The idea behind a lot of the regenerative methods is to work with nature to reduce the need for inputs. I am a pragmatist and will tell you that, it's really hard! On this I agree. But a lot of the ideas from more fringe communities like permaculturists are becoming more and more integrated into the mainstream. I just think we need to accelerate that, and put a lot more research into alternative methods like agroforestry – because I think we all rely on a food system that's way more brittle and tenuous than people realize. One with a lot of negative externalities that we can't paper over forever.
This seems highly debatable. Sure cheap calories and cheap corn based sugars make it easy to develop so called lifestyle diseases, but on the other hand we've essentially eliminated famine and in most parts of the world malnutrition.
In terms of ecosystem loss, it seems to me that concentrating most calorie production onto the smallest amount of land makes sense.
> And the labor issue is also complex
You're right of course, but I don't see how the manually intense process of regenerative and/or organic ag makes this better. Every small farm like this that I'm aware of makes heavy use of children, unpaid interns, and extremely low wage workers. It's not exactly comparable to migrant workers picking strawberries en-masse, but that's more of an issue of sacle and where these boutique farms find their labor IMO. I say this as someone whose parents and grandparents were all farmers, and my sister-in-law worked for a few years on a regenerative/organic farm.
> But a lot of the ideas from more fringe communities like permaculturists are becoming more and more integrated into the mainstream
This is the part that's actually really interesting to me. Finding ways to scale up and integrate ideas about soil health, water use, etc into mechanized, large scale agriculture is really great. People seem to be doing cool things with no-till and drip irrigation right now.
> alternative methods like agroforestry
My concern with this is that it definitely require LOADS of labor, and isn't likely to produce that much food. It also may put pressure on forest land may not be sustainable long term. On a small scale on you your own farm, it's probably great. But I have trouble imagining how it could ever make up a significant portion of overall fruit and nut consumption.
I think this is letting the good be the enemy of the perfect (a rare construction, to be sure). Yes, we've solved a very bad 1st order problem. That frees us up to work on 2nd order problems that we've never had to deal with before. This is a thalidomide-style problem in that the side-effects of the "cure" are a disease in their own right.
I'd rather have diabetes than be dead, certainly, but wouldn't it better to not risk diabetes just to stay alive?
I'm substantially in agreement with you though. The less land we use on food production, the better. The less labor we can expend growing and harvesting that food, the better.
All of that said, the parameter space of agriculture has a complicated shape, so optimizing for any one parameter will be at the expense of other parameters.
I actually agree with you.
> I'd rather have diabetes than be dead, certainly, but wouldn't it better to not risk diabetes just to stay alive?
Again I agree, but I also think there's a huge cultural component to food/eating that is often missed in these discussions.
This is a mischaracterisation. If you have any choice in what you eat, you risk diabetes just to stay alive.
There is so much food that far fewer people are dying of malnutrition than in the past. As part of there being lots of food available, it's also possible to eat yourself into heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Great availability requires some responsibility.
Since I reached the "can afford to shop at whole foods if I wanted to" stage of my life, the combination of lifestyle, genetics, and diet means I'm pretty far from diabetes at the moment.
But when I was a lot worse off, I bought the food I could afford, which tended to be the low-cost, high-calorie stuff that leads to health problems. Maybe (and I'm just spitballing here) we should find a way to lower the cost of higher-quality food. The decision for huge swaths of the world should not be "afford enough food to not starve, but the food is of such low quality that it leads to long-term health problems" vs "starve while eating food that, if eaten in sufficient quantity, would not lead to long-term health problems". Optimizing for dollars per calorie means you end up picking high carb options.
Telling people in Somalia or wherever "have you just tried keto?" is a pretty problematic stance.
