Sounds like there's a big potential for upheavals similar to the Arab Spring. A fair number of countries subsidize food for their citizens, and if they can't get their hands on any, there's going to be issues.
I wonder which countries are most at risk? I read somewhere that the Arab countries get a lot of Ukrainian wheat.
That’s probably mainly due to low shipping costs due to proximity (in the grand scheme of things). There is scope for substitution with supplies from elsewhere in the world, if those supplies can be freed up from their usual end use. Biodiesel, cattle feed, etc.
Here in the UK restrictions on labelling sunflower oil now mean it’s acceptable to adulterate it with other oils. My family has switched to using rapeseed oil where we can (except for deep frying, it stinks). I’d recommend eating less meat even if that means eating more grain products, it’s a more efficient use of the resource. For the well off we can weather this just fine, but we can still help by reducing our use of the scarcest resources.
It's not really as much about freeing up the supplies as much as it is about whether or not the supply chain can ship that food from someplace else. From what I've read, we don't have nearly as much of a food problem as we do a food shipping problem.
> A subsidized flatbread loaf in Egypt sells for the equivalent of about 1 U.S. cent. The country allocates five loaves a day to people in the program and uses the public treasury to compensate bakers for their losses.
> An attempt in the late 1970s by then-President Anwar Sadat to end subsidies on basic foodstuffs triggered riots that left more than 80 people dead, so the government since has resorted to workarounds such as shrinking the size of loaves.
> CAIRO, Feb 1 (Reuters) - Egypt is considering replacing a popular bread subsidy with cash payments for the poor to protect the budget from soaring global wheat prices, but domestic inflation and a history of protests could make the government opt for a less ambitious reform.
> Under the existing program, more than 60 million Egyptians, or nearly two thirds of the population, get 5 loaves of round bread daily for 50 cents a month, little changed since countrywide "bread riots" prevented a price hike in the 1970s.
I'm not sure why sunflower oil is so popular. Olive oil is much nicer for anything that isn't going to be deep-fried, and peanut oil is much better for frying (more saturated fats = more crispiness).
> Here in the UK restrictions on labeling sunflower oil now mean it’s acceptable to adulterate it with other oils.
Do you have a source for this claim? I'm interested since I'm using sunflower oil here in the UK.
Tesco labels its sunflower oil as "pure sunflower oil", it also has an ingredient list of "sunflower oil" [1].
Asda only labels it "sunflower oil", it doesn't have an ingredient list (at least on the website), but it states that the "regulated product name" is "sunflower oil" [2]
From the two the Asda one looks more suspicious, but I don't know what the regulation is. My suspicion is that regulation is for the label "sunflower oil", and Tesco goes out of its way to clarify that it doesn't contain other oils, or otherwise why risk putting "pure" there?
I don't see them selling anything, just a Patreon and some referral links. If that's considered some dark ulterior motive, then you also wouldn't be able to trust most youtubers (Veritasium, CPG Grey, MinutePhysics, etc)
I'm well aware of the general quality (or lack thereof) on Youtube, but that's why I gave a few examples of good Youtubers that also use patreon/referral links. Point being, I don't see a good reason to specifically call out iceagefarmer for having vested interest in saying what they say
There's a direct ask for support in the form of paypal donations right there on the linked page. He also funnels traffic to his youtube, where he has well over a quarter million subscribers. He has quite a cottage industry selling doom prepper news.
We should stop growing corn for ethanol since it's worse for the climate than gasoline[1] and instead use all that land and machinery to grow wheat instead.
Won't happen unless the fear of food shortage becomes an actual food shortage.
Ethanol subsidies let farmers already invested in corn grow more corn than they might otherwise sell for food, and politicians get to say they're doing something for renewable energy.
As with so many other things in politics, the good of society isn't the driving factor. Money and talking points are king.
Aren't the Iowa Caucus' days numbered? They've been a complete disaster the last few cycles – it seems to take days/weeks to determine a winner. Their last competently-run caucus was in 2008.
This is like asking how fungible are calories. People with the means to mill and cook with wheat flour can probably manage with corn too if the alternative is starvation.
I don't mean on the consumption side. I mean on the production side. Do they grow in the same soil? Do they take the same nutrients? Do they have the same water / sunlight / temperature band tolerances?
Looks like that rotation is pretty common but there are some details to concern oneself with.
Much of it boils down to water and/or irrigation. Maize (corn) likes wetter, wheat can stand dryer. In the US the corn belt starts in Ohio and includes eastern Nebraska, wheat is grown largely on the far western plains.
Wheat is also a viable winter crop --- fall planting / spring harvest for "winter wheat". That typically means 2 crops a year (winter + summer), and possibly more.
Rice is the third staple crop, though it wants a lot of water, and tends to be grown in subtropical climates as with China and India.
Other substitutes include barley, oats, millet, etc., though those are far less prevelant than wheat & maize.
Corn produces 4-6 times the calories per acre as wheat, not to mention farmers and distribution networks would have to spend a whole lot to switch.
Many people are suggesting eating less meat to help potential food shortages, switching corn to wheat actually loses about as much food as feeding corn to cattle. (i.e. a cornfield switched to wheat and a cornfield fed to cattle would result in a similar number of calories)
We indeed should stop producing ethanol, but plenty of hungry people around the world could be just as happy eating corn as wheat.
Might also be worth examining the amount of crop grown, then subsequently burned in the U.S. Somewhere between 25% to 40% of corn in the U.S., up to 20% of agriculture land is devoted to ethanol production. If food production is a growing concern, it seems strange that so much agricultural production is spent on non-food producing activities.
I think it’s something like 75% of soy and corn go to ethanol and animal feed (which loses most of the nutrients in the process just to inefficiently concentrate some bits).
Considering that the US alone could feed another 800M people with just the grains that go to feed cattle - the idea that we're going to run out of food any time soon is strange.
Is there any topic on which we’re not currently facing a catastrophe? In the last few months I’ve been warned about impending doom for insects, food, nuclear weapons treaties, democracy, the economy, the internet, space, the environment, the arctic circle, abortion rights.
There once was a boy keeping watch. He cried out "Wolf! wolf!" And the villagers came, and saw the wolf was quite far away, and not a danger yet.
The next night, the boy cried out "Wolf! Wolf!" And while the wolf was at the gate, it didn't seem to be hurting anybody. After all, the boy and his village were fine still, and there could be benefits to the wolf.
The third night, the boy did not cry wolf. The villagers discovered him dead the next morning next to the village free-range wolf. A great meeting was held, and it was decided that since most people were safe and secure and able to live their lives normally, we must all adapt to the new normal and learn to live with the wolf.
Most all of them. As people have gotten safer they have gotten progressively more afraid of the remaining danger.
Doom sells, don't buy it.
Economic cycles, political unrest, diseases, on and on and on, these things always have existed and constantly will ebb and flow, while people will pretend what's happening now is the worst its ever been because grabbing your attention is profitable and gives people the sense that their life has meaning.
We weren't living in an idyllic world n years ago, we're not living in one now, we won't be living in one in the future. The things that suck just kind of rotate from time to time. Things remain pretty ok.
Not really, no. Panic sells so panic is what is being sold. This is not a new thing as a stroll through the archives (in any language I can read at least - Dutch, English, German, French, Swedish, Norwegian and Danish) will quickly show, especially weather scares have a long and rich history.
In the past decade I've also noticed the word 'crisis' being used a lot more in less inappropriate ways. I just found, in today's DDG news stories, headlines about a US border crisis, a baby formula crisis, Sri Lanka having a fuel crisis, the Israeli govt. in crisis, a covid crisis in N. Korea, a mental health crisis in Alabama, a gun violence crisis, a cost of living crisis.... and many more.
And they're really using the word "crisis" wrong. It's supposed to mean something like a fork in the road, a situation that forces change. Not just "shit is bad right now".
The Economist is the only news publication I pay for, I do wish they were more economics focused (as opposed to politics, though of course the two are fundamentally intertwined).
Any other publications (paid or free) I should be looking at?
really? at least 50% of any given issue is concentrated on business/eocnomics. A few weeks back half the magazine was a deep dive into the expanding role of central banks
…but be reallllll careful thinking through the consequences of “any means necessary”, because a lot of those means end in a huge escalation of the conflict which further reduces access to minerals and food. (And, like, human lives.)
I'm pretty sure this fear of change at the helm is something all dictators will happily project out ("look, without me there will be chaos or worse"). It's likely not true. It's really impossible to predict what will happen once Putin is gone.
He'll die anyway sooner or later, and there will be a struggle for power regardless. Russia has a constitution, and article 81 describes how to get a new president via elections.
Current paranoid leader is waging major war and isolating the country, so it's hard to say what could be worse for the world. Maybe mobilization in Russia, but that may be a tough call for any newcomer.
You are right. Add to that, the constant and persistent info flow from russian media and incentives to “say the right things”, which raised whole generation.
no shit, but who do people expect to come after Putin?
what would taking out Bush Jr. in the early phase of operation Iraqi Freedom accomplish? would the next guy immediately withdraw from Iraq and apologize to the world for the past wrongdoings?
This aversion to "seed oils" (a totally made-up, arbitrary category) is one of the weirdest health fads I've seen in recent years, and that's saying something.
From doom-scrolling the Ukraine/Russia war it is pretty obvious that Ukrainian farmers have not been idle. Battles are being fought in the treelines and along rivers next to plowed and planted fields. Hopefully some of these crops are harvested and make it to market.
> Hopefully some of these crops are harvested and make it to market.
There are unfortunately a lot of problems here which make me seriously pessimistic:
- Ukraine will need a lot of the harvest for itself, given how Russians raided crop silos [1] and what they can't raid they bomb to pieces [2]
- No one knows if Russian operatives didn't poison crop silos - there are a number of poisons that are very stable in the environment and very hard to detect if you don't know what you are looking for, and Russians have proven over and over that they have an awful lot of skill in dealing with poisons
- Russians looted a lot of agricultural machinery, and a lot more got destroyed or seriously damaged - and the Ukrainians repurposed a lot of stuff either to tow off Russian tanks or to convert into technicals
- fertilizer is made of natural gas which is in short supply, which in turn will massively impact yields
- similar to the post-war situation in Yugoslavia, fields will need to be de-mined extensively, and they need to be cleansed off of shrapnel and fuel
- even if there are quantities to export, you need a way to transport them. The railroad track width is different in Ukraine (Russian wide-gauge) and Europe (standard), there aren't many re-trackable cargo wagons, a lot of rail equipment and bridges got blasted by Russians or by Ukrainians for sabotage. God knows in what state the sea ports are, there has been heavy fighting, not to mention the sea mines that are already causing chaos [3]
All in all it will be years if not decades until Ukraine can be a serious player on the crop market again.
I heard an interview with a farmer in Western Ukraine today. His area isn't immediately affected by the war (as in, no bombs, no mines, no occupation). His stores are still full with the 2021 harvest. The regular route would be via the black sea, but that's blockaded. He has a contract to ship some of the stored grain via train to Poland. But there's very little capacity to store his 2022 harvest.
Your local zoning board might object. I live in PA, and one of the neighborhood vigilantes immediately ratted me out to the local government when I started growing corn, squash, and beans in my backyard while raising a couple of chickens for eggs.
It also takes well over an acre to support a single person, and that's if you know what you're doing and have the time to manage a garden of that size.
The post you're replying to suggests a Victory Garden. While a personal victory garden may not have a big effect on global food supplies, it can absolutely help supplement food for households that are squeezed by higher food prices (which is another side effect of global food shortages).
Victory gardens, also called war gardens or food gardens for defense, were vegetable, fruit, and herb gardens planted at private residences and public parks in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Germany during World War I and World War II. In wartime, governments encouraged people to plant victory gardens not only to supplement their rations but also to boost morale. They were used along with rationing stamps and cards to reduce pressure on the public food supply.
I just wanted to look out my window and see something more useful than grass, OK? If I got to enjoy a couple meals out of what I grew, so much the better.
I've zero objection to "I like gardening" and "I love a home-grown tomato" as reasons to have a garden. I simply don't think it's a meaningful part of a fix to a collapse of the supply chain.
> To grow all the food for one person's needs for the whole year requires, for most people, at least 4,000 square feet—though some diet designs are possible that can use a smaller area.
> A 0.44 acre of land can produce enough vegetables and fruits to meet up with the daily calories needed for one person to feed for a year.
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 1993:
> It is realistic to suppose that the absolute minimum of arable land to support one person is a mere 0.07 of a hectare–and this assumes a largely vegetarian diet, no land degradation or water shortages, virtually no post-harvest waste, and farmers who know precisely when and how to plant, fertilize, irrigate, etc.
> The minimum amount of agricultural land necessary for sustainable food security, with a diversified diet similar to those of North America and Western Europe (hence including meat), is 0.5 of a hectare per person. This does not allow for any land degradation such as soil erosion, and it assumes adequate water supplies.
Cut out meat and it gets better, but not that much better.
Only if you use traditional farming. Hydroponics, Aeroponics, and Aquaponics use far less resources (more startup capital but far less inputs), can grow year round (assuming indoor grows), and has 5-10x the yield per sq ft.
She griped about both, the zoning board demanded I get rid of the chickens.
I was tempted to leave their corpses on her doorstep and egg the municipal building as a petty sort of revenge, but that would have been too obvious.
Those chickens were good eating, though, especially with some homegrown corn on the cob and baked beans. The squash didn't work out so well, unfortunately.
What was she griping about with the garden? Chickens I can understand if there are smell complaints. In San Francisco you are allowed to keep them but there are rules about the number you can have and the minimum distance their enclosure can be to any neighbors window, etc. But squash? That’s really an odd thing to complain about.
backyard chickens don't have a smell, that's only once you start mass producing them in a factory. The same way yours or your neighbors dogs, that produce substantially more feces than a chicken, don't cause neighborhood wide odor.
My biggest problem with my neighbor's chickens was that they kept getting out an coming over to my property and he'd have to ask me to let him in the back yard so he could take them back home. Never noticed any smells near their coop which was near the property line.
Never really bothered me since they mostly just hung out around the back fence far from my house, but finally another neighbor complained to the city and they had to get rid of the chickens. Chickens are allowed here (up to 10 per property), but have to be kept confined and on your own property.
I was probably just interpreting the ordinance requirements of a minimum distance of 20 feet from any neighbor’s door or window as having to do with smell when I read it.
Obviously regulations vary across counties and municipalities, but when/where I lived in PA, the zoning rules spelled it out pretty clearly that hens were fine but roosters weren't.
Quite true, and the potential for gardening is quite situational. OTOH, current forecasts of mega-scale hunger, famines, & death look pretty useful, if you wanted to paint such, ah, busybodies, in a rather negative light, and try to get some rules changed.
Growing a garden and raising livestock are pretty different in practice & impact from my experience. Assuming you voluntarily moved into the zoning and "Karen" objected to you violating them, it's all on you.
The zoning change came after I moved in and after I got my chickens. If I had the time, money, and inclination I might have been able to find a lawyer willing to appeal on ex post facto[0] grounds, but it wasn't a battle worth fighting. I had had a year's worth of free eggs by then, and the chickens themselves didn't go to waste.
I don't know if the comment was edited or not, but I hope you're not claiming "vigilante" is a slur. I looked up the definition of slur just to be sure and you are technically correct, but I'd say you're abusing language far more than the person you're responding to.
Editing a comment after the fact in a way that deprives a reply of its original context and makes it look stupid is, in most cases, a dick move. I think most users understand that. It doesn't make a difference whether the reply was by a moderator or not.
