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Comment by Turing_Machine | Hacker News Reader

Nah, we're fine.

The article stresses that the reason the amount of agricultural land is falling is because we're getting more efficient, allowing marginal land to fall out of use.

There's considerably more forest in the United States than there was a hundred years ago, and the same is true for most First World countries.

The wilderness land that's actually under attack is mostly in Third World countries where they practice "traditional", "organic" agriculture of the sort beloved by urban First World environmentalists.

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I can't bear the ideological stench.

https://panamaupclose.com/2020/05/25/farmers-learn-not-to-sl...

This entire article is about abandoning traditional methods and replacing them with organic agriculture.

You're just creating a straw man to defeat when your original position doesn't even make sense.

Continuous no till, cover cropping, crop rotation, managing mycorrhizal fungi and things like system of rice intensification are hardly traditional and they are also orthogonal whether they are used for organic farming or not but they massively reduce the need for synthetic inputs. This rubs a lot of people proud of conventional agriculture the wrong way because it means their products are really just there to take a shortcut to save money in the short term. The fact that these newer practices are trying to work by understanding the plants and the entire ecosystem you are building rather than treating them as a blackbox which need specific inputs and the recipe is done. Imagine doing something for 30 years and then some new guy comes along and uses a new method that reduces his yields by -10% but saves him expensive inputs and thus results in greater profit while his soil gets better every year and the conventional farmer's soil gets worse. This is particularly annoying to the Bill Gates types who think they are some sort of Messiah because they have a lot of money and push people around.

> I can't bear the ideological stench.

What you call "ideological stench" others call "facts".

None of these "newer practices" are responsible for the increase in forest cover in the United States over the past century.

None of them are responsible for this:

https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/images/US...

Also, facts (such as the one in the image linked immediately above) don't cease being facts just because you mod them down.

Before modern agriculture, just about every area could count on having a famine every few years.

That doesn't happen any more, except in areas where the government is fucked up.

And it wasn't "organic farming" that did it.

The "organic" bullshit is a gigantic scam aimed at extracting money from rich First-Worlders at the expense of raising food prices for the impoverished.

I think it be great if you repost this as a direct submission and not below another comment.

Forest for the trees with these things...

Forest != forest. Many of the new forests that were planted in the last few decades were basically tree factories. These forest don't help with biodiversity and don't help with CO2 capture as much as mixed forests.

Right, and the fact that that wood is destined to be harvested means it's not really long-term carbon storage, either.

Define long-term. If the wood takes 20 years to grow, and is then harvested and made into furniture, and that piece of furniture lasts another 20 years, that's pretty long term to me. But of course harvesting wood to be burned up is a crime.

The fossil fuel we get from the earth and burn, adding its carbon to the atmosphere, was stored there for hundreds of millions of years. That's the long term meant.

Well, the creation of fossil fuels was only possible because certain species of the bacteria did not exist yet back then. It's not like we can create new fossil fuels now. Also, no one cares about "hundreds of million of years" timeline.

We can pump CO2 back into depleted gas fields, it's one of the solutions for storing captured CO2.

What you call a crime I call the lesser evil option for heating my house in the country. The other options are peat and coal, neither of which are renewable on anything like the timescale in which a tree can be grown. I keep it at about 15° in the winter, and if I were to do that with electricity, I could simply not afford to heat, and somebody would be burning coal to make the power, anyway.

If it’s going to be harvested for building materials (rather than as fuel), why wouldn’t it be carbon storage?

Doesn't stop them getting carbon-capture government subsidies over here in Australia either. :(

While tree farms do exist, that's not the case for the marginal farms that have been abandoned in (e.g.) New England.

When the UK beef farming industry looked into going net zero, they found that the lowest hanging fruit was to stop buying animal feed that was grown on cleared rainforest.

Does anyone who likes beef actually want them to be fed that way? Do the people clearing the rainforests actually want that? Or is it just what will bring them profit in the current system. It's all just a series of poorly applied financial incentives that we are able to change.

Meat in a Net Zero World:

https://wrap.org.uk/sites/default/files/2021-09/Meat-in-a-Ne...

I mean it’s true that wilderness is under attack more in poorer countries (they didn’t so thoroughly deforest themselves in the first place after all). But they’re not using traditional, let alone organic, methods.

Yes, they are. Slash and burn agriculture is the traditional method in, say, the Amazon basin. That's how the Native Americans did it.

It's "organic", too. Slash and burn doesn't typically use pesticides or artificial fertilizers.

It’s true that indigenous methods of farming aren’t necessarily environmentally friendly but not true that the people clearing the Amazon for crops today are indigenous people using traditional methods and not farmers with modern equipment and pesticides.

I didn't say it was the same people. I said they were using the "traditional organic methods".

And they are.

But they aren’t? They’re using fertilizers, pesticides, tractors, and the rest of it. If you just meant to score some cheap points by referring to clearing the forest as “traditional organic methods” then not really anything worth engaging with.

A lot of the farmland in and around where my grandfather grew up has been unused for decades now - 100 years ago a family could farm it and made enough money to live off. Now it's either not economical to work it like they did 100 years ago or it's not economical to buy the right equipment etc to do it the modern way.

Right, environmentalists love industrial oil palm plantations and cattle grazing.

> The wilderness land that's actually under attack is mostly in Third World countries where they practice "traditional", "organic" agriculture of the sort beloved by urban First World environmentalists.

That’s a really weird way of framing multinational agriculture’s impacts on indigenous land. Like, none of what you’re saying is specifically wrong at a sub-clause level, the wilderness land under attack is “where they…”, but it’s not under attack by them or what they might practice.

They’re not actually the ones rapidly deforesting or otherwise devastating mostly pristine ecosystems. Cattle farms serving the US and many first world countries certainly are. It’s not a testament to our better farming techniques, it’s a testament to our prowess externalizing the costs of our lifestyle and internalizing the benefits of that. We’ve effectively outsourced imperialism. That’s not yay us, that’s gig genocide.

> They’re not actually the ones rapidly deforesting or otherwise devastating mostly pristine ecosystems.

You're aware that about 90% of the megafauna in the Americas went extinct within a few centuries after the arrival of the early Native Americans?

Yeah, well, it wasn't Archer Daniels Midland or Cargill that did that.

There are so many things in such a short comment to unpack. I don’t think I have the energy to do so right now, but I’ll leave these initial thoughts:

You’ve got a rhetorical style that suggests you’re familiar with sparring on the topic. I’m not interested in that kind of exchange even if I do have energy for it. If that’s how you want to discuss the topic, you may have the last word.

If I’ve mistakenly categorized your reply,

- What happened when natives arrived is as relevant to what their descendants do now, as what happened when europeans arrived characterizes what their descendants do now. I’ll leave that open ended

- Of course businesses which didn’t exist couldn’t have caused things which happened before they existed

- The history of when natives arrived or even whether they migrated is disputed

- All of this historical focus might be interesting from a “how did now come to be?” perspective, but it’s not an analysis of what’s happening now

- Applying a similar historical analysis to euro records doesn’t produce megafauna or any other exculpatory extinction records

Now if we resume conversation, I hope we can agree not to engage such gotcha bullshit.

You're talking "rhetorical style".

I'm talking facts.

Someone is bullshitting here, all right, but it's not me.

I agree that this conversation isn't really serving any purpose, though.

Well, every wildfire season is a reminder that there are limits to our ability to externalize.

Even organic agriculture isn’t like it used to be - organic farmers use machines and technology just like all others.

> "traditional", "organic"

Traditional is a bit weird with agriculture, techniques like crop rotation have been around since 6000 BC. There are so many ancient improvements third world countries may not even use.

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