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Can We Feed Billions of Ourselves Without Wrecking the Planet?
We are now producing more food more efficiently than ever, and there is plenty to go around for a human population of 7 billion. But it is coming at a drastic cost in environmental degradation, and the bounty is not reaching many people.
Sustainable Food Production, a new Earth Institute primer from Columbia University Press, explores how modern agriculture can be made more environmentally benign, and economically just. With population going to maybe 10 billion within 30 years, the time to start is now, the authors say.
The lead author is ecologist Shahid Naeem, director of the Earth Institute for Environmental Sustainability. He coauthored the book with former Columbia colleagues Suzanne Lipton and Tiff van Huysen.
This is an interesting interview with the author. Do you agree (or disagree) with his conclusions?
[Also Covered By]: Phys.org
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 12 2022, @03:51PM (2 children)
OK, kids. This is why, when you want to do back-of-the-envelope type stuff, if helps to understand the assumptions behind your simplified mathematical model.
First, pigs don't thrive on diets of rice. They want protein in their diets too, and not just the kind of protein present in rice. So right there, that substitution is wrong. They're omnivores. Don't believe me? Try feeding a pig just rice (or corn, or wheat) and see how it grows. Is there starch in their diet? Sure! But it's not what it looks like.
Second, not all arable land is fungible. But sure, you want to wave your hands about rice here and corn there, whatever.
Third, even if you could have wall-to-wall rice, your production numbers are poorly chosen. You're talking heavily supplemented returns in a given season without regard to crop rotation, fallow periods or sustainability. Not all land is equally productive, not all climates are equally friendly and not all methods are equally practical everywhere. They grow rice in the Himalayas, you know - want to guess what their yields are like? Pro tip: not the same as around the lower reaches of Vietnam.
And even with all of this, we still haven't addressed the question of whether that would be a complete diet (hah ... nope).
Go back, try again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 12 2022, @05:14PM (1 child)
Sonny, your trained skills in empty blabbing do not mean pig shit. Produce numbers, or shut up.
BTW, brazen lying is bad for your soul. https://mysrf.org/pdf/pdf_swine/s1.pdf [mysrf.org]
Go back, try again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 13 2022, @05:39PM
All right, let's do this. Straight from the first paragraph of the introduction section of your linked PDF.
Ready? Got your coffee in your comfy gaming seat? Good!
"Therefore, hog rations are made up primarily of farm-grown grains, plus a protein supplement that includes vitamins and minerals."
Did you get that? PROTEIN SUPPLEMENT. Because grains don't cut it. The cheap option can be soybeans (up to a point - they still need other top-ups over that) but please note that the statement: "not just the kind of protein present in rice" is specifically, factually correct and relevant.
Also, absolutely nothing in that PDF has any bearing on the other points about fallowing, crop rotations (unless you're rotating with soybeans - an agronomic nightmare because rice and soy have very different needs) or sustainable sources of soil amendments. In fact, it doesn't even mention rice a whole bunch.
Now, did you have any relevant PDFs to share, or just more stuff that you don't even understand? Oh, wait, you wanted numbers. Right, you quote 7 tons of rice per hectare (roughly 2.5t/acre) but here's the problem: if you rotate your crop on a one-in, one-out basis (no fallow periods for recovery, even) that reduces in the longer term to 3.5t/ha. Um, oops. But even then we're working with Borlaug-style boosted yields. If you ignore a heavy NPK insert, you're looking at more like 1t/acre/year, or around 2.5t/ha/year - reduced by crop rotation to 1.25t/ha average. Yeah, Borlaug championed new hybrids but he also championed supercharging the nitrogen cycle (among others) by massive supplementation using techniques that are not what we call sustainable.
Oops. Now all of a sudden your sustainable rice plan means we need to magic another one and a half billion arable hectares out of our asses. Or wilderness. Whichever.