- Getting snarky because they did the reasonable thing and got rid of the slur after it was pointed out
- Calling said user a dick. If Karen is a misogynistic slur, How is dick not moreso misandristic? I realize you said "dick move", but that's functionally the same. Saying something was a "c?nt move" or a "n????r move" would be tantamount to calling someone a c?nt or n????r.
- Because maybe it made your comment "look stupid"
Jawdropping desecration of the guidelines. You need a vacation.
In most of the spaces I frequent, an edit to change objectionable wording after being called on it is acceptable. Since you've made it plain that that sort of approach doesn't work here, I'll keep that in mind.
It's not a borderline case. People have trouble with the distinction between a judgement about a word overall, and a judgement about what a word will do to an HN thread. Also, people just like to gripe.
A Karen is no more an inappropriate slur than many other useful words and phrases that are negative, such as goody-two-shoes, busybody, bully, crank, etc.
> Please keep that sort of slur off HN. We don't need it here, and you don't need it to make your substantive points.
I think that may be an overly heated response.
Given that I have seen the term used as a pronoun applied to multiple genders, sex preferences, races, ethnicities, etc, I see the term as speaking to behaviors, rather than being a pejorative unique to a group. Here are good examples of it being applied across multiple ethnicities and genders [1] & [2] . There is even a transgender karen [3] .
Normally it is applied to people acting improperly, hall-monitor type of behaviors where it is not warranted. Someone maliciously reporting food growing in a backyard meets the definition.
Please don't make decisions based off Wikipedia [4] or dictionary.com [5] redefining a word to meet a specific agenda.
'internet forum aspiring to curious conversation' and 'youtube videos making fun of people's public meltdowns' have different standards and HN's are pretty well documented.
The word Karen reaching a tipping point in public awareness associated with the Gamestop incident I already pointed out. Many of us have seen it. We're aware of it, we know about it. And we know it is potent, otherwise it wouldn't be on the chopping block for redefinition. And forever, when I think of the word Karen, I think of that particular incident.
The word in that sense, has a great deal of similarity with a tiny little phrase, of a mere two words.
Mission Accomplished.
Whether tearful, premature, ironic, deceptive, tragic, or an example of great hubris, many of us living will forever associate those two words with George W. Bush on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, and the incalculable human suffering of an unpopular war. The friends we lost after that, and military adventurism run amok. The missing Weapons of Mass Destruction. So much is wrapped up in those two words. And forever, when I think of the phrase Mission Accomplished, I think of that particular speech.
Please do not tell me that HN is going to redefine a word for me, whether it is Karen, or Mission Accomplished, or some other phrase.
We don't need civilized pejoratives that are completely decent for dinner table talk to be conflated with uncivilized utterances not fit for the written or spoken word.
To say 'Au contraire' you have to provide some sort of meaningful counter-argument. You have 'comedy' youtube videos, oddly overwrought bombast ('dictator', 'agenda') and something about a completely different phrase which, unlike 'Karen', is not intended as an insult.
Directing tropey slurs at people is mostly not ok on HN and it's been moderated like that for ages.
The 'examples' obviously don't fit HN at all and beside you, nobody has mentioned racial or ethnic slurs nor made any argument the word should be treated here in some way that's different from the way it's widely interpreted. That seems more reach-y and redefin-y than simply asking people not to be trope-wielding jerks on HN.
> one of the neighborhood vigilantes immediately ratted me out to the local government
Better than your previous phrasing, but try again; if the action that they took was to report you to the government then they are the opposite of a vigilante by definition.
The original word (which: I can't keep up, is that really bad now? When did that happen, last week?) made more sense, really. "Vigilante" is way off from it.
I don't think it's right to co-opt and despoil that name of doubtless many real people, so if there is a pushback against using "Karen" as an insult then I'm in favour of it. That said, this is first time I've seen anyone else say anything against it. Perhaps I also can't keep up? ;-)
These are part of a propaganda strategy to make people feel like they're "helping". They are not an effective or efficient way of improving food availability. If you enjoy gardening as a hobby, that's great, but these are not practical bulwarks against food shortages.
The economies of scale in industrial farming are insane. The ROI on a personal garden is abysmally low, except for herbs and other low-volume plants.
> The economies of scale in industrial farming are insane. The ROI on a personal garden is abysmally low, except for herbs and other low-volume plants.
So I read this book called "How Asia Works" which documented the economic transformations of a few different Asian countries.
I was shocked to learn that in a lot of cases, the industrial farming not the huge boon that was expected efficiently a few people can grow things with intensely you can plant small plot farms.
Countries that promoted small-scale household farming instead of moving too soon to large scale farming were more successful, but this was largely because the labor pool can't transition that fast to going from farmers being everyone one in ten overnight.
We live at a time where very few people work in farming, the smallest amount in history. Why can't it slide back the other way?
> Countries that promoted small-scale household farming instead of moving too soon to large scale farming were more successful
Promoting small-scale farming and industry lead to widespread poverty and famine in cultural revolution China.
> very few people work in farming, the smallest amount in history. Why can't it slide back the other way?
It could, but this would probably be a pretty bad thing. I guess it depends how many people who currently have fake bullshit jobs transition to being farm workers. My guess is that almost everyone who would go into an expanded ag labor base is currently doing some actually useful work, and we would suffer a severe net decrease in labor output, if we tanked farming efficiency.
> Promoting small-scale farming and industry lead to widespread poverty and famine in cultural revolution China.
In this specific example, there might have been other causes.
In general I agree with you, getting the entire US to "go Amish" isn't viable. Just picking on your example which leaves out some of the details about how the transition was "promoted".
It can't slide back because 99%+ of people don't want to live like peasants of 100 years ago. I hope I don't need to explain why having a lot more people spending a lot of their time farming small plots leads to a substantially lower standard of living than an industrial or post-industrial economy.
These are part of a propaganda strategy to make people feel like they're "helping".
Depends whether you're gardening for a global food shortage, or to supplement your own use, which I suspect is why most people have home gardens.
A home garden can supply a significant fraction of your food - especially if you do canning or otherwise preserve for winter use.
From the link in the parent post:
Fruit and vegetables harvested in these home and community plots was estimated to be 9,000,000–10,000,000 short tons (8,200,000–9,100,000 t) in 1944, an amount equal to all commercial production of fresh vegetables
> Depends whether you're gardening for a global food shortage, or to supplement your own use
No, the effect on supply is the same.
> A home garden can supply a significant fraction of your food
It takes 5+ acres in a decently arable region with fertilizer to feed one person. By the time you're providing for a significant fraction of your caloric intake, it ceases to be a "garden".
> an amount equal to all commercial production of fresh vegetables
I guarantee this is some misleading bullshit statistic. They've probably selected "fresh vegetables" to mean some very small subset of industrial agriculture, like vegetables that are never canned or frozen.
well, no, if you're growing for personal use you can make a notable effect on your own supply/food costs. You don't have to solve the global food shortage to benefit from a personal garden and since the global food shortage will drive up prices, the financial benefit is even greater (as long as price increases in things like fertilizer don't eat up your cost savings).
You seem to be thinking about this from a personal finance angle instead of an economy-wide production angle.
It doesn't matter if a piece of corn is made in your garden or on a farm. The net effect on the corn supply is identical.
It takes orders of magnitude more input to grow a piece of corn in a garden than on a farm. That had better be offset by the personal enjoyment of the gardener.
You seem to be thinking about this from a personal finance angle instead of an economy-wide production angle.
Yes, I tried to be clear:
Depends whether you're gardening for a global food shortage, or to supplement your own use, which I suspect is why most people have home gardens.
No one's backyard garden in the USA is going to help feed someone in Africa, but even if the global food shortage doesn't mean food shortages in the USA, it's going to drive up prices, and a backyard garden can help offset that household expense.
You took specific objection to my comment that victory gardens were to make people "feel like they were helping". I meant this to imply some kind of externalized effect beyond just saving money.
It's also probably wrong that a home garden will net save you money unless you make like $3/hr. Again, unless you're extracting pleasure from gardening.
You took specific objection to my comment that victory gardens were to make people "feel like they were helping". I meant this to imply some kind of externalized effect beyond just saving money.
Yes, that's why I quoted it specifically and clarified that I was talking about a home garden.
It's also probably wrong that a home garden will net save you money unless you make like $3/hr. Again, unless you're extracting pleasure from gardening.
The people that benefit the most financially from a home garden are already low paid - those are the people that aren't going to struggle to afford food as prices rise. My sister has been gardening for years, a couple years ago she kept a spreadsheet and added up her savings based on retail prices of produce and her "revenue" from her garden (which covers most of the back yard of her 1/2 acre lot plus one apple tree) was over $2500 after deducting expenses (excluding labor).
She estimated around 2 hours/day tending the garden for a 6 month growing season, so that's around 360 hours of work, or around $7/hour, which is better than she'd take home working a minimum wage job and in exchange they get all of the organic produce they can eat in the summer, plus a lot of frozen or canned food in the winter. And she ends up giving a lot of it away to friends/family.
For a lot of people here, putting in 360 hours of work to earn "only" $2500 worth of food sounds like a terrible bargain, but for many people in this country, that's a great bargain.
> It takes 5+ acres in a decently arable region with fertilizer to feed one person. By the time you're providing for a significant fraction of your caloric intake, it ceases to be a "garden".
I'm sorry, but I just can't believe that. Is that fudged to account for livestock or waste or something? A single acre is what, 40*100m? That's huge, you could feed a whole family all year on potatoes, peanuts, greens, squash etc
>>> It takes 5+ acres in a decently arable region with fertilizer to feed one person. By the time you're providing for a significant fraction of your caloric intake, it ceases to be a "garden".
This is incorrect, it takes around 1/2 an acre if it's vegetarian or 1.5 acres including chickens/ducks for meat and eggs. That's using a traditional organic farming. If you use Hydroponics (Plants grown in water with no soil) or Aeroponics (Hydroponics grown in towers) or Aquaponics (Hydroponics with aquaculture, where the fish provide both protein and the fertilizer for the plants) the yield is dramatically higher (5x-10x per sq ft) can be done year round and indoors. It's not a perfect solution, it takes knowledge to setup and run, a very small capital investment for startup, and a constant power source. That said it IS commercially viable, you can already today buy produce produced this way in almost any grocery store, and it's viable for home production. I personally have several systems running in my apartment ranging from off the shelf commercial systems (AeroGarden Back to the Roots...) to custom built aquaponics systems. On a pure dollar level it's more expensive per lb of food, no doubt but within reason I don't care about that. I grow better and fresher food and most importantly I control the supply chain.
We can and should use these kind of technologies to replace as much of the modern agriculture system as we possibly can. No of the this mentions the MASSIVE environmental improvement that switching to these systems would make, which is reason enough to do it.
Commercial production of vegetables, particularly those not considered essential, was artificially low during the war, constrained by government control of allocation of things like materials for packaging and freight cars for transportation, and by no draft exemptions for male workers from the farm to the market.
That's great and all. I think home gardens are great. But the topic is about food shortages in poor nations due to increases in grain prices. Home gardens does literally nothing to help anyone in poor nations who will be going hungry later this year.
Try talking to some older folks - who at least heard many first-hand accounts from relatives who both had WWII Victory Gardens, and also gardened food during the Great Depression, out of economic necessity. With a few years' experience doing that, sharing tips and seeds with neighbors also doing it, and memories of being pretty hungry at times in the winter...ordinary people can get pretty damn good at growing a lot of food in a fairly modest-sized garden.
Getting good at gardening doesn't allow you to exceed agribusiness land efficiency levels, so we can put a pretty tight cap on how much small home gardens actually helped.
Isn’t this a bit of a false dichotomy though - solving a (potential) world food shortage or not; being more efficient than industrial farming or not; feeding one’s self/family completely via gardening or not gardening at all?
It seems to me that the more people who supplement their food supply with goods that don’t depend on imported supply (home or community gardens) lessens demand fractionally on the general supply, which fractionally helps with local pricing and household budgets, both of which are positives.
I’m not sure it’s ever been a requirement of victory gardens to be completely autonomous unless ur a hardcore prepper.
Agribusiness will happily choose lower yields in exchange for improved mechanization. Or resistance to disease (higher risk thereof from aggressive monoculture). Or better shelf life/transportability. Or marketability (yellow tomatoes don’t sell as well).
The backyard gardener doesn’t quite have those worries and could get higher land efficiency.
If rationing kicks in, and you're able to garden, that means the government is somehow preventing the ag supply from expanding. Random people gardening is a really inefficient way to work around that.
This is really hard, I had four 8x4 raised beds (all I could fit) for 5 years. The amount of space and time it takes to produce enough food to replace actual meals for more than just a few times in the summer is absolutely astonishing (unless you like squash all the time). I grew tomatoes, kale, squash, onions, lettuce and peppers. It tasted great, and got some salads and side dishes out of it, but that was about it. And it only yielded from July to August, I had nothing in the winter (except some canned tomatoes that were really good). It really takes a community effort to make this work. Like, plots of land that multiple people tend to. I've seen some cities do this and think it is fantastic.
My parents have a pear tree that came with the lot. Straggly looking creature with barely any signs of life all year, then for a month or two it produces more pears than my parents can eat for the rest of the year.
I love visiting my parents while it’s going apeshit. Crisp pears all day.
The last few years I planted I got my starts going real early in my basement and we had an early spring and I was over the moon. But I had a few cold springs that didn't warm up until June and had to replant multiple times. Rookie mistakes and bad luck. :)
Consider canning and fermenting some of your food. Also, grow things that can last throughout winter, such as potatoes, carrots, beets, etc. They can last in a cool dark place for months. Broccoli and Okra can be blanched and flash-frozen. Cucumbers can make pickles.
There are tons of good ideas out there about preserving your own food. But, I agree, that a small garden won't take a big bite out of your food needs. You're not trying to become self-sufficient, you're trying to lower your reliance on store-bought food.
100%. Growing up my parents were hardcore gardeners (arguably smalltime farmers) with about 2 acres of farmland and an additional 2 acres of fruit trees. We'd eat pretty heavily out of the garden from the late spring through the fall, and would have potatoes, apples, canned/frozen goods through much of the winter... but it was an enormous amount of work. In the spring and summer basically any time that it was viable to work in the garden on the weekends or in the evenings, we were out working in the garden.
That's huge; I haven't seen anything like that, even in the deep country where I grew up, where people (farmers) almost didn't buy anything but grew and processed most of their stuff. Their gardens hardly ever went over a 1/4 of an acre, I'd say, that was already pretty large and provided for filling quite a number of jar of tomatoes and beans and stuff.
Didn't your parents sell anything?
Using 400-500 sq ft, I get enough potatoes for a family of 3. Not that potato is our only staple food, but...
2 acres was the total farmland, they would rotate which areas they used so on any given year only 30-40% of it was actually growing crops. They never sold anything that I can recall, but they loved being able to give extras away. Both of them grew up in the 50s on farms in the south. They both saw their dad have to transition away from full time farming and get a day job, but in both of their families the farm remained a big source of supplemental income that involved the whole family. Interestingly both of them were the first in their family to go to college because they didn't want to be trapped in the rural farming life. I guess they were still pretty fond of it though because after they married they decided that their dream home was a small farm, which is where I grew up.
You don't need a community effort or astonishingly vast land to grow potatoes :-) What I mean by that is that the choice of stuff you grow matters. Lettuce, peppers (and one might add tomatoes) won't feed you much indeed. They are however indeed interesting in small spaces when you don't expect them to feed you but to provide you nice, fresh extras.