Incorrect. Agroforestry is the practice of integrating livestock and orchards. The orchard is designed to serve as the basis for an extended ecosystem. Trees provide shade for fowl, sheep and small cows and help limit swale evaporation. Fallen fruits attract a wide variety of animals and birds, providing prey for cats, hawks and owls. Systems like this sustainably produce a high quantity and quality of food per acre while encouraging diversity and natural beauty, at the cost of being less accessible to automated farm machinery. The best case scenario for sustainability and diversity would be if everyone lived in small communities with shared food forests, eating mostly locally grown food.
A world with shared food forests and locally grown food is probably a world with far fewer people.
I think high population and natural farming are mutually exclusive.
And the state of industrial AG isn't static, robotic micro pesticides are interesting for example. Not that I'm a fan of them, but it would be great to see us move away from showering everything in loads of agent orange and have more targeted application.
It's ironic to note that high population and sustainable farming are mutually exclusive. When we can no longer sustain our current system of agriculture due to resource exhaustion, environmental destruction and climate change, a lot of people are going to die. Even worse, if we wait until the 11th hour to adopt sustainable agriculture there will be a lot of avoidable suffering and death that will occur during the transition.
There is an alternative - gradually adopt sustainable farming now and let food prices rise. That will signal to people to have fewer children, and also encourage people to grow some of their own food or otherwise get involved in agriculture. That way, our population will move towards a level that can be sustainable fed as our agriculture system moves towards sustainability, and we won't have an "oh shit" moment where human civilization collapses because the rich are hoarding food in the face of mass starvation.
I can't express enough how morally reprehensible I find your position of "let food prices rise. That will signal to people to have fewer children".
We are in a car rocketing towards a brick wall at 100 miles an hour. We can slow down gradually (controlled population decline) or we can slam into the wall (unsustainable agriculture practices turn the earth into a toilet, sudden mass starvation, civil unrest leading to the collapse of civilization).
You seem to be under the enchanted fairy tail notion that there's an exponential curve of infinite resources just awaiting the power of human cleverness to save us from this grim fate, but I'm sorry to inform you that's delusional. You can see clearly that most areas of human technology are already in the logarithmic portion of the (sigmoidal, not exponential) progress curve, and those areas that are still in the exponential phase like AI aren't going to magically transform agriculture.
If you're concerned about overpopulation being a drain on food resources, then you should be agitating for overall better living conditions, better access to healthcare, better access to education in the global south. We have seen repeatedly that a healthier, happier, better educated society has a lower birth rate.
> You seem to be under the enchanted fairy tail notion that there's an exponential curve of infinite resources
Resources are definitionally raw materials coupled with human ingenuity.
> You can see clearly that most areas of human technology are already in the logarithmic portion of the (sigmoidal, not exponential) progress curve
I don't see this at all. This is just your opinion.
You're essentially talking about starving people on purpose, "controlled population decline" is eugenics and you should take that nonsense somewhere else. Seriously your ideas are disgusting.
Agriculture production as a major driver of the Earth system exceeding planetary boundaries
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320356605_Agricultu...
Our global food system is the primary driver of biodiversity loss
https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/our-glob...
Biodiversity conservation: The key is reducing meat consumption
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26231772/
Humans are driving one million species to extinction - United Nations-backed report finds that agriculture is one of the biggest threats to Earth’s ecosystems
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...
Your premise is flawed... outside of Antarctica, there's not really much empty land on earth.
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...
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.
This is orthogonal to the way you produce food.
I'm responding primarily to the overall land use picture here. Agriculture even as efficiently as we're doing it now takes a lot of space, even removing most meat from the equation.
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.
> If your proposal is to revert back to high land and labor input methods, then maybe it would make a difference insofar as a few billion people would probably starve.
Not necessarily. The crop lands we already have would be sufficient to feed the whole population.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
Sustainable and regenerative agriculture is entirely possible. You may want to explore practices such as natural, syntropic, permaculture, and agroforestry farming, to name just a few. While it may require more knowledge and labor, advancements in technology and automation could potentially mean only a slight increase in the workforce, from around 2% to maybe upto 4%.
