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It’s not just fertilizer:
it takes about 7.3 units of (primarily) fossil energy to produce one unit of food energy
Assessing the sustainability of the US food system: a life cycle perspective
With all the fertilizer, heavy equipment and agricultural practices the food production today is very inefficient from an energy perspective.
Without cheap, abundant energy available the whole food production system is not sustainable
plug myself into the power socket for more efficient energy usage.
got it.
brb
I’m surprised to see this truth known on the Internet, I guess Lemmy actually is smarter than most other social media out there :o
It would be a hell of a lot more sustainable if we ended animal agriculture.
Exactly. The Swedish government or something did some study recently to determine if we’d be able to be self-sufficient under a longer time if we needed to be, as we currently have a lot of food imports. The conclusion was “yes, but there won’t be as much food diversity”.
However, they completely ignored the fact that we only have a ~90 days strategic reserve of oil, and that basically all the machining used for farming runs on diesel. And there’s currently no goals to change that.
If we can’t import or refine diesel anymore, we will starve.
What is a pulse?
Beans
Lentils too
When agricultural processes are invented that allow the population to grow by billions, what’s the first thing people do? Rush to fill the extra capacity. Sure would be nice if we had the prudence to maintain a buffer.
Sure would be nice if we had the prudence to maintain a buffer.
we do. half the food is thrown away. that’s literally what a buffer is.
By design by those who refuse to escape their mysanthropic anthrocidal circular reasoning.
I read the title in the same voice as youtube’s “That’s how the law works.”
Good thing I have a couple of acquaintances that have small farms and produce, so if shit goes downhill, I know where to offer my labor
They’ll have plenty of friends and family that suddenly feel an urge to come over and lend them a hand once the real shit goes down
Natural gas is used to produce hydrogen, which is then used in the Haber-Bosch process to produce ammonia from nitrogen in the atmosphere. Only about 6% of natural gas is used to produce hydrogen, so even if the price were to rise substantially, we could divert natural gas from other uses and have plenty for making ammonia. We also have other ways of producing hydrogen, it’s just that natural gas is more established.
PEM electrolyzers paired with cheap solar in countries with high insolation can now produce hydrogen for less than the cost of natural gas, but we’re only recently starting to see the construction of the large-scale green ammonia plants needed to accomplish this. Egypt is currently constructing a 100-MW green ammonia plant powered by solar energy. Even if you didn’t have enough PEM eletrolyzers you could still just pass current through some salt water and produce hydrogen, albeit much less efficiently.
It’s not going to be a catastrophic issue.
Adding to that, logistics are such that direct impact will be felt strongest in places like India that rely heavily on Qatari LNG to make fertilizer, but many places have other sources of both gas and fertilizer. Americas, EU, Russia and China will get by because they have their own supply and will be only affected by price increase
Fun fact: Fritz Haber, the German guy that invented the Haber-Bosch process is the same Fritz Haber that developed a way to use the chlorine gas in chemical warfare. He was personally overseeing its effect in the battle of Ypres.
And the Bosch in this instance is not Robert Bosch, founder of the company Bosch, but his nephew Carl Bosch, founder of IG Farben. Famous for, among other things, zyklon b.
Dude knew his chemicals
Habe
rn wir einen an der Waffel? JaClara Immerwahr, who was married to Fritz Haber and was a successful chemist in her own right, spoke out against his research as a “perversion of the ideals of science” and “a sign of barbarity, corrupting the very discipline which ought to bring new insights into life.” She ended her own life the day before he traveled to the eastern front to oversee the use of chlorine gas against Russian troops.
we could divert natural gas from other uses and have plenty for making ammonia. We also have other ways of producing hydrogen
We can’t do any of those in a scale large enough to replace the destruction and have it online for the next planting season on the North Hemisphere. Or the next one on the South Hemisphere either, btw. Or the following ones for each.
Thank you for explaining the process, because the pro-fuel-cell pact doesn’t understand that hydrogen isn’t free and production is still heavily reliant on fossil fuels.
“Oh it comes from ammonia”. Alright, where does the ammonia come from???