I mean, I produce about 800 lbs of vegetables by spending 20 mn a day on it (average on 365 days, which means more at times and nothing at other times). Surely it requires more space that you had. But no motorised tool involved, no fertiliser but a tiny bit of manure (no fancy permaculture tricks either, just traditional beds), no pesticide except in case of emergency like once a year on 10% of the garden, no watering except in case of emergency again, no search of any optimisation (time, space, yield, ...). It isn't a bid deal to get a partial yet significant autonomy; it just gets harder and harder as you want to get close to 100%.
There are stuff you can keep across winter in storage without transformation, like potatoes or cereals (onions, shallot don't do bad either); and stuff that can be kept where they lie, in the ground, like parsnip, sunchoke, and a few other root vegetables; cabbage can stay too, leeks as well. (Of course, it depends on the geographical location.)
Yeah, a base of potatoes + cabbages + onions get you a long way; and they are quite versatile as far as cooking is concerned.
Agreed! I was just getting into it and trying various things. If I had grown up with family that did it I probably would have had better odds. Also, I've always wanted to try a root cellar, too, but alas, no space for that.
I actually have two, but the terms of their adoption require that the full extent of the victory be confined indoors. It's a sacrifice I'm willing to make for a kneading cat-doughnut on a cold day.
The squirrels are generally not in it for the tomato, what they really want is the water in the tomato. A lot of people (myself included) have eliminated or reduced the problem by having a birdbath or water display near the garden.
-Use raised beds or Hugelkulture to increase yields.
-Use sq foot gardening to plant more in less space
-Develop a three stage compost pile. Import food waste from others in your neighborhood if needs be.
-Grow year round with cold frames
-Use cover crops to enrich soil over winter
> Use sq foot gardening to plant more in less space
5gal buckets my friend. Cheap or free if you keep a lookout or have winemaking friends. Free-$2 per bucket for food grade. Pretty much the cheapest you’ll get per gallon of plant space. But I use ours to increase our garden space onto valueless concrete surfaces.
> Now, Europe tries to buy out all grain stock that's left
No. Europe is pretty much self-sufficient for vital crops. The problem is China [1] and the fact that Africa doesn't have much of its own once famous agricultural power left after decades of European and American "donations" - hard to compete against donated products...
Haven't ethanol fuels been introduced to have a buffer for this situation? If we don't turn grain and corn into petrol then there should be some reserves.
Additionally, if we stop rising live-stock, where roughly 10 units of plant create one unit of meat, there should be even more calories available.
Energy is having an even greater supply crunch than food (indeed part of the food shortage is that agricultural inputs can't get delivered in adequate quantities because the energy to transport them doesn't exist).
The energy market is willing to outbid the food market, so I wouldn't expect the conversion of agricultural inputs into fuel outputs to decelerate.
OP is speaking to the market level effective demand.
Someone who's poor and starving will direct their own very limited economic purchasing power toward food. But the marketas a whole includes those who are wealthy (far fewer in number, but individually having vastly greater purchasing power), who might prioritise energy purchases generally.
It's not the poor's own food-vs-energy deceisions, but poor-food vs. rich-energy, which are in play.
> where roughly 10 units of plant create one unit of meat
Those units are not remotely fungible.
Protein quality of plant protein (as measured by PER or other metrics not explicitly designed to favor soy) is horrendous compared to beef.
Much of the plant material fed to cows is also not even slightly edible to humans, like soy meal.
I would rather have 1lb beef than 10lb nominally edible soy extractives (or wheat, or grass, or inedible soy meal, or other inputs to cattle production).
Once again, you are trying to compare units which are not fungible.
There is more land on which you can make meat than land on which you can make plants. Animals can graze on non-arable scrubland, grassland, etc.
Growing staple crops is harder on the land than raising animals. Staple crops deplete soil nitrogen and other nutrients.
Raising crops typically requires massive importation of fertilizer from petrochemical plants, whereas cattle grazing (for example) does not require significant additional petrochemical input.
A classic tale of how animals unfairly take the heat for plants: we often hear about how the amazon is being cut down "for cattle". If you actually look into it, what's happening is that farmers are cutting down the amazon to grow soy for around 3 years, until the soil is totally depleted, at which point they will put some cattle on the land because the cattle can extract value from land destroyed by soy and helps the farmers maintain land claims.
We raise very few animals purely through grazing on non-arable land. If nothing else, they need feeding through part of the year in many climates, and more typically, supplementary feed to increase intensity. Pure free range non-arable grazing ruminants constitute a relatively low percentage of total meat produced.
A somewhat more common thing is to raise cattle on arable fallow land between crop cycles. This is better than keeping permanent pastures, but nowadays we still often supplement the feed or intensively finish.
Battery farms, which is purely fed on crops grown where humans could grow food, accounts for about 70% of beef and 99% of pork and chicken. Often the soy being grown in the rainforest is to support these animals.
The other thing is a lot of "non-arable" and fallow land is actually a lot more arable with modern agriculture than it used to be, it's just more profitable to grow animals. A lot of the plant matter that used to be considered as only usable for animal feed can also now be processed for further use in human food.
Meat production isn't quite as bad as people sometimes suggest, but it's still pretty bad. There are some cases where it is still a good option (e.g. low intensity lamb grazing on rocky/hilly terrain) and if we scaled our meat production to only these cases, we'd be in a much better situation, but there's also be way less meat.
> Battery farms, which is purely fed on crops grown where humans could grow food
They are mostly fed on the byproducts of human food production. Human-edible material has higher margins than cattle feed, so cattle feed either comes from human ag byproducts (like soy meal) or from land that probably isn't good for much except hay.
Black beans, for example, have a PER of 0 (unrealistically low) and a PDCAAS of 0.75 (unrealistically high, vs 1 for egg). A realistic comparison can't be reduced to a single scalar, but for my own personal dietary requirements, I would probably want to eat 5-10x as many grams of nominal protein from black beans as from beef. This would be very challenging.
I think some other beans like kidney beans fare somewhat better, although I don't recall numbers. Still not close to mammal meat.
Some beans can be large sources of anti-nutrients [1] . Because over consumption of anti-nutrient foods can seriously impact your overall health, it is important to think about when getting a balanced diet.
Another example is soy, which has been studied some [2] . The problem is with longterm vegans that consume a huge amount of soy over a long term.
What's the problem with vegans consuming soy long term? Your second link talks about soy fairly positively and your first link only mentions soy once in the context of a lot of other foods (and really it's rare for a food to be purely good, e.g. lots of plants contain toxins). Based on those links I'd probably conclude soy consumption is very far down my list of foods to be concerned about.
There's even this quote: "Studies on vegetarians who eat diets high in plant foods containing anti-nutrients do not generally show deficiencies in iron and zinc, so the body may be adapting to the presence of anti-nutrients by increasing the absorption of these minerals in the gut." indicating that it may not be a real problem to eat foods that contain these 'anti-nutrients'.
> What's the problem with vegans consuming soy long term?
Vegans I have known said that a heavy soy diet over an extended amount of time does impact the thyroid more. While it was anecdotal hearing this, it was not anti-soy, just, about soy quantities over a long time, and the need for a diverse diet for vegans too.
Some of the anti-nutrients seem positive in one way too, which makes it even more complex.
> I would rather have 1lb beef than 10lb nominally edible soy extractives
The argument is not "eat soy extractives instead of meat".
It's more like "lunch on veggies 2 or 3 days per week instead of having meat on every meal, including breakfast".
It obviously includes repurposing some of the land used to raise cattle into other things more suitable for direct human consumption. No one is talking about making you eat grass.
Vegetables also have horrendous nutritional profiles. For the most part, the only parts of plants with anything approaching good nutritional qualities are fruits. Human resistance to various poisons also makes certain root vegetables like potatoes acceptable, but they are not great. I will continue extracting the preponderance of my nutrition from meat.
If you are not able to digest cellulose, it doesn't matter if it takes 100, 1000 units of plant calories to create one of meat.
This criticism against meat only works for grain-fed beef, for grass-fed animals it makes no sense at all.
I suppose it gets more complicated though because in at least some cases, we could plant human-edible food where the grass is and still come out ahead (after taking into account that it's harder to grow pretty much anything than grass)
Iunno, I really don’t do anything to the apple tree other than trim branches (which I sell or give away to bbqers depending on my mood). Every couple years it yields a huge crop (and some years gets completely defoliated by disease, but I’m lazy and just let nature take its course).
This article is partisan garbage, as usual lately for The Economist. Sure, the war had an impact but most of the problems were months BEFORE the war.
Search for "AgInflation" articles from 2021. I know farmers who skipped this season due to razor thin profits, suppressed prices by governments and major supermarkets, and risk of water controls. Would you put $50k of your money for a 10% return with a very, very high risk of failure?
The farmers that did plant, say wheat, are not benefiting from the price surge because to minimize risk they sold their harvest in advance or sold futures. SPECULATORS that are making a killing. Usually hedge funds like Citadel, ETFs by BlackRock, and others.
And in several countries farmers are being blamed for higher prices. Governments should've given the sector a bit of help and control risks. Help with water management. Help with shrinking labor base and increasing costs. But nothing is being done.
There is a perverse system right now and action needs to be taken to heal the sector. But I bet they'll just keep blaming farmers and impose price controls or suppression of some kind. Fixing farming would take years and populist politicians want magic immediate results and shift-blame. So buckle up.
I am not sure how to do it, but some futures-plus arrangement might improve incentives - say sell your crop as a future, but with a (gov supported) price cap - so if the price goes through the roof the farmer gets a share of the overage.
Not sure how much difference it will make but agriculture is kind of important
Don't forget substitution effects. As it turns out, grains are pretty fungible. (Yes, it's nice to be able to use that word in its normal context for once.) As wheat becomes too expensive, demand for others will increase and their prices will spike as well. So yes, gluten intolerant folks will be significantly affected as well.
What nobody understands is that this is not happening strictly because of the war or the drought, but because of the fragility of the global food system, which simply cannot bear any shocks.
I wouldn't argue against the research but to me, the "global food system" is much more robust than I imagined.
We stayed in our homes for months en mass without prep time and prior warning and the food availability barely changed. We are creatures that need to eat multiple times a day and yet we can stay in our homes for months and get fed just as well. Therefore I'm not very worried about the management of the food production and distribution, we are extremely good at it.
Thanks to the global nature of it, things move quickly and even though a problem in one location can be felt everywhere we don't end up with millions of deaths in that location. I'm really not onboard with "localize everything" motto because everything being local means catastrophic consequences at local issues.
What scares me is something biological or ecological happening at global scale. Something that takes at least 6 months to fix for example.
We are extremely good at it is your take when 900 million people don't get to eat even in times of abundance?
If our food system can't take a little bit of war and drought imagine how will it fare when production starts falling. Climate change is happening at global scale, and we must be able to coordinate and innovate on a similar scale to be able to handle it.
Instead we have a spontaneously formed a shitty system. Most people are ignorant of this. Some pretends that isolation is the solution, let's Brexit it, some are blaming ethanol apparently. There is no shortage of bad takes on this, but the fact remains that we suck at this.
The system is unfortunately exclusionary of some parts of the world due to extreme conditions at those places - which are much worse than a single war. It's more like decades of never ending wars and extreme droughts. Africa's problem isn't that they don't know how to code and as a result make less money and can't afford food, the troubles there are much much bigger and as a result they are outside of the supply chain we have.
And yes, by global event that scares me is exactly the climate change.
Literally, untrue - LOTS of people understand. But like the people who understood that launching a space shuttle when the ambient temperatures were running far, far below the absolute minimum spec. for the SRB's...
In this case, the slack is obvious. And it has once again been wrung from the supply chain in the name of efficiency (aka more profits), under the grand delusion that there will never be bad lean times.
What you're missing is that the global food system is under attack by bad actors.
1. The US Treasury drew up the list of economic sanctions against Russia and Belarus. Then they pressured the compliant EU to follow. The sanctions no surprises had a predictable impact on global grain/fertilizer and energy supply prices. The US basically sanctioned themselves and the global economy.
2. Meanwhile China was hit by terrible flooding last year and faces record low yields for crops so they are now desperately converting baseball courts and roads because their farmers can't get seeds and fertilizers. Do you know why? Because they're stuck on cargo ships sitting off the coast of Shanghai which has been locked down under the bizarre "Zero Covid" quarantine. This is conveniently being done during planting season when they're already facing a huge shortfall. End result - they are importing more and increasing the global grain/food price further.
3. Whilst China gets hit by flooding, the reverse weather pattern (La Nina) is causing droughts in places like Argentina and Paraguay which produces the majority of the food in South America. So thanks again to our sanctions against Belarus and Russia, we can't get fertilizer to those countries. Similarly 35 African countries get food from Russia/Ukraine and 22 of them get fertilizer from there so the end result is famine in S America and Africa.
4. In Europe, the EU's "Green Agenda" deal means the Italian government can't provide more state aid to the farmers. In Germany, they want to phase out agriculture because of greenhouse gas emissions so they've stopped farmers who want to grow more food. At the same time, the sanctions are making covid-induced food shortages dramatically worse.
So you have well timed global food disasters which are amplified by our sanctions whilst back home:
a) "On Friday, April 8, 2022, Union Pacific informed CF Industries without advance notice that it was mandating certain shippers to reduce the volume of private cars on its railroad effective immediately. The timing of this action by Union Pacific could not come at a worse time for farmers. Not only will fertilizer be delayed by these shipping restrictions, but additional fertilizer needed to complete spring applications may be unable to reach farmers at all. By placing this arbitrary restriction on just a handful of shippers, Union Pacific is jeopardizing farmers’ harvests and increasing the cost of food for consumers."
Not only are they preventing urea and UAN from getting to farmers during the crucial planting season but they're also stopping DEF (Diesel Exhaust Fluid). DEF is used to control emissions in diesel trucks, without it engines can't run. So they're ensuring a complete shutdown of the supply chains across the United States at the same time.
b) "EPA will allow a 50% increase in corn-based biodiesel and ethanol fuel mix for the summer"
Before Covid even began, we had the "Renewable Fuel Standards Act" which mandates annually RISING targets for the production of corn for ethanol fuel blends. This add major price inflation for food. Now the EPA is mandating another increase in corn ethanol for fuel at the same time as when we have astronomical fertilizer prices due to sanctions we imposed AND we're blocking domestic fertilizers being shipped by rail... that's going to send corn prices through the roof and the government knows this very well.
and I'm not even going to touch on all the poultry that USDA are ordering to be destroyed because of "Bird Flu".
As I said in my other comment, it's not by accident or pure back luck - it's by design.
hi, please don't say "russia/Ukraine", it encourages the false equivalency between an international pariah state engaging in a genocide, and the country the genocide is being perpetrated against
Ukraine is not under sanction, and the only things preventing it from providing more food to the world are russia's genocide against Ukrainians, farmers included, russia's blockade of Ukraine, and russia's theft of Ukrainian grain
indeed, the sanctions of the world against russia and belarus, too, are purely a predictable result of their actions, which they nonetheless choose to perpetrate to this very moment, and thus they bear the entire brunt of the consequences
Any article with the term "Global Production Ecosystem (GPE)", financialization, sustainability, biotic homogenziation (!) and translational corporations should not qualify to be published in nature. They mean so many things that they don't mean anything (tm).
This article has all of them. This is topical doom-mongering, which always works for clicks, but speaks nothing to substance.
> What nobody understands is that this is not happening strictly because of the war or the drought, but because of the fragility of the global food system, which simply cannot bear any shocks.
