I also wish we'd send in the big guns to put a lot more pressure in focused places.
I also wish we'd send in the big guns to put a lot more pressure in focused places.
What may be an inconvenience to you, a probably-rich person on the global scale, who can afford to outbid poor people when food gets short, is not necessarily just an inconvenience for others.
This is not to say that all meat consumption is 'inefficient'. Cattle can graze on land that is not suitable for farming, and animals generally eat more of the physical plants than we do (animals on a feedlot are often eating fibrous parts of the plant like stalks and stubble and not just the parts we humans like to eat). But there's no way around it, industrialized meat in its current form is an extraordinarily inefficient use of land and has terrible environmental consequences.
Also relevant to any discussion on fertilizer is that excessive usage basically destroys the soil. We've moved away from time-tested methods of managing crops through things like crop rotation, cover crops, promoting natural vegetation in key areas... to over-tilling, over-fertilizing, mono-cropping, and this is taking its toil on the ground we use to farm. Fertilizer is also responsible for eutrophication (nutrient pollution) which destroys local ecosystems and poisons the water. Not to mention nutrition != calories.
Fertilizer is absolutely a modern technological wonder which has allowed humanity to produce food at tremendous scale, and I would not argue that it does not have its place in farming. But the current singular focus on "more yield per hectare" is a very modern, naive approach to farming that throws out a ton of considerations, and is absolutely unecessary.
† https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets †† https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs
You are missing a critical piece of information here: what is your yearly income and what is your family size?
Come back when you are willing to starve to death as this is what millions in other countries are facing