JPMorgan warns a global food crisis could hit next year — and unlike oil, there’s no backup plan for fertilizer
https://moneywise.com/news/economy/jpmorgan-global-food-crisis-fertilizer-shortage-2027Open linkView original on lemmy.worldSyndicated from the fediverse. Read and engage on the original instance.
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https://moneywise.com/news/economy/jpmorgan-global-food-crisis-fertilizer-shortage-2027Open linkView original on lemmy.world
27 replies
THIS WAS A STATED GOAL BY THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION! DON'T BE FOOLED BY IT BEING ANHTHING OTHER THAN INTERNATIONAL POLICY CAUSING IT.
It's not a coincidence that this is meant to occur after the midterms.
If only there was a may to make fertilizer from something else... like poop, aww wait..
For serious now, here in DE they use pig poop (with other stuff I guess), yes it stinks. There are compost stations where until recently people were taking vegetal waste, now you have to pay for it. Anyway, not all fertilizer needs to be petrol based
If by that you mean:
Don't piss off Canada and your precious potash won't be sold to Europe and Asia.
Stock up on dried beans, rice. Seriously. It’ll get you through some tough times. When other stuff is hard to get or too expensive it’s a beans and rice night.
Way ahead of you
Don't worry, we have trump mystery meat to sustain us
This crisis would serve as cover for whatever additional inflation large producers and grocers can put on top.
Also:
Good thing the US is cutting USDA funding at unprecedented rates!
Crazy el nino season generally means better harvests for the US and worse harvests for SEA...
Time to move away from industrial agriculture and towards organic farming methods (see: polyculture, horticulture, agroforestry, permaculture, crop rotation..)
The problem with organic farming is that the number 1 most limiting input in the world today is not fertilizer, it's arable land area. And that is the input (if you can call it an input) that organic farming is the least efficient at converting into food. It doesn't matter that organic farming is x times more efficient energy wise or fertilizer wise if it can't feed the world on the current arable land area we have available. And right now conventional farming is massively outyielding pretty much every farming system in every part of the world. If the first world would totally switch to organic so we can feel good about ourselves the ones suffering would be third world countries who today are totally dependent on cheap western food exports.
Also some of the info in your quote are straight up made up lies. Like how it says industrial farming uses 10 times more energy than it produces. If we just look at US Corn ethanol the current energy balance is around 2-3 times the energy produced than inputed. That would mean 0,33-0,5, not 10. Your quote is literally off by a factor over 20. And that's including the whole corn to ethanol industrial process. Imagine how high it is if you calculated on just the straight corn. Source: https://ethanolrfa.org/file/2214/Ethanol%20Energy%20Balance%20Update%20April%202022.pdf
And depleting the soil. Depleting the soil of what? Nearly every single yield world record location are on soils that have been conventionally farmed for decades. When you start conventionally farming in a previously unworked plot of land you tend to see yield increases year after year, the soil literally benefits and is improved in its capacity to deliver yield by farming it as we farm today. If you lack something in the soil you add it back in with fertilizer, that's the point of fertilizer. "Depleting the soil" and not mentioning what is depleted is like alternative medicine people saying that you need to detox but not specifying which toxins. Even soil humus doesn't have to be a problem in conventional farming. It's mostly a factor of which crop you grow and how hot and wet your climate is. Where I'm at in northern Europe nearly all soils are above 10% humus, even the intensively cultivated ones while in say Indonesia not even the pristine rain forest soils have more than 1% humus. Ironically enough some of the poster examples of ways to increase humus in the soil, like no-plow farming, necessitates the use of glyphosate for weed control with organic farms using these soil working techniques LESS than conventional ones.
Anybody know stocks for plants pulling nitrogen from the atmosphere and combine it with hydrogen to produce fertilizer powered by renewables? Something tells me they're going to be a lot more popular soon.
There are 3 elements that are required for high yield on crops: nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorous.
Nitrogen (in molecules usable by plants) was traditionally the bottleneck, the limiting factor, until the development of the Haber Bosch process, which allows plentiful atmospheric nitrogen to be combined with hydrogen and energy to make ammonia.
Creating green hydrogen (by cracking H2O/water into hydrogen and oxygen molecules using electrolysis) allows for the process to generate ammonia without contributing carbon to the atmosphere. That means it doesn't actually need plants or any biological feedstock for the process. Nitrogen can be fixed into the soil without plants (or fossil fuels), so that part isn't going to be the limiting factor.
I'd be much more concerned about the sources of mined potassium/potash and phosphorus/phosphates.
You can grow nitrogen fixating plants as fertilizer. It's called green manure and it's used in some niche cases. The problem is that you often have to grow as large of an area with the green manure crop as you need for the actual crop so suddenly this strategy requires you to use double the land for the same yield. This is not the answer to the fertilizer crisis.
Back in the olden days you'd collect your poo for that.
ok for non-food plants though
The problem is that it's human waste. It's full of different diseases, medication and other crap, and isn't a constant quality. Also, after the diarrhea salad I guess they'll not get it anywhere near crops for human consumption.
Eh, worked fine enough prior to the Haber Bosch process
With a side effect of parasites
peanuts
alfalfa and soybeans as well
Clover has been popular for a long time as an alternative to lawns because it's low maintenance, drought resistant, fixes nitrogen, and is pollinator friendly, amongst many other reasons. It's highly underrated
This article seems to list a lot of those benefits:
https://thehomesteadinghippy.com/crimson-clover-cover-crop/
Better start your compost now.
If most of us had the means of production of food, we'd be having a very different world.
Korean Natural Farming is cheap and effective. Also lets you add more things to your compost that'd normally cause issues.
Tbh I just be throwing everything in there and if there's bugs its probably good. I've killed a couple composts but this ones been going great since I dumped a bunch of oyster mushroom mycellium in it and keep up on string and turning it.