You’re just moving the problem around, not fixing anything.
You’ll make hydrogen from renewable energy. That is the point.
But why not just make electricity from renewable energy?
Like, I get the benefit of fuel cells, but people need to realize that hydrogen closer to a battery than a fuel source itself. You’re expending energy now to make storage of energy that can be tapped later.
It’s good for places where vehicles can’t tap into the grid and need dense energy storage (i.e. transoceanic freighters), or where long charging times are infeasible (like long-range trucking).
And probably good for grid-level storage, too.
But for a typical family car/commuter? There’s really no point. You’re adding more steps in energy conversion, and losing efficiency at every additional step (thanks to basic physics), and to gain what? A faster refueling time on a long road trip? An experience closer to what we were used to with ICE-cars? An experience that really isn’t that great anywhere that has a winter. Or an excessively hot summer.
Maybe for people who can’t have a charger at home, even an L1, but there are better solutions for that (like…adding an outlet? Making landlords responsible for providing power whenever there is parking? More municipal charging locations?)
You can’t fertilize crops with electricity, not can you eat it
Making food from pure electricity would be a cool sci-fi thing
Some startups are trying to synthesize edible fats from non-biological feedstocks, using just energy, water, carbon monoxide, and hydrogen, through the Fischer Tropsch process.
Personally I’m more interested in seeing whether that can expand into just manufacturing hydrocarbons with excess solar energy, rather than synthetic food, but it’s still cool to see that people can do it.
You can’t store electricity by itself. The problem we are facing is massive curtailment, i.e. massive overproduction of green energy that can’t be utilized. There needs to be way of storing it at a massive scale. There is no feasible way of storing that much energy in conventional batteries.
If you can acknowledge that hydrogen is needed for dense energy storage and grid-level storage, then you should realize that we will eventually have a huge hydrogen infrastructure, and production capacity to match. That will create very cheap green hydrogen, and will mirror what happened with solar and wind.
Cheap hydrogen alone will drive large-scale adoption of hydrogen cars, regardless of the popularity of BEVs. A lot of people will choose hydrogen cars (possible e-fuel cars too, since e-fuels can be made from hydrogen) simply because it is akin to an ICE-car in usage.
The other point is that battery production is not green and is very resource intensive. Hydrogen cars let’s you avoid that almost entirely. In the long-run, it will be pointless to care about efficiency when green energy becomes nearly free. That suggests hydrogen, not batteries, is the better idea.
Also, while it’s still new, plasma nitrogen has the potential to rapidly scale if the economics stop making sense for Haber-Bosch nitrogen.
Farmers almost uniformly over-apply N fertilizer. Having it be more expensive and forcing them to look into more efficient ways of applying fertilizer and managing nutrients is not a bad thing.
Unless it just causes the crop to cost more without any change in behavior.
Farmers are price-takers not price-makers. The prices they receive are driven by speculation on the commodities markets (even for crops not traded on the market).
Since they can’t control the price they receive for their crop, they are very sensitive to any change in the cost of inputs. Determining how much to spent on inputs is the part of their profitablity they can control. So widespread behavioral change is usually pretty close to immediate.
I’m glad I started growing wolffia globosa. Gonna help supplement a lot of meals. Kinda sucks that I got sick and neglected it and got set back a few weeks, but I have enough to sees other colonies
It’s a little late to start a food garden. You won’t be getting any harvests for a while, and it won’t be much. Best to stock up on shelf-stable goods now, and build community for mutual aid.
All I have is tomatoes…guess that will have to do.
It’s spring in most of the northern hemisphere and therefore the next months are the best time to start a garden. Yes, chances are that you won’t feed your family from it. But it’s fun, it is a great way to get fresh food and if you have the option to do it, you should
Oh, yeah. Gardening is lovely, just don’t expect to be able to feed yourself (or anyone else) in the immediate future by planting some tomatoes by your kitchen window, starting now. It would be a while before you could harvest, and it would be a very small yield, assuming you get a good healthy crop. A lot of people act like the average Joe or Jane could feed their household and neighbors with minimal effort and a few square feet of free space by their window, when that’s just not realistic - at least, not for most people.
