a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by kleinbl00

End Of Food mostly emphasizes that we didn't end up with this massive towering monstrosity of industrial food production out of malice, but because it's the most efficient way to feed a lot of people. That's the real problem - without intensive agriculture, the planet supports a lot fewer people than it has. So if you want to switch wholesale from intensive agriculture, you'd best look long'n'hard at population control.

That's the thing about permaculture. It's pretty awesome assuming you're one of the privileged folk with twenty times your allotment of land. If not, Soylent Green, baby.





organicAnt  ·  3496 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yes, industrial agriculture is the lazy, unsustainable way of feeding large amounts of people in the short run. But the side effects of fertility depletion and top soil erosion are the obvious alarm bells that industrial mono-cultures cannot be the way of feeding everyone in the future. Decentralizing the production of food and encouraging more local, sustainable land management and agriculture is the way to feed a growing population, as a UN study has found. As for the diet of the future, UN urges global move to meat and dairy-free diet.

kleinbl00  ·  3496 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Not that simple. Lots of industrial farms are switching to no-till which eliminates all your concerns.

organicAnt  ·  3496 days ago  ·  link  ·  

How does no till solve the problem of mono-culture depletion of soil fertility?

kleinbl00  ·  3496 days ago  ·  link  ·  

It doesn't, but then neither does rotation. Rotation diminishes the problem but considering modern agriculture of any appropriately-scaled quantity is heavily dependent on intensive practices and petroleum-based enrichment, supplementation is a given.

organicAnt  ·  3495 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Who mentioned rotation? Did you read the UN report?

Exactly, scale is part of the issue. More farmers and people growing more in their own back/front yard is part of the solution. Until we figure out a way of creating a closed loop of nutrients, supplementation will always be an issue. Some even argue that we've broken the nutrient look by flushing human waste down the toilet. But that's a whole different discussion that brings up its own issues.

kleinbl00  ·  3495 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Me, more than 4 months ago: "it's not that simple."

You, yesterday:

    Decentralizing the production of food and encouraging more local, sustainable land management and agriculture is the way to feed a growing population

Me, yesterday: "it's not that simple."

You, yesterday: "how does your simple solution address this complex problem I bring up?"

Me, yesterday: "it's not that simple."

You, today: "did you read this study I linked in response to your dead comment from four months ago?"

Dude - It's not that simple. And you know what? I'm not your audience. And you know what else? It's impolite to pick a fight with 4 month old comments so you can bludgeon me into reading a UN report. You can now officially fuck off.

organicAnt  ·  3495 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Haha, that has obviously hit a nerve.

My audience?! You seemed to be so self-assured and knowledgeable in the subject of food production that's why I engaged with your conversation. I'm not sure what the age of the thread has to do with anything. It sounds like a cop-out to avoid the discussion.

I'm sorry to hear that you confused a grown up discussion of facts with "picking a fight". As for your last comment, it says all I need to know about you. Take care.

veen  ·  3625 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Could you say that due to population growth rates coming to a halt (as already happens over here) a better system could be devised that is based on constant food supply instead of endless growth? Or is that a completely different scale / problem / cause and effect?

kleinbl00  ·  3625 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I think NAFTA, the World Bank, the WTO and all the rest of the multinational apparatus wouldn't exist if open-eyed capitalists didn't recognize there were more financial opportunities among emerging markets and developing economies than there were among stable democracies.

The Iraq War was very good for a large group of businesses. So are the water wars of South America. I think things will stabilize in a much better place but it's gonna be decades and decades.

user-inactivated  ·  3626 days ago  ·  link  ·  

But hell, raising cattle on a given area is tons less efficient than growing corn on the same plot. And much less humane. So clearly we need to let the social democrats slowly force everyone to become vegetarians.

There is hope.

kleinbl00  ·  3626 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yeah, but no. See, I can eat one cow, or I can eat five acres of grass.

That said, meat is pretty heavy on the old resources.

user-inactivated  ·  3626 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Well, how many acres of grass do the cows eat?

I mean, I know. But I'm pissed and reading the End of Food will make me more pissed probably. We need to figure out how to consume light, I think. Sounds like a job for theadvancedapes.

kleinbl00  ·  3626 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Reading the End of Food will demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt just how much oil you consume, son.

Check this link out. The whole fucking show is awesome (the whole fucking series is awesome) but this was one of the demonstrations that impressed me the most in my young life. Start at 2:32 if the link is fucked:

And that, dear flagamuffin, is why the world doesn't run on sunlight. That energy goes into fertilizer, too.

user-inactivated  ·  3625 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I don't know which part you were talking about specifically, maybe the eye-opening bit with the teaspoons of gunpowder and petrol -- wow -- but I'm sure glad I accidentally watched the whole thing because at the end a well-meaning penciled British family drowns when their car isn't energy-efficient and they trigger instant global warming.

kleinbl00  ·  3625 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Mostly the pure, raw energy in petroleum. But I also dig the shit out of that show.

thundara  ·  3625 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I've been vegetarian for going on two years now, and portion-to-portion and I eat about the same volume as my carnivore friends.

Cows may have their place on the farm (In the traditional sense of the word), but in the convoluted world we live in today, it's definitely more efficient to buy a pound of tofu and beans over a pound of steak at the supermarket.