Your logic seems strange: "he didn't die because of a car crash, he died because his car didn't resist being smashed into a tree"
Sure, any system could be made more or less fragile, and you could argue that making it less fragile would have lessened the impact, but you can't say that "this is not happening because of the war" - of course it is
You would think that with a food catastrophe on the way - the current administration's finest minds wouldn't be encouraging even higher corn prices (already at a 10 year high in April) with this mix of legislative action:
> Washington announced the EPA will allow a 50% increase in corn-based biodiesel and ethanol fuel mix for the summer. On April 12 the Secretary of Agriculture announced a “bold” initiative by the US Administration to increase the use of domestically-grown corn-ethanol biofuels
Or with what I can only call absolutely diabolical sabotage of food production:
CF Industries of Deerfield, Illinois, the largest US supplier of nitrogen fertilizers as well as a vital diesel engine additive, issued a press release stating that:
"On Friday, April 8, 2022, Union Pacific informed CF Industries without advance notice that it was mandating certain shippers to reduce the volume of private cars on its railroad effective immediately."
"The timing of this action by Union Pacific could not come at a worse time for farmers. Not only will fertilizer be delayed by these shipping restrictions, but additional fertilizer needed to complete spring applications may be unable to reach farmers at all. By placing this arbitrary restriction on just a handful of shippers, Union Pacific is jeopardizing farmers’ harvests and increasing the cost of food for consumers."
CF has made urgent appeals to the government for remedy, so far with no positive action
Wasn’t there an HN discussion recently about how rail operators were running extremely long trains which are more economically efficient for the operators, but much more likely to derail (causing physical and pollution damage to communities)?
Also ask yourself why Union Pacific is imposing these restrictions?
Maybe it might have something to do with the latest rage in the world financial markets? Blackrock and the WEF set up ESG certifying companies that award ESG ratings and punish those that don't comply. So you have companies forced to push for completely bonkers restrictions and policies because they're mandated to top down:
Union Pacific is acting to try to improve their "operating ratio" according to the current management fad that they've fallen prey to.
CF Industries is begging the administration, not because the administration is in a plot to cause this, but because Union Pacific isn't listening. (And also because the government just had hearings about the incompetence of railroads under the current management fad.) CF is just looking for some lever that will keep UP from damaging CF's business.
No, I don't think Blackrock or the WEF have anything to do with it. It has to do with Canadian National, and then Canadian Pacific, adopting Precision Scheduled Railroading, and improving their operating ratios by doing so, and every other major railroad (except maybe BNSF) jumping on the bandwagon. But in doing so, UP is driving away some traffic (not just food- or fertilizer-related), in the hope that net profit will go up.
This has all been building for a decade or so. It's nothing related to the current geopolitical and economic situation.
It's even worse when you realize biofuel is bad for the environment.
> Third-generation biofuels do not represent a feasible option at present state of development as their GHG emissions are higher than those from fossil fuels. As also discussed in the paper, several studies show that reductions in GHG emissions from biofuels are achieved at the expense of other impacts, such as acidification, eutrophication, water footprint and biodiversity loss. The paper also investigates the key methodological aspects and sources of uncertainty in the LCA of biofuels and provides recommendations to address these issues.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7735313/
> Our study examined data from 2005-2013 during this sharp increase in renewable fuel use. Rather than assuming that producing and using biofuels was carbon-neutral, we explicitly compared the amount of CO2 absorbed on cropland to the quantity emitted during biofuel production and consumption.
Existing crop growth already takes large amounts of CO2 out of the atmosphere. The empirical question is whether biofuel production increases the rate of CO2 uptake enough to fully offset CO2 emissions produced when corn is fermented into ethanol and when biofuels are burned.
Most of the crops that went into biofuels during this period were already being cultivated; the main change was that farmers sold more of their harvest to biofuel makers and less for food and animal feed. Some farmers expanded corn and soybean production or switched to these commodities from less profitable crops.
But as long as growing conditions remain constant, corn plants take CO2 out of the atmosphere at the same rate regardless of how the corn is used. Therefore, to properly evaluate biofuels, one must evaluate CO2 uptake on all cropland. After all, crop growth is the CO2 “sponge” that takes carbon out of the atmosphere.
When we performed such an evaluation, we found that from 2005 through 2013, cumulative carbon uptake on U.S. farmland increased by 49 teragrams (a teragram is one million metric tons). Planted areas of most other field crops declined during this period, so this increased CO2 uptake can be largely attributed to crops grown for biofuels. Over the same period, however, CO2 emissions from fermenting and burning biofuels increased by 132 teragrams. Therefore, the greater carbon uptake associated with crop growth offset only 37 percent of biofuel-related CO2 emissions from 2005 through 2013. In other words, biofuels are far from inherently carbon-neutral.
https://theconversation.com/biofuels-turn-out-to-be-a-climat...
Meta rant: You know a thread is compromised by sock-puppets when "Article photo is pretty badass" is one of the top comments in the thread, ahead of criticisms about the article.
That's just a typical high noise comment that no longer gets downvoted into oblivion like it used to. It was a top comment due to HN's comment ranking system weighting new comments towards the top for a while.
"Farmers have nowhere to store their next harvest, due to start in late June, which may therefore rot."
In Saskatchewan (where I grew up on a farm), when the grain bins get full, some farmers put their grain in shops or sheds normally used for storing farm machinery. Others put it in long giant plastic bags out in their fields. Others build makeshift plywood cylinders on some bare land (such as an already-harvested field). In short, farmers will do what they can to protect their harvests.
Ad hoc storage in Saskatchewan is for fall harvest and over winter storage. Rot isn't a concern when it is cold and dry.
In contrast Ukraine plants a higher percentage of fall crops harvesting in the summer and has about twice as much rainfall. Ad hoc storage is much more challenging. They'll try, but they'll lose a lot more crop than a Saskatchewan farmer would.
If you're in the West, it doesn't hurt to buy a couple big bags of rice from the local Indian market, and have some dried or canned beans handy, and cycle through them as you cook. A pallet of bottled water and a bag of charcoal don't hurt either. A dumb power outage or a downed wire or a tornado or something is much more likely than Red Dawn, but you'll still be happy to have all that.
If you have the setup where you've got that connected and make it work, that's a great idea. The neighbors next to my building have some on their roof--it's not too different from having batteries for your radio.
I was just researching this and the new Enphase IQ8 microinverters will run without grid power. You are correct though it is common for microinverters to require grid power to operate, which seems pretty surprising!
It's usually a safety feature. If there is a downed power line and you lose grid connection, energizing your (otherwise dead) side of the downed lines could easily kill the lineman who comes to fix it.
Oh certainly it is important to have some kind of cut-off to prevent back-feeding the power lines, but I thought that would just be part of the system design.
It is! The easiest design is to require existing grid stable power and supplement it. :)
Anything else is difficult to do reliably, and would generally require some kind of smart monitoring system, electrically actuated mains rated switch (not easy, cheap or durable it turns out), additional sensors, etc.
The design we're talking about just doesn't output power unless there is an existing sine wave to follow. Pretty foolproof, since anything that provided it would also be the one responsible for electrocuting the worker.
That makes sense! I guess being new to this it is just counter intuitive to think that you could install a big solar panel system and still suffer power outages. But I see what you mean.
I’m typing this from a computer I’m holding in my hand that’s more powerful than the ones used to put men on the moon. A box with three connections - grid, solar, and house (four if you have a battery) with sensors and disconnects and the smarts to not backfeed and electrocute linemen just doesn’t seem impossibly complex. Especially when we’re talking about home solar installs, which cost several thousand dollars to begin with. There’s got to be some other force at play here preventing this device, which is the most obvious way of implementing a supplementary power system connection, from being widespread.
Add in all the other stuff and an extra couple thousand to the cost of the solar installation is why it isn’t as common. Because most people don’t care enough to pay the extra amount. Some do.
If you wanted it enough to pay the extra, most electricians wouldn’t mind adding it in I’m sure.
To the breaker on your solar (or genset) the resistance of the neighborhood is gonna look indistinguishable from a short circuit so you'll need to at least disconnect from the grid if you want to power your house. From there your next problem is that solar panels don't handle being overloaded very well so you either need a ton of them ore batteries.
Often, but not always. There are a number of ways lines can and do fail that produce high impedance, including a tree downing a service connection, breaker tripping, etc.
2. Your appliances don't like brownouts and voltage dips whenever a cloud passes overhead. Try to run a house without a power buffer and you'll burn up power controllers all over your house.
Unfortunately the battery market is extremely tight due to so many car manufacturers trying to switch to BEVs ASAP and stressing the raw materials markets. That and COVID shortages. Prices are very high and availability is usually "8-12 month waitlist".
I wonder if it’s possible to retrofit a Tesla to work as a bootleg Powerwall in tandem with residential solar - should brownouts become a common thing.
My Google-fu isn’t strong enough to find anything on the topic that isn’t on the level of “tremendously sketchy YouTube video” and I’m not about to risk my car and house experimenting off the back of that sort of thing.
I don’t know about Tesla specifically but this is a thing that some EVs can do. The new Ford F-150 lightning can do it. This is generally called vehicle to grid, vehicle to load, or bidirectional charging. A quick search shows maybe Tesla hasn’t added it yet. But here’s some details on the Ford lightning setup:
The whole reason I wanted to take up camping was to understand what I can eat in an emergency situation. Now I own a camping stove, a few fuel canisters, some boil in bag rice, and a few large cans of plain freeze dried chicken and beef. Add in the charcoal BBQ and I'll have a feast the day the power goes out.
The benefit of backpacking as a hobby is not only testing gear and learning how to use it, but also having a means/excuse to rotate through an emergency freeze-dried food supply or MREs and/or learn how to forage and hunt/prepare small game. MREs are reasonably cheap, high calorie, long lasting, and if you strip them down to essentials can be reasonable weight. They don’t last forever on the shelf, but again, camping/backpacking/kayaking can give you an excuse to cycle out the oldest stuff.
Rice will be full of pest insect eggs. They'll hatch after a while (smallish count of months, likely).
You've got to freeze it (to kill the eggs) and then seal it (to keep more pests from getting in) and/or add stuff that'll kill anything that hatches very fast (IIRC diatomaceous earth is popular for this)
Other grains have similar pest problems, plus if it's wheat or similar and ground into flour (not e.g. whole wheat berries), it'll get worse over time from air exposure. Anything with the germ still on/in it will go rancid after a while, and the germ's full of nutrients so you really want that part if you can keep it.
Correct—it's doable, it just takes more material and planning than "buy bag of rice, stick bag in dry place in basement". Do that, you'll be sad when you try to use it in a year or three.
The alternative is maintaining a stock but constantly drawing it down & replenishing it, but it gets difficult to maintain a substantial reserve that way, unless you already eat your "apocalypse" diet most of the time, so go through a lot of the same things you've got in storage even during normal times—say, if you already eat rice & beans 5+ dinners a week. You're capped by the rate at which you go through those things in non-emergency times. Plus it takes some planning and ongoing monitoring/inventorying, which is a non-zero amount of work.
I'd expect a couple years at least. A quick Google gives common wisdom that you still want anti-weevil measures (bay leaves in the bag, the aforementioned diatomaceous earth) with that method.
My point with that part was just that you have to do the vacuum sealing (unless you're buying a product with all this taken care of, which I'd assume is expensive) and such, at least, which means more equipment and material than simply buying sealed (but not vacuum sealed) bags at the store and putting them on a shelf. Getting grains ready for long-term storage means more than just keeping mice and bugs and water out—you've gotta worry about oxygen, and about insect eggs already present in the grain, too. Just stuff one might not think of if one were to make the wrong assumptions.
[EDIT] Incidentally, trying to store all one's calories, at least more than enough for a week or two, might not be the right idea anyway, short of a truly horrible catastrophe like nuclear war—my great-grandparents and grandparents, who lived through the depression and World War II, respectively, didn't seem to be all that in to storing lots of grain. What they were into, big time, was canning vegetables, and gardening (to grow stuff to put in the cans). Man, were they ever into canning vegetables. I'd guess that's the result of some hard lessons about how to make it through hard times—plus, just, times before modern shipping and refrigeration when food availability dropped a whole bunch in Winter.
"What they were into, big time, was canning vegetables, and gardening (to grow stuff to put in the cans). Man, were they ever into canning vegetables."
I became aware of the world just as seasonal food availability was becoming a thing of the past—I remember significantly more seasonal variation, but only when I was pretty young—so this really stuck with me growing up. All those colorful jars lined up on shelves, all the gardening, all the boiling-of-jars, et c. All that work, and a can of the same thing was $0.29 at the store.
So I assume they all developed these super-similar habits for really great reasons. And since the ~1960s and earlier were just normally pretty similar to what a significant food shortage would probably look like now (at least in countries that will almost certainly be able to maintain adequate supplies of staples, like the US) it seems to me that might be a good first place to look. Stock up on canned veggies, worry less about the rest of it. Maybe get some chickens and plant some berry bushes (they also all loved keeping a line or two of berry bushes, and it seems like in their generations you just alway kept chickens, if you weren't smack in the middle of town)
I'm going to ramble a bit... I grew up on a farm in the actual middle of nowhere. It was a then-defunct, mid-size dairy. In it's heyday it had 300 head of Holstein being milked.
My mother, whose parents ran the dairy, and to a large extent my father, instilled this way of life on me at a young age. Growing up, we had a huge vegetable garden (they still maintain a 1/8 acre vegetable lot in their 70s, it's quite impressive, really -- and that's in addition to a 400 sq. ft. greenhouse I helped my father build and the rest of their lot that has fruit trees, berry bushes, etc.) but I was always in awe of the canning and the preserving. You grow all of this food but you only eat 20% of it fresh, canning and preserving the other 80%. But then, being so young I didn't realize that our meals consisted of vegetables/fruits that were canned or preserved years previously, of course. There was a strong communal aspect to it, too. We'd get oversupply from neighbors and/or give oversupply to neighbors.
Chickens, too. The farm had a coup. My parents had a coup (they gave it up in their late 60s -- my father grew tired of dealing with the foxes and skunks they attracted). It's something I want to do but where I live it's impossible. We're planning on a move where we can have a chicken coup and more space for growing food in general. I'd really like to preserve the heritage, as it were, and it's become more important as we start a family.
Also, I've dealt with corn and wheat weevils before. I actually did not realize that they also laid eggs on rice. I guess I assumed that it was "different" or whatever but thank you for highlighting that in other comments. I've got 50 lbs. of rice that I'm going to break down to smaller vacuum sealed bags this weekend. I've dealt with weevils at least a half of a dozen times in my past and it is not pleasant. I do not want a repeat of that mess, but especially where I live today.
Maybe the misunderstanding stems from a geographic difference. The rice I buy seems to come in an under a co2-atmosphere vacuum sealed bag that costs around $2 (or less on sale) per kg.
> What they were into, big time, was canning vegetables,
My grandmother did this too, after living her childhood through WW2 (in Germany), she used to have a repository of canned vegetables in the cellar. I sometimes talked to her about her rural live in the war-torn country, and she told me about soldiers, and all kinds of people, who would come by in war-time, where food was very sparse. And I think she maintained that sort of hoarding behavior throughout her life, based on the experiences she made as a child.
Interesting. Our (my part of the US) rice is mostly sold in small plastic bags (perhaps 1-2kg), or for some brands hard plastic containers; larger amounts come in either a much heavier opaque plastic bag (like pet/livestock feed, when it's not in a lined paper bag of some kind), or a thin clear plastic bag inside a rough cloth bag. If there are already-vacuum-sealed options here, I've not noticed them.