It totally depends on your living and garden conditions. If you have the space and the current climate for it you can totally use your garden to save money on groceries. This will not feed your whole household but can help to save some money and make everything more resilient. Plant an apple tree and you will maybe not have apples this year, but in the next year you can get your first apples. My tree is now 4 years old and is growing several kilos of apples every year and will for the next decades. Plant a cherry tree. Raspberries. Redcurrant. Other fruit trees. Those plants will grow every year and provide you with a lot of healthy food and will not take that much time to grow and cultivate. So it is a great time to start - you might get some results later this year, but next year will be great.
This will only affect poor countries. Rich, industrialized countries have more than enough capacity to make or buy their own fertilizer. Yes prices will go up again, but it’s an economics issue, not anything close to an existential threat. There is simply more than enough calorie production for everyone even with strong perturbations in global shipping. Fertilizer is only a marginal use for methane in terms of volume.
If you live in a poor country however, things are a lot more dire. The price of fertilizer is indexed on the price of gas, of which there is still enough for everyone; but your country will be competing with AI datacenters for the fucking stuff which means millions will have to die so Musk can continue to jerk it to AI child porn.
It’s not a gas pricing issue, it’s a wealth hoarding issue compounded by the aimless crusade of a demented manlet commanded by religious fanatics.
This will only affect poor countries.
This is a remarkably ignorant statement. Gas in Canada has skyrocketed over 40 cents in the last week. Diesel nearly twice as much. This will absolutely affect grocery prices. I’m a local truck driver for Dairy Farmers of Canada and the fuel prices will limit transportation of goods and we will see not just fuel prices rise but grocery prices across the entire store because of how expensive it is to transport anything now.
I live in Canada and we have a surplus of fertilizer and we supply dozens of nations with it. Guess how much it’s gonna cost to transport it even nationally?
If you don’t think this will have a catastrophic rippling effect across dozens of industries and factors, you’re completely hopeless. Lumber will cost more for construction projects. Food will cost more. It will cost you more to mail a package to a friend. Everything will go up because of this. This is a seismic global economic shift and it’s all because the USA elected the dumbest fucking person to lead the USA.
Oh boohoo. Chocolate will be more expensive for westerners. Cry me a river.
What the discussion was centered on is famine. Actual famine. Which will only affect poor countries and will kill millions. Whether or not individual Canadians stockpile grains in their basement (OP’s actual suggestion) has literally no bearing on anyone’s food security.
I’m sorry but I just can’t equate the economic struggle of a few more percent of inflation for mostly middle-class westerners with that of Global South subsistence farmers who are actually going to have to find out how far they can stretch out a grain silo or a fertilizer bag.
A lot of dreamers here who never actually tried to grow something. A lot of YouTube video knowledge but no practical experience.
Its damn difficult to grow your own food. I think buying canned goods and storing them is the best option for almost everyone instead of trying to grow your own.
Buying dry food is probably better than canned. It’s lighter, stores for longer, and is much more compact.
Are we talking like, bags of rice and beans?
Rice, lentils, peas, beans, wheat berries, barley, oats, etc. But if you buy in large bulk (which you should do for the cost savings), you should repack the goods into smaller individually sealed containers. Because a 25kg bag of rice, once opened, will take a small family all year to get through, and having an open bag of rice attracts rodents, weevils, moisture, mould and dust. Pack it down into half kilo or 1kg containers, ideally vacuum sealed or with some other preventative treatment. Then only open 1 container at a time.
This is good advice not just for building resilience against food cost shocks, but just generally good practice for saving money by buying in bulk and repacking yourself. Around here,a 25kg bag of rice costs me about $40, but buying 25kgs of rice in individual kilo bags at the supermarket costs $3.50 per kilogram for the cheap stuff, or $7.50 for the premium stuff ($88 or $188 respectively for 25kg worth)
Yeah unfortunately I can buy rice in either 4x125g individual bags in one package, or just a 500g package.
Somehow we just don’t get bulk packages of most goods. At least not in consumer facing stores.
