Spyke

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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.

18

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

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lemmy.world

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.

17

A Compounding Storm, warns that global food costs could climb 5% in the first half of 2027.

This crisis would serve as cover for whatever additional inflation large producers and grocers can put on top.

Also:

The U.S. has been using its oil reserves to weather shortages caused by the Strait of Hormuz closure. China is doing something similar in the face of a food crisis: It’s leaning on its fertilizer and crop stockpiles.

That places China in a better position — a more resilient position when compared to the U.S. The U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brook Rollins says this makes crop yields a matter of national security.

48

Crazy el nino season generally means better harvests for the US and worse harvests for SEA...

2
sh.itjust.works

Time to move away from industrial agriculture and towards organic farming methods (see: polyculture, horticulture, agroforestry, permaculture, crop rotation..)

"The efficiency and productivity of industrial agriculture hides the costs of depletion of soils, exploitation of groundwater, erosion, and extinction of biodiversity. Industrial agriculture uses 10 times more energy than it produces. It uses 10 times more water than biodiverse farming with water-prudent crops and organic practices use. In fact, when assessed from nature’s economy, biodiverse, ecological farms have much higher productivity than large-scale, industrial, monoculture farms. The illusion of efficiency is produced by externalizing the ecological costs." / "..a polyculture system can produce 100 units of food from 5 units of inputs, whereas an industrial system requires 300 units of input to produce the same 100 units. The 295 units of wasted inputs could have provided 5,900 units of food. This is a recipe for starving people, not for feeding them. A common argument used to promote industrial agriculture is that only it and industrial breeding can maintain the increased food productivity needed for a growing population. However, since resources, not labor, are the limiting actor in food production, it is resource productivity, not labor productivity, which is the relevant measure. What is needed is more efficient resource use so that the same resources can feed more people. A 66-fold decrease of food producing capacity in the context of resources use is not an efficient strategy for using limited land, water, and biodiversity to feed the world." (from the book "Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, And Peace" by Vandana Shiva)

"Modern industrial farms are built as vast monocultures, with a single crop stretching from horizon to horizon, doused in chemical pesticides and herbicides designed to exterminate all other forms of life. If you’ve ever seen aerial photographs of the American Midwest, you know what this looks like: under capitalist agriculture, the land is reorganised according to a totalitarian logic with a single goal in mind: to maximise short-term extraction. This approach has turned rich topsoils into dust, releasing huge plumes of CO2 from the earth in the process. It’s caused insect and bird populations to collapse, while chemical run-off has killed whole freshwater ecosystems. Fortunately, there’s another way. Intrepid farmers around the world, from Virginia to Syria, are experimenting with more holistic methods called regenerative agroecology. They’re planting multiple crop species together to build resilient ecosystems, while using compost, organic fertilisers and crop rotation to restore life and fertility to the soils. In areas where these methods have been used, crop yields have improved, earthworms have returned, insect populations have recovered and bird species have rebounded. And perhaps best of all, as dead soils recover they are sequestering enormous quantities of CO2 out of the atmosphere. In fact, scientists believe that if we’re going to have any chance of averting climate breakdown, we’ll need to roll out regenerative methods across most of the world’s farmland and pasture. It’s more effective by far than any man-made carbon-capture technology. This is what reciprocity looks like in action. When you give back as much as you receive, it has a multiplier effect on ecosystem health. It revives life. And it’s not just in agriculture that this is happening. Regenerative approaches are being developed in forestry and fishing as well, and in many cases people are drawing on techniques that have long been used by Indigenous communities and small farmers in the global South. Large agribusinesses have been slow to adopt these methods, however – despite the fact that they have been shown to improve the quality of crops and the long-term fertility of the soils. Why? Because it requires time and labour. It requires an intimate knowledge of the local ecosystem. It requires understanding the traits and behaviours of dozens of species, and how they interact with each other. It requires care. When you treat a farm like an ecosystem instead of a factory, you begin a relationship with the land that is inimical to the short-term extractivist logic of agribusiness." (from the book "Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save The World" by Jason Hickel )

1

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.

4

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.

5

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.

3

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.

3
Talcosisreply
lemmy.zip

Back in the olden days you'd collect your poo for that.

2

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.

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Talcosisreply
lemmy.zip

Eh, worked fine enough prior to the Haber Bosch process

2

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.

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