Reading some other comments, it is also possible that these bags aren't actually vacuum sealed. It is hard for me to tell how much of a barrier you need to get a good sealing, in particular to protect from rice weevils (bugs), which appear to be the biggest issue.
If you vacuum seal it with mylar lined bags and some oxygen absorbers, it can last up to 5 years, which is a long time.
Oxygen will get through normal plastic vacuum sealing bags and ruin the taste and eventually nutritional content otherwise after a year or two. Mylar lining stops most of that and the oxygen absorber gets the rest.
The thick bags will also stop rice moths from getting through (they are able to get through most cardboard and thin plastic bags), and the lack of oxygen will stop their eggs from hatching.
I've never seen anything like that and I've kept rice around for years as well. Do you live in a poor country where they don't have proper food protection agencies? If things like that hatched in food people bought from stores that would make the news, I've seen it in the news before so it can't happen that often.
This reminds me of something I read in Discover magazine around 20 years ago.
The gist of it was that immigrants in western Europe from various countries in Africa had developed nutritional deficiencies after immigrating. It appeared their diets were the same, perhaps better on paper, so it wasn't clear why their health was deteriorating.
It turned out that these people had diets rich in unwashed greens and vegetables, and they were likely consuming far more beneficial bacteria, insects, and minerals in their diets. They continued their mostly-vegetarian diets in Europe, but were no longer benefitting from what tended to accompany their foods before.
Not sure why I remember that. Regardless, we should all be eating dirt and weevils.
> Do you live in a poor country where they don't have proper food protection agencies?
USA.
So, I mean, kinda.
But, unless they're irradiating or freezing your rice before it gets to the store, there are rice weevil eggs in it. They're inside the rice grains. If you've eaten much rice, you've eaten rice weevil eggs.
Probably comes from grain storage locations in warmer climates then. I can't find anyone talking about these online in my local language which is to the north, we have no native pests like these so they all only live inside houses. There are other weevils, but they are very rare and mostly comes from other sources and starts eating your bread etc, they don't come from packages you get in the store. Nobody said there is a problem storing these things long term, instead you get rid of them by getting rid of all their eggs in your kitchen.
The eggs don't hatch right away, can take months or years, but most people buy rice to eat right now, not to stockpile, so it's mostly consumed before the weevils hatch. And when they do, it's just a known nuisance, not worth reporting.
I cannot find anyone talking about rice weevils in my language online, so I really doubt finding them is a common thing everywhere. If it is that impossible to get rid of them then it is probably a climate thing, they are common in your climate but not in my climate.
So the advice would be to look at local pests and how to avoid having those in your storage. We still have other kinds of weevils but they are not everywhere like you say rice weevils are, you are unlikely to have them in packages meant for humans so storing things long term is fine.
I have seen rice stay without any problems for more than a year. It was dried under hot sun for hours before storing. Most likely, the extreme heat took care of the weevils and the lack of moisture had a protective effect on the rice.
They take the rice out and soak it (as in soaking, not washing) like beans before cooking. Probably for re-hydrating it.
Eek. Ideally, you don't have a bag of rice for months and months at a time, though, you have a bag of rice and once you've used up most of it, you buy a new bag of rice, etc. There is kind of an inherent assumption that the person doing this is fond of eating rice.
I recently looked into how much rice I'd need to survive for a year. The results were fairly surprising. A kilogram of uncooked rice only provide you with about 3500 kcal, less than you'd use in 2 days of time (for the average human). So you'd need quite a lot of rice. Beans are similar, they just have more protein (not a complete protein though).
I concluded that while it is definitely advisable to have some number of days/weeks in storage, it doesn't seem feasible to store enough food to last a prolonged period of time (unless you go all-in on prepping, which has its limits). We humans are as successful as we are because we cooperate with other humans, and on our own we're pretty powerless. So fostering community might be the best way to advert crisis.
I still don't advise going in 100% on rice as beri-beri is an issue (or heavy metal issues if you go all brown rice).
A good mix of canned goods, dried goods and reliable water will help. Even in a shortage you will probably have some access, but limited access.
I strongly advise against bottled water for emergencies. It is the worst possible solution for cost/size/availability. You can buy 6 gallon aquatainers and fill them with tap water for an easy (and useful for camping) solution. Rotate every six months and you don't need secondary treatment.
Otherwise a food grade 55 gallon drum is $100 and you can fill it from your tap. You will want secondary treatment options if you plan to rotate just every 2 years, and you still need a smaller intermediary vessel.
Speak for yourself! I’m biking distance from a lake, so I’m going to focus on having enough bleach around. Bottled water is great… for bottles to do solar disinfection with. Though I guess I should really be worried about an algal bloom… ugh.
220gal IBCs should be $100 too, but maybe they’re more now.
Right, its always a good idea to have short term reserves but it's way more important to build out local and regional resilience and a less vulnerable, more robust, diverse food supply
You're forgetting about your fats. A 5 gal container of oil contains about 153,000 calories.
Every time you cook rice, beans, spit peas, lentils, etc. you put in a few tablespoons of oil or fat to keep it from boiling over, and to add flavor and calories. Each tablespoon is about 120 calories. When you make hummus, refried beans, tamales or spanish rice you generally add in a considerable amount more fats.
For sure. When making my emergency kit (my oldest has severe food allergies and I live in a major earthquake zone), I ran across some issues with things with high fat content though (which I believe bran might be). Unless you’re very careful with removing oxygen, the fat can go rancid after awhile (from months to years depending on the specific oils).
If you're going for shelf life I've eaten canned chili that was more than 15 years old and it was fine. Most things seem to change texture in unpleasant ways sitting in a can that long but chili doesn't. Not that it's viable to live off of in terms of calories and storage space, just an interesting observation about shelf life.
Carbs are not optional for survival. MREs are overwhelmingly carbs for a reason. Pure protein sources lack carbs. Beans and rice don't have this problem.
Isn't this one of the reasons why farm subsidies exist in the US? Paying farmers not to farm so in time of need or emergency we can produce more? (In addition to not over farming soil and depleting it permanently, keeping the price of food in a range to support farmers livelyhood)
I am refusing to agree that it is all "Putin's fault". The war is his decision and is not to understand from the normal Western position. However, it is the decision of the West to sanction Russia and to
1) accept increasing energy prices
2) accept a lower fertilizer production
3) break up supply chains even further
4) accept the refugee crisis, the costs of entering this war as a proxy combatant, sending tens of billions to not let the enemy win
5) ... and ultimately win and accept the even worse consequences: pouring billions into a corrupt Ukraine to rebuild it, deal with a terrible unbalanced post-war society (women who came to the West will stay, men will find no women in UA after the war; young people will stay in Europe, while UA population will be much older on average after the war) and finally a Russia crisis that could be something like the "crazy 90s 2.0" or a Russia that broke into many unstable post-Russian republics.
I am saying this as a person with UKRANIAN ROOTS.
The West has decided to fight for some "Western values" and now all people living here have to accept the costs and long-term consequences.
We had the chance to open up and help substantially during the crazy 90s when the post-Soviet economies dropped GDPwise to the 1960s/1970s levels, average male life expectancy dropped by 10-12 years, life-savings were destroyed, criminals became ultra-rich and were welcomed in Zurich, New York and London with open arms. We did not.
We had the chance to open the EU and NATO towards the Russian in the 00s, even when the Russian came crawling to the Berlin Bundestag and suggested to draw a path towards this direction and were rejected hardly.
We had the chance for a compromise, e.g. through the Normandy format when ALL relevant parties agreed more or less except the Americans.
This all does not make the invasion right, but it is not as one-sided as the propaganda is showing it here right now. And this is why agree with your statement that real life is not not as simple as "good" and "bad", it is all just bad - on all sides.
And just another anecdote. As we are originally from Ukraine, I went down to the border with friends, money and cars and helped people at the border to make the right decisions. We mainly focussed on people withough language skills, old people and people with very very very little money. I had the chance to speak to hundreds of Ukranians crossing the border to the EU. 90% DO NOT CARE who "rules" them. They have their dreams, hopes, they have their apartments, their jobs, their pets, friends, homes... they just want this war to be over - even if Putin "wins".
When watching Western news and reports I dont see those opinions represented in the same way I experienced them when talking to people. I see stories about values and democracy and other philosophical stuff - and when they show Ukranians then it is not those who I have met.
Where is the opinion of the normal folks that I have met: the war should end asap, no matter who wins. Instead I feel spoon-fed that we HAVE TO PAY THE PRICE for $VALUES. And then you speak to people who have absolutly NO CLUE and NO RELATION to either Ukraine or even Russia and they are so opinionated and SOOOO SURE about the things that must be done and the price that has to be paid.
I feel very frustrated and I stopped telling people about my experience at the border or here when volunteering and ACTUALLY speaking to the REAL people.
One part of me agrees with this. War is the worst (as far as i know from books and tv).
The other part of me thinks: That is how Germany expanded half a century ago, getting resources for ww2.
(thug perceives the pacifist as a weakling and an easy opportunity to profit).
Ukraine has a lot of natural resources, part of the reason for the war.
One of my theories it happened the way it did is that the US at that time was far weaker and spent from the Cold War than it let on. That it was fiscally more of a close a call as WW2 prevailing fiscal standards were, and the US simply did not have it within itself to financially support another rebuilding like it did with Germany and Japan. The US possibly also expected that if Russia integrated with Europe, the US would underwrite most of the check, the NATO alliance would absorb the benefits, dissolve, turn around and economically compete with the US after the US just exhausted itself from the extended effort.
Please ELI5 because I'm not following your anecdote. For your "90%" figure to make sense to me, you'd have to be able to draw the line connecting the dots that explains how 10% of the Ukrainian population can coerce however many remain in Ukraine to join that 10% and put up sufficiently organized resistance to stall Russian forces. The widespread expectation at the beginning was that too few Ukrainians would put up a fight (your "90%") and it was time to cede all of Ukraine like Crimea was ceded and move on.
How do we get from that expectation to the reality on the ground where the titular second most powerful military in the world was supposed to steamroller through Kyiv in a few days but is now bogged down in a conflict it now admits to its own citizens might be a long slog, on only 10% popular support of Ukrainians? I find it more plausible that 90% of those at the border might have this attitude, but that is still a minority fraction of the total population remaining in the country. Perhaps 90% of those fleeing are predisposed to just wanting it to all be over no matter who rules them?
And why would these people trust Putin's word that he wouldn't implement a modern Holodomor if they just let him have Ukraine, even as he's shipping grain away from Ukraine by the metric thousand-ton right now? And what would they feel if the rest of the world turned their backs on Ukraine in such a scenario because 90% "just want this war to be over - even if Putin 'wins'" and Ukraine is definitely a part of the Russian Federation instead of a currently-recognized sovereign state, and strategic nuclear weapons are instantly in play in that scenario to wrest control of Ukraine-the-Russian-Federation-territory from Russia?
Once Ukraine is under a vengeful narcissist's thumb with the other thumb on the nuclear trigger, just what exactly do you think will happen, Slavic brotherhood rainbows and unicorns? If that 90% ever existed in reality at all, then it lost its chance at any kind of "just want this war to be over" in the first week or two.
633 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 327 ms ] threadI wonder which countries are most at risk? I read somewhere that the Arab countries get a lot of Ukrainian wheat.
Here in the UK restrictions on labelling sunflower oil now mean it’s acceptable to adulterate it with other oils. My family has switched to using rapeseed oil where we can (except for deep frying, it stinks). I’d recommend eating less meat even if that means eating more grain products, it’s a more efficient use of the resource. For the well off we can weather this just fine, but we can still help by reducing our use of the scarcest resources.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-02/war-choki...
> A subsidized flatbread loaf in Egypt sells for the equivalent of about 1 U.S. cent. The country allocates five loaves a day to people in the program and uses the public treasury to compensate bakers for their losses.
> An attempt in the late 1970s by then-President Anwar Sadat to end subsidies on basic foodstuffs triggered riots that left more than 80 people dead, so the government since has resorted to workarounds such as shrinking the size of loaves.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/egypt-eyes-bread-s...
> CAIRO, Feb 1 (Reuters) - Egypt is considering replacing a popular bread subsidy with cash payments for the poor to protect the budget from soaring global wheat prices, but domestic inflation and a history of protests could make the government opt for a less ambitious reform.
> Under the existing program, more than 60 million Egyptians, or nearly two thirds of the population, get 5 loaves of round bread daily for 50 cents a month, little changed since countrywide "bread riots" prevented a price hike in the 1970s.
Do you have a source for this claim? I'm interested since I'm using sunflower oil here in the UK.
Tesco labels its sunflower oil as "pure sunflower oil", it also has an ingredient list of "sunflower oil" [1].
Asda only labels it "sunflower oil", it doesn't have an ingredient list (at least on the website), but it states that the "regulated product name" is "sunflower oil" [2]
From the two the Asda one looks more suspicious, but I don't know what the regulation is. My suspicion is that regulation is for the label "sunflower oil", and Tesco goes out of its way to clarify that it doesn't contain other oils, or otherwise why risk putting "pure" there?
[1] https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/271168790
[2] https://groceries.asda.com/product/cooking-oil/asda-sunflowe...
the vast majority of them have no independent editorial team with a track record of credibility
1. https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/us-corn-based-e...
Ethanol subsidies let farmers already invested in corn grow more corn than they might otherwise sell for food, and politicians get to say they're doing something for renewable energy.
As with so many other things in politics, the good of society isn't the driving factor. Money and talking points are king.
Looks like that rotation is pretty common but there are some details to concern oneself with.
https://extension.okstate.edu/fact-sheets/considerations-whe...
Wheat is also a viable winter crop --- fall planting / spring harvest for "winter wheat". That typically means 2 crops a year (winter + summer), and possibly more.
Rice is the third staple crop, though it wants a lot of water, and tends to be grown in subtropical climates as with China and India.
Other substitutes include barley, oats, millet, etc., though those are far less prevelant than wheat & maize.
There are required varieties and practices for growing corn intended for direct human consumption (i.e. making cornmeal or breakfast cereal).
Most corn though goes to animal feed, industrial uses (corn starch, syrup, etc), or export.
(source: am a 5th generation corn farmer)
The main differences are days to maturity, resistances to a variety of things, and nutrition content.
Many people are suggesting eating less meat to help potential food shortages, switching corn to wheat actually loses about as much food as feeding corn to cattle. (i.e. a cornfield switched to wheat and a cornfield fed to cattle would result in a similar number of calories)
We indeed should stop producing ethanol, but plenty of hungry people around the world could be just as happy eating corn as wheat.
Saskatchewan isn’t going to support a big corn crop, but wheat, pulses and oats do very well.
Nothing can be just 'news'. Its all framed as a signal of collapse.
The next night, the boy cried out "Wolf! Wolf!" And while the wolf was at the gate, it didn't seem to be hurting anybody. After all, the boy and his village were fine still, and there could be benefits to the wolf.
The third night, the boy did not cry wolf. The villagers discovered him dead the next morning next to the village free-range wolf. A great meeting was held, and it was decided that since most people were safe and secure and able to live their lives normally, we must all adapt to the new normal and learn to live with the wolf.
Doom sells, don't buy it.
Economic cycles, political unrest, diseases, on and on and on, these things always have existed and constantly will ebb and flow, while people will pretend what's happening now is the worst its ever been because grabbing your attention is profitable and gives people the sense that their life has meaning.