Have you tried Asian and indian grocery stores? I get Thai jasmine rice from a Vietnamese shop near me, but they also sell it at the Indian supermarkets. They have lots of spices in bulk too.
As someone who has been trying to grow tomatoes in containers for about 10 years, I can confirm that it really is difficult. It took me about 5 years to achieve fairly consistent results and get the hang of properly amending the soil, planting correctly, watering, pruning etc. And I still have years where the production is really low, largely due to fungal diseases.
We planted tomatoes on the backyard last year and we drowned in them, kilos and kilos of the stuff
It also would’ve been a lot cheaper to get the same amount from the grocery store 😅
Yeah. I have the largest respect for people who manage to get that far. It really is not easy.
Not wanting to add complexity or anything but have you considered trying a deep water culture (DWC) hydroponic system? That’s all a fancy way to say a dark colored large 5-ish gallon bucket of water with specific hydroponic nutrients dissolved in the water (I use a generic balanced powder and it works nicely) and an air pump to keep the water from going stagnant. As long as you keep the air pump dry, you can do the whole thing outside without issue. I hang mine under a plastic camera guard and it works nicely.
I’m terrible at growing things in dirt because dirt remembers what you did to it (holds salts and nutrient excess unless you flush the soil), but hydroponics is a totally different thing. You can just toss the water and give it new when it starts showing signs of nutrient deficiency/toxicity. The roots end up massive and healthy and everything grows faster since there’s zero resistance in the growth medium. Just sucking up everything they can. Tho since the typical advice is to just completely toss the water at least weekly once it’s grown up (great for outside gardens or houseplants after the tomato buckets), you usually don’t end up with imbalances like that at all.
Proper care of a hydro system makes for a bountiful harvest most years, and if you want, you can very easily keep a tomato clone over winter to keep some smaller amount of production going. Hydro works very well inside because you don’t bring most of the bugs you would with a dirt pot.
Throw like 4 standard screw-in daylight bulbs of 60+watt-equivalent leds and you’ve got a grow space. No fancy expensive nonsense required.
see what you should have done is just toss some rotten ones onto your driveway or behind the shed and ignored them and next year you’d have had the biggest baddest bitchingest tomato plants you’d ever seen
Bro my cacti died. Both of them.
ok you can stay away from the garden and take a more motivational role
This is how capitalism starts
Good. Captialism is based
I don’t even agree with this but I’m upvoting because I hope Lemmy becomes more open to hearing nuanced takes on this. Capitalism is complicated. It’s not God, it’s not Satan
I dont support everything in capitalism and I dislike the way Americans engage in it. But i do like it as an economic engine and a way for people to build things and shape their communities. The idea of someone being unable to own a store and sell goods and services is very sad to me.
I can do that. I’ll keep track of everyone’s food, you know, in exchange for food.
You should even get a little extra! You know, because of all the responsibility
Cacti are more difficult than other plants to grow.
The best is community roles in a collective. If you try to do everything yourself you’ll fail but in specializing you’ll succeed. For produce, one neighbor specializes in tomatoes, the other cucumber, the other onions, etc etc… that’s how human society survived in tough times and that’s actually as a species how we’re supposed to operate. As a community. Another reason why everyone is so dang lonely and depressed. Anyways, I digress…
Yep, find your local CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) and get a membership
Growing food isn’t hard but takes knowledge and time, and even then there is no way in fuck you can be self sufficient.
I grow a lot of stuff in a relatively small space. Sometimes I cave to give stuff away because it’s too much for me. Maybe living in a tropical region helps? or maybe because I grow mostly native stuff that needs near to zero care.
LOL yeah. Stuff actually grows in tropical regions! :p
I’m happy for you there. (Although I imagine pest control gets interesting haha)
Southwestern U.S desert? Yeah, another story. Hydroponics are basically the best bet for your typical suburbia-dweller, I think.
Indeed, I have some trouble with pests, especially with the guava tree, but I’ve been using the technique of covering the young fruits in clothing bags so that pests can’t access them, and it’ has been effective so far. Needs a bit of work, but it’s cheap and doesn’t need using any chemicals. Sometimes, a naughty possum comes and takes something away, but it’s not so frequent, so I let them take their share lol. I once planted a broccoli that was growing so big and nice-looking, but had it suddenly disappear, eaten by a group of caterpillars.