The benefits would be enormous. And with 40-70% of jobs being bullshit jobs I'm not even afraid we would fill those positions. It's just a matter of regulation and preferences.
> For my part, I'd prefer we try innovating our way through it.
Plant-based diets are an innovation. Restorative agriculture would require new machinery, agroforestry, smaller fields instead of vast monocultures, the incorporation of companion/nitrogen-fixing plants and compost instead of artificial fertilizers, among other changes. Many things would need to change.
> I'm responding primarily to the overall land use picture here. Agriculture even as efficiently as we're doing it now takes a lot of space, even removing most meat from the equation.
This is a very illustrative picture.
https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/10/World-Map-by-Land...
Animal ag. brings just 18% of calories and 36% of proteins, while destroying and polluting so much. We should dedicate the land to forests (carbon sequestration) and to the restoration of biodiversity.
> The benefits would be enormous. And with 40-70% of jobs being bullshit jobs I'm not even afraid we would fill those positions. It's just a matter of regulation and preferences.
This is total nonsense. When most people worked on farms, food comprised more than 30% of peoples' budgets. The idea that we could have a modern society with 40-70% of people shifting to agricultural labor is on its face ridiculous. You're making a utopian argument here and hand waving away the real problems involved in sending so many people back to agriculture.
> Plant-based diets are an innovation
Nowhere am I arguing against plant-based diets. You're arguing against a straw man. I'm also not anywhere here or at any point saying that the status quo of human calorie composition is ideal. I said that as it stands, our best effort to date to feed 8+ billion people has AT PRESENT negative externalities. I agree that problems are worth addressing, and you seem to be dead set on having an argument with me about something I'm not saying.
I never said we'd need 40-70% of people in the agriculture. I've talked about the possibility of the increase upto aproximately 4% , with a pool of 40-70% people to choose from. Is it clearer now?
> you seem to be dead set on having an argument with me about something I'm not saying
Ditto :)
> If your proposal is to revert back to high land and labor input methods, then maybe it would make a difference insofar as a few billion people would probably starve. For my part, I'd prefer we try innovating our way through it.
This has triggered my response. I can't agree with that at all.
There's no need to revert to high land and labor input methods. I'll simplify a lot. We could grow more veggies and fruit, plant more nut orchards to replace milk, grow more legumes to replace meat, on smaller fields separated with rows of productive trees (agroforesty) and reforest more lands to let biodiversity rebound and work with it, not against it ... nothing that is particulary hard and nothing of that means that billions would have to die. It would need new (smaller) electric machines and more workers, but maybe 1-2 times more, not 20 times more.
> I never said we'd need 40-70% of people in the agriculture.
> with a pool of 40-70% people to choose from
> There's no need to revert to high land and labor input methods.
> We could
> It would need new (smaller) electric machines and more workers, but maybe 1-2 times more,
This is all very squishy and utopian. I just don't see a practical proposal here. You're talking about completely reworking agriculture with no viable path to providing sufficient calories at a cost that developing nations can bare. We can see the recent debacle in Sri Lanka as a cautionary tale of what can happen if you try to force such a change. On a more personal note I've seen a lot of people try to spin up hobby farms using "restorative" practices and they're producing relatively little food, using unpaid interns, still having to charge 4x grocery store price for worse food, and havign to rely on government handouts to even do that.
> I just don't see a practical proposal here
My previous comment @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37589124 :
Sustainable and regenerative agriculture is entirely possible. You may want to explore practices such as natural, syntropic, permaculture, and agroforestry farming, to name just a few. While it may require more knowledge and labor, advancements in technology and automation could potentially mean only a slight increase in the workforce, from around 2% to maybe upto 4%.
> We can see the recent debacle in Sri Lanka as a cautionary tale of what can happen if you try to force such a change
Without a transition period, education, or support, it was poised to end up badly.