We weren't living in an idyllic world n years ago, we're not living in one now, we won't be living in one in the future. The things that suck just kind of rotate from time to time. Things remain pretty ok.
"We're all going to die" is the default state of reality. What matters is "when" and "how".
Methinks journalists need to buy a thesaurus.
Any other publications (paid or free) I should be looking at?
Also UK-based.
…but be reallllll careful thinking through the consequences of “any means necessary”, because a lot of those means end in a huge escalation of the conflict which further reduces access to minerals and food. (And, like, human lives.)
I hear people saying that, but this is very short term with no sustainable strategy.
Just genuinely pointing out he could be replaced by worse options, and you need to plan against it as well.
There is the guy, the system he built, the persons he chose to put in place, all incentivised to continue.
He'll die anyway sooner or later, and there will be a struggle for power regardless. Russia has a constitution, and article 81 describes how to get a new president via elections.
Current paranoid leader is waging major war and isolating the country, so it's hard to say what could be worse for the world. Maybe mobilization in Russia, but that may be a tough call for any newcomer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belling_the_Cat
what would taking out Bush Jr. in the early phase of operation Iraqi Freedom accomplish? would the next guy immediately withdraw from Iraq and apologize to the world for the past wrongdoings?
Guess who's #2, and under major international sanctioning? Between them, they're about 50% of worldwide production.
Even if that's not the case, a live war has to decrease productivity immensely.
Oh, that's new. How exactly do they do that?
There are unfortunately a lot of problems here which make me seriously pessimistic:
- Ukraine will need a lot of the harvest for itself, given how Russians raided crop silos [1] and what they can't raid they bomb to pieces [2]
- No one knows if Russian operatives didn't poison crop silos - there are a number of poisons that are very stable in the environment and very hard to detect if you don't know what you are looking for, and Russians have proven over and over that they have an awful lot of skill in dealing with poisons
- Russians looted a lot of agricultural machinery, and a lot more got destroyed or seriously damaged - and the Ukrainians repurposed a lot of stuff either to tow off Russian tanks or to convert into technicals
- fertilizer is made of natural gas which is in short supply, which in turn will massively impact yields
- similar to the post-war situation in Yugoslavia, fields will need to be de-mined extensively, and they need to be cleansed off of shrapnel and fuel
- even if there are quantities to export, you need a way to transport them. The railroad track width is different in Ukraine (Russian wide-gauge) and Europe (standard), there aren't many re-trackable cargo wagons, a lot of rail equipment and bridges got blasted by Russians or by Ukrainians for sabotage. God knows in what state the sea ports are, there has been heavy fighting, not to mention the sea mines that are already causing chaos [3]
All in all it will be years if not decades until Ukraine can be a serious player on the crop market again.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/05/05/europe/russia-ukraine-gra...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/exclusive-photos-show-russian-...
[3] https://www.dw.com/en/experts-warn-black-sea-mines-pose-seri...
it's funny you should mention 5, as that is exactly the amount of countries out of 180+ that voted to support russia, including russia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden
A garden is great, but it's not gonna solve a global food crisis.
Victory gardens, also called war gardens or food gardens for defense, were vegetable, fruit, and herb gardens planted at private residences and public parks in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Germany during World War I and World War II. In wartime, governments encouraged people to plant victory gardens not only to supplement their rations but also to boost morale. They were used along with rationing stamps and cards to reduce pressure on the public food supply.
Source?
https://www.thespruce.com/how-many-vegetables-per-person-in-...
> To grow all the food for one person's needs for the whole year requires, for most people, at least 4,000 square feet—though some diet designs are possible that can use a smaller area.
https://permaculturism.com/how-much-land-does-it-take-to-fee...
> A 0.44 acre of land can produce enough vegetables and fruits to meet up with the daily calories needed for one person to feed for a year.
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 1993:
> It is realistic to suppose that the absolute minimum of arable land to support one person is a mere 0.07 of a hectare–and this assumes a largely vegetarian diet, no land degradation or water shortages, virtually no post-harvest waste, and farmers who know precisely when and how to plant, fertilize, irrigate, etc.
> The minimum amount of agricultural land necessary for sustainable food security, with a diversified diet similar to those of North America and Western Europe (hence including meat), is 0.5 of a hectare per person. This does not allow for any land degradation such as soil erosion, and it assumes adequate water supplies.
Cut out meat and it gets better, but not that much better.
"One 4 × 4 Square Foot Garden box (16 square feet) will supply enough produce to make a salad for one adult every day of the growing season." [0]
0. Bartholomew, Mel. All New Square Foot Gardening, 3rd Edition, Fully Updated: MORE Projects NEW Solutions GROW Vegetables Anywhere (p. 61). Cool Springs Press. Kindle Edition.
https://squarefootgardening.org/
I was tempted to leave their corpses on her doorstep and egg the municipal building as a petty sort of revenge, but that would have been too obvious.
Those chickens were good eating, though, especially with some homegrown corn on the cob and baked beans. The squash didn't work out so well, unfortunately.
Never really bothered me since they mostly just hung out around the back fence far from my house, but finally another neighbor complained to the city and they had to get rid of the chickens. Chickens are allowed here (up to 10 per property), but have to be kept confined and on your own property.
If they hated my garden and chickens, they’re really gonna hate my 40’ Rohn and guidewires!
Is it for shortwave or ham radio?
I'm sorry
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law
Please keep that sort of slur off HN. We don't need it here, and you don't need it to make your substantive points.
Edit: I've added the context back by quoting what the GP originally said. I guess one good passive-aggressive stealth edit deserves another.
Though, in this specific context, appending something like "Edit: 's/Karens/vigilantes/g'" would be the unambiguous way to document the edit.
- Getting snarky because they did the reasonable thing and got rid of the slur after it was pointed out
- Calling said user a dick. If Karen is a misogynistic slur, How is dick not moreso misandristic? I realize you said "dick move", but that's functionally the same. Saying something was a "c?nt move" or a "n????r move" would be tantamount to calling someone a c?nt or n????r.
- Because maybe it made your comment "look stupid"
Jawdropping desecration of the guidelines. You need a vacation.
Edit: look you guys, We're not Bowdlers and have never been interested in language policing but I wouldn't have thought this was a borderline case.
A Karen is no more an inappropriate slur than many other useful words and phrases that are negative, such as goody-two-shoes, busybody, bully, crank, etc.
I don’t see how it helps to ban negative words.
Dang is totally in the right to scold people for saying this.
I think that may be an overly heated response.
Given that I have seen the term used as a pronoun applied to multiple genders, sex preferences, races, ethnicities, etc, I see the term as speaking to behaviors, rather than being a pejorative unique to a group. Here are good examples of it being applied across multiple ethnicities and genders [1] & [2] . There is even a transgender karen [3] .
Normally it is applied to people acting improperly, hall-monitor type of behaviors where it is not warranted. Someone maliciously reporting food growing in a backyard meets the definition.
Please don't make decisions based off Wikipedia [4] or dictionary.com [5] redefining a word to meet a specific agenda.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gncDv1GNF4
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0msiW0mEVo
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5Wj9GqsmAI
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_(slang)
[5] https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/karen/
Au contraire.
The word Karen reaching a tipping point in public awareness associated with the Gamestop incident I already pointed out. Many of us have seen it. We're aware of it, we know about it. And we know it is potent, otherwise it wouldn't be on the chopping block for redefinition. And forever, when I think of the word Karen, I think of that particular incident.
The word in that sense, has a great deal of similarity with a tiny little phrase, of a mere two words.
Mission Accomplished.
Whether tearful, premature, ironic, deceptive, tragic, or an example of great hubris, many of us living will forever associate those two words with George W. Bush on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, and the incalculable human suffering of an unpopular war. The friends we lost after that, and military adventurism run amok. The missing Weapons of Mass Destruction. So much is wrapped up in those two words. And forever, when I think of the phrase Mission Accomplished, I think of that particular speech.
Please do not tell me that HN is going to redefine a word for me, whether it is Karen, or Mission Accomplished, or some other phrase.
We don't need civilized pejoratives that are completely decent for dinner table talk to be conflated with uncivilized utterances not fit for the written or spoken word.
Dang should not become a speech dictator.
Directing tropey slurs at people is mostly not ok on HN and it's been moderated like that for ages.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
It's not super-complicated.
I've provided numerous examples of how it isn't restricted to a specific group and is instead aimed at behaviors.
It is quite similar to the word milquetoast. A mild pejorative aimed at a behavior.
Please stop reaching and trying to conflate it with racial or ethnic slurs.
Better than your previous phrasing, but try again; if the action that they took was to report you to the government then they are the opposite of a vigilante by definition.
The economies of scale in industrial farming are insane. The ROI on a personal garden is abysmally low, except for herbs and other low-volume plants.
So I read this book called "How Asia Works" which documented the economic transformations of a few different Asian countries.
I was shocked to learn that in a lot of cases, the industrial farming not the huge boon that was expected efficiently a few people can grow things with intensely you can plant small plot farms.
Countries that promoted small-scale household farming instead of moving too soon to large scale farming were more successful, but this was largely because the labor pool can't transition that fast to going from farmers being everyone one in ten overnight.
We live at a time where very few people work in farming, the smallest amount in history. Why can't it slide back the other way?
Promoting small-scale farming and industry lead to widespread poverty and famine in cultural revolution China.
> very few people work in farming, the smallest amount in history. Why can't it slide back the other way?
It could, but this would probably be a pretty bad thing. I guess it depends how many people who currently have fake bullshit jobs transition to being farm workers. My guess is that almost everyone who would go into an expanded ag labor base is currently doing some actually useful work, and we would suffer a severe net decrease in labor output, if we tanked farming efficiency.
In this specific example, there might have been other causes.
In general I agree with you, getting the entire US to "go Amish" isn't viable. Just picking on your example which leaves out some of the details about how the transition was "promoted".
Depends whether you're gardening for a global food shortage, or to supplement your own use, which I suspect is why most people have home gardens.
A home garden can supply a significant fraction of your food - especially if you do canning or otherwise preserve for winter use.
From the link in the parent post:
Fruit and vegetables harvested in these home and community plots was estimated to be 9,000,000–10,000,000 short tons (8,200,000–9,100,000 t) in 1944, an amount equal to all commercial production of fresh vegetables
No, the effect on supply is the same.
> A home garden can supply a significant fraction of your food
It takes 5+ acres in a decently arable region with fertilizer to feed one person. By the time you're providing for a significant fraction of your caloric intake, it ceases to be a "garden".
> an amount equal to all commercial production of fresh vegetables
I guarantee this is some misleading bullshit statistic. They've probably selected "fresh vegetables" to mean some very small subset of industrial agriculture, like vegetables that are never canned or frozen.
well, no, if you're growing for personal use you can make a notable effect on your own supply/food costs. You don't have to solve the global food shortage to benefit from a personal garden and since the global food shortage will drive up prices, the financial benefit is even greater (as long as price increases in things like fertilizer don't eat up your cost savings).
It doesn't matter if a piece of corn is made in your garden or on a farm. The net effect on the corn supply is identical.
It takes orders of magnitude more input to grow a piece of corn in a garden than on a farm. That had better be offset by the personal enjoyment of the gardener.
Yes, I tried to be clear:
Depends whether you're gardening for a global food shortage, or to supplement your own use, which I suspect is why most people have home gardens.
No one's backyard garden in the USA is going to help feed someone in Africa, but even if the global food shortage doesn't mean food shortages in the USA, it's going to drive up prices, and a backyard garden can help offset that household expense.
It's also probably wrong that a home garden will net save you money unless you make like $3/hr. Again, unless you're extracting pleasure from gardening.
Yes, that's why I quoted it specifically and clarified that I was talking about a home garden.
It's also probably wrong that a home garden will net save you money unless you make like $3/hr. Again, unless you're extracting pleasure from gardening.
The people that benefit the most financially from a home garden are already low paid - those are the people that aren't going to struggle to afford food as prices rise. My sister has been gardening for years, a couple years ago she kept a spreadsheet and added up her savings based on retail prices of produce and her "revenue" from her garden (which covers most of the back yard of her 1/2 acre lot plus one apple tree) was over $2500 after deducting expenses (excluding labor).
She estimated around 2 hours/day tending the garden for a 6 month growing season, so that's around 360 hours of work, or around $7/hour, which is better than she'd take home working a minimum wage job and in exchange they get all of the organic produce they can eat in the summer, plus a lot of frozen or canned food in the winter. And she ends up giving a lot of it away to friends/family.
For a lot of people here, putting in 360 hours of work to earn "only" $2500 worth of food sounds like a terrible bargain, but for many people in this country, that's a great bargain.
I'm sorry, but I just can't believe that. Is that fudged to account for livestock or waste or something? A single acre is what, 40*100m? That's huge, you could feed a whole family all year on potatoes, peanuts, greens, squash etc
This is incorrect, it takes around 1/2 an acre if it's vegetarian or 1.5 acres including chickens/ducks for meat and eggs. That's using a traditional organic farming. If you use Hydroponics (Plants grown in water with no soil) or Aeroponics (Hydroponics grown in towers) or Aquaponics (Hydroponics with aquaculture, where the fish provide both protein and the fertilizer for the plants) the yield is dramatically higher (5x-10x per sq ft) can be done year round and indoors. It's not a perfect solution, it takes knowledge to setup and run, a very small capital investment for startup, and a constant power source. That said it IS commercially viable, you can already today buy produce produced this way in almost any grocery store, and it's viable for home production. I personally have several systems running in my apartment ranging from off the shelf commercial systems (AeroGarden Back to the Roots...) to custom built aquaponics systems. On a pure dollar level it's more expensive per lb of food, no doubt but within reason I don't care about that. I grow better and fresher food and most importantly I control the supply chain.
We can and should use these kind of technologies to replace as much of the modern agriculture system as we possibly can. No of the this mentions the MASSIVE environmental improvement that switching to these systems would make, which is reason enough to do it.
It seems to me that the more people who supplement their food supply with goods that don’t depend on imported supply (home or community gardens) lessens demand fractionally on the general supply, which fractionally helps with local pricing and household budgets, both of which are positives.
I’m not sure it’s ever been a requirement of victory gardens to be completely autonomous unless ur a hardcore prepper.
The backyard gardener doesn’t quite have those worries and could get higher land efficiency.
Where are you?
I’m near Toronto, started my seedlings indoors ~6 weeks ago, and already eating small kale leaves and lettuce that’s somehow growing in the grass.
A dying apple tree gave me more than I could eat for 2-3 months last year. Gonna plant a pear tree in the front yard.
I love visiting my parents while it’s going apeshit. Crisp pears all day.
The last few years I planted I got my starts going real early in my basement and we had an early spring and I was over the moon. But I had a few cold springs that didn't warm up until June and had to replant multiple times. Rookie mistakes and bad luck. :)
There are tons of good ideas out there about preserving your own food. But, I agree, that a small garden won't take a big bite out of your food needs. You're not trying to become self-sufficient, you're trying to lower your reliance on store-bought food.
That's huge; I haven't seen anything like that, even in the deep country where I grew up, where people (farmers) almost didn't buy anything but grew and processed most of their stuff. Their gardens hardly ever went over a 1/4 of an acre, I'd say, that was already pretty large and provided for filling quite a number of jar of tomatoes and beans and stuff.
Didn't your parents sell anything?
Using 400-500 sq ft, I get enough potatoes for a family of 3. Not that potato is our only staple food, but...