But I simply avoid the things that attracted pests and favor the ones that grow without much need of maintenance, like acerola, cassava, some pumpkins, passion fruits, some wild grape-like fruits, and so on. My backyard looks like an abandoned house with the wilds taking over, i admit, but well, I like it that way…
Living in a tropical region definitely helps. Up north, the selection is difficult. Where and when you plant different items is really important, since you can very easily kill the plant if you plant it too early or late
That’s interesting to know. I never paid attention to timing when planting. We can plant most things in any season without much difference around here. Sometimes, things grow “spontaneously”, like the papaya tree that appeared last year and is already mature and giving fruits. Looks like I’m playing real-life stardew valley in easy mode >.<
Yeah, my peppers got too much calcium and had black ends. Cucumbers got too yellow. Cabbage worked fine, but I fucking hate cabbage. Beans were seriously lacking. Shit certainly isn’t easy, and it’s way to easy to think, hey, I can do this no problem!
Man your soil is farked . Start composting
Haha, are you speaking from your own practical experience, in which you failed and decided to buy canned food instead?
It’s not easy, but it’s not impossible either. It depends on your circumstances.
And there’s an in between as well: grow some of your own food and buy canned foods as well. Or share a garden with people who know what they’re doing.
I agree that people should definitely keep a good store of non-perishable foods in case of hard times, but you also should try to grow food as well. I don’t think anyone is trying to say it’ll be easy, like anything at first it is difficult. It’s definitely worth trying though, if you can and have the space. Like I said, don’t go all in as your only option, keep non-perishable foods on hand, like canned goods, or dried goods. If you’re able to grow your own food you get fresh fruits and veggies, and you won’t use up as many canned goods.
I planted horseradish into the ground, neglected it, and it grew anyway.
Who wants a kitchen garden?
Who wants to care for a kitchen garden? It’s not as simple as putting seeds into the ground and waiting until it grows. You have to dig up the site. You have to water it in a drought. You have to pull out the weed. You might even have to fight against insects, or use fertilizer. 19 out of 20 people I knew had given up on the idea of a kitchen garden.
Also, groundhogs will fuck up your garden, and they dig tunnels and climb fences. You have to basically build a big cage around your garden, floor included.
Not my garden :) groundhogs don’t exist here
one of my friend has a pretty elaborate garden setup.
he has a groundhog execution chamber too. he has to gas and kill about 6 of them each year.
I box trap them (they love cantaloupes) and haul them off to a neighboring town. I’m not sure how humane it is since they usually tear off their claws trying to get out of the trap. And momma hog is too smart to go in the trap, so I only get the kids.
Then there’s me who has a black hand. Damned near every plant I’ve intentionally tried to grow has died, including the sturdy ones.
I am a successful gardener.
You can’t and don’t want to eat 20lbs of tomato in a week. I use maybe 2-4lbs and the rest of it rots or has to be given away. I’m lucky if consume 1/4 of what I produce.
And that’s how crops come in, all at the same time in abundance. It’s not like you can pick 4 tomatoes each day and they just hang out for weeks on the vine. There is about a 4-6 week widow in which all the stuff you have spent 5 months growing, is edible off the vine. You start in April and then you don’t really get anything until August, and then by Mid Sept, the plants stop producing and are dead by Oct.
And if you want to preserve it, that’s a lot more work and you need the space and equipment to store dozens and dozens of jarred/canned veg. And at that point it’s no longer a small kitchen garden.
oh and by the way if you give me that ‘community sharing!’ stuff. no. literally everyone’s crops are also coming in at the same time. that’s why you see people leaving baskets of veg on the stops all around and nobody takes it, because they already have their own from their own gardens.
That is very different from a commercial farm who is able to have dozens of rotating crops and crop varieties with the expertise to manage it and also the ability to distribute it commercially.
My partner and I are in conflict about food storage. I buy beans, pasta, and jarred foods when I’m stressed. He doesn’t like sacrificing storage space and I think just sees it as clutter.
