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Comment by jampekka | Hacker News Reader

Quite obvious solution to these would be to transition to plant based diet which would reduce agricultural land use by 75%.

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

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But what do we need the land for? There's tons of empty land, grazing animals are beneficial for the land. Why would we need 75% more empty land?

To steel man a bit here, grazing isn't necessarily a win for biodiversity and then there is all of the land that used to produce supplemental feed. Its a set of problems worth considering, even as I disagree with the myopia of the link riddled comment above.

> But what do we need the land for

We should reforest most of that land. It was previously mostly forested anyway, and doing so, together with a rapid phase-out of fossil fuels, would enable us to store enough carbon to halt global warming, restore biodiversity, and repair the water cycle to prevent droughts.

https://ourworldindata.org/deforestation#the-world-has-lost-...

> grazing animals are beneficial for the land

Not really.

https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/publications/grazed-and-co...

https://newrepublic.com/article/163735/myth-regenerative-ran...

https://grist.org/climate-energy/cattle-grazing-is-a-climate...

> There's tons of empty land

Your premise is flawed... outside of Antarctica, there's not really much empty land on earth.

What do you mean by empty? Have you ever flown in an airplane? I just mean there's lots of undeveloped land. Perhaps I'm a bit biased by my daily surroundings the state of Georgia is almost 2/3rds forested. Almost all of which was previously clear cut agricultural land, but I've flown all over and it's pretty empty in a lot of areas.

Farming for an ever growing population.

Developed countries have dwindling population (well, at least exclusing immigration). And I think it's safe to assume when other countries catch up similar thing will happen, at the very least to the point of levelling up. Hell even India, the biggest country by number of people, is already at 2.0

We don't need to feed more, we just need to bring the education and standard of living if the world up. And maybe figure out how to make the people in developed countries to have sustainable birth rate...

There is no need to teach anything. World population will max this century https://www.populationpyramid.net/

Why is endless growth desirable? Why not quality over quantity, allowing for higher quality food supply instead of mass production of with unhealthy trade-offs?

Because the world population is growing, whether we want it to or not, and I'd prefer we feed everyone than not. So we're gonna need to keep food output growing.

Feeding 10 billion people by 2050 within planetary limits may be achievable

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/917471

A global shift towards healthy and more plant-based diets, halving food loss and waste, and improving farming practices and technologies are required to feed 10 billion people sustainably by 2050, a new study finds.

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