field of corn or soy) which evades reduction to a dataset.
The solutions I've seen on this board is typically "well let's reduce the variables and grow lettuce in warehouses!" Or trying to build a robot that can pick strawberries. Neither of these solves food scarcity issues.
If people reading this wanted to pursue a meaningful solution via data, my advise is to look at the scaling of the farm-to-consumer market, and how to enable larger distributed networks of small independent farms to sell to customers. The food supply will be more resilient when farming gets smaller, simpler, and more distributed
In a weird type of way, there's little we can do immediately. Almost like a solar flare type of event. Ag and food production systems are so massively scaled, even if we WANTED to change everything for the better, it would likely take years, if not decades. Not like software where any bug can be fixed in a week or so. Human population numbers have exploded on the back of cheap, abundant food. If anything seriously disturbed that, yikes.
I met a young man from Missouri.. he had a large frame but was just 20 years old or so.. He was harried and furtive and was getting into some trouble here and there. Upon knowing him a little bit, he was traumatized by large, loud, dominant men giving him orders, while as an intelligent young man he had questions. Of course many of the men I refer to here are from the Ag community.
North American Ag is not solved, and with the Oklahoma Dustbowl and current crop patterns in California, it must be obvious to science that sometimes, Ag has evolved for CONTROL not INTELLIGENCE. American factory animal farming is a living nightmare in places. American treatment of topsoil, and of fresh water, and industrial placement at the Great Lakes for that matter, are a DISASTER. You defend the Ag "community" like they need defending, from urban smart-people? They are beetle-like survivors of decades of market distortion, ego and alcohol.
Disrupt the Ag sector, yes please.
ps- your elected representative William Gates already started the ball rolling with farm ownership. see any news story after his "revelation" .. first result in GS
" Today, Bill Gates owns 242,000 acres of farmland in 19 states. In addition, he owns 25,750 acres of transitional land and 1,234 acres of recreational land for total land holdings of 268,984 acres. His largest holding is in Louisiana (69,071 acres), followed by Arkansas (47,927 acres) and Arizona (25,750 acres). Aug 27, 2021"
We can so easily grow enough food to feed everyone.
Livestock takes up >80% of land, yet produces <20% of calories.
The <20% of land that is used to grow food - only ~55% goes to feed people. The rest goes to animals and ethanol.
The apocalypse is nowhere near close.
The Earth's crust is ~2.5% potassium. A lower supply of Potash is not going to cause the end of the world.
Additionally what you're talking about sounds more like actions prompted by business 'leaders' and not IT staff making databases.
I think a lot of the pushback against cars have to do with the popularization of human-centric design movements that question the assumption that cars are the pinnacle of transportation that American cities have operated from since about the 1950s. An easy example is the idea of "induced demand" [1] that shows even from a pure engineering perspective that the cost-benefit math for cars has long been unfairly weighted towards cars by outside forces.
We're seeing a lot of pressure around housing and energy and social policy in general which in turn is making us question decisions we've made, culturally, in history, like can we really sustain the building of less dense housing for our growing population? Does it make sense to give every family 0.75 acres of grass, 400 sqft of driveway and a 2 car garage, when those things are only used some of the time? Might there be better ways to approach the utilization of that space as a population?
I'm rambling now, but I get frustrated when people dismiss concerns like that out of hand. Can the US ever totally get rid of cars? No, not for a hundred years at least. Having a good 80 years of city planning being focused around every adult having their own vehicle is of course going to e difficult to move away from, and there are certain lifestyles (rural living, farming, regions where building trains is more impractical) that it'll just never be a great idea... but I still think it's worth interrogating these assumptions we've carried to see if there's a better way we could be living life.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand#Effect_in_trans...
A standard suburban house doesn't sit on 0.75 acres. 0.2 is typical. Though you're probably low on the driveway and garage :).
I'd like to see a better argument for why we shouldn't live this way. There are relatively large metros (e.g. Portland) that are predominantly suburban single family homes, and so far it seems to work fine. Sure, we could compress Portland into a 10 mile by 10 mile square, but why? Would it actually make our lives better? By what metric?