> hobby farms using "restorative" practices and they're producing relatively little food
Again, take a look into syntropic agriculture (Ernst Gotsch) and natural (or 'do-nothing') farming (Masanobu Fukuoka). Their yields are comparable to or better than those of their traditional counterparts, all while repairing the soil and without using any external inputs (thus saving significant costs).
I mean - I think I understand the motivation behind that but
I am pretty convinced that the value of "low-carb" / "no-carb" diets has less to do with the impact of carbs (after all, wheat literally was the symbol of European civilization for a really long time) and more to do with how they're used as cheap caloric filler (looking at you, Panda Express). Pretty much a "get what you pay for" kind of situation, in my eyes - so maybe spending that much on food isn't as bad as was thought.
also, on the gripping hand, looks at cost of housing - so maybe if it's not one thing it's another.
We have a brain that seeks diversity and foods high in calories or salt. The average diet is equally high in fat, carbs, and salt. This is why ultra-processed foods aren't good for losing weight, as they are optimized for taste.
Pick any food you like, eat only that food for a couple of months, and you'll lose weight like crazy.
High carb and low carb diets work simply because they reduce choice. Except that food producers have caught on to it, and are now producing plenty of junk food that's within any macros parameters you want. The brain also eventually adjusts to the scarcity of some food group or another, it reajusts, and appetite comes back.
Also, compliance for such diets is absolutely terrible, most people putting all the weight back eventually.
There's no escaping the fact that what's making us fat is simply food availability, and that to lose weight we have to eat less somehow, either by strong will, or by medical assistance.
---
As for people wishing for food to be more expensive, such that they or others can lose weight ... OMG. I guess starving the poor is one way to solve obesity or overpopulation. The silliness of degrowth policies applied to our food supply.
Not only that, but as recently as like 100 years ago, 30% of people in the US were farmers (ish).
Generally unfree laborers at that (i.e., slaves or serfs).
For example, if instead of fighting insects directly, everything is soaked in glyphosate, it might be too much of a compromise.
In fact there are lots of these compromises that end up killing fiber, or favoring starches or processing away nutrients that makes eating a faustian bargain.
I would think labor-saving solutions should try to get whole foods to the table quickly and cheaply, rather than say maximizing shelf life or storage convenience.
And now they spend 30% of their income on medical costs.
That means continental-scale famine. I'm not kidding - loads of countries only have the populations they have today because they can import cheap food from Europe and the Americas. Without that trade, billions starve.
America needs more stimulation that's less direct cash and more services based. A guarantee for a one-time provision of free housing for non-asset holders. Proper zoning and less NIMBYism to make it more affordable (even massed mixed-purpose zones). Medicare and Medicaid for all, and making it easy for people to avail of these. More educational funding to state and community colleges, after diverting funding from private universities. Food stamps with rationing for the neediest. A solid infrastructure programme like the WPA, to stimulate rural and blue-collar growth.
Imo, you can only be truly free if the major needs in the hierarchy - food, shelter, education, health and leisure - are taken care of. Then you can help people get rid of bullshit jobs and working for a pittance.
Of course, they won't be implemented. Repubs would be crying out loud at "handouts" and "freeloaders", without saying that you can only stop further freeloading by pulling out the poor from their chasm.
So, the median family on a moderate food plan (never eating from restaurants) ALREADY spends 25% on food.
People who make less money, dine out, have more children, eat more food, buy fancier food, or have food waste spend proportionally even more. A lot of people who read and comment here don't realize that there's no "return to" that world -- lots of the U.S. already lives there.
[0]: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/09/median-househ...
[1]: https://fns-prod.azureedge.us/sites/default/files/media/file... via https://www.fns.usda.gov/cnpp/usda-food-plans-cost-food-mont...
To quote them:
>U.S. consumers spent an average of 11.3 percent of their disposable personal income on food in 2022
[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...
Not even sure how food falls under disposable income. Sounds like a cute way of saying "after-tax income" as if "things to buy otherwise you die" is a luxury"?