I mean, I produce about 800 lbs of vegetables by spending 20 mn a day on it (average on 365 days, which means more at times and nothing at other times). Surely it requires more space that you had. But no motorised tool involved, no fertiliser but a tiny bit of manure (no fancy permaculture tricks either, just traditional beds), no pesticide except in case of emergency like once a year on 10% of the garden, no watering except in case of emergency again, no search of any optimisation (time, space, yield, ...). It isn't a bid deal to get a partial yet significant autonomy; it just gets harder and harder as you want to get close to 100%.
There are stuff you can keep across winter in storage without transformation, like potatoes or cereals (onions, shallot don't do bad either); and stuff that can be kept where they lie, in the ground, like parsnip, sunchoke, and a few other root vegetables; cabbage can stay too, leeks as well. (Of course, it depends on the geographical location.)
Yeah, a base of potatoes + cabbages + onions get you a long way; and they are quite versatile as far as cooking is concerned.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B9bMqnjv2RE
Slugs will eat 1/2 a tomato in a night.
-Use raised beds or Hugelkulture to increase yields. -Use sq foot gardening to plant more in less space -Develop a three stage compost pile. Import food waste from others in your neighborhood if needs be. -Grow year round with cold frames -Use cover crops to enrich soil over winter
Thats how you garden to eat my friends
https://www.amazon.com/How-Grow-More-Vegetables-Possible/dp/...
5gal buckets my friend. Cheap or free if you keep a lookout or have winemaking friends. Free-$2 per bucket for food grade. Pretty much the cheapest you’ll get per gallon of plant space. But I use ours to increase our garden space onto valueless concrete surfaces.
No. Europe is pretty much self-sufficient for vital crops. The problem is China [1] and the fact that Africa doesn't have much of its own once famous agricultural power left after decades of European and American "donations" - hard to compete against donated products...
[1] https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Datawatch/China-hoards-ove...
https://circabc.europa.eu/sd/a/a1135630-e8e9-4531-a522-23670... 2021/2022 despite the file name
Additionally, if we stop rising live-stock, where roughly 10 units of plant create one unit of meat, there should be even more calories available.
The energy market is willing to outbid the food market, so I wouldn't expect the conversion of agricultural inputs into fuel outputs to decelerate.
Eventually, that effect should bring down the amount that energy companies want to pay for corn. But lots of people might starve first...
Someone who's poor and starving will direct their own very limited economic purchasing power toward food. But the marketas a whole includes those who are wealthy (far fewer in number, but individually having vastly greater purchasing power), who might prioritise energy purchases generally.
It's not the poor's own food-vs-energy deceisions, but poor-food vs. rich-energy, which are in play.
Those units are not remotely fungible.
Protein quality of plant protein (as measured by PER or other metrics not explicitly designed to favor soy) is horrendous compared to beef.
Much of the plant material fed to cows is also not even slightly edible to humans, like soy meal.
I would rather have 1lb beef than 10lb nominally edible soy extractives (or wheat, or grass, or inedible soy meal, or other inputs to cattle production).
There is more land on which you can make meat than land on which you can make plants. Animals can graze on non-arable scrubland, grassland, etc.
Growing staple crops is harder on the land than raising animals. Staple crops deplete soil nitrogen and other nutrients.
Raising crops typically requires massive importation of fertilizer from petrochemical plants, whereas cattle grazing (for example) does not require significant additional petrochemical input.
A classic tale of how animals unfairly take the heat for plants: we often hear about how the amazon is being cut down "for cattle". If you actually look into it, what's happening is that farmers are cutting down the amazon to grow soy for around 3 years, until the soil is totally depleted, at which point they will put some cattle on the land because the cattle can extract value from land destroyed by soy and helps the farmers maintain land claims.
We raise very few animals purely through grazing on non-arable land. If nothing else, they need feeding through part of the year in many climates, and more typically, supplementary feed to increase intensity. Pure free range non-arable grazing ruminants constitute a relatively low percentage of total meat produced.
A somewhat more common thing is to raise cattle on arable fallow land between crop cycles. This is better than keeping permanent pastures, but nowadays we still often supplement the feed or intensively finish.
Battery farms, which is purely fed on crops grown where humans could grow food, accounts for about 70% of beef and 99% of pork and chicken. Often the soy being grown in the rainforest is to support these animals.
The other thing is a lot of "non-arable" and fallow land is actually a lot more arable with modern agriculture than it used to be, it's just more profitable to grow animals. A lot of the plant matter that used to be considered as only usable for animal feed can also now be processed for further use in human food.
Meat production isn't quite as bad as people sometimes suggest, but it's still pretty bad. There are some cases where it is still a good option (e.g. low intensity lamb grazing on rocky/hilly terrain) and if we scaled our meat production to only these cases, we'd be in a much better situation, but there's also be way less meat.
They are mostly fed on the byproducts of human food production. Human-edible material has higher margins than cattle feed, so cattle feed either comes from human ag byproducts (like soy meal) or from land that probably isn't good for much except hay.
the distinction here is critical
I think some other beans like kidney beans fare somewhat better, although I don't recall numbers. Still not close to mammal meat.
thank you
Another example is soy, which has been studied some [2] . The problem is with longterm vegans that consume a huge amount of soy over a long term.
[1] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/anti-nutrients/
[2] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/soy/
There's even this quote: "Studies on vegetarians who eat diets high in plant foods containing anti-nutrients do not generally show deficiencies in iron and zinc, so the body may be adapting to the presence of anti-nutrients by increasing the absorption of these minerals in the gut." indicating that it may not be a real problem to eat foods that contain these 'anti-nutrients'.
Vegans I have known said that a heavy soy diet over an extended amount of time does impact the thyroid more. While it was anecdotal hearing this, it was not anti-soy, just, about soy quantities over a long time, and the need for a diverse diet for vegans too.
Some of the anti-nutrients seem positive in one way too, which makes it even more complex.
The argument is not "eat soy extractives instead of meat".
It's more like "lunch on veggies 2 or 3 days per week instead of having meat on every meal, including breakfast".
It obviously includes repurposing some of the land used to raise cattle into other things more suitable for direct human consumption. No one is talking about making you eat grass.
People love non-commercial applewood.
Not easy in the city to get cheap fruitwood that’s never been sprayed with anything.
Doing that mid-season is of course something of a challenge.
Search for "AgInflation" articles from 2021. I know farmers who skipped this season due to razor thin profits, suppressed prices by governments and major supermarkets, and risk of water controls. Would you put $50k of your money for a 10% return with a very, very high risk of failure?
The farmers that did plant, say wheat, are not benefiting from the price surge because to minimize risk they sold their harvest in advance or sold futures. SPECULATORS that are making a killing. Usually hedge funds like Citadel, ETFs by BlackRock, and others.
And in several countries farmers are being blamed for higher prices. Governments should've given the sector a bit of help and control risks. Help with water management. Help with shrinking labor base and increasing costs. But nothing is being done.
There is a perverse system right now and action needs to be taken to heal the sector. But I bet they'll just keep blaming farmers and impose price controls or suppression of some kind. Fixing farming would take years and populist politicians want magic immediate results and shift-blame. So buckle up.
Not sure how much difference it will make but agriculture is kind of important
That said, the rise in these grains will likely spill over to other foods, as people turn to substitutes for their calories.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/10/2/02...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1712-3
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/19/banks-...
We either fix this or we simply won't have a global food system.
We stayed in our homes for months en mass without prep time and prior warning and the food availability barely changed. We are creatures that need to eat multiple times a day and yet we can stay in our homes for months and get fed just as well. Therefore I'm not very worried about the management of the food production and distribution, we are extremely good at it.
Thanks to the global nature of it, things move quickly and even though a problem in one location can be felt everywhere we don't end up with millions of deaths in that location. I'm really not onboard with "localize everything" motto because everything being local means catastrophic consequences at local issues.
What scares me is something biological or ecological happening at global scale. Something that takes at least 6 months to fix for example.
If our food system can't take a little bit of war and drought imagine how will it fare when production starts falling. Climate change is happening at global scale, and we must be able to coordinate and innovate on a similar scale to be able to handle it.
Instead we have a spontaneously formed a shitty system. Most people are ignorant of this. Some pretends that isolation is the solution, let's Brexit it, some are blaming ethanol apparently. There is no shortage of bad takes on this, but the fact remains that we suck at this.
And yes, by global event that scares me is exactly the climate change.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31181311
In this case, the slack is obvious. And it has once again been wrung from the supply chain in the name of efficiency (aka more profits), under the grand delusion that there will never be bad lean times.
1. The US Treasury drew up the list of economic sanctions against Russia and Belarus. Then they pressured the compliant EU to follow. The sanctions no surprises had a predictable impact on global grain/fertilizer and energy supply prices. The US basically sanctioned themselves and the global economy.
2. Meanwhile China was hit by terrible flooding last year and faces record low yields for crops so they are now desperately converting baseball courts and roads because their farmers can't get seeds and fertilizers. Do you know why? Because they're stuck on cargo ships sitting off the coast of Shanghai which has been locked down under the bizarre "Zero Covid" quarantine. This is conveniently being done during planting season when they're already facing a huge shortfall. End result - they are importing more and increasing the global grain/food price further.
3. Whilst China gets hit by flooding, the reverse weather pattern (La Nina) is causing droughts in places like Argentina and Paraguay which produces the majority of the food in South America. So thanks again to our sanctions against Belarus and Russia, we can't get fertilizer to those countries. Similarly 35 African countries get food from Russia/Ukraine and 22 of them get fertilizer from there so the end result is famine in S America and Africa.
4. In Europe, the EU's "Green Agenda" deal means the Italian government can't provide more state aid to the farmers. In Germany, they want to phase out agriculture because of greenhouse gas emissions so they've stopped farmers who want to grow more food. At the same time, the sanctions are making covid-induced food shortages dramatically worse.
So you have well timed global food disasters which are amplified by our sanctions whilst back home:
a) "On Friday, April 8, 2022, Union Pacific informed CF Industries without advance notice that it was mandating certain shippers to reduce the volume of private cars on its railroad effective immediately. The timing of this action by Union Pacific could not come at a worse time for farmers. Not only will fertilizer be delayed by these shipping restrictions, but additional fertilizer needed to complete spring applications may be unable to reach farmers at all. By placing this arbitrary restriction on just a handful of shippers, Union Pacific is jeopardizing farmers’ harvests and increasing the cost of food for consumers."
Not only are they preventing urea and UAN from getting to farmers during the crucial planting season but they're also stopping DEF (Diesel Exhaust Fluid). DEF is used to control emissions in diesel trucks, without it engines can't run. So they're ensuring a complete shutdown of the supply chains across the United States at the same time.
b) "EPA will allow a 50% increase in corn-based biodiesel and ethanol fuel mix for the summer"
Before Covid even began, we had the "Renewable Fuel Standards Act" which mandates annually RISING targets for the production of corn for ethanol fuel blends. This add major price inflation for food. Now the EPA is mandating another increase in corn ethanol for fuel at the same time as when we have astronomical fertilizer prices due to sanctions we imposed AND we're blocking domestic fertilizers being shipped by rail... that's going to send corn prices through the roof and the government knows this very well.
and I'm not even going to touch on all the poultry that USDA are ordering to be destroyed because of "Bird Flu".
As I said in my other comment, it's not by accident or pure back luck - it's by design.
Ukraine is not under sanction, and the only things preventing it from providing more food to the world are russia's genocide against Ukrainians, farmers included, russia's blockade of Ukraine, and russia's theft of Ukrainian grain
indeed, the sanctions of the world against russia and belarus, too, are purely a predictable result of their actions, which they nonetheless choose to perpetrate to this very moment, and thus they bear the entire brunt of the consequences
thanks
This article has all of them. This is topical doom-mongering, which always works for clicks, but speaks nothing to substance.
Your logic seems strange: "he didn't die because of a car crash, he died because his car didn't resist being smashed into a tree"
Sure, any system could be made more or less fragile, and you could argue that making it less fragile would have lessened the impact, but you can't say that "this is not happening because of the war" - of course it is
> Washington announced the EPA will allow a 50% increase in corn-based biodiesel and ethanol fuel mix for the summer. On April 12 the Secretary of Agriculture announced a “bold” initiative by the US Administration to increase the use of domestically-grown corn-ethanol biofuels
Or with what I can only call absolutely diabolical sabotage of food production:
CF Industries of Deerfield, Illinois, the largest US supplier of nitrogen fertilizers as well as a vital diesel engine additive, issued a press release stating that:
"On Friday, April 8, 2022, Union Pacific informed CF Industries without advance notice that it was mandating certain shippers to reduce the volume of private cars on its railroad effective immediately."
"The timing of this action by Union Pacific could not come at a worse time for farmers. Not only will fertilizer be delayed by these shipping restrictions, but additional fertilizer needed to complete spring applications may be unable to reach farmers at all. By placing this arbitrary restriction on just a handful of shippers, Union Pacific is jeopardizing farmers’ harvests and increasing the cost of food for consumers."
CF has made urgent appeals to the government for remedy, so far with no positive action
https://news.sky.com/story/cost-of-living-bank-of-england-go...
Remember when the apocalyptic food crisis happens, it wasn't an accident OR bad luck, it was planned.
Or because the government didn't prevent a stupidity from a private company?
Never attribute to malice...
https://farmpolicynews.illinois.edu/2022/03/its-going-to-be-...
So why are CF Industries needing to beg the administration to intervene and allow shipments.
https://strangesounds.org/2022/04/fertilizer-giant-cf-indust...
Also ask yourself why Union Pacific is imposing these restrictions?
Maybe it might have something to do with the latest rage in the world financial markets? Blackrock and the WEF set up ESG certifying companies that award ESG ratings and punish those that don't comply. So you have companies forced to push for completely bonkers restrictions and policies because they're mandated to top down:
https://www.up.com/aboutup/esg/index.htm
If sometimes their incompetence lead to a winning situation for us, we could say it's just pure incompetence. But this is anything but incompetence.
CF Industries is begging the administration, not because the administration is in a plot to cause this, but because Union Pacific isn't listening. (And also because the government just had hearings about the incompetence of railroads under the current management fad.) CF is just looking for some lever that will keep UP from damaging CF's business.
No, I don't think Blackrock or the WEF have anything to do with it. It has to do with Canadian National, and then Canadian Pacific, adopting Precision Scheduled Railroading, and improving their operating ratios by doing so, and every other major railroad (except maybe BNSF) jumping on the bandwagon. But in doing so, UP is driving away some traffic (not just food- or fertilizer-related), in the hope that net profit will go up.
This has all been building for a decade or so. It's nothing related to the current geopolitical and economic situation.