I live in a country with relatively good public transport, relatively great one in the capital and few other large cities, with public bikes and biking lanes.
Then 2020 came, and due to covid, no more public transport (for some time). Want to go to work? Too bad. Want to go to the larger (and cheaper) store... nope. Order food delivery from a large supermarket chain? Good luck, people don't want to go to crowded stores, and delivery slots are full 2 minutes after midnight.
I know it's an extreme situation, but it made people rethink what they need for their independece, and cars came high on the list.
- Where I live (The Netherlands) you don’t have to live in a city to have good PT. There are places that you cannot reach by train or bus but they are few.
- While sometimes a car is necessary, the cars many people prefer (insanely oversized “trucks”) are hardly ever necessary.
You'll never see so many people so certain they were right despite lacking the most basic knowledge on the topic.
A shame, really. Because my skill in big data analysis stops at what Excel can do without macros. I'd love to get more data insight, simply turned out that it is hard to get.
all are Bigly disconnected from the real world
Most consume way more than they actually utilize for nutritional value. In America, food is entertainment more than anything else. Once the price of this "entertainment" becomes prohibitive, people will start looking at it with the proper perspective.
Simply switching from daily takeout to weekly meal prep can shave $500-1000 off someone's monthly food budget. The time/discipline tradeoff is complex, but ultimately a hungry person will figure something out.
When it's very plentiful, meat producers switch into more grains and grow more cattle. When it's scarce, meat producers slaughter their cattle earlier, and do as much as possible to substitute grains for grass.
AFAIK, the second largest stabilizer is on stockpiles. But some countries do almost none of it.
> The time/discipline tradeoff is complex
Here's how I do : once a week buy lots vegetables at the market. Once every two days, put a good deal of veggies + rice/lentils (+ rarely chicken) in a casserole. Add little water, cover, let cook very gently.
Now you have good food for two days. And cheap. And dead easy to make.
At the same time it also depends on what that local population really is used too - different to compare Asia, South East Asia to Africa.
Sure, it’ll all adjust, just not at the timescale necessary.
Ethanol Mandates == Higher Food Prices == Arab Spring Scenarios.
https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B00GTDGMHC
So basically the cost of enough fertilizer to feed an entire family for a year has gone up by, what, $20? $100?
And that's at retail prices; the cost (and cost increase) would obviously be much smaller when purchased in bulk. And that's also for the name brand product, obviously generics are much cheaper.
I'm not a farmer but I did fertilize ~20 fruit trees with weekend with Plant-tone, Peters 20-20-20, Garden Lime, and Fish & Kelp. My cost of doing that for the entire year will be maybe $60, and that's only because I'm trying to maximize fruit quality and tree health rather than minimize costs.
- Drastically reducing food waste. In the United States, food waste is estimated at 30-40% https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs
- Shift away from animal based protein rapidly. Livestock takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land, yet produces less than 20% of the world's supply of calories https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets.... (don't get me wrong, I love meat, but I also love a habitable planet that can sustain the current population...)
If we're having problems maintain soil fertility levels now, imagine if we needed 2-3x the fertilizer to transform unsuitable land into still unsuitable land (but now growing human-edible crops) because somebody thought this was a good idea.
Edit: Surprisingly our world in data has a breakdown of land uses (which includes grazing) but not of crop use. This study[0] says that about 40% of global crop use (by calories) is used to feed livestock and that it takes about 3.7 crop calories for 1 calorie of animal product. So yes, there's plenty of saving potential even if we kept all the grazing livestock untouched.
[0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/4/044...
Is there not an efficiency problem there that we could improve on?
(Not an expert in this area, genuinely curious.)
We could reforest the pastures (start reducing CO2 in the atmosphere) and return the land to the wildlife (put a stop to an anthropomorphic extinction).