From the chart after the one you quoted:
"In 2021, households in the lowest income quintile spent an average of $4,875 on food (representing 30.6 percent of income), while households in the highest income quintile spent an average of $13,973 on food (representing 7.6 percent of income)."
Pretty cool/sad to see the top 20% spending almost 3x/household on food.
The top 20% might have a disproportionate amount of family of 4+ with kids in their teenage years and parents in their highest earning years.
The bottom 20% might disproportionately be senior citizens collecting Social Security with no kids.
Also, top 20% are living in more expensive regions than bottom 20%. Lots of conflating factors to tease out that would result in 3x not being the correct multiple.
I’m not sure how they calculate that (and the page they link to with information is down), but that really doesn’t make sense. For my five person household - five adults - we spend about $800-1000/month on groceries. According to that document, we’d be spending about $1400 on their low-cost plan or $1750 on their moderate-cost plan. But we’re not low-cost: that’s our costs shopping at a fairly upscale grocery store (not Whole Foods, but above average on price) and buying pretty fancy food. Maybe the costs assume no bulk purchases split between multiple members of the household?
yes, we as well mostly cook at home, but if you add some occasional restaurant meals, plus fast food on the road, plus things like $ for NG to cook, and $ for electricity for fridge and freezer, $1200-1300/month looks about right
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/07/19/what-the-...
Most are white native, not some ethnic issue. Spread over much of the age spectrum. Most are just stuck in constant unemployment (61.6% "Not employed in any month")
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/07/19/what-the-...
I feel like it should be possible to have it both ways.
Right now we have a dichotomy with on one hand industrial methods that overuse chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and the other hand organic methods that are excessively labor-intensive.
Why is it not possible to use the organic methods, but automate the labor-intensive parts? I understand that we don't currently have the technology to do this, but is there some reason it isn't possible? Wouldn't it be a productive thing to fund?
Sure, that's entirely possible. Build lots of nuclear power plants and run everything off electricity.
I do not expect the "organic" people to accept this, of course.
This is considered a social good as it compels farmers to carry insurance instead of rolling the dice, the latter of which they would be more apt to do if they had to pay the full premium cost. Even with the subsidies, some farmers still opt to roll the dice. But perfect need not be the enemy of good. The split gets enough farmers interested in carrying insurance.
Farmers having insurance is considered a social good as it maintains some stability in food production. If experienced farmers are going bankrupt every time Mother Nature decides to throw a bit of a curve ball, you are at the mercy of the newbies who swoop in to replace them. Indeed, you always need some inflow of newbies to ensure that there are future farmers, and some farmers making mistakes can be absorbed, but when they are all newbies at the same time because everyone else went bankrupt, that is a big risk to the food supply. There is a lot of generational knowledge and experience required to make good management decisions in farming, so it is valuable to have some experienced people remaining in the business.
Why do you say that? My small farm – just a traditional grain farm, nothing fancy – is quite profitable.
The big farm is a different business model. They are focused on wealth building, leveraging large amounts of debt to keep growing as much as possible, using most of the farm income to cover the debt requirements. In this model you need to be large to survive as the remaining profit margin after paying off the debt is tiny.
I have kept the debt to a minimum. That means growth happens at a snail's pace, but it also means that all the money that would have went to the bank ends up in my pocket instead.
I'll no doubt have a lot less wealth at retirement, taking the profitability now instead of later, but maybe that's okay? How much do you really need? I don't feel like I'm short of my retirement goals. I just might not be crazy rich in the end. Tradeoffs, as always.
Considering the labour and resources needed to grow food, compared to the labour and resources needed to build houses, food should be much more of our expenses while housing should be much less.
a lot of our most popular food still requires a ton of human labor.
low prices are thanks in part to public subsidies.
> In the not distant past most Americans spent 30+% of their income on foo
where did this information come from?