> Third-generation biofuels do not represent a feasible option at present state of development as their GHG emissions are higher than those from fossil fuels. As also discussed in the paper, several studies show that reductions in GHG emissions from biofuels are achieved at the expense of other impacts, such as acidification, eutrophication, water footprint and biodiversity loss. The paper also investigates the key methodological aspects and sources of uncertainty in the LCA of biofuels and provides recommendations to address these issues. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7735313/
> Our study examined data from 2005-2013 during this sharp increase in renewable fuel use. Rather than assuming that producing and using biofuels was carbon-neutral, we explicitly compared the amount of CO2 absorbed on cropland to the quantity emitted during biofuel production and consumption. Existing crop growth already takes large amounts of CO2 out of the atmosphere. The empirical question is whether biofuel production increases the rate of CO2 uptake enough to fully offset CO2 emissions produced when corn is fermented into ethanol and when biofuels are burned. Most of the crops that went into biofuels during this period were already being cultivated; the main change was that farmers sold more of their harvest to biofuel makers and less for food and animal feed. Some farmers expanded corn and soybean production or switched to these commodities from less profitable crops. But as long as growing conditions remain constant, corn plants take CO2 out of the atmosphere at the same rate regardless of how the corn is used. Therefore, to properly evaluate biofuels, one must evaluate CO2 uptake on all cropland. After all, crop growth is the CO2 “sponge” that takes carbon out of the atmosphere. When we performed such an evaluation, we found that from 2005 through 2013, cumulative carbon uptake on U.S. farmland increased by 49 teragrams (a teragram is one million metric tons). Planted areas of most other field crops declined during this period, so this increased CO2 uptake can be largely attributed to crops grown for biofuels. Over the same period, however, CO2 emissions from fermenting and burning biofuels increased by 132 teragrams. Therefore, the greater carbon uptake associated with crop growth offset only 37 percent of biofuel-related CO2 emissions from 2005 through 2013. In other words, biofuels are far from inherently carbon-neutral. https://theconversation.com/biofuels-turn-out-to-be-a-climat...
In Saskatchewan (where I grew up on a farm), when the grain bins get full, some farmers put their grain in shops or sheds normally used for storing farm machinery. Others put it in long giant plastic bags out in their fields. Others build makeshift plywood cylinders on some bare land (such as an already-harvested field). In short, farmers will do what they can to protect their harvests.
In contrast Ukraine plants a higher percentage of fall crops harvesting in the summer and has about twice as much rainfall. Ad hoc storage is much more challenging. They'll try, but they'll lose a lot more crop than a Saskatchewan farmer would.
https://www.amazon.com/PROGENY-Portable-Kickstand-Flashfish-...
https://www.amazon.com/Jackery-SolarSaga-Portable-Explorer-F...
Apart from anything else, if you save on costs by sticking at 12v, you run quite high current. That 100w panel can fuck you up.
Anything else is difficult to do reliably, and would generally require some kind of smart monitoring system, electrically actuated mains rated switch (not easy, cheap or durable it turns out), additional sensors, etc.
The design we're talking about just doesn't output power unless there is an existing sine wave to follow. Pretty foolproof, since anything that provided it would also be the one responsible for electrocuting the worker.
Because that’s the typical rating for a new residence in most areas in the US (200 amp x 240 volt).
Is your handheld device rated to last 20+ years in an outdoor environment?
Because that’s what you’d need.
But don’t worry, just the switch itself is only about $700-800 without labor, installation, or maintenance - [https://www.electricgeneratorsdirect.com/Generac-RXSW200A3/p...]
Add in all the other stuff and an extra couple thousand to the cost of the solar installation is why it isn’t as common. Because most people don’t care enough to pay the extra amount. Some do.
If you wanted it enough to pay the extra, most electricians wouldn’t mind adding it in I’m sure.
1. Not killing linemen by backfeeding power
2. Your appliances don't like brownouts and voltage dips whenever a cloud passes overhead. Try to run a house without a power buffer and you'll burn up power controllers all over your house.
Unfortunately the battery market is extremely tight due to so many car manufacturers trying to switch to BEVs ASAP and stressing the raw materials markets. That and COVID shortages. Prices are very high and availability is usually "8-12 month waitlist".
My Google-fu isn’t strong enough to find anything on the topic that isn’t on the level of “tremendously sketchy YouTube video” and I’m not about to risk my car and house experimenting off the back of that sort of thing.
https://www.ford.com/support/how-tos/electric-vehicles/home-...
You've got to freeze it (to kill the eggs) and then seal it (to keep more pests from getting in) and/or add stuff that'll kill anything that hatches very fast (IIRC diatomaceous earth is popular for this)
Other grains have similar pest problems, plus if it's wheat or similar and ground into flour (not e.g. whole wheat berries), it'll get worse over time from air exposure. Anything with the germ still on/in it will go rancid after a while, and the germ's full of nutrients so you really want that part if you can keep it.
The alternative is maintaining a stock but constantly drawing it down & replenishing it, but it gets difficult to maintain a substantial reserve that way, unless you already eat your "apocalypse" diet most of the time, so go through a lot of the same things you've got in storage even during normal times—say, if you already eat rice & beans 5+ dinners a week. You're capped by the rate at which you go through those things in non-emergency times. Plus it takes some planning and ongoing monitoring/inventorying, which is a non-zero amount of work.
My point with that part was just that you have to do the vacuum sealing (unless you're buying a product with all this taken care of, which I'd assume is expensive) and such, at least, which means more equipment and material than simply buying sealed (but not vacuum sealed) bags at the store and putting them on a shelf. Getting grains ready for long-term storage means more than just keeping mice and bugs and water out—you've gotta worry about oxygen, and about insect eggs already present in the grain, too. Just stuff one might not think of if one were to make the wrong assumptions.
[EDIT] Incidentally, trying to store all one's calories, at least more than enough for a week or two, might not be the right idea anyway, short of a truly horrible catastrophe like nuclear war—my great-grandparents and grandparents, who lived through the depression and World War II, respectively, didn't seem to be all that in to storing lots of grain. What they were into, big time, was canning vegetables, and gardening (to grow stuff to put in the cans). Man, were they ever into canning vegetables. I'd guess that's the result of some hard lessons about how to make it through hard times—plus, just, times before modern shipping and refrigeration when food availability dropped a whole bunch in Winter.
Ditto
So I assume they all developed these super-similar habits for really great reasons. And since the ~1960s and earlier were just normally pretty similar to what a significant food shortage would probably look like now (at least in countries that will almost certainly be able to maintain adequate supplies of staples, like the US) it seems to me that might be a good first place to look. Stock up on canned veggies, worry less about the rest of it. Maybe get some chickens and plant some berry bushes (they also all loved keeping a line or two of berry bushes, and it seems like in their generations you just alway kept chickens, if you weren't smack in the middle of town)
My mother, whose parents ran the dairy, and to a large extent my father, instilled this way of life on me at a young age. Growing up, we had a huge vegetable garden (they still maintain a 1/8 acre vegetable lot in their 70s, it's quite impressive, really -- and that's in addition to a 400 sq. ft. greenhouse I helped my father build and the rest of their lot that has fruit trees, berry bushes, etc.) but I was always in awe of the canning and the preserving. You grow all of this food but you only eat 20% of it fresh, canning and preserving the other 80%. But then, being so young I didn't realize that our meals consisted of vegetables/fruits that were canned or preserved years previously, of course. There was a strong communal aspect to it, too. We'd get oversupply from neighbors and/or give oversupply to neighbors.
Chickens, too. The farm had a coup. My parents had a coup (they gave it up in their late 60s -- my father grew tired of dealing with the foxes and skunks they attracted). It's something I want to do but where I live it's impossible. We're planning on a move where we can have a chicken coup and more space for growing food in general. I'd really like to preserve the heritage, as it were, and it's become more important as we start a family.
Also, I've dealt with corn and wheat weevils before. I actually did not realize that they also laid eggs on rice. I guess I assumed that it was "different" or whatever but thank you for highlighting that in other comments. I've got 50 lbs. of rice that I'm going to break down to smaller vacuum sealed bags this weekend. I've dealt with weevils at least a half of a dozen times in my past and it is not pleasant. I do not want a repeat of that mess, but especially where I live today.
> What they were into, big time, was canning vegetables,
My grandmother did this too, after living her childhood through WW2 (in Germany), she used to have a repository of canned vegetables in the cellar. I sometimes talked to her about her rural live in the war-torn country, and she told me about soldiers, and all kinds of people, who would come by in war-time, where food was very sparse. And I think she maintained that sort of hoarding behavior throughout her life, based on the experiences she made as a child.
Oxygen will get through normal plastic vacuum sealing bags and ruin the taste and eventually nutritional content otherwise after a year or two. Mylar lining stops most of that and the oxygen absorber gets the rest.
The thick bags will also stop rice moths from getting through (they are able to get through most cardboard and thin plastic bags), and the lack of oxygen will stop their eggs from hatching.
This is also a suspected carcinogen. I'd be careful about putting it on food, even if you do wash it.
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_weevil
Unlucky is quite nasty, but maybe extra protein? /s
The gist of it was that immigrants in western Europe from various countries in Africa had developed nutritional deficiencies after immigrating. It appeared their diets were the same, perhaps better on paper, so it wasn't clear why their health was deteriorating.
It turned out that these people had diets rich in unwashed greens and vegetables, and they were likely consuming far more beneficial bacteria, insects, and minerals in their diets. They continued their mostly-vegetarian diets in Europe, but were no longer benefitting from what tended to accompany their foods before.
Not sure why I remember that. Regardless, we should all be eating dirt and weevils.
USA.
So, I mean, kinda.
But, unless they're irradiating or freezing your rice before it gets to the store, there are rice weevil eggs in it. They're inside the rice grains. If you've eaten much rice, you've eaten rice weevil eggs.
So the advice would be to look at local pests and how to avoid having those in your storage. We still have other kinds of weevils but they are not everywhere like you say rice weevils are, you are unlikely to have them in packages meant for humans so storing things long term is fine.
They take the rice out and soak it (as in soaking, not washing) like beans before cooking. Probably for re-hydrating it.
I concluded that while it is definitely advisable to have some number of days/weeks in storage, it doesn't seem feasible to store enough food to last a prolonged period of time (unless you go all-in on prepping, which has its limits). We humans are as successful as we are because we cooperate with other humans, and on our own we're pretty powerless. So fostering community might be the best way to advert crisis.
You can survive on 1200-1500 calories a day.
I still don't advise going in 100% on rice as beri-beri is an issue (or heavy metal issues if you go all brown rice).
A good mix of canned goods, dried goods and reliable water will help. Even in a shortage you will probably have some access, but limited access.
I strongly advise against bottled water for emergencies. It is the worst possible solution for cost/size/availability. You can buy 6 gallon aquatainers and fill them with tap water for an easy (and useful for camping) solution. Rotate every six months and you don't need secondary treatment.
Otherwise a food grade 55 gallon drum is $100 and you can fill it from your tap. You will want secondary treatment options if you plan to rotate just every 2 years, and you still need a smaller intermediary vessel.
220gal IBCs should be $100 too, but maybe they’re more now.
The goal is to reduce excess muscle and reduce the metabolism.
Rip off the bandaid and then the food rationing won't be as uncomfortable.
After a few days of fasting you lose a lot of your hunger.
Every time you cook rice, beans, spit peas, lentils, etc. you put in a few tablespoons of oil or fat to keep it from boiling over, and to add flavor and calories. Each tablespoon is about 120 calories. When you make hummus, refried beans, tamales or spanish rice you generally add in a considerable amount more fats.
Shelf life is about 5 years, depending on how it's stored: https://www.mreinfo.com/mres/mre-shelf-life/
So best to do some research beforehand.
I Olympic lift so I always have whey.
1) accept increasing energy prices
2) accept a lower fertilizer production
3) break up supply chains even further
4) accept the refugee crisis, the costs of entering this war as a proxy combatant, sending tens of billions to not let the enemy win
5) ... and ultimately win and accept the even worse consequences: pouring billions into a corrupt Ukraine to rebuild it, deal with a terrible unbalanced post-war society (women who came to the West will stay, men will find no women in UA after the war; young people will stay in Europe, while UA population will be much older on average after the war) and finally a Russia crisis that could be something like the "crazy 90s 2.0" or a Russia that broke into many unstable post-Russian republics.
I am saying this as a person with UKRANIAN ROOTS.
The West has decided to fight for some "Western values" and now all people living here have to accept the costs and long-term consequences.
Real life is not a series of choices between good and bad - it is a series of choices between bad and worse.
We had the chance to open the EU and NATO towards the Russian in the 00s, even when the Russian came crawling to the Berlin Bundestag and suggested to draw a path towards this direction and were rejected hardly.
We had the chance for a compromise, e.g. through the Normandy format when ALL relevant parties agreed more or less except the Americans.
This all does not make the invasion right, but it is not as one-sided as the propaganda is showing it here right now. And this is why agree with your statement that real life is not not as simple as "good" and "bad", it is all just bad - on all sides.
And just another anecdote. As we are originally from Ukraine, I went down to the border with friends, money and cars and helped people at the border to make the right decisions. We mainly focussed on people withough language skills, old people and people with very very very little money. I had the chance to speak to hundreds of Ukranians crossing the border to the EU. 90% DO NOT CARE who "rules" them. They have their dreams, hopes, they have their apartments, their jobs, their pets, friends, homes... they just want this war to be over - even if Putin "wins".
When watching Western news and reports I dont see those opinions represented in the same way I experienced them when talking to people. I see stories about values and democracy and other philosophical stuff - and when they show Ukranians then it is not those who I have met.
Where is the opinion of the normal folks that I have met: the war should end asap, no matter who wins. Instead I feel spoon-fed that we HAVE TO PAY THE PRICE for $VALUES. And then you speak to people who have absolutly NO CLUE and NO RELATION to either Ukraine or even Russia and they are so opinionated and SOOOO SURE about the things that must be done and the price that has to be paid.
I feel very frustrated and I stopped telling people about my experience at the border or here when volunteering and ACTUALLY speaking to the REAL people.
One part of me agrees with this. War is the worst (as far as i know from books and tv).
The other part of me thinks: That is how Germany expanded half a century ago, getting resources for ww2. (thug perceives the pacifist as a weakling and an easy opportunity to profit). Ukraine has a lot of natural resources, part of the reason for the war.
One of my theories it happened the way it did is that the US at that time was far weaker and spent from the Cold War than it let on. That it was fiscally more of a close a call as WW2 prevailing fiscal standards were, and the US simply did not have it within itself to financially support another rebuilding like it did with Germany and Japan. The US possibly also expected that if Russia integrated with Europe, the US would underwrite most of the check, the NATO alliance would absorb the benefits, dissolve, turn around and economically compete with the US after the US just exhausted itself from the extended effort.
Please ELI5 because I'm not following your anecdote. For your "90%" figure to make sense to me, you'd have to be able to draw the line connecting the dots that explains how 10% of the Ukrainian population can coerce however many remain in Ukraine to join that 10% and put up sufficiently organized resistance to stall Russian forces. The widespread expectation at the beginning was that too few Ukrainians would put up a fight (your "90%") and it was time to cede all of Ukraine like Crimea was ceded and move on.
How do we get from that expectation to the reality on the ground where the titular second most powerful military in the world was supposed to steamroller through Kyiv in a few days but is now bogged down in a conflict it now admits to its own citizens might be a long slog, on only 10% popular support of Ukrainians? I find it more plausible that 90% of those at the border might have this attitude, but that is still a minority fraction of the total population remaining in the country. Perhaps 90% of those fleeing are predisposed to just wanting it to all be over no matter who rules them?
And why would these people trust Putin's word that he wouldn't implement a modern Holodomor if they just let him have Ukraine, even as he's shipping grain away from Ukraine by the metric thousand-ton right now? And what would they feel if the rest of the world turned their backs on Ukraine in such a scenario because 90% "just want this war to be over - even if Putin 'wins'" and Ukraine is definitely a part of the Russian Federation instead of a currently-recognized sovereign state, and strategic nuclear weapons are instantly in play in that scenario to wrest control of Ukraine-the-Russian-Federation-territory from Russia?
Once Ukraine is under a vengeful narcissist's thumb with the other thumb on the nuclear trigger, just what exactly do you think will happen, Slavic brotherhood rainbows and unicorns? If that 90% ever existed in reality at all, then it lost its chance at any kind of "just want this war to be over" in the first week or two.