Anyways, I’m going to pick up more pasta, pasta sauce, and canned soup. Boxed macaroni and cheese. Stuff I know we’ll cycle through and doesn’t need much effort to cook because I know when things get bad I won’t want to brain much.
Oh! LPT: textured vegetable protein is shelf stable dried soy protein and you can rehydrate it to add a ground beefy texture to things, like macaroni and cheese or pasta sauce.
It’s easy to go overboard and make silly choices, but it’s also easy to plan a good contingency. I keep 1 year of dried food and 3 months of canned / jarred / frozen food. Any more than that and it gets wasteful for me. I have backup grid-independent solar power, and I also keep a small veggie garden going most of the year.
I like to re-pack my dried foods into emptied, washed, and dried PET bottles, because they store better. I use 1L Waterford’s bottles because their shape is perfect for maximizing storage and stack ability. I repack large bags of dried food into these with oxygen absorbers, and packed this way, rice, lentils, wheat berries, and barley will last 20 years. Rolled oats will last a couple years. Sugar and salt will last indefinitely. Scaling them down to 1L individual volumes means you can crack one without introducing contaminants to the others
Keeping a rigid system of labelling, inspecting and rotating your goods is as important as having them in the firstvplace
I’m still in the “mark expiration year in big marker” stage of rotating food, but that’s been easy enough to keep up with.
Sadly, my condo doesn’t allow vegetable gardens on our porch because of the real threat of visiting bears. I sneak in some herbs because they’re not vegetables, but the HOA can be persnickety.
Personally I think it’s worth a little space to have peace of mind. Also depending on where you live having a few week supply of food and drinking water in storage is generally recommended in case of a natural disaster.
That said, if you’re in a western countries that produces most of its own food you’ll probably be fine. Those countries produce such an incredibly surplus that much of it gets diverted towards animal agriculture. If you can afford meat and dairy now you’ll probably be able to afford rice and beans if prices rise.
It’s not a good thing to do that based on stress levels as opposed to a practical space minded approach that keeps in mind actual risk
I don’t think I’m trying to over stock. It’s things like buying more pasta when we’re down to 5 boxes instead of 0. We go through it, we just disagree on how much we should keep on hand.
So far, the trick has been to keep the backlog out of sight and refill the main cupboard as needed. Like, he knows I keep extra, but he doesn’t look for himself because it’s in the low-down awkward corner cupboard.
I guess I’d rather stress-buy pasta than gacha toys or another multitool or something, and I’m stressed for various reasons my therapist knows about.
A vegetable garden? LOL so you can get one tomato after 6 weeks? What are you going to eat in the meantime?
People are completely clueless and disconnected from reality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPfmYNNo-4U
This is what one couple needs to actually grow stuff. And that’s just fruits and vegetables.
And what freaking inputs in the form of plastic, fertilizers, pesticides are they using?
You do not need to replace your entire diet with home grown produce. Supplement the food you buy from the store with whatever you can grow in the small area you have. You can get a surprisingly good haul from 25ft².
aka hobby
There’s a difference between supplemental gardening and full on self sufficient farming.
I had a garden for years that I started in the spring every year, and reduced my grocery bills by about half.
tomatoes, onions, carrots, garlic, potatoes and cucumbers are all staple crops that can be gardened in abundance on basically any 1/4 acre plot in the US. Most of these are either shelf stable for extended periods on their own or can be canned at home for winter use.
Who has a 1/4 acre plot, and the knowledge, tools, and chemicals to grow the food? You have the seeds ready to go? You’re confident in the face of a global food shortage you’ll just snap your fingers and Disneyfy your way to “staple foods”?
How about buying canned produce, learning to preserve the food you can still buy now, dry beans, rice, etc? And then try to see if the knowledge we’ve lost as a culture wrt subsistence can be re-learned quickly and painlessly?
I don’t think so.
You think food prices will come back down after it’s all over?
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
As if you’d need to ask that question…
cue the padme meme!
FACT: Capitalism without regulation has a ratcheting effect on high prices.