While this always inevitably attracts the aggressively emotional "you can pry my nightly organic wagyu porterhouse steaks from my cold dead carnivorous hands, I'm not eating bugs", there's certainly a middle ground for flexitarian things.
A lot of meat consumed in the world isn't really consumed as meat like a steak or a lamb shank, it's "para-meat" like pink slime and low-grade mince, where it's really just a source of protein and umami to throw into ready meals, fast food and other industrial food where no one needs to see what it looked like as long as it says "chicken" on the menu. And it's only cheap enough to do that because it's subsidised.
I'm not a vegetarian, but I still chafe when I see 500g of tofu (often the only one carried in a supermarket[1]) costing the same as 1kg of chicken, which, kilo for kilo, probably ate at least 10x times that much soybean as is in the tofu.
And yes, I understand there's an economy of scale here, but it's more than just that. I think it's also that everyone from Nestle to supermarkets would rather, if people must shift from meat, that people substituted expensive alternatives like only organic tofu and "synthetic" meat alternatives since that's just more profitable.
[1]: Which always seems to be a spongy watery mess compared to the solid blocks you get in the Chinese supermarket (which also cost about half the normal supermarket variety).
* How much of that land is pasture, and cannot be viably used for other purposes?
* How much of the remaining arable land is suitable for growing plants humans will consume directly?
* How much of the corn/soy/etc that can be viably grown on the balance would humans choose to eat?
We're very, very good at growing bulk crops, but not so excited about eating them. Feeding the excess to animals, and eating the animals makes ~1/3 of that productive capacity available (and appetizing) to humans. Modulo environmental impacts of CAFOs and such (which need to be addressed) that's a pretty efficient use of excess productive capacity for bulk crops beyond demand for human consumption.
Easier said than done. After all, if businesses are literally throwing their product out, it's probably for a good reason (ie. trying to recover it is more expensive than buying more)
(2) But I want it.
This is the recipe for the road we are on.
Land limitations are not a problem.
Have you ever been to a feed lot? It is not a pretty little hilly patch of land with cows wandering aimlessly around nibbling on grass. The vast majority of cattle are, at a minimum, finished on a feedlot. A patch of dirt, packed in as much as movement allows, and fed grain via a trough for half (or more) of their weight gain.
Looking at the data it appears that we just need to drop beef and veal - totally doable I guess?
I didn't read the source in full, but I wonder how would such a shift affect fish populations?
Plant based protein is basically putting oil in the ground and getting crops back.
It's intellectually disgusting how you try to put a round peg in a square hole.
Reality is the opposite of what you said.
Pesticide bioaccumulation in cattle https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7525218/
Public Health Implications of Pesticide Residues in Meat https://www.researchgate.net/publication/50434365_Public_Hea...
Of course for those of us in the West "feeding" means buying strawberries in September just because we can.
If that's the case people might be able to make a quick buck locally sourcing and making fertilizer, which previously might've been beaten by economies of scale.
With corn-for-ethanol, the US gov is paying to keep farmland productive that has no human-or-livestock feed value. But you could imagine a situation where more human or livestock feed is needed (massive disruption of cropland, say), and in those or subsequent years we could convert basically-for-ethanol fields to consumption fields.
Or if you are running out of fertilizer instead of running out of food, then you can divert expected and stored fertilizer for ethanol fields onto human-and-livestock feed fields. Once again the excess capacity acts in your favor. (Or ought to)
This is assuming that governing bodies and farmers are making coherent rational decisions and in addition responding to local conditions. I have no opinion on that. Just explaining why subsidizing what looks like superfluous excess capacity is not necessarily a dumb thing to do.
Also, I have no idea where i heard it, but i remember from somewhere, that pretty much all of the pet food has to be edible by humans too, "just in case" shit hits the fan..
A lot of the mismanagement comes from big AG and profit/growth goals.
For example, people in the United States eat about 5 times the amount of meat per person as people did 100 years ago. The population has grown, too. The amount of food grown to produce the calories/nutrients needed to feed the animals which people then eat is far more than for when people eat the produce. It we're talking economies of scale, here.
