Surplusable farming is literally the basis on which all civilization is built
Like the whole point of the way things work for us now is that you don’t have to be a farmer or a hunter or a gatherer to be able to have access to a consistent source of food.
People romanticize about the idealic agrarian past but human civilization was literally invented over how back breakingly difficult that kind of work is for people who aren’t built for it.
This is also a major point of livestock. If you have more produce than you can eat, feed the excess to some animals and they will keep those calories fresh and delicious over the winter.
Adding on to that, its not just the surplus produce. Its all the rest of the
produce that’s unusable by us humans.
When we grow something like corn, we’re only growing it for the kernels that we can consume. We can’t physiologically make use of the stalks, stems and leaves, but an animal like the goat? They’ll chew up anything green and turn that into usable calories we humans can make use of.
This is one of the things I find funny about modern day self sufficient communes. Subsistence farming is awful, industrialized farming is less awful, but still far more work than most are willing to ever do.
Modern farming techniques consider sustainability, the larger problem is countries using traditional methods that are extremely harmful like burning forests.
The industrial farming of corn in the US requires using hybrid corn strains to reach the yields it has, which in turn requires the use of fertilizers because the natural soils is incapable of sustaining the density of corn plants that hybrid varieties achive.
Those fertilizers in turn are mainly made from Oil, which is a non-renewable resource, making the whole thing unsustainable. It’s is possible to make the fertilizers sustainably, it’s just much more expensive so that’s not done.
The US is so deeply involved (including outright military invasions) in the Middle East from where most of the oil comes because in the US oil it’s not just a critical resource for Transportation and Energy, it’s also a critical resource for Food because it’s so incredibly dependent on corn (which is estimated to add up directly and indirectly to more than 70% of the human food chain there)
PS: There is a book called The Omnivore’s Dilemma which is a great read on this.
Fertilizers are made from Amonia which in turn is made using the Haber-Bosch process which requires fossil fuels to provide the necessary energy and as reactants (see this related article).
There is also “natural” fertilizer made from organic mass left over from other activities which would otherwise go to waste, but that’s insufficient for large scale intensive farming (composting is fine for your community garden or even for supplementing low intensity agriculture, but not for the intensive industrial farming growing things like hybrid corn).
Finally, the use of techniques like crop rotation which lets letting fields lie fallow so that natural nitrate fixation occurs and the soil recovers do not make the soil rich enough in nitrates to support hybrid corn growing because, as I mentioned, the plant density is too high to be supported by natural soil alone without further addition of fertilizers.
Fertilizers are made from Amonia which in turn is made using the Haber-Bosch process which requires fossil fuels to provide the necessary energy and as reactants
That’s exactly what I said! Fertilizer is not made from oil. The factory is powered by oil. Just like your home where you garden is powered by oil.
Natural Gas - which is not renewable - is a reactant and Oil is still involved indirectly as a means to generate the power needed for the process. This can be replaced but is more expensive.
That said, it’s unclear to me if Oil is somehow used at the chemical plant to generate said energy (for example, to reach the necessary temperatures) or if it’s even more indirect than that and it’s just fuelling Power Generation plants which in turn provide electricity used in the heating, pressure generation and subsequent cooling for that process, in which case it could be replaced by something renewable.
If it is the latter case I have to agree that it’s not quite as bad in the renewable sense as I thought.
Surplusable farming is literally the basis on which all civilization is built
Like the whole point of the way things work for us now is that you don’t have to be a farmer or a hunter or a gatherer to be able to have access to a consistent source of food.
People romanticize about the idealic agrarian past but human civilization was literally invented over how back breakingly difficult that kind of work is for people who aren’t built for it.
Also the fact that one bad year in your tiny part of the world means you and everyone you know die slow agonizing deaths. Fun!
This is also a major point of livestock. If you have more produce than you can eat, feed the excess to some animals and they will keep those calories fresh and delicious over the winter.
Adding on to that, its not just the surplus produce. Its all the rest of the produce that’s unusable by us humans.
When we grow something like corn, we’re only growing it for the kernels that we can consume. We can’t physiologically make use of the stalks, stems and leaves, but an animal like the goat? They’ll chew up anything green and turn that into usable calories we humans can make use of.
This is one of the things I find funny about modern day self sufficient communes. Subsistence farming is awful, industrialized farming is less awful, but still far more work than most are willing to ever do.
The issue is that the current farming techniques are not sustainable.
The fertilizers and pesticides used are burning the land, polluting the underground water pools and killing a bunch of animals and insects.
The agriculture needs to change to something sustainable.
Modern farming techniques consider sustainability, the larger problem is countries using traditional methods that are extremely harmful like burning forests.
The industrial farming of corn in the US requires using hybrid corn strains to reach the yields it has, which in turn requires the use of fertilizers because the natural soils is incapable of sustaining the density of corn plants that hybrid varieties achive.
Those fertilizers in turn are mainly made from Oil, which is a non-renewable resource, making the whole thing unsustainable. It’s is possible to make the fertilizers sustainably, it’s just much more expensive so that’s not done.
The US is so deeply involved (including outright military invasions) in the Middle East from where most of the oil comes because in the US oil it’s not just a critical resource for Transportation and Energy, it’s also a critical resource for Food because it’s so incredibly dependent on corn (which is estimated to add up directly and indirectly to more than 70% of the human food chain there)
PS: There is a book called The Omnivore’s Dilemma which is a great read on this.
Fertilizer is not made from oil. Oil/gas is used to power the factory but that doesn’t make the farming unsustainable.
Because if you use the criteria of where we get our energy from, home gardening isn’t sustainable either because your house is powered by oil/gas.
Fertilizers are made from Amonia which in turn is made using the Haber-Bosch process which requires fossil fuels to provide the necessary energy and as reactants (see this related article).
There is also “natural” fertilizer made from organic mass left over from other activities which would otherwise go to waste, but that’s insufficient for large scale intensive farming (composting is fine for your community garden or even for supplementing low intensity agriculture, but not for the intensive industrial farming growing things like hybrid corn).
Finally, the use of techniques like crop rotation which lets letting fields lie fallow so that natural nitrate fixation occurs and the soil recovers do not make the soil rich enough in nitrates to support hybrid corn growing because, as I mentioned, the plant density is too high to be supported by natural soil alone without further addition of fertilizers.
That’s exactly what I said! Fertilizer is not made from oil. The factory is powered by oil. Just like your home where you garden is powered by oil.
Natural Gas - which is not renewable - is a reactant and Oil is still involved indirectly as a means to generate the power needed for the process. This can be replaced but is more expensive.
That said, it’s unclear to me if Oil is somehow used at the chemical plant to generate said energy (for example, to reach the necessary temperatures) or if it’s even more indirect than that and it’s just fuelling Power Generation plants which in turn provide electricity used in the heating, pressure generation and subsequent cooling for that process, in which case it could be replaced by something renewable.
If it is the latter case I have to agree that it’s not quite as bad in the renewable sense as I thought.
On indirect consumption, corn is largely used to feed cattle, make high fructose corn syrup, and other products that are not directly eaten as corn.
This makes corn insanely inefficient as a food source.
But for now my PLA 3D printer filament is still cheap! Yay? =\ lol…why is everything so broken…
Greed
I mean…yeah. I was more lamenting rhetorically. 😅