Big AG has a mass influence on subsidies, regulations, and even recommendations that come out of governments on diet.
If you look at what healthiest for us as individuals and societies with economies of scale taken into account... it's not what Big AG is guiding. Not according to the scientists who study this stuff, anyway.
Big AG is influencing a lot of mismanagement to help with their profits. So far, it's worked well for their bottom lines.
Big Ag invests in machines that each cost hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. Those machines are tuned to spread powdered/pelletized fertilizer that comes from a factory. It would be prohibitively expensive to pivot to machines that can collect and spread manure, and the results would be suboptimal compared to their usual inputs. It is simply not worth the cost, as it would put them at a disadvantage to those who do not switch over. The shortage will pass long before they could pay off the investment.
The coming years will be "fun" (and I mean bad, to be clear).
If you produce only just enough in good years, then people die in bad years. If you produce double demand in good years then bad years are fine.
The fact that we can usually afford to waste lots of food is a really really good thing.
I wouldn't call the impending cognitive dissonance "fun" unless one likes being a spectator of ideologically driven mental gymnastics.
We've done weird stuff to low levels of our economies. That's gonna have marginal consequences across the board. And a little bit across the board adds up to a lot of hardship.
Millions of pounds of perfectly good potatoes had to be destroyed. The US FDA declared the potato virus a threat to human health but no other country made that determination. Politics ruined a lot of food.
We have the most sophisticated data collection and logistics networks in the history of the world, and you think we just accidentally run out of a fundamental economic factor at a key moment in the natural economic cycle, and that risks mass starvation? We can somehow predict macro climate impacts, but not manage how much fertilizer we're going to need for a planting season? It's just politics by people who use politics as a means to gratify an urge for power for its own end. I would be suprised if people were still acting fooled.
Absolutely.
There is no omniscient Illuminati pulling the strings for the entire planet. Just people, corporations, governments, and other corporate entities making decisions based on what they perceive to be their best interest. And all of them are limited and fallible.
Also, wars and pandemics tend to throw a wrench into the quality of planning forecasts.
That's hundreds of fellowships and thousands of adjunct jobs. Even if you funded most of them, it would take several millions of dollars. Journalists are far too curious, and we can rely on them to object to any falsehood and propaganda such a scheme would require to survive. Really, all 6 or 7 media conglomerates working together to push the same messages or to kill stories that would expose said plot seems pretty far fetched. The logistics alone would be baffling.
The only plausible way that could happen would be through a kind of religious hysteria of people who imagine themselves as enlightened through an awakening, and on a path to redemption that requires them to efface themselves, dismantle their formerly sinful lives and prevent others from sinning in a similar way. It's absurd in a modern era. It would have to be wrapped in a political agenda, which educated people are basically immune to, especially ones who are largely agnostic. The amount of effort they would need just to suppress naturally occuring logical questions that would imply a conspiracy which would unravel under the most minor scrutiny would be so immense as to not be in the realm of serious consideration.
There are however, movements and ideologues reading from the same script that do things like creating a rail workers strike during planting season. It doesn't take a conspiracy, just the logic of an idea.
I'll take "ignore" for 50 please.
This only contributes for my anxiety levels. I'll outsource the worries for the big government, TYVM.
https://www.dissercat.com/content/biotekhnologicheskie-osnov... https://patents.google.com/patent/EP2095713A1/en Ah yes downvote because key knowledge nobody knows should keep being ignored otherwise it could.. save life's? Imagine the horror!
While we are at it, should we liberate Northern Ireland? What exactly is the difference, except that in the case of Northern Ireland less than 50% wants to be British and in Donbass more than 50% wants to be Russian.
Also I'd suggest you don't use independent. They went away from claiming that and it's not like the veneer of it in Transnistria and South-Ossetia was much better. The ethnic cleansing projects there went a lot smoother for Putin tho. Do they care so much about Armenia independence too?
And yeah let northern Ireland have it's independence if a vote goes that way imo.